Books by Mr. Torrey.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER’S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. 16mo, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
A WORLD OF GREEN
HILLS
OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE
AND HUMAN NATURE
IN THE BLUE
RIDGE
BY
BRADFORD TORREY
He joyes in groves, and makes himselfe full blythe
With sundrie flowers, in wilde fieldes gatherèd.
SPENSER.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1898
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
NORTH CAROLINA.
A DAY’S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 3
IN QUEST OF RAVENS 34
A MOUNTAIN POND 71
BIRDS, FLOWERS, AND PEOPLE 104
VIRGINIA.
A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES 145
AT NATURAL BRIDGE 208
INDEX 283
NORTH CAROLINA
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS
A DAY’S DRIVE IN THREE STATES
In a day and a night I had come from early May to middle June; from a
world of bare boughs to a forest clad in all the verdure of summer.
Such a shine as the big, lusty leaves of the black-jack oaks had put
on! I could have raised a shout. In the day when “all the trees of the
field shall clap their hands,” may I be somewhere in the black-jack’s
neighborhood. Hour after hour we sped along, out of North Carolina
into South Carolina: now through miles and miles of forest; now past a
lonely cabin, with roses before the door, white honeysuckle covering
the fence, and acres of sunny ploughed land on either side. Here a
river ran between close green hills, and there the hills parted and
disclosed the revolving horizon set with blue mountains. Then, at a
little past noon, the porter appeared with his brush. “Seneca is next,”
he said. I alighted in lonely state, was escorted to the hotel, did my
best with a luncheon,--gleaned bit by bit out of an outlying wilderness
of small dishes,--and at the earliest moment took my seat in a “buggy”
beside a colored boy who was to drive me to Walhalla, nine miles away.
At that point I was to be met, the next morning, by the carriage that
should convey me into the mountains.
Seneca is a smallish place, but my colored driver was no countryman.
“Boston?” Yes, yes; he had lived there once himself. He had been a
Pullman porter. “But you don’t get to learn anything in that way,”
he added, a little disdainfully; “just running back and forth.” He
had “waited” in Florida, and had been to Jamaica and I forget where
else, though he was only twenty-three years old. He liked to go round
and see the world. “Married?” No; a man who didn’t live anywhere had
no business with a wife and children. Still he was not oblivious to
feminine charms, as became evident when we passed a pair of dusky
beauties. “Oh, I will _look_ at ’em,” he said, with the tone of a man
who had broken his full share of hearts. He was one of the fortunates
who are born with their eyes open. I quizzed him about birds. Yes,
he had noticed them; he had been hunting a good deal. This and the
other were named,--partridges, pheasants, doves, meadow larks,
chewinks, chats, night-hawks. Yes, he knew them; if not by the names I
called them by, then from my descriptions, to which in most cases he
proceeded to add some convincing touches of his own. The chat he did
not recognize under that title, but when I tried to hit off some of
the bird’s odd characteristics he began to laugh. “Oh yes, sir, I know
_that_ fellow.” As for whippoorwills, the whole country was full of
them. “You can’t hear your ears for ’em at night,” he declared. “No,
sir, you can’t hear your ears.” With all the rest he was a “silverite.”
At the end of the drive I handed him a dollar bill, one of Uncle
Sam’s handsomest, as it happened, fresh from the bank. He looked at
it dubiously, fumbled it a moment, and passed it back. “Say, boss,”
he said, “can’t you give me a silver dollar? It might rain.” In a
land of thunder-showers and thin clothing, he meant to say, what we
need is an insoluble currency. That, as such things go, was a pretty
substantial argument for “free silver,” or so it seemed to me; and
I spoke of it, accordingly, a week or two afterward, to an advocate
of the “white metal.” He was impressed by it just as I had been, and
begged me to make use of the argument when I got back to Boston; as
I now do, with all cheerfulness, feeling that, whatever a man’s own
opinions may be, he is bound to keep an ear open for the best that can
be put forward against them. At the same time, I am constrained to add
that I have never been quite sure whether my driver’s plea was anything
better than a polite subterfuge. It would have been nothing wonderful,
surely, if he had questioned the genuineness of a kind of money to
which he was so little accustomed. Small bills--“ones and twos,” as we
familiarly call them--have but a limited circulation at the South, as
all travelers must have noticed. On my present trip, for instance, I
bought a railway ticket at a rural station, and proffered the agent a
two-dollar bill. He gave it a glance of surprise, looked at me,--“Ah,
a Northern man,” so I read his thoughts,--and incontinently slipped the
bill into his pocket. A rarity like that was not for the cash drawer
and the daily course of business. I might almost as well have given him
a two-dollar gold coin; like the pious heroine of a Sunday-school story
I was reading the other day, who dropped into the contribution-box a
“fifty-dollar gold piece”!
