CHESUNCOOK. 
131 
were coming and going, — Aleck among the rest, — and 
from time to time an Indian touched here. In the win¬ 
ter there are sometimes a hundred men lodged here at 
once. The most interesting piece of news that circulated 
among them appeared to be, that four horses belonging 
to Smith, worth seven hundred dollars, had passed by 
farther into the woods a week before. 
The white-pine-tree was at the bottom or farther end 
of all this. It is a war against the pines, the only real 
Aroostook or Penobscot war. I have no doubt that they 
lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric 
age, for men have always thought more of eating than 
of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the 
“ hot bread and sweet cakes ”; and the fur and lumber 
trade is an old story to Asia and Europe. I doubt if 
men ever made a trade of heroism. In the days of 
Achilles, even, they delighted in big barns, and perchance 
in pressed hay, and he who possessed the most valuable 
team was the best fellow. 
We had designed to go on at evening up the Caucom- 
gomoc, whose mouth was a mile or two distant, to the 
lake of the same name, about ten miles off; but some 
Indians of Joe’s acquaintance, who were making canoes 
on the Caucomgomoc, came over from that side, and gave 
so poor an account of the moose-hunting, so many had 
been killed there lately, that my companions concluded 
not to go there. Joe spent this Sunday and the night 
with his acquaintances. The lumberers told me that 
there were many moose hereabouts, but no caribou or 
deer. A man from Oldtown had killed ten or twelve 
moose, within a year, so near the house that they heard 
all his guns. His name may have been Hercules, for 
aught I know, though I should rather have expected to 
