This life, without responsibility or clean clothes, may continue as long as the reader desires.There are, those who would like to live in this free fashion forever, taking rain and sun as heaven pleases;and there are some souls so constituted that they cannot exist more than three days without their worldly--baggage.Taking the party altogether, from one cause or another it is likely to strike camp sooner than was intended.And the stricken camp is a melancholy sight.The woods have been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the bushes are scorched; the pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire;the landing looks like a cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all the unsightly dibris of a hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is a shabby object; the charred and blackened logs, where the fire blazed, suggest the extinction of family life.Man has wrought his usual wrong upon Nature, and he can save his self-respect only by moving to virgin forests.
And move to them he will, the next season, if not this.For he who has once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes its enticement: in the memory nothing remains but its charm.
VII
A WILDERNESS ROMANCE
At the south end of Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks, stands Noon Mark, a shapely peak thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, which, with the aid of the sun, tells the Keene people when it is time to eat dinner.From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness basin, a great stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose bosom you can hear from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of the Boquet.This basin of unbroken green rises away to the south and southeast into the rocky heights of Dix's Peak and Nipple Top,--the latter a local name which neither the mountain nor the fastidious tourist is able to shake off.Indeed, so long as the mountain keeps its present shape as seen from the southern lowlands, it cannot get on without this name.
These two mountains, which belong to the great system of which Marcy is the giant centre, and are in the neighborhood of five thousand feet high, on the southern outposts of the great mountains, form the gate-posts of the pass into the south country.This opening between them is called Hunter's Pass.It is the most elevated and one of the wildest of the mountain passes.Its summit is thirty-five hundred feet high.In former years it is presumed the hunters occasionally followed the game through; but latterly it is rare to find a guide who has been that way, and the tin-can and paper-collar tourists have not yet made it a runway.This seclusion is due not to any inherent difficulty of travel, but to the fact that it lies a little out of the way.
We went through it last summer; making our way into the jaws from the foot of the great slides on Dix, keeping along the ragged spurs of the mountain through the virgin forest.The pass is narrow, walled in on each side by precipices of granite, and blocked up with bowlders and fallen trees, and beset with pitfalls in the roads ingeniously covered with fair-seeming moss.When the climber occasionally loses sight of a leg in one of these treacherous holes, and feels a cold sensation in his foot, he learns that he has dipped into the sources of the Boquet, which emerges lower down into falls and rapids, and, recruited by creeping tributaries, goes brawling through the forest basin, and at last comes out an amiable and boat-bearing stream in the valley of Elizabeth Town.From the summit another rivulet trickles away to the south, and finds its way through a frightful tamarack swamp, and through woods scarred by ruthless lumbering, to Mud Pond, a quiet body of water, with a ghastly fringe of dead trees, upon which people of grand intentions and weak vocabulary are trying to fix the name of Elk Lake.The descent of the pass on that side is precipitous and exciting.The way is in the stream itself; and a considerable portion of the distance we swung ourselves down the faces of considerable falls, and tumbled down cascades.The descent, however, was made easy by the fact that it rained, and every footstep was yielding and slippery.Why sane people, often church-members respectably connected, will subject themselves to this sort of treatment,--be wet to the skin, bruised by the rocks, and flung about among the bushes and dead wood until the most necessary part of their apparel hangs in shreds,--is one of the delightful mysteries of these woods.I suspect that every man is at heart a roving animal, and likes, at intervals, to revert to the condition of the bear and the catamount.
There is no trail through Hunter's Pass, which, as I have intimated, is the least frequented portion of this wilderness.Yet we were surprised to find a well-beaten path a considerable portion of the way and wherever a path is possible.It was not a mere deer's runway: these are found everywhere in the mountains.It is trodden by other and larger animals, and is, no doubt, the highway of beasts.