golden-winged warblers, two more Kentuckies, a blue-gray gnatcatcher,
a Bachman's finch, a wood pewee, a quail, and the inevitable chats,
indigo-birds, prairie warblers, and white-eyed vireos. Then, as
I drew near the car track, I descended again to the river-bank
and walked in the shade of lofty buttonwoods, willows, and white
maples, with mistletoe perched in the upper branches, and poison ivy
climbing far up the trunks; the whole standing in great contrast to
the comparatively stunted growth, mainly oak,--and largely black
jack,--on the dry soil of the hillside. Across the river were broad,
level fields, brown with cultivation, in which men were at work, and
from the same direction came loud rasping cries of batrachians of
some kind. For aught that my ear could detect, they might be common
toads uttering their mysterious, discordant midsummer screams in
full chorus. Here were more indigo-birds, with red-eyes, white-eyes,
lisping black-poll warblers, redstarts, a yellow-billed cuckoo
(furtive as ever, like a bird with an evil conscience), catbirds, a
thrasher, a veery in song (a luxury in these parts), orchard orioles,
goldfinches, and chippers. A bluebird was gathering straws, and a
carrion crow, one of two seen in Tennessee, was soaring high over the
river.
The "pavilion," at the terminus of the car route, was deserted, and I
sat on the piazza enjoying the really beautiful prospect--the river,
the woods, and the cultivated fields. The land hereabout was all in
the market. In truth, the selling of building lots seemed to be one
of the principal industries of Chattanooga; and I was not surprised
to find the good-humored young fellow behind the counter--with its
usual appetizing display of cigars, drinks, and confectionery--full
of the glories and imminent possibilities of this particular
"suburb." He believed in the river. Folks would come this way, where
it was high and cool. (On that particular afternoon, to be sure, it
was neither very high nor very cool, but of course the weather isn't
always good anywhere.) "Lookout Mountain ain't what it used to be,"
he said, in a burst of confidence. "It's done seen its best days.
Yes, sir, it's done seen its best days." It was not for a stranger,
with no investment in view, to take sides in such competitions and
rivalries. I believed in the river and the mountain both, and hoped
that both would survive their present exploitation. I liked his talk
better when it turned upon himself. Nothing is more exhilarating than
an honest bit of personal brag. He was never sick, he told me. He
knew nothing of aches or pains. He could do anything without getting
tired. Save for his slavery to the counter, he seemed almost as well
off as the birds.
A MORNING IN THE NORTH WOODS.
The electric car left me near the Tennessee,--at "Riverview,"--and
thence I walked into the woods, meaning to make a circuit among the
hills, and at my convenience board an inward-bound car somewhere
between that point and the city. The weather was of the kind that
birds love: warm and still, after heavy showers, with the sun now
and then breaking through the clouds. The country was a suburb in
its first estate: that is to say, a land company had laid out miles
of streets, but as yet there were no houses, and the woods remained
unharmed. That was a very comfortable stage of the business to a man
on my errand. The roads gave the visitor convenience of access,--a
ready means of moving about with his eyes in the air,--and at the
same time, by making the place more open, they made it more birdy;
for birds, even the greater part of wood birds, like the borders of a
forest better than its darker recesses.
One thing I soon perceived: the rain had left the roads in a
condition of unspeakable adhesiveness. The red clay balled up my
heels as if it had been moist snow, till I pitched forward as I
walked. I fancied that I understood pretty well the sensations of
a young lady in high-heeled shoes. One moment, too, my feet were
weighted with lead; then the mass fell off in a sudden big lump, and
my next few steps were on air. A graceful, steady, self-possessed
gait was out of the question. As for abstaining from all appearance
of evil--well, as another and more comfortable Scripture says, "There
is a time for everything." However, I was not disposed to complain.
We read much about the tribulations of Northern soldiers on the march
in Virginia,--of entire armies mud-bound and helpless. Henceforth I
shall have some better idea of what such statements mean. In that
part of the world, I am assured, rubber overshoes have to be tied
on the feet with strings. Mother Earth does not believe in such
effeminacies, and takes it upon herself to pull them off.
