Any traveller knows that it is no very crushing disappointment not to see what he came to see. Outside sights give something, but inside joys are independent. We enjoyed our dim damp voyage heartily, on that wide loneliness. Nor were our shouts and laughter the only sounds. Loons would sometimes wail to us, as they dived, black dots in the mist. Then we would wait for their bulbous reappearance, and let fly the futile shot with its muffled report, — missing, of course.
No being has ever shot a loon, though several have legends of some one who has. Sound has no power to express a profounder emotion of utter loneliness than the loon’s cry. Standing in piny darkness on the lake’s bank, or floating in dimness of mist or glimmer of twilight on its surface, you hear this wailing note, and all possibility of human tenancy by the shore or human voyaging is annihilated. You can fancy no response to this signal of solitude disturbed, and again it comes sadly over the water, the despairing plaint of some companionless and incomplete existence, exiled from happiness it has never known, and conscious only of blank and utter want. Loon-skins have a commercial value; so it is reported. The Barabinzians of Siberia, a nation “up beyond the River Ob,” tan them into water-proof paletots or aquascutums. How they catch their loon, before they skin their loon, is one of the mysteries of that unknown realm.
Og, Gog, Magog, Memphremagog, all agog,
