The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

RIPOGENUS.

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a rim of forest and hill; and there behold, O gioja! at its eastern end, stooping forward and filling the sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we must see and sketch this cloudless summit from terra firma. A mile and half-way down the lake, we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where once had been a lumberman's station and hay-farm. It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy, a home deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumble-down was the never-painted house; ditto its three barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things to be had here,—one certain, one possible, probable even. The view, that was an inevitable certainty; Iglesias would bag that as his share of the plunder of Ripogenus. For my bagging, bears, perchance, awaited. The trappers had seen a bear near the barns. Cancut, in his previous visit, had seen a disappearance of bear. No sooner had the birch's bow touched lightly upon the shore than we seized our respective weapons,—Iglesias his peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike and destructive gun,—and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or lolling in the old hay. I entertain a vendetta toward the ursine family. I had a duello, pistol against claw, with one of them in the mountains of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the moral and adorn the tale. My antagonist of that hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight. Soon or late in my life, I hoped that I should avenge this evasion. Ripogenus would, perhaps, give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope! I was not to be an ursicide. I begin to fear that I shall slay no other than my proper personal bearishness. I did my duty for another result at Ripogenus. I bolted audaciously into every barn. I made incursions into the woods around. I found the mark of the beast, not the beast. He had not long ago decamped, and was now, perhaps, sucking the meditative paw hard-by in an arbor of his bear-garden.

After a vain hunt, I gave up Beast and turned to Beauty. I looked about me, seeing much.

Foremost I saw a fellow-man, my comrade, fondled by breeze and brightness, and whispered to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below me, on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the scene at its bel momento. I repented more bitterly of my momentary falseness to Beauty while I saw him so constant.

Furthermore, I saw a landscape of vigorous simplicity, easy to comprehend. By mellow sunset the grass slope of the old farm seemed no longer tanned and rusty, but ripened. The oval lake was blue and calm, and that is already much to say; shadows of the western hills were growing over it, but flight after flight of illumined cloud soared above, to console the sky and the water for the coming of night. Northward, a forest darkled, whose glades of brightness I could not see. Eastward, the bank mounted abruptly to a bare fire-swept table-land, whereon a few dead trees stood, parched and ghostly skeletons draped with rags of moss.

Furthermost and topmost, I saw Katahdin twenty miles away, a giant undwarfed by any rival. The remainder landscape was only minor and judiciously accessory. The hills were low before it, the lake lowly, and upright above lake and hill lifted the mountain pyramid. Isolate greatness tells. There were no underling mounts about this mountain-in-chief. And now on its shoulders and crest sunset shone, glowing. Warm violet followed the glow, soothing away the harshness of granite lines. Luminous violet dwelt upon the peak, while below the clinging forests were purple in sheltered gorges, where they could climb nearer the summit, loved of light, and lower down gloomed green and sombre in the shadow.

Meanwhile, as I looked, the quivering violet rose higher and higher, and at last floated away like a disengaged flame. A smouldering blue dwelt upon the peak. Ashy-gray overcame the blue. As dusk thickened and stars trembled into sight, the gray grew luminous. Katahdin's mighty presence seemed to absorb such dreamy glimmers as float in limpid night-airs: a faint glory, a twilight of its own, clothed it. King of the daylit-world, it became queen of the dimmer realms of night, and like a woman-queen it did not disdain to stoop and study its loveliness in the polished lake, and stooping thus it overhung the earth, a shadowy creature of gleam and gloom, an eternized cloud.

I sat staring and straying in sweet reverie, until the scene before me was dim as metaphysics. Suddenly a flame flashed up in the void. It grew and steadied, and dark objects became visible about it. In the loneliness—for Iglesias had disappeared—I allowed myself a moment's luxury of superstition. Were these the Cyclops of Katahdin? Possibly. Were they Trolls forging diabolic enginery, or Gypsies of Yankeedom? I will see,—and went tumbling down the hill-side.