The seventeen-year locusts made the air ring. Heard at the right
distance, the sound has a curious resemblance, noticed again and
again, to the far-away, barely audible buzz of an electric car. For
a week the air of the valley woods had been full of it. I wondered
over it for a day or two, with no suspicion of its origin. Then, as I
waited for a car at the base of Missionary Ridge, a colored man who
stood beside me on the platform gave me, without meaning it, a lesson
in natural history.
"The locuses are goin' it, this mornin', ain't they?" he said.
"The locuses?" I answered, in a tone of inquiry.
"Yes. Don't you hear 'em?"
He meant my mysterious universal hum, it appeared. But even then I
did not know that he spoke of the big, red-eyed cicada that I had
picked off a fence a day or two before and looked at for a moment
with ignorant curiosity. And even when, by dint of using my own eyes,
I learned so much, I was still unaware that this cicada was the
famous seventeen-year locust. Here in the north woods I more than
once passed near a swarm of the insects. At short range the noise
loses its musical character; so that it would be easy to hear it
without divining any connection between it and the grand pervasive
hum of the universal chorus.
One of the first birds at which I stopped to look was a Kentucky
warbler, walking about the ground and pausing now and then to sing;
one of six or seven seen and heard during the forenoon. Few birds are
more freely and easily observed. I mean in open woodlands with clear
margins, such as I was now exploring. In a mountain forest, where
they haunt brookside jungles of laurel and rhododendron, the story is
different, as a matter of course. How it happens that the same bird
is equally at home in surroundings so dissimilar is a question I make
no attempt to answer.
All the hill woods, mostly oak, were dry and stony; but after a
while I came unexpectedly to a valley, a place of another sort;
not moist, to be sure, but looking as if it had been moist at some
time or other; and with pleasant grassy openings and another set
of trees--red maples, persimmons, and sweet-gums. Here was a fine
bunch of birds, including many migrants, and I went softly hither
and thither, scanning the branches of one tree after another, as a
note or the stirring of a leaf attracted me, ready every minute for
the sight of something new and wonderful. I found nothing,--nothing
new and wonderful, I mean,--but I had all the exhilaration of
the chase. In the company, nearly all of them in song, were wood
thrushes, a silent palm warbler (red-poll), a magnolia warbler, three
Canadian flycatchers, many black-polls, one or two redstarts, a
chestnut-sided warbler, a black-and-white creeper, a field sparrow,
a yellow-throated vireo, a wood pewee, an Acadian flycatcher, and
two or more yellow-billed cuckoos. The red-poll was of a very pale
complexion (but I assert nothing as to its exact identity, specific
or sub-specific), and seemed to me unreasonably late. It was the 11th
of May, and birds of its kind had been passing through Massachusetts
by the middle of April. Chestnut-sides were scarce enough to be
interesting, and it was good to hear this lover of berry fields and
the gray birch singing from a sweet-gum.
When at last I turned away from the grassy glade,--where cattle were
pasturing, as I now remember,--and went back among the dry hills
(through the powdery soil of which the almost daily showers seemed
to run as through a sieve), I presently caught sight of a scarlet
tanager,--a beauty, and, except on the mountains, a rarity. Then I
stopped--on a street corner!--to admire the singing of a Bachman's
finch, wishing also to compare his plumage with that of a bird seen
and greatly enjoyed a few days before at Chickamauga. To judge from
my limited observation, this is one of the sparrows--the song sparrow
being another--which exhibit a strange diversity of individual
coloration; as if the fashion were not yet fully set, or perhaps
were being outgrown. The bird here in the north woods, so far as
color and markings went, might well enough have been of a different
species from that of the Chickamauga singer, yet there was no reason
to suspect the presence of more than one variety of _Peucæa_, so far
as I knew, and the music of the two birds was precisely the same. A
wonderfully sweet and various tune it is; with sometimes a highly
ventriloquial effect, as if the different measures or phrases came
from different points. It opens like the song heard in the Florida
flat-woods, but is even more varied, both in voice and in musical
form. So it seemed to me, I mean to say; but hearing the two a year
apart, I cannot speak without reserve. It is pleasanter--as well as
safer--to praise both singers than to exalt one to the pulling down
of the other. In appearance, Bachman's finch is one of the dullest,
dingiest, least prepossessing members of its great family; but its
voice and musical genius make it a treasure, especially in this
comparatively sparrowless country of eastern Tennessee.
