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14 This etext was produced by Jack Eden; wakerobin.org
THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME V
PEPACTON
PREFACE
I HAVE all the more pleasure in calling my book after the title of
the first chapter, "Pepacton," because this is the Indian name of
my native stream. In its watershed I was born and passed my youth,
and here on its banks my kindred sleep. Here, also, I have gathered
much of the harvest, poor though it be, that I have put in this and
in previous volumes of my writings.
The term "Pepacton" is said to mean "marriage of the waters;" and
with this significance it suits my purpose well, as this book is
also a union of many currents.
The Pepacton rises in a deep cleft or gorge in the mountains, the
scenery of which is of the wildest and ruggedest character. For a
mile or more there is barely room for the road and the creek at the
bottom of the chasm. On either hand the mountains, interrupted by
shelving, overhanging precipices, rise abruptly to a great height.
About half a century ago a pious Scotch family, just arrived in
this country, came through this gorge. One of the little boys,
gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so unlike in its
savage and inhuman aspects anything he had ever seen at home,
nestled close to his mother, and asked with bated breath, "Mither,
is there a God here?"
Yet the Pepacton is a placid current, especially in its upper
portions, where my youth fell; but all its tributaries are swift
mountain brooks fed by springs the best in the world. It drains a
high pastoral country lifted into long, round-backed hills and
rugged, wooded ranges by the subsiding impulse of the Catskill
range of mountains, and famous for its superior dairy and other
farm products. It is many long years since, with the restlessness
of youth, I broke away from the old ties amid those hills; but my
heart has always been there, and why should I not come back and
name one of my books for the old stream?
CONTENTS
I. PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE
II. SPRINGS
III. AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE
IV. NATURE AND THE POETS.
V. NOTES BY THE WAY
VI. FOOTPATHS....
VII. A BUNCH OF HERBS
VIII. WINTER PICTURES
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FRINGED GENTIAN
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
THE ASA GRAY SPRING.
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
KINGBIRD
From a drawing by L. A.
Fuertes
RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
IN THE ORCHARD
From a drawing by Charles
H. Woodbury
A MUSKRAT'S NEST
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
A FIELD PATH
From a photograph by
Clifton Johnson
PEPACTON
I
A SUMMER VOYAGE
WHEN one summer day I bethought me of a voyage down the east or
Pepacton branch of the Delaware, I seemed to want some excuse for
the start, some send-off, some preparation, to give the enterprise
genesis and head. This I found in building my own boat. It was a
happy thought. How else should I have got under way, how else
should I have raised the breeze? The boat-building warmed the
blood; it made the germ take; it whetted my appetite for the
voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to fortune,
like earning the right to your tools. In most enterprises the
temptation is always to begin too far along; we want to start where
somebody else leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an
impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before
they go a-fishing,--how they bring in the trout; and those hunters
who run their own bullets or make their own cartridges,-- the game
is already mortgaged to them.
When my boat was finished--and it was a very simple affair--I was
as eager as a boy to be off; I feared the river would all run by
before I could wet her bottom in it. This enthusiasm begat great
expectations of the trip. I should surely surprise Nature and win
some new secrets from her. I should glide down noiselessly upon her
and see what all those willow screens and baffling curves
concealed. As a fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to come at
the stream only at certain points: now the most private and
secluded retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every bend
and eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled in by
high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.
Whom shall one take with him when he goes a-courting Nature? This
is always a vital question. There are persons who will stand
between you and that which you seek: they obtrude themselves; they
monopolize your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half-
revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion a dog or a
boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys,--
transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless
quality that is akin to trees and growths and the inarticulate
forces of nature. With him you are alone, and yet have company; you
are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature
stream through him and around him; he is a good conductor of the
subtle fluid. The quality or qualification I refer to belongs to
most persons who spend their lives in the open air,--to soldiers,
hunters, fishers, laborers, and to artists and poets of the right
sort. How full of it, to choose an illustrious example, was such a
man as Walter Scott!
