STORIES OF THE TRAIL
DAWN comes to the big woods, a winter dawn, fair and wondrous still. It finds our little “Commoosie” nestled among the evergreens, its back to a protecting ledge, its open front to the lake. We are half asleep after restful hours of sleeping when a persistent hammering floats through our dreams and rouses us as the day is breaking.
The hammering comes from the birds’ table, now bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, where a woodpecker is impatiently calling for his daily fare. Chickadees repeat his call softly, and a pine grosbeak, perched on a projecting roof pole, bends his head to look into the “Commoosie” with its two lazy sleepers. Outside, the snow is four feet deep; the mercury huddles below the zero mark; the dead fire sends a thin column of smoke straight up into air that sparkles with frost as the light runs in through the evergreens. It is early spring by the almanac, but the world we look on gives no sign of it.
“Hello!” says Bob, poking a head out of his sleeping bag as a louder reveille rattles on the table. “Your friends out there want their breakfast.”
“Well, breakfast is a good thing,” I answer, “and hospitality is here the chief of virtues. Suppose you stir the fire and cook a bite for them. Trout, bacon, toast and coffee will just suit that woodpecker, and I’ll be content with whatever he leaves.” Then we crawl forth to rub our faces with snow, a tribute to civilization which has the effect of shocking sleep out of us, and take a look at the woods, the sky, the lake all white and still under its soft mantle.
Oh, but it is good to be alive in such an hour; good to be awakened by birds that brave the northern winter cheerfully; good to breathe deep of this keen air that blows over miles of spruce and balsam, uncontaminated by any smell of man, sniffed only by the wild things! So our day begins naturally with joy, as a day should begin which promises good hunting.
An hour later we say good-by and good luck on the lake shore, my friend heading northeast, and I due south, each with an ample wilderness to himself. Bob swings off in front of a moose sled, to which is strapped a camera and other duffle. While shooling through the woods a few days ago we discovered a colony of beaver in a beautiful spot, with a playground of open water in front of their lodges; now he will arrange a booth, a string, and other mysteries of his craft, and perhaps get a rare winter picture of the animals. Meanwhile I shall get many pictures of the kind that a man carries with him forever, but cannot show; for I travel light, with both hands free, having no other object than to follow any inviting trail wherever it may lead. There are stories with every one of these pictures—but first an explanation.
Since I am hunting alone to-day, bagging as game any woodsy impression of the trail, the personal pronouns of this narrative will become sadly jumbled before the day is done; and especially will the familiar “you” or convenient “we” replace the obtrusive “I.” Such pronouns are always used vaguely by a solitary man, for two reasons: first, because the woods discourage all self-assertion, telling one through his natural instincts to go softly, to merge himself bodily in his environment, to be in spiritual harmony with his visible or invisible audience; and second, because every wilderness voyageur, as a protection against the overwhelming silence, has the habit of talking to that other self, at once friendly and critical, who goes with him over every lonely way for good company.
That last is natural enough, and wholesome so long as one does not talk aloud or address that other self as a stranger. When a man in the woods suddenly hears the sound of his own voice, or catches himself asking that other, “Who are you?” it is a bad sign. It means that he has been alone too much, that solitude is getting the best of him, that he needs the medicine of human society. And now for the trail!