The Writings of John Burroughs | Page 3

and seem to interchange something with them; but upon the river,
even though it be a narrow and shallow one like this, you are more
isolated, farther removed from the soil and its attractions, and an easier
prey to the unsocial demons. The long, unpeopled vistas ahead; the still,
dark eddies; the endless monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the
unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the shore, half out of the
water, half in; a solitary heron starting up here and there, as you
rounded some point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view,
or standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the mountain,
his motionless form revealed against the dark green as you passed; the
trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on either side, and hid
the fields and the farmhouses and the road that ran near by,--these
things and others aided the skimmed milk to cast a gloom over my
spirits that argued ill for the success of my undertaking. Those rubber
boots, too, that parboiled my feet and were clogs of lead about
them,--whose spirits are elastic enough to endure them? A malediction

upon the head of him who invented them! Take your old shoes, that
will let the water in and let it out again, rather than stand knee-deep all
day in these extinguishers.
I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to the woods, and
profited by the change. In the woods I was at home again, and the bed
of hemlock boughs salved my spirits. A cold spring run came down off
the mountain, and beside it, underneath birches and hemlocks, I
improvised my hearthstone. In sleeping on the ground it is a great
advantage to have a back-log; it braces and supports you, and it is a
bedfellow that will not grumble when, in the middle of the night, you
crowd sharply up against it. It serves to keep in the warmth, also. A
heavy stone or other point DE RÉSISTANCE at your feet is also a
help. Or, better still, scoop out a little place in the earth, a few inches
deep, so as to admit your body from your hips to your shoulders; you
thus get an equal bearing the whole length of you. I am told the
Western hunters and guides do this. On the same principle, the sand
makes a good bed, and the snow. You make a mould in which you fit
nicely. My berth that night was between two logs that the bark-peelers
had stripped ten or more years before. As they had left the bark there,
and as hemlock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one
to be grateful to them.
In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the night had tided me
over the bar that threatened to stay my progress. If I can steer clear of
skimmed milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of fifty miles to
Hancock with increasing pleasure.
When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns back again and again
to see what he has left. Surely, he feels, he has forgotten something;
what is it? But it is only his own sad thoughts and musings he has left,
the fragment of his life he has lived there. Where he hung his coat on
the tree, where he slept on the boughs, where he made his coffee or
broiled his trout over the coals, where he drank again and again at the
little brown pool in the spring run, where he looked long and long up
into the whispering branches overhead, he has left what he cannot bring
away with him,--the flame and the ashes of himself.
Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times they have the power of
withholding their scent; no hint or particle of themselves goes out upon
the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual pores are always sealed

up, and I presume they have the best time of it. Their hearts never
radiate into the void; they do not yearn and sympathize without return;
they do not leave themselves by the wayside as the sheep leaves her
wool upon the brambles and thorns.
This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, had never before
been descended by a white man in a boat. Rafts of pine and hemlock
timber are run down on the spring and fall freshets, but of
pleasure-seekers in boats I appeared to be the first. Hence my advent
was a surprise to most creatures in the water and out. I surprised the
cattle in the field, and those ruminating leg-deep in the water turned
their heads at my approach, swallowed their unfinished cuds, and
scampered off as if