Part 9

Killing the trout as mercifully as such a thing can be done, I run a string through his red gills, and tie him to my loose-jointed craft. Then, just to see if there are any more like him (and to avoid temptation) I break my hook at the bend, leaving only a harmless bit of steel on the fly. Here comes a cloud-shadow, drifting up the lake. I wait for it, and cast again in the same place. Yi-yi, what a fool I was to break that hook! The flashing rise that follows my cast is such as a fisherman dreams of in his sleep.

There must be a spring hereabouts, I think; such trouty vim and dash at this season bespeak living water. The raft drifts over the spot where my fish rose, and I stretch out to become as one of the logs, shading my eyes with my hands to exclude the upper light. There to the left I dimly discern a ring of white sand; in the middle, where the water rolls in ceaseless commotion, boils up a spring as big as my hat. As the raft grows quiet, shadows glide in from all directions to rest on the rim of sand. Shades of Izaak Walton, look at them! My trout weighs two pounds; but I wish I had let him alone and waited for a big one.

The shadows dart away at the first motion of my head; but they will come back, and one has only to bring his raft within casting distance to have wonderful fishing. This is a sure-thing place, one of the few I have found in drifting over many northern lakes, and I must locate it past forgetting. Carefully I take the ranges: big pine east and larch stub west; hawk’s nest south and split rock north. Where the imaginary lines cross is the hidden spring with its treasures. No fear that I shall miss it when I come again!

The raft moves heavily shoreward and lands at the mouth of a little brook. There I broil the lordly trout, noting with satisfaction that his flesh is pink as a salmon’s; also I make a dipper of tea, and spread a birch-bark cloth, on which is a feast for a freeman. As I eat in thankfulness, after dousing my fire to kill all scent of smoke, the moose and her calf come circumspectly out of the woods; a deer appears on the opposite shore, stepping daintily; the wild ducks glide out of their hiding place, and I am one with the silent wilderness again.

Now comes the best time of all, the time when one remembers the traveler who came to a place where it was always afternoon. At one moment I am lost in the immense tranquillity of the woods; the next I am following some little comedy which begins with a flutter of wings or a rustle of feet on leaves, and which runs on till the actors discover that a stranger is watching them.

Slowly, imperceptibly, my lovely day slips away to join all the other days; each moment of it is like a full hour of life; each hour, when it is past, seems but a fleeting moment. From an endless period of alternate watching and reverie I start up with the consciousness that the sun is below the western hills, that shadows are growing long, that I have a dim trail to follow before I find familiar landmarks again.

As I hurry along, picking up the blazed spots with difficulty in the fading light, at times over-running the trail, there comes now and then a tingling of the skin, as at the touch of cold, when I pass through darkening thickets where the night life begins to stir and rustle. If the philosopher Hume had ever followed this or any other wilderness trail after sundown, he would have found under his own skin some illustrative matter for his central doctrine. He sought to tell what the mind of man is by determining its contents at any one instant, as if its continuity and identity were of no consequence. Had he lived in the woods, he must have noticed that there are moments on a darkening trail when the mind seems to be reduced to an acute point of attraction, at the tip of which, like an electric spark, is a sense-impression. One becomes at such a time a veritable part of wild nature; a multitude of sights, sounds and flavors that ordinarily pass unnoticed are each one bringing its warning, its challenge, its question. A man’s dull ears grow keen; the pupils of his eyes expand like an animal’s; his nose resumes its almost forgotten function of taking messages from the air; his whole skin becomes a delicate receiving instrument, like the skins of the lower orders; and the strange “sixth sense” of unseen things, which most animals possess, begins to stir in its long sleep. The flow of thought is suspended; reason retreats to its hidden spring, and one grows sensitive all over, alert and responsive in every fiber of his nature. Such is the way of a man alone in the woods at night.

If this be the way the higher animals live continually (and I think it is), I heartily envy them their aliveness. It is alleged that they live a life of ceaseless fear; but fear is almost wholly mental or imaginative, and is therefore beyond the animal’s horizon. All wild creatures are naturally timid, but they have no means of knowing what fear is. That which our naturalists thoughtlessly call fear in an animal (doubtless because civilized and imaginative man, having no wild experience, is himself fearful in the dark woods) is in reality only exquisite sensitiveness to physical and pleasurable impressions.

It is almost dark when I reach the old lumber road, thankful that I need no longer search out the trapper’s trail, and turn down the open way to the lake. Yet I go more cautiously, more cat-footedly, because a few minutes ago a hidden deer stood watching my approach till I could have touched him with the fishing rod. He reminds me that most animals are now at their ease, and that twilight is the best time to come near them. The birds are asleep, all save the owls; but I hear many a faint stir or lisp of surprise as my shoulder brushes a thicket.

