It bears marks of having been so for a long period, and probably a period long ago.Large animals are not common in these woods now, and you seldom meet anything fiercer than the timid deer and the gentle bear.But in days gone by, Hunter's Pass was the highway of the whole caravan of animals who were continually going backward; and forwards, in the aimless, roaming way that beasts have, between Mud Pond and the Boquet Basin.I think I can see now the procession of them between the heights of Dix and Nipple Top; the elk and the moose shambling along, cropping the twigs; the heavy bear lounging by with his exploring nose; the frightened deer trembling at every twig that snapped beneath his little hoofs, intent on the lily-pads of the pond; the raccoon and the hedgehog, sidling along; and the velvet-footed panther, insouciant and conscienceless, scenting the path with a curious glow in his eye, or crouching in an overhanging tree ready to drop into the procession at the right moment.Night and day, year after year, I see them going by, watched by the red fox and the comfortably clad sable, and grinned at by the black cat,--the innocent, the vicious, the timid and the savage, the shy and the bold, the chattering slanderer and the screaming prowler, the industrious and the peaceful, the tree-top critic and the crawling biter,--just as it is elsewhere.It makes me blush for my species when I think of it.This charming society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the snarling catamount.Ihave read in history that the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards than the fierce and warlike Caribs.As society is at present constituted in Christian countries, I would rather for my own security be a cougar than a fawn.
There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks.Out of the books of daring travelers, nothing.I do not know that the Keene Valley has any history.The mountains always stood here, and the Au Sable, flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the sands and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and soothing sounds.Before the Vermonters broke into it some three-quarters of a century ago, and made meadows of its bottoms and sugar-camps of its fringing woods, I suppose the red Indian lived here in his usual discomfort, and was as restless as his successors, the summer boarders.But the streams were full of trout then, and the moose and the elk left their broad tracks on the sands of the river.
But of the Indian there is no trace.There is a mound in the valley, much like a Tel in the country of Bashan beyond the Jordan, that may have been built by some pre-historic race, and may contain treasure and the seated figure of a preserved chieftain on his slow way to Paradise.What the gentle and accomplished race of the Mound-Builders should want in this savage region where the frost kills the early potatoes and stunts the scanty oats, I do not know.I have seen no trace of them, except this Tel, and one other slight relic, which came to light last summer, and is not enough to found the history of a race upon.
Some workingmen, getting stone from the hillside on one of the little plateaus, for a house-cellar, discovered, partly embedded, a piece of pottery unique in this region.With the unerring instinct of workmen in regard to antiquities, they thrust a crowbar through it, and broke the bowl into several pieces.The joint fragments, however, give us the form of the dish.It is a bowl about nine inches high and eight inches across, made of red clay, baked but not glazed.The bottom is round, the top flares into four comers, and the rim is rudely but rather artistically ornamented with criss-cross scratches made when the clay was soft.The vessel is made of clay not found about here, and it is one that the Indians formerly living here could not form.
Was it brought here by roving Indians who may have made an expedition to the Ohio; was it passed from tribe to tribe; or did it belong to a race that occupied the country before the Indian, and who have left traces of their civilized skill in pottery scattered all over the continent ?
If I could establish the fact that this jar was made by a prehistoric race, we should then have four generations in this lovely valley:-the amiable Pre-Historic people (whose gentle descendants were probably killed by the Spaniards in the West Indies); the Red Indians; the Keene Flaters (from Vermont); and the Summer Boarders, to say nothing of the various races of animals who have been unable to live here since the advent of the Summer Boarders, the valley being not productive enough to sustain both.This last incursion has been more destructive to the noble serenity of the forest than all the preceding.
