USA > New Hampshire > To Monadnock; the records of a mountain in New Hampshire through three centuries > Part 7
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Having left our packs here, and made all ready for the night, we went up to the summit to see the sun set. Our path lay through a couple of small swamps, and then up the rocks. Some forty or fifty rods below the very apex southeast, or quite on the top of the mountain, I saw a little bird flit out from beneath a rock close by the path on the left of it, where there were only very few scattered dwarf black spruce about, and, looking, I found a nest with three eggs. It was the Fringilla hyemalis [the junco or snowbird], which soon disappeared
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around a projecting rock. It was near by a conspicuous spruce six or eight feet high, on the west edge of a sort of hollow, where a vista opened south over a precipice, and the path ascended at once more steeply. The nest was sunk in the ground by the side of a tuft of grass, and was pretty deep, made of much fine dry grass or sedge (?) and lined with a little of a delicate bluish hair-like fibre (?) (q.v.) two or three inches long. The eggs were three, of a regular oval form, faint bluish- white, sprinkled with fine pale-brown dots, in two of the three condensed into a ring about the larger end. They had appar- ently just begun to develop. The nest and tuft were covered by a projecting rock. Brewer says that only one nest is known to naturalists .* We saw many of these birds flitting about the summit, perched on the rocks and the dwarf spruce, and dis- appearing behind the rocks. It is the prevailing bird now up there, i. e. on the summit. They are commonly said to go to the fur countries to breed, though Wilson says that some breed in the Alleghanies. The New York Reports make them breed on the mountains of Oswego County and the Catskills. This was a quite interesting discovery. They probably are never seen in the surrounding low grounds at this season. The an- cestors of this bird had evidently perceived on their flight northward that here was a small piece of arctic region contain- ing all the conditions they require,-coolness and suitable food, etc., etc.,-and so for how long have builded here. For ages they have made their home here with the Arenaria Grænlandica and Potentilla tridentata. They discerned arctic isles sprinkled in our southern sky. ..
As it was quite hazy, we could not see the shadow of the mountain well, and so returned just before the sun set to our
*[Dr. Brewer's statement, quoted above, must refer to the snow bunting, not to the snowbird (Bradford Torrey).]
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camp. We lost the path coming down, for nothing is easier than to lose your way here, where so little trail is left upon the rocks, and the different rocks and ravines are so much alike. Perhaps no other equal area is so bewildering in this respect as a rocky mountain-summit, though it has so conspicuous a central point. Notwithstanding the newspaper and egg-shell left by visitors, these parts of nature are still peculiarly unhandselled and untracked. The natural terraces of rock are the steps of this temple, and it is the same whether it rises above the desert or a New England village. Even the inscribed rocks are as solemn as most ancient grave-stones, and nature reclaims them with bog and lichens. . . These sculptors seemed to me to court such alliance with the grave as they who put their names over tomb stones along the highway. One, who was probably a blacksmith, had sculptured the emblems of his craft, an anvil and hammer, beneath his name. Apparently a part of the regular outfit of mountain-climbers is a hammer and cold chisel . . . Certainly you could not hire a stone-cutter to do so much engraving for less than several thousand dollars. But no Old Mortality will ever be caught renewing these epitaphs. It reminds what kinds of steeps do climb the false pretenders to fame, whose chief exploit is the carriage of the tools with which to inscribe their names. For speaking epitaphs they are, and the mere name is a sufficient revelation of the character. They are all of one trade,-stonecutters, defacers of mountain-tops. "Charles and Lizzie!" Charles carried the sledgehammer, and Lizzie the cold chisel. Some have carried up a paint pot, and painted their names on the rocks.