Presently I come to an open spot beside the road, where trees and underbrush have been cut away. A hundred roots or stubs rise above the ground, looking all alike in the gloom; yet somehow I am aware, without knowing why or how, that one motionless object is different from all the rest. I fix attention upon it, and approach softly, nearer and nearer. My eyes say that it is only a lump, dark and silent; my ears and nose tell me nothing. There is no sound, no motion, no form even to suggest what huddles there in the dark; but I know it is a living thing. I bend forward to touch it--Br-r-r-room! With a roar of whirring wings a cock partridge bursts away like a bomb, giving me a terrible shock.

I never saw that explosive fellow before; but I ought to have guessed who he was, because several times I have surprised a solitary cock grouse asleep amid stubs of his own size, or else leaning against a huge stump, where he looks precisely like an extra root in the dusk. Meanwhile mother partridges with their broods are roosting higher, some in thick alders where the leaves hide them, others close against the stem of a spruce or cedar, where it is hard for eyes to distinguish them even in broad daylight.

At the foot of a hill, where a jumper trail enters the logging road from the right, I hear a strange cry from the opposite side, and stop to learn what it is. For several minutes I wait, hearing the cry at intervals, till I have located it far away on a ridge and have recognized it as the voice of a cub-bear.

The dusk is now heavy in the sleeping woods; not a breath of air stirs; the silence is intense. I am listening for the bear, when suddenly comes a feeling that something is near or watching me. Where it is, what it is, I have absolutely no notion; but the sense-of-presence grows stronger, and I trust it because I have seldom known it to be wrong. I search the lumber road up and down, but there is nothing to be seen. I search the woods on both sides, slowly, minutely, but there is no sound. Then, as I turn to the jumper trail that comes winding down the hill behind me, a current of air drifts in; my nose begins to recognize a faint odor.

A few yards up the trail is a huge black object, an upturned tree with a mat of soil clinging to its roots. Yes, it is a root, surely; but there is something in its shadow. I watch it, bending slightly so as to get the outline against the sky; and there, clearly showing now above the root, are the antlers of a bull-moose. He is still as a rock, pointing ears and ungainly nose straight at me. Undoubtedly he was coming down the trail when he saw a motion in the road ahead, and froze in his tracks to find out about it. He knows now that he is seen, and that one of us must move. For a full minute we stare at each other; then he takes a nervous step, swings broadside to the trail, and turns his head for another look. Big as he is, not a sound marks his going; he takes a few springy, silent steps up the trail, and fades into the gloom of the big woods.

So I come to the canoe at last, and cross the pond and run the stream, which is now a veritable tunnel with a tattered ribbon of sky overhead. As I cross the big lake campward, the evening star is sparkling like a great jewel on the pointed tip of a spruce, which towers above his fellows on the crown of the western hills. Overhead passes a sound of hurrying wings; a loon calls far away, and again these wild sounds are as fragments of a mighty stillness. Under the gliding canoe the waters are quiet, as if in slumber; but in the distance you can hear them talking to the shore with a voice that is now a whisper, again a faint echo of music. On every side the woods come closer, as if to look upon their reflection in the inky mirror; and they seem to be waiting, to be listening. Over all this silent, expectant world some sublime presence, living but unseen, is brooding upon the mystery of life.

And at last I, too, begin to brood. For the first time in uncounted hours comes a touch of relaxation, a quieting of the alert senses, the well-done of a perfect day. I quote softly from Lanier:

“And now from the vast of the Lord shall the waters of sleep Roll in on the souls of men; But who will reveal to our waking ken The forms that swim and the shapes that creep Under the waters of sleep?”

As I double the point toward which the canoe has long been heading, a light flashes cheerily out of the dark woods; the camp fire sends out its invitation, and a voice calls, “Welcome home!” Though my “good lonesome” is ended, and better things are waiting, I must still turn for a last look at the sleeping lake, to watch the ultimate glimmer of twilight fade and vanish over the western steeps.

Good-by, my Day; and hail! You go, yet you stay forever. You have taught me something of the nature of eternity, of the day of the Lord that is as a thousand years, and of the thousand years that are as one day.

NIGHT LIFE OF THE WILDERNESS

Twilight is deepening into dusk as you leave camp to follow the silent trail. The long summer day has had its lesson, broken short off, as all lessons are before we learn them; now what of the night?

