The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts

by Robert Morgan

  A trap line is like a net throwed out over the mountains. But nobody is supposed to see it except the person that set the traps. A good trapper hides his traps so you could walk right over them and not see them. And you remember where every set is, no matter if they is dozens, strung out over twenty miles of branches and trails. You’re like a peddler that knows all the places in a region.

  I don’t reckon they’s no finer feeling than coming home with four or five pelts and one of them is mink. Even if you was cold, you could come in and set by the fire and skin off the hides and stretch them on boards. Mama complained about me skinning animals by the fire, but she let me do it. And I always cleared away the mess and wiped up the blood. I hung the stretched hides on the back side of the crib, out of reach of dogs while they dried and cured.

  Some days, if I had run into a polecat, they could smell me coming all the way down the valley. If the wind was right the stink carried for miles. A skunk gets in your trap you have to take it out, and when it’s riled, it throws the stink on you before you can kill it.

  When I come home smelling like a polecat, Mama would meet me out at the barn with clean clothes and a piece of lye soap. I had to wash up in the branch and then burn my dirty pants and shirt. I never did think a polecat smells as bad as other people do, but maybe I got used to them.

  I’m coming to the painter, girl. Every winter I made a little money selling furs that was mailed off to the St. Louis Fur Company, and to Chicago, and to a place in Baltimore. And most of these companies had catalogs and sold you guns and ammunition and traps and bottles of scent to attract mink. I bought a mackinaw coat and a new rifle. But every year I come out with a few dollars extra. The pelts of twenty miles of creeks and branches could be changed into a handful of silver dollars. But I done it for the fun of tramping back in the mountains.

  Besides trapping, I done my share of hunting too. The valleys was full of deer back then, and they was wild turkeys in almost every holler. They was bear in the Flat Woods, and over in South Carolina. And sometimes somebody would lose a pig or a calf to a painter. You never did see a painter in the daytime, hardly, but you heard them squalling in the night and they would come into your yard and kill a dog if they felt like it.

  You always heard stories about painters. The mountain over here at the state line was called Painter Mountain. Since I was a little youngun I heard stories about Great-grandma Petal Richards staying up all night to keep a painter from coming down the chimney. That was the night my Grandpa was born. She burned up half the furniture to keep the fire going.

  One time I seen some coonhunters come out of Gap Creek with a big cat stretched on a pole. I reckon it was six feet long, and it was the color of a Jersey calf, except the tip of its tail, and its ears and paws, was almost black. It was so heavy it wore out the two men carrying it up the mountain.

  I had a fox trap on the yon side of Pinnacle. It was at a place called the Sand Gap where the dirt is loose and gritty. I had caught three foxes there, and one morning I come along to check the trap and heard something growling. I thought a fox must have been caught and something was eating it. And I heard this thrashing around in the leaves and brush like they was a fight. I eased around the bend in the trail and didn’t see nothing at first. The trap was wired to a pine tree and the pine was shaking like a wind had hit it.

  Suddenly something rared up from the other side, and I seen it was a big yeller cat. People are always talking about black painters, but all I ever seen was tan with maybe some black on them. This painter rared up like it was going to jump on me. But its paw was caught in the trap. Now a normal fox trap wouldn’t hold a painter. The painter would just pull out of it. But I had used a bigger trap, a number four beaver trap I had ordered special to see how it would work for foxes and coons. And I had seen the tracks of an otter on Grassy Creek and wanted to catch it.

  I raised my gun to shoot, and just then the painter broke away. It tore the trap right off the pine and run away limping, dragging the trap. Before I could even fire a shot, it was gone.

  I wasn’t more than about sixteen then. I reckon the trap rotted the painter’s foot off, for I started hearing stories about a three-legged painter. Hunters in the Flat Woods would say they seen a big cat that was missing a foot. You know how stories like that will start on their own and grow. A feller named Ballard was camping back there one night and the cat attacked him. It raked him across the eyes with a big paw and the last thing he ever seen was this painter missing a foot. It clawed his eyes out and he took a week to make his way back to the settlement. He done it by finding a branch and follering it.

