Only to him whose coat of rags Has pressed at night her regal feet, Shall come the secrets, strange and sweet, Of century pines and beetling crags.
For him the goddess shall unlock The golden secrets which have lain Ten thousand years, through frost and rain, Deep in the bosom of the rock.
The trip was a long and tiresome one, considering the distance. There were no hairbreadth escapes; I was not tackled by bears, treed by wolves, or nearly killed by a hand-to-claw "racket" with a panther; and there were no Indians to come sneak-hunting around after hair. Animal life was abundant, exuberant, even. But the bright-eyed woodfolk seemed tame, nay, almost friendly, and quite intent on minding their own business. It was a "pigeon year," a "squirrel year," and also a marvelous year for shack, or mast. Every nut-bearing tree was loaded with sweet well-filled nuts; and this, coupled with the fact that the Indians had left, and the whites had not yet got in, probably accounted for the plentitude of game.
I do not think there was an hour of daylight on the trip when squirrels were not too numerous to be counted, while pigeons were a constant quantity from start to finish. Grouse in the thickets, and quail in the high oak openings, or small prairies, with droves of wild turkeys among heavy timber, were met with almost hourly, and there was scarcely a day on which I could not have had a standing shot at a bear. But the most interesting point about the game was--to me, at least--the marvelous abundance of deer. They were everywhere, on all sorts of ground and among all varieties of timber; very tame they were, too, often stopping to look at the stranger, offering easy shots at short range, and finally going off quite leisurely.
No ardent lover of forest life could be lonely in such company, and in such weather. The only drawback was the harassing and vexatious manner in which lakes, streams, swamps and marshes constantly persisted in getting across the way, compelling long detours to the north or south, when the true course was nearly due west. I think there were days on which ten hours of pretty faithful tramping did not result in more than three or four miles of direct headway. The headwaters of the Salt and Chippewa rivers were especially obstructive; and, when more than half the distance was covered, I ran into a tangle of small lakes, marshes and swamps, not marked on the map, which cost a hard day's work to leave behind.