But no such person came in answer to my prayer, so I set out alone.
It was fit that I put my boat into the water at Arkville, but it
may seem a little incongruous that I should launch her into Dry
Brook; yet Dry Brook is here a fine large trout stream, and I soon
found its waters were wet enough for all practical purposes. The
Delaware is only one mile distant, and I chose this as the easiest
road from the station to it. A young farmer helped me carry the
boat to the water, but did not stay to see me off; only some calves
feeding alongshore witnessed my embarkation. It would have been a
godsend to boys, but there were no boys about. I stuck on a rift
before I had gone ten yards, and saw with misgiving the paint
transferred from the bottom of my little scow to the tops of the
stones thus early in the journey. But I was soon making fair
headway, and taking trout for my dinner as I floated along. My
first mishap was when I broke the second joint of my rod on a bass,
and the first serious impediment to my progress was when I
encountered the trunk of a prostrate elm bridging the stream within
a few inches of the surface. My rod mended and the elm cleared, I
anticipated better sailing when I should reach the Delaware itself;
but I found on this day and on subsequent days that the Delaware
has a way of dividing up that is very embarrassing to the
navigator. It is a stream of many minds: its waters cannot long
agree to go all in the same channel, and whichever branch I took I
was pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others. I was
constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have to dismount, or
running full tilt into willow banks, where I would lose my hat or
endanger my fishing-tackle. On the whole, the result of my first
day's voyaging was not encouraging. I made barely eight miles, and
my ardor was a good deal dampened, to say nothing about my
clothing. In mid-afternoon I went to a well-to-do-looking
farmhouse and got some milk, which I am certain the thrifty
housewife skimmed, for its blueness infected my spirits, and I went
into camp that night more than half persuaded to abandon the
enterprise in the morning. The loneliness of the river, too, unlike
that of the fields and woods, to which I was more accustomed,
oppressed me. In the woods, things are close to you, and you
touch them and seem to interchange something with them; but upon
the river, even though it be a narrow and shallow one like this,
you are more isolated, farther removed from the soil and its
attractions, and an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long,
unpeopled vistas ahead; the still, dark eddies; the endless
monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the unheeding rocks basking
like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a
solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some
point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or
standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the
mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as
you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on
either side, and hid the fields and the farmhouses and the road
that ran near by,--these things and others aided the skimmed milk
to cast a gloom over my spirits that argued ill for the success of
my undertaking. Those rubber boots, too, that parboiled my feet and
were clogs of lead about them,--whose spirits are elastic enough to
endure them? A malediction upon the head of him who invented them!
Take your old shoes, that will let the water in and let it out
again, rather than stand knee-deep all day in these extinguishers.
I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to the woods,
and profited by the change. In the woods I was at home again, and
the bed of hemlock boughs salved my spirits. A cold spring run came
down off the mountain, and beside it, underneath birches and
hemlocks, I improvised my hearthstone. In sleeping on the ground it
is a great advantage to have a back-log; it braces and supports
you, and it is a bedfellow that will not grumble when, in the
middle of the night, you crowd sharply up against it. It serves to
keep in the warmth, also. A heavy stone or other point DE
RÉSISTANCE at your feet is also a help. Or, better still, scoop out
a little place in the earth, a few inches deep, so as to admit your
body from your hips to your shoulders; you thus get an equal
bearing the whole length of you. I am told the Western hunters and
guides do this. On the same principle, the sand makes a good bed,
and the snow. You make a mould in which you fit nicely. My berth
that night was between two logs that the bark-peelers had stripped
ten or more years before. As they had left the bark there, and as
hemlock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one to
be grateful to them.
In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the night had tided
me over the bar that threatened to stay my progress. If I can steer
clear of skimmed milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of
fifty miles to Hancock with increasing pleasure.
When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns back again and again
to see what he has left. Surely, he feels, he has forgotten
something; what is it? But it is only his own sad thoughts and
musings he has left, the fragment of his life he has lived there.
