I prepared to continue my journey to the Glen House by the valley of the Wildcat and the Carter Notch, which is a sort of side entrance to the Peabody Valley. Two passes thus lie on alternate sides of the same mountain chain. Before doing so, however, two words are necessary.
III.
THE CARTER NOTCH.
Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which needs
No school of long experience, that the world
Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen
Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares,
To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood
And view the haunts of nature.—Bryant.
WHAT traveller can pass beyond the crest of Thorn Hill without paying his tribute of silent admiration to the splendid pageant of mountains visible from this charmed spot! Before him the great rampart, bristling with its countless towers, is breached as cleanly as if a cannon-ball had just crashed through it. It is an immense hole; it is the cavity from which, apparently, one of those great iron teeth has just been extracted. Only it does not disfigure the landscape. Far from it. It really exalts the surrounding peaks. They are enormously aggrandized by it. You look around for a mountain of proper size and shape to fill it. That gives the true idea. It is a mountainous hole.
The little river, tumbling step by step down its broken ledges into Jackson, comes direct from the Notch, and its stream is the thread which conducts through the labyrinth of thick woods. I dearly love the companionship of these mountain streams. They are the voices of the wilderness, singing high or low, softly humming a melodious refrain to your thoughts, or, joining innumerable cascades in one grand chorus, they salute the ear with a gush of sound that strips the forest of its loneliness and awe. This same madcap Wildcat runs shouting and hallooing through the woods like a stream possessed.
By half-past seven of a bright and crisp morning I was climbing the steep hill-side over which Jackson Falls pour down. Here was a genuine surprise. On arriving at the top, instead of entering a difficult and confined gorge, I found a charming and tolerably wide vale, dotted with farms, extending far up into the midst of the mountains. You hardly realize that the stream flowing so demurely along the bottom of the valley is the same making its entry into the village with such noise and tumult. Half a mile above the falls the snowy cupola of Washington showed itself over Eagle Mountain for a few moments. Then, farther on, Adams was seen, also white with snow. For five miles the road skirts the western slopes of the valley, which grows continually deeper, narrower, and higher. Spruce Mountain is now on our left, the broad flanks of Black Mountain occupy the right side of the valley. Beyond Black Mountain Carter Dome lifts its ponderous mass, and between them the dip of the Perkins Notch, dividing the two ranges, gives admittance to the Wild River Valley, and to the Androscoggin, in Shelburne. Before me the grand, downward curves of Carter Notch opened wider and wider.
I picked up, en route, the guide of this locality, who lives on the side of the mountain near where the road is left for the woods. Our business was transacted in two words. While he was strapping on his knapsack I had leisure to observe the manner of man he was.
The guide, whose Christian name is Jonathan, is known in all the country round as “Jock” Davis. He was a medium-sized, muscular man, whiskered to his eyes, with a pair of bare arms the color of unglazed earthen-ware, and a step like a panther. As he strode silently on before, with his dog at his heels, I was reminded of the Jibenainosay and his inseparable Little Peter. He was steady as a clock, careful, and a capital forester, but a trifle taciturn. From time to time, as he drew my attention to the things noticeable or interesting by the way, his face grew animated, and his eyes sparkled. By the same token I believed I detected that dormant perception of beauty and grandeur which is inborn, and which travellers are in general too much disposed to deny any existence among the natives of these mountains. It is true, one cannot express his feelings with the vivacity of the other; but if there is such a thing as speech in silence, the honest guide’s looks spoke volumes.
He told me that he was accustomed to get his own living in the woods, like an old bear. He had trapped and gummed all through the region we were in; the slopes of the great range, and the Wild River wilderness, which he declared, with a shake of the head, to be “a horrid hole.” Now and then, without halting, he took a step to the right or left to look into his fox and sable traps, set near the foot-path. When he spoke of “gumming” on Wildcat Mountain, I was near making an awkward mistake; I understood him to say “gunning.” So I very innocently asked what he had bagged. He opened his eyes widely and replied, “Gum.”[17]
