Katahdin

“ Those who dislike long names may use its shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a granite crag draped with moss long as the beard of a Druid,—a crag on the south side of Ambajeejus or Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as ever, unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly vague, with the blue sky which surrounded it. It was still an isolate pyramid rising with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair green sea of the birch-forest,—a brilliant sea of woods, gay as the shallows of ocean shot through with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from golden sands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Drip was the pervading sound, as if the rain-drops were counting aloud the leaves of the forest. Evidently a resolute and permanent wetting impended. On rainy days one does not climb Katahdin. Instead of rising by starlight, breakfasting by gray, and starting by rosy dawn, it would be policy to persuade night to linger long into the hours of a dull day. When daylight finally came, dim and sulky, there was no rivalry among us which should light the fire. We did not leap, but trickled slowly forth into the inhospitable morning, all forlorn. Wet days in camp try "grit." ”

“ The men, women, and children of Millinoket were hospitable and delighted to see strangers, and the men, like all American men in the summer before a Presidential election, wanted to talk politics. Katahdin’s last full-bodied appearance was here; it rises beyond a breadth of black forest, a bulkier mass, but not so symmetrical as from the southern points of view. ”

“ Under you is spread all eastern Maine, like a map, and you look northeastward across silver levels of lakes and mottled green of dwarfed hills till, shadowy on the far horizon, looms the peak of Katahdin, a blue land-cloud on the rim of the silver-flecked green sea. The two peaks of Doublehead are curious twin green - 57 - knolls below to the north, and only in the far-distant north and west are summits of height that equal or exceed your own. ”

“ A little more squirrel-like skipping and cat-like creeping over the spruces, and we were out among bulky boulders and rough débris on a shoulder of the mountain. Alas! the higher, the more hopeless. Katahdin, as he had taken pains to inform us, meant to wear the veil all day. He was drawing down the white drapery about his throat and letting it fall over his shoulders. Sun and wind struggled mightily with his sulky fit; sunshine rifted off bits of the veil, and wind seized, whirled them away, and, dragging them over the spruces below, tore them to rags. ”

“ The boy had wonderful power: he had only to point at a moose or a duck or a bear, and it fell dead, so that the tribe never wanted food. For he was the son of the Indian girl and the spirit of the mountain, who had commanded her not to reveal the boy's paternity. Through years she held silence on this point, holding in contempt, like other Indians, the prying inquiries of gossips and the teasing of young people, and knowing that Katahdin had designed the child for the founder of a mighty race, with the sinews of the very mountains in its frame, that should fill and rule the earth. ”

“ Mountains, being cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen. Sometimes it stays bewildered in a bog, and here the climber must plunge. In the moist places great trees grow, die, fall, rot, and barricade the way with their corpses. Katahdin has to endure all the ills of mountain being, and we had all the usual difficulties to fight through doggedly. When we were clumsy, we tumbled and rose up torn. Still we plodded on, following a path blazed by the Bostonians, Cancut's late charge, and we grumblingly thanked them. ”

“ 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. We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin’s reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him. ”

“ It does not make Maine less, but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral result. Maine's face, thus exposed, has almost no features: there are no great mountains visible, none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance. Besides sky, Katahdin's view contains only the two primal necessities of wood and water. Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest, gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption of many fair lakes, and bright ways of river linking them. ”

“ Besides, whether Katahdin were bare-headed or cloud-capped, it would be better to blunder upward than lounge all day in camp and eat Sybaritic dinners. We longed for the nervy climb. We must have it. "Up!" said tingling blood to brain. "Dash through the forest! Grasp the crag, and leap the cleft! Sweet flash forth the streamlets from granite fissures. To breathe the winds that smite the peaks is life."
As soon as dawn bloomed in the woods we breakfasted, and ferried the river before sunrise. The ascent subdivides itself into five zones. 1. A scantily wooded acclivity, where bears abound. ”

“ He must be true and powerful.
The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of Katahdin, beyond a broad, beautiful scope of water, and rising seemingly directly from it. We fled before another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook, and made a portage around a great dam below the lake. The world should know that at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest wintergreen-berries in the world are to be found, beautiful as they are good.
Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect propriety. ”

“ We swept along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook, at sea in a bowl,—"rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard," in our keelless craft. Zephyr only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have been all over with us. But the breeze only sang about our way, and shook the water out of sunny calm. Katahdin to the North, a fair blue pyramid, lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent, yet still so many leagues away that his features were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable from the green of his beard of forest. ”

“ Yankees, who take in pulverized granite with every breath of their native dust, are not likely to melt in a drizzle. We three certainly did not. We reacted stoutly against the forlorn weather, unpacking our internal stores of sunshine, as a camel in a desert draws water from his inner tank when outer water fails. We made the best of it. A breakfast of trout and trimmings looks nearly as well and tastes nearly as well in a fog as in a glare: that we proved by experience at Camp Katahdin. ”

