FOREST AND STREAM 
167 
> 
THROUGH NATURE’S PORTALS 
ONLY THOSE MAY ENTER THERE WHO GO 
VELVET SHOD DOWN WOODLAND PATHS 
By J. OTIS SWIFT. 
steering all within his reach, in his posi¬ 
tion in the center of the canoe. 
Careful consideration of all these points 
will demonstrate that it is even practical 
to steer the canoe without the use of the 
paddle. By moving forward in the canoe, 
it will head into the wind. By moving 
aft, it will pay off from the wind. If the 
canoe is properly balanced, often just mov¬ 
ing the body from the hips is sufficient to 
affect the steering. 
Sailing canoes are safe only when they 
are balanced; and they must be safe to 
afford any real pleasure. In the few sec¬ 
tions of the country where most of the 
canoes are well equipped for sailing, canoe 
racing is the king of water sports. There 
are hundreds of canoes in the American 
Canoe Association in a one-design class, 
in which numerous and historic trophies 
are competed for annually. 
Canoes have been sailed for over fifty 
years. In the last few years the numbers 
have increased wonderfully. Just as soon 
as enthusiasts get down to applying yacht¬ 
ing principles to their tiny nomads, the fol¬ 
lowing will be stupendous. 
HE SAVED HIS TRIBE 
AND “PAID HIS DEBT.” 
William Wastesecoot, late chief of the 
Swampy Crees, of the Nelson River dis¬ 
trict, forty odd years ago saved his people 
from extermination by starvation when 
he left the band on a week’s hunt and lo¬ 
cated the passing of the migrating caribou 
The Grave of William Wastesecoot. 
on their annual trek northbound to the 
Barren Lands. His name is entered in the 
Indian’s Calendar of Saints and his son has 
succeeded him as chief of the Swampy 
Crees. 
An enviable epitaph: “Paid his debt,” 
“spoke the truth,” and was “a great 
hunter.” R. J p. 
ADDITION TO WHITMAN FOREST. 
Approximately fifty thousand acres sit¬ 
uated on the divide between the John Day, 
Powder, and Burnt rivers, in East-Central 
Oregon, have recently been added to the 
Whitman National Forest. 
N ATURE does not reveal her secrets 
to the highwayman who fares forth 
in greatboots, a slouch hat, and pis¬ 
tols in leathern belt, to hold her up on the 
road. So even he who goes out with a 
shotgun, sneaking through her hidden 
places to murder her little ones, without 
a thought of the long years and centuries 
of patient nurture that the good dame has 
gone through to produce this timid soft- 
eared rabbit, this wary, seclusion-loving 
grouse, or this romantically whistling bob- 
white, does not learn her heart-secrets. 
Rather does she take into her confidence 
the dreamy, poetic, ruminating old botanist 
or geologist who, clothing himself all in 
harmonious grays or browns that mingle 
with the shades of the underbrush, goes 
out to sit at the head of some rabbit path 
for hours, immovable as a stone or old 
lichened stump, to watch down the path 
for what may be stirring. 
S O put on the corduroy brown trousers, 
the old felt hat stuck full of fish-hooks 
and catgut leaders, the rusty iron- 
brownfaded coat; and with your bird 
glasses under your arm and a lunch in 
your pocket, let us set out from the manor 
at Hastings, wander over the hill through 
picturesque lanes to the highway, and then 
turn south on the big road until we come 
in good time to a spring by the way. Some 
benefactor years ago set a half barrel in 
the spring, and the water runs into it from 
under a great lichen-covered boulder in a 
stream of crystal coolness that makes man 
ashamed of his cold lager or his soda 
fountains, even on a hot summer day. 
The water gushes out from under the 
hill, filtered through many feet of clear 
sand and gravel, probably from some hid¬ 
den cavern in the depths of the ground. 
The spring is shaded by witch-hazel bushes, 
snapwood, sassafras, alder and blackberry, 
and many other shrubs. And the water 
comes out into the open from a little cave 
under the rock where green mosses, yellow 
fungi and water weeds grow luxuriantly in 
the grateful shade. People who know the 
spring, I am told, come from as far away 
as Yonkers, to drink at its lip; and through 
countless ages, I doubt not, men and ani¬ 
mals have slaked their thirst and given 
thanks to a bountiful Nature there. 
O NE early morning when, hiking over 
the hills in search of the rattlesnake 
plantain, I threw myself down there 
to drink, I found' pressed into the earth 
at the edge the clear-cut tracks of a deer 
that had come down from the grassy 
Sprain wilderness over the hill to drink 
in the gray-green early summer morning. 
I don’t know whether he had escaped from 
the grounds of some wealthy landowner, 
or was a stray wanderer through woodlets 
and parkage from the great north woods. 
But here he had been, unafraid in the 
early morning, drinking at the spring where 
stop countless knights of the road migrating 
from the city to the country, and where 
many an automobilist has doubtless regaled 
his party with the choicest of cooling 
draughts. 
If you go out the lane to a certain old 
black gum tree, and up a woodroad there, 
you will come in good time to a thick 
jungle of underbrush in the brook bottom; 
and making your way through this, you 
will find an old crossroads. It was prob¬ 
ably a highway in ancient Dutch days, but 
What May Be Stirring. 
now it is grown up to bushes, the great 
trees have encroached upon it and tumbled 
its walls about. The forest surrounds it 
on all sides, and in place of the broad road 
is only a rabbit path. 
If you walked carelessly through this 
path, you might walk for ever and never 
see any of the little inhabitants of the 
wood. But you should you go on velvet- 
shod feet down this old path to a certain 
mossy stone in the late afternoon, and 
crouching down in the tall umbrella brakes 
and white goldenrod, sit like a stone, hard¬ 
ly blinking—then you would see. 
Perhaps for ^e first hour nothing would 
stir. Then, far down the path by a clump 
of great Christmas ferns, perhaps there 
would be a soft movement among the 
green things; and a tinge of tawny color 
in the afternoon light would suddenly re¬ 
solve itself into the trim figure of old Sir 
Reynard, the red fox from the hills back 
of Rocky Lonesome, prowling through the 
forest in search of his belated dinner. His 
trim ears would be well forward, his deli¬ 
cate nose scenting the lazy breeze, his 
bushy tail downward. He is ready to 
spring away at a second’s notice, but there 
is a delicious laziness and confidence in 
his manner nevertheless. 
Now it needs but the breaking of a twig 
in your earnestness to see—a sudden motion 
on your part—and the show is ended. But 
(Continued on page 179-) 
