Sandhills sketches

How drear and dismal snow-bound January seems! What a torrent of chilly discomfort is the sleet and slush of March! The golf bag, or the gun case, in the corner by the fireplace is a subtle, suggestive temptation, and even the cheery open fire itself calls up memories of crackling pine knots that spluttered and blazed not in deadly earnest, so that you should not shiver, but lightly and brightly, impregnating the air with the pungent frankincense of comradeship.

There is a glorious exultation in dodging Winter. You cannot really fight on equal terms with the old rascal--a steam heater is such a pitiful weapon after all--so there is a keen delight in snapping your fingers under his frost-bitten nose. When you slip out of the freezing grasp of his long, cold arms, you have cheated a cruel, inexorable Fate. You feel like the hero of a Greek tragedy who has gloriously turned the play to comedy, and there is a peculiarly delicious feeling of freedom. The smelly coolness of the mid-summer woods is a respite from the burning heat of the city in July; the tingling, briny freshness of the wind-swept sea rocks is a reprieve--but the southern sun in winter gives freely a full pardon to the weather prisoner. It is he himself who weaves the enticing spell of the winter vacation, and the minute you tumble out of the Pullman, from whose blackened eaves the ghosts of icicles still trickle, you become a pagan sun worshipper.

Some winter vacationists carry their sun worshipping to a fanatic extreme. They are not at all content to bask in the sun, they must go way to Florida or Bermuda to be fairly baked. This sun gluttony carries its own punishments of lazy lassitude and all the risks of a sniffling cold or hacking cough when one must, as one always must, return to the cold North. It is wiser and more temperate to slip just far enough into the South to find a friendly sun, but not so far that he becomes a bore.

Isn’t the ideal winter play-place a country where it is warm enough for you to feel the sun, so, if you are out-of-doors, you do not need mufflers and ear tabs; where you can ride or motor, shoot or fish, play golf or tennis without a bungling sweater clinging to your shoulders and elbows; where you can sit under the trees an hour and read a favorite book without your fingers being numbed to blueness? But don’t you like a tang of frost in the morning air? Fifteen minutes in that air before breakfast is worth a whole month of cold baths and setting up exercises for starting the day right. In such a country too, the nights will be cool and refreshing as spring water, and you will sleep a sleep more strengthening than the most potent tonic in the whole pharmacopoeia.

Such a winter play-place is the Piedmont country of the Carolinas, the Sandhills, as the natives who “made cotton and corn on the clay” of the lowlands contemptuously christened them years ago. This was the old sea shore of the continent, and the sandy soil is even today, after all these geological ages, almost as white as a beach. The Sandhills roll away gently, not unlike great dunes, and through each little valley trickles a little stream--“branches” the natives call them--on whose banks crowd great clumps of holly bushes, bluegums, and magnolias. The dry, sandy soil, like a great blotter, keeps the air as dry as cotton, and the most soaking rain leaves no puddles or mud holes behind it. This, as the Old North State’s hearty toast proudly proclaims, is indeed

“The land of the long leaf pine, The southern land where the sun doth shine.”

Even the golfer on the Pinehurst links, who is so strictly admonished “to keep his eye on the ball,” carries away with him the picture of the towering long-leaf pines with their great, foot-long needles and their giant cones. The Aiken motorist, as he bowls down the hillsides and rattles over the little wooden bridge that spans the branch, cannot fail to distinguish out of the whirling landscape the sandy hilltops and the green thickets along the valley bottoms. The fox hunter, since Reynard will surely lay a line of scent ’way off the beaten tracks into the heart of the pine woods and the magnolia lowlands, will know the Sandhills better. But the one who tramps over the Sandhills behind a brace of bird dogs will know them best. Up through the valley, skirting the branch--over the hillside and across the fallow cotton fields--a scramble over the rail fence and a plunge through the tangle of holly bushes and briars all snarled with creepers--splash, splash, through the stream and up the other side of the hill. He is sure to learn the country first hand, and he will meet all sorts of interesting people. A lusty negro boy will be perfectly delighted to stop chopping at the black-jack stumps to tell him, “Dere’s a whalin’ big cobey ob birds done feed ober in dat field ob cow-peas. Ah hyah ’em whistlin’ ’bout half an hour ’go.” On a level hilltop an old darky tar burner will be his willing instructor in the mysteries of tar making. In a little hollow, miles from the high road, he will come suddenly upon a slatternly cabin with a curious chimney of clay and crossed sticks. Here a trio of putty faced babies will eye him suspiciously from behind the pig sty while their mother, a drab, timid woman, gives him a dipper of water.

