224 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
home; and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the 
myriads, as if it were an old road to him. How can a 
hawk ever find him there ? I fancied that he must be 
glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us. One of 
those sombre fir and spruce woods is not complete unless 
you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy 
recesses his fine alarum,— his spruce voice, like the 
working of the sap through some crack in a tree, — the 
working of the spruce-beer. Such an impertinent fellow 
would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. 
“ 0,” said I, “ I am well acquainted with your family, I 
know your cousins in Concord very well. Guess the 
mail’s irregular in these parts, and you’d like to hear 
from ’em.” But my overtures were vain, for he would 
withdraw by his aerial turnpikes iifto a more distant cedar- 
top, and spring his rattle again. 
We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow 
pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only 
on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which 
often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. The fallen 
trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route 
was through a succession of small yards, where we 
climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water 
often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a 
second yard, and so on; and going back for his bag my 
companion once lost his way and came back without it. 
In many places the canoe would have run if it had not 
been for the fallen timber. Again it would be more 
open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow, and no 
place to sit down. It was a mossy swamp, which it re¬ 
quired the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very 
likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though 
we saw none. It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, 
