Books by Mr. Torrey.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER'S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE
BY
BRADFORD TORREY
We travelled in the print of olden wars;
Yet all the land was green.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1896
Copyright, 1896,
BY BRADFORD TORREY.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE 1
LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN 28
CHICKAMAUGA 57
ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL CEMETERY 89
AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER 102
A MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS 113
A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE 124
SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES 183
A LIST OF BIRDS 213
INDEX 221
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.
AN IDLER ON MISSIONARY RIDGE.
I reached Chattanooga on the evening of April 26th, in the midst of
a rattling thunder-shower,--which, to look back upon it, seems to
have been prophetic,--and the next morning, after an early breakfast,
took an electric car for Missionary Ridge. Among my fellow-passengers
were four Louisiana veterans fresh from their annual reunion at
Birmingham, where, doubtless, their hearts had been kindled by much
fervent oratory, as well as by much private talk of those bygone days
when they did everything but die for the cause they loved. As the
car mounted the Ridge, one of them called his companions' attention
to a place down the valley where "the Rebels and the Yankees" (his
own words) used to meet to play cards. "A regular gambling-hole,"
he called it. Their boys brought back lots of coffee. In another
direction was a spot where the Rebels once "had a regular picnic,"
killing some extraordinary number of Yankees in some incredibly
brief time. I interrupted the conversation, and at the same time
made myself known as a stranger and a Northerner, by inquiring after
the whereabouts of Orchard Knob, General Grant's headquarters; and
the same man, who seemed to be the spokesman of the party, after
pointing out the place, a savin-sprinkled knoll between us and the
city, kindly invited me to go with him and his comrades up to the
tower,--on the site of General Bragg's headquarters,--where he would
show me the whole battlefield and tell me about the fight.
We left the car together for that purpose, and walked up the slope to
the foot of the observatory,--an open structure of iron, erected by
the national government; but just then my ear caught somewhere beyond
us the song of a Bachman's finch,--a song I had heard a year before
in the pine woods of Florida, and, in my ignorance, was unprepared
for here. I must see the bird and make sure of its identity. It led
me a little chase, and when I had seen it I must look also at a
summer tanager, a chat, and so on, one thing leading to another; and
by the time I returned to the observatory the veterans had come down
and were under some apple-trees, from one of which the spokesman was
cutting a big walking-stick. He had stood under those trees--which
were now in bloom--thirty years before, he said, with General Bragg
himself.
I was sorry to have missed his story of the battle, and ashamed to
have seemed ungrateful and rude, but I forget what apology I offered.
At this distance it is hard to see how I could have got out of the
affair with much dignity. I might have heard all about the battle
from a man who was there, and instead I went off to listen to a
sparrow singing in a bush. I thought, to be sure, that the men would
be longer upon the observatory, and that I should still be in season.
Probably that was my excuse, if I made one; and in all likelihood
the veteran was too completely taken up with his own concerns to
think twice about the vagaries of a stray Yankee, who seemed to be
an odd stick, to say nothing worse of him. Well, the loss, such
as it was, was mine, not his; and I have lost too much time in the
way of business to fret over a little lost (or saved) in the way of
pleasure. As for any apparent lack of patriotic feeling, I suppose
that the noblest patriot in the world, if he chanced to be also an
ornithologist, would notice a bird even amid the smoke of battle; and
why should not I do as much on a field from which the battle smoke
had vanished thirty years before?
So I reason now; at the time I had no leisure for such sophistries.
Every moment brought some fresh distraction. The long hill--woodland,
brambly pasture, and shrubby dooryard--was a nest of singing birds;
and when at last I climbed the tower, I came down again almost as
suddenly as my Louisiana friends had done. The landscape,--the city
and its suburbs, the river, the mountains,--all this would be here
to-morrow; just now there were other things to look at. Here in the
grass, almost under my nose, were a pair of Bewick wrens, hopping
and walking by turns, as song sparrows may sometimes be found doing;
conscious through and through of my presence, yet affecting to
ignore it; carrying themselves with an indescribable and pretty
demureness, as if a nest were something never dreamed of by birds
of their kind; the female, nevertheless, having at that moment her
beak bristling with straws, while the male, a proud young husband,
hovered officiously about her with a continual sweetly possessive
manner and an occasional burst of song. Till yesterday Bewick's wren
had been nothing but a name to me. Then, somewhere after crossing the
state line, the train stopped at a station, and suddenly through the
open window came a song. "That's a Bewick wren," I said to myself,
as I stepped across the aisle to look out; and there he stood, on
the fence beside the track, his long tail striking the eye on the
instant. He sang again, and once again, before the train started.
Tennessee was beginning well with a visiting bird-gazer.
There must be some wrennish quality about the Bewick's song, it would
seem: else how did I recognize it so promptly? And yet, so far as I
am able to give an account of my own impressions, it had in my ears
no resemblance to any wren song I had ever heard. I think it never
suggested to me any music except the song sparrow's. The truth is, I
suppose, that we _feel_ resemblances and relationships of which the
mind takes no cognizance.
