Part 4

For some hours we had been traveling thus, and were now come to an open place in the town of Hamburg, so the driver told me. Here, all at once, I nudged him with a quick command to stop. “There it is!” I cried, as I whipped out my opera-glass. “There’s a raven!” “Yes,” said the driver, “that’s the bird.” He was flying from us in a diagonal course, making toward a hill or mountain,--at a comfortable distance, in the best of lights, and most admirably disposed to show us his dimensions; but he was silent and in tremendous haste.

“Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he.”

If you would only _say_ something! I thought. But he did not “call out,” perhaps because he was not “flying over.” I held the glass on him till he passed out of sight,--a really good look, as time counts under such circumstances. Yes, at the last moment I had seen a raven! Would the driver, when he got back to Highlands to-morrow evening, have the goodness so to inform Dr. ---- for his comfort?

Another thing I had accomplished: I had supplied three male Hamburgers with abundant material for a week’s gossip; for even in my excitement I had been aware that we had halted almost directly in front of a house,--the only one for some miles, I think,--in the yard of which three men were lounging. I looked at the bird, and the men looked at me. It gave me pleasure afterward to think what a story it must have made. “Yes, sir, it’s gospel truth: he pulled out a spy-glass and sat there looking at a raven. I reckon he never see one before.”

I speak of excitement, but it was a wonder to me how temperate my emotions were, and how quickly they subsided. Within a half-mile our progress was blocked by a large oak-tree, which the wind had twisted partly off and thrown squarely across the road. The driver had brought no axe along, and was obliged to go back to the house for help, leaving me to care for the team. Straight before me loomed the Balsam Mountains, a dozen peaks, gloriously high and mountainous; not too far away, yet far enough to be blue, with white clouds veiling their lower slopes and so lifting the tops skyward. I looked at them and looked at them, and between the looks I put the raven into my notebook.

For the day it kept its place unquestioned. Then, long before I reached Massachusetts, I punctuated the entry with a question mark. The bird had been silent; its apparent size might have been an illusion; and my assurance of the moment, absolute though it was, would not bear the test of time and cold blood.

Here ended my raven-hunt. I had enjoyed it, and would gladly have made it longer,--in that respect it had been successful; but the “collection” I was to have made, my little store of “first-hand knowledge,” had fared but poorly. As far as ravens were concerned, I was bringing home a lean bag,--a brace of interrogation points.

A MOUNTAIN POND

Stewart’s Pond, on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to be thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land-owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal title, has dammed it (the reader may spell the word as he chooses--“dammed” or “damned,” it is all one to a mountain stream) for uses of his own. The water backs up between a wooded hill on one side and a rounded grassy knoll on the other, narrows where the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and immediately broadens again, as best it can, against the base of a steeper, forest-covered hill just beyond. The shapelessness of the pond and its romantic surroundings will in the course of years give it beauty, but for the present everything is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man’s work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.

When I came in sight of the pond for the first time, in the midst of my second day’s explorations, my first thought, it must be confessed, was not of its beauty or want of beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute more I was leaning over the fence to sweep the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there they were, five or six in number, one here, another there; solitary sandpipers, so called with only a moderate degree of appropriateness, breaking their long northward journey beside this mountain lake, which might have been made for their express convenience. I was glad to see them. Without being rare, they make themselves uncommon enough to be always interesting; and they have, besides, one really famous trait,--the extraordinary secrecy of their breeding operations. Well known as they are, and wide as is their distribution, their eggs, so far as I am aware, are still unrepresented in scientific collections except by a single specimen found almost twenty years ago in Vermont; a “record,” as we say in these days, of which _Totanus solitarius_ may rightfully be proud.

About another part of the pond, on this same afternoon (May 8), were two sandpipers of a more ordinary sort: spotted sandpipers, familiar objects, we may fairly say, the whole country over. Few American schoolboys but have laughed at their absurd teetering motions. In this respect the solitary sandpiper is better behaved. It does not teeter--it _bobs_; standing still, as if in deep thought, and then dipping forward quickly (a fanciful observer might take the movement for an affirmative gesticulation, an involuntary “Yes, yes, now I have it!”) and instantly recovering itself, exactly in the manner of a plover. This is partly what Mr. Chapman means, I suppose, when he speaks of the solitary sandpiper’s superior quietness and dignity; two fine attributes, which may have much to do with their possessor’s almost unparalleled success in eluding the researches of oölogical collectors. Nervousness and loquacity are poor hands at preserving a secret.