We returned to our camp, and got our tea in our sunken yard. While one went for water to the spring, the other kindled a fire. The whole rocky part of the mountain, except the extreme summit, is strewn with the relics of spruce trees a
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dozen or fifteen feet long, and long since dead and bleached, so that there is plenty of dry fuel at hand. We sat out on the brink of the rocky plateau near our camp, taking our tea in the twilight, and found it quite dry and warm there, though you would not have thought of sitting out at evening in the sur- rounding valleys. It was evidently warmer and drier there than below. I have often perceived the warm air high on the sides of hills late into the night, while the valleys were filled with a cold, damp night air as with water; and here the air was warmer and drier the greater part of the night. We perceived no dew there this or the next night. This was our parlor and supper-room; in another direction was our wash- room. The chewink [towhee] sang before night, . .. and the wood thrush, indefinitely far or near, a little more distant and unseen, as great poets are.
Early in the evening the night hawks were heard to spark and boom over these bare gray rocks, and such was our serenade at first as we lay on our spruce bed. We were left alone with the night hawks. These withdrawn bare rocks must be a very suitable place for them to lay their eggs, and their dry and un- musical, yet supramundane and spirit-like voices and sounds gave fit expression to this rocky mountain solitude. It struck the very key-note of the stern, gray, barren solitude. It was a thrumming of the mountain's rocky chords; strains from the music of Chaos, such as were heard when the earth was rent and these rocks heaved up. Thus they went sparking and booming while we were courting the first access of sleep, and I could imagine their dainty, limping flight, circling over the kindred rock, with a spot of white quartz in their wings. No sound could be more in harmony with that scenery. Though common below, it seemed peculiarly proper here. But ere long the night hawks were stilled, and we heard only the sound of
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our companion's breathing, or of a bug in our spruce roof. I thought I heard once, faintly, the barking of a dog far down under the mountain, and my companion thought he heard a bullfrog.
A little after 1 A. M. I woke and found that the moon had risen, and heard some little bird near by sing a short strain of welcome to it, somewhat song-sparrow-like. But every sound is a little strange there, as if you were in Labrador. Before dawn the night hawks commenced their sounds again, and these sounds were as good as a clock to us, telling how the night got on.
June 3. At length, by 3 o'clock, the signs of dawn appear, and soon we hear the robin and the Fringilla hyemalis,-its prolonged jingle,-sitting on the top of a spruce; the chewink, and the wood thrush. Whether you have slept soundly or not, it is not easy to lie abed under these circumstances, and we rose at 3.30 in order to see the sun rise from the top and get our breakfast there. Concealing our blankets under a shelving rock near the camp, we set out.
It was still hazy, and we did not see the shadow of the mountain until it was comparatively short. We did not get the most distant views, as of the Green and White Mountains, while we were there. We carried up fuel for the last quarter of a mile. A Fringilla hyemalis seemed to be attracted by the smoke of our fire, and flew quite near to us. . .
We concluded to explore the whole rocky part of the moun- tain in this wise: to saunter slowly around it at about the height and distance, from the summit, of our camp, or say half a mile more or less, first going north from the summit and returning by the western semicircle, and then exploring the east side, completing the circle, and return over the summit at night. ..
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We observed that the rocks were remarkably smoothed, al- most polished and rounded, and also scratched. The scratches run from about north-northwest to south-southeast. The sides of the rocks often straight, upright walls, several rods long from north to south and five to ten feet high, with a very smooth, rounded edge. There were many of these long, straight, rounded walls of rocks, especially on the northwest and west. Some smaller or lower ones were so rounded and smooth as to resemble at a little distance long-fallen trunks of trees. The rocks were, indeed, singularly worn on a great scale. . . There were occasionally conspicuous masses and also veins of white quartz, and very common were bright-purple or wine-colored garnets imbedded in the rock, looking like berries in a pudding. In many parts, as on the southeast plateau es- pecially, the rocks were regularly stratified, and split into regular horizontal slabs about a foot in thickness, projecting one beyond another like steps.
