I lay listening to the rain spattering against the fly of the tent and dripping through the roof of birch leaves upon the sputtering fire and soaking down into the deep, spongy bottom of the forest—softly, as soft as something breathing and asleep. The guide and the boy beside me were asleep, but I had been awakened by the rain. The rain always wakens me. And in my grave, I think, if I lie sleeping under a roof of forest leaves, I shall wake and listen when it rains. Before the stars sang together the primordial waters made music to the rising land; before the winds came murmuring through the trees the waves were fingering the sweet-tuned sands strung down the sounding shores; and before the birds found their tongues, or the crickets their little fiddles, or even the toad had blown his quavering conch, it had rained! And when it rained—and not until it rained—the whole earth woke into song. Mother of music[176] is the water, and, for me, the sweetest of her daughters is the rain, and never sweeter, not even on the shingles, nor down the rolled, fevered blades of the standing corn, than in the deep woods at night upon the low slant roof of your tent. But suddenly the singing stopped, and the myriad rain-notes were turned to feet, tiny, stirring feet, creeping down the tent, skipping across the leaves, galloping over the forest floor, and jumping in and out of the fire. Then a twig snapped. Was that what had awakened me? I rose up on my elbow slowly. The tent flap was open; the woods were very dark, the dim light from above the roof of leaves and rain showing only shadows, and an ashen spot where the camp-fire still spluttered, and beyond the ashen spot a shadow—different from the other shadows; a shape—a doe with big ears forward toward the fire! A bit of birch bark flared in the darkness, and the shape was gone. I could hear her moving through the ferns; hear her jump a fallen log and step out among the grating pebbles on the shore. Then all was still, except for the scampering rain, and the little red-backed[177] wood-mouse among the camp tins, and the teeth of a porcupine chilled and chattering in the darkness at the big wood-mouse among the tins, and the rain running everywhere.
I dropped back upon my pillow and left off listening. How good the duffle-bag felt beneath my head! And the thick, springy bows of the fir beneath the bag, how good they felt—springs and mattress in one, laid underside up, evenly, and a foot deep, all over the tent floor! And how good they smelled! A bed of balsam-fir boughs is more than a bed; it is an oblation to Sleep, and not a vain oblation—after miles of paddling in live water or a day of trailing through the spruce and fir.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding”
runs the song—
“Into the land of my dreams.”
But, speaking of sleep, there is no trail, except a forest trail, that winds away to a land of such deep dreamlessness as that of a woodman’s sleep; and no sleep, from which a man will waken, half so fragrant and refreshing as his. I do not wish to be carried to the skies “on flowery beds[178] of ease,” but I should like this balsam-fir bed, for two or three weeks every summer, in the woods of Maine. A reasonable and a wholesome wish that, as I lay there wrapped in the fragrant mantle of my couch, I coveted for city sleepers everywhere.
The odors (we should spell them with a “u”)—the odours of the big woods are so clean and pure and prophylactic! They clear the clogged senses, and keep them in a kind of antiseptic bath, washing a coated tongue as no wine can wash it; and tingling along the most snarled of nerves, straightening, tempering, tuning them till the very heart is timed to the singing of the firs. My bed of boughs was a full foot deep, covering every inch of the bottom of the tent, fresh cut that evening, and so bruised with the treading as we laid them that their smell, in the close, rainy air of the night, filled the tent like a cloud. I lay and breathed—as if taking a cure, this tent being the contagious ward of the great hospital, the Out-of-Doors. All around me poured the heavy, penetrating vapor distilled from the gums, and resins, and oils, and sweet healing essences of the woods, mingled here in[179] the tent with the aromatic balsam of the fir. I breathed it to the bottom of my lungs; but my lungs were not deep enough; I must breathe it with hands and feet to get it all; but they were not enough. Then a breeze swept by the tent, pausing to lay its mouth over my mouth, and, catching away my little breath, breathed for me its own big breath, until my very bones, like the bones of the birds, were breathing, and every vein ran redolent of the breath of the fir.
That breeze blew the sharp, pungent smell of wood smoke past the tent. I caught it eagerly—the sweet smoke of the cedar logs still smouldering on the fire. There was no suggestion of hospitals in this whiff, but camps, rather, and kitchens, altars, caves, the smoke of whose ancient fires is still strong in our nostrils and cured into the very substance of our souls.
