Within the waters of the lake there is abundant life. Years ago it was a famous trout pond, stocked perhaps by the Indians, but the malice of the white man spoiled it. A man who had a grudge against those who most enjoyed trout-fishing in the lake caught a pailful of horn-pout and turned them into the green waters. They multiplied, and now legions of them move their hideous bodies back and forth through the swaying weeds beneath its surface. They never grow large, but their numbers are appalling. Sometimes when, in a still summer evening, the surface of the lake is unruffled by wind, and myriads of small insects have fallen upon the water, the pout appear in countless multitudes, swimming so that their horns or tails show above the water.
The tadpoles also are extraordinarily numerous at some seasons, and they, too, have a way of coming to the top of the water and contemplating the upper world, to which they hope some day rightfully to attain. A sudden stamp of the foot upon the shore will cause hundreds of these floating polywogs to splash into foam the water over half the surface of the lake. The painted tortoise lives in the lake, but no other creature of his kind is found near it. In fact, I have never seen the spotted turtle in the Bearcamp valley. I once dug seventeen painted turtles out of one hole in the mud on the western edge of the lake, where they had crowded for some reason of their own.
Of all the many creatures which frequent the lonely lake, the big blue heron seems to be the most in sympathy with its shy silence and loneliness. He is its king, and by his name the lake is known.
FOLLOWING A LOST TRAIL.
Of the many roads which start northward from Bearcamp Water, every one is either warded off by the Sandwich range into the Saco or into the Pemigewasset valley, or else smothered in the dark forest-clad ravines between the mountain ridges. From Conway on the east to Campton and Thornton on the west, there is no rift in the mountain wall through which travel flows. There was a time, however, before the Civil War, when near the middle of the great barrier the human current found an outlet southward from the upper end of Swift River intervale to the Bearcamp Valley. Sitting by the fireside of a sturdy Albany farmer as the December moonlight gleamed upon the level snows of the intervale, I heard stories of the lumbermen’s journeys through those dark and narrow passes. Great spars and masts, the farmer said, had been hauled out of the valley under the frowning cliffs of Paugus, and carried safely to the level fields of Sandwich. Then there arose a storm such as old men know but once in a lifetime, and the passes were filled with tangled masses of wrecked forest. All the axes in Albany and Tamworth could not have cut a way through the snarl without many weeks of exhausting labor. So at least thought the lumbermen who attempted to pass the abattis raised by the storm. Years elapsed and the road became only a matter of vague tradition. Those who climbed the peak of Passaconaway or the lofty ledges of Paugus saw below them a panorama of ruin. Bleached bones of the great spruce forest lay there piled in magnificent confusion. Over the débris, springing from its midst, a dense growth of mountain ash, wild cherry, and hobble-bush made the chaos more chaotic. No trace of the lost trail was visible even to the most fanciful eye.
Between Paugus and Chocorua the hurricane had not done its worst work. There one could see four miles of narrow ravine reaching from the Tamworth fields directly northward to a steep ridge connecting Paugus with Chocorua at their northern slopes. On the other side of the barrier lay the Swift River intervale. If that ridge were out of the way, if it could be easily surmounted, or if a rift could be found in it, the journey of nearly thirty miles from the southern spurs of Paugus, round through Conway to the northern spurs, would be reduced to eight or nine miles. The people living at the upper end of Swift River valley, instead of having to travel sixteen miles to a post-office, doctor, minister, or store, could touch civilization by driving about eleven miles.
At half past four on the morning of Saturday, July 30, I drove rapidly away from my red-roofed cottage towards the southern foot of Paugus. Long days of parching heat had been brought to an end by a series of three heavy thunderstorms, which had drenched the country during the preceding evening. Nature had revived. The sky was bluer, the forest greener, the gold of the goldenrod more intense. Every particle of dust had been washed out of the air and off the many-tinted garments of the earth. For nearly a fortnight the mercury had been among the nineties as often as the clock struck noon. To face a cool breeze, to see everything sparkling with moisture, to have the air feel and appear thin and clear, was inspiring and exhilarating. To find the lost trail into the Swift River valley was now a matter of delightful interest.
At the southern foot of Paugus is a ruined mill and an old lumber camp. A good road leads thither from the highway, and the house at the point where the lumber road begins is the home of Nat. Berry, farmer, lumberman, hunter, trapper, surveyor, carpenter, and public-spirited citizen. I felt that if any man on the southern side of the mountains knew a way through them, that man was Berry. Two years before, while wandering over the ridges of Chocorua, I had been caught in one of Berry’s forty-pound steel bear traps. The springs of the trap were weak and it was deeply buried in the moss, so that before its cruel jaws had closed firmly upon my ankle, I thrust the stock of my gun between them and withdrew my foot. Berry’s greeting, as we drove up to his house, showed that he had not forgotten my adventure, for he shouted, “Come at last, have you, to let me cut off them ears? Can’t c’lect my bounty on you without ’em.” A few words told Berry of my errand, and he at once showed interest in the quest.
“Thirty-seven year ago,” he said, “when I was only twelve year old, a road was run through from this house to the back settlements. It was a winter road, but I recollect that a man and his wife drove over it in a pung. They went clean through. About fifteen year ago I went in where you are a-going, with a railroad surveyor, and he said there was only five hundred feet rising between here and the height of land. There used to be another road between Toadback and Passaconaway, but that’s all choked up now by the harricane. This road is between Toadback and Coroway, and I know that four miles of it is about as good going now as ever it was.”
It required little urging to induce Berry to join us, and our horse’s head was turned northward into the lumber road leading to the lost trail. As we drove away from fields, roads, and the surroundings of habitations, animal life grew less and less abundant, and plant life less varied. Around the farms robins, sparrows, and swallows are to be seen or heard at every hour in the day. Woodpeckers and chickadees abound in the orchards, and even hawks spend more time in sight of hen-yards than they do in the gloomy solitudes of the mountains. By the roadside goldenrod was in its glory, while St. John’s-wort was growing rusty. The pink of hardback and thistles large and small, the yellow of the mullein, the reds of fireweed, pasture lily, and the sumac fruit, the purple of vervain, early asters, and the persistent brunella, and the white of the exquisite dalibarda, of immortelles, arrowhead, and the graceful spiranthes in turn caught the eye as the wagon rolled by pasture and sandbank, meadow, copse, and swamp.