The graceful and beautiful wild goose that nests in the Canadian and
Northern lakes and marshes, makes his winter home in Tennessee. I think
it is the winter wheat that attracts him, as he passes over us, en route
to Florida, for wheat is sown in October in Tennessee and by Christmas
it is as green as the marsh grasses he left behind in Canada. I do not
blame the wild goose for stopping. He has flown for many weary days and
nights, over cold and lifeless lands; over mountains brown and sere; over
woodlands stripped of leaves and bare and uninviting. All day long the
“konk,” “konk” of the leader sounds from the point of the triangle that
cuts its ceaseless way through the thin, cold air. Night after night they
rest on frozen pond or reedy lake. But one day the air grows sweet and
balmy; they look below them at a landscape, which, at their altitude,
looks like a mighty lake whose waves are fields of green wheat, broken by
islands of dark green hills. It is the Basin of Tennessee. No wonder they
come down to earth again. If I were an angel with wings and on my way to
heaven by the same route, methinks I’d do the same thing.
“But the wild goose did not always winter here,” said Mr. Adcock, the
oldest goose hunter in my town. “I can remember when they first began
to come in. I think they began to come in after the country got to be
more open and the wheat fields so large that they could alight in the
midst of one and the sentinel on guard could see the approach of any
hunter. They live to an extreme old age. I know of one flock which
winters annually in the Bear Creek neighborhood and has wintered there
for forty-two years. The leader of the flock is known to be at least that
old. He has a peculiar white mark on his back and is readily recognized
each year by the hunters in that section. They propagate very fast in
their summer homes, for when this flock left last year it had been
reduced to eighteen in number. This year, when it came back, led again by
the old gander, it had increased to two hundred and eighty. But I do not
think there is a man in that country who would shoot at that old leader
with the white mark on him.”
There has always been something peculiarly fascinating to me in the
flight of a wild goose or wild duck. I have run up on wild turkeys and
seen them in their wild and awkward flight, and while it is beautiful
sport to kill a strutting old gobbler who comes to you, allured by your
call, and while it is finer sport the next day to sample him when he is
baked and browned to a queen’s taste, yet after all he is bred and raised
with us, he comes from our woods, not from far distant shores, walks over
the earth, does not cleave, like the wild goose, the
—“Pale, purpling evening—”
which in the language of the poet
—“Melts around thy flight.”
And so there is a mystery about him that, to me, is the mystery of other
lands and worlds. There is about him the manner as of one who comes from
distant climes; there is the everlasting wonder which to me always hangs
around the whistle of wings, the admiration for the creature to whom God
has given the power to soar above the sordid things of earth and bathe
their plumage in that air which is born of the sunset and the silent
stars. And in this connection where, in all language, is there a more
beautiful poem of its kind than Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl?” I shall copy
it in its entirety here, because it so beautifully expresses what we
commoner mortals can only feel.
[Illustration: The High Limestone Bluffs of Duck River.]
Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day
Far, through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
Seekest thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast—
The desert and illimitable air—
Lone wanderer, but not lost.
All day thy wings have fanned
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere.
Ye stoop not, weary, to the welcome land
Though the dark night is near.
And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o’er thy sheltered breast.
Thou’rt gone—the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given
And shall not soon depart.
He who, from zone to zone
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight
In the long way that I must tread alone
Will lead my steps aright.
For several weeks I had seen the wild geese flying over us. I knew where
they were going—to the wheat fields—and I knew where they roosted at
night—under the shadow of the bluff of the river, sitting like swans on
the dark waters. I hold it of guns as I do of sulkies and road carts—any
good make is good enough. It all depends on whom you happen to start in
with. If built by honest men, out of honest stuff, there is but little
difference in the rest of it. I happen to fancy the Ithaca and had just
got me a new one, and for hard, clean, honest shooting, wear and tear,
I’ll put it against any of them.
There is only one way to hunt wild geese successfully, and I had prepared
all of that; or rather my friend Jno. W. Jackson, assistant postmaster,
and the best all-round hunter and fisherman in Tennessee, had—in fact
it is part of our stable and belongs in our barn on the rafters, along
with the saddle and harness: a strong, light canoe that will hold three
people, two big reflecting headlight lanterns that will light up the
river from bank to bank, and for very cold weather a good Clark or
Lehman heater to drop in the bottom of the canoe and put your feet on
if they get cold. Then, with a laprobe over your knees, good gloves and
overcoat, and Jimmy Caldwell, who knows every crook and turn of the river
for a hundred miles, to paddle it, you are ready for the finest sport
on this side the globe. It was just noon when my man, Frank, hooked up
the blue roan Chestnut Hal mare to the buckboard. In the rear were my
blankets and gun, and oil-cloth to sleep on; also a saddle and bridle.
There is something about a blue roan that I always have liked. It reminds
me of steel. I have never seen a quitter that was that color. It is
remarkable how often the roan horse figures in the living romance of
our literature. Who that has ever read it has forgotten the strawberry
roan mare of the big-hearted robber in “Lorna Doone”—to my mind as fine
a novel as was ever written—a kind of Shakespeare in prose in the wild
woods. Do you remember Browning’s “How They Brought the Good News from
Ghent to Aix,” and the roan that dropped dead but never gave up the race?
By the way, there are, in that poem, two of as fine descriptive verses of
horses in motion as I ever read:
“At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare through the mist at us galloping past
And I saw my stout galloper, Roland, at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze, as some bluff river headland the spray.
