n^:\\ '^f^S t 1 l,'l ' t f fc ,f §ff ,« 5. if) # ] "Pi Cornell University IjM Library The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924067741912 CORNELL UNIVEfiSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 067 741 9 Production Note Cornell University Library produced this volume to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. It was scanned using Xerox software and equipment at 600 dots per inch resolution and compressed prior to storage using CCITT Group 4 compression. The digital data were used to create Cornell ' s replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39. 48-1984. The production of this volume was supported in part by the New York State Program for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials and the Xerox Corporation. Digital file copyright by Cornell University Library 1993. THE ADIRONDACKS Photo l.y Chester D. Moses & Co. Avalanche Pass THE ADIRONDACKS BY T. MORRIS LONGSTRETH ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAPS NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1917 Copyright, 1917, by The Cextubt Co. Publuhed, October, 1917 DEDICATED. WITH AFFECTION TO THOMAS K. BROWN OUR ONE-TIME MASTER. OUR OFT-TIME COUNSELOR, OUR ALL-TIME FRIEND. Ltnn. & MoREia. FOEEWOED It had been raining for almost ten days, and we were getting short of small-talk, when Lynn made his suggestion. "Let 's look ahead," he said. "We 've remem- bered the sugar and the lantern and the dish- towel, but we 've left out the most important thing of all." "Not matches," I said, "and there 's lots of punky dope left. What do you mean ? ' ' "This trip needs an underlying motive," he went on, "or it '11 peter out. It 's good enough fun fishing, and it 's good enough fun getting lost, but it 'd be a whole lot better if there was a reason for doing these things. I think I 've got one ! ' ' I paid more attention to the fire than I did to him, because he 's always gratifying his passion for making good things better, while I like to gratify mine for letting them alone. But he stopped spitting on the little whetstone with which he was putting a double-extra-fine edge on his ax and began again: vi FOREWORD "Did you ever see a book on the Yellowstone Park?" "Dozens. Why?" "Well, this Park 's bigger, but did you ever see one about it?" I thought a moment, but couldn't remember having seen anything of the sort. "You haven't," he went on, "because there isn't such a thing. You can read whole book- shelves on the south pole, and Liege, and other places you can't visit, but there 's nothing about this Park as it is now, and I bet you, out of the forty million people who live around here — " "Oh, come now, forty million!" "Yes, forty million within a five-hundred-mile circle of this spot, and not forty thousand of them know that these forests and mountains and fish and things we 're enjoying for nothing are here for them to enjoy also for nothing." "Aren't you glad?" I said. "It would be aw- fully crowded, for they would all come if they knew. But I don't see how that supplies our trip with an ulterior motive?" "We '11 write a book," he exclaimed. "I '11 study the map and chop the wood, and all you '11 have to do is to put down the necessary words. It '11 make us do the country thoroughly." I rebelled, but in vain. FOREWORD vii For the next two days it rained steadily, and we kept to camp. Lynn's idea germinated, and, like the Arab's camel, took possession of the tent. We planned out a tour that left no stone unde- scribed. It proved a rainbow suromer, but the marvel of it was that, at the end, we should find a pot-o'- gold publisher. I suspect it was Lynn's thirst for thoroughness that did it. All along he kept insisting that the book should be more than a rec- ord of our wanderings, spacious though they were. He wished for an Adirondack Arkeology, a treatise that should treat generously of every topic from aborigine to zoo. No type of reader was to turn from its pages disappointed. My hope is more modest. I hope there may be some reader besides myself to turn from them at all. After the reality, they paint so palely the wilderness colors and breathe so thinly of the good wood-smells that Luggius himself never would take a second sniff. One word more, and the Park shall speak for itself. There are but two kinds of travelers; those who enjoy the road, and those who think they shall have enjoyment at the end of it. To the latter pass the time of day good-naturedly enough, but reserve the former for your company. And now, when I would come out from between viii FOREWORD the lines to speak of my friend, I cannot, for at any moment he may come to read over my shoul- der. This I can say, however. Lnggins loves him, too, and I never met a horse, I here and now declare, who enjoys better sense. T. MOBKIS LONGSTBETH, Camp Pellows', July, 1917. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Foreword v CHAPTER I An Aboriginal Approach 3 II North Creek to Chimney Mountain . . 26 III We Travel North by South .... 46 rv The Cedar Eivbr Country 64 V The Adirondack Forest 80 VI The Raquette River Trip 102 VII Unconsidered Cranberry 143 VIII Animals of the Adirondacks .... 173 IX The Gospel According to Paul Smith . 208 X Lake Placid and an Experiment in Intel- ligence 231 XI The Giants Clothed- with Stone . . . 258 XII A Chapter of Ends anh Odds .... 297 XIII Winter Preferred 303 XIV Weathering the Weather and the Fly . 318 XV On Hermits and Other Tragedies . . . 333 XVI The Spirit of the Park 344 XVII Duffle 352 Index 367 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Avalanche Pass Frontispiece rACINQ PAGE Southwest from Pharaoh Mountain 18 Forest Cover: Brant Lake Country 35 North from Pharaoh Mountain 54 A Legal Lean-to for State Land 71 An Adirondack Lumber Camp — 30° below ... 81 Pines of Saranac 96 The Three Minute Tent 105 Nameless Creek 116 Log Drive on the Raquette River 125 The Long Lake Country 135 Road House of the Old Staging Days 146 Indian Pass Brook: The Infant Hudson . . . 156 Hanging Spear Falls of the Opalescent .... 165 South from the Summit of Indian Pass .... 176 Midsummer Mildness 185 The First Reinforced Concrete 196 Ausable Chasm 205 The Peak of Mclntyre from Tahawus' Top . . .216 Mt. Colvin and Sawtooth (right) from the Ausable Club 225 The Ausable River 236 Tahawus, Algonquin and Iroquois ; The Great Range 245 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Lower Ausable Lake 256 Sawtooth from the Upper Ausable Lake .... 265 Indian Pass from Lake Henderson 276 Keene Valley from Keene Heights 285 Crown of the Cloud-Cleaver 296 The Original Winter Sport 305 "Whitefaee in November from Cobble Hill . . . 316 A Home of the Old Wolf Days 325 How Doth the Hermit 336 The Spirit of the Park 345 Map 44 THE ADIRONDACKS THE ADIRONDACKS CHAPTER I AN ABOBIGINAL APPROACH HERE and there among the epic groupings of scenery upon our planet one chances upon a little lyric landscape and ever afterward cherishes it. When one comes to consider the matter, it all at once seems strange that upon a surface as extensive and as varied as this, there should be so little domestic scenery, — if that be the term for what is neither wild nor common- place. Certain of the counties of England have just the proper cadence and color to recommend them to this class of countryside, but where else in lo- calities of equal extent can you find it ? The truth is that nature abhors a vacuum only a little more violently than she eschews a happy medium. For the most part, her mountains are too high, her oceans too big, her plains too excessively plain. In our own country there is such an example of natural extravagance that there might be found 3 4 THE ADIRONDACKS in the lay of the land some palliation for the na- tional fault. Our smallest unit is a thousand miles. A little prairie is a pleasant thing, but day after day of it takes on the nature of an ex- travaganza. A few Rockies here and there add considerably to the view, but ten thousand square miles of splendor is an emotional tax upon any tourist. One needs a little Kansas thrown in. Aud so it goes. The Grand Canyon is so un- bearably grand, the open ocean so intolerably open, that we soon find nothing to admire in any prospect that is not palpably monstrous. It is nature's own fault if we have been schooled to praise her masterpieces at the top of our lungs and to ignore the rest. I know a country, however, where there are no Vesuvian smoke-pots, no Himalayan heights, no Samoan trances, no abominable abysses, and yet where there are quiet lakes and haunting vistas that are unutterably satisfying to a man's soul. It is a country where there is sternness, but stern- ness tempered by a smile ; where there is silence, but silence broken by the call of birds. And if this should seem too soft to those who pine for tragic deaths, I would say that there are still spaces, wild and wide enough, wherein the bewil- dered man might perish of starvation were his heart set on it. Thus one comes to the Adirondacks, not to AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 5 eulogize, but to enjoy. The spirit of the North Woods differs from the spirit of the other great playgrounds of our land. In the Yellowstone one feels aggrieved if there be not a new wonder every minute. In the Adirondack Park there are no wonders, no grievances. Hot springs, Sequoias, Crater lakes, glaciers, — there are none of these things, not even a desert! Consequently the professionals keep away. There are no rhinos, and the big-game hunter goes to Africa ; there are no chances to fall a mile off a cliff, whereupon the big-mountaineer goes west and the meek inherit the good average earth that he has left. And^because there are so few meek, there is plenty of room for everybody. But in a matter of understanding, there can be no beginning except at the foundation. The re- gion in question first appeared above the sea about five billion years ago. There is, of course, dispute among the daters, but the average guess seems to be about that date if you (are inquiring from one who is not too stingy with his periods. Somewhere, then, in the antiquities of ArehsBan time, the Appalachians groped and heaved above the waters — the world's first seashore. Swept by great tides and eroded by equatorial torrents, they washed lazily back into the primeval ocean only to make a reappearance as the ages rolled on. This time they stayed. They were the primal 6 THE ADIRONDACKS ranges, — there were no Alps, no Himalayas, no Eocky Mountains, — and their head, Tahawus, the Cloud-cleaver, was over eight thousand feet high before he stopped growing. Upon his lower slopes the ocean weeds still grew. Gradually more and more of the future site of the United States came to light. The rains and the frosts beat and chiseled until the granite ledges could withstand no longer, and about the island of mountains spread a rolling plain. To the eastward rose sister heights, and to the south the ranges waved in parallel chains, but there were no connecting ridges. Nothing infringed upon the Adirondack island and its mountains stood as the embodiment of stonish giants, — ele- vated, grim, alone. But they did not remain grim for long. The pulverized granite deepened and decayed into a bed for seedlings, and vast areas of white pine spread in utter loneliness up to the rounding peaks. There was, however, one spec- tacular change to come. Due to the infinitesimal but perpetual oscillation of our planet-pendulum, the climate cooled from a white pine to a juniper stage, then to the dwarf-willow stage, next to the stage where winter snow lasted in places through the summer, and finally to the stage where it snowed the summer through. The snows piled up, crushing deep, — five thousand feet, it is thought, — and their gigantic forefoot of ice AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 7 gouged out great valleys, scratched the hardest barriers, and at last majestically retreated. Oh, what a slush there must have been ! Though the ice retreated, it could never put back the valley bottoms, and, behind each termi- nal moraine, the waters collected. On the hill- sides the soil began to accumulate once more ; the willow, juniper, and pine returned ; the moose and wolves and all their wild clans spread through the wilderness, and one evening of prehistoric calm a signal fire arose, kindled by the first Indian scout. It said, "Come; this land is good hunt- ing!" Eival tribes saw and obeyed that signal, and so fierce were the contests for the deer run-ways, so murderous the first impulses of the rival braves, that the entire country became known as "The Dark and Bloody Ground." All the way from the Lower St. Lawrence came the Montagnais In- dians, — though I cannot conceive why, — and from the south, bands of the Iroquois swarmed into the mountains to repulse them. The Montagnais and other Algonquins were nearly always defeated and had to retreat, leaving their scalps behind them. Neither did they learn to bring enough food from their stores of fish and venison so that, running out of food, they had to provide a precarious vege- tarian commissary from the buds of moose-bushes and the bark of other trees. It was this spectacle 8 THE ADIRONDACKS that roused the Mohawks to derision. They called the Montagnais tree-eaters, which, being trans- lated into Iroquois, means Ad-i-ron-daks. Thus we come to the jest that names our great- est eastern park-land; only we have substituted the dining-table for the diner. However, the mountains are a monument to those who fared less well than they; and the last laugh is again best, for the derisive Mohawks are remembered by an inconsiderable river, while the derided Montagnais cannot be forgotten while the most lovely moun- tainland endures. Other members of the ungentle Iroquois, the Oneidas and Onondagas, were also accustomed to forage on the Adirondack slopes, and they were as keen as the Mohawks to fall upon visitors from the North in this scenic slaughter- house. Villages grew on its outskirts, but, within the confines of the mountains, the frequent mas- sacres prevented all settlements. All was dark and roving and the tomahawk never rested in a truce. But there was a day coming when the savages could no longer pursue their bloodshed with undi- verted satisfaction. It came in 1609, and from two directions. With but the flapping of a main- sail, as the little Half Moon hove to at the place to be known as Beverswyck, Fort Orange, and aft- erwards, Albany, these Indians could not be ex- pected to be much excited. They killed a tasty AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 9 dog to make a Dutcliman's holiday, and they could not be expected to foresee that the off-spring of their guests would drive them back toward their diminished preserves. Their medicine men pre- dicted none of the startling events that the same summer already had witnessed further north. Near the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga is an old rock, cleft from the mountain, which is called Split Rock to this day. This marked the ancient do- main of the Algonquin from the Mohawk. But on a certain day in July, a fleet of war canoes, filled with painted Algonquins and accompanied by a Frenchman who looked very much like Wil- liam Shakspere, crossed the boundary, moving south. They were met at twilight off the promon- tory that was afterward to see so much of the fortunes of war, and, secure in their new war- magic, waited till the dawn. The Mohawks at- tacked, but the new French fire-arms had the final word. It is strange that the word of this encounter in July had not tempered the hospitality shown Hud- son in September ; but the Englishman sailed down his river without knowing how far he was from China, the port of his endeavor, and without guess- ing how near he was to his great contemporary and national rival who also was bent on going cross lots to Kubla Khan. With firearms and new reasons for rivalry, the 10 THE ADIRONDACKS differences between the northern and sonthem wildernesses grew more sharp. The Mohawks were so enraged at the alliance of their old enemies with France that when the pale faces made their way up from New Amsterdam and when the Eng- lish later sought their aid, they were ready to give it. There is no reason to doubt that it was the few shots fired by Champlain that later lost New France to Saxon rule. While Indians and whites were swarming up and down the Lake-that-is-the-Gate-of-the-Coun- try, there was very little encroachment upon the Adirondacks. New Amsterdam in 1614, Bevers- wyck in 1630, Schenectady in 1662, Amsterdam in the Mohawk Valley in 1716, Utica in 1793, Lake Pleasant in 1795, Long Lake in 1830, Lidian Lake in 1845 — these are the dates (as nearly as I could discover) of the first houses, but it must be re- membered that white men, the coureurs de hois, had run through every valley, that in some cases lumber had been taken, and that by 1861 the last moose had been shot out of the country. With the vast areas of the Empire State that were more richly soiled, more readily acquirable, it is, at first, difficult to see why any white men should choose to locate within the area of the North Woods. But the blood of the frontiersmen still raced in the national veins; the freedom of untimbered reaches and the hazards of new valleys AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 11 haunted the Boones of the North. The long pe- riod between the confounding of Burgoyne and the expansions following the War of 1812 was an age of individual prowess and isolated occupation along the natural waterways of "The Dark and Bloody Ground." It was a half century of racial meetings, — and partings. For the Indian it was a time of twilight and eclipse. The last great war parties had come from the north and been forgotten. One of them left a flotilla of a thousand canoes at the head waters of the St. Eegis where they were discovered later under the mold of a century, the reminder of some massacre. Imperceptibly the dusky wanderers faded from actual encounter into hearsay, and finally into tradition. It is well for them that there was a Parkman to portray the real Iroquois whose name was his proudest boast — "The men who surpass all others." The patroon had gone, too, with the wigwam, and babies who no longer woke crying at some shivery war-whoop were also no longer luUabied to the cradle strains of: "Trip a trop a troontjes, De varkens in de boontjea, De koetzes in de klaver, De paarden in de haver, De eenjes in de waterplas, De kalf in de lang gras, So groot mijn kleine poppetje was." 12 THE ADIRONDACKS The "bo' jour," too, was but a broken echo from the St. Lawrence outposts, though, from the western wilderness in 1815, drifted strange reports of revelries where the brother of Napoleon had bought a hundred thousand acres in a vain effort to mingle the perfumes of Versailles with the scents of the wilderness. Yearly the meetings of the history-makers grew less frequent and yearly the thin tide of home- makers crept up from the south. These were mainly Irish and Scotch, the inveterate colonizers. At first the skin-hunters prospered. The Iro- quois had talked of the Kohsaraga, the Beaver- Hunting Country; and because beaver were easy to capture, within a couple of decades after the Erie Canal had focussed the attention of mer- chants upon the north, it was Kohsaraga no more. Then the prospectors told their tales. To this day one hears of Adirondack gold where mines can never be. But there was magnetic iron ore, in quantities that some day may pay the working, but which then served only to attract capital to erect ambitious iron works whose future was only disuse and decay. Lumberers were better rewarded, and the easier valleys and nearer slopes were stripped of hem- lock and white pine. Tanneries and sawmills were erected for temporary use, and the wanderer to- day often stumbles upon raspberry patches that AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 13 hide the moldering remains of shanties. In the older river towns of Hinckley, Corinth, and For- estport there are still told stories of brave ex- ploits of the river men. Though the kind of inhabitant had changed with the changing centuries until a coureur-de-bois, or a war-painted Iroquois would have been as un- usual a sight as a Chinaman, until 1870 the land was the same game-filled paradise of shining lake and looming mountain as of old. Along the At- lantic seaboard cities were already congesting. People were beginning to take vacations, but they took them on porches or in picnics, or, if very ven- turous and rich, went to Europe. Thought of run- ning up to the Adirondacks was only less hare- brained than planning an air flight. It simply did not figure in the prospectuses of the railroads. These were beginning to enlarge their service and even to carry passengers on pleasure errands. The delight of camping was, in the common opin- ion, similar to the other pleasures of the field — usually left to asses. But the ten years, beginning about 1880, saw a change. During the Civil "War the Adirondack fastnesses had harbored men who had arrived by night and who did not leave any address at home — fugitives from the draft. Some stayed. Others returned (when one did not have to be furtive to be safe) to report on the excellence of a venison- 14. THE ADIRONDACKS and-trout cuisine. And since a fisli liook and a rifle comprised almost their sole need for a sum- mer's outing, it was cheaper to take their families there than to pay the bills for this new fad of beach-front hotels. This was the genesis of the summer boarder. To other and more legitimate ears, meanwhile, had come the report issued by a certain Verplanck Colvin, an enthusiastic woods-lover, who had sur- veyed the region in 1870 and returned his findings to the metropolitan world. Here was news worth attention. The millions of acres that every five years had been sold by the State for unpaid tases began to be bought up by men who knew the value of green timber and the worth of falling water. Vast estates were bought outright for private pre- serves ; still vaster areas were leased for the tim- ber upon them and then allowed to lapse into the State's possession. It was all done quietly, and the few men who had made their homes in the Keene Valley, at Saranac, and down the Fulton Chain, who