I have remarked that I found this bird upon a street corner.
Unhappily my notes do not enable me to be more specific. It may have
been at the corner of Court and Tremont Streets, or, possibly, at the
junction of Tremont and Dartmouth Streets. All these names appear in
my memoranda. Boston people should have had a hand in this business,
I said to myself. It was on Federal Street (so much I put down) that
I saw my only Tennessee rose-breasted grosbeak. He, or rather she,
was the most interesting bird of the forenoon, and matched the one
Baltimore oriole seen at Chickamauga. I heard the familiar _click_,
as of rusty shears, and straightway took chase. For some minutes
my search was in vain, and once I feared I had been fooled. A bird
flew out of the right tree, as I thought, but showed yellow, and the
next moment set up the _clippiticlip_ call of the summer tanager.
Could that bird have also a note like the rose-breast's? It was not
impossible, of course, for one does not exhaust the vocabulary of
a bird in a month's acquaintance; but I could not think it likely,
thick as tanagers had been about me; and soon the _click_ was
repeated, and this time I put my eye on its author,--a feminine
rose-breast. Perhaps it was nothing more than an accident that she
was my only specimen; but so showy a bird, with so lovely a song and
so distinctive a signal, could hardly have escaped notice had it been
in any degree common.
Wood thrushes sang on all sides. They had need to be abundant
and free-hearted, since they stand in that region for the whole
thrush family. Blue golden-winged warblers, too, were generously
distributed, and, as happens to me now and then in Massachusetts,
I found one with a song so absurdly peculiar that I spent some time
in making sure of its author. It is to be hoped that this tendency
to individual variation will persist and increase in the case of
this species till something more melodious than its present sibilant
monotony is evolved; till beauty and art are mated, as they ought
to be. Who would not love to hear the music of all our birds a few
millions of years hence? What a singer the hermit thrush will be,
for example, when his tune is equal to his voice! Indigo-birds,
white-eyed vireos and prairie warblers abounded. As for the chats,
they saluted me on the right and on the left, till I said, "Chats,
Chattanooga," and felt almost as if Nature had perpetrated a huge
fantastic pun on her own account. If I could have had the ear of the
enterprising owners of this embryo suburb,--a syndicate, I dare say
they call themselves,--I would have suggested to them to name it
"Chat City."
I wandered carelessly about, now following a bird over a rounded
hill (one, I remember, was covered literally from end to end with
the common brake,--_Pteris_,--which will give the reader an idea of
its sterility), now keeping to the road. In such a soil flowers were
naturally scarce; but I noticed houstonia, phlox, hieracium, senecio,
pentstemon, and specularia. Like the brake, the names are suggestive
of barrenness. The senecio (ragwort), a species with finely cut
leaves (_S. millefolium_), was first seen on Missionary Ridge. There,
as here, it had a strange, misplaced appearance in my eyes, looking
much like our familiar _S. aureus_, but growing in dry woods!
So the morning passed. The hours were far too brief, and I would
have stretched them into the afternoon, but that my trunk was packed
for Walden's Ridge. It was necessary to think of getting back to the
city, and I took a quicker pace. Two more Kentucky warblers detained
me for a moment; a quail sprang up from under my feet; and on the
other side of the way an oven-bird sang--the only one found in the
valley. Then I came to the car-track; but somehow things wore an
unexpected look, and a preacher, very black, solemn, and shiny, gave
me to understand, in answer to a question, that the city lay not
where I thought, but in an opposite direction. Instead of making a
circuit I had cut straight across the country (an unusual form of
bewilderment), and had come to another railway. But no harm was done.
In that corner of the world all roads lead to Chattanooga.
A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.
I.
Throughout my stay in Chattanooga I looked often and with desire at
a long, flat-topped, perpendicular-sided, densely wooded mountain,
beyond the Tennessee River. Its name was Walden's Ridge, I was told;
the top of it was eighty miles long and ten or twelve miles wide;
if I wanted a bit of wild country, that was the place for me. Was
it accessible? I asked. And was there any reasonable way of living
there? Oh yes; carriages ran every afternoon from the city, and there
were several small hotels on the mountain. So it happened that I
went to Walden's Ridge for my last week in Tennessee, and have ever
since thanked my stars--as New England Christians used to say, in my
boyhood--for giving me the good wine at the end of the feast.