I wandered at a venture down the further slope, turning this way and
that as a song invited me. Here were Southerners and Northerners
fraternally commingled: summer tanagers, Carolina wrens, blue-gray
gnatcatchers, cardinal grosbeaks, chats, Bachman finches, field
sparrows, chippers, white-throated sparrows, chewinks, indigo
buntings, black-poll warblers, myrtle-birds, prairie warblers, a
Maryland yellow-throat, a bay-breasted warbler, a black-and-white
creeper, a redstart, brown thrushes, catbirds, a single mocking-bird,
wood thrushes, red-eyed vireos, white-eyed vireos, wood pewees, a
quail, and, in the air, purple martins and turkey buzzards. On the
Ridge, as well as near the foot on our way up, a mocking-bird and a
wood thrush sang within hearing of each other. Comparison as between
birds so dissimilar is useless and out of place; but how shall a man
avoid it? The mocking-bird is a great vocalist,--yes, and a great
singer; but to my Northern ears the wood thrush carried the day with
his _voice_.
Having climbed the Ridge again,--though climbing might be thought
rather too laborious a word for so gradual a slope,--and started
down on the side toward the city, I came to a patch of blackberry
vines, in the midst of which sat a thrasher on her nest, all a
mother's anxiety in her staring yellow eyes. Close by her stood
an olive-backed thrush. There, too, was my first hooded warbler,
a female. She escaped me the next instant, though I made an eager
chase, not knowing yet how common birds of her sort were to prove in
that Chattanooga country.
In my delight at finding Missionary Ridge so happy a hunting-ground
for an opera-glass naturalist, I went thither again the very
next morning. This time some Virginia veterans were in the car
(they all wore badges), and when we had left it, and were about
separating,--after a bit of talk about the battle, of course,--one
of them, with almost painful scrupulosity, insisted upon assuring me
that if the thing were all to be done over again, he should do just
as before. One of his comrades, seeing me a Northerner, interrupted
him more than once in a vain attempt to smooth matters over. They had
buried the hatchet, he said; let bygones be bygones. But the first
man was not to be cajoled with a phrase. He spoke without passion,
with no raising of the voice, quite simply and amicably: he too
accepted the result; the thing never _would_ be done over again; only
let his position be understood,--he had nothing to take back. It was
impossible not to respect such conscientiousness. For my own part, at
any rate, I felt no prompting to argue against it, being sufficiently
"opinionated" to appreciate a difficulty which some obstinate people
experience in altering their convictions as circumstances change,
or accepting the failure of a cause as proof of its injustice. If
a man is not _too_ obstinate, to be sure, time and the course of
events may bring him new light; but that is another matter. Once,
when the men were talking among themselves, I overheard one say, as
he pointed down the hill, "The Rebels were there, and the Union men
yonder." That careless recurrence of the word "Rebel" came to me as a
surprise.
The principal excitement of the morning was a glimpse of a Kentucky
warbler, a bird most peculiarly desired. I had finished my jaunt,
and was standing beside the bramble patch not far from the railway,
where I had seen the hooded warbler the day before, when the splendid
creature flashed into sight, saw me, uttered a volley of quick, clear
notes, and vanished up the hillside. I ran after him, but might as
well have remained where I was. "He _is_ a beauty!" I find written
in my notebook. And so he is, clothed in lustrous olive and the
most gorgeous of yellows with trimmings of black, all in the best
of taste, with nothing patchy, nothing fantastic or even fanciful.
I was again impressed with the abundance of chats, indigo-birds,
and white-eyed vireos. Bachman sparrows were numerous, also, in
appropriate localities,--dry and bushy,--and I noted a bluebird, a
yellow-throated vireo, and, shouting from a dead treetop, a great
crested flycatcher.
My most vivid recollection of this second visit, however, is of the
power of the sun, an old enemy of mine, by whom, in my ignorance
of spring weather in Tennessee, I allowed myself to be taken at a
cruel noonday disadvantage. Even now, in the deep frigidity of a
Massachusetts winter, I cannot think of Missionary Ridge without
seeing again those long stretches of burning sunshine, wherein the
least spot of shade was like a palm in the desert. In every such
shelter I used to stand awhile, bareheaded; then, marking the next
similar haven, so many rods ahead, I would hoist my umbrella and
push forward, cringing at every step as if I were crossing a field
under fire. Possibly I exaggerate, but, if I do, it is very little;
and though it be an abuse of an exquisite poem, I say over to myself
again and again a couplet of Miss Guiney's:--
"Weather on a sunny ridge,
Showery weather, far from here."
In truth, early as the season was, the excessive heat, combined with
a trying dog-day humidity, sadly circumscribed all my Tennessee
rambles. As for my umbrella, my obligations to it were such that
nothing but a dread of plagiarism has restrained me from entitling
this sketch "An Umbrella on Missionary Ridge." Nature never intended
me for a tropical explorer. Often I did nothing more than seek a
shady retreat and stay there, letting the birds come to me, if they
would.