I wonder if our oldest racial memory may not be that of fire, and if any other form of fire, a coal off any other altar, can touch the imagination as the coals of a glowing camp-fire. And I wonder if any other odor takes us farther down our ancestral past than the smell of wood smoke, and if there is another smoke so sweet as cedar[180] smoke, when the thin, faint wraith from the smouldering logs curls past your tent on the slow wind of the woods and drifts away.
It does not matter of what the fire is built. I can still taste the spicy smoke of the sagebrush in my last desert camp. And how hot that sagebrush fire! And as sweet as the spicy sage is the smell in my nostrils of the cypress and gum in my camp-fires of the South. Swamp or desert or forest, the fire is the lure—the light, the warmth, the crackle of the flames, and the mystic incense of the smoke rising as a sweet savor to the deities of the woods and plains.
It is the camp-fire that lures me to the woods when I might go down to the sea. I love the sea. Perhaps I fear it more; and perhaps I have not yet learned to pitch my tent and build my fire upon the waves; certainly I have not yet got used to the fo’c’s’le smell. For, of all foul odors known to beast or man, the indescribable stench of the fo’c’s’le is to me the worst. What wild wind of the ocean can blow that smell away? When bilges are sprayed with attar of roses, and fo’c’s’les sheathed in sandalwood, and sailors given shower-baths and open fires, I shall take a[181] vacation before the mast; but until then give me the woods and my fir-bough bed, and my fire of birch and cedar logs, and the rain upon my tent.
When I woke at dawn it was still raining; and off and on all day it rained, spoiling our plans for the climb up Spencer Mountain and keeping us close to camp and the drying fire. The forest here at the foot of the mountain was a mixed piece of old-growth timber, that had been logged for spruce and pine some years before—as every mile of the forest of Maine has been logged—yet so low and spongy was the bottom that the timber seems to have overgrown and long since ceased to be fit for lumber, so that most of it was left standing when the lumber-jacks went through. We were camped by the side of Spencer Pond in the thick of these giant trees—yellow birch, canoe birch, maple and spruce, hemlock and fir and pine—where the shade was so dense and the forest floor so strewn with fallen trees that only the club mosses, and the sphagnum, and a few of the deep-woods flowers could grow. The rain made little difference to my passage here, so low were these lesser forest[182] forms under the perpetual umbrage of the mighty trees, and I came back from as far in as I dared to venture on so dull a day, my clothes quite dry, but my spirit touched with a spell of the forest, which I should have missed had the sun been shining and the points of the compass clear.
For in the big woods one is ever conscious of direction, a sense that is so exaggerated in the deepest bottoms, especially when only indirect, diffused light fills the shadowy spaces, as to border on fear. I am never free, in a strange forest, from its haunting Presence; so close to it that I seem to hear it; seem able to touch it; and when, for a moment of some minor interest or excitement, I have forgotten to remember and, looking up, find the Presence gone from me, I am seized with sudden fright. What other panic comes so softly, yet with more terrible swiftness? And once the maze seizes you, once you begin to meet yourself, find yourself running the circle of your back tracks, the whole mind goes to pieces and madness is upon you.
“Set where you be and holler till I come get ye, if ye’re lost,” the guide would say. “Climb[183] a tree and holler; don’t run around like a side-hill gouger, or you’re gone.”
I do not know what sort of animal is Johnny’s side-hill gouger; though I saw, one day, far up on the side of the mountain a big bare spot where he had been digging—according to the guide. It is enough for me that there is such a beast in the woods, and that he gets those who turn round and round in the forest on rainy days and forget to look up.
The gouger was abroad in the woods to-day. The clouds hung at the base of the mountains, just above the tops of the trees; the rain came straight down; the huge fallen trunks lay everywhere criss-cross; and once beyond the path to the spring the semi-gloom blurred every trail and put at naught all certainty of direction.
But how this fear sharpened the senses and quickened everything in the scene about me! I was in the neighborhood of danger, and every dull and dormant faculty became alert. Nothing would come from among the dusky trees to harm me; no bear, or lynx, or moose, for they would run away; it was the dusk itself, and the big trees that would not run away; and I watched[184] them furtively as they drew nearer and nearer and closed in deeper about me. I knew enough to “set down and holler” if I got turned hopelessly around; but this very knowledge of weakness, of inability to cope alone with these silent, sinister forces, woke all my ancient fears and called back that brood of more than fabled monsters from their caves and fens and forest lairs.
