Willis, walking ahead with his gun, soon startled us with its near report, adding a fine speckled cock to our prospective larder; erelong he shot another and still another. These fine birds were very plenty in the borders of the "great woods."
On reaching Clear Pond, we were obliged to say good-by to our team. The wagon could go no further; for here the more recent lumber road terminated, the trail beyond being older and much obstructed by fallen trees.
Then began the real labor of carrying our baskets. Addison and I led off with one basket and the ax; while Tom and Willis followed with the other. The girls came on at leisure, in the rear; they were seeing a great deal that was novel in the woods; and having but light loads, they could enjoy it better than we boys who were carrying the bushel baskets.
Going up the side of the wooded ridge, a pine marten was espied in full chase after a red squirrel, up and down the trunk of a spruce.
"What a specimen he would make to mount!" Addison exclaimed, and dropping his "ear" of our basket, unslung his gun and ran forward to get a shot; but the shy creature vanished in time to save its life, through the thick tops of the adjacent trees. Near the top of the ridge, he fired at a red-tailed hawk which had alighted on the top of a pine stub; the distance was too great, however, and the hawk sailed away placidly.
After crossing the ridge, the path led us through denser, darker woods. A large animal which Willis thought to be a bear, but Addison and Thomas deemed more likely to be a deer, was heard to run away through a copse of cedar, a little in advance of us. We passed some very large swamp elms here and several basswoods fully four feet in diameter.
At length, a few minutes before twelve o'clock, by the old silver watch (which Kate had brought from home to keep time for us during the trip) we came out at the "skedaddlers' fort," where we had planned to stop for lunch and make a pot of coffee. This was the first time I had heard of this old structure, thus singularly named. But Willis, Thomas and Kate knew its history; Addison and our girls had also heard accounts of it.
It stood in the midst of a little opening—now overgrown again—made by felling the great bass, hemlock, and spruce trees, of which its log walls were built. In length, it may have been forty feet, by about twenty-five in width. It was substantially roofed with logs and "splits" covered with gravel. There were little ports, six or eight inches square, at intervals in the walls, at a height of six or seven feet from the ground, and one heavy door, or gate, of hewn plank, five or six inches thick. The little brook in the valley flows beneath one corner of the building, ensuring water to those who may have dwelt within.
This log structure, suggestive both of warfare and refugee life, was a great puzzle to a party of city young men who not many years ago penetrated these forest solitudes, on a hunting excursion. They concluded that it was built at a time when defense against the Indians was necessary. A writer for a New York magazine, who seems to have stumbled on this old "block-house," as he calls it, also came to the conclusion that it was a relic of early border warfare.
It is nothing of the sort, however, and instead of being a hundred years old, it is less than fifty. The city visitors did not make proper allowance for the rapidity with which, in a damp, dense forest, everything made of wood becomes moss-grown and decays.