And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye’s black intelligence—ever that glance
O’er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!
And the thick, heavy spume-flakes, which aye and anon,
His fierce lips shook upward in galloping on”
I claim that the Hals are the best all-round horses in the world—they are
tireless roadsters and jog, at a trot, a good road gait. By half past
one I was in Williamsport—twelve miles—and the roan mare had not struck
a pace—her fastest gait. After crossing the river and getting into the
rough roads over the hills of Hickman County, she climbed them like a
mountain goat, for if there is anything a pacer likes it is to chop up
his gait for hill work. Not once did she make a misstep. The chief beauty
of these hunts, to me, had always been in the fact that I had only to
throw a saddle on this mare, after getting to camp, and I had an easy
seat all day in our rides over the hills and fields in pursuit of that
most delightful of all Southern game—quail. It knocks the sport out of
things when you have to take one horse to drive and another to ride, and
another to do this, and another that. Reared for generations as one of
the family, the Hal horse can come very nearly doing everything that his
master can, and if this mare had asked me for a toddy before breakfast
the next morning I should not have been at all surprised.
[Illustration: Duck River, Where the Wild Geese Roost.
As an illustration of the fertility of Middle Tennessee, the field on the
right has been in cultivation ninety years, has had no fertilizers except
rotation and clover, and produced this year two crops of Irish potatoes
of fifty and ninety barrels per acre, respectively.]
My destination was the little village of Shady Grove, way up in the
foothills, and yet down in a little valley thirty miles from nowhere. We
reached it just before sunset, when the smoke began to curl up out of the
chimneys for the evening meal, and I stopped on the high hill and looked
down on the quiet scene. I have always held that it does a man good to
get away from the sound of trade and traffic now and then, and for my
part there is nothing that appeals to me so much as to look down on one
of these little villages in the hills and speculate on the simple life
that exists there. So free from the knockout battles of the modern life,
so simple and quiet and wanting so little. There is the school house,
yonder the quaint little church which means so much to them and, whether
narrow, quaint or clannish, we must admit are the real bulwarks of all
the great moral structures that are the strength and pride and glory of
twentieth century progress. The little homes cluster around these two.
Once a day the mail boy rides over the hills on his pacing horse, with
the thoughts of the rest of the world in his leathern pouch. In the
twilight I could see that the village blacksmith, a sturdy, handsome
young fellow, was forging a horse-shoe. A pretty girl came out of the
little postoffice and locked the door. She stopped at the blacksmith’s
as she passed and they laughed and made love. I smiled as I drove on,
and said: “This is the glorious twentieth century with all its knowledge
and science and progress, and yet when we come to think of it we are
right where we were two hundred years ago, for in spite of engines and
automobiles the two things that progress must have first of all, before
she can move a foot—is a horse-shoe and—love.”
* * * * *
My destination was three miles farther—at Hen Island—but, when I reached
it night had set in and, to my astonishment, I saw neither camp nor
canoe. It is one hundred miles by river to Hen Island, a fine all-day and
all-night float, with plenty of geese and ducks. The canoe had started
down with the Old Hunter and Mr. Jackson, the setter dog and the camping
outfit, and I expected them to meet me with a full game bag, and to have
the camp pitched and supper ready. Instead, I sat alone on the banks of
a river, in the chill of a winter’s evening, out in the woods, and with
no prospect of anything but the ground to sleep on. I had begun to feel
uneasy and dreadfully lonesome, when I noticed a native come down to
water the mule he was riding. In answer to my inquiry he said that the
Old Hunter had landed there that morning and had tacked a card on the
sycamore tree near where I stood. I struck a match and soon deciphered
the old man’s peculiar spelling, which told me he had gone on two miles
further to camp at a better place.
A camp-fire at night will draw two months’ work and worry out of a man.
How grand the trees look in the big, weird flashes of the firelight in
front of the tent! The setter dog is at home and welcomes you with his
honest bark and playful gambols. You can smell the fine flavor of the
boiling coffee (does any other ever taste so good?) a quarter of a mile
before you get to it, while the odor that comes up from the “skillet” is
enough to bring every wolf out of the woods. In addition to all this the
Old Hunter had two barbecued squirrels and, best of all, a mallard which
he had cooked in his own inimitable way. That is to say, he had dressed
it, all except taking off the feathers. Then he had pasted a wet clay all
over it, wrapped it in wet paper and buried it just under the sod of the
camp fire. In two hours it was pronounced done, and then he had taken
it out, soon after I came up, and with a few hefty touches had peeled
the clay and feathers off, with the skin. You may not think this is good
until you eat it at camp; then you will not want to eat duck any other
way.
The night had grown intensely dark, it seemed to me. The setter was
asleep by the camp-fire, the river sang a surly song as it swept by in
the blackness and ever and anon the “konk” of a flock of wild geese
sounded from out the heavens as if they still flew about, disdaining
to go to roost. In my vanity I supposed that they had heard that I had
arrived and so concluded it was best to spend the night in the air.
We did not wish to start until nearly midnight and as we sat around the
fire the Old Hunter grew mellow and reminiscent and this was one of the
funny stories he told me.
“Talk about horses breakin’ the record, an’ all that, but do you kno’
that in my young days I broke all the records that ever was an’ ever will
be, s’fur as a pacin’ hoss is concerned? Whut’s Star Pointer’s time?” he
asked.