May 7, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
729 
“Well, yes. I remember once I was exploring 
near Telos. I came out to an old camp ground 
and there stood a big bull moose just across the 
clearing. Like a fool I made a trumpet of my 
hands and called. He came for me head first. 
There was a bunch of maple sprouts eight or 
ten feet across in the camp yard where a large 
tree had been cut. I dodged round that. For 
a time it was nip and tuck, but I gained on him 
so that I managed to come up behind him and 
cut a ham-string. He ran about as well on three 
legs, but finally I got a chance to cut the other.” 
He stopped the story here till the lawyer in¬ 
quired: “Didn’t you kill him?” 
“Of course; I would not leave him to suffer.” 
“But weren’t you afraid?” 
“Why, no, young man, I wasn’t exactly afraid, 
but I was a little suspicious.” 
Breakfasting before day, we were loaded and 
ready to start at sunrise. As soon as the dead- 
water ended, the water was so low that, with our 
loaded canoes, we were obliged to get out and 
wade and drag them, while the explorers, having 
only their packs, were soon out of sight. All 
day from sunrise to sunset we waded and sacked. 
In many places, after picking out the large rocks 
with our hands and shoveling gravel with our 
paddles to make a channel, it took all three of 
us to drag a canoe to the next place where it 
would float. In some places we would have to 
wade to the waist to get to the bow which was 
aground. At Pine Stream Falls, which is usually 
a smart pitch to run, and where batteaux had 
been swamped and men drowned, there was so 
little water that w r e had to drop the canoes down 
with a line. I learn that lately the raising of the 
dam at the foot of Chesuncook has backed up 
the water, so as to flow these falls out. 
Night found us half a mile below Pine Stream 
Falls, having worked fourteen hours to get about 
twelve miles. We were so tired that as soon as 
supper was over, w*et as we were, we lay down 
in the alders without attempting to pitch a tent 
or to pick a bough, and neither of us knew any 
more trouble until daylight. 
A four-mile paddle brought us to Ansel Smith's 
farm at the head of Chesuncook on the west 
side. As Thoreau, in his article on Chesuncook 
in “The Maine Woods,” has described minutely 
this place and the route we went over, I will 
only say that at this time Mr. Smith had some 
600 bushels of potatoes and turnips which he 
had raised to sell to the lumbermen, besides a 
large amount of hay and grain. 
Here we met a man named Jim Ferris who 
was hunting for an ox. The spring before Mr. 
Charles Y. Richardson had turned out sixteen 
oxen at his camp on Caucomgomocsis to shift 
for themselves for the summer. Fourteen of 
them had been found alive, besides one on Um- 
bazooksus meadows shot behind the shoulder, 
evidently having been mistaken for a moose. 
Ferris was hunting the sixteenth. Besides Fer¬ 
ris hunting for weeks, I knew of another man 
being paid $32 for hunting sixteen days. Finally, 
after the ox had been given up for weeks, and 
nearly two months after the snow had come to 
stay, he was found in Smith’s barnyard among 
his cattle, thin in flesh, but able to travel, hav¬ 
ing lived for all this time on what he could pick 
up in the woods. 
After getting some potatoes at Smith’s we 
crossed at the head of the lake, here about a 
mile wide, and at this time so low that I saw 
men poling canoes across. We landed and 
cooked dinner for Mr. Staples, who was to start 
from here for a fourteen-mile walk over to 
Chamberlain Lake. There he would build a fire 
on the shore to attract the attention of the peo¬ 
ple at Chamberlain farm, who would send a 
canoe across two miles for him. 
Giving him a good supply of matches and with 
mutual hand shakes, we turned nearly north up 
Caucomgomoc Cove. This is a broad cove run¬ 
ning up nearly a mile to where it receives the 
Umbazooksus coming in from the northeast and 
the Caucomgomoc from the north. Proceeding 
up Caucomgomoc stream, we passed the lower 
and the upper falls, having to carry by our loads 
and canoes. The lower carry was about twenty 
rods, the upper less. The lower falls consist of 
two pitches of about six feet each, the upper of 
MANLY HARDY. 
one fall of fifteen feet, both over trap ledges. 
At the lower, with only a cut pole and pork bait, 
I caught all the nice trout we needed. 
