September 14, 1927

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interests. He has a business job on his hands, and has sought to carry it through in the face of the greatest difficulty. About the time of my arrival in Hankow Soong broke into the papers with a revolutionary announcement to the general public: "The Minister of Finance is pleased to see all those who call on business. He begs leave to say, however, that Government responsibility prevents his reception of social callers and, likewise, makes it impossible for him to take time to drink tea with those who call on business."

Whether or not Eugene Chen, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, will stand with the Communist or the moderate wing is not certain. His office is at the end of Han Chung Road in Hankow, under the shadow of the building which. when I was in Hankow, was occupied by Borodin. Chen himself is diminutive, dapper, and very English. He does not speak a word of Chinese, but works with his colleagues through an interpreter. He is anti-British and an adept at epithets. But he was trained in England. made his fortune practicing law in an

English colony, and had just recalled his sons from study in an English school.

But Chen-this with the usual reservations seems to have had his little day. It is not likely that the Powers will be inclined to take him seriously again, regardless of those for whom he may allege to speak. And the authorities who will control to-morrow's Nationalist régime appear to be inclined to follow a more moderate leadership in the administration of foreign affairs.

domination has certainly resulted, in considerable part, from his own personality. He comes towering into the room. His voice and his eyes are commanding. His long black hair sweeps back from his head in effective Lloyd-Georgian fashion. There is something about him that is pleasant-and final. It was not difficult to imagine the authority of his counsel in the sessions of the various committees of the Hankow régime.

I can share the general skepticism concerning Borodin's retreat to Moscow.

was across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and three flights up. It was a bourgeois place. There were stenographers, over-stuffed furniture, a roll-top desk, conservative Havanas, and no photographs of Lenine.

Borodin, I found, was something of a surprise. There is nothing up-stage about his tactics. And there are no show-cases for the wares he brings to China. But he is a dominant person and, doubtless, has been more potent than any other single influence within the inner circles of the party. This

that he would prove so easy a subject for deportation. Already from the headquarters of Feng Yu-hsiang some fruits of Borodin's continued activity seem to have appeared. Feng, during the entire past year, has been the dark horse in the Nationalist movement. He has been known to have the best trained and disciplined army in China, its numerical strength being variously estimated at from 25,000 to 125,000 men. But, with this effective force at his command, he has won distinction by inaction.

I met General Feng's vice-commander

E

LY is the last place, but one-end of the Iron Range and the railroad, a place of diggings and dumps; beginning, also, of the wilderness, home of the outfitters, peddling point for a few squaws who sell birch bark and beads.

Winton is the last place the last point, absolutely. A kennel of Eskimo dogs, proxy of the canoe for the winter months, tells what it is. Piles of bark and sawdust and an old band saw rusting away in the shallow water of the lake edge tell what it was-the last line that the lumberman had to break in his campaign of desolation.

Beyond is well, a chug-boat runs across Fall Lake, and an old truck across a corduroy portage, and another boat across Basswood Lake to several places, but this time it ran to Prairie Portage.

And there we were, the chug-boat chugging back down Basswood, alone with our packs on Prairie Portage. Four of us, not counting the boy-not counting him just for the moment; he had to be counted later, being, probably, the best man of the party. I had known none of them till the day before.

Ahead of us, any way that we might choose to go, lay an unbroken wilderness of water and rock and a little-very little-soil made of leaf mold; a wilderness nine days long with good going, twice as big, approximately, as the State of Massachusetts, in which no human being lives.

Where? Why, along the boundary waters between Minnesota and Ontario, our Superior National Forest the south side, their Quetico Forest Reserve the north side, innumerable lakes, twice innumerable islands, thrice innumerable rocky ridges, the last big wilderness left

THE territory of which Mr. Merritt here gives some impressions is the last great area of unspoiled wilderness accessible to the bulk of the population in the heart of the United States. If there are other comparable wilderness areas, they are far West. It is, beyond question, the greatest canoeing country in North America, perhaps in the world. The comparative sparsity of its fauna is the more proof that it is wilderness absolute.

The International Boundary Commission, on reference of the Governments of the United States and Canada, is now investigating a proposal to permit the building of storage dams at seven or eight points in this maze of waters. The effect would be to raise the level of the lakes, to kill the timber alongshore, to flood many islands when the reservoirs are full, to leave desolate mud-banks when they are lowered, to upset the economy of fish life in the waters and of bird life on the shores. The benefit, such as there might be, would accrue to power and pulp plants, mainly owned by the E. W. Backus interests, farther down the basin, on Rainy Lake, Lake of the Woods, and the Winnipeg River.