Although my first brief visit to Stewart’s Pond made three additions to my local bird list (the third being a pair of brown creepers), I did not go that way again for almost a fortnight. Then (May 21) my feet were barely on the bridge before a barn swallow skimmed past me. Swallows of any kind in the mountains of North Carolina are like hen-hawks in Massachusetts,--rare enough to be worth following out of sight. As for barn swallows, I had not expected to see them here at all. I kept my eye upon this fellow, therefore, with the more jealousy, and happily for me he seemed to have found the spot very much to his mind. If he was a straggler, as I judged likely in spite of the lateness of the season, he was perhaps all the readier to stay for an hour or two on so favorable a hunting-ground. With him were half a dozen rough-wings,--probably not stragglers,--hawking over the water; feeding, bathing, and now and then, by way of variety, engaging in some pretty spirited lovers’ quarrels. In one such encounter, I remember, one of the contestants received so heavy a blow that she quite lost her balance (the sex was matter of guesswork) and dropped plump into the water; and more than once the fun was interrupted by an irate phœbe, who dashed out upon the makers of it with an ugly snap of his beak, as much as to say, “Come, now, this is my bridge.” Mr. Stewart himself could hardly have held stricter notions about the rights of property. The rough-wings frequently perched in the dead trees, and once, at least, the barn swallow did likewise; something which I never saw a bird of his kind do before, to the best of my recollection. For to-day he was in Rome, and had fallen in with the Roman customs.

As I have said already, his presence was unexpected. His name is not included in Mr. Brewster’s North Carolina list, and I saw no other bird like him till I was approaching Asheville, a week later, in a railway train. Then I was struck almost at the same moment by two things--a brick chimney and a barn swallow. My start at the sight of red bricks made me freshly aware with what quickness the mind puts away the past and accustoms itself to new and strange surroundings. Man is the slave of habit, we say; but how many of us, even in middle age, have altered our modes of living, our controlling opinions, or our daily occupations, and in the shortest while have forgotten the old order of things, till it has become all like a dream,--a story heard long ago and now dimly remembered. Was it indeed we who lived there, and believed thus, and spent our days so? This capacity for change augurs well for the future of the race, and not less for the future of the individual, whether in this world or in another.

In a previous chapter I have mentioned as provocative of astonishment the ignorance of a North Carolina man, my driver from Walhalla, who had no idea of what I meant by “swallows.” His case turned out to be less singular than I thought, however, for when I spoke of it to an exceptionally bright, well-informed farmer in the vicinity of Highlands, he answered that he saw nothing surprising about it; _he_ didn’t know what swallows were, neither. Martins he knew,--purple martins,--though there were none hereabout, so far as I could discover, but “swallow,” as a bird’s name, was a novelty he had never heard of. Here on Stewart’s bridge I might have tested the condition of another resident’s mind upon the same point, but unfortunately the experiment did not occur to me. He came along on horseback, and I called his attention to the swallows shooting to and fro over the water, a pretty spectacle anywhere, but doubly so in this swallow-poor country. He manifested no very lively interest in the subject; but he made me a civil answer,--which is perhaps more than a hobby-horsical catechist, who travels up and down the world cross-examining his busy fellow mortals, has any good reason for counting upon in such a case. With so many things to be seen and done in this short life, it is obvious that all men’s tastes cannot run to ornithology. “Yes,” the stranger said, glancing at the swallows, “I expect they have their nests under the bridge.” A civil answer I called it, but it was better than that; indicating, as it did, some acquaintance with the rough-wing’s habits, or a shrewd knack at guessing. But the man knew nothing about a bird that nested in barns.

A short distance beyond the bridge, in a clearing over which lay scattered the remains of a house that had formerly stood in it (for even this new country is not destitute of ruins), a pair of snowbirds were chipping nervously, and near the same spot my ear caught the lisping call of my first North Carolina brown creeper. No doubt it was breeding somewhere close by, and my imagination at once fastened upon a loose clump of water-killed trees, from the trunks of which the dry bark was peeling in big sun-warped flakes, as the site of its probable habitation. This was on my first jaunt over the road, and during the busy days that followed I planned more than once to spend an hour here in spying upon the birds. A brown creeper’s nest would be something new for me. Now, therefore, on this bright morning, when I was done with the swallows, I walked on to the right point and waited. A long time passed, or what seemed a long time. With so many invitations pressing upon one from all sides in a vacation country, it is hard sometimes to be leisurely enough for the best naturalistic results. Then, suddenly, I heard the expected _tseep_, and soon the bird made its appearance. Sure enough, it flew against one of the very trees that my imagination had settled upon, ducked under a strip of dead bark, between it and the bole, remained within for half a minute, and came out again. By this time the second bird had appeared, and was waiting its turn for admission. They were feeding their young; and so long as I remained they continued their work, going and coming at longer or shorter intervals. I made no attempt to inspect their operations more nearly; the tree stood in rather deep water, and the nest was situated at an altitude of perhaps twenty feet; but I was glad to see for myself, even at arm’s length, as it were, this curious and highly characteristic abode of a bird which in general I meet with only in its idle season. I was surprised to notice that the pair had chosen a strip of bark which was fastened to the trunk at the upper end and hung loose below. The nest was the better protected from the weather, of course, but it must have been wedged pretty tightly into place, it seemed to me, unless it had some means of support not to be guessed at from the ground. The owners entered invariably at the same point,--in the upper corner. The brown creeper has been flattening itself against the bark of trees for so many thousand years that a very narrow slit suffices it for a doorway.

