man who hewed out the highest farm in New England, a century or less
ago, on the high shoulder of a westerly spur of Wildcat Mountain. Few
New Englanders are farmers now. In the eighteenth century most of them
were, and the tide of young men who had the courage and the brawn to
build farms in the wilderness rose high in the New Hampshire hills.
The river-bottom lands were taken up, then the lower valleys, then
the higher slopes, and finally, as the nineteenth century grew, the
ultimate pioneers landed on the very shoulders of the White Mountains.
Up the valley of the Wildcat River climbed the Fernalds, the Hayeses,
the Wilsons, the Meserves, Wentworths, Johnsons and half a dozen other
pioneer families, each hewing out of the terrific timber and grubbing
out of the grim rocks with infinite labor the fields that to this day
smile up to the sun.
[Illustration: "Such beauties as these the mountains set daily before
the eyes of the man who hewed out the highest farm in New England on
the high shoulder of a westerly spur of Wildcat Mountain"]
Hall, the traditions have it, was the name of the highest-minded
pioneer, who set his farm on a spur of Wildcat, 2500 feet above the
sea level. He is said to have been an educated man, born far down
the State and educated in college. Tradition has it, too, that he
was a poor farmer, which is what tradition always says of college
men who farm. However that may be, he certainly was a worker. On his
farm acre after acre of mighty trees crashed to the ground in the
wine-sweet mountain air and went up again in the pungent smoke of the
"burns," whereby the first settlers cleared their ground and made
ready for their primitive first plantings. Gray ledges and black soil
inextricably intermingled drop down his farm from terrace to terrace
toward the Wildcat River, and on the highest of these stood his house.
Its foundations only remain to-day, showing the vast square occupied
by the central chimney. Around the foundations of this the cellar
lingers, narrow and apologetic. The rooms above even must have been
rather crowded by this leviathan chimney, four-squared to the world and
with a big fireplace on each side. We are apt to think of the houses of
the early mountaineers as being cold in winter, but this one need never
have been. That great bulk of enclosed chimney once warmed through
would hold the heat in its stone heart for hours, and the wood for its
reheating was so plentiful as to be in the way.
From his door sill to the south the pioneer's family looked forth upon
the sweet curves of the Wildcat River valley at their very feet. From
the shoaling green of the sea of air beneath them it deepens into a
richer and softer blue as mile runs beyond mile to the spot where Thorn
and Iron mountains slope toward one another to a broad notch through
which the glance runs on down the Saco to the horizon line where the
Ossipee Mountains melt and mingle with the blue of the sky. Thorn
Mountain blocks the lower end of the Wildcat Valley, in which the
pioneer saw from his doorstone more farms than I see to-day. Down the
slope of Wildcat beneath him a half-dozen since his time have passed
to the slumber of pasture or on to the complete oblivion of returning
forest. Over on Black Mountain now unoccupied were as many more. But
the view in the main is the same as he saw on clear September days, nor
need one think he or any other mountain farmer was or is insensible to
the beauty of it. You rarely get one to talk much about it--they all
know how poor things words are--but they feel the joy of it for all
that.
* * * * *
From the northern edge of Hall's topmost terrace I look forth across a
wide gulf of crystalline air to the rough slopes and ridges of Wildcat
and Carter mountains. The middle of September is past and autumn is
setting the seal of her colors deeper and deeper on the high hills.
Both mountains have a saddle blanket, so to speak, of green-black dwarf
firs, but each of these is decorated with a misty featherstitching of
yellow birch leaves. Below each blanket is a ridge up and down which
fire swept some years ago. On these ridges great birches, all dead,
stand so close together that their trunks line it with perpendicular,
parallel scratches of gray, all cross-hatched with a netting of limbs
that soften the whole into a wonderful warm tone. In the greatest
distance these scratches blend into a fur that is softer and more
beautiful than any ever brought into the markets of civilization by the
Hudson Bay Company. Other winter pelts that the mountains wear may be
warmer, but none can vie with this in the delight of its coloration.
