Spring and the Mountaineer

by Algernon Blackwood

With these first softer winds of spring there breaks upon the mind a thought of flowers, sunny woods, mountains soaring through haze into blue skies⁠—visions of some fair playground. For old Pan is out again. He has stepped forth from that “everlasting lair” of his, and pipe in hand⁠—those huge yet gentle hands⁠—is running over the world. And his music is strangely disquieting; it stirs the deep migratory instinct⁠—to break camp and move on further. One sees water running through the meadows with feet of silver, hears the idle flapping of a sail, tastes in the very thickest of the office atmosphere the fresh, keen fragrance of some upland dawn. One longs to burn the desks and be off without delay. It is all very upsetting⁠—this wild, sweet message spring brings, whispering cunningly to the heart that there are places where the world has never grown old, and that if one can only get away quickly enough, one’s own youth can be caught there, unchanged, untamed. Very fleeting, very fugitive, too; for most of us, alas, gone before it seized⁠—a dream one sets aside with other dreams If only the bodily and physical transfer could be immediate, it might be otherwise! If one could shoot across the earth’s surface to these lovely places to catch them before the midsummer pomps have robbed them of their wonderful first suggestiveness⁠—in May and early June!

With the waning of March the dream is apt to return more insistently, crossing the threshold into waking and action. One remembers that there is no harm, even thus early, in greasing the heavy stiff leather of the mountain boots, putting in new nails, airing that old grimy knapsack and seeing that the traps are right. It brings the playground nearer. The thoughts of thousands turn to their luring memories of the Alps: Italy, Tyrol, Switzerland. Eyes turn to flaming posters in the streets, the mind considers routes, the fingers probably turn the pages of a timetable as though it were some novel of adventure; a few may even hear the wind in those “dark clustered trees” that “fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.”

And at once, though with a sense of impatience that will not be denied, one’s daily work grows lighter. Magic names flit through the memory⁠—the Engadine, the Bernese Oberland, the peaks of Valais and the valleys of Savoy, the flowered uplands of Tyrol, the rustling chestnut woods of the Italian slopes, or the Bernina snowfields, rosy in the dawn. They are endlessly seductive; the scenery passes through the mind with a vividness of cinematograph films. One feels the blazing sunshine on the dusty roads of the Upper Engadine, returning from a climb that began before the dawn. The peasants are already bringing down their hay⁠—the early June crop, and the fields will yield at least two more before October slips upon the valley with its touch of frost and a wind chilled by the first flurries of snow. In the middle of the road the cart stands upon its tiny wheels, thick dust over the oxen hoofs, and the hay piled up on it in huge, bursting bundles packed in canvas sheets. It is three-parts flowers, and the perfume fills the air deliciously. Three hours before one passed the peasants, men and women, scything it on slopes of perilous steepness, still wet with sparkling dew, patches of Alpenrosen gleaming in between. The still air rings with the gentle music of the cowbells and the elusive tinkle of the smaller ones carried by the wandering herds of goats. For the goats are everywhere. In the valleys of the Austrian Tyrol, especially, the faint chiming comes upon every wind and haunts the air as inevitably as that other sound of falling water. The memory brings back the two together. Those small grey spots on some high, hanging slope beneath the very snow that looked like rocks, rise suddenly in a body and drift away to yet more dangerous declivities; the sound of bells floats across the deep, narrow valley; one thinks of “horns of Elfland faintly blowing”⁠ ⁠… the goats dot every landscape. Far above the tree-line, when life is least expected, one turns a corner, and there, lying among the boulders, grouped perhaps about some little wooden cross, their bodies rise out of the very ground, horns glistening in the sunshine. Not far away, hatless and usually barefooted, hovers the boy or girl who shepherds them, idly singing, or playing the hours away on some rude flute of home manufacture, and not uncommonly carrying in his arms a tired or injured young one. Dogs, except in the Bernese Alps, where, as a rule, they are big, ugly, savage brutes, are rarely seen with the flocks, but in the Valais villages every chalet owns at least one⁠—cat! I remember seeing once, on the high uplands towards the frontier of Savoy, a herd of fifty goats led by a barelegged girl to early pasture, all following in single file a⁠—tabby cat. With tail erect, jerking the dew from its paws delicately, it proudly showed the way. “It has done so since its kitten days,” said the girl. It rubbed against their legs, and when they butted it in play it easily evaded the horns and showed no fear. She told me that one year they also had a stork! Her father found it on the mountains in the late autumn, delayed in its flight southwards by a broken leg. He healed the leg and kept the bird all the winter in the chalet, where it established a firm, if curious, friendship with the cat. In the spring, as soon as he heard that the other storks had returned to their chimneys of South Germany, he let it go, watching it fly away northwards with unerring instinct across the mountains to find its own again.

The pictures throng and crowd; there comes again the perfume of the pine woods, baked in sunshine; the scents of thousand flowers where the swallowtails and apollos dance with the fritillaries; in the evenings the echoing notes of the great Alpine horns as the peasants call the cattle home: the banks of the rock-strewn torrent where they go down to drink and always that sky of clear and brilliant blue overhead⁠ ⁠… As yet the snow still lies thick, of course, but these first softer winds of spring are already at work upon it, “eating it up,” as the peasants say, “far more quickly than the sun,” The roar of the swollen torrents fills the air. The upper chalets, locked and shuttered all the winter often lying flush with the ground beneath enormous drifts, are being opened now. One thinks, and dreams, and calculates, making delightfu| plans. Old Pan has brought the news. Last night was heard that searching music of his pipes among the chimney-pots⁠ ⁠… and one begins to count the days.