The wine, it is true, was a little too freely watered. I went up the
mountain in a rain, and came down again in a rain, and of the seven
intervening days five were showery. The showers, mostly with thunder
and lightning, were of the sort that make an umbrella ridiculous,
and my jaunts, as a rule, took me far from shelter. Yet I had little
to complain of. Now and then I was put to my trumps, as it were; my
walk was sometimes grievously abbreviated, and my pace uncomfortably
hurried, but by one happy accident and another I always escaped a
drenching. Worse than the water that fell--worse, and not to be
escaped, even by accident---was that which saturated the atmosphere,
making every day a dog-day, and the week a seven-day sweat. And
then, as if to even the account, on the last night of my stay I
was kept awake for hours shivering with cold; and in the morning,
after putting on all the clothing I could wear, and breakfasting
in a snowstorm, I rode down the mountain in a state suggestive of
approaching congelation. "My feet are frozen, I know they are," said
the lady who sat beside me in the wagon; but she was mistaken.
This sudden drop in the temperature seemed to be a trial even to the
natives. As we drove into Chattanooga, it was impossible not to
smile at the pinched and woebegone appearance of the colored people.
What had they to do with weather that makes a man hurry? And the next
morning, when an enterprising, bright-faced white boy ran up to me
with a "'Times,' sir? Have a 'Times'?" I fear he quite misapprehended
the more or less quizzical expression which I am sure came into my
face. I was looking at his black woolen mittens, and thinking how
well he was mothered. It was the 19th of May; for at least three
weeks, to my own knowledge, the city had been sweltering under the
hottest of midsummer heats,--94° in the shade, for example; and now,
mittens and overcoats!
I should be sorry to exaggerate, or leave a false impression. In
this day of literary conscientiousness, when writers of fiction
itself are truth-tellers first, and story-tellers afterwards,--if
at all,--it behooves mere tourists and naturalists to speak as
under oath. Be it confessed, then, that the foregoing paragraphs,
though true in every word, are not to be taken too seriously. If the
weather, "the dramatic element in scenery," happened not to suit the
convenience of a naturally selfish man, now ten times more selfish
than usual--as is the rule--because he was on his annual vacation, it
does not follow that it was essentially bad. The rains were needed,
the heat was to have been expected, and the cold, unseasonable and
exceptional, was not peculiar to Tennessee. As for the snow, it was
no more than I have seen before now, even in Massachusetts,--a week
or two earlier in the month; and it lent such a glory to the higher
Alleghanies, as we passed them on our way homeward, that I might
cheerfully have lain shivering for _two_ nights in that unplastered
bedroom, with its window that no man could shut, rather than miss the
spectacle. Eastern Tennessee, I have no doubt, is a most salubrious
country; properly recommended by the medical fraternity as a refuge
for consumptive patients. If to me its meteorological fluctuations
seemed surprisingly wide and sudden, it was perhaps because I had
been brought up in the equable climate of New England. It would be
unfair to judge the world in general by that favored spot.
The road up the mountain--the "new road," as it is called--is a
notable piece of work, done, I was told, by the county chain-gangs.
The pleasure of the ascent, which naturally would have been great,
was badly diminished by the rain, which made it necessary to keep the
sides of the wagon down; but I was fortunate in my driver. At first
he seemed a stolid, uncommunicative body, and when we came to the
river I made sure he could not read. As we drove upon the bridge,
where straight before his eyes was a sign forbidding any one to drive
or ride over the bridge at a pace faster than a walk, under a penalty
of five dollars for each offense, he whipped up his horse and his
mule (the mule the better horse of the two), and they struck into a
trot. Halfway across we met another wagon, and its driver too had let
his horses out. Illiteracy must be pretty common in these parts, I
said to myself. But whatever my driver's educational deficiencies, it
did not take long to discover that in his own line he was a master.
