No other bird track was there, but the sand-pipers by no means monopolize the borders of this shallow water. Here were the marks of hedgehog claws, and there was a track which led me to pause in astonishment. What plantigrade had set foot of such size on the soft sand of the shore? I looked over my shoulder after the first glimpse, half expecting to see an old bear, for here was what looked very like the track of a young one. A second look told me better. This footmark, not unlike that of a human baby, save for the claws, was no doubt that of a raccoon, but certainly the biggest raccoon track I have seen yet. It was perfectly fresh, and I dare say the owner, interrupted in his frog hunt by the sound of my scrambling approach beneath the black growth, had but then shambled to some den in the nearby cliffs and was impatiently awaiting my departure.
The flower of the place was the little, herbaceous St.-John's-wort, Hypericum ellipticum, in whose linear petals such sunlight as reached the bottom of the cleft seemed tangled. It grew everywhere on the narrow margin between the black shade of the spruces and the clear, shallow water, and its petals shone out of a soft mist of tiny white aster blooms in many places. Farther up stream, and indeed in most woodland shadow throughout the Notch, grows the Eupatorium urticæfolium, which, though its common name is "white snake root," is nevertheless the daintiest of the thoroughworts. Its flowers are a finer, whiter fluff of mist than are those of the aster, so plentiful on the shore of the not dismal pool and which I take to be aster ericoides. In late August they seem to me quite the most beautiful flowers of the Notch woodlands. In this I do not except the blue harebells which grow so plentifully on the sandy flats down by the Willey House site. Above the tree line the harebells are beautiful. Here they are straggling and pale and are not to be compared with their hardier, sturdier sisters.
As railroad, highway and river draw together and touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the Notch, so do all other tides of travel. Here in spring should be the finest place in the world to see all migrant birds on their way farther north. The valley of the Saco catches them as in the flare of a wide tunnel and gradually draws them together here. At certain corners in London all the world is said, sooner or later, to pass. So at the gateway of the Notch one should see in May and June all north-bound varieties of birds. Even at this time of year the wandering tribes concentrate at this spot and bird life seems far more plentiful than at any other equal area in the mountains. On the bare heights of the Presidential Range, which I had been travelling for long, the juncos are one's only bird companions. Here in deep forest glades variety after variety passed singing or twittering by. Here were robins, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throated sparrows, chickadees in flocks. Red-eyed vireos preached in the tops of yellow birches. A yellow-throated vireo twined and peered among the twigs, gathering aphids. Here were myrtle and magnolia warblers and a blackpoll, all residents in the neighborhood without doubt, but all on their way, and seen in a brief time.
"Where railroad, highway, and river draw together and touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the Notch"
Most pleasing of all to me was a strange new chickadee voice which sang something very like the ordinary black-capped chickadee song, but with a slower and far different intonation. I followed the maker of this old song with new words over some very rough country, from one side of the Notch just below the nick to the other, for I was very eager to see him. By and by I found him with others of his kind swinging head down from twigs, climbing and flitting in a fashion that is that of all chickadees, but had a quality of its own, nevertheless. Here was a flock of chickadees, with less of nervousness in their manner and a little more poise, if I may put it that way, than the blackcaps have, chickadees with brown crowns instead of black, and, I thought, a little more of buff in their under parts. All summer I had looked for the Hudsonian chickadee on one mountain slope after another, and I had not found him. But here in the nick of the Notch a flock had come to me and I did my best to see and hear as much as possible of them. They, too, were on their way, but were probably residents of the neighborhood, for I took them to be one family, father, mother and five youngsters, just learning to forage for themselves. This they did in true chickadee fashion, swinging and singing, flitting and sitting, and always following and swallowing food, to me invisible, with great gusto.
The song was what pleased me most. One authority on birds has written it down in a book that the song of the Hudsonian chickadee is not distinguishable from that of the blackcap, though uttered more incessantly. Another, equally reliable, says the notes are quite unlike those of the blackcap. My Hudsonian chickadees sang the blackcap's song, but they sang it a trifle more leisurely and with a bit of a lisp. But that is not all. There is something in the quality of the tone that reminded me at once of a comb concert. It was as if these roguish youngsters had put paper about a comb and were lustily singing the prescribed song through this buzzing medium. It may be that other Hudsonian chickadees sing differently. Birds are intensely individualistic, and it is hardly safe to generalize from one flock. This may have been a troupe doing the mountain resorts with a comb concert specialty and tuning up as they travelled, as many minstrels do, but the results were certainly as I have described them. I am curious to see more birds of this feather and see if they, too, conform, but I fancy Crawford Notch is about the southern limit of the variety in summer, and I may not hear another serenade in passing. These certainly found me as interesting as I did them. They fearlessly flew down on twigs very near me and looked me over with bright eyes, the while talking through their combs about my characteristics and how I differed from the Hudsonian variety of man. It was a genuine case of mutual nature study.
Very cosy all these things made the nick of the Notch, but now and then as I scrambled through its rough forest aisles the mountains looked down on me through a gap in the trees, frowning so portentously from such overhanging heights that I was minded to jump and flee from the imminent annihilation. For, after all, the beauty of flowers and the friendliness of birds, the architectural decorations of the firs and spruces, even the monster semblances of the rock carvings that overhang, are but the embroidery on the real impression of the Crawford Notch. To get this it is well to go down the long slope of the highway, ten miles and more, till you emerge below Sawyer's River where Hart's Ledge frowns high above Cobb's Ferry. Thus you shall know something of the length of this tremendous fold in the rock ribs of the earth. Here is no work of erosion alone. The Notch was made primarily by the bending of the granite of the mountains that rise in such tremendous sweeps on either side to heights of thousands of feet. On most of their swift-slanting sides some dirt and débris of rock has accumulated and the forest has clothed them, but this clothing is thin and in many places the slant is so swift and the surface so smooth that the rock lies bare to the sun, and all streams have swept it clean. In August little water comes down these, but there is the bare channel of brown rock up which one may look from the highway, taking in the whole sweep of a stream at a glance. At the bottom of these swift glissades the tangled piles of smashed rocks show with what force the waters come down when floods push them.