Locusts and Wild Honey - John Burroughs
In the evening we sat about the fire in rude homemade chairs, and had
such broken and disjointed talk as we could manage. Our host had lived
in Quebec and been a school-teacher there; he had wielded the birch
until he lost his health, when he came here and the birches gave it
back to him. He was now hearty and well, and had a family of six or
seven children about him.
We were given a good bed that night, and fared better than we expected.
About one o'clock I was awakened by suppressed voices outside the
window. Who could it be? Had a band of brigands surrounded the house?
As our outfit and supplies had not been removed from the wagon in front
of the door I got up, and, lifting one corner of the window paper,
peeped out: I saw in the dim moonlight four or five men standing about
engaged in low conversation. Presently one of the men advanced to the
door and began to rap and call the name of our host. Then I knew their
errand was not hostile; but the weird effect of that regular alternate
rapping and calling ran through my dream all the rest of the night.
Rat-tat, tat, tat,--La Chance; rat-tat, tat,--La Chance, five or six
times repeated before La Chance heard and responded. Then the door
opened and they came in, when it was jabber, jabber, jabber in the next
room till I fell asleep.
In the morning, to my inquiry as to who the travelers were and what
they wanted, La Chance said they were old acquaintances going
a-fishing, and had stopped to have a little talk.
Breakfast was served early, and we were upon the road before the sun.
Then began a forty-mile ride through a dense Canadian spruce forest
over the drift and boulders of the paleozoic age. Up to this point the
scenery had been quite familiar,--not much unlike that of the
Catskills,--but now there was a change; the birches disappeared, except
now and then a slender white or paper birch, and spruce everywhere
prevailed. A narrow belt on each side of the road had been blasted by
fire, and the dry, white stems of the trees stood stark and stiff. The
road ran pretty straight, skirting the mountains and threading the
valleys, and hour after hour the dark, silent woods wheeled past us.
Swarms of black flies--those insect wolves--waylaid us and hung to us
till a smart spurt of the horse, where the road favored, left them
behind. But a species of large horse-fly, black and vicious, it was not
so easy to get rid of. When they alighted upon the horse, we would
demolish them with the whip or with our felt hats, a proceeding the
horse soon came to understand and appreciate. The white and gray
Laurentian boulders lay along the roadside. The soil seemed as if made
up of decayed and pulverized rock, and doubtless contained very little
vegetable matter. It is so barren that it will never repay clearing and
cultivating.
Our course was an up-grade toward the highlands that separate the
watershed of St. John Lake from that of the St. Lawrence, and as we
proceeded the spruce became smaller and smaller till the trees were
seldom more than eight or ten inches in diameter. Nearly all of them
terminated in a dense tuft at the top, beneath which the stem would be
bare for several feet, giving them the appearance, my friend said, as
they stood sharply defined along the crests of the mountains, of cannon
swabs. Endless, interminable successions of these cannon swabs, each
just like its fellow, came and went, came and went, all day. Sometimes
we could see the road a mile or two ahead, and it was as lonely and
solitary as a path in the desert. Periods of talk and song and jollity
were succeeded by long stretches of silence. A buckboard upon such a
road does not conduce to a continuous flow of animal spirits. A good
brace for the foot and a good hold for the hand is one's main lookout
much of the time. We walked up the steeper hills, one of them nearly a
mile long, then clung grimly to the board during the rapid descent of
the other side.
We occasionally saw a solitary pigeon--in every instance a
cock--leading a forlorn life in the wood, a hermit of his kind, or
more probably a rejected and superfluous male. We came upon two or
three broods of spruce grouse in the road, so tame that one could have
knocked them over with poles. We passed many beautiful lakes; among
others, the Two Sisters, one on each side of the road. At noon we
paused at a lake in a deep valley, and fed the horse and had lunch. I
was not long in getting ready my fishing tackle, and, upon a raft made
of two logs pinned together, floated out upon the lake and quickly took
all the trout we wanted.
