Morning in the Forest
I spend my days now in the woods and on the mountainside, and share the deserted trails of the black bear with the occasional deer, and a still less frequent visitor, Brere Rabbit. Early every morning, I leave behind me the blue spirals of breakfast fires in the valley, and with two companions, strike out along the railroad to where the forest comes down to meet us.
We are three silent men in the morning, and trudge along with mailed boots crunching on the trodden snow. Charlie, as the man in charge, goes ahead. With hands in pockets and bent head beneath a battered hat, he lifts his feet as though he would leave his footprints deep in the iron ground. Youthful James, in his old green mackinaw, with a piece of his twenty-first birthday cake in his lunch-box, ambles mentally from breakfast to geology, from his mother’s last letter to the prickly spruce we found yesterday; half bemused by these waking thoughts and the faint persistent vestiges of dreams from which he had been torn not an hour before, he stumbles occasionally in his heavy boots. The rails at our feet slide by in monotonous procession, alchemised by a frosty nacreous patine from common steel to a dull silver.
The air is still and cold. Morning is detained as yet by dying night, though the stars have faded half an hour since. A cold transparency washes the shadows from their last tenebrous refuges among the trees and in the westerly hollows.
At the shed, we leave the track and take a steep and snow-covered trail through the slashing. Here, the protective influence of the trees has extended a little way on all sides into the clearing. Where the snow has dwindled, the foot sinks into the moist, re humus of the trail. Presently, no more than an occasional patch of snow lingers by a moss-covered log. Jack Frost, with his silver brush, has here laid a Parthian touch upon the farthest dead leaf, and fled upon the wind to the open hillside. The trees engulf us as we climb. Before morning is fairly come night has half stolen upon us under their leafy roof. To us they are now the innumerable pillars of a dim and damp cathedral, guarding the dark arcana of nature.
A squirrel, alarmed at our invasion, chatters at us suddenly from a great hemlock. With tail erect, he jerks his small body from one frozen attitude of defiance to another. Where our trail crosses a tangle of fallen trees, we find ourselves upon an old pack trail, broad and evenly covered with brown leaves. In places, young trees stand insolently in mid-road, vanguard of the silent sylvan army waiting on either side to close ranks in ineluctable reclamation.
Where we stop to rest, warmed now and out of breath, the air is full of the sound of rushing water. For many days now we have worked within earshot of this heedless, hurrying mountain stream, with its swift passage in contrast to our own deliberate moves.
Later today, in a stony spot near the water, we shall build a fire of dry cedar, lit from dead twigs with their parasitic murderer, the beard-moss, dead in turn and still clinging. The water for our tea, in the old black and battered pot, will have been caught in its flashing leap between the glistening, spray-drenched boulders. Thin sunlight will be in the tree-tops then, hardly filtering to the mossy ground; while the faint blue and fragrant smoke of our fire, starting with an eager leap from the flames to the moving air, will float leisurely between the trees.
Address: Box 176, Tunnel Camp, Britannia Beach, B.C.