22 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Jan. 30, 1890. 



Ut jtgmtett\mt amourist 



STANLEY. 



BY K. H. 



A GAIN from the sunland. 



Where the blue eyes 

 Of Nile's new-born sources 



Stare at the skies, 

 The solver of riddles 

 Breathlessly asked. 

 Steps out of the silence- 

 Broken at last. 



For heart-burning questions 

 Pressed on the earth: 



The fate of a brave band- 

 Passing, in worth, 



A continent's secret- 

 Was to be read; 



Now told by their voices 

 Woke from the dead. 



The wilderness opens, 



Yields up its prey, 

 Tramped down to submission* 



Footsteps that stay 

 For no cry of danger 



Stretching their chain, 

 Strong welded by heartbeats 



Out from the main. 



Through vine-woven jungles. 



Savages' camps. 

 Close coils of treachery, 



Festering swamps; 

 The thread of a sunbeam 



Searching the grave 

 Of primeval forests 



Emin to save. 



All hail to the heroes, 

 Living and dead, 



Whose names mark the pathways 

 Knowledge shall tread; 



And trade's restless armies, 

 Faith too, and love. 



The new realms of power- 

 Gifts from above. 



BY THE WAY. 



TN this day civilization crowds nature so closely that 

 A not infrequently do her children in their journeying 

 to and fro within the supposed precincts of their wilder- 

 ness, come plump upon civilizing man actually engaged 

 in his despoiling work. "What was but yesterday a quiet 

 recess in the woods, where perhaps the' liveliest disturb- 

 ance ever occurring is a strong breeze shaking the top- 

 most branches of the tall and thick-set trees, or rattling 

 their hard, dry leaves in autumn to the ground, echoes 

 of a sudden with the axe, the tools of the sapper and 

 miner, and in the twinkling of an eye is transformed into 

 a summer resort, a railroad station or a miner's camp. 



As we came out of the woods we were told that on the 

 day before a youthful sportsman had shot an unsuspect- 

 ing doe on the edge of the clearing almost as he turned 

 about from lifting his duffle and his gun off the platform 

 of the car at the station furthest in. She died like a 

 fish on the beach gasping for the receding tide. The deer 

 and' the "iron horse," as the locomotive is figuratively 

 and expressively called, well illustrate the whole range 

 of incongruity between nature and the type of modern 

 civilization— the railroad. The result of the struggle be- 

 tween them where we were was plain to be seen, and the 

 unseemly haste of its approach offensive. 



***** 



We talked with a pioneer of the country. Quite three 

 score and ten her courage and habit of work were ever 

 manifest as she busied herself about her house. Her 

 children, too, showed the characteristics of their parent, 

 though less directly and more self-consciously than did 

 their mother. Now, when the other world is beckoning 

 her to join the partner of her venturesome, lonely and 

 valorous life, hardly sustained for many years out 6f the 

 cold and rocky soil, the habit of labor binds sufficiently 

 her thoughts to earth. Almost less than the face of 

 nature about her dwelling has she herself changed. 

 Society with its arts, its railroads, fine clothes and com- 

 fortable ways of living, may have changed and may con- 

 tinue to change, her children, her house to some extent 

 may change, but her groove of life, has been cut too deep 

 and long for any such thing. 



***** 



One son outstrips even his progenitor. If she is a 

 driver, he outdrives her. He takes in the whole situ- 

 ation. He is down to bed rock principles of trade, finance 

 and barter, and no diverting taste or thought or sympa- 

 thy thrusts him aside a moment in any waking hour 

 from getting and gaining. Even his Irish wit busies 

 itself solely with the humor of business. We numbered 

 three lawyers in our company, but this native bargainer 

 shut two of us up with a word apiece, and settled the 

 third in a short but sharp encounter over his compensa- 

 tion for carrying our traps into the woods. Everything 

 went his way. Already were his affairs getting beyond 

 the paltry. When we came out we learned that he had 

 sold a few acres of land on a neighboring lake for fifteen 

 hundred dollars. It was dazzling to think what schemes 

 and enterprises would go on now at the instigation of 

 this person equipped with so substantial a sum. 



***** 



Thankful were we to reach the river and the hunting 

 lodge on its banks in the vast wilderness of the woods. 

 Here a worthy citizen of an interior town came, erected 

 a simple and substantial house, and year in and year out 

 lives, when in the lower altitude of his civilized resi- 

 dence he must die for lack of air for his enfeebled lungs. 