Improved after this indolent fashion, one of the hottest of my
forenoons became also one of the most enjoyable. I left the car
midway up the Ridge,--at the angle of the Y,--and, passing my
thrasher's blackberry tangle and descending a wooded slope, found
myself unexpectedly in a pleasant place, half wood, half grassy
field, through which ran a tiny streamlet, the first one I had seen
in this dry and thirsty land. Near the streamlet, on the edge of the
wood, quite by itself, stood a cabin of most forlorn appearance, with
a garden patch under the window,--if there _was_ a window, as to
which I do not remember, and the chances seem against it,--the whole
closely and meanly surrounded by a fence. In the door stood an aged
white woman, looking every whit as old and forlorn as the cabin, with
a tall mastiff on one side of her and a black cat on the other.
"Your dog and cat are good friends," I remarked, feeling it polite to
speak even to a stranger in so lonesome a spot.
"Yes," she answered gruffly, "they're good friends, only once in a
while he wants to kill her."
She said nothing more, and her manner did not encourage further
attempts at neighborly intercourse; but as I passed the cabin now and
then during the forenoon, the birds leading me about, I heard her
muttering often and at considerable length to her hens and ducks.
Evidently she enjoyed conversation as well as most people, only
she liked to pick her own company. She was "Aunt Tilly," I learned
afterwards, and had lived there by herself for many years; one of the
characters of the city, a fortune-teller, whose professional services
were in frequent request.
In this favored nook, especially along the watercourse, were many
birds, some of them at home for the summer, but the greater part,
no doubt, lying over for a day or two on their long northward
journey. Not one of them but was interesting to me here in a new
country, however familiar it might have become in New England. Here
were at least eleven kinds of warblers: black-polls of both sexes,
black-throated blues, chestnut-sides, myrtle-birds, golden warblers,
black-and-white creepers, redstarts (have we anything handsomer?),
Maryland yellow-throats, blue golden-wings, chats, and Kentuckies.
Here were blue-gray gnatcatchers, bluebirds, wood thrushes, veeries,
an olive-backed thrush, catbirds, thrashers, Carolina wrens, tufted
titmice, a Carolina chickadee, summer tanagers uncounted, orchard
orioles, field sparrows, chippers, a Bachman sparrow (unseen), a
cardinal, a chewink, flocks of indigo-birds and goldfinches, red-eyed
vireos, white-eyed vireos, a yellow-throated vireo, kingbirds, and a
crested flycatcher.
In an oak at the corner of Aunt Tilly's cabin a pair of gnatcatchers
had built a nest; an exquisite piece of work, large and curiously
cylindrical,--not tapering at the base,--set off with a profusion of
gray lichens, and saddled upon one limb directly under another, as
if for shelter. If the gnatcatcher is not a great singer (his voice
is slender, like himself), he is near the head of his profession as
an architect and a builder. Twice, in the most senseless manner, one
of the birds--the female, I had no doubt, in spite of the adjective
just applied to her conduct--stood beside the nest and scolded at
me; then, having freed her mind and attracted my attention, she got
inside and began pecking here and there at the rim, apparently giving
it the final touches. The tufted tits whistled unseen with all their
characteristic monotony. The veeries and the olive-back kept silence,
but the wood thrushes, as was their daily habit, made the woods ring.
One of them was building a nest.
Most admired of all were the Kentucky warblers, of which there were
at least five. It was my first real sight of them, and, fortunately,
they were not in the least bashful. They spent the time mostly on
the ground, in open, grassy places, especially about the roots of
trees and thorn-bushes,--the latter now snowy with bloom,--once in a
while hopping a few inches up the bole, as if to pick off insects.
In movement and attitude they made me think often of the Connecticut
warbler, although when startled they took a higher perch. Once I
saw one of them under a pretty tuft of the showy blue baptisia (_B.
australis_),--a new bird in the shadow of a new flower! Who says that
life is an old story? From the general manner of the birds,--more
easily felt than defined,--as well as from their presence in a group
and their silence, I inferred, rightly or wrongly, that they had
but recently arrived. For aught I yet knew, they might be nothing
but wayfarers,--a happy uncertainty which made them only the more
interesting. Of their beauty I have already spoken. It would be
impossible to speak of it too highly.
As I took the car at noon, I caught sight of a wonderfully bright
blood-red flower on the bank above the track, and, as I was the only
passenger, the conductor kindly waited for me to run up and pluck it.
It turned out to be a catchfly, and, like the Kentucky warbler, it
became common a little later. "Indian pink," one of my Walden's Ridge
friends said it was called; a pretty name, but to me "battlefield
pink" or "carnage pink" would have seemed more appropriate.
I had found an aviary, I thought, this open grove of Aunt Tilly's,
with its treasure of a brook, and at the earliest opportunity I went
that way again. Indeed, I went more than once. But the birds were no
longer there. What I had seen was mainly a flock of "transients,"
a migratory "wave." On the farther side of the Ridge, however, I
by and by discovered a spot more permanently attractive,--a little
valley in the hillside. Here was a spring, and from it, nearly dry
as it was, there still oozed a slender rill, which trickled halfway
down the slope before losing itself in the sand, and here and there
dribbled into a basin commodious enough for a small bird's bath.
