Part 11

This song, which the reader will perhaps blame me for trying thus to analyze (I shall not blame _him_), very soon grew to be almost a part of the glen; so that I never recall the brook and the cliffs without seeming to hear it rising clear and sweet above the brawling of the current; and when I hear it, I can see the birds flitting up or down the creek, just in advance of me, with sharp _chips_ of alarm or displeasure; now balancing uneasily on a boulder in mid-stream (a posterior bodily fluctuation, half graceful, half comical, slanderously spoken of as teetering) and singing a measure or two, now taking to an overhanging branch, sometimes at a considerable height, for the same tuneful purpose. One acrobatic fellow, I remember, walked for some distance along the seemingly perpendicular face of the cliff, slipping now and then on the wet surface and having to “wing it” for a space, yet still pausing at short intervals to let out a song. In truth, the happy creatures were just then brimming over with music; and if I seem to praise their efforts but grudgingly, it is to be said, on the other hand, in justice to the song and to myself, that my appreciation of it grew as the days passed. Whatever else might be true of it, it was the voice of the place.

Of birds beside the rough-wings and the water thrushes there were surprisingly few in the glen, though, to be sure, there may well have been many more than I found trace of. The splashing of a mountain brook is very pleasing music,--more pleasing, in itself considered, than the great majority of bird-songs, perhaps,--but an ornithological hobbyist may easily have too much of it. I call to mind how increasingly vexatious, and at last all but intolerable, a turbulent Vermont stream (a branch of Wait’s River) became to me, some years ago, as it followed my road persistently mile after mile in the course of a May vacation. One gets on the track of the smaller birds through hearing their faint calls in the bushes and treetops; and how was I to catch such indispensable signals with this everlasting uproar in my ears? So it was here in Cedar Creek ravine; it would have to be a pretty loud voice to be heard above the din of the hurrying water. And the birds, on their side, had something of the same difficulty; or so I judged from the unconventional behavior of a blue yellow-backed warbler that flitted through the hanging branches of a tree within a few inches of my hat, having plainly no suspicion of a human being’s proximity. The tufted titmouse could be heard, of course. He would make a first-rate auctioneer, it seemed to me, with his penetrating, indefatigable voice and his genius for repetition. Now and then, too, I caught the sharp, sermonizing tones of a red-eyed vireo. Once an oven-bird near me mounted a tree hastily, branch by branch, and threw himself from the top for a burst of his afternoon medley; and at the bridge a phœbe sat calling. These, with a pair of cardinal grosbeaks, were all the birds I saw in the glen during my first day’s visit.

In fact, I had the place pretty nearly to myself, not only on this first day, but for the entire week. Once in a great while a human visitor was encountered, but for the most part I went up and down the path with no disturbance to my meditations. Happily for me, the Bridge was now in its dull season. Many tourists had been here. The trunks of the older trees, the beeches especially, were scarred thickly with inglorious initials, some of them so far from the ground that the authors of them must have stood on one another’s shoulders in their determination to get above the crowd. (In work of this kind an inch or two makes all the difference between renown and obscurity.) The fact was emblematic, I thought. So do men hoist and boost themselves into fame, not only in Cedar Creek ravine, but in the “great world,” as we call it, outside. Who so lowly-minded as not to believe that he could make a name for himself if only he had a step-ladder? At the arch, likewise, such autographers had been busy ever since Washington’s day. I peeped into a crevice to obtain a closer view of a tiny fern, and there before me was a penciled name, invisible till I came thus near to it. One of the meek the writer must have been; a lead pencil, and so fine a hand! Dumphy of New Orleans. Why should I not second his modest bid for immortality? A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. By all means let Dumphy of New Orleans be remembered.

As for Washington’s “G. W.,” the letters are said to be still decipherable by those who know exactly where to look and exactly what to look for; but I can testify to nothing of myself. I was told where the initials were; one was much plainer than the other, my informant said,--which seemed to imply that one of them, at least, was more or less a matter of faith; he would go down with me some day and point them out; but the hour convenient to both of us never came, and so, although I almost always spent a minute or two in the search as I passed under the arch, I never detected them or anything that I could even imagine to stand for them. I have had experience enough of such things, however, to be aware that my failure proves nothing as against the witness of other men’s eyesight. Certainly I know of no ground for doubting that Washington cut his initials on the cliff; and if he did, it seems reasonable to believe that tradition would have preserved a knowledge of the place, and so have made it possible to find them now in all their inevitable indistinctness after so long an exposure to the wear of the elements. Neither do I esteem it anything but a natural and worthy curiosity for the visitor to wish to see them; and I may add my hope that all young men who are destined to achieve Washington’s measure of distinction will cut their names large and deep in every such wall, for the benefit of future generations. As for the rest of us, if we must scratch our names in stone or carve them on the bark of trees, let us seek some sequestered nook, where the sight of our doings will neither be an offense to others nor make of ourselves a laughing-stock.

