Canoeing in the wilderness

by Henry David Thoreau

After this rough walking in the dark woods it was an agreeable change to glide down the rapid river in the canoe once more. This river, though still very swift, was almost perfectly smooth here, and showed a very visible declivity, a regularly inclined plane, for several miles, like a mirror set a little aslant, on which we coasted down. It was very exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling, the coasting down this inclined mirror between two evergreen forests edged with lofty dead white pines, sometimes slanted half-way over the stream. I saw some monsters there, nearly destitute of branches, and scarcely diminishing in diameter for eighty or ninety feet.

As we were thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words, “Daniel Webster, great lawyer,” apparently reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in Boston at what he supposed was his boarding-house. He had no business with him but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. It was on the day after Webster delivered his Bunker Hill oration. The first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. The next time he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. He thought that if he had come to see Indians they would not have treated him so. At length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, “What do you want?” and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, “You’d better take care; if you try that I shall know what to do.”

He did not like him, and declared that all he said “was not worth talk about a musquash.”

Coming to falls and rapids, our easy progress was suddenly terminated. The Indian went alongshore to inspect the water, while we climbed over the rocks, picking berries. When the Indian came back, he remarked, “You got to walk; ver’ strong water.”

So, taking out his canoe, he launched it again below the falls, and was soon out of sight. At such times he would step into the canoe, take up his paddle, and start off, looking far down-stream as if absorbing all the intelligence of forest and stream into himself. We meanwhile scrambled along the shore with our packs, without any path. This was the last of our boating for the day.

The Indian now got along much faster than we, and waited for us from time to time. I found here the only cool spring that I drank at anywhere on this excursion, a little water filling a hollow in the sandy bank. It was a quite memorable event, and due to the elevation of the country, for wherever else we had been the water in the rivers and the streams emptying in was dead and warm, compared with that of a mountainous region. It was very bad walking along the shore over fallen and drifted trees and bushes, and rocks, from time to time swinging ourselves round over the water, or else taking to a gravel bar or going inland. At one place, the Indian being ahead, I was obliged to take off all my clothes in order to ford a small but deep stream emptying in, while my companion, who was inland, found a rude bridge, high up in the woods, and I saw no more of him for some time. I saw there very fresh moose tracks, and I passed one white pine log, lodged in the forest near the edge of the stream, which was quite five feet in diameter at the butt.

Shortly after this I overtook the Indian at the edge of some burnt land, which extended three or four miles at least, beginning about three miles above Second Lake, which we were expecting to reach that night. This burnt region was still more rocky than before, but, though comparatively open, we could not yet see the lake. Not having seen my companion for some time, I climbed with the Indian a high rock on the edge of the river forming a narrow ridge only a foot or two wide at top, in order to look for him. After calling many times I at length heard him answer from a considerable distance inland, he having taken a trail which led off from the river, and being now in search of the river again. Seeing a much higher rock of the same character about one third of a mile farther down-stream, I proceeded toward it through the burnt land, in order to look for the lake from its summit, and hallooing all the while that my companion might join me on the way.

Before we came together I noticed where a moose, which possibly I had scared by my shouting, had apparently just run along a large rotten trunk of a pine, which made a bridge thirty or forty feet long over a hollow, as convenient for him as for me. The tracks were as large as those of an ox, but an ox could not have crossed there. This burnt land was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. Judging by the weeds and sprouts, it appeared to have been burnt about two years before. It was covered with charred trunks, either prostrate or standing, which crocked our clothes and hands. Great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt without, or burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or forty feet high. The fire had run up inside, as in a chimney, leaving the sapwood. There were great fields of fireweed, which presented masses of pink. Intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry bushes.

Having crossed a second rocky ridge, when I was beginning to ascend the third, the Indian, whom I had left on the shore, beckoned to me to come to him, but I made sign that I would first ascend the rock before me. My companion accompanied me to the top.

There was a remarkable series of these great rock-waves revealed by the burning; breakers, as it were. No wonder that the river that found its way through them was rapid and obstructed by falls. We could see the lake over the woods, and that the river made an abrupt turn southward around the end of the cliff on which we stood, and that there was an important fall in it a short distance below us. I could see the canoe a hundred rods behind, but now on the opposite shore, and supposed that the Indian had concluded to take out and carry round some bad rapids on that side, but after waiting a while I could still see nothing of him, and I began to suspect that he had gone inland to look for the lake from some hilltop on that side. This proved to be the case, for after I had started to return to the canoe I heard a faint halloo, and descried him on the top of a distant rocky hill. I began to return along the ridge toward the angle in the river. My companion inquired where I was going; to which I answered that I was going far enough back to communicate with the Indian.