If they wish to see off, they must go to the Brow, which, by a
stroller's guess, may be two miles distant. My first visit to it
was the pleasanter--the more vacational, so to speak--for being an
accident. I sauntered aimlessly down the road, past the scattered
houses and orchards (the raising of early apples seemed to be a
leading industry on the Ridge, though a Chattanooga gentleman had
assured me that the principal crops were blackberries and rabbits),
and almost before I knew it, was in the same delightful woods that
had welcomed me wherever I had gone. And in the same woods the same
birds were singing. My notes make particular record of hooded and
Kentucky warblers, these being two of my newer acquaintances, as well
as two of the commoner Ridge songsters; but I halted for some time,
and with even a livelier interest, to listen to an old friend (no
acquaintance, if you please),--a black-throated green warbler. It was
one of the queerest of songs: a bar of five or six notes, uniform
in pitch, and then at once, in perfect form and voice,--the voice
being a main part of the music in the case of this warbler,--the
familiar _trees_, _trees_, _murmuring trees_. Where could the
fellow have picked up such a ditty? No doubt there was some story
connected with it. Nothing is born of itself. A dozen years ago, in
the Green Mountains,--at Bread-Loaf Inn,--I heard from the forest by
the roadside a song utterly strange, and hastened in search of its
author. After much furtive approach and diligent scanning of the
foliage, I had the bird under my opera-glass,--a black-throated blue
warbler! With my eye still upon him, he sang again and again, and
the song bore no faintest resemblance to the _kree_, _kree_, _kree_,
which all New England bird-lovers know as the work of _Dendroica
cærulescens_. In what private school he had been educated I have no
idea; but I believe that every such extreme eccentricity goes back to
something out of the common in the bird's early training.
I felt in no haste. Life is easy in the Tennessee mountains. A
pile of lumber, newly unloaded near the road,--in the woods, of
course,--offered a timely seat, and I took it. Some Chattanooga
gentleman was planning a summer cottage for himself, I gathered. May
he enjoy it for twenty years as much as I did for twenty minutes. Not
far beyond, near a fork in the road, a man of twenty-five or thirty,
a youth of sixteen or seventeen, and a small boy were playing marbles
in a cabin yard. I interrupted the sport long enough to inquire
which road I had better take. I was going nowhere in particular, I
explained, and wanted simply a pleasant stroll. "Then I would go
to the Brow, if I were you," said the man. "Keep a straight road.
It isn't far." I thanked him, and with a cheery "Come on!" to his
playmates he ran back, literally, to the ring. Yes, life is easy
in the Tennessee mountains. It is not to be assumed, nevertheless,
that the man was a do-nothing: probably he had struck work for a
few minutes only; but, like a sensible player, he was enjoying the
game while it lasted. Perhaps it is a certain inborn Puritanical
industriousness, against which I have never found the courage
effectually to rebel, that makes me look back upon this dooryard
comedy as one of the brightest incidents of my Tennessee vacation.
Fancy a Massachusetts farmer playing marbles at nine o'clock in the
forenoon!
At that moment, it must be owned, a rebuke of idleness would have
fallen with a poor grace from my Massachusetts lips. If the player of
marbles had followed his questioner round the first turn, he would
have seen him standing motionless beside a swamp, holding his head on
one side as if listening,--though there was nothing to be heard,--or
evoking ridiculous squeaking noises by sucking idiotically the back
of his hand. Well, I was trying to find another bird, just as he was
trying to knock another marble out of the ring.
The spot invited such researches,--a bushy swamp, quite unlike the
dry woods and rocky woodland brooks which I had found everywhere
else. I had seen my first cerulean warbler on Lookout Mountain, my
first Cape May warbler on Cameron Hill, my first Kentucky warbler
on Missionary Ridge, and my first blue-winged yellow warbler at the
Chickamauga battlefield. If Walden was to treat me equally well, as
in all fairness it ought, now was the time. Looking, listening, and
squeaking were alike unrewarded, however, till I approached the same
spot on my return. Then some bird sang a new song. I hoped it was a
prothonotary warbler, a bird I had never seen, and about whose notes
I knew nothing. More likely it was a Louisiana water-thrush, a bird
I had seen, but had never heard sing. Whichever it was, alas, it
speedily fell silent, and no beating of the bush proved of the least
avail.
