The precious light was fading, and we had yet more than half the magic circle of the shore to round. As we passed out into the pond again a flock of roosting blackbirds whirred noisily from the “pucker-brush,” or sweet-gale bushes, frightened by the squeal of the bushes against the sides of the canoe; and hardly had their whirring ceased when, ahead of me, his head up, his splendid antlers tipped with fire, stood a magnificent buck. He had heard the birds, or had scented us, and, whirling in his tracks, curiosity, defiance, and alarm in every line of his tense, tawny body, stood for one eternal instant in my eye, when, shaking off his amazement, he turned and, bounding over the sweet-gale and alders, went crashing into the swamp.
I had neither camera nor gun; but, better than both, I had eyes—not such good eyes as John Eastman’s, for he could see in the dark—but mine with my spectacles were better than a camera; for mine are a moving-picture theater—screen, film, machine, and camera, all behind my spectacles, and this glorious creature for the picture, with the dark hills beyond, the meadowy margin of the pond in the foreground, and over the buck, and the pond, and the dark green hills, and over me a twilight that never was nor ever can be thrown upon a screen!
I had come into the wilds of Maine without so much as a fish-line—though I have fished months of my life away, and am not unwilling to fish away a considerable portion of whatever time may still be left me. But am I not able, in these later days, to spend my time “in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than, these,—employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of Nature!... Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success!... Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”
Thoreau did not teach me that truth, for every lover of life discovers it himself; but how long before me it was that he found it out, and how many other things besides it he found out here in the big woods! Three-quarters of a century ago he camped on Katahdin, and on Chesuncook, and down the Allegash; but now he camps wherever a tent is pitched or a fire is lighted in the woods of Maine. His name is on the tongue of every forest tree, and on every water; and over every carry at twilight may be seen his gray canoe and Indian guide.
And I wonder, a century hence, who will camp here where I am camping, and here discover again the woods of Maine? For the native shall return. And as “every creature is better alive than dead, man and moose and pine tree”; and as “he who understands it aright will rather preserve his life than destroy it” so shall he seek his healing here.
The light had gone out of the sky. It was after nine o’clock. A deep purple had flowed in and filled the basin of the pond, thickening about its margins till nothing but the long chalk-marks of the birches showed double along the shore. The high, inverted cone of Spencer stood just in front of the canoe as we headed out across the pond toward the camp, its shadow and its substance only faint suggestions now, for all things had turned to shadow, the solid substance of the day having been dissolved in this purple flood and poured into the beaker of the night. A moose “barked” off on a marshy point near the dam behind us; a loon went laughing over, shaking the hollow sides of Spencer and all the echoing walls of the woods with his weird and mirthless cry. Against the black base of the mountain a faint bluish cloud appeared—the smoke of our camp-fire that, slowly sinking through the heavy air, spread out to meet us over the hushed and sleeping pond.
CHAPTER VIII
WOODCHUCK LODGE AND LITERATURE