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Title: Sandhills sketches
Author: Williams Haynes
Release date: February 26, 2026 [eBook #78048]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: D. O. Haynes & Co, 1916
Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SANDHILLS SKETCHES ***
[Illustration: THE LUMBEE TWISTS THROUGH THE SANDHILLS]
Sandhills Sketches
BY
WILLIAMS HAYNES
_Author of “Casco Bay Yarns,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS.
NEW YORK
D. O. HAYNES & CO. Publishers
_COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAMS HAYNES_
This little book is just what its title implies: pages from a note book
kept during a winter spent in the Piedmont Country of North Carolina.
Because the story of the Sandhills has not heretofore been told, it has
seemed worth while to collect them in this form.
With one exception, the following sketches have been published in
various magazines, and my thanks are due the proprietors of “Travel,”
“Forecast,” “House and Garden,” and “Outing” for their kind permission
to reprint material that first appeared in their publications.
WILLIAMS HAYNES.
Northampton, Mass.
CONTENTS
DODGING WINTER 5
“THEM HUGGINS BOYS” 15
A SANDHILLS CHRISTMAS CAROL 31
“TAR BURNIN’” 43
SOME QUAIL DOGS AND OTHERS 54
THE CLAY BIRDS 67
THROUGH A JUNGLE TO THE OLD SOUTH 79
Dodging Winter
A winter vacation is as seductive as the opium pipe. Slip away to the
sunny Southland just once during the winter; next season you will
surely want to do it again--one whiff and you are an habitué.
How drear and dismal snow-bound January seems! What a torrent of
chilly discomfort is the sleet and slush of March! The golf bag, or
the gun case, in the corner by the fireplace is a subtle, suggestive
temptation, and even the cheery open fire itself calls up memories of
crackling pine knots that spluttered and blazed not in deadly earnest,
so that you should not shiver, but lightly and brightly, impregnating
the air with the pungent frankincense of comradeship.
There is a glorious exultation in dodging Winter. You cannot really
fight on equal terms with the old rascal--a steam heater is such a
pitiful weapon after all--so there is a keen delight in snapping your
fingers under his frost-bitten nose. When you slip out of the freezing
grasp of his long, cold arms, you have cheated a cruel, inexorable
Fate. You feel like the hero of a Greek tragedy who has gloriously
turned the play to comedy, and there is a peculiarly delicious feeling
of freedom. The smelly coolness of the mid-summer woods is a respite
from the burning heat of the city in July; the tingling, briny
freshness of the wind-swept sea rocks is a reprieve--but the southern
sun in winter gives freely a full pardon to the weather prisoner. It is
he himself who weaves the enticing spell of the winter vacation, and
the minute you tumble out of the Pullman, from whose blackened eaves
the ghosts of icicles still trickle, you become a pagan sun worshipper.
Some winter vacationists carry their sun worshipping to a fanatic
extreme. They are not at all content to bask in the sun, they must go
way to Florida or Bermuda to be fairly baked. This sun gluttony carries
its own punishments of lazy lassitude and all the risks of a sniffling
cold or hacking cough when one must, as one always must, return to the
cold North. It is wiser and more temperate to slip just far enough into
the South to find a friendly sun, but not so far that he becomes a bore.
Isn’t the ideal winter play-place a country where it is warm enough
for you to feel the sun, so, if you are out-of-doors, you do not need
mufflers and ear tabs; where you can ride or motor, shoot or fish, play
golf or tennis without a bungling sweater clinging to your shoulders
and elbows; where you can sit under the trees an hour and read a
favorite book without your fingers being numbed to blueness? But don’t
you like a tang of frost in the morning air? Fifteen minutes in that
air before breakfast is worth a whole month of cold baths and setting
up exercises for starting the day right. In such a country too, the
nights will be cool and refreshing as spring water, and you will sleep
a sleep more strengthening than the most potent tonic in the whole
pharmacopoeia.
Such a winter play-place is the Piedmont country of the Carolinas, the
Sandhills, as the natives who “made cotton and corn on the clay” of the
lowlands contemptuously christened them years ago. This was the old
sea shore of the continent, and the sandy soil is even today, after all
these geological ages, almost as white as a beach. The Sandhills roll
away gently, not unlike great dunes, and through each little valley
trickles a little stream--“branches” the natives call them--on whose
banks crowd great clumps of holly bushes, bluegums, and magnolias. The
dry, sandy soil, like a great blotter, keeps the air as dry as cotton,
and the most soaking rain leaves no puddles or mud holes behind it.
This, as the Old North State’s hearty toast proudly proclaims, is indeed
“The land of the long leaf pine,
The southern land where the sun doth shine.”
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
GRAPES, PEACHES AND COTTON THE STAPLE PRODUCTS OF THE SANDHILLS ALL
GROWING IN ONE FIELD]
Even the golfer on the Pinehurst links, who is so strictly admonished
“to keep his eye on the ball,” carries away with him the picture of
the towering long-leaf pines with their great, foot-long needles and
their giant cones. The Aiken motorist, as he bowls down the hillsides
and rattles over the little wooden bridge that spans the branch, cannot
fail to distinguish out of the whirling landscape the sandy hilltops
and the green thickets along the valley bottoms. The fox hunter, since
Reynard will surely lay a line of scent ’way off the beaten tracks into
the heart of the pine woods and the magnolia lowlands, will know the
Sandhills better. But the one who tramps over the Sandhills behind a
brace of bird dogs will know them best. Up through the valley, skirting
the branch--over the hillside and across the fallow cotton fields--a
scramble over the rail fence and a plunge through the tangle of holly
bushes and briars all snarled with creepers--splash, splash, through
the stream and up the other side of the hill. He is sure to learn the
country first hand, and he will meet all sorts of interesting people.
A lusty negro boy will be perfectly delighted to stop chopping at
the black-jack stumps to tell him, “Dere’s a whalin’ big cobey ob
birds done feed ober in dat field ob cow-peas. Ah hyah ’em whistlin’
’bout half an hour ’go.” On a level hilltop an old darky tar burner
will be his willing instructor in the mysteries of tar making. In a
little hollow, miles from the high road, he will come suddenly upon a
slatternly cabin with a curious chimney of clay and crossed sticks.
Here a trio of putty faced babies will eye him suspiciously from behind
the pig sty while their mother, a drab, timid woman, gives him a dipper
of water.
The quail shooter cannot wander over the Sandhills without sooner or
later being reminded of the post card with the picture of the revenue
officers and the score of captured blockade whisky stills he sent
off to his particular friend the first night he reached his hotel. I
remember very well a suspicious old fellow, whose curt answers and
strange advice sent our imaginations weaving tales of the moonshiners.
’Way back in the hills the dogs found a big covey beside a swamp and
the birds flushed over the hill. We followed them to pick up the
scattered singles and found two before we noticed this old fellow
sitting on a stump at the edge of the thicket. We called in the dogs
and walked over to him. He sat there, his elbows on his knees, his
hands clasped in front of him, quite motionless. A rusty, single
barrelled shotgun, with a hammer as big as a clothes hook, rested in
the crook of his arm, and between his feet sat a thin, black and tan
foxhound, with a meek, sorrowful expression in her dark eyes. Neither
man nor dog moved as we came up to them.
“Hello. Is this your land?” I asked.
He had been peering at us keenly from under his heavy brows as we
approached, but now he dropped his eyes and mumbled noncommittally,
“Dunno.”
“It isn’t posted, is it?”
“Tain’t posted,” he replied shortly.
“Are you finding many rabbits?” I asked him cheerfully.
“Ain’t huntin’ rabbits.”
“’Possums then?” I suggested.
“Ain’t huntin’ ’possum.”
“Does your hound point quail?”
“Nope.”
“Are you running deer? We saw some tracks back in the swamp.”
“Ain’t huntin’ deer.”
“Well, what are you hunting?”
“Ain’t huntin’ nawthin’.”
I gave up in despair, and my friend asked him very politely, “Do you
live hereabouts?”
“Ovah yondah,” he answered without a sign, so whether his home was
north, south, east, or west, and whether a hundred yards or ten miles
away, there was no telling.
“Are there many birds about here?”
“Dunno,” he answered shortly.
“Queen” had found another bird and was pointing beautifully. We went
over to her and my friend made a fine shot on a hard single. We started
on and the old man yelled after us. We stopped and turned. He was
hobbling slowly towards us.
“Is it possible he has found his tongue?” I whispered.
“The age of miracles is past,” replied my companion.
“Them birds you-all is huntin’,” said the old man when he was close
beside us, “went ovah t’other side o’ the swamp.”
“But,” protested my friend, “we saw them come over the hill and we’ve
found three singles already.”
“Right smart o’ ’em circled ’round.”
“Are you sure?” I persisted.
“Sartin’,” he grunted.
We exchanged glances, both wondering whether we were receiving a
friendly tip from a strange fellow-sportsman or whether we were being
gently warned away from the proximity of an illicit whisky still. We
accepted his advice and recrossed the swamp. We found just one lone
bird on that hillside where he had indicated, that “right smart o’ ’em”
had flown.
As we went down the hill on the other side my friend asked me in all
seriousness, “You know something about this Tar Heel dialect--would you
call one, ’right smart’?”
“Would you?” I asked, and we both laughed.
If “the East is East and the West is West,” so the North is North and
the South, South. That, if you really know the Sandhills, is one of
the best charms of a winter vacation in that fascinating country. It
is a very different country with different trees and flowers and birds
and animals. The people too, are different. The Sandhill darky is a
type quite distinct, and the Tar Heel is as fascinating and romantic
as his cousin up in the Cumberland Mountains. You will not find these
things at your hotel nor in the shops at Southern Pines, or Hamlet,
or Aberdeen. You will not find them on the golf links or the tennis
courts. You are very apt to ride over them on horseback, and you will
surely pass them in a motor; but they are there, and over and above the
good sport of winter play, they add a great deal to the fun of dodging
winter in the Sandhills.
“Them Huggins Boys”
Everybody in the Sandhills, it seemed, knew “them Huggins boys”, and
nobody had a good word to say for them. Everywhere I went I heard of
them, and everything that I heard was ill.
Just after my arrival, as I was superintending the loading of my trunk
onto a most rickety wagon, the station agent touched my arm and,
pointing across the tracks, said, “Thar’s one o’ them Huggins boys,
suh.”
