I 
May 22, 1909.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
j conquered at last, when the mind revels in the 
I intoxication of success! If I were a poet I 
I would write an epic of the hunting field. I 
i would seek to thrill the imagination of the 
I sportsman, and by reminding him of his own 
j grand holidays spent close to nature, far from 
the grime and the discord and the pettiness of 
civilization, I would give him a pleasure which 
no versified narrative of the Trojan war could 
hope to create. 
The poem, indeed, is surging through my mind 
now like breezes through the harp of Eolus, but 
to most of us the gift of poetic expression is 
not vouchsafed, and my epic will, alas, never 
crowd the works of Homer and Virgil from the 
bookshelves. Being neither poet nor artist, then, 
I can do no more than outline, in commonplace 
prose, the stirring scenes which I have long been 
living over and over in memory. 
The hanging gardens of Babylon—the hang¬ 
ing gardens of Squaretown. From the sublime 
to the ridiculous you will say. And you may 
think so, of course, but I, who have enjoyed the 
hospitality of Squaretowm’s hanging gardens, 
must be allowed to consider them far above 
ridicule and to remember them with pleasure. 
Two pairs of weary legs—the younger and 
more experienced plowdng a way through fifteen 
or eighteen inches of accumulating snow; the 
older and less trained equally tired from fol¬ 
lowing in the slight path made by the weary 
human plow. It was almost night. The day 
had begun in a moose hunt in five or six inches 
of snow. It degenerated into a deer hunt, as 
the hope of finding moose “works” dwindled, 
and the deepening snow restricted our radius 
of action, camp from various causes being left 
further and further away at the other end of 
a back track long since obliterated. 
My chief employment that day, as I recall it 
after the lapse of years, consisted in brushing 
the snow from the front sight of my rifle, and 
less frequently blowing it out from the back 
sight, which enjoyed some protection from my 
arm as I carried it. 
Now it was almost night. Camp was not diffi¬ 
cult to find, though impossible to reach while 
daylight lasted, because of the slow progress 
which we could make in the snow. My paso- 
meter even refused to record many of the steps, 
so deep and soft was the snow, and so little the 
jar when my heel came down. In this situation 
we held a council of war. Should it be the 
camp, with exhausted strength, though with late 
supper, change of clothing and comfortable 
bough beds, or should it be an old logging camp 
not far away, but with scant supper or break¬ 
fast and without other clothing or bedding than 
the garments which we wore? The council de¬ 
cided in favor of the logging camp. 
The way led through a cedar swamp across 
a beaver dam where we were not too weary to 
marvel at the engineering skill displayed by its 
builders, and upon a little ridge where a small 
plateau afforded room for the group of log 
buildings which had housed the men and horses 
of a logging operation of nearly a generation 
earlier. A banquet hall deserted, when com¬ 
pared with such a camp, is like Broadway at 
noontime. It was not only abandoned, but it 
was built to be abandoned when its lonesome 
purpose—a single winter’s occupancy in the 
wilderness—was accomplished. 
Its timbers, many of them too worthless when 
cut to be floated down to civilization, were 
broken with their own weight, except in the 
walls. The roof timbers, with the superadded 
splits and earth and snow, pitched helplessly 
down to the center of the floors. Such incon¬ 
gruous surroundings 1 Broken hardware sug¬ 
gesting kitchen outfit and blacksmith’s supplies, 
pork barrels and molasses casks, wrecked sleds 
and scraps of harness—a little of everything 
that was useless cropping out through the snow 
or hanging on the broken walls. Strange grains 
and grasses lifted their withered heads above 
the snow, descendants from seed brought with 
MUNSUNGAN LAKE. 
the provender for the horses—exotics, suggest¬ 
ing nothing but city-bred people amid the un¬ 
congenial surroundings of a frontier settlement 
where social and material conditions are foreign 
and unfamiliar. 
This then must be our home for the night. In 
one corner of the camp, which had housed the 
crew, a little open space, where even the snow 
had hardly penetrated, was left available for 
our use. The jointed timbers at one corner of 
the camp held the walls on two sides practically 
intact. The broken roof timbers rested on the 
ground in the middle of the camp, but the other 
ends were still supported by the wall at the end 
of the structure. On these roof timbers the 
cedar splits still rested and the earth, which had 
been shoveled on to keep the camp warm through 
the long Northern winter, was still there. Thus 
we had what was practically a lean-to in which, 
however, one of the sides instead of the front 
was open. 
Ambitious little seedling spruces had taken 
root in the earth which covered the roof. Some 
of them were three or four feet high and they 
809 
were perhaps foolishly dreaming of the day, 
which could never come, when they, too, would 
have commercial value and would be floated 
down the big river to be bought and sold at 
so much a thousand feet, board measure. It 
was a miniature forest, such as the Japanese 
love to cultivate, growing above our heads as 
we made our plans for the night. 
Flistory recites that the hanging gardens of 
Babylon, with all their wealth of mystery to 
stimulate the imagination, were merely a level 
space planted with trees and flowers, overlook¬ 
ing the Euphrates, and supported by a series of 
lofty arches. The garden of spruces, to the 
roots of which we turned up our toes when we 
composed ourselves to sleep, was as well en¬ 
titled to be described as “hanging” as the Baby¬ 
lonian structure, even though it could not take 
rank as an eighth wonder of the world. 
There were cedar splits in plenty to make a 
little fire to dry our clothing and make a cup 
of tea, and a little group of dainty birches grow¬ 
ing within the walls of the camp surrendered 
one of their number to serve as a tea pole. The 
unconsumed remnant of our dinner, which had 
been eaten in the open air, afforded a meager 
supper, made still more meager by our resolu¬ 
tion to save some for breakfast. And then we 
were ready for the night. 
A vertical section of our habitation would 
show a right-angle triangle, with our heads, as 
we lay on the ground, in the acute angle formed 
bv the hypothenuse and base, and our feet to¬ 
ward the fire, which flickered gaily in the right 
angle of the triangle. A few splits, standing on 
end in the snow, formed a wall to protect our 
heads and shoulders from the weather. And 
then it snowed, but we were warm, and by a 
comparative standard, comfortable. I do not re¬ 
member that we had any spring beds with mat¬ 
tresses and blankets, but we rested well and at 
daybreak arose refreshed. 
Our hunt had begun three or four days earlier 
on bare ground, dry leaves and sticks making 
still-hunting quite out of the question. For those 
three or four days we talked of little but the 
hoped-for snow. We tried to win over the 
weather man to give us snow by compliments, 
cajolery and even abuse. Snow was the one 
object of our hope. Give us that and we would 
undertake to find the moose without further 
assistance. But we overdid it. It was the first 
snow of the season, and when the skies cleared, 
in the morning after our night under the hang¬ 
ing gardens, the ground was evenly covered with¬ 
out drift, with twenty-four inches of soft, dry 
snow, and no snowshoes for a dozen miles! 
I had no camera with which to picture our 
home for the night and the hanging gardens of 
Squaretown, but the picture is as vivid in my 
mind now as if the incident were of yesterday. 
Another picture. Again an old logging camp. 
Eight or ten inches of freshly fallen and still 
falling snow; every footstep cushioned by the 
soft, dry snow on the ground and the trees 
loaded with masses of white which seemed to 
muffle every sound; the track of a deer made 
two or three hours ago, leading past the hovels, 
with their roofs broken down and filling the in¬ 
terior with disordered timbers, like giant jack¬ 
straws; the track leading—leading, of course, 
for I was hunting and instinctively followed— 