Meanwhile I had been to the Brow, where I had sat for an hour or more
on the edge of the mountain, gazing down upon the world. The sky was
clouded, but here and there were fugitive patches of sunshine, now
on Missionary Ridge, now on the river, now glorifying the smoke of
the city. Southward, just across the valley and over Chattanooga,
was Lookout Mountain; eastward stretched Missionary Ridge, with
many higher hills behind it; and more to the north, and far in the
distance, loomed the Great Smoky Mountains, in all respects true
to their name. The valley at my feet was beautiful beyond words:
green forests interspersed with green clearings, lonely cabins,
and bare fields of red earth. At the north, Walden's Ridge made a
turn eastward, narrowing the valley, but without ending it. Chimney
swifts were cackling merrily, and the air was full of the hum of
seventeen-year locusts,--miles and miles of continuous sound. From
somewhere far below rose the tinkle of cow-bells. Even on that
cloudy and smoky day it was a glorious landscape; but it pleased me
afterward to remember that the eye returned of itself again and again
to a stretch of freshly green meadow along a slender watercourse,--a
valley within the valley. Of all the fair picture, that was the most
like home.
Meanwhile there was no forgetting that undiscovered stranger in the
swamp. Whoever he was, he must be made to show himself; and the
next day, when the usual noonday deluge was past, I looked at the
clouds, and said: "We shall have another, but in the interval I can
probably reach the Brow. There I will take shelter on the piazza of
an unoccupied cottage, and, when the rain is over, go back to the
swamp, see my bird, and thence return home." So it turned out--in
part. The clouds hurried me, but I reached the Brow just in season,
climbed the cottage fence, the gate being padlocked, and, thoroughly
heated as I was, paced briskly to and fro on the piazza in a chilling
breeze for an hour or more, the flood all the while threatening to
fall, and the thunder shaking the house. There was plenty to look at,
for the cottage faced the Great Smokies, and though we were under the
blackest of clouds, the landscape below was largely in the sun. The
noise of the locusts was incessant. Nothing but the peals of thunder
kept it out of my ears.
So far, then, my plans had prospered; but to find the mysterious
bird,--that was not so easy. The swamp was silent, and I was at once
so cold and so hot, and so badly under the weather already, that I
dared not linger.
In the woods, nevertheless, I stopped long enough to enjoy the
music of a master cardinal,--a bewitching song, and, as I thought,
original: _birdy_, _birdy_, repeated about ten times in the sweetest
of whistles, and then a sudden descent in the pitch, and the same
syllables over again. At that instant, a Carolina wren, as if
stirred to rivalry, sprang into a bush and began whistling _cherry_,
_cherry_, _cherry_ at his loudest and prettiest. It was a royal
duet. The cardinal was in magnificent plumage, and a scarlet tanager
near by was equally handsome. If the tanager could whistle like the
cardinal, our New England woods would have a bird to brag of.
Not far beyond these wayside musicians I came upon a boy sitting
beside a wood-pile, with his saw lying on the ground. "It is easier
to sit down than to saw wood, isn't it?" said I. Possibly he was
unused to such aphoristic modes of speech. He took time to consider.
Then he smiled, and said, "Yes, sir." The answer was all-sufficient.
We spoke from experience, both of us; and between men who _know_,
whatever the matter in hand, disagreement is impossible and
amplification needless.
Three days later--my last day on the Ridge--I had better luck at the
swamp. The stranger was singing on the nearer edge as I approached,
and I had simply to draw near and look at him,--a Louisiana
water-thrush. He sang, and I listened; and farther along, at the
little bridge where I had first heard the song, another like him was
in tune. The strain, as warbler songs go ("water-thrushes" being not
thrushes, but warblers), is rather striking,--clear, pretty loud,
of about ten notes, the first pair of which are longest and best.
I speak of what I heard, and give, of course, my own impression.
Audubon pronounces the notes "as powerful and mellow, and at times
as varied," as those of the nightingale, and Wilson waxes almost
equally enthusiastic in his praise of the "exquisitely sweet and
expressive voice." Here, as in Florida, I was interested to perceive
how instantly the bird's appearance and carriage distinguished it
from its Northern relative, although the descriptions of the two
species, as given in books, sound confusingly alike. It is matter for
thankfulness, perhaps, that language is not yet so all-expressive as
to render individual eyesight superfluous.