I caught a fleeting glance of an amazingly long and lank youth jogging
away astraddle a dilapidated mule.
“Looks like Ichabod Crane, doesn’t he?” I noted casually.
The station agent was frankly puzzled to find the resemblance. He
scratched his sandy head and spat thoughtfully.
“Ah doan reckon,” he drawled, “Ah know What’s-his-name Crane. Is he
kin to the Cranes over in Scotland County?”
“No,” I laughed, “he’s a school-master in a book.”
This information relieved him immensely. He would have been touched to
the quick in his pride had he failed to recognize anyone in all the
Sandhills, but a character in a book was quite a different matter. He
grinned appreciatively.
“Oh,” he replied easily, “Ah ain’t much at book readin’; but ef
What’s-his-name Crane looked laik them Huggins boys, Ah bet he wasn’t
much of a school teacher.”
“Looks are deceiving,” I quoted.
“They shore are--them Huggins boys ain’t more’n half as mean lookin’ as
they is.”
It was my turn to be puzzled, but the trunk was loaded now, and by the
time I had given Uncle Willis his instructions, the agent had stepped
back into his cubbyhole office. I wanted to question him further about
“them Huggins boys” and find out the reason for his venomous words, but
there were many things to be attended to, and, resolving to drop in on
him some day between train times, I hurried over to the store.
Ten minutes later I again heard of “them Huggins boys.” The
storekeeper, introductions having been completed and after he had
done his duty by the good weather and the abundance of quail in the
vicinity, remarked in his cheerful, talkative way that a neighbor of
mine had just left.
“Is that so--who was it?” I asked politely.
“One of them Huggins boys.”
I began to be distinctly curious about these mysterious youths.
“’Bout a mile away,” the storekeeper replied to my question, “but Ah
reckon you’ll find that close enough.”
“These Huggins boys don’t seem to be very popular,” I said, hoping to
lead him on.
“They ain’t,” he answered shortly, adding confidentially, “Doan you
lend ’em nawthin’ you set no value on.”
Another customer interrupted us. I thanked him for his advice, and he
supplemented it with the information. “We-all doan give ’em no credit
here.”
That evening my next door neighbor, who lived half a mile away, dropped
in to extend his welcome. He too, warned me about these boys. Later
I questioned his overseer, who had ordered them off the plantation,
and he characterized them shortly as “the damnedest nuisances in the
country”. Uncle Willis, after a deal of questioning, confessed, “Well,
Massa Billie, hit’s disaway, dey is jest natcherly meaner dan a mad
mule”.
Bits like this, a little here and a little there, I gathered up
everywhere. In little scraps too, I collected their history. Their
father before them had been a notorious character, famous as a fighter
and a leader of moonshiners. All his life he had been a hard-drinking,
work-hating good-for-nothing, and his sons, according to common report,
were following right in his unsteady footsteps. There was not enough
energy among the four of them to cultivate their little farm properly.
They raised a little cotton and harbored a scrubby cow and half a dozen
gaunt, half-wild hogs, but land and stock, little cabin and dilapidated
barn were all going to rack and ruin as fast as abuse and neglect
could drive them. Failing to make a living out of what might have been
a good little plantation, they hired out for odd jobs and in the winter
burned tar. But their services were never greatly in demand, and just
how they managed to live, and their old mother and sister too, was a
mystery. Some people, with a great show of pretended knowledge, hinted
at a blockade still and raw corn liquor sold to the darkies for two
bits a quart. Others pointed out that whatever ready money they scraped
together was invested in the cheapest and most virulent whisky, which
argued against any home-made intoxicants. All this I learned before I
made their acquaintance, and our first meeting did not tend to improve
the opinion I had formed of them.
One Sunday morning, as I was sitting on the verandah pretending to
read, but really luxuriating in the January sun, the Sabbath peace was
rudely broken by a quavering falsetto voice whining out a darky song:
“De Lord he thought he’d mak’ a man.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Lil’ bit o’ earth an’ lil’ bit o’ sand.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Thought He’d mak’ a ’ooman too.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Cast about see what He’d do.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!”
The mournful sound was getting louder and louder. Evidently the singer
was coming up the driveway. I laid aside my book and walked around the
house to see who it was.
“Took a rib from Adam’s side.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Made Miss Eve t’ be his bride.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”
I stepped around the corner and the song stopped abruptly. A most
remarkable vehicle, an ancient phaeton, all besplattered with red clay
mud and held together with odd bits of rope, twine, and wire, was
approaching at a slow and dignified pace. It was drawn by a little
moth-eaten mule who dragged his hoofs through the sand and flopped his
big ears in a distressingly spiritless manner. In violent contrast
to their melancholy equipage two cheerful figures sprawled in the
carriage. The driver, his great feet thrust over the wobbly dashboard
his head resting on the back of the seat, was paying much more
attention to the wisps of white clouds overhead than to his steed. His
companion, the singer, sat sideways, swinging his legs over the side
in time with his song. He broke off in the middle of a word when he
caught sight of me, and giving the driver a violent nudge, switched
himself around into the carriage. The driver slipped his feet off the
dashboard and hunched up into an almost sitting position. The mule just
stopped and, for all the world with the Dormouse at the mad tea-party,
immediately went to sleep. The singer, too, might have posed for the
drawings of the Mad Hatter himself. He had the same lean face with
high cheek bones; the same bulging eyes and prominent nose; the same
protruding teeth and receding chin. Nor was the driver unlike the March
Hare. There was a strange mixture of brazen effrontery and extreme
timidity in his manner. His shifting eyes and shuffling feet belied his
bold speech.
“Good morning,” I said.
The singer nodded embarrassedly, and the driver, his eyes scanning the
landscape, grunted, “Mawnin’”.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“Is you the gemmen’s rented dis place?” asked the driver bluntly.
I told them I had and they exchanged glances.
“Ah’m Jim Huggins,” the driver replied to my question, “an’ he’s mah
brother Tom,” indicating the singer with a side-wise jerk of his head.
“We live ovah yondah.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “two of the Huggins boys. I’m glad to meet you. I’ve
heard of you.”
They shook hands doubtfully, and Jim questioned me with open suspicion.
“What’d you heah ’bout us?”
Tom, who had not spoken till now, shifted uneasily, and before I could
reply asked if I didn’t want to buy some eggs.
“MacDougall’s sellin’ ’em at the store,” he added, “fo’ fo’ty cents a
dozen, but we-all’l let you have ’em for thirty-five.”
I had bought eggs from MacDougall just the day before for thirty-five
cents.
“You say,” I said, “that you’ll sell me eggs for five cents less than
the store price?”
He nodded eagerly.
“Well, then. I’ll give you thirty cents a dozen for them--if Sally
wants some.”
Again they exchanged glances.
“Ah reckon that’ll be alright,” said Jim, looking everywhere but at me.
I called Sally out of her kitchen, and she explained that “’deed, Massa
Billie, we-all has all de aiggs we kin use till ’bout Wednesday,” so
I told the Huggins boys to come back then. Their almost proverbial
meanness flared up at this. They considered my refusal to buy of them
an insult and a great injustice, and muttered threats and abuse.
“Here,” I said, “stop your grumbling and clear out. I didn’t ask you to
bring me eggs, and I’ve ordered some for next Wednesday though you lied
about the price. Stop your grumbling and get along with you. And next
time you come round here leave that home.”
I pointed to an empty flask that lay neglected on the floor of the
carriage. Jim kicked it under the seat, jerked at the reins to wake up
the mule, and with something about “Jest’s you say, boss,” drove slowly
off.
So these were the far-famed Huggins boys. I watched them half way down
the driveway, and then went back to my sunny seat and the book. As I
settled myself, the quavering tones of Tom’s high voice, taking up
again his interrupted song, came floating to me.
‘Put ’em in a gardin fair.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Tole ’em eat what they see there.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine ’t rise again.
“Sarpint wound around a trunk.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again.
At Miss Eve his eye he wunk.
Dese bones gwine rise again.
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”
The words faded gradually in the distance into a thin minor wail.
[Illustration: THIS IS A “FRUIT-STAND & PORK”]
The very next morning I had another visit from “them Huggins boys”.
I was out riding at the time, and when I came back I noticed someone
had driven in and out of the driveway. It had rained during the night
and the fresh tracks were plain in the sandy road. The hoof prints
were long and narrow, evidently of a mule, and I wondered idly who my
visitor could have been. Sally told me.
“Hit’s dose shiftless Huggins boys again. They was trying t’ sell mo’
eggs, an’ they got out an’ cum right in de libin’ room. Ah couldn’t
stop ’em nohow.”
Evidently they were going to make themselves a first-class nuisance
unless I put my foot down firmly. Resolving to read them the riot
act next time they came around, I tied the pony and went into the
house, Sally protesting all the while against “all dese heah pore
white trash”. I went to the mantlepiece to fill my pipe. There was
the tobacco pouch, but my pipe, my favorite briar, which I was sure I
had put there just before I went out, was not there. Sally remembered
seeing it, but had not touched it.
“Hit mus’ a been them Huggins boys tuk hit,” she suggested.
I hurried out and jumped on the pony.
“Ef dey’s been drinkin’ look out fo’ ’em,” Sally called after me.
“Dey’s pow’rful mean in liquah.”
“Don’t worry about me, Sally,” I called back. “They wouldn’t hurt
anybody.”
By riding ’cross lots I came out on the road to their farm ahead of
them. The telltale tracks in the sand told they had driven out, but
had not yet returned. I rode back to meet them. Half way to the main
road I came up with them. They were coming along at their usual funeral
pace, and the musical Tom was whistling a jolly jig tune. I rode up and
stopped their mule.
“Good mawnin’, suh,” they chorused.
“Which of you boys smokes a pipe?” I asked.
They were surprised and outdid each other in looking as innocent as
lambs.
“Whichever it is, hand over my pipe.”
They shifted uneasily, but neither made a move to restore my property.
“Come, be quick,” I said, moving the pony in closer to their carriage.
Tom slowly reached in his pocket and drew out my pipe. He reached it
out to me silently.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now understand this: the next time I catch or hear
of one of you boys on my place except on business I am coming after him
with this.”
I shook my riding crop and they nodded solemnly. The pony was dancing
about and I rode off, leaving them looking after me surprised and
disgusted, a little mad, but properly scared. After that we became
friends.
