Christmas Day was warm, cloudy at best, densely foggy at worst. Soon
after breakfast we were swinging westward up the valley road, determined
to find Sabba Day Falls or perish in the attempt. As we passed the
crossbill feeding-ground no birds were in sight, but a moment later,
high in the air, we heard bird voices. Looking skyward, we saw a flock
of from one to two hundred birds whirling round and round, like ashes
drawn upwards over a fire. They were at a very great height, and were
gradually rising. As they increased their distance they disappeared and
reappeared several times; then they vanished wholly, swallowed up in the
high air. I think they were our crossbills, goldfinches, and siskins,
and that they were soaring in search of fair weather, perhaps intending
to migrate to some other favorite haunt. Christmas Day is not a time
when one expects much color in a White Mountain landscape, but the warm
air, the moisture, and the contrasts against snow below and fog above
combined to produce and to make evident a great deal of exquisite
tinting in the shrubs of the fields and the forests of the mountain
spurs. As we strode up the line of yellow mud which made the road, our
path was bordered by shallow snow from which sprung an abundant growth
of hardback and spiræa. Taken in masses, their stems made a rich maroon,
somewhat dull near by, but warm and deep when seen across an acre of
snow. A foot or two higher than these small shrubs were viburnums and
small cherry and maple trees growing along the skirts of the forest.
Their general tone was also dull red, though somewhat brighter than the
spiræa. The next band of color was ashy mottled with dark green, and
made probably by young birches, poplars, beeches, and hemlocks. Then
came a belt of fog mingled with snowy smoke from the saw-mill, and above
that a broad band of ashes-of-rose color, formed by the upper branches
and twigs of the common deciduous trees. Above all were the spruces,
always dark except when the piercing eye of the sun reveals the
wonderful golden olive which they keep for him alone.
The smoke of the saw-mill showed that the timber-eater finds no time for
remembering the birthday of Jesus. Teams were moving as usual, carrying
the green lumber down to the railway. The men employed to demolish our
forests are poorly paid. A dollar a day and board is what the French
Canadian receives here. Board is called fifty cents a day, and the
married workman with a houseful of children lives on that sum. We passed
the home of a French Canadian known in the valley as Bumblebee. The
house is twelve feet long by ten feet deep. The ridgepole is twelve feet
from the ground. The chimney is a piece of stove-pipe. The walls are
made of boards, battened, and the roof is unshingled. Bumblebee has five
children, the eldest being eight. His wife’s mind is affected. The
standing timber, the mill, the lumber railway, and many of the dwellings
and small farms belong to non-residents, whose only object is to shear
the mountains, squeeze the laborers, and keep Congress from putting
lumber on the free list.
Not far beyond Bumblebee’s one-room house we entered the primeval
forest. We were following the trail through the snow made by us on
Sunday. When a quarter of a mile in, we were surprised to find a bear
track crossing our path at right angles. The huge brute had passed that
way on Tuesday or Wednesday, judging by the condition of the snow. On
reaching the spot where we had aroused a barred owl on Sunday, we hid
under some small hemlocks, thereby getting a thorough sprinkling, and I
hooted. After my third attempt, I saw a great bird fly through the woods
to a point only a hundred yards distant. In a moment or two I hooted
again, and then made the fine squeaking noise which a mouse makes. The
owl came nearer, and at once began hooting. During nearly ten minutes,
in which we kept up a lively exchange of hoots, he varied his notes in
several ways, sometimes keeping on, without pausing, from one series of
hoots to another. I never heard a more talkative owl. At last he flew
into a tree so near us that I could see him clearly through my glass. As
he hooted, his throat swelled and pulsated. He searched the trees and
the ground with his keen dark eyes. When at last he saw me, I seemed to
feel the force of his glare. Then he turned his head to the left and
flew away with long, soft sweeps of his wings. At a distance he resumed
his hooting, which we could hear for some time as we strolled on up
Sabba Day Brook. What we had supposed to be the river, on Sunday, proved
to be Sabba Day Brook itself. The water was high, most of the ice had
gone, and all the small brooks poured in liberal streams. In one pool I
observed a small trout. At last we heard the thunder of the falls, and
looked forward eagerly to see them. The stream seemed to issue from the
solid rock, for directly across the channel rose a cliff of dark granite
crowned with black spruces and one or two pines whose lofty tops were
pale in the fog. As we drew near, the majestic beauty of the place
became apparent. At the foot of the black cliff was a deep pool full of
strange colors,—greens, olives, and white. The waters in it were
restless, rising and settling back, but forever washing the sides of
their basin. Four gigantic icicles hung from the top of the cliff,
extending to the bottom. One of them, at its lower end, touched a flat
shelf of rock, and so became a graceful column supporting the
overhanging mosses from which it started. Another adhered to the rock
all the way, and was a crystalline pilaster. The other two were free
throughout the whole of their thirty feet of length, and tapered to
needle points threatening the pool below. The colors in the pool were in
fact borrowed from the mosses and ferns which grew in masses at the
sides and upon the top of the cliff. Living in perpetual dampness, these
exquisite plants flourish and become perfect examples of their kind. The
trailing fern fronds were as green and as clean in outline as in summer.
