I make no apology for giving a few lines to the great event of a moose’s life. He is the hero of those evergreen-woods, — a hero too little recognized, except by stealthy assassins, meeting him by midnight for massacre. No one seems to have viewed him in his dramatic character, as a forest-monarch enacting every year the tragicomedy of decoronation and recoronation.
The Kinneo House is head-quarters for moose-hunters. This summer the waters of Maine were diluvial, the feeding-grounds were swamped. Of this we took little note: we were in chase of something certain not to be drowned; and the higher the deluge, the easier we could float to Katahdin. After dinner we took the steamboat again for the upper end of the lake.
It was a day of days for sunny summer sailing. Purple haziness curtained the dark front of Kinneo, — a delicate haze purpled by this black promontory, but melting blue like a cloud-fall of cloudless sky upon loftier distant summits. The lake rippled pleasantly, flashing at every ripple.
Suddenly, “Katahdin!” said Iglesias.
Yes, there was a dim point, the object of our pilgrimage.
Katahdin, — the more I saw of it, the more grateful I was to the three powers who enabled me to see it: to Nature for building it, to Iglesias for guiding me to it, to myself for going.
We sat upon the deck and let Katahdin grow, —