Several times I idled away an hour or two in this retreat, under the
shadow of red maples, sweet-gums, sycamores, and tupelos, making an
occasional sortie into the sun as an adventurous mood came over me or
a distant bird-call proved an irresistible attraction.
They were pleasant hours, but I recall them with a sense of waste and
discomfort. In familiar surroundings, such waitings upon Nature's
mood are profitable, wholesome for body and soul; but in vacation
time, and away from home, with new paths beckoning a man this way and
that, and a new bird, for aught he can tell, singing beyond the next
hill,--at such a time, I think, sitting still becomes a burden, and
the cheerful practice of "a wise passiveness" a virtue beyond the
comfortable reach of ordinary flesh and blood. Along the upper edge
of the glen a road ran downward into the valley east of the Ridge,
and now and then a carriage or a horseman passed. It would have been
good to follow them. All that valley country, as I surveyed it from
the railway and the tower, had an air of invitingness: beautiful
woods, with footpaths and unfrequented roads. In them I must have
found birds, flowers, and many a delightful nook. If the Fates could
have sent me one cool day!
Yet for all my complaining, I have lived few more enjoyable Sunday
forenoons than one that I passed most inactively in this same
hillside hollow. As I descended the bank to the spring, two or three
goldfinches were singing (goldfinch voices go uncommonly well in
chorus, and the birds seem to know it); a female tanager sat before
me calling _clippity_, _clippity_; a field sparrow, a mocking wren,
and a catbird sang in as many different directions; and a pair of
thrashers--whose nest could not be far away--flitted nervously about,
uttering characteristic moaning whistles. If they felt half as badly
as their behavior indicated, their case was tragical indeed; but at
the moment, instead of pitying them, I fell to wondering just when it
is that the thrasher _smacks_ (all friends of his are familiar with
his resounding imitation of a kiss), and when it is that he whistles.
I have never made out, although I believe I know pretty well the
states of mind thus expressed. The thrasher is to a peculiar degree
a bird of passion; ecstatic in song, furious in anger, irresistibly
pitiful in lamentation. How any man can rob a thrasher's nest with
that heartbroken whistle in his ears is more than I can imagine.
Indigo-birds are here, of course. Their number is one of the marvels
of this country,--though indeed the country seems made for them, as
it is also for chats and white-eyed vireos. A bit farther down the
valley, as I come to the maples and tupelos, with their grateful
density of shade, a wood pewee sings, and then a wood thrush. At the
same moment, an Acadian flycatcher, who is always here (his nest
is building overhead, as, after a while, I discover), salutes me
with a quick, spiteful note. "No trespassing," he says. Landowners
are pretty much alike. I pass on, but not far, and beside a little
thicket I take up my stand, and wait. It is pleasant here, and
patience will be rewarded. Yes, there is a magnolia warbler, my
second Tennessee specimen; a great beauty, but without that final
perfection of good taste (simplicity) which distinguishes the
Kentucky. I see him, and he is gone, and I am not to be drawn into
a chase. Now I have a glimpse of a thrush; an olive-back, from what
I can see, but I cannot be sure. Still I keep my place. A blue-gray
gnatcatcher is drawling somewhere in the leafy treetops. Thence, too,
a cuckoo fires off a lively fusillade of _kuks_,--a yellow-bill,
by that token. Next a black-poll warbler shows himself, still far
from home, though he has already traveled a long way northward;
and then, in one of the basins of the stream (if we may call it a
stream, in which there is no semblance of a current), a chat comes
to wash himself. Now I see the thrush again; or rather, I hear him
whistle, and by moving a step or two I get him with my eye. He _is_
an olive-back, as his whistle of itself would prove; and presently
he begins to sing, to my intense delight. Soon two others are in
voice with him. Am I on Missionary Ridge or in the Crawford Notch?
I stand motionless, and listen and listen, but my enjoyment is
interrupted by a new pleasure. A warbler, evidently a female, from
a certain quietness and plainness, and, as I take it, a blue-winged
yellow, though I have never seen a female of that species (and only
once a male--three days ago at Chickamauga), comes to the edge of
the pool, and in another minute her mate is beside her. Him there is
no mistaking. They fly away in a bit of lovers' quarrel, a favorite
pastime with mated birds. And look! there is a scarlet tanager; the
same gorgeous fellow, I suppose, that was here two days ago, and the
only one I have seen in this lower country. What a beauty he is! One
of the finest; handsomer, so I think, than the handsomest of his
all-red cousins. Now he calls _chip-cherr_, and now he breaks into
song. There he falls behind; his cousin's voice is less hoarse, and
his style less labored and jerky.