I kept on to the Brow, and some time afterward was at Mabbitt's
Spring, quenching my thirst with a draught of liquid iron rust, when
a third songster of the same kind struck up his tune. The spring,
spurting out of the rock in a slender jet, is beside the same
stream--Little Falling Water--that makes through the swamp; and along
its banks, it appeared, the water-thrushes were at home. I was glad
to have heard the famous singer, but my satisfaction was not without
alloy. Walden, after all, had failed to show me a new bird, though it
had given me a new song.
The most fatiguing, and perhaps the most interesting of my days on
the Ridge was the one day in which I did not travel on foot. Passing
through the village, on my return from one of my earlier visits to
Falling Water, I stopped a nice-looking man (if he will pardon the
expression, copied from my notes), driving a horse with a pair of
clothes-line reins. He had an air of being at home, and naturally I
took him for a native. Would he tell me something about the country,
especially about the roads, so that I might improve my scanty time
to the best advantage? Very gladly, he answered. He had walked and
driven over the mountain a good deal, surveying, and if I would call
at his house, a short distance down the road,--the house with the big
barn,--he would make me a rough map, such as would answer my purpose.
At the same time he mentioned two or three shorter excursions which
I ought not to miss; and when I had thanked him for his kindness, he
gathered up the reins and drove on. Intending no disrespect to the
inhabitants of the Ridge, I may perhaps be allowed to say that I was
considerably impressed by a certain unexpected propriety, and even
elegance, of diction, on the part of my new acquaintance. I remember
in particular his description of a pleasant cold spring as being
situated not far from the "confluence" of two streams. _Con-fluens_,
I thought, flowing together. Having always something else to do, I
omitted to call at his house, and one day, when we met again in the
road, I apologized for my neglect, and asked another favor. He was
familiar with the country, and kept a horse. Could he not spare a day
to take me about? If he thought this proposal a bit presumptuous,
courtesy restrained him from letting the fact be seen, and, after a
few minutes of deliberation,--his hands being pretty full just then,
he explained,--he promised to call for me two mornings later, at
seven o'clock. We would take a luncheon along, and make a day of it.
He appeared at the gate in due season, and in a few minutes we were
driving over a road new to me, but through the same spacious oak
woods to which I had grown accustomed. We went first to Burnt Cabin
Spring, one of the famous chalybeate springs of the mountain,--a
place formerly frequented by picnic parties, but now, to all
appearance, fallen into neglect. We stretched our legs, drank of the
water, admired the flowers and ferns, talking all the while (it was
here that my companion told a story of a young theologian from Grant
University, who, in a solemn discourse, spoke repeatedly of Jacob as
having "euchred his brother out of his birthright"), and then, while
a "pheasant" drummed near by, took our places again in the buggy.
Another stage, still through the oak woods, and we were at Signal
Point, famous--in local tradition, at least--as the station from
which General Sherman signaled encouragement to the Union army
beleaguered in Chattanooga, in danger of starvation or surrender.
I had looked at the bold, jutting crags from Lookout Mountain and
elsewhere, and rejoiced at last to stand upon them.
It would have been delightful to spend a long day there, lying
upon the cliffs and enjoying the prospect, which, without being so
far-reaching as from Point Lookout, or even from the eastern brim
of Walden, is yet extensive and surpassingly beautiful. The visitor
is squarely above the river, which here, in the straitened valley
between the Ridge and Raccoon Mountain, grows narrower and narrower
till it rushes through the "Suck." Even at that elevation we could
hear the roar of the rapids. A short distance above the Suck, and
almost at our feet, lay Williams Island. A farmer's Eden it looked,
with its broad, newly planted fields, and its house surrounded by
out-buildings and orchard-trees. The view included Chattanooga,
Missionary Ridge, and much else; but its special charm was its
foreground, the part peculiar to itself,--the valley, the river,
and Raccoon Mountain. Along the river-banks were small clearings,
each with its one cabin, and generally a figure or two ploughing or
planting. A man in a strangely long boat--a dugout, probably--was
making his difficult way upstream with a paddle. The Tennessee, in
the neighborhood of Chattanooga, at all events, is too swift for
pleasure-boating. Seen from above, as I commonly saw it, it looked
tranquil enough; but when I came down to its edge, now and then, the
speed and energetic sweep of the smooth current laid fast hold upon
me. From the mountains to the sea is a long, long journey, and no
wonder the river felt in haste.