The little bogs or mosses, sometimes only a rod in diameter, are a singular feature. Ordinarily the cladonia and other lichens are crackling under your feet, when suddenly you step into a miniature bog filling the space between two rocks, and you are at a loss to tell where the moisture comes from. The amount of it seems to be that some spongy moss is enabled to grow there and retain some of the clouds which rest on it. Moisture and aridity are singularly near neighbors to each other up there. . . In more extensive swamps I slumped through moss to water sometimes, though the bottom was of rock, while a fire would rapidly spread in the arid lichens around. Perhaps the mosses grow in the wettest season chiefly, and so are en- abled to retain some moisture through the driest. . . Methinks there cannot be so much evaporation going on up there,-wit- ness the water in the clintonia leaves, as in the solidago [golden-
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rod] by the sandy seashore,-and this (which is owing to the coolness), rather than the prevalence of mist, may account for the presence of this moisture, forming bogs.
In a shallow rain-water pool or rock cistern, about three rods long by one or one and a half wide, several hundred feet below the summit on the west side, but still on the bare rocky top and on the steepest side of the summit, I saw toad-spawn (black with white bellies), also some very large spawn new to me. There were four or five masses of it, each three or four inches in diameter and of a peculiar light misty bluish white as it lay in the water near the surface, attached to some weed or stick, as usual. Each mass consisted of but few large ova, more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, in which were pale- brown tadpoles flattened out. The outside of the mass when taken up was found to consist of large spherical or rounded gelatinous projections three-quarters of an inch wide, and blue in the light and air, while the ova within were greenish. This rain-water pool was generally less than a foot deep, with scarcely a weed in it, but considerable mud concealing its rocky bottom. The spawn was unusually clean and clear. I suspect it to be that of bullfrogs,* though not a frog was to be seen; they were probably lurking beneath the rocks in the water at that hour. This pool was bounded on one or two sides by those rounded walls of rock five or six feet high. My com- panion had said that he heard a bullfrog the evening before. Is it likely that these toads and frogs ever hopped up there? The hylodes peeped regularly toward night each day in a similar pool much nearer the summit. Agassiz might say that
*[In 1860, when Thoreau again visited Monadnock, he saw two or three frogs-"one large Rana fontinalis, in that rocky pool on the southwest side where I saw the large spawn which I supposed to be bullfrog spawn two years ago, but now think must have been R. fontinalis spawn." See post, 1860, p. 156.]
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they originated on the top. Perhaps they fell from the clouds in the form of spawn or tadpoles or young frogs. I think it more likely that they fell down than that they hopped up. Yet how can they escape the frosts of winter? The mud is hardly deep enough to protect them.
Having reached the neighborhood of our camp again and explored the wooded portion lower down along the path up the mountain, we set out northeast along the east side of the mountain. The southeast part of the mountain-top is an ex- tended broad rocky almost plateau, consisting of large flat rocks with small bogs and rain-water pools and easy ascents to different levels. The black spruce tree which is scattered here and there over it, the prevailing tree or shrub of the mountain- top, evidently has many difficulties to contend with. It is gen- erally of a yellowish green, its foliage. The most exposed trees are very stout and spreading close to the rock, often much wider close to the rock than they are high, and these lower, almost their only, limbs completely filling and covering open- ings between the rocks. I saw one which grew out of a narrow crack in the rock, which was three feet high, five inches in diameter at the ground, and six feet wide on the rock. . . It forms dense coverts and forms apparently, for the rabbits, etc. A single spruce tree of this habit would sometimes make a pretty good shelter, while the rocks on each side were your walls.
As I walked over this plateau, I first observed, looking toward the summit, that the steep, angular projections of the summit and elsewhere and the brows of the rocks were the parts chiefly covered with dark-brown lichens, umbilicaria, etc., as if they were to grow on the ridge and slopes of a man's nose only. It was the steepest and most exposed parts of the high rocks alone on which they grew, where you would think it most difficult for them to cling. They also covered the more rounded
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brows on the sides of the mountain, especially on the east side, where they were very dense, fine, crisp, and firm, like a sort of shagreen, giving a firm footing or hold to the feet where it was needed. It was these that gave that Ararat brown color of antiquity to these portions of the mountain, which a few miles distant could not be accounted for, compared with the more prevalent gray. From the sky blue you pass through the misty gray of the rocks to this darker and more terrene color. The temples of the mountain are covered with lichens, which color it for miles. . .