The rain, concerning whose destructive power my colored boy had been
so apprehensive, very soon set in, and left me nothing to do but to
make the best of an afternoon upon the hotel piazza, with its outlook
up and down the village street, and its gossip and politics. As to the
latter I played the part of listener, in spite of sundry courteous
attempts to draw me out. Tillman and the silver question were discussed
with a welcome coolness of spirit, while I looked at an occasional
passing horseman (it is the one advantage of poor roads that they
keep an entire community in the saddle), or admired the evolutions
of the chimney swifts and the martins. Roses and honeysuckles would
have made the dooryards beautiful, had that result fallen within the
bounds of possibility, and a chinaberry-tree, full of purple blossoms,
was not only a thing of beauty in itself, but to me was also a sweet
remembrancer of Florida.
My only other recollection of the afternoon seems almost too trivial
for record. Yet who knows? What has interested one man may perchance
do as much for another. In the midst of the talk, a man with an axe
came along, and said to the proprietor of the hotel, “Have you got a
grinding-rock here?” “Yes, round behind the house,” was the answer.
“Grinding-rock”!--that was a new name for my old back-breaking
acquaintance of the haying season, and good as it was new. I adopted
it on the instant. With its rasping, gritty sound, it seemed a plain
case of onomatopoetic justice. No more “grindstone” for me, if I live a
thousand years.
I mentioned the subject some days afterward to a citizen of
Highlands. “Oh yes,” he answered, “they always say ‘rock;’ not only
‘grinding-rock,’ but ‘whet-rock.’” Then he added something that pleased
me still more. He had just been to the county seat as a member of
the grand jury, and among the cases before him and his colleagues
was one of alleged assault by “rocking,” that word being used in the
legal document, whatever its name, in which the complaint was set
forth. This point was of special interest to me, I say. In my boyhood,
which, so far as I know, was not exceptionally belligerent, it was
an every-day occurrence to “fire rocks” at an enemy, or “rock him;”
whereas an editorial brother, himself of New England birth, with whom
it is often my privilege to compare notes, affirms that he never heard
such expressions, though he has sometimes met with them--and presumably
corrected them--in manuscript stories. It was no small satisfaction
to find this bit of my own Massachusetts--Old Colony--dialect still
surviving, and in common use, in the Carolinas.
Walhalla itself, with an elevation of a thousand feet, and mountains
visible not far off, lays some not unnatural claims to a “climate,” and
in a small way is a health resort, I believe, in spite of its rather
sinister name, both summer and winter. To me, indeed, it seemed a place
to stop at rather than to stay in; but, as the reader knows, I saw it
only from the main street on a muddy afternoon, and was likely to do
it but foul-weather justice. Even its merits as a necessary lodging
station were lightly appreciated, till on my return I made my exit from
the mountains on the other side of them, and put up for the night in
another village, and especially at another hotel. Compared with that,
Walhalla was, in deed as in name, a kind of heavenly place. Is it well,
or not, that what is worse makes us half contented with what is simply
bad? I was more than ready, at any rate, when a Walhalla boy brought me
word the next morning, “Your carriage has done come.”[1]
The sky was fair, and shortly after seven o’clock we were on the road,
the driver and his one passenger, in a heavy three-seated mountain
wagon, locally known as a “hack,” drawn by two horses. Our destination
was said to be thirty-two miles distant,--so much I knew; but the
figures had given me little idea of the length of the journey. It was
an agreeable surprise, also, when the driver informed me that we were
not only going from South Carolina to North Carolina, but on the way
were to spend some hours in Georgia, the mountainous northeastern
corner of that State being wedged in between the two Carolinas. In
short, to accomplish our ascent of twenty-eight hundred feet we were
out for a day’s ride in three States and over four mountains,--an
exhilarating prospect in that perfect May weather.
My recollections of the day run together, as it were, till the route,
as memory tries to picture it forth, turns all to one hopeless blur: an
interminable alternation of ups and downs, largely over shaded forest
roads, but with occasional sunny stretches, especially, as it seemed,
whenever I essayed to take the cramp out of my legs by a half-hour’s
climb on foot. A turn or two in the road, and we had left the village
behind us, and then, almost before I knew it, we were among the hills:
now aloft on the shoulder of one of them, with innumerable mountains
crowding the horizon; now shut in some narrow, winding valley, our
“distance and horizon gone,” with a bird singing from the bushes,
and likely enough a stream playing hide-and-seek behind a tangle of
rhododendron and laurel. Wild as the country was, we never traveled
many miles without coming in sight of a building of some kind: a rude
mill, it might be, or more probably a cabin. Once at least, in a very
wilderness of a place, we passed a schoolhouse; as to which it puzzled
me to guess, first where the pupils came from, and then how they got
light to read by, unless, happy children, they took their books out of
doors and studied their lessons under the trees, and so went to school
with the birds.
Little by little--very little--we continued to ascend, gaining
something more than we lost as the road seesawed from valley to hill,
and from hill to valley. So it finally appeared, I mean to say; the
changes in the vegetation serving eventually to establish a point
which for hours together had been mainly an article of faith. As to
another point, the four mountains over which our course was supposed
to run, that remains a question of faith to this day. There might have
been two, or thrice two, for aught I could tell. The road avoided
summits, as a matter of course, and, if I can make myself understood,
we were so lost in the hills that we could not see them. When we had
left one and had come to another, I knew it only as the driver told me.
