Advisory: Mild peril from Little Nippers, blackfly philosophy, Methodist-picnic profanity, and mail delivered under the wrong name. May unsettle anyone fond of still water behaving like memory with no proper town supervision nearby.
Correspondence from East Bellmont
Squibs from our Inexhaustible and Talented Scribe
There is no news this week, which is news of a kind, though it does not sell papers nor make a man leave his hoe standing in the hill of potatoes.
The weather is caught in the same hitch it has traveled in for three weeks: gray morning, sulky noon, a little dampness toward evening, and then a night so still the frogs appear to be waiting for instructions. The roads are neither good nor bad, the gardens neither drowned nor comforted, and the hens have taken to expressing no opinion whatever. We have all looked up at the sky till the sky looks back with the old blank face of a justice of the peace asked to settle a quarrel over a borrowed rake.
As there is no new matter worth troubling the public with, we have once more gone poking into the olden golden days of Chateaugay’s past, and bring before the readers of today a peculiar tale from the History of Chateaugay Lake. It is one of those accounts that has floated about from camp to boathouse, from boathouse to store, and from store to the back side of memory, until nobody can say whether it is history, warning, mischief, or merely a wet lie that has grown weeds.
The tale concerns the Little Nippers, that old lake yarn regarding small troublesome creatures, or spirits, or water-snakes, or nothing at all, according to the courage of the speaker. Some call them horned things. Some say they nip toes. Some say they do not bother toes unless the toes have no business being in the water. Others maintain the Nippers are only a story told to frighten children, though I have noticed the same parties remove their boots mighty careful at the shore.
One witness, whose name was not given, and whose voice was said to have issued from somewhere beyond a cedar thicket, or perhaps from a thick clump of sweet-smelling but intoxicating sasquatch-widow’s brush, put the matter in this fashion:
“Now, ye figger them’s just ordinary greenhorn weeds tanglin’ up the North Country, do ye? Just a mess o’ salad hair round a paddle, nothin’ more? Or is that there lake weed the dead dregs—caput mortuum, if ye’ve got Latin in yer boots—of some old-time thing pushin’ up through Chateaugay, slow as a bad memory and twice as mean?”
This is a strong statement for a person hidden in brush, and we do not endorse the Latin, though we admire the confidence.
The oldest form of the tale says that certain guides of Chateaugay Lake had an agreement, never written down except once on a birch chip that immediately curled up and became a caterpillar. These guides were practical men, not given to superstition unless it improved the fishing. They knew the old routes, the shoals, the cold pockets, the places where trout lay, and the places where no respectable trout would stay after sundown. They also knew that when a line gave a tug unlike any fish, stump, turtle, or drowned log, a man was to cut it quick.
Not pull.
Not pray.
Cut.
A second voice, muttered so low that the hearer declared the lake itself leaned in to catch it, said:
“When them original Chateaugay guides tell ye to cut the line once ye feel that tug, that ain’t cowardice, no sir. That there is separation, clean and deliberate. Snippin’ the thread afore some fool receives illumination from the lower real estate.”
I do not know what “lower real estate” may be worth per acre, but from all reports there is poor drainage.
The guides also had a custom of dropping a little rye and tobacco over the gunwale before taking sportsmen into certain waters. Naturally they told visitors it was for luck, for full creels, and for the old Indian ways. That satisfied the tourists, who came north with soft hands, loud pants, and picnic hampers full of ham sweating in wax paper. But the old guides counted the bubbles afterward. They counted them solemnly. One pour for the fish. One pinch for the dead. One silence for whatever bumped the underside of the boat and then, according to Mrs. Philo Ketcham’s uncle, bumped it again from inside the boards.
There was also talk of an order called the Scale and the Oar. This may have been a society, or a joke, or no more than three men with a bottle and a bad explanation. Its object, so far as can be learned, was to keep the lake peaceable, the tourists ignorant, the fish biting, and certain young things below the weed-line from growing too curious about daylight.
One old fellow, who had only one eye but used it in a suspicious manner, declared:
“The Scale is old flesh, cold and fixed. The Oar is man’s own foolish tool, pushin’ him straight across the lip of the basin whether he knows it or not. Don’t ye tell me them old-timers didn’t know. Course they knew. Any feller with one good eye and a bad conscience could see the arithmetic of it.”
This was said, we are told, while he was mending a landing net with black thread and would not look toward the water.
The queerest part of the history concerns a silver dollar. In one telling it was an 1850 piece. In another, 1873. In a third, and here the story grows improper with time, it was a genuine 1897 Morgan dollar found before 1897 had arrived, melted into the metal fitting of a boat as though the boat had swallowed it and disagreed. The owner said it was not wedged, not hammered, not placed there by human hand, but dissolved in, “like the metal had remembered it wrong.”
What are we to do with such a statement? We print it and go on.
About the same season, weeds gathered thick near the Narrows. Some called them common weeds. Some called them a green shroud. A boy from the west shore said they moved against the wind. A woman gathering berries above the landing said the weed spelled out a word, though she would not say what word, only that it was not fit for a Methodist picnic. A teamster passing with shingles said the water did not ripple when the wind moved, but when something beneath it reconsidered.
This last expression has been repeated so often it is now nearly respectable.
There were, in those days, six barrels of cider hidden in a boathouse, though the W.C.T.U. ladies, in later and sterner years, are said to have found seven shadows when they came out. I state this without prejudice. Shadows are not intoxicating by law, though several have behaved questionably in Franklin County.
The Little Nippers, meanwhile, continued their work. They nipped tourist toes, Albany toes, fisherman toes, local toes, young toes, old toes, and one wooden toe belonging to a veteran who said it was the first honest attention that limb had received since the war. No one saw the Nippers plainly. That is their way. A thing may be small and still carry ancient ideas. A blackfly proves that every June.
The final testimony we possess came from a guide whose name was either Bixby, Bruso, or none of the two. He was heard near dusk, under cedar, speaking to somebody who was not seen.
“No, friend, the lake ain’t merely buyin’ full creels. It’s upholding a pact. Algae and whisky, scale and oar, old guides and unpaid debts. Stars keep their distance from Chateaugay after midnight. Ask any old guide who won’t answer ye.”
The listener asked what became of the weed.
The guide said, “Last night the milfoil in my bucket spelled my name wrong.”
The listener laughed.
The guide did not.
Next morning, according to the tale, the mail was delivered to him under that wrong name, and he accepted it.
That is as far as history carries us, and perhaps farther than history likes to be carried. We do not advise any reader to fear Chateaugay Lake, which is beautiful, useful, and generally well-behaved in daylight. Neither do we advise trailing bare feet over the gunwale after sundown, mocking old guide customs, or refusing to cut a line when the tug comes from too far below. A lake, like a neighbor, may forgive much, but it remembers who has been careless.
BELZORAM
#ChateaugayLakeFolklore
#ShatageeWoodsFolklore
#AdirondackGothic
#NorthCountryWeirdTales
#LittleNippersLegend
#LakeMythology
#RuralNewspaperSatire
#UncannyGuideLore
#StrangePeriodNews
#FolkloricTallTale
#ShatageeWoodsMystery
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?