A change of trains, and I met the Collector, as enthusiastic as ever. Already that year he had found six ravens’ nests with eggs in them, but the one he had promised to show me was the best of the lot. It was located in Poe’s Gap, where local tradition hath it that the poet wooed, not unsuccessfully, a mountain girl, and wrote “The Raven” in her cabin. On the way to the Gap we heard and saw nineteen different kinds of birds, including siskin, fox sparrows, and killdeer, and saw a buzzard sail on black-fringed wings over the peaks. On a farmer’s barn we saw a goshawk nailed, its blue-gray back and finely penciled breast unmistakable, even after the winter storms.
As we entered the Gap, patches of snow showed here and there, and a mad mountain brook of foaming gray water came frothing and raging to meet us. When we were full two hundred and fifty yards away from the nest, the female raven flapped and soared away. The nest itself was only thirty feet from the ground, on a shelf protected by a protruding ledge, some ten feet down from the top of the cliffs. Rigging a rope to a tree, I managed to swarm up and look at last on the eggs of a Northern raven. They were three in number, a full clutch. The number ranges from three to five, very rarely six, with one instance of seven. The eggs themselves were half as large again as those of a crow, and all different in coloration. One was light-blue-flecked and speckled with brown and lavender; another heavily marked with lavender and greenish-brown; while the last was of a solid greenish-brown color.
The nest itself faced the Gap, and from it one could look clear across the forest to the settled country beyond, while behind the cliff stretched a range of low, unexplored mountains. The nest itself was made of smaller sticks than the one I had seen over at Seven Mountains, and had a double lining of brown and white deer-hair, a fresh lining having been laid over that of the year before. As we climbed to the nest, the ravens soared near, giving only the hoarse “Crrruck.” They have also a soft love-note, which cannot be heard fifty yards away and sounds something like the syllables “Ga-gl-gl-gli.” As they soared near us, their plumage shone like black glass, and we could see the long tapered feathers of the neck swell whenever either of them croaked. They had a peculiar trick of gliding side by side and suddenly touching wings, overlapping each other for an instant. While we watched them, a red-shouldered hawk unwarily approached the Gap. In an instant, the male raven was upon him, and there was a sharp fight. The Buteo was not to be driven away easily, and made brave play with beak and talons; but he never had a chance. The raven glided round and round him with wonderful speed and smoothness, driving in blow after blow with his heavy, punishing beak, until the hawk was glad to escape.
For long and long I watched the dark, wise mysterious birds circle through the blue sky. As I sat in their eyrie, I could look far, far across the forests and the ranges of hills, to where the ploughed fields began. Perhaps that poet whose heart-strings were a lute had looked from that same raven-cliff before he went back to die among the tame folk, and wished that he could stay in wild-folk land where he belonged.
[VI]
HIDDEN TREASURE
It cost me an appendix to become a treasure-hunter, but it was worth the price. I really had very little use for that appendix anyway, while my membership in the Order of Treasure-Hunters has brought me in several million dollars’ worth of health and happiness.
It all began when I was sent from a city hospital to an old farmhouse in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, with instructions to avoid all but the most ladylike kind of exercise. Accordingly one morning I found myself tottering feebly along a wood-road that led over Pond Hill, highly resolved to walk to Hen’s Pine and back. This was the lone tree which stood on the crest of the wooded hill which, half a century ago, old Hen, a freed slave, had begged from the charcoal-burners when they coaled that region. Hen’s old horse, Bill, is buried at its foot, and Hen had hoped to lie there himself with his axe, his fiddle, and his whip. Instead, he sleeps in a little graveyard on a bare hill beside his old master.
My path had just crossed a round green circle in the woods where an old charcoal-pit had set its seal forever. Suddenly a brown bird flew up from beside the road a few yards ahead of me. If she had kept quiet, I never would have learned her secret. When, however, she came back, flying from branch to branch with fluttering wings and jerking tail, keeping up at the same time a rattle of alarm-notes like a tiny machine-gun, even a novice like myself would suspect a nest.