peddled their venison throughout the year and made scant money guiding the owners of the preserves dreamt not of its significance. There were not blazed trails then to every lake, and a guide who knew his business was as neces- sary as sugar in tea. And the guides did know their business. They knew their own native spots of land; they counseled wisely, shot well, and kept AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 15 their word. But they knew neither the power of money nor the greed for wealth. The long win- ter season saw them gather about stoves, tell long tales, and chew. There is one volume, at least, where such things may be read that were dreamt of only in the Adirondack woodsman's philosophy. Try "Adirondack Adventures," if you find some one to lend it to you, and see if Adirondack Mur- ray does not conjure up for you these lean, rank- whiskered men, the stuffy cabin, and the whole wilderness howling just the other side of the thick plank door. The long winter season was also rich harvest time for the timber thieves. Indeed, if Hough, Colvin, The Association for the Preservation of the Adirondacks, a succession of public-spirited governors, and tireless groups of incorruptible persons had not labored for a generation, there would have been no great North Woods for future Americans to enjoy. The people awoke to the fact that much land had escaped in the usual mys- terious manner from the public treasury. Later, only by herculean efforts on the part of the few, was a succession of bills prevented from passing the legislature, which would have permitted com- panies to dam most of the valley land at public expense for private profit. Forest fires annually ruined large areas ; the stretches of forested coun- try rapidly decreasing in size pointed to the com- 16 THE ADIRONDACKS plete extermination of all game. Streams that had supplied trout for the taking were polluted by chemicals or dynamited for immediate gains. Bribery in the legislative bodies and ruthless de- struction at the front combined for a final spurt of depredation. But victory came in the nick of time. For years the State had been acquiring and holding lands, often denuded, to be sure, which lumber interests did not pay the taxes on. It was this nucleus of property that gave the idea for the Park. Curiously enough, in this way, avarice was its own undoing. In 1877, Hough laid down the project that Colvin had suggested. In 1885 the Forest Preserve was created, and the popular vote in 1894 set it aside for the use of all the people forever. So slow, however, was the progress of the march of the law against the forays of cor- ruption, that not until 1908 did the number of enforcements of the law exceed the number of un- punished violations. Inasmuch, also, as the State owned less than half the acreage of forest and lake, and as careless and even criminal manage- ment of the rest endangered the entire holdings of the State, immediate action became necessary. So in 1916, a proposition was brought before the voters of the State as to whether a bond issue for increasing the State holding should be author- ized in the November election. By a great ma- AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 19 jority in New York City, and by a smaller majority over the State, the issue was approved, and the $7,500,000 made available will go far to intrench the interests of the State, and the East, for that matter. For the Adirondacks has become the great pleasure ground of immense numbers of va- cationists. To have failed to back up the admin- istration of the Park at this critical time in its existence, would have been a crime to the millions of workers in cities who will never be able to afford the time to go to the great breathing spaces of the West. Democracy, in ultimately recogniz- ing what is best for itself, has again triumphed. And this time, before it was entirely too late. If the adventures of the land itself were so cru- cial, the status of the land-holders was even more thrilling. For a hundred years the settlers had lived undisturbed, except by the severities of cli- mate, the hardships of wilderness life, the draw- backs of the isolated. From 1880 to 1890 they had begun to realize that boarders had bank-ac- counts. They began to enlarge their inns, to esti- mate upon their next summer's takings. Moun- tain lamb was served throughout the year, and many of them had never seen a railroad, but these men of independence had grown subtly dependent upon the" outside world. Then came the first of a series of revolutions in their affairs. A railroad was pushed north 20 THE ADIRONDACKS from Eemsen, splitting the wilderness. Huge do- mains beside it fell overnight into private hands, though some of the territory undoubtedly had been the State's. At one blow the Adirondackers were bereft of patronage and hunting grounds. The patronage followed the rails. What was the use of tedious days on stages when steam would take one into the heart of the coveted shoot- ing territory? Inn-keepers were left with noth- ing but empty beds, while new hotels with baths and billiard rooms shot up like geysers along the double steel line of the new enterprise. If the guests did not shoot the deer from the rail- road trains, as kid-gloved adventurers shot the lions in Africa, it was because they were satiated. Fifty deer could be seen in an hour's run through the woods on an August day. It was all rare fun for everybody except the original settlers — ^the deer and the backwoodsmen. But the second in the series of calamities fol- lowed hard upon the heels of the diverted board- ers. Little kingdoms were cut out of the choicest deer ranges, and keepers stood on guard. Trails that for generations had been short cuts through the forest were found fenced, and the fence rein- forced by a rifleman. It was the Saxon days of the New Forest over again, and the tragedy of William Eufus was reenacted in detail. A preserve owner in the north, whether from too AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 21 much pride of estate or too little sense in its administering, was found shot in the back. The horse that was pulling him wandered into the vil- lage with a bleeding rimip where the bullet still lodged. Searchers came upon the man, cold and past tale-bearing ; but throughout the entire Adi- rondacks each owner of a preserve construed the attack as upon himself. Fear, spurred in cases by a guilty conscience, advised flight. The exodus, as will be remembered, was sudden, hasty, and complete. For years only the armed protectorate guarded the "camp"; the owner was examining art treasures in Europe. Blame for the crisis was as usual almost equally deserved. The preserve owner, in most cases, had actually preserved the forest by financing the fight against the timber thief and the water-power scoundrel. Without his aid it is a question whether there would have remained anything but a desert for the inhabitant to roam over. On the other hand, the spirit of give and take in the mountains had been admirable. Every man's property was, to a certain extent, the next man's. Not only were mountain slopes and trout streams free for all, but in necessity, cabin and food as well. More than once I have spread my blankets on another man's bunk, cooked with his dishes, and known that, if he came suddenly upon me, I would not have to explain. As in the West, you 22 THE ADIRONDACKS were free to use another man's wood and food. The only unwritten stipulation was not to leave his dishes unwashed. Therefore the sudden influx of wealthy outsiders, with their haughty prohibi- tions and displays of unsuitable luxury, was a particularly hard pill to swallow after the priva- tion caused by the move of the center of summer population from inns to railroad hotels. Passion ebbed with time, however. Burnings of preserves grew less frequent. More people used the woods in summer, and prosperity came back. Such was the condition in 1910. Then, as suddenly as its predecessors, came the third and greatest change in Adirondack affairs. The map was altered in a summer by tbe automo- bile. A mighty flood of gasoline washed out in- vestments that bad taken two decades to grow substantial. It swept comparative wealth back to the doors of the very old proprietors who had been ruined by the railroad and the preserves. Hotels, whose clients had formerly come for the summer, could now only claim them for a nigbt. The back- woods innkeepers, whose only comforts had been bitter memories and a plug of tobacco, began to wear white collars on Sunday. But the greatest change was in. tbe Park itself. Good roads were laid along tbe main arteries and projected everywhere. Contractors were forced by public sentiment to expend more than a mere AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 23 fraction of the public money upon public needs. Centers of distribution for hunting parties swelled into villages ; villages became towns. Saranac to- day is a young city. The railroads bettered their service in an effort to divert back a certain per cent, of the maddened motorists. The wilderness that had had its reticences for a thousand cen- turies grew spotty with vacationists. The effect of all this on you, depends on what kind of a man you are. If you think in mass num- bers, there is great satisfaction. If you do not, beside the feeling of exhilaration that development always gives, there runs a shadow of sadness that the woods, at last, have been found by the million ; that the day of "old man Phelps" and his race is past. But, looking at the matter from neither extremity, there will be found comfort for both those who delight in society and for those who prefer the untenanted forest. Within the con- fines of the Park exist great possibilities for every temperament. Its boundaries enclose all that is scenically best of the central portion of the Adi- rondack region. The Park, counting public and private lands, embraces 3,313,564 acres. Forty- eight per cent, of this belongs to the State ; fifteen per cent, is private preserve; six per cent, small private holdings; twenty-three per cent, belongs to lumber companies; six per cent, is improved, and the remaining two per cent, is retained by M THE ADIRONDACKS mineral companies. The recent bond issue will bring the State's holdings well over the halfway mark. In another chapter will be detailed the varied uses to which any visitor, whether New Yorker or not, may put this princely estate. There seems but one more dimension for expan- sion, and that a matter of the calendar. Time was when July and August saw the season finished. Then, when some stubborn beauty lover stayed, and Labor Day ceased to tyrannize, September had a chance to exercise her charms. Husbands went up to bring their ladies home, and stayed to shoot. Now, from mid-December to March, one may wan- der into the woods with snow-shoes and be re- garded as neither childish nor unbalanced. In- deed, some say a mid-winter night's dream is by far the fairest of all. With this bare outline of the story of the Park, I must be content. It is only too easy to go on and on, to expand the obvious while forgetting that, of all persons who deserves the inverted thumb, he is foremost who starts out as guide and ends up with the garrulity of the seeing-every- thing man. One must expose the dangers; one should point out the routes that better the arrival ; but not to let the traveler discover the chief glories for himself is an act that deserves shooting at sunrise. So do not expect either Luggins or my- AN ABORIGINAL APPROACH 25 self to stamp, explain and vivisect the beauties 'of the road. Despite all modern conveniences, the Adiron- dack wilderness remains. Despite the upholstered car, the thermos flask, the automatic fusillader, the mountains furnish humble pleasures that can never be exhausted. Seldom were our travels salted with superlatives. Indeed, the chief danger lay in our tendency to revel in the smallness of our pleasures. In rereading this log I find the greatest fault is just that. The data are explicit, the beauties taken for granted. You must begin, then, to wonder why Lynn and I, having seen some of the West's best wonders came to love this lake-starred, balsam forest better than that dazzling land nearer the setting sun. CHAPTER n NOETH CHEEK TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN WE set out rather self-consciously, I remem- ber, and with an air of cavalcade. Lynn led off in knickerbockers and flannel shirt with a small pack-basket on his back. His little Western horse followed, as he had grown well accustomed to do on Wyoming trails, with the blanket rolls, the little tent, and the provisions that were meant to see us through the first stage of our indepen- dence. A soft south wind and I brought up the rear. I carried the fishing-rods, and the June sun promised an over-tardy spring at last. The red-winged blackbirds and the meadow-larks could not keep it to themselves. To Lynn and myself about all that was of im- portance loomed before us; our baggage, a set of virgin mountains, and vacation. The vacation seemed capacious enough, viewed from the large end. The dufiie bags did n't. They looked a trifle bulgy. So did the mountains. That was about all one could say for them when reminiscences of Montana rose to the lips only to die there out of deference to our new adventure. Indeed, I was 26 TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 27 a trifle worried at the outset because from the memories of a youthful trip I had drawn upon my comrade's credulity to the point of making a summer of it in the Adirondacks. And now the Adirondacks did not rise to the occasion. But Lynn had set himself to outwhistling the birds, and Luggins fairly beamed at the prospect, as well he might, — a winding easy road, much grass in sight, and none of those familiar preci- pices with which his former excursions with us had been strewn! So, gratified, as if I were re- sponsible for the drenching sunlight and the fresh- foliaged hills, I began to tread on air. After much packing and much planning we were off. There was perhaps a subtler reason for the glee at our setting forth. We had had to spend the night at North Creek, and North Creek may best be described as a most excellent point to depart from. It exists chiefly for people to leave it. And doubtless it has grown so calloused to fare- wells that it has given over any attempts to make the departing guest sorrow at the prospect. Cer- tainly we didn't. If the hotels of North Creek suffer from the transitoriness of their guests, the town itself, in- deed, any town, would suffer by comparison with its surroundings. On one side the stripling Hud- son glitters and slides; on the other Gore Moun- tain's slopes and foot-hills wrinkle into alluring 28 THE ADIRONDACKS distances of green. And, as if for a day, the strings of houses straggle tawdrily between, ad- vertising the drinks and tobaccos in a way to make the advertiser infamous. Our road clung to the river for a smart hour's pacing. Only the telegraph wires were to show that the world of shopkeepers was not perma- nently at our backs. And on them occasionally played a tune — the wild tune that Thoreau loved most to hear. Also bluebirds, kingbirds, swallows sat upon them. And all the time the shallow, rippling Hudson, with its stranded logs, turned some corner and showed us further into the heart of the highlands. At North River we had such a dinner as was to be remembered, country style and country cour- tesy and all five courses for fifty cents. Luggins, too, made industrious use of the occasion and showed a sorry reluctance to resume the road for one who had been fattened for a pilgrimage. But one o'clock saw us turning to the southwest and away from the river, with constantly rising spirits. That very night was to bed us under stars. As we were much surprised to find, our mode of travel appeared to throw nearly every one into a fever of curiosity or concern. In the West not an eyebrow would have been raised if we had started to cross the Staked Plains with the same outfit, but in North Creek we had noticed no metropolitan TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 29 reticence concerning our peculiarity, and at the little hotel where we lunched some guides pre- dicted misadventure ahead. We gathered that to go conventionally in the Adirondacks one must travel either by stage, in a motor bus or private automobile, on foot or in canoes. But we had faith in Luggins. He was a birth- right member in the pragmatic school of optimists. Like God in Browning's mad poem, he never said a word, even at murder. There was no vicissitude that he had not gone through. His ordinary course was unpretentious plodding, but he would have scaled the Alps if we had led him on. He was willing at any moment to sleep or swim, fast or feast, as necessity demanded. And we grew to have an exaggerated tenderness for the crooked streak of white down his nose. By the turn of the afternoon we had left the highway and plunged down steeply for a few rods through the woods to come upon the lake called Thirteenth Lake, a continuation, I suppose, of the Fulton Chain that runs bravely up to Eighth and stops perplexed like the Parson in the "One Hoss Shay." Thirteenth Lake runs southwest by northeast as do nearly all the Adirondack waters. The shadow was just commencing to steal out from the lee of the mountain on its farther shore, half a mile away, when we stopped on the little promon- 30 THE ADIRONDACKS tory that had apparently been created for our camp site. It took but a moment to dispossess Luggins of his load and but another to arrange our apartment. At the risk of seeming to gloat, I am intruding the details, just this once. Lynn and I had been pals on so many of these parties that we worked with the silence and pre- cision of knitting needles. Our foremost discov- ery had been that two can accomplish more upon one job by cooperation that they can by dividing the chores into each-man-for-himself operations. We both put up the tent, both chopped the fire- wood, both cooked, and both ate. Probably during the progress of this account there will intrude an itemized list of household gods. It is a temptation too traditional to be eluded. Where is the camper who writes or the writer who camps who has ever let slip the chance to corrupt some other 's comfort with his own con- traptions ? The delight to preach is too universal whether it be in a promulgation of the pulpit or in an exhortation on some fantastic frying-pan. But not now is the time to gloat upon our con- tentments. Now but two articles demand descrip- tion — our tent and our beds. The tent was a baker of brown waterproofing. A baker tent is the sort that opens to the fire along the entire front and entails unnecessary labor for quite unnecessary comfort. For a one-night stand it can be set up TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 31 in a few minutes ; for an indefinite stay it can be made elaborately cheerful. At any time it affords the luxuries of dryness, warmth, and space in which to have one's being. The amount of wood that can be burned before a baker through an autumn night is more than a matter of sentiment. It means hard labor — indeed, the unnecessary labor to which I referred, for other tents will do. But so will your town house, if it comes to a question of being easy. Lynn and I would have put up our baker at any cost just for the unindus- trious hour of after-supper. To loaf before the great backlog, with the forest freshness drifting in at the sides, and your spirits soaring under the quite inadequate heavens, is the best privilege of a hard day. Bed comes next. Our beds had been the text of many a speculation and experiment during our past trips. We had foreborne to request Luggins to carry cots, and yet we refused to sleep on bare ground or balsam tips plucked at a too large cost of time. Air cushions were too expensive and sleeping bags too warm. Our solution was the cot, after all, but minus its woodwork. With the canvas hooked upon two parallel logs, securely staked apart, each could procure him the easiest and most somnifacient bed in the world for the carriage of two pounds of canvas and the neces- sary quilts and blankets to keep him warm. And 32 THE ADIRONDACKS these we wished upon Lnggins without qualm. How much humanity there is in the act of pitch- ing a tent! The race seems more tender in the deed. It compounds all the past and sweetest emotions — door-stone, hearthstone, shelter, home. They are all there, renewed each setting-up time with a newness that house-buying never feels. But with Lynn and myself the rite began always with a bit of folly that I find we share with most pitchers of tents. We always had an eye to the view. The practice was even more preposterous than the theory. The theory presupposed that we would retire at sunset with the glorious orb fading away behind the encrimsoned peaks, that we would drowse off with the evening star etching itself into our dreams, and that we would awake to the enjoyment of limpid beams upspringing from a gilded hori- zon. The theory is flattery. The reality is dis- illusion. We mostly turned in dog-tired and rather late. We fell asleep with the usual speed of falling bodies. We woke in the extremity of hunger. We rose with never a glance at the hori- zon. There was no margin for rhapsody and only a legendary interest in anything but breakfast. And yet we always posed that tent. I trust that a subtler influence than logic can suspect, ratified the instinct. Making all allowances for first enthusiasms, TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 33 Thirteentli Lake retains a comeliness in our mem- ories that more gifted localities do not. It com- posed, as we found, all the essentials of an excel- lent base for beginnings into a tract of interest and beauty. Its woods were wild but not remote ; its climbs steep, but not drastic. Its fish catch- able. The next morning turned bracing cool before a west wind. Great white clouds put on sail in a sky that shone blue and spacious. And we set forth to overlook the country from a small moun- tain called Peaked. The excursion developed into an engaging little climb. In a boat, which we borrowed from a genial gentleman in overalls, we crossed the lake. A trail followed a tiny stream to its source in Peaked Mountain Pond, and turned to the right. The last few yards of the ascent was almost mountaineering, being bare and rugged rock. From the summit there opened out a view that is not too common from the lower Adirondack peaks, which, under altitudes of thirty-five hun- dred feet, are usually wooded. In the direction of the Hudson Eiver stretched the green and white checkerboard of settlement and clearing, while on the other sides rolled the almost unbroken forest. Above us the summery clouds promised a truce between storms for several days. Though rising only a few hundred feet. Peaked was a most satis- fying mountain. 