Where he hung his coat on the tree, where he slept on the boughs,
where he made his coffee or broiled his trout over the coals, where
he drank again and again at the little brown pool in the spring
run, where he looked long and long up into the whispering branches
overhead, he has left what he cannot bring away with him,--the
flame and the ashes of himself.
Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times they have the
power of withholding their scent; no hint or particle of themselves
goes out upon the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual
pores are always sealed up, and I presume they have the best time
of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void; they do not yearn
and sympathize without return; they do not leave themselves by the
wayside as the sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.
This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, had never
before been descended by a white man in a boat. Rafts of pine and
hemlock timber are run down on the spring and fall freshets, but of
pleasure-seekers in boats I appeared to be the first. Hence my
advent was a surprise to most creatures in the water and out. I
surprised the cattle in the field, and those ruminating leg-deep in
the water turned their heads at my approach, swallowed their
unfinished cuds, and scampered off as if they had seen a spectre. I
surprised the fish on their spawning-beds and feeding-grounds; they
scattered, as my shadow glided down upon them, like chickens when a
hawk appears. I surprised an ancient fisherman seated on a spit of
gravelly beach, with his back upstream, and leisurely angling in
a deep, still eddy, and mumbling to himself. As I slid into the
circle of his vision his grip on the pole relaxed, his jaw dropped,
and he was too bewildered to reply to my salutation for some
moments. As I turned a bend in the river I looked back, and saw
him hastening away with great precipitation. I presume he had
angled there for forty years without having his privacy thus
intruded upon. I surprised hawks and herons and kingfishers. I
came suddenly upon muskrats, and raced with them down the rifts,
they having no time to take to their holes. At one point, as I
rounded an elbow in the stream, a black eagle sprang from the top
of a dead tree, and flapped hurriedly away. A kingbird gave
chase, and disappeared for some moments in the gulf between the
great wings of the eagle, and I imagined him seated upon his back
delivering his puny blows upon the royal bird. I interrupted two
or three minks fishing and hunting alongshore. They would dart
under the bank when they saw me, then presently thrust out their
sharp, weasel-like noses, to see if the danger was imminent. At
one point, in a little cove behind the willows, I surprised some
schoolgirls, with skirts amazingly abbreviated, wading and playing
in the water. And as much surprised as any, I am sure, was that
hard-worked-looking housewife, when I came up from under the bank
in front of her house, and with pail in hand appeared at her door
and asked for milk, taking the precaution to intimate that I had no
objection to the yellow scum that is supposed to rise on a fresh
article of that kind.
"What kind of milk do you want?"
"The best you have. Give me two quarts of it," I replied.
"What do you want to do with it?" with an anxious tone, as if I
might want to blow up something or burn her barns with it.
"Oh, drink it," I answered, as if I frequently put milk to that
use.
"Well, I suppose I can get you some;" and she presently reappeared
with swimming pail, with those little yellow flakes floating about
upon it that one likes to see.
I passed several low dams the second day, but had no trouble. I
dismounted and stood upon the apron, and the boat, with plenty of
line, came over as lightly as a chip, and swung around in the eddy
below like a steed that knows its master. In the afternoon, while
slowly drifting down a long eddy, the moist southwest wind brought
me the welcome odor of strawberries, and running ashore by a
meadow, a short distance below, I was soon parting the daisies and
filling my cup with the dead-ripe fruit. Berries, be they red,
blue, or black, seem like a special providence to the camper-out;
they are luxuries he has not counted on, and I prized these
accordingly. Later in the day it threatened rain, and I drew up to
shore under the shelter of some thick overhanging hemlocks, and
proceeded to eat my berries and milk, glad of an excuse not to
delay my lunch longer. While tarrying here I heard young voices
upstream, and looking in that direction saw two boys coming down
the rapids on rude floats. They were racing along at a lively pace,
each with a pole in his hand, dexterously avoiding the rocks and
the breakers, and schooling themselves thus early in the duties and
perils of the raftsmen. As they saw me one observed to the other, --
"There is the man we saw go by when we were building our floats. If
we had known he was coming so far, maybe we could have got him to
give us a ride."
