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.