Toward the close of a dreamy, tranquil July day, a day made impressive beyond the possible comprehension of a dweller in civilization by its sun having risen for us over the unbroken wilderness of the Adirondack, a mountain-land in each of whose deep valleys lies a blue lake, we, a party of hunters and recreation-seekers, six beside our guides, lay on the fir-bough-cushioned floor of our dark camp, passing away the little remnant of what had been a day of rest to our guides and of delicious idleness to ourselves. The camp was built on the bold shore of a lake which yet wants a name worthy its beauty, but which we always, for want of such a one, call by that which its white discoverer left it,—Tupper's Lake,—whose waters, the untremulous mirror of the forests and mountains around and the sky above, gleamed to us only in blue fragments through the interstices of the leafy veil that intervened. The forest is unbroken to the water's edge, and even out over the water itself it stretches its firs and cedars, gray and moss-draped, with here and there a moisture-loving white-birch, so that from the very shore one sees only suggestive bits of distance and sky; and from where we were lying, sky, hills, and the water below were all blue alike, and undistinguishable alike, glimpses of a world of sunlight, which the grateful shadow we lay in made delicious to the thought. We were sheltered right woodsman-like;—our little house of fresh-peeled bark of spruces, twelve feet by nine, open only to the east, on which side lay the lake, shielded us from wind and rain, and the huge trees shut around us so closely that no eye could pierce a pistol-shot into their glades. There were blue-jays all about us, making the woods ring with their querulous cries, and a single fish-hawk screamed from the blue overhead, as he sailed round and round, watching the chances of a supper in the lake. Between us and the water's edge, and a little to one side of the path we had bushed out to the shore, was the tent of the guides, and there they lay asleep, except one who was rubbing up his "man's" rifle, which had been forgotten the night before when we came in from the hunt, and so had gathered rust.
Three of our party were sleeping, and the others talked quietly and low, desultorily, as if the drowsiness had half conquered us too. The conversation had rambled round from a discussion on the respective merits of the Sharp's and the Kentucky rifles (consequent on a trial of skill and rifles which we had had after dinner) to Spiritualism,—led to this last topic by my relation of some singular experiences I had met in the way of presentiments and what seemed almost like second-sight, during a three-months' sojourn in the woods several summers before. There is something wonderfully exciting to the imagination in the wilderness, after the first impression of monotony and lonesomeness has passed away and there comes the necessity to animate this so vacant world with something. And so the pines lift themselves grimly against the twilight sky, and the moanings of the woods become full of meaning and mystery. Living, therefore, summer after summer, as I had done, in the wilderness, until there is no place in the world which seems so much like a home to me as a bark camp in the Adirondack, I had come to be what most people would call morbid, but what I felt to be only sensitive to the things around, which we never see, but to which we all at times pay the deference of a tremor of inexplicable fear, a quicker and less deeply drawn breath, an involuntary turning of the head to see something which we know we shall not see, yet are glad to find that we do not,—all which things we laugh at as childish when they have passed, yet tremble at as readily when they come again. J., who was both poet and philosopher, singularly clear and cold in his analyses, and at the same time of so great imaginative power that he could set his creations at work and then look on and reason out the law of their working as though they were not his, had wonders to tell which always passed mine by a degree; his experiences were more various and marvellous than mine, yet he had a reason for everything, to which I was compelled to defer without being convinced. "Yes," said he, finally knocking out the ashes from his meerschaum, as we rose, at the Doctor's suggestion, to take a row out on the lake while the sun was setting,—"Yes, I believe in your kind of a 'spiritual world,'—but that it is purely subjective."