They drew near, guided their crafts to shore beside me, and tied
up, their poles answering for hawsers. They proved to be Johnny and
Denny Dwire, aged ten and twelve. They were friendly boys, and
though not a bit bashful were not a bit impertinent. And Johnny,
who did the most of the talking, had such a sweet, musical voice;
it was like a bird's. It seems Denny had run away, a day or two
before, to his uncle's, five miles above, and Johnny had been after
him, and was bringing his prisoner home on a float; and it was hard
to tell which was enjoying the fun most, the captor or the
captured.
"Why did you run away?" said I to Denny.
"Oh, 'cause," replied he, with an air which said plainly, "The
reasons are too numerous to mention."
"Boys, you know, will do so, sometimes," said Johnny, and he smiled
upon his brother in a way that made me think they had a very good
understanding upon the subject.
They could both swim, yet their floats looked very perilous,--three
pieces of old plank or slabs, with two cross-pieces and a fragment
of a board for a rider, and made without nails or withes.
"In some places," said Johnny, "one plank was here and another off
there, but we managed, somehow, to keep atop of them."
"Let's leave our floats here, and ride with him the rest of the
way," said one to the other.
"All right; may we, mister? "
I assented, and we were soon afloat again. How they enjoyed the
passage; how smooth it was; how the boat glided along; how quickly
she felt the paddle! They admired her much; they praised my
steersmanship; they praised my fish-pole and all my fixings down to
my hateful rubber boots. When we stuck on the rifts, as we did
several times, they leaped out quickly, with their bare feet and
legs, and pushed us off.
"I think," said Johnny, "if you keep her straight and let her have
her own way, she will find the deepest water. Don't you, Denny?"
"I think she will," replied Denny; and I found the boys were pretty
nearly right.
I tried them on a point of natural history. I had observed, coming
along, a great many dead eels lying on the bottom of the river,
that I supposed had died from spear wounds. "No," said Johnny,
"they are lamper eels. They die as soon as they have built their
nests and laid their eggs."
"Are you sure?"
"That's what they all say, and I know they are lampers."
So I fished one up out of the deep water with my paddle-blade and
examined it; and sure enough it was a lamprey. There was the row of
holes along its head, and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed
their nests, too, all along, where the water in the pools shallowed
to a few feet and began to hurry toward the rifts: they were low
mounds of small stones, as if a bushel or more of large pebbles had
been dumped upon the river bottom; occasionally they were so near
the surface as to make a big ripple. The eel attaches itself to the
stones by its mouth, and thus moves them at will. An old fisherman
told me that a strong man could not pull a large lamprey loose from
a rock to which it had attached itself. It fastens to its prey in
this way, and sucks the life out. A friend of mine says he once saw
in the St. Lawrence a pike as long as his arm with a lamprey eel
attached to him. The fish was nearly dead and was quite white, the
eel had so sucked out his blood and substance. The fish, when
seized, darts against rocks and stones, and tries in vain to rub
the eel off, then succumbs to the sucker.
"The lampers do not all die," said Denny, "because they do not all
spawn;" and I observed that the dead ones were all of one size and
doubtless of the same age.
The lamprey is the octopus, the devil-fish, of these waters, and
there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted here that equals that of one
of these vampires slowly sucking the life out of a bass or a trout.
My boys went to school part of the time. Did they have a good
teacher?
"Good enough for me," said Johnny.
"Good enough for me," echoed Denny.
Just below Bark-a-boom--the name is worth keeping--they left me. I
was loath to part with them; their musical voices and their
thorough good-fellowship had been very acceptable. With a little
persuasion, I think they would have left their home and humble
fortunes, and gone a-roving with me.
