Maine Woods — Ktaadn, Section 09

We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls.

Anxious to avoid the delay, as well as the labor, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the batteau down the falls, carrying the baggage only over the portage.

Jumping from rock to rock until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the boat and let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet perpendicular.

The boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock, where the fall is perhaps nine or ten feet perpendicular, in from one to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it slide gently over, till the bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the air; then, letting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the other leaps in, and his companion following, they are whirled down the rapids to a new fall or to smooth water.

In a very few minutes they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy for the unskillful to attempt as the descent of Niagara itself.

It seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navigate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety.

At any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they.

One might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud-puddle.

There was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

The boatman pauses, perchance, on some shelf beneath a table-rock under the fall, standing in some cove of backwater two feet deep, and you hear his rough voice come up through the spray, coolly giving directions how to launch the boat this time.

Having carried round Pockwockomus Falls, our oars soon brought us to the Katepskonegan, or Oak Hall carry, where we decided to camp half-way over, leaving our batteau to be carried over in the morning on fresh shoulders.

One shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red spot as large as one’s hand, worn by the batteau on this expedition;

and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than its fellow, from long service.

Such toil soon wears out the strongest constitution.

The drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in the spring, rarely ever dry; and if one falls in all over he rarely changes his clothes till night, if then, even.

One who takes this precaution is called by a particular nickname, or is turned off.

None can lead this life who are not almost amphibious.

McCauslin said soberly, what is at any rate a good story to tell, that he had seen where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their shoulders to handspikes.

If the log did not start, then they had to put out their heads to breathe.

The driver works as long as he can see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed.

We lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our tent over the poles which were still standing, but re-shingling the damp and faded bed with fresh leaves.

In the morning we carried our boat over and launched it, making haste lest the wind should rise.

The boatmen ran down Passamagamet, and soon after Ambejijis Falls, while we walked round with the baggage.

We made a hasty breakfast at the head of Ambejijis Lake on the remainder of our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface again, under a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds in the northeast.

Taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across Deep Cove, the foot of Pamadumcook, and the North Twin, at the rate of six miles an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the Dam at noon.

The boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the batteau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in below.

Here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any.

Shooting down sometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant.

Now like a bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock.

I

suppose that it was like running the rapids of the Sault Sainte Marie, at the outlet of Lake Superior, and our boatmen probably displayed no less dexterity than the Indians there do.

We soon ran through this mile, and floated in Quakish Lake.

After such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and subdued; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, gone through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers seemed but playthings henceforth.

I began, at length, to understand the boatman’s familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids.

“Those Fowler boys,” said Mrs. McCauslin, “are perfect ducks for the water.

” They had run down to Lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles, in a batteau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor _cried_, when they brought him up by daylight, “Why, Tom, how did you see to steer?

” “We didn’t steer much,--only kept her straight.

” And yet they met with no accident.

It is true, the more difficult rapids are higher up than this.

When we reached the Millinocket opposite to Tom’s house, and were waiting for his folks to set us over,--for we had left our batteau above the Grand Falls,--we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along.

The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose, but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them.

At a little distance they might have been taken for Quakers, with their broad-brimmed hats and overcoats with broad capes, the spoils of Bangor, seeking a settlement in this Sylvania,--or, nearer at hand, for fashionable gentlemen the morning after a spree.

Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city.

There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a great city.

The one is no more a child of nature than the other.

In the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost.

Neptune at first was only anxious to know what we “kill,” seeing some partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too much anger to permit of a reply.

We thought Indians had some honor before.

But--“Me been sick.

Oh, me unwell now.

You make bargain, then me go.

” They had in fact been delayed so long by a drunken frolic at the Five Islands, and they had not yet recovered from its effects.

They had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of the banks with a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are their principal food on these expeditions.

So they went on up the Millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the Penobscot, after recruiting ourselves with a draught of Tom’s beer, leaving Tom at his home.

Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.

Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary;

perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me.

Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now?

He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets.

Can you well go further back in history than this?

Ay!

ay!

--for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former.

In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles, he dips his way along.

He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau.

He builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins.

He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears.

He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space.

So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man.

