University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
MOOSEHEAD.

Moosehead Lake is a little bigger than the Lago
di Guarda, and therefore, according to our American
standard, rather more important. It is not
very grand, not very picturesque, but considerably
better than no lake, — a meritorious mean; not
pretty and shadowy, like a thousand lakelets all
over the land, nor tame, broad, and sham-oceanic,
like the tanks of Niagara. On the west, near its
southern end, is a well-intended blackness and
roughness called Squaw Mountain. The rest on
that side is undistinguished pine woods.

Mount Kinneo is midway up the lake, on the east.
It is the show-piece of the region, — the best they
can do for a precipice, and really admirably done.
Kinneo is a solid mass of purple flint rising seven
hundred feet upright from the water. By the side
of this block could some Archimedes appear, armed
with a suitable “pou stô” and a mallet heavy
enough, he might strike fire to the world. Since
percussion-guns and friction cigar-lighters came in,
flint has somewhat lost its value; and Kinneo is
of no practical use at present. We cannot allow
inutilities in this world. Where is the Archimedes?
He could make a handsome thing of it by
flashing us off with a spark into a new system of
things.

Below this dangerous cliff on the lake-bank is
the Kinneo House, where fishermen and sportsmen
may dwell, and kill or catch, as skill or fortune
favors. The historical success of all catchers and
killers is well balanced, since men who cannot master
facts are always men of imagination, and it is
as easy for them to invent as for the other class to
do. Boston men haunt Kinneo. For a hero who
has not skill enough or imagination enough to kill
a moose stands rather in Nowhere with Boston
fashion. The tameness of that pleasant little capital
makes its belles ardent for tales of wild adventure.
New York women are less exacting; a few
of them, indeed, like a dash of the adventurous in
their lover; but most of them are business-women,
fighting their way out of vulgarity into style, and
romance is an interruption.

Kinneo was an old station of Iglesias's, in those
days when he was probing New England for the
picturesque. When the steamer landed, he acted
as cicerone, and pointed out to me the main object
of interest thereabouts, — the dinner-table. We
dined with lumbermen and moose-hunters, scufflingly.

The moose is the lion of these regions. Near
Greenville, a gigantic pair of moose-horns marks a
fork in the road. Thenceforth moose-facts and
moose-legends become the staple of conversation.
Moose-meat, combining the flavor of beefsteak and
the white of turtle, appears on the table. Moose-horns
with full explanations, so that the buyer can

play the part of hunter, are for sale. Tame moose-lings
are exhibited. Sportsmen at Kinneo can
choose a matinée with the trout or a soirée with the
moose.

The chief fact of a moose's person is that pair of
strange excrescences, his horns. Like fronds of
tree-fern, like great corals or sea-fans, these great
palmated plates of bone lift themselves from his
head, grand, useless, clumsy. A pair of moose-horns
overlooks me as I write; they weigh twenty
pounds, are nearly five feet in spread, on the right
horn are nine developed and two undeveloped
antlers, the plates are sixteen inches broad, — a
doughty head-piece.

Every year the great, slow-witted animal must
renew his head-gear. He must lose the deformity,
his pride, and cultivate another. In spring, when
the first anemone trembles to the vernal breeze, the
moose nods welcome to the wind, and as he nods
feels something rattle on his skull. He nods again,
as Homer sometimes did. Lo! something drops.
A horn has dropped, and he stands a bewildered
unicorn. For a few days he steers wild; in this
ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree
on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy
creature is staggered, body and mind. In
what Jericho of the forest can he hide his diminished
head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck
through the woods. Days pass by in gloom, and
then comes despair; another horn falls, and he
becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his
brow bear again its full honors.

I make no apology for giving a few lines to the
great event of a moose's life. He is the hero of
those evergreen-woods, — a hero too little recognized,
except by stealthy assassins, meeting him
by midnight for massacre. No one seems to have
viewed him in his dramatic character, as a forest-monarch
enacting every year the tragicomedy of
decoronation and recoronation.

The Kinneo House is head-quarters for moose-hunters.
This summer the waters of Maine were
diluvial, the feeding-grounds were swamped. Of
this we took little note: we were in chase of something
certain not to be drowned; and the higher
the deluge, the easier we could float to Katahdin.
After dinner we took the steamboat again for the
upper end of the lake.

It was a day of days for sunny summer sailing.
Purple haziness curtained the dark front of
Kinneo, — a delicate haze purpled by this black
promontory, but melting blue like a cloud-fall of
cloudless sky upon loftier distant summits. The
lake rippled pleasantly, flashing at every ripple.

Suddenly, “Katahdin!” said Iglesias.

Yes, there was a dim point, the object of our
pilgrimage.

Katahdin, — the more I saw of it, the more
grateful I was to the three powers who enabled me
to see it: to Nature for building it, to Iglesias
for guiding me to it, to myself for going.