They sprang from beds of mosses wonderful in tints. Some were golden
olive, others pale green, and still others blood red. Pressed against
the upper edge of the black cliff, they were like a garland of bright
flowers on the forehead of some sullen warrior.
The water did not pour into this pool from the cliff, but came to it
through a narrow flume or gap in the solid rock which had been concealed
from us as we ascended the stream by the high wooded bank opposite the
cliff. On reaching the edge of the pool, in the chill shadow of the
black rock, we looked up the flume between narrow walls of dark gray
granite, and saw, thirty feet or more beyond, another pool, into which
was pouring from the left a great sheet of water. This fall, coming from
a point fifty or sixty feet above us, and on the extreme left of the
flume, had its side towards us; yet, after its green waters struck the
upper pool and struggled there awhile, they came through the flume as
their only outlet. Clambering up the right-hand or north bank, we gained
a point where we could see all the details of this strange cataract.
Sabba Day Brook above the falls flows nearly due east. It strikes a
rocky hillside and is deflected to the left by a sharp curve, so that it
runs due north. In this direction it has worn a sloping passage to the
edge of the falls. Dropping fifty feet into a great pot-hole, it turns
abruptly to the east and flows out through the flume into the green
pool, past the black ledge, and then, turning slightly towards the
north, hurries on from basin to rapid on its way to the intervale.
Standing on a shelf of snow-covered rock overhanging the angle in the
fall, we first looked up at the water leaving its level above and
hurrying towards its leap, and then down at the boiling pool below and
the dashing water in the flume. These falls must be beautiful in summer,
with sunlight playing in the leaves, blue sky lending color to the
water, and rainbow tints gleaming in the uprising spray. They were also
beautiful to-day,—Christmas Day,—when the loneliness of winter was
brooding over the mountains, when ice and snow mingled in the
surroundings of the falls, and when the gay coloring of the summer
forest was replaced by the sombre tones of leafless trees. In summer
some trace of man might have jarred upon the perfect solitude of the
spot and made it seem less pure. As it was, standing in the untrodden
snow, surrounded by the fog, the wild stream, the ice-sheathed rocks, I
felt as one might if suffered to land for a while upon some far planet,
strange to man, and consecrated to eternal cold and solitude.
We turned away reluctantly and entered the old forest which stands
between Sabba Day Brook and Swift River, a quarter of a mile to the
north. The rumble of the falls grew fainter and fainter, then ceased.
Blue jays flew through the tree-tops; a great hawk floated by above the
trees; kinglets and a brown creeper lisped to us; chickadees,
nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and a great flock of singing siskins came
in answer to our whistles; and red squirrels scolded us from their
tree-strongholds. When we reached Swift River, we found it broad, still,
and without a log or stones to cross upon. Having on water-tight
hip-boots, I waded the stream, bearing my companion upon my shoulders.
Entering a swamp on the farther shore, we observed fresh hedgehog
tracks. In one place the fat beast had lain down in the snow, and some
of his soft quills had frozen to his bed and pulled out when he trundled
his body along again. At every labored step he left the print of his
body in the snow, making a track as conspicuous as a man’s. In a tangle
of yew branches he had paused and nibbled bark from several stems. After
following his trail a hundred yards or more, we lost it in a spruce
thicket where the snow had melted.