I had gone to Signal Point not as an ornithologist, but as a patriot
and a lover of beauty; but, being there, I added one to my list of
Tennessee birds,--a red-tailed hawk, one of the very few hawks seen
in all my trip. Sailing below us, it displayed its rusty, diagnostic
tail, and put its identity at once beyond question.
Our next start--far too speedy, for the day was short--was for
Williams Point; but on our way thither we descended into the valley
of Shoal Creek, down which, with the creek to keep it company, runs
the old mountain road, now disused and practically impassable. Here
we hitched the horse, and strolled downwards for perhaps half a mile.
I was never in a lovelier spot. The mountain brook, laughing over
the stones, is overhung with laurel and rhododendron, which in turn
are overhung by precipitous rocks broken into all wild and romantic
shapes, with here and there a cavern--"rock-house"--to shelter a
score of travelers. The place was rich in ferns and other plants,
which, unhappily, I had no time to examine, and all the particulars
of which have faded out of my memory. We walked far enough to look
over the edge of the mountain, and up to the Signal Point cliffs. If
I could have stayed there two or three hours, it would have been a
memorable season. As it was, the stroll was enlivened by one little
adventure, at which I have laughed too many times ever to forget it.
I had been growing rapturous over the beauty of things, when my
companion said, "There are some people whom it is no pleasure to take
into places like this. They can't keep their eyes off the ground,
they are so bitten with the fear of snakes." He was a few paces ahead
of me, as he spoke, and the sentence was barely finished before he
shouted, "Look at that huge snake!" and sprang forward to snatch up
a stone. "Get a stick!" he cried. "Get a stick!" From his manner I
took it for granted that the creature was a rattlesnake, and a glance
at it, lying motionless among the stones beside the road, did not
undeceive me. I turned hurriedly, looking for a stick, but somehow
could not find one, and in a moment more was recalled by shouts of
"Come and help me! It will get away from us!" It was a question of
life and death, I thought, and I ran forward and began throwing
stones. "Look out! Look out! You'll bury it!" cried my companion;
but just then one of my shots struck the snake squarely in the head.
"That's a good one!" exclaimed the other man, and, picking up a dead
stick, he thrust it under the disabled creature and tossed it into
the road. Then he bent over it, and, with a stone, pounded its head
to a jelly. Such a fury as possessed him! He might have been bruising
the head of Satan himself, as no doubt he was--in his mind; for my
surveyor was also a preacher, as had already transpired.
"It isn't a venomous snake, is it?" I ventured to ask, when the work
was done.
"Oh, I think not," and he pried open its jaws to look for its fangs.
"I don't generally kill innocent snakes," I ventured again, a little
inopportunely, it must be confessed.
"Well, _I_ do," said the preacher. "The very sight of a snake stirs
my hatred to its depths."
After that it was natural to inquire whether he often saw
rattlesnakes hereabouts. (The driver who brought me up the mountain
had said that they were not common, but that I "wanted to look out
sharp for them in the woods.") My companion had never seen one, he
answered, but his wife had once killed one in their dooryard. Then,
by way of cooling off, after the fervor of the conflict, he told
me about a gentleman and his little boy, who, having come to spend
a vacation on the Ridge, started out in the morning for a stroll.
They were quickly back again, and the boy, quite out of breath, came
running into the garden.
"Oh, Mr. M.," he cried, "we saw a rattlesnake, and papa fired off his
pistol!"
"A rattlesnake! Where is it? What did it look like?"
"Why, we didn't see it, but we heard it."
"What was the noise like?" asked Mr. M., and he took a pencil from
his pocket and began tapping on a log.
"That's it!" said the boy, "that's it!"
They had heard a woodpecker drilling for grubs,--or drumming for
love,--whereupon the man had fired his pistol, and for them there was
no more walking in the woods.
