afterward at the same house--the lady handed me an orchid. I might be
interested in it; it was not very common, she believed. I looked at
it, thinking at first that I had never seen it before. Then I seemed
to remember something. “Is it _Pogonia verticillata_?” I asked. She
smiled, and said it was; and when I told her that to the best of my
recollection I had never seen more than one specimen before, and that
upwards of twenty years ago (a specimen from Blue Hill, Massachusetts),
she insisted upon believing that I must have an extraordinary botanical
memory, though of course she did not put the compliment thus baldly,
but dressed it in some graceful, unanswerable, feminine phrase which I,
for all my imaginary mnemonic powers, have long ago forgotten.
The same lady had the rare _Shortia galacifolia_
growing--transplanted--in her grounds, and her husband volunteered to
show me one of the few places in the neighborhood of Highlands (this,
too, on his own land) where the true lily-of-the-valley--identical with
the European plant of our gardens--grows wild. It was something I had
greatly desired to see, and was now in bloom. Still another man--but
he was only a summer cottager--took me to look at a specimen of the
Carolina hemlock (_Tsuga Caroliniana_), a tree of the very existence of
which I had before been ignorant. The truth is that the region is most
exceptionally rich in its flora, and the people, to their honor be it
recorded, are equally exceptional in that they appreciate the fact.
A small magnolia-tree (_M. Fraseri_), 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 (I speak as a hobbyist), 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 (scarlet painted-cup),
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.
My first concern, as I recovered myself, was to set down in black and
white a complete account of the stranger’s plumage; for though I knew
it for a phalarope, I must wait to consult a book before naming it
more specifically. It would have contributed unspeakably to my peace
of mind, just then, had I been better informed about the distinctive
peculiarities of the three species which compose the phalarope family;
as I certainly would have been, had I received any premonition of what
was in store for me. As it was, I must make sure of every possible
detail, lest in my ignorance I should overlook some apparently trivial
item that might prove, too late, to be all important. So I fell to
work, noting the white lower cheek (or should I call it the side of
the upper neck?), the black stripe through and behind the eye, the
white line just over the eye, the light-colored crown, the rich reddish
brown of the nape and the sides of the neck, the white or gray-white
under parts, the plain (unbarred) wings, and so on. The particulars
need not be rehearsed here. I was possessed by a recollection, or half
recollection, that the marginal membrane of the toes was a prime mark
of distinction (as indeed it is, though the only manual I had brought
with me turned out not to mention the point); but while for much of the
time the bird’s feet were visible, it never for so much as a second
held them still, and as the water was none too clear and the bottom
muddy, it was impossible for me to see how the toes were webbed, or
even to be certain that they were webbed at all. Once, as the bird
was close to the shore, and almost at my feet, I crouched upon a log,
thinking to pick the creature up and examine it; but it moved quietly
away for a yard or so, just out of reach, and though I could probably
have killed it with a stick,--as a friend of mine killed one some years
ago on a mountain lake in New Hampshire,[6]--it was happily too late
when the possibility of such a step occurred to me. By that time I was
not on collecting terms with the bird. It was “not born for death,” I
thought, or, if it was, I was not born to play the executioner.
Its activity was amazing. If I had not known this to be natural to the
phalarope family, I might have thought the poor thing on the verge of
starvation, eating for dear life. It moved its head from side to side
incessantly, dabbing the water with its bill picking something,--minute
insects, I supposed,--from the surface, or swimming among the loose
grass, and running its bill down the green blades one after another.
Several times, in its eagerness to capture a passing insect, it almost
flew over the water, and once it actually took wing for a stroke or
two, with some quick, breathless notes, like _cut, cut, cut_. One thing
was certain, it did not care for polliwogs, shoals of which darted
about its feet unmolested.
Once a horseman frightened it as he rode over the bridge, but even then
it barely rose from the water with a startled _yip_. The man glanced
at it (I was just then looking carelessly in another direction),
and passed on--to my relief. At that moment the most interesting
mountaineer in North Carolina would have found me unresponsive. As for
my own presence, the phalarope seemed hardly to notice it, though I
stood much of the time within a distance of ten feet, and now and then
considerably nearer than that,--without so much as a grass-blade for
cover,--holding my glass upon it steadily till a stitch in my side made
the attitude all but intolerable. The lovely bird rode the water in the
lightest possible manner, and was easily put about by slight puffs of
wind; but it could turn upon an insect with lightning quickness. It was
never still for an instant except on two occasions, when it came close
to the shore and sat motionless in the lee of a log. There it crouched
upon its feet, which were still under water, and seemed to be resting.
It preened its feathers, also, and once it rubbed its bill down with
its claw, but the motion was too quick for my eye to follow, though I
was near enough to see the nostril with perfect distinctness.
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!”
A year afterward (May 29, 1892), she wrote again, with equal
enthusiasm: “If I only had a house of my own here I should make a
business of trying desperately hard to bring you here, if only for one
of your spare Sundays, to see the ‘bay birds’ that have been round
here literally by the _thousands_ for the last month, the swimming
sandpipers--_so beautiful!_ In great flocks that wheel and turn, and,
flying in long masses over the water, show now dark, now dazzling
silver as they careen and show the white lining of their wings, like a
long, brilliant, fluttering ribbon. I never heard of so many before,
about here.”
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 (valleys are coves in that
part of the South), 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.