Early in the afternoon we entered upon what is called _La Grande
Brulure,_ or Great Burning, and to the desolation of living woods
succeeded the greater desolation of a blighted forest. All the
mountains and valleys, as far as the eye could see, had been swept by
the fire, and the bleached and ghostly skeletons of the trees alone met
the gaze. The fire had come over from the Saguenay, a hundred or more
miles to the east, seven or eight years before, and had consumed or
blasted everything in its way. We saw the skull of a moose said to have
perished in the fire. For three hours we rode through this valley and
shadow of death. In the midst of it, where the trees had nearly all
disappeared, and where the ground was covered with coarse wild grass,
we came upon the Morancy River, a placid yellow stream twenty or
twenty-five yards wide, abounding with trout. We walked a short
distance along its banks and peered curiously into its waters. The
mountains on either hand had been burned by the fire until in places
their great granite bones were bare and white.
At another point we were within ear-shot, for a mile or more, of a
brawling stream in the valley below us, and now and then caught a
glimpse of foaming rapids or cascades through the dense spruce,--a
trout stream that probably no man had ever fished, as it would be quite
impossible to do so in such a maze and tangle of woods.
We neither met, nor passed, nor saw any travelers till late in the
afternoon, when we descried far ahead a man on horseback. It was a
welcome relief. It was like a sail at sea. When he saw us he drew rein
and awaited our approach. He, too, had probably tired of the solitude
and desolation of the road. He proved to be a young Canadian going to
join the gang of workmen at the farther end of the road.
About four o'clock we passed another small lake, and in a few moments
more drew up at the bridge over the Jacques Cartier River, and our
forty-mile ride was finished. There was a stable here that had been
used by the road-builders, and was now used by the teams that hauled in
their supplies. This would do for the horse; a snug log shanty built by
an old trapper and hunter for use in the winter, a hundred yards below
the bridge, amid the spruces on the bank of the river, when rebedded
and refurnished, would do for us. The river at this point was a swift,
black stream from thirty to forty feet wide, with a strength and a
bound like a moose. It was not shrunken and emaciated, like similar
streams in a cleared country, but full, copious, and strong. Indeed,
one can hardly realize how the lesser water-courses have suffered by
the denuding of the land of its forest covering, until he goes into the
primitive woods and sees how bounding and athletic they are there. They
are literally well fed, and their measure of life is full. In fact, a
trout brook is as much a thing of the woods as a moose or deer, and
will not thrive well in the open country.
Three miles above our camp was Great Lake Jacques Cartier, the source
of the river, a sheet of water nine miles long and from one to three
wide; fifty rods below was Little Lake Jacques Cartier, an irregular
body about two miles across. Stretching away on every hand, bristling
on the mountains and darkling in the valleys, was the illimitable
spruce woods. The moss in them covered the ground nearly knee-deep, and
lay like newly fallen snow, hiding rocks and logs, filling depressions,
and muffling the foot. When it was dry, one could find a most
delightful couch anywhere.
The spruce seems to have colored the water, which is a dark amber
color, but entirely sweet and pure. There needed no better proof of the
latter fact than the trout with which it abounded, and their clear and
vivid tints. In its lower portions near the St. Lawrence, the Jacques
Cartier River is a salmon stream, but these fish have never been found
as near its source as we were, though there is no apparent reason why
they should not be.
There is perhaps no moment in the life of an angler fraught with so
much eagerness and impatience as when he first finds himself upon the
bank of a new and long-sought stream. When I was a boy and used to go
a-fishing, I could seldom restrain my eagerness after I arrived in
sight of the brook or pond, and must needs run the rest of the way.
Then the delay in rigging my tackle was a trial my patience was never
quite equal to. After I had made a few casts, or had caught one fish, I
could pause and adjust my line properly. I found some remnant of the
old enthusiasm still in me when I sprang from the buckboard that
afternoon and saw the strange river rushing by. I would have given
something if my tackle had been rigged so that I could have tried on
the instant the temper of the trout that had just broken the surface
within easy reach of the shore. But I had anticipated this moment
coming along, and had surreptitiously undone my rod-case and got my
reel out of my bag, and was therefore a few moments ahead of my
companion in making the first cast. The trout rose readily, and almost
too soon we had more than enough for dinner, though no "rod-smashers"
had been seen or felt. Our experience the next morning, and during the
day and the next morning, in the lake, in the rapids, in the pools, was
about the same: there was a surfeit of trout eight or ten inches long,
though we rarely kept any under ten, but the big fish were lazy and
would not rise; they were in the deepest water and did not like to get
up.
