Of the many roads which start northward from Bearcamp Water, every one
is either warded off by the Sandwich range into the Saco or into the
Pemigewasset valley, or else smothered in the dark forest-clad ravines
between the mountain ridges. From Conway on the east to Campton and
Thornton on the west, there is no rift in the mountain wall through
which travel flows. There was a time, however, before the Civil War,
when near the middle of the great barrier the human current found an
outlet southward from the upper end of Swift River intervale to the
Bearcamp Valley. Sitting by the fireside of a sturdy Albany farmer as
the December moonlight gleamed upon the level snows of the intervale, I
heard stories of the lumbermen’s journeys through those dark and narrow
passes. Great spars and masts, the farmer said, had been hauled out of
the valley under the frowning cliffs of Paugus, and carried safely to
the level fields of Sandwich. Then there arose a storm such as old men
know but once in a lifetime, and the passes were filled with tangled
masses of wrecked forest. All the axes in Albany and Tamworth could not
have cut a way through the snarl without many weeks of exhausting labor.
So at least thought the lumbermen who attempted to pass the abattis
raised by the storm. Years elapsed and the road became only a matter of
vague tradition. Those who climbed the peak of Passaconaway or the lofty
ledges of Paugus saw below them a panorama of ruin. Bleached bones of
the great spruce forest lay there piled in magnificent confusion. Over
the débris, springing from its midst, a dense growth of mountain ash,
wild cherry, and hobble-bush made the chaos more chaotic. No trace of
the lost trail was visible even to the most fanciful eye.
Between Paugus and Chocorua the hurricane had not done its worst work.
There one could see four miles of narrow ravine reaching from the
Tamworth fields directly northward to a steep ridge connecting Paugus
with Chocorua at their northern slopes. On the other side of the barrier
lay the Swift River intervale. If that ridge were out of the way, if it
could be easily surmounted, or if a rift could be found in it, the
journey of nearly thirty miles from the southern spurs of Paugus, round
through Conway to the northern spurs, would be reduced to eight or nine
miles. The people living at the upper end of Swift River valley, instead
of having to travel sixteen miles to a post-office, doctor, minister, or
store, could touch civilization by driving about eleven miles.
At half past four on the morning of Saturday, July 30, I drove rapidly
away from my red-roofed cottage towards the southern foot of Paugus.
Long days of parching heat had been brought to an end by a series of
three heavy thunderstorms, which had drenched the country during the
preceding evening. Nature had revived. The sky was bluer, the forest
greener, the gold of the goldenrod more intense. Every particle of dust
had been washed out of the air and off the many-tinted garments of the
earth. For nearly a fortnight the mercury had been among the nineties as
often as the clock struck noon. To face a cool breeze, to see everything
sparkling with moisture, to have the air feel and appear thin and clear,
was inspiring and exhilarating. To find the lost trail into the Swift
River valley was now a matter of delightful interest.
At the southern foot of Paugus is a ruined mill and an old lumber camp.
A good road leads thither from the highway, and the house at the point
where the lumber road begins is the home of Nat. Berry, farmer,
lumberman, hunter, trapper, surveyor, carpenter, and public-spirited
citizen. I felt that if any man on the southern side of the mountains
knew a way through them, that man was Berry. Two years before, while
wandering over the ridges of Chocorua, I had been caught in one of
Berry’s forty-pound steel bear traps. The springs of the trap were weak
and it was deeply buried in the moss, so that before its cruel jaws had
closed firmly upon my ankle, I thrust the stock of my gun between them
and withdrew my foot. Berry’s greeting, as we drove up to his house,
showed that he had not forgotten my adventure, for he shouted, “Come at
last, have you, to let me cut off them ears? Can’t c’lect my bounty on
you without ’em.” A few words told Berry of my errand, and he at once
showed interest in the quest.
“Thirty-seven year ago,” he said, “when I was only twelve year old, a
road was run through from this house to the back settlements. It was a
winter road, but I recollect that a man and his wife drove over it in a
pung. They went clean through. About fifteen year ago I went in where
you are a-going, with a railroad surveyor, and he said there was only
five hundred feet rising between here and the height of land. There used
to be another road between Toadback and Passaconaway, but that’s all
choked up now by the harricane. This road is between Toadback and
Coroway, and I know that four miles of it is about as good going now as
ever it was.”
