752 BILLY (who is underneath): "I say, fellers, I guess one of us will have to git off." She doesn' call me "Ichabod " Or "Ich," or "Ole Fool" now; An' ef I mentioned "Annikey," 'T ud sartin raise a row. 'Tis "Mister Brown" an' "Mistis Brown," Ontwel it seems ter me We's done gone changed our natrel selves F'om what we used ter be. I knows, beca'se as how Ise tried, An' never seed it gee, It's awful hard ter teach new tricks Dat broadclof coat she made me buy- As dat ole jeans I used ter w'ar An' beefsteak aint for sich as me An' "Mister Brown" aint "Ichabod " I can't git over dat! So "Mistis Brown" may go ter town Jes when she wants; but sartin sho An' as for her insistin' how I doesn' keer what grub she eats, I doesn' keer how fine her clo'es 'Tis only one o' all her ways UP SAGINAW BAY. and we were all to meet upon an appointed day at Bay City, which is at the head, if head it can be called, of Saginaw Bay. Our route thence was by steamer to Tawas, and from Tawas by teams to the hunting-grounds in the Michigan backwoods. The steamboat wharf at Bay City was full of bustle and activity. There were piles of baggage and numbers of anxious owners. Conspicuous among the parcels were the gun-cases, some made of new pig leather or water-proofing, and evidently out for the first time, and others of weatherworn aspect telling of many a campaign and of much serious usage. Every object upon the wharf and about the freight office to which a dog could be tied had a dog tied to it, and all these dogs were rearing, and plunging, and tugging at their chains and giving vent to occasional sharp yells, in a condition of great excitement a feeling more or less shared by the numerous higher animals who were present. The crowd was composed of hunting parties bound for the backwoods by way of the various settlements on the Lake Huron side of the Michigan peninsula; of lumbermen going to the camps; of farmers going home, and of the usual variety of more or less accentuated Western types. There was a good deal of confusion about it, and among it all our party met, and, after a few moments of spasmodic and pleasant welcome, and the interchange of hearty greetings, got on board the steamer. Our dogs, twelve in number, were safely bestowed between decks, and as remotely from the dogs of other people as possible; all our baggage was put away, nothing missing or forgotten, and we moved off from the wharf with that sense of entire comfort that is incident only to well-ordered and properly premeditated excursions. 66 We had a delightful run up Saginaw Bay on a beautiful October evening, on which the sun went down with one of those gorgeous displays of color which England's most eminent art critic has told us are seen but very seldom in a life-time. It was an impressive and singularly beautiful spectacle, but one of which our West is prodigal, and which is not consistent with insular conditions of fog and moisture. A note of admiration sounded within the captain's hearing had the effect of eliciting his practical valuation of it. Humph!" he said, "rain like blazes all day to-morrow." It was a matter of common regret that the barometric impressions of this worthy navigator were invariably correct. We made some stoppages at points upon the shore, where seemingly unaccountable wharves projected from the outskirts of desolation. At these we took off people who might have been fugitives from some new Siberia, and debarked people who might have been exiles going thither. But at half-past eight o'clock we reached East Tawas, where, as the boat came alongside, we were cheerily hailed out of the darkness by a mighty hunter of the wilderness named Curtis, who had come down with his stout team to meet us and help to carry our multifarious traps. We disembarked amid a dreadful howling of the dogs, who charged about in every direction, dragging their masters in the darkness over all manner of calamitous obstructions, regardless of kicks, cuffs or vigorous exhortation. In half an hour we were comfortably ensconced in an inn with an enormous landlord, whose mighty girth shook with unctuous premonitions of an excellent supper. He produced half of a deer slain that very day, and gave us an earnest of our coming sport in the shape of a vast quantity of broiled venison, all of which we dutifully ate. Our captain, for we had a captain, as every well-constituted hunting party should, was Mr. John Erwin, of Cleveland, a gentleman at whose door lies the death of a grievous quantity of game of all kinds, and whose seventy years seem to have imparted vigor and activity to a yet stalwart and sym OUR CAPTAIN. metrical frame. Hale, hearty, capable of enduring all manner of fatigue, unerring with his rifle, full of the craft of the woods and an inexhaustible fund of kindly humor, he was the soul of our party. We were under his orders the next day, and so remained until our hunt was over. He was implicitly obeyed; none of his orders were unpleasant; they simply implied the necessary discipline of the party. We left Tawas in