Part 7

"The locuses are goin' it, this mornin', ain't they?" he said.

"The locuses?" I answered, in a tone of inquiry.

"Yes. Don't you hear 'em?"

He meant my mysterious universal hum, it appeared. But even then I did not know that he spoke of the big, red-eyed cicada that I had picked off a fence a day or two before and looked at for a moment with ignorant curiosity. And even when, by dint of using my own eyes, I learned so much, I was still unaware that this cicada was the famous seventeen-year locust. Here in the north woods I more than once passed near a swarm of the insects. At short range the noise loses its musical character; so that it would be easy to hear it without divining any connection between it and the grand pervasive hum of the universal chorus.

One of the first birds at which I stopped to look was a Kentucky warbler, walking about the ground and pausing now and then to sing; one of six or seven seen and heard during the forenoon. Few birds are more freely and easily observed. I mean in open woodlands with clear margins, such as I was now exploring. In a mountain forest, where they haunt brookside jungles of laurel and rhododendron, the story is different, as a matter of course. How it happens that the same bird is equally at home in surroundings so dissimilar is a question I make no attempt to answer.

All the hill woods, mostly oak, were dry and stony; but after a while I came unexpectedly to a valley, a place of another sort; not moist, to be sure, but looking as if it had been moist at some time or other; and with pleasant grassy openings and another set of trees--red maples, persimmons, and sweet-gums. Here was a fine bunch of birds, including many migrants, and I went softly hither and thither, scanning the branches of one tree after another, as a note or the stirring of a leaf attracted me, ready every minute for the sight of something new and wonderful. I found nothing,--nothing new and wonderful, I mean,--but I had all the exhilaration of the chase. In the company, nearly all of them in song, were wood thrushes, a silent palm warbler (red-poll), a magnolia warbler, three Canadian flycatchers, many black-polls, one or two redstarts, a chestnut-sided warbler, a black-and-white creeper, a field sparrow, a yellow-throated vireo, a wood pewee, an Acadian flycatcher, and two or more yellow-billed cuckoos. The red-poll was of a very pale complexion (but I assert nothing as to its exact identity, specific or sub-specific), and seemed to me unreasonably late. It was the 11th of May, and birds of its kind had been passing through Massachusetts by the middle of April. Chestnut-sides were scarce enough to be interesting, and it was good to hear this lover of berry fields and the gray birch singing from a sweet-gum.

When at last I turned away from the grassy glade,--where cattle were pasturing, as I now remember,--and went back among the dry hills (through the powdery soil of which the almost daily showers seemed to run as through a sieve), I presently caught sight of a scarlet tanager,--a beauty, and, except on the mountains, a rarity. Then I stopped--on a street corner!--to admire the singing of a Bachman's finch, wishing also to compare his plumage with that of a bird seen and greatly enjoyed a few days before at Chickamauga. To judge from my limited observation, this is one of the sparrows--the song sparrow being another--which exhibit a strange diversity of individual coloration; as if the fashion were not yet fully set, or perhaps were being outgrown. The bird here in the north woods, so far as color and markings went, might well enough have been of a different species from that of the Chickamauga singer, yet there was no reason to suspect the presence of more than one variety of Peucæa, so far as I knew, and the music of the two birds was precisely the same. A wonderfully sweet and various tune it is; with sometimes a highly ventriloquial effect, as if the different measures or phrases came from different points. It opens like the song heard in the Florida flat-woods, but is even more varied, both in voice and in musical form. So it seemed to me, I mean to say; but hearing the two a year apart, I cannot speak without reserve. It is pleasanter--as well as safer--to praise both singers than to exalt one to the pulling down of the other. In appearance, Bachman's finch is one of the dullest, dingiest, least prepossessing members of its great family; but its voice and musical genius make it a treasure, especially in this comparatively sparrowless country of eastern Tennessee.

I have remarked that I found this bird upon a street corner. Unhappily my notes do not enable me to be more specific. It may have been at the corner of Court and Tremont Streets, or, possibly, at the junction of Tremont and Dartmouth Streets. All these names appear in my memoranda. Boston people should have had a hand in this business, I said to myself. It was on Federal Street (so much I put down) that I saw my only Tennessee rose-breasted grosbeak. He, or rather she, was the most interesting bird of the forenoon, and matched the one Baltimore oriole seen at Chickamauga. I heard the familiar click, as of rusty shears, and straightway took chase. For some minutes my search was in vain, and once I feared I had been fooled. A bird flew out of the right tree, as I thought, but showed yellow, and the next moment set up the clippiticlip call of the summer tanager. Could that bird have also a note like the rose-breast's? It was not impossible, of course, for one does not exhaust the vocabulary of a bird in a month's acquaintance; but I could not think it likely, thick as tanagers had been about me; and soon the click was repeated, and this time I put my eye on its author,--a feminine rose-breast. Perhaps it was nothing more than an accident that she was my only specimen; but so showy a bird, with so lovely a song and so distinctive a signal, could hardly have escaped notice had it been in any degree common.

