University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
RIPOGENUS.

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a
rim of forest and hill; and there behold, O gioja!
at its eastern end, stooping forward and filling the
sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we
must see and sketch this cloudless summit from
terra firma. A mile and half-way down the lake,
we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where
once had been a lumberman's station and hay-farm.
It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper
sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy,
a home deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumbledown
was the never-painted house; ditto its three
barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things
to be had here, — one certain, one possible, probable
even. The view, that was an inevitable certainty;
Iglesias would bag that as his share of the
plunder of Ripogenus. For my bagging, bears,
perchance, awaited. The trappers had seen a bear
near the barns. Cancut, in his previous visit, had
seen a disappearance of bear. No sooner had the
birch's bow touched lightly upon the shore than
we seized our respective weapons, — Iglesias his
peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike
and destructive gun, — and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or

lolling in the old hay. I entertain a vendetta toward
the ursine family. I had a duello, pistol
against claw, with one of them in the mountains
of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the
moral and adorn the tale. My antagonist of that
hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then
dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight.
Soon or late in my life, I hoped that I should
avenge this evasion. Ripogenus would, perhaps,
give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope! I was not to be an ursicide. I
begin to fear that I shall slay no other than my
proper personal bearishness. I did my duty for
another result at Ripogenus. I bolted audaciously
into every barn. I made incursions into the woods
around. I found the mark of the beast, not the
beast. He had not long ago decamped, and was
now, perhaps, sucking the meditative paw hard-by
in an arbor of his bear-garden.

After a vain hunt, I gave up Beast and turned to
Beauty. I looked about me, seeing much.

Foremost I saw a fellow-man, my comrade,
fondled by breeze and brightness, and whispered
to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below me,
on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the
scene at its bel momento. I repented more bitterly
of my momentary falseness to Beauty while I saw
him so constant.

Furthermore, I saw a landscape of vigorous simplicity,
easy to comprehend. By mellow sunset
the grass slope of the old farm seemed no longer

tanned and rusty, but ripened. The oval lake was
blue and calm, and that is already much to say;
shadows of the western hills were growing over it,
but flight after flight of illumined cloud soared
above, to console the sky and the water for the
coming of night. Northward, a forest darkled,
whose glades of brightness I could not see. Eastward,
the bank mounted abruptly to a bare fire-swept
table-land, whereon a few dead trees stood,
parched and ghostly skeletons draped with rags
of moss.

Furthermost and topmost, I saw Katahdin twenty
miles away, a giant undwarfed by any rival. The
remainder landscape was only minor and judiciously
accessory. The hills were low before it, the lake
lowly, and upright above lake and hill lifted the
mountain pyramid. Isolate greatness tells. There
were no underling mounts about this mountain-in-chief.
And now on its shoulders and crest sunset
shone, glowing. Warm violet followed the glow,
soothing away the harshness of granite lines. Luminous
violet dwelt upon the peak, while below the
clinging forests were purple in sheltered gorges,
where they could climb nearer the summit, loved
of light, and lower down gloomed green and sombre
in the shadow.

Meanwhile, as I looked, the quivering violet rose
higher and higher, and at last floated away like
a disengaged flame. A smouldering blue dwelt
upon the peak. Ashy-gray overcame the blue. As
dusk thickened and stars trembled into sight, the

gray grew luminous. Katahdin's mighty presence
seemed to absorb such dreamy glimmers as float in
limpid night-airs: a faint glory, a twilight of its
own, clothed it. King of the daylit-world, it became
queen of the dimmer realms of night, and
like a woman-queen it did not disdain to stoop and
study its loveliness in the polished lake, and stooping
thus it overhung the earth, a shadowy creature
of gleam and gloom, an eternized cloud.

I sat staring and straying in sweet reverie, until
the scene before me was dim as metaphysics.
Suddenly a flame flashed up in the void. It grew
and steadied, and dark objects became visible
about it. In the loneliness — for Iglesias had disappeared
— I allowed myself a moment's luxury
of superstition. Were these the Cyclops of Katahdin?
Possibly. Were they Trolls forging diabolic
enginery, or Gypsies of Yankeedom? I will
see, — and went tumbling down the hill-side.

