My path led down the side of the lonely Barrack, as the coffin-shaped
hill had been named. There I had been exploring a little mountain
stream, which I had fondly and mistakenly hoped might prove to be a
trout-brook. The winding wood-road passed through dim aisles of
whispering pine trees. At a steep place, a bent green stem stretched
half across the path, and from it swayed a rose-red flower like a
hollow sea-shell carved out of jacinth. For the first time I looked
down on the moccasin flower or pink lady-slipper (_Cypripedium
acaule_), the largest of our native orchids.
For a long time I hung over the flower. Its discovery was a great
moment, one of those that stand out among the thirty-six-odd million
of minutes that go to make up a long life. For the first time my eyes
were opened to see what a lovely thing a flower could be. In the
half-light I knelt on the soft pine-needles and studied long the
hollow purple-pink shell, veined with crimson, set between two other
tapering petals of greenish-purple, while a sepal of the same color
curved overhead. The whole flower swayed between two large curved,
grooved leaves.
Leaving the path, I began to hunt for others under the great trees,
and at last came upon a whole congregation nodding and swaying in
long rows around the vast trunks of white pines which were old trees
when this country was born.
From that day I became a hunter of orchids and a haunter of far-away
forests and lonely marshlands and unvisited hill-tops and
mountain-sides. Wherever the lovely hid-folk dwell, there go I. They
are strange flowers, these orchids. When first they were made out of
sunshine, mist, and dew, every color was granted them save one. They
may wear snow-white, rose-red, pearl and gold, green and white, purple
and gold, ivory and rose, yellow, gold and brown, every shade of
crimson and pink. Only the blues are denied them.
Since that first great day I have found the moccasin flower in many
places--on the top of bare hills and in the black-lands of northern
Canada, where, four feet under the peat, the ice never melts even in
midsummer. Once I saw it by a sphagnum bog where I was hunting for the
almost unknown nest of the Tennessee warbler, amid clouds of black
flies and mosquitoes that stung like fire. Again, on the tip-top of
Mount Pocono in Pennsylvania, I had just found the long-sought nest of
a chestnut-sided warbler. Even as I admired the male bird, with his
white cheeks and golden head and chestnut-streaked sides, and the four
eggs like flecked pink pearls, my eye caught a sight which brought me
to my knees regardless for a moment of nest, eggs, birds, and all.
Among rose-hearted twin-flowers and wild lilies of the valley and
snowy dwarf cornels swung three moccasin flowers in a line. The outer
ones, like the guard-stars of great Altair, were light in color.
Between them gleamed, like the Eagle Star itself, a flower of deepest
rose, an unearthly crystalline color, like a rain-drenched jacinth.
Another time, at the crest of a rattlesnake den, I found two of these
pink pearls of the woods swinging above the velvet-black coils of a
black timber rattlesnake. I picked my way down the mountain-side, with
Beauty in one hand and Death in the other, as I romantically remarked
to the unimpressed snake-collector who was waiting for me with an open
gunny-sack.
Then there was the day in the depths of the pine-barrens, where
stunted, three-leaved pitch pines took the place of the towering,
five-leaved white pine of the North. The woods looked like a
shimmering pool of changing greens lapping over a white sand-land that
had been thrust up from the South into the very heart of the North. I
followed a winding wood-path along the high bank of a stream stained
brown and steeped sweet with a million cedar-roots. A mountain laurel
showed like a beautiful ghost against the dark water--a glory of
white, pink-flecked flowers.
Through dripping branches of withewood and star-leaved sweet-gum
saplings the path twisted. Suddenly, at the very edge of the bank, out
of a mass of hollow, crimson-streaked leaves filled with clear water,
swung two glorious blossoms. Wine-red, aquamarine, pearl-white, and
pale gold they gleamed and nodded from slender stems. It was the
pitcher-plant, which I had never seen in blossom before.
From the stream the hidden path wound through thicket after thicket,
sweet as spring, with the fragrance of the wild magnolia and the
spicery of the gray-green bayberry. Its course was marked with white
sand, part of the bed of some sea forgotten a hundred thousand years
ago. By the side of the path showed the vivid crimson-lake leaves of
the wild ipecac, with its strange green flowers; while everywhere, as
if set in snow, gleamed the green-and-gold of the Hudsonia, the
barrens-heather. The plants looked like tiny cedar trees laden down
with thickly set blossoms of pure gold, which the wind spilled in
little yellow drifts on the white sand. In the distance, through the
trees, were glimpses of meadows, hazy-purple with the blue toad-flax.
Beside the path showed here and there the pale gold of the
narrow-leaved sundrops, with deep-orange stamens. Beyond were masses
of lambskill, with its fatal leaves and crimson blossoms.