I have said that I discovered Dumphy of New Orleans while leaning against the cliff to peer into a crevice in search of a diminutive fern. This fern was of much interest to me, being nothing less than the wall-rue spleenwort (_Asplenium Ruta-muraria_), for which I had looked without success in years past on the limestone cliffs of northern Vermont, at Willoughby and elsewhere. The fronds, stipe and all, last-year plants in full fruit, were less than three inches in length. Another fern, one size larger, but equally new and interesting, was the purple-stemmed cliff-brake (_Pellæa atropurpurea_), which also had eluded my search in its New England habitat. Both these rarities (plants which will grow only on limestone cannot easily be degraded into commonness) I could have gathered here in moderate numbers, but of course collecting is not permitted; in the nature of the case it cannot be, in a spot so frequented by curiosity-seekers. It was pleasure enough for me, at any rate, to see them.

Along the bottom of the ravine I had remarked a profusion of a strikingly beautiful larger fern (but still “smallish,” as my pencil says), with showy red stems and a most graceful curving or drooping habit. This I could not make out for a time; but it proved to be, as I soon began to suspect, _Cystopteris bulbifera_, to my thinking one of the loveliest of all things that grow. I had seen it abundant at Willoughby, Vermont, and at Owl’s Head, Canada, ten years before; but either my memory was playing me a trick, or there was here a very considerable diminution in the length of the fronds, accompanied by a decided heightening in the color of the stalk and rhachis. Before long, however, I found a specimen already beginning to show its bulblets, and these, with a study of Dr. Eaton’s description, left me in no doubt as to the plant’s identity.

What other ferns may have been growing in the ravine I cannot now pretend to say. I remember the Christmas fern, a goodly supply of the dainty little _Asplenium trichomanes_, and tufts of what I took with reasonable certainty for _Cystopteris fragilis_ in its early spring stage, than which few things can be more graceful. On the upper edge of the ravine, when I left the place one day by following a maze of zigzag cattle-paths up the steep slope, and found myself, to my surprise, directly in the rear of the hotel, I came upon a dense patch of a smallish, very narrow, dark-stemmed fern, new to my eyes,--the hairy lip-fern, so called (_Cheilanthes vestita_). These fronds, too, like those of the cliff-brake and the wall-rue spleenwort, were of last year’s growth, thickly covered on the back with brown “fruit-dots,” and altogether having much the appearance of dry herbarium specimens; but they were good to look at, nevertheless. Here, as in the case of _Pellæa atropurpurea_, it was a question not only of a new species, but of a new genus.

From my account of the scarcity of birds in Cedar Creek ravine the reader will have already inferred, perhaps, that I did not spend my days there, great as were its botanical attractions. My last morning’s experience at Pulaski, the evidence there seen that the vernal migration was at full tide, or near it, had brought on a pretty acute attack of ornithological fever,--a spring disease which I am happy to believe has become almost an epidemic in some parts of the United States within recent years,--and not even the sight of new ferns and new flowers could allay its symptoms. I had counted upon finding a similar state of things here,--all the woods astir with wings. Instead of that, I found the fields alive with chipping sparrows, the air full of chimney swifts, the shade trees in front of the hotel vocal with goldfinch notes, and, comparatively speaking, nothing else. By the end of the second day I was fast becoming disconsolate. “No birds here,” I wrote in my journal. “I have tried woods of all sorts. A very few parula warblers, two or three red-eyed vireos, one yellow-throated vireo, seven Louisiana water thrushes in the glen, one prairie warbler, and a few oven-birds! No Bewick wrens. Two purple finches and one or two phœbes have been the only additions to my Virginia list.” A pitiful tale. Vacations are short and precious, and it goes hard with us to see them running to waste.

The next evening (May 3) it was the same story continued. “It is marvelous, the difference between this beautiful place, diversified with fields and woods,--hardwood, cedar, pine,--it is marvelous, the difference between this heavenly spot and Pulaski in the matter of birds. There I registered six new arrivals in half an hour Wednesday morning; here I have made but six additions to my list in two full days. There is scarcely a sign of warbler migration. Was it that in Pulaski the woods were comparatively small, and the birds had to congregate in them? Or does Pulaski lie in a route of migration?” Wild surmises, both of them; but wisdom is not to be looked for in a fever patient.

