A COMMON EXPERIENCE

The keenest of the sportsman's disappointments is not a blank day, nor a series of misses, unaccountable or too well accountable to a blundering hand or unsteady nerves, nor adverse weather, nor gun or tackle broken in the midst of sport, nor perversity of dogs, nor uncongeniality of comradeship, nor yet even the sudden cold or the spell of rheumatism that prevents his taking the field on the allotted morning.

All these may be but for a day. To-morrow may bring game again to haunts now untenanted, restore cunning to the awkward hand, steady the nerves, mend the broken implement, make the dogs obedient and bring pleasanter comrades or the comfortable lonesomeness of one's own companionship, and to-morrow or next day or next week the cold and rheumatic twinges may have passed into the realm of bygone ills.

For a year, perhaps for many years, he has yearned for a sight of some beloved haunt, endeared to him by old and cherished associations. He fancies that once more among the scenes of his youthful exploits there will return to him something of the boyish ardor, exuberance of spirit and perfect freedom from care that made the enjoyment of those happy hours so complete. He imagines that a draught from the old spring that bubbles up in the shadow of the beeches or from the moss-brimmed basin of the trout brook will rejuvenate him, at least for the moment while its coolness lingers on his palate, as if he quaffed Ponce de Leon's undiscovered fountain. He doubts not that in the breath of the old woods he shall once more catch that faint, indescribable, but unforgotten aroma, that subtle savor of wildness, that has so long eluded him, sometimes tantalizing his nostrils with a touch, but never quite inhaled since its pungent elixir made the young blood tingle in his veins.

He has almost come to his own again, his long-lost possession in the sunny realm of youth. It lies just beyond the hill before him, from whose crest he shall see the nut-tree where he shot his first squirrel, the southing slope where the beeches hide the spring, where he astonished himself with the glory of killing his first grouse, and he shall see the glint of the brook flashing down the evergreen dell and creeping among the alder copses.

He does not expect to find so many squirrels or grouse or trout now as thirty years ago, when a double gun was a wonder, and its possession the unrealized dream of himself and his comrades, and none of them had ever seen jointed rod or artificial fly, and dynamite was uninvented. Yet all the game and fish cannot have been driven from nor exterminated in haunts so congenial and fostering as these, by the modern horde of gunners and anglers and by the latter-day devices of destruction, and he doubts not that he shall find enough to satisfy the tempered ardor of the graybeard.

Indeed, it is for something better than mere shooting or fishing that he has come so far. One squirrel, flicking the leaves with his downfall, one grouse plunging to earth midway in his thunderous flight, one trout caught as he can catch him, now, will appease his moderate craving for sport, and best and most desired of all, make him, for the nonce, a boy again. He anticipates with quicker heartbeat the thrill of surprised delight that choked him with its fullness when he achieved his first triumph.

At last the hilltop is gained, but what unfamiliar scene is this which has taken the place of that so cherished in his memory and so longed for? Can that naked hillside slanting toward him from the further rim of the valley, forlorn in the desolation of recent clearing, be the wooded slope of the other day? Can the poor, unpicturesque thread of water that crawls in feeble attenuation between its shorn, unsightly banks be the wild, free brook whose voice was a continual song, every rod of whose amber and silver course was a picture? Even its fringes of willow and alders, useful for their shade and cover when alive, but cut down worthless even for fuel, have been swept from its margin by the ruthless besom of destruction, as if everything that could beautify the landscape must be blotted out to fulfill the mission of the spoiler.

Near it, and sucking in frequent draughts from the faint stream, is a thirsty and hungry little sawmill, the most obtrusive and most ignoble feature of the landscape, whose beauty its remorseless fangs have gnawed away. Every foot of the brook below it is foul with its castings, and the fragments of its continual greedy feasting are thickly strewn far and near. Yet it calls to the impoverished hills for more victims; its shriek arouses discordant echoes where once resounded the music of the brook, the song of birds, the grouse's drum call, and the mellow note of the hound.

Though sick at heart with the doleful scene, the returned exile descends to his harried domain hoping that he may yet find some vestige of its former wealth, but only more disappointments reward his quest. Not a trout flashes through the shrunken pools. The once limpid spring is a quagmire among rotting stumps. The rough nakedness of the hillside is clad only with thistles and fireweed, with here and there a patch of blanched dead leaves, dross of the old gold of the beech's ancient autumnal glory.

Of all he hoped for nothing is realized, and he finds only woful change, irreparable loss. His heart heavy with sorrow and bursting with impotent wrath against the ruthless spoiler, he turns his back forever on the desolated scene of his boyhood's sports.

Alas! That one should ever attempt to retouch the time-faded but beautiful pictures that the memory holds.