As I entered the circle about the cooking-fire of
drift-wood by the lake, Iglesias said, —

“The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do
for breakfast; now, then, with your bear!”

“Haw, haw!” guffawed Cancut; and the sound,
taking the lake at a stride, found echoes everywhere,
till he grew silent and peered suspiciously
into the dark.

“There 's more bears raound 'n yer kin shake a
stick at,” said one of the muskrateers. “I would
n't ricommend yer to stir 'em up naow, haowlin'
like that.”

“I meant it for laffin',” said Cancut, humbly.

“Ef yer call that 'ere larfin', could n't yer cry a
little to kind er slick daown the bears?” said the
trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to chocolat à la crème,
made with the boon of the ex-barkeeper. I suppose
I may say, without flattery, that this tipple
was marvellous. What a pity Nature spoiled a
cook by making the muddler of that chocolate a
painter of grandeurs! When Fine Art is in a
man's nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from
a pine-tree. Our muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously
of this unaccustomed dainty, and were
visited with indescribable Nemesis. They had
never been acclimated to chocolate, as had Iglesias
and I, by sipping it under the shade of the mimosa
and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more
likely to hunt than a lucky. Satiety follows more
speedily upon success than despair upon failure.
Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear! I
had bagged not a bear, and must needs satisfy my
assassin instincts upon something with hoofs and
horns. The younger trapper of muskrat, being
young, was ardent, — being young, was hopeful,
— being young, believed in exceptions to general
rules, — and being young, believed that, given a
good fellow with a gun, Nature would provide
a victim. Therefore he proposed that we should
canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and
stillest of all the nights. The senior shook his

head incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.

“Since you have massacred all the bears,” said
Iglesias, “I will go lay me down in their lair in
the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa
Major when you come back, make a pun and he
will go.”

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus,
it seemed, had never listened to such
silence as this. Calm never could have been so
beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean
and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across
ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly
as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and
rifle on either side. The pilot gave one stroke of
his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed
the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating
upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of
his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and
sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle
violence, and the unwavering water needed slight
tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm;
then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness.
We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge,
within the shadows of the pines. With
never a plash we slid. Rare drops fell from the
cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot,
not parted by, our imponderable passage.
Sometimes from far within the forest would come

sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs.
Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread.
Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up
no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness,
lest falling it sound too loudly. Somewhat comes.
Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the
shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming,
perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it
and it came not. To glide over glassiness while
uneventful moments link themselves into hours is
monotonous. Night and stillness laid their soothing
spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost myself
out of time and space, and seemed to be floating
unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling
and snorting hard by, in the shallows of Ripogenus,
trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars,
making the world conscious of its lost silence by
the death of silence in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my
gun. In another instant I should have lodged the
fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my
shoulder, — “I kinder guess yer 've ben asleep an'
dreamin', ha'n't yer?”

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy
snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars.
Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter
woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and

veins of water and sunlight. Till long past midnight
we paddled and watched and listened, whisperless.
In vain. At last, as we rounded a point,
the level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart
the water reminded us of passing hours and traveller
duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no
bears this side of Ursa Major, were bivouacked in
one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly, as
a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied
head beneath a mound of ancient hay, not without
the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night.
A Ripogenus chill awaked the whole party with
early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the
hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed
without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand
sensation Nature might purvey for our æsthetic
breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped
into out-of-doors, looking for Ripogenus, a lake of
Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in the
landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as
the Americans say,) literally mizzled. Our simplified
view comprised a grassy hill with barns, and
a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft,
beyond, above, below, thither, hither, and yon,
Fog, — not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations,
and a boon of brief transfiguration into a cloud-body
had been granted it by Nature, who grants

to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences
of what it one day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted
itself into vapor, and filled the valley full
to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow
this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against
the eastern hill-side, over which they sometimes
broke, and, involving it totally, rolled clear and
free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the
glows of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the
mountain rested a presence of cirri, already white
and luminous with full daylight, and from them
drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging
to the rosy-violet granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged
the whole; then we condescended to breakfast.