sylvan innocence that a partridge with her half-grown brood hardly
feared me as their path crossed mine, and they flew only when I
approached very near them. Cotton-tailed rabbits hopped leisurely
across in front of me, in no wise excited by my approach, and though
the chipmunks whistled shrilly and dived into their holes before I
touched them, they waited almost long enough for me to do it. The
roadside flowers climbed bravely up the second mile among the wayside
grasses, white clover, blue-eyed grass and golden ragwort, with the
daisies, these not so plentiful as below, and the gentle brunella,
and out of the woods came as if to meet and fraternize with them the
rose-veined wood sorrel, its pure white petals seeming even more
diaphanous because of the rose-veining. The heart-shaped, trifoliate
leaves of this lovely little plant which climbs the great mountain on
all sides are not those of the veritable shamrock, perhaps, but they
are enough like them to prove to a willing mind that St. Patrick must
surely have climbed Mount Washington in his day, and that this gentle
insignia of his clan remained behind to prove it. It is a flower of
shaded mossy banks in deep evergreen woods, where its tender white
flowers, with their beautifully rose-shaded, translucent petals,
delight the eye along the lower and middle reaches of all paths that
lead to the summit.
Toward the end of the second mile one realizes that he is climbing
high. Through the trees to westward flit glimpses of the deep valley of
the Peabody River, when he has risen, and beyond it the misty blue wall
of the Carter Range, rising ever higher behind him as he goes up. The
fritillaries come on, but the admirals drop behind to be seen no more,
their places taken by an occasional angle-wing, Grapta interrogationis
or Grapta comma. As the road rises the wayside flowers too fall behind,
leaving lonely places, though well up to the Halfway House, nearly four
miles up, white and pink yarrow is to be found, flanked by bunchberry
blooms and the lovely greenish yellow of the Clintonia. This has
half-ripened berries in the lowlands at the base, but toward the summit
of the mountain it blooms till well into the middle of July, perhaps
later. The butterflies fall behind as the roadside flowers do, yet
now and then a mountain fritillary goes by and almost at the Halfway
House I saw the most superb Compton tortoise, Vanessa j-album, that I
have met anywhere. Below the Halfway House young spruces have crowded
into the roadside to the very wheel tracks, and the last of the
lowland blooms has vanished. On the day that I came looking for them
the lowland butterflies had vanished too, and the road seemed bare and
desolate for two or three miles, indeed until the alpine plants of the
high plateau began to appear, and with them the Arctic butterfly that
makes this summit home, the curious little Oeneis semidea.
I had thought to find this, "the White Mountain butterfly," the only
variety of the plateau and the summit cone, but in this the day and the
place had more than one surprise in store for me. There are many days
in summer when even the hardiest, strongest-flying lowland butterfly
would not be able to scale the summit because of wind and cold, but
this day had only a gentle air drifting in from the north, and the
heat, which was a killing one below, was there tempered to that of a
fine June day. The sudden bloom of the alpine plants had passed its
meridian, but many were still in good flower. All along on the head
wall of the Tuckerman Ravine and out upon the Alpine Garden were the
pink, laurel-like cups of the Lapland azalea. There was the Phyllodoce
cærulea with its urn-shaped corolla turning blue as it withers, the
three-toothed cinquefoil, Potentilla tridentata which looks to the
careless glance like a little running blackberry vine with its star of
white bloom, and everywhere low clumps of the lovely little mountain
sandwort, Arenaria grœnlandica, the only petal-bearing plant that dares
the very summit, where its white, cup-shaped blooms make the bleak
rocks glad.
* * * * *
On the Alpine Garden and at the ravine heads are lower level flowers
which come up and mingle with these. The buttercup-like blossoms of the
mountain avens flash their rich yellow. The Labrador tea puts out its
white umbels and sends spicy fragrance down the wind. The houstonia
grows bravely its little white, four-pointed stars with their yellowish
centre, and cornel and even Trientalis, the American star-flower, grow
from the tundra moss and make a brave show in that bleak spot. Boldest
of all is the great, rank-growing Indian poke, with its erect stem of
big green leaves and its topping spike of greenish bloom. High up to
the angles of the rock jumble of the cone, wherever the water comes
down into the Alpine Garden, this climbs with a bold assurance that no
other lowland plant equals. It is plentiful in the neighborhood of the
Lakes of the Clouds and high on the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine
it sprouts under the receding snow, blanched like celery.
