Our Brother, the Mountain

I KNEW a hermit once. He lived in a little red hut among the mountains, but he said he liked the sea better. Perhaps he did. He insisted that those particular mountains were monotonous and uninteresting in summer, untidy and even ugly in winter ; and yet he lived in the little red hut for as much as two years and a half, all alone, because he wanted to. And when the world called him, and he had to stop being a hermit, he was very glum. In his last summer at the hermitage he said little, as always, but I saw that he knew his mountains better than he knew himself. And meanwhile he never ceased to assert his preference for the sea.

Some day, when I have as much as two years and a half at my disposal, I am going to be a hermit, too, and among those same monotonous New England mountains. But not at the edge of the highroad, in a red hut, with an air-tight stove. No; we found my cell last August, a friend and I, — she is going to be another hermit. We came out under the ledges of a great ungainly mountain, — halfway up its side, — and straight before us rose a sheer precipice. For a little way we walked delicately, close between the high gray wall and the stems of the higher birch trees that stretched their flickering boughs to overtop the ledge. Below us, the shattered mountain side fell away to the ravine ; beyond, the broken rocks offered a wider footing. We crept through a dim cavern, came out upon splinters set edgewise upon cracks and holes, tottered to an intermittent equilibrium, and lifted up our heads. There was a rustle, a quick scramble, and ten feet away a young deer leaped up and looked at us. We caught our breath and turned shamefaced before him ; and he, snuffing the air, swept us with his wide, proud, anxious gaze, turned, and bounded down the ravine. As he went he waved his tail excitedly, and it was white and broad, fluffy like a feather, and astonishingly long. We found his little lair, all carpeted with twigs, under a shelving rock; and I am going to make my cell in the narrow cavern at the foot of the precipice. I shall not miss the air - tight stove ; the dry crackle of burning branches in the open has a warmer, friendlier sound. There is no brook in that ravine ; but, after all, what is a walk of a mile or two for a drink of water, when one is thirsty ? And in the spring, when the snows melt, there is water everywhere. I could drink a great deal of water in the spring, and emulate the camel the rest of the year.

In the old time men had a good, grateful custom of blessing the brooks and fountains that met them and refreshed them on pilgrimage, and of late my friend — who hopes to be the other hermit—and I, pressed upon by the thought of all the little unblessed trickles of water in Puritan New Hampshire, have revived this custom ; it induces in us a recollected spirit, and the water is always sweet afterwards.

There are many of these little wells and water courses in our mountains, and the brooks we use as Theseus used Ariadne’s ball of twine in the labyrinth, — to find our way out. The people who live in the valley shake their heads, and tell us these gently rising, broad-topped, wooded hills are dangerous; we hear of thirty miles of unbroken forest stretching back to Canada, — of the inevitable man who went forth and never returned. And we sling a blue canvas bag over our shoulders, and smile up at the rockcrowned summit that shall be ours at high noon. We are never lost; the trees and rocks are too friendly. Sometimes we lose the mountain and do not know where we are, but that is a different matter. We lost one last summer; it hid its head, and we wandered disconsolate all day, up, up, through unremembered forests, seeing close at hand, in broken glimpses, huge unfamiliar heights which we never attained. In the afternoon we dropped into a brook, and ran down with it to the valley ; now beating through the underbrush along its banks, now treading its stepping-stones, now swishing ankle-deep through the soaked moss in its rocky bed. Yet we were not lost; for, after a bewildering mile, the brook, on a sudden, laughed down a waterfall, and we knew it for a friend.

But the days when we do not lose the mountain are the best days: when we follow the blazed trail through the woods, our eyes set on the green, tree-barred distance with a listening look, the smile of the explorer on our lips; when we grip the hardy twigs that grow out of the cracks of the ledges, and pull ourselves up, hand over hand, to the next little tree, and hug it, breathless. Such climbing Dante did when

And we, like him, grow rested as we mount. So the boy Wordsworth climbed : —

And bis were little hills like ours, — his friends and brothers. These are the things we think of as we he against the tree trunk, leaning out with it over the precipice up which we have crawled.

