Kearsarge and Bartlett, seen from Middle Mountain, near Jackson
With the white admirals I find, flying lower and keeping well in shadowy nooks, a thumbnail butterfly which might well be a midshipman, he is so much a copy on a small scale of the admiral, very dark in ground color and having white epaulettes across both wings also. This butterfly is new to me, nor do I find him figured in such works on lepidoptera as I have been able to consult since I have seen him. I had to get lost on the way up Bartlett to find him most plentiful, but his fellows are common throughout the shady woodlands of the upper branches of the Saco from Pinkham Notch to the borders of the Conway meadows. In fact I fancy the whole White Mountain region is a school for these understudies of the white admirals, and they certainly could have no more noble exemplar.
No doubt my volunteer white admiral guide had a great contempt for any would-be sailor that could not climb as he did when he went straight toward the main truck of Kearsarge by way of the bobstay, but he left me where the lumber road did, in a wild tangle of slash, to get up the mountain the way the bear does, on all fours. There is a path up Bartlett, a proper one that enters from the highway as the A. M. C. guide says it does and sticks to its job after the first third of the ascent is accomplished, but the way it flirts with the wood roads between these two points is bewildering to the sober-minded stranger who attempts to follow it. However, missing this slender trifler had its compensations. I am convinced that I reached portions of the slope of Bartlett that are rarely visited. I was long getting out of the awful mess which lumbermen leave behind them at the upper ends of their roads. The inextricable confusion of tangled spruce tops and the sudden riot of new deciduous growth, wild with delight over the flood of sunshine it gets, held me as if in a net. And all the time I wrestled with it an indigo bunting sat on the top of a rock maple and sang his surprise at seeing such a thing in such a place. "Dear, dear!" he gurgled, "who is it? who is it? dear, dear, dear!" and once in a while he added a little tittering "tee, hee, hee." It was all very well for him. He could follow the white admiral if he were bound for the main truck of Kearsarge by way of the Bartlett bobstay, and he looked very handsome and capable as he glistened, iridescent blue-black up there against the sun. How poor a creature a man is, after all! A box turtle could have gone up through that slash better than I did.
From Eagle Mountain one may see Kearsarge, blue and symmetrical in the distance, peering over the shoulder of Thorn
However, man wins because he keeps everlastingly at it, and I reasoned that if I kept climbing I would come out on top of something or other, and I did. On top of a pretty little hill, which is an outlying, northwesterly spur of Bartlett, a spot which gave me a glimpse of the dark, spruce-covered summit far above and a deep ravine between down into which I must go and begin my scramble all over again. A no-trail trip gives one an idea of what a mountain really is, showing him, for one thing, how rapidly it moves down into the valley beneath it. Here on steep slopes were loose masses of angled fragments of granite, weighing from a few pounds to a few tons each, broken from the precipices above by the frost and ready, some of them at least, to be toppled at a touch and start an avalanche. It needs but the footfall of a climbing deer, a bear, or a stray man to start one rock, or two, and it is easy to see that a down-rush of spring rain takes always a part of the mountain with it. To go up one of the precipitous ledges, "tooth and nail" as one must who misses the path, is to find how easily these broken chunks, separated by the frost from the parent rock, fall out and join the masses below.
Yet such a climb has its joys, which the path does not always give. Here the deer have browsed and left prints of slender hoofs in the black earth beneath the trees, there the white hare had his lair all winter, a jutting rock sheltering him and the sun from the southwest warming him as he crouched. Here are holes where the porcupines have scratched their bristly way, or a cave where perhaps a bear had his den. This the wandering stranger views with suspicion and approaches with many delightful thrills strangely compounded of hope and fear. Probably there are no bears on Bartlett, but what if there were one, and nothing for defence but the majesty of the human eye! A man is apt to get his own measure in places like these. Of course the bear, if there be one, will run—but which way? In the wildest glen, filled with rough dens and suspicions of bears of the largest size, I found grateful traces of at least the former presence of men, men in bulk, so to speak. Here, in the forest tangle, wreathed with mountain moosewood blooms, was a good-sized cook-stove. There was no suspicion of a road, and I could only guess that it had wandered from a lumber camp and lost the trail, as I had. It reminded me that Bartlett summit was still distant, more distant perhaps than the noon hour which this mountain range also suggested, and it set me to the ascent with renewed vigor.