They seemed to me wild robins that placed their nests in the spruce up there. I noticed one nest. William Emerson, senior, says they do not breed on Staten Island. They do breed at least at Hudson's Bay. They are certainly a hardy bird, and are at home on this cool mountain-top.
We boiled some rice for our dinner, close by the edge of a rain-water pool and bog on the plateau southeast from the summit. Though there was so little vegetation, our fire spread rapidly through the dry cladonia lichens on the rocks, and, the wind being pretty high, threatened to give us trouble, but we put it out with a spruce bough dipped in the pool. . . These rain-water pools or cisterns are a remarkable feature. There is a scarcity of bubbling springs, but this water was commonly cool enough in that atmosphere and warm as the day was. I do not know why they were not warmer, for they were shallow and the nights were not cold. Can there be some concealed snow or ice about? Hardly. . . You never have to go far to find water of some kind. On the top, perhaps, of a square half- acre of almost bare rock, as in what we called our wash-room by our camp, you find a disintegrated bog, wet moss alternating with dry cladonia (sign and emblem of dryness in our neigh- borhood), and water stands in little holes; or if you look
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under the edges of a boulder there, you find standing water, yet cool to drink.
After dinner we kept on northeast over a high ridge east of the summit, whence was a good view of that part of Dublin and Jaffrey immediately under the mountain. There is a fine, large lake extending north and south, apparently in Dublin, which it would be worth the while to sail on. When on the summit of this, I heard the ring of toads from a rainpool a little lower and northeasterly. It carried me back nearly a month into spring (though they are still ringing and copulating in Con- cord), it sounded so springlike in that clear, fresh air. ..
In one or two places on this side of the mountain, which, as I have said, terminated in an abrupt precipice, I saw bogs or meadows four or six rods wide or more. . . close to the edge of the mountain or precipice, where, if you stood between the meadow and the summit, looking east, there would appear to be a notch in the rim of the cup or saucer on the east and the meadow ready to spill over and run down the mountain on that side; but when you stood on this notched edge, the descent was seen to be much less precipitous than you had expected. Such spongy mountain bogs, however, are evidently the sources of rivers. Lakes of the clouds when they are clear water. Between this and the northeast spur or ridge was the largest swamp or bog that I saw, consisting, perhaps, of between one and two acres, as I remember. It was a grassy and mossy bog without large bushes, in which you sank a foot, with a great many fallen trees in it, showing their bleached upper side here and there but almost completely buried in the moss. This must once have been a dense swamp, full of pretty large trees. The trees buried in the moss were much larger than any now standing at this height. The outlet of this, if it had any, must have been northwesterly. This was a wild place enough. . .
We had thus made a pretty complete survey of the top of
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the mountain. It is a very unique walk, and would be almost equally interesting to take though it were not elevated above the surrounding valleys. It often reminded me of my walks on the beach, and suggested how much both depend for their sublimity on solitude and dreariness. In both cases we feel the presence of some vast, titanic power. The rocks and valleys and bogs and rain-pools of the mountain are so wild and un- familiar still that you do not recognize the one you left fifteen minutes before. This rocky region, forming what you may call the top of the mountain, must be more than two miles long by one wide in the middle, and you would need to ramble about it many times before it would begin to be familiar. There may be twenty little swamps so much alike in the main that [you] would not know whether you had seen a particular one before; and the rocks are trackless, and do not present the same point. So that it has the effect of the most intricate labyrinth and artificially extended walk ...
We proceeded to get our tea on the summit, in the very place where I had made my bed for a night some fifteen years before. There were a great many insects of various kinds on the topmost rocks at this hour, and among them I noticed a yellow butterfly and several large brownish ones fluttering over the apex.