_He_ was going to Highlands, also. He had been “putting in a week”
trying to buy a cow to replace one that had mired herself and broken
her neck. “I would rather have paid down twenty-five dollars in gold,”
he declared. (The air was full of political silver talk; but gold
is the standard, after all, when men come to business.) He knew the
invalid, it appeared, for presently he turned into a trail, a short
cut through the woods, which till now had escaped my notice, and
remarked, “Well, John, I guess I’ll take the narrow way;” and off he
went up the slope, while the other man and I continued our dialogue,--I
still playing the part of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Christian still
unconvinced, but not indisposed to parley.
He wished to know where I had come from; and when I told him, he said,
“Massachusetts! Well, I reckon it’s right hot down there now.” He
held the common belief of the mountain people that the rest of the
earth’s surface is mostly uninhabitable in summer-time. One morning, I
remember, I said something to an idler on the village sidewalk about
the cool night we had just passed. I meant my little speech as a kind
of local compliment, but he took me up at once. It was “pretty hot,” he
thought,--about as hot a night as he ever knew. He didn’t see how folks
_lived_ down in Charleston; and I partly agreed with him. He had been
“borned right here,” and had never been farther away than to Seneca;
and from his manner of expressing himself I inferred that he hoped
never to find himself so far from home again. This was in the midst of
a “heated term,” when the mercury, at four o’clock in the afternoon,
registered 74° on the hotel piazza.
However, it was many degrees warmer than that in Horse Cove (at a
considerably lower level) 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 (as we
call it, in our lofty human way of speaking, having no doubt that we
are the people), 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 (the universal “packing” by both sexes over those up-and-down
roads, and the shiftless, comfortless appearance of the cabins,
were proof enough of a pinched estate), 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 (the key must fit
the lock), and certainly they treated me with nothing but kindness.
More than a fortnight after my interview with the invalid, just
described, I was returning to the hotel from an early morning jaunt
down the Walhalla road, when I met a man driving a pair of dwarfish
steers hitched to a pair of wheels, on the axle-tree of which was
fastened a rude, widely ventilated, home-made box, with an odd-shaped,
home-made basket hung on one side of it,--the driver, literally, on the
box. I greeted him, and he pulled up. “Well, I see you are still here,”
he said, after a good-morning. “You have seen me before?” I replied. He
was sallow and thin,--the usual mountaineer’s condition,--but wore the
pleasantest of smiles. “Yes; I saw you down in the Cove with the sick
man.” He was the pilgrim who took the “narrow way,” and was hunting
for a cow, though I should not have remembered him. And now, peeping
through one of the holes in the box, I saw that he had a calf inside.
“A Jersey?” said I. “Part Jersey,” he answered. Mr. S---- (one of the
villagers, whom by this time I counted as a friend, a white-haired,
youngish veteran of the civil war, on the Union side, a neighbor I
had “taken to” from the moment I saw him), Mr. S---- had given the
calf to the man’s father-in-law, and he, the son-in-law, had driven
up to the village to fetch it home. He lived about six miles out, on
a side-road. I inquired about the two or three houses in sight in the
valley clearing below us. It was the “Webb settlement,” he said; “so
we always call it.” I remarked that all hands seemed to have plenty of
children. “Yes, plenty of children,” he responded, with a laugh; and
away he drove.
It was only a few minutes before another man appeared, a foot-passenger
this time, walking at a smart pace, with an umbrella on his shoulder,
and a new pair of boots slung across it. “You travel faster than I do,”
said I. “Yes, sir,” he answered, smiling (all men like the name of
being active), “I go pretty peert when I go.” He, too, had six miles
before him, and believed it would “begin to rain after a bit.” It would
have been an imposition upon good nature to detain him. There was a
bend in the road just below, and in another minute I heard him spanking
round it at a lively trot.
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 (the ramrod projecting)
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.[7]
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.
The _new_ road, of which I have spoken, and concerning which I heard
so much said on all hands, was really not quite that, but rather a new
laying out--with loops here and there to avoid the steeper pitches--of
the road from Walhalla, over which I had driven on my entrance into
the mountains. My friend Mr. S---- had made the surveys for the work,
and the whole town was looking forward eagerly to its completion.
Toward sunset, on a Sunday afternoon, I had been out of the village in
an opposite direction, and was sitting by the wayside in the Stewart
woods, full of flowers and music, where I loved often to linger, when
three men approached on foot. “How far have you come?” I inquired.
“From Franklin,”--about twenty miles distant,--they answered. They were
going to work “on the new road up at Stooly” (Satulah Mountain), or so
I understood the oldest of the trio, who acted throughout as spokesman.
(In my part of the country it is only the professionally idle who walk
twenty miles at a stretch.) “Well,” said I, none too politely, being
nothing but an outsider, “I hope you’ll make it better than it was when
I came up.” He replied, quite good-humoredly, that they were making a
good road of it this time. And so they were, comparatively speaking,
for I went over the mountain one day on purpose to see it, after I knew
who had laid it out, and had begun to feel a personal interest in its
success. One of the men carried a hoe, and one a small tin clock. They
had no other baggage, I think. When a man works on the road, he needs
a hoe to work with, and a timepiece to tell him when to begin and when
to leave off. So I thought to myself; but I am bound to add that these
workmen seemed to be going to their task as if it were a privilege.
It eases labor to feel that one is doing a good job. That makes the
difference, so we used to be told, by Carlyle or some one else, between
an artist and an artisan; and I see no reason why such encouraging
distinctions should not apply to road-menders as well as to menders of
philosophy. There is no such thing as drudgery, even for a man with a
hoe, so long as quality is the end in view.
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 (a two days’ journey for loaded
wagons),--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.