As I entered the circle about the cooking-fire of drift-wood by the lake, Iglesias said,—

"The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do for breakfast; now, then, with your bear!"

"Haw, haw!" guffawed Cancut; and the sound, taking the lake at a stride, found echoes everywhere, till he grew silent and peered suspiciously into the dark.

"There's more bears raound 'n yer kin shake a stick at," said one of the muskrateers. "I wouldn't ricommend yer to stir 'em up naow, haowlin' like that."

"I meant it for laffin'," said Cancut, humbly.

"Ef yer call that 'ere larfin', couldn't yer cry a little to kind er slick daown the bears?" said the trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to chocolat à la crème, made with the boon of the ex-bar-keeper. I suppose I may say, without flattery, that this tipple was marvellous. What a pity Nature spoiled a cook by making the muddler of that chocolate a painter of grandeurs! When Fine Art is in a man's nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from a pine-tree. Our muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously of this unaccustomed dainty, and were visited with indescribable Nemesis. They had never been acclimated to chocolate, as had Iglesias and I, by sipping it under the shade of the mimosa and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more likely to hunt than a lucky. Satiety follows more speedily upon success than despair upon failure. Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear! I had bagged not a bear, and must needs satisfy my assassin instincts upon something with hoofs and horns. The younger trapper of muskrat, being young, was ardent,—being young, was hopeful,—being young, believed in exceptions to general rules,—and being young, believed, that, given a good fellow with a gun, Nature would provide a victim. Therefore he proposed that we should canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and stillest of all the nights. The senior shook his head incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.

"Since you have massacred all the bears," said Iglesias, "I will go lay me down in their lair in the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa Major when you come back, make a pun and he will go."

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus, it seemed, had never listened to such silence as this. Calm never could have been so beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and rifle on either side. The pilot gave one stroke of his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness. We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines. With never a plash we slid. Rare drops fell from the cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable passage. Sometimes from far within the forest would come sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs. Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread. Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too loudly. Somewhat comes. Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it and it came not. To glide over glassiness while uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous. Night and stillness laid their soothing spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling and snorting hard-by, in the shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars, making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my gun. In another instant I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my shoulder,—

"I kinder guess yer 've ben asleep an' dreamin', ha'n't yer?"

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars. Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and veins of water and sunlight. Till long past midnight we paddled and watched and listened, whisperless. In vain. At last, as we rounded a point, the level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart the water reminded us of passing hours and traveller duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no bears this side of Ursa Major, were bivouacked in one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly, as a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied head beneath a mound of ancient hay, not without the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night. A Ripogenus chill awaked the whole party with early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our aesthetic breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped into out-of-doors, looking for Ripogenus, a lake of Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in the landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as the Americans say,) literally mizzled. Our simplified view comprised a grassy hill with barns, and a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft, beyond, above, below, thither, hither, and yon, Fog, not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations, and a boon of brief transfiguration into a cloud-body had been granted it by Nature, who grants to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences of what it one day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted itself into vapor, and filled the valley full to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against the eastern hill-side, over which they sometimes broke, and, involving it totally, rolled clear and free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the glows of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the mountain rested a presence of cirri, already white and luminous with full daylight, and from them drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging to the rosy-violet granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged the whole; then we condescended to breakfast.

CHAPTER XI

TOWARD KATAHDIN.

Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found below mill-ponds. Analogously in the Maine rivers, below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids too often compel carries. While we breakfasted without steak of bear or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually retracted itself, and became conscious again of what poetry there is in a lake's pause and a rapid's flow. Fog condensed into water, and water submitting to its destiny went cascading down through a wild defile where no birch could follow.

The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint path through thickets.

"First half," said Cancut, "'s plain enough; but after that 't would take a philosopher with his spectacles on to find it."

This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman without tools? And never a goggle had we.

But the trappers of muskrats had become our fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our loads over the brambly league. This was kindly. Cancut's elongated head-piece, the birch, was his share of the burden; and a bag of bread, a firkin of various grub, damp blankets for three, and multitudinous traps, seemed more than two could carry at one trip over this longest and roughest of portages.

