Moosilauke (1880) - James Merrill, Mountain Guide
". . . I went as one of these [witnesses], having as our guide James Merrill, of the Breezy Point House, who had long hunted and trapped through all that region, and had, many years ago, passed by these falls, though he was now by no means sure of their precise position. . . .
Our guide walked on before us, erect and manly, wearing one of those broad canvas hats which are characteristic of this region, and furnish one of our few glimpses of picturesque costume. He had led for years the genuinely out-door life which belongs to our mountaineers. As a rule, farmers are far less rich in conversation than sea-side people, - sailors, pilots, fishermen; the rural lives are rather monotonous and uneventful; but when you come where the farms actually abut upon untamed forest, the art of conversation revives, and James Merrill was as good as Thoreau, so far as the habit of observation could carry him.
He showed us, in the occasional deposits of soft mud by the water bars on the mountain road, how to distinguish squirrel tracks, sable-tracks, bear-tracks. A bear had passed, as he proved to us, within a few days, had weighed about one hundred and seventy-five pounds and was probably two years old. He pointed out to us where, in sandy places, the young partridges had nestled and fluttered like hens in the path, and where the hedgehogs had gnawed and torn the roots in the wood.
He told us how these little "quill-pigs," as they are popularly called, defend themselves with their tails, thrashing them about till the nose of a dog or other animal is full of bristles; the dogs instinctively fear this, and seize the creature by the head, where the bristles turn the other way, and cannot hurt. The hedgehog is in winter the chief food of the "fisher-cat" and this in turn is trapped for its fur. This small quadruped is jet-black, with a few white hairs; is as large as a large cat but is shaped like a mink, having short legs. The fisher cat and sable - pronounced uniformly "saple" - climbs trees like cats, in pursuit of squirrels, and will run from tree to tree as easily as the game they hunt, though unable to spring like them through the air. Both of these species are active and daring, venturing sometimes into the hunters' camps at night in search of food.
The ordinary wildcat or "bobcat," or "lucivee" (loup-cervier) is also found on Moosilauke, but not the larger catamount," or that half-mythical beast known among Maine lumbermen as the "Indian devil." This bob-cat is of ten as large to the eye as a Newfoundland dog, but its fur is so deceptively thick that it really does not weigh more than thirty pounds. Merrill was eloquent about its shriek at night. "When you hear it near you," he said, "it makes every hair stand up straight, and you feel about as big as your finger. I have heard it when it made me feel as if my hat was two feet from my head. It is as much bigger than the house-cat's noise as that is bigger than a canary's. . ."
Many of our guide's facts were before known to us, but some were wholly new, as when he told us that a deer, if forced into water too shallow for his long legs, will swim easily on his side instead of wading. There is always pleasure in listening to the simplest woodcraft from those who habitually live by its pursuit, - those who know nothing of books, but supply observations for the bookmakers. Such talk links us with the Rocky Mountains, and with Scott's novels and the great French forests in old days of royal hunting. All the "venerers, prickers, and verderers" of romance have now come down to a few plain incidents like these, but no matter; so long as there is a squirrel on a bough or a partridge in the woods, it will keep us in contact with that healthful outdoor nature which is the background of all our civilization. . . ."
From "In Search of the Pleiades" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, pp. 93-113, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