“ Manly men need the wilderness and the mountain. Katahdin is the best mountain in the wildest wild to be had on this side the continent. He looked at us encouragingly over the hills. I saw that he was all that Iglesias, connoisseur of mountains, had promised, and was content to wait for the day of meeting.
The steamboat dumped us and our canoe on a wharf at the lake-head about four o’clock. A wharf promised a settlement, which, however, did not exist. There was population, — one man and one great ox. ”

“ From the opposite bank the woods stretched away in undulating waves of ridge and valley to the foot of Mount Katahdin, which still showed grandly to the northward.
“Millinokett Lake,” said Cyrus, prolonging the syllables with a soft, liquid sound. “It’s an Indian name, boys; it signifies ‘Lake of Islands.’ Whatever else the red men can boast of, the music of their names is unequalled. I don’t know exactly how many of those islets there are, but I believe Millinokett has over two hundred of them anyhow. Our camp is on the western shore. ”

“ We despatched our camp-building and bed-making with speed, for we had a purpose. The Penobscot was a very beautiful river, and the Ayboljockameegus a very pretty stream; and if there is one place in the world where trout, at certain seasons, are likely to be found, it is in a beautiful river at the mouth of a pretty stream. Now we wanted trout; it was in the programme that something more delicate than salt-pork should grace our banquets before Katahdin. Cancut sustained our a priori, that trout were waiting for us over by the Aybol. ”

“ The tent was on Herb’s shoulders; and naught was left to mark the visit of man to the humming stream but a bed of withering boughs on which the lynx might sleep to-night, and a few dying embers which the guide had thrashed out with his feet.
No halt was made until four o’clock in the afternoon. Then Herb Heal came to a standstill on the edge of a wide bog. It lay between him and what he called the “first heavy growth;” that is, the primeval forest, unthinned by axe of man, which at certain points clothes the foot of Katahdin. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The highest mountains are the Katahdin, situated near the centre of the state, the Speckled, Bald, Bigelow, and Ebeeme mountains. The range between the rivers Hudson and Connecticut, and this last and lake Champlain, is called the Green Mountains, an appellation which it has received from its perpetual verdure, being covered on its western side with hemlock, pine, spruce, and other evergreens. These mountains are from ten to fifteen miles wide, much intersected with valleys, and abounding in springs and streams. Vegetation decreases on approaching their summits ”

“ There are several ponds in the basin; one of them, a tiny, clear lake, without any visible outlet, is Pamolah’s fishing-ground. That’s the yarn about the mountain as I heard it.”
In The Shadow Of The Katahdin.
“Ain’t it a’most time for us to be gittin’ down from this Horseback, Doc?” asked Joe, who had been listening with the others. “I thought we’d reach the farm you’re heading for to-night, but we’re half a dozen miles off it yet; and we can’t do more’n another mile or two afore it’ll be time to halt and make camp. There’s some pretty bad travelling and a plaguy bit of swamp ahead.” ”

“ Then they go back and carry the body with them. Oh, they ver’ good men.”
I judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see Katahdin.
However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do Sunday then ther’s no harm, but if he takum pay then wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men. ”

“ Katagum consists of several small but ancient Mahommedan emirates—Katagum, Messau, Gummel, Hadeija, Machena, with a fringe of Bedde pagans on its eastern frontier towards Bornu, and other pagans on the south towards Bauchi. The Waube flows from Kano through the province via Hadeija and by Damjiri in Bornu to Lake Chad, affording a route for the transport of goods brought by the Zungeru-Zaria-Kano railway to the headquarters of Katagum and western Bornu. Katagum is a fertile province inhabited by an industrious people whose manufactures rival those of Kano. ”

“ Before wooden palisades and walls of stone enclosed her, she turned her face to look across the mouth of Cataraqui River and at Lake Ontario rippling full of submerged moonlight. A magnified moon was rising. Farther than eye could reach it softened that northern landscape and provoked mystery in the shadows of the Thousand Islands.
South of the fort were some huts set along the margin of Ontario according to early French custom, which demanded a canoe highway in front of every man’s door. West of these, half hid by forest, was an Indian village ”

“ A legion of small streams rush down to the bays from [Pg 104] their mountain sources, but none of them are navigable—they are mere rapids and cascades in their entire length. A growth of the characteristic circumpolar annuals and biennials on the slopes of these hills of Kadiak is of exotic luxuriance, and of the most varied beauty of floral display in June, July, and August. Willows and alders fringe the borders of the streams in their range throughout the woodless area, while stunted birch and green grasses reach to the very summits of the hilly ridges of the interior. ”

“ For little Fritz was gone to the better land; hunger and want had been more than his poor little crippled body could bear, and Kathie's kindness could not keep life any longer in so feeble a frame. The woodsman had made a little grave in the forest for him, and there poor Kathie had gone every day, and was but returning from it the evening previous when she found Laura waiting for her. ”