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.