Maine Woods — The Allegash & East Branch, Section 25

Having held a consultation, and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep on to Chamberlain Lake, omitting Mud Pond, than to go back and start anew for the last place, though the Indian had never been through this way, and knew nothing about it.

In the meanwhile he would go back and finish carrying over his canoe and bundle to Mud Pond, cross that, and go down its outlet and up Chamberlain Lake, and trust to meet us there before night.

It was now a little after noon.

He supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed back from Mud Pond, which could not be far off eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp.

Keeping on, we were ere long agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but there was never any outlook over the forest.

While descending the last, I saw many specimens of the great round-leaved orchis, of large size; one which I measured had leaves, as usual, flat on the ground, nine and a half inches long, and nine wide, and was two feet high.

The dark, damp wilderness is favorable to some of these orchidaceous plants, though they are too delicate for cultivation.

I also saw the swamp gooseberry (_Rides lacustre_), with green fruit, and in all the low ground, where it was not too wet, the _Rubus triflorus_ in fruit.

At one place I heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk, like a single note from a white-throated sparrow, only very much louder, as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head.

I wondered that he allowed himself to be disturbed by our presence, since it seemed as if he could not easily find his nest again himself in that wilderness.

We also saw and heard several times the red squirrel, and often, as before observed, the bluish scales of the fir cones which it had left on a rock or fallen tree.

This, according to the Indian, is the only squirrel found in those woods, except a very few striped ones.

It must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we had come.

I wondered how he could call any particular tree there his home; and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as if it were an old road to him.

How can a hawk ever find him there?

I

fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us.

One of those sombre fir and spruce woods is not complete unless you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine alarum,--his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some crack in a tree,--the working of the spruce beer.

Such an impertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me.

“Oh,” said I, “I am well acquainted with your family, I know your cousins in Concord very well.

Guess the mail’s irregular in these parts, and you’d like to hear from ’em.

” But my overtures were vain, for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and spring his rattle again.

We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely.

The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on; and, going back for his bag, my companion once lost his way and came back without it.

In many places the canoe would have run if it had not been for the fallen timber.

Again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow, and no place to sit down.

It was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw none.

It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

I did, however, see one dead porcupine; perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of the way.

These bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.

Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and they who do the work are called “swampers.

” I now perceived the fitness of the term.

This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw.

Nature must have cooperated with art here.

However, I suppose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the swamps passable.

We came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we could.

This probably emptied into Mud Pond, and perhaps the Indian might have come up it and taken us in there if he had known it.

Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we were on a path of any kind.

We then crossed another low rising ground, and I, who wore shoes, had an opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get his wet boots on again.

He went over the whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow; beside that the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for walking.

As I sat waiting for him, it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone.

Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at nightfall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companion’s bag.

Having gone about a mile, and got into low ground again, I heard a noise like the note of an owl, which I soon discovered to be made by the Indian, and, answering him, we soon came together.

He had reached the lake, after crossing Mud Pond, and running some rapids below it, and had come up about a mile and a half on our path.

If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this particular part of the lake.

So he went back for my companion and his bag, while I kept on.

Having waded through another stream, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away,--and this was not altogether worse than our ordinary walking, since it was less muddy,--we continued on, through alternate mud and water, to the shore of Apmoojenegamook Lake, which we reached in season for a late supper, instead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone without our dinner.

It was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three times, he had walked full a dozen miles, bad as it was.

In the winter, when the water is frozen, and the snow is four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman.

As it was, I would not have missed that walk for a good deal.

If you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus and Apmoojenegamook; then send a family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the fencing.

We had come out on a point extending into Apmoojenegamook, or Chamberlain Lake, west of the outlet of Mud Pond, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees.

We were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the world.

But at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness.

We all three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash our clothes.

This was another noble lake, called twelve miles long, east and west;

if you add Telos Lake, which, since the dam was built, has been connected with it by dead water, it will be twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to two miles wide.

We were about midway its length, on the south side.

We could see the only clearing in these parts, called the “Chamberlain Farm,” with two or three log buildings close together, on the opposite shore, some two and a half miles distant.

The smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal agreed on when one wishes to cross.

It took them about half an hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains this time.

Even the English name of the lake had a wild, woodland sound, reminding me of that Chamberlain who killed Paugus at Lovewell’s fight.

After putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to dry on the pole which the Indian arranged over the fire, we ate our supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire, without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the stones.

Here first I was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em (_Simulium nocivum_,--the latter word is not the Latin for no-see-em), especially over the sand at the water’s edge, for it is a kind of sand-fly.

You would not observe them but for their light-colored wings.

They are said to get under your clothes, and produce a feverish heat, which I suppose was what I felt that night.

Our insect foes in this excursion, to sum them up, were, first, mosquitoes, the chief ones, but only troublesome at night, or when we sat still on shore by day; second, black flies (_Simulium molestum_), which molested us more or less on the carries by day, as I have before described, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream.

Harris mistakes when he says that they are not seen after June.

Third, moose-flies.

The big ones, Polis said, were called _Bososquasis_.

It is a stout, brown fly, much like a horse-fly, about eleven sixteenths of an inch long, commonly rusty-colored beneath, with unspotted wings.

They can bite smartly, according to Polis, but are easily avoided or killed.

Fourth, the no-see-ems above mentioned.

Of all these, the mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously; but, as I was provided with a wash and a veil, they have not made any deep impression.

The Indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil; he, therefore, suffered from insects now, and throughout this journey, more than either of us.

I think that he suffered more than I did, when neither of us was protected.

He regularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in his blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between us and the fire for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to make enter his blanket about his face, and for the same purpose he lit his pipe and breathed the smoke into his blanket.

As we lay thus on the shore, with nothing between us and the stars, I inquired what stars he was acquainted with, or had names for.

They were the Great Bear, which he called by this name, the Seven Stars, which he had no English name for, “the morning star,” and “the north star.

” In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake.

It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird.

I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling.

When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness.

Some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in your head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground,--the forest being perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the voice of a wolf or some other wild beast, for only the last part is heard when at a distance,--you conclude that it is a pack of wolves, baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose.

Strange as it may seem, the “mooing” of a cow on a mountain-side comes nearest to my idea of the voice of a bear; and this bird’s note resembled that.

It was the unfailing and characteristic sound of those lakes.

We were not so lucky as to hear wolves howl, though that is an occasional serenade.

Some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the Caucomgomoc River, were serenaded by wolves while moose-hunting by moonlight.

It was a sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke loose,--a startling sound enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on end, and all was still again.

It lasted but a moment, and you’d have thought there were twenty of them, when probably there were only two or three.

They heard it twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the wilderness which it lacked before.

I heard of some men who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which ate it up.

This of the loon--I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,--is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,--_hoo-hoo-ooooo_, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head.

I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.

Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon.

I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.

I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore.

So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.