So far as any sense of upward progress was concerned, we might almost
as well have been marking time.
“What mountain are we on now?” This was a stock question with me.
“Stumphouse.”
“And why is it called Stumphouse?”
“Because a good many years ago a man lived here in a hollow stump.”
“And in what State are we?”
“South Car’lina.”
“But aren’t we near the North Carolina line?”
“No, sir; we have to go through Georgy first.”
Till now I had been quite unaware of what I may call the interstate
character of our day’s ride.
“Indeed! And how soon shall we get into Georgia?”
“When we cross the Chattoogy River.”
“The Chattooga? What is that? A branch of the Savannah?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you spell it?”
“I do not know, sir.”
My driver had certain verbal niceties of his own; he never said
“don’t.” As for his inability to spell “Chattooga,” or “Chatuga,” he
was little to be blamed for that. The atlas-makers are no better off.
By and by we forded a sizeable stream.
“Now, then, we are crossing into Georgia?” I began again.
“No, sir; this is not the Chattoogy, but one of its prongs.”
Finally, at high noon, we dropped into a hot and breezeless valley,
with the Chattooga running through it in the sun. Here was a farm.
Mr. ---- lived here, and kept a kind of half-way house for travelers.
But we would not stop at it, the driver said, if it was all the same
to me. There was another house just across the river. He had given
the people notice of our coming, on his way down the day before, and
the woman would have dinner ready for me. Both houses were very nice
places to eat at, he added for my encouragement. So it happened that I
breakfasted in South Carolina, dined in Georgia, and supped in North
Carolina. The dinner, to which I sat down alone, was bountiful after
its kind. If the table did not “groan,” it must have been because it
was ignorant of a table’s duty; and if I did not make a feast, let
the failure be laid to the idiosyncrasy of a man who once cut short
his stay at one of the most inviting places in all Virginia because
he was pampered monotonously for five consecutive meals with nothing
but fried ham, fried eggs, and soda biscuits. “It is never too late
to give up our prejudices,” says Thoreau, in one of his lofty moods.
Wisdom uttered in that tone is not to be disputed; but if it is never
“too late,” I for one have sometimes found it too early. My bill of
fare here in Georgia was by no means confined to the three Southern
staples just now enumerated (let so much be said in simple justice),
but they held the place of honor, as a matter of course, and for the
rest--well, there is a kind of variety that is only another kind of
sameness. “An excellent dinner,” said a facetious fellow-traveler of
mine on a similar occasion, as, knife and fork in hand, he hovered
doubtfully over the table, and, like Emerson’s snowflake, “seemed
nowhere to alight,”--“a most excellent dinner; but then, you see, it
is nothing but ham and eggs with variations.” If this sounds like
grumbling, it is only against a “system,” as we say in these days, not
against a person. My generous hostess had spared no pains, and from any
point of view had given me far more than my money’s worth; stinting
herself only when it came to setting a price upon her bounty. That
unavoidable business she approached, in response to the usual overtures
on my part, with all manner of delicate indirections, holding back the
decisive word till the very last moment, as if her tongue could not
bring itself to utter a figure so extortionate. The truth was, she
said, she had made nothing by giving dinners the year previous, and so
felt obliged to charge five cents more the present season![2]
The noon hour brought a sudden change in the day’s programme. All the
forenoon I had been asking questions, presuming upon my double right as
a traveler and a Yankee; now I was to take my turn in the witness-box.
My landlady’s brother sat on the veranda mending a fishing-tackle,
and we had hardly passed the time of day before it became apparent
that he possessed one of nature’s best intellectual gifts, an appetite
for knowledge. With admirable civility, yet with no waste of time or
breath, he went about his work, and long before dinner was announced
I had given him my name, my residence (my age, perhaps, but here
recollection becomes hazy), my occupation, the object of my present
journey and its probable duration, some account of my previous visits
South, my notion of New England weather, my impressions of Washington,
especially of the height of the Washington monument as compared with
other similar structures (a question of peculiar moment to him, for
some reason now past recall), and Heaven knows what else; while on
a thousand or two of other topics I had confessed ignorance. I had
never been to Chautauqua; that was perhaps my examiner’s most serious
disappointment. He was at present engaged on a Chautauquan course of
reading, as it appeared,--the best course of reading that he had ever
seen, he was inclined to think. Here again he had me playing second
fiddle, or rather no fiddle at all.
His was a wholesome catholicity of mind, but it pleased me to notice
that he too had felt the touch of the modern spirit, and was something
of a specialist. Geography, or perhaps I should say climatology, seemed
to lie uppermost in his thoughts. Once, I remember, he brought out a
ponderous atlas of the world, a book of really astonishing proportions
when the size of the house was taken into account, though it may not
have been absolutely necessary for him to bring it out of doors in
order to open it. On the subject of comparative climatology, be it said
without reserve, it did not take him long to come to the end of my
resources. It is possible, of course, that his own concern about it was
but temporary,--the result of his before-mentioned course of reading.
There is no better--nor better understood--rule for conversation than
to choose the subject of the book you happen to have had last in hand.
