Rolf in the Woods

Tea, potatoes, and fried pork, with maple syrup and hard-tack, made their meal of the time, after which there was a long smoke. Quonab took a stick of red willow, picked up-in the daytime, and began shaving it toward one end, leaving the curling shreds still on the stick. When these were bunched in a fuzzy mop, he held them over the fire until they were roasted brown; then, grinding all up in his palm with some tobacco, and filling his pipe he soon was enveloped in that odour of woodsy smoke called the “Indian smell,” by many who do not know whence or how it comes. Rolf did not smoke. He had promised his mother that he would not until he was a man, and something brought her back home now with overwhelming force; that was the beds they had made of fragrant balsam boughs. “Cho-ko-tung or blister tree” as Quonab called it. His mother had a little sofa pillow, brought from the North — a “northern pine” pillow they called it, for it was stuffed with pine needles of a kind not growing in Connecticut. Many a time had Rolf as a baby pushed his little round nose into that bag to inhale the delicious odour it gave forth, and so it became the hallowed smell of all that was dear in his babyhood, and it never lost its potency. Smell never does. Oh, mighty aura! that, in marching by the nostrils, can reach and move the soul; how wise the church that makes this power its handmaid, and through its incense overwhelms all alien thought when the worshipper, wandering, doubting, comes again to see if it be true, that here doubt dies. Oh, queen of memory that is master of the soul! how fearful should we be of letting evil thought associated grow with some recurrent odour that we love. Happy, indeed, are they that find some ten times pure and consecrated fragrance, like the pine, which entering in is master of their moods, and yet through linking thoughts has all its power, uplifting, full of sweetness and blessed peace. So came to Rolf his medicine tree.

The balsam fir was his tree of hallowed memory. Its odour never failed, and he slept that night with its influence all about him.

Starting in the morning was no easy matter. There was so much to be adjusted that first day. Packs divided in two, new combinations to trim the canoe, or to raise such and such a package above a possible leak. The heavy things, like axes and pans, had to be fastened to the canoe or to packages that would float in case of an upset. The canoe itself had to be gummed in one or two places; but they got away after three hours, and began the voyage down the Schroon.

This was Rolf’s first water journey. He had indeed essayed the canoe on the Pipestave Pond, but that was a mere ferry. This was real travel. He marvelled at the sensitiveness of the frail craft; the delicacy of its balance; its quick response to the paddle; the way it seemed to shrink from the rocks; and the unpleasantly suggestive bend-up of the ribs when the bottom grounded upon a log. It was a new world for him. Quonab taught him never to enter the canoe except when she was afloat; never to rise in her or move along without hold of the gunwale; never to make a sudden move; and he also learned that it was easier to paddle when there were six feet of water underneath than when only six inches.

In an hour they had covered the five miles that brought them to the Hudson, and here the real labour began, paddling up stream. Before long they came to a shallow stretch with barely enough water to float the canoe. Here they jumped out and waded in the stream, occasionally lifting a stone to one side, till they reached the upper stretch of deep water and again went merrily paddling. Soon they came to an impassable rapid, and Rolf had his first taste of a real carry or portage. Quonab’s eye was watching the bank as soon as the fierce waters appeared; for the first question was, where shall we land? and the next, how far do we carry? There are no rapids on important rivers in temperate America that have not been portaged more or less for ages. No canoe man portages without considering most carefully when, where, and how to land. His selection of the place, then, is the result of careful study. He cannot help leaving some mark at the place, slight though it be, and the next man looks for that mark to save himself time and trouble.