We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and there, while the others compacted the portables for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a ducking with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a crag for a supreme view of the fair lake and the clear mountain. And we did well. Katahdin, from the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and solitary pyramid, grander than any below the realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly mountainous than any mountain of those that stop short of the venerable honors of eternal snow.

We trod the trail, we others, easier than Cancut. He found it hard to thread the mazes of an overgrown path and navigate his canoe at the same time. "Better," thought he, as he staggered and plunged and bumped along, extricating his boat-bonnet now from a bower of raspberry-bushes, now from the branches of a brotherly birch-tree,—"better," thought he, "were I seated in what I bear, and bounding gayly over the billow. Peril is better than pother."

Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented the peril, and came upon the river flowing fair and free. The trappers said adieu, and launched us. Back then they went to consult their traps and flay their fragrant captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music. Mountain airs bent and blunted the noonday sunbeams. There was shade of delicate birches on either hand, whenever we loved to linger. Our feather-shallop went dancing on, fleet as the current, and whenever a passion for speed came after moments of luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the river's will into leaps and chasing, with a few strokes of the paddle. All was untouched, unvisited wilderness, and we from bend to bend the first discoverers. So we might fancy ourselves; for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and liberal reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered river were only solitary, not lonely. It is never lonely with Nature. Without unnatural men or unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself. And so we found her,—a lovely being in perfect toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating, masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition of a most becoming light. Iglesias and I, being old friends, were received into close intimacy. She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had a thousand exquisite things to say, drawing us out also, with feminine tact, to say our best things, and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence, of more delicate possibilities of refinement and a tenderer poetic sense. So we voyaged through the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress. We could not always drift and glide. Sometimes we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches were the inevitable "rips" and rapids: some we could shoot without hitting anything; some would hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever the rocks in the current were only as thick as the plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could venture to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied to a school-boy's ideal, we were arrested. Just at the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy into a shady pool by the shore. At such spots we found a path across the carry. Cancut at once proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling birch. Iglesias and I took up the packs and hurried on with minds intent on berries. Berries we always found,—blueberries covered with a cloudy bloom, blueberries pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.

Often, when a portage was not quite necessary, a dangerous bit of white water would require the birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore, raced through the thick of the forest, tore through the briers, and plunged through the punk of trees older than history, now rotting where they fell, slain by Time the Giganticide. Cancut then had us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed at him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made vague clutches at the thread of discourse. Now suppose he should take a fancy to drop down stream and leave us. What then? Berries then, and little else, unless we had a chance at a trout or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to be left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and with breadths of lake and mountain and Nature, shaggy and bearish, between man and man. With the consciousness of a latent shudder in our hearts at such a possibility, we parted brier and bramble until the rapid was passed, we scuffled hastily through to the river-bank, and there always, in some quiet nook, was a beacon of red-flannel shirt among the green leaves over the blue and shadowy water, and always the fast-sailing Cancut awaiting us, making the woods resound to amicable hails, and ready again to be joked and to retaliate.

Such alternations made our voyage a charming olla. We had the placid glide, the fleet dash, the wild career, the pause, the landing, the agreeable interlude of a portage, and the unburdened stampede along-shore. Thus we won our way, or our way wooed us on, until, in early afternoon, a lovely lakelet opened before us. The fringed shores retired, and, as we shot forth upon wider calm, lo, Katahdin! unlooked-for, at last, as a revolution. Our boat ruffled its shadow, doing pretty violence to its dignity, that we might know the greater grandeur of the substance. There was a gentle agency of atmosphere softening the bold forms of this startling neighbor, and giving it distance, lest we might fear it would topple and crush us. Clouds, level below, hid the summit and towered aloft. Among them we might imagine the mountain rising with thousands more of feet of heaven-piercing height: there is one degree of sublimity in mystery, as there is another degree in certitude.