At the northeastern corner of the lake there is a grove of oaks, the largest of which doubtless stood there before this part of New England was settled by white men. Squirrels hold this grove as frisky tenants-in-common with woodchucks and raccoons; a family of porcupines having a right of way across it by virtue of unopposed use running back till the memory of rodents knoweth nothing to the contrary. I have never been so fortunate as to find ’coons in the grove, although some of my household have found them, but I have seen their footprints in the April snow. They are strange footprints, which one can never mistake for any other. If the dearest, plumpest baby in New England patted the soft snow with its dimpled hands, it could not make daintier images of its little palms than this wild creature of the forest makes with its feet, as it hurries over the new-fallen snow. The most conspicuous squirrels by the pond are the great bushy-tailed grays; the most retiring are the refined little flying-squirrels, which live in a deserted woodpecker’s hole in a dead tree. The grays climb after acorns to the highest limbs and branchlets of the oaks, frequently breaking off leafy twigs, and dropping acorns to the ground. Below, watching for and improving their opportunities, are striped chipmunks, which gather up a portionof the harvest and conceal it in their burrows. Chickaree, too, is there, nervous, petulant, and noisy, but he is more likely to be found in the pines, or near the butternuts. In winter, especially, the pine woods are alive with red squirrels. I recall seeing twenty red squirrels in a single midwinter day. Chipmunks may be seen late in December, and by the end of February, if it is warm, and the mouths of their holes are not covered by snow, they are ready to take a peep at the sky. They store enormous quantities of food, and the heat and moisture of their nests is such that they can eat corn sprouts and acorn shoots in midwinter while poor Chickaree is scratching about in the cold snow for an unnibbled pine cone. The gray squirrels are fond of the high-bush blueberries, which grow in abundance on the margins of the pond. They come down from the oaks to the great fallen trees lying half on the shore and half in the lake, and bask in the sunlight, drink of the water, and run up and down the logs with tails arched and waving behind them.
The home of the porcupines is west of the pond on the slope of a heavily wooded hill, the sides of which are encumbered by very large boulders. Beneath one of the largest of these boulders and overhung by one almost as large,which rests against its mate, is the porcupines’ den. By lying down between the rocks and crawling forward into the mouth of the den I can see several feet into its black interior. A passage large enough for a hound to squeeze through leads out of sight below the rocks. Quills and hairs line the ground, and other marks of long occupancy are abundant. I have been told by farmers that they had killed old “hedgehogs” weighing nearly fifty pounds. Tales are told of white porcupines, and it is impossible to shake the hunter’s belief in the brutes’ power to shoot their quills at their enemies.
The skunk is a well-known character at the pond, but I have not sought her society, and it is an open question whether she lives in a deserted woodchuck hole or among the boulders on the porcupine’s hill.
So far as I know, Bruin never comes to my pond. He lives within sight of it among the oaks and blueberry patches on the ledges of Chocorua, and if his small eyes ever scan the landscape from the cliffs above the heart of the mountain, he can see its emerald water gleaming in the sunlight. I am more than willing not to find his huge footprints on my mosses. Deer, on the other hand, go freely and frequently to the pond, and in May and June come to the garden patch below my cottage.
Wings even more than feet bring wild life to the lonely lake. The first time that I ever saw the waters of the pond flashing and rippling in the sunlight, wings awoke the echoes of the basin as a flock of black ducks rose at my coming and vanished behind the oaks. Wood ducks nested for years in a hollow oak by the shore. One bright October morning a black tern, borne by storm or waywardness of wing, came to the lake with five black ducks. That tiny mirror in the deep woods seemed to please the weary sea-bird, for it rested there many hours, and even when alarmed circled for a while in the sky and then returned to the spot where Chocorua’s horn was reflected in the mountain pool. The great numbers of tadpoles and frogs always to be found in the lake attract not only the great blue heron and the bitterns, but also the night herons, which sometimes come in flocks of eight or ten to fish in the lakes of this region. Early in August of each year a kingfisher appears at the pond and passes much of his time by it. There are certain dry branches upon which he perches one after another in order, as he circles round the pond uttering his harsh rattling cry. I suspect that fishing of the same kind goes on after dark, for the lake is a favorite resort of the barred owls, whose trumpet tones are heard nightly at certain seasons.More than once I have seen them on branches above the water, or floating on noiseless wing from shore to shore. The fondness of this owl for frogs and fish is remarkable, particularly for hornpout, which abound in this lake. I have known my captive owls to strike a fish with their talons when it was several inches below the surface of the water in a tank.
Many a time as I have been hidden by sheltering boughs, scanning the lake and its shores for signs of life, I have seen a dark shadow glide across the water, and then a broad-winged bird alight noiselessly on a dead limb from which the whole surface of the lake could be seen. Its face would express cruelty and hunger, apprehension and something akin to remorse. The eyes of a hawk are full of meaning; they tell the story of guilt and of the eternal misery of spirit which follows guilt. The hawks which come to my pond are of several species, including the slowbuteos, which one sees circling by the hour in the high skies; the dangerousaccipiters, so ruthless in their raids upon poultry and small birds; and the low-flying, graceful, mouse-hunting marsh hawk, readily to be known by its white rump. At evening the whippoorwills and their cousins the night-hawks frequent the lake. Just at twilight I have heard six whippoorwills at once singingtheir strange song on the edge of the water. Perhaps they come there to bathe; at all events they sing only for a moment, after which only an occasional cluck or “whip” betrays their presence. Late in August the night-hawks fly in large companies, and as many as twenty-five have sometimes wheeled into the lake’s basin and circled over it, to the consternation of the small frogs.