34 THE ADIRONDACKS We entertained our boat-lender at a luncheon. Lynn contributed corn-bread, and I, sunnies, caught at the overalled gentleman's advice. He had said: "If* you row up to the inlet yonder, you '11 have some real smart fishin'. You kin catch all you kin eat at twenty throws." And I had. Fat sunnies fried in butter shall not mas- querade as bass, nor yet as trout, but men back from climbing do not eat them listlessly for all that. Our guest, who, in his duller moments pursued a trade at North Creek, spent much of his time, he told us, at Thirteenth Lake. Between applica- tions of corn-bread and maple syrup the good man vouchsafed us much first-hand information on the neighborhood. He told us that we would see many deer at Hour Pond, a circular shallow of pic- turesque water where lily pads grow extrava- gantly. He held us by accounts of the wilderness about Botheration Flow. He talked of the garnet mines in the vicinity. And we went with him to his little shack to see a large stone that he had found. Our eyes were mostly for the shack ; it was such an example of slovenliness. Newspapers of his- toric times, clothes of the same date, ingredients of past and future meals, bedclothes, were all part of the baggage of this unspeakable den. How a gentleman who had escaped from North Creek to TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 37 the woods could fraternize with such filth in the respectable society of forest trees and beside the clean waters is a mystery that laziness alone does not explain. Occasionally among the Adirondack hermits you will find one, slothful and revolting when it comes to sanitation and the broom, though otherwise full of good sense. But for the most part the trappers, the woodsmen, and guides, who spend much of their time alone, are excellent housekeepers. Their dishes are always washed, their wood-bins filled, their clothes sewed with the carefulness of sailors. It is oftener the people of cities who live catch as catch can. We were in a hurry to reach the Kunjamuk country and on that account neglected to profit by the old man's cheerful descriptions of many places. But we did go up Gore Mountain. It attains the respectable altitude of 3540 feet and gives one a look-off into blue counties. The view was not so interesting, barring the charming pros- pect of the Hudson's valley, as the descent on the western side. There is unfrequented wildland, indeed. You sink into thick mosses, at peril to your legs. You climb great fallen trunks. It is just the sort of wet and secretive wilderness that neither repels by inaccessibility nor attracts by special beauty. You would expect the warblers to nest there in content. From our night encamp- ment along Botheration Flow we heard the first 38 THE ADIRONDACKS barred owl barking; leagues off it seemed, across the wide and lonely wilderness. Botheration Flow, like King's Flow and the other flows, is a watercourse of special design, peculiarly misnamed. There is no flow. The natural ambition of a stream is to get somewhere. But a flow, having been thwarted by reduced valley slope or beaver dams or human agency, barely creeps. The result is excellent canoeing. On these flows it is possible to paddle for miles, or to fish from a boat where spring holes harbor trout, to surprise deer at nightfall, or simply float on an inverted sky in the amazing twilight beauty of these water-lanes. They are numerous in all parts of the Park except the northeastern. And Both- eration, which was our first, grappled us to it with speedy attachment. We finally returned our bor- rowed canoe to our dirty counsellor with a regret that was only surpassed by our desires to be for- warded upon our journey. Beautiful as the Thir- teenth region was, it was but the threshold of the woods, and the unbroken forest ahead made us uneasy with its call. Before we went, however, we obtained permission from the owner to over- haul his haggard den. It was a ghoulish job, but we felt distinctly better for having repaid him for his loans by the sweat of a profound house- cleaning. In the secluding mists of early morning we set TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 39 Luggins again to his interrupted profession. Our winding road took us in the general direction of Indian Lake. The tops of the moderate moun- tains that lay beside ns were not visible, but alter- nate openings and meetings of the wood offered the variety that devours the miles. There was a vague loneliness of the landscape caused by un- inhabited clearings. It was superior in degree to the aloofness of the forest itself. The prepared spaces seemed to long for an occupancy and a business of which the uncleared land did not hint. Lynn and I both felt this, and after the day's march, when we pitched our tent by a meadow, rank with uncut hay, the domestic wildness lay upon our spirits. We were glad to make an early night of it. In the morning lifted clouds showed what a superb sleeping room we had unwittingly found. Our one object had been to gratify Luggins' deep desire for the rich meadow-grass. Our own breakfast was eaten before a landscape of sub- dued beauty. Toward the west flanking hills dipped sharply and through the wide vale rose Snowy Mountain, master by a head of his long range. This side of him lay Indian Lake, in- visible. Below us shone a bright arc of the King's Flow. To the south the valley of the dark Kun- jamuk invited, while behind us rolled the green shoulders of mountains. 40 THE ADIRONDACKS Late May and June are the great bird months of the Adirondacks. However still the woods may be at other seasons of the year, in the mating month there is too much joy to be swallowed up by the grim spruces. Clearings become orches- tral, and even the deep forest has its songs. Who- ever has heard the whitethroat in some remote valley or the hermit thrush from the deep wood at evening has been bound with invisible strings to the wilderness. The long sweet warbling of a flock of purple finches is tenderness itself. By July there are gaps in the chorus, and soon after an infinite quiet settles upon the forest, broken by sounds that only he that hath ears to hear will have the sensibility to detect. The immediate goal of campers by King 's Flow is a curious formation called Chimney Mountain which does everything a chimney should do, but smoke. This unique structure, lying about seven miles to the southeast of Indian Lake Village, rises in a sixty-foot pinnacle from a mountain already 2650 feet in the air. Mr. William J. Miller in a New York State Museum Bulletin ex- plains the interesting geologic formation by ero- sion. He states that an inclined plane of rock weathered on the under side of its upper end until a huge block cracked off. This left the tower and a rift, 650 feet long, 250 deep, and 300 wide, with a slope at an angle of fifty degrees. The appear- TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 41 ance of the crater-like cavity beside the chimney is misleading, and visitors are inclined to defraud erosion of its due by ascribing the fissures, pin- nacle, and craterjto volcanic action. Although it is not, the spectacle is unique in the Adirondacks, and we found it and the view worth the clamber. And, in the name of all that is rude, that was an aggravating ascent! For, after ten minutes over fields and ten through open wood by a pel- lucid brook, we came to one of those arrangements of the devil, known as a bum. On this side of the mountain, the west, the rise is nearly a thousand feet in half a mile, and that is pretty stiff going. The burn made it seem like ten thousand, for a burn is nature's barbed- wire entanglement. The fire had burned off the wood loam, and a million rocks projected. The sound-looking places let us through. Fallen trees criss-crossed at the height of our waists, too sticky to crawl under, too hard to flounder over. We had to wiggle through. In the less cumbered spots, briers bloomed to heaven. The sun came out with violence. We were thirty minutes crossing this fallacious short-cut which an able kangaroo could have done in twenty leaps. Weeks later we learned that there is a long way round by a trail — and probably a still longer hunt for it. By a series of disablements we at last emerged from the narrow zone at the entrance to a cave, 4a THE ADIRONDACKS which, luilike the Sibyl's, spouted not hot air, but cool. It was a fissure in the waU of the mountain, with a small opening at the top. This broadened as it descended. We let down our sweating selves between its dripping walls with gratitude. In the interior dimness we crawled upon snow covered with dirt and small stones. Later, when we came to inquire about this singular mountain which had a refrigerator as well as a chimney, we learned that on ordinary summers the supply of snow lasted into the autumn, sometimes the season round. Lynn, of course, coveted a seat upon the un- steady-looking chimney. I reminded him of the half-gale that was now blowing from the north- west, and of his home and mother. There seemed to be little actual danger. Indeed when he waved to me, I began to follow and, once starting, dis- liked to stop. I huddled close to the rocks, insert- ing my fingers in the crevices. The wind piped at my ears. In fact at the time there seemed no reason why a harder puff should not waft me off and down to the gravestones below. But from the pinnacle much of the amiable provinces of Warren and Hamilton Counties spread before us. On the north lay an open val- ley, with the clay-colored road slashing here and there into a hill. It was the State road that runs from North Creek to Indian Lake Village. To the TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 43 west and soutli rose the mountains about Indian Lake. Bellying clouds threw a wash of shadow over the forest and clearings. And always did old Kunjamuk draw attention to his post in the south. I have seen this mountain from every side and in every weather, but never, even at the sunniest does he lose his aspect of piratical blackness. The wind howled cheerfully at our turret, and my distrust of the descent was only exceeded by my definite dislike for freezing on the Chimney. Yet going down was not so bad as I expected. Only once did I have to cling to the ledge while my feet groped for their inch of standing room. But 1 do remember thinking that if my remains were to garnish the bottom of some precipice I hoped it would be a taller one — the Jungfrau's, perhaps, or the Grand Canyon. We got back to our tent in time to catch some trout from King's Flow for lunch, and since Lug- gins was still stowing ballast considerably to hay- ward, we went into consultation with the map. There are, in the main, but two varieties of travelers — the tourist and the tramp. The tourist leaves nothing to chance or to the gods. He knows weeks ahead just where he is to stop and how much he is going to tip the waiter. A time-table stimulates him like strong drink. He intoxicates himself with railway folders, and the more complicated the routing, the better he is 44) THE ADIRONDACKS pleased. Such creatures enjoy the things they see, I am forced to suppose, but I wager it is only if the sights do not conflict with the guide-book. The tramp, on the other hand, is touchy about plans. For him the worst thing that can be said about a trip is that it was premeditated. For him the first fine cream of the road must not be skimmed by the descriptions of any guide. He must have no times definitely scheduled, no spaces exactly measured out. Such creatures eat, I pre- sume, but it must be done extemporaneously. Lynn's temperament and mine fell well within these lines. We often differed and sometimes dis- agreed, fortunately, for by complaisance fell the angels. But both of us were content, after the skeleton of our adventures was arranged, to let the complexion of the moment be decided by the moment. Our scheme was for each to state his desire as plausibly as he could and then we would bide by the golden mean. This had worked so weU on our other trips that we had long ago lost any false unselfishness in the preliminary statement of ambitions. In our compromises we would have made Henry Clay blush like a dilettante. In this case our question was three-fold ; whether to strike across through three hours of woodland to the shores of Indian Lake where friends of ours were encamped, or to take a day's circuit by Indian Lake Village and thence to their camp, TO CHIMNEY MOUNTAIN 45 or to spend a week in the march around to Specu- lator. The decision was not difiQcult, this time, for in the backs of our two heads was beginning to blossom the scheme of seeing the Adirondack Park from top to bottom, and from side to side. If Lynn can claim any of the more forbidding virtues, it is that of thoroughness. Later I found out that he secretly intended to see every mile of our highland wilderness, and I had secretly already begun to take notes. So the zealot in both of us voted for the long detour. In twenty min- utes we had reaped a bundle of hay for Luggins' breakfast and in twenty more were nosing our way south over the dilapidations of an old logging road. CHAPTER m WE TEAVEL NOETH BY ^OUTH ALTHOUGH we were only a short distance out from North Creek, yet the routine of our travel was already set. Luggins understood that he was to demand drink of the frequent streamlets not more than once an hour. Lynn and I each carried a light pack basket for the chinaware and the extras. Luggins probably wished that we would carry more. When in the mood, we talked of all things under heaven and a few above it. But as often as not we would be silent for a league of woodland, the rhythm of the marching being sufficiently potent for one's dreams. We got along, as they say, beautifully. A sense that certain bounds of polite- ness must never be overstepped contributed. Also, life was so full of a number of things that we never felt circumscribed. There must have been crises, but we swallowed them, silent. And we never approached that impasse of pertinacity that breaks the relations of trappers or prospec- tors in greater solitudes for longer periods. Close travel for many weeks demands a fraternity 46 WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 47 that is too intimate to be lightly entered upon. Yet to find a comrade for the long hike is worth many an experiment on shorter tours. The full savor of wild life can come only to those most happily bonded for their work in sun and rain. That night we camped by a little brook, called Silver on the map. It was a refreshing spot, though it would have been hideously lonely for just one person. It had been a lonely sort of day — a day shut in by forests of spruce and sugar- maple, birch and balsam. We had only the most occasional glimpses of the by-lying territory. We had journeyed, to be sure, upon a man-made road, but mosses softened the ancient ruts, and there was nothing else to show that human beings traversed the country twice a year. As we sat about our early supper not even a chipmunk in- fringed upon the stillness. The dimness dripped with the primeval. The occasion belonged clearly to the dryads. Tired with the long tramp, we let their solemnities seal the day for us in sleep. The next morning, after much refreshment, an ill-starred glance at the map suggested that we ascend nearby Dug Mountain for the outlook it would give us upon our neighbors. Leaving Lug- gins trying to conceal his satisfaction, we followed the thread of Silver to a deserted lumber camp. For half an hour we mounted a ridge, bore to the left, toiled under a feverish sun toward the elusive 48 THE ADIRONDACKS summit. "With each step upward we streamed more incontinently. When is a windfall not a windfall? When it 's in your way. A broad burn and the incline made progress an exactiug tor- ment. Gravity and good sense bade us turn about. But, though it probably is a sign of unsound in- tellect, Lynn refused to be interviewed about re- considering the ascent. So after another brutal quarter of an hour we stood upon what may have been the summit. Although the eminence rises to upwards of three thousand feet we still had to climb a tree to get a view. The view was swathed in heat. Filling the whole west, stretched Indian Lake, slender and shining under the Snowy Eange. At the south gleamed Whittaker, and immediately below were three gemlets, called the Dug Mountain Ponds. We returned to Luggius by way of them. I be- lieve that they are being lumbered now. On one there was a grove of white pines rising into blue- green heights greater than I have seen elsewhere in the Park. Under them we gratefully ate a little lunch. We lay on the soft needles, listening to the soft stir of the wind and resting. It was a spot for tired bodies to soak up comfort, and for taut spirits to bathe in the securities of peace. Late in the afternoon, indeed so late that a round moon was rising over a round mountain, we entered Speculator. It is a comfortable place WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 49 with white-painted houses and a long white inn, clamorous with children and their nurses. The village sits a little back from Lake Pleasant to have a view of Speculator Mountain, and, barring the children, seems void of animation. It is a day's stage from the railroad, old style, and at the very end of its street, as we found in conversa- tion with the post-office, begins a hinterland of trout and bear. But Speculator, despite the trout and the bear, presents itself to my memory as the paradise for children as our adventure with its lake attests. We had followed the street to the water's edge and then went along the water's edge for half a mile in order to screen the village from our view. On such a night we scorned hotel rooms and yet we were weary from the Dug Mountain cHmb of the morning. So we took few pains with our beds, fatally few. The full moon was caught by the lake in plains of glory. The noises from the village hushed one by one. Perfect night was about us, and the hills grew ghostly with moon- shine. But I was too tired. The occasional wake- fulness that assails one every so often in the woods struck home. I lay there in luxuries of light, but with barely a wink of sleep. The trip of the mom- ning seemed as part of a past lifetime. I began to look forward to the morning plunge. But in this lake designed for children it was 50 THE ADIRONDACKS not to be. The water was insufferably shallow. The lake had a magnificent sand bottom, just the thing for wading, but the bottom had very little lake. We waded out and waded out. Yet it was only about one foot deep. Another hundred yards and Lynn sat down in desperation and began to pour the lake over him. Through the cold mists of dawn shapely mountains rose from the distant shores. To a person not affected with a zeal for diving it was a kindly scene. To us it was dis- appointing : delightful, horizontally, but vertically, childish. Although Lake Pleasant and Sacandaga, its twin, are surrounded by private holdings, there is much State land to the west and south for camp- ing and hunting. The elevations are not high, but the situations are charming, and the wilderness in which the Canada creeks take their rise is a wilder- ness indeed. There are no roads, no villages. Here and there is a sequestered shack built by the guides for the hunting season. In addition, there is something to hunt. For sheer joy in comfortable exploration one can stumble upon no more appetizing country than the richly wooded, high-shouldered, and well- watered slopes to the west of Piseco Lake. From an inciting eminence we looked upon these fields, so Elysian for wayfarers ; but as we were to make our incursions from another sallying-point, we WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 61 desisted. We turned our backs upon Piseco, re- traced our steps to Speculator, replenished our stores for a future of unknown duration at a neat corner emporium, and quit the district by a long and upright road. The incline of the hill devoured the breath. But at the top we hovered a moment over as cheer- ing a panorama of cultivation and green fields as any man with a little farmer in the blood might travel fifty miles to see. Yet it held us only for a moment. The fresh and unknown wilderness lay before, and we gladly turned our backs upon the village with its church and fields. From sunny farm-house to unpainted shack, from shack to uninhabited clearing, from clearing to unfrequented wood, the road bore us, and the radiant morning permitted no sluggishness in thought or gait. It was difficult not to run and sing. Only the desire not to appear too ridicu- lous in Luggins ' eyes prevented us. It was not going so well with all the world, however. Around a turn we came upon a Ford, stalled mid-hill, with three men in mackinaws in session about it. They looked upon our caval- cade with envy, I thought. Luggins was at least moving. A young Scandinavian was experiment- ing under the hood, and the two old Irishmen, gray of hair and quizzical of countenance, were engaged in thought. Machinery out of order was 52 THE ADIRONDACKS as much of a temptation to Lynn as an Irishman was to me; so we stopped. They were in luck, for I wager there was no- body within the Park so good at an amateur autopsy as my companion. Unlike myself! I appreciate motoring. It is a gift of the gods like maple syrup and the new moon, something to be enjoyed as long as possible. But if it resolves itself into an argument of cylinders and mixtures, I am willing to have the bill sent in. I suspect, at times, that Lynn wants the things to give out just to enjoy the pleasures of resuscitation. I am only grateful that he takes Luggins for granted without a dissection. Perhaps it is because he is only one cylinder. Lynn's masterly motions and profound enjoy- ment awed the men in mackinaws. They regarded him with deference, and when he coaxed the first plaintive cadences and finally a continuous purr from the stalled brute, a reUeved conversation broke out. They told us that they had been work- ing all winter on a large lumbering operation on Whittaker Lake. Large areas awaited cutting. We confided our route to them. They proposed a detour to their camp which promised interest. Then the Scandinavian took the wheel, and with a parting convulsion, they left us. Lynn looked after the clattering car until it had topped the rise, and for an instant I thought I detected long- WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 65 ing in his gaze. But I did him an injustice. He set out after Luggins and me with his old appetite for the road undiminished, and when he caught up with us, he said a little wistfully : "Do you suppose they are all like that? A lumber camp can't be any more romantic than a ranch." Even so. The men of a lumber camp are mostly middle-aged and always tired. Their hours are long; they eat in silence, smoke in silence, sleep. If there ever was romance about their life, it has vanished. Wherever there is humanity, there is a story, but the cattle raiser and the wood-chopper of to-day bury it beneath slovenly surfaces. Yet there are camps in the Adirondacks, which we fell upon later, that proved cleanly as well as hospi- table, ambitious as well as hard-working. Gen- eralizations are not generous. We turned Luggins from his road of ease to follow the telephone wire as by direction. It led us through caverns of green giant beeches, with pyramids of the most succulent green boughs for their roofs. There were ancient pines that had been proud treelings when Henry Hudson was learning Dutch. Swarthy spruces and magnificent sugar-maples walled in the luxurious maze of our advance. Languid sunlight fell in places, but an eerie gloom increased. But the weather outside was distant as if outside a house. 