MOUNT CHOCORUA IN WINTER

Visitor’s Edition

AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER

Chronicles of a Stroller
in New England
from July to December

BY
FRANK BOLLES

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

CONTENTS.

PAGE [A Thunderstorm in the Forest] 1 [The Heart of the Mountain] 10 [A Lonely Lake] 27 [Following a Lost Trail] 43 [A Night Alone on Chocorua] 62 [Bringing Home the Bear] 82 [The Dead Tree’s Day] 96 [Migration] 118 [Trapping Gnomes] 132 [Old Shag] 146 [My Heart’s in the Highlands] 157 [The Vintage of the Leaves] 168 [Chocorua in November] 194 [Among the Wind-Swept Lakes] 211 [’Lection Day, ’92] 219 [A Wintry Wilderness] 230 [Climbing Bear Mountain in the Snow] 243 [In the Paugus Woods] 252 [At the Foot of Passaconaway] 264 [Christmas at Sabba Day Falls] 273 [Down the Torrent’s Pathway] 285 [Index] 295

Invitation

To drink the wine of mountain air

Beside the Bearcamp Water.

Whittier, Among the Hills.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

[Mount Chocorua in Winter] Frontispiece [Water-Lilies in Chocorua Lake] 16 [Chocorua from Heron Pond] 28 [Canoe Birches of the Bearcamp Valley] 40 [The Peak of Chocorua from the Hammond Trail] 64 [“The Cow”] 68 [The Peak from the Southeast] 72 [The Peak from the North] 76 [View from “the Cow,” showing Moat Mountain and Mount Pequawket Beyond] 80 [The Dead Tree] 98 [Mount Chocorua and Chocorua Lake in Summer] 118 [Two Kinds of Gnomes—Hesperomys and Zapus] 138 [Paugus from Wonalancet Road] 146 [Chocorua seen from the Side of Paugus] 150 [Whiteface and Passaconaway from Paugus] 154 [Crowlands, formerly the Old Doe Farm] 158 [Twilight on the Lake] 174 [Chocorua and Dr. Chadwick’s Pines] 184 [The Peak of Chocorua from Bald Mountain] 206 [Mount Chocorua from Whitton Pond] 216 [“Moat, like a breaking wave”] 232 [Mount Chocorua and the Lake in Winter] 250 [Frost-covered Spruce near the Summit of Passaconaway] 262 [Moat Mountain and the Swift River] 290

AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER.

A THUNDERSTORM IN THE FOREST.

During nearly the whole of the forenoon of July 3, 1892, a soft rain had been falling. It had begun in the night to the discomfiture of the whippoorwills, but not to the extinguishment of their voices. It continued until nearly noon, when the wind shifted from east to west, patches of blue sky appeared, and ever and anon gleams of sunlight fell upon the distant forest across the lake, or slid slowly over the tree-tops on the side of Chocorua. Bird voices grew stronger with the promise of fair weather. Hermit thrushes, veeries, red-eyed vireos, and Maryland yellow-throats sang four invitations from as many points of the compass, and I said Yes to the veeries and sought the swamp. A New Hampshire swamp is full of attractions at all seasons. In winter the great northern hares make innumerable paths across its soft snow, and tempt the gunner into the chilly gloom in search of a shot at their phantom forms. In spring a host of migrating warblers makes merry in its tree-tops, and the song of the winter wren is sent from heaven to give joy to its shadows. Summer brings to it many a shy orchid blooming among the ferns, and the fisherman finds the trout in its brook’s placid pools long after they have ceased to bite well in the upper reaches of the stream. There are no venomous serpents hanging from its moss-grown trees, no tigers concealed in its brakes, and no ague lingering in its stagnant pools. It is a safe swamp and kind, yet none the less a swamp.

When I reached its borders, after crossing the meadow, I found wild roses in bloom. It was of these, doubtless, that the veery was singing so bewitchingly. Certainly nothing less fair could have prompted such magic music. Moreover, the veery’s nest, framed in nodding osmundas, is near these beautiful blossoms, with many a pool and thicket between it and hard ground. Passing into the darkness of the swamp, I glanced back at the sky. The north and west were filled with black clouds which were stirred by passionate winds in their midst. A low growl of thunder came through the heavy air. I felt as though forbidden to enter the mysteries of the swamp, as though warned that danger lay within those aisles of twilight. The veery ceased its song. No bird voice broke the stillness of the gloom, and a hush of expectation held every leaf motionless. The branches closed behind me and I stole on between lofty trees with mossy trunks, over fallen logs, and through the dripping jungle of ferns. Upland woods are cleaner, stronger, more symmetrical than swamp growth, but they have not the effect of tropical luxuriance which the swamp forest possesses. The mosses, lichens, ferns of many species, climbing vines, and such large-leaved plants as the veratrum and skunk cabbage, give to the moist land an air of wealth of leaf-growth which is distinctive.

Two species of orchid were conspicuous, rising just above the ferns. They were the purple-fringed, just coming into bloom, and the white, which was abundant. Splashing back and forth through the shallow pools, gathering the spikes of the white orchis, I did not at first notice a distant sound which grew in volume until its sullen vibration could not be ignored. The tree-tops above me gave a sudden, vicious swish. Crows to the westward were cawing wildly. The roar of the storm became unmistakable; the swamp grew darker; a few big drops of rain fell, and then, as though a train were plunging down noisy rails upon the forest, the rain and wind leaped upon the trees, filling the air with deafening sounds, and twisting the branches until it seemed as though the whole structure of the woods was about to collapse in one vast ruin. Then through the tormented tree-tops the floods fell. They were white like snow, and seemed to be a fallen part of a white sky which showed now and then as the forest swayed back and forth in the wind’s arms. Wet as the swamp had been before, its colors became more vivid under this deluge. Every leaf grew greener, and each lichen gave out new tints as it drank in rain. The trunks of the trees assumed more distinctive shades; that of the ash became brown, of the yellow birch almost like saffron, and of the canoe birch glistening white. The rain pelting into my eyes bade me look less at the sky and more at the beauties at my feet. Beauties there surely were at my feet, both of color and form. There were no flowers, but the leaves were enough to satisfy both eye and mind,—large leaves and small, coarse and delicate, strong and feeble, stiff and drooping. Some were long and slender, others deeply cleft, some round, or smoothly oval, others shaped like arrow-heads. Some received the rain submissively and bowed more and more before it, others responded buoyantly as each drop struck them and was tossed off. In some the up-and-down motion communicated by the falling drop was by the formation of the leaf-stalk transformed at once into an odd vibration from side to side, which was like an indignant shaking of the head.

Looking at the marvelous variety in the outlines of these gleaming leaves, I suddenly found my memory tugging me back to the schoolroom where I was first taught botany. I recalled one melancholy morning when my teacher, who knew neither the derivation of botanical terms nor the true beauties of botanical science, ordered me to commit to memory the list of adjectives applied to the various shapes of leaves. The dose prejudiced me against botany for full ten years of my life, yet here in this glistening carpet of the swamp I saw “lanceolate,” “auriculate,” “cordate,” “pinnate,” written, not in letters of gold, but in something equally impressive to the memory, and much more easy for a dull teacher to obtain.

When one is in the deep woods and a flash of lightning comes, the eye seems to see a narrow horizontal belt of light play swiftly across the foliage immediately in the line of vision. If I looked at the ground I caught it there; if my eyes were fixed on the low branches at a distance, the flash was there. Each flash was promptly followed by the glorious mountain thunder which is so much more impressive than that in level regions. At first heaven was rent by the sound; then mountain after mountain seemed to fall in noisy ruin, the great ledges tumbling in upon each other with deafening shocks; then the sound rolled away through the sky, striking here and there upon some cloudy promontory and giving out a softened boom or waning rumble.

For full twenty minutes the trees writhed in the wind, the rain fell, the leaves nodded and shivered under the drops, and the rhythmic roar of the rain was broken irregularly by the thunder. As time passed, the shower slackened, the thunder followed the lightning at longer and longer intervals, the wind seemed to take deeper and less nervous breaths, and I listened to discover what creature of the swamp would first raise its voice above the subsiding storm. A mosquito hovered before me, dodging the drops in its vibratory flight. If it was buzzing I could not hear it. Suddenly a single call from a blue jay came, in a lull of the wind, from a thicket of spruces. “Yoly-’oly,” it said, and was silent again. I took a few steps forward, and the shrill alarm-note of a chipmunk sounded through the gloom. I strolled slowly through the drenched and dripping woods fragrant with the perfume of moss and mould. It was more like wading than walking, for every leaf had a drop of cold water ready to give away to whatever first touched it. A ray of sunlight dodged through the lifting clouds and fell into the swamp. The song of a parula warbler, distilled by it, floated back skyward. As the west grew golden and blue, bird-songs sounded from every quarter. The merry chickadees, conversational vireos, and querulous wood pewees vied with each other and the tree-toads in replacing the orchestral passion of the storm by the simple music of their solos.

Leaving the swamp, I climbed the terrace marking the ancient border of the lake, which once included the swamp in its area, and passed through a grove of slender birches and poplars. Their stems, streaming with rain, were as bright as polished marble, and their foliage, illuminated by the clear sunlight, was marvelously green against the deep blue of the sky. Presently a vista opened northward, and at its end rose the dark peak of Chocorua. After a rain this towering rock presents a noticeably different appearance from its normal coloring. Most of its surface is covered by lichens, one species of which, when dry, resembles burnt paper. When rain falls upon these lichens they alter their tints, and the burnt paper species in particular becomes so green that a wonderful change takes place in the whole coloring of the mountain. Looked upon through the birch vista, the air being clear and clean, and the colors of the mountain uncommonly bright, the peak seemed near at hand, and even grander than usual. There are few things in New England as truly picturesque as this horn of Chocorua. Three thousand feet above its lake and the level of the Saco, the great rock lifts itself with bold and naked outline into the midst of the sky. No foot seems able to creep up its precipitous slopes to its dizzy tip, and even the sturdy spruce can cling only to the deep clefts in its storm-swept ledges. There was a time when the forest reached to its crest, and when the cold rocks, now naked, were covered deep in soil and mosses. Passaconaway, close by, shows how this could have been, and how Chocorua must have looked draped in evergreens. Fire and hurricane destroyed the trees; the parched soil was washed away from the rocks; and now the only trace of the old forest growth is an occasional bleached stump or log hidden in a cleft in the ledges.

As I strolled homewards I passed a spot where the linnæa has covered several square yards of ground in a birch wood. The tiny bells had rung out their elfin music for the year. By dint of laborious search on hands and knees I found eight of the flowers, still wonderfully fragrant though somewhat faded. All the rest of the chime had fallen. Not far away a growth of dogbane fringed the path. I picked some of its blossoms and held the two sets of bells side by side in my hand. The comparison made me feel sorry for the dogbane.

THE HEART OF THE MOUNTAIN

Floating upon the clear waters of Chocorua Lake in the latter part of a warm July afternoon, and looking northward, I see the coolness of night beginning to grow in the heart of the mountain. At first there is but a slender dark line marking a deep ravine, through which a brook flows; then the shadow widens until a great hollow in the mountain’s side is filled with shade. As the sun sinks the shadow reaches higher and higher upon the wooded flanks of the two spurs which hold the hollow between them, until at last only the vast rock of the peak, resting upon its forest-clad shoulders, is left warm in the sun’s rays. The point where the shadow begins to form is more than a thousand feet above the level of the lake. From it, reaching upwards, two folds in the forest drapery extend towards the foot of the peak. One marks a brook coming from the upper part of the right-hand ridge, the other a brook which rises at the very head of the left-hand, or west ridge. The heart of the mountain is the wild ravine where these two streams mingle in perpetual coolness and shadow. No path leads to it and few are the feet which have found a way to its beauties. There is a peculiar charm in a spot unknown to the many. Its loneliness endears it to the mind, and gives its associations a rarer flavor. If besides being unfrequented it is singularly beautiful in itself, it becomes a shrine, a place sacred to one’s best thoughts. To me the heart of Chocorua is a shrine, all the more valued because of the weariness of flesh required to attain to it.

Early on the morning of July 10, I set out across the pastures for the foot of the mountain. The sun was hot, the air hazy, and not a breath of a breeze made the aspens quiver. In the shaded hollows something of the night’s chill still lingered, and from them floated the psalm of the hermit and the gypsy music of the veery. Now and then the clear, cool phœbe-note of the chickadee reached the ear, in contrast to the trill of the field sparrows which came from the warmest parts of the grass-land. On the hill to the westward young crows with high-pitched voices clamored for food, and quarreled with each other on their shady perch in the beeches.

The flowers which bloomed by the path were children of heat, types of midsummer. Buds were large on the goldenrod, the St. John’s-wort was in full bloom, and so, too, were the diurnal evening-primrose, the fleabane and dogbane, both worthy of sweeter names; the yarrow, as disagreeable among flowers as a cynic is among men; the tall potentilla, yellow clover, and, representing the purple flowers, the brunella. In many places thick beds of checkerberry, decked with brilliant berries, were made gayer by many heads of the brunella growing through them. The brunella is shaped somewhat like the conventional chess castle, but the castle is never quite complete while blossoming, owing to the lack of harmony among the many little flowers which unite to form its head. Low, running blackberry dotted the banks with uninteresting white blossoms, and the stiff spikes of the spiræa were abundant. The daisy, stigmatized as whiteweed by the indignant farmers, still displayed a few battered blossoms, which kept company with heads of red and of white clover. After passing these flowers of summer, it seemed strange, on descending into a deep cup-shaped basin where a small pond fed by springs is shaded by lofty oaks and birches, to find the houstonia still in full glory, and the dwarf cornel blooming in dark and mossy nooks. Animate nature takes solid comfort in a hot day. As I stole softly downward to the shore of the little pond, scores of tadpoles shot away from the edge of the water into its green depths. Painted tortoises, which had been baking on logs and stones in the full glare of the sun, dropped off unwillingly into the water. Countless dragonflies skimmed the surface of the pond, devouring smaller insects, and from a dead limb overlooking the shore, a crow, whose plumage gleamed with iridescent lights, flapped sluggishly out of sight among the trees. Snakes love to lie coiled in the hottest sunlight; squirrels stretch themselves contentedly on horizontal limbs and bask by the hour; the fox, woodchuck, and weasel, and even toads and newts, and those so-called birds of darkness the barred owls, seek the broadest glare of the midsummer sun and absorb comfort from its scorching rays.

Taking tribute from the pond-basin by a deep drink of ice-cold water at a spring in its bank, I crossed another strip of open pasture—where the tinkle-tankle of the cow-bells sounded with each bite the cows took of the grass—and gained the edge of the forest and the foot of the mountain. There was something akin to coolness in the shade of the birches, poplars, and beeches. New flowers bloomed here and new birds called. The dependent bells of the white pyrola, of the small green pyrola, and of the quaint pipsissewa were found beneath the brakes. Here, too, was the Indian pipe, looking as though formed from sheets of colorless wax, and its tawny sister the pine sap (Monotropa hypopitys). The wintergreens are strong, positive herbs with rich pungent flavor, but the pale parasitic plants are mere negations. They are the “poor relations” among flowers, content to draw their sustenance from others, while showing no color, giving out no perfume, attracting no butterflies, and not even daring to face the blue sky until they are dead.

The oven-bird stepped primly about upon her neat carpet of dry leaves, the red-eyed vireo preached his perpetual homily from the treetops, a young Cooper’s hawk screamed shrilly in the distance, and two inquisitive red-capped sapsuckers hitched up and down tree-trunks near me, while I hooted at them after the manner of my barred owls. A grouse had been wallowing among the leaves, and had left a round hollow in the dust with five discarded feathers and the prints of her feet to show that she had been there. Rana sylvatica, the wood-frog, betrayed himself by leaping over the dry beech leaves. I followed him quickly as he sought to elude me. Not only were his leaps long, but his skill in doubling was something marvelous. His second jump was generally at right angles with the first, and thrice he no sooner struck the ground than he turned and rebounded upon his tracks, so that he passed over or between my feet. When he was weary I caught him and, laying him on my knee, stroked the nape of his neck, his back and sides. He soon ceased to struggle and sat motionless. I laid him gently on his back and stroked him beneath. His throat throbbed and his eyes blinked, but he made no effort to escape. Then I restored him to his proper position, and extended one leg after another. He was as pliable and nerveless as a rubber frog. Finally I let him alone, wondering how soon he would hop away; but he showed a willingness to spend the day on my knee, and not until I placed him on the leaves did he seem to awaken to life and the advantages of freedom.

A few rods beyond, a toad hopped from me and I followed him to see what method of escape he would adopt. As soon as he saw that he was pursued he increased his speed and by a series of rapid hops reached a cavern under the arched root of a stump and plunged out of sight in its depths. Our toads, although of but a single species, vary in color from black to the paleness of a dry beech leaf. This one, living in the midst of pale browns and yellows, was nearly as light in tone as the light-footed Rana sylvatica.

The color of the dry beech leaves as they lie upon the ground is sometimes curiously bewitched by the spots of sunlight which dapple the woodland carpet. Walking with the sun behind me, the sunlight, especially where it fell in small round spots on the beech leaves before me, was of an unmistakably amethystine hue. Several years ago when I first noticed this, I supposed it to be due to temporary causes, but I am now convinced that the color will always be distinguishable when the conditions named are favorable.

The loveliest July flower in the woods fringing Chocorua is the mitchella, named by Linnæus for Dr. John Mitchell of Virginia. In their small round leaves of dark glossy green, their creeping stems, their modest, delicate-tinted and highly-perfumed blossoms, the flower of Linnæus and the flower of Mitchell are much alike. The partridge-berry, as the mitchella is commonly called, begins to bloom just as the linnæa bells cease to swing. It is an evergreen, and all through the winter its bright green leaves and red berries are one of the pledges of returning life after snow and ice have vanished. The flower is small and faces the sky. It is white with a delicate rosy blush tinging its corolla, chiefly on its outer side. The four pointed petals open wide and curve back, exposing the whole interior of the flower to view. Each petal is covered on its inner surface with a thick velvety nap which is the distinguishing characteristic of the blossom. The perfume of this flower is both powerful and pleasant. When freshly picked it suggests the scent of the water-lily, coupled with something as spicy and enduring as the heavier perfume of heliotrope.

WATER-LILIES IN CHOCORUA LAKE

Fifteen or twenty minutes’ walking over the beech leaves brought me within hearing of the torrent which flows from the heart of the mountain. Presently I came to the edge of its cutting and saw far below me, through the trees which filled the gorge, the flash of its waters and the vivid green of mosses. Walking upstream along the face of the bank, yet neither climbing nor descending, I struck the level of the water at a point not many rods distant. I had not gone down to the brook; it had come up to me. The whole ravine was filled with its music, and following down with its eager flow was a current of cold air. Above, in the woods, quiet and heat had prevailed. Here noise and coolness ruled with absolute sway. The sound came in waves as did the water and the breeze, but no human senses could measure the intervals between the beats. The sound seemed threefold,—a splash, a murmur, and a deeper roar. The roar reached me even if I pressed my hands tightly over my ears; while, if I made ear-trumpets of my hands, the splashing thus intensified drowned the heavier sounds. The rhythm of the water was most prettily shown on a boulder faced with thick moss. When the high water came it poured over the top of the rock, and the moss was filled with white shining drops coursing downward through it; but, on the reaction, it instantly became vivid green. The same pulsation showed in each cascade, which was greater then less, greater then less, in each second of time. As I bent over a pool, taking now and then a sip of the icy water, a small trout suddenly jumped near the foot of the fall below. He was intensely busy working about in the edge of the falling water, where rising bubbles and whirling foam half concealed him. In color he looked not unlike a beech leaf, and he moved so constantly that only an attentive eye could distinguish him from the waste of the stream whirled about in the eddies. I cast him some moss and mould, and he darted hither and thither in the water clouded by it, snapping up bits of food or specks which he mistook for food. His eagerness and restlessness seemed born of the restlessness of the stream and the keen temperature of the water in which he lived.

