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tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man's work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.

Although my first brief visit to Stewart's Pond made three additions to my local bird list , I did not go that way again for almost a fortnight. Then my feet were barely on the bridge before a barn swallow skimmed past me. Swallows of any kind in the mountains of North Carolina are like hen-hawks in Massachusetts,--rare enough to be worth following out of sight. As for barn swallows, I had not expected to see them here at all. I kept my eye upon this fellow, therefore, with the more jealousy, and happily for me he seemed to have found the spot very much to his mind. If he was a straggler, as I judged likely in spite of the lateness of the season, he was perhaps all the readier to stay for an hour or two on so favorable a hunting-ground. With him were half a dozen rough-wings,--probably not stragglers,--hawking over the water; feeding, bathing, and now and then, by way of variety, engaging in some pretty spirited lovers' quarrels. In one such encounter, I remember, one of the contestants received so heavy a blow that she quite lost her balance and dropped plump into the water; and more than once the fun was interrupted by an irate phoebe, who dashed out upon the makers of it with an ugly snap of his beak, as much as to say, "Come, now, this is my bridge." Mr. Stewart himself could hardly have held stricter notions about the rights of property. The rough-wings frequently perched in the dead trees, and once, at least, the barn swallow did likewise; something which I never saw a bird of his kind do before, to the best of my recollection. For to-day he was in Rome, and had fallen in with the Roman customs.

As I have said already, his presence was unexpected. His name is not included in Mr. Brewster's North Carolina list, and I saw no other bird like him till I was approaching Asheville, a week later, in a railway train. Then I was struck almost at the same moment by two things--a brick chimney and a barn swallow. My start at the sight of red bricks made me freshly aware with what quickness the mind puts away the past and accustoms itself to new and strange surroundings. Man is the slave of habit, we say; but how many of us, even in middle age, have altered our modes of living, our controlling opinions, or our daily occupations, and in the shortest while have forgotten the old order of things, till it has become all like a dream,--a story heard long ago and now dimly remembered. Was it indeed we who lived there, and believed thus, and spent our days so? This capacity for change augurs well for the future of the race, and not less for the future of the individual, whether in this world or in another.

On my way through the village, at noon, I passed the steer turned out to grass by the roadside, and had a better look at the harness, a simple, home-made affair, including a pair of hames. The driving-rope, which in its original estate might have been part of a clothes-line or a bed-cord, was attached to a chain which went round or over the creature's head at the base of the horns. The lads themselves were farther down the street, and the younger one nudged the other's elbow with a nod in my direction as I passed on the opposite sidewalk. They seemed to have sobered down at a wonderful rate since their arrival in the "city." I should hardly have known them for the same boys; but no doubt they would wake the echoes again on the road homeward. I hoped so, surely, for I liked them best as I saw them first.

This boy was not a "cracker's" child, I think. Probably he belonged to one of the Northern families, that make up the village for the most part, and have settled the country sparsely for a few miles round about. The lot of the native mountaineers is hard and pinched, and although flocks of children were playing happily enough about the cabin doors, it was impossible not to look upon them as born to a narrow and cheerless existence. Possibly the fault was partly in myself, since I have no very easy gift with strangers, but I found them, young and old alike, rather uncommunicative.

However, it is the mountain woman's way to do her full share of the hard work, as I was soon to see farther exemplified; for within half a mile I heard in front of me the grating of a saw, and presently came upon another family group, in the woods on the mountain side,--a woman, three children, and a dog. The woman, no longer young, as we say in the language of compliment, was at one end of a cross-cut saw, and the largest boy, ten or eleven years old, was at the other. They were getting to pieces a huge fallen trunk. "Wood ought to be cheap in this country," said I; and the woman, as she and the boy changed hands to rest themselves, answered that it was. In my heart I thought she was paying dearly for it; but her voice was cheerful, and the whole company was almost a merry one, the younger children laughing at their play, and the dog capering about them in high spirits. The mountain family may be poor, but not with the degrading, squalid poverty of dwellers in a city slum; and at the very worst the children have a royal playground.

As to the question of snakes and the danger from them, the people here, as is true everywhere in a rattlesnake country, held widely different opinions. Everybody recognized the presence of the pest, and most persons, whatever their own practice might be, advised a measure of caution on the part of strangers. One thing was agreed to on all hands: whoever saw a "rattler" was in duty bound to make an end of it; and one man told me a little story by way of illustrating the spirit of the community upon this point. A woman was riding into town, when her horse suddenly stopped and shied. In the road, directly before her, a snake was coiled, rattling defiance. The woman dismounted, hitched the frightened horse to a sapling, cut a switch, killed the snake, threw it out of the road, remounted, and went on about her business. It is one advantage of life in wild surroundings that it encourages self-reliance.