Behind the great oaks, in which scarlet tanagers breed, there is a level overgrown with gray birches. Nearly a dozen of these trees have been converted into drinking fountains by a family of sap-sucking woodpeckers, and through the summer days, as long as the sap is sweet and abundant, the indolent birds cling to the trunk, sip the tree’s lifeblood as it drains away, and catch a few of the many insects which hover around the moist bark. The product of the trees is shared with several humming-birds, and the insects attract small flycatchers and warblers.
To tell of all the birds which either live near the lake or come to it more or less regularly, would be to recount the doings of most of the six-score species which are found in the Chocorua country. The lake is not only a favorite place of resort for resident birds, but it is a section of one of those dimly recognizable“lines” of migration along which bands of spring and autumn birds seem by instinct to take their way year by year. On this “line,” above the lake shore, I met my first and only Philadelphia vireo, one of the rarest of our migrants.
The vegetation of the lake shore has a great deal to do with its power to attract animal and bird life. I know of some woods which are forever silent to bird voices, and in which the snows of winter seem untrodden by any foot save mine. The lake was once in the heart of a white pine forest. Scores of huge stumps show where the giant trees lived until a tornado overturned them. Now the canoe birch is the prevailing tree, and few creations of the New England soil can rival it in grace, beauty, and useful qualities. The forest’s carpet of gray and green mosses, wintergreen, checkerberry, linnæa, dwarf cornel, asters and goldenrod, ferns and brakes, is strangely lacking in one flower generally common to the region. I have searched for half a mile in every direction from the pond and failed to find more than one root of the mayflower. That root, with its three or four clusters of flowers, is well hidden in a deeply shaded and poorly watered spot, where its future is threatened by a lack of all the elements which make plant life prosperous. Near this solitary rootof mayflower there grows an eccentric blueberry bush, which bears pale pink and white berries very sweet to the taste, but which never grow blue. Here, too, is to be found the shy little snowberry, whose fruit has the art of hiding itself beneath glossy round leaves, so that close search is needed to gather it. Along the banks of the lake high-bush blueberries of fabulous size tempt the stroller from his course. Some of these berries were once mistaken for fox grapes. In the moist sand at the foot of these blueberry bushes, the modest houstonia blossoms throughout six consecutive months of the year. It comes in May, and it fades not until November. The bunchberry retains its flowers in these groves until long after its berries are red elsewhere. Yet autumn flowers are not noticeably slow in blooming by the lake. One of these autumn flowers is an interesting hybrid, so recognized at the Gray Herbarium. For four years we have found several roots of a goldenrod which is neither thecæsia, which it closely resembled in form, nor thebicolor, from which it inherits its white ray flowers. Both of these familiar species grow near it, and are presumably its parents.
CANOE BIRCHES OF THE BEARCAMP VALLEY
CANOE BIRCHES OF THE BEARCAMP VALLEY
Within the waters of the lake there is abundant life. Years ago it was a famous trout pond, stocked perhaps by the Indians, but the malice of the white man spoiled it. A man who had a grudge against those who most enjoyed trout-fishing in the lake caught a pailful of horn-pout and turned them into the green waters. They multiplied, and now legions of them move their hideous bodies back and forth through the swaying weeds beneath its surface. They never grow large, but their numbers are appalling. Sometimes when, in a still summer evening, the surface of the lake is unruffled by wind, and myriads of small insects have fallen upon the water, the pout appear in countless multitudes, swimming so that their horns or tails show above the water.
The tadpoles also are extraordinarily numerous at some seasons, and they, too, have a way of coming to the top of the water and contemplating the upper world, to which they hope some day rightfully to attain. A sudden stamp of the foot upon the shore will cause hundreds of these floating polywogs to splash into foam the water over half the surface of the lake. The painted tortoise lives in the lake, but no other creature of his kind is found near it. In fact, I have never seen the spotted turtle in the Bearcamp valley. I once dug seventeen painted turtles out of one hole in the mud on the western edge of the lake, where they had crowded for some reason of their own.
Of all the many creatures which frequent the lonely lake, the big blue heron seems to be the most in sympathy with its shy silence and loneliness. He is its king, and by his name the lake is known.