There was something of the impressiveness of the sea in this mountain brook. The sea rolls its waves upon the shore by night and by day all through the endless years, and this brook rolls down its tons upon tons of water by night and by day forever. It seems impossible that this and all the other streams which flow down rocky mountain-sides can be nourished simply by the softly falling rain and snow.

Much of the fascination of the sea is in its voice, so seldom hushed, so often roused to anger. The torrent by which I stood had something of the same weird power. For the moment, all outside those narrow wooded steeps, between which the splash, murmur, and roar of the stream pervaded everything and overwhelmed everything, all beyond that controlling sound was forgotten, barred out, lost. All within the power of the stream was under a spell, cooling, soothing, comforting.

To reach the heart of the mountain nearly a mile of brook bed had to be traveled, so I climbed upward rock by rock, past falls and pools, clusters of nodding ferns, bridges of ancient trees now hung with mosses, and sloping ledges faced with moss, down which the water rolled in glistening sheets. At one point the brook, years ago, had cut through a ledge which crossed its path diagonally. One great shoulder of rock remained, protruding from the western bank and hanging over the water, which poured into a black cavern beneath, making a whirlpool in the darkness. The temperature under this ledge was nearly forty degrees lower than on the top of the bank a few yards above. Standing by the ledge, I counted nine distinct cascades varying from three to six feet in height. One of them was an ideally symmetrical fall, for the whole body of water, gathered between two rocky faces, fell into a deep round pool just at its centre. Another fall showed clearly why the water under a cascade looks white. The water poured into a very broad, deep basin at its upper corner, leaving most of the surface undisturbed; and between the limpid falling water and the flat face of rock behind it air was caught and sucked downward by the flow. It was carried to the very bottom of the pool, where, breaking into small round bubbles, it struggled to the surface. Strings and masses of snow-white bubbles filled the area in front and at each side of the fall, while some were drawn some distance down-stream by the escaping water. These bubbles, when under water, produced the whiteness of the pool, and, on reaching the surface, burst and made a large part of its foam and spray. In this pool, as in many others, small trout hovered about the edge of the rising bubbles, seizing upon everything which looked like food. They rose with charming promptness to anything resembling a fly which I tossed upon the surface of the foam.

As I neared the heart of the mountain I saw, towering above twin cascades which fell into a single pool at its feet, the rough likeness of a sphinx. It was a huge boulder, dividing the torrent by its lichen-covered mass, and lifting its frost-hewn face towards the narrow strip of sky left between the trees overarching the ravine.

Close above the sphinx a spring in the eastern bank filled a hollow in the hill with cold, fern-decked mud. A flower I never should have sought in this lofty nook had taken possession of the spot and raised hundreds of its white spikes towards the sky. It was a white orchis, Habenaria dilatata. In a space six feet by ten, I counted seventy-five of its plants, each in full bloom. On the edges of this miniature swamp the leaves of the mayflower mingled with those of the linnæa. The blossoms of the mayflowers were dry and brown; those of the linnæa, with one fragrant exception, had fallen. Close by, the open-eyed flowers of the oxalis smiled from their beds of clover-shaped leaves.

A few rods farther up the stream, the land grew steeper and the walls of the ravine drew more closely together. Taller trees presided over the torrent, and the water struggled downward between larger boulders. A stream, tumbling down its narrow bed, came from the high eastern ledges and met that which poured from the heights on the west. Here, in the perpetual music of falling drops, where one or another of the great walls of the gorge always casts a deep shadow upon the ferns, is the heart of the mountain, the birthplace of the twilight.

Early in the afternoon I followed the western stream to its source, where, in a dark hollow at the head of the west ridge, hidden wholly from view by the forest, lies a small mountain lake. Perhaps it would be more truthful to call it a large pool, fed as it is mainly by melting snow or the streams of rain-water poured into it from the crags of Chocorua. Beneath its shallow water the maroon and dark green sphagnum formed a submerged carpet of intense colors. The growing tops of the moss, star-shaped and erect, glowed with the tint of life. The borders of the pool were fringed with dense growths of yellow-green Osmunda regalis which were swayed by a sweet wind. Through the soft foliage of the deciduous trees surrounding the pool, lance-shaped spruces and balsams pierced a way for themselves towards the sky. No fish were visible in the pool, and its only living tenants seemed to be some tadpoles about the size of squash-seeds. Now that the noises of the brook no longer overwhelmed every other sound, the songs of birds could be heard. Red-eyed and solitary vireos, oven-birds, a black-throated blue warbler, a hermit thrush, and another thrush which was neither hermit nor veery, were singing either in the woods close by or among the small spruces which crowned the adjoining ledges. I climbed to the top of the nearest ledge in search of the thrush, and gained not only the full benefit of his song, but a view of many a mile of the fair lake country, the Bearcamp valley, and the rugged peaks of the Sandwich range. The air was full of quivering heat and hazy midsummer softness. Over the shoulder of the Ossipees, south of Bearcamp Water, sparkled Squam Lake and Winnepesaukee. The hayfields of Sandwich were baking under the sun’s fierce heat. North of them began the mountains,—Black Mountain in the edge of Campton, Whiteface, Passaconaway, and, nearer at hand, Paugus, towards which all the western ridges of Chocorua were tending. The sun being over and beyond these wooded mountains, they were very dark, lacking in detail, but clearly outlined against one another. Northward and just above me the cliffs of the Chocorua horn hung in the sky. The lichens on the crag were dry and very black. Towering into the air, ledge upon ledge, and cliff over cliff, the peak was like a huge citadel defying attack. I had climbed upon the shoulders of the mountain, but its proud head, held high, was still out of reach.

The thrush was one which is common upon the upper slopes of the mountains, wholly replacing the veery there and probably outnumbering the hermit. Its song, while pleasing, is not as musically beautiful as that of the hermit, nor yet as unique as the veery’s. The hermit has three distinct phrases, the veery one, and Swainson’s several which are not distinct, but rather jumbling reproductions of the same notes. If this bird had learned his song for himself, I should surmise that he had listened closely to a veery and a thrasher, and then tried to model a combination of their notes upon the lines of the hermit’s exquisite song. Perhaps it was the heat and the glare of light on the ledges, or perhaps it was a certain dullness in the Swainson’s song, at all events I wearied of it and sought a higher ledge beyond the pool.

On this higher ledge, lambkill (Kalmia angustifolia) was blooming in great abundance. It is a handsome flower, and it goes a little way to console us for not having mountain laurel. Between two great patches of lambkill and flowering diervilla was a level strip of gravel. It bore printed on its face an interesting history. Beginning near the edge of a thicket and extending to the edge of the cliff, where a view of miles of surrounding country could be obtained, was a line of sharp hoof-marks. A deer had walked slowly to the verge of the ledge, presumably to survey the landscape. The track had been made since the rain of the day before, and, for all that I could see, might have been made within an hour. While studying it I heard an unfamiliar bird-song reminding me slightly of the Maryland yellow-throat’s. The bird was in the thicket. I crept towards him, but he retreated, singing at intervals. After following for some time, I tried working on his sympathies, and “squeaked” like a bird in distress. Instantly a flash of vivid yellow came through the trees and a magnificent male magnolia or black and yellow warbler appeared in search of the supposed sufferer. His mate soon joined him, as did a junco and two white-throated sparrows. The coloring of the magnolias is certainly gay. It includes blue-gray on the head, black on the back, canary-yellow beneath and on the rump, with white and dark bars, stripes, and spots enough on various parts of his body to make him as variegated as a harlequin.

While the magnolia warblers are members of the Canadian fauna, and seldom seen in the breeding season south of the White Mountains, the bird which I next heard singing was even more interesting. It was a male blackpoll warbler, perched upon the highest plume of a spruce and pouring out his unmusical ze-ze-ze-ze-ze with all a lover’s earnestness. He clearly considered two thousand feet rise on Chocorua equivalent to several hundred miles’ flight towards Labrador. In this the flowers sustained him, for growing near by was the charming Arenaria grœnlandica, with its cluster of delicate white flowers springing from the sand, and the Potentilla tridentata blooming freely. Apparently dissenting from this boreal majority was a bunch of goldenrod in full bloom. It was a mountain species which comes into flower a fortnight or more earlier than its lowland relatives.

My homeward path followed the crest of the great eastern ridge of Chocorua as it descends towards the basin of Chocorua ponds. The ridge is narrow and mainly open, save for a few stunted spruces. In every direction far-reaching and beautiful views charmed me and tempted me to linger. From the last of the open ledges, the top of what is called Bald Mountain, I saw the sun set just behind the peak. Then with quickened pace I entered the forest and ran through the gathering gloom down the rough path to the pastures a mile below.

A LONELY LAKE.

Six witheringly hot days had been followed by one so cool and clear, so full of rushing Arctic air, that all nature sparkled as on an autumn morning. About sunset on the evening of this cool day,—July 17,—the pale blue sky in the north was suddenly barred by ascending rays of quivering white light. Chocorua, lying dark and still against the cold sky, seemed to be the centre of the aurora. As it grew dark I watched to see the heavens glow with the electric flame, but hour after hour passed with only an occasional gleam of light. Shortly before sunrise, however, the promised illumination came. I awoke to find my chamber as bright as though day had come, for from the southeast moonlight streamed across the floor, while from the north the glow of the aurora flooded the room. An immense arch of throbbing white light crowned the northern sky, and within it a smaller coronet rested above the inky blackness of Chocorua. Between the two hung the Great Dipper, and from one to the other occasional pulsating rays passed. The eastern end of the upper and larger belt of light made a sharp bend inward a few degrees above the horizon, and to a less defined extent the smaller arch was similarly shaped. The effect of this curve at the base of the two bows was very remarkable, for it destroyed the image of an arch and created the impression that one was looking into the inner curve of a ring which surrounded the earth, just as the rings of Saturn encircle that planet. Gradually the lower ring faded, the upper one settled down closer and closer to Chocorua; masses of electric energy seemed to dart across the eastern sky, where Sirius and the fair Pleiades gleamed, to the moon and Mars sailing serenely on their westward way. Behind Pequawket the lowest line of sky grew white. The dawn was coming, and, as though to avoid it, the hurrying beams and flashing waves of aurora moved faster and faster until in their dimness they could scarce be seen. Snowy mists raised their phantom forms from the lake and floated eastward to meet the sun. A whippoorwill sang his last song to the night, and as the glow of day grew more real a hermit thrush told in its heartfelt music the joy of life at the birth of a new period of labor.

CHOCORUA FROM HERON POND

A scrap of mist which trailed over the forest just at the foot of one of the ridges of Chocorua was the spirit of a lonely lake rising to do homage to the day-star. This lake is a rendezvous for all that is wildest and freest in the animal life of the region. It is sufficient unto itself, and yields no tribute save to its lord the sun. Around it, high glacial walls stand, crowned with ancient oaks and graceful birches. No stream flows from it, or into it, unless threads of ice-cold water coming from springs in its banks are called streams. Its waters are deep, the fisherman, so they say, finding places in its centre where long lines reach no bottom. Seen from the peak of Chocorua, this lake, even in November, is as green as an emerald, and when one floats upon its surface and gazes far down into its depths, rich green water-weeds are seen stretching their tremulous fingers towards him, and crowding each other for standing-room on its muddy floor.

Many are the days I have spent at this lonely lake learning the secrets of its tenants, and this morning, soon after the auroral beauties had faded from the sky, I came to it while the dew sparkled on the ferns. Drifting with the wind on the water, or stretched on the soft mosses which flourish under the birches, I stayed by the lake until evening. If an observer keeps still, it matters little whether he sits hidden under the spreading branches of a great oak on the shore, or lies upon a raft anchored in the lake, he is sure to see something interesting in either case. One morning, as I leaned against the oak’s wide trunk, watching a bittern on the opposite shore, I noticed that the bird showed signs of uneasiness, paying more heed to the bushes than to its fishing. Suddenly the cause of its unrest became apparent. The bushes just behind it were slowly poked apart and the head of a fox appeared. With a guttural note of alarm the bittern rose and flew across the lake, above the trees on the opposite bank, and out of sight. Reynard, graceful and alert, stood upon the mossy shore for a moment, looking after his lost opportunity; then turned abruptly and vanished in the underbrush. Another morning, while I was under the same tree, a big blue heron came softly stepping along the beach towards me. He was a comical figure, with his attenuated legs, wasted to the semblance of rushes; his extensible neck, expressive of centuries of hungry reaching after the partly attainable; and his long beak as cruel as a pair of shears. His dull eyes told of terror when he saw me. For a moment I felt their worried glare, and then the quaint machinery of the bird was put in motion and he flapped off out of sight.

One still, cloudy afternoon in August, I lay upon a raft of weather-beaten logs and mossy boards, watching the fitful sky and listening to an occasional bird-note, when suddenly my eyes were drawn to the north shore of the lake by seeing a branch of green leaves swimming, apparently unaided, along the surface of the water. After progressing for forty or fifty feet it disappeared under the ripples. A mystery, truly. A few moments later a muskrat’s head rose above the water, and the creature swam back to the point from which the leaves had started. Leaving the lake cautiously, the rat crawled clumsily up the bank into the bushes. After a minute or two it came waddling out bearing a second branch of ash, and this, too, floated along the placid surface of the lake until abruptly drawn down into the rat’s burrow in the submerged bank. Later in the afternoon I noticed a V-shaped ripple plowing across the lake from the southern shore. On it came, a small, dark object being at its point, parting the water steadily. As it drew near the raft I saw that the dark spot was the head of another muskrat, whose course was shaped straight for the hole into which his mate had been carrying ash branches. He passed quite close to me without alarm, and a minute or two later the ripple ceased as the rat sank below the water a few yards from the mouth of the hole.

The same still, cloudy day, a brownish black creature appeared on the southern shore of the lake and ambled along the edge of the water. At first glance it looked like a black kitten, but a plainer view showed it to be twice the length of a kitten, although no larger round than a man’s wrist. Its progress at times was almost snake-like, so undulatory was it. Its head and fore-quarters would be gliding down one side of a log before its black tail and hind feet had quite reached the log on the other side. The edge of the pond was lined with tadpoles clinging to logs and stones, with their heads towards the shore. The black creature seemed to be attempting to catch these fish-like batrachians, for every few yards he pounced at something, and, if successful, cantered out of sight, into the weeds and bushes, where he remained until, so I surmised, he had eaten his adolescent frog. Although the raft was only about a hundred feet from the western shore of the pond, the mink kept his course past me, apparently without a thought of anything beyond the wary polywogs. He went as far as the mouth of the muskrat hole and then turned and retraced his cantering until I lost sight of him on the farther southern shore. Several times, in his eagerness to catch a tadpole, he plunged wholly beneath the water and pursued his prey as though he had been a pickerel.

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 portion of 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 slow buteos, which one sees circling by the hour in the high skies; the dangerous accipiters, 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 singing their 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 root of 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 the cæsia, which it closely resembled in form, nor the bicolor, 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

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.

FOLLOWING A LOST TRAIL.

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 filled with 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 at the 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-spirited citizen. 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 is between 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, were the 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 drawn skin. 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 higher levels. 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 crossed this frowning barrier, alone sustained our hopes of finding a pass which could be opened to wheels.

My watch said that it was 10.30 A. M. As we had begun our first meal at four A. 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 shallow ravine 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 upon stumps 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 we enjoyed 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, and anon 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 in several 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.

· · · · · · ·

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 hid hollows 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.

A NIGHT ALONE ON CHOCORUA.

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’clock P. 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 three miles 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

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 with loose, 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 cottage rests 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 sound clear 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”

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 were the 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 light that 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.

THE PEAK FROM THE SOUTHEAST

The sounds in the air continued, and at one time made me wonder whether electric waves passing through the low-hanging clouds above me could produce them. There being no light accompanying the sounds, I dismissed this hypothesis as unsatisfactory. Once I thought that something was scratching and grinding down the side of a sloping ledge. Since rain began falling thick and fast at the same moment, I seized my lantern and retreated to the cave. When I gained the dizzy rock at the mouth of the cave, the heavens again spoke, and mist-forms swept past in front of me. The next moment I was at the bottom of the cave, wondering whether a temperature of 60°, which my thermometer recorded, justified wholly the goose-flesh that crept over me.

My lantern cast a clear, steady light into all parts of the cave. Now and then a flash of lightning showed where the entrance faced the east, and where one or two other cracks were open between the Cow and its rocky foundation. I lay perfectly motionless, pondering upon the strange sounds I had heard. My eyes rested upon several stones lying in the narrow space beyond my feet where the two rocks neared each other. Something moved there. A body had passed from the shelter of one stone to that of another. I held my breath, and watched. Again a brownish thing flashed past an opening, came nearer, darted forward into the light, vanished, reappeared, came clearly into view, shot back, and finally sped across a broad, well-lighted face of rock, and revealed itself as a large short-tailed mouse,—perhaps an Eastern Phenacomys as yet unknown to collectors. Although I did not move for a long time, he failed to reappear, and my only companion was a gauzy-winged fly which sat upon my knee and contemplated the flame of the lantern.

The rain continuing, I sang and whistled until after ten o’clock, when I crawled to the mouth of my cave and looked down into the depths beneath. A stone thrown far out, so as to clear the first few ledges, might fall eight hundred feet before it struck the rocks below. As I stared into the darkness, I found that much which had been invisible an hour earlier was now dimly outlined in black and white. The sky, too, showed gaps in its curtain, and the white lakes in the distant valleys were more silvery than before. The storm was over, the moon was at work eating the clouds, and soon, I hoped, the stars would keep their tryst. Lantern in hand, I crept up the rocks, and settled myself once more on the peak. All my friendly lights in the valley had gone out, and I was now alone in the sky.

Paugus, Passaconaway, and Whiteface were quite clearly outlined against each other and the sky. They seemed very near, however, so that it was easier for me to imagine myself on a lonely rock in the ocean, with huge waves about to overwhelm me, than to make those combing waves stand back three, eight, twelve miles and become spruce-covered mountains. Gradually other mountain outlines became discernible, and the cloud-curtain above showed folds and wrinkles, which in time wore out under the moon’s chafing and let through a glimpse of Mars or Vega, marvelously far away in that serene ether. Half an hour before midnight the pale disk of the moon appeared through the thin clouds, and at the witching hour she sailed out proudly into a little space of clear blue-black heaven. The wind came in fresher puffs, a snowy cloud-cap rested on the head of Paugus, and the air was so much colder that I was glad to put on both jersey and oilskin jacket. A dozen lakes and twenty-five mountain peaks were visible at half past twelve, and Mars had worked a place for his red eye, so that it could look down through the breaking clouds without interruption. Drowsiness now overtook me, and in order to keep awake I was forced to walk rapidly up and down the small area of the top, or to jump about over the ledges farther south. About one o’clock a light flashed brightly from a point near the Maine line; perhaps in Fryeburg. At first I thought it might be a fire which would gather strength and size; then, as it appeared to move and come nearer, it looked more like the headlight of a locomotive. My glass made it seem smaller, and the motion was so slow and irregular that I thought the gleam might be from a doctor’s buggy, as the man of sickness took his way through the night.