Till recently the country where “them Huggins boys” live has been known
all over North Carolina as “poor old Moore County”. It lies in the
very heart of the Sandhills, and the farmers who “make corn and cotton
on the clay” have long scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the joke
runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting trying to make a living in the
poor soil”. Too poor even to give a decent stand of grass--except the
coarse, useless crab grass--the Sandhills supported a fine growth of
long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins boys’ grandfather and his
neighbors eked out their thin crops with the tall, straight timber and
with turpentine. Their sons, the best of the timber gone, hewed out
railroad ties and burned tar. They were poor farmers on poor soil, a
ruinous combination. The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’ natives,
having little to sell and nothing with which to buy, lived sufficient
unto themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and a hard one, a life of few
pleasures and almost no advantages, of much labor and little reward.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
DESERTED TURPENTINE STILL]
A score of years ago new factors entered into the life of the
Sandhills. Inspired by the few passengers and little freight on this
division of the road, railroad men turned their attention to this
country. They sent agricultural and industrial experts who reported
back that all the Sandhills had was a glorious winter climate. So the
general passenger agent and the traffic manager consulted physicians,
and the Sandhills became famous as a resort for tubercular patients.
But wiser men nipped the growing sanitoriums in the bud and planted in
their stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf courses, hunting
preserves.
Men and women came from all over the country to slip away from Jack
Frost and play in the open, and the mysterious spell of the Sandhills
was thrown over them.
Under this spell a little group of Northern men, fresh from college,
ambitious and full of energy, decided the Sandhills should be good for
other things besides golf and quail shooting. Agricultural experts from
Raleigh and Washington said things that confirmed this belief, and
these young men turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins boys’ father and
his neighbors in poor old Moore County laughed at these soft-handed
agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with great profit over at
Jackson Springs; they grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought top price
in the open market, and their big dairy near Hoffman sold cream to
the railroad and fed hogs on the skimmed milk. The pioneers have been
followed by others, and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors from good
examples have learned to get bigger crops and sell them for higher
prices.
[Illustration: AT THE PINEHURST FARM]
[Illustration: LORD OF THE PINEHURST DAIRY]
But in among the hills, a little way back from the railroad and the
new automobile highways the old life, the hard, narrow life, is still
lived. “Them Huggins boys” and their poor, old mother and drab sister
are still drudging along in the old way. That, after I knew them,
was the only real fault I found. They are not vicious or mean: they
are frightened and suspicious. They are not clever and they are very
lazy, so they have no confidence in themselves to cope with the keener
competition that the new life has brought. They have neither the speed
nor the stamina to stand the swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath
their diffidence and sham effrontery they are helpless and hopeless.
They are the tattered remnants of an out-worn age.
[Illustration: OLD SLAVE QUARTERS]
A Sandhills Christmas Carol
“Chris’mas gift, Massa Billie, Chris’mas gift!”
Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at the door of my room, trying at
once to waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit. I opened one eye and
she redoubled her efforts, laughing.
“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is it?”
“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie--’deed hit’s ’most aight
o’clock.”
“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt upright in bed, “didn’t I
tell you to call me at six?”
“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest knowed you’d not want to go
shootin’ dis mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”
Sally was right; it was raining, a steady, soaking, most
un-Christmas-like rain. Out of the little windows I could see the
Sandhills drenched and dripping. The great long-leafed pines, so proud
and stately in the bright sunlight, stood dejected and tawdry. Even the
jovial little holly bush at the corner of the porch had quite lost its
gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the head of the branch, the
rich, warm greens and olives of the magnolias and bluegums seemed grey
and melancholy in the fine mist that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,”
the most sedate and dignified of pointers, strolled into my room and
put his head on the side of the bed.
“No hunting for us today, old man,” I said to him, and he sniffed
sympathetically and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to say, “I know
it--ain’t it the devil?” He was so very sad about it that I could not
help laughing at the old sportsman.
Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A rainy Christmas--no
shooting--and stuck off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from
anywhere, with only the remnants of another man’s library for
company--Ugh! I dragged on my clothes without any enthusiasm for the
day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast--golden scrambled eggs heaped up in the
center of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn bread, and steaming
cakes smothered in molasses--cheered me wonderfully; and then, after
breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband, came shuffling up from his cabin
for his “Chris’mas gift.”
He inspected his present thoughtfully, and thanked me with verbose
formality for it. Then he began talking. Willis is always an
entertaining conversationalist, though I fear he is not a thoroughly
reliable source of exact information. As Toby confided to me one day,
“Dat nigger’s de wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de whol’ state
of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s some tol’ably good liars down disaways.”
His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged Willis a Midas. He knew
more about cotton than the whole of the Department of Agriculture, and
as for tar burning, he could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of a
cord of pine wood than any nigger in Moore County, though he would
begrudgingly acknowledge that Jim Watson could go him one better in
this. There was a wonderful, childlike simplicity in his optimism, but
his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns was irritating till you
recognized the artist in him. I remember how out of patience I was
with him when he solemnly informed me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago
he’d been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt down in Drownin’ Creek
Swamp.”
“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are an unmitigated liar!”
“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout
hit.”
So I did, but this Christmas morning I was in no humor to listen to his
prattle, and until he got on the subject of “hants and conjurin’,” I
gave him but scant attention. The sly rascal knows this way of arousing
my flagging interest, and employs it very effectively.
“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s
been conjurin’ Lee Gordon, has yo’?”
“I haven’t, no--who is Lee Gordon?”
“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de
railroad wid de section gang, but he done move to Hoffman las’ night.”
“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I asked skeptically.
“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas eve. When he come home last
evenin’ he done found a conjure layin’ right on de front do’-step. Ah
doan’ jest ’actly know what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore a
mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his audience he launched forth in full
details of how the darky had moved his wife and numerous children, all
his goods and chattels, right over to Hoffman and was staying with his
wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.
“Why did he move last night?” I asked to egg him on.
“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in dat cabin wid a conjure
layin’ on de front do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”
“Why not?” I replied, New England fashion, to draw him out.
“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied earnestly, “yo’ is laik
t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’ doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die
anyway. But dey all moved out de back do’,” he added reassuringly. He
digressed to tell how all the household goods had been taken out the
back way, stopping to recount the history of a certain bed, a family
heirloom of slavery days. Finally, however, he got back to conjuring,
and, expressing in the same breath his most abject fear and his
utter contempt for all Black Art, he told me considerable about this
mysterious matter. “Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so I learned, you
can kill your enemies by placing a conjure where they will walk over
it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive, you can merely
drive them crazy by placing a hair of their head in the tough bark of a
little, twisted black-jack oak. Should you be very merciful indeed, and
if you merely wish to get some objectionable person out of your path,
you can pick up a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road and
throw it, accompanied by proper chants and incantations, into running
water. Henceforth that person will be a hapless wanderer over the face
of the earth. There are, I gather, other awful powers that obey the
commands of the conjurer, and his poor victims can only be freed from
his spell by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm having been duly
crossed, will first determine the exact nature of the spell. He takes
a little iron kettle about the size of your two fists, and mounts this
upon a little pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle he places cold
water from a running stream and into it he throws salt, herbs, and
sundry mysterious powders. Then he kindles the fire. While the little
blaze crackles, he chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the sticks
before the kettle boils it means “yo’ is shore conjured”--a thing that
must assuredly happen if the doctor is careful to use dry wood that is
fairly steeped with rosin. Then you must cross his palm again, and he
will throw about you a counter-charm.
At this point my lesson in Black Art was interrupted.
Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over by the Tower, knocked on the
door, and I could never get Willis to resume his course of instruction.
Jerry, grinning and bobbing, delivered a formal invitation from the
switch operator over at the signal tower on the railroad, half a mile
away, to come and share with him a Christmas box he had received from
his wife. I accepted, and we set off, the boy and I, through the warm
drizzle that enveloped you and soaked through your clothes as if they
had been tissue paper.
The Christmas box was not a perfect success. It had been packed in
cardboard and had been sadly damaged in transit, so that you would
bite into a crumpled piece of capital, homemade cake to find the
frosting--and maybe a brick-like gum drop--embedded in the center. But
my host, the operator, is a communicative, ingenuous soul whose spirits
no amount of Christmas rain could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had spent
two hours of his spare time ploughing through swamps to pick a great
bunch of holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a sprig of which dangled
at the end of a silver cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers
of his switches. The day was close and muggy, but in honor of the
occasion his little, pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with heat.
Over his telegraph instruments was strung a line of garish Christmas
post cards, flaming with scarlet and emerald green daubs of color,
besprinkled with tinsel, declaring, as through a megaphone, “Peace on
Earth--Good Will to Men.” The stuffy little signal tower fairly reeked
with the Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching fruit cake I looked
over at my happy host and was ashamed that a little rain should wash
all the warm, generous Christmas out of me.
Yes, this was decidedly better than moping alone in the bungalow.
With every freight that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath,
a burly brakeman would thrump up the steps of the signal tower for
train orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber coat, he would throw
open the door with a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a peach of a
Christmas day?” If his train must wait on the switch for another to
pass, he would sit down by the fire and between enormous mouthfuls
of cake and candy, tell a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad
gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph table watching this
strange procession. After a short nod they paid little attention to
me, for my host never bothered with introductions, and I sat there
with the curious feeling that I was at the theatre. Certainly these
men were of another world, each so different and yet each so true to
the type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow with the sharp twang
of Down East in his voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling
whose low drawl betrayed him long before he casually mentioned that he
wished he could have been home in Savannah this day. They talked only
of railroading. They whirled up and down the length of the country from
New York to Florida and back again, many times during the year and saw
nothing but switches and roundhouses; they passed nothing but expresses
and other freights; they met no one save engineers, conductors, and
brakemen like themselves. They lived a life divided into miles and
minutes, bounded by the glistening rails, but within this life they
found complete absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous life in
which exact knowledge is at a premium.
[Illustration: ON THE SWITCH BY THE TOWER]
About three o’clock in the afternoon, “Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac.
He was working the “second trick,” or as we out of the signal towers
would say, the second shift, and he came over on a freight to be ready
to take up his duties at four.
“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the season’s greetings had been
exchanged and he had sampled the now nearly demolished Christmas box,
“McNab sure did play some good trick on some of his niggers last
night.”
