XLI

THE blue Kennebec lay below us to the west, its rushing waters rippled with the sunlight of a bright October morning, and to the east and above us on hills and mountains, the forest blazed in its autumnal coat of many colors. Along these waters and through this same wilderness, I remembered, Arnold had made his way to Quebec at the beginning of the Revolution; over these very rapids his men had dragged their clumsy and heavily loaded batteaux; on these very slopes they had built their evening fires. In their village homespuns and cowhide boots, in their torn woolen stockings and woolen scarves, the figures of the expedition peopled the scene again in my mind’s eye as I drove north, they, too, facing north in another splendor of autumn one hundred and seventy-one long years ago.

Uninhabited and for the most part uninhabitable, the forest still covers the lonely country of “the height of land” and the immense region of the boundary mountains. For well over a century lumber companies have used these hundreds of wilderness miles, and everywhere are old tote-roads leading to nowhere, their corduroy lengths and swamp crossings long ago sunk and rotted into the black forest mire. These last years bears have made it particularly their own, and a friend tells me that they are now so numerous that at the lumbercamps their prowling visits alarm newcomers from the French villages over the border.

And what shall one say of presences much more mysterious than bears? One of the “undeveloped townships” of the woods—or as we call them here, “plantations”—has from time immemorial borne the curious and lovely name of “The Enchanted.” People may say to you of a neighbor, “He’s gone hunting in The Enchanted.” Fifty years ago in this plantation a wood voice, a seemingly human voice, sent a whole lumbercamp out searching in the night, yet in the morning there were no strange footsteps in the snow. Well … a Canada lynx can make very curious noises, but the old woodsmen always spoke of the sound they heard as “the voice,” and the incident is remembered to this day.

With the cutting of so much spruce and pine, the forest is surely more of a hardwood region than it was in Arnold’s day. On the tote-roads the pale and papery beech leaves now strew the forest clearings together with the deep scarlet of the maples and the beautiful tan-bronze of the fronded ash. Even so, the dark of the returning evergreens is to be seen on every side, young pines, spruces, and fir balsams rising up in power from the floors of fallen leaves. On the highways, too, pass thundering trucks piled with pine logs so giant that one wonders in what lost, hidden valley they were found.

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At the village of The Forks, the expedition left the Kennebec and followed the Dead River to “the chain of ponds” and the ragged desolate, and stunted “height of land.” What lumber there was seems to have been long ago appropriated, and vast fires have reduced the region to a wilderness of bush, bouldery mires, and alder-bordered ponds; much of it is now owned by a hunting and fishing club. I have had old woodsmen tell me that in one of the ponds lies some waterlogged planking which some imagine is part of one of Arnold’s batteaux.

I know the region, but last week I did not go beyond The Forks. The village today is but a line of rather frontierish houses built to the west of the confluence beyond an old-fashioned iron bridge painted an old-fashioned and faded red. The tourist season being about over, few cars overtook us driving on to Canada by the black road which crosses the boundary a good thirty miles east of Arnold’s narrow ponds in their archaic gully in the bush.

The old general store at The Forks, I noticed, stood closed and empty, though its black and gold sign was still fixed to the wall. There was something on it about fishing tackle, groceries, and cigars. A kind of porch stood before the door and the empty windows, and we sat down there awhile to rest ourselves from driving and listen to the murmur of the Kennebec below the bridge. The sounds of rivers can bemuse the mind, and I am sure that if I had but waited longer, I might have heard the far-off shouts of Arnold’s men and the last of the talk and the voices as the expedition moved up the Dead River to the woods.

FARM DIARY

To Bingham, Maine, to give a lecture and to visit with our dear friend Arthur R. Macdougall, Jr., and his family. “Mak” is the author of the genial, amusing, friendly-spirited “Dud Dean” stories so cherished all over America by all good fly-fishermen. Moreover, he is a minister as well as a writer, and hearing that he was expecting guests, some youngsters of his congregation make him a present of partridges. So when Mrs. Macdougall calls us, Elizabeth and I sit down with the family to a wonderful dinner of partridge white-meat cooked to a turn and served with vegetables from the garden. / At a post office and country store in the mountains, am able to buy a new corn-popper, the first I have seen for years. / A pleasant, elderly woman who runs a tiny shop full of second-hand things and “antiques” tells Elizabeth that she was one of twenty-two children, all of whom lived. “We never took anything for sickness but Indian herb medicines. Father knew all the healing plants. He was wonderful.” / At Waterville, a good shopping center, I succeed in getting myself a pair of shoes. This is triumph, for outside of my high winter boots and old work shoes, I am down to one rather battered pair with scuffed toecaps. / Returning to the farm late in the afternoon, find it coldish and empty of its usual sense of life, but this we presently overcome with a cup of strong tea and a great open fire.

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Every autumn I watch for one great star. It is the star Capella, and when in September I look to the north and see it rising over the somber roof line of a deserted barn, I know that winter is near. Night after night it stands a little higher above the earth when twilight comes, and when arrives the true cold and the dark, it has cleared the floors of earth and the low mists and is rising on its great arc into that northeast whence come the birds whose clamor sometimes wakes us in the earlier night. There is an order established against whose laws only fools will struggle, an order whose acceptance is the very cornerstone of life and peace.