Now straight before me, up a woody aisle, an olive-backed thrush
stands in full view and a perfect light, facing me and singing,
a lovely chorister. Looking at him, I catch a flutter of yellow
and black among the leaves by the streamlet; a Kentucky warbler, I
suspect, but I dare not go forward to see, for now the thrushes are
in chorus again. By and by he comes up from his bath, and falls to
dressing his feathers: not a Kentucky, after all, but a Canadian
flycatcher, my first one here. He, too, is an exquisite, with fine
colors finely laid on, and a most becoming jet necklace. While I am
admiring him, a blue yellow-back begins to practice his scales--still
a little blurred, and needing practice, a critic might say--somewhere
at my right among the hillside oaks; another exquisite, a beauty
among beauties. I see him, though he is out of sight. And what seems
odd, at this very moment his rival as a singer of the scale, the
prairie warbler, breaks out on the other side of me. Like the chat
and the indigo-bird, he is abundantly at home hereabout.
All this woodland music is set off by spaces of silence, sweeter
almost than the music itself. Here is peace unbroken; here is a
delicious coolness, while the sun blazes upon the dusty road above
me. How amiable a power is contrast--on its softer side! I think of
the eager, bloody, sweaty, raging men, who once stormed up these
slopes, killing and being killed. The birds know nothing of all
that. It might have been thousands of years ago. The very trees have
forgotten it. Two or three cows come feeding down the glade, with
the lazy tinkle of a bell. And now my new friend, the blue-winged
yellow warbler, sings across the path (across the aisle, I was going
to say), but only two or three times, and with only two insignificant
lisping syllables. The chary soul! He sings to the eye, I suppose. I
go over to look at him, and my sudden movement startles the thrushes,
who, finding themselves again in the singers' gallery, cannot
refrain from another chorus. At the same moment the Canadian warbler
comes into sight again, this time in a tupelo. The blue-wings are
found without difficulty; they have a call like the black-and-white
creeper's. A single rough-winged swallow skims above the treetops. I
have seen him here before, and one or two others like him.
As I return to the bed of the valley, a female cardinal grosbeak
flutters suspiciously about a thicket of tall blackberry vines. Her
nest should be there, I think, but a hasty look reveals nothing.
Again I come upon the Canadian warbler. If there is only one
here, he is often in my way. I sit down upon the leaning, almost
horizontal, bole of a large tupelo,--a new tree to me, but common
in this country. The thick dark-colored bark is broken deeply into
innumerable geometrical figures, giving the tree a noticeable,
venerable appearance, as wrinkles lend distinction and character to
an old man's face. Another species, which, as far as I can tell,
should be our familiar tupelo of Massachusetts, is equally common,--a
smaller tree, with larger leaves. The moisture here, slight as it
now is, gives the place a vegetation of its own and a peculiar
density of leafage. From one of the smaller tupelos (I repeat that
word as often as I can, for the music of it) cross-vine streamers
are swinging, full of red-and-yellow bells. Scattered thinly over
the ground are yellow starflowers, the common houstonia, a pink
phlox, and some unknown dark yellow blossom a little like the fall
dandelion,--Cynthia, I guess.
My thoughts are recalled by a strong, sharp _chip_ in a voice I do
not recognize,--a Kentucky warbler's, as presently turns out. He
walks about the ground amid the short, thin grass, seemingly in the
most placid of moods; but at every few steps, for some inscrutable
reason, he comes out with that quick, peremptory call. And all the
while I keep saying to myself, "What a beauty!" But my forenoon is
past. I rise to go, and at the motion he takes flight. Near the
spring the goldfinches are still in full chorus, and just beyond them
in the path is a mourning dove.
That was a good season: hymns without words, "a sermon not made
with hands," and the world shut out. Three days afterward, fast
as my vacation was running away, I went to the same place again.
The olive-backed thrushes were still singing, to my surprise, and
the Kentucky warblers were still feeding in the grass. The scarlet
tanager sang (it is curious how much oftener I mention him than the
comparatively unfamiliar, but here extremely common summer tanager),
the cuckoo called, the Acadian flycatcher was building her nest,--on
a horizontal limb of a maple,--and a goldfinch warbled as if he
could never cease. A veery sang, also (I heard but one other in
Tennessee), with a chestnut-sided warbler, two redstarts (one of them
in the modest garb of his mother), a Carolina chickadee, a mocking
wren, a pine warbler, a prairie warbler, and a catbird. In time,
probably, all the birds for a mile around might have been heard or
seen beside that scanty rill.