At the extreme western end of Swift River intervale stands a hill seven
or eight hundred feet high, having long sloping lines and a pointed top.
It is called Sugarloaf. Its sides are covered with as fine a growth of
ancient trees as it is often one’s fortune to find in New England. As
this growth includes few spruces, hemlocks, or pines, it has escaped the
timber fiends. There are among its trees giant yellow birches,
saffron-colored in the mist; beeches a century old, with trunks moulded
into shapes suggestive of human limbs strong in muscles, rock maples
eighty or ninety feet high and hemlocks with coarse bark unbroken by
limbs until, a hundred feet from the hillside, a mat of their interwoven
branches finds the sunlight. The cultivated fields and pasture lands of
the intervale are singularly free from rocks. Here and there a great
boulder can be found, but it is conspicuous in its loneliness. On this
hillside, however, boulders of all shapes and sizes are strewn. Most of
them are about the size of a load of hay. They are covered with showy
lichens and the greenest of green mosses. Selecting one at the very
summit of the hill, we searched under its overhanging sides for dry
leaves and twigs. Then we broke an old stump into pieces and tore the
curling bark from a prostrate birch. All this material was more or less
damp, but by patience we secured a little bed of coals which soon dried
the rest of our fuel, so that before long a bright blaze and a warm glow
gladdened our eyes and comforted our chilled bodies. Then came our
cheery Christmas dinner in the primeval forest, upon a snow-covered
hillside, under the projecting face of a great rock, beneath which we
sat, with a ruddy fire crackling in front of us. Never Christmas dinner
went straighter to the right spot.
While we were resting and enjoying our fire, a flock of sweet-voiced
pine grosbeaks came to neighboring tree-tops, a white-bellied nuthatch
hung head downwards from a beech-trunk, and two downy woodpeckers called
uneasily to each other. At last we extinguished our fire and descended
the hill. Five grouse flew noisily from the hillside. Through the trees
we could see the white ice on Church’s Pond, and towards it we made our
way. The pond is the last remnant of the great lake which in distant
ages filled the whole of this intervale. Even now an area twenty times
as large as the lake adjoins its water, and is almost level with it,
being covered with sphagnum, laurel, pitcher-plant, and other bog
growth, and offering very uncertain footing. Reaching the pond, we
circled around it on the ice, cautiously keeping close to the shore,
although a yoke of oxen could probably have blundered across without
danger. While we were on the lake the sunset hour passed, and a dense
fog crept down upon the serrated spruce forest which borders the water.
Three pine grosbeaks flew into the advancing mists, talking in gentle
music to one another. One was left on a dead tree in the bog, and
uttered a plaintive cry again and again. Leaving the ice, we struck
across the frozen bog, now and then breaking through the soft places,
but generally finding ice or roots to sustain our weary feet. As we
progressed, we gathered an armful of club-mosses and a bunch of
checkerberry plants bearing their gay fruit. The fog closed in around
us, and the air became chilly. Not a mountain could we see. It was a
relief to strike firm soil, though it was only a few inches higher than
the bog. Presently we came to the river, and for a second time I
shouldered my friend and took him over dryshod. After doing the same, a
few moments later, at Sabba Day Brook, we gained the end of the
intervale road near Bumblebee’s hut. It was now growing dark, yet a mile
of yellow mud still lay before us. Colors had faded; the graceful
outlines of the forest were dimmed; nothing but the martial spruces
remained with us, drawn up in stiff lines beside the road.
When we reached home, the Christmas greens and checkerberries were made
by our inexperienced fingers into a cross, a wreath, and a long strip
for festooning. These we presented to the three-year-old Lily of the
intervale, whose ideas of Christmas had been obscured by the fact that
no one had given her any presents. These offerings made matters better
with her, and I fancied that she pommeled her four kittens less
mercilessly than usual, as she gazed at the Christmas greens, and said
many times to her grandmother, “Man dave dose to Diddy, he did.”