66 THE ADIRONDACKS After an hour through the somber forest, out we came upon some buildings beside a gray lake. The sky was filmed, the glorious blue of the morn- ing but a memory. In Wyoming we had never needed a tent in summer. In the Adirondacks no morning sky could foretell the evening. The weather was either a dazzling uncertainty or a drizzling certainty. Within fifteen minutes after our arrival upon Whittaker the mist curtain had descended upon the great, wooded shoulders of Dug Mountain. At the lumber house we were welcomed by the "missus." She was much too thin and pale-eyed for a dweller in the palace of health. But the impending storm rather than her lean and hungry look decided us to hasten. We exaggerated about the size of our last meal, tele- phoned to Master Thomas, the friend whose camp we were aiming for, across the miles of wilder- ness, and were again engulfed in the afternoon shadows of the wood. For the first time on our trip all was not plain sailing. Master Thomas had explained our route with the neat science of a woods-traveler. He had told us to skirt Whittaker, follow a trail to the Jessup Eiver, proceed down the right bank to the entrance of Dug Mountain Brook, and wait there until he appeared with the launch. But the trail had been much defaced by lumbering operations; the sky was a seamless and dripping WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 67 drab; our spirits had lost the impetus of break- fast and not yet felt the spur of an anticipated supper. "We began to think of our despised lum- ber lunch with tenderness. Though hungry, we were not yet entirely in- sensible to the majestic woods. A fine rain had begun to fall. We heard it pattering upon the green roof, but we walked dry in somber cloisters as if in a different world. At length we came out into a natural clearing, very much like the wild meadows of the West, and doubtless beautiful to persons in a dry and well-fed condition. But to us it was a desert island. The trail led in, but none led out. Encumbered with Luggins, we dared not contemplate striking through to the Jes- sup by compass. We were marooned, and if in no danger of dying of thirst, we were in some peril of the opposite. Lynn remarked that he was going to restore the balance of power by getting some of the water inside him. So we set about making ourselves some tea while Luggins ate the juicy grass. It was as curious a party as I remember. Master Thomas appeared just as we were done. If I had been concocting this narrative, I could not have arranged his entrance more dramatically. To a stranger he was a quick, short, grizzled man, whose observations were interesting. To Lynn and me he had been an open-air comrade, a keen- 68 THE ADIRONDACKS sighted counselor. Years before at school he had taught us algebra and animals, logarithms and love of the woods. Now, although his sons were older than we, he was still to be counted upon to furnish an active sympathy for our exploits. His first remark was typical. Instead of asking us why we were having afternoon tea by a drenched meadow like two Mad Hatters, he praised us for letting ourselves be so easily found. In a moment he had won Luggins for life by letting him nose a piece of maple sugar out of his coat pocket. Talking industriously about the trout fishing that he was going to show us, he led the way at a brisk pace to the dianesque cove wherein Dug Mountain Brook merged forever with the broadening Jessup. The motor-boat lay in wait, and Luggins justified our boast of his being the most versatile and best self-adjusting creature in existence by consenting to stand on the bottom. Indian Lake is a ribbon of water nine miles long and about a mile wide. At its upper end it divides. One three-mile branch lies in the Jes- sup River valley which was submerged when the dam was made. Above the slack water the little stream sparkles through woods to which the beaver have come back. Opposite the Dug Mountain Brook outlet lies a trail which takes one over to Mason Lake and the Miami Eiver, a marvelous home of trout and beaver. If you follow the WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 59 Miami's aldered curvings, you are at last en- tranced by the Sabbath beauties of Lewey Lake. It lies under the Snowy Range, sandy-beached and forest-shored. It empties into Indian's other arm, and if you paddle around the long point and up through the beautiful rocky passage crowned with beeches, you will find the sequestered camp called Back Log. Thither our conglomerate launch load was tending. You will have to screen for yourself the drama of our reception : two wan- derers, tired and wet and hungry, a patient pack- horse, some hospitable hand-shakings, a tent to dress in before which a fuU-tongued fire licked at a giant birch-log, premonitions of an imminent meal in the air. Camping has two rewards, nay, three: the anticipation, the time being, and the afterward. Indian Lake makes as fine a forest headquarters as the Adirondacks afford. Wooded shores rise on all sides, and to the north on the fairest days the Marcy Mountains show blue. Snowy, with its attendants, fairly gluts the west, and Kunjamuk lords it in melancholy to the east. At the north- ern end of the lake a small cottage colony has built ; the remainder of the hundred miles of shore line is State land. Unfortunately the water is partly drawn off on dry seasons, leaving an un- sightly residuum of logs and stumps. But there is always enough liquid left to float the enormous 60 THE ADIRONDACKS pickerel. Elijah would never have needed to call in the ravens if he had struck Indian Lake with a pickerel spoon. The in-flowing streams are scat- teringly inhabited by trout. It is a hospitable wilderness. Little ponds lie back from the big lake. And some of these, Crotched and Johnny Mack and Eound, left in our memories some inti- mate scenes to be cherished. It began to rain, at first steadily from the east, and then impartially from every part of the com- pass. And then we were vouchsafed a morning of crystal and blue that shouted, "Snowy!" in our ears. I shall be all my life deciding, I suppose, whether it be better to hustle about the world and see the sights, with a sort of understanding, of course; or to master the ravines and hillocks of one domestic neighborhood ; whether it be nearer living to worship before Fuji-yama and the Mat- terhorn or to know well the intricacies and secrets of a single vale. It is a rending decision. Will you have star-spaces or flowers in the crannied wall? Snowy is the sort of mountain that is negligible in size, when compared with your Mt. McKinleys — negligible, that is, except to the one carrying bed and lodging up him. He is commonplace for looks, compared with the Gothic splendors of the Alps. He fronts you with a bold precipice or two. He WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 61 rises out of decent woods. He scorns to lure with any waterfall of particulars. Yet Snowy has his moods, his beauties, his sternnesses, and the hearts of those who know him. "We set out, Master Thomas leading. For thirty minutes the trail kept a decent sense of direction under great trees, and then took to the brook. Up the brook we scrabbled on inclined slabs of mother rock till a wall, a few hundred feet high, sets one to the right. Another half hour, sufficiently upright to borrow all one 's wind, and there was the fire warden's cabin. A little turn and we were out on top. To scale Gibraltar is a matter you would never heed with Master Thomas guiding. He takes you on with a short step. Under his shrewd brow shine shrewd eyes that miss nothing of the con- tour of the country. It is he that points out our first fawn. It is he that finds the rare flower. Evening camps with him are a feast of woodlore and a flow of soul as well. The sharpness in those eyes is mainly humor and twinkle. For resource and wisdom he is the wiry woodmaster of us all. "We found the fire warden seizing the fair day to mend his housekeeping. Can hermits think? Or have they just the two gratifications : reading last month's magazine and not being struck by lightning? This man, spare and forty-five, whose muscles had been hardened by the log-drive and 62 THE ADIRONDACKS who was taking the rest cure — ^was he becoming just another part of the azure, drenched wonder- land about him? Or did the gales that fell upon his cabin drive him to deep thought? Does the crawling stuffiness of the office-holder or the wide- ness of blown horizons conjure the greater vision of the universe? It is impossible to divine di- rectly, and I am afraid my warden would not have told me no matter how obliquely I had pressed the question. From the summit of Snowy an amazing expanse of forest-land falls away. Only to the east is much water seen. There the whole length of In- dian lies white at one's feet. In the distance a few ponds glimmer, but only as foam laces wide- rolling combers. Tou breathe in relief to realize that, despite fire and pillage, there are such stretches of forest left. In every view that is to refresh the memory there must remain one chief delight. And from Snowy it is not the tumble of green rollers, not even the timber blanket that I would climb to see most of all. There is a little ledge on the western side from which the slope swoops down into a perfect amphitheater. The soaring sides sink evenly to rest. From the ledge the arms of moun- tains appear to enclose it. Storms cannot harry it. The sun nestles into it. Quiet, driven from everywhere else, may sleep there. Even the frost WE TRAVEL NORTH BY SOUTH 63 leaves it for its last and most enchanting prey. Long did we lie on the moss of the ledge, steep- ing in the sunshine, and the calm of the marvelous bowl below. It was a vision of serenity worth far greater struggle to attain. We forgot, for the moment, that we were on a planet that was mad. CHAPTEE IV THE CEDAR EIVEE COUNTRY THERE is no mortal doubt that a fisherman will sacrifice himself and everybody else for his fish. Ask a fisherman what epitaph to write for him, and even if he has been a grand duke or a bard, I will wager my new rod that he would secretly prefer to have "Good Fisherman" carved upon the final stone. Consequently, when Master Thomas looked down into the wooded country west of Snowy and traced the number of virgin streams upon the map, it was quickly decided that we would make a sortie upon the trout. The calendar was to be thrown to the winds ; enough food was to be lashed upon Luggins to ameliorate any hard luck. Like Moses, we descended from the mountain with a glowing countenance. There were two avenues of attack from our base at Back Log. Lynn and Master Thomas were to go around by Indian Lake Village with Luggins and come in by the Cedar River to a junction of three streams on the Little Moose River. That was a two days' trip. Thornton, 64 THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 65 Master Thomas' son, and I were to take the tent, cross the range, and have camp ready. Every- body was suited. Thornton is a man of muscle, with a mind of parts. It is a good combination for wood travel. We set out under the shining skies at dawn with gaiety. He carried the tent, a blanket, axes; I bore the food for three meals, a blanket, and the fishing rods. He had the weight, I the vexation. One cannot walk too carefully with rods. The day warmed to our efforts. We spent much time looking for the blazes that should lead us to Squaw Brook. To add to the humor of the trip tall nettles stung us with animation. We further strained our habit of politeness by momently in- creasing the distance from breakfast. But by noon we had reached the Squaw, a cheerful brook on the farther side of Snowy, and within a flick of a fly some trout were sizzling in the pan. Thus does barbarism uphold convention by fortifying the amenities by a square meal. It was well that we began that afternoon with confidence, for before sundown we were to endure every annoyance of the inhabitable wilderness short of breaking our necks. The series began promptly with a corduroy road. Forswear such. A corduroy road is a suc- cession of slippery tree trunks laid side by side to complicate walking over places already natu- 66 THE ADIRONDACKS rally impassable. It undoubtedly does prevent the teams of lumbermen from sinking out of sight in the mire, and in certain stages of time and tide a corduroy is an aid. But this one down the Squaw had been laid in legendary times. The logs were rotted to a degree that made each step a surmise. And if the surmise proved incorrect, you broke your leg. Above, raspberry bushes of unheard of virility entwined in handsome pro- fusion. Decomposed bridges aggravated the crossings of the stream. And the monotony of our progress was playfully diversified by the sur- mounting of fallen trees at intervals. There was three miles of this. We were now in the heart of the wilderness. Hard wood and soft wood rose in a magnificent forest which was intermingled with little under- growth except upon our road. Twice we passed great beaver dams. From one Master Thomas had once taken thirty legal trout, stopping only because he had enough. But we resisted that temptation. We found the Cedar Eiver basking in the golden sunlight of mid-afternoon and the spot recommended itself for rest. The shallow stream ran between grassy banks from which the serried spruces had retreated a few rods. A delicious breeze blew down from the open sky. But I dis- covered that I had left my ax half a mile back THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 67 at the last crossing, which had been particularly complicated. So while Thornton rested, I re- traced my leaps over the corduroy. This only tended to emphasize my previous impressions of it. But in the woods aggravations are only skin- deep. Fatigue passes soon while the beauty is eternal. As we pushed deeper and deeper into the uninhabited, past trials grew vague in the green oblivion, and our conversation again took on the detached manners of the content. So, I suppose, it was really due to the discus- sion of Hindenburg's ethics or some such sub- limated topic that we missed the trail. All I know is that we had gone on much longer than we ought and that my pack was asserting its existence when we discovered that it was only a deer trail that we were following. In the fading day the woods were doubtless more beautiful than ever. But it was a beauty unidentified with either food or shelter. We ignored it. Of course we weren't lost. We were merely where we shouldn't have been, without knowing where that was. We sat down on a log to lay plans and to rest the gnats which had been over- exerting themselves to keep up. Curiously enough the stimulus of being play-lost had banished my fatigue. I was good for twenty miles, now, bar corduroy. Prudence signaled retreat, but we 68 THE ADIRONDACKS knew what was behind ; we did not know what lay before. The sun was presumably still making for the west, although the indications made it out northeast. Blessed are the docile for they do not get lost. It is only the stubborn who try to buck the com- pass. We couldn't imder stand why the sun should want to set in the northeast after all these years of the other thing, but as we stiU enjoyed the use of our intelligences we set out after him. And this proves that we weren't lost. The sun might set in the zenith without disturbing a lost man or making him pause. Twilight was encroaching. Nevertheless, we de- cided to go on for half an hour before looking for a camp-site. Within five minutes we had ex- perienced all the sensations of Balboa on his peak in Darien, for at the foot of a slope twinkled the waters of a lovely lake, and at its farther end stood a cabin from which rose the blue smoke of a new wood fire. Doubtless the cabin was lost, too, for by our map it clearly should not have been there. But we were in a condition to accept it and no questions asked. But how to reach it awaited solution. To our right a promontory promised hard walking. To our left a stream had to be forded. We chose a wetting rather than more promenade. The stream was deeper than we judged, thanks THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 69 to the indiscriminate industries of some beaver. The beaver is the self-made man of the forest and, I suppose, is held up to the children of the forest as such. But it is a dangerous example. We came through wet to the arms and too weary for remark, only to encounter a labyrinth of alder. My spirits had been drowned in the dam. Dis- tance was no longer enchanting, but downright painful. I had grown slippery. I fell and broke my arm, or almost did. Thornton laughed. So did I. There comes a time when the multiplicity of discomforts lies too deep for tears. A half hour of this brought us opposite the cabin. The lake stretched around a bend for un- believable distances. There was nothing to it but to swim across or to make them hear. We yelled, and no one appeared. We waded out and yelled again. It was a lovely evening. But the black flies were gormandizing upon our persons. We yelled. Presently a Christian emerged from the cabin and yelled back. Whatever he may have thought of human noises issuing from two am- phibians, he lost no time in speculation. Within ten minutes we were dredged up into his boat, so to speak, and in twenty more were eating flap- jacks and maple syrup out of his hand. The lake was Little Moose. If those gentlemen who took us in plied us with towers of hot cakes and yards of trout, and shared 70 THE ADIRONDACKS their cabin and their clothes and their all without so much as a hidden smirk at the dazzling clown- ishness of our entrance — if those gentlemen should ever see this account, I hope they will realize again more directly than we could tell them, our appre- ciation of their hospitality. And not only that, but the great and impersonal service they rendered the law of the woods. At one time the Adiron- dacks seemed likely to become the private pre- serve of a few wealthy men, whose embargo upon stream and woodland was changing the prevailing spirit of good-fellowship into the bitterness of exile. Armed wardens, "no trespass" signs, un- necessary selfishness, aroused opposition, poach- ing, malice. The generosity of frontier life was speedily converted into suspicion and retaliation. The crisis came in murder and burning. And as quickly it subsided because of a change of front on the part of the capitalists and the State's ac- quiring a good deal of territory. The reaction is .now complete. Campers are welcome anywhere. Permissions can be obtained for anything reason- able on the small holdings not already thrown promiscuously open. But best of all, the give and take, the natural hospitality has returned to stay. The stranger is cordially received and helped upon his way in the fashion of the remoter "West. Our hosts were generous examples of the new spirit. Little Moose Lake, encircled by forest and pro- THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 73 tected by little mountains, is a spot to dream on. Deer come at dawn and dusk. Birds sing in the clearing. A spring issues near the one cabin. And from the cold lake flows a river filled with trout. If I did not feel that some reward was due the person who has read as far as this, Little Moose should remain undivulged. But I am re- assured by the certainty that only the deserving will take the trouble to hie them thither. Sleep washed away fatigue and the sting of past mistakes, and we awoke to the early beauty of an upland summer. It is astonishing how com- plete recuperation is in the free air. In the Great North Woods each day begins with a clean page, no matter how blotted the one before. The most complicated miseries untangle in a night, open to balsam healing, and good food and coffee revise untoward views of life. We blessed the mis- chances that had brought us to such a pitch of satisfaction, and we felt as if we had partly re- paid our hosts who were leaving for Indian Lake by warning them of the corduroy. As luck had it, our wanderings had been in the right direction, and lunch time saw us weU down the right bank of Moose Eiver, past Butter