With the sunset a subtle change comes over the big woods; they are fragrant and profoundly still. Trees that were massed in the sunshine now seem more individual, standing with outstretched arms, praying their myriad prayer; and viewing them against the sky you see their delicate grace as well as their strength. The birds have long been quiet, all but the robin, who on the tip of the tallest evergreen, where he can see a gleam of afterglow, pours out a strangely wild song. He is always the last to go to bed. Chipmunks that have been silently busy all day, and red squirrels that have been noisily idle, are now in their dens asleep. Something like a shadow passes before your face, swooping downward in quivering flight; you hear the scratching of tiny feet on bark, and there at your shoulder, looking at you with round inquisitive eye, is Molepsis the flying squirrel. He is the gentlest, the most lovable of his tribe, and he belongs to the night. You are watching him, your heart warming to the little fellow, when leaves rustle and a twig cracks.

If your ears were better trained, you would know now what is passing, since no two animals rustle the leaves or snap a twig in precisely the same way. Lacking such lore of the woods, you halt at the first sound, straining your eyes in the gloom. The rustle draws nearer; and there in the shadow stands Hetokh the buck, observing you keenly and asking, “Who are you, Pilgrim, and whither does your trail lead?”

There is no fear in his alert poise, you see; nor does he whirl and bound away in alarm, as you expect him to do, because you know him only by daylight. Receiving no answer, he goes his own way, but haltingly, looking back as he disappears. Then Molepsis loses interest in you, or remembers his small affairs; he runs to the top of his tree, launches himself out in slanting flight, and is swallowed up in the immensity of the dusk. Such a little life to trust itself so boldly in a great darkness!

Again the trail is before you, silent but never lifeless; it seems always to be listening. As you follow it onward, you are wiser than before, having learned the odor of a deer and the meaning of a tiny shadow that often passes before your face in the twilight. You are also more sympathetic, and richer by two happy memories; for the flying squirrel has softened your heart to all innocent creatures, and that questioning pose of the buck has awakened a desire to know more of the real animal, the living mysterious anima of him, not the babble of his death or the jargon of his bones that fill our books of hunting or of science. Meanwhile Kook’skoos the great horned owl is sounding for rain, and his voice is no longer a foreboding; it is a call, an invitation to come and learn.

And speaking of learning, you will not follow the twilight trail very far before it is impressed on your mind that the wild creature you surprise or startle by day is very different from the creature that surprises and often startles you by night. He has at first all the advantage, being at home in dark woods where you are a wary stranger. Then, as you grow familiar with the dusk, more in tune with its harmony, you begin to appreciate this distinction: by day you see a strange wild animal at a distance; by night you may meet him as a fellow traveler on the same road of mystery. This natural equality, this laying aside of all killing or collecting for a live-and-let-live policy, is absolutely essential if you would learn anything worth knowing about the wood folk.

All this is at variance with the prevalent notion that timid beasts spend their nights in a state of terror; but never mind that notion now. It is pure delusion. You will learn from the night woods that the alleged terror of animals is, like their imaginary struggle for existence, the distorted reflection of a human and most unnatural experience. A lone man in the woods after nightfall is like one who has lost his birthright of confidence in nature. His spine goes chilly at every rustling; his overstrained eyes irritate his whole nervous system, which becomes “like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh”; whereupon his imagination conjures up a world of savage beasts and other hallucinations. When he returns to his fire-lighted camp, there to think of small or large creatures roaming the dusk from which he has just escaped with trembling, he easily attributes to them his own human fears or terrors. It does not occur to our fevered fancy that the animal is abroad because he prefers the dusk to the daylight, or that he has, as we shall see, an excellent reason for his preference. The simple fact is that of fear, in any human sense, the wild animal is wholly and happily ignorant.

Let me emphasize, therefore, as the first lesson of the night woods, that they have no fear in them, except such as you carry in your own heart. Banish that fear, and you shall speedily learn this other lesson: by day your civilized man is by force of habit an intruder, a meddlesome adventurer who makes noises and disturbs the peace; but by night his transgressions are covered; he is peaceable because powerless, unable to use his inventions, and nature accepts him as part of a reasonable universe in which sizes vary but rights are all equal. Gradually his spirit, set free from its worldly business, expands into the immensity around him. From the stars and the still night he absorbs tranquillity; and then it is that the animal seems to recognize his changed disposition and meets him unafraid. This, I think, is the most illuminating experience that comes to a man who enters into the spirit of the night, that the wild animal has little or no fear of him.