It was a cold May day. The Ornithologist and myself were climbing Kent Mountain, along with Jim Pan, the last of the Pequots. Whenever Jim drank too much hard cider, which was as often as he could get it, he would give terrible war-whoops and tell how many palefaces his ancestors had scalped. He would usually end by threatening to do some free-hand scalping on his own account—but he never did. He had a son named Tin Pan, who never talked unless he had something to say, which was not more than once or twice during the year.
The two lived all alone, in a little cabin on the slope of Kent Mountain. On the outside of Jim’s door some wag once painted a skull and crossbones, one night when Jim was away on a hunt for some of the aforesaid hard cider. When the Last of the Pequots came back and saw what had been done, he swore mightily that he would leave said insignia there until he could wash them out with the heart’s blood of the gifted artist. They still show faintly on the door, although Jim has slept for many a year in the little Indian cemetery on the mountain, beside his great-aunt Eunice who lived to be one hundred and four years old. Lest it may appear that Jim was an unduly fearsome Indian, let me hasten to add that there was never a kinder, happier, or more untruthful Pequot from the beginning to the end of that long-lost tribe.
On that day the Ornithologist and myself were on our way to a rattlesnake den, the secret of which had been in the Pan family for some generations. In past years Jim’s forbears had done a thriving business in selling skins and rattlesnake oil, in the days when the rattlesnake shared with the skunk the honor of providing an unwilling cure for rheumatism. Our path led up through masses of color. There was the pale pure pink of the crane’s-bill or wild geranium, the yellow adder’s tongue, and the faint blue-and-white porcelain petals of the hepatica, with cluster after cluster of the snowy, golden-hearted bloodroot whose frail blossoms last but for a day.
That very morning a long-delayed warbler-wave was breaking over the mountain, and the Ornithologist could hardly contain himself as he watched the different varieties pass by. I recall that we scored over twenty different kinds of warblers between dawn and dark, and I saw for the first time the Wilson’s black-cap, with its bright yellow breast and tiny black crown, and the rare Cape May warbler, with its black-streaked yellow underparts and orange-red cheeks. The richly dressed and sombre black-throated blue and bay-breasted were among the crowd, while black-throated greens, myrtles, magnolias, chestnut-sided, blackpolls, Canadians, redstarts, with their fan-shaped tails, and Blackburnians, with their flaming throats and breasts glowing like live coals, went by in a never-ending procession.
All the way Jim kept up a steady flow of anecdote. I can remember only one, a blood-curdling story about a man from Bridgeport, name not given, who caught a rattlesnake while on a hunt with Jim, but who let go while attempting to put it into the bag, whereupon the rattlesnake bit him as it dropped.
“Did he die?” queried the writer and the Ornithologist in chorus.
“No,” said Jim proudly; “Tin and I saved his life.”
“Whiskey?” ventured the writer.
“Not for snake-bites,” responded Jim simply.