Of the many roads which start northward from Bearcamp Water, every one is either warded off by the Sandwich range into the Saco or into the Pemigewasset valley, or else smothered in the dark forest-clad ravines between the mountain ridges. From Conway on the east to Campton and Thornton on the west, there is no rift in the mountain wall through which travel flows. There was a time, however, before the Civil War, when near the middle of the great barrier the human current found an outlet southward from the upper end of Swift River intervale to the Bearcamp Valley. Sitting by the fireside of a sturdy Albany farmer as the December moonlight gleamed upon the level snows of the intervale, I heard stories of the lumbermen’s journeys through those dark and narrow passes. Great spars and masts, the farmer said, had been hauled out of the valley under the frowning cliffs of Paugus, and carried safely to the level fields of Sandwich. Then there arose a storm such as old men know but once in a lifetime, and the passes were filledwith tangled masses of wrecked forest. All the axes in Albany and Tamworth could not have cut a way through the snarl without many weeks of exhausting labor. So at least thought the lumbermen who attempted to pass the abattis raised by the storm. Years elapsed and the road became only a matter of vague tradition. Those who climbed the peak of Passaconaway or the lofty ledges of Paugus saw below them a panorama of ruin. Bleached bones of the great spruce forest lay there piled in magnificent confusion. Over the débris, springing from its midst, a dense growth of mountain ash, wild cherry, and hobble-bush made the chaos more chaotic. No trace of the lost trail was visible even to the most fanciful eye.
Between Paugus and Chocorua the hurricane had not done its worst work. There one could see four miles of narrow ravine reaching from the Tamworth fields directly northward to a steep ridge connecting Paugus with Chocorua at their northern slopes. On the other side of the barrier lay the Swift River intervale. If that ridge were out of the way, if it could be easily surmounted, or if a rift could be found in it, the journey of nearly thirty miles from the southern spurs of Paugus, round through Conway to the northern spurs, would be reduced to eight or nine miles. The people living atthe upper end of Swift River valley, instead of having to travel sixteen miles to a post-office, doctor, minister, or store, could touch civilization by driving about eleven miles.
At half past four on the morning of Saturday, July 30, I drove rapidly away from my red-roofed cottage towards the southern foot of Paugus. Long days of parching heat had been brought to an end by a series of three heavy thunderstorms, which had drenched the country during the preceding evening. Nature had revived. The sky was bluer, the forest greener, the gold of the goldenrod more intense. Every particle of dust had been washed out of the air and off the many-tinted garments of the earth. For nearly a fortnight the mercury had been among the nineties as often as the clock struck noon. To face a cool breeze, to see everything sparkling with moisture, to have the air feel and appear thin and clear, was inspiring and exhilarating. To find the lost trail into the Swift River valley was now a matter of delightful interest.
At the southern foot of Paugus is a ruined mill and an old lumber camp. A good road leads thither from the highway, and the house at the point where the lumber road begins is the home of Nat. Berry, farmer, lumberman, hunter, trapper, surveyor, carpenter, and public-spiritedcitizen. I felt that if any man on the southern side of the mountains knew a way through them, that man was Berry. Two years before, while wandering over the ridges of Chocorua, I had been caught in one of Berry’s forty-pound steel bear traps. The springs of the trap were weak and it was deeply buried in the moss, so that before its cruel jaws had closed firmly upon my ankle, I thrust the stock of my gun between them and withdrew my foot. Berry’s greeting, as we drove up to his house, showed that he had not forgotten my adventure, for he shouted, “Come at last, have you, to let me cut off them ears? Can’t c’lect my bounty on you without ’em.” A few words told Berry of my errand, and he at once showed interest in the quest.
“Thirty-seven year ago,” he said, “when I was only twelve year old, a road was run through from this house to the back settlements. It was a winter road, but I recollect that a man and his wife drove over it in a pung. They went clean through. About fifteen year ago I went in where you are a-going, with a railroad surveyor, and he said there was only five hundred feet rising between here and the height of land. There used to be another road between Toadback and Passaconaway, but that’s all choked up now by the harricane. This road isbetween Toadback and Coroway, and I know that four miles of it is about as good going now as ever it was.”
It required little urging to induce Berry to join us, and our horse’s head was turned northward into the lumber road leading to the lost trail. As we drove away from fields, roads, and the surroundings of habitations, animal life grew less and less abundant, and plant life less varied. Around the farms robins, sparrows, and swallows are to be seen or heard at every hour in the day. Woodpeckers and chickadees abound in the orchards, and even hawks spend more time in sight of hen-yards than they do in the gloomy solitudes of the mountains. By the roadside goldenrod was in its glory, while St. John’s-wort was growing rusty. The pink of hardback and thistles large and small, the yellow of the mullein, the reds of fireweed, pasture lily, and the sumac fruit, the purple of vervain, early asters, and the persistent brunella, and the white of the exquisite dalibarda, of immortelles, arrowhead, and the graceful spiranthes in turn caught the eye as the wagon rolled by pasture and sandbank, meadow, copse, and swamp.
From Berry’s house we drove a long mile before the true primeval forest was reached. There, in a clearing of an acre or more, werethe ruins of a saw-mill, two or three slab houses, and a collapsed stable where the lumbermen’s oxen had been kept in the winter nights, years ago. In the mill’s time sawdust had covered everything; but now the strong, quarrelsome blackberry had mastered the sawdust. Our guide pointed to a break in the solid wall of woods surrounding the mill, so we struggled through the blackberry jungle and left the sunlight behind us. As we entered the forest, bird music ceased, few flowers decked the ground,—the pallid Indian pipe seeming more akin to the fungi than to flowers,—and not a squirrel disturbed the quiet of the endless aisles. Here and there small brightly colored toadstools and the fruit of bunchberry or clintonia lent a bit of vermilion, orange, yellow, or lustrous metallic blue to the dull brown carpet of the woods; or a branch of maple, prematurely robbed of its chlorophyll, gleamed in the far-off sunlight among the tree-tops. If by chance the eye caught a glimpse of the flowers of the rattlesnake plantain, or of some of the greenish wood orchids, it found in them less color than in the toadstools and less perfume than in the needles of the balsam.