[Illustration: The fantastic lion's head which, carved in stone, guards
the trail along Boott's Spur toward the summit cone of Washington]
* * * * *
All these and more were in bloom on the plateau that supports the high
cone of Washington summit on that day, and up to them had come the
lowland butterflies. Most plentiful were the mountain fritillaries,
but often a great spangled fritillary spread his wider wing above the
head wall of Huntington or Tuckerman and soared along the levels. With
these was an occasional angle-wing, Grapta interrogationis and Grapta
progne, feeding in the larval stage on the leaves of the prickly wild
gooseberry which is common well up to the base of the summit cone.
Strange to relate, the beautiful, hardy, and common mourning cloak was
not to be seen on the days in which I hunted butterflies about the
summit, but his near relative, the Compton tortoise, Vanessa j-album,
was there, and the smaller but lovely little Vanessa milberti, with
his wings so beautifully gold-banded, I saw frequently. Milbertis flew
up out of the Great Gulf toward the summit, and one afternoon I found
one of them carefully following the Crawford trail down, winding its
every turn a foot above the surface as if he knew that it was made to
show the way. To the very summit, circling the Tip Top House, came big,
red-winged, black-veined monarchs, and all the varieties I had seen
in the Alpine Garden came up there too, most numerous of all being
the mountain fritillaries. I take it that no one of these lowland
butterflies is bred at these high levels, but that all wander up when
the sun is bright and the wind still enough to permit the excursion.
[Illustration: "Semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock-pile
which is the summit cone"]
Most interesting of all to the lepidopterist is the one Arctic
butterfly of our New England fauna, Oeneis semidea, "The White Mountain
Butterfly," which might be perhaps better called in common parlance
"The Mount Washington Butterfly," as it is commonly believed to be
restricted in its habitat, so far as New England is concerned, to
the high summit cone of Mount Washington. Holland so states in his
excellent butterfly book. As a matter of fact the insect is plentiful
over a rather wider range. I found it along the Crawford trail out to
the Lakes of the Clouds and Mount Monroe, as well as along the lawns
and Alpine Garden and down the carriage road far below the summit cone.
It is also found at similar altitudes on Jefferson, Adams and Madison,
its habitat being rather the high peaks of the Presidential Range than
Mount Washington alone.
But semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock pile which is the
summit cone. Wherever you climb, there it flutters from underfoot
like a two-inch fleck of gray-brown lichen that has suddenly become a
spirit. Alighting, it turns into the lichen again. In rough weather
the other butterflies go down hill into the shelter of the ravines,
but this one has learned to fight gales and midsummer snow storms
and hold patriotically to its native country. Even in still weather
when disturbed it skims the surface of the rock in flight, seeming
to half crawl, half fly, lest a gale catch it and whirl it beyond its
beloved peak. Its refuge is the little caverns among and beneath the
angled boulders, and when close pressed by a would-be captor it flies
or climbs down into these as a chipmunk would, and remains there till
the danger has passed. It seems to be born of the rocks and to flee to
its mother as children do when afraid of anything. It is our hardiest
mountaineer. Neither beast nor bird dares the winter on this high
summit. Yet here, winter and summer, is the home of this boreal insect
which in the egg or the chrysalid withstands cold that often goes to
fifty below Fahrenheit, and is backed by gales that blow a hundred
miles an hour. No wonder this little but mighty butterfly takes the
colors of the rocks that are its refuge.
It is the only easily noticed form of animated wild life that one is
sure to find on the very summit, even in summer. Hedgehogs sometimes
come to the door of the Tip Top House in summer weather and have to
be shooed away, and gray squirrels have been seen there; but these,
like the tourists, are casual wanderers from the warmer regions below.