The exact effect of the building of such dams cannot be even approximately known until the reports of the American and Canadian engineers are filed, which probably will not be until late next winter. Meanwhile, the people of the United States and Canada should acquire some understanding of what it would mean to this and future generations to have the wilderness marred.

The Outlook will have more to say on the subject from time to time. Mr. Merritt's trip to this territory was purposely taken in order to acquire firsthand information about the region and the possible results of building the dams. -THE EDITORS.

At

So, taking up our packs, we made Prairie Portage. Three times we made it, as many trips as that being necessary for our numerous packs and the canoes. A private is entitled to think. least, he will think. And I thought, on that portage, that we had too much duffel; that, in this particular if in no other, we were not good wilderness men. When thirty-seven portages were behind us, I thought the same. The welcome of the wilderness would have seemed less grudging if we had had less luggage. I make that statement at this time because at certain points in the narrative lack of appreciation will appear, and I should like the reason to appear too. I was frequently too tired to appreciate.

But, the portaging done, we were in Birch Lake. The wilderness had swallowed us. The clear water was under us. The pale green of birch and poplar scrub, with darker rich patches of conifer growth-that and the rocks-was around us. Silence, absolute, was above us. No bird called. Even when we were well inshore no cricket chirped. That, too, I mention thus early because throughout it was the rule. Sound was the exception, and will be mentioned as such.

September 14, 1927

An arm of Emerald Lake-a picture of peace I occupied, was the pilot. He had gone that route before-four times, I thinkunguided.

We paddled far, it seemed, and into many coves. Mack's paddle laggedand dragged. Turning his head over one shoulder, he called, "Alf, I've missed the portage."

So we searched for what Alf called drainage lines (Alf claimed to be recognized as an engineer, by everybody except engineers; as a geologist, by everybody except geologists). A portage, I found, ought always to be at the lowest spot on the horizon. The lowest spot appeared to be away to the south, and we paddled there, only to find that the lowest spot was clear away to the north, hidden from where we first were. We paddled back-until the Professor's bass boomed down the bay:

"Beaver house to the left!"

And Mack said that he never had

really been lost at all, that he just wanted us to see that particular beaver house. I do not know. Bill, who is the son of Mack, laughed. Later, I thought that we might have spared the sight of this particular beaver house, though, of course, we did not know it then.

The beaver, except possibly for the loon, is the dominant element in the population of that wilderness. The next day, at another house, we were to come in close contact with one. He came out and swam, time and again, around our canoe, close enough that we might have struck him with a paddle. Frequently we dragged the canoes over beaver dams, wading boot-top deep to do it; old dams with wide fringes of dead timber above them, new dams with the fringe of timber dying from inundation.

The beaver, it should be understood, first builds his house. Then, below it, he builds a dam to back the water up so

49

that the entrances to his house will be below the water-line and he safe from

his enemies.

He builds his house of small stuff, his dam of larger, but the largest he cuts, apparently, in pure wantonness. We went through beaver clearings where trees thicker than a man's body lay crossed and piled as if in the track of a cyclone. The Professor, anxious to make out a case for every wild thinghe reproved me once for killing a wasp that had stung him-said that this was really a service to the forest growth, since the trees cut were birch and poplar and their destruction made room for the conifers. But another time, looking at the dead timber above a dam, he adImitted that the evidence for and against the beaver is pretty evenly balanced.

H

OWEVER that may be, the wilderness would be less worth while as a wilderness if the beavers were absent or their numbers less. I heard them one night-but that story needs a preface.

That day had been our only windy one, and we were on Lake Agnes, one of the biggest. Mack and the boy and I, through rough going, had made a landing and camp at dusk. But we had lost the other canoe and, the wind coming up stronger after dark, I climbed a cliff and made a beacon fire. They saw it, I afterwards learned, the instant it flared up, and Alf tried to answer with a flashlight, but was nearly swamped and dared not again release his hold on the paddle.

Well, while I waited by my beacon fire there was borne down the wind a mighty boom and crash. And almost instantly another, and another, and still another. In civilization and the daylight, it would have been lumbermen felling trees. The beaver, across a little bay, were holding carnival in the night and in the storm, felling trees for fun. But for the strong wind, blowing from them to us, they would have been silent so near a human camp.