There extended before us a clearly marked passageway between the giant trunks of ancient trees. It was the beginning of the old trail.Stout young saplings had grown up within it, and the long interlacing stems of the hobble-bush, or “tangle-foot” as Berry called it, concealed its many inequalities. We proceeded slowly, cutting away bushes as we went, and the horse followed with the wagon, which rose and fell over logs and boulders as though tossed on the waves of the sea. At the end of half a mile, we decided to leave the horse with all of our impedimenta except axes and luncheon. A space was accordingly cleared, and Kitty, tied to a large tree, was fenced in on two sides to prevent her from walking around the tree, and so choking herself.
The trees which formed the forest were of many kinds, making it much more interesting than the monotonous spruce growth of the higher slopes. Those which were to all appearance the oldest were the yellow birches, hundreds of them having trunks over ten feet in circumference at a point two feet from the ground. Some of the giant hemlocks were larger, but they are, I believe, trees of more rapid growth than the yellow birch and so probably less venerable. There was a large representation of ancient beech-trees with trunks which looked as hard as granite, yet which made me think of wrestlers with swollen muscles strained and knotted under the tightly drawnskin. Some of the beeches seemed to have begun life in mid-air, for their trunks rested upon tripods or polypods of naked and spreading roots, which held them two or even three feet from the surface of the soil. In other cases these polypods clasped great boulders in their unyielding embrace, showing that the beech in its infancy had taken root upon the top of the rock, and year by year extended its thirsty tentacles lower and lower down the sides of its mossy foundation until the soil was reached. Then the hungry sapling, fed for so long on meagre supplies of food and water, must have expanded with sudden vigor, while its roots grew strong and gripped the rock in tighter and tighter embrace. The only way of accounting for the empty polypods seemed to be to suppose the trees to have sprouted upon stumps prone to decay, or upon rocks capable of rapid disintegration. Many of the glimpses through these beech woods reminded me of the grotesque forest pictures which are produced so frequently in German woodcuts.
Huge maples, with bark resembling that of ancient oaks, formed an important part of the forest, and so did canoe birches of various ages, solitary white pines of immense height, and old-growth spruces, the last named becoming more and more numerous as our road gained higherlevels. Dozens of these trees had been struck by lightning and more or less injured. One had been completely shattered and surrounded by a spiral abattis of huge splinters stuck firmly into the ground.
The twilight and silence of the forest made it restful at first, but as the day wore on, rare glimpses of distance and of sunlight were as welcome to us as to men confined between prison walls.
We had gone rather more than three miles from Berry’s house when our guide paused and said: “There, the old road is missing for a piece beyond this, and the best we can do is to head north and spot the trees as we go.”
To that point there had been evident, to eyes accustomed to forest travel, a difference between the continuity of large timber and the strip once cleared of this timber in order to form the road. Looking back, we could see the passage; looking forward, there seemed to be no trace of it. The greater part of Paugus had been passed on our left, and on our right the peak of Chocorua, which at Berry’s had been northeast, was now a little south of east from us. Before us the valley narrowed somewhat, and far ahead a continuation of the ridge of Paugus seemed to cross the northern sky line and approach the northern spurs of Chocorua.Blazing the trees as we walked by them, both on our left and on our right, on the south side of the trunks and on their north sides also, we pushed forward due north. Ever since leaving the ruined mill our way had lain close to the foot of Paugus, the width of the valley being between us and the foot of Chocorua. Nearly a mile was traversed before we touched the wall of Paugus barring the north and forcing us to bend eastward. Entering a narrow ravine, none too wide for a single road at its bottom, we came once more upon the lost trail. Marks of the axe were frequent, but the great hemlocks which it had felled were mere moss-covered pulp, and from their stumps viburnum or young trees had sprouted. Berry found spots on the trees which he remembered to have made when he guided the engineer through the pass fifteen years before. The walls of the ravine grew steeper, and across it fallen trees occasionally blocked the way. Presently it bent sharply to the left, so that we were once more headed northward, and then it widened into an amphitheatre half a mile in width, wholly surrounded by steep and rocky sides. The old trail was again lost, and Berry declared that out of this pocket there was no outlet save over the towering ridge at the north. The story of the man and woman in a sleigh, who had once crossedthis frowning barrier, alone sustained our hopes of finding a pass which could be opened to wheels.
