Free Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Page B

spread out for the night, the brook trout frying in the pan. I knew they would be telling how they heard the wind and the sounding water; and the stories again about Captain Jim's time, or even back to Old Tom's time when panther had roamed Over the Mountain, and Old Tom had seen the eastern bison in small droves, great shaggy black-humped bison coming down at sunset to cross the ford.
    Over at home, the week was a long and dreary one: the garden to tend, the cows to milk, working all day with my mind off somewhere, and then at evening I would watch the pasture slope. At last, they would come in smelling of fish and woodsmoke and rotten fishing worms. Standing in the lamplit kitchen, they would pour their shining loads out into Mama's big dishpans: silver cataracts; silver-sided, orange-bellied, red-speckled trout that G.D. called the “speckled beauties,” brook trout, wild andsalted—a hundred or a hundred and fifty of them—like a mountain stream. After supper, out on the porch, they told of the big one Uncle Dock lost in the Red Hole; of the great fishing they had found on Cranberry; or of the flock of turkeys flushed out at Barlow Top.
    When it all changed, it was not suddenly. There was no sudden summer or sudden fall; but gradually, as the years moved by, the song turned sour as the north fork of Cranberry River turned muddy. It had already begun in the 1880s, when the white pine had been cut and sent down the Greenbrier River. When the white pine loggers had come, they had brought the river-driving French Canucks. The log chutes on the skid trail glittered with ice, and they were greased with black-strap oil; the great logs roared down the chutes to the crick side. G.D. and Uncle Dock told that on a clear day when the logs were running, you could hear their heavy, screeching roar fifteen miles down river. And down at the cricks, where the loggers built their splash dams, the white pine logs splashed and swirled into the river on their way to the Ronceverte Mill.
    Then there was big money in the county, and plenty of quick talk. Up at town, brick-and-brownstonehouses were built; hardware stores and whiskey stills flourished; and boardwalks were laid down. But our Over the Mountain was hardwood country, and hardwood floats too heavy. And Uncle Dock insisted, “By God, they can't take her. She's too big for them.”
    Hardwood can go out by log train; and before 1900, the railroad came, and the Italians came to build it through the steep river-cuts. They camped in shanties all along the river, and G.D. told of the shanty down on Buckley's farm that was blown to bits one night, hardly a shred of flesh left. When he went down the next morning, he found a little embroidered wool bag in bright reds, blues, and yellows, hanging up in a tree. Inside it was a woman's and a child's picture, and G.D. brought it home and kept it down in a trunk.
    The day of the First Train, October 26, 1900, there was a big “speaking” up at town as the great locomotive came screaming up the valley, and the men from the railroad gave an ox roast with all the bankers, storekeepers, and lumber kings. Soon the narrow-gauge railroad began to creep up the Williams, and then its branches stretched up Tea Crick, Mountain Lick, and all the little feeder streams; and it began to carry the hardwood out.
    Still, through most of the years of my childhood, G.D., Uncle Dock, Cousin Rush, and Ward went Over the Mountain and brought home sacks of salted brook trout to pour into Mama's big pans. The change came slowly, and slowly a deep lament began to run through their stories: for the muddy, silted streams; the forest fires; the skid roads bleeding down the eroded hills; and the terrible waste of it all. When the jackleg lumber companies went bankrupt, the lumber shanties were abandoned, and the rusting, twisted rails. The trout began to die with sawdust in their gills, and the great ravaged trees were left rotting along the ridges'