the early morning. We had two wagons, one of which carried nine of us, the other, Curtis's, had the heavier baggage in it, and was accompanied by the remaining three on foot. They had the option of getting into the wagon by turns, if tired, but they were all good walkers. We had twenty-five miles to make to "Thomp is nothing particularly exhilarating in driving in a drenching rain, even when it is done under particularly favorable auspices. There was some novelty for one, to be sure, in the great wastes of scrub-oak, the groups of stout Norway pines, the glistening white birch, the maples, the spruce-pines and the beeches; in the impenetrable jungles of tangled undergrowth and in the iteration and re-iteration of landscapes with no landmark or peculiarity whereby one might distinguish one from the other. All this was in one sense a novelty, inasmuch as one might never have seen anything like it before, but the enjoyment of it, were it really susceptible of being enjoyed, was marred by the steadiness with which the cold rain beat in our faces; extinguishing cigars and making pipes a-doubtful blessing; drenching everything exposed to it, and imparting that peculiar chill to which mind and body are alike liable under such conditions. One of our party, a veritable Mark Tapley, who was sure to "come out strong" under the most discouraging conditions, whistled fugitive airs in a resolute way; but they got damp and degenerated into funereal measures, suggesting that possibly the Dead March in "Saul" was originally conceived in a spirit of inferior vivacity or sprightly insincerity and becoming wet had been recognized as a thing of merit, and had therefore been permanently saturated for use on occasions of public grief. Another dispiriting element was the road, of which a large part was what is known as "corduroy," from some obscure resemblance, which does not exist, between its structure and a certain well-known fabric affected by "horsey" gentlemen. The jolting we got over this was painful to a degree which it is disagreeable to recall. It jarred OUR BACKWOODSMAN. ties of figurative description of that kind are as a closed book to one who has never ridden on a corduroy road in a wagon with inferior springs. At last we emerged on a higher plateau of sand, and left the marsh behind us for good. The rain had become a milder and tolerable evil, compared to the swamp road. All was sand, but the wet made it "pack" beneath the horses' feet and the wheels, and we went over it at an excellent pace. Around us was the Michigan forest in all its wonderful variety of growth and richness, and in all its drear monotony and desolation. Grass there was in tufts, and thin and poor. Thick gray lichens and starving mosses strove to cover up the thankless sand, but nothing seemed to prosper in it but the trees for which it held mysterious sustenance, where their deep roots could reach it. But even they made an unlovely forest. The great fires that sweep across this region, leave hideous scars behind them. One sees for miles and miles the sandy plain covered with the charred trunks of the fallen forest. Great lofty pines, whose stems are blackened from the root as high as the fire has reached, huge, distorted and disfigured, stand gloomily above their moldering brethren, their white skeletons extending their dead and broken arms, in mute testimony of lost grace and beauty. Nothing could be more desolate than these "burnings," as they are called. They present an aspect of such utter, hopeless dreariness, and such complete and painful solitude as one might imagine to exist only within the frozen circle of the Arctic The rain continued and wet us until we began to get on good terms with it, as if we were Alaskans or Aleuts and rather liked it. Besides, we got stirred up over the deer tracks in the sand. They were very numerous and fresh, and one or two rifles were loaded in hopes of a shot at one "on the wing." None came in sight, however, and the undergrowth and scrub-oaks effectually kept them from our view. At half-past one o'clock, after a few premonitory symptoms in the shape of fences, of which the purpose was obscure, since they hedged in nothing and looked as if they had only been put up for fun or practice, we came suddenly to the edge of a basin or depression in the plateau over which we had been driving, and there, beneath us, lay Thompson's. Here in the midst of the wilderness was a prosperous, healthy-looking farm, actually yielding vegetables and cereals, and having about it all manner of horses, cows, pigs, hay-stacks, barns, dogs to bark, pumpkins, and all the other established characteristics of a well-regulated farm. We rattled down the declivity to the house and met with a hearty welcome, most of the party having known Thompson for years. He is a bluff, hearty backwoodsman, whom years of uninterrupted prosperity have made rich. He owns thousands of acres of timber-land, and his house is known far and wide as the best hotel in Michigan. Mrs. Thompson is not exactly a backwoods |