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.
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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.