Part 9
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.
My friend (he will allow me that word, I am sure) had given me a day of days, and with it a new idea of this mountain world; where the visitor finds hills and valleys, creeks and waterfalls, the most beautiful of forests, with clearings, isolated cabins, straggling settlements, orchards, and gardens, and where he forgets again and again that he is on a mountain at all. Even now I had seen but a corner of it, as I have seen but a corner of the larger world on which, for these few years back, I have had what I call my existence. And even of what I saw, much has gone undescribed: stately tulip-trees deep in the forest, with humming-birds darting from flower to flower among them; the flame-colored azalea; the ground flowers of the woods, including some tiny yellow lady's-slippers, too dainty for the foot of Cinderella herself; the road to Sawyer's Springs; and numbers of birds, whose names, even, I have omitted. It was a wonderful world; but if the hobbyist may take the pen for a single sentence, it may stand confessed that the greatest wonder of all was this,--that in all those miles of oak forest I found not one blue jay.
Another surprising circumstance, which I do not remember to have noticed, however, till my attention was somewhat rudely called to it, was the absence of colored people. With the exception of three servants at the hotel, I saw none but whites. Walden's Ridge, although stanchly Union in war-time, and largely Republican now, as I was told, is a white man's country. I had gone to bed one night, and was fast asleep, when I was wakened suddenly by the noise of some one hurrying up the stairs and shouting, "Where's the gun? Where's the gun? Shorty's been shot!" "Shorty" was the colored waiter, and the speaker was a general factotum, an English boy. The colored people--Shorty, his wife, and the cook--had been out on the edge of the woods behind the house, when three men had fired at them, or pretended to do so. It was explained the next morning that this was only an attempt (on the part of some irresponsible young men, as the older residents said) to "run the niggers off the mountain,"--after what I understood to be a somewhat regular custom. "Niggers" did not belong there; their place was down below. If a Chattanooga cottager brought up a colored servant, he was "respectfully requested" to send him back, and save the natives the trouble of attending to the matter. In short, the Ridgites appeared to look upon "niggers" as Northern laborers look upon non-union men--"scabs."
The hotel-keeper, an Englishman, with an Englishman's notions about personal rights, was naturally indignant. He would hire his own servants, or he would shut the house. In any event, the presence of "Whitecaps," real or imaginary, must affect his summer patronage. I fully expected to see the colored trio pack up and go back to Chattanooga, without waiting for further hints; but they showed no disposition to do anything of the sort, and, I must add, rose in my estimation accordingly.
Of the feeling of the community I had a slight but ludicrous intimation a day or two after the shooting. I passed a boy whom I had noticed in the road, some days before, playing with a pig, lifting him by the hind legs and pitching him over forwards. "He can turn a somerset good," he had said to me, as I passed. Now, for the sake of being neighborly, I asked, "How's the pig to-day?" He smiled, and made some reply, as if he appreciated the pleasantry; but a more serious-looking playmate took up his parable, and said, "The pig'll be all right, if the folks up at the hotel don't shoot him." His tone and look were intended to be deeply significant. "Oh, I know you," they implied: "you are up at the hotel, where they threaten to shoot white folks."
For my last afternoon--wars and rumors of wars long since forgotten--I went to the place that had pleased me first, the valley of Falling Water Creek. The cross-vine on the dead hemlock had by this time dropped the greater part of its bells, but even yet many were hanging from the uppermost branches. The rhododendron was still at the height of its splendor. All the gardens were nothing to it, I said to myself. Crossing the creek on the log, and the branch on stepping-stones, I went to quench my thirst at the Marshall Spring, which once had a cabin beside it, and frequent visitors, but now was clogged with fallen leaves and seemingly abandoned. It was perhaps more beautiful so. Directly behind it rose a steep bank, and in front stood an oak and a maple, the latter leaning toward it and forming a pointed arch,--a worthy entrance. Mossy stones walled it in, and ferns grew luxuriantly about it. Just over them, an azalea still held two fresh pink flowers, the last till another May. In such a spot it would have been easy to grow sentimental; but there came a rumbling of thunder, the sky darkened, and, with a final hasty look about me, I picked up my umbrella and started homeward.
My last walk had ended like many others in that showery, fragmentary week. But what is bad weather when the time is past? All those black clouds have left no shadow on Walden's Ridge, and the best of all my strolls beside Falling Water, a stroll not yet finished,
"The calm sense of seen beauty without sight,"
suffers no harm. As Thoreau says, "It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain."
FOOTNOTE:
[2] It was _not_ the top of the mountain; so I am now informed, on the best of authority. I followed the map, but misunderstood the man who drew it. It was a map of some other route, and I did not see the top of the mountain, after all.
SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES.