Two to one the other man will know less about it than you do. Then you
are in clover. But should it turn out that he is at home where you have
but recently peeped in at the window, and so is bound to have you at a
disadvantage, you have only to be beforehand with him by acknowledging
with becoming modesty that you really know nothing about the matter,
but happen to have just been looking over with some interest Mr.
So-and-So’s recent book. In other words, you may pass for a special
student or a discursive reader, honorable characters both of them,
according as the way opens.
I am not saying that my noonday acquaintance had practiced any such
stratagem. His attitude throughout was that of a learner; nor did he
set himself to shine even in that humble capacity, as one may easily
do (and there are few safer methods) in this day of multifarious
discovery, when the ability to ask intelligent questions has become
of itself a badge of scholarship. His inquiries followed one another
with perfect naturalness and simplicity; he simply wanted to know.
As for the more strictly personal among them, they were only such as
the most conventional of us instinctively feel like asking. “As soon
as a stranger is introduced into any company,” says Emerson, “one of
the first questions which all wish to have answered is, ‘How does
that man get his living?’” There was no thought of taking offense.
On the contrary, it was a pleasure to be angled for by so true an
artist. If any newspaper should be in want of an “interviewer,”--a
remote contingency so far as any newspaper that I know anything about
is concerned,--I could recommend a likely hand. A candidate for the
presidency might balk him, but nobody else. My own conversation with
him is still an agreeable memory; a man’s mind is like a well, all the
better for being once in a while pumped dry. And yet, while I speak of
him in this tone of sincere appreciation, it must be acknowledged that
in one respect he did me an ill turn. He robbed me of an illusion. The
Yankee is second where I had supposed him an undisputed first.
Though we were at the half-way house, and in fact had made more than
half of our day’s journey, the valley of the Chattooga at this point
lay so warmly in the sun that the aspect of things remained decidedly
southern. Roses and snowballs were in bloom in the dooryard, and as I
came out from dinner a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the only one seen on my
entire trip, was complaining from a persimmon-tree beside the gate. My
attention to it, and to sundry other birds of the smaller sorts,--a
blue golden-winged warbler, for example,--was matter of surprise to the
men of the house, both of whom were now on the veranda. My seeker after
knowledge, indeed, asked me plainly, but not without a word of apology,
what object I had in view in such studies; in short,--when I stumbled a
bit in my explanation,--whether there was “any money in them.” In that
form the question presented less difficulty, and in my turn I asked
him and his brother-in-law how often they were accustomed to see ravens
thereabout. Their reply was little to the comfort of an enthusiast
who had come a thousand miles, more or less, with ravens in his eye.
Neither of them had seen one in the last five years. Something had
happened to the birds, they could not say what. Formerly it was nothing
uncommon to notice one or two flying over. Alas, this was not the first
time it had been borne in upon me that, ornithologically, my portion
was among the belated.
I have said nothing about it hitherto, but I had not driven five or
six hours through strange woods and into the midst of strange hills
without an ear open for bird notes. Even the rumbling of the heavy
wagon and the uneasy creaking of the harness could not drown such music
altogether, and once in a while, as I have said, I spelled myself on
foot. At short intervals, too, when we came to some promising spot,--a
swampy thicket, perhaps, or a patch of evergreens,--I called a halt to
listen; the driver making no objection, and the horses less than none.
The voices, to my regret rather than to my surprise, were every one
familiar, and the single unexpected thing about it all was the dearth
of northern species. The date was May 6, and the woods might properly
enough have been alive with homeward-bound migrants; but the only bird
that I could positively rank under that head was a Swainson thrush,--a
free-hearted singer, whose cheery White Mountain tune I never hear at
the South without an inward refreshment. From the evergreens, none too
common, and mostly too far from the road, came the voices of a pine
warbler and one or two black-throated greens; and once, as we skirted a
bushy hillside, I caught the sliding ditty of a prairie warbler. Here,
too, I think it was that I heard the distinctive, loquacious call of a
summer tanager,--four happy chances, as but for them, and the single
gnatcatcher by the half-way house gate, my vacation bird list would
have been shorter by five species.
After all, the principal ornithological event of the forenoon was,
not the singing of the Swainson thrush, but the discovery of a
humming-bird’s nest. This happened on the side of Stumphouse Mountain.
I had taken a short cut by myself, and had come out of the woods into
the road again some distance ahead of the wagon, when suddenly I heard
the buzz and squeak of a hummer, and, glancing upward, put my eye
instantly upon the nest, which might have been two thirds done from its
appearance, and then upon its owner, whose reiterated squeakings, I
have no doubt, expressed her annoyance at my intrusion. In truth, both
owners were present, and in that lay the exceptional interest of the
story.
Some years ago I had proved, as I thought, that the male ruby-throat
habitually takes no part in the hatching and rearing of its young,
and, for that matter, is never to be seen about the nest in the five
or six weeks during which that most laborious and nerve-trying work
is going on. As to why this should be I could only confess ignorance;
and subsequent observations, both by myself and by others,[3] while
confirming the fact of the male’s absence, had done nothing to bring
to light the reason for it. Is the female herself responsible for
such a state of things? I should hate to believe, as I have heard it
maintained, that female birds in general cherish little or no real
affection for their mates, regarding them simply as necessities of
the hour; but it is certain that widows among them waste no time in
mourning, and it appears to me likely enough, if I am to say what I
think, that the lady hummer, a fussy and capable body (we all know the
human type), having her nest done and the eggs laid, prefers her mate’s
room to his company, and gives him his walking ticket.