  You started hearing stories about Old Tryfoot. That’s what they named the painter. People up on the mountain said the painter took their lambs, and killed their pigs. They said it could smell a mother’s milk for miles, and always knowed when a cow had freshened or a sow had a new brood. Some of these stories I believed and some I didn’t. People said they seen Old Tryfoot looking in the window at night, and they seen him on top of the church one time in the moonlight. Boys said they seen that cat diving into the river catching fish, but I think what they seen was their own faces reflected in moonshine.

  But the story I did believe was the one Alice Jeter told. She had a new baby named Sarah. It wasn’t more than ten weeks old. She went out to her garden and picked some peas in a basket and was shelling them on the porch. Baby Sarah was laying on a pallet on the puncheons. Alice had heard a painter squall the night before. But in the daytime she didn’t think they was no cause to worry. When she went inside to get another pan to wash the peas in she heard a rush and thud on the porch. The baby cried for just an instant and then they was the pad of feet across the yard. By the time she got to the door she just seen the painter slip into the woods.

  Alice screamed so people heard her all up and down the valley. She was near beside herself. She run after the painter but it was gone. She run down to her brother’s house and told him what happened. Then she hurried back to the house and looked on the porch like she thought the cat might have brung the baby back. She went inside and looked in the cradle but it was still empty.

  They got together a pack of dogs and tracked the cat right up the side of the mountain to these rocks just under the top. And they seen this crevice where the cat must have crawled. The dogs set up a howl outside the cave, and the men gathered with their guns trying to figure what to do. They listened to see if they could hear the baby cry. They didn’t want to smoke the cat out for fear of smothering the baby. They talked and waited, and they couldn’t hear nothing from the cave.

  Finally they pulled the dogs away from the entrance and somebody took a long stick and poked around inside. They couldn’t feel a thing, though the dogs was yipping and carrying on like they could still smell the painter. One of the Smart boys lit a pine knot and pushed it inside, and he didn’t see nothing at first. The painter was gone. It had left before they arrived, backtracked on itself and leaped up a tree and was gone. But what the Smart boy did see was bones in the corner of that cave, white as if they had been gnawed clean, or eat and then puked up. And among the pile was the bones of little Sarah.

  Honey, what you end up doing may be the last thing you ever planned. I didn’t go to be no builder, mostly, like I said, because that’s what my Pa done. He was knowed far and wide as “the Roadbuilder.” From the time I was a shirt-tail youngun I had to help him lay off right of ways and dig out roadways on mountainsides. I might have liked doing it except it was what I was expected to do. Everybody said, “You’re just like your Pa.” I was always sweaty and bent over a dragpan or wheelbarr. But all I was thinking about was how I’d like to be off in the cool woods looking for sign of mink or fox.

  I didn’t want to be no schoolteacher like my Grandpa MacPherson either. Mama would talk about how he had worked at the little college in town and how poor he was paid. And he had to do everything from teaching handwriting to directing the chorus. Mama would say, “Maybe David wants to be a pro
fessor, like his Grandpa,” and I would make it up in my mind that I would never be no teacher either, much as I liked to read books and find out about things.

  But it’s like we know what our destiny is and we try to avoid it. Like somebody is called to preach and they get drunk and try to prove how mean and sinful they are, till they can’t resist the call no longer. And sometimes when a boy falls in love, he’ll not even mention the girl he’s struck on and will avoid looking at her or even going near her house, until he can’t stand it no more. He’ll talk about every girl in the county except the one he’s in love with. The truth is, he is struck so deep he can’t talk about it. Then one day, when something happens that means he can’t wait no longer, like sickness or a death in the family, he goes and confesses to her. And she has knowed all along how he felt and what a fool he is, but couldn’t do nothing about it.

  I told myself all I wanted to do was trap and hunt and gallivant around the ridges. I told Pa I didn’t want no more roads into the mountains. I wanted people to stay to the woods and trails, like Pa said Tracker Thomas told him they should. I learned to use a dial and leveler, better than Pa ever had. But I told myself I was learning so I could work quick and get a job over with and go back to the woods. I told myself I didn’t care how a road was made, as long as I could get it done and take my pay and buy a few more steel traps.