My watch said that it was 10.30A. M.As we had begun our first meal at fourA. M., a second one seemed appropriate; so in the face of our frowning crisis we lay upon the moss and made way with the larger part of our knapsack’s contents. A red squirrel, inquisitive, petulant Chickaree, came down from the ridge and chattered to us. Far above in the treetops two birds called loudly to each other. Their notes were new to me, and so shy were they that I secured only a distant glimpse of them through my glass. They seemed to prefer the highest tips of dead trees, from which they darted now and then into the air after insects. It did not require much knowledge of birds to assign this noisy couple to the family of the tyrant flycatchers, and their size was so great as to make them one of three species,—kingbirds, great crested flycatchers, or olive-sided flycatchers. As I knew the first two well, from daily chances to watch their habits, I felt practically certain that these keepers of the pass were the wild, wayward, and noisy olive-sided flycatchers of which I had heard so often, but never before met on their breeding-grounds. Luncheon over, we faced the barrier, and, selecting a shallowravine in its side, began the ascent. While struggling over huge boulders and winding around fallen trees we did not feel as though wheels were ever likely to go where legs were having so hard a time. Still the ascent was made in less than ten minutes, and to a practical road-builder the slope, cleared of its surface débris, would present few serious obstacles.
On reaching the top we gained a view of the peak of Chocorua well to the south of east, and of the ramparts of Paugus, half spruce hung and half bald rock, bounding the long valley through which our morning tramp had taken us. The peak of Chocorua had lost its horn-like contour and resembled more a combing wave dashing northward. It was the only part of the mountain proper to be seen, as in the foreground a massive spur projecting northwestward completely concealed the principal mass. Looking towards the north, the prospect was disheartening. The ridge on which we stood had been a battleground of the elements. It was, in the language of this region, a “harricane,” and woe to the man who ventures into a “harricane.” We advanced cautiously, choosing our ground, and cutting a narrow path through the small spruces, cherry saplings, and mountain maples which had overgrown the fallen forest. Every few steps we came uponstumps which bore the axe mark instead of that of the storm. We surmised that we had struck a belt which had been “lumbered” before the hurricane had completed its destruction. Fighting on yard by yard, we crossed the top of the ridge and gained its northern edge. There the signs of timber cutting were plainer, and presently I noticed a curious ribbon of saplings reaching down the slope in front of us. The young trees in it were higher than the wreck on each side of it, yet the ribbon was the road and the wreck was all that remained of the forest through which the road had been cut long years ago. The broken thread of the lost trail had been found. Behind us a blazed path reached into the Bearcamp valley; before us the lumber road wound downward a short two miles to the Swift River road, now plainly visible over the sloping tree-tops.
We followed the lumber road down about a mile, searching for a hut which Berry remembered to have seen. As we descended, the “harricane” was left behind, and our ribbon of saplings led into the forest, its massed stems contrasting oddly with the wide-spaced trunks of the primeval growth. Coming to the hut, which Berry said had been built twenty years before, we found it remarkably well preserved. Straw still remained in the lumbermen’s bunks,pieces of the stove lay on the floor, and although the roof had been sprung by snow resting heavily upon it, the hut was as dry and habitable as ever. It even retained the “stuffy” smell of a dirty and ill-ventilated house. It was inhabited, too, not by men, but by hedgehogs, as the American porcupine is universally called in New Hampshire. They had been under it, through it, and over it. Every piece of stair, joist, or floor, upon which salt or grease had fallen, had been gnawed away by them. They had slept in the bunks both upstairs and down, and the stairs bore traces of their constant use.
In front of the hut stood a watering-trough. It was a huge log hollowed by the axe into two tanks, a small one at the upper end for man’s use, and a larger one below for the cattle. Small logs had been neatly grooved as spouts to lead the water from the brook to the trough. Moss grew upon them now and the summer sunlight shone upon them, but it was easy to imagine the snow piled high upon the hills, smothering the brooks and burying the rough spouts, and to fancy that over the trampled snow the woolly and steaming oxen came to drink of the water, while a sturdy French Canadian broke the ice with his axe and drank at the spot where from under the snow the spouts led the water into his end of the dugout. The cattle are dead,the axe has rusted, the Canadian has been killed in a brawl, or has gone back to his River St. Lawrence to spend his old age under the shadow of the cross, but the brook still murmurs over its pebbles, and when snow falls by the trough and the hut it is cleaner and purer than the foot of the lumberman left it.
Woe to the man who ventures into a “harricane”! Not content with the road which we had made and found over the ridge, we sought, as we turned homewards, to see whether another lumber road, which came into ours from the southeast, did not cross the ridge by an easier grade. Following it upward higher and higher, we came at last to an open ledge from which a beautiful view was gained. Northward of us frowned Bear Mountain, dark in its spruces. To its left were Lowell, Nancy, Anderson, and the rest of the proud retinue of Carrigain. Deep shadows lay in Carrigain Notch. Bluer and fairer, higher and more distant, the heads of Bond, Willey, and the Franconia Mountains rested against the sky. To the westward, above the long rampart of Paugus with its flat, gray cliffs capped by black spruce, towered the cone of Passaconaway, wooded to its very tip. Southward, just across a deep ravine and behind a heavily timbered spur, was Chocorua, its great tooth cutting into the blue heavens. Though weenjoyed the picture of the distance, we were filled with something like despair at the foreground. On three sides of us the “harricane” extended as far as the nature of the ground permitted us to see. Westward, along the ridge, in the direction in which lay our trail of the morning, it reached for half a mile at least, and through it we must go, unless, indeed, we preferred to retrace our steps into the Swift River valley and regain our path by such an ignominious circuit. Seen from above, that half-mile of forest wreck looked like a jack-straw table of the gods. Thousands of trees, averaging sixty or seventy feet in height, had been uprooted and flung together “every which way.” They were flat upon the ground, piled in parallel lines, crossed at right angles, head to head, root to root, twisted as though by a whirlwind, or matted together as they might have been had a sea of water swept them from hill-crest to valley. Boulders of various sizes lay under the wreck, and, to make its confusion more distracting, saplings, briers, and vines flourished upon the ground shaded and enriched by the wasting ruin.
