It Makes Me Blush For My Species When I Think Of It.
This Charming Society Is Nearly Extinct Now:
Of the larger animals
there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly
than any person
I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly
with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection
from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying
destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that
the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the
brutal Spaniards than the fierce and warlike Caribs. As society is at
present constituted in Christian countries, I would rather for my own
security be a cougar than a fawn.
There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks. Out of
the books of daring travelers, nothing. I do not know that the Keene
Valley has any history. The mountains always stood here, and the Au
Sable, flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the
sands and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and
soothing sounds. Before the Vermonters broke into it some
three-quarters of a century ago, and made meadows of its bottoms and
sugar-camps of its fringing woods, I suppose the red Indian lived here
in his usual discomfort, and was as restless as his successors, the
summer boarders. But the streams were full of trout then, and the
moose and the elk left their broad tracks on the sands of the river.
But of the Indian there is no trace.
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