Wood thrushes sang on all sides. They had need to be abundant and free-hearted, since they stand in that region for the whole thrush family. Blue golden-winged warblers, too, were generously distributed, and, as happens to me now and then in Massachusetts, I found one with a song so absurdly peculiar that I spent some time in making sure of its author. It is to be hoped that this tendency to individual variation will persist and increase in the case of this species till something more melodious than its present sibilant monotony is evolved; till beauty and art are mated, as they ought to be. Who would not love to hear the music of all our birds a few millions of years hence? What a singer the hermit thrush will be, for example, when his tune is equal to his voice! Indigo-birds, white-eyed vireos and prairie warblers abounded. As for the chats, they saluted me on the right and on the left, till I said, "Chats, Chattanooga," and felt almost as if Nature had perpetrated a huge fantastic pun on her own account. If I could have had the ear of the enterprising owners of this embryo suburb,--a syndicate, I dare say they call themselves,--I would have suggested to them to name it "Chat City."

I wandered carelessly about, now following a bird over a rounded hill (one, I remember, was covered literally from end to end with the common brake,--Pteris,--which will give the reader an idea of its sterility), now keeping to the road. In such a soil flowers were naturally scarce; but I noticed houstonia, phlox, hieracium, senecio, pentstemon, and specularia. Like the brake, the names are suggestive of barrenness. The senecio (ragwort), a species with finely cut leaves (S. millefolium), was first seen on Missionary Ridge. There, as here, it had a strange, misplaced appearance in my eyes, looking much like our familiar S. aureus, but growing in dry woods!

So the morning passed. The hours were far too brief, and I would have stretched them into the afternoon, but that my trunk was packed for Walden's Ridge. It was necessary to think of getting back to the city, and I took a quicker pace. Two more Kentucky warblers detained me for a moment; a quail sprang up from under my feet; and on the other side of the way an oven-bird sang--the only one found in the valley. Then I came to the car-track; but somehow things wore an unexpected look, and a preacher, very black, solemn, and shiny, gave me to understand, in answer to a question, that the city lay not where I thought, but in an opposite direction. Instead of making a circuit I had cut straight across the country (an unusual form of bewilderment), and had come to another railway. But no harm was done. In that corner of the world all roads lead to Chattanooga.

A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE.

Throughout my stay in Chattanooga I looked often and with desire at a long, flat-topped, perpendicular-sided, densely wooded mountain, beyond the Tennessee River. Its name was Walden's Ridge, I was told; the top of it was eighty miles long and ten or twelve miles wide; if I wanted a bit of wild country, that was the place for me. Was it accessible? I asked. And was there any reasonable way of living there? Oh yes; carriages ran every afternoon from the city, and there were several small hotels on the mountain. So it happened that I went to Walden's Ridge for my last week in Tennessee, and have ever since thanked my stars--as New England Christians used to say, in my boyhood--for giving me the good wine at the end of the feast.

The wine, it is true, was a little too freely watered. I went up the mountain in a rain, and came down again in a rain, and of the seven intervening days five were showery. The showers, mostly with thunder and lightning, were of the sort that make an umbrella ridiculous, and my jaunts, as a rule, took me far from shelter. Yet I had little to complain of. Now and then I was put to my trumps, as it were; my walk was sometimes grievously abbreviated, and my pace uncomfortably hurried, but by one happy accident and another I always escaped a drenching. Worse than the water that fell--worse, and not to be escaped, even by accident---was that which saturated the atmosphere, making every day a dog-day, and the week a seven-day sweat. And then, as if to even the account, on the last night of my stay I was kept awake for hours shivering with cold; and in the morning, after putting on all the clothing I could wear, and breakfasting in a snowstorm, I rode down the mountain in a state suggestive of approaching congelation. "My feet are frozen, I know they are," said the lady who sat beside me in the wagon; but she was mistaken.

