Maine Woods — Ktaadn, Section 07

but I had no wish to repeat the experiment.

It had too medicinal a taste for my palate.

There was the skeleton of a moose here, whose bones some Indian hunters had picked on this very spot.

In the night I dreamed of trout-fishing; and, when at length I awoke, it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam there so near my couch, and rose to our hooks the last evening, and I doubted if I had not dreamed it all.

So I arose before dawn to test its truth, while my companions were still sleeping.

There stood Ktaadn with distinct and cloudless outline in the moonlight; and the rippling of the rapids was the only sound to break the stillness.

Standing on the shore, I once more cast my line into the stream, and found the dream to be real and the fable true.

The speckled trout and silvery roach, like flying-fish, sped swiftly through the moonlight air, describing bright arcs on the dark side of Ktaadn, until moonlight, now fading into daylight, brought satiety to my mind, and the minds of my companions, who had joined me.

By six o’clock, having mounted our packs and a good blanketful of trout, ready dressed, and swung up such baggage and provision as we wished to leave behind upon the tops of saplings, to be out of the reach of bears, we started for the summit of the mountain, distant, as Uncle George said the boatmen called it, about four miles, but as I judged, and as it proved, nearer fourteen.

He had never been any nearer the mountain than this, and there was not the slightest trace of man to guide us farther in this direction.

At first, pushing a few rods up the Aboljacknagesic, or “open-land stream,” we fastened our batteau to a tree, and traveled up the north side, through burnt lands, now partially overgrown with young aspens and other shrubbery;

but soon, recrossing this stream, where it was about fifty or sixty feet wide, upon a jam of logs and rocks,--and you could cross it by this means almost anywhere,--we struck at once for the highest peak, over a mile or more of comparatively open land, still very gradually ascending the while.

Here it fell to my lot, as the oldest mountain-climber, to take the lead.

So, scanning the woody side of the mountain, which lay still at an indefinite distance, stretched out some seven or eight miles in length before us, we determined to steer directly for the base of the highest peak, leaving a large slide, by which, as I have since learned, some of our predecessors ascended, on our left.

This course would lead us parallel to a dark seam in the forest, which marked the bed of a torrent, and over a slight spur, which extended southward from the main mountain, from whose bare summit we could get an outlook over the country, and climb directly up the peak, which would then be close at hand.

Seen from this point, a bare ridge at the extremity of the open land, Ktaadn presented a different aspect from any mountain I have seen, there being a greater proportion of naked rock rising abruptly from the forest; and we looked up at this blue barrier as if it were some fragment of a wall which anciently bounded the earth in that direction.

Setting the compass for a northeast course, which was the bearing of the southern base of the highest peak, we were soon buried in the woods.

We soon began to meet with traces of bears and moose, and those of rabbits were everywhere visible.

The tracks of moose, more or less recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on the sides of the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous there now than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements.

The track of a full-grown moose is like that of a cow, or larger, and of the young, like that of a calf.

Sometimes we found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which they had made, like cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather openings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than trodden paths; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them, clipped as smoothly as if by a knife.

The bark of trees was stripped up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide, still showing the distinct marks of their teeth.

We expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment, and our Nimrod held his shooting-iron in readiness; but we did not go out of our way to look for them, and, though numerous, they are so wary that the unskillful hunter might range the forest a long time before he could get sight of one.

They are sometimes dangerous to encounter, and will not turn out for the hunter, but furiously rush upon him and trample him to death, unless he is lucky enough to avoid them by dodging round a tree.

The largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh sometimes one thousand pounds; and it is said that they can step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk.

They are described as exceedingly awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making a ludicrous figure when in full run, but making great headway, nevertheless.

It seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish,--climbing, stooping, and winding, alternately.

They are said to drop their long and branching horns, which usually spread five or six feet, on their backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies.

Our boatmen said, but I know not with how much truth, that their horns are apt to be gnawed away by vermin while they sleep.

Their flesh, which is more like beef than venison, is common in Bangor market.

We had proceeded on thus seven or eight miles, till about noon, with frequent pauses to refresh the weary ones, crossing a considerable mountain stream, which we conjectured to be Murch Brook, at whose mouth we had camped, all the time in woods, without having once seen the summit, and rising very gradually, when the boatmen beginning to despair a little, and fearing that we were leaving the mountain on one side of us, for they had not entire faith in the compass, McCauslin climbed a tree, from the top of which he could see the peak, when it appeared that we had not swerved from a right line, the compass down below still ranging with his arm, which pointed to the summit.

By the side of a cool mountain rill, amid the woods, where the water began to partake of the purity and transparency of the air, we stopped to cook some of our fishes, which we had brought thus far in order to save our hard-bread and pork, in the use of which we had put ourselves on short allowance.

We soon had a fire blazing, and stood around it, under the damp and sombre forest of firs and birches, each with a sharpened stick, three or four feet in length, upon which he had spitted his trout, or roach, previously well gashed and salted, our sticks radiating like the spokes of a wheel from one centre, and each crowding his particular fish into the most desirable exposure, not with the truest regard always to his neighbor’s rights.

Thus we regaled ourselves, drinking meanwhile at the spring, till one man’s pack, at least, was considerably lightened, when we again took up our line of march.

