IX
Led by Dave, sometimes by the boy, the four followed the course of rivers, upward, always except when they descended some mountain which they had to cross, and then it was soon upward again. The two Virginia lads found themselves, much to their chagrin, as helpless as children, but they were apt pupils and soon learned to make a fire with flint and even with dry sticks of wood. On the second day Harry brought down a buck, and the swiftness and skill with which Dave and the Kentucky boy skinned and cleaned it greatly astonished the two young gentlemen from the James. There Erskine had been helpless, here these two were, and they were as modest over the transposition as was the Kentucky lad in the environment he had just left. Once they saw a herd of buffalo and they tied their horses and slipped toward them. In his excitement Harry fired too soon and the frightened herd thundered toward them.
“Climb a tree!” shouted Erskine dropping his rifle and skinning up a young hickory. Like squirrels they obeyed and from their perches they saw Dave in an open space ahead of them dart for a tree too late.
The buffalo were making straight for them through no purpose but to get away, and to their horror they saw the big hunter squeezing his huge body sidewise against a small tree and the herd dashing under them and past him. They could not see him for the shaggy bodies rushing by, but when they passed, there was Dave unhurt, though the tree on both sides of him had been skinned of its bark by their horns.
“Don’t do that again,” said Dave, and then seeing the crestfallen terror on Harry’s face, he smiled and patted the boy on the shoulder:
“You won’t again. You didn’t know. You will next time.”
Three days later they reached the broad, beautiful Holston River, passing over the pine-crested, white-rocked summit of Clinch Mountain, and came to the last outlying fort of the western frontier. Next day they started on the long, long wilderness trail toward the Cumberland range. In the lowland they found much holly and laurel and rhododendron. Over Wallen’s Ridge they followed a buffalo trail to a river that had been called Beargrass because it was fringed with spikes of white umbelliferous flowers four feet high that were laden with honey and beloved by Bruin of the sweet tooth. The land was level down the valley. On the third day therefrom the gray wall of the Cumberland that ran with frowning inaccessibility on their right gathered its flanks into steep gray cliffs and dipped suddenly into Cumberland Gap. Up this they climbed. On the summit they went into camp, and next morning Dave swept a long arm toward the wild expanse to the west.
“Four more days,” he cried, “and we’ll be there!”
The two boys looked with awe on the limitless stretch of wooded wilds. It was still Virginia, to be sure, but they felt that once they started down they would be leaving their own beloved State for a strange land of unknown beasts and red men who peopled that “dark and bloody ground.”
Before sunrise next morning they were dropping down the steep and rocky trail. Before noon they reached the beautiful Cumberland River, and Dave told them that, below, it ran over a great rocky cliff, tumbling into foam and spray over mighty boulders around which the Indians had to carry their bark canoes. As they rode along the bank of the stream the hills got lower and were densely thicketed with laurel and rhododendron, and impenetrable masses of cane-brake filled every little valley curve. That night they slept amid the rocky foot-hills of the range, and next morning looked upon a vast wilderness stretch of woods that undulated to the gentle slopes of the hills, and that night they were on the edge of the blue-grass land.