THE PEAK FROM THE NORTH

My own light was now growing dim, so I extinguished it in order to save the remaining oil for emergencies. Immediately afterwards a bat flew against the lantern, and then perched upon a lichen-hung rock near by, to recover his composure. The moon slowly made way with the clouds, and by two o’clock a quarter part of the sky was clear. The mercury had dropped to 52°, and the moisture hurled against the mountain by the wind was condensed and sent boiling and seething up the sides of the peak. Tongues of fog lapped around me with the same spasmodic motion which flames display in rising from a plate of burning alcohol. At first they scarcely reached the peak; then they came to my feet, and swept past me around both sides of my platform; finally they flung themselves higher and higher, hiding not only the black valley from which they came, but Paugus and more distant peaks, the sky, the moon, and the glimmering stars. Suddenly from the fog-filled air came once more the gruesome sound which I had heard earlier in the night. Its cause was nearer to me now, and I felt sure that it was some creature of the air, and consequently nothing which could cause me inconvenience. I strained my eyes to see the creature as it passed, but in vain, until in its flight it chanced to cross the face of the moon. Then the mystery was solved. I saw that it was either a night-hawk or a bird of similar size. The speed at which it was flying was wonderful. When it tacked or veered, it produced the extraordinary sounds which, with their echoes from the rocks, had so puzzled me at first. Once or twice during the night I had heard night-hawks squawking, and from this time on their harsh voices were heard at intervals mingled with the booming which, for some unexplained reason, they make by night as well as by day; after as well as during the breeding season.

A few minutes after two o’clock a large meteor shot across a small patch of clear sky near the constellation Andromeda, and was quenched in the fog. From time to time other smaller ones flashed in brief glory in the same quarter of the heavens, and one brilliant fragment burned its way past Jupiter, as though measuring its passing glory with the light of the planet. The wind was falling, the temperature rising, and, following these two influences, the fog decreased, until its only remnants clung to the ponds and rivers far below. Two thirds of the sky were clear by three o’clock. In the east, the Pleiades sparkled in mysterious consultation; farther north, Capella flashed her colored lights, and Venus, radiant with a lustre second only to Selene’s own, threw off the clouds which for an hour had concealed her loveliness, and claimed from Mars the foremost place in the triumph of the night. Her reign was short. At a quarter after three I noticed that the cloudbank which lay along the eastern and northern horizon was becoming more sharply defined by the gradual growth of a white band above it. A greater orb than Venus was undermining her power in the east. The white line imperceptibly turned to a delicate green, and extended its area to left and right and upward. The clouds in the high sky took on harder outlines and rounder shapes. Shadows were being cast among them, and a light was stealing through them from something brighter even than the yellow moon. The pale green band had changed to blue, the blue was deepening to violet, and through this violet sky the brightest meteor of the night passed slowly down until it met the hills. High in the sky the stars were growing dim, and the spaces between the clouds, which looked for all the world like a badly painted picture, were growing blue, deep real blue. The line of brightest light above the eastern clouds showed a margin of orange. Venus in the violet sky was still dazzling, but her glory was no longer of the night, but of the twilight. She was wonderful, in spite of the stronger light which was slowly overpowering her. Mars burned like a red coal low down in the west, unaffected thus far by the sun’s rays, while Jupiter, supreme among the high stars, was paling fast as the light of day rolled towards him.

The eastern sky looked strangely flat. Its colors were like a pastel drawing. Small, very black clouds, with hard outlines, lay unrelieved against the violet, silver, and orange. A full hour had sped by since I first noted the coming of the day, and still the earth below slept on. Hark! up from the deep valley below the Cow comes a single bird-voice, but scarcely are its notes sprinkled upon the cool, clear air, when a dozen, yes, fifty singers join their voices in a medley of morning music. The first songster was a white-throat, and the bulk of the chorus was made up of juncos and white-throats, the stronger song of Swainson’s and hermit thrushes coming in clearly now and then from points more distant from the peak. There was ecstasy in those matins. No sleepy choir of mortal men or women ever raised such honest, buoyant music in honor of the day’s coming. The birds love the day, and they love life for all that each day brings. They labor singing, and they sing their vespers, as they sing their matins, with hearts overflowing with joy and thanksgiving.

VIEW FROM “THE COW,” SHOWING MOAT MOUNTAIN AND MOUNT PEQUAWKET BEYOND

There is something inexpressibly touching and inspiring in the combination of fading night, with its planets still glowing, and the bird’s song of welcome to the day. Night is more eloquent than day in telling of the wonders of the vast creation. Day tells less of distance, more of detail; less of peace, more of contest; less of immortality, more of the perishable. The sun, with its dazzling light and burning heat, hides from us the stars, and those still depths as yet without stars. It narrows our limit of vision, and at the same time hurries us and worries us with our own tasks which we will not take cheerfully, and the tasks of others which are done so ill. Night tells not only of repose on earth, but of life in that far heaven where every star is a thing of motion and a creation full of mystery. Men who live only in great cities may be pitied for being atheists, for they see little beyond the impurity of man; but it seems incredible that a being with thoughts above appetite, and imagination above lust, should live through a night in the wilderness, with the stars to tell him of space, the dark depths of the sky to tell him of infinity, and his own mind to tell him of individuality, and yet doubt that some Being more powerful and less fickle than himself is in this universe. The bird-music coming before the night is ended combines the purest and most joyous element of the day with the deep meaning of the night. The birds bear witness to the ability of life to love its surroundings and to be happy. The night bears witness to the eternity of life and to the harmony of its laws.

BRINGING HOME THE BEAR.

The horn of Chocorua rose into a sky full of threatening colors and shadows. Its own coloring was sinister, its outlines vague, its height apparently greater than usual. Low, growling thunder came from its ledges and ravines. The forest at its feet, which ended at my door, was silent; no whisper swept through its waiting leaves. In the west as in the north, cloud masses were boiling up into the sky, covering the blue with white, gray, and black, through which now and then shot a ray of gold from the protesting sun. A tempest seemed brewing as a not unwelcome close of a mid-August day.

A tall man emerged from the woods and came striding towards me across the grass. A rifle swung to and fro in his right hand as he walked. It was a repeating rifle, one of those inclusive successors of the fowling-piece, shot-pouch, powder-flask, cap-box, and wad-pocket of this tall man’s boyhood. The stride ended at my side, and the tall man and I spoke of the heat, the drought, and the approaching storm. Just as he was preparing to lope onwards down the ribbon road through the birches, I said:—

“I hear Merrill caught a bear Saturday, and brought it out at Piper’s.”

“That so? How big was it?”

“A small one, a two-year-old, probably. It was in one of his traps and he shot it.”

“Well, I’ve kept up with him this time. I shot one less than an hour ago, and he warn’t in any trap, either.”

I looked at the man wonderingly. There had been no unusual spark in his eye, flush on his bronzed cheek, or spring in his heavy step. He had not boasted, or even spoken of his achievement until I touched his pride by my tale of his rival’s success. Would he have gone home without telling me? I think so. Yet this meeting with a bear, alone, on the high ledges of Chocorua, had been one of the joys of this man’s life. Many a weary hour had he carried his magazine rifle over the ledges, treading softly, keeping eye and ear alert, hoping to see Bruin on his feeding-ground. A year before he had trapped and killed some of the great creatures; but shooting a beast caught in a forty-pound steel trap is tame sport compared with facing a free bear on the open ledges.

Before the hunter left me, we had arranged that soon after sunrise on the following morning he was to pass through my dooryard on his way to the spot where, under those black clouds, poor Bruin was lying dead.

The rage around Chocorua deepened. Boom, boom, of thunder rolled downward from the heights of storm. The peak was swept by masses of rain. Flash after flash lit up the darkening sky behind the grim mountain. Still the nearer forests lay at rest, waiting. Then a golden rift came in the western cloud-bank. One half of the storm rolled past us on the south, drenching Ossipee and Wolfborough, the other half on the north, soaking Conway and Fryeburg; we alone were dry.

The morning of the 13th of August was breathlessly hot. Even the hermit thrushes forgot to sing. A rattle of wheels brought me from breakfast to join the party organized to bring home the bear. A strong, sure-footed horse was drawing a farm wagon which had been the stand-by of an earlier generation, and which, therefore, was made of solid stuff. My tall friend and two of his hunting satellites were in it, and around them were strewn rifle, hatchet, ropes, empty grain-bags, and other apparatus to be used in bringing the dead brute down the mountain. My master of the horse, an alert and muscular Prince Edward Islander, stood by ready to march, so the word was given, and we five, some walking, some in the ancient wagon, started for the mountain.

For a quarter of a mile the road was good, winding through my pasture and belts of white birches. Then we turned from it and plowed through beds of brake and blackberry bushes dripping and glistening with dew. We might as well have waded waist deep in the lake, which would have been warmer though no more wet than that dew-deluged tangle. Next came a ravine filled with spruces, over which towered two immense canoe birches, at whose feet a cold spring bubbled in a sandy pool. The horse wound in and out among the trees, shaking from them showers of cold dew-drops. Small saplings and bushes bowed before the wagon and passed under its axles; large ones were bent away by strong hands, or hacked down. Sometimes the wheels locked against tree-trunks, bringing the horse to a sudden standstill, and almost throwing the passengers to the ground; and sometimes they sank into unseen hollows filled to the brim with ferns, making the wagon careen so that all its contents slid, or struggled not to slide, against its sinking side.

Beyond the ravine and its dripping spruces was a narrow sunny valley pointing straight towards the mountain. Up this valley our party continued its course, the sun drying the dew from our clothes, and flashing many colors in the drops still clinging to brakes and grasses. Fifteen hundred feet above us towered the West Ledges, on which the bear had been shot. As one looks at Chocorua from the south, its peak seems to rest upon the shoulders of two converging ridges, one sloping upward towards it from the southeast, and one from the southwest. Between the two ridges the soft forest drapery of the mountain falls in graceful folds and curves to the level of the lake. We were in one of these folds, climbing towards the steep inner side of the western ridge. On each side of us lofty trees clung to the slopes of the valley. Owls hoot in these woods after twilight and at dawn. Great boulders lie in confusion in the perpetual shadows of the trees, and in the caverns between and under them are dens of porcupines, foxes, and skunks.

Not until we reached the torrent at the foot of the west ridge was the wagon abandoned and the horse tethered. The forest at this point consists mainly of poplars, birches, and oaks. The bear-slayer led the way through them, and his more muscular satellite followed at his heels, cutting saplings in order to form a path for our descent with the bear. After climbing several hundred feet, we rested. A loud humming filled the air, yet no bees were to be seen. They appeared to be in the higher foliage, attracted by something on the leaves. We examined the lower branches, and then the leaves of low shrubs and plants. They seemed to be covered with dew, but the dew was sticky and proved to be sweet to the taste. As we continued our walk we found that the entire side of the mountain had been sprinkled with heavenly sweetness of the same kind.

The roar of bees had become familiar to our ears. The bear-slayer was bending down a slender beech for the satellite to cut, when suddenly he uttered a cry and sprang backward. “Run, run,” he shouted, and in a moment the Islander and the small satellite were bounding down the mountain-side like chamois. The larger satellite became a football under the bear-slayer’s feet, and I, hearing a second cry of “hornets!” plunged headforemost into the bushes and crawled away under the brakes, thus avoiding both the hornets and the necessity of re-climbing lost ground. The bear-slayer’s retreat was marked by repeated howls of pain which lent further speed to the flying heels of the rear-guard. It was some time before the ignominious stampede was checked and a fresh ascent begun. The bear-slayer had been stung in three places, and the larger satellite declared he had saved himself from a sting by pulling the hornet off his back with his fingers.

Standing among the young trees of the forest were many gray stumps of ancient origin,—decayed relics of forest gentry now displaced by the democracy of poplars and birches. These stumps bore no axe marks; they had fallen at the command of the tornado, not of the lumber thief. On their sides were long scratches which looked like claw marks. Had “Sis Wildcat” been trying her claws there? No; but “Brer Bar” had been. Near by was a small grove of oaks, not one of which was more than a foot in diameter. Their sides were deeply scored by Bruin’s claws, and their highest branches hung down upon the rest of their limbs, broken and dying. There is hardly an oak on Chocorua which has not been climbed by bears in acorn time, and disfigured by the great brutes in their attempts to reach the coveted nuts.

Towering close above the oaks we could see the abrupt faces of the West Ledges. We seemed to be at the foot of a great feudal castle whose gray walls needed scaling ladders to be conquered. Ferns grew in the crevices in the rock; tiny streams of water trickled down its sides and fed mosses and lichens; honeysuckle, mountain ash, wild Solomon’s seal, and striped maple sprang in luxuriant tangles from its feet, and tripped us as we skirted the castle’s base and sought a break in its smooth walls. Presently we found one,—a rift made originally by ice, but long since widened and deepened by other erosive forces. Clinging to tree-trunks or the tough stems of blueberry bushes, we pulled ourselves up the steep ravine and reached the top of the first ledge. The mountain was still unconquered before us, but turning we saw, sunlit and smiling, the world we had left. Curving, undulating forest; warm spots of open pasture; the Hammond farm, from which one of the principal paths starts up Chocorua; my own red-roofed cottage with squares of flax, millet, corn, and buckwheat giving patchwork colors to its clearing; Chocorua ponds and the cottages on Nickerson’s hill, and then the wider world of forest, mountain, river, and lake,—Ossipee, Sandwich Dome, Bearcamp, Winnepesaukee,—blended beauties whose names awaken pleasant memories and whose picture is a joy to look upon,—all these things we saw, and much more which we only half thought about, so eager were we to go on with our quest.

Climbing ledge after ledge, wading through thickets of mountain ash, dogwood, low spruce and blueberry bushes, we gained at last the highest open point on West Ridge. On three sides the land fell away abruptly. On the north the ridge, heavily grown with stunted spruce and poplars, continued toward the peak. It did not go straight towards that proud rock, but sought it by bending westward and then northward in a great bow. The peak, consequently, stood the other side of a vast hollow filled with tangled forest. It was near, and yet appeared unattainable. I thought of the winter day when I had climbed to this point over four feet of packed and frozen snow and seen the Chocorua horn, crusted with ice and flanked by mighty snowdrifts, hanging in the bright blue sky. Then, stimulated by the keen air, I had plunged into the hollow, crossed it, scaled its farther side on hands and knees, gained the foot of the peak, and finally won its slippery summit, no larger than my dining table; and lying there half freezing, had seen the snow-covered world from Casco Bay to the Green Mountains; Monadnock to Dixville Notch. The sun of August did not encourage such exploits, and a dead bear lying hidden near us drew our thoughts away from the heights to the damp thicket close below.

The bear-slayer was telling his story: “I was coming along here, sort of softly, thinking it was just the kind of place for a bear, when just as I got to this open ledge I heard a hustling round in that snarl of bushes. I stopped short and listened and peeped in. There was something black and hairy rubbing round in the blueberry bushes,—you can see how thick the berries are in there. Well, I thought, I must be careful; there are lots of folks berrying, and I should hate to put one of these pills into a woman picking blueberries. It would settle her right off. So I peeked round, till I was dead sure it was a bear, and then I let drive—at what I could see. The ball hit him in his side not far back of his shoulder, and he gave an awful roar and started out this way. I climbed up on this big boulder, five feet out of harm’s way, and waited. He was letting out roars and then drawing awful deep breaths. You could hear those gasps a mile. I could not see him, he was in so thick in the bushes. But then he began to drag himself off towards old Coroway and I started after him. I heard him go kerchunk down this ledge, and then I caught sight of his head and let him have another, and a third ball, but they didn’t seem to stop him a bit, just glanced off his skull, I s’pose. Well, he got down ’most a hundred feet before I could get a sight at his side again, but when I did, I put one in where it stopped his gasping and kicking.”

During this narrative we had followed the hunter through the network of trees, bushes, and brambles, tracing the track made by the bear in his agony. Branches were broken, leaves crushed, moss stained, and rocks torn up. As we descended the north slope towards the dark ravine which the bear had sought, the sunlight grew dim and the air cold. Suddenly I saw the bear. At the foot of a slippery ledge, over which hung dripping wet moss, lying upon a deep bed of sphagnum, was a gaunt black form. Dead and still as it was, it sent a thrill through me. I seemed to see the being for whom this wild region had been created. The horn-blowing, pistol-firing, peanut-eating tourist is out of place in the rugged ravines of Chocorua. Even the bronzed, gray-shirted native with his magazine rifle is not in tune with the solemn music of this wilderness. But in the dead creature on the moss I saw the real owner of forest and ledge, mountain pool and hidden lake. He looked weary and worn, as though life had been full of hunger and terror. The small, keen, wicked eyes were closed; the cruel teeth were locked tight, the broad feet were cut by his last struggles on the ledges, and his thin hair, showing the hide below it, was flecked with blood which had oozed from four bullet wounds.

We five men gathered around the dead bear and looked at him, felt of him, counted his nails, tried to open his set jaws, guessed at his weight, discussed his character, wondered at his ability to maintain life in such a region, and marveled especially at the nature of his kind to bring forth young in late winter and to rear them in the chill and foodless months of February and March. With great interest we sought through his capacious stomach to see what he had eaten, and found quarts of ripe blueberries, scarlet cherries, and what we at first took to be grubs dug from decaying stumps. Closer examination showed that Bruin had swallowed the whole of a hornet’s nest, for the perfect insects, hundreds of their undeveloped young in the brood-cells, and the gray, papery nest were all recognized. This bear certainly knew how to pick ripe blueberries and not to pick green ones. I saw but one green berry in the quarts which he had gathered.

Drawing the bear’s fore and hind feet on each side together, the hunter strapped them firmly. He next tied the head to the feet, so that it should not drag, and then passed two maple poles through the loops made by the two pairs of lashed feet, and called upon the larger satellite and the Islander to shoulder their burden. They did so, and the homeward march began, the bearers groaning. Possibly a hundred yards had been traversed before the Islander tripped and fell, pulling the bear down upon his prostrate form, and receiving also the weight of the heavy satellite. The hunter took his place under the poles, and fifty yards more were gained. Then the hunter, with a resounding exclamation, flung down the poles and whipped out his hunting-knife. With difficulty he was dissuaded from skinning and quartering Bruin on the spot. The plan which induced him to stay his hand was suggested by one of the party who had read of what he called an “Indian wagon.” Under his direction two long poles were cut and the bear was lashed on top of them near their heavy ends. The satellites then stood between the light ends, as horses stand between the shafts, and began dragging the bear down the steep side of the mountain. They had not gone fifty feet before the weight of the bear turned the poles over and left the satellites sprawling in the bushes. Once more knives were drawn and skinning threatened.

The next proposal was to wrap Bruin in grain bags so as to protect his skin, and then to drag and roll him down to where traveling would be easier. The bear slayer consented to try this experiment, and two large short bags were drawn over the body, one from its head, the other from its tail. Other bags were laid under the body, and, thus protected, it was dragged, bumping and rolling, down several hundred yards to the foot of the ledges. Short cross-sticks were then inserted in the lashings, which were tied round the bear’s legs, and four of us, two on each side, or two in front and two behind, raised the body by these sticks and bore it through the winding path we had cleared while ascending. The lesser satellite, carrying the rifle, hatchet, and other luggage, brought up the rear, and urged on the party by jeering remarks and snatches of song. In spite of repeated cautions from the bear-slayer, whose stings still smarted, we narrowly escaped walking into the hornet’s nest a second time.

More than six hours had elapsed since our departure from home when our little procession wound out of the woods into my dooryard. Raspberry vinegar never was more gratefully swallowed, and never was dead emperor received with more respect than poor Bruin by the crowds which flocked to view his remains during the afternoon of that hot August day. One bought his nails, another his teeth, a third his thinly haired skin, while pieces of his flesh, prepared for future cooking, were carried away in various directions. As when sugar is spilled upon the ground, ants come from every quarter to gather up the grains and draw them away, so dead Bruin drew gossips and idlers from all parts of the town, eager to pick up bits of his body or stories of his melancholy end.

THE DEAD TREE’S DAY.

It is the theory that there are always plenty of hens to be bought in a New England farming town; but as a matter of fact, in the month of July, 1892, the country north of Bearcamp presented such a dearth of hens that, after traveling miles in my efforts to buy some, I returned to my own neighborhood and hired a contingent for the season. The transaction was unique, but, on the whole, mutually satisfactory. It had one drawback. When one owns fowls, the accumulation of family wrath against the rooster on account of too early crowing on his part always finds relief in eating him; but when one hires a rooster, his life is charmed by contract, and he can with impunity crow the family into nervous prostration. The magnificent Black Spanish cock hired by me began crowing, on the morning of August 21, at twenty minutes of four. Not a ray of daylight pierced the bank of mist which filled the east. Nothing but instinct or a bad conscience could have told Murillo that it was time to crow. Nevertheless, on this occasion his song was welcome, for I had counted upon his arousing me early in order that I might spend an entire day with the Dead Tree.

