When the Logs Come Down
T was April, and the time of freshet, when
"Again the last thin ice had gone
To join the swinging sea."
After the ice was all away the river had risen rapidly, flooding the intervale meadows, till in some places the banks, deep under water, were marked only by the tops of the alder and willow bushes, and by a line of elms growing, apparently, in the middle of a lake. Behind these elms the water was as still as a lake; but in front of them it rushed in heavy swirls, swaying the alders and willows, and boiling with swish and gurgle around the resolutely opposing trunks.
Above the swollen flood of water,—the hurried retreat of the last snow from a thousand forest valleys converging around the river's far-off source,—washed softly the benign and illimitable flood of the April air. This air seemed to carry with reluctance a certain fluctuating chill, caught from the icy water. But in the main its burden was the breath of willows catkin and sprouting grass and the first shy bloom on the open edges of the uplands. It was the characteristic smell of the northern spring, tender and elusive, yet keenly penetrating. If gems had perfumes, just so might the opal smell.
Besides the fragrance and the faint chill, the air carried an April music, a confusion of delicate sounds that seemed striving to weave a tissue of light melody over the steady, muffled murmur of the freshet. In this melody the ear could differentiate certain notes,—the hum of bees and flies in the willow bloom, the staccato chirr, chirr of the blackbirds in the elm-tops, the vibrant yet liquid kong-kla-lee of the redwings in the alders, the intermittent ecstasy of a stray song-sparrow, the occasional long flute-call of a yellowhammer across the flood, and, once in awhile, a sudden clamour of crows, a jangle of irrelevant, broken chords. From time to time, as if at points in a great rhythm too wide for the ear to grasp, all these sounds would cease for a second or two, leaving the murmur of the flood strangely conspicuous.
The colours of the world of freshet were as delicately thrilling as its scents and sounds. The veiled blue pallor of the sky and the milky, blue-gray pallor of the water served as neutral background to innumerable thin washes and stains of tint. Over the alders a bloom of lavender and faint russet, over the willows a lacing of pale yellow, over the maples a veiling of rose-pink, over the open patches on the uplands a mist that hinted of green, and over the further hills of the forest, broad, smoky smudges of indigo. Here and there, just above the reach of the freshet, a pine or spruce interrupted the picture emphatically with an intrusion of firm green-black.
Into this opalescent scene, some days before the freshet reached its height, the logs began to come down. In the upper country every tributary stream was pouring them out in shoals,—heavy, blind, butting, and blundering shoals,—to be carried by the great river down to the booms and saws above its mouth. Some, caught in eddies, were thrust aside up the bank to lie and slowly rot among the living trees. But most, darting and wallowing through mad rapids, or shooting falls, or whirling and circling dully down the more tranquil reaches of the tide, made shift to accomplish their voyage. They would blacken the broad river for acres at a time; and then again straggle along singly, or by twos and threes. It was a good run of logs and the scattered dwellers along the river forgave the unusual excesses of the freshet, because to them it was chiefly important that all the logs of the winter's chopping should be got out.
On a single log, at a most daunting distance from either shore, came voyaging a lonely and bedraggled little traveller. This particular red squirrel had been chattering gaily in the top of an old tree on the river-bank, when misfortune took him unawares. The tree was on a bluff just where a small but very turbulent and overswollen stream flowed in. The flood had stealthily undermined the bluff. Suddenly the squirrel had felt the tree sway ominously beneath him. He had leaped for safety, but too late! The whole bank had melted into the current. By great luck, the squirrel had managed to swim to a passing log. Breathless and all but drowned, he had clambered upon it. Before he could recover his wits enough to make a venture for shore, the vehement lesser stream had swept his log clean out into mid-channel. Though a bold enough swimmer, he had seen that he could not face that boiling tide with any hope of success; so he had clung to his unstable refuge and waited upon fate.