It required little urging to induce Berry to join us, and our horse’s
head was turned northward into the lumber road leading to the lost
trail. As we drove away from fields, roads, and the surroundings of
habitations, animal life grew less and less abundant, and plant life
less varied. Around the farms robins, sparrows, and swallows are to be
seen or heard at every hour in the day. Woodpeckers and chickadees
abound in the orchards, and even hawks spend more time in sight of
hen-yards than they do in the gloomy solitudes of the mountains. By the
roadside goldenrod was in its glory, while St. John’s-wort was growing
rusty. The pink of hardback and thistles large and small, the yellow of
the mullein, the reds of fireweed, pasture lily, and the sumac fruit,
the purple of vervain, early asters, and the persistent brunella, and
the white of the exquisite dalibarda, of immortelles, arrowhead, and the
graceful spiranthes in turn caught the eye as the wagon rolled by
pasture and sandbank, meadow, copse, and swamp.
From Berry’s house we drove a long mile before the true primeval forest
was reached. There, in a clearing of an acre or more, were the ruins of
a saw-mill, two or three slab houses, and a collapsed stable where the
lumbermen’s oxen had been kept in the winter nights, years ago. In the
mill’s time sawdust had covered everything; but now the strong,
quarrelsome blackberry had mastered the sawdust. Our guide pointed to a
break in the solid wall of woods surrounding the mill, so we struggled
through the blackberry jungle and left the sunlight behind us. As we
entered the forest, bird music ceased, few flowers decked the
ground,—the pallid Indian pipe seeming more akin to the fungi than to
flowers,—and not a squirrel disturbed the quiet of the endless aisles.
Here and there small brightly colored toadstools and the fruit of
bunchberry or clintonia lent a bit of vermilion, orange, yellow, or
lustrous metallic blue to the dull brown carpet of the woods; or a
branch of maple, prematurely robbed of its chlorophyll, gleamed in the
far-off sunlight among the tree-tops. If by chance the eye caught a
glimpse of the flowers of the rattlesnake plantain, or of some of the
greenish wood orchids, it found in them less color than in the
toadstools and less perfume than in the needles of the balsam.
There extended before us a clearly marked passageway between the giant
trunks of ancient trees. It was the beginning of the old trail. Stout
young saplings had grown up within it, and the long interlacing stems of
the hobble-bush, or “tangle-foot” as Berry called it, concealed its many
inequalities. We proceeded slowly, cutting away bushes as we went, and
the horse followed with the wagon, which rose and fell over logs and
boulders as though tossed on the waves of the sea. At the end of half a
mile, we decided to leave the horse with all of our impedimenta except
axes and luncheon. A space was accordingly cleared, and Kitty, tied to a
large tree, was fenced in on two sides to prevent her from walking
around the tree, and so choking herself.
The trees which formed the forest were of many kinds, making it much
more interesting than the monotonous spruce growth of the higher slopes.
Those which were to all appearance the oldest were the yellow birches,
hundreds of them having trunks over ten feet in circumference at a point
two feet from the ground. Some of the giant hemlocks were larger, but
they are, I believe, trees of more rapid growth than the yellow birch
and so probably less venerable. There was a large representation of
ancient beech-trees with trunks which looked as hard as granite, yet
which made me think of wrestlers with swollen muscles strained and
knotted under the tightly drawn skin. Some of the beeches seemed to have
begun life in mid-air, for their trunks rested upon tripods or polypods
of naked and spreading roots, which held them two or even three feet
from the surface of the soil. In other cases these polypods clasped
great boulders in their unyielding embrace, showing that the beech in
its infancy had taken root upon the top of the rock, and year by year
extended its thirsty tentacles lower and lower down the sides of its
mossy foundation until the soil was reached. Then the hungry sapling,
fed for so long on meagre supplies of food and water, must have expanded
with sudden vigor, while its roots grew strong and gripped the rock in
tighter and tighter embrace. The only way of accounting for the empty
polypods seemed to be to suppose the trees to have sprouted upon stumps
prone to decay, or upon rocks capable of rapid disintegration. Many of
the glimpses through these beech woods reminded me of the grotesque
forest pictures which are produced so frequently in German woodcuts.