So much for a bit of half-serious speculation. The interest of the nest
found here on Stumphouse Mountain lay, as I have said, in the fact that
it was unfinished, and the male owner of it--if he is to be called an
owner--was still present. Whether he was actually assisting in the
construction of the family house, I am unable to tell. For the few
minutes that I remained the female alone entered it, doing something or
other to the wall or rim, and then flying away. With so long a journey
before us there was no tarrying for further investigations, glad as I
should have been to see the ruby-throat for once conducting himself
with something like Christian propriety. For to-day, at all events, he
was neither a deserter nor an exile.
We rested for an hour or more at the half-way house, and then resumed
our journey: the morning story over again,--upward and downward and
roundabout, with woods and hills everywhere, and two mountains still
to put behind us. We should be in Highlands before dark, the driver
said; but one contingency had been left out of his calculation. When
we had been under way an hour, or some such matter, he began to worry
about one of the horses. My own eyes had been occupied elsewhere, but
now it was plain enough, my attention having been called to it, that
“Doc” was leaving his mate to do the work. And Doc was never known to
play the shirk, the driver said, with a jealousy for his favorite’s
reputation pleasant to see and honorable to both parties. The poor
fellow must be sick. “Didn’t he eat his dinner?” I asked. “Yes; there
was no sign of anything wrong at that time.” Then it could be no very
killing matter, I said to myself; a touch of laziness, probably; who
could blame him?--and I continued to enjoy the sights and sounds of
the forest. But my seatmate, better experienced and more charitable,
was not to be misled. Little by little his anxiety increased, till he
could do nothing but talk about it (so it happened that we crossed the
North Carolina line, and I was none the wiser); and before long it
became evident, even to me, that whatever ailed the horse, sickness,
laziness, discouragement, or exhaustion, he must be carefully humored,
or we should find ourselves stranded for the night on a lonesome
mountain road. Slower and slower we went,--both men on foot, of course,
up all the ascents,--and worse and worse grew Doc’s behavior. I was
sorry for him, and sorrier still for the driver, who was thinking
not only of his horse and his passenger, but of himself and his own
standing with the owner of the team. He was sure it was none of his
fault, he kept protesting; nothing of the kind had ever happened to
him before. Finally, seeing him so miserably depressed (for the time
being every misfortune is as bad as it looks), so quite at the end of
his wit, and almost at the end of his courage, I said, “Why not take
advice at the next house we come to? Two heads are better than one.”
That was a word in season. To take advice would be a kind of division
of responsibility. It is what doctors do when the patient is dying on
their hands. The man brightened at once.
A mile or two more of halting and painful progress, then, and we
approached a clearing, on the farther side of which two men were busy
with a plough. The driver hailed one of them by name, and made known
our difficulty. Wouldn’t he please come to the road and see if he could
make out what was the matter? He responded in the most neighborly
spirit (he would have been a queer farmer, neighborly or not, not to
feel interested in a question about a horse); but after looking into
the animal’s mouth, and disclaiming any special right to speak in such
a case, he could only say that he saw no sign of anything worse than
fatigue. Hadn’t the horse been worked hard lately? Yes, the driver
answered, he had been in the harness pretty steadily for some time
past. At this I put in my oar. Couldn’t another horse be borrowed
somewhere, and the tired one left to rest?--a suggestion, I need
hardly say, that squinted hard toward the horse in sight before us
across the field. The farmer approved of the idea; only where was the
horse to come from? Mountain farmers, as I was to learn afterward,--and
a strange state of things it seemed to a pilgrim from Yankee land,--are
mostly too poor to support a horse, or even a mule. The man would
let us have his, of course, but it was a young thing that had never
been hitched up. “But I tell you,” he broke out, after a minute’s
reflection. “You know So-and-So, don’t you? He has a pair of mules.
Perhaps you could get one of them.” “Good!” said I, and we drove on
a mile or two farther,--and by this time it _was_ driving,--till we
came to a cross-road, the only one that I recall on the whole day’s
route, though there must have been others, I suppose. The owner of
the mules--whose exceptional opulence should have kept his name
remembered--lived down that road a piece, the driver said. If I would
stay by the wagon, he would go down there, and be back as quickly as
possible.
He was gone half an hour or more, while the horses browsed upon
the bushes (if a good appetite signified anything, Doc was not yet
on his way to the buzzards), and I, after listening awhile to the
masterly improvisations of a brown thrasher, went spying about to
see what birds might be hiding in the underbrush. The hobbyist, say
what you please about him, is a lucky fellow. All sorts of untoward
accidents bring grist to his mill; and so it was this time. I
heard a sparrow’s _tseep_, and soon called into sight two or three
white-throats,--ordinary birds enough, but of value here as being
the only ones found on the whole journey. I should have missed them
infallibly but for Doc’s misadventure.