He could hit the ear of his mule with the end of his whip with a
precision that was almost startling. In fact, it _was_ startling--to
the mule. For my own part, as often as he drew back his hand and let
fly the lash, my eye was glued to the mule's right ear in spite of
myself. Had my own ears been endowed with life and motion, instead
of fastened to my head like blocks of wood, I think they too would
have twitched. I wondered how long the man had practiced his art. He
appeared to be not more than forty-five years old. Perhaps he came of
a race of drivers, and so began life with some hereditary advantages.
At all events, he was a specialist, with the specialist's motto,
"This one thing I do."
We were hardly off the bridge and in the country before I began
plying him with questions about this and that, especially the wayside
trees. He answered promptly and succinctly, and turned out to be
a man who had kept his eyes open, and, better still, knew how to
say, "No, suh," as well as, "Yes, suh." (There is no mark in the
dictionaries to indicate the percussive brevity of the vowel sound
in "suh" as he pronounced it.) The big tupelo he recognized as the
"black-gum." "But isn't it ever called 'sour-gum'?" "No, suh." He
knew but one kind of tupelo, as he knew but one kind of "ellum."
There were many kinds of oaks, some of which he named as we passed
them. This botanical catechism presently waked up the only other
passenger in the wagon, a modest girl of ten or twelve years. She
too, it appeared, had some acquaintance with trees. I had asked the
driver if there were no long-leaved pines hereabout. "No, suh,"
he said. "But I think I saw some at Chickamauga the other day,"
I ventured. (It was the only place I did see them, as well as I
remember.) "Yes, sir," put in the girl, "there are a good many
there." "Good for you!" I was ready to say. It was a pretty rare
schoolgirl who, after visiting a battlefield, could tell what kind of
pines grow on it. Persimmons? Yes, indeed, the girl had eaten them.
There was a tree by the fence. Had I never eaten them? She seemed to
pity me when I said "No," but I fancied she would have preferred to
see me begin with one a little short of ripe.
As for the birds of Walden's Ridge, the driver said, there were
partridges, pheasants, and turkeys. He had seen ravens, also, but
only in winter, he thought, and never in flocks. His brother had
once shot one. About smaller birds he could not profess to speak.
By and by he stopped the carriage. "There's a bird now," he said,
pointing with his whip. "What do you call that?" It was a summer
tanager, I told him, or summer redbird. Did he know another redbird,
with black wings and tail? Yes, he had seen it; that was the male,
and this all-red one was the female. Oh no, I explained; the birds
were of different species, and the females in both cases were yellow.
He did not insist,--it was a case of a driver and his fare; but he
had always been told so, he said, and I do not flatter myself that
I convinced him to the contrary. It is hard to believe that one man
can be so much wiser than everybody else. A Massachusetts farmer once
asked me, I remember, if the night-hawk and the whippoorwill were
male and female of the same bird. I answered, of course, that they
were not, and gave, as I thought, abundant reason why such a thing
could not be possible. But I spoke as a scribe. "Well," remarked the
farmer, when I had finished my story, "some folks _say_ they be, but
I guess they _ain't_."
With such converse, then, we beguiled the climb to the "Brow,"--the
top of the cliffs which rim the summit of the mountain, and give it
from below a fortified look,--and at last, after an hour's further
drive through the dripping woods, came to the hotel at which I was to
put up--or with which I was to put up--during my stay on the Ridge.
I had hardly taken the road, the next morning, impatient to see
what this little world on a mountain top was like, before I came to
a lovely brook making its devious course among big boulders with
much pleasant gurgling, in the shadow of mountain laurel and white
azalea,--a place highly characteristic of Walden's Ridge, as I was
afterwards to learn. Just now, naturally, there was no stopping so
near home, though a Kentucky warbler, with his cool, liquid song, did
his best to beguile me; and I kept on my way, past a few houses, a
tiny box of a post-office, a rude church, and a few more houses, till
just beyond the last one the road dropped into the forest again, as
if for good. And there, all at once I seemed to be in New Hampshire.
The land fell away sharply, and at one particular point, through a
vista, the forest could be seen sloping down on either side to the
gap, beyond which, miles away, loomed a hill, and then, far, far in
the distance, high mountains dim with haze. It was like a note of
sublimity in a poem that till now had been only beautiful.