Huge maples, with bark resembling that of ancient oaks, formed an
important part of the forest, and so did canoe birches of various ages,
solitary white pines of immense height, and old-growth spruces, the last
named becoming more and more numerous as our road gained higher levels.
Dozens of these trees had been struck by lightning and more or less
injured. One had been completely shattered and surrounded by a spiral
abattis of huge splinters stuck firmly into the ground.
The twilight and silence of the forest made it restful at first, but as
the day wore on, rare glimpses of distance and of sunlight were as
welcome to us as to men confined between prison walls.
We had gone rather more than three miles from Berry’s house when our
guide paused and said: “There, the old road is missing for a piece
beyond this, and the best we can do is to head north and spot the trees
as we go.”
To that point there had been evident, to eyes accustomed to forest
travel, a difference between the continuity of large timber and the
strip once cleared of this timber in order to form the road. Looking
back, we could see the passage; looking forward, there seemed to be no
trace of it. The greater part of Paugus had been passed on our left, and
on our right the peak of Chocorua, which at Berry’s had been northeast,
was now a little south of east from us. Before us the valley narrowed
somewhat, and far ahead a continuation of the ridge of Paugus seemed to
cross the northern sky line and approach the northern spurs of Chocorua.
Blazing the trees as we walked by them, both on our left and on our
right, on the south side of the trunks and on their north sides also, we
pushed forward due north. Ever since leaving the ruined mill our way had
lain close to the foot of Paugus, the width of the valley being between
us and the foot of Chocorua. Nearly a mile was traversed before we
touched the wall of Paugus barring the north and forcing us to bend
eastward. Entering a narrow ravine, none too wide for a single road at
its bottom, we came once more upon the lost trail. Marks of the axe were
frequent, but the great hemlocks which it had felled were mere
moss-covered pulp, and from their stumps viburnum or young trees had
sprouted. Berry found spots on the trees which he remembered to have
made when he guided the engineer through the pass fifteen years before.
The walls of the ravine grew steeper, and across it fallen trees
occasionally blocked the way. Presently it bent sharply to the left, so
that we were once more headed northward, and then it widened into an
amphitheatre half a mile in width, wholly surrounded by steep and rocky
sides. The old trail was again lost, and Berry declared that out of this
pocket there was no outlet save over the towering ridge at the north.
The story of the man and woman in a sleigh, who had once crossed this
frowning barrier, alone sustained our hopes of finding a pass which
could be opened to wheels.
My watch said that it was 10.30 A. M. As we had begun our first meal at
four A. M., a second one seemed appropriate; so in the face of our
frowning crisis we lay upon the moss and made way with the larger part
of our knapsack’s contents. A red squirrel, inquisitive, petulant
Chickaree, came down from the ridge and chattered to us. Far above in
the treetops two birds called loudly to each other. Their notes were new
to me, and so shy were they that I secured only a distant glimpse of
them through my glass. They seemed to prefer the highest tips of dead
trees, from which they darted now and then into the air after insects.
It did not require much knowledge of birds to assign this noisy couple
to the family of the tyrant flycatchers, and their size was so great as
to make them one of three species,—kingbirds, great crested flycatchers,
or olive-sided flycatchers. As I knew the first two well, from daily
chances to watch their habits, I felt practically certain that these
keepers of the pass were the wild, wayward, and noisy olive-sided
flycatchers of which I had heard so often, but never before met on their
breeding-grounds. Luncheon over, we faced the barrier, and, selecting a
shallow ravine in its side, began the ascent. While struggling over huge
boulders and winding around fallen trees we did not feel as though
wheels were ever likely to go where legs were having so hard a time.
Still the ascent was made in less than ten minutes, and to a practical
road-builder the slope, cleared of its surface débris, would present few
serious obstacles.