We sat upon the deck and let Katahdin grow, —

and sitting, talked of mountains, somewhat to this
effect: —

Mountains are the best things to be seen.
Within the keen outline of a great peak is packed
more of distance, of detail, of light and shade, of
color, of all the qualities of space, than vision can
get in any other way. No one who has not seen
mountains knows how far the eye can reach. Level
horizons are within cannon-shot. Mountain horizons
not only may be a hundred miles away, but
they lift up a hundred miles at length, to be seen
at a look. Mountains make a background against
which blue sky can be seen; between them and
the eye are so many miles of visible atmosphere,
domesticated, brought down to the regions of earth,
not resting overhead, a vagueness and a void. Air,
blue in full daylight, rose and violet at sunset,
gray like powdered starlight by night, is collected
and isolated by a mountain, so that the eye can
comprehend it in nearer acquaintance. There is
nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain:
even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in
comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness,
that melting permanence, that evanescing
changelessness. Clouds in vain strive to imitate
it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be
blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid
positiveness.

Mountains, too, are very stationary, — always at
their post. They are characters of dignity, not
without noble changes of mood; but these changes

are not bewildering, capricious shifts. A mountain
can be studied like a picture; its majesty, its grace,
can be got by heart. Purple precipice, blue pyramid,
cone or dome of snow, it is a simple image
and a positive thought. It is a delicate fact, first,
of beauty, — then, as you approach, a strong fact
of majesty and power. But even in its cloudy, distant
fairness there is a concise, emphatic reality
altogether uncloudlike.

Manly men need the wilderness and the mountain.
Katahdin is the best mountain in the wildest
wild to be had on this side the continent. He
looked at us encouragingly over the hills. I saw
that he was all that Iglesias, connoisseur of mountains,
had promised, and was content to wait for
the day of meeting.

The steamboat dumped us and our canoe on a
wharf at the lake-head about four o'clock. A
wharf promised a settlement, which, however, did
not exist. There was population, — one man and
one great ox. Following the inland-pointing nose
of the ox, we saw, penetrating the forest, a wooden
railroad. Ox-locomotive, and no other, befitted
such rails. The train was one great go-cart. We
packed our traps upon it, roofed them with our
birch, and, without much ceremony of whistling,
moved on. As we started, so did the steamboat.
The link between us and the inhabited world grew
more and more attenuated. Finally it snapped, and
we were in the actual wilderness.

I am sorry to chronicle that Iglesias hereupon
turned to the ox, and said impatiently, —

“Now, then, bullgine!”

Why a railroad, even a wooden one, here? For
this: the Penobscot at this point approaches within
two and a half miles of Moosehead Lake, and over
this portage supplies are taken conveniently for
the lumbermen of an extensive lumbering country
above, along the river.

Corduroy railroad, ox-locomotive, and go-cart
train up in the pine woods were a novelty and a
privilege. Our cloven-hoofed engine did not whirr
turbulently along, like a thing of wheels. Slow
and sure must the knock-kneed chewer of cuds
step from log to log. Creakingly the wain followed
him, pausing and starting and pausing again with
groans of inertia. A very fat ox was this, protesting
every moment against his employment, where
speed, his duty, and sloth, his nature, kept him
bewildered by their rival injunctions. Whenever
the engine-driver stopped to pick a huckleberry,
the train, self-braking, stopped also, and the engine
took in fuel from the tall grass that grew between
the sleepers. It was the sensation of sloth at its
uttermost.

Iglesias and I, meanwhile, marched along and
shot the game of the country, namely, one Tetrao
Canadensis, one spruce-partridge, making in all one
bird, quite too pretty to shoot with its red and
black plumage. The spruce-partridge is rather
rare in inhabited Maine, and is malignantly accused

of being bitter in flesh, and of feeding on sprucebuds
to make itself distasteful. Our bird we found
sweetly berry-fed. The bitterness, if any, was that
we had not a brace.

So, at last, in an hour, after shooting one bird
and swallowing six million berries, for the railroad
was a shaft into a mine of them, we came to the
terminus. The chewer of cuds was disconnected,
and plodded off to his stable. The go-cart slid
down an inclined plane to the river, the Penobscot.

We paid quite freely for our brief monopoly of
the railroad to the superintendent, engineer, stoker,
poker, switch-tender, brakeman, baggage-master,
and every other official in one. But who would
grudge his tribute to the enterprise that opened
this narrow vista through toward the Hyperboreans,
and planted these once not crumbling sleepers
and once not rickety rails, to save the passenger a
portage? Here, at Bullgineville, the pluralist railroad-manager
had his cabin and clearing, ox-engine
house and warehouse.

To balance these symbols of advance, we found
a station of the rear-guard of another army. An
Indian party of two was encamped on the bank.
The fusty sagamore of this pair was lying wounded;
his fusty squaw tended him tenderly, minding,
meanwhile, a very witch-like caldron of savory
fume. No skirmish, with actual war-whoop and
sheen of real scalping-knife, had put this prostrate
chieftain here hors du combat. He had shot himself
cruelly by accident. So he informed us feebly,

in a muddy, guttural patois of Canadian French.
This aboriginal meeting was of great value; it
helped to eliminate the railroad.