It took more than an hour to climb and tumble over half a mile of this tangle. Any one who has watched an ant laboriously traversing a stubble-field or a handful of hay, crawling along one straw, across some, under others, andanon climbing to a height to consult the distance, will know how we made our journey. Men go through great battles without a scratch, but they could not penetrate a “harricane” with any such fortunate results.
The spots on our blazed trees seemed as friendly as home on a winter’s night, when at last we reached them and began the southward march. As we had been two hours without water, the first brook drew us to its side and held us entranced by its tiny cascades. In the pool from which I drank, half a dozen caddis-worm cases lay upon the sand at the bottom. They were sand, yet not of the sand, for mind had rescued them from the monotony of their matter and made them significant of life. They had faithfully guarded their little builders while dormant, and now those awakened tenants had risen from the water, dried their gauzy wings in the sun and vanished in airy wanderings. Near the brook lay a dead tree, and upon it were fastened a number of brightly colored fungi. Their lower surfaces and margins were creamy white, then a band of orange vermilion passed around them, while the upper and principal part was greenish gray marked with dark brown wavelike lines. They reminded me, by their color and surface, of the tinted clay images or costume figures which are made by peasants inseveral parts of southern Europe, and in Japan. Anything more in contrast with the gloom of a northern forest would be hard to discover. Much of the ground near the brook was covered by yew bushes, on which, brilliant as jewels, gleamed their pendent and slightly attached red berries. The mosses and lichens were the glory of the wood. Never parched by thirst in these perpetual shades, they grew luxuriantly on boulders, fallen logs, standing trees, the faces of ledges, and over the moist brook banks and beds of leaf mould. What the great forest was to us, that the mosses must be to the minute insects which live among them.
So thoroughly had we spotted the trees in the morning, that as we followed our trail back there was not a moment when our eyes hesitated as to the direction of the path.
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Four days passed, and on the morning of the fifth a gay column wound its way through the forest following the regained trail. Nearly a score of axes, hatchets, and savage machettas resounded upon the trees and shrubs which encroached upon the road. Behind the axemen came several horses, each bearing a rider as courageous as she was fair. If branches menaced the comfort of these riders, they were speedily hewn away; if the hobble-bush hidhollows or boulders in the road, it was cut off at the root; if a ford or a bog offered uncertain footing to the snorting horses, strong hands grasped their bridles and they were led through to surer ground. When the difficulties of the road became serious, the horses were left behind and the column pressed forward on foot. The ridge was met and stormed, the “harricane” was safely pierced, the hedgehog’s hut was visited and passed, and the old lumber road was followed swiftly down to the grass-land and highway of the Albany intervale. If one woman in days long past had traversed the winter road in a sleigh, others of her sex had now overcome greater difficulties and broken the stubborn barrier of the Sandwich range.
The 10th of August ranked, by the family thermometer, as next to the hottest day of the summer. It was a marked day in my calendar,—marked long in advance for a night alone on the narrow rock which forms the tip of Chocorua’s peak. It was chosen on account of the display of meteors which, in case of a clear sky, always makes that night attractive for a vigil. On August 10, 1891, I counted two hundred and fifty meteors between sunset and eleven o’clockP. M.As I watched the sky, and saw the great rock of the peak rising sharply into it, I determined that another year I would count my meteors from its summit, and not from the common level of a field.
By four o’clock in the afternoon a breeze had drifted down to us from the mountains, and behind them cloud-heads were rising in the northwest. Fanned by the breeze and undaunted by clouds, I began the ascent of Chocorua by the Hammond path. In the woods the breeze was stifled by the trees, and I was stifled by the still heat which oppressed all nature. For threemiles the only bird I heard was a red-eyed vireo, and the only one I saw was a grouse which flew from the path. In the road below and along the trail up the mountain there were dozens of young toads. They were about the size of the Indian’s head on a cent. I wondered how far up the trail I should find them, so I watched closely as the path grew steeper and steeper. The last one seen was about sixteen hundred feet above the sea, and one thousand feet above the Hammond clearing where I first noticed them. There is no still water within a mile of the point where I found the last one. In view of such facts, it is not difficult to account for the popular belief that young toads fall from the clouds with rain.
Clearing the forest, and reaching the open ledges on the crest of the great southeastern ridge of Chocorua, along which the Hammond path runs towards the peak, I saw that a storm was gathering in the west. Piles of thunderheads were rolling up beyond Whiteface and the Sandwich Dome, and tending northward. Chocorua might be too far east to be included in the drenching which was in store. It was not too far away to lose the cool wind which suddenly changed my gasping heat into a shiver. With a quicker pace I pushed towards the foot of the peak.