“He’s like to play one too many tricks on them niggers of his,” said
our host. “D’you remember ’bout that section boss over on the L. & N.
that was found with his skull stove in with a sledge?”
“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers good, but there was a family of
them livin’ in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d sing an’
howl half the night, so McNab’s been ’bout crazy to get shut of them
someway. He tried fifty ways to close them up, but yesterday he took
a bit of rabbit skin and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped it
round with a strip of red flannel, and tied it all ’round with a horse
hair. Then he went an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step. When
the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’ bloody murder about somebody
tryin’ to conjure him. He and his whole tribe moves out last night,
an’ every bit of their studdings went out the back door to dodge that
conjure of McNab’s.”
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
NEGRO FAMILY AT HOME]
Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked, “Was the nigger’s name Lee
Gordon?”
“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there
ain’t a nigger in the whole Sandhills will live in that cabin now,” and
Shorty chuckled to himself.
I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All that he would say was,
“H’m! Those railroad men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He did not,
however, mean to be sarcastic, for a couple of weeks later when I
suggested that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s old cabin in
Cognac he was horrified at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman and
worked in Cognac and was always complaining of the length and expense
of his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac would have solved this
problem and was really a first-class house in good condition, Willis
could only answer with a shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect
Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere shack.”
[Illustration: SANDHILLS RAPID TRANSIT]
“Tar Burnin’”
When first I went to North Carolina to spend the winter in the
Sandhills, my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy memories of
tar-balls made from material purloined from the contractors who paved
New York’s streets and a rather indirect connection through a cousin
who had once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially regretted it.
Down in the Sandhills, old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept and
halting example, taught me just how the black, sticky stuff is wrung
from the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled up, and brought to
market.
Soon the good old-fashioned way that Uncle Willis burns his tar will
be replaced by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting machine,
a great still, with a gigantic metal retort in a brick oven as big as
Willis’ little shanty. The old darky tar burner who considers himself
lucky to get a barrel of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but a
faltering competitor of the machine that from the same wood can wring
two barrels of tar, valuable creosote, and other important wood oils.
Squeezing out fifteen dollars where before but three or four were
extracted is all in strict accord with economic progress, and plainly
it is very much more profitable--for those who own the stills--but
this fine machine is costly beyond the dreams even of Willis’ vivid
imagination, and it is but a question of time when the negro tar burner
and his handmade tar kilns will be another vanished bit of the Old
South.
[Illustration: THE BURNING TAR KILN]
Willis had made a tar-burning agreement--the usual one in such
cases--with Massa Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine wood--“light
’ud” Willis calls it--and he further agreed to furnish the barrels
to hold the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook to collect the
wood on Massa Ralph’s land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill
the barrels and deliver them to the railroad at Hoffman. Each was to
receive a half of the receipts from the sale of the tar.
On a piece of level ground, down in the valley beside the little
trickling branch, just behind my bungalow, Willis “done built hisself a
whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug out a slight hollow, like a great
wash basin full twenty feet across, with a trench leading from the
center to a deep pit dug just outside the outer edge. Then he and his
brother Henry hitched up their old grey mule and scoured all over the
land, piling the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood they picked up
everywhere and hauling load after load to the site of the kiln. After
a great store had been collected, Henry fell to work chopping up the
knotty stumps and splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly
constructed the kiln. This must be carefully and neatly done, for the
quantity of the tar yielded depends most directly upon the close and
proper building of the kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis laid
row upon row of the long, straight, split rails, each pointing due to
the center and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety into its place.
In the center of the kiln he stowed away the little twisted knots and
gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This is rough work too, and
were not old Willis’ black hands as tough as sole leather, they would
be filled with splinters.
[Illustration: THE TAR BURNER’S WAGON]
After the kiln had slowly risen till it was full seven feet high at
its outer rim, it was topped off with a roof made of the split rails.
Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were now pressed into service flagging the
kiln. On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf pine boughs, and
then they stuck similar branches into the crevices of the sides until
the whole looked like a great, regular mound of giant pine needles.
Uncle Willis and Henry again took up the work. They now banked the
kiln. Starting at the ground, and building up tier on tier, they laid
long logs of green wood round the kiln. In between the long logs and
the kiln itself they packed sod and dirt, transforming the great heap
of pine needles into an octagonal, log block house in miniature. Sand
and clay piled six inches deep on the top and then packed down finished
the job. Willis was now ready to burn his kiln.
[Illustration: FLAGGING]
So far everything had gone swimmingly, but now a long series of
troubles began to fall with distressing regularity on Willis’ woolly
head. A dozen times a day he would come shuffling up for my consolation
and advice. Off would come his battered hat and he would begin, “’Deed,
Massa Billie, Ah doan’ know----”, till, had I not felt so sorry for the
old man, I would have been driven crazy by these woeful consultations.
In this big tar-kiln he had planned and executed his _magnum opus_,
which should not only re-establish his shaky credit at the store in
Hoffman, but must also supply the necessary capital for cotton seed and
fertilizer against the fast approaching planting season. He was staking
more than his little all on this kiln; he was gambling in futures,
futures of slab-side pork and corn meal; a promised dress for the
Xantippean Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina, Liza, Sally II,
Robert Lee, and a couple of the other children whose names I forget.
[Illustration: BUILDING THE TAR KILN]
His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and with such great
expectations, contained about seventy cords of good wood and should,
according to all expert calculation, yield about seventy barrels of
tar. Massa Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these seventy barrels,
had only been able to collect forty. He scoured the country, mills,
cross-road stores, freight offices, but every available source of
supply that usually had barrels almost to give away had no barrels now,
even at fancy prices. And Willis, because once the kiln was started
there would be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid to fire the
kiln until he had on hand enough containers to hold his expected
quantity of tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to pay Henry fifty
cents a day till the tar was all run, and he saw the wages of his
helper daily eating deeper and deeper into his profits. To cap the
climax, the market price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing rate,
and every no-’count nigger that passed along the road took a diabolical
delight in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving him the very latest
and most discouraging market quotations. Poor old Willis! Whenever
he saw me he implored help in getting him some barrels, and I never
rode over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent message to the freight
agent--“Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry hup dat lot
ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph done order in Wilmington.”
[Illustration: FILLING THE BARRELS]
At last the long-expected barrels came, and one evening about dusk
Jim Watson scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of Willis’ kiln
for a couple of square feet and applied a match to the dry lightwood
underneath. As the red flames darted through the black smoke, Willis
heaved a great sigh of relief. Had everything gone smoothly, Willis
would have run the kiln himself. So many things had gone wrong and so
very much depended on this kiln that he called in Jim Watson, who plays
the part of tar burning efficiency expert throughout the Sandhills, in
the hope, I believe, of his being able to break the spell of bad luck.
In the back of his brain there was some notion that the fee he paid to
Jim Watson hired not only his supposedly superior experience, but also
bought a charm against further misfortune.
All night long the ruddy glow of the burning kiln lighted up the little
valley, and the pungent, piney smell of the black smoke filled the
air. Up at the bungalow, two hundred yards away, we could hear the
snap and crackle of the burning knots and the thick scent of the pitch
penetrated the house. Early in the morning, Willis covered the hole in
the banking of the roof under the direction of Jim Watson who, perched
on an up-turned barrel, gave directions with a thoroughly expert and
professional air. Now the kiln began to smoulder, and the pair sat
down, only getting up to patch with great shovelsful of earth any
cracks that appeared in the banking.
[Illustration: BANKING]
About the middle of the afternoon, the tar, sweated out of the pine
wood by the intense heat, began to ooze out of the trench. Slowly at
first, drop by drop; soon in a little trickle that grew in size, till
by nightfall, it was pouring out so that one of the workers must busily
ply the bucket all the time. This bucket Willis had fastened on the end
of a long pole, and with it he scooped the black, sticky mess out of
the pit, pouring it into a rough wooden trough through which it flowed
into the waiting barrel. This work must go on day and night, and the
kiln must also be carefully watched lest it catch fire; so Willis had
built a crude hut for shelter, and here, when not on duty, the burners
rested on a great heap of filthy blankets. Sally brought them their
meals, and they slept by turns in snatches.
Jim Watson had not brought good luck with him, for just as the tar
began to run, it started to rain. A chilly northwest wind sent the
shivers chasing each other down old Willis’ sun-loving back, and the
water soon came pouring through the chinks in the imperfect shelter.
The wet and cold could, at worst, mean a heavy cold or a sharp twinge
of the rheumatism; a heavier blow of misfortune awaited Willis.
The great kiln behaved itself very properly indeed for a day and a
half, and twenty good barrels were filled with tar. In spite of the
bad weather old Willis was jubilant, but his joy was untimely, for
despite his expert help, things went wrong with the kiln. Air sneaked
in somewhere through some unnoticed crack in the banking, and then the
lightwood, instead of smouldering, burst into flame, burning up both
wood and tar. What a blaze the tar-soaked pine made! It roared and
it snapped. Great jets of red fire, followed by puffs of inky smoke,
thrust themselves through the banking. Every now and then a blazing
knot, accompanied by a whole train of bright sparks, would be hurled
through the roof and shot ten feet into the air. Fifty feet from the
kiln I had to hold my hands over my face to keep off the intense heat,
but like a great black Satan stoking the brimstone fires, Willis
slaved, patching the shattered banking, throwing dirt on the roof
in the hope of smothering the fierce fire and saving the remnant of
the tar. And Jim Watson worked too, like a Trojan, for the blame and
disgrace of the accident were his.
Finally, they succeeded in choking the flames under control, but the
seventy barrels of tar for which Willis had worked so hard and waited
so long had shrunk to thirty-one. Over at Hoffman he received just four
dollars and a quarter a barrel for his tar, and but ten days before the
price had been five dollars. He paid off his high-priced expert and
settled up with his brother Henry. Then he came over to consult with
me. He took the crumpled, little wad of dirty bank notes out of his
pocket and looked at it ruefully.
“Hit doan’ mak’ much ob ah show fo’ all dat work an’ all dat time,
does hit, Massa Billie?” and then he added earnestly, his black face
seamed with doubt and apprehension, “Mebbe so--Ah doan’ know--but hit
do ’most seem as eff thar’s sumbuddy conjured dat ole tar kil’.”