I was silenced in a moment;—this single sentence, spoken like the expression of the experience of a lifetime, produced an effect which all his logic could not. He had rubbed some talismanic opal, pronouncing the spirit-compelling sentence engraved thereon, and a new world of doubts and mysteries, marvels and revelations burst on me. One phase of existence, which had been hitherto a reality to me, melted away into the thinness of an uncompleted dream; but as it melted away, there appeared behind it a whole universe, of which I had never before dreamed. I had puzzled my brains over the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and found only words; now I grasped and comprehended the round of the thing. I looked through the full range of human cognitions, and found, from beginning to end, a proclamation of the presence of that arch-magician, Imagination. I had said to myself,—"The universe is subjective to Deity, objective to me; but if I am his image, what is that part of me which corresponds to the Creator in Him?" Here I found myself, at last, the creator of a universe of unsubstantialities, all of the stuff that dreams are made of, and all alike unconsciously evoked, whether they were the dreams of sleep or the hauntings of waking hours. I grew bewildered as the thought loomed up in its eternal significance, and a thousand facts and phenomena, which had been standing in the darkness around my little circle of vision, burst into light and recognition, as though they had been waiting beyond the outer verge for the magic words. J. had spoken them.
Silent, almost for the moment unconscious of external things, in the intense exaltation of thought and feeling, I walked down to the shore. Taking the lightest and fleetest of our boats, we pushed off on the perfectly tranquil water. There was no flaw in the mirror which gave us a duplicated world. Line for line, tint for tint, the noble mountain that lifts itself at the east, robed in primeval forest to its very summit, and now suffused with rosy light from the sun, already hidden from us by a low ridge in the west, was reproduced in the void below us. The shadow of the western ridge began to climb the opposite bluffs of the lake shore. We pulled well out into the lake and lay on our oars. If anything was said, I do not remember it. I was as one who had just heard words from the dead, and hears as prattle all the sounds of common life. My eyes, my ears, were opened anew to Nature, and it seemed even as if some new sense had been given me. I felt, as I never felt before, the cool gloom of the shadow creep up, ridge after ridge, towards the solitary peak, irresistibly and triumphantly encroaching on the light, which fought back towards the summit, where it must yield at last. It drew back over ravines and gorges, over the wildernesses of unbroken firs which covered all the upper portion of the mountain, deepening its rose-tint and gaining in intensity what it lost in expanse,—diminished to a handbreadth, to a point, and, flickering an instant, went out, leaving in the whole range of vision no speck of sunlight to relieve the wilderness of shadowy gloom. I had come under a spell,—for, often as I had seen the sun set in the mountains and over the lakes, I had never before felt as I now felt, that I was a part in the landscape, and that it was something more to me than rocks and trees. The sunlight had died on it. J. took up the oars and our silently-moving boat broke the glassy surface again. All around us no distinction was visible between the landscape above and that below, no water-line could be found; and to the west, where the sky was still glowing and golden, with faint bands of crimson cirrus swept across the deep and tremulous blue, growing purple as the sun sank lower, we could distinguish nothing in the landscape. Neither sound nor motion of animate or inanimate thing disturbed the scene, save that of the oars, with the long lines of blue which ran off from the wake of the boat into the mystery closing behind us. A rifle-shot rang out from the landing and rolled in multitudinous echoes around the lake, dying away in faintest thunders and murmurings from the ravines on the side of the mountain. It was the call to supper, and we pulled back to the light of the fire, which was now glimmering through the trees from the front of the camp.
Supper over, the smokers lighted their pipes and a rambling conversation began on the sights and sounds of the day. For my own part, unable to quiet the uneasy questioning which possessed me, I wandered down to the shore and took a seat in the stern of one of the boats, which, hauled part of their length upon the sandy beach, reached out some distance among the lily-pads which covered the shallow water, and whose folded flowers dotted the surface, the white points alone visible. The uneasy question still stirred within me; and now, looking towards the northwest, where the sky yet glowed faintly with twilight, a long line of pines, gaunt and humanesque, as no tree but our northern white-pine is, was relieved in massy blackness against the golden gray, like a long procession of giants. They were in groups of two and three, with now and then an isolated one, stretching along the horizon, losing themselves in the gloom of the mountains at the north. The weirdness of the scene caught my excited imagination in an instant, and I became conscious of two mental phenomena. The first was an impression of motion in the trees, which, whimsical as it was, I had not the slightest power to dispel. I trembled from head to foot