About four o'clock the warm, vapor-laden southwest wind brought
forth the expected thunder-shower. I saw the storm rapidly
developing behind the mountains in my front. Presently I came in
sight of a long covered wooden bridge that spanned the river about
a mile ahead, and I put my paddle into the water with all my force
to reach this cover before the storm. It was neck and neck most of
the way. The storm had the wind, and I had it--in my teeth. The
bridge was at Shavertown, and it was by a close shave that I got
under it before the rain was upon me. How it poured and rattled and
whipped in around the abutment of the bridge to reach me! I looked
out well satisfied upon the foaming water, upon the wet, unpainted
houses and barns of the Shavertowners, and upon the trees,
"Caught and cuffed by the gale."
Another traveler--the spotted-winged nighthawk--was also roughly
used by the storm. He faced it bravely, and beat and beat, but was
unable to stem it, or even hold his own; gradually he drifted back,
till he was lost to sight in the wet obscurity. The water in the
river rose an inch while I waited, about three quarters of an hour.
Only one man, I reckon, saw me in Shavertown, and he came and
gossiped with me from the bank above when the storm had abated.
The second night I stopped at the sign of the elm-tree. The woods
were too wet, and I concluded to make my boat my bed. A superb elm,
on a smooth grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked
hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up beneath it. I
hung my clothes on the jagged edges of its rough bark, and went to
bed with the moon, "in her third quarter," peeping under the
branches upon me. I had been reading Stevenson's amusing "Travels
with a Donkey," and the lines he pretends to quote from an old play
kept running in my head:--
'The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was sweet, the water ran;
No need was there for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai."
But the stately elm played me a trick: it slyly and at long
intervals let great drops of water down upon me, now with a sharp
smack upon my rubber coat; then with a heavy thud upon the seat in
the bow or stern of my boat; then plump into my upturned ear, or
upon my uncovered arm, or with a ring into my tin cup, or with a
splash into my coffee-pail that stood at my side full of water from
a spring I had just passed. After two hours' trial I found dropping
off to sleep, under such circumstances, was out of the question; so
I sprang up, in no very amiable mood toward my host, and drew my
boat clean from under the elm. I had refreshing slumber
thenceforth, and the birds were astir in the morning long before I
was.
There is one way, at least, in which the denuding the country of
its forests has lessened the rainfall: in certain conditions of the
atmosphere every tree is a great condenser of moisture, as I had
just observed in the case of the old elm; little showers are
generated in their branches, and in the aggregate the amount of
water precipitated in this way is considerable. Of a foggy summer
morning one may see little puddles of water standing on the stones
beneath maple-trees, along the street; and in winter, when there is
a sudden change from cold to warm, with fog, the water fairly runs
down the trunks of the trees, and streams from their naked
branches. The temperature of the tree is so much below that of the
atmosphere in such cases that the condensation is very rapid. In
lieu of these arboreal rains we have the dew upon the grass, but it
is doubtful if the grass ever drips as does a tree.
The birds, I say, were astir in the morning before I was, and some
of them were more wakeful through the night, unless they sing in
their dreams. At this season one may hear at intervals numerous
bird voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I
lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I
heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling
the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am
convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird,
and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar
guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer
night, in any part of the country, and occasionally his better
known cuckoo call. He is a great recluse by day, but seems to
wander abroad freely by night.
The birds do indeed begin with the day. The farmer who is in the
field at work while he can yet see stars catches their first matin
hymns. In the longest June days the robin strikes up about half-
past three o'clock, and is quickly followed by the song sparrow,
the oriole, the catbird, the wren, the wood thrush, and all the
rest of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I have heard the
Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and persistently in the tree-
tops above, that sleeping after four o'clock was out of the
question. Just before the sun is up, there is a marked lull, during
which, I imagine, the birds are at breakfast. While building their
nest, it is very early in the morning that they put in their big
strokes; the back of their day's work is broken before you have
begun yours.
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