On reaching the top we gained a view of the peak of Chocorua well to the
south of east, and of the ramparts of Paugus, half spruce hung and half
bald rock, bounding the long valley through which our morning tramp had
taken us. The peak of Chocorua had lost its horn-like contour and
resembled more a combing wave dashing northward. It was the only part of
the mountain proper to be seen, as in the foreground a massive spur
projecting northwestward completely concealed the principal mass.
Looking towards the north, the prospect was disheartening. The ridge on
which we stood had been a battleground of the elements. It was, in the
language of this region, a “harricane,” and woe to the man who ventures
into a “harricane.” We advanced cautiously, choosing our ground, and
cutting a narrow path through the small spruces, cherry saplings, and
mountain maples which had overgrown the fallen forest. Every few steps
we came upon stumps which bore the axe mark instead of that of the
storm. We surmised that we had struck a belt which had been “lumbered”
before the hurricane had completed its destruction. Fighting on yard by
yard, we crossed the top of the ridge and gained its northern edge.
There the signs of timber cutting were plainer, and presently I noticed
a curious ribbon of saplings reaching down the slope in front of us. The
young trees in it were higher than the wreck on each side of it, yet the
ribbon was the road and the wreck was all that remained of the forest
through which the road had been cut long years ago. The broken thread of
the lost trail had been found. Behind us a blazed path reached into the
Bearcamp valley; before us the lumber road wound downward a short two
miles to the Swift River road, now plainly visible over the sloping
tree-tops.
We followed the lumber road down about a mile, searching for a hut which
Berry remembered to have seen. As we descended, the “harricane” was left
behind, and our ribbon of saplings led into the forest, its massed stems
contrasting oddly with the wide-spaced trunks of the primeval growth.
Coming to the hut, which Berry said had been built twenty years before,
we found it remarkably well preserved. Straw still remained in the
lumbermen’s bunks, pieces of the stove lay on the floor, and although
the roof had been sprung by snow resting heavily upon it, the hut was as
dry and habitable as ever. It even retained the “stuffy” smell of a
dirty and ill-ventilated house. It was inhabited, too, not by men, but
by hedgehogs, as the American porcupine is universally called in New
Hampshire. They had been under it, through it, and over it. Every piece
of stair, joist, or floor, upon which salt or grease had fallen, had
been gnawed away by them. They had slept in the bunks both upstairs and
down, and the stairs bore traces of their constant use.
In front of the hut stood a watering-trough. It was a huge log hollowed
by the axe into two tanks, a small one at the upper end for man’s use,
and a larger one below for the cattle. Small logs had been neatly
grooved as spouts to lead the water from the brook to the trough. Moss
grew upon them now and the summer sunlight shone upon them, but it was
easy to imagine the snow piled high upon the hills, smothering the
brooks and burying the rough spouts, and to fancy that over the trampled
snow the woolly and steaming oxen came to drink of the water, while a
sturdy French Canadian broke the ice with his axe and drank at the spot
where from under the snow the spouts led the water into his end of the
dugout. The cattle are dead, the axe has rusted, the Canadian has been
killed in a brawl, or has gone back to his River St. Lawrence to spend
his old age under the shadow of the cross, but the brook still murmurs
over its pebbles, and when snow falls by the trough and the hut it is
cleaner and purer than the foot of the lumberman left it.
Woe to the man who ventures into a “harricane”! Not content with the
road which we had made and found over the ridge, we sought, as we turned
homewards, to see whether another lumber road, which came into ours from
the southeast, did not cross the ridge by an easier grade. Following it
upward higher and higher, we came at last to an open ledge from which a
beautiful view was gained. Northward of us frowned Bear Mountain, dark
in its spruces. To its left were Lowell, Nancy, Anderson, and the rest
of the proud retinue of Carrigain. Deep shadows lay in Carrigain Notch.
Bluer and fairer, higher and more distant, the heads of Bond, Willey,
and the Franconia Mountains rested against the sky. To the westward,
above the long rampart of Paugus with its flat, gray cliffs capped by
black spruce, towered the cone of Passaconaway, wooded to its very tip.
