Chapter VI (3)

Joe, in the silence in which they glided along in the moonlight, imitated the call of the animal by blowing into a birch-bark hunting-horn. No reply this evening: nothing but an occasional dry rushing sound as of the closing of some faraway door in the forest, a falling tree. But later, as they were ascending a little tributary stream, a great head appeared which, when they took good aim, dropped into the water. It was not Henry’s shot, needless to say. The animal was as big as a good-sized mare; the long fall from the high shoulders to the receding rump gave it almost the look of a giraffe. Henry watched Joe, skilfully removing the skin, making a fearful butchery of what the moment before had been a clothed and perfect form. Henry was no milksop, but he did not like to see life destroyed. It was true that this evening he did not refuse to eat a moose steak, which tasted rather like pickled veal. It was also true that three comrades eating together fried moose-meat cut directly from the animal and cooked over live coals in the open wind, in a magnificent solitude, while they sat with their backs against the towering fir-trees to the sound of the rippling water that rocked their canoe, was a very different thing from seeing a similar scene pictured in the almanac or in the tales of missionaries. You felt as if you were living a mighty life. And as for savagery, you didn’t have to aspire to it any longer; you were eating it, you were partaking of it.

In the moonlight, the fairies had taken possession of the prospect, erected their scenery, arranged their lighting effects, and Henry half thought he was some personage of the forest of Arden in the brain of Shakespeare and not just a little fellow from Concord crouching in a canoe with Joe the Indian and his cousin the lumber-merchant. Henry was sleepy and he fell into a dreamy state: he was floating through prodigious gardens and avenues bordered with fantastic architecture where he heard the sound of Joe’s horn calling the moose: _ugh, ugh, ou-ou-ou ... ou-ou-ou_.... The venison had gone to Henry’s head. The others were hoping for the chance of a second shot. But for him the hunting was finished. One moose was enough. That great despoiled carcass had impressed him too painfully, and he had not digested the moose-steak very well. He had not made the journey with any such intentions as these. And there were enough of these red-shirted woodsmen coming in the pay of employers or a company to massacre trees and animals; the forest should know the face of at least one disinterested friend.

Henry left the others to their pleasure and sat down by the camp-fire to examine the fruits of his own hunt--the botanical specimens he had collected that afternoon. Then he took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions, just as if he had been in his own bedroom at Concord. But his room was vast this evening, and what an evening it was here for a solitary man with that stream of moonlight on the river ... with those great shafts surrounding him with their sombre profiles ... friendly shafts destined for the axe, destined for the saw, for the crime of being great and brawny and for holding under their skins the promise of such beautiful timber. The common destiny of trees and men, to be doomed to trade, to be sold in planks or pencils, instead of being understood, loved and glorified. In the dancing light of the flames the little men and the tall trees looked as if they were bending over the shoulder of a boy who was writing instead of joining in the chase.

At Chesuncook, that great log-house belonged to Ansell Smith, who had cleared a good stretch along the lake. It was enough to see the assembled logs of which it was made, lapping over one another several feet at the corners, enough to see that forester’s broad-axe leaning by the door to love the fine, manly air of the place and be happy at the prospect of spending the night there in a beautiful room where the wooden partition creaked with every movement. On the way back to Bangor, they stopped at an island that had been left as a reservation for the Indians. The Governor was a rare old boy whom they found sitting on the edge of his bed, in his shanty, dressed in a frock-coat and well-worn black pantaloons, with a red silk handkerchief about his neck and a straw hat. He was deaf, but he had hardly a grey hair in spite of his eighty-nine years. His corpulent squaws were gathered about him. They were tamed, Christianized, slatternly Indians. They were interested in politics, and were not in agreement on the question of the school which the priest, the sole holder of the Roman candles, wanted to close. Henry stopped for some time by an Indian who was making canoes. He would have liked to spend a whole season there, as an apprentice, and master this fine, primitive art. But he was obliged to take the trail for Concord again.

How was he going to like it after having gorged himself with this wild nature? Very much indeed, you may be sure. It had variety and all sorts of fine shades, and he never wearied of his old domain as he would have wearied after a while of the deep, monotonous forest. These solitudes of Upper Maine were like a strong wine that he liked to have a taste of now and then as a tonic. But they would never have done for every day. Those dear old attaching surroundings at home were ... how was he to put it?... “nature humanized.” Exactly. You would never have believed it perhaps: hu-man-i-zed. A fellow does not come back from Upper Maine, you see, without a curious little memory to accompany the indigestibleness of the moose.