The third day, in the afternoon, we had our first and only thorough
sensation in the shape of a big trout. It came none too soon. The
interest had begun to flag. But one big fish a week will do. It is a
pinnacle of delight in the angler's experience that he may well be
three days in working up to, and, once reached, it is three days down
to the old humdrum level again. At least it is with me. It was a dull,
rainy day; the fog rested low upon the mountains, and the time hung
heavily on our hands. About three o'clock the rain slackened and we
emerged from our den, Joe going to look after his horse, which had
eaten but little since coming into the woods, the poor creature was so
disturbed by the loneliness and the black flies; I, to make
preparations for dinner, while my companion lazily took his rod and
stepped to the edge of the big pool in front of camp. At the first
introductory cast, and when his fly was not fifteen feet from him upon
the water, there was a lunge and a strike, and apparently the fisherman
had hooked a boulder. I was standing a few yards below, engaged in
washing out the coffee-pail, when I heard him call out:--
"I have got him now!"
"Yes, I see you have," said I, noticing his bending pole and moveless
line; "when I am through, I will help you get loose."
"No, but I'm not joking," said he; "I have got a big fish."
I looked up again, but saw no reason to change my impression, and kept
on with my work.
It is proper to say that my companion was a novice at fly-fishing,
never having cast a fly till upon this trip.
Again he called out to me, but, deceived by his coolness and nonchalant
tones, and by the lethargy a glimpse of the fish, I gave little heed.
of the fish, I gave little heed. I knew very well that, if I had struck
a fish that held me down in that way, I should have been going through
a regular war-dance on that circle of boulder-tops, and should have
scared the game into activity if the hook had failed to wake him up.
But as the farce continued I drew near.
"Does that look like a stone or a log?" said my friend, pointing to his
quivering line, slowly cutting the current up toward the centre of the
pool.
My skepticism vanished in an instant, and I could hardly keep my place
on the top of the rock.
"I can feel him breathe," said the now warming fisherman; "just feel
of that pole!"
I put my eager hand upon the butt, and could easily imagine I felt the
throb or pant of something alive down there in the black depths. But
whatever it was moved about like a turtle. My companion was praying to
hear his reel spin, but it gave out now and then only a few hesitating
clicks. Still the situation was excitingly dramatic, and we were all
actors. I rushed for the landing-net, but being unable to find it,
shouted desperately for Joe, who came hurrying back, excited before he
had learned what the matter was. The net had been left at the lake
below, and must be had with the greatest dispatch. In the mean time I
skipped about from boulder to boulder as the fish worked this way or
that about the pool, peering into the water to catch a glimpse of him,
for he had begun to yield a little to the steady strain that was kept
upon him. Presently I saw a shadowy, unsubstantial something just
emerge from the black depths, then vanish. Then I saw it again, and
this time the huge proportions of the fish were faintly outlined by the
white facings of his fins. The sketch lasted but a twinkling; it was
only a flitting shadow upon a darker background, but it gave me the
profoundest Ike Walton thrill I ever experienced. I had been a fisher
from my earliest boyhood. I came from a race of fishers; trout streams
gurgled about the roots of the family tree, and there was a long
accumulated and transmitted tendency and desire in me that that sight
gratified. I did not wish the pole in my own hands; there was quite
enough electricity overflowing from it and filling the air for me. The
fish yielded more and more to the relentless pole, till, in about
fifteen minutes from the time he was struck, he came to the surface,
then made a little whirlpool where he disappeared again.
But presently he was up a second time, and lashing the water into foam
as the angler led him toward the rock upon which I was perched net in
hand. As I reached toward him, down he went again, and, taking another
circle of the pool, came up still more exhausted, when, between his
paroxysms, I carefully ran the net over him and lifted him ashore,
amid, it is needless to say, the wildest enthusiasm of the spectators.
The congratulatory laughter of the loons down on the lake showed how
even the outsiders sympathized. Much larger trout have been taken in
these waters and in others, but this fish would have swallowed any
three we had ever before caught.
"What does he weigh?" was the natural inquiry of each; and we took
turns "hefting" him. But gravity was less potent to us just then than
usual, and the fish seemed astonishingly light.