Brook and over a smaller unnamed stream which we christened Oleo with its own waters. We crossed Silver and were at the rendezvous. It was va- cation ground for Diana. Three streams united 74. THE ADIRONDACKS to increase the Moose. It seemed as if no person had ever passed that way, so silent, so remote lay the sunny spaces. A generation ago some lum- bermen cut out the hemlock. But it was a triumph for sensible cutting, and how different from the usual despoiling of timberland! As Lynn once remarked when we were confronted by a desolated tract, "There 's a place for every lumber-hog, and every lumber-hog should be in his place." Lynn is not often profane. Making camp in such a situation was an easy enterprise, and our camp, we flattered ourselves, should be more than a sop to the human instinct for a place to sleep. We had sheltered sunlight for the tent-site, balsam for the bed, firewood for all hours, a riU to drink from, a pool to plunge in, and a fisher's paradise radiating in three di- rections. As the day waned we found ourselves listening for our partners. Shadows crept from the forest, the spruce spires glowed and went out. We pre- pared supper, and still they did not come. Night crouched about the fire, and many a time we thought that we heard our names when it was only the brook sounding through the stillness, the rip- ples breaking into consciousness. Since both Lynn and Master Thomas were so yrood-wise, we felt no alarm, and yet when we THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 75 heard an unmistakable shouting and saw them leading Luggins by the aid of a birch torch, we were relieved. There is more in the night forest than is dreamt of in any of our philosophies. It was a tired, but triumphant quartet that rested in the balsam. And Luggins' old white face peered solemnly upon us, without comment, but obviously as of one who is digesting a new ex- perience. He appeared ruminative, as if adding another to the memory of an already richly varied list of catastrophes. But Luggins was to have his reward. For the next five days we moored him upon a grassy island where he ate and dreamed delectably. At the end of the day he was glad to see us back from our excursions down the stream. Once he tried to tell us that he had smelled a bear. We found the tracks in the sand above our camp. But, all in all, the inertia of the life was beyond his criticism. Existence, for the moment, was justified. And so was it for us. We were now utterly freed from the odor of our costermonger lives. Freedom was our plaything. Whether it was the forest spell or the mending of one's outfit, every sensation was vivid. We laid out long explora- tions for ourselves just to show that liberty should not make us soft. And on one of these we discov- ered Otter Brook. Otter lies to the east of Little Moose, an hour's 76 THE ADIRONDACKS travel for you who can keep the sun on the proper shoulder, but a year's wandering for those who will not mind their way. It is a stream of rocky reaches and great pools. The pools harbor some very large and proud trout who mutiny except under the command of the master angler. The conditions that fish propose before allowing them- selves to be caught are preposterous. It is an art of pretense on both sides. But down the Otter there are other attractions if the fish remain per- verse. First you travel along a diminutive can- yon, and then suddenly the forest flattens out, stops, and you are out upon a natural meadow that lies greener than memories of Ireland. The for- est rolls up the slopes of distant mountains, but before you, in extravagances of quiet and sun- light, the plains widen along the stream. And in a little while the Otter has joined the Moose. The fact that there are a dozen other Otters and a dozen other Mooses in the Adirondacks cannot take the charm from this first of our discovery. It is a living matter of irritation, nevertheless, that the names of the myriad ponds should not be sorted out and shuffled a little better. The lakes and mountains were named by settlers who could have no ideas of the nomenclature prevailing in other places. When somebody killed a bear by a lake, the slaughter was commemorated by naming the water after the event. As there were a good THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 77 many bears, there grew to be a good many Bear Ponds. There are six or seven now in the Adi- rondack Park. There are ten Clear Ponds, a dozen Wolf 's, and fifteen Long ones. Deer Ponds, Pine Lakes, and the other inevitables flourish by the fives and tens. These cease to be names ; they become disguises. Of course it is rare that we come upon a region like Glacier Park ready and waiting to be chris- tened by a geographical board. But there are beauties in the Adirondacks, quieter perhaps, but as suggestive as the proud title-bearers of Gun- sight Pass and Two Medicine Lake, and it is a loss to everybody that their name is Mud. There are a dozen such. Many places in the Adirondacks have names of distinction and some of charm — Massawepie, Eaquette, Canachagala, Boreas, Crotched, Bona- parte, Joe Indian Pond, Honnedaga, Nehasane, Middle Brother Pond, Witchapple, Vly, T Lake, Nameless Creek, Squaw Brook, Paradox, Poke O* Moonshine — all these and some others have a per- sonality that a succession of North Ponds neces- sarily relinquishes. I have a conundrum. If you called Niagara, Johnson Falls,- would its beauty be as great to you? Would you not rather date your letters from Witchapple than from Mud Pond? Perhaps when the Conservation Commission has 78 THE ADIRONDACKS made sure of all its real estate, and the timber, it may begin to conserve the beautiful heritage of Indian names that is fading from memory and the books. The sainted aborigines were the first American poets, and they deserve their Westmin- sters. Strange to say the mountains fared better than the lakes. I dare say because there were so many of them that the average settler got discouraged ; or his thoughts were so much more interested in his potato crop that he had little time to lift up his eyes unto the hills. He never climbed for either the altitude or the view. Discrimination was not necessary. Hence, instead of clumps of Blues and Greens over the landscape we have Wolf Jaws, Hurricane, Ampersand, Noon-Mark. These have nobility. Those early summer days with Master Thomas and Thornton on the upper waters of the Moose pass my ability to mirror. The season had lost none of the delicacy of spring ; the country was a fountain-land of life. Deer would step with care and grace down the rocky banks to drink. Wild ducks hustled their broods to safety. Beaver abounded ; foxes barked ; we knew that there was at least one bear in our vicinity. There was a largeness about the woods and the days that was satisfying. It was also disturbing. We longed to expand to it ; we could not in full. Of the night THE CEDAR RIVER COUNTRY 79 fires and philosophies, of the reticence and frank- ness nothing can be said, for the same tongue does not tell the dream and the interpretation thereof. On a morning threatening thunder we broke camp. Master Thomas and his son were to re- turn to Back Log for expected guests. Lug- gins, who had been belly-deep in the present for over-long, was to have his nose turned smartly to the future in company with Lynn's and mine. We saw our companions over Oleo and Butter dry-shod, and then, making sad jests, we parted. The idea of a Isook was now firm within us, and there was much eoimtry to be^seen. CHAPTER V THE ADIEONDACK FOREST A POET loves the forest most, a camper al- ways, a lumberman for keeps. The great mantle of the Adirondack Mountains serves them all. The goal of our desire, I remember, was to find ourselves in the forest primeval. We were al- ways for pushing on into some denser growth that was indubitably primeval. So when we found that without knowing it we had spent a good part of a week in woods that had never been lumbered, we were considerably chagrined. We had expected, I suppose, a barricade of trees, so dark as to be eternal night, where gigantic trunks grew so close together that you could barely squeeze between. But the primeval forest is far different. The original covering of the Adirondack slopes boasts occasional great trees, but they grow far apart. There is little undergrowth, though a wealth of moss and fern. Slash, burn, and thickets do not 80 > THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 83 exist. There is a timelessness about it that new woods cannot assume. It is a magnificent sight or an interesting sight or a rare sight, depending upon whether you are intent on fashioning these trees into hexameters or backlogs or two-inch boards. The artist sees a wonderland dripping with shades of green and gray and gold, roofed with spires and domes and black-groined arches, floored with the wildest profusion of ferned rocks and moss-grown trunks. He remembers it fragrant with the damp of twilight, alluring with its glimpses of dim aisles, silent always, always strange. He goes his way. The camper finds it a spectacle for admiration and for groans. He responds to the fact of its greatness, but finds it not the most useful for his purpose. It is too wet, too large, too empty. But he returns. The lumberman sees board-feet. He calculates great currencies moldering for lack of the ax. He regrets the moneys that stand unminted. The poet was melancholy by reason of the dim vast- ness and decay. The woodman's sadness is less vague. He realizes that but for the law he would have the land denuded in a winter. And when he has his will therei is nothing to return to. Of the forest that once covered the entire north about seventy thousand acres remain in the Park. 84 THE ADIRONDACKS Seventy thousand acres come to about one third the Adirondack lake surface. Most of it is in the Essex County preserves; a little lies to the west of the railroad and the rest to the south of Indian Lake. Of the rest of the park about one million four hundred thousand acres have been lumbered, but are covered with second or third growths. One hundred and twenty thousand acres are utterly denuded. More will still go, unfortunately, as the lumber companies hold twenty-three per cent, of all the Park land, and it is their rather short- sighted policy to take as much wood as possible and then let the land revert to the State for taxes. Of course in thirty years new trees can grow to a certain fullness if forest fires do not damage the soil beyond the repair of centuries. But thirty years is a generation. These million and a half timbered acres would cover half of Connecticut. They offer a dozen kinds of trees in abundance, and a score of others scattered in small quantities. Besides this wealth of variety, numberless species of mosses, grasses, weeds, shrubs, and water-plants make the region a botanist's happy hunting ground. In all this territory the white pine once reigned supreme. Withia the Park boundaries now, how- ever, it has sunk to fourth place in importance, and the new blister threatens to sweep it from the THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 85 land as thorougUy as the chestnut has been swept from the Middle States. Of white pine standing, there remain seventy-five-million board feet. The nearer it draws to the fate of the buffalo, the grander this tree seems, growing a diameter of over three feet, a height of more than fifty. Far off you can tell this magnificent tree by the droop of the long branches, and near at hand its five-fingered leaf bunches will make you sure. Beneath it the ground is always soft with needles, and above, its blue-green depths are always speak- ing with the winds. In some of the preserves magnificent groves of white pine are to be found. The trees on the Dug Mountain Ponds were glori- ous monarchs. To live in such company was to breath nobility. The yellow pine in the Adirondacks is of in- ferior quality and lacks the patrician look of its white lord. As camper's fuel the pines are only fair, burning quickly to dead ashes. Among the noblemen of the ancient wood the hemlock ranks high. There is about ten times as much of this left as of the white pine, but as it has been coveted and cut for wood and bark and root its days are numbered. The hemlock can easily be told from the other evergreens by the short flat leaves and firm-textured bark. Its shape and color mark it for appreciation. In the sunlight it takes on a soft, blue-green beauty that 86 THE ADIRONDACKS lends mystery to its dignity. Its fate is the leather tannery. The wood is hard to split. Of all the conifers the spruce is the most numer- ous in the park. Two and a half billion board- feet still stand, despite the ravages of recurring pests and the perpetual pulp-wooder. There is no difficulty in telling the spruce, because its spiny leaves spiral about the branches and bristle thickly from the parent shaft. Its dark lances spike the air and on a winter day seem to stand like a cohort of centurions, with javelins ready. In the spring new tips of a delicious green spring from the end of every branch and relieve the ascetic appearance for a while. But the fresh- ness soon passes, and the tree darkens into its habitual severity. Like most of the other soft- woods, for a camper's fire spruce is scarcely worth cutting. To all woodsmen the balsam is a friendly tree. Green, it will not burn, and seasoned, it burns too rapidly. But for generations of tired bodies it has furnished a soft and scented bed. It is easy to know. Its leaves are a little longer and broader than the spruce, and they do not grow around the stem, as do those of the spruce, but lie flat. They are lighter on the under side, and from them flows the odor of eternal youth. Not a billion board-feet remain within the Park. Three other evergreens, the tamarack of the THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 87 swamp, the- arbor-vitse of the lake shore, and the red cedar, are present in appreciable quantities. Tamarack is excellent for backlogs and burns very slowly when green. Cedars burn to dead coals with considerable crackling. The North Woods contain four and a half bil- lion feet of soft woods and three and a quarter billion of hard, of which the birches, maples, beech, and poplar bulk the largest. The white birch is the Adirondacker's chief reliance. There are few ponds along which it may not be found, growing in groups of threes and sevens; and one does not travel far in the deep wood without coming upon great ancestral trunks which are producing the best wet-weather tinder in the world. No storm is so protracted that some layer of the oily bark may not be found to burn, no situation so depressing that its sure aid for fire or shelter or canoe cannot relieve. Men have rescued themselves from nocturnal sit- uations with the help of birch torches, boiled water in kettles of its bark, patched their worn foot-gear, or housed themselves in broad rippings from big trunks. For burning, the yellow birch is better than its more spectacular white sister, and it even burns more vigorously green than dry. The black birch, much rarer than either, is the best of all. It does not claim superficial connection 88 THE ADIRONDACKS with, its family, the bark resembling cherry, but its leaf gives it away. All three kinds split well. The white birch sticks — it is the winter occupa- tion of the entire mountain region to cut and stuff them into stoves — ^look good enough to eat. About three quarters of a billion board-feet remain. Of all the maples the sugar-maple leads in serv- ice and number and size. From the first it has been the homestead's friend. The maple has a sickly sound to us who are accustomed to the red and rubbishy specimens of our city streets. But to enter a great grove of sugar-trees is to renounce all prejudice. The sugar-maple is known by its smaller leaf and larger bole. Although the maple family has no aristocracy of form, yet sometimes a sugar- tree will rise over a hundred feet and spread with. a gigantic sweep. In the fall it glows in a red mound of color. Its wood makes fair fuel for the boiling of its sap. In the northern Adirondacks the last week of a normal March sees groups of men and girls betake themselves to the sugar groves for the first festival of the year. The snow lies a foot or two deep in the forest ; but during the forenoon and early afternoon the sun shines warm enough, to set the sap running. At night the frost re- turns. It is this weather of alternate freeze and thaw that the country-side has waited for. Each THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 89 tree over seven inches has been tapped with an iron spout on which hangs a pail. On good days the colorless, sweetish water drips constantly and fills the buckets faster than they can be collected from a grove of five hundred trees. A boy with a sledge, on which is a great container, drives around and collects the sap which is put into an evaporator. A fire drives off the water vapor, and as the sap runs down from vessel to vessel it slowly thickens. Before the scientific age, a great iron kettle did the whole trick, but less quickly, and the product was darker colored. Presently the sap is taken into the shack and put in a flat receptacle on the stove. It bubbles over the birch fire like a lake of molasses taflfy, and as it thickens the master sugar-man anxiously tests it in the snow. By this time the neighbors have been summoned, for this is the sugaring-oflf and very much of an occasion. At last the syrup is taken off the fire and stirred; little pans are filled with snow and each sweet-tooth sits about with one on his lap. A spoonful of the amber stuff is poured on the snow. It hardens instantly and is devoured as soon. There is no confection so pure, so delicate, so Edenish. There is no sociability so natural and so sincere as that which it instigates. The warm syrup is strained through a piece of felt, and the dark remnant, called the sugar- 90 THE ADIRONDACKS sign, is thrown away. The strained part is boiled again if sugar and not syrup is desired, and is put into molds to cool. In a fair year a tree will yield fifty quarts of sap, which boils down into two quarts of syrup, which makes one pound of sugar. This retails at twenty or at most twenty- five cents a pound. But as the sugar season comes at the time of least outdoor activity and as the utensils need be no more elaborate than one can afford, the industry still appeals to every one who retains a drop of colonial blood within his veins. To Lynn and myself the circumstance of our first sugaring-off savored of the olden homespun days. We had been staying with LeGrand Hale in upper Keene Valley, and when the invitation went round that Mr. Lamb was to have a sugar- ing-off, we were included with that uncomputing hospitality of the big woods. From the little shack high on the hills the view swept in cloudy grandeur across the noble valley. Inside, around the stove, sat a dozen of the admirable : Mr. Hale, old, but straight and strong; the host, generous and jolly; his daughter, busy and gifted with an unlearned art of ease and modesty before these many men ; George Beede, type of frontier youth, healthy and strong; other young fellows, quiet among their elders and before strangers, but with adventure lurking in their eyes. Blood never THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 91 spoke more surely. It is such stock as this that will perpetuate the American tradition. But to climb down from the sugar-maple, there is an insignificant and useless member of the fam- ily that thrives on wet land, called the swamp maple. But it claims one moment of the year. Late in August or early in September it flames for a brief day in scarlet, or vermilion. It is the first figure of the autumn pageant. There are three birches to the maple's one, the estimated board-feet being but a quarter billion. Beech comes in a billion strong. Its smooth trunk of delicate gray, its exquisite foliage, and its burnability make it a favorite. Along with the sugar-maple and the rare hickory, it is an almost faultless fuel. "When the beech goes, the wild animals will go, too, for there is scarcely one from the bear or the deer down to the chipn munk that does not depend upon its mast. In the autumn its gold and brown, and later its faded whiteness, are matters of distinction. The beech is an aristocrat. The poplar, on the other hand, is essentially vulgar. It overtops most of the forest, though as yet it does not overtotal many species. It grows rank, blooms with a coarse flower, and de- cays into the yellow leaf early in the autumn, leaving a tall-boled awkward skeleton. Poplar is probably good for many things, but it burns worse 92 THE ADIRONDACKS than wet balsam when green. When dry, how- ever, it is a fuel not to be despised. The other trees of the Adirondacks do not grow in merchantable quantities. Alder is everywhere along the streams and it makes a good fire for a short stopping, but never grows to any great size. A scattering of oaks and basswood appears in the south where winds and birds have carried them. But nature's first idea was best, and to- day great quantities of the soft woods are being set out from the nurseries. Two million trees are planted every year. At the outset there were three mortal conflicts that had to be waged by the Conservation Commis- sion on a hundred fronts. The great park forest had to be protected from fire ; the holdings of the lumber companies had to be protected from in- discriminate spoliation; the desert lands had to be reclaimed by plantings of many million trees, or some day not only all the fertility would be washed into the sea, but the water supply of the immense cities to the south would be endangered. It takes thousands of years to make a soil, hun- dreds of years to grow a tree, and half an hour to destroy both utterly by fire. When the Com- mission came into power, the danger was en- croaching upon the last stands of original forest. In Michigan four billion board-feet of timber had just gone up in one conflagration. Farther west THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 93 whole Khode Islands had been devastated in single fires. Eailroads, cigarette-droppers, fish- ermen, malice, had combined to start one holocaust before the last was extinguished. In 1903, 