To-day, however, my mood was less Sundayish than before, and in spite
of the heat I ventured across an open pasture,--where a Bachman's
finch was singing an ingenious set of variations, and a rabbit
stamped with a sudden loudness that made me jump,--and then through
a piece of wood, till I came to another hollow like the one I had
left, but without water, and therefore less thickly shaded. Here was
the inevitable thicket of brambles (since I speak so much of chats
and indigo-birds, the presence of a sufficiency of blackberry bushes
may be taken for granted), and I waited to see what it would bring
forth. A field sparrow sang from the hillside,--a sweet and modest
tune that went straight to the heart, and had nothing to fear from
a comparison with Bachman's finch or any other. What a contrast in
this respect between him and his gentle-seeming but belligerent
and tuneless cousin whom we call "chippy."[1] Here, likewise, were
a pair of complaining Carolina wrens and an Acadian flycatcher. A
thrush excited my curiosity, having the look of a gray-cheek, but
showing a buff eye-ring; and while I was coaxing him to whistle,
and so declare himself,--often a ready means of identification,
and preferable on all accounts to shooting the bird,--there came a
furious outburst from the depths of the brier patch, with a grand
flurry of wings: a large bird and two smaller ones engaged in sudden
battle, as well as I could make out. At the close of the _mêlée_,
which ended as abruptly as it had begun, the thicket showed two
wrens, a white-throated sparrow, and a female cardinal. The cardinal
flew away; the affair was no business of hers, apparently; but in a
minute she was back again, scolding. Then, while my back was turned,
everything became quiet; and on my stepping up to reconnoitre, there
she sat in her nest with four eggs under her. At that moment a chat's
loud voice was heard, and, turning quickly, I caught the fellow in
the midst of a brilliant display of his clownish tricks, ridiculous,
indescribable. At a little distance, it is hard to believe that it
can be a bird, that dancing, shapeless thing, balancing itself in the
air with dangling legs and prancing, swaying motions. Well, that is
the chat's way. What more need be said? Every creature must express
himself, and birds no less than other poets are entitled to an
occasional "fine frenzy."
My little excursion had brought me nothing new, and, like all my
similar ventures on Missionary Ridge, it ended in defeat. The sun was
too much for me; to use a word suggested by the place, it carried too
many guns. I took a long and comfortable siesta under a magnificent
chestnut oak. Then it was near noon, and, with my umbrella spread, I
mounted the hill to the railway, and waited for a car.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] If I could have my way, he should be known as the doorstep
sparrow. The name would fit him to a nicety.
LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.
Lookout Mountain was at first a disappointment. I went home
discouraged. The place was spoiled, I thought. About the fine inn
were cheap cottages,--as if one had come to a second-class summer
resort; while the lower slopes of the mountain, directly under
Lookout Point on the side toward the city, were given up to a squalid
negro settlement, and, of all things, a patent-medicine factory,--a
shameful desecration, it seemed to me. I was half ready to say I
would go there no more. The prospect was beautiful,--so much there
was no denying; but the air was thick with smoke, and, what counted
for ten times more, the eye itself was overclouded. A few northern
warblers were chirping in the evergreens along the edge of the
summit, between the inn and the Point,--black-polls and bay-breasts,
with black-throated greens and Carolina wrens; and near them I saw
with pleasure my first Tennessee phoebes. In the street car, on the
way back to Chattanooga, I had for my fellow-passengers a group of
Confederate veterans from different parts of the South, one of whom,
a man with an empty sleeve, was showing his comrades an interesting
war-time relic,--a bit of stone bearing his own initials. He had cut
them in the rock while on duty at the Point thirty years before, I
heard him say, and now, remembering the spot, and finding them still
there, he had chipped them off to carry home. These are all the
memories I retain of my first visit to a famous and romantic place
that I had long desired to see.
My second visit was little more remunerative, and came to an untimely
and inglorious conclusion. Not far from the inn I noticed what seemed
to be the beginning of an old mountain road. It would bring me to St.
Elmo, a passing cottager told me; and I somehow had it fast in my
mind that St. Elmo was a particularly wild and attractive woodland
retreat somewhere in the valley,--a place where a pleasure-seeking
naturalist would find himself happy for at least an hour or two, if
the mountain side should insufficiently detain him. The road itself
looked uncommonly inviting, rough and deserted, with wild crags
above and old forest below; and without a second thought I took it,
idling downward as slowly as possible, minding the birds and plants,
or sitting for a while, as one shady stone after another offered
coolness and a seat, to enjoy the silence and the prospect. Be as
lazy as I could, however, the road soon gave signs of coming to an
end; for Lookout Mountain, although it covers much territory and
presents a mountainous front, is of a very modest elevation. And at
the end of the way there was no sylvan retreat, but a village; yes,
the same dusty little suburb that I had passed, and looked away from,
on my way up. _That_ was St. Elmo!--and, with my luncheon still in
my pocket, I boarded the first car for the city. One consolation
remained: I had lived a pleasant hour, and the mountain road had
made three additions to my local ornithology,--a magnolia warbler, a
Blackburnian warbler, and a hairy woodpecker.
There was nothing for it but to laugh at myself, and try again; but
it was almost a week before I found the opportunity. Then (May
7) I made a day of it on the mountain, mostly in the woods along
the western bluffs. An oven-bird's song drew me in that direction,
to begin with; and just as the singer had shown himself, and been
rewarded with an entry as "No. 79" in my Tennessee catalogue, a
cuckoo, farther away, broke into a shuffling introductory measure
that marked him at once as a black-bill. Till now I had seen
yellow-bills only, and though the voice was perhaps a sufficient
identification, a double certainty would be better, especially in the
retrospect. Luckily it was a short chase, and there sat the bird, his
snowy throat swelling as he cooed, while his red eye-ring and his
abbreviated tail-spots gave him a clear title to count as "No. 80."
