“A dead faint,” was suggested.
“I don’t like thet word, stranger. But, the boys an’ dogs cum on me a second arter. Bill Allen cut my veins an’ in a short time I cum round, but I war sick fer a week.”
“How about the bear?”
“Hit lay dead by the branch below, staubed clean through the heart.”
Before the story ended, a noise like thunder came rolling to us through the forests. Owing to the strange time of the year for a thunder storm, we were slow in realizing that one was brooding, but repeated peals and long rumbling echoes, preceded by vivid flashes of light in the northern sky, soon convinced us of this fact. The wind changed, grew stronger, and soughed dismally through the trees. Rain began pattering on the bark roof: it came in slight showers, ceasing with each gust and flaw, then descending in torrents. The fire grew fiercer under these attempts to smother it, and with the shifting of the wind, much to our discomfiture, smoke and sparks were driven under the roof. Occasionally, a strong blast would make us draw up our feet as the flames, leveled to the ground, whirled in on us.
The situation became unendurable, and in a lull of the storm we crawled out in the open air; tore down our camp, and changed it around with its back wall towards the wind. This occupied but a few minutes, and we were soon ensconced again. It was a wretched night. We lay tight together, like spoons, the six middle men being well protected from cold, but not from leaks in the roof. The two end men fared less comfortably with one side exposed. No one slept unless it was the gray-headed Medford, hardened by 1001 nights of like experience. The rain ceased before morning, but the temperature was considerably below the freezing point, and icicles had formed on the end of the roof fartherest from the fire. All night we had shifted and changed our positions, and the gray light of dawn found us in the ashes, seemingly close enough to the fire to blister our faces, suffering in martyr-like submission with smoke in our eyes and backs cold.
I never saw a man with a good appetite for breakfast after a night of wakefulness beside a camp fire. After a long tramp, you can eat the roughest food with relish, but there is nothing tempting about hot coffee without sugar and cream, dry cornbread and fat meat, in the ashes, on a cold, raw morning before the stars have paled in the sky. However, on the unpleasant prospect of seven hours elapsing before another snack, on this occasion we did stuff down some solid food, and drank copiously of the coffee.
At this time an artist, seated at some distance up the brook, would have seen a spectacle of striking interest for the subject of a painting. In the center of his canvas he would have placed a huge fire with blaze, ten feet high; behind it, half hidden by smoke and flame, the outlines of a rude shelter; around it, their rugged features brightly lighted up, a group of shivering mountaineers, some wrapped to their hat rims in blankets, others with closely buttoned coats, and all squatting on the ground or standing leaning on their rifles; the dogs in all imaginable postures, either crouched close to the fire, or, outside the human circle, struggling for the possession of a dry crust; the great, mossed trunks of trees springing from the ferny rocks and slopes on which moved fantastic shadows. He could have shown the stillness of the air by the straightness of the column of ascending smoke, and the winter chill by the gaunt branches encased in ice. But the sounds of camp life—striking characteristics of the scene—would have eluded him. No brush could have conveyed to the canvas the snarling of the dogs, the laugh of a strong-lunged hunter, or Wid’s startling imitation of the hoot of the owl, awakening the echoes of the gorges and responses from the night-bird just repairing to his roost.
We ascended Old Bald by a trail termed the “winds.” It was icy underfoot, and some of the party had severe falls before we issued, from the dwarf beeches, upon the bare backbone of the range. Although no breeze was stirring that morning on the north side of the mountain, a bitter, winter blast was sweeping the summit. It cut through our clothing like wizard, sharp-edged knives that left no traces except the tingling skin. This blast had chased off every cloud, leaving clear, indigo-blue depths for the sun, just lifting over Cold Spring mountain, to ride through. As we reached the bare, culminating point of the narrow ridge between Old Bald and Lone Balsam, the sun had cleared himself from the mountain tops; and, red and round, doubly increased in size, he was shedding his splendor on a scene unsurpassed in beauty and wild sublimity. The night rain, turning to sleet on the summits of the mountains, had encased the black balsam forests, covering the Spruce Ridge and Great Divide, in armors of ice. They glistened like hills and pinnacles of silver in the sunlight. Below the edges of these iced forests, stood the deciduous trees of the mountains, brown and bare. No traces of the storm clung to them. The hemlocks along the head-prongs of the Richland were green and dark under the shadows of the steep declivities. No clouds were clinging to the streams through the valleys, and visible in all the glory of the frosty morn, lay the vale of the Richland, with its stream winding through it like an endless silver ribbon. The white houses of Waynesville were shining in the sunlight pouring through the gap towards the Pigeon. No smoke was circling above their roofs. The quiet of night apparently still pervaded the street. High, and far behind it, rose the mystic, purple heights of the Newfound.
On the side towards the south the scene was different. Mountains are here rolled so closely together that the valleys between them are hidden from sight. There are no pleasant vales, dotted with clearings or animated by a single column of cabin smoke. No evergreens are to be seen beyond the slope of the Balsams. That December morning the vast ranges looked black and bare under the cutting wind, and far off, 30 miles on a bee-line through space, rose Whiteside and its neighboring peaks, veritably white from snow mantling their summits.