In all places, nevertheless, and under all conditions, human nature remains a paradoxical compound. A mountain woman, while ploughing, came into close quarters with a rattlesnake. To save herself she sprang backward, fell against a stone, and in the fall broke her wrist. No doctor being within call, she set the bone herself, made and adjusted a rude splint, and now, as the lady who told me the story expressed it, "has a pretty good arm." That was plucky. But the same woman suffered from an aching tooth some time afterward, and was advised to have it extracted. She would do no such thing. She couldn't. She had a tooth pulled once, and it hurt her so that she would never do it again.

A small magnolia-tree , in bloom everywhere along the brooksides, did not attract me to any special degree till one day, in an idle hour at Stewart's Pond, I plucked a half-open bud. I thought I had never known so rare a fragrance; delicate and wholesome beyond comparison, and yet most deliciously rich and fruity, a perfume for the gods. The leaf, too, now that I came really to look at it, was of an elegant shape and texture, untoothed, but with a beautiful "auriculated" base, as Latin-loving botanists say, from which the plant derives its vernacular name,--the ear-leaved umbrella-tree. The waxy blossoms seemed to be quite scentless, but I wished that Thoreau, whose nose was as good as his eyes and his ears, could have smelled of the buds.

The best thing that I found at the pond, however, by long odds the most interesting and unexpected thing that I found anywhere in North Carolina , was neither a tree nor a human being, but a bird. I had been loitering along the river-bank just above the pond itself, admiring the magnolias, the silver-bell trees, the lofty hemlocks,--out of the depths of which a "mountain boomer," known to simple Northern folk as a red squirrel, now and then emitted his saucy chatter,--and the Indian's paint-brush , the brightest and among the most characteristic and memorable of the woodland flowers; listening to the shouts of an olive-sided flycatcher and the music of the frogs, one of them a regular Karl Formes for profundity; and in general waiting to see what would happen. Nothing of special importance seemed likely to reward my diligent idleness, and I turned back toward the town. On the way I halted at the bridge, as I always did, and presently a carriage drove over it. Inside sat a woman under an enormous black sunbonnet. She did me, without knowing it, a kindness, and I should be glad to thank her. As the wheels of the carriage struck the plank bridge, a bird started into sight from under it or close beside it. A sandpiper, I thought; but the next moment it dropped into the water and began swimming. Then I knew it for a bird I had never seen before, and, better still, a bird belonging to a family of which I had never seen any representative, a bird which had never for an instant entered into my North Carolina calculations. It was a phalarope, a wanderer from afar, blown out of its course, perhaps, and lying by for a day in this little mountain pond, almost four thousand feet above sea level.

I was in love with the bird from the first minute. Its tameness, the elegance of its shape and plumage, the grace and vivacity of its movements, these of themselves were enough to drive a bird-lover wild. Add to them its novelty and unexpectedness, and the reader may judge for himself of my state of mind. It was the dearest and tamest creature I had ever seen, I kept saying to myself, forgetful for the moment of two blue-headed vireos which at different times had allowed me to stroke and feed them as they sat brooding on their eggs.

Another thing I must mention, as adding not a little to the pleasure of the hour. The moment I set eyes upon the phalarope, before I had taken even a mental note of its plumage, I thought of my friend and correspondent, Celia Thaxter, and of her eager inquiries about the "bay bird," which she had then seen for the first time at the Isles of Shoals--"just like a sandpiper, only smaller, and swimming on the water like a duck." And as the bird before me darted hither and thither, so amazingly agile, I remembered her pretty description of this very trait, a description which I here copy from her letter:--

"He was swimming about the wharf near the landing, a pretty, dainty creature, in soft shades of gray and white, with the 'needle-like beak,' and a rapidity of motion that I have never seen equaled in any living thing except a darting dragon-fly or some restless insect. He was never for one instant still, darting after his food on the surface of the water. He seemed perfectly tame, wasn't the least afraid of anything or anybody, merely moving aside to avoid an oar-blade, and swaying almost on to the rocks with the swirl of the water. I watched him till I was tired, and went away and left him there still cheerfully frisking. I am so glad to tell you of something you haven't seen!"

The birds seen at the Isles of Shoals were doubtless either red phalaropes or northern phalaropes,--or, not unlikely, both,--"sea snipe," they are often called; two pelagic, circumpolar species, the presence of which in unusual numbers off our Atlantic coast was recorded by other observers in the spring of 1892. My bird here in North Carolina, if I read its characters correctly, was of the third species of the family, Wilson's phalarope, larger and handsomer than the others; an inland bird, peculiar to the American continent, breeding in the upper Mississippi Valley and farther north, and occurring in our Eastern country only as a straggler.