Southward, just across a deep ravine and behind a heavily timbered spur,
was Chocorua, its great tooth cutting into the blue heavens. Though we
enjoyed the picture of the distance, we were filled with something like
despair at the foreground. On three sides of us the “harricane” extended
as far as the nature of the ground permitted us to see. Westward, along
the ridge, in the direction in which lay our trail of the morning, it
reached for half a mile at least, and through it we must go, unless,
indeed, we preferred to retrace our steps into the Swift River valley
and regain our path by such an ignominious circuit. Seen from above,
that half-mile of forest wreck looked like a jack-straw table of the
gods. Thousands of trees, averaging sixty or seventy feet in height, had
been uprooted and flung together “every which way.” They were flat upon
the ground, piled in parallel lines, crossed at right angles, head to
head, root to root, twisted as though by a whirlwind, or matted together
as they might have been had a sea of water swept them from hill-crest to
valley. Boulders of various sizes lay under the wreck, and, to make its
confusion more distracting, saplings, briers, and vines flourished upon
the ground shaded and enriched by the wasting ruin.
It took more than an hour to climb and tumble over half a mile of this
tangle. Any one who has watched an ant laboriously traversing a
stubble-field or a handful of hay, crawling along one straw, across
some, under others, and anon climbing to a height to consult the
distance, will know how we made our journey. Men go through great
battles without a scratch, but they could not penetrate a “harricane”
with any such fortunate results.
The spots on our blazed trees seemed as friendly as home on a winter’s
night, when at last we reached them and began the southward march. As we
had been two hours without water, the first brook drew us to its side
and held us entranced by its tiny cascades. In the pool from which I
drank, half a dozen caddis-worm cases lay upon the sand at the bottom.
They were sand, yet not of the sand, for mind had rescued them from the
monotony of their matter and made them significant of life. They had
faithfully guarded their little builders while dormant, and now those
awakened tenants had risen from the water, dried their gauzy wings in
the sun and vanished in airy wanderings. Near the brook lay a dead tree,
and upon it were fastened a number of brightly colored fungi. Their
lower surfaces and margins were creamy white, then a band of orange
vermilion passed around them, while the upper and principal part was
greenish gray marked with dark brown wavelike lines. They reminded me,
by their color and surface, of the tinted clay images or costume figures
which are made by peasants in several parts of southern Europe, and in
Japan. Anything more in contrast with the gloom of a northern forest
would be hard to discover. Much of the ground near the brook was covered
by yew bushes, on which, brilliant as jewels, gleamed their pendent and
slightly attached red berries. The mosses and lichens were the glory of
the wood. Never parched by thirst in these perpetual shades, they grew
luxuriantly on boulders, fallen logs, standing trees, the faces of
ledges, and over the moist brook banks and beds of leaf mould. What the
great forest was to us, that the mosses must be to the minute insects
which live among them.
So thoroughly had we spotted the trees in the morning, that as we
followed our trail back there was not a moment when our eyes hesitated
as to the direction of the path.
· · · · · · ·
Four days passed, and on the morning of the fifth a gay column wound its
way through the forest following the regained trail. Nearly a score of
axes, hatchets, and savage machettas resounded upon the trees and shrubs
which encroached upon the road. Behind the axemen came several horses,
each bearing a rider as courageous as she was fair. If branches menaced
the comfort of these riders, they were speedily hewn away; if the
hobble-bush hid hollows or boulders in the road, it was cut off at the
root; if a ford or a bog offered uncertain footing to the snorting
horses, strong hands grasped their bridles and they were led through to
surer ground. When the difficulties of the road became serious, the
horses were left behind and the column pressed forward on foot. The
ridge was met and stormed, the “harricane” was safely pierced, the
hedgehog’s hut was visited and passed, and the old lumber road was
followed swiftly down to the grass-land and highway of the Albany
intervale. If one woman in days long past had traversed the winter road
in a sleigh, others of her sex had now overcome greater difficulties and
broken the stubborn barrier of the Sandwich range.