This sudden drop in the temperature seemed to be a trial even to the natives. As we drove into Chattanooga, it was impossible not to smile at the pinched and woebegone appearance of the colored people. What had they to do with weather that makes a man hurry? And the next morning, when an enterprising, bright-faced white boy ran up to me with a "'Times,' sir? Have a 'Times'?" I fear he quite misapprehended the more or less quizzical expression which I am sure came into my face. I was looking at his black woolen mittens, and thinking how well he was mothered. It was the 19th of May; for at least three weeks, to my own knowledge, the city had been sweltering under the hottest of midsummer heats,--94° in the shade, for example; and now, mittens and overcoats!

I should be sorry to exaggerate, or leave a false impression. In this day of literary conscientiousness, when writers of fiction itself are truth-tellers first, and story-tellers afterwards,--if at all,--it behooves mere tourists and naturalists to speak as under oath. Be it confessed, then, that the foregoing paragraphs, though true in every word, are not to be taken too seriously. If the weather, "the dramatic element in scenery," happened not to suit the convenience of a naturally selfish man, now ten times more selfish than usual--as is the rule--because he was on his annual vacation, it does not follow that it was essentially bad. The rains were needed, the heat was to have been expected, and the cold, unseasonable and exceptional, was not peculiar to Tennessee. As for the snow, it was no more than I have seen before now, even in Massachusetts,--a week or two earlier in the month; and it lent such a glory to the higher Alleghanies, as we passed them on our way homeward, that I might cheerfully have lain shivering for two nights in that unplastered bedroom, with its window that no man could shut, rather than miss the spectacle. Eastern Tennessee, I have no doubt, is a most salubrious country; properly recommended by the medical fraternity as a refuge for consumptive patients. If to me its meteorological fluctuations seemed surprisingly wide and sudden, it was perhaps because I had been brought up in the equable climate of New England. It would be unfair to judge the world in general by that favored spot.

The road up the mountain--the "new road," as it is called--is a notable piece of work, done, I was told, by the county chain-gangs. The pleasure of the ascent, which naturally would have been great, was badly diminished by the rain, which made it necessary to keep the sides of the wagon down; but I was fortunate in my driver. At first he seemed a stolid, uncommunicative body, and when we came to the river I made sure he could not read. As we drove upon the bridge, where straight before his eyes was a sign forbidding any one to drive or ride over the bridge at a pace faster than a walk, under a penalty of five dollars for each offense, he whipped up his horse and his mule (the mule the better horse of the two), and they struck into a trot. Halfway across we met another wagon, and its driver too had let his horses out. Illiteracy must be pretty common in these parts, I said to myself. But whatever my driver's educational deficiencies, it did not take long to discover that in his own line he was a master. He could hit the ear of his mule with the end of his whip with a precision that was almost startling. In fact, it was startling--to the mule. For my own part, as often as he drew back his hand and let fly the lash, my eye was glued to the mule's right ear in spite of myself. Had my own ears been endowed with life and motion, instead of fastened to my head like blocks of wood, I think they too would have twitched. I wondered how long the man had practiced his art. He appeared to be not more than forty-five years old. Perhaps he came of a race of drivers, and so began life with some hereditary advantages. At all events, he was a specialist, with the specialist's motto, "This one thing I do."

We were hardly off the bridge and in the country before I began plying him with questions about this and that, especially the wayside trees. He answered promptly and succinctly, and turned out to be a man who had kept his eyes open, and, better still, knew how to say, "No, suh," as well as, "Yes, suh." (There is no mark in the dictionaries to indicate the percussive brevity of the vowel sound in "suh" as he pronounced it.) The big tupelo he recognized as the "black-gum." "But isn't it ever called 'sour-gum'?" "No, suh." He knew but one kind of tupelo, as he knew but one kind of "ellum." There were many kinds of oaks, some of which he named as we passed them. This botanical catechism presently waked up the only other passenger in the wagon, a modest girl of ten or twelve years. She too, it appeared, had some acquaintance with trees. I had asked the driver if there were no long-leaved pines hereabout. "No, suh," he said. "But I think I saw some at Chickamauga the other day," I ventured. (It was the only place I did see them, as well as I remember.) "Yes, sir," put in the girl, "there are a good many there." "Good for you!" I was ready to say. It was a pretty rare schoolgirl who, after visiting a battlefield, could tell what kind of pines grow on it. Persimmons? Yes, indeed, the girl had eaten them. There was a tree by the fence. Had I never eaten them? She seemed to pity me when I said "No," but I fancied she would have preferred to see me begin with one a little short of ripe.