Down the ridge again the birches thin out and, all among them and
below, the bird cherry trees paint the slope a soft cerise, a color
that in the distance is but a neutral one, a background for the rich
hues of the rock maples that climb into it from the ravines. Not all
these have felt the flare of autumn in their blood. Many seem to ride
toward the summit in Lincoln green. The outcry of beagles should be
just ahead of them. But more have added a scarlet facing to their
hunting coats, and some others are fairly aflame with the richest tint
that any autumn leaf can get, the flaming crimson of the rock-maple
foliage ripened under a full sun where mountain brooks soak a primal
vigor from the granite and send it upward into white cambium layers
all summer long. The twenty-fifth of September finds the hillsides
displaying the autumn hunting colors for all who follow the hounds. The
very sight of them sets the blood a-gallop and brings the view-halloo
to the lips of the most sedate.
All along the horizon to the east of this highest farm stretches the
green wall of Black Mountain. In the pioneer's day no doubt it deserved
its descriptive title for the spruce growth which clothed it, but on
the easy slopes this did not last so long as the pioneer, and the green
of deciduous trees which has replaced it belies the mountain's name.
So high is this wall of green hill that only Doublehead peers over it,
and that by way of a gap in the ridge, a little of the purple haze
of distance setting it apart lest one take it for a part of the same
mountain. But I fancy the gaze of the pioneer passing oftenest a little
to the west of south, passing the smiling beauty of the valley and the
stately cone of Kearsarge, to the summit of Iron Mountain, where to
this day one may see the broad cultivated fields of what I believe
to be the next highest farm in New England, and one still occupied by
descendants of the pioneers that hewed it out on a broad terrace not
far below the summit. This is the Hayes farm, and it is a singular fact
that while, according to the surveys, the Hayes farm is many hundred
feet below this site of the ancient Hall homestead, and looks it, on
the contrary one looking across from the Hayes farm thinks himself
several hundred feet above it. In the same way Hall could look across
to the Gerrish farm on Thorn Mountain and would surely know that it
was far below him. Yet on the Gerrish place, looking across to Hall's
fields, I always feel sure that the Gerrish place is much the higher.
As a matter of fact, a contour map places Hall's house six hundred feet
higher in the air than that of Hayes and eight hundred higher than
Gerrish. In so much at least was the college-bred farmer superior to
his good neighbors of other mountain tops.
* * * * *
Farther westward the highest farmer looked in his day as one does now
upon an unbroken wilderness where the Giant Stairs break the long
levels of the Montalban Range and stand blue-black against the gold of
the sunset. Only on the north and northwest was his view broken by the
highest points of Wildcat Mountain, which sheltered him completely from
the sweep of the winter winds. It is now, as it was then, a wood-lot,
and from it the forest steadily moves down into the open spaces of this
highest New England farm. The firs and spruces sit about in it now
in groups, reminding one of dark-plumed aborigines that seem to have
come back and to be holding councils once more in this clearing of the
pale-face. The unmown grass stands deep all about these encroaching
forest trees and, lacking the care of the farmer, has cured itself
and waits in vain to be harvested, while all through it the sunlight
silvers the dry white panicles of the everlasting, the only flower
of the season on these terraced fields which so steadily and surely
drift back to be again the forest from which the college-bred pioneer
with such labor reclaimed them. There is a pungent aroma of old herb
gardens about this silvery everlasting, though it is essentially a
wild flower, that seems to bear dreams of the pioneer grandmothers of
the lovely Wildcat Valley. It is as if in the bright September sun they
came back with silvery hair and white kerchiefs and caps, for one more
stroll in the pleasant fields and one more look at the beautiful valley
below, a landscape than which none in New England is more beautiful.
The nasal twittering of red-breasted nuthatches led me up the hill
above the highest cleared terrace into the forest that from its
multiplicity of fascinating wood roads gives evidence of having always
been the farm wood-lot. The pioneer should certainly have loved this
hill. It sheltered him on all parts of his farm from the bite of winter
winds out of the northwest. Out of its deep heart it gave him water
that he had but to allow to run to his buildings, and from its top the
wood which he cut would coast down grade to his fireplace. An hour
before it had been a silent forest filled with a yellow underglow of
sunlight, doubly distilled from the ripening leaves of white and yellow
birch. Now, in a moment it was filled with quaint twittering and
snatches of eerie song. With the nuthatches came chickadees, and the
red-breasted ones sang in part their song, at least an eerie imitation
of it such as only nuthatches could make. The nuthatches are the goblin
acrobats of the deep wood. Gravity may exist where they perform, but
it does not trouble them. They walk with utter disregard to it, and in
their evolutions I expect any day to see one fly upside down, and, if
I were mean enough to shoot one, I would as soon expect him to fall
up into the sky as to fall down to the ground. Nor would I be much
surprised if he hung like Mahomet's coffin, suspended between heaven
and earth. If brownies ever try to blow the notes of the chickadee's
song on tiny tin trumpets, ranged in Palmer Cox rows on mossy tree
trunks, they no doubt get the same result that the red-breasted
nuthatches did that day in the wood-lot of the highest farm in New
England.