At length we reached an elevation sufficiently bare to afford a view of the summit, still distant and blue, almost as if retreating from us.

A torrent, which proved to be the same we had crossed, was seen tumbling down in front, literally from out of the clouds.

But this glimpse at our whereabouts was soon lost, and we were buried in the woods again.

The wood was chiefly yellow birch, spruce, fir, mountain-ash, or round-wood, as the Maine people call it, and moose-wood.

It was the worst kind of traveling; sometimes like the densest scrub oak patches with us.

The cornel, or bunch-berries, were very abundant, as well as Solomon’s-seal and moose-berries.

Blueberries were distributed along our whole route; and in one place the bushes were drooping with the weight of the fruit, still as fresh as ever.

It was the 7th of September.

Such patches afforded a grateful repast, and served to bait the tired party forward.

When any lagged behind, the cry of “blueberries” was most effectual to bring them up.

Even at this elevation we passed through a moose-yard, formed by a large flat rock, four or five rods square, where they tread down the snow in winter.

At length, fearing that if we held the direct course to the summit, we should not find any water near our camping-ground, we gradually swerved to the west, till, at four o’clock, we struck again the torrent which I have mentioned, and here, in view of the summit, the weary party decided to camp that night.

While my companions were seeking a suitable spot for this purpose, I improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone.

We were in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then with impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce trees, and with moss, but at last bare of all vegetation but lichens, and almost continually draped in clouds.

Following up the course of the torrent which occupied this,--and I mean to lay some emphasis on this word _up_,--pulling myself up by the side of perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches, and then, perhaps, walking a level rod or two in the thin stream, for it took up the whole road, ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giant’s stairway, down which a river flowed, I had soon cleared the trees, and paused on the successive shelves, to look back over the country.

The torrent was from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without a tributary, and seemingly not diminishing in breadth as I advanced; but still it came rushing and roaring down, with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare rock, from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just burst over the mountain.

Leaving this at last, I began to work my way, scarcely less arduous than Satan’s anciently through Chaos, up the nearest though not the highest peak.

At first scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce trees (_Abies nigra_), old as the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the solid cold.

I walked some good rods erect upon the tops of these trees, which were overgrown with moss and mountain cranberries.

It seemed that in the course of time they had filled up the intervals between the huge rocks, and the cold wind had uniformly leveled all over.

Here the principle of vegetation was hard put to it.

There was apparently a belt of this kind running quite round the mountain, though, perhaps, nowhere so remarkable as here.

Once, slumping through, I looked down ten feet, into a dark and cavernous region, and saw the stem of a spruce, on whose top I stood, as on a mass of coarse basket-work, fully nine inches in diameter at the ground.

These holes were bears’ dens, and the bears were even then at home.

This was the sort of garden I made my way _over_, for an eighth of a mile, at the risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any path _through_ it,--certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled.

“Nigh foundered on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying,” But nothing could exceed the toughness of the twigs,--not one snapped under my weight, for they had slowly grown.

Having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, I arrived upon a side-hill, or rather side-mountain, where rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset.

They looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or a low.

This brought me to the skirt of a cloud, and bounded my walk that night.

But I had already seen that Maine country when I turned about, waving, flowing, rippling, down below.

When I returned to my companions, they had selected a camping-ground on the torrent’s edge, and were resting on the ground; one was on the sick list, rolled in a blanket, on a damp shelf of rock.

It was a savage and dreary scenery enough, so wildly rough, that they looked long to find a level and open space for the tent.

We could not well camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world.

Even at this height we met with frequent traces of moose, as well as of bears.

As here was no cedar, we made our bed of coarser feathered spruce; but at any rate the feathers were plucked from the live tree.

It was, perhaps, even a more grand and desolate place for a night’s lodging than the summit would have been, being in the neighborhood of those wild trees, and of the torrent.

Some more aërial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire, and dispersing the embers about.

It was as if we lay in the very nest of a young whirlwind.

At midnight, one of my bed-fellows, being startled in his dreams by the sudden blazing up to its top of a fir tree, whose green boughs were dried by the heat, sprang up, with a cry, from his bed, thinking the world on fire, and drew the whole camp after him.

In the morning, after whetting our appetite on some raw pork, a wafer of hard-bread, and a dipper of condensed cloud or waterspout, we all together began to make our way up the falls, which I have described;

this time choosing the right hand, or highest peak, which was not the one I had approached before.

But soon my companions were lost to my sight behind the mountain ridge in my rear, which still seemed ever retreating before me, and I climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely poised, a mile or more, still edging toward the clouds; for though the day was clear elsewhere, the summit was concealed by mist.

The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf.

They were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth.

This was an undone extremity of the globe; as in lignite we see coal in the process of formation.

At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them.

Now the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sunlight, wherein I stood;

then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind’s intensity.

Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another.

It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away.

It was, in fact, a cloud-factory,--these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks.

Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me.

It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus.

Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound.

Æschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this.

It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits.

Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends.

He is more lone than you can imagine.

There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit.

His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air.

Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.

She does not smile on him as in the plains.

She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time.

This ground is not prepared for you.

Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys?

I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors.

I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I _am_ kind.

Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?

Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.