The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [76]
Roosevelt relished the fact that moose were the largest member of the deer family populating North America, standing six feet tall, with the males weighing up to 1,300 pounds. (A bull bison, however, can be larger, weighing up to a ton.) With their poor eyesight, moose rely on their excellent hearing to escape predators at night. Certainly Roosevelt would have identified with the way the moose turned this deficit into an asset. Their sense of smell was so heightened that a favorite saying of Maine moose hunters was “Keep the wind in your face and the sun at your back” so as not to be detected. Able to run thirty-five miles an hour, neck craning with every sudden noise, the docile-looking bull moose became astonishingly aggressive when feeling threatened. And if a hunter killed a bull moose—which usually took more than a single bullet—two or three grown men were needed to carry the carcass off. Roosevelt was also impressed with the raw strength of the bull moose.
VII
Unfortunately, there is no photograph of Roosevelt on August 23, 1879, when he arrived in Island Falls full of vim and vigor. He was carrying a forty-five-pound pack on his back and held both a shotgun and a rifle in his hands. There was no telling what oddments were inside the pack. You could have recognized him as a greenhorn from as far away as the North Pole. Along with Emlen West and Arthur Cutler, he headed over to the Sewall cabin to plan their climb. Staring at Mount Katahdin, pointing at it with his rifle, Roosevelt spontaneously decided to canoe more than twenty miles to Lake Mattawamkeag (with Emlen) just to loosen up for their big outing.
For eight days the Roosevelt-Sewall party camped and hiked in the Mount Katahdin area. (Today it’s part of Baxter State Park.) A huge mound looming out over a sea of woodlands, Katahdin had a soothing Japanese Zen-like aura. Just staring at the peak made you want to write a haiku. On a clear day from the Katahdin summit, Canada poured open on both sides of the mountain. You could see New Brunswick to the east and Quebec to the west. But that serenity was misleading. One misjudged step on the way up Katahdin could mean a broken neck or death.
About three-quarters of the way up Katahdin, both Cutler and Emlen collapsed from fatigue. Roosevelt soldiered on; he bragged in his diary that he had learned to “endure fatigue” as stoically as any lumberjack, even though his throat was burning and his joints were aching. At one juncture, he claimed he was “fagged” but was not stricken with asthma. His mind, however, was on fire. Looking toward the west, Roosevelt probably could see Moosehead Lake, where “the humiliation” had taken place. He’d come a long way since that hazing. As Hudson Stuck, a member of the first team to climb Mount McKinley in Alaska explained, first-time mountaineers like Roosevelt were embarked on a “privileged communion” with the “high places of earth.”71 And, indeed, as he was ascending Thoreau’s peak, Roosevelt’s heart filled with pure joy; he was double-charged with life, wearing everybody else out.
Once they all returned to Island Falls, Cutler and Emlen decided to call it quits. But Roosevelt wanted another wilderness adventure now, while the adrenaline was still coursing through his body like a river of fire. Full of spark and fizz, he said good-bye to his tutor and cousin and turned his sights to the caribou country around the Munsungun Lake region. The idea was for Roosevelt and Sewall to take a pirogue up the Aroostook River on a hunting jag in search of moose and caribou. They loaded up on hardtack, pork jerky, and flour, gearing up for a grueling nine or ten days combating rocks and rapids.
Refusing to take shortcuts, they forded rivers, slipped on stones in fast-moving streams, shot doves for dinner, and hiked until they dropped in clammy exhaustion. With each effort Roosevelt grew merrier. Tellingly, Cutler later wrote to Sewall