Beside this they sang little twittering ditties that were quite musical and altogether uncanny as well, and seemed to fill the golden woodland aisles with all sorts of suggestions of goblin adventures to be found there. Between me and the deep heart of the Carter-Moriah range was unbroken wilderness out of which might well come any of the phantoms the Pequawkets were wont to declare they saw there. Climbing steadily toward the top of the long ridge which swings round from the old farm to the summit of Wildcat I thought I heard the footsteps of that great white moose that breathed fire from his nostrils and turned back all arrows before they reached him. Nearing the top I knew I heard him—or something just as good—an irregular stamping which I stealthily approached from behind the screen of gray tree trunks and golden forest leaves.
Almost at the top I could see the shaking of boughs from which the creature was browsing, and to me, approaching from below and with the elfin incantations of the nuthatches still in my ears, these seemed very high in air. Some creature of prodigious size was just beyond and in a moment more a turn of a rock corner revealed part of him. A long, lean, white neck I saw, and a head stretching high up to a maple limb whence prehensile lips plucked pink-cheeked leaves. Its mouth full the creature turned a long face toward me and neighed, and the forest aisles echoed the spluttering whinny in tones full as uncanny in their laughter as had been those of the nuthatches; also vastly louder. Somebody's old white horse looked at me with a mild curiosity as I tramped up to him on this ridge of the Wildcat wilderness, and at sight of him the spectral moose vanished into the past century, there to remain with the Indians who claimed to have seen him.
Spectral enough the old horse looked here in the deep shadows of the wood. He had "yarded" on the hilltop much as deer do in winter. I found well-worn trails of his, leading hither and thither on the ridge, but none going away from it, and, under the shade of a beech, in what had tried to be a thick bed of spinulose wood ferns, was evidently his nightly bed. He had worn the earth bare in his clumsy getting up and lying down. Far down the terraces of the old farm in sunny glades were pastured other horses and cattle. There they stayed, for the feed was good and water near, and they loved the sight of the lower pasture bars that will later let them out to the road to stalls of which they dream. But here was a finer soul than these, a hermit that preferred the cool fragrance of wood fern and the unmolested quiet of his wooded hilltop, from the loopholes of whose retreat he might look upon the world. I fancy him the best horse of the herd.
Now and then you find a man like that, and I dare say such an one was the maker of the old farm. As I came down again into his highest field the sun was sinking behind Boott's Spur and cool blue shadows stretched out across the low, sweet curves of the Wildcat River valley. Against them the pale smoke of supper fires rose lazily and far over from the gorge below Carter Notch floated the hush of falling waters. The blue of the mountains to southward deepened and only on their summits sat the rose of sunset fire. Behind me in the wood was now no sound of nuthatches, but a single robin sat in a treetop and sang softly, as if to himself. On such a scene of peace and unsurpassed beauty it is easy to fancy the college-bred pioneer looking at nightfall and finding it good. If his descendants descended through the pasture bars to be stall-fed in cities, so much the worse for them.
XIX
SUMMER'S FAREWELL
The Blaze of Its Adieu to Mount Washington
Summer lingers yet just south of Mount Washington and, though often frowned away, as often returns to say good-bye, "parting is such sweet sorrow." Already there have been days when the frown was deep, when the hoar frost on the summit clung as white as snow in the sun and refused to melt even on the southerly slopes, when at night the cold of winter bit deep and the Lakes of the Clouds shone wan in the morning light under a coating of new, black ice. Then summer has come back, dissolving the repentant frost into tears at a touch of warm lips, bending and quivering over the great gray dome of the summit until, approaching from peaks to the southward, I have seen her presence surround all in a shimmering enfolding of loving radiance.
From the high ridge of Boott's Spur I saw it thus, slipping back myself to say good-bye, of a day in late September. From no point in the mountains does one get a finer impression of the massive dignity of Washington summit than from this. The Spur is itself no mean mountain, rising with precipitous abruptness from between Tuckerman Ravine and the Gulf of Slides, bounding in rounding, thousand-foot ledges from Pinkham Notch to a height of more than 5500 feet; it lifts the persistent climber to a veritable mizzen-top whence he looks still upward to the main truck of the summit, with the wonderful rock rift of Tuckerman Ravine between, dropping out of sight behind sheer cliffs at his feet. On such an autumn day there is a mighty exhilaration in thus floating in blue sky on such a pinnacle. The body is conscious that the spirit within it steps forth from peak to peak into limitless space and is ready to shout with the joy of it. Indian summer, which does not come down to the sea-coast levels for another month, touches the high ranges now, and under its magic they remember spring. It paints the brown grasses, the sedges and the leaves of the three-toothed cinquefoil which scantily streak the cone of Washington, with a purple tint, and the gray rocks themselves ripen like grapes with a soft blue bloom in all shadows.