I believe the only bird that makes its summer home on the cone is the
junco, though I heard song-sparrows and white-throats sing down on
the levels of the plateau, at the Alpine Garden and about the Lakes
of the Clouds. The juncos breed about these next highest levels in
considerable numbers, and one pair at least bred this summer high up
on the summit cone, about a third of the way down from the top toward
the Alpine Garden. Like the Arctic butterflies, the refuge of this pair
was the interstices of the rocks themselves, the nest being actually a
hole in the ground, beneath an overhanging jut of ledge where the moss
from below crept perpendicularly up to it, but left a gap two inches
wide into which the mother bird could squeeze. It was almost as much of
a hole in the ground as that in which a bank swallow nests, absolutely
concealed, and protected from wind or down-rush of torrential rain.
* * * * *
Rare butterflies are not the only insects which tempt the entomologist
to the very summit of Mount Washington. On my butterfly day there
I found two members of the Cambridge Entomological Society dancing
eagerly about the trestle at the terminus of the Mount Washington
Railway, collecting beetles, of which they had hundreds stowed away in
their cyanide jars. I'll confess that all beetles look alike to me, but
these grave and learned gentlemen were ready to dance with joy at their
success of the afternoon before at the Lakes of the Clouds, where each
had captured one Elaphrus olivaceus. The name sounds like something
gigantic; as a matter of fact, olivaceus is a tiny, dark, oval-shaped
beetle, on which these enthusiasts saw beautiful striæ and olive-yellow
stripes. Having the eye of faith I saw them too, but only with that
eye. Together we went hunting the Alpine Garden for Elaphrus lævigatus,
another infinitesimal prodigy of great rarity and scientific interest,
but the omens were bad and lævigatus escaped. Such are some of the
magnets with which this mighty mountain top draws men and women from
all over the world, to spend perhaps a day, perhaps a summer, among its
clouds, its scintillant sunshine and its ozone-bearing breezes.
Storm winds drive most of us below. When they blow, all the beautiful
lowland butterflies set their wings and volplane down to the shelter
of the valleys behind the jutting crags and the head walls. The chill
of descending night as well drives these light-winged creatures off
the hurricane deck of this great rock ship of the high clouds. But the
thousands of hardy Oeneis semidea simply fold their lichen gray wings
and creep into miniature caverns of the jumbled granite, waiting, warm
and secure, for the light of the next sunny day.
X
MOUNTAIN PASTURES
_Their Changing Beauty from Low Slopes to Presidential Plateaus_
On the mountain farms the cultivated fields hold such levels as the
farmer is able to find. Often on the roughest mountain side he has
found them, treads on the stairways of the hills whose risers may be
perpendicular cliffs or slide-threatening declivities. These last are
for woodland in the farm scheme, if tremendously rough, or if they have
roothold for grass and foothold for cattle they are pastures. Thus it
is the pastures rather than the cultivated lands that aspire, and from
their heights one looks down upon the farm-house and the farmer and his
men at work in the hay fields. The stocky, square-headed, white-faced
cattle may well feel themselves superior to these beings far below
who groom and feed them, and from their wind-swept ridges I dare say
they have the Emersonian thought, even if they have never learned the
couplet:
"Little recks yon lowland clown
Of me on the hilltop looking down."
[Illustration: "The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well
feel themselves superior to these beings far below who groom and feed
them"]
These mountain cattle are of many breeds, according to the fancy or
the fortune of their owner. Probably many of them are mongrels whose
ancestors it would be hard to determine, yet there seems to be a
strong resemblance in some to those cattle one sees on Scottish hills
and in the highlands of the English border, and one wonders if here
are not lineal descendants of the stock which came in with the early
English settlers. At least the white-faced ones have been settled on
the mountain pastures long enough to become part and parcel of them.
Except when in motion they so fit their rocky surroundings as to be
with difficulty picked out from them by the eye. One might say the
pasture holds so many hundred rocks and cattle, but which is which it
takes a nice discernment to decide. Especially is this true when the
herd stands motionless and regards the wandering stranger. Then the
red bodies are the very color shadows of the green pasture shrubs
and the white faces patches of weather-worn granite. Sometimes it is
disconcerting to tramp up to such a rock in such a shadow and have it
suddenly spring to its feet with an indignant "ba-a" and flee to the
forest with much clangor of a musical bell.