* * * * *
Beside this they sang little twittering ditties that were quite musical
and altogether uncanny as well, and seemed to fill the golden woodland
aisles with all sorts of suggestions of goblin adventures to be found
there. Between me and the deep heart of the Carter-Moriah range was
unbroken wilderness out of which might well come any of the phantoms
the Pequawkets were wont to declare they saw there. Climbing steadily
toward the top of the long ridge which swings round from the old farm
to the summit of Wildcat I thought I heard the footsteps of that great
white moose that breathed fire from his nostrils and turned back all
arrows before they reached him. Nearing the top I knew I heard him--or
something just as good--an irregular stamping which I stealthily
approached from behind the screen of gray tree trunks and golden forest
leaves.
Almost at the top I could see the shaking of boughs from which the
creature was browsing, and to me, approaching from below and with the
elfin incantations of the nuthatches still in my ears, these seemed
very high in air. Some creature of prodigious size was just beyond
and in a moment more a turn of a rock corner revealed part of him. A
long, lean, white neck I saw, and a head stretching high up to a maple
limb whence prehensile lips plucked pink-cheeked leaves. Its mouth
full the creature turned a long face toward me and neighed, and the
forest aisles echoed the spluttering whinny in tones full as uncanny
in their laughter as had been those of the nuthatches; also vastly
louder. Somebody's old white horse looked at me with a mild curiosity
as I tramped up to him on this ridge of the Wildcat wilderness, and at
sight of him the spectral moose vanished into the past century, there
to remain with the Indians who claimed to have seen him.
Spectral enough the old horse looked here in the deep shadows of the
wood. He had "yarded" on the hilltop much as deer do in winter. I found
well-worn trails of his, leading hither and thither on the ridge, but
none going away from it, and, under the shade of a beech, in what had
tried to be a thick bed of spinulose wood ferns, was evidently his
nightly bed. He had worn the earth bare in his clumsy getting up and
lying down. Far down the terraces of the old farm in sunny glades were
pastured other horses and cattle. There they stayed, for the feed was
good and water near, and they loved the sight of the lower pasture
bars that will later let them out to the road to stalls of which they
dream. But here was a finer soul than these, a hermit that preferred
the cool fragrance of wood fern and the unmolested quiet of his wooded
hilltop, from the loopholes of whose retreat he might look upon the
world. I fancy him the best horse of the herd.
* * * * *
Now and then you find a man like that, and I dare say such an one was
the maker of the old farm. As I came down again into his highest field
the sun was sinking behind Boott's Spur and cool blue shadows stretched
out across the low, sweet curves of the Wildcat River valley. Against
them the pale smoke of supper fires rose lazily and far over from the
gorge below Carter Notch floated the hush of falling waters. The blue
of the mountains to southward deepened and only on their summits sat
the rose of sunset fire. Behind me in the wood was now no sound of
nuthatches, but a single robin sat in a treetop and sang softly, as
if to himself. On such a scene of peace and unsurpassed beauty it is
easy to fancy the college-bred pioneer looking at nightfall and finding
it good. If his descendants descended through the pasture bars to be
stall-fed in cities, so much the worse for them.
XIX
SUMMER'S FAREWELL
_The Blaze of Its Adieu to Mount Washington_
Summer lingers yet just south of Mount Washington and, though often
frowned away, as often returns to say good-bye, "parting is such sweet
sorrow." Already there have been days when the frown was deep, when
the hoar frost on the summit clung as white as snow in the sun and
refused to melt even on the southerly slopes, when at night the cold of
winter bit deep and the Lakes of the Clouds shone wan in the morning
light under a coating of new, black ice. Then summer has come back,
dissolving the repentant frost into tears at a touch of warm lips,
bending and quivering over the great gray dome of the summit until,
approaching from peaks to the southward, I have seen her presence
surround all in a shimmering enfolding of loving radiance.