"Four pounds," we said; but Joe said more. So we improvised a scale: a
long strip of board was balanced across a stick, and our groceries
served as weights. A four-pound package of sugar kicked the beam
quickly; a pound of coffee was added; still it went up; then a pound of
tea, and still the fish had a little the best of it. But we called it
six pounds, not to drive too sharp a bargain with fortune, and were
more than satisfied. Such a beautiful creature! marked in every respect
like a trout of six inches. We feasted our eyes upon him for half an
hour. We stretched him upon the ground and admired him; we laid him
across a log and withdrew a few paces and admired him; we hung him
against the shanty, and turned our heads from side to side as women do
when they are selecting dress goods, the better to take in the full
force of the effect.
He graced the board or stump that afternoon, and was the sweetest
fish we had taken. The flesh was a deep salmon-color and very rich.
We had before discovered that there were two varieties of trout
in these waters, irrespective of size,--the red-fleshed and the
white-fleshed,--and that the former were the better.
This success gave an impetus to our sport that carried us through the
rest of the week finely. We had demonstrated that there were big trout
here, and that they would rise to a fly. Henceforth big fish were
looked to as a possible result of every excursion. To me, especially,
the desire at least to match my companion, who had been my pupil in the
art, was keen and constant. We built a raft of logs and upon it I
floated out upon the lake, whipping its waters right and left, morning,
noon, and night. Many fine trout came to my hand, and were released
because they did not fill the bill.
The lake became my favorite resort, while my companion preferred rather
the shore or the long still pool above, where there was a rude
makeshift of a boat, made of common box-boards.
Upon the lake you had the wildness and solitude at arm's length, and
could better take their look and measure. You became something apart
from them; you emerged and had a vantage-ground like that of a mountain
peak, and could contemplate them at your ease. Seated upon my raft and
slowly carried by the current or drifted by the breeze, I had many a
long, silent look into the face of the wilderness, and found the
communion good. I was alone with the spirit of the forest-bound lakes,
and felt its presence and magnetism. I played hide-and-seek with it
about the nooks and corners, and lay in wait for it upon a little
island crowned with a clump of trees that was moored just to one side
of the current near the head of the lake.
Indeed, there is no depth of solitude that the mind does not endow with
some human interest. As in a dead silence the ear is filled with its
own murmur, so amid these aboriginal scenes one's feelings and
sympathies become external to him, as it were, and he holds converse
with them. Then a lake is the ear as well as the eye of a forest. It is
the place to go to listen and ascertain what sounds are abroad in the
air. They all run quickly thither and report. If any creature had
called in the forest for miles about, I should have heard it. At times
I could hear the distant roar of water off beyond the outlet of the
lake. The sound of the vagrant winds purring here and there in the tops
of the spruces reached my ear. A breeze would come slowly down the
mountain, then strike the lake, and I could see its footsteps
approaching by the changed appearance of the water. How slowly the
winds move at times, sauntering like one on a Sunday walk! A breeze
always enlivens the fish; a dead calm and all pennants sink, your
activity with your fly is ill-timed, and you soon take the hint and
stop. Becalmed upon my raft, I observed, as I have often done before,
that the life of Nature ebbs and flows, comes and departs, in these
wilderness scenes; one moment her stage is thronged and the next quite
deserted. Then there is a wonderful unity of movement in the two
elements, air and water. When there is much going on in one, there is
quite sure to be much going on in the other. You have been casting,
perhaps, for an hour with scarcely a jump or any sign of life anywhere
about you, when presently the breeze freshens and the trout begin to
respond, and then of a sudden all the performers rush in: ducks come
sweeping by; loons laugh and wheel overhead, then approach the water on
a long, gentle incline, plowing deeper and deeper into its surface,
until their momentum is arrested, or converted into foam; the fish hawk
screams; the bald eagle goes flapping by, and your eyes and hands are
full. Then the tide ebbs, and both fish and fowl are gone.