Four years later the taste of this strong wine tempted Henry again. He had made another visit to Cape Cod early in the season and had scarcely been home a month when he started for Bangor. This time it was not his cousin who was going to make the journey with him but his friend Edward Hoar, the beloved companion of many a ramble about Concord--including the one when the two “damned rascals” set fire to the woods. Rambles of long ago, for Edward had been living for eight years in California. They meant to reach the Allegash Lakes and return by the East Branch of the Penobscot. In this way they would encircle Ktaadn, giving it a sufficiently wide berth not to disturb the Giant.

They could not do this without a guide. The Bangor cousin recommended one whom he had known from boyhood. He was another Joe--Joseph Polis; a very different sort of fellow from the Joe of four years back. This Joe was a grown-up man, forty-eight years old, who had spent his childhood exploring the solitudes around the sources of the St. John. He now lived with his wife in a pretty house surrounded by a vegetable garden, just like a New England villager who subscribed to the county paper. A stoutly built chap, of rather more than middle height, with a broad face--the true Indian type. He spoke a passable English, using l’s for r’s. He belonged to the aristocracy of his tribe. Joe was glad to join the expedition and agreed to the price. He was to carry his own canoe--literally, for he bore it on his head to the stage, where he installed himself beside the driver. As an old hand, he brought with him, along with the great knife that dangled in a sheath from his belt, nothing but his axe, his gun, a blanket and a good supply of tobacco. Joe had bought a new pipe. He was very economical with his words; when you spoke to him, he muttered some vague phrase, as if all such things interested him very little. At the tavern, when a tipsy man asked him if he smoked, adding, in reply to a kind of yes: “Won’t you lend me your pipe a little while?”, Joe looked straight over his head and answered with an absent air: “Me got no pipe.” Joe’s silence would be the greatest relief after the palaver and smartness of white people.

As there were three of them in the bark canoe, with their baggage, there was no room for them to stretch their legs, but even so it was better than it was in the stage. And in the evening how much better than the inn was the little tent, set up in a dense wood where it was as black as an oven. They were in no need of a lullaby to put them to sleep as they rolled up in their blankets; but Joe, at Henry’s request, sang in Indian a slow, rather nasal chant on some well-known themes, obligingly furnished by the missionaries, about the only and sole Almighty, ruler of the world. But there was such a fine simplicity about it that you utterly forgot the flatness of the performance: it was like a child singing his childish thoughts. Henry, who slipped outside the tent some time after midnight, saw a bit of phosphorescent wood. With his knife he shaved off a few chips which, when he placed them in the hollow of his hand, lighted up the lines of the palm. It was the first time he had seen this. He was so entranced by his discovery that he had to go and wake up Edward and show him his magic night-lamp.

In the morning, the piercing _ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te_ of the white-throated sparrow ringing through the wood sounded the Sunday reveille. Joe wanted to stop for the day. Joe was a good Protestant and he had principles; at home he never failed to go to church. Of course if they were absolutely determined to go ahead, he would have to go with them, but the money he earned would be the wages of sin.... Well, perhaps this could be arranged ... later.

Joe was exquisitely ingenuous. He was full of admiration for pious people. He said his prayers on his knees, in a loud voice, in his own language, morning and evening. If, by inadvertence, he happened to lie down at night without having said them and remembered it, he immediately scrambled out of his blanket and said them in double-quick time. You could see that he had been to a good school. This evening, to atone for having worked on Sunday, he said a particularly long prayer. But how much more natural a Joe he revealed when, glued to the bank on his stomach, he began to talk to the muskrats in their own language, calling them with a strange squeaking sound with his lips.... Or better still, when he named in his own tongue some incident of the forest life. The Indian word for echo was _Pockadunkquaywayle_: kindly place the accent where it belongs and see if you can find anything like it in your own language. Henry was quick to note every scrap of this music; it enchanted him. The words of his own tongue had been worn away like pennies that have been passed from hand to hand for centuries. Joe’s words were like butterflies--he wanted to catch them without hurting them at a moment when they were motionless on a leaf, with their wings open and still beating. How he would have liked to write a dictionary of all these earthy words, which had the quality of the pressed leaves he brought home in his old music-case or those veiny pebbles on the beaches of Cape Cod.

Two white men and an Indian plunged into the immense forest of fantastically shaped larches, where the mosquitoes poisoned them and made an infernal buzzing din about the fire when they stopped. Sometimes, in the depths of the night, a man rolled up, still awake, in his blanket on his arbor-vitae mattress heard in the dense silence the long-drawn call of the loon, rather like the hallooing of a man on a very high key. They reached Lake Apmoojenegamook, the goal of the excursion, and then Heron Lake, where a procession of sheldrakes passed them.