From the high ridge of Boott's Spur I saw it thus, slipping back
myself to say good-bye, of a day in late September. From no point in
the mountains does one get a finer impression of the massive dignity of
Washington summit than from this. The Spur is itself no mean mountain,
rising with precipitous abruptness from between Tuckerman Ravine
and the Gulf of Slides, bounding in rounding, thousand-foot ledges
from Pinkham Notch to a height of more than 5500 feet; it lifts the
persistent climber to a veritable mizzen-top whence he looks still
upward to the main truck of the summit, with the wonderful rock rift of
Tuckerman Ravine between, dropping out of sight behind sheer cliffs at
his feet. On such an autumn day there is a mighty exhilaration in thus
floating in blue sky on such a pinnacle. The body is conscious that the
spirit within it steps forth from peak to peak into limitless space
and is ready to shout with the joy of it. Indian summer, which does
not come down to the sea-coast levels for another month, touches the
high ranges now, and under its magic they remember spring. It paints
the brown grasses, the sedges and the leaves of the three-toothed
cinquefoil which scantily streak the cone of Washington, with a purple
tint, and the gray rocks themselves ripen like grapes with a soft blue
bloom in all shadows.
To me the finest of the four trails which lead to the summit of Boott's
Spur is that which comes up from Pinkham Notch by way of the Glen
boulder. Its start is through a forest primeval. The lumbermen have
taken the spruce, to be sure, but here are birches along the footpath
that may have been growing when Darby Field first came this way to
the summit of Washington with his two Indians. It may be not. Birches
are quick-growing trees, yet here are some that are almost three feet
in diameter, having the great solid trunks and shaggy, scant heads
of foliage which are characteristic of trees that reach maturity in
a forest before it knows the axe. Whatever the trials of the trail
it is worth while to climb among such trees as these. It is a steep
trail, in ledgy spots, and it soon leads to slopes where the axe has
not followed the spruce, on to a growth which the axe scorns, and on
again to a dwarf tangle of firs that are hardly to be passed without
the cutting of a canyon. Not in the mangroves of Gulf swamps nor in
the rhododendron "slicks" of the southern Appalachians can a traveller
find a more determinedly dense impediment to his passage than in these
mountain firs where they dwindle to chin height and interlace their
century-old stubs of branches. Farther up they shorten into a knee-deep
carpet which hardly delays the passage, and from these emerges the
great cliff on whose verge hangs "the boulder."
* * * * *
He who does not believe that "there were giants in those days," that
they fought on the Presidential Range, and that the head of one, cut
off and petrified with fear, rolled down to this spot where it quite
miraculously stopped, has probably never seen the boulder from the
ledge about north of its point of poise. There it looks all these
things. It has a George Washington nose, a Booker Washington chin, and
the low forehead of the cave man. It has even an ear, plugged with a
bluish, slaty rock quite different from the brown sandstone of which
the whole is composed, as this is quite different from the various
rocks of the ledges round about. Motorists driving up the Glen road
can see the boulder ahead of them outlined against the sky. It looks
from that point as if it might roll down and stop the car at any time.
But if it looks insecure in its position to motorists in the highway,
to the Alpinist who stands beside it this appearance of instability is
startling. Jocund day never poised more on tiptoe on the misty mountain
top than does this big rock head on the verge of the cliff. I, for one,
dislike to go directly below it. Some day it is going to roll on down
the mountain and that might be the day.
In the clearness of the autumn air all the forest of Pinkham Notch and
its approaches lay far below my feet. The world below was a Scotch
plaid of equally proportioned crimson and green with a finer stripe
of rich yellow. Every maple is at the height of its flame, but the
birches of the valley still hold much of their green, at least from
above. Below them in the forest one walks as if at the bottom of a sea
of golden light in which flecks of other color fall or spring into view
at each new turn of the path. The hay-scented ferns are almost as white
as the bark of the canoe birches. The brakes are a golden brown, and
all the under-forest world is yellow with the leaves of all varieties
of birch. Only the withe-rod sets splotches of maroon in its great
oval leaves, and shows among them its deep blue of clustered berries.
