Part 14

On and on the path led, past jade-green pools in which gleamed buds of the yellow pond-lily, like lumps of floating gold. Among them were blossoms of the paler golden-club, which looked like the tongue of a calla lily. At last the path stretched straight toward the flat-topped mound that showed dim and fair through the low trees. The woods became still. Even the Maryland yellow-throat stopped singing, the prairie warbler no longer drawled his lazy notes, and the chewink, black and white and red all over, like the newspaper in the old conundrum, stopped calling his name from the thickets and singing, "Drink your tea!"

I knew that at last I had come upon a fairy hill, such an one wherein the shepherd heard a host of tiny voices singing a melody so haunting sweet that he always after remembered it, and which has since come down to us of to-day as the tune of Robin Adair. Listen as I would, however, there was no sound from the depths of this hill. Perhaps the sun was too high, for the fairy-folk sing best in late twilight or early dawn.

The mound, like all fairy hills, was guarded. The path ran into a tangle of sand-myrtle, with vivid little oval green leaves and feathery white, pink-centred blossoms. Just beyond stood a bush of poison-sumac. Pushing aside the fierce branches, I went unscathed up the mound. At its very edge was another sentry. From under my feet sounded a deep, fierce hiss, and there across the path stretched the great body of a pine snake fully six feet long, all cream-white and umber-brown. Raising its strange pointed head, with its gold and black eyes, it hissed fearsomely. I had learned, however, that a pine snake's hiss is worse than its bite and, when I poked its rough, mottled body with my foot, it gave up pretending to be a dangerous snake and lazily moved off to some spot where it would not be disturbed by intruding humans.

The pyxies had carpeted the side of the mound thick with their wine-red and green moss, starred with hundreds of flat, five-petaled white blossoms. This celebrated pyxie moss is not a moss at all, but a tiny shrub. Near the summit of the mound the path was lost in a foam of the blue, lilac, and white butterfly blossoms of the lupine. Little clouds of fragrance drifted through the air, as the wind swayed rows and rows of the transparent bells of the leucothoe. Beyond the lupine stood a rank of dazzling white turkey-beards, the xerophyllum of the botanists. The inmost circle of the mound was carpeted with dry gray reindeer moss, and before me, in the centre of the circle, drooped on slender stems seven rose-red moccasin flowers.

They have sought him high, they have sought him low, They have sought him over down and lea; They have found him by the milk-white thorn That guards the gates o' Faerie.

'Twas bent beneath and blue above, Their eyes were held that they might not see The kine that grazed beneath the knowes; Oh, they were the Queens o' Faerie.

If only that day my eyes had been loosed like those of True Thomas, I too might have seen the fairy queens in all their regal beauty.

Wherever it be found, the moccasin flower will always hold me by its sheer beauty. Yet to my memory none of them can approach the loveliness of that cloistered colony which I first found in the pine wood so many years ago. Year after year I would visit them. Then came a time when for five years I was not able to travel to their home. When, at last, I made my pilgrimage to where they grew, there was no cathedral of mighty green arches roofed by a shimmering June sky; there were no aisles of softly singing trees; and there were no rows of sweet faces looking up at me and waiting for my coming; only heaps of sawdust and hideous masses of lopped branches showed where a steam sawmill had cut its deadly way. Underneath the fallen dying boughs which had once waved above the world, companioned only by sky and sun and the winds of heaven, I found one last starveling blossom left of all her lovely company. Protected no longer by the sheltering boughs, she was bleached nearly white by the sun, and her stem crept crookedly along the ground underneath the mass of brush and litter which had once been a carpet of gold. Never since that day have I visited the place where my friends wait for me no more.