On and on the path led, past jade-green pools in which gleamed buds of
the yellow pond-lily, like lumps of floating gold. Among them were
blossoms of the paler golden-club, which looked like the tongue of a
calla lily. At last the path stretched straight toward the flat-topped
mound that showed dim and fair through the low trees. The woods became
still. Even the Maryland yellow-throat stopped singing, the prairie
warbler no longer drawled his lazy notes, and the chewink, black and
white and red all over, like the newspaper in the old conundrum,
stopped calling his name from the thickets and singing, "Drink your
tea!"
I knew that at last I had come upon a fairy hill, such an one wherein
the shepherd heard a host of tiny voices singing a melody so haunting
sweet that he always after remembered it, and which has since come
down to us of to-day as the tune of Robin Adair. Listen as I would,
however, there was no sound from the depths of this hill. Perhaps the
sun was too high, for the fairy-folk sing best in late twilight or
early dawn.
The mound, like all fairy hills, was guarded. The path ran into a
tangle of sand-myrtle, with vivid little oval green leaves and
feathery white, pink-centred blossoms. Just beyond stood a bush of
poison-sumac. Pushing aside the fierce branches, I went unscathed up
the mound. At its very edge was another sentry. From under my feet
sounded a deep, fierce hiss, and there across the path stretched the
great body of a pine snake fully six feet long, all cream-white and
umber-brown. Raising its strange pointed head, with its gold and black
eyes, it hissed fearsomely. I had learned, however, that a pine
snake's hiss is worse than its bite and, when I poked its rough,
mottled body with my foot, it gave up pretending to be a dangerous
snake and lazily moved off to some spot where it would not be
disturbed by intruding humans.
The pyxies had carpeted the side of the mound thick with their
wine-red and green moss, starred with hundreds of flat, five-petaled
white blossoms. This celebrated pyxie moss is not a moss at all, but a
tiny shrub. Near the summit of the mound the path was lost in a foam
of the blue, lilac, and white butterfly blossoms of the lupine. Little
clouds of fragrance drifted through the air, as the wind swayed rows
and rows of the transparent bells of the leucothoe. Beyond the lupine
stood a rank of dazzling white turkey-beards, the xerophyllum of the
botanists. The inmost circle of the mound was carpeted with dry gray
reindeer moss, and before me, in the centre of the circle, drooped on
slender stems seven rose-red moccasin flowers.
They have sought him high, they have sought him low,
They have sought him over down and lea;
They have found him by the milk-white thorn
That guards the gates o' Faerie.
'Twas bent beneath and blue above,
Their eyes were held that they might not see
The kine that grazed beneath the knowes;
Oh, they were the Queens o' Faerie.
If only that day my eyes had been loosed like those of True Thomas, I
too might have seen the fairy queens in all their regal beauty.
Wherever it be found, the moccasin flower will always hold me by its
sheer beauty. Yet to my memory none of them can approach the
loveliness of that cloistered colony which I first found in the pine
wood so many years ago. Year after year I would visit them. Then came
a time when for five years I was not able to travel to their home.
When, at last, I made my pilgrimage to where they grew, there was no
cathedral of mighty green arches roofed by a shimmering June sky;
there were no aisles of softly singing trees; and there were no rows
of sweet faces looking up at me and waiting for my coming; only heaps
of sawdust and hideous masses of lopped branches showed where a steam
sawmill had cut its deadly way. Underneath the fallen dying boughs
which had once waved above the world, companioned only by sky and sun
and the winds of heaven, I found one last starveling blossom left of
all her lovely company. Protected no longer by the sheltering boughs,
she was bleached nearly white by the sun, and her stem crept crookedly
along the ground underneath the mass of brush and litter which had
once been a carpet of gold. Never since that day have I visited the
place where my friends wait for me no more.
It was another orchid which, for eleven years, on the last day of
every June, made me travel two hundred miles due north. From an old
farmhouse on the edge of the Berkshires I would start out in the
dawn-dusk on the first day of every July. The night-hawks would still
be twanging above me as I followed, before sunrise, a dim silent road
over the hills all sweet with the scent of wild-grape and the drugged
perfume of chestnut tassels. At last I would reach a barway sunken in
masses of sweet-fern and shaded by thickets of alder and witch-hazel.
There a long-forgotten wood-road led to my Land of Heart's Desire.
Parting the branches, I would step into the hush of the sleeping wood,
pushing my way through masses of glossy, dark-green Christmas ferns
and clumps of feathery, tossing maidenhair. Black-throated blue
warblers sang above, and that ventriloquist, the oven bird, would call
from apparently a long way off, "Teacher, teacher, teacher," ending
with a tremendous "TEACH!" right under my feet.