It was interesting to watch from that height the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the landscape. You could hardly distinguish them from forests. It reminded me of the similar shadows seen on the sea from the high bank of Cape Cod beach. There the perfect equality of the sea atoned for the comparatively slight elevation of the bank. We do not com- monly realize how constant and amusing a phenomenon this is, in a summer day, to one standing on a sufficiently elevated point. In the valley or on the plain you do not commonly notice the shadow of a cloud unless you are in it, but on a mountain-top,
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or on a lower elevation in a plain country or by the seaside, the shadows of clouds flitting over the landscape are a never-failing source of amusement. It is commonly easy to refer a shadow to its cloud, since in one direction its form is preserved with sufficient accuracy. Yet I was surprised to observe that a long, straggling downy cumulus extending north and south a few miles east of us, when the sun was perhaps an hour high, cast its shadow along the base of the Peterboro Hills, and did not fall on the other side, as I should have expected. It proved the clouds not so high as I supposed. It suggested how with tolerable accuracy you might easily calculate the height of a cloud with a quadrant and a good map of the country; e. g., observe at what distance the shadow of a cloud directly overhead strikes the earth, and then take the altitude of the sun, and you may presume that you have the base and two angles of a right- angled triangle, from which the rest may be calculated ; or you may allow for the angle of elevation of the mountain as seen from the place where the shadow falls. Also you might de- termine the breadth of a cloud by observing the breadth of the shadow at a given distance, etc., etc. Many such calculations would be easy in such a locality. It was pleasant enough to see one man's farm in the shadow of a cloud,-which perhaps he thought covered all the northern states,-while his neighbor's farm was in sunshine. It was still too hazy to allow of our seeing the shadow of the mountain, so we descended a little before the sun set, but already the hylodes had been peeping for some time.
Again the wood thrush, chewink, etc., sang at eve. I had also heard the song sparrow.
As the sky was more cloudy this evening, we looked out a shelving rock near our camp, where we might take shelter from the rain in the night if necessary, i.e., if our roof did not prove tight enough. There were plenty of clefts and small
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caverns where you might be warm and dry. The mosquitoes troubled us a little this night.
Lying up there at this season, when the nighthawk is most musical, reminded me of what I had noticed before, that this bird is crepuscular in its habits. It was heard by night only up to nine or ten o'clock and again just before dawn, and marked those periods or seasons like a clock. Its note very conveniently indicated the time of night. It was sufficient to hear the night- hawk booming when you awoke to know how the night got on, though you had no other evidence of the hour. I did not hear the sound of any beast. There are no longer any wolves to howl or panthers to scream. One man told me that many foxes took refuge from dogs and sportsmen on this mountain ...
June 4. Friday. At 6 A. M. we began to descend. . . south- ward, taking the road to the State Line station and Winchen- don, through the west part of Rindge.
It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression. . . When you are on the mountain, the different peaks and ridges appear more independent; indeed, there is a bewildering variety of ridge and valley and peak; but when you have withdrawn a few miles, you are surprised at the more or less pyramidal outline of the mountain and that the lower spurs and peaks are all subordinated to the central and principal one. The summit appears to rise and the sur- rounding peaks to subside, though some new prominences ap- pear. Even at this short distance the mountain has lost most of its rough and jagged outline, considerable ravines are smoothed over, and large boulders which you must go a long way round make no impression on the eye, being swallowed up in the air.
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I
From Thoreau's Journal, Walden Edition, 1906, by the courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company.
[Aug. 4, 1860]. 8.30 A. M .- Start for Monadnock. Begins to rain at 9 A. M., and rains from time to time there- after all day, the mountain-top being constantly enveloped in clouds. . .
According to the guide-board it is two and one-fourth miles from Troy to the first fork in the road near the little pond and schoolhouse, and I should say it was near two miles from there to the summit,-all the way uphill from the meadow.
We crossed the immense rocky and springy pastures, contain- ing at first raspberries but much more hardhack in flower reddening them afar, where cattle and horses collected about us, sometimes came running to us as we thought for society, but probably not. I told Bent of it-how they gathered about us, they were so glad to see a human being-but he said I might put it in my book so, it would do no harm, but then the fact was they came about me for salt. . . Cattle young and old, with horns in all stages of growth; young heifers with budding horns; and horses with a weak sleepy-David look, though sleek and handsome. They gathered around us while we took shelter under a black spruce from the rain.
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