As I approached the precipitous western edge of the mountain, I
heard, just below, the sharp, wiry voice of a Blackburnian warbler;
a most splendid specimen, for in a moment more his orange-red
throat shone like fire among the leaves. From farther down rose
the hoarse notes of a black-throated blue warbler and two or three
black-throated greens.
Here were comfortable, well-shaded boulders and delightful
prospects,--a place to stay in; but behind me stood a grove of small
pine-trees, out of which came now and then a warbler's _chip_;
and in May, with everything on the move, and anything possible,
invitations of that kind are not to be refused. Warbler species
are many, and there is always another to hope for. I turned to the
pines, therefore, as a matter of course, and was soon deeply engaged
with a charming bevy of northward-bound passengers,--myrtle-birds,
palm warblers, black-throated blues (of both sexes), a female Cape
May warbler (the first of her sex that I had seen) magnolias,
bay-breasts, and many black-polls. It makes a short story in the
telling; but it was long in the doing, and yielded more excitement
than I dare try to describe. To and fro I went among the low trees
(their lowness a most fortunate circumstance), slowly and with all
quietness, putting my glass upon one bird after another as something
stirred among the needles, and hoping every moment for some glorious
surprise. In particular, I hoped for a cerulean warbler; but this was
not the cerulean's day, and, if I had but known it, these were not
the cerulean's trees. None but enthusiasts in the same line will be
able to appreciate the delight of such innocent "collecting,"--birds
in the memory instead of specimens in a bag. Even on one's home beat
it quickens the blood; how much more, then, in a new field, where a
man is almost a stranger to himself, and rarities and novelties seem
but the order of the day. Again and again, morning and afternoon, I
traversed the little wood, leaving it between whiles for a rest under
the big oaks on the edge of the cliffs, whence, through green vistas,
I gazed upon the farms of Lookout Valley and the mountains beyond. A
scarlet tanager called,--my second one here,--wood thrush voices rang
through the mountain side forest, a single thrasher was doing his
bravest from the tip of a pine (our "brown mocking-bird" is anything
but a skulker when the lyrical mood is on him), while wood pewees,
red-eyed vireos, yellow-throated vireos, black-and-white creepers,
and I do not remember what else, joined in the chorus. Just after
noon an oven-bird gave out his famous aerial warble. To an aspiring
soul even a mountain top is but a perch, a place from which to take
wing.
All these birds, it will be noticed, were such as I might have seen
in Massachusetts; and indeed, the general appearance of things about
me was pleasantly homelike. Here was much of the pretty striped
wintergreen, a special favorite of mine, with bird-foot violets,
the common white saxifrage (dear to memory as the "Mayflower" of
my childhood), the common wild geranium (cranesbill, which we were
told was "good for canker"), and maple-leaved viburnum. One of the
loveliest flowers was the pink oxalis, and one of the commonest
was a pink phlox; but I was most pleased, perhaps, with the white
stonecrop (_Sedum ternatum_), patches of which matted the ground, and
just now were in full bloom. The familiar look of this plant was a
puzzle to me. I cannot remember to have seen it often in gardens, and
I am confident that I never found it before in a wild state except
once, fifteen years ago, at the Great Falls of the Potomac. Yet here
on Lookout Mountain it seemed almost as much an old friend as the
saxifrage or the cranesbill.
I ate my luncheon on Sunset Rock, which literally overhangs the
mountain side, and commands the finest of valley prospects; and
then, after another turn through the pines, where the warblers
were still busy with their all-day meal,--but not the new warbler,
for which I was still looking,--I crossed the summit and made the
descent by the St. Elmo road, as before. How long I was on the way
I am unable to tell; I had learned the brevity of the road, and,
like a schoolboy with his tart, I made the most of it. Midway down I
caught sudden sight of an olive bird in the upper branch of a tree,
with something black about the crown and the cheek. "What's that?" I
exclaimed; and on the instant the stranger flew across the road and
up the steep mountain side. I pushed after him in hot haste, over the
huge boulders, and there he stood on the ground, singing,--a Kentucky
warbler. Seeing him so hastily, and on so high a perch, and missing
his yellow under-parts, I had failed to recognize him. As it was, I
now heard his song for the first time, and rejoiced to find it worthy
of its beautiful author: _klurwée_, _klurwée_, _klurwée_, _klurwée_,
_klurwée_; a succession of clear, sonorous dis-syllables, in a fuller
voice than most warblers possess, and with no flourish before or
after. Like the bird's dress, it was perfect in its simplicity. I
felt thankful, too, that I had waited till now to hear it. Things
should be desired before they are enjoyed. It was another case of
the schoolboy and his tart; and I went home good-humored. Lookout
Mountain was not wholly ruined, after all.