688 fires, doing damage to the known extent of $864,082, burning 464,189 acres, and costing $153,763 to put out, were started, chiefly by care- lessness. The Commission erected fire stations, cut fire lanes, paid fifty wardens to be on duty on mountain-tops with spy-glass and telephone, from the spring thaw till the autumn rains. This is the tale of their success. In 1914 there were 413 fires. But these were all extinguished for $13,978 before they had burned more than 13,837 acres to the tune of $14,905. During one summer the railroads were the cause of 120 fires, fisher- men 125, hunters 90, smokers 220. It will require better spark arresters on engines, increased care among sportsmen, and more watchers before the double evil of the forest fire will be abolished. The civic conscience grows so slowly that it is always worth while repeating the known, but undigested, fact that a forest fire bums the candle at both ends. The wood not only goes ; the woods to come can never be. The seedlings, the seeds, and the soil are licked up; the unconsumed earth washes away; rivers are choked; droughts deepen in intensity, and floods double in violence; and the farmer, the paper user, the furniture-maker, 94 THE ADIRONDACKS and those who burn wood for fuel pay the in- demnity. It is a tragic sequence. Yet it occurs because we never accept a fact until it begins to grab at our bank roll. This fact is edging up. The Commission found that an unprotected for- est was in as bad a way as an unprotected bank, subject to pillage and destruction. When the ex- perts began to figure on the cost of protection they found, luckily, that the balance was on the proper side. The fifty wardens were not intended to conserve just an unproductive pleasure spec- tacle. They were guardians of a crop, as sure and even more constant than any cereal crop. The estimated aimual crop of wood procurable from the Adirondack forest totals 250,000,000 board-feet. This is enough to construct an At- lantic City board walk from New York to Wash- ington each year. And this is but the annual pruning from the Park trees from which the living forest would benefit. For it is known that the average decay throughout the year equals the year's growth. The present rate of consumption is too great. We are not only living on our income, but eating into our principal as well. This rate amounted to 544,254,898 board-feet in 1901. This is equivalent to 3800 feet to the acre for 103,135 acres. This makes the handsome total of 161 square miles de- forested a year. Such lumbering is bad enough, Pliolo by "Warwick S. Carpenter Pines of Saranac THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 97 but in addition the acids used in the preparation of pulp-wood are poured into the streams. Their poison kills the fish and sometimes the vegetation. And it is a commonplace of scientific measurement that the denudation of the forest lowers large streams and dries up small ones for part of every year. In 1868, Verplanck Colvin, the explorer and far-sighted surveyor, made the first suggestion of a forest preserve. In 1873, he prophesied that "The Hudson Eiver Valley must eventually con- tain one long marginal city, extending from the Mohawk Eiver to New York. The Adirondack Wilderness is the only watershed which will af- ford a sufficient supply of pure water for such a population as will then exist." In 1885, the Forest Preserve was at last organ- ized. By 1902 it had secured control of 1,325,851 acres out of the Park's area of 3,226,144 acres. In the same year was incorporated a society, com- posed of landowners and others interested in maintaining the Adirondacks in their beauty of forest and water, in their abundance of game and fish ; this society was called ' ' The Association for the Preservation of the Adirondacks." It found much work at hand. At that time in our national history, an era of great prosperity and of great rapacity was begin- ning. Individuals, small and great corpora- 98 THE ADIRONDACKS tions, alike, had set their eyes in envy upon the riches remaining upon the Adirondack slopes. They desired to feast upon the wealth prom- ised by water-power. Their influences working through Albany had just about paved the way for flooding unlimited areas of State lands. Other influences had all but amended the State constitution with the view to cutting down State forests. The title to much land had already been surrendered and much timber had already been deliberately stolen with the fuU knowledge of cer- tain officials, when this Association came into being. For half a generation its labors have been cease- less, and certain results that have been attained by it would have been lost, to the great detriment, if not wholesale destruction, of Adirondack re- sources, if its energy had been anything less than unflagging. To state some of its triumphs is to show how perilously close the great Park had come to utter spoliation. This society has obtained an amendment to the constitution limiting the area of the forest pre- serve that might be flooded to three per cent. It has advocated the retention by the State of title to State waters, because Verplanck Colvin's prophecy is coming true. It has opposed the granting of State water- powers to private interests without compensation to the people. THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 99 It has opposed any amendment permitting the removal of live timber from the Forest Preserve. It has taken measures to secure construction of fire trails in the Forest Preserve. It has successfully employed engineers, lawyers, and detectives in order to keep informed of mat- ters affecting public interests. It has been instrumental in obtaining the recent bond issue of $7,500,000 for the purchase of For- est Preserve lands. It has urged appropriations for replanting de- nuded areas. It has exposed political graft. In 1905 it ex- posed the illegal removal of sixteen million board- feet of timber from State lands. It has studied "top-lopping," fire-preventive inventions, and it helped to secure the substitution of oil-burning locomotives within the Forest Pre- serve. It has sustained oflScials in the conscientious dis- charge of their duty, and has given legal as well as moral support to the State's forest adminis- tration. It has enforced the law against illegal advertis- ing signs on public highways of the Park. It has retained expert advice in the study of forest taxation. It has given publicity to the menace of ruthless hard-wood lumbering. 100 THE ADIRONDACKS It is still trying to find a substitute for wood- pulp in the manufacture of paper, which would relieve the vast forests that are being cut down each year to make newspapers. By arranging conferences between lumber in- terests and conservationists, by lectures and un- ceasing propaganda, it has forwarded the ideals of Adirondack conservation. Thanks to this Association, the great Park is still a park, still a refuge for wild game. Its mem- bers still subscribe large sums that the law may be kept over this woodland which is as large as three Delawares. And all their efforts will have result. Years from now when the Hudson is lined with cities and when three hundred million people live where now there are the fifty million, this magnificent playground will teach the stanch vir- tues that can be learned only in the wilderness. And the public-spirited members of the Associa- tion for the Preservation of the Adirondacks will have realized that they, in like manner with the Puritans and the heroes of '63, can be called the "Makers of America." The days are coming wherein we shall again become aware of the forest. In the dim long ago the forest was a dark hinterland from which evil spirits came to prey and into which, glutted, they withdrew. Witches lived in the wood. Even to- day the dark aisles of the evening firs are shivery THE ADIRONDACK FOREST 101 at nightfall because of these unchallengeable ter- rors of the past. Yesterday when out of the Adirondack ravines the cougar cried and the howl of the wolf sounded across the snow, the frontier children shuddered. Yet they liked to hear the legends of the wood. But with the passing of yesterday the terrors abated. The frontier children grew up, reasoned themselves out of the witches, and shot the wolves. The forest ceased to be a thing of fear, of venera- tion, and became a matter of dollars and board- feet, a bank account in the rough. It was wan- tonly cut and criminally devoured by fire. This storehouse of legend, this temple of the race, was in danger of extinction. Now all that is safely passed. We have let the buffalo go; we have barely saved the beaver, but we will save the forest. We will save it, not only for fuel, not only against flood, but because it is the most beautiful thing on the earth. CHAPTER VI THE EAQTJETTB BIVEB TBIP MUCH study of the map had made us mad. The Adirondacks, a little clump of moun- tains in the northeast corner of New York State, had grown very large. This was because we had suddenly decided to see them thoroughly. We had already spent a month in their least con- spicuous corner, with most of the spectacular and all the famous places yet to view. Lynn calcu- lated that if we took a morning dip in each of the Park's lakes and ponds, we could make the round in about three years and seven months. To climb all the mountains would finish out the decade. Clearly to be thorough was to be preposterous. We decided to fish the still water on the Moose once more and talk things over. We fished, but did n't talk, and when shame of dead fish made us move, we were agreed upon the wisdom of a sug- gestion of Master Thomas's, to make a permanent camp on Eaquette Lake, hire a canoe, and see the southwest Adirondacks from that base. It was a matter of one day and two-and-twenty thunder showers to Eaquette from the Moose. 102 THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 103 Blithely did the southwest wind heave one blue cloud after another over the patient hills. There would be a rattle of thunder, and a flow of water would set in from the zenith. In ten minutes the gray curtain would be rolled away with consider- able creaking, and we would come up for air. But nature being so very earnest, we were the more stirred to laughter. There is a certain imbecility about my nature that will crop out on serious oc- casions, and Luggins was very serious. Such phe- nomena had never figured in his Western life. A rain was one thing, but spasmodic drownings were another. To come upon Raquette gipsy-wise is to surprise the essence of beauty. Not many have the for- tune, for the lake is famous, touristed. Thou- sands of people in a season are shunted off the main line at Clearwater and, after leaving de- posits of trunks and picnickers along the Fulton Chain, arrive at breakfast-time at the Eaquette terminus. Then a launch deports them to the ho- tels and camps to enjoy the summer. It is the same system to which all picturesque localities are subjected sooner or later and to which most in the end succumb. But Eaquette 's beauty has not been ruined yet, in fact, it is hardly marred. At the wildest end, called North Bay on the maps, we settled down to a more ambitious house- keeping than any yet attempted. A tiny cove 104 THE ADIRONDACKS made the coziaess absent from a larger water- side. Niggerhead Mountain rose behind and made a black beacon to steer for in the dark. The view from our supper table showed long, wooded capes, wide lake arms and a rare sky-line. The shores of the lake are high and overhung with old trees, and the length of shore-line is well on to- ward a hundred miles. Much of the land is held by the State, and that owned privately is fitly administered. Some of the great estates have es- tablished havens of luxury, but the reaches of water are so great that these log palaces are per- fectly in keeping. On all sides hills run back from the lake and many of them are mountains that stand up proudly. There is one eminence, called the Crags, that is specially worth the fifteen minutes' climb. From it one gets the entrancing contour and col- ors of the lake. Yet it is so low that the intimate loveliness of things lingers in the memory when the delight of views from more exaggerated heights is but a blur. After a month of trail, a canoe was refreshing, and we were soon planning trips of two or three nights away from our base, a luxury of choice pre- senting. Eaquette is the paddlers' paradise. You can go up to the head of the Fulton Chain, or down to Saranac and around by Tupper and the Forkeds, or over to Blue and indulge in only a B » THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 107 negligible carries. We began with. Blue. And since two Boy Scouts had the benevolence to be camping near us, we loaned them the care of Lug- gins with a pittance for amiability's sake. They were downright good fellows, as Scouts usually are, and said that they didn't mind having a horse about the house. Of course Luggins in- sisted on very little entertaining. To set out in a light canoe under a fair heaven and with a good wind on the shoulder is to taste translation ; and it was a stirring breeze from the north that set us briskly on our way. The waters of Kaquette are so cut that only under the stiffest blows are they unmanageable, yet there are stretches, particularly with a west wind, that lead the stern paddle to admire himself if he comes through with a dry boat. Thanks to Lynn's un- weakening vigilance, we kept our fidelity to an upright keel, and in a shorter time than we '11 ever do it again, slid into the flawless waters of the Marion. The Marion is one of those astonishing Adiron- dack streams that you cannot call a river because it seems not to flow and yet which you dare not call a flow because there is some current. It winds so painstakingly that Lynn said that there must be alcohol in the water. Yet in the middle of the windingest place we nearly jumped out of the canoe on being confronted by an impertinent 108 THE ADIRONDACKS steamer. There it was pumping around the cor- ners, as amiable as a dachshund. It conveys the public from the Raquette Bailway to Blue Moun- tain. It is a forgivingly quiet little boat. Eight in the middle of this amazing trip we boarded a toy railroad, canoe and all, and were set down by Utowana Lake, which merges into Eagle, which merges into Blue. And if you are as tired as we were, you will not climb the moun- tain on the afternoon you arrive. Blue Mountain Lake is most beautiful viewed from half-way up its mountain. From there it is a gem. Close at hand it is a gem still, but its set- ting has been tamed a bit. It does exist slightly for the hotel ; it should exist wholly for the moun- tain. But I have to admit that that is what Lynn calls transcendental raving and a bit unreason- able. The lake to-day is gemlike enough. Lovely islands venture out from wooded shores. The sights of housekeeping upon its capes are cun- ningly concealed by an arras of green. And the guardian mountain asserts its guardianship with dignity. The climb added very little to our knowledge of the wilderness because one of the white clouds that had been piling up suddenly toppled over upon the summit and us. And when we crawled out of the debris of lightning, thunder, and hail, we could see that the rain was raining all around THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 109 for considerable distances as in the Stevenson poem. We met a man on the way down, also abandoning the bath, who told us that while extensive, there was nothing unique about the view. His opinion I have heard repeated by others. Blue stands about two thousand feet above its lake, which is about as much above the sea. On all sides there must be a notable look-off into the ridgy west and toward the mountainous north, but the big peaks are so far away that the view leaves an absentee impression, I am told. The only unfortunate circumstance about asking information is that you get too much. Our in- former, whom we had picked up at the three-thou- sand-foot level, had a freshness of interest that was astonishing in one of his years. He had the appearance and endurance of a German spy, and if it had been the year for German spies we should have counted ourselves in fortune. But he knew too much about the war. In fact, he knew every- thing about it. Although the war was just ending its second year, it had been conducted with so much variety and vivacity that there was a good deal to know ; yet he knew it all and told us about it. Perhaps our appearance warranted it. There is a chance that our clothing, bedraggled with the now bankrupted cloud, or our faces (not too in- telligent at their best and now unshaven) begged 110 THE ADIRONDACKS to be brouglit up to date. The stranger made the most of the supposition. We had got only to the merits of the Gallipoli campaign when we reached the lake. It had been very historic, but fatiguing and we were in terror lest the gentleman should offer to finish the war while we paddled him around the lake. The after- noon was turning fine. It was a critical moment. But there was no breeze to speak of, and the black flies, the punkies, the mosquitos, and the assorted gnats, seeing us standing about the boat in delicate attitudes, joined the party informally. At first our instructor would only pause in his exposition for a moment to slap. We did nothing to frighten them off. Soon the narrative flagged for longer, but none the less industrious, intervals. They were biting deliciously. He fled. Lynn grinned as he looked affectionately at the mosquitos eating his bare arm. "We couldn't hurt 'em after that," he said. The boat shot out on the lake, and we were rid of all the bores without bloodshed. There was not much use for Luggins at Ea- quette. Therefore he enjoyed the place: it is a pleasant thing to make everybody happy. But we decided, on the Scouts' advice, to harness him once more in a jaunt to the back country, including West Mountain, an eminence of not quite three thousand feet and one which we would not have bothered with except for their remark, "It 's the THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 111 buUiest little view in the country, and don't you forget Shallow, either." Skirting the shores of North Bay to the West Mountain trail (which is fairly well marked from the west side of the lake nearest the mountain) was a recrudescence of frontier life. If we had been commandeered for the task, we would have reproached our oflBcers as singular fools. But as it was a voluntary venture, we complimented our pertinacity and plugged on. Only Luggins' com- pliments were doubtful. There would be an open space of great trees, then a ravine overgrown with alders and black flies, then a short scramble through moss and a repeat. But we had waited for exactly the right day and after we had struck the trail, we progressed swimmingly. The first twenty minutes of the trail is boggy; the second twenty undulates through lifting woods of birch and spruce, and the last forty, which is the climb, tries not good brawn, but harries some- what the over-corpulent. Out West we had led our horse up and down natural ladders that Jacob would have liked to reconsider. But Luggins was always game. No matter how diffident was his attitude toward the ordinary occupations of the road, when confronted with something serious, the blood of his sporting ancestry simmered in his veins. The more crushing the predicament, the gamer he got. Otherwise we would have been 112 THE ADIRONDACKS fools, indeed. I am thus explicit lest somebody try to out-Hannibal us with a mere livery-stable nag. Nothing but impossible luck would prevent such an animal's address remaining permanently, "The Woods." It takes Western experience to teach a horse not to break its leg in mossy pit- falls. With one to pull and another to prod you can get a pony up anything short of a precipice ; it is the down-grade grave that yawns. All this is not intended to convey that the ascent of West was hard. There was scarcely a rod not practicable for a nurse and a baby-carriage. There was one rod. We had sat down to let Lug- gins recapture his wind and we had sat too in- discriminately. It was a place set aside in the divine plan for some yellow- jackets and for them only. They stood upon their rights, and we stood not upon the order of our going. I have never seen Luggins more agreeable to the suggestion of speed. He disappeared into the moose bushes in an angry splash of green. Lynn made an emo- tional gesture and dove after him. I followed Tinder the strongest convictions. I don't know why the Scouts had not told us of that place. Such neglect lessened the value of the movement in our eyes for a while. Inquiring tourists can locate that nest by looking carefully for a deceitful trail that branches from the main trail on the left as you ascend. The trail has to be noticed for THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 113 the descent anyway, as it is sure to mislead you and you might just as well have the yellow- jackets in mind at the same time. They have staked their claim just a few yards above the fork. If there is any doubt look for a blue bandana that I dropped in the briskness of my departure. I am sure it is there. Although it was high noon and after when we reached the bare top, the day had still the fresh- ness of creation upon it. A world of green ranges fell away from all sides, and on all sides lay the blue and glitter of much water. Eaquette seemed everywhere, and a score of outer lakes ringed us round with their effect of calm and waiting. Crisp white cloudlets floated at serene heights, and here and there threw the panorama into shadow. The wind came so gently from the north that it was comfortable to have our tea and mush and rai- sins on the summit. The outspread peacefuhiess grooved itself into our sensibilities, and I need but to close my eyes to recover the scene, so white and blue under the caressing sun. A moment of such content is worth a mountain of preparation; or rather each for the other. And when you add to the fair universe yonder a comprehending friend at hand, you have the best of life's adventures. We proved that we knew how to live in heaven by quitting the summit in good time. The exploration now began. The Scouts had 114 THE ADIRONDACKS mentioned