All but one of the well-marked paths up Chocorua spend too much time in the ravines and woods. It is discouraging to toil mile after mile through uninteresting small growth, without a breath of cool air or a glimpse of distance. The Hammond path cancels nearly half the height of the mountain in the first mile of woodland, and then rewards the climber by successive views which grow more charming as ledge after ledge is passed. While following the top of the slowly rising and scantily wooded ridge, the peak is seen coming nearer and nearer, and growing more and more impressive. Range after range of northern mountains rise above the foreground, and the far horizon widens slowly. When the foot of the peak is finally reached, shutting out for a time all that is grandest in the view, the climber feels that he must scale those forbidding cliffs, whatever becomes of him when the final struggle is over. So I felt as, at about half past six, I gained the top of the mountain’s shoulder and looked up at the huge rock which forms its awful head. The eastern side of the peak is so precipitous that few have the temerity even to try to scale it. The southern side is broken into smaller cliffs, between which tufts of spruces grow. In winter this face is quite readily climbed upon the packed snow, but in summer wide sloping ledges polished by ice make the way difficult and dangerous to the novice. A few score rods to the west, yet still on the southern face of the peak, there is a rift in the cliffs filled with small trees and fragments of rock. This cleft leads straight upwards to a small sandy plateau on the west side of the peak, two thirds of the way to its summit. As I struggled up this almost perpendicular ravine, I heard the steady roar of thunder, and saw above me black clouds surging across the sky. It would have been dark had not the south been filled with silvery light and hazy sunset glory. A black-mouthed cave upon my right offered a refuge. Hedgehogs lived in it, but its outer chamber would be storm-proof. Should I wait? No, storm or no storm, I would gain the peak, and do my part to keep my tryst with the stars.
THE PEAK OF CHOCORUA FROM THE HAMMOND TRAIL
THE PEAK OF CHOCORUA FROM THE HAMMOND TRAIL
Stumbling out of the ravine upon the plateau, I faced the north. A picture was there which made the memory of Doré’s strongest delineations of Dante’s visions seem weak. On my right was an upright wall of black rock, on my left an abyss. Northward, before me, lay that wilderness of forests and peaks which forms the White Mountains, thirty miles square of spruce forests, and all of it on edge,—a sierra forbidding at its best, but now made terrible by a tempest. The higher heavens were filled withloose, rounded black clouds with white spaces between them. Below them, impending over a belt of country about ten miles north of me, was a very long but narrow cloud, black as ink, with a clean-cut lower edge as straight as a level. From it forked lightning was playing downward. The outlines of the mountains were singularly clear. I could see, beginning at the right, the Presidential Range, the Crawford Notch, Anderson, Nancy, Lowell, the Carrigain Notch, Carrigain; and then, partly obscured by rain, the Franconia Mountains and the nearer heights of Tripyramid and its neighbors. Just over Tripyramid, reaching nearly to the zenith, was an opening in the clouds, a narrow space between two storms. It was clear gold within, but hideous black profiles were outlined against it, as though the fiends of one storm were looking across it at their allied hosts in the second bank of clouds now hurrying upward from the southwest.
Turning sharply to the right, I found and climbed the rough path leading up the rocks to the highest point on the peak. Three thousand feet below me, in that peaceful valley by the lake, was my home. I could just see its red roof among the trees. Wind ripples were chasing each other across the lake, marring its white surface. The lake is heart-shaped, and my cottagerests at the tip. No storm impended over those whom I had left behind, but the voice of the thunder reminded me of what was passing to the northward.
Under the long level black cloud, from which zigzag lightning darted downward like a snake’s tongue, were three zones of color. The first, nearest the east, and at the head of the storm as it moved forward, was gray. It was formed of scud. The second was black, and from it shot most of the lightning. The third was snowy white shaded by perpendicular lines. This was the rain. Each belt seemed to be two miles or more in width, and the whole was moving about twenty miles an hour. When I reached the peak, Carrigain Notch was just passing under the scud, and as I watched, Lowell, Anderson, and Nancy were in turn obscured. By the time Mount Nancy was covered, Carrigain and its notch were reappearing. Meanwhile, the golden gap in the clouds had closed, and the second storm was approaching. Its course was such as to take in Chocorua, Paugus, and the Swift River intervale which lay just below me on the north. Wild as the first storm made the northern sky, the second one seemed bent upon making the picture even more gloomy. It was the moment of sunset, but the sun was lost in a wilderness of thunder-clouds. Suddenly a soundclear and sweet came to me. It was the first sound, save thunder and wind, that I had heard since reaching the peak. A long, pure note, followed by one much higher, repeated several times, formed the song of my companion on the heights. It was the farewell to the day of a white-throated sparrow, that sweetest singer of the mountain peaks. A feeling of forlornness which had been creeping over me was dispelled. Let the storm come; I was ready for it.