As for the birds of Walden's Ridge, the driver said, there were partridges, pheasants, and turkeys. He had seen ravens, also, but only in winter, he thought, and never in flocks. His brother had once shot one. About smaller birds he could not profess to speak. By and by he stopped the carriage. "There's a bird now," he said, pointing with his whip. "What do you call that?" It was a summer tanager, I told him, or summer redbird. Did he know another redbird, with black wings and tail? Yes, he had seen it; that was the male, and this all-red one was the female. Oh no, I explained; the birds were of different species, and the females in both cases were yellow. He did not insist,--it was a case of a driver and his fare; but he had always been told so, he said, and I do not flatter myself that I convinced him to the contrary. It is hard to believe that one man can be so much wiser than everybody else. A Massachusetts farmer once asked me, I remember, if the night-hawk and the whippoorwill were male and female of the same bird. I answered, of course, that they were not, and gave, as I thought, abundant reason why such a thing could not be possible. But I spoke as a scribe. "Well," remarked the farmer, when I had finished my story, "some folks say they be, but I guess they ain't."

With such converse, then, we beguiled the climb to the "Brow,"--the top of the cliffs which rim the summit of the mountain, and give it from below a fortified look,--and at last, after an hour's further drive through the dripping woods, came to the hotel at which I was to put up--or with which I was to put up--during my stay on the Ridge.

I had hardly taken the road, the next morning, impatient to see what this little world on a mountain top was like, before I came to a lovely brook making its devious course among big boulders with much pleasant gurgling, in the shadow of mountain laurel and white azalea,--a place highly characteristic of Walden's Ridge, as I was afterwards to learn. Just now, naturally, there was no stopping so near home, though a Kentucky warbler, with his cool, liquid song, did his best to beguile me; and I kept on my way, past a few houses, a tiny box of a post-office, a rude church, and a few more houses, till just beyond the last one the road dropped into the forest again, as if for good. And there, all at once I seemed to be in New Hampshire. The land fell away sharply, and at one particular point, through a vista, the forest could be seen sloping down on either side to the gap, beyond which, miles away, loomed a hill, and then, far, far in the distance, high mountains dim with haze. It was like a note of sublimity in a poem that till now had been only beautiful.

From the bottom of the valley came a sound of running water, and between me and the invisible stream a chorus of olive-backed thrushes were singing,--the same simple and hearty strains that, in June and July, echo all day long through the woods of the Crawford Notch. The birds were on their way from the far South, and were happy to find themselves in so homelike a place. Then, suddenly, amid the golden voices of the thrushes, I caught the wiry notes of a warbler. They came from the treetops in the valley, and--so I prided myself upon guessing--belonged to a cerulean warbler, a bird of which I had seen my first and only specimen a week before, on Lookout Mountain. Down the steep hillside I scrambled,--New Hampshire clean forgotten,--and was just bringing my glass into play when the fellow took wing, and began singing at the very point I had just left. I hastened back; he flew again, farther up the hill, and again I put myself out of breath with pursuing him. Again and again he sang, now in this tree, now in that, but there was no getting sight of him. The trees should have been shorter, or the bird larger. Straight upward I gazed, till the muscles of my neck cried for mercy. At last I saw him, flitting amid the dense foliage, but so far above me, and so exactly between me and the sun, that I might as well not have seen him at all.

It was a foolish half-hour. The bird, as I afterwards discovered, was nothing but a blue yellow-back, with an original twist to his song. In Massachusetts, I should not have listened to it twice, but on new hunting-grounds a man is bound to look for new game; else what would be the use of traveling? It was a foolish half-hour, I say; but I wish some moralist would explain, in a manner not inconsistent with the dignity of human nature, how it happens that foolish half-hours are commonly so much more enjoyable at the time, and so much pleasanter in the retrospect, than many that are more reasonably employed.

