I was hunting alone in the mountains, and exploring ground that was new to me. About noon, while descending from a high ridge into a creek valley, to get some water, I became enmeshed in a rhododendron “slick,” and, to some extent, lost my bearings.
After floundering about for an hour or two, I suddenly came out upon a little clearing. Giant hemlocks, girdled and gaunt, rose from a steep cornfield of five acres, beyond which loomed the primeval forest of the Great Smoky Mountains. Squat in the foreground sat one of the rudest log huts I had ever seen, a tiny one-room shack, without window, cellar, or loft, and without a sawed board showing in its construction. A thin curl of smoke rose from one end of the cabin, not from a chimney, but from a mere semi-circle of stones piled four feet high around a hole cut through the log wall. The stones of this fireplace were not even plastered together with mud, nor had the builder ever intended to raise the pile as high as the roof to guard his premises against the imminent risk of fire. Two low doors of riven boards stood wide open, opposite each other. These, helped by wide crevices between the unchinked logs, served to let in some sunlight, and quite too much of the raw November air. The surroundings were squalid and filthy beyond anything I had hitherto witnessed in the mountains. As I approached, wading ankle-deep in muck that reached to the doorsill, two pigs scampered out through the opposite door.
Within the hut I found only a slip of a girl, rocking a baby almost as big as herself, and trying to knit a sock at the same time. She was toasting her bare toes before the fire, and crooning in a weird minor some mountain ditty that may have been centuries old.
I shivered as I looked at this midget, comparing her only garment, a torn calico dress, with my own stout hunter’s garb that seemed none too warm for such a day as this.
Knowing that the sudden appearance of a stranger would startle the girl, I chose the quickest way to reassure her by saluting in the vernacular:
“Howdy?” she gasped.
“Who lives here?”
“Tom Kirby.”
“Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him—we’ve been hunting together. Is your father at home?”