On the northern shore of Chocorua Lake a broad reach of swampy woodland is broken by a meadow. At the point where the small and very cool brook which bounds the meadow on the west enters the lake, a tall pine once cast its shadow upon a deep pool at its foot. The pine died many years ago, and its bark has been entirely removed by weather and woodpeckers, leaving its trunk and eighty-seven branches, or stumps of branches, as white as bleached bones. A few rods farther from the mouth of the brook stands a smaller pine of similar character. These two trees form a famous bird roost, and at their feet I planned to stay from sunrise to sunset on this August day, in order to see, during consecutive hours, how many birds would make use of the tree as a perch. From frequent visits during this and earlier years, I knew that the tree was not only a rendezvous for the birds living in the meadow and adjoining woods, but also a kursaal for tourists in feathers, and for all birds coming to the lake to hunt or to fish.

As I left the house, hermit thrushes were uttering the short complaining notes of alarm characteristic of them at twilight. Dark as it was, they were awake and stirring. Reaching the bank of the lake a minute or two after four, I startled a spotted sandpiper from the beach, and heard his peeping whistle as he flew from me across the black water, beyond which only dusky masses of gloom marked the pine woods on the farther shore. The surface of the water was disturbed by thousands of insects cutting queer figures upon it. Where they moved, white ripples followed. As I walked along the moist sand of the beach, pickerel shot out from the shore, bats squeaked, and frogs jumped into deeper water with nervous croaks of fear. Then a whippoorwill sang, and as his weird notes echoed from the woods, Venus sailed clear from the mist bank and reflected her dazzling beauty in the lake. As I drew near the mouth of the brook, a solitary tattler ran along the sand in front of me, whistling softly. When I turned into the bushes, he stopped and resumed his search for breakfast.

The dead tree rose above me, jet black against the dark sky. Stepping softly through the bushes, I disturbed the wary catbirds, and their fretful cries awoke the meadow. At twenty minutes past four, three whippoorwills were singing, and two catbirds, with several hermit thrushes, were complaining. A few moments later, the call of a veery was heard, a song sparrow gave a sharp squeak, and then, so still was the air, I heard the heavy stamping of my horse in his stable, a quarter of a mile away, as he gained his feet after a long night’s rest. The stars were growing paler moment by moment, and outlines becoming sharper in the bushes and trees near me. A Swainson’s thrush uttered its clear “quick,” expressive of much more vigilance than the cries of the veery and the hermit, yet less fault-finding than the mew of the catbird.

THE DEAD TREE

I settled myself comfortably amid the bushes eastward of the dead trees, near enough to them to see even a humming-bird if one alighted on the bare branches. At 4.35 I had heard eight kinds of birds, yet the crows, notorious for early rising, had not spoken. A minute later one cawed sleepily among the eastern pines where the mist lay thickest, and soon a dozen voices responded. Dense as was the fog, the light of day made swift inroads upon the shadows, and when, about quarter to five, a young chestnut-sided warbler came out of a dewy bush near me, its colors were plainly distinguishable. The little bird looked sleepy and dull. It moved languidly, and so did three Maryland yellow-throats which appeared from the same clump of thick bushes a moment later. As yet no bird of the day had sung.

Far away in the swampy woods to the north a big red-shouldered hawk cried “ky-e, ky-e, ky-e.” I remembered the morning, just a year previous, when, sitting in about the same spot, with Puffy perched on a dead limb over my head, a red-shouldered hawk had flown with stately wing-beat to one of the lower branches of the dead tree, and then, suddenly discovering the owl, had thrust its head forward, opened wide its beak, and, with its fierce eyes glaring, had shrieked its hatred at the almost unmoved owl. This morning it did not visit the meadow, probably finding its humble game nearer home.

The first bird to appear flying above the level of the meadow was a graceful night-hawk. Perhaps he had just come down from a night’s revel in the cool air over Chocorua’s summit. I wondered whether he had been one of a company of between two and three hundred of his tribe which deployed across the sky on the afternoon of the 19th, just in advance of a violent thunderstorm. Yearly, about the 20th of August, the night-hawks muster their forces and parade during one or two afternoons. Yet there seems to be no diminution in the number of the local birds after the army disappears. Perhaps it is formed of migrants from the north; or perhaps the display is, after all, only a drill, preparatory to a later flight.

The Maryland yellow-throats, in moving about the bushes, discovered me, and began scolding at my intrusion. They came so near to me that they seemed within reach of my hands. I kept perfectly still, and half closed my eyes. Their inspection seemed to convince them that I was harmless, for they went away, and presently the male sang his “rig-a-jig, rig-a-jig, rig-a-jig,” close behind me. I am convinced that closing the eyes does a great deal to reassure a timid bird. Owls entirely cloak their evil appearance by simply drawing their eyelids down, and closing their feathers tightly about them. On discovering a man, birds watch, not his legs or his body, but his face, and his eyes are the most conspicuous part of his face and fullest of menace. I have sometimes fancied that nervous birds knew when they were watched, even though they could not see the observer.

At 4.48 a kingbird came sailing and fluttering over the meadow, its chattering cries giving ample warning of its approach. It lighted in the big tree, and scanned sky, water, and grass, searching for something with which to quarrel. A flicker passed silently, coming, as the kingbird had, from the woods, and going to a tree near the lake shore. Small birds, possibly warblers, flew by, westward. A blue jay screamed harshly in the edge of the woods, but the fog, which was growing more and more dense upon the meadow, discouraged its coming to the dead trees. Just at five o’clock a goldfinch undulated past, and the noisy rattle of a kingfisher echoed along the edge of the pond, provoking answers from a red squirrel, whose chatter seemed an imitation of the call, and from a crow, whose mimicry of the fisher’s rattle was remarkably good. Probably all bird-calls originated in the efforts of their makers to reproduce sounds which pleased or startled them. In this case, Chickaree and Corvus had no sober motive for replying to the kingfisher; they may neither of them have associated the rattle with the blue projectile which made it. Both were entertained or attracted by the sound, and each in its way tried to reproduce it. It is by a similar process, doubtless, that parrots, crows, and blue jays acquire the power of producing sounds which correspond to our words. Later, they may gain, through experience, a knowledge of the meaning or force of such words, but often no such knowledge lies behind the empty iteration of the parrot.

For nearly a quarter of an hour there seemed to be a lull in the process of bird-awakening. The Maryland yellow-throats were moving, and now and then the male sang a little. Crows called in the distance, and the catbirds moved restlessly about from one part of the meadow to another, mewing, but nothing new appeared under the fog mantle. The spell was broken by the appearance of one of the small tyrant flycatchers, which are so difficult to identify during the migrations unless they are killed and closely examined. This one seemed to me to be a least flycatcher (Empidonax minimus), there being almost no trace of yellow in his coloring. He flew from point to point, in or just over the bushes, catching small insects with vicious snaps of his beak. Apparently it was necessary, for the proper working of his machinery, to have his tail jerk spitefully several times a minute.

About half past five three crows came to the big tree. One of them sailed softly by, but the other two alighted and began cawing in a fretful way. They were bedraggled with fog and dew, and their tones told of hunger and discomfort. When they spoke, they thrust their heads far forward, giving them a low, mean air. They pulled viciously at their moist clothing, all the while keeping the keenest watch of their surroundings and the distance. Suddenly one of them saw me, and with a low croak flew away, his mate following. Again silence and fog prevailed. A cedar-bird, alighting on the tip of the old tree, seemed to shiver. He remained in the dim upper air but a moment, taking a headlong plunge into the shrubbery below. I thought even the frogs resented the slow-moving vapors, for they croaked and splashed restlessly.

A red-eyed vireo began his sermon at 6.10, and soon after, blue sky and scattering rays of sunlight appeared. Then the birds became more cheerful, and catbirds, crows, kingbirds, Maryland yellow-throats, and song sparrows vied with each other in activity and noise. Every one of them was intent upon making a good breakfast. The catbirds ate viburnum berries; the crows marched upon the lake sand, searching for the waste of the waves; a barn swallow, the kingbirds, and several smaller flycatchers hovered or darted in pursuit of insects, and the sparrows gathered their harvest from the earth. Then a flicker appeared in the top of the old tree, and, finding a resonant spot in the trunk, beat his reveille softly upon it. My neck fairly ached when I tried to imagine the mental and muscular effort required of the bird to produce such regular and rapid action with his beak. The only way in which a man can make as many beats to the minute with any regularity is by allowing his hand to rest in such a position that it will tremble. Then, by grasping a pencil and resting its tip upon a board, a sound somewhat similar to the rolling reverberation of the woodpecker’s drumming can be produced.

At half past six an olive-sided flycatcher came to the pine, but on seeing the kingbird disappeared. A moment later the kingbird flew away, and the olive-sided at once returned to the highest branch of the tree, and made it his point of rest during a long series of sallies after insects. When he caught one of large size, he brought it back to his perch, and pounded it violently against the branch until its struggles ceased, and its harder portions were, presumably, reduced to a jelly. The kingbirds really have more right than any of the migrants to use the old tree, for they have built, year after year, time out of mind, in the spreading branches of the nearest living pine overhanging the lake. As August advances, however, they wander a good deal, paying visits to my orchard and other good feeding-grounds near the lake. While they are away, wood pewees and phœbes, olive-sided and least flycatchers, visit the vicinity, and enjoy the great tree and the fine chances which it offers of seeing insects over both land and water. About quarter to seven a solitary sandpiper flew swiftly over the meadow, calling. It made two great circles, rising above the trees, and then flew westward so fast that I looked to discover a pursuer, but could discern none. In the high woods, over which it flew, the crows were chortling. Northward the peak was clear, although below it a long scarf of mist trailed over the forest, moving westward. In the tree-top the flicker “flickered,” and then drummed; called again, and drummed more emphatically. Soon a second woodpecker appeared, but flew by into the woods. The first one watched him, and then drummed again, whereupon the new-comer flew to him, and an animated dialogue took place, the second bird apparently having much to say in an excited manner. After they had finished their conference, the second bird flew away, and the first relapsed into a reverie. It lasted only a few moments, for shortly before seven o’clock two crows flew into the two dead trees, and the woodpecker hurried away. Each crow took the topmost perch on his tree, and began his toilet. Just then a frog jumped with a splash into the pool in front of me, and the crows, hearing the noise, looked searchingly down, saw me, and flew off without a caw.

For several years the morning of the 21st of August has been my time for first seeing Wilson’s blackcap warblers on their autumn journey southward. Having been in the swamp three hours without seeing one, I began to think that, 1892 being leap year, the pretty migrants might not keep their tryst; but I wronged them, for just at seven o’clock I heard a sharp “cheep” behind me, and, turning slowly, found a blackcap gazing at me nervously. No sooner had my eyes met his than he darted away.

Between seven and eight the trees were occupied by a flock of twelve cedar-birds, one or two flickers, several young robins, a pewee, a humming-bird, and some of the small flycatchers. The humming-bird is a tyrannical and blustering little bird, giving himself many airs. His wife is quite as much of a virago as he is of a bully. In this instance she was determined to drive away the flycatchers. Sitting in the big tree, and looking smaller than a well-fed dragonfly, she darted, every now and then, at one of the chebecs, and put him to flight. They tired her out, however, and after a while she gave up the struggle and departed. About 7.30 a flock of small birds, including several chickadees, appeared in the edge of the woods and scattered over the meadow. Few of them came near enough to me for identification, but there seemed to be vireos and warblers among them. Their coming aroused other birds, and a goldfinch, a catbird chasing a veery, one or two Maryland yellow-throats, and a swift were in sight at one time.

Thirst overtook me at eight, after four hours of watching, and I crept softly down to the brook. Before I had gone a dozen steps, a huge bird sprang from the sedgy growth by the lake shore and rose into the air. It was a blue heron which had been patrolling the sand within forty feet of me. He flew along the shore for some distance, then rose and passed over the trees towards the north, seeking, no doubt, my lonely lake, half a mile away in the forest. One morning, when hidden in the alders and viburnums which grow at the very foot of the big tree, I heard a queer guttural call or grunt from the meadow, and the next moment the heron stood above me, on the lowest limb of the pine. He looked sharply over the meadow and the lake, stretched first one leg, then the other, then each wing in turn, and finally fell to preening his blue and gray plumes. Against a pale blue sky or ruffled water which mingles blue and gray with bits of white, he is marvelously well protected by his coloring. No wonder that the poor frogs fall a prey to his patient spearing. I kept breathlessly still, and watched this largest of our Chocorua birds. It seemed odd that the old tree should be a perch for him and for the humming-bird. The hummer is three and a quarter inches long; the heron spreads six feet with his great wings when he flies, and measures over four feet when standing. After a while I grew weary of watching the heron, and of wondering at his macaroni-like legs and his strangely concentrated stare, which now and then fixed itself on my hiding-place, so I whistled softly. The heron paused in his feather-combing and looked towards me. There was no fear in his glance, only mild interest. I sang, first sad music, then “Nancy Lee,” “Pinafore,” “Hold the Fort,” everything I could think of, in fact, which might prompt him to action; but he only stared, now over his beak, then under it. The latter method of ogling was very effective, for the long bill was contemplating the skies, while the cold, calculating eyes stood out each side of its base and glared down across it until I seemed to feel their clamminess. From music I turned to animal language, and barked, mewed, mooed, brayed, whinnied, quacked, crowed, cackled, peeped, hooted, and cawed, until my throat was raw. He was clearly entertained, and showed no desire to leave me. At last I came down to plain English, supposing that my voice undisguised by song would certainly alarm him, but to my great surprise he apparently did not associate the human voice with its owner in the slightest degree. In fact, he now seemed bored by my noise, and went on with his preening. Suddenly, in moving my foot, I snapped a small twig. Before there seemed to have been time for the sound to reach his brain, the heron was on the wing, and I saw him no more that day.

At 8.30, as I was watching the big tree, a large, light-colored bird passed close to its trunk and plunged downward towards the deep pool at its foot. The sound of splashing water was followed by utter silence. After remaining motionless for several minutes I crawled carefully towards the bank of the brook. The bushes were thick, and small dry twigs covered the ground. Their snapping could not be avoided, and just before I reached a point where I could see the water and the narrow strip of muddy beach, a heavy bird rose with a great beating of wings and flew up-stream. I broke through the cover, headlong, but the bird was out of sight. The surface of the stream was covered with small, soft feathers, which I gathered together and dried. They appeared to be from the breast of a sandpiper. Who the murderer was will never be known, though I presume that it was a Cooper’s hawk.

My glimpse of this hawk, if such it was, reminded me of an encounter between a sharp-shinned hawk and a flock of blue jays which I had seen at the tree the week previous. The hawk arrived when several flickers were in the tree and hurled himself upon them. They fled, calling wildly, and brought to their aid, first a kingbird, which promptly attacked the hawk from above, and then a flock of blue jays, which abused him from cover below. When the kingbird flew away, as he did after driving the hawk into the bushes for a few moments, the jays grew more and more daring in approaching the hawk. In fact they set themselves to the task of tiring him out and making him ridiculous. They ran great risks in doing it, frequently flying almost into the hawk’s face; but they persevered, in spite of his ferocious attempts to strike them. After nearly an hour the hawk grew weary and edged off to the woods. Then the jays went up the tree as though it were a circular staircase, and yelled the news of the victory to the swamp.

As the forenoon passed slowly by, there were periods when the tree was empty for ten minutes or more at a time, but generally a flicker, cedar-bird, olive-sided flycatcher, blue jay, crow, or catbird was to be seen perched in some part of the great skeleton. At ten o’clock I shifted my place to avoid the heat of the sun, and to keep its light behind me. My new seat was in the heart of a tangle of bushes, and as I looked through the network of their stems I suddenly saw a bird’s head, motionless. My glass aided me in recognizing the little creature as a red-eyed vireo sitting upon a twig. Close by it was a second vireo also perfectly passive. I watched them for a long time, and could see nothing but their eyes move. It is such moods as this, taking possession of birds, which make some parts of the day silent, and cause the woods to seem deserted by all their feathered tenants. Another occupant of the thicket was a yellow-bellied flycatcher, whose activity in the pursuit of small insects was tireless. He certainly found enough to eat, for small insects have been unusually abundant this summer, while birds have been noticeably scarce near Chocorua. Some species, usually well represented, have seemingly vanished, and others, quite numerous in average years, have been very sparingly represented. For instance, the summer has passed without my seeing either an oriole or a winter wren, while redstarts and chestnut-sided warblers, usually among the most numerous species, have been represented by a mere handful of birds. The supposed local causes of this dearth of small birds are a heavy snowfall, which occurred the last week in May, and a hailstorm, which did great damage just in the middle of the nesting period. Unusual numbers of birds are said to have been killed by spring storms in the Gulf States before the year’s migration really began.

At eleven o’clock a flock of small birds moved rapidly across the meadow, and four of the number passed through my covert. They were a chickadee and three Wilson’s blackcaps. I wish the latter bird lived here in the breeding season, for it is a pretty, confiding, gentle little creature. The departure of these birds was hastened by the appearance on the lake shore of a young man, a boy, and a dog. The man carried a gun, and the dog rushed about in an excited way, doing his best in cur fashion to aid in the hunt. When the trio reached the brook at the point where it debouched upon the lake sand, the man cursed the stream for its width, and the boy, in a loud nasal voice, followed his example. They stood upon the farther side for several minutes pouring out blasphemy and filth until a sandpiper attracted their attention and their gun spoke sharply. The bird escaped, perhaps to die in the meadow grass, and again the two intelligent human beings invoked wrath upon the bird, the stream, the meadow, the dog, and the gun. Then they crossed the brook higher up, where it was narrower, and distance covered their conversation with a welcome veil. As long as the pleasant memories of that quiet day linger in my mind, so long will there be drawn through them a black line of disgust at the vileness of the two representatives of my own species who offered such a contrast to the purity of nature.

From eleven until one o’clock there was almost unbroken stillness near the great tree. Now and then some one of the regular residents of the meadow spoke, a dragonfly buzzed past, a small pickerel stirred in the brook, or a frog said “wurro, wurroùh,” and splashed in the still water among the reeds. The kingbirds broke the monotony by coming, three strong, with much noise and fluttering to take possession of the tree. One of them flew to the sand by the lake ripples and drank. Then all three came upon the lowest branches of the big tree and looked at the dark pool below. One flew obliquely against the water, striking it and dashing a thousand bright drops into the air. He rose chattering and returned to his perch, shaking himself. I thought he had aimed for a fly and struck the water unintentionally, but down he went again, making even more of a splash than before, and presently both the others followed his example at such frequent intervals that the pool had no time to smooth its ripples. This odd kind of bathing was continued for ten minutes, during which time a catbird sneaked down upon the sand and watched the process silently but with evident interest. Later he saw me sitting motionless under the bushes, and flew directly at me, turning sharply just before reaching my head, and making a loud noise both by striking his wings against branches and by his harsh voice. If his purpose was to startle me he certainly succeeded.

The afternoon was clear, still, and warm, and the birds were evidently drowsy. From two until after four nothing perched in the tree. A sandpiper amused me by his patient search for food, as he waded back and forth on the mud over which the brook spread as it entered the lake. For an hour he confined himself to a space less than six feet square and worked over almost every inch of it. Much of the time he merely prodded the mud gently with his long, quill-like bill, but occasionally he seemed to see something squirm, and then he pursued it quickly and stabbed more vigorously. Much of the time the water was above his knees, and sometimes he ran into deeper places, so that it lapped upon his breast. Twice he plunged his head and neck entirely under water, but his eyes seemed to need no wiping when they emerged as wide open as before. Sometimes he crossed his legs and stood like a camp-stool, with his thin props meeting their equally straw-like reflections in the brook. After a while a second sandpiper appeared, but his method was to travel rapidly along the water line, and he was soon out of sight.

