KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT.
CHAPTER IV.
UMBAGOG.
Rain ends, as even Noah and the Arkites discovered. The new sensation of tickling frogs could entertain us for one day; bounteous Nature provided other novelties for the next. We were at the Umbagog chain of lakes, and while it rained the damster had purveyed us a boat and crew. At sunrise he despatched us on our voyage. We launched upon the Androscoggin, in a bateau of the old Canadian type. Such light, clincher-built, high-nosed, flat-bottomed boats are in use wherever the fur-traders are or have been. Just such boats navigate the Saskatchawan of the North, or Frazer's River of the Northwest; and in a larger counterpart of our Androscoggin bark I had three years before floated down the magnificent Columbia to Vancouver, bedded on bales of beaver-skins.
As soon as sunrise wrote itself in shadows over the sparkling water, as soon as through the river-side belt of gnarled arbor-vitae sunbeams flickered, we pushed off, rowed up-stream by a pair of stout lumbermen. The river was a beautiful way, admitting us into the penetralia of virgin forests. It was not a rude wilderness: all that Northern woods have of foliage, verdurous, slender, delicate, tremulous, overhung our shadowy path, dense as the vines that drape a tropic stream. Every giant tree, every one of the Pinus oligarchy, had been lumbered away: refined sylvan beauty remained. The dam checked the river's turbulence, making it slow and mirror-like. It merited a more melodious name than harsh Androscoggin.
Five miles of such enchanting voyage brought us to Lake Umbagog. Whiff's of mist had met us in the outlet. Presently we opened chaos, and chaos shut in upon us. There was no Umbagog to be seen,—nothing but a few yards of gray water and a world of gray vapor. Therefore I cannot criticize, nor insult, nor compliment Umbagog. Let us deem it beautiful. The sun tried at the fog, to lift it with leverage of his early level beams. Failing in this attempt to stir and heave away the mass, he climbed, and began to use his beams as wedges, driving them down more perpendicularly. Whenever this industrious craftsman made a successful split, the fog gaped, and we could see for a moment, indefinitely, an expanse of water, hedged with gloomy forest, and owning for its dominant height a wild mountain, Aziscohos, or, briefer, Esquihos.
But the fog was still too dense to be riven by slanting sunbeams. It closed again in solider phalanx. Our gray cell shut close about us. Esquihos and the distance became nowhere. In fact, ourselves would have been nowhere, except that a sluggish damp wind puffed sometimes, and steering into this we could guide our way within a few points of our course.
Any traveller knows that it is no very crushing disappointment not to see what he came to see. Outside sights give something, but inside joys are independent. We enjoyed our dim damp voyage heartily, on that wide loneliness. Nor were our shouts and laughter the only sounds. Loons would sometimes wail to us, as they dived, black dots in the mist. Then we would wait for their bulbous reappearance, and let fly the futile shot with its muffled report,—missing, of course.
No being has ever shot a loon, though several have legends of some one who has. Sound has no power to express a profounder emotion of utter loneliness than the loon's cry. Standing in piny darkness on the lake's bank, or floating in dimness of mist or glimmer of twilight on its surface, you hear this wailing note, and all possibility of human tenancy by the shore or human voyaging is annihilated. You can fancy no response to this signal of solitude disturbed, and again it comes sadly over the water, the despairing plaint of some companionless and incomplete existence, exiled from happiness it has never known, and conscious only of blank and utter want. Loon-skins have a commercial value; so it is reported. The Barabinzians of Siberia, a nation "up beyond the River Ob," tan them into water-proof paletots or aquascutums. How they catch their loon, before they skin their loon, is one of the mysteries of that unknown realm.
Og, Gog, Magog, Memphremagog, all agog, Umbagog,—certainly the American Indians were the Lost Tribes, and conserved the old familiar syllables in their new home.