Most of the mountain cattle wear this bell, which is but a hollow,
truncated, four-sided pyramid with a clapper hung within. It does
not tintinnabulate, but "tonks" with a tone that is low, but carries
far and seems always a part of the woodland whence it so often
sounds,--woodland in which pasture and cattle so continually merge. In
its mellow tones the clock of the pasture strikes, marking the lazy
hours for the loving listener. In the time when the slender thread of
the old moon disputes with the new dawn the honor of lighting the high
eastern ridges, I hear it chorusing in mellow merriment as the herd
winds up the lane from the big old barn. It briskly rings the changes
of the forenoon as the herd crops eagerly among the rocks, the slowing
of its tempo marking the appeasing of hunger. Through the long, torrid
hours of mid-day it sleeps in the deep shadow of the wood, toning only
occasionally as the drowsy bearer moves. Then with the coming of the
afternoon hunger I hear it again, moving down the mountain with the
day, to meet the twilight and the farmer at the pasture bars.
* * * * *
As these mountain cattle are curiously different in aspect and carriage
from those of our lowland pastures in eastern Massachusetts, so the
pastures themselves differ widely in more than location and level.
Here in part is the old world of bird and beast, herb, shrub and tree,
yet many an old friend is missing and many a new one is to be made. It
is difficult to believe that a pasture can be fascinating and lovable
without either red cedars or barberry bushes, yet here are neither, and
though the slim young spruces stand as prim and erect as the red cedars
of a hundred and fifty miles farther south, they do not quite take
their places, nor do they have the vivid personality of those trees. It
is the same with the barberry. There is an individuality, an aura of
personality about the shrub that forbids any other to take its place or
indeed to in any way resemble it. The mountain pastures are the worse
for that.
For my part I miss the clethra more even than these. July is the time
for those misty white racemes to be coming into bloom and sending down
the wind that spicy, delectable fragrance that seems to tempt him who
breathes it to adventure forth in search of all woodland romance. But
the clethra is a lover of the sea rather than the mountains and it
has never voyaged far up stream. The waters of the mountain brooks
have lost their clearness long before they greet the clethra on
their banks. The striped moosewood and the mountain moosewood, both
pasture-bordering shrubs of the high pastures, are beautiful in their
way, but they cannot make up for this sweet-scented, brook-loving
beauty of the lowlands.
There are two pasture people, however, who love the high slopes of
the White Mountain pastures as well as they do the sandy borders of
the Massachusetts salt marshes. These are the spiræas, latifolia and
tomentosa. The latter, the good old steeple bush or hardhack, moves
into some rocky, open slopes till it seems as if there was hardly room
for any other shrub or scarcely for grass to grow, and makes the whole
hillside rosy with its pink spires. It always seems to me as if the
hardhack should be hardier than its less sturdy-looking, more dainty
sister, the Spiræa latifolia or meadow-sweet. In most pastures of the
foothills, so to speak, I find them together, but as one goes on up
the slopes of the high ranges the hardhack vanishes from the wayside
leaving the meadow-sweet to climb Mount Washington itself and show the
delicate pink of its bloom over the head wall of the Tuckerman Ravine
and about the Lakes of the Clouds. Nor has it altogether escaped the
pasture there. The white-faced cattle remain behind with the hardhack,
but the deer come over the col from Oakes Gulf and browse on its
leaves and those of the Labrador tea and drink from the clear waters
of the high lakes. These herds of the highest pastures bear no bell
and fit into the color scheme of the landscape better even than the
white-faced cattle, and it is no wonder that they escape observation.
Yet I find their hoof marks at almost every drinking place of these
highest mountain moors.
In these last days of July the most conspicuous bird of the pastures
is the indigo bunting. I say this advisedly and in the presence of
goldfinches, myrtle and magnolia warblers, purple finches and various
sparrows, including the white-throat, also some other birds who breed
and sing there. Yet of all these the indigo bunting seems by numbers
and pervasiveness to be most in the public eye; I being the public.