Not many rods below the peak, on the very verge of the eastern crag, stands an enormous detached rock, roughly cubical in shape, and at least twenty feet in each dimension. This rock, which is known as “the Cow,” rests upon a narrow shelf having a saucer-shaped depression about fifteen feet in diameter in its upper surface. The Cow projects slightly beyond the outer edge of the ledge, but at the point where it projects the concavity of the under granite leaves a space exactly eighteen inches in height and several feet long, which admits light into the hollow beneath the Cow.
“THE COW”
“THE COW”
Years before, I had discovered this strange cave, and had found that a projecting corner of rock gave standing-room near enough to the narrow mouth to allow a man to creep into it. To this shelter I determined to take my luggage for safe-keeping during the rain. As I wound my way down the zigzag path to the cave, a junco flew past me in the gloom and chirped inquiringly. A drop or two of rain fell. Thunder roared in the southwest as well as in the north. The mountains had lost the wonderful dark violet shade which they possessed before the light faded, and were now almost black, those nearest being darkest. As I reached the mouth of the cave, an uncomfortable thought intruded itself upon my mind,—was it possible that bears used the cave? I peered in. The place was empty now, at all events. Pushing in my oilskin coat, jersey, knapsack with lunch, lantern, and star-atlas, I slid in after them. At the deepest part of the depression in the ledge, the space between the rock below and the rock above is thirty inches. I could not sit up straight, but I could recline comfortably at various angles. Lighting my lantern, I unpacked my bag and furnished my lodgings. A watch, match-box, foot rule, thermometer, pencil, a mirror for signaling, compass, hunting-knife, bird whistles, supper, breakfast, and dry underclothing made the cave seem quite homelike. The dry clothing attracted me, for I was wet with perspiration, and my thermometer reminded me that I felt chilly. I listened. Was it raining? No. Taking my lantern, supper, and dry clothes, I wriggled to the entrance and regained the air.Happy thought: if any bear could get into that cave, it would be a very thin one. Unhappy thought: his thinness would betoken all the greater hunger.
There was a lull in the storm, for although everything above was black, the wind seemed to have died away and the thunder to be very distant. On the narrow ledge between the towering pinnacle and the black abyss below the Cow, I discarded my damp clothes and put on the dry ones. The change was comforting. I was glad when it was accomplished, for I had no inclination to fight a bear in the costume of Mulvaney at the taking of Lungtungpen.
Step by step I crept back up the cliff to the summit. There was wind enough on top, and my lantern had to be thrust into a crack in the rock on the lee side to keep it not only from blowing out, but from blowing away. The top of Chocorua is about the shape and size of a large, wide dining-table. On the south, other levels lead up to it gradually; but west, north, and east this highest rock is bounded by abrupt sides, from which a fall in the night would be a serious matter. Lying down on this dizzy platform, I ate my supper with savage relish, and took new account of the night and its pictures. Except when lightning illumined some part of the horizon, the only things visible to me werethe long black ridge of Paugus, the hump of Passaconaway over Paugus, fragments of white ledges on the northern spurs of Chocorua, and lakes in the valley. Even Ossipee Lake, fifteen miles or more away, was plainly distinguishable as a white spot in the surrounding gloom. Lights shone from many of the cottages near Chocorua Lake, and from Birch intervale, Albany intervale, and Conway. They were the connecting link between me and the rest of mankind. In the sky there was absolute blackness, curiously broken once by the sudden appearance of the red planet for the space of a single minute. Sometimes a few drops of rain fell, but the second storm seemed to be reserving most of its strength for a region farther east. It was now nine o’clock, and the first storm had passed far over into Maine, its lightning playing with rapid flashes behind Mount Pequawket. At every flash the sky just behind the pyramidal peak assumed the color of dead gold, while the mountain was embossed upon it like an emblem on a shield. Occasionally the second storm produced lightning, and when it did so the effects were startling, so near was the heavenly fire. One flash was from side to side across a low cloud which hung near Chocorua on the east. It was very vivid, and so complex with its many delicate lines and loops of lightthat a fiery sentence appeared to have been written on the sky. Another bolt was broad and straight, and went down into the forest like an arrow. It was so near and so brilliant that for almost a minute I could see nothing. The thunder which followed it began in the zenith, and rolled away, booming and crashing, in three directions, lasting so long that I wished I had timed it, to see for how many seconds its terrific echoes refused to subside. As many of its rumblings and mutterings resounded from the ravines and hillsides below me, the effect of this great peal was unlike any I had ever before heard.
While I was listening to the sighing of the wind-tossed forest in the hollows eastward of the mountain, another sound reached my ears, and made me concentrate my senses in an effort to determine its nature. At the moment I heard it, I was somewhat below the peak, leaning against a wall of rock facing the south. The sound seemed to come from above. It resembled that made by a thin stick or shingle when whirled rapidly in the air. At the same time there was a creaking, and sounds almost like wailing and groaning. A moment later, a slender column of white cloud, a hundred feet or more in height, but proportioned like a human figure, glided past the mountain over the black abyss below the eastern cliffs. It is needless to say that I was interested in these phenomena. I was much more than interested; and the fact that I was absolutely alone, in the dark, miles away from home, with a storm howling around me, was brought clearly to my mind. The legend of Chocorua, the Indian for whom this mountain was named, of his curse upon the whites, and of his melancholy death near these eastern cliffs, rose, for some illogical reason, into my memory.