Some Quail Dogs--And Others
“Old Joe” and his daughter “Queen” are as ill-assorted a brace of
pointers as ever hunted a covey along the edge of a field of cow peas.
In the first place, nobody, to look at them, would ever suspect their
relationship.
“Joe” is a strapping, lemon marked dog, with a heavy head and a tail
like a couple of feet of garden hose. He has too much “lumber” to
please any bench show judge, but no sportsman can look at him without
recognizing a sturdy, capable workman. He is one of the stolid,
old-time type of “Mainspring,” “Rip Rap,” “Bow,” “Faust” and the other
heroes of his race imported in the early days from England. Despite
his coarseness, he shows his breeding, but his daughter, on the other
hand, is a common looking rat of a pointer, light and racy, thin as
a match stick and as nervous as the needle of a pocket compass. She
is a thickly ticked liver all splotched over with great patches of
solid color. Her nose is snipy, her skull is domed, her tail curls
provokingly upwards, and her thin ears are long and pendulous, so that
one suspects that somewhere in her mother’s family there may have been
a _mesalliance_ with a foxhound. This suspicion is emphatically denied
by her owner. Perversely, he worships this ugly duckling of his.
The old dog is a mighty hunter and quail are his favorite sport, but
he takes his pleasures sadly. He is as sedate as a senior deacon and
as serious as the professor of Sanskrit in a German University. Even
when his beloved Master appears in his battered felt hat and stained
and faded hunting coat, “Joe,” though he trembles with excitement,
never allows his feelings to get the better of him. His self control
is marvelous. ’Round and ’round he walks, stiff legged like a terrier
boiling for a fight, his tail as straight and stiff as a broom handle,
his big nose quivering, his yellow eyes flashing. But “Queen” skips
about, barking short, yappy barks, wagging her tail and wriggling her
slender body. She is always as flighty as a giggling schoolgirl. Last
winter was her first hunting season, and she threw herself into the
good sport of finding quail as a giddy debutante abandons herself to
the social whirl. She was out for a good time, and she had it. So did
we who followed her mad racings over the Sandhills.
In the field, this strange pair carry with them all their differences,
but by a system of hunting that the trifling “Queen” invented herself,
they managed between them to find an amazing number of birds. “Joe” is
blessed with a truly wonderful power of scent and cursed with an excess
of caution. Not in the memory of man has he ever been known to over-run
his birds. Time and again his fine nose catches the scent of the covey
twenty or more yards off. Then he takes so long creeping up to them
that they run merrily off, leaving a confusing and exasperatingly
tempting foot scent for him to snuffle over. Poor old “Joe”--there is
no more snap to his work than there is to pea soup, but “Queen”--she
hunts, as a Bobby Watson says, “laik ah bunch o’ fiah-crackers.” She
loves to run. Over the Sandhills she races, head up, tail waving.
[Illustration: Photo by Mr. Kirkover
A COVEY IN THE LONG-LEAF PINE]
At first she often ran plumb into a covey before she had the slightest
idea that there was such a thing as a quail within a hundred miles of
her. Startled and disgusted she would stand stock still for a moment,
and then, as much as to say, “O well, no matter--better luck next
time,” she would be off again.
But this was only at first. She soon got the hang of the game, and,
while she continued to range far afield, she learned not to flush.
“Joe” is too old a dog to learn any new tricks, but the versatile
“Queen” has devised an unscrupulous hunting system of her own that
is absolutely unorthodox but which fits in admirably with his slow
methods. As she prances over the hills, she keeps one eye on her steady
sire. When she sees him acting “birdy” she will rush in, dart in front
of him, and hold the birds till he comes up. It is, of course, very
wrong of her indulgent owner to allow her to ravish points in this
high handed manner. He knows it, and will sheepishly excuse her, by
saying he hadn’t the heart to leave the old dog home, but he is such
a potterer, we should never find birds unless he let “Queen” have her
way. In this way of hers she has a splendid good time. Without giving
up the sport of running riot, she has the sport of pointing with
the warm scent in her quivering nostrils, all the excitement of the
shooting, and the pleasant duty of retrieving.
Poor old “Joe” regards this erratic system of hunting with the greatest
disfavor. Whenever “Queen” darts in front of him to point the covey
he has found, he stops and looks at her, saying, just as plain as
English, “Impudent puppy!” Then he turns and looks at his Master, “It’s
a disgrace, sir, the disrespect of the younger generation--a disgrace.
Whatever are we coming to?” He sniffs an emphatically contemptuous
sniff and walks in very dignifiedly to back up her point. How annoyed
he is if she breaks ever so little at the sound of the guns, and with
what a perfect holier-than-thou air he will wait patiently for the
command, “Fetch!” His self-righteousness knows no bounds if, when
“Queen” is seeking busily about, he can, as he often does, go straight
to the dead bird, pick it up, toss it into his mouth, and walk off,
saying, “There, little girl, that’s the proper way to do it.” What
a splendid conservative he is! Poor old chap, his hunting days are
nearly over now. Though he stoutly refuses to acknowledge it, he has
outlived his generation. I don’t suppose that even as a puppy he was a
dashing performer, and now, on the verge of his dotage, he has become
unbearably deliberate. Yet for all his provoking faults one cannot but
admire his stout heart and his passion for hunting. He is the very
pattern of the good sportsman of the Old School, kindly, keen, and
a bit old fashioned in his ways. He is thoroughly game and will go
hunting till he drops. Even now, old as he is, he will face a swamp
thicket bristling with briars, at five in the afternoon that many a
younger dog would not hunt the first thing in the morning.
There is “Gypsy,” for example--she never will hunt any but the easiest
places. She is a little picture setter who comes down to the Sandhills
from Connecticut every winter for the quail season. She is clever as
an urchin and dainty as a princess. She has a capital nose and all
the speed in the world--when it pleases her ladyship to use her gifts.
She knows just where to hunt for the birds and she handles them in a
truly masterful way, but she has no more real love of hunting than
a Berkshire hog and not half the spunk of a cottontail. She is as
different from “Joe” as “Queen,” yet I know a very nice old lady whose
sons, she says, keep her “horse and dog poor,” who finds all their
hunting dogs uninteresting, because forsooth they lack individuality.
I wish that she might know Capt’n Jack Evans’s four dogs. They are all
half brothers and sisters, but nobody could fail to note their marked,
distinct personalities. The rollicking “Bob” and the timid “Dot” are
full brother and sister; brilliant “Bessie” and plodding “Sport” have
the same daddy as the others, but different mothers.
The privilege of going hunting with Capt’n Jack and this quartet may
be purchased at reasonable rates by the day or the week, but the honor
of accompanying him when he himself goes hunting for sport is bestowed
upon very few. I was delighted then when one morning he took me aside,
as we were waiting for the mail at the post office, and whispered
that had found a piece of country back in the hills “whar Ah reckon,
suh, thar’s more’n a million quail t’ the acre.” Capt’n Jack knows the
Sandhills, and he is not given to making promises he cannot keep. I was
sure we should find plenty of good sport.
[Illustration: “HUNTER’S HOME”]
Bright and early next morning, while the snap of the night frost was
still in the air, we set off to hunt this quail metropolis. The four
dogs tumbled about in the tonneau over the gun cases and lunch basket.
“Bob” jumped from side to side, critically inspecting the country,
while “Dot” and “Sport” lay on the floor, and “Bess” bounced about on
the rear seat. We left the main road soon and burrowed for five or six
miles along a twisting, sandy trail through the pine woods. We stopped
on the flat top of a hill, a miniature plateau over the edge of which
stood the tree tops of the valley. Right in the middle of the deserted
tote road we left the car, and, leaving coats, lunch, extra shells,
all, walked off across the hilltop. Through a grove of long-leafed
pines we went into the valley and worked forward, skirting the edge
of thick growth that marked the course of the winding stream. “Bob”
scoured the hilltop. “Dot” and “Sport” hunted carefully along close to
the swamp thickets. “Bess” beat up and down the southern side of the
hill just under the brow.
“‘Bess’ shore does know what t’ hunt fo’ ah covey on ah cold mawnin’,
don’t she”--and the words had hardly slipped lazily from the Capt’n’s
lips before she came to a stiff point. A high, shrill whistle and the
other dogs came and backed. We walked in; the birds flushed; and the
sport began. On up over the crest of the hill, hunting the scattered
singles. “Steady thar, you ‘Bob’!” The young dog had found one and
was trembling with suppressed eagerness. Before we could get to him,
“Sport” was pointing another bird over to the left, and, as we watched,
both “Dot” and “Bess” suddenly froze stiff on points. “Ah swear! all
fo’ o’ ’em on points on singles.” We separated and flushed our birds
at the same moment. Whur-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r-r! To the
right, the left, on in front scattered quail got up on all sides of us.
“Bess” broke excitedly, and had to be properly reprimanded, and then,
a hundred yards further on, she redeemed herself by finding a second
covey. After this we did not hunt singles at all. During the day we got
up twenty-seven coveys, which is a pretty good true quail story.
[Illustration: “STEADY!” Photos by Mr. Kirkover]
For a day of good sport anyone in the Sandhills will heartily recommend
Capt’n Evans and his quartet, but the true favorite native son of
Moore County is a handsome blue belton setter owned by Jim MacDougall.
“Prince” has a pedigree that fairly bristles with champions. Both his
parents were winners at the field trials, and he himself was trained
by Armstrong at High Point. He is the marvel dog of all the Sandhills.
What stories they tell of him on the post-office steps and ’round the
stove in MacDougall’s store winter afternoons! From Dr. Adams to the
youngest black boy who hangs about the freight shed, everyone in town
takes a keen personal pride in that dog. Of course, he has pointed dead
quail, and quail in trees and under logs, and he has, as can be proved
by half the gold watches and every Ingersoll in the township, held a
point for two hours and sixteen minutes--some say seventeen minutes.
In the midst of his admirers at the store the handsome rascal is as
bored as a young prig back in his home town after his first term at the
University, but in the field he is keen sportsmanship personified. With
his free open stride, he covers the country, head and tail up, his nose
thrust into the air, sniffing first one side and now the other, eager
to catch the first faint suggestion of the scent of the little brown
birds. A short whistle and he stops in his tracks. A wave of the hand
and he is off again in the opposite direction, quartering the ground
perfectly. He stops dead on a point. Still as a statue he seems, but as
you walk closer you see that he trembles with suppressed excitement,
every muscle taut, every nerve straining, he stands there, a perfect
picture. Flush the birds and at the command he will retrieve, going
quickly and surely to each dead quail and returning it without so much
as a feather dampened. He is a splendid dog wonderfully broken.