It was not until nearly six o’clock that the tree became really populous again. Then the catbirds went upstairs on its branches, flickers and kingbirds occupied its top; a humming-bird buzzed in the face of a pewee who was perched fully thirty feet from the ground; a sapsucking woodpecker came and drummed for a moment, and finally a flock of cedar-birds rested in it for a while as they had in the morning. The sun set and night breathed upon the meadow. A single cedar-bird remained in the tip of the tree and drearily repeated his one dismal word. Below in the shadows the catbirds were restlessly mewing, and as it grew dark the lament of the hermits joined in the gloomy chorus. The sky was fair, and rosy lights flowed and ebbed in the clouds. The stars came, and in the distant pines a barred owl sounded his long trumpet note. A few minutes after seven, when catbirds and hermits were silent for the night, I heard a solitary sandpiper whistling at the mouth of the brook. My glass brought his tiny form to view, and as I watched him, a second tattler ran along the gleaming sand and the whistling ceased. Suddenly they flew together as though startled, and the next moment I saw what I had supposed to be a bunch of pickerel-weed growing in the shallows move slowly eastward. The object was several rods from the shore, and moving across the mouth of the brook. Now it glided a few inches, then it paused. Ten minutes passed before it progressed as many yards. It was the heron’s ghostly form. When he reached the eastern shore a light flashed across the lake and a voice sounded. He flew. I rose to go, but as I crept out upon the sand I turned to take a last look at the tree, and saw there the heron, standing on a high limb, black against the sky.

MIGRATION.

For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,

· · · · · · ·

Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,

And flowers put on a fairer hue,

And everything was strange and new.

The quaint story of Noah’s gathering the animals into the ark is always linked in my mind with the Pied Piper, and with that strange turn in the tide of bird life which is called migration. The marvelous music which charmed the rats and children of Hamelin town must have been used by Noah to call his creatures into the ark of safety, and it is still to be heard in the winds of autumn sighing through the Chocorua forests and calling the birds away to other lands. One day all is calm and serene; the next, though the sky is just as blue and the sunlight just as warm, something of unrest is in the air, and the birds are telling each other the story of the great journey. Songs are forgotten or sung only to greet the dawn and bless the night; nestlings are trained to flight and led silent journeys through field, forest, or ether after food; new scenes are visited, and the weak separated from the strong and left to die. Then, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, the hosts meet, drawn together by a force as irresistible and mysterious as magnetism, and finally the story of the great journey is written in fact once more.

MOUNT CHOCORUA AND CHOCORUA LAKE IN SUMMER

In the August mornings I hear the Swainson’s thrush by the lake. He was not there a few days before, he was on the mountain-side. He is drifting southward, slowly at first, but feeling the thrill of the Pied Piper’s music in his wings. All through the summer I have listened in vain for the nasal “quank, quank, quank,” of the red nuthatch. Suddenly, in mid-August, I hear it on the mountain, and an hour or two later every flock of chickadees brings the northern migrant’s call along with the jolly chorus of “dee, dee, dee.” These chickadees, alert, courageous, tireless, and generous, are the convoys of the warbler fleets. For an hour the silence of the forest will be broken only by the tiresome platitudes of the red-eyed vireo, the dry staccato of the harvest-fly, and the occasional whistle of a hyla. Then, far away, will be heard the faint “dee-dee” of the titmouse. It comes nearer, and presently a dozen or twenty little birds are seen hovering, darting, flitting, but steadily advancing, tree by tree, through the woods. Perhaps not more than one in ten will be a chickadee, yet it is the chickadee which gives character and direction to the body. The guided flock of easy-going warblers and vireos, nuthatches and kinglets, drift on, feeding and frolicking, heedless of what it passes.

If the observer “squeaks,” or if an owl draws the attention of the passing birds, the chickadee comes to the front at once, with his sharp reproving iterations, and his beady eyes snapping indignantly. Along with him come red-eyed and solitary vireos, nuthatches, golden-crested kinglets, black-throated blue warblers, Wilson’s blackcaps, young chestnut-sided warblers, looking puzzlingly unlike their parents. Blackburnians, with throats aflame; black-throated greens, rich in spring tints of yellow and tender green; black and white creepers, the tidiest of birds; the gay magnolias, redstarts, Canadians, and sober myrtle warblers. Sometimes a single flock contains nearly all of these courtiers of the woods, while others are composed almost entirely of a single species, as, for example, the black-throated greens, or the magnolias.

In these same late August and early September days the cherry and berry eaters gather together and travel in flocks. Robins by scores, sometimes by hundreds, combine with the cedar-birds and flickers and range over the country in search of food. The flickers feed much of the time upon the ground among the berry-bushes, casting aside woodpecker habits and seeming more like starlings. The robins are sometimes with them upon the ground, but oftener in the wild cherry-trees with the cedar-birds, stripping bough after bough of its dark fruit. When the flock moves, the cedar-birds mass themselves and fly for a while as though linked together. Then, without apparent cause, part or the whole turn about and fly first this way, then that, perhaps coming back, after a few minutes, to the point of departure. When a flock of red crossbills do this, they sprinkle the air and the earth with sweet notes; but the cedar-birds have no joy in their one chilly whistle, and there is more of aimless, witless indecision in their flights than there is of romping. Whenever I come near one of their flocks, I scan them carefully, hoping to detect the white wing-bars of a Bohemian waxwing among them, yet it is more than likely that I may watch a lifetime without having the fortune to see in the flesh one of those rare vagabonds of the north. The roving habits of these birds and of the crossbills contrast strangely with the simple steadfastness of the grouse, and the clock-like punctuality of many of the migrants. Something in that cold past with its glaciers and ice-crushed continents could explain the present temperaments of the wandering birds, but we may never know what that something is. Whether we are to know it or not, it is natural to have a feeling akin to pity for birds so lacking in home life.

The winter wren is an amusing little migrant. He seems to have an underground railway of his own from the grim northern forest straight towards a milder clime. Like other underground ways, it has breathing holes, and out of these he occasionally pops his head and sputters at the observer. Sometimes he appears at an opening in a stone wall and scolds mankind for picking blackberries or plucking goldenrod; again he emerges from the darkness beneath a log in the swamp, and bustles about with the offensive energy of a special policeman. If he travels in company, the fact is not often made evident. He certainly seems too crusty for pleasant companionship on a long journey. One late September morning a winter wren flew into my hen-house and became my prisoner for a few hours. I placed him in a room and watched his efforts to escape. He flew with such speed that he made almost as much of a humming as a humming-bird. He clung to the woodwork, and hid in the curtains, but finally dropped to the floor and ran about like a mouse, hiding in corners or behind the legs of chairs. Once or twice I caught him and stroked his head and neck. He was quiet enough while I touched him, but the moment my fingers left him, he slipped away out of sight. When taken out of doors and set free, he darted into the nearest stone wall and was seen no more.

Birds of the upper air which feed on insects depart early. The eaves swallows and martins go while some mothers are still sitting on belated eggs. Bank swallows, barn swallows, night-hawks, and many of the tyrant flycatchers have vanished by the time the maples begin to flame upon the mountain-side. On the 3d of August, 1891, I saw about twenty martins in the dead tree. They were very noisy, and evidently excited. While watching them I saw in the zenith what looked like a cloud of insects. My glass showed it to be a large flock of birds, apparently swallows, moving in a great circle. After a time all but one of the martins in the tree flew away and were gone many minutes, the birds in the sky also disappearing. The martins returned, however, to the one which had not flown, and shortly after I again discovered the bird cluster in the sky. After fresh noise and flutterings of wings the martins finally flew, and no more were seen near the lake that season. Often in an August afternoon the lake will be apparently without birds, when in a twinkling the air will be full of graceful forms, and a flock of white-breasted swallows, barn swallows, or night-hawks will sweep over the blue water, rise, vanish over the meadow, reappear, fly towards the peak, wheel, return, and then perhaps speed away, not to greet the fair lake again until ice and snow have come and gone, and the number of their own light forms has been sadly diminished in the south.

A field of buckwheat or other small grain is a magnet in the days when the birds are wandering. To it come the song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throats, juncos, purple finches, field sparrows, goldfinches, and bay-winged buntings. They love to linger many days in the stubble; and when bird music is rare, their occasional songs are precious to the ear. If the field is approached softly there seems to be no life hidden in its midst, but suddenly wings whirr noisily, and bird after bird flies up into the neighboring trees and bushes. Sparrows love fences, stone walls, and their accompanying growths of berry-bushes and small trees. The latter are our New England substitutes for the hedgerows of the Old World, and I believe the sparrow tribe takes as much comfort in wall and briers as in hedge and ditch. The ditch is more than replaced by countless brooks, always clear and pure, and the wall gives shade, shelter, food, and many a comfortable perch. While driving along the narrow roads, bordered by many a mile of rough stone wall, the rattle of my wagon wheels startles the sparrows and finches from their cover. The bay-wing runs along the rut in front of the horse; the goldfinch undulates over the field, turns, and ripples back; the song sparrow mounts a bush-top and scolds; the white-throat appears for a moment in a gap between the bushes and then goes on with his scratching in the leaves. So they go southward along the dusty roads, or the borders of dry field and dryer pasture. They are thousands strong, yet they look to be but a few each day, and the careless eye might think them always the same individuals from mid-August until Indian summer.

Sometimes alone, but often with the field sparrows and bay-wings, or later with the juncos, flocks of bluebirds travel the autumnal way. This year, on August 28, I saw a flock of twelve working slowly along a moor-like pasture ridge in company with double their number of sparrows. I have seen them by dozens in early October mingle with juncos and white-throats in gleaning over the stubble just left bare by the melting of a first snowfall. As they fly from spot to spot, they prefer to alight on the upper curve of a boulder, the tip of a cedar, or some equally favorable point for seeing and being seen. They are comparatively silent, but now and then their sweet “cheruit” comes as a promise that after the long winter spring shall return, and with it their loveliness and courage. Many of the birds go south cheerfully, or indifferently, but the bluebirds seem to linger sadly and lovingly, and to feel that the migration is an enforced exile from the home they love best.

The Chocorua country is not a good one for starlings and blackbirds; in fact, I have never seen but one bobolink nearer than Fryeburg intervales, twenty-five miles away; and with all my watching, no crow blackbird or meadow lark has ever caught my eye in this region. The old residents say that years ago, when flax was cultivated hereabouts and grain-fields were broader, these birds were present in large numbers. The first flock of rusty grackles which I have ever seen here appeared this year on a hilltop, about the middle of the afternoon of September 22. The birds were either very tame or very weary, for they remained in the tops of some locust-trees, while I not only stood beneath them, but shook their tree, called to them, and clapped my hands. They maintained a steady flow of sotto voce music charming to the ear.

All migrants are not desirable visitors. An inroad of hawks is far from pleasant for the birds of a neighborhood, or for other migrants. All through the month of September hawks abound. They circle round the peak of Chocorua, seemingly for the pleasure of it. Often a dozen sharp-shinned and young Cooper’s hawks are in sight there at once. Sometimes great flocks of hawks pass across the sky, not circling, as the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks are so fond of doing, but sailing straight before the wind like a fleet of mackerelmen running down the coast wing and wing. I once saw three hundred and thirty migrating hawks in one forenoon, most of them a thousand feet or less above the earth, but some so high that a powerful glass only just brought them into view. The stately progress of these birds, moving many miles an hour without a wing-beat visible to the observer, is one of the wonders of nature. The Dead Tree is a resting-place for migrating hawks, eagles, and ospreys. I doubt not that by night it is used by owls, when they too move southward as their food grows scarce.

In several different years I have seen my big blue heron sail away southward. In each instance it has been about four o’clock in the afternoon. Rising with slow and dignified flight, he makes two or three immense circles over the lakes, and then, as though partings were said, landmarks remembered, and bearings taken, he flies with strong and steady strokes towards the outlet of the Ossipee basin. This year, in August, ten night herons visited us at one time, remaining in the neighborhood two or three days. When disturbed by day, they rose, and, forming an orderly flock, flew away with military precision. The ducks and geese are, however, the best examples of well-drilled companies. Geese are not often seen here, although several were killed this spring in a small lake halfway between Chocorua and the Bearcamp. Wood duck and black duck begin to fly past us late in August, but their numbers are comparatively insignificant, a flock of ten being unusually large. In October and early November the wind-swept lakes are seldom without little companies of black ducks, sheldrakes, and their less common relatives.

One of the most interesting of migrants is the loon, or great northern diver. Loons are said to breed in this vicinity on Whitton Pond, and they are seen now and then during all the summer months. It is on the edge of a northeast storm in September, when mackerel clouds deck the sky and the hazy sunlight spreads gold upon the ripples, that the migrating loon comes with the force of a cannon-ball, and plunges into the lake’s waters. His shrill laughter is taken up by all the mocking forests, and his deep and prolonged diving carries consternation to bass and pickerel. Restlessly he plows the ruffled water with his broad breast, and now and then he pounds the waves with his wings, raising his head high above them. When he flies, the water is churned into foam for many yards before his unwieldy body is finally raised into the air and placed under the full control of his powerful wings. Then he rises little by little, his wings moving faster and faster, until, after progressing half a mile, he has risen two or three hundred feet. Turning, he comes back, still rising, and passes in review the lake and forests which he is to leave. Again and again he tacks, on each new line rising farther from the earth, until at last, seen against the sky, he is but a pair of swiftly whirling wings set strangely far back on the long black line of his head, neck, and body. It is said that hunters have been killed by being struck by falling loons shot by them on the wing.

Occasionally a stray sea-bird comes to the mountain lakes. Herring gulls have been seen on Chocorua Pond, a Wilson’s tern was shot on August 30, 1890, on Ossipee Lake, and a year earlier, on September 30, a black tern remained half a day on my lonely lake.

Late in September and in October there are days when the rush of migrating birds is like the stampede of a defeated army. I recall one such day, the 25th of September, 1891, when a torrent of migrants swept past my red-roofed cottage in the hour following sunrise. Before breakfast, and without going out of sight of my door, I saw over two hundred birds go by, including sixty pigeon woodpeckers, several sapsuckers, nuthatches, chickadees, crows, blue jays, robins, catbirds, seven kinds of warblers, solitary and red-eyed vireos, four kinds of sparrows, a tanager, pewees, and a flock of cedar-birds. Most of these birds were on the trees, bushes, or ground, busily feeding, yet restlessly progressing southwestward, as though haunted by some irresistible impulse to keep in motion. The day was hot and still, and my notes mention the fact that we heard the splash of an osprey as he plunged into the lake, more than a quarter of a mile away. That evening the whippoorwills were singing their farewells in the soft moonlight.

As the early October days glide by, these waves of migration come faster and faster, their acceleration seeming, as one looks back upon it, like the ever quicker throbbing of the air under the wing-beats of the grouse. Even as the drumming suddenly ceases and the summer air seems still and heavy in the silence which follows, so the migration suddenly ends, and the woods and fields become very still in the late Indian summer. Now and then the scream of a blue jay falls upon the ear, or a faint note of a tree sparrow comes from the weeds by the roadside; but as a rule nature is dumb, and the leaves fall like tears. All the beauty of sky and autumn foliage cannot bring the birds back to the silent forest. Warm though the sun may be, and soft the haze on the cheek of Passaconaway, these charms cannot woo back the birds from their migration. The music of the Pied Piper has bewitched them, they are dreaming of gushing waters and flowers of fairest hue; and many a frosty, starlit night will pass before their wings beat once more in the clear Chocorua air.

TRAPPING GNOMES.

When the harvest moon is large and the nights clear, I love to spend an evening hour or two under the great oak-trees on the shore of my lonely lake. The soft mists creep across the water, bats flit back and forth squeaking, the whippoorwills call to each other that the time for migration is near at hand, and sometimes the voices of the barred owls wake weird echoes in the lake’s curves. Sitting motionless in the black shadow, I am unseen and unsuspected by the night creatures round me. Many feet move upon the dry leaves, and the fluttering of wings disturbs the still air. Measuring the evening from sunset until ten o’clock, it seems a period of more activity than the day. Hours roll by in the September sunlight with scarce a sign of life near the lake, but the coming of twilight is a signal for awakening. High in the oaks the gray squirrels are busy with the acorns. In the stillness of the night an acorn falling against one and another bunch of stiff leaves, finally striking upon the ground, seems to make an unduly loud noise. The fine squeak of a bat might pass unnoticed in the daytime, but in the gloom it carries far and comes upon the ear sharply.

In these hours the ground gives up its cave-dwellers, and their soft feet rustle the leaves in all the forest and by every brookside. From the ledges of Chocorua, foxes by dozens descend upon the surrounding farms and search for mice and other prey. It is the light snowfall which betrays the great number of these wary marauders, and not the secretive leaves of autumn, upon whose dry surfaces the fox-tread makes no imprint. From his den under the screes the hedgehog wanders through the woods or seeks the orchard. The skunk, too, is abroad, poking his snout into ant-hills or among mouldering leaves where insects lie hidden. It is neither fox nor skunk which makes the soft pattering just behind the old oak against which I lean. A smaller wanderer than they comes there, and as surely as gnomes have settled in America this must be one of their haunts. I feel certain of it when a squeaky little whisper follows the pattering, or when occasionally a tiny form darts across a patch of moonlight near the edge of the water.

In these September hunting-days I have left the grouse to feed undisturbed among the blackberries, and the hare to dream away the sunlit hours in his form among the swamp evergreens. Gnome-hunting has been my pastime, and so low is our human estimate of the character and usefulness of these tiny creatures that my conscience has not given the faintest bit of a twinge when I have brought home dead gnomes from field, meadow, mountain, and forest. Our gnomes are not all of one kind, and when I started with my game-bag in the September sunlight I did not feel sure what manner of elf I might bring home with me. Setting out early on the morning of the 12th, I dashed the dew from the brakes as I crossed an open pasture on the way to my lonely lake. The brakes were growing brown, yet we had had no frost, and the equinox was still ten days distant. The sumacs were gorgeous in green, scarlet, and orange, waiting for the first rain or wind to hurl to the ground half their gay leaves. As they hung motionless in the sunlight, they seemed brilliant enough for the tropics. Asters and goldenrod joined them in painting part of the picture with high colors, and so did the maples on the high ledges of the mountain where a bear-hunter’s fire raged last October. A bit of woodbine climbing up the maple trunk gleamed like flames, mountain-ash berries were full of the same fire, and the clustered fruit of the hobble-bush glowed in the midst of its maroon and crimson foliage.

What means this decking of the earth in autumn with scarlet and purple, crimson and gold, russet and orange? The flowers of the springtime are full of joyous color, in order that the wandering bee and butterfly may aid in their fertilization. The bird gleams with color as the glow-worm gleams with fire, that his mate may not forget him in the mazes of the life-dance. The autumn is the season of ripening, of the gathering of harvests, of the decay of the earthly, and the creation of that which shall endure. Are these colors only the emblems of death, the garlands upon the pall, or are they the signals which Nature hangs on high to call her forces into ranks for the battle against extinction and in favor of persistent life? Surely the berry which by its brilliancy of color calls the bird to it, in order that it may be eaten and its seeds carried afar, is as wise as the flower which by its tints and perfume attracts the bee and secures fertilization. Perhaps the tree which blazes with autumn color is avoided by insects whose instinct teaches them to shun colors in contrast to their own.