After our ramble along Shoal Creek we rested at the ford, near a
brilliant show of laurel and rhododendron, and ate our luncheon to
the music of the stream. I finished first, as my evil habit is, and
was crossing the brook on natural stepping-stones when a bird--a
warbler of some unknown kind--saluted me from the thicket. Making my
companion a signal not to disturb us by driving into the stream, I
gave myself up to discovering the singer; edging this way and that,
while the fellow moved about also, always unseen, and sang again and
again, now a louder song, now, with charming effect, a quieter and
briefer one, till I was almost as badly beside myself as the preacher
had been half an hour before. But my warfare was less successful than
his, for, with all my pains, I saw not so much as a feather. There
is nothing prettier than a jungle of laurel and rhododendron in full
bloom, but there are many easier places in which to make out a bird.
Williams Point, which we reached on foot, after driving as near it
as the roughness of the unfrequented road would comfortably allow,
is not in itself equal to Signal Point, but affords substantially
the same magnificent prospect. Near it, in the woods, stood a newly
built cabin, looking badly out of place with its glaring unweathered
boards; and beside the cabin stood a man and woman in a condition of
extreme disgust. The man had come up the mountain to work in some
coal-mine, if I understood him correctly; but the tools were not
ready, there was no water, his household goods were stranded down
in the valley somewhere (the hens were starving to death, the woman
added), and, all in all, the pair were in a sorry plight.
Here, as at Signal Point, I made an addition to my local ornithology,
and this time too the bird was a hawk. We were standing on the edge
of the cliff, when a sparrow hawk, after alighting near us, took wing
and hung for some time suspended over the abyss, beating against the
breeze, and so holding itself steady,--a graceful piece of work,
the better appreciated for being seen from above. Here, also, for
the first time in my life, I was addressed as a "you-un." "Where
be you-uns from?" asked the woman at the cabin, after the ordinary
greetings had been exchanged. I believe, in my innocence, I had
always looked upon that word as an invention of story-writers.
Somewhere in this neighborhood we traversed a pine wood, in which
my first Walden pine warbler was trilling. Then, for some miles, we
drove along the Brow, with the glory of the world--valley, river,
and mountain--outspread before us, and the Great Smokies looming in
the background, barely visible through the haze. For seven miles, I
was told, one could drive along that mountain rim. Surely the city
of Chattanooga is happy in its suburbs. Here were many cottages, the
greater number as yet unopened; and not far beyond the one under
the piazza of which I had weathered the thunderstorm of the day
before, the road entered the forest again. Then, as the way grew
more and more difficult, we left the horse behind us, and by and by
came to a foot-path. This brought us at last to Falling Water Fall,
where Little Falling Water--after threading the swamp and passing
Mabbitt's Spring, as before described--tumbles over a precipice
which my companion, with his surveyor's eye, estimated to be one
hundred and fifty feet in height. The slender stream, broken into
jewels as it falls, strikes the bottom at some distance from the
foot of the cliffs, which here form the arc of a circle, and are
not perpendicular, but deeply hollowed. After enjoying the prospect
from this point,--holding to a tree and leaning over the edge of the
rocks,--we retraced our steps till we came to a steep, zigzag path,
which took us to the foot of the precipice. Here, as well as above,
were laurel and rhododendron in profusion. One big rhododendron-tree
grew on the face of the cliff, thirty feet over our heads, leaning
outward, and bearing at least fifty clusters of gorgeous rose-purple
flowers; and a smaller one, in a similar position, was equally full.
The hanging gardens of Babylon may have been more wonderful, but I
was well content.
From the point where we stood the ledge makes eastward for a long
distance, almost at right angles, and the cliffs for a mile--or,
more likely, for two or three miles--were straight before us, broken
everywhere into angles, light gray and reddish-brown intermixed, with
the late afternoon sun shining full upon them, and the green forest
fringing them above and sweeping away from them below.
It was a breathless clamber up the rocks again, tired and poorly off
as I was, but I reached the top with one hand full of rhododendrons
(it seemed a shame to pick them, and a shame to leave them), and in
half an hour we were driving homeward, our day's work done; while my
seatmate, who, besides being preacher, lawyer, surveyor, and farmer,
was also a mystic and a saint,--though he would have refused the
word,--fell into a strain of reminiscence, appropriate to the hour,
about the inner life of the soul, its hopes, its struggles, and its
joys. I listened in reverent silence. The passion for perfection is
not yet so common as to have become commonplace, and one need not be
certain of a theory in order to admire a practice. He had already
told me who his father was, and I had ceased to wonder at his using
now and then a choice phrase.