Canoeing in the Wilderness
Copyright© 2024 by Henry David Thoreau
Chapter 4: Sunday, July 26
The note of the white-throated sparrow was the first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. Though commonly unseen, their simple ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te, so sharp and piercing, was as distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkest of the forest would be to the eye. We were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early. What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind!
I told the Indian that we would go to church to Chesuncook this morning, some fifteen miles. It was settled weather at last. A few swallows flitted over the water, we heard Maryland yellow-throats along the shore, the notes of the chickadee, and, I believe, redstarts. Moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream.
The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday. Said he, “We come here lookum things, look all round, but come Sunday look up all that, and then Monday look again.”
He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with some ministers to Katahdin and had told him how they conducted. This he described in a low and solemn voice. “They make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. Come Sunday, they stop ‘em, no go at all that day—keep still—preach all day—first one, then another, just like church. Oh, ver’ good men. One day going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while. They go right ashore—stop there, go no farther that day—they have meeting there, preach and pray just like Sunday. Then they go back and carry the body with them. Oh, they ver’ good men.”
I judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see Katahdin.
However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do Sunday then ther’s no harm, but if he takum pay then wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men. Nevertheless, I noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the Sundays at last.
He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening—sometimes scrambling up in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. In the course of the day he remarked, “Poor man rememberum God more than rich.”
We soon passed the island where I had camped four years before. The deadwater, a mile or two below it, the Indian said was “a great place for moose.” We saw the grass bent where a moose came out the night before, and the Indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see him, but he added that if he should see five or six to-day close by canoe he no shoot ‘em. Accordingly, as he was the only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe.
Just below this a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking if I knew what it was, imitated very well the common hoo, hoo, hoo, hoorer, hoo, of our woods.
We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream Falls, while the Indian went down in the canoe. A Bangor merchant had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some time ago while passing these falls in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night and was taken off in the morning. There were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring shores. I measured the largest canoe birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the carry. It was fourteen and one half feet in circumference at two feet from the ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. The Indian cut a small woody knob as big as a filbert from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine.
After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift current. This taught us the difference between going up and down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and half at least. So we landed, and while he and the Indian were gone back for it, I watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white waterfowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. It alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being carried round by an eddy.
Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook Deadwater, caused by the flowing back of the lake. As we paddled slowly over this, the Indian told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself. It appeared that he had represented his tribe at Augusta, and once at Washington. He had a great idea of education, and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this, “Kademy—good thing—I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there. You been college?”
We steered across the northwest end of the lake. It is an agreeable change to cross a lake after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. It is one of the surprises which Nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. To look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water was liberating and civilizing even. The lakes also reveal the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought. Already there were half a dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. In these woods the earliest settlements are clustering about the lakes, partly, I think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.
About noon we turned northward up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about a mile from the lake reached the Umbazookskus. Our course was up the Umbazookskus, but as the Indian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a cool place where there were few mosquitoes, about half a mile farther up the Caucomgomoc, we went thither. So quickly we changed the civilizing sky of Chesuncook for the dark wood of the Caucomgomoc. On reaching the Indian’s camping-ground on the south side, where the bank was about a dozen feet high, I read on the trunk of a fir tree blazed by an axe an inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. It was surmounted by a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign used by his family always. The drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. The inscription ran thus. I interline the English of his Indian as he gave it to me.
|
July 15
1855
niasoseb
He added now below:—
1857
July 26
Jo. Polis
This was one of his homes. I saw where he had sometimes stretched his moose-hides on the sunny north side of the river where there was a narrow meadow.
After we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost exactly on the site of the Indian’s last camp here, he, looking up, observed, “That tree danger.”
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