But no creature could have been odder than this odd fish Joe. As sharp as a weasel, by turns lively and taciturn, sparing of words and gestures, he was always master of himself except when he had made a good shot, when he trembled with emotion like a novice. If you asked him the same question twice, his silence gave you to understand that you had asked him once too often, and if you suggested that he might explain one of the numerous tricks he knew, he would oblige you to swallow this reply: “There are some things a man does not even tell his old woman.” And then sometimes, along the trail, or when he was paddling, or, more often, in the evening, after he had said his prayers, when you were not asking him anything he would suddenly begin to tell you some interminable yarn. You should have heard him describe his interview with the famous Daniel Webster whom he had gone to see in Boston. After an endless wait, he was received like a dog by the great man, so rudely that Joe said to himself: “You’d better take care. If you try that I shall know what to do.” A humbug, that Webster, a talking-machine. No Indian would ever have received a visitor so bluntly.

Joe had preserved the old Indian custom of leaving a trace of his passing by making an inscription on a tree or hanging up a bit of birch-bark. Once all of a sudden he said to Henry: “Me make a bet. We two follow the path. I take canoe and you take the rest. See which gets there first.” And he at once pulled off his boots and stockings, tossed the boots to Henry and set out ahead. To make up a bundle of all the utensils, the moose-skin, axe, paddle, gun, frying-pan and the rest, would have taken time for a little white man who merely gathered up everything he could, dashed off in pursuit, overtook the Indian, passed him.... But he was forced to stop, for the innumerable utensils slipped out of his arms, and Joe overtook him in turn. The obstinate little white man, however, hugging all his traps desperately to his sides, outran the Indian again and saw him no more. When the man-canoe came up with him, both were out of breath. Joe explained that he had cut his feet on the rocks and concluded with a laugh: “Oh, me love to play sometimes.”

One night Henry had a bad scare. In a desolate region where a great stretch of the forest had been destroyed by fire, he suddenly noticed that Edward was missing. It was inexplicable. Among the standing or fallen corpses of the trees, he vainly searched for him in the twilight. Near a waterfall that made the earth tremble, Henry camped with Joe, but he could not sleep. From time to time he thought he heard the voice of his friend calling him through the roar of the water. What could have happened to him? He was nearsighted, and he might have fallen over some precipice. On the morning after this terrible night, Edward was found again, smoking his pipe to soothe the cry of his hollow stomach which had been empty since the day before. He thought they were ahead of him when they were behind. After this they could have eaten two moose-steaks each for breakfast.

The great journey was ended. They were back again among men, or almost. That evening, the new-mown hay on which they were sleeping in an open barn was like a foretaste of the feather beds that awaited them; the hay was full of grasshoppers, but the smell was delicious. Now, from time to time, they met an Indian in a canoe on the river, and Joe would exchange a word with him in his own language. Before reaching the end of the voyage, Joe, who had taught Henry the proper way to paddle, asked: “How you like ’em your pilot?” There was his house at last. The two friends stopped there for an hour to rest after the rough journey. They caught a glimpse of Mrs. Polis, who was wearing a hat and a silver brooch; but the Indian did not introduce his fellow-travellers to his “old woman.”

That very evening, two veterans climbed into the train for Bangor, with their battered belongings, back again from the lakes of Finland perhaps or, who knows, from a journey across some _terra incognita_ of the map.

What a beautiful trip! Joseph Polis.... He was just a poor devil of a denatured Indian who said his prayers like a theological student--a fallen sovereign who hired himself out as a guide to strangers. Just the same, it was Joe who had made of this fortnight the richest of the three expeditions to Upper Maine. Henry was full of him. He could talk of nothing else but their guide, mentioned him in his letters to friends, thought of him every time he ate something that Joe had taught him to like. Joe had entered his life for good and all. Poor Joe was going to find himself placed, without knowing it, on a level with heroic and immortal figures; he had earned on this expedition a great deal more than his dollar and a half a day.

Joe had spoken for his whole race, which had always appealed so strongly to Henry’s heart. Every time he had found himself in the presence of an Indian--degenerate, catechised, mere shadow as he might be--the blood had spoken in him; not the old Norman blood, nor the Scottish, nor the English, nor the Welsh, but this subtler blood that is mixed, in everybody, with the red blood. There was no romantic passion in this cult; it was like an avowal of a secret kinship. Yes, it was of Joe especially that he would think if he was able to carry out some day the work he dreamed of composing so lovingly on the North American Indian. Joe’s coat-of-arms should be a bear paddling a canoe. There were far less proud artists than these to whom America could turn for the designs of its armorial bearings.

So many dreams of childhood, affinities, old desires, found their embodiment in Joe.... The artist’s love of the finest shades of instinct, admired in a descendant of the race that scattered music as it scattered words along the way. The taste for the primeval so ingrained in a man to whom, in spite of college and the classics and his environment, a valueless arrow-head spoke more intimately than a verse of the Bible. The ambition also of a writer to secrete the flint-flakes under his phrases, so that other vagabonds, finding them there some day, might make a collection of them and keep them in their dens. All this found something in Joe.