 You, who have not dwelt long enough with nature to 

 learn the satisfaction she gives to her steadfast lovers, 

 would shudder at the monotony, the l©ng winter, the 

 lingering spring, the deep snows, the fast-bound ice, the 

 bitter cold. However, he may find these things in their 

 time, certain it is that no more cheerful and contented 

 spirit has appeared to us. He is very simple in affairs. 

 The innocent air with which he receives somewhat acrid 



criticism on the lack of method displayed in the disposi- 

 tion of his now numerous guests cripples its force. He 

 placidly tells us, too, how late in the last fall, when up the 

 river Rooking for deer, he was waited on by four bears, 

 two adults and two well-grown cubs, and how from his 

 vantage seat in a tree he slew them every one with his 

 repeating rifle. 



* * * * * 



Five miles further in, over which we walked the next 

 morning, in a mean cabin on the bank of the river, 

 we "met up" with a somewhat interesting specimen! 

 Upward of seventy years of age, in solitude save when 

 passing sportsmen make him a call, lives " the Judge" — 

 title earned by years of faithful pettifogging in justice 

 courts of the neighboring county in the days of his prime. 

 Now he rises betimes in the morning, seeks the places 

 where the trout hide, catches his breakfast, reads his 

 papers and books, dreams and dozes, writes such worthy 

 thoughts as his surroundings breed in him, eats again 

 and sleeps again, and thus fares along. We swap stories 

 with him, get the best of the bargain and on we go. 

 ***** 



Three dogs are our companions, and like human kind 

 each has its character. One whom we call Lady Branch 

 was easily the favorite. She was a deerhouud, small and 

 delicate, with pendulous ears and dewlap. Led in leash she 

 would trot hour after hour close at the heel of her leader, 

 unobtrusively, save when a deer had too recently crossed 

 the trail. Then her instinct got the better of her disci- 

 pline and frequently she had to be cuffed into submission. 

 Her eyes had the habitual mournf illness of the eyes of a 

 dog, but vouchsafe to her so much as a word or touch and 

 instantly delight, vivacity and interest flashed from them. 

 What could be more touching, more sympathetic, more 

 appreciative than the caresses she showered upon any 

 known friend of hers ? And yet let her range in the 

 aisles of the forest until her nostrils met the faintest 

 odor of the deer, and entreaty, command and cajolement 

 went for nothing. She has been known to run for days 

 until brought to the ground from utter exhaustion she 

 lay awaiting some helping hand or death. She was so 

 small, so delicate, so frail, it seemed inrpossible that she 

 should wish long to pursue, much less to harm, the least 

 Of all her fellow creatures. 



* * * * * 



It would doubtless take more space than it is worth to 

 lay down the lines of character belonging to our guides. 

 If nature ever moulded a man for the woodsman's art she 

 moulded one of the two. Tall, but not too tall, lithe, 

 muscular, enduring, patient, courageous, cool, intelligent, 

 with keenest sight and hearing, and withal silent and 

 thoughtful. If the face be a good index of character it 

 seemed as if much of his might be read there. It was im- 

 passive, but strong, intellectual, and for that matter 

 handsome. No creature of the forest — not even the 

 fabled fox — could equal him in cunning, and of this 

 his dark and restless eyes, lacking in openness, told. He 

 cared nothing to tell of his exploits. The story of the two 

 panthers -he killed the last winter had to be dragged from 

 him with an ox team. The only circumstance of his 

 career that he ever volunteered was one night when we 

 stumbled and felt our way along a devious woods trail 

 by the light of a couple of lan terns to the night shelter of a 

 bark "lean-to" after "jacking" for deer. He told how, 

 when caught out at night in the late fall with no light, he 

 traveled by the bank of the river until he struck the same 

 trail on which we were, and how in the impenetrable 

 darkness of the forest he made his way for six miles to a 

 hunting shanty, where he stayed till dawn. One who 

 has never traversed the woods at night can hardly appre- 

 ciate the magnitude of this task. 



Favorite guides are commonly expert paddlers, crack 

 shots and good cooks. Certainly no guide anywhere in 

 the vicinity was in such demand as this man of ours. 

 But to say nothing of these commonly vaunted quali- 

 ties, he had an unusual strength in the lines that mark 

 strong men in any walk of life. His acquaintance with 

 the geography of the woods was celebrated, and it is said 

 that dropped out of a balloon anywhere he could take the 

 shortest line to a given point. 