After having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last time, at Uncle George’s, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his return, we kept on down the river the next day, about eight miles on foot, and then took a batteau, with a man to pole it, to Mattawamkeag, ten more.

At the middle of that very night, to make a swift conclusion to a long story, we dropped our buggy over the half-finished bridge at Oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws, which never rest, and at six o’clock the next morning one of the party was steaming his way to Massachusetts.

* * * * * [Illustration: _Maine Wilderness_] What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined.

Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.

It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry.

The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree.

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,--so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

These are not the artificial forests of an English king,--a royal preserve merely.

Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature.

The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.

It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,--a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of _leucisci_, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man.

Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian.

Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?

What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in!

There certainly men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave.

There they could have no such thoughts as are associated with the village graveyard,--that make a grave out of one of those moist evergreen hummocks!

Die and be buried who will, I mean to live here still;

My nature grows ever more young The primitive pines among.

I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is.

You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh visited.

If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, have discovered only the shores of America.

While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored.

Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.

The very timber and boards and shingles of which our houses are made grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the Indian still hunts and the moose runs wild.

New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.

Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores?

Let a man travel on foot along the coast, from the Passamaquoddy to the Sabine, or to the Rio Bravo, or to wherever the end is now, if he is swift enough to overtake it, faithfully following the windings of every inlet and of every cape, and stepping to the music of the surf,--with a desolate fishing town once a week, and a city’s port once a month to cheer him, and putting up at the lighthouses, when there are any,--and tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man’s Land.

We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser Oregon and California unexplored behind us.

Though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.

There stands the city of Bangor, fifty miles up the Penobscot, at the head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand, like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, and to the West Indies for its groceries,--and yet only a few axemen have gone “up river,” into the howling wilderness which feeds it.

The bear and deer are still found within its limits; and the moose, as he swims the Penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping, and taken by foreign sailors in its harbor.

Twelve miles in the rear, twelve miles of railroad, are Orono and the Indian Island, the home of the Penobscot tribe, and then commence the batteau and the canoe, and the military road; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the New World.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Springer, in his _Forest Life_ (1851), says that they first remove the leaves and turf from the spot where they intend to build a camp, for fear of fire; also, that “the spruce-tree is generally selected for camp-building, it being light, straight, and quite free from sap;”

that “the roof is finally covered with the boughs of the fir, spruce, and hemlock, so that when the snow falls upon the whole, the warmth of the camp is preserved in the coldest weather;” and that they make the log seat before the fire, called the “Deacon’s Seat,” of a spruce or fir split in halves, with three or four stout limbs left on one side for legs, which are not likely to get loose.

[2] The Canadians call it _picquer de fond_.

[3] Even the Jesuit missionaries, accustomed to the St. Lawrence and other rivers of Canada, in their first expeditions to the Abenaquinois, speak of rivers _ferrées de rochers_, shod with rocks.

See also No. 10 _Relations_, for 1647, p. 185. [4] “A steady current or pitch of water is preferable to one either rising or diminishing; as, when rising rapidly, the water at the middle of the river is considerably higher than at the shores,--so much so as to be distinctly perceived by the eye of a spectator on the banks, presenting an appearance like a turnpike road.

The lumber, therefore, is always sure to incline from the centre of the channel toward either shore.

”--Springer.

[5] “The spruce tree,” says Springer in ’51, “is generally selected, principally for the superior facilities which its numerous limbs afford the climber.

To gain the first limbs of this tree, which are from twenty to forty feet from the ground, a smaller tree is undercut and lodged against it, clambering up which the top of the spruce is reached.

In some cases, when a very elevated position is desired, the spruce tree is lodged against the trunk of some lofty pine, up which we ascend to a height twice that of the surrounding forest.

” To indicate the direction of pines, one throws down a branch, and a man on the ground takes the bearing.

[6] The bears had not touched things on our possessions.

They sometimes tear a batteau to pieces for the sake of the tar with which it is besmeared.

[7] I cut this from a newspaper: “On the 11th (instant?

) [May, ’49], on Rappogenes Falls, Mr. John Delantee, of Orono, Me.

, was drowned while running logs.

He was a citizen of Orono, and was twenty-six years of age.

His companions found his body, enclosed it in bark, and buried it in the solemn woods.

”