That was a lucky hour, an hour worth a long journey, and worthy of long remembrance. It brought me, as I began by saying, a new bird and a new family; a family distinguished not more for its grace and beauty than for the strangeness--the "newness," as to-day's word is--of its domestic relations; for the female phalarope not only dresses more handsomely than the male, but is larger, and in a general way assumes the rights of superiority. She does the courting--openly and ostensibly, I mean--and, if the books are to be trusted, leaves to her mate the homely, plumage-dulling labor of sitting upon the eggs. And why not? Nature has made her a queen, and dowered her with queenly prerogatives, one of which, by universal consent, is the right to choose for herself the father of her royal children.

Like Mrs. Thaxter, I stayed with my bird till I was tired with watching such preternatural activity; and the next day I returned to the place, hoping to tire myself again in the same delightful manner. But the phalarope was no longer there. Up and down the road I went, scanning the edges of the pond, but the bird had flown. I wished her safely over the mountains, and a mate to her heart's liking at the end of the journey.

BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE

"I'd rather do anything than to pack," said a North Carolina mountain man. His tone bespoke a fullness of experience; as if a farm-bred Yankee were to say, "I'd rather do anything than to pick stones in cold weather." He had found me talking with a third man by the wayside on a sultry forenoon. The third man carried a bag of corn on his back, and was on his way from Horse Cove to Highlands , up the long steep mountain side down which, with frequent stops for admiration of the world below, I had been lazily traveling. He was sick, he told me; and as his appearance corroborated his words, I had been trying to persuade him to leave his load where it was, trust its safety to Providence, and go home. Just then it happened that mountaineer number two came along and delivered himself as above quoted.

However, it was many degrees warmer than that in Horse Cove on the day of which I am writing, and a sick man with a bag of corn on his back had good reason to rest halfway up the climb. He had killed "a pretty rattlesnake" a little way back, he told me. "Very dangerous they are," he added, with an evident kindly desire to put a stranger on his guard. As we separated, a man on horseback turned a corner in the road above us, and on looking round, a few minutes later, I was relieved to see that he had lent the pack-bearer his horse, and was pursuing his own way on foot. And now I thought, not of Bunyan's parable, but of an older and better one.

Though the primary interest of my trip to the North Carolina mountains was rather with the fauna and flora than with the population , I found, first and last, no small pleasure in the men, women, and children, as I fell in with them out of doors here and there, in the course of my daily perambulations. Poverty-cursed as they looked , they seemed to be laudably industrious, and, as the world goes, enjoyers of life. If they said little, it was perhaps rather my fault than theirs , and certainly they treated me with nothing but kindness.

Five minutes more, and a second pedestrian hove in sight. He, likewise, was in haste. "You are all in a hurry to-day," I said to him. I was in pursuit of acquaintance, and in such places it is the part of wisdom, and of good manners as well, to make the most of chance opportunities. "Yes, sir," he made answer, slackening his pace; "I want to get my road done. I've got till Saturday, and I want to get it done;" and he put on steam again, and was gone. His countenance was familiar, but I could not tell where I had seen him,--one of the fathers of the Webb settlement, perhaps. The mountaineers, all thin, all light-complexioned, and all wearing the same drab homespun, look confusingly alike to a newcomer. Whoever the stranger was, he had evidently undertaken to build some part of the new road, and was returning from the village with supplies. In one hand he carried two heavy drills, and under the other arm a strip of pork, a piece of brown paper wrapped about the middle of it, and the long ends dangling. It did my vacationer's heart good to see men so cheerfully industrious; but I thought it a reproach to the order of the world that so much hard work should yield so little of comfort. But then, who knows which was the more comfortable,--the idle, criticising tourist or the sweating laborer? For the time being, at all events, the laborer had the air of a person inwardly well off. A mountain man with a "contract" was not likely to be envious even of a boarder at "Mrs. Davis's," as the hotel is locally, and very properly, called.

As I went on, passing the height of land and beginning my descent homeward, I met two other foot-passengers,--two women: one old and fat,--the only fat mountaineer of either sex seen in North Carolina,--with a red face and a staff; the other young, slightly built and pale, carrying an old-fashioned shotgun over her right shoulder. Both wore sunbonnets, and the younger had a braid of hair hanging down her back. With her slender figure, her colorless face, her serious look, and the long musket, she would have made a subject for a painter. This pair I could think of no excuse for accosting, much as I should have enjoyed hearing them talk. Shortly after they had gone, I stopped to speak with a small boy who was climbing the hill, with a mewing kitten hugged tightly to his breast. He was taking it home to his cat, he said. She brought in mice and things, and wanted something to give them to. The little fellow was still young enough to understand the mother instinct.