  I knowed about grades and soils and how to build a simple bridge, and I read books on civil and military engineering which I bought at the store in Augusta when we drove down to trade in the fall. But I told myself I was doing it to support myself, and to make people leave me alone. I thought I just wanted to do my work and get back into the woods.

  Then Pa had his stroke and everything changed. I was took by surprise, for Pa had always been so healthy and full of ideas. When he was on a job, all he thought of was how to get a road made. He expected everybody to fall in and help him. He give orders and he couldn’t believe the rest of us wasn’t as keen as him to get on with the job.

  So here this big strong man that hadn’t never been sick before couldn’t move his left side, and he couldn’t talk fast, the side of his mouth was drawed so. It was like something had got inside him and held him. And he was in pain too. Wherever the stroke had hit, I reckon it hurt something awful. He was a strong man that had always done whatever he wanted to, and he couldn’t stand to be helpless. He was mad that he couldn’t get out of his chair.

  Pa kicked and rared and lashed out at whoever tried to help him. He talked ugly to Mama for the first time I ever heard him. He hollered like a little kid and he cussed at Doctor Wilkes when he come to examine him. It didn’t seem like Pa at all. I told the doctor I was sorry, and he said not to worry about it. He said Solomon wasn’t hisself, and after a stroke it was natural to blame a doctor if he couldn’t make you walk again and feel better.

  I seen Pa do things I never would have dreamed of, like slap pills out of the way and knock a bowl of soup out of Mama’s hands when she was trying to feed him. But the thing that showed me how much he had changed was when Lance the politician from Asheville that got the contract for the new turnpike come to the house.

  “Mr. Richards, I want you to lay out the new road through the gap,” Lance said.

  But Pa wouldn’t even try to answer him. His head was turned to the side and he didn’t speak. I reckon he was ashamed he couldn’t work like he used to. He didn’t seem to care about the new road. He just looked at the floor like a little youngun that ain’t used to strangers. It made me sick inside to see him do that.

  “Solomon is getting better,” Mama said. “He is getting better use of himself every day.”

  “But Pa has to rest a lot still,” I said.

  When Mr. Lance stood up to go, his fine beaver hat in his hand, he drawed me aside. “David,” he said, “could you survey the right-of-way over the gap? You’ve been helping your Pa, ain’t you?”

  Even before Pa took sick, I had done a few little jobs on my own, building roads out at Flat Rock and doing most of the labor myself with my cousin Noble and my brother John. I done it of course to make money to buy more traps.

  “I’ll give you the contract for the gap,” Mr. Lance said. “Howard and his chaingangs from South Carolina will build the road up to the foot of the mountain.”

  This was the most important job in upper Carolina. Pa was too sick to take it on, and Mama was already worried about money. It seemed like I didn’t have no choice. I was scared to take the job on, and even scareder to refuse it.

  “David can build a road any place,” Mama said to Mr. Lance.

  “I’ll start the survey for Pa,” I said. “Then when he’s better, he can build the road.” It seemed like the only decent thing for me to say. And right then, in a few seconds, the rest of my life was changed. And the strange thing was I knowed it, though I didn’t know it exactly either. What I did know for certain was it would be a long time before I could go back to the creek banks and my trap lines in the woods.

  Well, my child, I’ve always been one to stay with a job once I start it. It don’t do no good to jump into something and then quit. Some people will give up a job before they’ve learned how to do it. If I have a talent, it is a talent for sticking with things. A lot of people will get tired of a hard task and leave. They can’t wait to get things over so they can be gone. Everybody wants to move on to something new.

  But I found out a long time ago it’s staying with a job that gives the true satisfaction. I get the urge to quit and move on, same as anybody. But if you resist the restlessness, and stay and see things is done right, you get a satisfaction you don’t find no other way. Even Pa was always one to move on to the next job, the next road contract, before the present one was finished. He liked to lay out and start new things. He wanted the thrill of seeing where a new track would go. When it was mostly built, he lost interest.