The driver returned at last, and with him came a mountain
farmer,--another good neighbor, I was glad to see,--leading a mule,
which was quickly put into Doc’s harness. But what to do with Doc?
“Leave him,” said I. “Lead him at the tail of the wagon,” said the
farmer; and the latter advice prevailed. And very good advice it seemed
till we came to the first steepish piece of road. Then the horse began
to hold back. “Look at him!” exclaimed the driver in despairing tones;
and all our tribulations were begun over again.
From this point there was only one way of getting on, and that at a
snail’s pace and with continual interruptions. The passenger took
the reins, and the driver walked behind with his whip, and so, using
as much kindness as might be, forced the unwilling horse to follow.
Even that cruel resource threatened before long to fail us; for it
began to look as if the unsteady creature would drop in his tracks.
There it was, as I now suspect, that he played his best card. “You
must leave him at the next house, if there is another,” I said. “Yes,
there is another,” the driver answered, “and only one.” We came to it
presently,--a cabin far below us in a deep, wood-encircled valley,
out of which rose pleasant evening sounds of a banjo and singing. The
driver lifted his voice, and a woman appeared upon the piazza. The man
of the house was not at home, she said; but the driver took down the
Virginia fence, and with much patient coaxing and pulling got the horse
down the long, steep slope and into a shed. Then, leaving word for him
to be fed and cared for, he climbed back to the road, and, freed at
last from our incumbrance, we quickened our pace.
By this time it was growing dark. Bird songs had ceased, and flowers
had long been invisible. But indeed, for the greater part of the
afternoon, we had been so taken up with working our passage that I had
found small opportunity for natural history comment. I recall a lovely
rose-acacia shrub, an endless display of pink azalea,--set off here and
there with the flat snowy clusters of the dogwood,--thickets fringed
with drooping, white, sickly sweet Leucothoë racemes (which at the
time I mistook for some kind of Andromeda), the shouts of two pileated
woodpeckers,--always rememberable,--a hooded warbler’s song out of
a rhododendron thicket, and the sight of two or three rough-winged
swallows. These last are worth mentioning, because in connection
with them there came out the astonishing fact that the driver did
not know what I meant by swallows. Apparently he had never heard the
word,--which may help readers to understand what a scarcity of these
airy birds there is in all that Alleghanian country. I should almost as
soon have expected to find a man who had never heard of sparrows!
It was after eight o’clock when we turned a sharp corner in the road
and saw the lights of the village shining through the forest ahead of
us. In fifteen minutes more I was at supper. I had come a long way by
faith,--faith in a guidebook star; and my faith had not been vain.
IN QUEST OF RAVENS
“Every pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the
pursuer.”--KEATS.
While M. Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of the Institute, was in Sicily
prosecuting his memorable search for the Alexandrian manuscript of the
Golden Legend, he fell in unexpectedly with his old acquaintances, M.
and Mme. Trépof, collectors of match-boxes. Their specialty, as may be
supposed, was not exactly to M. Bonnard’s liking. Being a scholar and
an antiquary, he would rather have seen their affections bestowed upon
something more strictly in the line of the fine arts,--upon antique
marbles, perhaps, or painted vases; but after all, he said to himself,
it made no very great difference. A collector is a collector; and,
besides, Mme. Trépof always spoke of their pursuit (she and her husband
were traveling round the world in furtherance of it) with a mixture of
enthusiasm and irony that made the whole business truly delightful.
There we have the shrewd collector’s secret. Whatever the objects
of his choice,--postage-stamps, first editions, butterflies, or
match-boxes,--they become for the time being the only objects worthy
of a man’s desire; but in talking about them, as of course he cannot
altogether avoid doing, he keeps in mind the old caution about the
pearls and the swine, and veils his seriousness under a happy lightness
of speech. This is the better course for all concerned; and something
like this is the course I mean to adopt in narrating my raven-hunt amid
the North Carolina mountains, in May, 1896. The work was absorbing
enough in the doing, but at this distance, and out of consideration
for the scholarly reader,--who may feel about ravens as M. Bonnard
felt about match-boxes,--I hope to be able to treat it with a becoming
degree of disinterestedness.
My collecting, be it said in parenthesis, was in one respect quite
unlike M. Bonnard’s and Mme. Trépof’s. It was concerned, not with the
objects themselves, but with the sight of them. I wanted, not cured
bird-skins in a cabinet, but bits of first-hand knowledge in the memory
and the notebook. Here at Highlands, this little hamlet perched far up
in a mountain wilderness, ravens were common,--so I had read; and as
I purposed remaining in the place for two or three weeks, I should no
doubt see much of them, and so be able not only to “check the name,”
thus adding the species to my set of the _Corvidæ_, but to acquire some
real familiarity with the bird’s voice and ways. Such was my dream; but
certainty began to fade into uncertainty from the day I drove into the
mountains.