That was a truly social walk. I had never before found one of the mountain roads half so populous. Once, indeed, I drove all day without seeing a passenger of any sort, until, near the end of the afternoon and within a mile or two of the town, I met a solitary horseman.

Whatever else was to be said of the roads hereabout,--and the question is of paramount importance in such a country, where mails and supplies must be transported thirty miles ,--they were almost ideally perfect from a walking naturalist's point of view; neither sandy nor muddy, the two evils of Southern roads in general, and conducting the traveler at once into wild and shady places. The village is closely built, and no matter in which direction I turned, the houses were quickly behind me, and I was as truly in the woods as if I had made a day's march from civilization. A straggling town, with miles of outlying farms and pasturelands, through the sunny stretches of which a man must make his way forenoon and afternoon, is a state of things at once so usual and so disheartening that the point may well be among the earliest to be considered in planning a Southern vacation.

In a new country an ornithologist thinks first of all of the birds peculiar to it, if any such there are; and I was no sooner off the hotel piazza for my first ante-breakfast stroll at Highlands, than I was on the watch for Carolina snowbirds and mountain solitary vireos, two varieties originally described a few years ago, by Mr. Brewster, from specimens taken at this very place. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile over the road by which I had driven into the town, after dark, on the evening before, when I was conscious that a bird had flown out from under the overhanging bank just behind me. I turned hastily, and on the instant put my eye upon the nest. My ear, as it happened, had marked the spot precisely. "Here it is," I thought, and in a fraction of a minute more the anxious mother showed herself,--a snowbird. The nest looked somewhat larger than those I had seen in New Hampshire, but that may have been a fault of memory. It contained young birds and a single egg. I was in great luck, I said to myself; but in truth, as a longer experience showed, the birds were so numerous all about me that it would have been no very difficult undertaking to find a nest or two almost any day.

Birds which had been isolated long enough to have taken on some constant physical peculiarity--without which they could not be entitled to a distinctive name, though it were only a third one--might be presumed to have acquired at the same time some slight but real idiosyncrasy of voice and language. But if this is true of the Carolina junco, I failed to satisfy myself of the fact. On the first day, indeed, I wrote with perfect confidence: "The song is clearly distinguishable from that of the northern bird,--less musical, more woodeny and chippery;" more like the chipping sparrow's, I meant to say. If I had come away then, with one bird's trill to go upon, that would have been my verdict, to be printed, when the time came, without misgiving. But further observation brought further light, or, if the reader will, further obscurity. Some individuals were better singers than others,--so much was to be expected; but taking them together, their music was that of ordinary snowbirds such as I had always listened to. For aught my ears told me, I might have been in Franconia. This is not to assert that the Alleghanian junco has not developed a voice in some measure its own; I believe it has; probability has more authority than personal experience with me in matters of this kind; but the change is as yet too inconsiderable for my senses to appreciate on a short acquaintance, with no opportunity for a direct comparison. In such cases, it is perhaps true that one needs to trust the first lively impression,--which has, undeniably, its own peculiar value,--or to wait the result of absolute familiarity. My stay of three weeks gave me neither one thing nor another; it was long enough to dissipate my first feeling of certainty, but not long enough to yield a revised and settled judgment.

The mountain vireo , like the Carolina snowbird, may properly be called a native of Highlands; and, like the snowbird, it proved to be common. My first sight of it was in the hotel yard, but I found it--single pairs--everywhere. A look at the feathers of the back through an opera-glass showed at once the principal distinction--apart from a superiority in size, not perceptible at a distance--on which its subspecific identity is based; but though to its original describer its song sounded very much finer than the northern bird's, I could not bring myself to the same conclusion. I should never have remarked in it anything out of the common. Once, to be sure, I heard notes which led me to say, "There! that voice is more like a yellow-throat's,--fuller and rounder than a typical solitary's;" but that might have happened anywhere, and at all other times; although I had the point continually in mind, I could only pronounce the song to be exactly what my ear was accustomed to,--sweet and everything that was beautiful, but a solitary vireo's song, and nothing else. And this, to my thinking, is praise enough. There is no bird-song within my acquaintance that excels the solitary's in a certain intimate expressiveness, affectionateness, home-felt happiness, and purity. Not that it has all imaginable excellencies,--the unearthly, spiritual quality of the best of our woodland thrush music, for example; but such as it is, an utterance of love and love's felicity, it leaves nothing to ask for. What a contrast between it and the red-eye's comparatively meaningless and feelingless music! And yet, so far as mere form is concerned, the two songs may be considered as built upon the same model, if not variations of the same theme. There must be a world-wide difference between the two species, one would say, in the matter of character and temperament.

