This low pond-bank moraine with its immemorial trail leads all along the north side of the pond, skirting the shoreward edge of the great bog nicely. It takes you through the Talbot plains where tan-brown levels stretch far to the northward, seeming to shrink suddenly back from the overhanging bulk of Great Blue Hill, and it leads again into the tall oak woods, where later the warbling vireos will swing in the topmost branches and cheer the solemn arches with their gentle carols. By-and-by the bog ends and the path marks the dividing line between the bulrushes, marsh grass, bog-hobble wickets, and mingled débris of last summer’s thorough wort, and joepye weed, and marsh St. John’s-wort on the one hand, and the soft pinky grays of the wood on the other.
The climbing sun shines in here fervently, and the clear waters lap on the sand and croon among the water weeds with all the semblance of summer. No wonder the wild ducks linger long. The pond is full of them,—black ducks and sheldrake,—quacking and whistling back and forth, sometimes forty of them in the air at once, and taking no notice of the wanderer on the bank. It seems to be their jubilee day as well as that of the birds on shore.
Thus by way of the long trail teeming with spring life I reach the enchanted country of the wood roads. Here are no pastures reclaimed, no ancient cellar holes to show the path of the pioneer. Woodland it was when the first Englishman came to Cape Cod; woodland it remains to-day. Somewhere in its depths the barred owls are nesting, and I hear the shrill pæan of a hawk as he harries the distant hillside. But for the most part there is a gentle silence, a dignified quiet that befits the solitude. It is the hush of the elder years dwelling in places somewhat man-harried indeed, but never by man possessed. In this country to the east of Ponkapog Pond lingered longest the moose and bear. The fox makes it his home and his hunting-ground still; I find his trail still warm, and in summer you should tread with care, for an occasional rattlesnake trails his slow length among the rocks. The most that man has ever done here is to shoot and chop trees. The echoes of axe and gun die away soon, the trees grow up again, and man’s only mark is the wood roads.
Roads in this world are supposed to lead from somewhere to somewhere else, but no suspicion of such definiteness of purpose can ever be attached to wood roads, unless you are willing to say that they lead from the land of humdrum to the country of romance. Sometimes, in following them, you unexpectedly come out on the highway, but far more often you have better luck, and the plain trail grows gently vague, shimmers away to nothing, and you find yourself, perhaps, in a beech grove, out of which is no path. You can hear the young trees titter at your embarrassment, but you cannot find the path that led you among them.
Perhaps in all your future wanderings you may not come upon that beech grove again, for the wood roads wind and interlace and play strange tricks on all outsiders. Particularly over in this region wood-lot owners sometimes lose their wood-lots, and are able to get track of them only after prolonged search, tumbling upon them then more by accident than wit. Sometimes a wood road innocently leads you round a hill and slyly slips you into itself again through a gap in the thicket. Thus, before you know it, you may have gone around the hill any number of times, as strangers get coursing in revolving doors in the entrances to city buildings and continue to revolve until rescued.
Nor can you tell where the most sedate and straightforward one which you can pick out will lead you, except that you know it will be continually through a land of delight, and that Eden is bound to be just ahead of you.
It is difficult to understand, though, in all seriousness, how these roads persist. Wood cut off over extensive areas grows up again in thirty or forty years and fills in the gap in the forest till no trace of it remains, yet the roads by which it was carted to the highway, leading once as directly as possible, seem still to have some subtle power of resistance whereby they are not overgrown, though they lose their directness. After a few years it seems as if, glad to be relieved of any responsibility, they took to strolling aimlessly about, meeting one another and separating again casually.
I never see a wood-cart coming out with a load, yet the road seems as definite in marking as it did a half-century ago. But that is one of the fascinations of the region. You take the same road as usual, and by it you come out at some strange and hitherto unheard-of garden of delight. It is like the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, where one story leads into another and you wander on with always a new climax just ahead of you.
Out of the great pudding-stone boulders of this region, of which you may find specimens as large as an ordinary dwelling-house standing in lonely dignity, you may see cunning workmen making soil for the nourishment of these forest trees. Here will be a round blot of yellow-gray lichen, perhaps a Parmelia conspersa, clinging to the smoothest surface of flint with ease and sending down its microscopic rhizoids into the tiniest crevice between the round pebble, which is the plum, and the slate which makes the body of the pudding.
On another part of the boulder you may find a slanting surface, where the parmelia’s work is already done. Its tiny root-organs have dissolved off and split away enough of the slate to loosen some tiny pebbles, which fall to the ground as gravel, leaving hollows in which dew and dead lichens make a soil for the roots of soft pads of mosses. Some of the boulders over here are like Western buttes, densely tenanted by these hardy cliff-dwellers, the many-footed rock lovers finding foothold where you would hardly think the lichens even would survive.