[Illustration: DELIVERING QUAIL]
We all applaud the stiff antics of a high school trained horse and wax
enthusiastic over the trick of the lion tamer’s tawny pupil, but not
one in fifty of us ever thinks that the quail dog displays intelligence
and training far beyond these. He ranges over the country as free as
the winter wind, but always under perfect control. No bit guides him,
yet he turns right or left at the wave of a hand. No snapping whip
compels obedience, but he minds the call of a whistle promptly and
cheerfully. If a savage tiger or a docile brown cow could be trained
thus, scientific gentlemen would investigate the case in the interest
of animal psychology. It would be one of the marvels of the world, but
nobody thinks it at all “abnormal” in a setter or a pointer. Thousands
of rollicking puppies learn the trick each year.
How much more wonderful even is the subversion of the bird dog’s
strongest instincts to the will of his master! We have seized upon
that momentary pause that precedes the wild dog’s spring at his prey
and developed it into the pointing habit, a habit that, through
generations of painstaking training and selective breeding, has become
stronger than the instinct to pounce upon the birds. What self-control
is demanded to stand staunch when the birds flush right under your
nose! How many men have the firm hold on their passions that the quail
dog displays when he picks up a dead bird in his mouth and returns it
gently to his master? “The dog,” Maeterlinck has said, “is the only
animal that is the friend of man.” The bird dog has gone even farther:
he is the friend and the partner of man as well. He curbs his strongest
instincts for the good of the game that he and his Master play
together. His is the proud joy of humble service.
Half the sport of quail shooting lies in working and watching the dogs.
All day long the quail shooter has before him a living example of
strength, of perseverance, of good faith, of self-restraint, the very
cardinal virtues of good sportsmanship. It is a spiritual experience
that is good for any man. And we love our four-footed partner in
sport not alone because he is a splendid animal, good to look at,
intelligent, and faithful; not only because he shows us good sport;
but also because his own good sportsmanship appeals to the best
sportsmanship in ourselves.
The Clay Birds
We sat round a blazing pine-knot fire in the big hotel’s cozy smoking
room, and every man in the group, except the Banker, had been
hobby-horse riding. Each had enjoyed a glorious day in the outdoors,
pursuing his favorite sport. Each, tired with that delicious, restful
tiredness that comes like a benison at the close of every day of keen
sport, luxuriated in his deep leather chair. The fresh, pine-scented
winds had swept the cobwebs from our brains, and, as the fire snapped
and crackled, the bright flashes of friendly repartee, witty thrust and
ready parry, flew round the circle.
The Collegian and his Father had started it by holding, as golfers
are so very apt to do, a _post mortem_ over their afternoon round.
This led the Editor, who had slipped away from the impatient telephone
and the ever-hungry presses for a couple of weeks’ winter vacation,
to make some caustic comparisons between golf and his favorite
tennis. But casualties on this hard and long-fought battlefield were
tactfully avoided by the Manufacturer, who boldly asserted that both
these good sports paled into utter insignificance before the most
glorious sport of quail-shooting. He proved it too--to his own complete
satisfaction--and then the polo-player championed his hobby, and was
followed very naturally by a hard-riding fox-hunter. Then we had
another round of golf, and so back again to the wide-ranging bird-dogs
and the whirling quail coveys.
[Illustration: SNOW IN THE SANDHILLS]
“I wonder,” put in the Banker, “if you gentlemen have read a poem of
Whitcomb Riley’s called ‘His Favorite Fruit?’ It’s a little dialect
sketch in which some Hoosier farmers, gathered ’round the iron stove
in a little cross-roads grocery, discuss their favorite fruits. Each
one holds out for his own personal choice--the apple, the peach, the
pear, the watermelon--and slanders unmercifully the taste of the last
speaker. But all the time the teller of this story ‘chaws on an’ sez
nawthin’.’ Finally one of the party asks him point blank, ‘Jim, what’s
yourn fav’rite fruit?’ He chaws on fer quite a spell an’ then he sez,
slow an’ solemn-like, ‘Terbaccer,’ an’ you oughter heard ’em roar.”
“You,” continued the Banker, when the laugh had subsided, “have been
each slandering the other’s favorite sport, while I have been ‘chawin’
on an’ saying nawthin’,’ and I wonder who of you will laugh at me and
my favorite sport as at the Hoosier farmer whose favorite fruit was
tobacco.”
“Speaking for myself,” remarked the Editor, “I laugh at no sport except
tiddle-de-winks.”
“How about ping-pong?” asked the Collegian.
“That must have been before your day--did you ever play it?”
“No, thank Heaven, but----”
“Ah, I thought not. If you had, you’d not laugh at it, either,” and the
Editor chuckled to himself reminiscently.
“I came down here to Pinehurst,” continued the Banker, “to get some
good trap-shooting.”
“Huh!”--a short, sarcastic “Huh!”--came from the depths of the chair
where the Manufacturer, after a long day tramping over the Sandhills
behind his brace of pointers, was resting.
“I expected just that from you, Charlie,” laughed the Banker. “Simply
’huh!’ and nothing more can express your wonder and contempt. For the
life of you, you cannot understand why on earth a supposedly sensible
man should come down here into the very heart of one of the best quail
counties in North Carolina to smash clay birds at the trap, can you?”
The Manufacturer shook his head vigorously. “Well,” continued the
Banker again, “I felt just as you do a couple of years ago. I followed
your favorite sport too many years to start slandering it now. I used
to come down here quail-shooting before you were out of school, but I
can tell you that trap-shooting is good sport, too. You are a Doubting
Thomas, but why don’t you try it sometime? It’s not so simple as it
looks.”
Before we broke up an hour later, we had made an appointment to visit
the traps next morning to witness the Banker’s promised conversion of
the Manufacturer into a trap-shooter. None of us will ever forget that
skeptic’s immense surprise when he found the little clay birds so very
“gamey” that he only broke nine out of his first string of twenty-five.
It was a hard jolt to his pride, but he stuck out his jaw, tucked his
gun under his cheek, and tackled another string. He did better later,
and soon he got into the habit of joining the little parties at the
squatty little gun clubhouse in the center of the big open field over
against the great red barns of the model dairy. He came sheepishly at
first, but later with brazen effrontery. In the end, he decided to stay
over a week longer than he had planned, just to enter in the Mid-Winter
Handicap Tournament the last of January.
In no very strict historical sense can the adjective “new” be fairly
applied to trap-shooting, and yet there is a newness in the recent
vogue of the sport. The live, tame pigeon, thrown into the air,
frightened and confused, from a collapsible wooden cage, has long since
been supplanted by a little clay disc, hurled with lightning speed from
a steel spring trap. This was the starting point of the development
of trap-shooting as we know it in America today, and this took place
years ago. It is a harder, more sporty thing to smash a whizzing clay
bird to smithereens than to knock down a frightened tame pigeon,
and it is more humane. This change of targets put a keen zest into
trap-shooting and took out a bitter reproach. But till recently, the
growth of trap-shooting has been slow. In four short years, however,
the number of active trap-shooters has increased fourfold; from about
100,000 to about 425,000. During the same period trap-shooting clubs
have increased from 1,000 to 4,000, and it is estimated that about
500,000,000 clay pigeons are thrown into the air each year at the
shooter’s sharp command, “Pull!” In one short Presidential term,
trap-shooting has sprung forward from a low place among the so-called
minor sports to occupy a position second only to baseball in the number
of its devotees. We are not apt to appreciate what this really means
without the help of the cold figures above.
There is a world of difference in being a “rooter” and in being a
“player,” and the one simple little fact that each trap-shooter is
a player himself, or herself, is just what gives the sport its
strongest grip upon the interest of its followers. That tense moment
of “two out and the bases filled”; the jerky, crashing advance of the
battling human machine carrying a pigskin ball down the field toward
the goal-posts; the rush of the ponies and the hollow click of mallet
against polo ball--all these tighten the muscles and quicken the
heart-beat of any live sportsman, but, as the psychologist says, these
are all external stimuli.
Let the same man--or the same woman, for many women shoot at the traps
nowadays--step up to the score, tuck his gun against his shoulder,
brace himself and draw a deep breath, glance down the long length of
blued barrels, and call “Pull!” Whizz goes the little black disc,
hurtling away at a speed that makes the teal and the mallard seem
lazy laggards. One moment of intensely concentrated effort and keen
enjoyment till the flying saucer is found just above the forward sight;
an almost involuntary squeeze of the trigger finger, the thrilling jump
of the discharge, and puff!--the clay target is knocked into a thousand
bits.
That tremendously concentrated effort of finding the speeding disc--you
must find him quick--he will be quite out of range if you stop to say
quickly--followed by the physical climax of the almost simultaneous
kick of the gun and the shattering of the clay target; these are
secrets of the witching spell that lures the shooter back and back
again to the traps. I must confess to a thoroughly diabolical delight
in knocking the clay birds to powder. I do not do it always--not even
often, but when I do I enjoy the keenest pleasure. Other trap-shooters
confess the same joy. Please, do not say anything about dangerous
destructive tendencies that ought to be rigidly suppressed, or we shall
get into an argument, and then I will have to say a lot of things about
quickness of eye, correlation of senses and muscles, and a great deal
more that has nothing whatever to do with the sport of shooting the
clay birds.
Over and above the inherent fascination of knocking the flying clay
targets into powder, the fact that there is no closed season on
these clay birds and that even a little hand trap in any open field
will furnish good game anywhere, goes far towards making “the sport
alluring” the sport universal. Nor do the changing seasons at all
handicap the trap shooter. The clay birds are always full grown and
they have no nesting-time; they are just as plentiful and just as fair
sport in November as in May. Indeed, when you mount the trap-shooting
hobby-horse, you can make up your mind to settle yourself in the saddle
for a long, long gallop over all sorts of country and in all sorts of
weather.