Early in the morning he sings. In the full warmth of noontide he
sings, and I hear him when the sun is low behind the Presidential
Range and the clouds are putting their gray nightcap on the summit of
Washington. Always it is the same song, which slight variations only
tend to emphasize without obscuring. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it,
who-is-it, who-is-it? dear, dear, dear." And sometimes he adds a little
whimsical, stuttering, "What-do-you-know-about-that?" He sits as he
sings on the penultimate twig of some pasture shrub or tree, and
as the sun shines on his indigo blue suit it flashes little coppery
reflections from it that might well make one think him the product of
some skilled jeweller's art rather than born of an egg in the bushes.
With the self-consciousness of the average summer visitor, I at first
thought that this song of his referred to me. I fancied that he was
calling to his little brown wife at the nest in the nearby bushes,
exclaiming about this stranger who was tramping the pastures and
asking her about him. If you wish to know about new people in town
ask your wife. Any happily married indigo bunting will give you that
advice. But I know his theme better now. I have seen the wife slip
slyly out of the dense green of the thicket, and have most impolitely
invaded it, there to find the compact grass nest full of a new-born
bunting family. I know now that the father bunting sits in the tree
tip and exclaims all day long over the arrival of these. Seeing their
huddled, naked forms, their astounding mouths and unopened eyes, I
do not wonder that he exclaims in perplexity and indeed some dismay
over the new arrivals. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it, who-is-it?
What-do-you-know-about-that?" He will never get over his astonishment
at such tiny gorgons coming from those pale, pretty eggs that were
there but a few days ago. Nor do I blame him one bit. It does not
seem possible that these miracles of ugliness can ever grow up to be
such sleek, beautiful birds as this father of theirs that sits on the
treetop and all day long fills the pasture with echoes of his song
of wonder over them. No. His song had no reference to me, but was
strictly concerned with his own affairs. Like the other native-born
mountaineers, he does not take the summer visitors any too seriously.
It is interesting to go up the mountains from one pasture, scramble to
another and see what lowland folk fall behind and how the habits of
those that keep up the climb change as they progress into the higher
altitudes. The woodchuck is not missing here, but he is not the same.
He is the northern woodchuck, very like his Massachusetts cousin
in habits but grayer, leaner and rangier. At this time of year a
Massachusetts woodchuck is so fat that if you meet him he fairly rolls
to his hole. The northern woodchuck gets into his with a scrambling
bound that shows much less accumulation of adipose tissue. I fancy
this leanness and greater alertness is due to the greater numbers and
greater alertness of his woodland enemies. The pastures are full of
foxes, and when they get hungry they go down and dig out a woodchuck
for dinner. But even the northern woodchuck fails the pastures in their
higher portions.
* * * * *
One by one the lowland flowers fall back and the lowland trees and
shrubs, also, until high on the Presidential Range the pastures
themselves, in the common use of the word, have failed as well. Yet
I like to think the true use of the word includes that debateable
land at the tree limit as pasture land. In the economy of a farm it
would surely be of use for nothing else, and it would make excellent
pasturage in summer, were there farms near enough to use it. It always
seems homelike, this region of grass and browse, coming to it as one
does from the dark depths of fir woods and dwarfed deciduous trees. The
hemlocks, beeches, yellow birches and maples have stayed behind in the
region of cow pastures. Here where sometimes the deer come and where
mountain sheep ought to find pasturage, only the hardiest of pasture
people have dared to take their stand. The firs and spruces have come
up, growing stockier and more gnome-like at every hundred-foot rise,
until above the head walls of the ravines they shrink to low-growing
shrubs not knee high, except where they have cunningly taken advantage
of some hollow. Even there they rise no higher than the shelter that
fends them from the north wind. Above that they are trimmed down, often
into grotesque shapes like those that old-time gardeners affected,
shearing evergreens into strange caricatures of beasts or men. Often on
these Alpine pastures you find a boulder behind which on the south a
fir has taken refuge. Close up to the rock it mats, drifting away from
it, southerly, in much the same lines that a snowdrift would assume in
the same position. There is in this nothing of the spiring shape of the
same variety of spruce or fir in the valley pastures far below. Yet the
botanists accept this as an individual distortion due to environment
and do not class these firs or spruces of the mountain pastures as a
variety different from those that grow below.
[Illustration: Mountain Sandwort in bloom on a little lawn near Mount
Pleasant on the last day in July]
They think otherwise of other trees.