Whoever loves the music of English sparrows should live in Chattanooga; there is no place on the planet, it is to be hoped, where they are more numerous and pervasive. Mocking-birds are scarce. To the best of my recollection, I saw none in the city itself, and less than half a dozen in the surrounding country. A young gentleman whom I questioned upon the subject told me that they used to be common, and attributed their present increasing rarity to the persecution of boys, who find a profit in selling the young into captivity. Their place, in the city especially, is taken by catbirds; interesting, imitative, and in their own measure tuneful, but poor substitutes for mocking-birds. In fact, that is a rôle which it is impossible to think of any bird as really filling. The brown thrush, it is true, sings quite in the mocking-bird's manner, and, to my ear, almost or quite as well; but he possesses no gift as a mimic, and furthermore, without being exactly a bird of the forest or the wilderness, is instinctively and irreclaimably a recluse. It would be hard, even among human beings, to find a nature less touched with urbanity. In the mocking-bird the elements are more happily mingled. Not gregarious, intolerant of rivalry, and, as far as creatures of his own kind are concerned, a stickler for elbow-room,--sharing with his brown relative in that respect,--he is at the same time a born citizen and neighbor; as fond of gardens and dooryard trees as the thrasher is of scrublands and barberry bushes. "Man delights me," he might say, "and woman also." He likes to be listened to, it is pretty certain; and possibly he is dimly aware of the artistic value of appreciation, without which no artist ever did his best. Add to this endearing social quality the splendor and freedom of the mocker's vocal performances, multifarious, sensational, incomparable, by turns entrancing and amusing, and it is easy to understand how he has come to hold a place by himself in Southern sentiment and literature. A city without mocking-birds is only half Southern, though black faces be never so thick upon the sidewalks and mules never so common in the streets. If the boys have driven the great mimic away from Chattanooga, it is time the fathers took the boys in hand. Civic pride alone ought to bring this about, to say nothing of the possible effect upon real estate values of the abundant and familiar presence of this world-renowned, town-loving, town-charming songster.
From my window, on the side of Cameron Hill, I heard daily the singing of an orchard oriole--another fine and neighborly bird--and a golden warbler, with sometimes the _fidgety_, _fidgety_ of a Maryland yellow-throat. What could _he_ be fussing about in so unlikely a quarter? An adjoining yard presented the unnatural spectacle--unnatural, but, I am sorry to say, not unprecedented--of a bird-house occupied in partnership by purple martins and English sparrows. They had finished their quarrels, if they had ever had any,--which can hardly be open to doubt, both native and foreigner being constitutionally belligerent,--and frequently sat side by side upon the ridge-pole, like the best of friends. The oftener I saw them there, the more indignant I became at the martins' un-American behavior. Such a disgraceful surrender of the Monroe Doctrine was too much even for a man of peace. I have never called myself a Jingo, but for once it would have done me good to see the lion's tail twisted.
With the exception of a few pairs of rough-wings on Missionary Ridge, the martins seemed to be the only swallows in the country at that time of the year; and though _Progne subis_, in spite of an occasional excess of good nature, is a most noble bird, it was impossible not to feel that by itself it constituted but a meagre representation of an entire family. Swallows are none too numerous in Massachusetts, in these days, and are pretty certainly growing fewer and fewer, what with the prevalence of the box-monopolizing European sparrow, and the passing of the big, old-fashioned, widely ventilated barn; for there is no member of the family, not even the sand martin, whose distribution does not depend in great degree upon human agency. Even yet, however, if a Massachusetts man will make a circuit of a few miles, he will usually meet with tree swallows, barn swallows, cliff swallows, sand martins, and purple martins. In other words, he need not go far to find all the species of eastern North America, with the single exception of the least attractive of the six; that is to say, the rough-wing. As compared with the people of eastern Tennessee, then, we are still pretty well favored. It is worth while to travel now and then, if only to find ourselves better off at home.
It might be easy to suggest plausible reasons for the general absence of swallows from a country like that about Chattanooga; but the extraordinary scarcity of hawks, while many persons--not ornithologists--would account it less of a calamity, is more of a puzzle. From Walden's Ridge I saw a single sparrow hawk and a single red-tail; in addition to which I remember three birds whose identity I could not determine. Five hawks in the course of three weeks spent entirely out of doors, in the neighborhood of mountains covered with old forest! Taken by itself, this unexpected showing might have been ascribed to some queer combination of accidents, or to a failure of observation. In fact, I was inclined so to explain it till I noticed that Mr. Brewster had chronicled a similar state of things in what is substantially the same piece of country. Writing of western North Carolina, he says:[3] "The general scarcity--one may almost say absence--of hawks in this region during the breeding season is simply unaccountable. Small birds and mammals, lizards, snakes, and other animals upon which the various species subsist are everywhere numerous, the country is wild and heavily forested, and, in short, all the necessary conditions of environment seem to be fulfilled." Certainly, so far as my ingenuity goes, the mystery is "unaccountable;" but of course, like every other mystery, it would open quickly enough if we could find the key.
Turkey vultures were moderately numerous,--much less abundant than in Florida,--and twice I saw a single black vulture, recognizable, almost as far as it could be seen (but I do not mean at a first glance, nor without due precaution against foreshortened effects), by its docked tail. Both are invaluable in their place,--useful, graceful, admirable, and disgusting. The vultures, the martins, and the swifts were the only common aerial birds. The swifts, happily, were everywhere,--jovial souls in a sooty dress,--and had already begun nest-building. I saw them continually pulling up against the twigs of a partially dead tree near my window. In them nature has developed the bird idea to its extreme,--a pair of wings, with just body enough for ballast; like a racing-yacht, built for nothing but to carry sail and avoid resistance. Their flight is a good visual music, as Emerson might have said; but I love also their quick, eager notes, like the sounds of children at play. And while it has nothing to do with Tennessee, I am prompted to mention here a bird of this species that I once saw in northern New Hampshire on the 1st of October,--an extraordinarily late date, if my experience counts for anything. With a friend I had made an ascent of Mount Lafayette (one of the days of a man's life), and as we came near the Profile House, on our return to the valley, there passed overhead a single chimney swift. What he could be doing there at that season was more than either of us could divine. It was impossible to feel any great concern about him, however. The afternoon was nearly done, but at the rate he was traveling it seemed as if he might be in Mexico before sunrise. And easily enough he may have been, if Mr. Gätke is right in his contention that birds of very moderate powers of wing are capable of flying all night at the rate of four miles a minute!