There seems to be a delicate touch of sarcasm in the fact that the
most important winter trap-shooting tournament should be held within
a stone’s throw of grounds so well stocked with quail that they are
chosen for the running of one of the largest field trials. The pick of
the blooded setters and pointers are tried out for their bird sense
and hunting ability almost within hearing of the guns at the Pinehurst
traps. But the quail-hunter and the trap-shooter are brothers in
arms. Often, like the Manufacturer, converted at the Pinehurst traps
last winter, they are sporting Siamese twins. The traps furnish good
practice to the field shooter and good sport when the closed season
would otherwise keep the gun in its case.
There is a curious connection between these brother sports. How
keenly, at the traps, does one miss the tramping over the open fields,
scrambling up hillsides, fording the streams, hopping over the rail
fences! All the tireless quest of the hunt, that strange, primitive,
impelling force that defies physical fatigue and keeps your high boots
swishing through the coarse, knotted crab grass with a long, eager
stride from daylight to dark! Most of all, you miss the dogs. That
to me is the great loss. But there is continual shooting to take the
place of the joys of the open fields, and there is a cleaner, keener
satisfaction in smashing a target than in knocking down a quail; but
what takes the place of the dogs? Nothing. Every shooter loves to
shoot--if he says he does not, put him down as a hypocrite. No man
lugs six or eight or ten or even twelve pounds of shotgun all day long
just for the fun of carrying firearms. He likes to shoot. He may--and
probably does--thoroughly enjoy the tramp and the pleasure of watching
the dogs work, but if he went hunting for these alone he would not
burden himself with a gun. No, the shooter loves to shoot, and at
the traps he can shoot till his gun barrels get red hot. Only a lame
shoulder and the price of shells need keep him from shooting his head
off, as the saying is. To the man who loves action--quick action and
lots of it--this is a charm that the traps surely, and the live birds
only uncertainly, offer.
But the very kernel of the sport of trap-shooting comes in smashing
those flying discs. However keen the hunting instinct there is always
just the tinge of regret in blotting out the pretty life of little
brown birds. There are times when one feels just a bit ashamed of that
fierce pleasure of a good, clean, quick shot. At the traps one can let
that pleasure run wild. You can grit your teeth and say, “I’m going to
paste you this time,” without qualm of conscience. You can give rein
to the passion for destruction without becoming a brute. To do so in
the field is to degenerate. We hate the “game hog,” not because he is
selfish and cruel, but because he is not a man. We need the strong,
elemental passions, and we are in danger of becoming super-refined
jelly-fishes, incapable of doing wrong because we are incapable of
doing good. It takes more courage to attack a lie than to storm a
trench, more passion for destruction to root out a bad habit than to
raze a city.
Through a Jungle to the Old South
The first man to whom we spoke about canoeing down the Lumbee was
not encouraging. The water would be too high for fishing, and what
with whirlpools and other dire, vaguely hinted-at dangers he did not
reckon we would even get to Lumberton, to say nothing of going all the
way through to the sea. But our weather-stained mail held forth no
inducements to return North to be buffeted about by a blizzard, and our
dismal friend’s croakings but seemed to us promises of an exciting trip
and strengthened our determination to go--to go, we secretly hoped,
despite all hazard. He proved to be a melancholy deceiver; we found
excitement, but not the kind he foretold. The natives know precious
little about the Lumbee.
Our first confirmation of this was when we discovered that the
authority on the river is Dr. John Warren Achorn, who has a winter
home at Pinebluff. This canoeing enthusiast told us much about the
river--that till three years ago, barring the natives’ cypress dugouts,
the Lumbee had never borne a canoe, and that, while he and others
had been down a hundred and eighty miles, no one had ever gone clear
through from the headwaters to the sea at Georgetown, S. C. Here was
an additional fillip--we were going to blaze the way! Dr. Achorn also
extended to us the courtesies of the Mid-Winter Canoe Club, and, thanks
to him, we used one of the club canoes. He would have fitted us out
with a complete kit had we needed it.
“It was a misty, moisty morning, and cloudy was the weather,” when we
pushed off from Blue’s Bridge and started down the Lumbee. We, by the
way, were two men and two dogs, Leonard Chester Freeman and I, his
setter “Belle” and my Scottish terrier “Dixie”. Snugly stowed away
in our sixteen foot canoe were a shelter tent, blankets and ponchos,
duffle bags, two shotguns and a .22 rifle with ammunition, a camera,
cooking kit and food supplies for a week; a two hundred pound outfit,
but there are no carrys on the Lumbee.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
BLUE’S BRIDGE, PINE BLUFF, N. C.]
Half a dozen strokes and we were round a bend. The little clubhouse
under the great pines had vanished. Faintly, through the thickets,
Dr. Achorn’s cheery voice reached us, calling the Indian’s “_Bon
Voyage!_”--“Good hunting!” Then, save for the swish of the paddles and
the buzzing of a couple of precocious dragon-flies all was silent.
Apparently, we were miles from civilization. The strange wildness of
the Lumbee country strikes you at once. It is all a tangled wilderness,
wild and rampant. There are no stump pastures, such as one meets along
the banks of the rivers of the North Woods; no clearings with a squatty
cabin and a field of scraggly corn; no trace of the hand of man. Except
for the friends who pursued us in a motor to give us a farewell banquet
in our first night’s camp, we saw no human being for eighty miles.
Again unlike the northern rivers, the headwaters of the Lumbee do not
“chatter over stony ways”; they zigzag, silent and swift, over a bed
of white sand. If every river had its own private trade-mark, surely
“XXX” would be granted to the Lumbee, for it twists and turns and loops
about till beside it the proverbial corkscrew seems to be the shortest
distance between two points. If you are mathematically inclined, you
can calculate the curves from this data: we paddled twenty-eight miles
from Blue’s Bridge to McLeod’s Bluff, where we made our first camp, and
our friends’ speedometer showed they had covered just six miles over
the road between these two points.
There are no rapids or falls in the upper Lumbee, but the water
glides along at a merry rate, scooting round the bends--“cow faces”
the natives call them--in a way that, till you get just the knack of
cutting the corners, is quite disconcerting. Every once in a while,
which may mean every three miles or every thirteen, we came to what
the natives are pleased to call bluffs, rises of ground that stand,
dry and sheltered, a couple of feet above the swirling high water.
Between these bluffs the river is literally bankless. The flood flows
round and through the trees, a floating forest not a swamp, for there
is no marshy ground and few reeds or water grasses. On the entire trip
we never slapped at a mosquito or a fly. During the hot summers, this
tangled jungle must teem with them, but from September to May, though
the weather is mild enough, they vanish completely.
As it slips quietly to the sea, the Lumbee passes through three
distinct phases, each different, each with a charm all its own. During
the first stage, the hundred and thirty miles from the headwaters to
Lumberton, the river winds its way through the Sandhills. Here the
bottom land is heavily timbered, but it is hard country to lumber,
and the woods are almost virgin forest. During the cold weather the
swirling high water, and in the summer the noxious malaria, have kept
the lumberman and his swinging axe out of the Lumbee woods, and the
country is a great natural game preserve. Giant long-leafed pines
dominate the thickets. These great trees shoot straight up fifty or
seventy-five feet, their heads crowned by their long needles and huge
cones, as the palms are crowned. Beneath are great dark clumps of
mountain laurel, glossy bluegums, and tall bushes of bright holly all
dotted with scarlet berries. Here and there the strained and twisted
branches of a black-jack, that curious dwarf oak that seems to have
been racked by some terrible torture, stand stark and bold among the
leaves of its fellows, for even in December, the Lumbee woods are
bright and green.
What capital places for a snug camp the little bluffs are--dry and
sandy, sheltered by the evergreens, and stocked with great stores of
the best fire-wood in all the world. Those dry pine sticks, saturated
with rosin and tar, crackle at a single match’s provocation into a
bright flame. Some of these Lumbee camps of ours cling in my memory as
the most glorious camps I have known. I can hear now the happy gurgle
of the river and the swishing whispers of the wind in the pines. The
pungent incense of our snapping fire, mixed with the fragrance of the
pines and damp, cool, woodsy smell of the river bank even now fills my
nostrils.
From the very first we paddled one at a time, one hour on and one hour
off; and oh, how much more quickly passed the “sabbatical hour,” when
you lolled in the bow, than the “paddlatical hour” in the stern. This
trip ruthlessly destroyed all my faith in copybook maxims about toil
making the hours pass quickly.
We had left Blue’s Bridge but a few moments when we came suddenly upon
a great colony of blue herons, giants of the race, standing over five
feet. Disturbed at our boorish intrusion upon their domestic affairs,
the great, grey birds flapped laboriously up from their crude nests
in the tree-tops. They rise as painfully as a gouty old man, but once
fairly underway they sail gracefully in huge arcs. We grew to know
them well before our trip was over, for they and the buzzards are both
plentiful. For their beauty they are protected the year round, and the
law, for the utilitarian reason that they act as public scavengers, is
equally kind to the buzzards, who are tame to the point of familiarity.
One battered old fellow, whose wings and tail lacked several feathers,
took a keen, morbid interest in us. Soaring just behind us, watching
with his wicked, hungry eyes, he followed us all one morning, but he
finally convinced himself that we were going to get through all right,
and disgusted, he gave up the chase.
In the Lumbee woods are many wild turkeys, and during the fall and
early winter, before the water has risen so high, if one has a still
paddle, he can often slip round a bend and surprise a stately old
gobbler and his hens feeding on the bank. ’Coons and ’possums--African
pork--are also plentiful. Often a slim brown mink slips silently off a
log, and sometimes a lusty otter streaks across the stream, leaving a
wake like a miniature power boat.
The middle of the third afternoon, while I dozed in the bow, Freeman
shot us through a narrow strip where a fallen tree had all but dammed
the stream. As we skinned skilfully between the bank and the branches,
a most unmistakably hog-like grunt woke me thoroughly, and Freeman,
with a couple of vigorous strokes, brought us about and headed up
stream. Several times we had come up with wild hogs, great porkers who
have taken the back-to-nature call too seriously. Years ago--no one
knows when--they forsook the pen with its three square meals a day to
roam the woods in search of uncertain livelihood. Nomadic life has
made them lean and gaunt, and armed them with stubby tusks that stick
wickedly through their lips. We had some pot shots at these tough
customers, but they had always rushed away through the flooded woods
where pursuit was impossible. We were therefore mightily surprised to
find, when Freeman paddled us back, a great three-hundred pounder,
black as the ace of spades and ugly as sin, who stood ground on a
little ribbon of land between the river and the back waters. Cautiously
we approached, I in the bow with gun ready waiting for the splashing
rush to cover, Freeman paddling and trying to quiet the dogs who were
most forcefully expressing their opinions on the subject of wild hogs.