My arrival at Highlands seemed to have been coincident with that of an extraordinary throng of rose-breasted grosbeaks. For the first few days, especially, the whole countryside was alive with them, till I felt as if I had never seen grosbeaks before. Their warbling was incessant; so incessant, and at the same time so exceedingly smooth and sweet,--"mellifluous" is precisely the word,--that I welcomed it almost as a relief when the greater part of the chorus moved on. After such a surfeit of honeyed fluency, I was prepared better than ever to appreciate certain of our humbler musicians,--with a touch of roughness in the voice and something of brokenness in the tune; birds, for instance, like the black-throated green warbler, the yellow-throated vireo, and the scarlet tanager. But if I was glad the crowd had gone, I was glad also that a goodly sprinkling of the birds had remained; so that there was never a day when I did not see and hear them. The rose-breast is a lovely singer. In my criticism of him I am to be understood as meaning no more than this: that he, like every other artist, has the defects of his good qualities. Smoothness is a virtue in music as in writing; but it is not the only virtue, nor the one that wears longest.

Another bird seen almost daily, though in limited numbers, was the red-winged blackbird, which Mr. Brewster noticed only in a few places in the lower valleys. It seemed well within the range of probability that the same changes which had brought in one lover of sedgy tussocks and button-bushes should have attracted also another. I made no search for nests, but the fact that the birds were seen constantly from May 7 to May 27 may be taken as reasonably conclusive evidence that they were on their breeding-grounds.

Two or more pairs of phoebes had settled in the neighborhood, and two or more pairs of parula warblers. The former were not found by Mr. Brewster above a level of 3000 feet, and the latter he missed at Highlands, although, as he says, the presence of trees hung with usnea lichens made their absence a surprise.

Hardly less rememberable than these differences of experience was one striking coincidence. On the 25th of May, when I had been at Highlands more than a fortnight, I was sitting on the veranda waiting for the dinner-bell, and reading the praises of "free silver" in a Georgia newspaper, when I jumped to my feet at the whistle of a Baltimore oriole. I started at once in pursuit, and presently came up with the fellow, a resplendent old male, in a patch of shrubbery bordering the hotel grounds. I kept as near him as I could , and even followed him across the street into a neighbor's yard. He was the only one I had seen , and on referring to Mr. Brewster's paper I found that he too met with one bird here, and in exactly the same spot. The keeper of the hotel remembered the circumstance and the pleasure of Mr. Brewster over it. In my case, at any rate, the lateness and unexpectedness of the bird's appearance, together with what a certain scholarly friend of mine would have called his "uniquity," made him the bringer of a most agreeable noonday excitement. Where he had come from, and whether he had brought a mate with him, were questions I had no means of answering. He reminded me of my one Georgia oriole, on the field of Chickamauga.

The road to Horse Cove, of which I have already spoken, offered easy access to a lower and more summery level, the land at this point dropping almost perpendicularly for about a thousand feet. In half an hour the pedestrian was in a new climate, with something like a new fauna about him. Here were such birds as the Kentucky warbler, the hooded warbler, the cardinal grosbeak, and the Acadian flycatcher, none of them to be discovered on the plateau above. Here, also,--but this may have been nothing more than an accident,--were the only bluebirds that I saw anywhere until, on my journey out of the mountains, I descended into the beautiful Cullowhee Valley.

At Highlands the birds were a mixed lot, Southerners and Northerners delightfully jumbled: a few Carolina wrens ; a single Bewick wren, singing and dodging along a fence in the heart of the village; tufted titmice; Carolina chickadees; Louisiana water thrushes and turkey buzzards: and on the other side of the account, brown creepers, red-bellied nuthatches, black-throated blues, Canada warblers, Blackburnians, snowbirds, and olive-sided flycatchers.

An unexpected thing was the commonness of blue golden-winged warblers, chats, and brown thrashers at an elevation of 3800 feet. Still more numerous, in song continually, even on the summit of Satulah, were the chestnut-sided warblers, although Mr. Brewster, in his tour through the region, "rarely saw more than one or two in any single day:" a third instance, as seemed likely, of a species that had taken advantage of new local conditions--an increase of shrubby clearings, in the present case--within the last ten years. Here, as everywhere, the presence of some birds and the absence of others were provocative of questions. Why should the Kentucky warbler sing from rhododendron thickets halfway up the slope at the head of Horse Cove, and never be tempted into other thickets, in all respects like them, just over the brow of the cliff, 500 feet higher? Why should the summer yellow-bird, which pushes its hardy spring flight beyond the Arctic circle, restrict itself here in the Carolinas to the low valley lands , and never once choose a nesting-site in appropriate surroundings at a little higher level? Why should the chat and the blue golden-wing find life agreeable at Highlands, and their regular neighbors, the prairie warbler and the white-eyed vireo, so persistently refuse to follow them? And why, in the first half of May, was there so strange a dearth of migrants in these attractive mountain woods?--a few blackpoll warblers , a single myrtle-bird , and a crowd of rose-breasted grosbeaks and Blackburnian warblers being almost the only ones to fall under my notice. After all, one of the best birds I saw, not forgetting the Wilson's phalarope,--my adventure with which has been detailed in a previous chapter,--was a song sparrow singing from a dense swampy thicket on the 25th of May. So far as I am aware, no bird of his kind has ever before been reported in summer from a point so far south. He looked natural, but not in the least commonplace, as, after a long wait on my part,--for absolute certainty's sake,--he hopped out into sight. I was proud to have made one discovery!