This was the real woods, however, deep, dark, and primeval, and no mere fantasy of fear. It looked even older than its hoary years, for the floor was strewn with its mouldering dead, not one generation, but ages of them, form under form, till only long, faint lines of greener moss told where the eldest of them had fallen an ?on since and turned to earth. Time leaves on nothing its failing marks so deeply furrowed as upon men and trees, and here in the woods upon no other trees so deeply as upon the birches. Lovely beyond all trees in their shining, slender youth, they grow immeasurably aged with the years, especially the yellow birch, whose grim, grizzled boles seemed more like weathered columns of stone than living trees.
One old monster, with a hole in his base that a[185] bear might den in, towering till his shoulders overtopped the tallest spruce, stood leaning his gnarled hands upon the air, as a bent and aged man leans with his knotty hands upon a cane. A hundred years he might have been leaning so; a hundred years more he might continue in his slow decline, till, with a crash, he falls to lie for a hundred years to come across a prostrate form that fell uncounted years before.
I was standing on the tough, hollow rind of such a birch, so long, long dead that its carcass had gone to dust, leaving only this empty shell that looked like a broken, half-buried piece of aqueduct. It was neither tree nor pipe, however, but the House of Porcupines, as I could plainly hear by the grunting inside. A pile of droppings at the door of the house told the story of generations of porkies going in and out before the present family came into their inheritance. I knocked on the rubbery walls with my foot, but not hard, for I might break through and hurt Mother or Father Porky, or possibly the baby that I saw along the pond that night. No careful, right-minded person steps on or hurts a porcupine in any manner.
[186]I went on out of the sound of their teeth, for chattering teeth are not consoling, and the woods were gray enough. Gray and vast and magnificently ruinous, yet eternally new they were, the old walls slowly crumbling, and over them, out of their heaped disorder, the fresh walls rising to the high-arched roof that never falls. To-day the deep, hollow halls were shut to me by the arras of the gloom, and so smoky rolled the rain beneath the roof that even the black rafters of the birches were scarcely visible; but all the closer about me, in the wildest wealth and splendor, lay the furniture of the forest floor.
Never were wools dyed and woven with a pile so rich and deep as the cover of mosses and lichens that carpeted this rude, cluttered floor. Rolled and wrinkled and heaped up over the stumps, it lay, nowhere stretched, nowhere swept, a bronze and green and gold ground, figured and flowered endlessly; and down the longest, deepest wrinkle a darkling little stream! It was a warp of sphagnum moss with woof of lichens, liverworts, ferns, mushrooms, club mosses, and shier flowers of the shadows, that[187] was woven for the carpet—long, vivid runners of lycopodium, the fingered sort, or club moss, and its fan-leaved cousin, the ground pine, now in fruit, its clusters of spikes like tiny candelabra standing ready to be lighted all over the floor; and everywhere, on every tree-trunk, stump, and log, and stone the scale mosses, myriads of them, in blotches of exquisite shapes and colors, giving the gray-green tone to the walls as the sphagnums gave the vivid bronze-green to the floor. Down to about the level of my head, the dominant note in the color scheme of the walls, hung the gray reindeer moss, tufts and shreds and pointed bunches of it like old men’s grizzled beards. Some of the spruces and twisted cedars were covered with it. Shorter in staple than the usnea of the South, stiffer and lighter in color, it is far less somber and funereal; but a forest bearded with it looks older than time. This moss is the favorite winter food of the moose and caribou and deer, and so clean had the moose and deer eaten it from the trees, up as high as they could reach, that the effect on a clear day was as if a thin gray fog had settled in the forest at an even six-foot level from the ground.
[188]Worked in among the lichens and mosses, quite without design, were the deep-woods flowers—patches of goldthread, beds of foam-flower and delicate wood-sorrel and the brilliant little bunchberry. Wherever the sunlight had a chance to touch the cold, boggy bottom it seemed to set the punk on fire and blaze up into these scarlet berries, stumps and knolls and slopes aflame with them, to burn on through the gloom until they should be smothered by the snow. Twin-flower and partridge-berry were laced in little mats about the bases of the trees; here and there the big red fruit of trillium and the nodding blue berries of clintonia were mixed in a spot of gay color with berries of the twisted stalk, the wild lily-of-the-valley, and the fiery seed-balls of the Indian turnip.
These touches of color were like the effect of flowers about a stately, somber room, for this was an ancient and a solemn house of mighty folk. If the little people came to dwell in the shadow of these noble great they must be content with whatever crumbs of sunshine fell from the heaven-spread table over them to the damp and mouldering floor. There were corners s............