Part 12

My enjoyment of the country about the Bridge may be said to have begun with my settling down for a more leisurely stay. Hurry and discontent are poor helps to appreciation. That afternoon, the morning having been devoted to ornithological excitements, I strolled over to Mount Jefferson, and spent an hour in the observatory, where a delicious breeze was blowing. The “mountain” proved to be nothing more than a round grassy hilltop,--the highest point in a sheep-pasture,--but it offered, nevertheless, a wide and charming prospect: mountains near and far, a world of green hills, with here and there a level stretch, most restful to the eye, of the James River valley, in the great Valley of Virginia. Up from the surrounding field came the tinkle of sheep-bells, and down in one corner of it young men were slowly gathering, some in wagons, some on horseback, for a game of ball. There was to be a “match” that “evening,” I had been told, between the Bridge nine (I am sorry not to remember its name) and the Buena Vistas. It turned out, however, so I learned the next day, that a supposed case of smallpox at Buena Vista had made such an interchange of athletic courtesies inexpedient for the time being, and the Bridge men were obliged to be content with a trial of skill among themselves, for which they chose up (“picked off”) after the usual fashion, the two leaders deciding which should have the first choice by the old Yankee test of grasping a bat alternately hand over hand, till one of them should be able to cover the end of it with his thumb. Such things were pleasant to hear of. I accepted them as of patriotic significance, tokens of national unity. My informant, by the way, was the same man, a young West Virginian, who had told me where to look for Washington’s initials on the wall of the bridge. My specialties appealed to him in a measure, and he confessed that he wished he were a botanist. He was always very fond of flowers. His side had been victorious in the ball game, he said, in answer to my inquiry. Some of the players must have come from a considerable distance, it seemed, as there was no sign of a village or even of a hamlet, so far as I had discovered, anywhere in the neighborhood. The Bridge is not in any township, but simply in Rockbridge County, after a Virginia custom quite foreign to a New Englander’s notions of geographical propriety.

The prospect from Mount Jefferson was beautiful, as I have said, but on my return I happened upon one that pleased me better. I had been down through Cedar Creek ravine, and had taken my own way out, up the right-hand slope through the woods, noting the flowers as I walked, especially the blue-eyed grass and the scarlet catchfly (battlefield pink), a marvelous bit of color, and was following the edge of the cliff toward the hotel, when, finding myself still with time to spare, I sat down to rest and be quiet. By accident I chose a spot where between ragged, homely cedars I looked straight down the glen--over a stretch of the brook far below--to the bridge, through which could be seen wooded hills backed by Thunder Mountain, long and massive, just now mostly in shadow, like the rest of the world, but having its lower slopes touched with an exquisite half-light, which produced a kind of prismatic effect upon the freshly green foliage. It was an enchanting spectacle and a delightful hour. Now my eye settled upon the ravine and the brook, now upon the arch of the bridge, now upon the hills beyond. And now, as I continued to look, the particulars fell into place,--dropping in a sense out of sight,--and the scene became one. By and by the light increased upon the broad precipitous face of the mountain, softness and beauty inexpressible, while the remainder of the landscape lay in deep shadow.

I fell to wondering, at last, what it is that constitutes the peculiar attractiveness of a limited view--limited in breadth, not in depth--as compared with a panorama of half the horizon. The only answer I gave myself was that, for the supreme enjoyment of beauty, the eye must be at rest, satisfied, with no temptation to wander. We are finite creatures with infinite desires. The sight must go far,--to the rim of the world, or to some grand interposing object so remote as to be of itself a natural and satisfying limit of vision; and the eye must be held to that point, not by a distracting exercise of the will, but by the quieting constraint of circumstances.