“Six additions in two full days,” I wrote; but the second day was not yet full. As evening came on I went out to stand awhile upon the bridge; and while I listened to the brawling of the creek and admired the beautiful scene below me, the moon shining straight down upon it, a night-hawk called from the sky, and afterward--not from the sky--a whippoorwill. Here, then, were two more names for my catalogue; but even so,--six or eight,--it was a beggarly rate of increase in such a favored spot and in the very nick of the season. The “six additions,” it may ease the reader’s curiosity to know, were the Carolina wren, the summer tanager, the purple finch, the indigo bunting, the blue-gray gnatcatcher, and the phœbe.

One compensation there was for the ornithological barrenness of these first few days: I had the more leisure for botany. And the hours were not thrown away, although at the time I was almost ready to think they were, with so many of them devoted to ransacking the Manual; for a man who does not collect specimens to carry home with him must, as it were, drive his field work and his closet work abreast; he must study out his findings as he goes along. On the evening of the second day, for example, I wrote in my journal thus,--the final entry under that date, as the reader may guess: “In bed. Strange how we flatter ourselves with a knowledge of names. I have spent much time to-day looking up the names of flowers and ferns, and somehow feel as if I had learned something in so doing. Really, however, I have learned only that some one else has seen the things before me, and called them so and so. At best that is _nearly_ all I have learned.” But after setting down the results of my investigations, especially of those having to do with the pretty draba and the bulbiferous fern, I concluded in a less positive strain: “Well, the hunt for names does quicken observation and help to relate and classify things.” That was a qualification well put in. The whole truth was never written on one side of the leaf. If _all_ our botany were Latin names, as Emerson says, we should have little to boast of; yet even that would be one degree better than nothing, as Emerson himself felt when he visited a museum and saw the cases of shells. “I was hungry for names,” he remarks; and so have all men of intelligence been since the day of the first systematic, name-conferring naturalist, the man who dwelt in Eden. Let us be thankful for manuals, I say, that offer on easy terms a speaking acquaintance, if nothing more, with the world of beauty about us. Things take their value from comparison, and my own ignorance was but a little while ago so absolute that now I am proud to know so much as a name.

Meanwhile, to come back to Natural Bridge, I had found the country of a most engaging sort. In truth, while the bridge itself is the “feature” of the place, as we speak in these days, it is by no means its only, or, as I should say, its principal attraction, so far, at least, as a leisurely visit is concerned. A man may see it and go,--as most tourists do; but if he stays, he will find that the region round about not only has charms of its own, but is one of the prettiest he has ever set eyes on; and that, I should think, though he be neither a botanist, nor an ornithologist, nor any other kind of natural historian. For myself, at all events, I had already come to that conclusion, notwithstanding I had yet to see some of the most beautiful parts of the country, and was, besides, far too much concerned about the birds (the absentees in particular) and the flowers to have quieted down to any adequate appreciation of the general landscape. I have never yet learned to see a prospect on the first day, or while in the eager expectation of new things, although, like every one else, I can exclaim with a measure of shallow sincerity, “Beautiful! beautiful!” even at the first moment.

As my mood now was, at any rate, fine scenery did not satisfy me; and on the morning of May 4, after two days and a half of botanical surfeit and ornithological starvation, I packed my trunk preparatory to going elsewhere. First, however, I would try the woods once more, if perchance something might have happened overnight. Otherwise, so I informed the landlord, I would return in season for an early luncheon, and should expect to be driven to the station for the noon train northward.

I went to a promising-looking hill covered with hardwood forest, a spot already visited more than once,--Buck Hill I heard it called afterward,--and was no sooner well in the woods than it became evident that something _had_ happened. The treetops were swarming with birds, and I had my hands full with trying to see and name them. Old trees are grand creations,--among the noblest works of God, I often think; but for a bird-gazer they have one disheartening drawback, especially when, as now, the birds not only take to the topmost boughs (even the hummer and the magnolia warbler, so my notes say, went with the multitude to do evil), but, to make matters worse, are on the move northward or southward, or flitting in simple restlessness from hill to hill. However, I did my best with them while the fun lasted. Then all in a moment they were gone, though I did not see them go; and nothing was left but the wearisome iterations of oven-birds and red-eyes where just now were so many singers and talkers, among which, for aught I could tell, there might have been some that it would have been worth the price of a long vacation to scrape even a treetop acquaintance with.