Big Moose Lake, but we knew from previous inquiry that Big Moose was the abiding place of fortune while Master Thomas had told us about the Brandreth trout. Besides, it was traiUess thither, and we were still ambitious. It was slow, but not painful progress that we made down into the great green bowl below. Wilderness advance is measured variously. About the only unit never taken is the mile. On corduroy I suspect that travel would be registered by the oath. Ordinary snow-shoe climbing can count at least a mile an hour. The airman counts his flight by States. And we with Luggins, at times negotiating ledges and at others traversing beech groves, with abandon, felt that a mile an hour was not too disastrous a speed. As yet time was no particular object and place absolutely none; so we neither urged Luggins to the verge of eternity nor let him dawdle. We made our first camp beneath some pines with a brook to guard the fire, and slept where no one had ever slept before. Trout-fishing with a horse was a new and pos- sibly not an unrivaled enjoyment. We tried vari- ous combinations: tying him up and going back for him, leading him on and fishing up to him, dividing the pleasure of being groom by the watch. If Brandreth had not really been more than a mere earthly trout-stream has a right to be, we Photo by Warwick S. Carpenter Nameless Creek THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 117 must have shot Luggins from sheer vexation and carried out our kitchen on our backs. But Brand- reth would have restored the temper of a dyspep- tic. Beautiful pools, beautiful trout, beautiful bugsl We began with cursings, but concluded with pity, for as the day wore on so did the flies. We covered Luggins 's flanks, but that only drove them to his fore. To us protected by science and enlivened by great luck, the blacks were of a negli- gible interest. But to Luggins, with nothing to think about except his station in a mismanaged world, they were humiliating. Finally we made a glorified smudge on each side of him and set off down the stream with easy consciences. Youth and love and Italy was, as a combination, utterly flat compared to youth and late afternoon on Brandreth when the trout were rising. The Scouts had done a good turn the day that they told us of West Mountain and the regions be- yond. After consideration of the calendar we gave up the notion of doing the Fulton Chain. Perhaps the nearness of Brandreth to our camp on North Bay had something to do with it, but our imagina- tions had more. The Fulton Chain is a navigable string of lakes dedicated to the summerer. He lines their banks. His victrolas fill in the natural vacancies of an evening in the woods. His women- folk enjoy themselves shrilly. Not that the sum- 118 THE ADIRONDACKS merer is not a good sign. He is an earnest of the day when "God's green caravanserai" shall supplant the more popular summer hotel. There is everything to be said for the summer camper, no matter how clumsy or how careless of his tin cans. May his tribe increase! But also may it not overrun the lovelier wilderness until it shall have learned to put out its fires and to bury its cans. For the beginning Adirondacker the Fulton Chain sounds like a very training school. Stores are not so far apart that you will suffer if you 've left the ax at home. Steamers are at hand to pick you up if blistered. The carries are supplied with carriers if your pride goeth before a haul. And the railroad folders say that "brook trout, lake trout, whitefish, and bass inhabit these waters." It does not say how closely, however. I should judge that sparsely would be a good adverb. The Fulton section of the Adirondacks centering about Old Forge is about the oldest of the sports- man's retreats. It was from this region that the game getters went out to kill the last elk, the last moose, and the last wolf. Even yet the winter season in this section is not tinreminiscent of the good old days, for in winter the voice of the sum- mer maiden is gone, the tan of the bank clerk is fading in the city movies, and the Old Forger's THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 119 age-long occupation of sitting by the stove has recommenced for another eight months. We did, however, paddle down Brown's Tract Inlet, which is the last stage of the voyage from Old Forge to Eaquette, and we can recommend it as an auspicious opening to the major pleasures of the lake. We also walked into Shallow, which calls forth memories of raspberries, deer, and frogs. Part of the trail is in a deserted lumber road, lined with bushes that shed red lusciousness into eager hands. It is a strong-minded person who can quit that .road in good health. Shallow is a pond of hospitable dimensions, yet so withdrawn as to gladden a hermit's heart. We were lucky enough to discover a leaky, but floatable craft which ferried us to an ideal spot for a camp on the side farthest from the trail-end. Tall pines gave play to the breeze, and birch and balsam offered their best. Behind us thick woods buUt up a strictest privacy where dusk skulked forever. A creek, called Nameless, saunters into the pond at the west end, and on the pavement of lily-pads at its mouth we caught supper. Ah! Delicious legs. They grew long and meaty at the nether extremities of croakers whose self-satisfaction was their undoing. No art was needed to procure them. You tickled their throats with a bare fish- hook and when it was in the right position jerked. If it was an unsuccessful jerk, the frog gave you 120 THE ADIRONDACKS another try. I have never seen anything more idiotically satisfactory, even if it was not art. While we were preparing supper and the odor of the frying-pan rose to heaven, the deer began to appear on the grassy beaches half a mile away. The sun, which had set for us, still shone for them. They roamed placidly and fed at ease. Deer have not good sight, as we proved by getting into our absurd shallop and poling toward them. Half- way over one raised its head and went on feeding. Soon the three began to move restlessly along the margin. But we had got within sixty yards be- fore they jumped the bushes and were gone. In a decent canoe we could have halved that distance and perhaps better. Master Thomas has told me that in one hot August afternoon he has counted twenty-seven deer on the shores of Shallow. Large preserves lie near the pond, and the deer are far more numerous than in the east. Nameless Creek is an artist's lure. At twilight it winds in blackness of shadow between skeletons of drowned trees. The darkness and silence of the forest were heavy. One is almost glad to get back to a fire from so eerie and lonesome a lagoon. But in the sunlight it is enchanting. Spruce files stand in along the sides. There is often the stir of some kingfisher, and the rounded clouds float flawless beneath you. There are two skies. THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 121 Such a place demands comradeship. It is an easy pleasure to spend the day fishing down a mountain brook alone. But Nameless is too aloof, the gaunt and naked trees too taciturn. Lynn felt the same as I about it. We both confessed to a relief in coming out upon the pond. To call the place "Nameless" was an inspiration. Aud while I am on the question of influences, I would like to add my testimony concerning that enigmatic sensation, the fear of the dark. Why, do you suppose, that two grown men, who have deliberately fled the great white ways because of the enjoyment of the great unlighted, — ^why should they prefer to stick around the camp-fire after dark? Once I slept alone in the woods for two months and at the end of that time I was no more broken from the faint distrust of something be- yond the firelight than at the beginning. It was the safest place in the world, my Adirondack camp. There were no dangerous animals, no dangerous insects, no snakes, no tramps. I took supper reg- ularly with friends on the other side of a lake, paddled over alone under glorious heavens, and suffered no feeling of the nerves. But my tent was fifty feet back from the water's edge, and those fifty feet through darkness up the familiar path verged on the unpleasant. If they had been more unpleasant I should have left a lantern at the landing to light me home, but that seemed childish. 182 THE ADIRONDACKS There was always a relief when I had lighted the lantern in my tent — a very slight relief, but actual. I never thought about being alone after the light was burning or minded waking up at night. I would like to know whether forest rangers, Yel- lowstone guards, night watchmen and all the citi- zens whose legal business is conducted after dark, have this same faint distrust of it that is many degrees less than fright, yet a shade different from daylight ease. All our cave-men ancestors could not have been arrant cowards, lying in mortal ter- ror at the approach of twilight. Yet anything short of that could scarcely have survived as in- stinct when so many other instincts have fallen by the way. On the other hand, if it be imagina- tion, it should be controllable and not involuntary. Children are brave by nature, yet they suffer most. There are more things in heaven and earth and in the dark, than are dreamt of in our philosophies, Horatio. There was one trip about which we had often talked, the famous Raquette River loop, which our Scouts, by taking charge of Luggins, made possible for us. As High Lords of the Stable they had won the confidence of Lynn on the occasion of our excursion to Blue. Unfortunately they were going to break camp on the fifth morning, which gave us just four days for the hundred-mile cir- cuit. But it was too good a chance to lose, and THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 183 we made our getaway at six-thirty under the best auspices of wind and sky. Ten days of canoeing had made us fit. In the northeastern part of our country there are many celebrated sequences of lake and stream which sportsmen have extolled; some because the scenery is a little wilder, some because the fish are a little bigger. In Canada there are more lakes than there are outdoor men to use them. But I can think of none where you can make a circle with so little portaging through country constantly varying, but always beautiful. To the woods-lover it is enough to be in the forest. One does not need to laud one section more than an- other. There is no city on our continent that cannot offer at the end of a trolley some of the charms of nature. And so it shall not be my care, advertisement-wise, to magnify our days upon the Eaquette. The Eangeleys may be more exciting and Algonquin Park more wild. I hope some day to visit both. But on the Eaquette the nights are just as mysterious, the spruce-lands just as allur- ing, the spell of the twilight just as subtle, the wandering odors just as sweet as in more distant wildernesses. Go see for yourself. The broad bay, leading out of Eaquette on the northeast, draws the south wind beautifully on a summer morning. Gaily we blew before it. We did not know in great detail what lay before us, 124 THE ADIRONDACKS but we did know that the distance approximated a hundred miles, and that we had about a hundred hours to spend. It may not be the ideal way to set out upon an excursion, but there was a certain novelty and stimulus in being limited. We puri- tan progenies do thrive upon goals and disciplines. The rounded hiUs slipped steadily by, and we removed our ascetic stores for the carry to Forked Lake with the feeling that we had hardly got under way, although Luggins was already five miles to the rear. Half a mile of road and we were re- embarked. Forked is an ingratiating lake. From its shores rise great rocks, and behind them stand worthy trees, and all the while long arms beckon to be explored. But we promised ourselves another visit and paddled on. The Eaquette River reassumes its identity after issuing from Forked Lake ; it even stands upon its dignity as a river and demands some obeisance in the form of carries. There is a long mile and a half carry around impossible water which a wagon will perform for you for a dollar and a half. With a horse waiting to be asked, to carry your own boat seems like too gratuitous sweating. At the farther end your lunch will nestle gratefully in its appointed place. But we held out for another half mile, preferring to eat ours near the sound of Buttermilk Falls. * THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 127 Buttermilk is quite a decent cascade. In one of Adirondack Murray's tales, a guide (either som- nambulant or full of whiskey) is supposed to go over it in a boat and survive. Murray claimed that the exploit was founded on fact. It is diffi- cult to believe, and as Lynn remarked, "Butter- milk and whiskey must be a mighty fetchin' con- coction, but he 'd rather take his straight." The late thunder storms had loaned volume to the falls. They churned up a curtain of mist and roared handsomely. We gave our digestion its due be- side this tumult. But though the spectacle, the overflow of fifty ponds, begged continually for one look more, Long Lake lay a little way ahead, with but a half-mile carry intervening. Of Long Lake I am ashamed to say that I re- member almost nothing. There remains a blurred picture of a ribbon of water, a bridge appearing remotely ahead, enlarging, drawing close enough till its spidery rods shone in the sun, then passing into the unconsidered rearward. I remember the picture of low hills, points that loomed ahead, jutted at us, and fell by. Chiefly, however, re- mains the exhilaration of the paddle. It was a warm day, and the southwest wind held steady.' A glance at the map will show you what that meant to us. It meant almost aviation in a light canoe. The little waves curled in exasperation, but could not keep up. Speed was no effort. Long Lake 128 THE ADIRONDACKS is fourteen miles in length on paper. With the wind it is four, against it forty. To have bucked that breeze a whole afternoon would have made fit penance for the damned. To fly with it was exhilaration. Air-travel, I foresee, will leave few memoirs. Long Lake is too desirable to be dismissed with a hazy word. It is the geographical axis of the Park. To the south and the west and the north lies an intricacy of watei^ay that a generation of vacations could scarcely master. To the northeast rise the Giants Clothed with Stone, five hundred square miles of them. Park lands and private preserves guarantee the length and breadth of all this beauty. I am beginning to regret that south- west wind. With the excitement over, we began to feel fatigue, and soon after entering the Eaquette, found a camping place. The summer was getting on, and twilight coming earlier now, and before we had the night wood gathered, bright sheaves of the aurora wavered up into the northern skies. The banners of light advanced beyond the zenith. Shadows of white flame quivered and disappeared; cold, aloof, spiritual, and intense. And when the aerial signaling was done, and the streamers had ceased their flying, the white glow along the north still lighted the forest eerily. It was like the re- flection from some great celebration of which we THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 129 had not heard. It was something to have seen from the outside. Some day we would know. Down we laid us, with all our muscles murmuring content, and almost before we had taken the last turn, the sun of morning was shining under the tent's gray hood. Having made such unpredicted progress on the day before, we were now in a position to take the longer route, which included Upper Saranac. If we had been pressed for time, the alternative would have been to follow the Raquette around to the Tuppers. The day began smoothly with five winding miles down the easy stream. Then came a long carry (also a dollar and a half) around white water and some falls, with a farewell to the river at Axton. A lift over into a small pair of lakes, the Spec- tacles, a half mile of carry and we ate belated lunch at the bottom end of Upper Saranac. Saranac is a very beautiful sheet of water, pierced by a hundred wooded promontories, fur- nishing a hundred charming vistas. But for men hunting rest, it is hardly satisfying. At the end of every vista there is a "no trespassing" sign, actual or implied. Every promontory gives a rea- son for moving on. Saranac is no longer a part of the wilderness; it is a pleasure-land of great beauty. If you recognize this at the outset, there will be no disappointment. There is plenty of ISO THE ADIRONDACKS wilderness elsewhere, and one must not begrudge, but congratulate the millionaires upon their archi- tects. Nature has been educated to perfect taste. The lake is eight miles long, and unless you try to find a place for your tent, you would never guess how expensive. At the head of Saranac stands the Inn, from the porch of which an exquisitely modulated view of hill and headland and level waters is to be had. On the porch the remote world of lovely dresses and afternoon tea was going round. We had for- gotten that there was any reality but ours. It was something of a shock. We hurried around to the kitchen door for some supplies. Of one thing I am sure : the joys of the road are very real, and so are the joys of the Ritz, but you cannot oscillate from one to the other too rapidly and enjoy it. For weeks on end a fellow may elect to do his own cooking, to dress in woolens, to wander light-heartedly through dust and misad- venture, with the whole system of luxury and equipage forgotten and undesired. He may also breakfast at ten, golf in white flannels, dine to music and the converse of fair ladies, and never feel an itch to wash the dishes or sleep out in the rain. It is habit that hardens you to either. But this is the point : you have to take these moods in big splashes and not too thinly sandwiched. You dare not alternate luxury and the Spartan life too THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 131 rapidly, or you will be calling yourself regretful names. Now Lynn and I were far from ready for the big exchange, so we bought our chops and choco- late in high disdain of white napery and hors- d'osuvres. "We left the ladies on their porch as un- envious as cold potatoes. While doubtless they, using our sad case to make a moment's conversa- tion, wondered what pleasure we could find in spoiling food and sleeping on the ground. It is the old question of age and the red gods. It was not easy to find a place to camp where we could trespass in comfort and safety at the same time. But we finally Eobin-Hooded our- selves under the greenwood half-way down the lake. I trust that our absentee landlord heard the prayers we raised to his forbearance. But there are intruders and intruders, and the latter have to suffer for the former. In this connection I have a story that is absurd, but true. On the grounds of the Placid Club stands a grove of white birches, whose beauty was radiant. Some strangers of the summer race passed by and cov- eted and cut, utterly regardless of private prop- erty or the injury to the trees. They wanted the bark ; the girdled trees might die. When the crime was discovered, the club painted the eyesore white in an effort to save the trees as well as to preserve their looks. It was too cleverly done. Not a 132 THE ADIRONDACKS month had passed before another party of un- invited picnickers was seen actually endeavoring to remove the counterfeit. There is a rapacity that o'erleaps itself: these picnickers were fined. It would make an interesting study of national growth, the statistics of vacations. The cramped city-dweUer is the man who needs nature most and the last to take to the woods. He commits the most grotesque trespasses. He does not un- derstand their spirit. Offense comes from every creed and con- dition of man. And the amount of selfishness per- petrated by the passer-by is enraging. The holi- day season is marked by a litter of past lunches. Smoldering cigarettes and unextinguished matches ruin men's estates with a sickening finality. It is small wonder when one's holdings are kept un- harmed only at the expense of perpetual vigilance that landowners should limit their courtesies. They are really remarkably generous. A camper with a reputation for carefulness with fire can obtain almost any privilege. Perhaps another generation of training will eliminate the vacation hog. But let the transitory grouch disappear in the odor of broiled chop. For some time we had sub- sisted on epicurean dishes, trout in all its mani- festations. Lynn had embellished our meatless days until there was no virtue in them. However, THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP when we did find ourselves sitting before the little sizzlers and when we did sink our incisors into the crusted fat, two vegetarian votes were lost. The relish of some meals lives after thenx. I have not as yet established a full sympathy with our ancestors of the cavern who ate their meat on the hoof, despite its scientific advantages. But that evening's satisfaction will not be soon for- gotten. "We did not bother with forks. We had neglected to hunt for them till the chops were getting cold. It taught us a lesson of the good old pre-utensil days: that a chop in the hand is worth two on the plate. You have heard of gnaw- ing hunger. Well, we gnawed, and if that be brutish, then I am in perfect accord with the dumb animals. The third day, of varied memory, dawned fair. But the gods, thus far so heavily in our favor, were turning neutral. A south wind made the four miles down to the Sweeney carry an exhibi- tion of early morning vigor, and when we arrived, Sweeney or his descendant was not to be discov- ered. The carry was three miles, however, and transportation was worth a good deal of waiting. Yet when the transportation company did come, he said that he was engaged by another party. Money is the resource of those who lack the more spiritual persuasions, I suppose. So, as a confession of weakness, we offered him money. 