But none of this reaches my eye as I sit high in air above it. Thence
the world below is a Scotch plaid, out of which the roar of Glen Ellis
Falls rises, the falls themselves completely hidden within the plaid.
[Illustration: "The Glen Boulder has a George Washington nose, a Booker
Washington chin, and the low forehead of the cave man"]
* * * * *
More and more of the under-world of birch yellow comes to the surface
as the trees climb the hill till at the last they spread a golden mist
of color wonderful to behold. At certain portions of the slope the
firs begin again and go on up the hill with the birches, slender and
beautiful, aspiring and inspiring, and even along among the bleak rocks
they creep, soft green mats of spreading limbs, flecked here and there
with the yellow of creeping birches and the maroon of low blueberries,
all this patterned among the exquisite lichen-grays of the rocks. All
the southerly ridge beyond the boulder is a rolling smoke of these
golden birch tops pricked through with the green-black spires of spruce
and fir, nor has any slope on any mountain more beauty to offer to the
eye on this day in late September when the air is like a crystal lens
through which one looks into unmeasured distances and sees clearly.
Behind the boulder, terrace by terrace, the mountain rises to the top
of Slide Peak, whence one may see the magic of the air lenses change
this mingling of vivid colors to a blend which is a rich violet and
loses its red as the distance grows greater till it ends on the far
horizon in a pure blue that seems born of the very sky itself, and to
sleep in its arms. With it the eye floats over the ranges that rim
the horizon half around, touching and soaring from Wildcat and Black
on to Baldface and on again to be lost in the maze of hills that ride
eastward into the dim distance of the State of Maine. More to the
southward Doublehead lifts his twin peaks in massive dignity and over
Thorn is Kearsarge, almost airy in the contrast of its perfect cone. On
again southeast and south flash lakes, Silver and Conway and Ossipee,
Lovell's Pond and in the far distance Sebago, lighting the softest
blue toward a haze that one suspects is the sea. Due south between
peak after peak, between Paugus and Chocorua and through a gap in the
Ossipee Range lie the waters of Winnipesaukee, shining beneath the
noonday sun.
* * * * *
The Gulf of Slides beneath my feet was a vast bowl of russet gold
decorated with Chinese patterns of deep green. In its very bottom I saw
a black stream rounding the edge of a level open meadow where the deep
grass had been trodden into paths by the passing deer. All round about
it the spruce and firs set a bristling wall of pointed tops, and the
quivering air that filled the bowl to the brim was obviously a liquid.
I could see it flow up and over the ridge toward the summit of Boott's
Spur, and as if to prove that it did so a red-tailed hawk flapped up
from the firs that surround the little meadow, caught the updrift of
this southerly breeze and soared on it in easy spirals to a point just
above the ridge. Here he caught another current that came up the Rocky
Branch Valley, a breeze resinous with the last big area of spruce in
sight from the summits near Mount Washington, pungent with the smoke of
the great woodcutter camps in its midst, and soared on up Boott's Spur.
And as he did so the sun flashed back in white fire from a point in a
ledge of the Spur overhanging the Gulf of Slides.
Somewhere in the highest hills hung once the great carbuncle whose
fame led many early settlers to dare disaster in mountain searches
for precious gems. Tradition has it that the great gem vanished from
its matrix long ago. Perhaps it did. But something flashes white fire
from a high cliff on the Spur to the eye of him who gets the sun at
just the right angle from Slide Peak. The carbuncle may be there yet.
Certainly the ridge that leads up from the boulder is rich in matrices
for gems. Out through its granite burst veins of sparkling quartz,
dazzling white, pink and green. Imbedded in this quartz are great
crystals of silvery mica and smaller ones of black tourmaline. There
are spots along the trail that glitter like a Bowery jeweller's window.
This profusion of gemlike stones is to be found all along the way to
the high ridge of Boott's Spur and make it doubly fascinating. If the
great carbuncle ever really hung high in the mountains I fancy it is
still not far from this neighborhood. Very likely it broke from its
cliff and lies now buried in the débris of slides at the bottom of the
great precipice which springs from the Gulf up to the top of the Spur,
leaving only a fragment to dazzle my eyes from the top of Slide Peak.
Perhaps the real thing is there yet, and I recommend the Glen Boulder
trail to present-day gem hunters.
* * * * *