One of my first village calls, after a day’s ramble in the country
round about, was upon the apothecary, who sat sunning himself on the
stoop in front of his shop,--a cheerful example of how idyllic a life
“tending store” may become under favorable conditions. To begin with,
as was natural, not to say obligatory, between a newcomer and an old
resident, the altitude and climate of the place were discussed. Then,
as soon as I could do so with politeness, I asked about ravens.
“Ravens?” said the doctor. “Ravens?” Surely the inflection was not
encouraging. There _were_ no ravens, so far as he knew.
“But the books say they are common here.”
“Well, I am perfectly acquainted with the bird, and I have never seen
one in Highlands in all my twelve years.”
This might have seemed to end the matter, once for all; but as I walked
away I remembered how often birds had proved to be common where old
residents had never seen them, and I said to myself that the present
would be only another repetition of the familiar story. There _must_ be
ravens here. Mr. ---- and Mr. ---- could not have been mistaken.
Let that be as it might, this was my third day in the mountains,--the
long ride from Walhalla counting for one,--and when I returned to
the village, at noon, my first glimpse of a raven was yet to be had.
However, a wide-awake farmer assured me that, as he expressed it,
something must be the matter with Dr. ----’s eyes. _He_ had seen ravens
many a time; in fact he had seen one within two days. Of course he
had. The affair was turning out just as I had foreseen. It is a poor
naturalist who has not learned to beware of negative testimony. The
apothecary might sit on his stoop and shake his head; before many days
I would shake a black wing in his face.
That afternoon I took another road, and though I found no ravens I
brought back a lively expectation. I had stopped beside a pond, and
was pulling down a small halesia-tree to break off a branch of its
snowy bells, when a horseman rode up. We spoke to each other (it is
one advantage of out-of-the-way places that they encourage human
intercourse, as poverty helps people to be generous), and in answer
to my inquiry he told me that the tree I was holding down was a “box
elder.” The road was the Hamburg road, or the Shortoff road,--one name
being for a town, the other for a mountain,--and the body of water was
Stewart’s Pond. Then I came to the point. Did he often see ravens in
this country? He answered promptly in the affirmative; and when I told
him of my want of success and of Dr. ----’s twelve-year failure, he
assured me that if I would come out to Turtlepond, where he lived, I
could see them easily enough. He saw them often, and just now they were
particularly noisy; he thought they must be teaching their young to fly.
How far was it to Turtlepond? I asked. “Seven or eight miles.” And
the road? Could he tell me how to get there? Oh, yes; and he began.
But I was soon quite lost. He knew the way too well, and I gave over
trying to follow him, saying to myself that I would procure directions,
when the time came, from some one in the village. The man was very
neighborly and kind, invited me to get up behind him and ride, gave me
his name, answered all my questions, and rode away. Here, then, were
ravens with something like certainty and well within reach (“ra-vĕns,”
my new acquaintance had been careful to say, with no slurring of the
second vowel), and, Dr. ---- to the contrary notwithstanding, I would
yet see them.
The next morning, with a luncheon in my pocket and a minute itinerary
in my notebook, I set out for Turtlepond. Important things must be
attended to promptly. “You will be lucky if you find it,” said the man
who had laid out my route, by way of a godspeed; and I half believed
him. He did not add, what I knew was on his tongue, “You will be
luckier still if you find a raven;” as to that, also, he was welcome to
his opinion. Ravens or no ravens, I meant to enjoy myself. What could a
man want better than a long, unhurried day in those romantic mountain
roads, with a bird singing from every bush, and new and lovely flowers
inviting his hand at every turn? With fair weather and in a fair
country, walking is its own reward.
To put the town behind me was the work of a few minutes. After that my
way ran through the woods, although for the first half of the distance,
at least, there was never more than a mile or two without a clearing
and a house. This part of the road grew familiar to me afterward, I
traveled it so often; and now, as I take it once more in my mind, I can
see it in all its windings. Here, as the land begins to decline from
the plateau, or mountain shoulder, on which the village nestles, stands
a line of towering conical hemlocks,--a hundred and fifty feet tall,
at a moderate guess. Out of them came the nasal, high-pitched, highly
characteristic _ank, ank, ank_ of my first Canadian nuthatch,--my
first one in North Carolina, I mean. That, by the bye, was on this
very trip to Turtlepond. I had been on the watch for him, and put him
into my bird list with peculiar satisfaction. He was like a fellow
Yankee, as was also the brown creeper that dwelt near by. This same
row of hemlocks--beside a brook, as Southern hemlocks always are,
with a thicket of laurel and rhododendron underneath--was also one
of the haunts of the olive-sided flycatcher, another Northerner, who
chooses the loftiest perch he can find from which to deliver his wild
_quit-quequeeo_. Should this Carolinian representative of a boreal
species ever be promoted to the dignity of subspecific rank, as has
happened to some of his neighbors, I should bid for the honor of naming
him,--the hemlock flycatcher.
By the time I reached this point, on a sultry morning, I was commonly
ready for a breathing-spell, and by good luck here was a most
convenient log, on which I used to sit, listening to the bird chorus,
and waylaying any socially disposed mountaineer who might chance
to come along on his way to the town; for Highlands, whatever an
outsider may think of it, is in its own measure and degree a veritable
metropolis.[4] The only man who ever failed to halt in response to my
greeting was a very canonical-looking parson. He was traveling up to
Zion in a “buggy,” and not unlikely was meditating his next Sunday’s
sermon.