  He left me, even as a boy, to stay there and see the ditches and drains was dug right, that gravel was spread on the steep places, that big rocks got pounded into low wet places. I found they was pleasure in staying on a job till the very end, till the last rock was hammered in and the last shovel of dirt throwed. That was a pleasure I don’t think Pa ever learned. I learned it because he made me do it. He made me finish up for him, and I found they was a thrill in completeness after everybody else has gone.

  I liked to do the same thing at corn shuckings and barn raisings. I liked to stay there till the whole thing was done and everybody else had gone off to eat and sing. Ain’t nothing so sweet as staying with the work till the bitter end. When I was a boy I would hang around the school yard after the last class of term. The other younguns run off home, and I lingered while the teacher packed up his things and locked the schoolhouse. I felt such a contentment to have got through the term I didn’t want to leave. After the whippings and recitations and spelling bees it was wonderful to see the schoolhouse quiet.

  It was a wisdom I learned by accident. Yet maybe I was born that way too. It just suits me to finish what I start, while other people have to run off to fresh things, which they will probably leave to start something else. In building they’s a special ease in seeing things through. You might call it the rewards of patience. But whatever you call it, the feeling is real and important, and I hope it will be important to you.

  Honey, I want you to be patient. It may look now like you won’t ever have another chance to get married. But they will be another boy come to love you, and your baby. You’ve got to see this through. To see things through is the best we can do. They ain’t no escape and I don’t believe they is no higher purpose than to finish a task right down to the end without giving up and without turning away from the grief that is give us.

  My girl, though I hated to work for Pa, I loved to find an easy way through thickets and big rocks and split the mountain so folks could get across. It was a pleasure to make a level track through steep slopes, to move dirt and rocks around for people’s use. The gentle grade of a road is l
ike a lever that moves a mountain out of your way, a foot at a time. If you make a road right, you can take any load anywhere. Switchbacks up a ridge are like threads on a screw that twist right up to the highest summit. I hated it, and I loved it.

  A road brings order to the wildest country and makes a flow of people and wealth into the wilderness. A road is like the blood and breath to farback valleys and dark coves. I hated to do it, and I thrilled to do it. Now I ain’t sure how I feel.

  “Richards,” Mr. Lance said, “we’re going to build the first real road these mountains ever seen, and we’re going to build it cheap.”

  “Cheap ain’t always the best business,” I said.

  “We got convict labor,” he said. “We don’t have to pay them hardly nothing, except a fee to Mr. Howard, the warden.”

  “I can get my own crew,” I said.

  “Who you hire comes out of your pay,” Mr. Lance said. “The heavy work will be done by Howard’s gangs.” Mr. Lance winked when he talked. He leaned on his cane and sweated from the strain of standing.

  “We’ll build a plank road over the low places,” Mr. Lance said, “so there won’t be no mud. And we’ll make a grade so gentle the finest carriages can drive up from Greenville without a pause and the horses won’t fart on the pretty ladies.”

  Honey, sometimes you come to a place and it seems like they’s no way to get beyond it. The more you worry and fuss the worser everything gets. I know how you feel. That’s why I’m telling you this. When your heart is about broke, ain’t nothing helps but knowing other people have their troubles too. That, and getting on with your work. Here, don’t cry.

  The jump-off into South Carolina is the steepest place I know. You’ve seen it yourself. If you set down on the leaves at the top you could scoot all the way to Chestnut Springs. When people took their wagons that way on the old turnpike, loaded with hams and maple syrup and such, they had to tie the wheels back with rope on one side and hickory withes on the other. It was all a horse could do to hold the wagon back and men got on each side and helped. Coming back with a load from Greenville or Augusta, they had to make several trips up through the gap, or carry most of it on their backs. But coming up wasn’t nigh as scary as going down. Climbing up was bone-wrenching, gut-busting work. But going down, it was like the earth fell away and left you nothing to hold to. Even if you wasn’t afraid of high places it felt like the ground was tipping way down toward the treetops in Dark Corner and they was nothing between you and the trapdoor of hell.