At last there would loom up through the green tangle a squat broken
white pine. That was my landmark. I would push my way through a tangle
of sanicle, and beyond the trunk of a slim elm catch a gleam of white
in the dusk. There, all rose-red and snow-white, with parted lips,
waited for me the queen flower of the woods, the _Cypripedium reginæ_,
the loveliest of all our orchids. Two narrow, white, beautiful curved
petals stretched out at right angles, while above them towered a white
sepal, the three together making a snowy cross. Below this cross hung
the lip of the flower, a milk-white hollow shell fully an inch across
and an inch deep, veined with crystalline pink which deepened into
purple, growing more intense in color until the veins massed in a
network of vivid violet just under the curved lips kissed by many a
wandering wood-bee. Inside the shell were spots of intense purple,
showing through the transparent walls. The other two white sepals were
joined together and hung as a single one behind the lip.
[Illustration: PINK AND WHITE LADY SLIPPERS (_Cypripedium reginæ_)]
I had first found this orchid while hunting for a veery's nest in the
marsh. At that time nothing was showing except the leaves, which grow
on tall, round, downy stems. They were beautifully curved at the
margin, and were of a brilliant green, a little lighter on the under
side than on the upper, and, at first sight, much like the leaves of
the well-known marsh hellebore. That day was the beginning of a
ten-year tryst which I kept every summer with this wood-queen. Then,
alas, I lost her!
It came about thus. The marsh in which she hid was part of a thousand
acres owned by a friend of mine, who was an enthusiastic and rival
flower-hunter. Each year, when I visited my colony of these queen
orchids, I sent him one with my compliments and the assurance that the
flower belonged to him because it was found on his land. I accompanied
these gifts with various misleading messages as to where they grew. He
would hunt and hunt, but find nothing but exasperation. Finally, he
bribed me, with an apple-wood corner cupboard I had long coveted, to
show him the place. It was not fifty yards from the road, and when I
took him to it he was overcome with emotion.
"I'll bet that I have tramped a hundred miles," he said plaintively,
"through every spot on this farm except this one, looking for this
flower. Nobody who knew anything about botany would ever think of
looking here."
The next year my wood-lady did not meet me, nor the next, and I
strongly suspect that she has been transplanted to some secret spot
known to my unscrupulous botanical friend alone. Moreover, he has
never yet paid me that corner cupboard.
I never saw the flower again until last summer I visited a marsh in
northern New Jersey, where I had been told by another orchid-hunter
that it grew. This marsh I was warned was a dangerous one. Cattle and
men, too, in times past have perished in its depths. For eight
unexplored miles it stretched away in front of me. After many
wanderings I at length found my way to Big Spring, a murky, malevolent
pool set in dark woods, with the marsh stretching away beyond.
Not far away, in a limestone cliff, I came upon a deep burrow, in
front of which was a sinister pile of picked bones of all sizes and
shapes. The sight suggested delightful possibilities. Panthers,
wolves, ogres--anything might belong to such a pile of bones as that.
I knew, however, that the last New Jersey wolf was killed a century or
so ago. The burrow was undoubtedly too small for a panther, or even an
undersized ogre. Accordingly I was compelled reluctantly to assign the
den to the more commonplace bay-lynx, better known as the wild-cat.
On these limestone rocks I found the curious walking-fern, which loves
limestone and no other. Both of the cliff brakes were there, too--the
slender, with its dark, fragile, appealing beauty, and its hardier
sister, the winter-brake, whose leathery fronds are of a strange
blue-green, a color not found in any other plant. Then there was the
rattlesnake fern, a lover of deep and dank woods, with its
golden-yellow seed-cluster, or 'rattle,' growing from the centre of
its fringed leaves. The oddest of all the ferns was the maidenhair
spleen-wort, whose tiny leaves are of the shape of those of the
well-known maidenhair fern. When they are exposed to bright sunlight,
all the fertile leaves which have seeds on their surface suddenly
begin to move, and for three or four minutes vibrate back and forth as
rapidly as the second-hand of a watch.
Farther and farther I pushed on into the treacherous marsh, picking my
way from tussock to tussock. Now and then my foot would slip into
black, quivering mire, thinly veiled by marsh-grasses. When this
happened, the whole swamp would shake and chuckle and lap at the
skull-shaped tussocks and the bleached skeletons of drowned trees
which showed here and there. At last, when I had almost given up hope,
I came upon a clump of the regal flowers growing, not in the swamp
itself, but on a shaded bank sloping down from the encircling woods.