Let my theorizing be true or false, I greatly enjoyed the picture; the deep, dark, wooded ravine, with the line of water running through it lengthwise, the magnificent stone arch, the low hills in the middle distance, and Thunder Mountain a background for the whole. The mountain, as has been said, was a long ridge, not a peak; and sharp as it looked from this point of view, it was very likely flat at the top. Like Lookout Mountain and Walden’s Ridge, it might, for anything I knew, be roomy enough to hold one or two Massachusetts counties upon its summit. While I sat gazing at it the sun went down and left it of a deep sombre blue. Then, of a sudden, a small heron flew past, and a pileated woodpecker somewhere behind me set up a prolonged and lusty shout; and a few minutes later I was startled to see between me and the sunset sky a flock of six big herons flying slowly in single file, like so many pelicans. From their size they should have been _Ardea herodias_, but in that light there was no telling of colors. It was a ghostly procession, so silent and unexpected, worthy of the place and of the hour. I was beginning to feel at home. A wood thrush sang for me as I continued my course to the hotel, and my spirit sang with him. “I’m glad I am alive,” my pencil wrote of its own accord at the end of the day’s jottings.

I woke the next morning to the lively music of a whippoorwill,--the same, I suppose, that had sung me to sleep the evening before. He performed that service faithfully as long as I remained at the Bridge, and always to my unmixed satisfaction. Whippoorwills are among my best birds, and of recent years I have had too little of them. Immediately after breakfast I must go again to the roadside wood, and then to Buck Hill, as a dog must go again to bark under a tree up which he has once driven a cat or a squirrel. But there is no duplicating of experiences. The birds--the flocks of travelers--were not there. Chats were calling _ceow, ceow_, with the true countryman’s twang; and what was much better, a Swainson thrush was singing. Better still, a pair of blue yellow-backed warblers (the most abundant representatives of the family thus far) had begun the construction of a nest in a black-walnut-tree, suspending it from a rather large branch (“as big as my thumb”) at a height of perhaps twenty feet. It was little more than a frame as yet, the light shining through it everywhere; and the bird, perhaps because of my presence, seemed in no haste about its completion. I saw her bring what looked like a piece of lichen and adjust it into place (though she carried it elsewhere first--with wonderful slyness!), but my patience gave out before she came back with a second one.

On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence of birds, I amused myself with a “dry land tarrapin,” as my West Virginia acquaintance had called it (otherwise known as a box turtle), a creature which I had seen several times in my wanderings, and had asked him about; a new species to me, of a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and curious for its habit of shutting itself up in its case when disturbed, the anterior third of the lower shell being jointed for that purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed to be; looking at me with dull, unspeculative eyes, and sometimes responding to a pretty violent nudge with only a partial closing of its lid. It is very fond of may apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really one of the “features” of the dry hill woods. I ran upon it continually.

A lazy afternoon jaunt over a lonely wood road, untried before, yielded little of mentionable interest except the sight of a blue grosbeak budding the upper branches of a tree in the manner of a purple finch or a rose-breast. I call him a blue grosbeak, as I called him at the time; but he went into my book that evening with a damnatory question mark attached to his name. He had been rather far away and pretty high; and the possibilities of error magnified themselves on second thought, till I said to myself, “Well, he may have been an indigo-bird, after all.” Second thought is the mother of uncertainty; and uncertainties are poor things for a man’s comfort. The seasons were met here; for even while I busied myself with the blue grosbeak (as he pretty surely was, for all my want of assurance) a crossbill flew over with loud calls.

In the same place I heard a tremendous hammering a little on one side of me, so vigorous a piece of work that I was persuaded the workman could be nobody but a pileated woodpecker. A long time I stood with my gaze fastened upon the tree from which the noise seemed to come. Would the fellow never show himself? Yes, he put his head out from behind a limb at last (what a fiery crest!), saw me on the instant, and was gone like a flash. Then from a little distance he set up a resounding halloo. This was only the second time that birds of his kind had been seen hereabout, but the voice had been heard daily, and more than once I had noticed what I could have no doubt were nest-holes of their making. One of these, on Buck Hill,--freshly cut, if appearances went for anything,--I undertook to play the spy upon; but if the nest was indeed in use the birds were too wary for me, or I was very unfortunate in my choice of hours. Time was precious, and the secret seemed likely to cost more than it would bring, with so many other matters inviting my attention. Nest or no nest, I was glad to be within the frequent sound of that wild, ringing, long-drawn shout, a true voice of the wilderness; as if the Hebrew prophecy were fulfilled, and the mountains and the hills had found a tongue.

