Chapter II: Part 2

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

=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.