Three of the plants had two flowers each, the rest only one. Among
these was a single blossom, pure white without a trace of pink or
purple. Although it was only the thirtieth of June, several of the
flowers were already slightly withered and past their prime, showing
that this orchid is at its best in New Jersey in the middle of June,
rather than the end of the month, as in Connecticut. The perfect
flowers were beautiful orchids, and had a rich fragrance which I had
never noticed in my Connecticut specimens. Yet, in some way, to me
they lacked the charm and loveliness of my lost flowers of the North.
* * * * *
It was a cold May day. The Ornithologist and myself were climbing Kent
Mountain, along with Jim Pan, the last of the Pequots. Whenever Jim
drank too much hard cider, which was as often as he could get it, he
would give terrible war-whoops and tell how many palefaces his
ancestors had scalped. He would usually end by threatening to do some
free-hand scalping on his own account--but he never did. He had a son
named Tin Pan, who never talked unless he had something to say, which
was not more than once or twice during the year.
The two lived all alone, in a little cabin on the slope of Kent
Mountain. On the outside of Jim's door some wag once painted a skull
and crossbones, one night when Jim was away on a hunt for some of the
aforesaid hard cider. When the Last of the Pequots came back and saw
what had been done, he swore mightily that he would leave said
insignia there until he could wash them out with the heart's blood of
the gifted artist. They still show faintly on the door, although Jim
has slept for many a year in the little Indian cemetery on the
mountain, beside his great-aunt Eunice who lived to be one hundred and
four years old. Lest it may appear that Jim was an unduly fearsome
Indian, let me hasten to add that there was never a kinder, happier,
or more untruthful Pequot from the beginning to the end of that
long-lost tribe.
On that day the Ornithologist and myself were on our way to a
rattlesnake den, the secret of which had been in the Pan family for
some generations. In past years Jim's forbears had done a thriving
business in selling skins and rattlesnake oil, in the days when the
rattlesnake shared with the skunk the honor of providing an unwilling
cure for rheumatism. Our path led up through masses of color. There
was the pale pure pink of the crane's-bill or wild geranium, the
yellow adder's tongue, and the faint blue-and-white porcelain petals
of the hepatica, with cluster after cluster of the snowy,
golden-hearted bloodroot whose frail blossoms last but for a day.
That very morning a long-delayed warbler-wave was breaking over the
mountain, and the Ornithologist could hardly contain himself as he
watched the different varieties pass by. I recall that we scored over
twenty different kinds of warblers between dawn and dark, and I saw
for the first time the Wilson's black-cap, with its bright yellow
breast and tiny black crown, and the rare Cape May warbler, with its
black-streaked yellow underparts and orange-red cheeks. The richly
dressed and sombre black-throated blue and bay-breasted were among the
crowd, while black-throated greens, myrtles, magnolias,
chestnut-sided, blackpolls, Canadians, redstarts, with their
fan-shaped tails, and Blackburnians, with their flaming throats and
breasts glowing like live coals, went by in a never-ending procession.
All the way Jim kept up a steady flow of anecdote. I can remember
only one, a blood-curdling story about a man from Bridgeport, name not
given, who caught a rattlesnake while on a hunt with Jim, but who let
go while attempting to put it into the bag, whereupon the rattlesnake
bit him as it dropped.
"Did he die?" queried the writer and the Ornithologist in chorus.
"No," said Jim proudly; "Tin and I saved his life."
"Whiskey?" ventured the writer.
"Not for snake-bites," responded Jim simply.
"Well, how was it?" persisted the Ornithologist, hoping to learn of
some mysterious Indian remedy.
"Well," said Jim, stretching out his tremendous arms like a great
bear, "I held him tight and Tin here burned the place out. It took two
matches and he yelled somethin' terrible. I told him we were savin'
his life, but the fool said he would rather die of snake-bite than be
burned to death. You wouldn't suppose a grown man would make such a
fuss over two little matches."
Finally, we reached the Den, a ledge of rocks near the top of the
mountain, where for some unknown reason all the rattlesnakes for miles
around were accustomed to hibernate during the winter and to remain
for some weeks in the late spring before scattering through the
valley. The Ornithologist and I fell unobtrusively to the rear, while
the dauntless Pan led the van with a crotched stick. Suddenly Jim
thrust one foot up into the air like a toe-dancer, and pirouetted with
amazing rapidity on the other. He had been in the very act of stepping
over a small huckleberry-bush, when he noted under its lee a
rattlesnake in coil, about the size of a peck measure--as pretty a
death-trap as was ever set in the woods. By the time I got there, Jim
had pinned the hissing heart-shaped head down with his forked stick,
while the bloated, five-foot body was thrashing through the air in
circles, the rattles whirring incessantly.
"Grab him just back of the stick," panted Jim, bearing down with all
his weight, "and put him in the bag."