***** 



Our other coureur de bois made up in capacity of 

 amusement if he fell short of the exceptional other in 

 professional skill. "While the woods and the life there 

 was the thought and existence of the other, tins one 

 had other channels of interest and energy. He was the 

 hewer of wood and drawer of water, who knew the trail 

 sufficiently well, and who could "paddle a man up to a 

 deer." He was a Hibernian, and nature had not denied 

 to him the proverbial wit of his race. With this splendid 

 coin he more than paid up for any deficiency. To hear 

 him tell the story of how he got even with a mean neigh- 

 bor who shot down his dog was as good as a play, although 

 a reproduction of it by the writer without the unction of 

 his humorous expression and casual manner may leave 

 the reader in doubt whether any but a somewhat harsh fun 

 could be extracted from an account of so severe an inci- 

 dent. It must suffice to say that weeks, if not months, 

 after his enemy had supposed from lapse of time and ap- 

 parent indifference that Mr. Borrigan had buried all un- 

 kindness, he was one evening quietly unharnessing his 

 team, when the fellow appeared, and taking his place on 

 the opposite side of the horses from our friend, opened an 

 ordinary conversation. Mr. H., with perhaps unusual 

 deliberateness, continued unbuckling straps, until in the 

 natural course of the business he came round to where 

 his unthinking victim stood, when without any preface 

 he hit him in the "tushes," i. e., the teeth, and felled him 

 to the ground, where he belabored him a few times, per- 

 mitted him to arise, challenged him to resent his treat- 

 ment, and on his declining, hit him again and sent him 

 home. "I made it 'torching' (his word for scorching) hot 

 for him," he said. 



***** 



One day as we slid our boat on to the shelving shore 

 of a neighboring lake, a bluejay fell out of the sky 

 among the rushes not far away, and sat screaming, 

 his wings wide spread, apparently sick or hurt. We. 

 picked him up still clamoring at the top of his lungs. 

 He showed such spirit and was so beautiful in his mot- 

 tied blue coat and gay crest, that we led him away cap- 

 tive to our camp. There he was installed in a pack bas- 

 ket turned on its side, with mosquito netting stretched 

 across its opening. He would not eat and yet never 

 showed a white feather in fear or depression. All the 

 evening he worked unflaggingly upon his prison walls, 



striking his sharp bill into the netting, without a symp- 

 tom of his former illness or injury, so we kept him, 

 waiting to see if in the morning his proud spirit would 

 at all be humbled. Alas! on the morrow he was dead 

 and our remorse was great. 



What was the secret of his taking off? What brought 

 him down at first to lie helpless against our capture of him? 

 He bore no visible mark of hurt, no feather was ruffled 

 or displaced, yet he lay among the tall plumes of grass 

 powerless to escape us. No bird is warier than he of any 

 enemy, nay, he delights in the office of warning other 

 birds and animals of the forest of the approach of an in- 

 truder. It is said that bluejays often meet their death 

 at the hands of the hunter, "who, deprived at the final 

 moment of the wary deer by their shrill and discordant 

 call of alarm, have in revenge turned against their breasts 

 the shot intended for a nobler game. He forgets or neg- 

 lects after his warning to the deer, to find safety with 

 them in the dense copses of the wood. Did a hawk turn 

 on his accustomed prosecutor and slide his sharp beak 

 or claw between the close-lying feathers of his breast in 

 deadly thrust, or did a night owl, catching him unawares 

 in the silence and darkness of some glade, thus strike him 

 and vent the heaped up wrongs and persecutions that 

 have come to his tribe from all the tribe of jays? Or did 

 some nut, or seed or berry plucked for breakfast beneath 

 some tall tree, or as he swayed at dawn on the depending 

 branch of some fruitful bush beside a distant lake or 

 stream, poison his blood and destroy his life? We could 

 not tell. Perchance it was, that if we had not robbed 

 him of his liberty, he might have cured his hurt and 

 lived, finding a balm that nature's children know in some 

 juice of balsam tree or fir or other simple of the wood. 

 Perchance it was the breaking of his proud spirit, by our 

 confinement of him, that broke at last his heart and 

 stripped him of all courage to fight successfully the 

 trouble that only momentarily palsied his life whew we 

 secured him. Remorseful thought! G. T. C. 