While I was occupied with this interesting bit of household economy, I heard a clatter of wheels mingled with youthful shouts. Two boys were coming round a bend in the road and bearing down upon me, seated upon an axle-tree between a pair of wheels drawn by a single steer, which was headed for the town at a lively trot, urged on by the cries of the boys, one of whom held the single driving-rope and the other a whip. “How fast can he go?” I asked, as they drew near. I hoped to detain them for a few minutes of talk, but they had no notion of stopping. They had never timed him, the older one--not the driver--answered, with the merriest of grins. I expressed wonder that they could manage him with a single rein. “Oh, I can drive him without any line at all.” “But how do you steer him?” said I. “I yank him and I pull him,” was the laconic reply, which by this time had to be shouted over the boy’s shoulder; and away the crazy trap went, the wobbling wheels describing all manner of eccentric and nameless curves with every revolution; and the next minute I heard it rattling over the bridge. Undoubtedly the young fellows thought me a green one, not to know that a yank and a steady pull are equivalent to a gee and a haw. “Live and learn,” said I to myself. It was a jolly mode of traveling, at all events, as good as a circus, both for the boys and for me.

On my way through the village, at noon, I passed the steer turned out to grass by the roadside, and had a better look at the harness, a simple, home-made affair, including a pair of hames. The driving-rope, which in its original estate might have been part of a clothes-line or a bed-cord, was attached to a chain which went round or over the creature’s head at the base of the horns. The lads themselves were farther down the street, and the younger one nudged the other’s elbow with a nod in my direction as I passed on the opposite sidewalk. They seemed to have sobered down at a wonderful rate since their arrival in the “city.” I should hardly have known them for the same boys; but no doubt they would wake the echoes again on the road homeward. I hoped so, surely, for I liked them best as I saw them first.

As far as the pleasure of life goes, boys brought up in this primitive mountain country have little to complain of. They may lack certain advantages; in this imperfect world, where two bodies cannot occupy the same space at once, the presence of some things necessitates the absence of others; but most certainly they have their full quota of what in youthful phrase are known as “good times.” The very prettiest sight that I saw in North Carolina, not excepting any landscape or flower,--and I saw floral displays of a splendor to bankrupt all description,--was a boy whom I met one Sunday morning in a steep, disused road outside of the town. I was descending the hill, picking my steps, and he was coming up. Eleven or twelve years old he might have been, cleanly dressed, fit for any company, but bare-legged to the knee. I wished him good-morning, and he responded with the easiest grace imaginable. “You are going to church?” said I. “Yes, sir,” and on he went up the hill, “progressing by his own brave steps;” a boy, as Thoreau says, who was “never drawn in a willow wagon;” straight as an arrow, and with motions so elastic, so full of the very spirit of youth and health, that I stood still and gazed after him for pure delight. His face, his speech, his manner, his carriage, all were in keeping. If he does not make a good and happy man, it will be an awful tragedy.

This boy was not a “cracker’s” child, I think. Probably he belonged to one of the Northern families, that make up the village for the most part, and have settled the country sparsely for a few miles round about. The lot of the native mountaineers is hard and pinched, and although flocks of children were playing happily enough about the cabin doors, it was impossible not to look upon them as born to a narrow and cheerless existence. Possibly the fault was partly in myself, since I have no very easy gift with strangers, but I found them, young and old alike, rather uncommunicative.