It was another orchid which, for eleven years, on the last day of every June, made me travel two hundred miles due north. From an old farmhouse on the edge of the Berkshires I would start out in the dawn-dusk on the first day of every July. The night-hawks would still be twanging above me as I followed, before sunrise, a dim silent road over the hills all sweet with the scent of wild-grape and the drugged perfume of chestnut tassels. At last I would reach a barway sunken in masses of sweet-fern and shaded by thickets of alder and witch-hazel. There a long-forgotten wood-road led to my Land of Heart's Desire. Parting the branches, I would step into the hush of the sleeping wood, pushing my way through masses of glossy, dark-green Christmas ferns and clumps of feathery, tossing maidenhair. Black-throated blue warblers sang above, and that ventriloquist, the oven bird, would call from apparently a long way off, "Teacher, teacher, teacher," ending with a tremendous "TEACH!" right under my feet.

At last there would loom up through the green tangle a squat broken white pine. That was my landmark. I would push my way through a tangle of sanicle, and beyond the trunk of a slim elm catch a gleam of white in the dusk. There, all rose-red and snow-white, with parted lips, waited for me the queen flower of the woods, the Cypripedium reginæ, the loveliest of all our orchids. Two narrow, white, beautiful curved petals stretched out at right angles, while above them towered a white sepal, the three together making a snowy cross. Below this cross hung the lip of the flower, a milk-white hollow shell fully an inch across and an inch deep, veined with crystalline pink which deepened into purple, growing more intense in color until the veins massed in a network of vivid violet just under the curved lips kissed by many a wandering wood-bee. Inside the shell were spots of intense purple, showing through the transparent walls. The other two white sepals were joined together and hung as a single one behind the lip.

I had first found this orchid while hunting for a veery's nest in the marsh. At that time nothing was showing except the leaves, which grow on tall, round, downy stems. They were beautifully curved at the margin, and were of a brilliant green, a little lighter on the under side than on the upper, and, at first sight, much like the leaves of the well-known marsh hellebore. That day was the beginning of a ten-year tryst which I kept every summer with this wood-queen. Then, alas, I lost her!

It came about thus. The marsh in which she hid was part of a thousand acres owned by a friend of mine, who was an enthusiastic and rival flower-hunter. Each year, when I visited my colony of these queen orchids, I sent him one with my compliments and the assurance that the flower belonged to him because it was found on his land. I accompanied these gifts with various misleading messages as to where they grew. He would hunt and hunt, but find nothing but exasperation. Finally, he bribed me, with an apple-wood corner cupboard I had long coveted, to show him the place. It was not fifty yards from the road, and when I took him to it he was overcome with emotion.

"I'll bet that I have tramped a hundred miles," he said plaintively, "through every spot on this farm except this one, looking for this flower. Nobody who knew anything about botany would ever think of looking here."

The next year my wood-lady did not meet me, nor the next, and I strongly suspect that she has been transplanted to some secret spot known to my unscrupulous botanical friend alone. Moreover, he has never yet paid me that corner cupboard.

I never saw the flower again until last summer I visited a marsh in northern New Jersey, where I had been told by another orchid-hunter that it grew. This marsh I was warned was a dangerous one. Cattle and men, too, in times past have perished in its depths. For eight unexplored miles it stretched away in front of me. After many wanderings I at length found my way to Big Spring, a murky, malevolent pool set in dark woods, with the marsh stretching away beyond.

Not far away, in a limestone cliff, I came upon a deep burrow, in front of which was a sinister pile of picked bones of all sizes and shapes. The sight suggested delightful possibilities. Panthers, wolves, ogres--anything might belong to such a pile of bones as that. I knew, however, that the last New Jersey wolf was killed a century or so ago. The burrow was undoubtedly too small for a panther, or even an undersized ogre. Accordingly I was compelled reluctantly to assign the den to the more commonplace bay-lynx, better known as the wild-cat.

On these limestone rocks I found the curious walking-fern, which loves limestone and no other. Both of the cliff brakes were there, too--the slender, with its dark, fragile, appealing beauty, and its hardier sister, the winter-brake, whose leathery fronds are of a strange blue-green, a color not found in any other plant. Then there was the rattlesnake fern, a lover of deep and dank woods, with its golden-yellow seed-cluster, or 'rattle,' growing from the centre of its fringed leaves. The oddest of all the ferns was the maidenhair spleen-wort, whose tiny leaves are of the shape of those of the well-known maidenhair fern. When they are exposed to bright sunlight, all the fertile leaves which have seeds on their surface suddenly begin to move, and for three or four minutes vibrate back and forth as rapidly as the second-hand of a watch.