In such a place, so limited in the range of its physical conditions,--a village surrounded by forest,--the birds, however numerous they might be, counted as individuals, were sure to be of comparatively few species. Omitting such as were certainly, or almost certainly, migrants or strays,--the blackpoll, the myrtle-bird, the barn swallow, the kingbird, the solitary sandpiper, and the phalarope,--and such as were found only at a lower level, in Horse Cove and elsewhere; omitting, too, all birds of prey,--few, and for the most part but imperfectly identified; restricting myself to birds fully made out and believed to be summering in the immediate neighborhood of Highlands; omitting the raven, of course,--I counted but fifty-nine species.

All things considered, I was not inconsolable at finding my ornithological activities in some measure abridged. I had the more time, though still much too little, for other pursuits. It would have been good to spend the whole of it upon the plants, or in admiring the beauties of the country itself. As it was, I plucked a blossom here and there, stored up a few of the more striking of them in the memory, and enjoyed many an hour in gazing upon the new wild world, where, no matter how far I climbed, there was nothing to be seen on all sides but a sea of hills, wave rising beyond wave to the horizon's rim.

The horizon was never far off. I was twice on Satulah and twice on Whiteside, from which latter point, by all accounts, I should have had one of the most extensive and beautiful prospects to be obtained in North Carolina; but I had fallen upon one of those "spells of weather," common in mountainous places, which make a visitor feel as if nothing were so rare as a transparent atmosphere. For ordinary lowland purposes the days were no doubt favorable enough: a pleasing, wholesome alternation of rain and shine, wind and calm, with no lack of thunder and lightning, and once, at least, a lively hailstorm. "Weather like this I have never seen elsewhere. Such air!" So I wrote in my enthusiasm, thinking of physical comfort,--a man who wished to walk and sit still by turns, and be neither sunstruck nor chilled; but withal, there was never an hour of clear distance till the morning I came away, when mountain ascents were no longer to be thought of. The world was all in a cover of mist, and the outlying hills, one beyond another, with the haze settling into the valleys between them, were, as I say, like the billows of the sea. Nothing could have been more beautiful, perhaps; but a curtain is a curtain, and I longed to see it rise. A change of wind, a puff from the northwest, and creation would indeed have "widened in man's view." That was not to be, and all those lofty North Carolina peaks--of which, to a New Englander, there seem to be so many--were seen by me only from railway trains and from the hotel veranda at Asheville, on my journey homeward. On Satulah and Whiteside I was forced to please myself with the glory of the foreground. What lay beyond the mist was matter for dreams.

But even as things were, I was not so badly used. There was more beauty in sight than I could begin to see, and, notwithstanding the comparative narrowness of the outlook,--partly because of it,--one of my most enjoyable forenoons was spent on the broad, open, slightly rounded summit of Satulah. Here and there a solitary cabin was visible, or a bit of road, a ribbon of brown amidst the green of the forest, but no village, nor so much as a hamlet. The only other signs of human existence were a light smoke, barely distinguishable, rising from Horse Cove as I guessed, and, for a few minutes, a man whom my eye fell upon most unexpectedly, a motionless speck, though he was walking, far down the Walhalla road. I turned my glass that way, and behold, he had the usual bag of grain on his back.

The date was May 12. I had been in Highlands less than a week, and my thoughts still ran upon ravens, the birds which, more even than the southern snowbird and the mountain vireo, I had come hither to seek. They were said often to fly over, and this surely should be a place to see them. They could not escape me, if they passed within a mile. But though I kept an eye out, as we say, and an ear open, it was a vigil thrown away. Buzzards, swifts, and a bunch of twittering goldfinches were all the birds that "flew over." A chestnut-sided warbler sang so persistently from the mountain side just below that his sharp voice became almost a trouble. From the same quarter rose the songs of an oven-bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak, and a scarlet tanager. On the summit itself were snowbirds and chewinks; and once, to my delight, a field sparrow gave out a measure or two. After all, go where you will, you will hear few voices that wear better than his,--clear, smooth, most agreeably modulated, and temperately sweet.