The next day found me there again, to my own surprise, for I had
promised myself a trip down the river to Shellmound. In all the
street cars, as well as in the city newspapers, this excursion was
set forth as supremely enjoyable, a luxury on no account to be
missed,--a fine commodious steamer, and all the usual concomitants.
The kind people with whom I was sojourning, on Cameron Hill, hastened
the family breakfast that I might be in season; but on arriving at
the wharf I found no sign of the steamer, and, after sundry attempts
to ascertain the condition of affairs, I learned that the steamer did
not run now. The river was no longer high enough, it was explained;
a smaller boat would go, or might be expected to go, some hours
later. Little disposed to hang about the landing for several hours,
and feeling no assurance that so doing would bring me any nearer to
Shellmound, I made my way back to the Read House, and took a car for
Lookout Mountain. In it I sat face to face with the same conspicuous
placard, announcing an excursion for that day by the large and
commodious steamer So-and-So, from such a wharf, at eight o'clock.
But I then noticed that intending passengers were invited, in smaller
type, to call at the office of the company, where doubtless it would
be politely confided to them that the advertisement was a "back
number." So the mistake was my own, after all, and, as the American
habit is, I had been blaming the servants of the public unjustly.
I was no sooner on the summit than I hastened to the pine wood. At
first it seemed to be empty, but after a little, hearing the drawling
_kree_, _kree_, _kree_, of a black-throated blue, I followed it,
and found the bird. Next a magnolia dropped into sight, and then a
red-cheeked Cape May, the second one I had ever seen, after fifteen
or twenty years of expectancy. He threaded a leafless branch back and
forth on a level with my eyes. I was glad I had come. Soon another
showed himself, and presently it appeared that the wood, as men speak
of such things, was full of them. There were black-polls, also, with
a Blackburnian, a bay-breast, and a good number of palm warblers,
(typical _palmarum_, to judge from the pale tints); but especially
there were Cape Mays, including at least two females. As to the
number of males it is impossible to speak; I never had more than
two under my eye at once, but I came upon them continually,--they
were always in motion, of course, being warblers,--till finally, as
I put my glass on another one, I caught myself saying, in a tone of
disappointment, "Only a Cape May." But yesterday I might as well have
spoken of a million dollars as "only a million." So soon does novelty
wear off. The magnolia and the Blackburnian were in high feather, and
made a gorgeous pair as chance brought them side by side in the same
tree. They sang with much freedom; but the Cape Mays kept silence,
to my deep regret, notwithstanding the philosophical remarks just
now volunteered about the advantages derivable from a bird's gradual
disclosure of himself. Such pieces of wisdom, I have noticed, when
by chance they do not fall into the second or third person, are
commonly applied to the past rather than the present; a man's past
being, in effect, not himself, but another. In morals, as in archery,
the target should be set at a fair distance. The Cape May's song is
next to nothing,--suggestive of the black-poll's, I am told,--but I
would gladly have bought a ticket to hear it.
The place might have been made on purpose for the use to which it
was now put. The pinery, surrounded by hard-wood forest, was like
an island; and the warblers, for the most part, had no thought of
leaving it. Had they been feeding in the hard wood,--miles of tall
trees,--I should have lost them in short order. At the same time, the
absence of undergrowth enabled me to move about with all quietness,
so that none of them took the least alarm. Not a black-throated green
was seen or heard, though yesterday they had been in force both among
the pines and along the cliffs. A flock of myrtle warblers were
surprisingly late, it seemed to me; but it was my last sight of them.
The reader will perceive that I was not exploring Lookout Mountain,
and am in no position to set forth its beauties. It is eighty odd
miles long, we are told, and in some places more than a dozen miles
wide. I visited nothing but the northern point, the Tennessee end,
the larger part of the mountain being in Georgia; and even while
there I looked twice at the birds, and once at the mountain itself.
At noon, I lay for a long time upon a flat boulder under the tall
oaks of the western bluff, looking down upon the lower woods, now in
tender new leaf and most exquisitely colored. There are few fairer
sights than a wooded mountain side seen from above; only one must
not be too far above, and the forest should be mainly deciduous.
The very thought brings before my eyes the long, green slopes of
Mount Mansfield as they show from the road near the summit,--beauty
inexpressible and never to be forgotten; and miles of autumn color
on the sides of Kinsman, Cannon, and Lafayette, as I have enjoyed
it by the hour, stretched in the September sunshine on the rocks of
Bald Mountain. Perhaps the earth itself will never be fully enjoyed
till we are somewhere above it. The Lookout woods, as I now saw
them, were less magnificent in sweep, but hardly less beautiful. And
below them was the valley bottom,--Lookout Valley, once the field of
armies, now the abode of peaceful industry: acres of brown earth,
newly sown, with no trace of greenness except the hedgerows along the
brooks and on the banks of Lookout Creek. And beyond the valley was
Raccoon Mountain, wooded throughout; and behind that, far away, the
Cumberland range, blue with distance.