It was not until the sixth day that I went to Lincoln Heights, a place worth all the rest of the countryside, I soon came to think, with the single exception of Cedar Creek ravine. A winding wood road carried me thither (the distance may be two miles; but I have little idea what it is, though I covered it once or twice a day for the next four days), and might have been made--half made, just to my liking--for my private convenience. I believe I never met any one upon it, going or coming.

The glory of the spot is its trees; but with me, as things fell out, these took in the order of time a second place. My first admiration was not for them, admirable as they were, but for a few birds in the tops of them. In short, at my first approach to the Heights (there is no thought of climbing, but only the most gradual of ascents) I began to hear from the branches overhead, now here, now there, an occasional weak warbler’s song that set my curiosity on edge. It was not the parula’s (blue yellow-back’s), but like it. What should it be, then, except the cerulean’s? By and by I caught a glimpse of a bird, clear white below, with a dark line across the breast; and yes, I saw what I was looking for,--though the bird flew to another branch the next moment,--black streaks along the sides of the body. There were at least eight or ten others like him in the treetops; and it was a neck-breaking half-hour that I passed in watching them, determined as I was to gain a view not only of the under parts, but of the back and wings. The labor and difficulty of the search were increased indefinitely by the confusing presence of numerous other warblers of various kinds in the same lofty branches, making it inevitable that many opera-glass shots should be wasted. It is no help to a man’s equanimity at such a time to spend a priceless three minutes--any one of which may be the last--in getting the glass upon a tiny thing that flits incessantly from one leafy twig to another, only to find in the end that it is nothing but a myrtle warbler; a pretty creature, no doubt, but of no more consequence just now than an English sparrow. To-day, however, the birds favored me; no untimely whim hurried them away to another wood, and patience had its reward. Little by little my purpose was accomplished and my mind cleared of all uncertainty. Then I took out my pencil to characterize the song while it was still in my ears, and still new. “Greatly like one of the more broken forms of the parula’s,” I wrote, a bird repeating it at that very instant by way of confirmation. “I can imagine a fairly sharp ear being deceived by it, especially in a place like this, where parulas have been singing from morning till night, until the listener has tired of them and become listless.” This sentence the reader may keep in mind, if he will, to glance back upon for his amusement in the light of a subsequent experience which it will be my duty to relate before I have done with my story.

Between the migratory “transients” and the birds already at home, the place was pretty full of wings. A Swainson thrush sang, and from a bushy slope came a nasal thrush voice that should have been a veery’s. I took chase at once, and caught a glimpse of a reddish-brown bird darting out of sight before me. Do my best, I could find nothing more of it. If it was a veery, as I suppose, it was the only one I saw in Virginia, where the species, from Dr. Rives’s account of the matter, seems to be a rather uncommon migrant. Unhappily, I could not bring my scientific conscience to list it on so hurried a sight, even with the note as corroborative testimony. That, for aught I could positively assert, might have been a gray-cheek’s, while the reddish color might with equal possibility have belonged to a wood thrush, clear as it had seemed at the moment that what I was looking at was the back of the bird itself, and not the back of its head. Doubt is credulous. All kinds of negatives are plausible to it, and once it has adopted one it will maintain it in the face of the five senses.