134 THE ADIRONDACKS It was rather dreadful, but we argued that in all probability this other party was not being pa- tiently awaited by a packhorse and two amateur horse-keepers, and that therefore his errand could not be as urgent as ours. The carrier thought the same for two dollars extra. It was late in the momhig when we were fairly on our way, and there were still fifty complicated miles ahead of us. The south wind increased man- fully, and the heat beat upon us, but every stroke was bringing us nearer home, and we said little. At times the country opened to rolling vistas domi- nated by Mount Morris. At times the forest closed about us. We met nobody and had no ad- venture of note, and our first stop was before the swift water eight miles or so below the carry, where we quieted our feelings with a slim tea and a promise of a generous supper. Below, about fifteen minutes, if you will look for another channel on the map, you will find a decided short cut, and almost immediately you come out on Big Simon's Pond. We didn't stop to inquire who Big Simon was, but set to work usiag his pond without permission and with all the energy at our command. Very soon we came around the bend and were confronted by our worst fears. It was to be a lively afternoon. Looking back upon it, I believe that the big wind was a help. Every moment was a sparkling THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 137 uncertainty, and the fun of it relieved the toil. The canoe was light; Lynn was skill itself; the waves were playful rather than dangerous as long as we observed ordinary caution. But just before we landed, after it was all over but the shouting, I suddenly realized that it had been a day's work. The sun was almost of the same opinion. But not so the map. There was a giant carry ahead of us, three miles of it at least, and this time no charioteer was waiting to be conjured forth even by all the money in. the township. For now we had been insensibly drawn back into the wilds. The influence of the village at the upper end of Big Tupper did not reach so far. We had no other's strength to rely on. How people accomplish things alone I do not see. It was because Lynn was there (to whom I could not explain that I was weary to the marrow and that life was disagreeably pointless anyway) that I began to tie the paddles for the portage. Or rather it was because Lynn was Lynn. I know many a good soul before whom I would have no particular hesitancy in lying down and dying. They are good to dine with and to sit with through the play. But I cannot conceive of them leading me into action. And what is comradeship for if it is not the thing that makes the extra mile pos- sible? As usual we did our hard work in silence, and 138 THE ADIRONDACKS as usual it proved less wearing than our fears. To be sure the light did almost fail us. To be sure I got so tired that I could make progress with the boat only by dint of counting sixties, planning things to eat, and other mental makeshifts. Three miles isn't much if you spell each other off by the watch, but it is a great thing to have behind you. And when it was over, we suddenly remem- bered our noon-time promise of a big meal. We remembered it, but neither of us mentioned it. "I think I 'd like a little tea," Lynn murmured from the patch of sand where he lay blinking at the first star. "With the fresh loaf and apple sauce," I added from the flat of my back. My foot, I thiuk, was half way in the lake where it had fallen. We had carried the dried apples by every meal, saying that we 'd find a better use for them yet. It is a filling, tasty, good-to-go-to-bed-on dish, is apple sauce, delicately sweetened and eaten with new bread. Up we got to put the kettle on. And then the tragedy happened. The plates were got, our palates primed, our bodies propped for the final labor of eating, and we found that one of us (no matter which) had sweetened our piece de resistance with com meal. The result was mostly de resistance. That evening we broke every law of our own THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 139 decalogue. Instead of making bed, we scooped out hollows in the sand. Instead of making a night fire, we relied upon the season's not betray- ing us. Instead of putting up the tent, we put it under. And, I might as well add, instead of sleeping, we dozed off from time to time. Yet from that same sand bank I carry to this day three pictures that my memory loves to look on. One was of late evening. A quarter moon was just disappearing behind the black wall of spruces, and the shores of the little lake seemed very stiU. The next must have been after mid- night. It was much colder and wreaths of mist were curling from the pond; a loon was calling from the farther shore. Lynn was sleeping, his arm thrown back over his fine head. I lay down again, the forsaken call, the vapors of the lake, and the breath of Lethe winding round my heart. The last picture was too beautiful for fully waking eyes. The sun had not risen, but had sent scarlet and orange streamers to proclaim his coming. The pond lay breathless in the coils of mist. Except for the lad beside me, there was no hint of life. It was creation over again. And then he stirred, opened his eyes, saw me awake, and said, yawning: "We 're damned fond of Luggins, don't you think?" The day had come on which we had pledged 140 THE ADIRONDACKS ourselves to lighten our Scouts of their responsi- bility, and we were five carries and six lakes from home. But the spite had left the south wind, and we attacked the carries with precision. While Lynn tied the paddles crisscross for a shoulder rest, I assembled the other articles. If it was his turn with the canoe, I helped him up with it, got under the big duffel bag, slung the other over it, carried the ax in one hand, the rods in the other, and led the way. It took two minutes to get started and two to reassemble the things in the boat, count them, and push on. "Business as usual" was our slogan, and the little carries be- came not pestiferous, but amusing. As for the aches of yesterday, they had vanished with the morning mists. It had become a pleasure jaunt again. There is something so reviving in being immersed in the air of forests that the amount of actual slumber doesn't matter much. We were now traveling through the great Whit- ney Preserve. Deer herded on the shores of the little ponds. They did not always bother to run away. Loons swam a little to one side and went on fishing. We were so tuned down to the natural key that we vibrated with pleasure to the com- monest things. Could the woods have performed a greater service? By shedding starch and five- course meals and the chauffeur, one finds the lux- ury of flannel shirts and the taste of food and THE RAQUETTE RIVER TRIP 141 the mastery of the wheel. Think, then, what dis- coveries lie in wait for the man who can keep the best of each variety of life. It is the middle course that makes the slipperiest riding. Extremes are easy. It is easy to succumb to the lazy life of the log cabin or to the schedules of citizen routine. In one sphere you do not think at all ; in the other your thinking is done for you ; the result of either is listlessness. But to carry your mental stimu- lants to the woods or to bring your woods health and simplicities to town is to improve upon con- tent. It is to create a new world for most of us. The flaring mom had been portentous of chang- ing weather, and as we entered Forked Lake at its northernmost projection, the sun yielded to the steadily thickening cloud. The dark high shores of that enchanted water were close about us ; no wind stirred; the afternoon darkened. The fore- boding spruces were prophetic of coming storm. The season was summer, but the sparkle was gone. Everything conveyed some subtle suggestion of the severer season so lately past, so soon to come again. In the north country summer is but an armistice. Spirits run high, but there always re- mains the shadow of struggle, but scantily veiled. The pines have been too long wracked by winter winds to lose their sternness in a short six weeks or the spruces their hint of snow. Spring's pen- nants proclaim that the truce is on; but an August 142 THE ADIRONDACKS frost is like to slay in treachery. It is a long defense that trees and animal and man have to make against the cold. But it breeds greatness. The last carry, the last rearrangement in the canoe, and then the last five miles. Darkness had shut in, but the rain yet forbore. We remem- bered the exultation in our flight down that same channel only four days before. It might have been four weeks. Another mood had taken its place. We were pretty tired, but we were finish- ing strong; we were coming home. We had seen much and lived a good deal, and a co2y camp was awaiting us. Exultation might have passed, but satisfaction had come. There is something very bed-rock about satisfaction. Around the cape decorated by the Carnegie establishment, and our strokes strengthened. We saw a fire. It was the Scouts '. They, then, were still hopeful. We paddled. They had been more than hopeful, faithful. They had a supper aU pre- pared. It was downright religious of them. And it warmed our hearts that Luggins was so pleased to see us. Truly this was a home-coming. That night we slept the sleep of perfect harmony with life. CHAPTER Vn TTNCONSIDEBED CEANBEBKY THE next day, with a northeast storm beat- ing steadily down the lake, we lay in a glory of indolence within our castle. The rain had be- gun late in the night. I had heard the first slow and measured drops, half aroused, and had turned over in that most perfect luxury of warmth and weariness, drowsing away into the limbo of no more duties to do. Every so often in camp you loaf and mend your outfit; every so often a rest is enforced by the weather. When these two conditions are coin- cident, delicious is the savor thereof. It was a magnificent storm. A long roar per- vaded the forest. But as our own position was sheltered we banished a fatuous sympathy for Luggins and set about enjoying it. Enjoying a nor'easter implies a lot of firewood, but we had that and could concentrate on maintaining a su- perior fire. At odd times we studied the map. The rain laid by in time to let us indulge in a supper of proportions, and in the afterglow of 143 144 THE ADIRONDACKS exaggerated kindliness, I broached a sclieme that I had always longed to try. The scheme was simple. It proposed to set our faces in a certain direction through the wilderness and, with no advice except that of the compass, to follow along until we had won our objective. In other words, I suggested that we play Daniel Boone. I was able to go at once into particulars as to the direction. I asked Lynn the name of the biggest lake in the Adirondacks. He didn't know. I asked him in what section more bears were shot than in all others together. He couldn't guess. I asked him if he 'd ever heard of Cranberry. He hadn't. Lynn was not the first person that I 'd stumped. In fact, for weeks before deciding where to strike into the Adirondacks, I had asked people about the Cranberry Lake section. I had never found one eye-witness. There were scores who had never heard of its existence. There were dozens who knew Keene Valley or the Saranacs or the Schroon Lake country, but had only heard vaguely of this western body of water. Several asked me to drop them a line about it when I should have visited it. Doubtless if I had made my inquiries in Buffalo or Utiea or Carthage, I should have found some one whose grandson or second cousin had been near the spot. a 6 a c -< o d i UNCONSIDERED CRANBERRY 147 Here, I thought, in considerable elation, is new ground. But before that evening I said nothing about it to Lynn. I had saved this most delectable news until the most inciting strategic moment. The effect was proper. The boy was infected with the subtle poison of exploration. We proposed to give the western Adirondacks to the world. "Cranberry or combust" became our cry. Though the railroads would not have you think so, there is really no geography to enjoyment. The amount of gratification one gets varies not with the length of the green ticket, but with the strength of your imagination. I have always fixed the region vaguely adjacent to Hudson's Bay as the land where the nearest superior brand of adventure is to be had. But I doubtless could be just as uncomfortable nearer home. Miling away the time is a habit. It was begun by Marco Polo and encouraged by advertisement agencies. These agencies beg of you to see all of America first. They feature Niagara and Nitnit, Oregon, because it is so expensive to get there. They neglect Cranberry for the reverse reason and so does everybody else. I imagine that a thousand Americans have been to Sitka or up the Nile for every one who has toured the Adirondack plateau. This is a tribute, not to Sitka, but to the agencies. The Adirondack plateau comprises the western third of the Park. Its level is between fifteen 148 THE ADIRONDACKS hundred and two thousand feet above sea. It is filled with little ponds and little mountains and little else. You can travel across great areas of second growth forest or better without seeing a farm. It furnishes a breeding ground for game, second only to the well-watched estates for deer, and second to no other place for bear and the small fur animals. The fishing varies, but chiefly among the superlatives. The scenery does not. It never takes your breath unless you 're easily winded. It was into country such as this, recom- mended by none, yet so near to all, that our curi- osity was to lead us. The northeast storm blew itself out during the night, but left a drizzle to blot out an unambitious landscape, which it did effectively for two more days. We used these, however, in perfecting our readiness and storing energy for the attack. Even Luggins, I risk believing, was ready for a change, even though it involved motion. Consequently we were all joyful the next morn- ing when the sun shone upon an amphibious world. By a supernal show of self-control we gave but half an hour to Brandreth trout and had our lunch well along the shore of North Pond. * ' To- morrow," we said, "we will be in uncharted waters." Cranberry lay northwest by north, and with a sense of exhilaration, we left the road and plunged toward it. UNCONSIDERED CRANBERRY 149 It was pleasant walking in the wood. The trees were tall, the undergrowth inconsequential, and Lynn, who was a master-packer, had tied Luggins most engagingly to his load. There is nothing quite so hard to do as stacking bread, bedding, and the rest of a camper's miscellany upon a horse, and binding it there to stay. There is no art so discouraging to the amateur. It is awkward learning to swim, and to master the violin is a saddening business. But to arrange things on a horse's back tests one's nature. Arrange, heave, tie as you will, unless you have the skill of the chosen, the items of your load will fall passion- ately to earth. There is no beginner's luck in packing. The most you can hope for is that your beast does not run off when the furniture slips beneath his belly. Lynn, however, had learned his lesson in Wyoming, and we made progress through the open forest without mishap. Our camp was pitched beside Lake Lila, in Nehasane Park, Dr. Webb's purchase, now belong- ing, I believe, to an association which can be justly proud of its hundred thousand acres. At even- song we heard the rumble of the Montreal express. "To-morrow," we said, "we shall hear no train." At ten of a beautiful morning we crossed the rails. The shining pathway curved, graceful and significant. As Luggins climbed the embankment, stepped gingerly across the steel, and paused, the 160 THE ADIRONDACKS contrast had almost the vividness of poetry. Our little caravan, recently so important and again to be so important to us, was all at once reduced to its proper proportions by contact with modem power. Our pleasures seemed small, our efforts infantile. To creep off into the woods, to set our hearts upon trout an inch longer than their fel- lows, to play house with a bit of waterproofing — these things in the stern sight of those rails seemed to discount ambition and render us open to just blame. For one depressing moment the rails seemed to have the final word. Then from a little way within the wood came the song of the whitethroat, just once, but a solace to my feeling. It came not so robust now as in the springtime, but still rounded and crystal clear. "Ah! wonderful, wonderful, wonderful," was all, in descending revery, but singing in one's brain through the after-silence, was not pathos, but the earnestness of beauty in simplest song. It was a sufficient answer to the rails. We pushed on. I would not like to rise in camp-meeting when it is time for the superstitious to go forward. But one does notice that three is the popular number for mishaps. Our sequence of misfortune began almost immediately after lunch. An ani- mated southwest breeze was blowing. I was wash- ing the dishes by a pond; Lynn was attending to UNCONSIDERED CRANBERRY 151 Luggins 's lunch. A little pack-basket was bowled over and rolled into the fire. It was rescued be- fore it had been much damaged, but our precious map was cindered. We were now in condition to play Daniel Boone in earnest. The railroad lay but an hour behind us, but we were unwilling to accept its haughty terms of security. We declined a separate peace with the wilderness. One thing that we had over Daniel was a desti- nation; even a direction. We were sure to hit Cranberry on one of its hundred and sixty-five miles of coast-line if we but kept long enough on our northwesterly course. The thing was not to hit anything else. Our apparent indifference to calamity was shaken somewhat by our arrival near twilight upon the shores of a disconcerting bayou. It was elongated beyond sight, yet narrow enough to put the shot over. We rested, like Caesar, to get a frog's-eye view (Lynn's description) of the swampy crossing. Trees did not grow quite close enough to fell a bridge-way. "And so," said Lynn, "school-boys will never have to read your classic account of that, at least." Luggins could swim, but we did not want to drown the duffle. To go around appeared an interminable task as the lay of land promised swamp. We prepared to camp, since dusk was at hand, although the situation was not perfection. 152 THE ADIRONDACKS Then came tlie third disaster. "We discovered that we had left our mosquito bar at Raquette, and that this was going to be a night foreordained for mosquito bar. The rank grass was a sort of sanatorium for the lyric insect, and this was its Saturday night. Luggins was already showing signs of nervousness. Slightly out of temper on account of our enforced encampment by a mere morass, we grew silent. I grew specially silent, because it was I who, in a spasm of preparation for the trip, had insisted upon washing out the mosquito bar and had left it soaking in a natural wash-basin. But the mosquitos made up for any silence on our part. The mosquitos in the Adirondacks are not so numerous as on the northern plains, nor so robust as in the swamps of uncleared Jersey. But at times they can be enraging beyond the invention of words. In another chapter I must have my say, for it is a thing no writer of outdoors can resist. But being anxious to get to Cranberry, I shall here rest content with remarking that for choral harmonies and unity of purpose that was a red-letter night. It would have been difficult to have found a gathering busier or more dis- tinguished. By building a vigorous smudge and mummifying ourselves in blankets, we escaped being torn limb from limb, but the uproar outside such a thin partition as a layer of wool was UNCONSIDERED CRANBERRY 163 scarcely muffled. And -when, at the coming of dawn, the pack began to realize that they had toiled all night and had taken nothing, their song rose into a cheerless and harrowing minor. It would have been less disturbing to have been quietly eaten. But fatigue had its way, and I was drowsing off when Lynn poked me in the ribs and asked me whether I thought that St. Paul had ever camped out or how had he got grounds for his pessimistic cry, "0 death, where is thy sting 1" After our night of inaction any action took on an aspect of pleasantness. The traverse of the flow became an interesting problem. First we swam Luggins over, then bound together some logs with rope, and swam this raft over with the duffle on top, and as in the arithmetic problems, succeeded in transferring all the household gods in the smallest number of trips and the maximum of dryness. With a fervent but simple adieu we •left this spot of unhallowed memory. The day was without excitement, as was fitting. We followed a deer trail along the bank of a stream which had the goodness to favor our direction. It brought us to a fair and square body of water, covered with water-lilies and frogs. Our compass advised a turn to the right, but an emphatic little eminence forbade. We skirted this to the left- ward and, coming upon a breezy natural clearing, decided to stop there for the night, far from the 164 THE ADIRONDACKS madding cloud. After putting our house in order, we decided that the little mountain would give us the lay of the morrow's land and climbed it. Un- fortunately Adirondack hills do not rise to sym- metrical and shiny apexes from which the land- scape extends with geographical clearness on all sides. There is too much room at the top and it is mostly unherpicidal (Lynn's term). But we found a convenient tree from which we swayed and looked about us with that wild surmise that distinguished Balboa's travels. There was very little accurate information in the view. Arms of water appeared in various places to the westward. But the striking sight was the sea-like rolling of the landscape. Take the Bay of Biscay in a storm, magnify thirty diameters, and you reproduce this unfeatured wilderness in contour. Upholster it with trees and sprinkle with ponds and you com- plete the picture we had from our spruce-top. When we finally brought ourselves to the point of leaving, in the east the haze of twilight was begin- ning to rise, although Lynn insisted it was only a bank of mosquitos hovering over our last night's marsh. If being alone in the woods was our ob- ject, we had at last achieved it. The sky itself could not have been more vacant of habitation. "We had reached a land where height and grandeur and the other qualities that are supposed to recom- mend mountains were lacking. But there was a iT