Farther and farther I pushed on into the treacherous marsh, picking my way from tussock to tussock. Now and then my foot would slip into black, quivering mire, thinly veiled by marsh-grasses. When this happened, the whole swamp would shake and chuckle and lap at the skull-shaped tussocks and the bleached skeletons of drowned trees which showed here and there. At last, when I had almost given up hope, I came upon a clump of the regal flowers growing, not in the swamp itself, but on a shaded bank sloping down from the encircling woods. Three of the plants had two flowers each, the rest only one. Among these was a single blossom, pure white without a trace of pink or purple. Although it was only the thirtieth of June, several of the flowers were already slightly withered and past their prime, showing that this orchid is at its best in New Jersey in the middle of June, rather than the end of the month, as in Connecticut. The perfect flowers were beautiful orchids, and had a rich fragrance which I had never noticed in my Connecticut specimens. Yet, in some way, to me they lacked the charm and loveliness of my lost flowers of the North.

* * * * *

It was a cold May day. The Ornithologist and myself were climbing Kent Mountain, along with Jim Pan, the last of the Pequots. Whenever Jim drank too much hard cider, which was as often as he could get it, he would give terrible war-whoops and tell how many palefaces his ancestors had scalped. He would usually end by threatening to do some free-hand scalping on his own account--but he never did. He had a son named Tin Pan, who never talked unless he had something to say, which was not more than once or twice during the year.

The two lived all alone, in a little cabin on the slope of Kent Mountain. On the outside of Jim's door some wag once painted a skull and crossbones, one night when Jim was away on a hunt for some of the aforesaid hard cider. When the Last of the Pequots came back and saw what had been done, he swore mightily that he would leave said insignia there until he could wash them out with the heart's blood of the gifted artist. They still show faintly on the door, although Jim has slept for many a year in the little Indian cemetery on the mountain, beside his great-aunt Eunice who lived to be one hundred and four years old. Lest it may appear that Jim was an unduly fearsome Indian, let me hasten to add that there was never a kinder, happier, or more untruthful Pequot from the beginning to the end of that long-lost tribe.

On that day the Ornithologist and myself were on our way to a rattlesnake den, the secret of which had been in the Pan family for some generations. In past years Jim's forbears had done a thriving business in selling skins and rattlesnake oil, in the days when the rattlesnake shared with the skunk the honor of providing an unwilling cure for rheumatism. Our path led up through masses of color. There was the pale pure pink of the crane's-bill or wild geranium, the yellow adder's tongue, and the faint blue-and-white porcelain petals of the hepatica, with cluster after cluster of the snowy, golden-hearted bloodroot whose frail blossoms last but for a day.

That very morning a long-delayed warbler-wave was breaking over the mountain, and the Ornithologist could hardly contain himself as he watched the different varieties pass by. I recall that we scored over twenty different kinds of warblers between dawn and dark, and I saw for the first time the Wilson's black-cap, with its bright yellow breast and tiny black crown, and the rare Cape May warbler, with its black-streaked yellow underparts and orange-red cheeks. The richly dressed and sombre black-throated blue and bay-breasted were among the crowd, while black-throated greens, myrtles, magnolias, chestnut-sided, blackpolls, Canadians, redstarts, with their fan-shaped tails, and Blackburnians, with their flaming throats and breasts glowing like live coals, went by in a never-ending procession.

All the way Jim kept up a steady flow of anecdote. I can remember only one, a blood-curdling story about a man from Bridgeport, name not given, who caught a rattlesnake while on a hunt with Jim, but who let go while attempting to put it into the bag, whereupon the rattlesnake bit him as it dropped.

"Did he die?" queried the writer and the Ornithologist in chorus.

"No," said Jim proudly; "Tin and I saved his life."

"Whiskey?" ventured the writer.

"Not for snake-bites," responded Jim simply.