Medford had been right in his prediction; snow had fallen, but not in our immediate vicinity. Before noon, as we had good reasons to believe, the wintry character of the scene would be changed under the influence of the sun in an unclouded sky. As we descended into the low gap between Lone Balsam and the next pinnacle of the Balsams, Ickes, who had started in advance, came out in sight, on the ridge top, at a point some distance below us. Just at the moment he appeared, a turkey rose, like a buzzard, out of the winter grass near him, and was about to make good its flight for the iced forests beyond, when his gun came to his shoulder, a flash and a report succeeded, and the great bird whirled and fell straight downward into the firs. The mountaineers yelled with delight. Shot-guns being little used in this section, shooting on the wing is an almost unheard of art. Not one of those bear hunters had ever seen a shot of like nature, and the unostentatious young sportsman was raised to a high notch in their estimation. When we reached him, he had already descended into the grove and returned with his game. It was somewhat bruised, and feathers considerably ruffled from falling through tree-tops upon a rocky ground.
A mountain turkey is no small game. This one was a magnificent specimen; a royal turkey-gobbler, that by stretching his brilliant neck would have stood four feet high. Stripped of his green and blue bronzed plumage, and prepared for the oven, he weighed 24 pounds. In the neighborhood of Waynesville I have bought the same birds about Christmas time for 50 cents a piece, and the hunter, who, with heavy rifle, had ranged the cold mountain top before day-break, and then brought his game eight miles down the winding trail, felt satisfied with this sum (all he had asked) as compensation for his labor and skill as a sportsman. Perhaps he weighed the fun of killing the bird on his side of the scales.
We now reached the edge of the great forests of the balsam firs,—forests which mantle nearly every peak above 6,000 feet in altitude in North Carolina. The balsam is one of the most beautiful of evergreens. When transplanted, as it is occasionally, to the valleys of this region, it forms an ornamental tree of marked appearance, with its dark green, almost black, foliage, its straight, tapering trunk and symmetrical body. In the rich dark soil in some of the lofty mountain gaps it attains to a height of 150 feet, and in certain localities growing so thickly together as to render it almost impossible for the hunters to follow the bear through its forests. It is of two sorts, differing in many particulars, and termed the black and white or male and female balsams. Every grove is composed of both black and white balsams, and no single tree is widely separated from its opposite sex. The black balsam has a rougher bark, more ragged limbs, and darker foliage than the white. The latter is more ornamental, with its straight-shooting branches and smooth trunk; it bears blisters containing an aromatic resinous substance of peculiar medicinal properties. A high price is paid for this balsam of firs, but it seems that the price is not in proportion to the amount of time and labor necessary to be expended in puncturing the blisters for their contents, for very little of it is procured by the mountaineers. It covers every high pinnacle of the Balsam mountains. On some slopes, however, extending only a few hundred yards down from the top before blending, and disappearing into the deciduous forests; but on other slopes, like those descending to the west prongs of the Pigeon, it reaches downward for miles from the summit of the mountains, forming the wildest of wooded landscapes.
Although the observer, from the outer edge of this sombre wood-line, fails to see any foliage but that of the balsam, when he enters the shadows he discovers a number of trees and shrubs, peculiar to the firs forests of the extreme mountain heights. Of the trees indigenous to the valleys, the wild cherry and hawthorn appear to be the only species growing here. The most ornamental of the trees of the firs forests is the Peruvian, with its smooth, slender trunk, and great branches of brilliant red berries, which appear in the early fall and hang until the severest frosts. Its bark and berries taste like the kernel of a peach-pit, and are frequently mixed by the mountaineers in their whisky, as a bitters having the flavor of peach brandy. Here also spring the service tree, with its red, eatable berry, ripe in August; the balsam haw, with its pleasant tasting black fruit; the Shawnee haw; the Peru tree; the small Indian arrow wood; and thick in some of the most darkly shaded localities, hedges of the balsam whortle-berry, a peculiar species of that bush, bearing in October a jet black berry, juicy and palatable, but lacking the sweetness of the common whortle-berry, which is also found on heights above 6,000 feet in altitude.
Scattered near these hedges, are great thickets of blackberry bushes. It is a fortunate thing for the hunters obliged to break through them (sometimes for hundreds of yards), that they are singularly free from briers. While the berries are ripe in July in the valleys, these are green, and it is not until September and October that they become mature. The bears grow fat in such gardens. Peruvian berries are a great delicacy for them. That day, on the Spruce Ridge, Wid Medford called my attention to a small tree of this kind, no more than four inches through at the base, with branches broken on its top about 15 feet from the ground. Deep scratches of an animal’s claws were visible in the bark. It had been climbed by a bear a month since; and a good-sized bear at that, judging from the distance he had reached from where his claws had left their imprint to the highest broken branch. The wonder was how so heavy an animal had climbed a tree so slender.
In this connection, I had with the old hunter an interesting talk containing considerable information concerning the habits of the black bear. Whatever Wid Medford says on natural history can be accepted as truth gained by him through long years of experience, close observation, retained by a good memory, and imparted, as such matters would be, without any incentive for exaggeration. His quaint vernacular being the most fitting medium for the conveyance of the sense of his remarks, it is not necessary to clothe it in the king’s English.
“Wid,” I asked, “do bears sleep all winter?”
“Thet calls fer more o’ an answer than a shake or nod o’ the head. Bears go inter winter quarters ’tween Christmas an’ New Ye’r. The ole he bats fast his eyes an’ never shuffles out till about the fust o’ May. The bearing she has cubs in Feb’ry, an’ then she comes out fer water an’ goes back till April fust, when she mosies out fer good.”
“What are their winter quarters?”
“Caves, holler trees, or bray-sheaps cut by them and piled high ’ginst a log. When they git it high nuff, they dig a tunnel from the furder side o’ the log, an’ then crawl through an’ under the brashe.”