Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

To-day of South Moluncus not much more than the thresholds remains, the whole village having been wiped out by fire. But the glory of the place had departed long since. The railroad which brings civilization and prosperity to some places takes it away from others; and Mattawamkeag and Kingman thrive, while South Moluncus and other once busy little centers in the virgin forest along the old Patten road are like the cities of old Greece, but memories and ash heaps. The porcupine noses unmolested in many a cellar along the narrow way, the deer browse undisturbed on the apple trees, and over the once prosperous farms passes the resistless, majestic march of the forest.

It cannot subdue that thin gray line of road, because the hand of man is set to the keeping of it open; but it crowds to the wheelruts, and in places where the pitch is steep and later builders have deviated from the straight line and made a curve so that the hill might be climbed more easily, it has swooped upon this untraveled bit and made forest of it again with amazing celerity.

That is the one astounding thing in this whole region of northern Maine,—the regenerative power of the forest. What could stand before the surgent growth of its young trees? Men with axes have been hacking at the giants of the wood up here for two centuries and more. The goliaths have been laid low indeed, yet for one tree that stood on a given space along the hillsides and in the valleys of Number One a century ago five stand to-day.

They are giants no more, it is true, but they are splendid trees; and just as the Liliputians might prevail where Gulliver was bound, so these trees hold their own against man and even press in on his clearings and wipe them out. There must be many more lumbermen with axes along the Macwahoc, the Moluncus, and the Mattawamkeag before this beautiful region will fail of its forest.

Over on the ridge, some miles to the westward of the Macwahoc-Kingman road, stands a sole survivor of the old-time pumpkin pines. Forty and fifty feet from the earth toward its limbs the birches and beeches lift whispering leaves. Timber and cat-spruce and resinous fir spire higher yet and fling incense toward him. Sixty and seventy feet they reach, growing tenuous to the tip of nothingness, yet the stately column of his trunk soars half a hundred feet beyond their tops, lonely and unapproachable.

It was to forests of such trees as these that our great-grandfathers brought their axes,—a forest that we unlucky moderns may see here in our dreams only. We are fortunate in having the stumps left, for they still stand along the Moluncus in much the same form that they stood when the lumberman’s axe was yet pitchy with their chips. The roots are still sound wood, and it may be another half-century before they decay and add to the richness of the dense forest mold about them.

The stumps, five or six feet in diameter, and often as high as your head, showing in what depth of snow our ancestors worked at their logging, hold their shape in many instances. Around the base is a circular ring of dark rich mold which was once the bark on the stump. This has in every case fallen off and crumbled to humus, leaving the heart-wood exposed. Mosses gray and green cling to this and cover it, and because it retains its shape you might almost think it sound, but a kick or a stab with your walking-stick will prove the opposite. It is but punk, standing in the breathless, windless silence of the wood, mute monument to a glory that is departed, waiting itself to pass on at a touch.

What the glory and solemnity of the Maine forest must have been when these giants were the columns to the temple of the woods we can but dream. In the dense shade of their dark, interlocking boughs no deciduous growth could thrive, and their own lower branches died for lack of sunlight and passed in time, leaving behind no scars to mar the splendid columns that rose fifty or sixty feet clear without knob or limb.

Out of these lofty, silent spaces must have stepped the tall gods of the red men, nor can one imagine the Indians themselves traversing them in other than silent reverence. Nor yet can we of a stronger race stand among their moss-grown stumps to-day without feeling the worshipful awe of the forest strong upon us. The gods are gone indeed, but the demigods remain. The spruces and firs, foster children of the great pines, stand close-set upon the ground that they once occupied and rear again the temple toward heaven in pinnacles and spires where once were darkly-vaulted domes.

You may worship here still, as I feel that you might have worshiped under the great pines, and I can but feel, too, that among the firs the wood gods are nearer and more gently kind than they may have been among the elder trees. The giant on the ridge, looming so high in cold reserve, seems too lonely and far away for human companionship. The spruces and firs are your friends, while yet the deep wood which they make loses no whit of its solemn nobility.