On the bare gray summit we build a fire, perhaps, and toast our sandwiches, and lie under the sky, looking up and out, till the earth turns, and we are helplessly lying on the underside, looking down into blue depths, instead of up, and wondering, drowsily, why we do not drop off. We sit up, after that, and read Dante out of a little battered Florentine volume that has climbed up hither in the blue canvas bag. As we read we face the greater mountains which we do not climb. They rise on the other side of the valley. They seem all built of horizontal lines, and yet — they rise. One of them has a little peak, but the others are rounded on top. We tell each other that they are not sharp and rugged because they are so old, and their edges are worn off. “ Older than the Alps ! ” — we say that with a little smile of satisfaction, and a little unsatisfied sigh. “They are very noble,” we say, “these elder brothers,” and we fall to gazing at them without more speech ; till one of us — usually the other one — rises, scatters the ashes of the fire, stamps out the embers, and drops Dante into the blue canvas bag.

Going down, perhaps we miss the trail, and swim through half an acre of scrub (the progress cannot be dignified by the term “ walking ”) ; we are scratched, our clothes are torn, our feet cannot find the ground, and our eyes are on a level with the top of the thicket; we are all but submerged in the pungent, prickly sea of green; we swallow spruce twigs, and plunge onward doggedly till the scrub breaks, and an old unused logging road, coming up to the surface of the earth for a few rods, affords us temporary relief. Out of the distance grows the sound of water dashing down the rocks. If the day is long enough, we go out to the waterfall and climb down the edge of it, and taste the foam ; marveling that the poets spoke truth when they told us it was bitter.

The little lake that feeds this waterfall is on the broad, flat top of the mountain ; its shores are made of bog and laurel bushes ; in the soft mud by the water’s edge are the prints of the feet of the creatures that have come down to drink. The hoofs of the deer have sunk in sharply, the little foxes must have pranced on the shore last night, and here is the mark of a great fat paw. We glance over our shoulders involuntarily, then back at the interesting discovery in the mud ; there has been a little paw beside it, — a bear and her cub ! One day, something like a big, clumsy black dog moved away from us, far off through the trees ; we could only infer that it was not a dog, but we hardly like to say that we have seen a bear. Porcupines we have seen, fat and black and shaggy, sitting in the top of a tree, watching us with a baleful eye. And in the dusk, as we swing along the highroad, glad of a level three-mile stretch after a day of ups and downs, we hear the wild fox bark, and we clutch each other by the hand and stop still, and the bark comes again, — a yelp, a screech, and a long, thin sob.

We do not always read Dante on our mountains, although he always climbs with us. Sometimes we read The High History of the Holy Grail ; sometimes The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a bird book by John Burroughs, Travels with a Donkey, Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Sometimes we do not read at all; we work. We have two or three little workaday hills near at hand, with convenient shade trees just under their summits. The birds fly up above, and peer at us through the leaves, we sit so still; but they do not ask questions.

We are very confidential with our mountains, our brothers; we tell them things ; we are used to them. They are monotonous, maybe. We do not know this, but we are told that they are. It is true that they seldom startle us ; but so much else in civilization is melodramatic that it is good to feel that our mountains are only dignified, and serene, and very noble, and very, very old. The ones that Francis knew in Italy were more romantic, gray in the skirts with olive, looking out east and west to the bright sea, — robber-haunted, with soft, mellifluous names. There are no banditti on our hills, and the democracy has named them after Jones and Brown and Robinson, and a few other men ; but they belong to us ; we know them and love them. Sometimes we go on pilgrimage among them, as Francis went among his. In their solitudes it may be that one day we too shall see visions. Meanwhile we wait, and trust them. When we make a pilgrimage on the feast of the Transfiguration, or some other day, we like to think of how those earlier pilgrims read the Hours as they climbed : Prime beside a river in a valley, perhaps, under a bridge, where the chipmunks and the birds came to prayers Tierce beneath a pine tree, facing the morning light on the hills, and praying open-eyed before the glories of God. We think they must have read Sext on the summit, and Nones by the brookside, after they had put their shoes from off their feet; and Compline a trifle early, on a great stone by the road, with the moon rising in the summer twilight, and the mist drifting up from the river.

Yes, it will be very worth while being a hermit.

Florence Converse.