Just beyond the sumacs is the stump of a prehistoric pine. It has lasted generations since its towering pillar fell and sank year by year deeper into the soil. Its hard gray walls look as though they might endure half a century more of snow and sunshine. Gnomes live under that stump, and the first of my traps was set at their cave archway. Kneeling down behind the clustering blackberry briers, I could see the archway just at the head of the opening between two of the great buttress roots of the stump. Moss was growing at the threshold, ferns overhung the doorway, and a tiny path led through the grass from the arch into the dry pasture beyond the briers. Yes, the trap had been sprung, and crushed beneath its cruel springs was a gray gnome. His eyes were large and dark. His coat was of soft gray, and his waistcoat snowy. His hands and feet were very white and his elfin ears mischievously large and erect. The name of this gnome is quite musical,—Hesperomys, the evening gnome.

In a deep hollow between wooded banks runs the pasture brook. It comes from the forest-clad mountain-side, and flows to a dark swamp, beyond which is the lake. Gnomes live by the brook, both in the hollow and in the swamp. Nine traps were set in the hollow and eighteen in the swamp. These traps are, with true Yankee originality, named “cyclones,” and they are nearly perfect as engines of destruction. Upon a small square of tin are hinged two rectangles of stiff wire, so attached to strong springs that they naturally lie flat upon the square of tin. One rectangle is smaller than the other so that it just lies within it. The trap is set by raising the rectangles until they make a tent-like frame, and then securing them by a catch. The best lure for gnomes is whole corn, which is placed near the centre of the square of tin in a tiny cup suspended by a lever to the catch which holds the trap open. The gnome steps softly through the wire rectangles and tries to lift the grain from the cup. Woe to him if he presses ever so lightly upon the side of the cup, for if it is depressed, and the other end of the lever moved, the catch is cast free and the rectangles fall together with such force as to crush any small creature which stands below them.

The nine traps set by the brook were in groups of three. As I drew near the first group, I looked for broken twigs and a scrap of white cotton tied to a branch, my signals to show where the traps were placed. Bent twigs with their leaves slightly withered and drooping are readily seen at a long distance. The first three traps were set at a point where the banks of the brook were steep, and the level moss near the water only a narrow belt. At one place a mossy log crossed this level, a mouldering stump crowned with ferns flanked it, and a big boulder raised a wall of granite parallel with the stream. Just across the brook was another long log covered with moss, violet leaves, and rue. One trap was on this log, one by the boulder close to a little hole running under it, and the third near the mouldering stump. At first as I stood in the midst of the traps I could see none of them. The corn scattered near had been carried away or eaten, and the strings by which the traps were tied to stakes were not where I remembered to have left them. Suddenly I saw one trap. It was sprung and drawn away among the leaves. Something was in it, something I had never before seen, a creature more beautiful than any squirrel, as graceful as a swallow and as suggestive of speed and lightness. I knelt over this slender, brightly-clad gnome, and released his lifeless body from the trap. His cobweb-like whiskers were wonderfully long, his coat was of pale straw color and brown, his waistcoat of purest white. No monkey has a tail proportionally longer than the seemingly endless white-tipped appendage of Zapus insignis, this jumping gnome of the mountain streams. Exquisite creature, I thought, how can I have lived so long among woods and brooks without suspecting your presence? But for a “cyclone” I might never have known that such a being existed.

The other two traps were sprung, one containing a second Zapus, and the third a gray Hesperomys. Similar fortune had attended the remaining traps by the brook, three containing specimens of Zapus, two of Hesperomys, and one a large mole with fur as fine as the softest silk velvet. I pushed on eagerly to the series of traps in the swamp.

TWO KINDS OF GNOMES

Hesperomys

Zapus

On the way I crossed a strip of level pasture over which a grove of gray birches is rapidly spreading year by year. Several of them are bent so that their upper branches sweep the ground. They are victims of the snow and ice storms of winter, and, unlike the Arlington cedars, they are not resilient enough to recover an erect position. In the heart of the grove, a family of sapsucking woodpeckers had been at work in one of their “orchards.” Eight trees bore marks of their mischievous tapping, and in the two principal trees many hundreds of holes had been made by them. Their thirst is as insatiable as Mulvaney’s, but I supposed that before this time they had wearied of their summer fountains. Not so; one of them was hitching around the drills, dipping as persistently as in early July, and bees buzzed near him, enjoying their share of the tree’s sweets. Restraining my impatience to see the swamp traps, I watched long for a humming-bird to visit the drills, but none came, thus confirming my impression that they not only arrive in New England later than the sapsuckers, but that they migrate southward earlier.

While I waited under the birches, a gray squirrel came tripping over the grass and through the brakes. His great brush was not carried over his back, but in an arch behind him. His approach was so noisy that at first I thought a dog was coming towards me, but his voice betrayed him. “Cluck, cluck, cluck, cleck, cleck, cleck, cleck, clēēk.” If a “cyclone” had been choking him he could not have made sounds any more queer. When at last he discovered me, he lowered his tail and undulated very softly away.

The first of the second series of traps was set on the slope leading down towards the moist bed of the swamp. It contained one of the white-footed gray gnomes. The next three were empty. Number five was in the darkest part of the swamp on a huge upturned stump whose twisted roots, looking like the arms of a devil-fish, reached far into the air. The trap was sprung, and the gnome in it was as new to my eyes as Zapus had been. Coarse, chestnut-brown hair, in parts almost as bright as red mahogany, small eyes, conspicuous ears, and a tail so short that it seemed only a stump of something more satisfactory, were the conspicuous points in this gnome. His name, as I later learned, was Evotomys, the long-eared gnome. His rich coloring matched to perfection the decayed hemlock stump in which he lived, and harmonized with the brown bark of pines and the stained waters of the swamp brooks. In the sunlight, or upon the sand by the brookside, he would have been conspicuous. Where he lay he looked like a fragment of the reddish wood under him.

Five more of his tribe, and a tiny shrew, only three inches long, were found in the remaining swamp traps. One of the gnomes had been nearly devoured as he lay in the trap, the parts remaining being skin, feet, tail, and a small portion of the head. I suspected a big mole of being the ghoul. On my way home I looked in a trap set under a small foot-bridge which spanned a damp spot in a mowing-field. The victims here—for two had been caught at once—were of the family Arvicola, the sturdy gnomes of the fields. Their eyes were very small, their ears almost concealed by their coarse, dark-brown hair, and their bodies awkwardly but strongly built. They are the farming gnomes.

On September 17, I walked from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale, over the once “lost trail,” now nearly completed as a broad bridle-path and winter road. I took twenty-five “cyclones” with me and set them at the most favorable spots along the way. Brook crossings, big, moss-grown stumps or logs, boulders overhanging springs or rivulets, and old logging camps were among the places which seemed to me likely to be frequented by gnomes. As I was not to return until the next day, a night would intervene to give the little cave-dwellers time to smell the corn and to inspect and spring the traps.

The intervale was very beautiful as it lay tranquil in the autumn haze, but the memories of last Christmas-time had a charm about them which even the foretaste of Indian summer could not equal. Snow adds greatly to the dignity and grandeur of our New England mountains, making them more akin to the Alps, perpetual in their wintry covering. Chocorua, always a reminder of the Matterhorn, is much more like it when clad in ice, and rose-tinted by the morning sun. Even Swift River, framed in meadow brakes, waving osmundas, and gay scarlet maples, seemed less sparkling than when set in ice and overhanging banks of pure white snow.

As night came, coldness suggestive of winter crept over the great plain. The first light frost came caressingly in the still night hours and fell upon the pumpkin vines and the delicate ferns by the roadside, so that morning saw them wither away and die in the early sunbeams. With the dawn came many bird-notes. Crows, jays, flickers, red nuthatches, chickadees, golden kinglets, robins, cedar-birds, and goldfinches all made their voices heard. In the bushes by the road, Maryland yellow-throats mingled with various migrating sparrows, and among the spruces dozens of warblers flitted joyously back and forth, saying little, perhaps because nuthatches and red-eyed vireos said too much. Swallows had gone, but grace of flight was shown by hawks of various kinds which circled, soared, or shot past on even wing. The fickle crossbills, present a year ago this week in large numbers, were nowhere to be seen.

Sabba Day Falls were even grander than I remembered them to be, and although nothing could surpass in loveliness the icicles, frozen spray, masses of snow, and other paraphernalia of winter which had surrounded them in December, their present dress of tender green and brown, relieved by autumnal colors and crowned by a cloudless sky of purest blue, was wonderfully fair to look upon, and to lay away in the mind for weary days when brick walls and English sparrows should replace the wilderness and its warblers.

It was high noon when I turned my back on Carrigain and Bear and climbed the ridge towards Paugus valley. Would the traps be sprung? The question gave speed to my footsteps, which might otherwise have lagged by spring or brookside, for the day was meltingly warm and no breeze came over the Paugus ramparts. The first trap was near the top of the ridge, under a huge boulder. It was two miles from the nearest house in the intervale, and more than double that distance from Berry’s or any other inhabited dwelling in Tamworth. Perhaps gnomes did not live in spots so remote from man and his grain-fields. The trap was sprung. Evotomys had found it and perished. The next one was sprung, and a second long-eared victim lay in it. So with the third and fourth, set at intervals of many rods. The fifth was sprung, but empty; the sixth contained a gray Hesperomys; the seventh another Evotomys. I was now in the deep, dark valley between the northern ridges of Paugus and Chocorua. Three miles and a half of the roughest mountain woodland lay between this spot and tilled land, yet animal life was so abundant that it seemed to make no difference where I set my traps and scattered my corn; gnomes were everywhere waiting.

Out of twenty-five traps, fifteen held victims and six others were sprung, but empty. One of the slain was a chipmunk, another a mole. Of the remainder, three were long-tailed gray Hesperomys, and ten were red-backed Evotomys. The latter are clearly the most numerous inhabitants of the dark evergreen forests, but they are also to be found near secluded farm buildings in spots where the fulvous Hesperomys is the prevailing sprite. Among these gnomes of the woods and fields, all true American species, a European intruder is found. In some thickly settled places he has done among gnomes what the European sparrow has done among birds, elbowed himself into exclusive possession. When found in a trap, or seen scampering along the pantry shelf, this gnome is called, in vulgar English, a mouse.

OLD SHAG.

Old Shag, Toadback, or Paugus Mountain stands in the Sandwich range between Chocorua on the east and Passaconaway on the west. It is better armed against attack by mountain climbers than any of its neighbors, and this in spite of the fact that in elevation it is the lowest of the range. Its defenses consist of numerous radiating ridges covered with dense growths of spruce and crossed by belts of “harricane,” miles of cliffs so forbidding as to repel any but determined assault, and ravines choked by débris of rock and fallen forest. No path of any kind leads to its top, and when its summit is gained, none of the familiar marks indicating previous visits by egg-eating, initial-cutting tourists are discoverable.

Like most impregnable fortresses, Paugus has its weak spot. There is a way to reach its southern summit without touching a “harricane,” climbing a precipice, or struggling through more than a few rods of spruce jungle. Moreover, on this way the traveler is sung to by one of the most musical of streams, while his eyes are charmed by the ever-changing beauties of a series of as exquisite cascades as are to be found in the White Mountains. It is true that in midsummer the brook is so reduced in size that its chief charm is seriously lessened, but if the time chosen for ascent is in spring, autumn, or after a heavy summer rain, the falls will be found at their best.

PAUGUS FROM WONALANCET ROAD NEAR START OF LIBERTY TRAIL UP MOUNT CHOCORUA

On the morning of September 15, a party of four persons entered the “lost trail,” leading from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale. A heavy rain had fallen during the whole of the preceding day, and Paugus River, with all its sons and daughters, grandchildren brooks, and great-grandchildren rivulets, made the forest resound with the music of innumerable singing falls and rapids. Following the old trail for two miles, the party reached a spot where a good-sized stream appeared flowing eastward from the great hollow in the eastern flank of Paugus. Leaving the bridle-path at this point, and walking nearly due west, the explorers followed the branch towards its source. As the region was reported to be thickly set with bear-traps, the party walked in Indian file, while their leader sounded and punched every foot of moss and soft leaf mould with his stout staff. The traps used by the hunters on these mountains are murderous inventions, consisting of two huge steel jaws lined with sharp teeth. The trap, when set, is buried beneath a layer of moss. If a bear or man steps between the opened jaws, thereby pressing a pan which frees the two powerful springs below the jaws, the trap closes instantaneously, the teeth are locked in the flesh, cutting sinews and crushing bone. A man thus caught is maimed for life, if, indeed, he does not die from starvation and pain before he can be released from his horrible imprisonment. A bear usually drags the trap until its anchor catches in a tree, or his strength is exhausted. Sometimes he gnaws off his foot and crawls away bleeding and crippled. The trap weighs from twenty-five to forty pounds, and although usually marked in such a way that its owner can recognize it, no name betrays the identity of the trapper.

The places chosen by the bear hunter for setting his traps are those to which a bear is in the habit of going often. On damp and mossy spots the great footprints of the brute show plainly, and when the trapper is satisfied that Bruin walks that way habitually, he cuts out a square of moss upon which the footprint is plainly visible, places his open trap in the hole, restores the moss with great care, and goes away for a week, or even longer, visiting other traps, some of which may be many miles away. If signs of any proper kind were placed near the traps to warn the passer-by of his peril, there would be small reason to complain of bear-trapping, but unhappily no such signals are displayed, and man, if he wanders in wild places, is in as much danger as the bears. The brook bed which our party of four was ascending is one of the best grounds for bears in all the Sandwich range. No wonder, then, that we watched and sounded anxiously for hidden traps.

As we walked westward into the hollow in the side of Paugus, the ground rose rapidly and the level land on the edges of the stream soon gave way to steeply sloping banks. For beech, birch, and maple were substituted spruce, balsam fir, and hemlock; the rapids of the brook changed to falls; glimpses of sky were replaced by occasional peeps at spruce-capped gray cliffs hanging high above us, and we felt as though if we kept on we should soon enter the black interior of a vast cavern, unless some unseen avenue to light and air appeared. The barometer showed that we had climbed nearly a thousand feet, when suddenly there opened before us a view of a succession of high, steeply-sloping ledges, polished by rushing water and festooned with delicate mosses. A sheet of clear and sparkling water, stained a rich hemlock brown by the moss beds through which it had filtered, poured in quivering folds over the rock. Standing by the side of the pool at the foot of the lowest incline, we could see four of these smooth ledge faces rising one behind another above us. Climbing to their top, we saw as many more still higher, and beyond them all, twin cascades gleamed through the trees, as they fell from a ledge in the middle of which a mass of black spruces and huge gray rocks seemed to form an island poised in the air between the two halves of the torrent.

Nearly a thousand feet above this twin fall, yet so close beyond it that my companions almost despaired of further progress up the mountain, was a wall of gray rock suspended between the sky and the tree-tops. It was the last redoubt of the impregnable Paugus. Was there a rift in its apparently solid face? Yes, I knew that there must be, because years before I had come down this ravine from the summit and had found no obstacle to gradual and easy descent. While passing the falls, we used the barometer to ascertain their approximate height, and found a difference of two hundred and fifty feet between the level of the pool at their foot and that of the stream above the twin cascades. The several inclines down which the water shot in rippling sheets were each fifty or sixty feet long and about twenty-five feet in perpendicular rise. With a stream twice or three times the volume of this brook, Paugus Falls would take rank as among the most beautiful in New England. Even as they are, they deserve a place in song instead of obscurity in an almost unknown corner of a pathless mountain.

CHOCORUA SEEN FROM THE SIDE OF PAUGUS

Not far above the twin cascades, the brook formerly shot over a polished ledge almost steep enough to form a perfect fall. Here a very unusual and interesting change had been worked in the rock and the course of the water by the action of frost. Just at the point where the polished rock bed of the stream was steepest, a crack had opened at right angles with the current. Of course water had filled this fissure and deepened it until in some winter night a sound of rending must have startled the forest and echoed afar down the gorge. The front of the ledge, measuring twenty yards or more from side to side and nearly half that distance from top to bottom, broke from its ancient foundation and slipped forward about eighteen inches, thus forming a perpendicular crevasse sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Into this the stream plunged and vanished from sight. Standing just below the crevasse and looking up the smooth face of the ledge, I could see the eager water coming towards me, hurrying forward its amber masses, bubbles, sheets of foam, and yellow leaves dropped by the ripening trees. As it seemed about to hurl itself upon me and sweep me down its bed, it disappeared.

When the water reached the bottom of the crevasse, it turned aside and flowed at right angles to its course until a fault in the rock allowed it to steal out into the daylight. The crevasse was full of sounds, and amid the splashing, gurgling, and roaring of the water, the ear could fancy that it detected wild cries, sobs, and moans.

Above this rift and cavern of wild waters came many a rod of steep climbing. Again and again an impassable cliff seemed to bar our way, but each time the stream showed us how, by a zigzag or a long diagonal, we could avoid the abrupt face of the rock and find a way to a higher level. Finally, after nearly four hours of climbing we found ourselves in a moist and mossy hollow between two of the summits of the mountain. Northward the rocks rose abruptly to the wooded crest of the highest ridge, southward they rose to the dome-shaped ledge which forms the best height for observation, wind and fire having left it as bald as an egg. It was impossible to cross the moist hollow dry shod, for at no point was it less than a rod wide and in parts it was forty or fifty yards from ledge to ledge. The brown water stood in pools amid the sphagnum beds and between the stems of trees. Several paths led downward between the low spruces to these pools, but we shunned them. Human feet had not trodden them, unless, indeed, the bear hunter had passed that way and set his traps directly across them. In one place I saw where a bear had recently walked across the sphagnum, leaving the imprint of his huge foot clearly stamped upon the moss.

The view from the dome of Paugus was autumnal in tone. Great masses of cold clouds were sweeping across the blue sky, urged forward by a blustering northwest wind. Wherever the spruce growth upon the mountains was interrupted by deciduous trees, delicate shades of red, yellow, or russet lay in patches between the sombre tones of the evergreens. In spots brilliant scarlet maples stood out boldly, but as a rule the new colors were not pronounced but merely suggestive of the gorgeous transformation soon to be perfected. In the hollows, especially those in which “harricanes” had been overgrown by mountain ash, sumac, and similar perishable wood, the autumnal tints were more prevalent and stronger. The only flowers upon the mountain-top were a few small asters with highly scented leaves, and a goldenrod (macrophylla) with large blossoms and coarse leaves.

Old Shag is not high enough to rival Chocorua or Passaconaway with its views, but it affords the only really satisfactory chance of studying those two mountains from a point between them. Chocorua varies strangely in its outlines from different points of view. From the south it looks like a huge lion couchant; from the Albany intervale it is an irregular ridge resembling a breaking wave; from Paugus it seems more like a giant fortress, with battered ramparts lifted high against the sky. A slide, invisible from other points, is seen to extend from the western foot of the peak far down into the forests of the Paugus valley. North of it a ridge densely grown with old spruce runs from the peak northwestward. It is one of the few parts of Chocorua not given up to deciduous trees. Beyond it rises the Champney Falls brook which flows northward into Swift River.

Passaconaway from the Bearcamp valley is one of the most perfect of pyramids; from Paugus it is a rough hump of sinister outline and color. The spruces upon it grow so thickly that it is hard to force a way through them, yet they spring from sides so steep that it seems a marvel that any soil or vegetation can cling to the rocks. A slide of great length shows its scar upon the eastern face, and serves to emphasize the fact that this side of Passaconaway is really less of a slope than of a continuous precipice nearly three thousand feet from summit to plain. In these almost inaccessible forests several birds from the Canadian fauna are occasionally found. I have seen there in summer both kinds of the three-toed woodpeckers; Canada grouse or spruce partridges have been shot there this autumn, and the moose-bird, or Canada jay, is occasionally seen near the lumber camps.

WHITEFACE AND PASSACONAWAY FROM PAUGUS

In descending a mountain in the afternoon which has been climbed in the morning, many new effects of light and shade, color, and even of outline, are observable. This may be puzzling to the guide who does not thoroughly know his path, but it is the one redeeming feature in a homeward scramble to those who are weary enough to regard their second view of a mountain-side as an anti-climax to the triumphant ascent of a new peak. Paugus Falls were more beautiful with the pallor of the afternoon around them, than they were with the southeastern sun shining into their rushing bubbles. They were whiter and the water consequently looked greater in volume. Again we wondered how such rare beauty could have been hidden so long in an untrodden forest, and, wondering, we blazed the trees so that those who might come after us could follow without perplexity the easy and beautiful way which we had been fortunate enough to find.