On the opposite side of the path, in the bushy angles of a Virginia fence, a hooded warbler showed himself, furtive and silent,--my only Bridge specimen, to my great surprise; and near him was a female black-throated blue, a queer-looking body, like nothing in particular, yet labeled past mistake, which I can never see without a kind of wonder. Among the treetop birds were Blackburnian warblers, black-throated greens and blues, chestnut-sides, redstarts, myrtle-birds, red-eyed and yellow-throated vireos, and indigo-birds. Many white-throated sparrows still lingered; singing flat, as usual,--the only birds I know of that find it impossible to hold the pitch. The defect has its favorable side; it makes their concerts amusing. I remember seeing a quiet gentleman thrown into fits of uncontrollable laughter by the rehearsal of a spring flock, bird after bird starting the tune, and not one in ten of them keeping its whistle true to the conclusion of the measure. All these things,--though they may seem not many,--with the long rests and numerous side excursions that went with them, consumed the morning hours before I knew it, so that I was hardly at the end of the way before it was time to return for dinner.

For the afternoon nothing was to be thought of but another visit to the same place,--“the finest place I have seen yet, and the finest walk.” So I had put down the morning’s discovery. The cerulean warbler I found spoken of by Dr. Rives as “accidental or very rare;” in the light of which entry the dozen or so of specimens seen and heard during the forenoon acquired a fresh interest.

The second jaunt, because it _was_ a second one, could be taken more at leisure; and as the birds gave me less employment, my eyes were more upon the trees. These, as I had felt before, were a wonder and a comfort; it was a benediction to walk under them, as if one were within the precincts of a holy place: oaks for the most part (of several kinds), with black walnut, shagbark, tulip, chestnut, and other species, set irregularly, or rather left standing irregularly, two or three deep, beside the road on either hand; a royal uphill avenue, which near the top became an open grove. Except in Florida, I had never seen a more magnificent growth. Some of the trees had grapevines and Virginia creeper clinging about them. Up one huge oak, with strange flaky bark, like a shagbark-tree’s (a white oak, nevertheless, to judge from its half-grown leaves), a grapevine had mounted for a height of forty feet, as I estimated the distance, not making use of the bole, but of the limbs, seeming to leap from one to another, even when they were ten feet apart. It must have been of the tree’s age, I suppose, and had grown with its growth. In the shadow of these giants, yet not overshadowed by them, were flowering dogwoods and redbuds. It is a pretty habit these two have of growing side by side, as if they knew the value of contrasted colors.

At a point on the edge of the grove I turned to enjoy the prospect southward: mountains everywhere, with the more pointed of the twin Peaks of Otter showing between two oaks that barely gave it room; all the mountains radiantly beautiful, with cloud shadows flecking their wooded slopes. Not a house was in sight; but in one place beyond the middle-distance hills a thin blue smoke was rising. There, doubtless, lay the valley of the James. Just before me, on the left of the open field, stood a peculiarly graceful dogwood, all in a glory of white, one fan-shaped branch above another,--a miracle of loveliness. The eye that saw it was satisfied with seeing. Beyond it a chat played the clown (knowing no better, even to-day), and a rose-breast began warbling. It seemed a tender story,--sweetness beyond words, and happiness without a shadow. From a second point, a little farther on, the entire southern horizon came into view, with both the Peaks of Otter visible; a truly enchanting picture, the sky full of sunlight and floating white clouds.

In a treetop behind me a cerulean warbler had been singing, but flew away as I turned about. My only sight of him was on the wing, a mere speck in the air. Afterward a parula gave out his tune, running the notes straight upward and snapping them off at the end in whiplash fashion, as much as to say, “Now see if you can tell the difference.” And then, just as I was ready to leave the grove, stepping along a footpath through a bramble patch, I descried almost at my feet a warbler,--a female by her look and demeanor, and a stranger; blue and white, with dark streakings along the sides. I lost her soon; but she had seemed to be looking for nest materials, and of course I waited for her to return. This she presently did, and now I saw her strip bits of bark from plant stems till she had her bill full of short pieces. Carrying these, she disappeared in a bramble and grapevine thicket. I waited, but she did not come back. Then I stole into the place after her, and in a moment there she was before me; but without complaint or any symptom of perturbation she passed quietly along, and again I lost her. I kept my position till I was tired, and then went back to the wood and sat down; and in a few minutes--how it happened I could not tell--there she stood once more, wearing the same innocent, preoccupied air. This time I saw her fly down the slope and disappear in a clump of undergrowth. I followed, took a seat, waited, and continued to wait. All was in vain. That was the last of her. She had played her cards well, or perhaps I had played mine poorly; and finally I turned my steps homeward, where a comparison of my notes with Dr. Coues’s description proved the bird to be, as I had believed, a female cerulean warbler. Her nest would probably be the first one of its kind ever found in Virginia.