Indeed, it was certain that one member of the flock was a rarity, if not an absolute novelty. That was the most exciting and by all odds the most deplorable incident of the whole affair. I had obtained several glimpses of him, but had been unable to determine his identity; a warbler, past all reasonable doubt, with pure white under parts (the upper parts quite invisible) except for a black or blackish line, barely made out, across the lower throat or the upper breast. He, of course, had vanished with the rest, the more was the pity. I had made a guess at him, to be sure; it is a poor naturalist who cannot do as much as that (but a really good naturalist would “form a hypothesis,” I suppose) under almost any circumstances. I had called him a cerulean warbler. Once in my life I had seen a bird of that species, but only for a minute. If he wore a black breast-band, I did not see it, or else had forgotten it. If I could only have had a look at this fellow’s back and wings! As it was, I was not likely ever to _know_ him, though the printed description would either demolish or add a degree of plausibility to my offhand conjecture.

The better course, after losing a bevy of wanderers in this way, is perhaps to remain where one is and await the arrival of another detachment of the migratory host. This advice, or something like it, I seem to remember having read, at all events; but I have never schooled myself to such a pitch of quietism. For a time, indeed, I could not believe that the birds _were_ lost, and must hunt the hilltop over in the hope of another chance at them. An empty hope. So I did what I always do: the game having flown, I took my own departure also. I should not find the same flock again, but with good luck--which now it was easy to expect--I might find another; and except for the single mysterious stranger, that would be better still. One thing I was sure of,--Natural Bridge was not to be left out of the warbler migration; and one thing I forgot entirely,--that I had planned to leave it by the noonday train.

My useless chase over the broad hilltop had brought me to the side opposite the one by which I had ascended, and to save time, as I persuaded myself, I plunged down, as best I could, without a trail,--a piece of expensive economy, almost of course. In the first place, this haphazardous descent took me longer than it would have done to retrace my steps; and in the second place, I was compelled for much of the distance to force my way through troublesome underbrush, in doing which I made of necessity--being a white man--no little noise, and so was the less likely to hear the note of any small bird, or to come close upon him without putting him to flight. In general, let the bird-gazer keep to the path, except in open woods, or as some specific errand may lead him away from it. In one way and another, nevertheless, I got down at last, and after beating over a piece of pine wood, with little or no result, I crossed a field and a road, and entered a second tract of hardwood forest.

The trees were comfortably low, with much convenient shrubbery, and after a little, seeing myself at the centre of things, as it were, I dropped into a seat and allowed the birds to gather about me. At my back was a bunch of white-throated sparrows. From the same quarter a chat whistled now and then, and white-breasted nuthatches and a Carolina chickadee did likewise, the last with a noticeable variation in his tune, which had dwindled to three notes. Here, as on the hill I had just left, wood pewees and Acadian flycatchers announced themselves, in tones so dissimilar as to suggest no hint of blood relationship. The wood pewee is surely the gentleman of the family, so far as the voice may serve as an indication of character. In dress and personal appearance he is a flycatcher of the flycatchers; but what a contrast between his soft, plaintive, exquisitely modulated whistle, the very expression of refinement, and the wild, rasping, over-emphatic vociferations that characterize the family in general! The more praise to him. The Acadians seemed to have come northward in a body. Nothing had been seen or heard of them before, but from this morning they abounded in all directions. In a single night they had taken possession of the woods. Here was the first Canadian warbler of the season, singing from a perch so uncommonly elevated (he is a lover of bushy thickets rather than of trees) that for a time it did not come to me who he was,--so exceedingly earnest and voluble. A black-throated blue warbler almost brushed my elbow. Redstarts were never so splendid, I thought, the white of the dogwood blossoms, now in their prime, setting off the black and orange of the birds in a most brilliant manner, as was true also of the deep vermilion of the summer tanager. A Blackburnian warbler, whose flame-colored throat needs no setting but its own, had fallen into a lyrical mood very unusual for him, and sang almost continuously for at least half an hour,--a poor little song in a thin little voice, but full of pleasant suggestions in every note. The first Swainson thrush was present, with no companion of his own kind, so far as appeared. I prolonged my stay on purpose to hear him sing, but was obliged to content myself with the sight of him and the sound of his sweet, quick whistle.

All the while, as I watched one favorite another would come between us. Once it was a humming-bird, a bit of animate beauty that must always be attended to; and once, when the place had of a sudden fallen silent, and I had taken out a book, I was startled by a flash of white among the branches,--a red-headed woodpecker, in superb color, new for the year, and on all accounts welcome. He remained for a time in silence, and then in silence departed (he had been almost too near me before he knew it); but having gone, he began a little way off to play the tree-frog for my amusement. After him a hairy woodpecker made his appearance, with sharp, peremptory signals, highly characteristic; and then, from some point near by, a rose-breasted grosbeak’s _hic_ was heard.

It was high noon before I was done with “receiving” (one of the prettiest “functions” of the year, though none of the newspapers got wind of it), and returned to the hotel, where the landlord smiled when I told him that some friends of mine had arrived, and I should stay a few days longer.

II