But the beavers have taken me off the line of my story, as they frequently took us off our route.

WE

E camped that first night, after being lost for the sake of a beaver house, on the portage from Birch to Carp Lake. Bill caught a bass and a pickerel. His father made him put the latter back into the water. "Either put it back," he said, "or take it so far from camp that it will be clear out of the way." The pickerel is not esteemed as a food fish by the few who penetrate that wilderness.

There was a queer little noise about

50

camp that night. We found, in the morning, that it was made by young weasels-weasels almost as gentle as kittens, so little did they and their ancestors know of man and his treachery.

Practically the only sign of man, even on that portage, was his domesticated grasses. More faithful than his dog, they follow him into the wilderness—red clover and alsike clover and timothy and redtop. The clovers turn back first. Timothy tags on for a time longer. And when you are where redtop no longer follows the tracks of man across the portages the wilderness is absolute.

And there, where all marks of man

told me to go away. I found signs of moose under the balsams by a little bay where I went for a swim. Several times we found such signs. But the Professor was never hopeful that we would see a moose, and we never did. There were no swamps, he explained. And, though that has nothing to do with moose, there were no sand beaches. In the nine days we did not see as much sand as would fill a chicken's crop. Those lakes are too new, the complete glaciation too recent-only a few hundreds of thousands of years ago, perhaps the wave wash too slight to have piled up sand beaches as yet.

end, the loons begin. Almost the incar- THE

nation of the wilderness, they would make those boundary waters well worth while if all the other charms were gone -but the loons would go, of course, with the other charms. We had unusual opportunity to study them. Bill could imitate their call so accurately that they would come, searching through the little waves, very close to our canoe. But Bill never could remember how to make the call until the loon did it first. Those that kept silence, therefore, we could not conjure.

But the realest witchery of the loons was not in those that laughed and cried by day upon the broad waters. It would come late at night, when the camp-fire had burned to a glow, when the last pipe was almost smoked, when no shadow of sound existed in earth or air or water. Then, from some far lagoon, would float that other soft and pleasing call, the lullaby of the loon, hardly a sound at all, but just enough to make the silence audible.

The next day we were in big water, on Emerald Lake. In the afternoon rain threatened, and we made camp early on a stony point. That was the beginning of our inability to pitch tents with stakes, so thin is the leaf-made soil, so near the rock. We had to tie to trees and blueberry bushes and little stunted cedars in the cracks.

We found near camp next morning some really fine blueberries, and the Professor and I picked enough for two or three meals for the party. While we were doing it he gave me a bit of interesting information. "The few Indians who once lived in this region," he said, "had no vegetable food except blueberries and wild rice." Incidentally, we had brought along some wild rice, harvested by Indians, sold by the outfitter, and-in camp, at least-it is much superior to the ordinary kind.

On the rocks above this camp some chipmunks barked about my feet and

HE next day we were on water surrounded by real woods, fairly big pine and spruce and balsam, the first that we had seen. We made a portage, a mile long and extremely rough, on which there were some wonderful

trees.

On that portage I heard the song of the winter wren, a privilege not before vouchsafed to me, a privilege not vouchsafed to any whose bird hunting has not extended north of the line of the Great Lakes. My mind went back to the time when I first saw this least and loneliest of the wrens. It was a late fall twilight, under the shadow of the Overton Knobs near Nashville, when a party of us were returning from a long bird tramp. The little fellow flashed out of the foliage, and one of my party shot it. Such license is granted to ornithologists -for the benefit, the law reads, of science.

On that portage we met a canoeful of wilderness farers coming out, and sent letters by them, Mack and I, to our families. They told us, those outcoming wilderness farers, of a particularly fine camp site which they had left, up Otter Track Lake one of the prettiest lakes that I saw-and we made it that night, by hard paddling.

And when we had made it, Mack did not want to camp there. It had been too recently used, he said, and the skunks might get us. The Professor sniffed. "It's by odds the best campingplace we have seen, or will see," he said, "and there are not enough skunks in this whole wilderness to musk a midget." Mack paddled away across the bay looking for another camp site, but he did not find it, and we camped in the old one, and no skunk came. Some Canada jays did come and feast on our bacon rinds. They know, those wise birds, much better than skunks do where food is likely to be. No doubt they had eaten of the bacon rinds of all parties that had camped by that fireplace for years.