Oswego, N. Y., November, 1889. 



OUT-OF-DOOR PAPERS. 



X. — OTHER MEN'S OBSERVATIONS. 



IT is comforting sometimes when not over well pleased 

 with one's own performance, to see how other people 

 have fallen short of absolute accuracy; and, for my own 

 part, in order to obtain complete satisfaction, I frequently 

 go back two hundred years or so to those early observers 

 who wrote when the world of things was fresh and undis- 

 covered. There is much besides science in their writings, 

 and a man might grow old guessing, if he tried to deter- 

 mine what is meant in all cases; but with all then- mis- 

 takes and superstitions these old books are none the less 

 excellent and pleasurable reading. What can be better 

 than good Sir Thomas Browne's experiment to discover 

 whether an ostrich can digest nails, feeding one on the 

 tenpenny article till it died, and then gravely lamenting 

 that he had not more ostriches whereupon to experiment 

 further? We f ollow him with a lively interest while, in lan- 

 guage more latinic tkan Latin, he discourses on such deep 

 questions as, whether the diamond is softened by goat's 

 blood; whether elephants have joints in their legs; "why 

 the bittern's voice differs from that of all other volatiles"; 

 "the anthropophagie of Diotnedes Ins horses"; and the 

 probable non-existence of griffins, basilisks and the phce- 

 nix — weighty chapters in which Browne in the text is 

 overpowered by Ross and Dean Wren in the foot notes; 

 who, being men gymnastically composed in then- intel- 

 lectuals, as Sir Thomas might say, halt at no leap in order 

 to reach their conclusion; thephcenix must certainly be 

 alive, have retreated into the wilds of Scythia for safety, 

 says Ross; "for had Heliogabalus, that Roman glutton, 

 met with him he had devoured him, though there were 

 no more in the world!" 



But there is no need of going into the wilds of Scythia 

 for wonders; the early voyagers brought them to our 

 own doors. For one thing, they were all interested in 

 snakes, as if they had all just come from Ireland, and 

 they spend pages in describing these "terrible creatures, 

 carrying stings in their tails." That doughty warrior, 

 Sieur Chaniplain, who writes of the rarities of America, 

 with a hand unprejudiced in favor of the facts, produces 

 the most remarkable; "As large as one's arm, his head 

 as large as a hen's egg, upon which they have two feath- 

 ers. At the end of the tail they have a rattle, which 

 makes a noise when they crawl; they are very dangerous 

 as to teeth and tail, nevertheless the Indians eat them, 

 having cut off the two extremities." The plate (drawn 

 by Champlain himself) represents a creature with head 

 decorated with two ascending plumes and tail finished by 

 a knob the size of a mainmast truck; its body is disposed 

 in three complete loops, which would necessitate rolling 

 sidewise iike a spiral spring had not the artist made loco- 

 motion impossible by turning two of the coils one way 

 and the third in the opposite direction. "There are also 

 dragons," says Champlain, who was nothing if not super- 

 stitious, "of strange shape, having a head approaching 

 that of an eagle, w T ings like a bat, a body like a lizard 

 and only two feet, sufficiently large, and the tail very 

 scaly, and is as large as a sheep; they are not dangerous 

 and do injury to no one, although to see them one would 

 think the contrary;" that is if they at all resemble M. 

 Champlain's picture. But then Champlain helped invent 

 the Gougou, which is much more terrible, so that possi- 

 bly he didn't mind the little dragons. 



Not only are mythological creatures introduced in im- 

 pressive numbers, but our old, familiar animals appear 

 in new lights. "The porcupine I have likewise treated 

 of," says John Josselyn in his "Two Voyages," "only this 

 I forgot to acquaint you with, that they lay eggs and are 

 good meat." 



"The mink is of the otter kind, and subsists in the 

 same manner," writes Capt. John Carver, "In shape and 

 size it resembles a polecat, being equally long and slender. 

 Its skin is blacker than that of the otter or almost any 

 other creature^ 'as black as a mink' being a proverbial 

 expression in America; it is not, however, as valuable, 

 though this greatly depends on the season in which it is 

 taken. Its tail is round like that of a snake, but growing 

 flatfish toward the end, and is entirely without hair." 

 Capt. Carver's ornithology is one degree worse. "The 

 whetsaw is of the cuckoo kind, being like that a solitary 



