You’ve heard a lot of stories about the old days in the deep woods of northern Maine, when river drivers cut the trees and moved the logs into the rivers, down the great waterways or through the dense frozen forest. In Maine’s early days as a state, most of it was a frontier, far removed from the rest of civilization and only connected with a thin line of rail or a dark ribbon of water weaving its way from the overwhelming forest to the towns and cities near the coast. When winter came and the ground froze solid, that’s when lumbermen ventured deep into the woods, so deep that the closest connection with the world was literally days away.  Working in the deep woods meant isolation for long periods of time, away from the comforts and the safety of civilization, especially healthcare. The men had to rely on each other and themselves in times of trial and uncertainty and this they did. There are songs and stories detailing the toils and times of these men of the woods, but perhaps none so strange and unique to Maine as the tales of the Charming Man. It’s quite likely you’ve never heard a tale like it. The Charming Man? He’s not what you think.  It seems that any time a group of people needs a healer, one seems to arise. It’s a hallmark of our species and perhaps the reasons we’ve made it thus far. When famed anthropologist Margaret Meade was asked when she thought civilization began, she didn’t choose the advent of agriculture over hunting and gathering as her moment when humans became something more than merely animals. She pointed to a fifteen thousand year old healed femur bone, saying that “​​in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.” When one of us is in need, we feel a compulsion to help. It’s deep in our bones.  There’s a story told in a 1902 edition of Forest and Stream magazine that details the strange adventure of a friend of author Holman Day, a famous chronicler of the Maine wild lands at the turn of the last century. He details an exploit of a friend of his known only to the reader as “The Doctor.”  In this tale, this doctor is hunting in the region of the woods above Upper Lobster Lake east of the Churchill, far from the cities near the coast. The interior of Maine in 1902 was a wild and lonely place.  What follows are Holman’s words from the 1902 article, speaking as the doctor whose story it is. “Now, you know I have been in the woods every season for ten years, and I never was lost up to that time. I did get lost, though, that day. I don’t have the least idea how it happened, but all at once I found myself wandering through the woods with no clear idea where I was going nor why, for I had told the guide that I would meet him at the head of the lake for a snack.  “Well, I traveled around quite a while. I’ll tell you just how I felt -it was as though something all at once had set me into a brown study and then when I came out of it I looked around to find that some sprite had moved the sun and had skeow-wowed the scenery around in some way that I failed to understand. Never had that happen to me in the woods before! In what I am going to relate, I do not want to be considered too credulous, but that mystification of the morning made the later events of that day more impressive.  “After a time I climbed the side of a hill and took a look around to see if I could locate any landmark. Off to the east of south by my compass I spied a column of smoke wavering up over the trees. I was so turned around that I couldn’t tell whether the lake lay in that direction or not, but I scrambled down the hill and plowed away in that hope.  “The smoke must have been five miles away, and it took me more than an hour to cover the distance.