When we reached the old trail, about five o’clock, the woods seemed dark and the penetrating coolness of an autumn night was in the air. Twenty minutes later we emerged in the blackberry tangle by the abandoned saw-mill, and found wagons and warm wraps waiting for us. As we looked back towards the golden sunset, the dark dome of Old Shag stood boldly out against the sky. Fire and wind had left scars upon its face, and nature originally made it so rough in outline that “Toadback” is tellingly descriptive of its shape. Toads have their jewels, and so has Paugus, hidden in the shadows of its eastern flank.

MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS.

No matter how tightly the body may be chained to the wheel of daily duties, the spirit is free, if it so pleases, to cancel space and to bear itself away from noise and vexation into the secret places of the mountains. Well it is for him who labors early and late at the desk, if his soul can thus spread its wings and soar to deep forests, clear lakes, and rugged mountain peaks, drawing from memory, imagination, and sweet forecast, something to inspire itself to patient action, and something to strengthen the heart in its wish to do its appointed task manfully. As these bright October days slip by and my wheel of daily duties spins round and round in that granite prison called University Hall, my memory takes me back to fair Chocorua. I remember the 6th of October in the year 1884. The sun struggled through soft gray clouds and gazed upon a world of magical opposites. Every maple in a hundred townships blazed with scarlet or gold; yet soft and cold, wrapping the earth from Chocorua’s horn to the sand at the lake shore, the first snow of autumn sparkled in the rays of the rising sun. Skies of blue, forests of fire, fields of snow,—those were the delights of that matchless October dawning.

If the wheel grows too noisy I come back from these visions to my desk and its papers, and open dozens of letters from all over our broad country, from Europe, Japan, Mexico, and from distant India, whence some Harvard soldier of the Cross writes to ask tidings of his alma mater. In his day every John knew every William, and the roll of the University never climbed beyond the hundreds. Now the questioner at my side wonders how near we shall come to having three thousand students this year; while the prophet declares that in five years or less Harvard will have distanced Cambridge and Oxford, and become the greatest English-speaking University in the world. Even now her students do not all speak English. Aside from the scores of American youths who hear only light-weight silver dollar English at home, and who learn little that is better at school, there are many who come to Harvard from far-away foreign homes. The tall Bulgarian with his dark eyes full of poetry and fire; the patient Russian Jew, exiled from a cruel land, and struggling night and day to win an education and a fortune in the home of the free; the dashing young Norwegian, with winning, deferential manners and a light in his blue eyes which speaks of his own glaciers and dark fjords; the gifted Japanese, absorbing philosophy or science with such readiness as to make his slower American competitor blush with shame; the angular Armenian, with his keen, thin face and nervous hands; the self-possessed Costa Rican, the moody Icelander and his taciturn but clear-headed neighbor from Newfoundland,—all are beside me taking turns with their American fellow-students in hurrying my wheel until the day is done.

CROWLANDS, FORMERLY THE OLD DOE FARM

When the day is done, and pale sunset colors lie in the sky behind the witching iron tracery in the great western gateway, my soul goes northward again into that other October when the early snow melted, and the winds blew in the fair Chocorua land. I go back to a gusty afternoon when we rowed our boat the length of the lakes and landed upon the silent shore of the old Doe farm. It was our first visit to the white sand of that beach, to the little footpath leading upward through the orchard, and to the tumble-down cottage with its huge chimney, in which the swifts had found no smoke for twenty long years. Our first visit,—yet now the anchor of life is so strongly fixed on that shore, and the family fairies so firmly domiciled on that hearth, that our first voyage of discovery seems as far off as the time when “Kit Colombus sailed from the Papal See.”

We wandered through the rooms of the cottage, peeped at the sky through the cracks in its roof, noted the pewee’s nest on the wainscoting in the east room, and whirled the old flax-wheel which stood in the dark attic. Then, passing the ancient maples behind the great barn, we strolled on and on through the pastures until a faint path led us to the lonely lake among the dingles, almost at the foot of Chocorua. Softly descending the steep path to the edge of the green water, we saw five black ducks rise from the lake and fly from us over the oaks. The rush of their wings is in my ears to this day, and my eyes recall the clouds which loomed over the peak and swept down upon the lake, bringing much cold wind and a little rain. From the storm-clouds a small hawk came circling down towards the troubled water and tossing birches. As he soared above us, seemingly protesting against our coming into the charmed vale, I shot him. The strong wings gave one spasmodic beat, the fierce head fell forward, and the body shot downward and struck the sand at our feet. We had claimed dominion by force of arms, and when we next saw the lake, it was ours in law.

The wheel turns fastest in the University prison house when pale boys and gaunt young men come to me with confidences of their life-long hope to come to fair Harvard, of mothers’ sacrifices, and fathers’ toil, of the parson’s chiding against the influence of the non-sectarian college, and the schoolmaster’s prophecy that Cambridge will be all proud looks and cold hearts, and finally of their own determination to work their way through, no matter what the cost in comfort and energy. It is the same soul-stirring story, whether it speaks from the butternut-colored coat from Georgia, the coarse gray homespun from Cape Breton, or the shiny, long-tailed black frock from Nebraska. Beseeching, honest, or searching eyes look straight into the heart, and the heart would not be good for much if it did not grow warmer under their scrutiny. Generally all except the least useful and adaptable of such men find ways of earning much of that which is needed to keep them decently clad and safely fed during their years of study; but it is anxious work starting them on self-support, and helping them to drive away homesickness.

There is a feeling of gritting sand and the lack of oil in the wheel when purse-proud, over-dressed, loud-voiced, tired-eyed youths drift to me in their attempts to escape parts of their college duties. They have come from shoddy homes to mix shoddy with the honest stuff of Harvard life. It would be better for them, for us, and for all their associates, if they never set foot on scholastic ground. Still they serve as a foil to the noble-hearted men of wealth who are the glory of a college,—men who are strong in their willingness to aid others, pure in heart, active in body, loyal to the ideals of the University.

One reason that the wheel of duty turns hard is to be found in the multitude of human atoms pressing against it. The present system of college government was well adapted for the management of five or six hundred men, for it is an easy task for an officer of keen sympathies and a good memory to carry even more than six hundred men in his mind, and to know their faces, names, and general record. Now that the six hundred have become two thousand, and the same system is applied, each officer being expected to know something of every student, the memory gives way, interest weakens, and discipline through acquaintance becomes impossible. Here and there individual students stand out conspicuously and become well-known figures in the crowd; but it is more likely to be through their success in football than in their studies. The man who attains “Grade A” in all his studies may be dull-eyed and dingy; but the half-back on the university eleven cannot fail to have in him some of the qualities of the hero.

On the football field of a Saturday afternoon I am less likely to let my thoughts wander away to Chocorua than when at my desk. Something akin to the wild north wind seems surging down old Jarvis when the crimson rush-line guards its bunch of ball-carriers as they fly round the left end, blocking, interfering, sweeping down opposing arms, hurling themselves against crouching tacklers, and finally falling across the line for the triumphant touchdown. That Chocorua north wind is as irresistible in its way, when in October it hurls itself from the mountains and lashes the lake till foam flies in white masses over the crests of the breaking waves. Such winds often arise suddenly, and in a moment change the placid water, full of its reflections of gay forest and lofty peak, into a turbulent mass of waves. I well remember a soft, hazy morning when we rowed a heavy flat-bottomed boat to the northern end of the lake, returning about noon. When in the middle of the pond, the wind caught us, and, turning the boat sideways, drove it towards a shallow cove lined with boulders. Every wave dashed spray and water over the gunwales, and the most vigorous rowing availed nothing against the furious wind. It was not until I could jump overboard in the shoal water and push the boat before me out of the wind that I really regained the mastery of it.

About the middle of October a vast regiment of birds passes over the Bearcamp valley. On the 13th of October, 1889, I counted and recognized 488 birds. Of these, 173 were crows, flying from the northeast towards the southwest in two great flocks. They passed far above the forests, many of them being much above the tops of the highest mountains. On the same day I counted 143 juncos, which were peppered all over fields, roads, small thickets, pasture bushes, and woods of small height. Wherever we strolled the little cowled heads turned to watch us, or the white V-shaped tail-feathers flashed as the juncos flew from us. The white-throated sparrows were almost always with them, coming, I doubt not, from the same breeding-grounds, and bent upon reaching the same winter-quarters, or havens even farther south than those which juncos like. Now and then a white-crowned sparrow is to be seen among flocks of this kind. Those who watch for them are apt to see many white-throats, which they try to persuade themselves are the rarer species, but when the eye at last rests upon a white-crown there is no doubting his identity.

The golden-crested kinglets were present in great numbers on the same 13th of October, 1889, and as they passed through the evergreens they accomplished a marvelous amount of effective house-cleaning. With them or near them chickadees, red nuthatches, white nuthatches, and brown creepers took part in the keen inspection of the trees, and woe came to the insect which fell under their eyes.

Among the other birds which I recorded that day were robins, a hermit thrush, bluebirds, yellow-rumped warblers, solitary vireos, a flock of thirty-five goldfinches, a good many sparrows of various kinds, blue jays, one or two kinds of woodpeckers, several hawks, and a flock of black ducks. They formed the rear guard of the grand army, and as the leaves rustled down over them it was easy to imagine snowflakes gathering in the northern clouds and waiting for a summons to begin their soft descent upon the abandoned earth.

Bird voices sometimes mingle with the hum and roar of my duty-wheel. Opposite my office window are two tall pine-trees, almost the only evergreens in the college yard. These trees swarm with the alien sparrows, whose clamor at times is almost deafening. Better three months of utter silence than such bird music as this. Each year, as autumn deepens into winter, I watch the immigrant sparrow to see whether he is not learning that migration southward in the season of snow is wise and comfortable. He does wander somewhat, already, when food fails, and it will not be strange if, as years pass, he should acquire by sympathetic vibration something of the swing of the migratory pendulum.

When I walk slowly home from my office past Christ Church and the silent field of quaintly lettered stones, past the old elm within whose shade Washington took command of the Colonial army, and past Cotton Mather’s gold chanticleer holding high his ancient head against the rosy afterglow, I seem to see beyond all these things the crouching lion of Chocorua. Waking or dreaming, the outline of that peak is always stamped upon my northern horizon, and the north is the point to which my face turns as surely as does the needle, whenever my face, like the needle, is left to settle its direction in accordance with its controlling affinities. In these October days the picture of Chocorua which haunts me is not a summer picture. Far from it. In it the leaves are falling, drifting down like snow, birds are silent, nervous, always on the alert for danger; new ledges show upon the mountain-sides, new vistas have opened through the forests, and spots which, when behind their August leaf mantles seemed dark and secret, are now as open as the day. The brooks are more noisy, and easily seen, the grouse fly afar off; if one wishes a flower he must pluck the witch-hazel or let the bitter yarrow or the last clusters of goldenrod and asters satisfy him. Nature seems preoccupied and inclined to tell the visitor to see what he wants, and to take what he can find, but to let her alone.

THE VINTAGE OF THE LEAVES.

Friday, October 21, was observed by Harvard University as a holiday,—Columbus, while hunting for something else, having on that day, four hundred years ago, rediscovered America for the Europeans. On the same day, four hundred years ago, the Americans discovered Columbus, a weary and worn mariner, nearing the shore in a small and feebly-rigged ship. At that time America was much more of a boon to the explorer than he seemed likely to be to the continent.

I left Cambridge about the time the sun reached it, and gained the valley of the Bearcamp at 1 P. M. There are some days in the year which seem to have happened upon the wrong calendar day. They are too cold or too warm to keep company with the days which go before and after. This was not one of them. It was a model late October day, with clear air, a rushing wind, dark blue-gray clouds moving fast across a pale blue sky, leaves flying before the wind, and with ruffled water full of cold lights, though in spots increasing in its reflections the blue of the sky. Marvelous colors were spread upon the face of the meadows, and crept up the sides of the hills. The world was in gay attire, gayer even than the towns this day decked out in honor of the Genoese.

Gazing out of the train window, I have seen the Sandwich range from afar over the melting greens of spring, the rich verdure of summer, and the cold, still snow of winter. To-day I saw it framed in russet and carmine,—the colors of the oak-clad hills of Wakefield. The peak of Chocorua was capped by a dark slate-colored cloud from which rain seemed to be falling. Behind or above the other mountains of the range the same threatening vapors hung. As the train sped onward, past Ossipee Lake, over the Bearcamp, and up to the West Ossipee station, the clouds rolled away and a flood of clear sunlight poured its revealing rays into the hidden colors of the distant forests. From cold, dark masses in which black rocks were no darker than gloomy groves, the mountains’ sides suddenly became aglow with warm tones. The far-reaching view suggested a painter’s palette, upon which he had been daubing his colors from the tubes. Here he laid on a mass of dark green, there crimson, and next to it pale yellow. Then buff and orange, scarlet and blood-red pleased him, and he rubbed them upon spare areas. Cobalt and ultramarine added here and there, with now and then a dash of silvery white or a broad band of burnt sienna, served to make the scarlets more intense and the yellows more aggressive.

Driving in an open wagon from West Ossipee to the Chocorua House, I found a heavy overcoat, warm gloves, and a fur robe essential to comfort, especially on coming from the steam-heated cars into the racing northwest wind. As we sped through groves and across meadows, my eyes devoured the wonderful coloring of all that had once been green. I could see nothing else, think of nothing else. The contrast to our summer coloring could not have been much sharper if I had been transported to the sanguinary groves and pastures of the red planet Mars. Even the birds which rose from the roadside and whirled away before the wind seemed less interesting, so absorbing were the marvels of coloring in foliage from ancient oak to tender grasses. A flock of birds seemed to dance through the sunlight across the road, yet when I looked after them they were only beech leaves hurried along by the wind. A cloud of leaves, picked up by an eddy of the air and tossed high above the trees, suddenly became bluebirds and sparrows speeding away from the wagon across the pasture. Crows, few in number, and unusually wary, were not so easily mistaken for leaves, nor were the robins, which occasionally rose in flocks from the grass and sought the branches of leafless maples or butternuts.

After a hasty dinner I left the hotel and crossed field and copse to the outlet of the Chocorua lakes. The third lake, with its deep, dark water and its grove of lofty white pines shutting it in from distant views, is one of the most daintily lovely nooks in this region of beauty and grandeur. Crows love the dark pines, wild ducks float in their shadows, and many a mink has been trapped at the end of the dam. I found no life stirring in woods or water, so stepping cautiously along the mouldering logs of the dam, I gained the farther shore and crossed a broad, rock-strewn pasture, once covered by a growth of lofty pines. I know not how many years ago they fell or were felled, but this I do know, that scores of pitch-soaked knots are hidden in their ruins and among the ferns and bushes which have sprung from the decaying stumps. Many is the winter evening in town that I have sat by the fireside and gazed into the red flame of the blazing “light-wood” gathered in happy October days from this old pasture. As the pitch grew hot and burst through the dry wood, whining and whistling, blowing out long jets of white smoke and slender tongues of flame, its voice and warmth have carried me back in spirit to the brown beds of fern, the busy chipmunks under the old oak in the wall, or to the mayflowers gathered in spring from the edges of the lingering snow-banks. I passed a ledge of rocks on which I had seen a woodchuck sunning himself last August, and I recalled how he had squeezed himself into a little cave in the ledge only to find me peering in after him, and quite able to reach him with a stick. His method of escape from me was characteristic. Grunting and snarling, he spent half his time in threatening to come out and attack me, and the other half in undermining himself and poking the earth with his nose into the hole through which I was looking. In five minutes he had completely covered the opening and sunk his plump body out of reach of my probe. Later in the season I had a young woodchuck which had been partly tamed escape from captivity by gnawing his way through a thick pine board. The same individual repeatedly climbed up six feet from the floor on the coarse wire netting which formed the front of his cage, so that in future I shall not think it strange if I see a woodchuck climb a tree. His eccentricity also carried him to the point of devouring nearly a third of the carcass of a freshly-killed red squirrel, although an abundance of clover and young vegetables were close at hand ready for his dinner.

My walk took me up the western side of the lake to my own land and cottage. Robins rose from the ground in small flocks, a few tree sparrows and juncos flew from a plowed field by the wall, and two crows were feeding on swampy ground by a brook. It was to them that the land really belonged, not to me,—a waif from the city. So a flock of white-throats thought, as I disturbed them feeding upon the chaff at the back door of my barn. They flew into a bush on which a few dry leaves swung. While still watching them, as I supposed, I discovered that they had vanished, the wagging leaves alone remaining. In the orchard a few red apples hung, and gleamed like polished stones. One which grew upon a wild tree in the edge of the wood swung near the ground, and sharp little teeth had bitten out pieces from its side. Some of the fruit which lay upon the ground had been gnawed away until its seeds could be reached. Man eats the pulp and throws away the seeds, the mice and squirrels waste the pericarp solely to gain the seeds. Perhaps in this case man would have thrown away both apple and seeds had he tasted the bitter, wild fruit.

The lake was lower by a foot than I had ever before seen it in the autumn. In August it had washed the bushes on its dikes; now a yard or more of sand tempted a stroller to follow its fair rim past wood and meadow. Along my shore of the lake the natural dike is in places fully seven feet high. It has been made during the centuries by the “thrust” of the ice which results from the expansion of the ice-field by day following its contraction by night. On a sandy shore the expanding ice pushes up a little ridge of silt, and works it higher and higher as the ice mass rises during the winter. If the edge of the ice meets an obstacle, it is apt to break at a foot or more from the shore, and the pieces, still carrying their load of gravel, are shoved up the bank to its top, until, as years roll by, the dike is made too high to receive further additions.

TWILIGHT ON THE LAKE

The lake in summer is certain to be stirring with life. Insects upon and over the water, fish, frogs, birds, muskrats, and often large animals are in sight and moving both by day and by night. Now, as the waning sun grew pale behind the birches, no living creature moved. The yellow leaves drifted out upon the breeze, and kept on drifting across the ruffled water. Nothing cared where they drifted. They were dead, and just then all the world seemed full of falling, drifting leaves, with no one to notice them or care for them. Were they to blame for the feeling of sadness which crept over me as the sun went down and the first chill of night came into the air? Or was it the absence of those who might, had they been by the lake, have enjoyed the placid twilight with me? No lights gleamed behind the closed blinds of my home, no fire crackled upon the hearth. Those whom I loved were far away in the city. Leaves were falling in the city, birds had fled from it as well as from the mountains. Chilly night had fallen there too, and with it came, not the sweetness of clear streams and pine groves, but the foul breath of the Charles and of Alewife Brook, open sewers of filthy towns. No, it was not the sadness of the season or the influence of drifting leaves which cast a little shadow over my enjoyment of the exquisite scene before me. It was regret at being alone in its presence and of having to leave it so soon in favor of desk and drudgery.