I recall a family group that I overtook toward the end of an afternoon; a father and mother, both surprisingly young-looking, hardly out of their teens, it seemed to me, with a boy of perhaps six years. They were resting by the roadside as I came up, the father poring over some written document. “You must have been to the city,” said I; but all the man could answer was “Howdy.” The woman smiled and murmured something, it was impossible to tell what. They started on again at that moment, the grown people each with a heavy bag, which looked as if it might contain meal or flour, and the little fellow with a big bundle. They had four miles still to go, they said; and the road, as I could see for myself, was of the very worst, steep and rugged to the last degree. Partly to see if I could conquer the man, and partly to please myself, I beckoned the youngster to my side and put a coin into his hand. The shot took effect at once. Father and mother found their voices, and said in the same breath, “Say thank you!” How natural that sounded! It is part of the universal language. Every parent will have his child polite. But the boy, poor thing, was utterly tongue-tied, and could only smile; which, after all, was about the best thing he could have done. The father, too, was still inclined to silence, finding nothing in particular to say, though I did my best to encourage him; but he took pains to keep along with me, halting whenever I did so, and making it manifest that he meant to be with me at the turn in the road, about which I had inquired (needlessly, there is no harm in my now confessing), so that I should by no possibility go astray. Nothing could have been more friendly, and at the corner both he and his wife bade me good-by with simple heartiness. “Good-by, little boy,” said I. “Tell him good-by,” called both father and mother; but the boy couldn’t, and there was an end of it. “He’s just as I was at his age; bashful, that’s all.” This little speech set matters right. The parents smiled, the boy did likewise, and we went our different ways, I still pitying the woman, with that heavy bag under her arm, having to make a packhorse of herself on that tiresome mountain road.

However, it is the mountain woman’s way to do her full share of the hard work, as I was soon to see farther exemplified; for within half a mile I heard in front of me the grating of a saw, and presently came upon another family group, in the woods on the mountain side,--a woman, three children, and a dog. The woman, no longer young, as we say in the language of compliment, was at one end of a cross-cut saw, and the largest boy, ten or eleven years old, was at the other. They were getting to pieces a huge fallen trunk. “Wood ought to be cheap in this country,” said I; and the woman, as she and the boy changed hands to rest themselves, answered that it was. In my heart I thought she was paying dearly for it; but her voice was cheerful, and the whole company was almost a merry one, the younger children laughing at their play, and the dog capering about them in high spirits. The mountain family may be poor, but not with the degrading, squalid poverty of dwellers in a city slum; and at the very worst the children have a royal playground.

Mountain boys, certainly, I could never much pity; for the girls it was impossible not to wish easier and more generous conditions. Here at Stewart’s Pond I detained two of them for a minute’s talk: sisters, I judged, the taller one ten years old, or thereabout. I asked them if there were many fish in the pond. The older one thought there were. “I know my daddy ketched five hundred and put in there for Mr. Stewart,” she said. Just then the younger girl pulled her sister’s sleeve and pointed toward two snakes which lay sunning themselves on the edge of the water, where a much larger one had shortly before slipped off a log into the pond at my approach. “They do no harm?” said I. “No, sir, I don’t guess they do,” was the answer; a strange-sounding form of speech, though it is exactly like the “I don’t think so” of which we all continue to make hourly use, no matter how often some crotchety amateur grammarian--for whom logic is logic, and who hates idiom as a mad dog hates water--may write to the newspapers warning us of its impropriety. Then the girls, barefooted, both of them, turned into a bushy trail so narrow that it had escaped my notice, and disappeared in the woods. I thought of the villainous-looking rattlesnake that I had seen the day before, freshly killed and tossed upon the side of the road, within a hundred rods of this point, and of the surprise expressed by a resident of the town at my wandering about the country without leggins.

As to the question of snakes and the danger from them, the people here, as is true everywhere in a rattlesnake country, held widely different opinions. Everybody recognized the presence of the pest, and most persons, whatever their own practice might be, advised a measure of caution on the part of strangers. One thing was agreed to on all hands: whoever saw a “rattler” was in duty bound to make an end of it; and one man told me a little story by way of illustrating the spirit of the community upon this point. A woman (not a mountain woman) was riding into town, when her horse suddenly stopped and shied. In the road, directly before her, a snake was coiled, rattling defiance. The woman dismounted, hitched the frightened horse to a sapling, cut a switch, killed the snake, threw it out of the road, remounted, and went on about her business. It is one advantage of life in wild surroundings that it encourages self-reliance.

In all places, nevertheless, and under all conditions, human nature remains a paradoxical compound. A mountain woman, while ploughing, came into close quarters with a rattlesnake. To save herself she sprang backward, fell against a stone, and in the fall broke her wrist. No doctor being within call, she set the bone herself, made and adjusted a rude splint, and now, as the lady who told me the story expressed it, “has a pretty good arm.” That was plucky. But the same woman suffered from an aching tooth some time afterward, and was advised to have it extracted. She would do no such thing. She couldn’t. She had a tooth pulled once, and it hurt her so that she would never do it again.