It was the pure, rich wine of the woods with a pleasant
taste, bringing spicy spruce groves and widespread bog and beaver
meadows to mind. On this amber stream I discovered an interesting
fall. It is only a few feet high, but remarkably fine in the curve of
its brow and blending shades of color, while the mossy, bushy pool
into which it plunges is inky black, but wonderfully brightened by
foam bells larger than common that drift in clusters on the smooth
water around the rim, each of them carrying a picture of the
overlooking trees leaning together at the tips like the teeth of moss
capsules before they rise.
I found most of the trees here fairly loaded with mosses. Some
broadly palmated branches had beds of yellow moss so wide and deep
that when wet they must weigh a hundred pounds or even more. Upon
these moss-beds ferns and grasses and even good-sized seedling trees
grow, making beautiful hanging gardens in which the curious spectacle
is presented of old trees holding hundreds of their own children in
their arms, nourished by rain and dew and the decaying leaves
showered down to them by their parents. The branches upon which these
beds of mossy soil rest become flat and irregular like weathered
roots or the antlers of deer, and at length die; and when the whole
tree has thus been killed it seems to be standing on its head with
roots in the air. A striking example of this sort stood near the camp
and I called the missionary's attention to it.
"Come, Mr. Young," I shouted. "Here's something wonderful, the most
wonderful tree you ever saw; it is standing on its head."
"How in the world," said he in astonishment, "could that tree have
been plucked up by the roots, carried high in the air, and dropped
down head foremost into the ground. It must have been the work of a
tornado."
Toward evening the hunters brought in a deer. They had seen four
others, and at the camp-fire talk said that deer abounded on all the
islands of considerable size and along the shores of the mainland.
But few were to be found in the interior on account of wolves that
ran them down where they could not readily take refuge in the water.
The Indians, they said, hunted them on the islands with trained dogs
which went into the woods and drove them out, while the hunters lay
in wait in canoes at the points where they were likely to take to the
water. Beaver and black bear also abounded on this large island. I
saw but few birds there, only ravens, jays, and wrens. Ducks, gulls,
bald eagles, and jays are the commonest birds hereabouts.
