"Always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in the Carter-Moriah Range"
To hear a tiny shriek in the wayside bushes and on search to rescue a half-grown field sparrow from the very jaws of a garter snake, sending the snake to gehenna with a stamp of a big foot and seeing the fledgling snuggle down again into the nest with the others, was as pleasant as finding the way to a new cascade. But after all, the great lure of such a crystalline day is toward the high peaks. The Wildcat River has its very beginning in the height of Carter Notch, and its prattle over every shallow teased me to follow its trail back to this high source and see what the spot might be. To do this step by step with the falling water would be a herculean task, for the gorges down which it runs are choked with boulders and forest débris and tangled with thickets as close-set and difficult of passage as any tropical jungle. But there is no need to seek its source by that route. You may go within four miles of it by motor, if you will, up the good road from Jackson that finally dwindles and vanishes on the slope up toward Wildcat Mountain, but not before it has taken you through a gate and showed you the entrance to the A. M. C. trail to the top of the Notch.
All the way up to this point the outlook to the south has been growing more extensive and more beautiful. Black Mountain still lifts its broad ridge from pinnacle to pinnacle on the east side of the Wildcat, but Eagle Mountain, Thorn, Tin, and the little height between these last two have been dropping down the sky line till Kearsarge, Bartlett, Moat, and even the distant Sandwich and Ossipee ranges far to the south, loom blue and beautiful above them, while the valley of the Wildcat unrolls its slopes, checkered with farm and woodland, to where the river vanishes from sight around the turn at Jackson Falls. Fifty miles of sylvan beauty lie before you as you look down the narrow valley, over the green heights that rim it to the blue ones far beyond, and up again to the amethystine sky.
It is a wide world of sun and it is good to look at it now, for the path before you plunges to shade immediately and is to give you little more than a dapple of sunlight for five miles. Yet it is a wide and easy way for most of the distance, for which the chance traveller may thank the lumbermen, whose road it follows, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. The lumbermen opened it. The Appalachians have kept it up since the tote road was abandoned. They even have mowed its grassy stretches each spring, lest some fair Appalachian pilgrim set her foot upon a garter snake, inadvertently and without malice, and henceforward abjure mountaineering. A half-dozen brooks splash down the mountain-side and cross this trail, all for the slaking of your thirst, and if you do not find the garter snake to step on you may have a porcupine. Indeed, to judge from my own experience, the porcupine is the more likely footstool. Just before you round the low shoulder of Wildcat Mountain to enter the Notch is a burnt region full of gaunt dead trees, and this neighborhood grows porcupines in quantity, also in bulk. One of them looms as big as a bear at the first glimpse of him in the trail ahead, and if he happens to start from almost beneath your foot as you step over a rock, giving that queer little half squeal, half grunt of his, you are momentarily sure that you have kicked up Ursus Major himself.
But though the porcupine may squeal and move for a few shambling steps with some degree of quickness, he is by no means afraid of you. He just moves off a few feet, turns his back, shakes out his quills till they all point true, then waits for you to rush at him and bite him from behind—waits with a wicked grin in his little eye as he leers over his shoulder at you. Then if nothing happens he shambles awkwardly away into the shadows of the forest. If something does happen it is the aggressor that shambles away with a mouthful of barbed, needle-pointed quills. But then, why should anyone bite a porcupine? They do not even look edible, and judging by the numbers of them that strayed casually out of the path round the shoulder of Wildcat that day nothing has eaten any of them for a long time, else there had not been so many. In this burnt district you get a glimpse of Carter Mountain on the other side of the notch you are about to enter and then you plunge again into deeper woods on the west side, under the cliffs of Wildcat, whose very frown is hidden from you by the high trees.
The cool, shadowy depths here will always be marked in my mind as the place of great gray toads. I saw several of these right by the path, six-inch long chaps, looking very wise and old and having more markings of white than I ever before saw on a toad, besides a white streak all the way down the backbone. The place is as beautiful as these bright-eyed, curious creatures, and as uncanny. Mossy boles of great trees rise through its gloom and through the perfumed air comes the cool drip of waters. Moss is deep, and over it and the rough, lichen-clad rocks grows the Linnæa, holding up its pink blooms, fairy pipes for the pukwudgies to smoke. Here out of high cliffs have fallen great rocks which lie about the patch in mighty confusion. Here are caves, little and big, that might shelter all the hedgehogs roaming the fire-swept mountain-side below, and as many bears. Yet neither porcupines nor bears appeared, or any other living things except the great white-mottled toads, that would not hop aside for my foot, but sat and gazed at me with the calm patience of woodland deities.
Then the path swung sharp down the hill through lesser trees that gave a glimpse of the high frown of Carter cliffs, swimming in the sky above, and then—I wonder if every pilgrim does not at this point laugh with pure joy and caper a bit on road-weary legs, for here in the gruesome depths of the great Notch, at the climax point of its wildness, is a little clear mountain lake where surely no lake could be, set in thousand-ton fragments of mighty broken ledges. To look north is to see a little barrier of wooded ridge stretching across from side to side of the place, and between the eye and this a low barrier of wood growth among great rocks, behind which is the air of empty space. I pushed through this, expecting a crater, and behold! Here is another little round lake with lily pads floating on its surface, and beyond this an open space in the woods and the A. M. C. camp.
The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Carter Notch