I swallowed my disappointment, and presently forgot it, for at the first turn in the road I found myself following the course of a brook or creek, between which and myself was a dense thicket of mountain laurel and rhododendron, with trees and other shrubs intermingled. The laurel was already in full bloom, while the rhododendrons held aloft clusters of gorgeous rose-purple buds, a few of which, the middle ones of the cluster, were just bursting into flower. Here was beauty of a new order,--such wealth and splendor of color in surroundings so romantic. And the place, besides, was alive with singing birds: hooded warblers, Kentucky warblers, a Canadian warbler, a black-throated blue, a black-throated green, a blue yellow-back, scarlet tanagers, wood pewees, wood thrushes, a field sparrow (on the hillside beyond) a cardinal, a chat, a bunch of white-throated sparrows, and who could tell what else? It was an exciting moment. Luckily, a man can look and listen both at once. Here was a fringe-tree, a noble specimen, hung with creamy-white plumes; here was a magnolia, with big leaves and big flowers; and here was a flowering dogwood, not to be put out of countenance in any company; but especially, here were the rhododendrons! And all the while, deep in the thickest of the bushes, some unknown bird was singing a strange, breathless jumble of a song, note tripping over note,--like an eager churchman with his responses, I kept saying to myself, with no thought of disrespect to either party. It cost me a long vigil and much patient coaxing to make the fellow out, and he proved to be merely a Wilson's blackcap, after all; but he was the only bird of his kind that I saw in Tennessee.

On this first visit I did not get far beyond the creek, through the bed of which the road runs, with a single log for foot-passengers. I had spent at least an hour in going a hundred rods, and it was already drawing near dinner time. But I returned to the spot that very afternoon, and half a dozen times afterward. So poor a traveler am I, so ill fitted to explore a new country. Whenever nothing in particular offered itself, why, it was always pretty down at Falling Water Creek. There I saw the rhododendrons come into exuberant bloom, and there I oftenest see them in memory, though I found them elsewhere in greater abundance, and in a setting even more romantic.

More romantic, perhaps, but hardly more beautiful. I remember, just beyond the creek, a bank where sweet bush (Calycanthus), wild ginger (Asarum), rhododendron, laurel, and plenty of trailing arbutus (the last now out of flower) were growing side by side,--a rare combination of beauty and fragrance. And within a few rods of the same spot I sat down more than once to take a long look at a cross-vine covering a dead hemlock. The branches of the tree, shortening regularly to the top, were draped heavily with gray lichens, while the vine, keeping mostly near the trunk and climbing clean to the tip,--fifty feet or more, as I thought,--was hung throughout with large, orange-red, gold-lined bells. Their numbers were past guessing. Here and there a spray of them swung lightly from the end of a branch, as if inviting the breeze to lend them motion and a voice. The sight was worth going miles to see, and yet I passed it three times before it caught my eye, so full were the woods of things to look at. After all, is it a poor traveler who turns again and again into the same path? Whether is better, to read two good books once, or one good book twice?

A favorite shorter walk, at odd minutes,--before breakfast and between showers,--was through the woods for a quarter of a mile to a small clearing and a cabin. On a Sunday afternoon I ventured to pass the gate and make a call upon my neighbors. The doors of the house stood open, but a glance inside showed that there was no one there, and I walked round it, inspecting the garden,--corn, beans, and potatoes coming on,--till, just as I was ready to turn back into the woods, I descried a man and woman on the hillside not far away; the man leading a mule, and the woman picking strawberries. At sight of a stranger the woman fell behind, but the man kept on to the house, greeted me politely, and invited me to be seated under the hemlock, where two chairs were already placed. After tying the mule he took the other chair, and we fell into talk about the weather, the crops, and things in general. When the wife finally appeared, I rose, of course; but she went on in silence and entered the house, while the husband said, "Oh, keep your seat." We continued our conversation till the rain began to fall. Then we picked up our chairs and followed the woman inside. She sat in the middle of the room (young, pretty, newly married, and Sunday-dressed), but never once opened her lips. Her behavior was in strict accordance with local etiquette, I was afterward assured (as if all etiquette were not local); but though I admire feminine modesty as much as any man, I cannot say that I found this particular manifestation of it altogether to my liking. Silence is golden, no doubt, and gold is more precious than silver, but in cases of this figurative sort I profess myself a bimetallist. A little silver, I say; enough for small change, at any rate; and if we can have a pretty free coinage, why, so much the better, though as to that, it must be admitted, a good deal depends upon the "image and superscription." However, my hostess followed her lights, and reserved her voice--soft and musical let us hope--for her husband's ear.

They had not lived in the house very long, he told me, and he did not know how many years the land had been cleared. There was a fair amount of game in the woods,--turkeys, squirrels, pheasants, and so on,--and in winter the men did considerable hunting. Formerly there were a good many deer, but they had been pretty well killed off. Turkeys still held out. They were gobbling now. His father had been trying for two or three weeks, off and on, to shoot a certain old fellow who had several hens with him down in the valley. His father could call with his mouth better than with any "caller," but so far the bird had been too sharp for him. The son laughed good-naturedly when I confessed to an unsportsmanlike sympathy with the gobbler.