under the consciousness of this supernatural vitality. My rational faculties were as clear as ever they had been, and I understood perfectly that the semblance of motion was owing to two characteristics of the white-pine, namely,—that it follows the shores of the lakes in lines, rarely growing back at any distance from the water, except when it follows, in the same orderly arrangement, the rocky ridges,—and that, from its height above all other forest-trees, it catches the full force of the prevalent winds, which here are from the west, and consequently leans slightly to the east, much as a person leans in walking. These traits of the tree explained entirely the phenomenon; yet the knowledge of them had not the slightest effect to undeceive my imagination. I was awe-struck, as though the phantoms of some antediluvian race had arisen from the valleys of the Adirondack and were marching in silence to their old fanes on the mountain-tops. I cowered in the boat under an absolute chill of nervous apprehension.—The second phenomenon was, that I heard mentally a voice which said distinctly these words,-"The procession of the Anakim!"—and at the same time I became conscious of some disembodied spiritual being standing near me, as we are sometimes aware of the presence of a friend without having seen him. Every one accustomed to solitary thought has probably recognized this kind of mental action, and speculated on the strange duality of Nature implied in it. The spiritualists call it "impressional communication," and abandon themselves to its vagaries in the belief that it is really the speech of angels; men of thought find in it a mystery of mental organization, and avail themselves of it under the direction of their reason. I at present speculated with the philosophers; but my imagination, siding with the spiritualists, assured me that some one spoke to me, and reason was silenced. I sat still as long as I could endure it, alone, and then crept back, trembling, to the camp,—feeling quiet only when surrounded by the rest of the party.
My attendant dæmon did not leave me, I found; for now I heard the question asked, half-tauntingly,—"Subjective or objective?"
I asked myself, in reply,—"Am I mad or sane?"
"Quite sane, but with your eyes opened to something new!" was the instantaneous reply.
On such expeditions, men get back to the primitive usages and conditions of humanity. We had arisen at daybreak; darkness brought the disposition to rest. We arranged ourselves side by side on the couch of balsam and cedar boughs which the guides had spread on the ground of the camp, our feet to the fire, and all but myself soon slept. I lay a long time, excited, looking out through the open front of the camp at the stars which shone in through the trees, and even they seemed partakers of my new state of existence, and twinkled consciously and confidentially, as to one who shared the secret of their own existence and purposes. The pine-trees overhead had an added tone in their meanings, and indeed everything, as I regarded it, seemed to manifest a new life, to become identified with me: Nature and I had all things in common. I slept, at length,—a strange kind of sleep; for when the guides awoke me, in the full daylight, I was conscious of some one having talked with me through the night.
In broad day, with my companions, and in motion, the influences of the previous evening seemed to withdraw themselves to a remote distance,—yet I was aware of their awaiting me when I should be unoccupied. The day was as brilliant, as tranquil as its predecessor, and the council decided that it should be devoted to a "drive," for we had eaten the last of our venison for breakfast. The party were assigned their places at those points of the lake where the deer would be most likely to take the water, while my guide, Steve M——, and myself went up Bog River, to start him. The river, a dark, sluggish stream, about fifty feet wide, the channel by which the Mud Lakes and Little Tupper's Lake, with its connected lakes and ponds, empty into Tupper's Lake, is a favorite feeding-ground with the deer, whose breakfast is made on the leaves of the Nuphar lutea which edge the stream. We surprised one, swimming around amongst the leaves, snatching here and there the choicest of them, and when he turned to go out and rose in the water, as his feet touched bottom, I gave him a ball without fatal effect, and landing, we put Carlo on the track, which was marked by occasional drops and clots of blood, and hearing him well off into the woods, and in that furious and deep bay which indicates close pursuit, we went back to our boat and paddled upstream to a run-way Steve knew of, where the deer sometimes crossed the river. We pushed the boat into the overhanging alders which fringe the banks, leaning out into and over the water, and listened to the far-off bay of the hound. It died away and was entirely lost for a few minutes, and then came into hearing from the nearer side of the ridge, which lay back from the river a hundred rods or so, and I cocked my rifle while Steve silently pushed the boat out of the bushes, ready for a start, if the deer should "water." The baying receded again, and this time in the direction of the lake. The blood we had found on the trail was the bright, red, frothy blood which showed that the ball had passed through the lungs, and, as we knew that the deer would not run long before watering, we were sure that this would be his last turn and that he was making in earnest for the lake, where some of the boats would certainly catch him.