“Yea, la! I’m jist loaferin’ about.”
And yet one hears that our mountaineers have a limited vocabulary!
Although this is no place to discuss the mountain dialect, I must explain that to “brogue” means to go about in brogues (brogans nowadays). A “cooter” is a box-tortoise, and the noun is turned into a verb with an ease characteristic of the mountaineers. “Spuddin’ around” means toddling or jolting along. To “shummick” (also “shammick”) is to shuffle about, idly nosing into things, as a bear does when there is nothing serious in view. And “shacklin’ around” pictures a shackly, loose-jointed way of walking, expressive of the idle vagabond.
A stranger takes the mountaineers for simple characters that can be gauged at a glance. This illusion—for it is an illusion—comes from the childlike directness with which they ask him the most intimate questions about himself, from the genuine good-will with which they admit him to their homes, and from the stark openness of their domestic affairs in houses where no privacy can possibly exist.
In so far as simplicity means only a shrewd regard for essentials, a rigid exclusion of whatever can be done without, perhaps no white race is nearer a state of nature than these highlanders of ours. Yet this relates only to the externals of life. Diogenes sat in a tub, but his thoughts were deep as the sea. And whoever estimates our mountaineers as a shallow-minded or open-minded people has much to learn.
When Long John asks, “What you aimin’ to do up hyur? How much money do you make? Whar’s your old woman?” he does not really expect sincere answers. Certainly he will take them with more than a grain of salt. Conversation, with him, is a game. In quizzing you, the interests that he is actually curious about lie hidden in the back of his head, and he will proceed toward them by cunning circumventions, seeking to entrap you into telling the truth by accident. Being himself born to intrigue and skilled in dodging the leading question, he assumes that you have had equal advantages. When you discuss with him any business of serious concern, if you should go straight to the point, and open your mind frankly, he would be nonplussed.
The fact is that our highlanders are a sly, suspicious, and secretive folk. That, too, is a state of nature. Primitive society is by no means a Utopia or a Garden of Eden. In wilderness life the feral arts of concealment, spying, false “leads,” and doubling on trails, are the arts self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them.
As a friend, no one will spring quicker to your aid, reckless of consequences, and fight with you to the last ditch; but fear of betrayal lies at the very bottom of his nature. His sleepless suspicion of ulterior motives is no more, no less, than a feral trait, inherited from a long line of forebears whose isolated lives were preserved only by incessant vigilance against enemies that stalked by night and struck without warning.
Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers. I am not speaking of personal but of race character—type. No outsider can discern and measure those powerful but obscure motives, those rooted prejudices, that constitute their real difference from other men, until he has lived with the people a long time on terms of intimacy. Nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either for or against this people. The fluttering tourist marks only the oddities he sees, without knowing the reason for them. On the other hand, a misguided champion flies to arms at first mention of an unpleasant fact, and either denies it, clamoring for legal proof, or tries to befog the whole subject and run it on the rocks of altercation.
The mountaineers are high-strung and sensitive to criticism. No one has less use for “that worst scourge of avenging heaven, the candid friend.” Of late years they are growing conscious of their own belatedness, and that touches a tender spot. “Hit don’t take a big seed to hurt a sore tooth.” Since they do not see how anyone can find beauty or historic interest in ways of life that the rest of the world has cast aside, so they resent every exposure of their peculiarities as if that were holding them up to ridicule or blame.