In vain did we wait for the snort and the splashing rush to cover, and,
when almost on top of her, we discovered the reason for her determined
stand. A volley of wild squeals greeted us. We had found a sow with
twelve day-old piggies. I landed, and “Uff er--r--runt!” she bowled
at me. I stuck my gun barrel in her face and she stopped, grunting
and chopping her short, thick tusks. Freeman, having tied the dogs to
the canoe braces, joined me and staved off her bold attacks while I
snapped the brave lady’s picture. Then, after a deal of maneuvring,
we kidnapped one of her offspring. I managed to get a youngster on a
paddle and flipped him like a pancake over to Freeman, who deposited
him unceremoniously in the canoe. Off we pushed, delighted with
visions of roast pigling, and the old lady gave us a parting rush.
[Illustration: THE BRAVE LADY’S PORTRAIT]
Our little piggie was, barring nothing, the most homely beastie ever
seen. He was black and shiny, like a shaved and varnished puppy, with
a big, shapeless wedge of a head, topped off with enormous, flappy
ears. He squealed, and squawked, and snorted, and grunted in every key,
and every waking minute he kept up his racket. But his comical antics
and unfailing good nature won our hearts. We did not enjoy roast pig,
and since he did not prove to be a good canoeist, we sold him, three
days later, for the munificent sum of “two bits.” His new owner carried
him off to join him to a family of tame pigs in his pens.
[Illustration: FEEDING THE CAPTIVE]
Just above Alma (Alma is a puffing saw mill surrounded by dirty,
dilapidated negro shacks), we passed under Gilchrist’s Bridge, where
Sherman’s army, marching north after taking Charleston, crossed the
river. Just below Alma is the reservation of the Croatoan Indians, the
mysterious blue-eyed race descended, so it is said, from Sir Walter
Raleigh’s Lost Colony, which was planted on Roanoke Island in 1587
and disappeared as completely as if swallowed by the earth. We met
several of these Indians--short, thick-set fellows with yellow skins
and wide-set, blue eyes--and found them so engrossed in planting cotton
that it was hard to believe they were for years a thorn in the side of
the Government and the army.
Nearing Lumberton, a busy little town with an attractive Confederate
Monument, all strangely like a New England village with its shaft “To
our Soldiers and Sailors,” the country began to change. We were leaving
the long-leafed pines of the Sandhills. Cypress became more and more
common, and occasionally we spied a bunch of Spanish moss swaying in
the branches overhead. Just above Lumberton the river twists itself all
into knots and then straightens out, so the last couple of miles into
the town are straight as a canal, between banks that rise steeply from
each side of the swift, deep stream.
We created a sensation in Lumberton. Khaki clad, in flannel shirts,
much in need of the barber’s services, traveling in a strange craft
whose frailty aroused great admiration of our supposed courage, and
accompanied by two dogs and a young wild pig--it is small wonder we
disembarked amid a crowd that thought we were crazy, but was too
polite to say so. The sole and only hotel, so we discovered, had been
torn down to make room for a bank, but we found a genial savior in an
energetic gentleman who combines the various duties of proprietor of
the movies, political boss, reporter for the local paper, and last, but
not least, husband of the landlady of “th’ best eatin’-house in town.”
Here we could eat, and our factotum found us a place to sleep with one
of his neighbors.
Below Lumberton, which we left next morning after stocking our larder
and purchasing a nursing-bottle for piggie, we came fairly to the
second stage of the river. The woods of the Sandhills had vanished;
we were in a semi-tropical jungle. Bottle-neck cypress rose, like
the columns of a cathedral, right out of the water. When they rise
in mid-stream, the lumbermen recognize such a phenomenon of Nature
by calling them “dram trees” and claiming a drink when the logs
are safely by. There are parts of the river where, if this jovial
custom is strictly followed, it must take a remarkably hard head to
bring the lumber to the mill. The undergrowth is a tangle of giant
ferns and cactus-like palms, all snarled up with twining creepers.
Overhead every crotch in the trees is a jardiniere of ferns, and every
branch is coated with lichens, and festooned with Spanish moss and
vines. Here is fascinating canoeing. The current slips along merrily
between the banks, and one can whirl along almost without dipping the
paddle in the water. In other places, the water sprawls out through
the cypress jungle and there is no more current than in a bath-tub.
Chattering black birds in whole colonies scolded us roundly; red and
yellow wood-peckers played tag up and down the tree trunks; scarlet
tanagers and sapphire kingfishers darted down the stream before us,
while humming-birds, like great bejewelled moths, hovered about our
canoe. The trees had burst into leaf as if by magic, and the delicate
greens of their new foliage made a delightful setting against which to
show off the brilliant colors of the bright birds. We had canoed right
into the heart of Fairyland at the first of a glorious spring. Who
would believe that it was the first of March and that a blizzard was
throttling the North?
[Illustration: “DRAM TREES”]
Soon we left this Fairyland and came to the great Buzzard Flats, the
stillest, weirdest waters one ever canoed. After threading our way
between the decaying bastions of the Old State Line Bridge, once a
famous thoroughfare, now but a mark to tell the lumbermen they have
passed from North to South Carolina, we had slipped with the Lumbee
into the waters of the Little Pee Dee. They slide together these two
great rivers and except that the banks are now a hundred yards from
side to side one would hardly know the change. But it is different
when the Little Pee Dee joins the Great Pee Dee. Here the rush of the
big river’s muddy floods backs up the slower waters of the smaller
river. They sprawl over the flat country into a great labyrinth of
lakes and lagoons, the famous Buzzard Flats of the Pee Dee. It was a
cool, still, grey afternoon when we paddled through this strange place.
The sky stretched steely grey above us, and on all sides the still
water reached away like great sheets of ground glass. The great, grey
cypress, all hung with grey Spanish moss, rose in straight colonnades.
Save for the swish-swish of the paddles and the clunk-a-plunk of
innumerable turtles which dropped dully into the water at our coming,
all was still as the tomb. Even the birds added to the eerie spell; big
blue heron swinging in lazy circles; grey cranes streaking across the
sky; buzzards hanging all but motionless far overhead; and owls bolting
away in their senseless flight.
But with all their witching spell these Flats are a capital place in
which to get lost. Forewarned, we kept to the right when in doubt,
for the Great Pee Dee comes in on the right side. All afternoon we
paddled through these bewitched lagoons, and the sun, a great, hazy
red ball, was just sinking when the rush of yellow water told us we
were in the Great Pee Dee. We both heaved a sigh of relief, and then
laughed at each other. Neither had spoken of it, but we had both been
contemplating the prospect of a chilly night, cold and without a warm
supper, spent in the canoe among the misty reaches of water and cypress.
The river’s swift current carried us along without paddling and
for half an hour we idly watched the rearguard of the great duck
army hurrying northwards from their winter quarters among the rice
islands at the mouth of the Great Pee Dee. They came as if flung
from catapults, flying high, singly, in couples, trios, and little
flocks of five or six. Often in the evening stillness we could hear
the whr-r-r-r-r of their strong wings long before they would burst
out of the twilight. Then a black streak would be drawn against the
pink, western sky, and be lost in the hazy distance over the Buzzard
Flats. We were too late for duck shooting, but just in time for the run
of spring shad, and we drifted by two rowboats in which some singing
darkies toiled with a giant’s net loaded with the fish that soon would
be commanding a fancy price in the Northern markets.
That night we camped our last camp on the river. High up on the right
bank we pitched our tent under a spreading live oak, and we sat
silently smoking till our fire had died to a handful of glowing embers.
Tomorrow we would be back in the world of today again, the bustling,
busy world of men; but tonight we were still in the great, wild woods,
close to the heart of Mother Earth. A chugging little flat-bottomed
steamer awoke us in the morning. She puffed laboriously up stream,
and threatened to soon tire of being overloaded with bulging cotton
bales, and drop quietly to the river bottom. We made a late start, and
slipped reluctantly by the banks of magnolias, wild honeysuckle, and
yellow jasmines. Here was the third stage of the trip. We had come out
of the jungle into a bit of the Old South, a bit curiously preserved
from the hard blows of Fate.
[Illustration: A PEE DEE PLANTATION]
Behind the magnolias we caught glimpses of great colonial mansions,
many of them in ruins, others we knew in the hands of strangers, for
the rice islands across the river are now all wild and untilled. These
rice islands have a strange history. ’Way back in Colonial days they
were given over to indigo culture, and in Georgetown Indigo Growers’
Hall, an impressive building, still bears silent testimony to the
importance of the industry that was destroyed by better communication
with the East. During the Revolution, these same islands sheltered
Marion, the Swamp Fox, and his ragged patriots, and Yohahanna’s Ferry
is still pointed out as their favorite crossing place to and from
their raids on the British forces. Later these islands became huge
rice plantations, accounted the most valuable land in the South and
supporting the flower of southern chivalry. The Civil War laid waste
this gardenland, but the rice enabled it to regain a shadow of its
former greatness, till, twenty years ago, it was a fourth time ruined
by the discovery that rice could be more economically grown in Texas.
[Illustration: YOHANNAHAS FERRY]
Warm-hearted friends greeted us with open hospitality in this country,
and when we reached Georgetown, after ten glorious days on the river,
we were feted as if we had discovered both Poles and been on a little
side trip to the moon.
[Illustration: INDIGO MAKERS HALL, GEORGETOWN, S. C.]
It took us ten days to follow the winding Lumbee down to the ocean. If
one wishes to break our record it will not be a hard task, for we went
along at a go-as-you-please pace. Anyone who has only canoed in the
North will find curious things and new delights along this little-known
stream. Do not believe it, if some veteran canoeist says “muddy water”
to you. The last forty miles are muddy water, but, even at flood-time,
the Lumbee and the Little Pee Dee twisting through the Sandhills are
clear, or at most stained with juniper. Remember, too, that they glide
between the green banks when northern streams are frozen hard. January
in North Carolina is amazingly like October in Maine or Wisconsin. The
Lumbee is the canoeist’s great excuse to dodge Winter.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
A VISTA OF THE LUMBEE]
=Transcriber’s Notes=
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
as printed.
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