The Outlook for

Those wilderness fireplaces-stones piled up with a green birch pole across on forked stakes and pothooks made of forked limbs are frequently to be found. Only one night did we fail to find a camp site with a fireplace already made. Practically the only marks of human hands in all that region, they are well smoked and old. More than two hundred years old, some of them, perhaps. For that wilderness was no more a wilderness at the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century than it is at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth. A queer feeling comes over one from the realization that by these rocks where he squats and fries bacon a French voyageur probably squatted and fried bacon when this was no more wilderness than all the rest of North America.

THE

'HE next day was one of many portages from one small lake to another, of many lifts over beaver dams, for we had decided to take a short cut to Saganagons, leaving Cache Bay and Saganaga, on the regular route, to the east. The rocks were rougher, the portages steeper, but there was the reward of a profusion of plants. No end of clintonia, the brilliant, blue-berried plant named in honor of De Witt Clinton. I found a handful of raspberries, one lone strawberry, a dewberry or two, a little wisp of currants, a fair-sized patch of thimbleberries, queer cousins of the raspberry-not enough to have helped out the food supply of the Indians who once were there, but enough to give a pilgrim a taste. Partridgeberries, too, were everywhere-of no service to man, but fine for birds, if there only had been any birds there.

And there were birds there, as it turned out. Suddenly I was in the midst of a flock of warblers of several species, through with their family duties, no doubt, and ready to start south. Instinctively, I listened for the chickadee. He is the bell-wether of the warbler flock, queerly enough, as it feeds southward in the fall. And, sure enough, the chickadee piped up-busy, there in those northern woods and waters, herding his flock together for the long drive to another summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

We portaged into Saganagons, into a marsh. And redwing blackbirds were calling. A kingfisher flashed across the channel. One spot in that wilderness had its fair population of birds.

We found a likely-looking camping site on a cliff, and paddled toward it. Bill, looking through the glasses, said that there was a bear waddling about

NEXT

EXT morning we broke camp two hours earlier than usual, in order to make up time. But we made up no time. A sudden thunder-storm, with wind, came upon us, and we were glad to seek shelter in a little bay and to land on its shores. Here, I think, was the spot with more the feel of wildness to it than any other that I saw in all that welter of wildness. The trees were all conifers and fairly large. All over the ground were graves of trees-mounds of moss, with all the wood that had once lain beneath them completely rotted away, so that one's feet went down half knee-deep. Alf and the Professor sheltered on the other side of the bay, in woods not so fine as ours. But a porcupine sat in a tree above their heads, motionless as long as the rain poured down. When the shower was over, he started eating buds, and we left him making a hearty breakfast.

A step on the stairs from Saganagons to Kanipi That porcupine completes the list of the four-footed things that I saw during nine days in the wilderness of the boundary waters.

OU

UT of Saganagons Lake we went into Saganagons River, a stream of many beautiful waterfalls with portages around them-hogbacks, and hard to make. By the time we reached the last of them we had left Alf and the Professor far behind-not that we were

rest from the portaging. Perhaps one other place awed me as much. We had camped the night before among the falls, and the Professor and I sat late by the fire, and the moon, almost at the full, hung southward over a woods that by daylight had been fire-scarred and ugly. Under the moon, with the falls in the foreground, it made a wonderful picture of loneliness and remoteness from human kind.

T was at this camp that the Professor developed the habit of kicking over the coffee-pot. He did it with wonderful regularity and precision for the next three meals, until I hit upon the happy expedient of setting out the pot for him to kick over before the coffee was made. After that he refused to have anything to do with the cooking, and even declined, at the next camp, to share my tent, though the ground was so stony that he could not put up his own.

better paddlers, but merely that they, IT having the camera, found many pictures to make. Mack and Bill, while we waited, went fishing below the falls. And on the portage, among black spruce trees, on a bed of boughs that some other wilderness farer had left, with the roar of the falls in my ears, I stretched out and went to sleep. I awoke with a wonderful picture framed before my eyes a glorious old white pine on the other side of the falls and, for an instant, an eagle hanging motionless above iteagle or osprey, I had not time to make certain which, and the Profesor said that both were rare in that region.

Here was the spot whose beauty struck nearest home to my heart. No doubt there were other spots as beautiful, but at this one I had opportunity to

He led me to think that this stubbornness was related to the coffee-pot incident, but afterwards explained that he wanted to be able to tell his wife that he had slept on the rocks and dreamed of her. I think he meant to be complimentary. He was not, however, complimentary of the mosquitoes the next morning