If the religious condition of a community is to be estimated by the
number of its meeting-houses, let me say in passing, then Highlands
ought to be a very suburb of the New Jerusalem. Its population cannot
be more than three or four hundred, but its churches are legion.
“Yes,” said a sprightly young lady, to whom the subject was mentioned,
“if there were only one or two more, we might all have one apiece.”
Baptists, Methodists (of different sorts,--species and subspecies),
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Adventists, Unitarians,--all the sects
seemed to be provided for, though I am not sure about the Catholics
and the Swedenborgians. It is queer how conscientiously particular,
and almost private, the worship of God is made. The Almighty must be a
great lover of mint, anise, and cummin, one would say. I was reminded
again and again of that sweet old Scripture: “Behold how good and how
pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”
This digression, though suggested by the recollection of my
serious-faced clergyman, is not to be taken as reflecting in any wise
upon him or upon his calling. He was trying to do his duty, I have no
question. If he felt obliged to have a pulpit and a uniform of his own,
it was not that he differed from other people, but that other people
differed from him. May his work prosper, and his days be long! He was
traveling in a buggy, as I have said. Had he been on foot, no doubt he
might have been readier to stop a minute to chat with an inquisitive
stranger,--as ready, perhaps, as a more venerable pilgrim who happened
along a few minutes later, and who not only stopped, but sat down, and,
so to speak, paid me a visit: a little man, bent with his seventy-three
years (he told me his age almost at once), who had come ten miles on
foot that morning. In one hand he carried a live turkey,--with its
legs tied, of course,--and in the other a chicken. Poor things, they
were making their last journey. It was a “very hot day,” the old man
thought. His cotton shirt was flung wide open for coolness, and as he
mopped his face, having put down his burdens and taken off his hat, he
talked in a cheerful, honest voice, most agreeable to listen to. Life
was still a pleasant experience to him, as it seemed. I doubt whether
he had ever tired of it for a day. He would sell the turkey and the
chicken, buy a little tobacco and perhaps one or two other necessaries,
and then trudge the ten miles home again. It is a great thing to have
a market for one’s produce, and a greater thing to be contented with
one’s lot.
Not far beyond this favorite resting-place--tempting even in the
retrospect, as the reader perceives--is a house with a good-sized
clearing, through which meanders a trout-stream, to the endless comfort
of one of the younger boys of the family. I saw him angling there,
one day, with shining success. What a good time he was having! He
could hardly bait the hook fast enough. I leaned over the fence and
watched him out of pure sympathy (he did not see me, I think, though
there was nothing in the world between us--except the fish), and
afterward I mentioned the circumstance to his father. “Oh, he is a
great fisherman,” was the proud response. For a boy that _is_ a boy a
trout-brook is better than all the toy-shops. The good man and his wife
(New York State people, who had moved here twelve years before) treated
me most hospitably when I came to know them, but on this first morning,
having far to go, I went by without calling, pausing only to note the
_chebec_ of a least flycatcher, which seemed to be at home in their
orchard trees. Its name is still Number 60 in my North Carolina list.
Another bend in the road, and I came within sight of the first of
two mills. These had figured at considerable length in my chart
of directions, and near them, as I now remember, I fell into some
uncertainty as to how this chart was to be interpreted. I turned aside,
therefore, to inquire of the second miller; but before I could reach
him a blue yellow-backed warbler began singing from a treetop; and
as he was my first specimen here, I must out with my opera-glass and
find him. The miller surveyed my proceedings with unashamed curiosity,
but he answered my questions, none the less, and for still another
stage I kept on with the comfortable assurance that I was headed for
Turtlepond.
If I failed to arrive there, it should not be for want of using my
tongue. From the time I left Highlands I had inquired my way of every
man I met. For one thing, I relish natural country talk; and if there
is to be conversation, it must somehow be opened. I kept in mind, too,
the skepticism of my Highlands informant, and by unhappy experience I
had learned how easy it is, in cases of this kind, to go astray through
some misunderstanding of question or answer.
So I sauntered along, with frequent interruptions, of course (that was
part of the game),--here for a bird, there for a flower, a tree, or a
bit of landscape. I recall especially great numbers of the tiny yellow
lady’s-slipper and beds of the white-flowered clintonia--the latter a
novelty to me--just coming into bloom. Then, by and by, the road began
a long, sidelong ascent of a mountain; but at the last moment, when I
seemed to have left human habitations behind me for good, I saw across
the narrow valley through the forest--the branches at this height being
still in the bud--two men at work in a ploughed field. Here was one
more opportunity to assure myself against contingencies, and with a
loud “hullo” I gained their attention. Was this the road to Turtlepond?
I shouted. Yes, they shouted back (a man who could not lift up his
voice would be poorly off in that country); I was to keep on and on as
far as the schoolhouse, just beyond which I must be sure to turn to the
right. Very good, said I to myself, here is something definite; and
again I faced the mountain road.