On the way a male sang and showed himself. Now, too, I discovered for the first time that there were tupelo-trees among the large oaks and walnuts; much smaller than they, and for that reason, it is to be supposed, not noticed in my three previous passages along the avenue. They are particular favorites of mine, and I made them sincere apologies. In another place was a patch of what I knew must be the fragrant sumach, something I had wished to see for many years: low, upright shrubs, yet resembling poison ivy so closely that for a minute I shrank from gathering a specimen, although I was certain beyond a peradventure that the plant was not poison ivy and could not be noxious to the touch; just as people in general, through force of early instruction and example (miscalled instinct), shiver at the thought of handling a snake, though it be of some kind which they know to be as harmless as a kitten. While in chase of the cerulean, also, I had stumbled on several bunches of cancer-root (_Conopholis_), rising out of the dead leaves, a dozen or more of stems in each close bunch; queer, unwholesome-looking, yellowish things, reminding me of ears of rice-corn, so called. I had never seen the plant till the day before.

The next morning my course was beyond discussion or argument. I must go again to Lincoln Heights. The thought of the female cerulean warbler and her nest would not suffer me to do anything else. But for that matter, I should probably have taken the same path had I never seen her. The trees, the prospects, and the general birdiness of the place were of themselves an irresistible attraction. On the way I skirted a grove of small pines, standing between the road and the edge of Cedar Creek ravine: dull, scrubby trees, like pitch-pines, but less bright in color; of the same kind as those amid which, on Cameron Hill and Lookout Mountain, in Tennessee, there had been so notable a gathering of warblers the year before. _Pinus pungens_, Table Mountain pine, I suppose they were, though it must be acknowledged that I was never at the pains to settle the point. Here at Natural Bridge I had found all such woods deserted day after day, till I had ceased to think them worth looking into. Now, however, as I idled past, I caught the faint sibilant notes of a bird-song, and stopped to listen. Not a blackpoll’s, I said to myself, but wonderfully near it. And then it flashed into my mind what a friend had told me a few years before. “When you hear a song that is like the blackpoll’s, but different,” he had said, “look the bird up. It will most likely be a Cape May.” He was one of the lucky men (almost the only one of my acquaintance) who had heard that rare warbler’s voice. I turned aside, of course, and made a cautious entry among the pines. The bird continued its singing. Yes, it was like the blackpoll’s, but with a _zip_ rather than a _zee_. Nearer and nearer I crept, inch by inch. If the fellow _were_ a Cape May, it would be carelessness inexcusable not to make sure of the fact. And soon I had my glass upon him,--in high plumage, red cheeks and all. He had not been disturbed in the least, and kept up his music till I had had my fill and could stay no longer,--all the while in low branches and in clear view. Few songs could be less interesting in themselves, but few could have been more welcome,--for the better part of twenty years I had been listening for it: about five notes, a little louder and more emphatic than the blackpoll’s, it seemed to me, but still faint and, as I expressed it to myself, “next to nothing.” The handsome creature--olive and bright yellow, boldly marked with black and white--remained the whole time in one tree, traveling over the limbs in a rather listless fashion, and singing almost incessantly. He was my hundredth Virginia bird,--as my list then stood, question marks included,--and the second one whose song I had heard for the first time on this vacation trip. The day had begun prosperously.