It was May 27 when, after an early breakfast, I left Highlands in a big mountain wagon, bound for Boston by the way of Dillsboro and Asheville. I had come into the mountains from the south, and was going out in a northerly direction. The road was not highly recommended; it would be a rough, all-day drive, but it would take me through a new piece of country; and as for the jolting, I fancied that by this time I had become hardened to all that the steepest and stoniest of roads could inflict upon a passenger. On that point, I may as well confess, though it does not concern the present story, I was insufficiently informed.
It had been agreed that I should take my own time, making the trip as natural-historical as I pleased. “It fares better with sentiments not to be in a hurry with them,” says Sterne, and the same is true of sciences and other pleasures. Again and again I ordered the horses stopped as we came to some likely piece of cover, but little or nothing resulted. There were singers in plenty, but no new voices. After all, I said to myself, one does not study ornithology to any great advantage from a wagon-seat. Yet I remember one lesson—an old one rehearsed—that the morning brought me.
Soon after getting out of the village we passed Stewart’s Pond. This had been one of my most frequent resorts. A considerable part of several half-days had been idled away beside it, and more than once I had commented upon the singular fact that its shores, birdy as they were, harbored no water thrushes, while in several similar places I had heard them singing for more than a fortnight. There was something really mysterious about it, I was inclined to think. The place seemed made for them, unless, perhaps, the damming of the stream had rendered the current too sluggish to suit their taste. Now, however, as we drove past, and just as I was bidding the place good-by, a water thrush struck up his simple, lazily emphatic tune. “Here I am, stranger,” he might have been saying. Had he been there all the time? I did not know. One’s investigations are never complete, even in the most limited area.
We had not gone many miles farther before we took what was for me a new road, which turned out presently to be like all the others: a road running mostly through the forest, uphill and downhill by turns, with here and there, at long distances, a solitary cabin, unpainted, perhaps unwindowed, yet pretty certainly with a patch of sweet-william and other old-fashioned flowers in the “front yard.” The rudest one of all, in the very lonesomest of clearings, had before the door a magnificent eglantine bush that would have made the fortune of any Northern gardener. The mountain side might be all aflame with azalea and laurel, but the woman’s heart must have a bit of garden, something planted and tended, to make the cabin more like a home.
For some hours we had been traveling thus, and were now come to an open place in the town of Hamburg, so the driver told me. Here, all at once, I nudged him with a quick command to stop. “There it is!” I cried, as I whipped out my opera-glass. “There’s a raven!” “Yes,” said the driver, “that’s the bird.” He was flying from us in a diagonal course, making toward a hill or mountain,—at a comfortable distance, in the best of lights, and most admirably disposed to show us his dimensions; but he was silent and in tremendous haste.
“Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he.”
If you would only say something! I thought. But he did not “call out,” perhaps because he was not “flying over.” I held the glass on him till he passed out of sight,—a really good look, as time counts under such circumstances. Yes, at the last moment I had seen a raven! Would the driver, when he got back to Highlands to-morrow evening, have the goodness so to inform Dr. —— for his comfort?
Another thing I had accomplished: I had supplied three male Hamburgers with abundant material for a week’s gossip; for even in my excitement I had been aware that we had halted almost directly in front of a house,—the only one for some miles, I think,—in the yard of which three men were lounging. I looked at the bird, and the men looked at me. It gave me pleasure afterward to think what a story it must have made. “Yes, sir, it’s gospel truth: he pulled out a spy-glass and sat there looking at a raven. I reckon he never see one before.”
I speak of excitement, but it was a wonder to me how temperate my emotions were, and how quickly they subsided. Within a half-mile our progress was blocked by a large oak-tree, which the wind had twisted partly off and thrown squarely across the road. The driver had brought no axe along, and was obliged to go back to the house for help, leaving me to care for the team. Straight before me loomed the Balsam Mountains, a dozen peaks, gloriously high and mountainous; not too far away, yet far enough to be blue, with white clouds veiling their lower slopes and so lifting the tops skyward. I looked at them and looked at them, and between the looks I put the raven into my notebook.
For the day it kept its place unquestioned. Then, long before I reached Massachusetts, I punctuated the entry with a question mark. The bird had been silent; its apparent size might have been an illusion; and my assurance of the moment, absolute though it was, would not bear the test of time and cold blood.