The only trees I remember at the very top of the mountain were a few dwarfed and distorted pines and white oaks,--enough to remind a Yankee that he was not in New Hampshire. On the other hand, here grew our Massachusetts huckleberry , which I had seen nowhere below, where a great abundance of the buckberry--so I think I heard it called ,--taller bushes, more comfortable to pick from, with larger blossoms--seemed to have taken its place. I should have been glad to try the fruit, which was described as of excellent quality. On that point, with no thought of boasting, I could have spoken as an expert. With the huckleberry was chokeberry, another New England acquaintance, fair to look upon, but a hypocrite,--"by their fruits ye shall know them;" and underneath, among the stones, were common yellow five-fingers, birdfoot violets, and leaves of trailing arbutus, three-toothed potentilla , checker-berry, and galax. With them, but deserving a sentence by themselves, were the exquisite vernal iris and the scarlet painted-cup, otherwise known as the Indian's paint-brush and prairie fire, splendid for color, and in these parts, to my astonishment, a frequenter of the forest. I should have looked for it only in grassy meadows. Here and there grew close patches of the pretty, alpine-looking sand myrtle , thickly covered with small white flowers,--a plant which I had seen for the first time the day before on the summit of Whiteside. Mountain heather I called it, finding no English name in Chapman's Flora. Stunted laurel bushes in small bud were scattered over the summit. A little later they would make the place a flower garden. A single rose-acacia tree had already done its best in that direction, with a full crop of gorgeous rose-purple clusters. The winds had twisted it and kept it down, but could not hinder its fruitfulness.

These things, and others like them, I noticed between times. For the most part, my eyes were upon the grand panorama, a wilderness of hazy, forest-covered mountains, as far as the eye could go; nameless to me, all of them, with the exception of the two most conspicuous,--Whiteside on the one hand, and Rabun Bald on the other. For my comfort a delicious light breeze was stirring, and the sky, as it should be when one climbs for distant prospects, was sprinkled with small cumulus clouds, which in turn dappled the hills with moving shadows. One thing brought home to me a truth which in our dullness we ordinarily forget: that the earth itself is but a shadow, a something that appeareth, changeth, and passeth away. The rocks at my feet were full of pot-holes, such as I had seen a day or two before, the water still swirling in them, at Cullasajah Falls. As universal time is reckoned,--if it is reckoned,--old Satulah and all that forest-covered world which I saw, or thought I saw, from it, were but of yesterday, a "divine improvisation," and would be gone to-morrow.

They were never out of sight, and I never could have enough of them. Wherever I went, I was always stopping short before one bush and another; admiring this one for the brilliancy or delicacy of its floral tints, and that one for its bold and pleasing habit. For as the plants do not grow in close ranks, so they do not put forth their flowers in a mass. They know a trick better than that. Thousands of shrubs, but every one in its own place, to be separately looked at; and on every shrub a few sprays of bloom, each well apart from all the others; one twig bearing nothing but leaves, another full of blossoms; a short branch here, a longer one there; and again, a smooth straight stem shooting far aloft, holding at the tip a bunch of leaves and flowers; everything free, unstudied, and most irregularly graceful, as if the bushes had each an individuality as well as a tint of its own. Often it was not a bush that I stood still to take my fill of, but a single branch,--as beautiful, I thought, as if it had been the only one in the world.

One walk on Satulah--not to the summit, but by a roundabout course through the woods to a bold cliff on the southern side --was literally a walk through an azalea show; first the flame-colored, bushes beyond count and variety beyond description; and then, a little higher, a plentiful display of the white viscosa, more familiar and less showy, but hardly less attractive.

Better even than this wild Satulah garden was a smaller one nearer home: a triangular hillside, broad at the base and pointed at the top, as if it were one face of a pyramid; covered loosely with grand old trees,--oaks, chestnuts, and maples; the ground densely matted with freshly grown ferns, largely the cinnamon osmunda, clusters of lively green and warm brown intermixed; and everywhere, under the trees and above the ferns, mountain laurel and flame-colored azalea,--the laurel blooms pale pink, almost white, and the azalea clusters yellow of every conceivable degree of depth and brightness. A zigzag fence bounded the wood below, and the land rose at a steep angle, so that the whole was held aloft, as it were, for the beholder's convenience. It was a wonder of beauty, with nothing in the least to mar its perfection,--the fairest piece of earth my eye ever rested upon. The human owner of it, Mr. Selleck , had asked me to go and see it; and for his sake and its own, as well as for my own sake and the reader's, I wish I could show it as it was. It rises before me at this moment, like the rhododendron cliffs on Walden's Ridge, and will do so, I hope, to my dying day.

