The dusk is now heavy in the sleeping woods; not a breath of air stirs; the silence is intense. I am listening for the bear, when suddenly comes a feeling that something is near or watching me. Where it is, what it is, I have absolutely no notion; but the sense-of-presence grows stronger, and I trust it because I have seldom known it to be wrong. I search the lumber road up and down, but there is nothing to be seen. I search the woods on both sides, slowly, minutely, but there is no sound. Then, as I turn to the jumper trail that comes winding down the hill behind me, a current of air drifts in; my nose begins to recognize a faint odor.
A few yards up the trail is a huge black object, an upturned tree with a mat of soil clinging to its roots. Yes, it is a root, surely; but there is something in its shadow. I watch it, bending slightly so as to get the outline against the sky; and there, clearly showing now above the root, are the antlers of a bull-moose. He is still as a rock, pointing ears and ungainly nose straight at me. Undoubtedly he was coming down the trail when he saw a motion in the road ahead, and froze in his tracks to find out about it. He knows now that he is seen, and that one of us must move. For a full minute we stare at each other; then he takes a nervous step, swings broadside to the trail, and turns his head for another look. Big as he is, not a sound marks his going; he takes a few springy, silent steps up the trail, and fades into the gloom of the big woods.
So I come to the canoe at last, and cross the pond and run the stream, which is now a veritable tunnel with a tattered ribbon of sky overhead. As I cross the big lake campward, the evening star is sparkling like a great jewel on the pointed tip of a spruce, which towers above his fellows on the crown of the western hills. Overhead passes a sound of hurrying wings; a loon calls far away, and again these wild sounds are as fragments of a mighty stillness. Under the gliding canoe the waters are quiet, as if in slumber; but in the distance you can hear them talking to the shore with a voice that is now a whisper, again a faint echo of music. On every side the woods come closer, as if to look upon their reflection in the inky mirror; and they seem to be waiting, to be listening. Over all this silent, expectant world some sublime presence, living but unseen, is brooding upon the mystery of life.
And at last I, too, begin to brood. For the first time in uncounted hours comes a touch of relaxation, a quieting of the alert senses, the well-done of a perfect day. I quote softly from Lanier:
“And now from the vast of the Lord shall the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men;
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?”
As I double the point toward which the canoe has long been heading, a light flashes cheerily out of the dark woods; the camp fire sends out its invitation, and a voice calls, “Welcome home!” Though my “good lonesome” is ended, and better things are waiting, I must still turn for a last look at the sleeping lake, to watch the ultimate glimmer of twilight fade and vanish over the western steeps.