At ten minutes past five, planets sparkled in the silvery sky, yet a mile away the colors of oaks and poplars still burned their way to me through the clear air. As I walked back to the hotel, I noticed more clearly the number of trees which had lost their leaves. By daylight they were inconspicuous, flanked and backed as they had been by evergreens and trees full of showy color. Now they reared their skeleton arms against the sky, making some parts of the way seem as desolate as in winter. Many of the goldenrods, asters, and immortelles contributed to the wintriness of the scene, for only dry white phantoms of their once cheerful flowers remained upon their stalks. The soft air with only a trace of cold in it belied these signs of winter, and so did the occasional note of a locust. From the little rustic bridge between the large and second lakes, the evening view of the mountains was bewitching. If a hermit thrush could have sung even one phrase of his holy music, I might have felt satisfied; but no bird was there to sing, and only the waves lapping upon the pebbles and the breeze sighing in the pines broke the silence of the starlit night. A leaf came sailing down the lake and passed under the bridge. Its little life as a green leaf was over. It had served the tree which bore it, and now its parched body was given to the stream to be borne away wherever wind and current decided. Was it, then, dead for all time? Ask this of the coal which glows in the grate, the oil which burns in the lamp, or the mayflower whose roots spread through the leaf mould in the forest. Where was this leaf a year ago, or a century ago? As certainly as the parts of this leaf have endured thus far, so certainly will they continue to endure in ages to come. It seems equally sure that if there is a something in me which will not and cannot in time be made into leaves to wither and go down-stream with the wind, then that something will necessarily have as good a chance as the leaf to go down a stream of its own and bring up safely where it can be used again in endless cycles.

The voices of young chickens awoke me next morning, and mingling with their melancholy peeping came the wailing of a northeast wind as it struggled through a window crack. Bed was warm and my watch said it was only six o’clock. I peeped through my blinds and saw that the piazza roof seemed to be shining with rain. Nothing but the momentum of a previous determination to open my shutters led my finger to press the snap and let the wind swing the blind from me; for by the dismal shining of the rain my mind had been completely robbed of any wish to see the sky. The blind slammed against the clapboards and a bewildering sea of color surged across my vision. Instead of a waste of gray mist and dull wet field, I saw six mountains set against a silver sky; and rolling from them towards me, line after line of wave-like wooded ridges and pasture slopes, each more brilliant in coloring than the last. The sunlight was just touching a solitary cloud which floated feather-like above Paugus, and a delicate sea-shell pink suffused it. Some of the same radiance fell upon the granite peak of Chocorua, floated over the highest ridges of spruce-hung Paugus and Passaconaway, warmed the naked shoulder of Whiteface, and touched even the dark head of the Sandwich Dome rising from the Pemigewasset forests. The flanks of these mountains and the whole of Mount Whittier, which rose in the southwest, were violet. A moment before they might have been dark purple, but now the rosy rays of dawn were stealing down them swiftly. I had scarcely time to note the wealth of suppressed color which lay upon the wave-like hills between me and the mountains, or to spring to my north window, fling its blinds wide open, and see the lake so ruffled by the wind and so hidden from the coming dawn as to be only the quicksilver side of the mirror, before the sunlight began creeping down the mountain-sides.

It is a pretty sight in the twilight or darkness to see a rosy edge of flame play along the margin of a sheet of burning paper, slowly devouring it. Some parts of the paper burn more brightly than others, but the whole line of advancing fire is beautiful and animating. So it was with the line of sunlight slowly passing from the rosy crests of the high mountains, downward, with even march across their flanks, their projecting spurs, then the nearer hills, the lake, and river hollow, and finally over the great reach of woods and field nearest to me. In summer nearly the whole of this wide landscape is green or grayish green. In winter it is white, grayish brown, and dark green. Early autumn dots the woods with vivid points of scarlet and gold which stand out sharply from the mass of green; but as the sunlight crept downward over this late October foliage the prevailing color, which glowed forth full of strength, warmth, and meaning, was red,—the red of dregs of wine, of iron rust, of sleek kine, of blood. Intermingled with it were bits of golden or of sulphur yellow, marking birches and poplars, and in the pastures a few maples late in turning blazed with fiery scarlet as their fellows had weeks earlier.

The warmest of the color came from the oaks, but the beeches supported them with generous pigments, and so did the masses of blackberry vines, choke-cherry and huckleberry bushes, and other small shrubs which had turned crimson, red, or madder-brown under the October sun. Sweet-fern bushes, brakes, ferns, pine needles, many of the grasses, and most of the fallen leaves constituting the greater part of the earth’s carpet, answered the sun’s greeting by showing broad expanses of brown, ranging from burnt umber to dark straw color.

Near the lake were many pines, and as the light reached them they seemed to grow higher, broader, nearer, and to shed into the surrounding air something of their steadfastness and strength. They change not, falter not, fail not, come what may to their deciduous neighbors. In this northern land they are a symbol of constancy and faith. No one can look at a pine-tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time. The lake itself soon shared in the flood of color brought out by the sun. Most of its surface was ruffled by the breeze, but at points where the high pines sheltered the water and left it rippleless, the mountain-sides mirrored themselves, and the reflection was red like wine.

As the sun rose higher above the hill behind me, and cast its rays against the west, more and more from above, and less from a level, the colors in the landscape became less vivid, and leafless trees, birch trunks, and softer tints in general, blended with the maroons and browns, toning them down and flattening them, until the prevailing coloring on the mountain slopes became like the bloom on the cheek of a plum; and even the brighter, stronger tints in the nearer view grew softer and dimmer.

After breakfast I climbed the ridge behind the Chocorua House and sought a small beech grove on its crest. In the pasture one of the hawkweeds, two goldenrods, autumn buttercups, yarrow, the red and the white clover were still in bloom, sparingly, of course, and only in warm corners, but still clinging bravely to sunlight and life. Crickets and small green locusts were active and noisy. They frequented hollows in the pasture surface, where beech leaves had blown and lodged among the dry and matted fern fronds. Lying in one of these hollows, which made a warm dry cradle, I watched the locusts hopping from leaf to leaf, crawling along the warm faces of lichen-crusted boulders, and now and then working their bent legs up and down, while their fine, strident music fretted upon my ear. Some were green, some brown, both large and small, some almost buff, tiny, and very agile. They were not the only insects enjoying the sunlight, for spiders, house-flies, now and then a bee, small, gauzy-winged flies, and many a queer and, to me, nameless thing, with nervous antennæ, passed that way by wing or foot. At a spring in the woods where I drank of icy water, countless hosts of springtails or bristletails skipped, in sprightly humor, over the leaves and the surface of the pool. About noon I saw a dragonfly dart past, and later a solitary ant crawl slowly across a patch of sand. No butterflies came to me, yet they were still abundant in Cambridge.

There was no chill in the air which surged over the hilltop. It was soft and caressing, yet so cool that thick clothing or constant exercise was needed to keep warm. Its perfect dryness made it seem less cool than it really was. The sky was wonderfully blue, and it lent its marvelous color to the lake. I have a friend who says that March water is bluer than any other. It certainly carries its blueness straighter into the heart than any other, but as I looked at Chocorua Lake from the hilltop it seemed to me that it could not be any bluer than it was, framed in glossy pines on the one hand, and in golden brown and wine color on the other. The wind was rough with the lake this morning. Striking it suddenly at the far north end, near where my well-loved home stands silent and deserted in the old orchard, it darkened the clear blue into angry flaw-lines and hurried them down the long mile towards the bridge, against which it hurled them in white-capped waves. I laughed as I watched one of the white-edged squalls pass down the length of the lake, for it reminded me of a day in mid-winter when I attempted to cross the lake near its middle, carrying my pet owl “Puffy” perched upon my gun-barrel. A squall came over the white ice, bearing stinging snow-dust in its van; it caught Puffy from his perch and set him down upon the ice with feet helplessly spread, and then as he opened his wings and tail and struggled in the breeze, it spun him southward, sliding and rolling, poor wisp of feathers that he was, until he was landed, more dead than alive, in the woods on the southern shore.

The pines below my breezy hilltop tempted me by their music into their aisles. Under them was spread the new carpet of their needles, dry, warm, and tempting as a couch of eiderdown. The wind sang in their tops, oh so sweetly, and it took me back to the moment in my earliest childhood when I was first conscious of that soft, soothing music. I do not know when it was, nor where it was, nor how young I may have been, but I can recall as from an almost infinite distance the memory of a sudden feeling of happiness at hearing the voice of the pines, and knowing that it was something kind and soothing. If we are in tune with Nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy without it. The man who trembles at thunder is more to be pitied than the poor Esquimau who was frightened the other day by the crash of orchestral music at a Boston theatre.

While I listened to the pines a chickadee sang his phœbe-note. It was but once, but it told of his happiness as he bustled about in the dark pine wood from which warbler and vireo had departed, and upon which before many days the first snows of winter are to fall. Brave little titmice! they are among the sturdiest of New England’s sons.

In the heart of the pines stands a house. I well remember the gray autumn morning when three of us, on a Thanksgiving holiday, staked out its foundation lines in the thin snow and drifted leaves. We tramped back and forth among the trees, now higher, now lower, then a little to the left, then more to the right. The peak of Chocorua must clear those monster pines; that bunch of low pines must be left low enough to give a free view of the large lake, and finally the young trees rising on the left must not on any account cover the charming glimpse of the third lake with its grove. At last we settled the spot, and drove our first stakes, fingered the long brass tape and drove more stakes. Our hands, ears, and noses were cold, but it was rare sport settling just where that new home should be planted among the singing pines.

CHOCORUA AND DR. CHADWICK’S PINES

To this house, deserted like my own sunny cottage, I took my way. Ascending its steps, I stood within its lofty, granite-walled piazza, as romantic a spot, with its three arched openings facing westward, as a screened loggia overlooking fair Maggiore’s azure waves. High above and out of sight of the road, embowered in the forest, and with the very essence of the exquisite Chocorua landscape framed in its arches, this house might well attract me and draw me, even from the singing pines, to linger the rest of the forenoon above its terraces. Bees and locusts made music in the sunlight, flaming geraniums bloomed at the foot of the castle wall, the perfume of sweet peas still in full flower hung lightly in the air, and upon one of the stone columns of the arches, morning-glories, unharmed by the several frosts which had wrought havoc with other tender plants, turned their filmy blossoms towards the sun. Society with its present habits is to blame for the desertion of such a home as this on such a day as this, when Nature is at her loveliest. Why is it that all New England which has brains, money, or philanthropy thinks the city the one proper sphere for life in all save a few weeks given grudgingly to rest? The cities are too large, too rich in human forces. They are debasing our New England stock, draining away the best of our vitality in their too nervous life. If a third of their population could be sown into the fallow places in the hill country, their own competition would become a less fatal flame, and the country districts, instead of steadily degenerating in physical, moral, and intellectual tone, would again become prolific in healthy men and women.

So far as I know, the word “moor” is not applied to any part of our New England scenery; yet there are dry, comparatively treeless uplands, wind-swept and dotted with bogs which closely resemble English moorland. I climbed to the level of one early in the afternoon and strolled along its rough surface. At the first bit of bog that I struck a wood-frog jumped across the path. He was listless, and made but short leaps. When I followed him he plunged beneath a log which lay in the cold mud. Beyond, on dry ground, a grouse rose noisily from low cover and flew far before going out of sight. As I crossed some stony ground a mouse ran from me and hid between two boulders. Blocking both entrances to his hiding-place with my feet, I tilted one rock away from the other. The mouse darted first towards one of my feet and then towards the other. He dared not cross either, for I kept them moving. So he remained trembling in the middle. He was Hesperomys, the deer mouse, big-eyed and white-footed. I left him unharmed.

Following the edge of my moor, I came to a little glen which cut deeply into its side. A few acres of bog fed a little brook that passed through the glen on its way to the river. The ravine was heavily wooded, mainly with tall and unusually slender beeches. Descending into this grove was like entering the halo which the sunlight of Paris, shining through golden-tinted glass, casts around the tomb of Napoleon in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides. The rushing of the wind in the dry leaves filled the glen with sweet, soothing sounds; the sun warmed it and suffused it with radiance; and a deep bed of beech leaves gathered in a hollow offered a couch too tempting to be passed by. Every sense was gratified in this abode of music and color, for a faint perfume came from the leaves, telling of ripening and the fulfillment of nature’s purposes. At ease in the drifted leaves, I watched the tree-tops bending before the gusts. One moment the golden roof of foliage concealed the sky; the next, as every lofty head inclined, wide areas of distant ether appeared, only to vanish again under the rhythmic movement of the trees. The gusts kept the air well filled with falling, fluttering fragments of the golden roof. Hundreds of leaves were often in the air at once, parting company from hundreds of thousands still upon the branches, but going to join legions already on the ground, waiting there the soft tyranny of the snow.

In the midst of the beeches stood a lofty hemlock. The owner of this wood had chosen it for his castle. About thirty feet from the ground at a point where several limbs diverged from the main trunk a nest was securely fixed. Perhaps an inexperienced eye would have taken it for a bird’s nest. It may have been a bird’s nest originally. Now the mass of dead beech leaves heaped upon it and woven into its fabric, making it a conspicuous object from every point of view, proclaimed it to be the home of a gray squirrel. Winds may blow, and rain, hail, and snow fall, but that nest will rest secure against the hemlock’s trunk, under the thatched roof of hemlock branches. Early in September I found a new nest of this kind in a large beech-tree, and upon opening it made a discovery. The compressed green beech leaves gave out a strong, aromatic odor which I at once recognized as one of which I had often obtained whiffs in walking through the beech woods, but which I never had been able to assign to any flower or shrub.

In the lulls between the wind’s gusts I could hear the tinkling of a brook at the bottom of the glen. Peering into the gloom below, where hemlock bushes overshadowed the stream’s bed, I sought for a gleam of water. Not a drop was to be seen. I descended, following the sound of the falling drops, and came to a perpendicular ledge at the upper end of the ravine. There was no mistaking the direction of the music; it came from the face of the rocks and the pile of débris at its bottom. Still not a drop of water could be seen. The falling beech leaves had completely covered brook and fall, pool and rock, but behind their veil the water went on with its singing. It will do the same, brave little rill! when snow covers the leaves and ice forms above and below the snow. The sweet jingling notes will be muffled, but they will be sung all the same.

Of course I drank from the brook, sweeping away the encumbering leaves from the top of the fall to get the water just where it rushed most swiftly. Not to drink from a New Hampshire brook is almost as much of a slight as not to bow to a friend, or not to kiss a little child when she lifts her face for the good-night caress which she thinks all the world is ready and worthy to give to little children. Refreshed, I clambered up the other side of the glen and regained the open moorland, and the glorious, rushing wind. Across the valley the old river terraces stood out as sharply as steps cut in the face of the hill. To have cut those fair outlines there must have been more water flowing out of Chocorua lakes in the olden time than flows from them now. Perhaps in those days Ossipee Lake washed these very terraces.

Coming to another deep cleft in the side of the moor, I hesitated whether to run down one grassy slope, a hundred feet and more, and then up the other slope, or to go round. Precedent decided me to go round. About six feet below the edge of the bank a narrow well-trodden path skirted the ravine, going to its head, crossing at the same level and following along just below the edge of the opposite bank. Sometimes a well-turfed bank in a pasture where food is not abundant will be scored by many paths of this kind, one below another. They are made by the cattle, for a cow never will go down a steep incline if, without too great exertion, she can keep her four feet approximately on a level.

When I gained the southern end of the moor-like ridge, two villages lay before me, one on the left, the other on the right. One was the home of the dead, the other the toiling-ground of the living. They can see each other, and year by year the village on the hill grows larger, and that in the valley grows smaller. When the venerable village postmaster was suddenly turned out of office a few years ago against the public wishes, but in obedience to the infamous “spoils” policy, he was commiserated with for his hard fortune. “Yes,” he said, “it is hard, but I knew it was coming, and bless your soul, the time is near when I shall be turned out of this house too, and told to let some other fellow rotate in and get warm. But, my friend, there is a house of mine up yonder on the hill where politics and money don’t count, and when this world seems unkind I look up there and say to myself, ‘Pretty soon, pretty soon.’”

While waiting for the mail wagon to come down the Ossipee road, over the red bridge and up the hill to the store, I plucked individual leaves from trees and bushes, and marveled over their many ways of changing from pliant green to crackling brown. One of the most brilliant shrubs near the road was a blueberry. Its leaves were crimson, tending towards scarlet, and their surface was as brilliant as satin. The blackberry, which in some lights seemed as bright as the blueberry, was more of a wine color, and it had a duller surface. Some of the viburnum leaves were rich red on their upper faces, but pale below, their mid-vein being pink, and a greenish tone pervading their under surface. Others, shaped like maple leaves, were of a singular color,—a kind of pinkish purple. An oak leaf, plucked from a young bush not many years out of the acorn, was the color of newly-shed blood in its centre, but many small detached areas upon it remained green. From a sucker shoot of a poplar I gathered several strangely effective leaves. One was of sulphur yellow coarsely spotted with black dots; another was blackish brown with crimson veinings above, and clear yellowish white veinings below,—a most unique combination. From an adjoining poplar I picked one uniformly black over three quarters of its area, but blotched with vivid green near its apex. Its veins were yellowish white both above and below. The clusters of lambkill leaves were very pretty. While the upper surfaces of the leaves were faded vermilion or pinkish salmon color, the under sides were buff, or very pale sage green. The willow leaves were queer, damaged looking things, a good deal nibbled by insects and much splashed with dark brown upon a yellowish olive groundwork. A bunch of violet leaves were clear golden yellow, while some of the more delicate ferns were nearly white. Truly the botanists have many pleasant problems before them if they are ever to ascertain why some green leaves turn black, and others brown, orange, yellow, red, purple, or white.

An inspection of the mail led me to walk rapidly back to the Chocorua House and pack my bag for a return journey to the city. As I drove southward the mountains, seen across the pine barrens, were veiled in haze. The wind seemed chiding me for going away so abruptly from this paradise of color. Again and again I looked back at my favorite peaks and forests, printing more and more deeply in my mind the recollection of their noble outlines and remarkable coloring. Finally from the platform of the rear car I saw them over the Bearcamp meadows, and above and beyond them, with its cloud-cap just drifting away to the eastward, Mount Washington, benignantly presiding over the northern sky. Then the train rumbled across the Bearcamp trestle and the shadow of the Ossipee hills fell upon us and deepened into night.

CHOCORUA IN NOVEMBER.

In Cambridge, Saturday, the 5th of November, began its daylight in a driving snowstorm. The long, dry, sunny month of October was, as the farmers had prophesied, to be followed by a real old-fashioned, early and hard New England winter. By ten o’clock the warm sun and brisk northwest wind had dissipated the snow, and bad-weather prophets were silent. Not for long, however, for at noon the ground was again white, and as I crossed West Boston Bridge on my way to the train, the Back Bay was swept by a fierce wind which carried the spray from its gray-green waves half over the bridge piers, and into the level gravel walks on Charlesbank. My friends looked at me pityingly when I said that I was bound for the White Mountains, and asked whether I was not going to take my snowshoes.

Oddly enough, on reaching Portsmouth, having traveled to that point through dizzy myriads of flakes of the stickiest kind of snow, I found the sun brightly shining, and no snow visible on the Kittery pastures. Not until we were within sight of the hills which bound the Bearcamp valley on the south did snow again greet my eyes, and then it was confined to the highlands.

My last trip had been such a revel in color that I found myself noticing tints more than other beauties in the ever-varying landscape through which the train flew shuttle-wise. A great change had come over the face of nature in the fortnight which had fled since my last visit. November was written in subdued tones where October had burned before. The birch groves were no longer filled with pale lambent flames. Their yellow leaves had all fallen, and their massed twigs needed the full power of the sun to show that behind their dull gray shading lurked the subdued color of the plum. Even darker, and without warm undertones, were the alder thickets, more black than gray. The larches were still pure gold, wonderful in their happy contrast to the pines and spruces. The apple-trees retained their full suit of leaves, sometimes touched with a golden light, often perfectly green. Under them the grass was generally as verdant as in spring. Barberries hung in dense masses in their bushes; the American holly berries blazed with scarlet, and here and there in the dull forest a gleam of crimson told of a blueberry or amelanchier bush. As the train whirled across wood-paths, they showed as yellowish stripes in the forest. The drifted beech leaves gave them tone. In the gloom of the matted alders, fuzzy balls of soiled wool seemed to have lodged. They were the flowers of the white clematis, gone to seed. Somewhat similar but thinner masses clung to the stalks of the fireweed.

At the North of Bearcamp Water / Chronicles of a Stroller in New England from July to December