VIRGINIA

A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES

For fifty miles beyond Roanoke we traveled southward; but an ascent of a thousand feet offset, and more than offset, the change of latitude, so that at Pulaski we found the apple-trees not yet in flower, but showing the pink of the buds. The venerable, pleasingly unsymmetrical sugar maples in the yard of the inn were hung full of pale yellow tassels, and vocal with honey-bees. Spring was here, and I felt myself welcome.

Till luncheon should be ready, I strayed into the border of the wood behind the town, and, wandering quite at a venture, came by good luck upon a path which followed the tortuous, deeply worn bed of a brook through a narrow pass between steep, sparsely wooded, rocky hills. Along the bank grew plenty of the common rhododendron, now in early bud, and on either side of the path were trailing arbutus and other early flowers. Yes, I had found the spring, not summer. And the birds bore the same testimony: thrashers, chippers, field sparrows, black-and-white creepers, and a Carolina chickadee. Summer birds, like summer flowers, were yet to come. A brief song, repeated at intervals from the ragged, half-cleared hillside near a house, as I returned to the village, puzzled me agreeably. It should be the voice of a Bewick's wren, I thought, but the notes seemed not to tally exactly with my recollections of a year ago, on Missionary Ridge. However, I made only a half-hearted attempt to decide the point. There would be time enough for such investigations by and by. Meanwhile, it would be a poor beginning to take a first walk in a new country without bringing back at least one uncertainty for expectation to feed upon. It is always part of to-day's wisdom to leave something for to-morrow's search. So I seem to remember reasoning with myself; but perhaps a thought of the noonday luncheon had something to do with my temporizing mood.

In any case no harm came of it. The singer was at home for the season, and the very next morning I went up the hill and made sure of him: a Bewick's wren, as I had guessed. I heard him there on sundry occasions afterward. Sometimes he sang one tune, sometimes another. The song heard on the first day, and most frequently, perhaps, at other times, consisted of a prolonged indrawn whistle, followed by a trill or jumble of notes , as if the fellow had picked up his music from two masters,--a Bachman finch and a song sparrow. It soon transpired, greatly to my satisfaction, that this was one of the characteristic songsters of the town. One bird sang daily not far from my window , and I never walked far in the town without passing at least two or three. Sometimes as many as that would be within hearing at once. They preferred the town to the woods and fields, it was evident, and for a singing-perch chose indifferently a fence picket, the roof of a hen-coop, a chimney-top, or the ridgepole of one of the churches,--which latter, by the bye, were most unchristianly numerous. The people are to be congratulated upon having so jolly and pretty a singer playing hide-and-seek--the wren's game always--in their house-yards and caroling under their windows. As a musician he far outshines the more widely known house wren, though that bird, too, is excellent company, with his pert ways, at once furtive and familiar, and his merry gurgle of a tune. If he would only come back to our sparrow-cursed Massachusetts gardens and orchards, as I still hope he will some time do, I for one would never twit him upon his inferiority to his Bewickian cousin or to anybody else.

The city itself would have repaid study, if only for its unlikeness to cities in general. It had not "descended out of heaven," so much was plain, though this is not what I mean by its unlikeness to other places; neither did it seem to have grown up after the old-fashioned method, a "slow result of time,"--first a hamlet, then a village, then a town, and last of all a city. On the contrary, it bore all the marks of something built to order; in the strictest sense, a city made with hands. And so, in fact, it is; one of the more fortunate survivals of what the people of southwestern Virginia are accustomed to speak of significantly as "the boom,"--a grand attempt, now a thing of the past, but still bitterly remembered, to make everybody rich by a concerted and enthusiastic multiplication of nothing by nothing.

Such a community, I repeat, would have been an interesting and very "proper study;" but I had not come southward in a studious mood. I meant to be idle, having a gift in that direction which I am seldom able to cultivate as it deserves. It is one of the best of gifts. I could never fall in with what the poet Gray says of it in one of his letters. "Take my word and experience upon it," he writes, "doing nothing is a most amusing business, and yet neither something nor nothing gives me any pleasure." He begins bravely, although the trivial word "amusing" wakens a distrust of his sincerity; but what a pitiful conclusion! How quickly the boom collapses! It is to be said for him, however, that he was only twenty years old at the time, and a relish for sentiment and reverie--that is to say, for the pleasures of idleness--is apt to be little developed at that immature age. I had passed that point by some years; I was sure I could enjoy a week of dreaming; and, unlike Bewick's wren, I took to the woods.

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