Patiently whipping the waters of the lake from my rude float, I became
an object of great interest to the loons. I had never seen these birds
before in their proper habitat, and the interest was mutual. When they
had paused on the Hudson during their spring and fall migrations, I had
pursued them in my boat to try to get near them. Now the case was
reversed; I was the interloper now, and they would come out and study
me. Sometimes six or eight of them would be swimming about watching my
movements, but they were wary and made a wide circle. One day one of
their number volunteered to make a thorough reconnoissance. I saw him
leave his comrades and swim straight toward me. He came bringing first
one eye to bear upon me, then the other. When about half the distance
was passed over he began to waver and hesitate. To encourage him I
stopped casting, and taking off my hat began to wave it slowly to and
fro, as in the act of fanning myself. This started him again,--this was
a new trait in the creature that he must scrutinize more closely. On he
came, till all his markings were distinctly seen. With one hand I
pulled a little revolver from my hip pocket, and when the loon was
about fifty yards distant, and had begun to sidle around me, I fired:
at the flash I saw two webbed feet twinkle in the air, and the loon was
gone! Lead could not have gone down so quickly. The bullet cut across
the circles where he disappeared. In a few moments he reappeared a
couple of hundred yards away. "Ha-ha-ha-a-a," said he, "ha-ha-ha-a-a,"
and "ha-ha-ha-a-a," said his comrades, who had been looking on; and
"ha-ha-ha-a-a," said we all, echo included. He approached a second
time, but not so closely, and when I began to creep back toward the
shore with my heavy craft, pawing the water first upon one side, then
the other, he followed, and with ironical laughter witnessed my efforts
to stem the current at the head of the lake. I confess it was enough to
make a more solemn bird than the loon laugh, but it was no fun for me,
and generally required my last pound of steam.
The loons flew back and forth from one lake to the other, and their
voices were about the only notable wild sounds to be heard.
One afternoon, quite unexpectedly, I struck my big fish in the head of
the lake. I was first advised of his approach by two or three trout
jumping clear from the water to get out of his lordship's way. The
water was not deep just there, and he swam so near the surface that his
enormous back cut through. With a swirl he swept my fly under and
turned.
My hook was too near home, and my rod too near a perpendicular to
strike well. More than that, my presence of mind came near being
unhorsed by the sudden apparition of the fish. If I could have had a
moment's notice, or if I had not seen the monster, I should have fared
better and the fish worse. I struck, but not with enough decision, and,
before I could reel up, my empty hook came back. The trout had carried
it in his jaws till the fraud was detected, and then spat it out. He
came a second time and made a grand commotion in the water, but not in
my nerves, for I was ready then, but failed to take the fly, and so to
get his weight and beauty in these pages. As my luck failed me at the
last, I will place my loss at the full extent of the law, and claim
that nothing less than a ten-pounder was spirited away from my hand
that day. I might not have saved him, netless as I was upon my cumbrous
raft; but I should at least have had the glory of the fight, and the
consolation of the fairly vanquished.
These trout are not properly lake trout, but the common brook trout.
The largest ones are taken with live bait through the ice in winter.
The Indians and the _habitans_ bring them out of the woods from here
and from Snow Lake, on their toboggans, from two and a half to three
feet long. They have kinks and ways of their own. About half a mile
above camp we discovered a deep oval bay to one side of the main
current of the river, that evidently abounded in big fish. Here they
disported themselves. It was a favorite feeding-ground, and late every
afternoon the fish rose all about it, making those big ripples the
angler delights to see. A trout, when he comes to the surface, starts a
ring about his own length in diameter; most of the rings in the pool,
when the eye caught them, were like barrel hoops, but the haughty trout
ignored all our best efforts; not one rise did we get. We were told of
this pool on our return to Quebec, and that other anglers had a similar
experience there. But occasionally some old fisherman, like a great
advocate who loves a difficult case, would set his wits to work and
bring into camp an enormous trout taken there.
I had been told in Quebec that I would not see a bird in the woods, not
a feather of any kind. But I knew I should, though they were not
numerous. I saw and heard a bird nearly every day, on the tops of the
trees about, that I think was one of the crossbills. The kingfisher was
there ahead of us with his loud clicking reel. The osprey was there,
too, and I saw him abusing the bald eagle, who had probably just robbed
him of a fish. The yellow-rumped warbler I saw, and one of the kinglets
was leading its lisping brood about through the spruces. In every
opening the white-throated sparrow abounded, striking up his clear
sweet whistle, at times so loud and sudden that one's momentary
impression was that some farm boy was approaching, or was secreted
there behind the logs. Many times, amid those primitive solitudes, I
was quite startled by the human tone and quality of this whistle. It is
little more than a beginning; the bird never seems to finish the strain
suggested. The Canada jay was there also, very busy about some
important private matter.