The quail shooter cannot wander over the Sandhills without sooner or later being reminded of the post card with the picture of the revenue officers and the score of captured blockade whisky stills he sent off to his particular friend the first night he reached his hotel. I remember very well a suspicious old fellow, whose curt answers and strange advice sent our imaginations weaving tales of the moonshiners. ’Way back in the hills the dogs found a big covey beside a swamp and the birds flushed over the hill. We followed them to pick up the scattered singles and found two before we noticed this old fellow sitting on a stump at the edge of the thicket. We called in the dogs and walked over to him. He sat there, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, quite motionless. A rusty, single barrelled shotgun, with a hammer as big as a clothes hook, rested in the crook of his arm, and between his feet sat a thin, black and tan foxhound, with a meek, sorrowful expression in her dark eyes. Neither man nor dog moved as we came up to them.

“Hello. Is this your land?” I asked.

He had been peering at us keenly from under his heavy brows as we approached, but now he dropped his eyes and mumbled noncommittally, “Dunno.”

“It isn’t posted, is it?”

“Tain’t posted,” he replied shortly.

“Are you finding many rabbits?” I asked him cheerfully.

“Ain’t huntin’ rabbits.”

“’Possums then?” I suggested.

“Ain’t huntin’ ’possum.”

“Does your hound point quail?”

“Nope.”

“Are you running deer? We saw some tracks back in the swamp.”

“Ain’t huntin’ deer.”

“Well, what are you hunting?”

“Ain’t huntin’ nawthin’.”

I gave up in despair, and my friend asked him very politely, “Do you live hereabouts?”

“Ovah yondah,” he answered without a sign, so whether his home was north, south, east, or west, and whether a hundred yards or ten miles away, there was no telling.

“Are there many birds about here?”

“Dunno,” he answered shortly.

“Queen” had found another bird and was pointing beautifully. We went over to her and my friend made a fine shot on a hard single. We started on and the old man yelled after us. We stopped and turned. He was hobbling slowly towards us.

“Is it possible he has found his tongue?” I whispered.

“The age of miracles is past,” replied my companion.

“Them birds you-all is huntin’,” said the old man when he was close beside us, “went ovah t’other side o’ the swamp.”

“But,” protested my friend, “we saw them come over the hill and we’ve found three singles already.”

“Right smart o’ ’em circled ’round.”

“Are you sure?” I persisted.

“Sartin’,” he grunted.

We exchanged glances, both wondering whether we were receiving a friendly tip from a strange fellow-sportsman or whether we were being gently warned away from the proximity of an illicit whisky still. We accepted his advice and recrossed the swamp. We found just one lone bird on that hillside where he had indicated, that “right smart o’ ’em” had flown.

As we went down the hill on the other side my friend asked me in all seriousness, “You know something about this Tar Heel dialect--would you call one, ’right smart’?”

“Would you?” I asked, and we both laughed.

If “the East is East and the West is West,” so the North is North and the South, South. That, if you really know the Sandhills, is one of the best charms of a winter vacation in that fascinating country. It is a very different country with different trees and flowers and birds and animals. The people too, are different. The Sandhill darky is a type quite distinct, and the Tar Heel is as fascinating and romantic as his cousin up in the Cumberland Mountains. You will not find these things at your hotel nor in the shops at Southern Pines, or Hamlet, or Aberdeen. You will not find them on the golf links or the tennis courts. You are very apt to ride over them on horseback, and you will surely pass them in a motor; but they are there, and over and above the good sport of winter play, they add a great deal to the fun of dodging winter in the Sandhills.

“Them Huggins Boys”

Everybody in the Sandhills, it seemed, knew “them Huggins boys”, and nobody had a good word to say for them. Everywhere I went I heard of them, and everything that I heard was ill.