Late in the afternoon we camped at the upper 
end of Black Pond, so called from the dark color 
of its water. This pond is about a mile across, 
being nearly circular, and can raise the worst 
sea of any water of its size I was ever on. 
“Sept. 10. Started early. Shortly after start¬ 
ing, as my canoe was ahead, I came to where a 
bull moose had just left the water; the roil was 
still in his track. Motioning my companion to 
stop, I crept up the bank and could hear him 
rubbing his horns in a thicket of small trees. I 
crawled in carefully until I was nearly under 
him. He certainly was not over eight or ten 
feet away, as I could plainly hear him breathe. 
Just as I felt sure of him my partner made a 
noise in the canoe and the moose started to rush 
through the thick firs. I followed as fast as I 
could, and after a long run came out on a 
meadow, but the moose was not in sight.” 
The water was so unusually low that we 
worked all day to get five or six miles, having 
to unload everything twice and carry where 
usually there is plenty of water. At night we 
reached the foot of the Horse Race Carry. This 
carry is usually one and a quarter miles and 
often a loaded canoe can be poled by; but now 
it was piled with pine logs from ten to twenty 
feet deep, all intermixed like jackstraws, which 
made it necessary to carry a full mile and a half. 
We camped on what was known as Arise Smith’s 
old camp ground. Just at dark a great horned 
owl called to his mate from a dead tree in front 
of our camp and I dropped him into the stream. 
The next day being Sunday we stayed in camp. 
I found my partner a nice, clean fellow, never 
using either tobacco or liquor. His father had 
kept what was known as the Philbrook shanty, 
a stopping place for tote teams and lumbermen 
on the Nahmakanta supply road. His mother 
had been left a widow with three small boys and 
one girl. They were twelve miles from the 
nearest village with only one shanty between. 
Soon after her husband’s death one of the boys 
died of the smallpox, and I have seen his little 
grave in the woods. This resolute woman did 
not give up, but hiring a man to do the out-of- 
door work, she for years kept the place, in 
summer scarcely ever seeing anyone, while in 
winter on some days she cooked for from ten 
to forty men a day. As the two boys grew 
larger they helped as they could. Rufus began 
to hunt very early, as there was game close to 
the farm. A noted hunter, Jim Lyford, when 
he passed in and out, used to teach him how to 
trap, and on one occasion, finding the family 
sick, Lyford gave up his hunt and stayed some 
weeks, cutting the wood and helping till the sick 
had recovered. When a mere boy, Rufus joined 
an older hunter and went on a hunt to the Resti- 
gouche and Kedgwick, being gone nine months. 
As there was not a school within twelve miles 
the mother did the best she could to educate 
them at home. Rufus went one term to the 
Foxcroft Academy, paying his way by the skins 
and the bounty on bears he caught near home. 
A short time before ^e started he had bought 
a place in the village of Brownville and had moved 
his mother and sister Sarah out among neigh¬ 
bors. Calling at the house in 1861 I saw the 
books Sarah had been studying and could see 
by the thumb marks that she was well advanced 
in algebra and in Latin. Some time in the 6o’s 
Rufus removed the family to Minnesota, and 
after hunting a couple of years, settled down 
to farming, while Sarah, after teaching in San 
Francisco, married a school teacher, and when 
I last heard of her was living in Arizona. The 
B. & A. railway now runs within a few miles of 
their old place in the woods, and the pond and 
the mountain west of it are now known as Phil- 
brook’s Pond and Mountain. 
“Sept: 12. The rain of yesterday still con¬ 
tinued this morning. We carried six turns each 
over the rough carry of fully one and a half 
miles, or eighteen miles, half of the way loaded. 
Our outfit, including canoes, paddles and setting 
poles weighs about 900 pounds. For provisions 
we have 100 pounds of flour, one barrel of hard 
bread (75 pounds), 50 pounds of sugar, 30 of 
rice, about 40 of pork, a peck of beans, a bushel 
and a half of potatoes, 2 pounds of chocolate, 
soda, cream of tartar, pepper and salt.” 
We had no butter and there was no such 
thing known then as condensed milk or canned 
stuff or dried fruit. We took such a quantity 
of sugar, expecting to find cranberries, in which 
