Woods Treacheries

THERE can be no better place to watch marsh-hawks than Fenwick Castle in the Carolina Low Country. This is so partly because of the wide sweep of the wet meadows and marshes between the ruined mansion and the winding river, and partly because of the romance that invests the spot. The beautiful daughter of Lord Fenwick fell in love with a groom in her father’s stables. She ran away and married him, but the old hawk, her father, owner of some of the finest race horses in the Province, pursued and overtook the fugitives. He made short work of the marriage.

Tradition provides the outlines for a tragic picture — the young man bound and seated on his horse, a noose around his neck, the rope slung over a limb of a gray-bearded live-oak whose huge arms spread far and wide in the gloom overhead; Fenwick sitting pale and implacable on his panting racer; the daughter hysterical with terror; the flaring torches of Fenwick’s negro henchmen casting a lurid, flickering light upon the scene.

Just how the thing was done, the story does not make clear. Perhaps they forced her to it by main strength; perhaps she stood in such awful fear of her father that his word of command was enough. At any rate, the legend says that it was the girl herself who lashed the horse from under her lover.

From Fenwick Castle, where the negroes who live near by hear ghosts moaning and crying on windy nights, an old causeway, lined with shrubbery and trees, leads across the marshes to the river a mile or so to the east; and beneath this causeway, it is said, a secret passage ran underground from the house to the water’s edge.

That this subterranean way once extended as far as the river, and was used by the master of Fenwick as a means of smuggling in forbidden goods, may be doubted. Only a short section of it remains — a bricked-in tunnel through which a man might crawl on hands and knees; and it may be that this is all there ever was — an outlet from the mansion, designed to permit the escape of a messenger in case of Indian attack.

But whether or not the tunnel once went all the way to the river, and whether or not in the old days smugglers, who were pirates as well, passed through it under the ground, the legend has it so. It is an agreeable tale to think of; and thinking of it added something to the pleasure of even a matter-of-fact man, not a purveyor of romance, whose prime business on the causeway was the watching of marsh-hawks, and who had gone there because it was a good place from which to watch these birds.

Yet I found it hard to keep my mind on the marsh-hawks that afternoon. Though several of them were seen from time to time, flying low above the green grassy plains near the river, my thoughts wandered away from them, often returning to the old deserted house of brick behind me, from the high roof of which, when it was first built, one might have watched the canoes of red men passing up and down the Stono. But while my brain was busy with other things, my eyes followed the slow, graceful flight of the big harriers quartering the marsh meadows in their search for prey; and suddenly I saw one of them halt in the air, hang poised for a moment, then dart down. In a quarter of a minute he was up and away again, his talons empty; but in the intervening fraction of time something had happened.

Just above the tip of the marsh blades, the hawk had checked his descent with a frantic and desperate beating of his wings; then with powerful downward strokes he had shot swiftly upward. Evidently he had discovered in the nick of time that the object in the marsh grass, which had attracted his attention and brought him swooping down, was not what he had supposed it to be. Perhaps, instead of a mouse or a marsh-sparrow, a sly raccoon was crouching in the reeds, his paw raised for a fatal blow.

At any rate, it was laughable to see the sudden panic of the hawk; and, as I watched him sailing away from the spot where he had had a good scare, and perhaps a narrow escape, I was reminded of a true story of a hawk, which I had heard not long before — one of the strangest of many stories gathered from hunters and woodsmen of the Low Country.

It was a tale of a hawk and a deer hunter who fell asleep at his stand in the woods; and, more particularly, it was a tale of this deer hunter’s flowing white beard. The dogs were far off. Their music came faint and thin from the other side of the swamp. There was little chance that the deer would come our old gentleman’s way. So, keen hunter though he was, he sat down at the foot of a tree, holding his gun between his knees, the muzzle pointing upward, and in a few moments he was asleep.

How long he dozed, he never knew. Suddenly the gun was almost knocked from between his knees, and he opened his eyes to find that a large hawk, plunging downward from the air, had hurled itself against the end of the gun barrel and lay dead at his feet. Undoubtedly it was the white beard that had caught the hawk’s eye and brought him dashing down to instant annihilation. Probably the hawk had no time to be surprised; but there was never a more astounded deer hunter than the venerable Captain W-, when he realized that, while he slept peacefully in the wood, a hawk had made a target of his beard.

It was not one of the long-winged, rather deliberate harriers of the Fenwick marshes that made this dramatic, ill-starred raid. The marsh-hawk, too, shows speed and dash at times, as when he falls suddenly upon a clapper-rail crouching on her nest among the reeds; but, with the exception of the rare Peregrine falcon, the swiftest and boldest of all the feathered buccaneers of the Low Country are the blue darter hawks, as they are called hereabouts — the big blue darter, to which the scientists give the colorless name of Cooper’s hawk, and the little blue darter, termed with equal inappropriateness the sharpshinned hawk. These two are the heroes of most of the spectacular stories that are told of hawks in this region, which, because of its abundant wild life, great tracts of wooded country, and inaccessible marshlands, is a hunting-ground for many hawks; and it was almost certainly a big blue darter that committed assault and battery upon Captain W―’s beard.

Strange as that assault was, anyone who knows this bold falcon, and has observed his headlong recklessness in action, can understand readily enough how the thing occurred. The hawk, cruising silently through the long aisles of the woods, swerving swiftly in and out among the tree-trunks, and scanning the ground and thicket-tops for some bird or rabbit or other woods dweller which would satisfy his appetite, was suddenly aware of a white object beneath him. The blue darter is set on a hair-trigger. When he hunts on the wing in the woods, the moment his eye spots the prey, he plunges. Perhaps this hawk thought that the white thing beneath him was a hen, which had strayed from some farm or negro cabin. It is more likely that he did not pause to consider at all, but, responding instantly to instinct doubled his speed and shot down like an arrow to his death.

Death sets some queer ambuscades in the woods. Near the west bank of the South Santee, on an abandoned plantation which the Santee wilderness has reclaimed for its own, there is one of the oddest graves in the Low Country. Here, tradition says, was buried many years ago a beautiful young girl, the dearly beloved of her father, the master of the plantation; and the story runs that he, in order to make sure that she would be ready when the Last Trumpet sounded, buried her in an erect position so that she could step forth instantly from her tomb on the Day of the Resurrection. Hence the grave, standing by itself in a lonely, secluded spot, is taller than most graves, being some six or seven feet in height.

There is no stone, but from the top of the cone-shaped mound grows a handsome pine. The deer, which frequent these woods, come to the place sometimes at night; you can stand by the mound on an evening in May or June and hear the big alligators of the Santee bellowing like bulls in the river a half-mile or so away; and as you walk through the thickets around the grave, you must keep a sharp look-out, for this deserted plantation is a paradise for snakes.

I had gone to the spot hoping to find some snakes, especially one sort of snake in which I was interested at the time; and I was disappointed when none was discovered near the grave. But I had better luck amid the ruins of the old plantation house, whose tall chimneys and massive walls of brick have now been so hemmed in and engulfed by the forest that a man might pass twenty yards from the house and never see it at all.

For the most part the walls still stand, and the heavy stone steps at front and rear remain, though some of them have been heaved up from their places by the slow, irresistible strength of great roots that twine and twist like pythons amid the ruins. But there is now no vestige of a roof or of floors, and tall trees grow inside the house, some of them soaring high up above the jagged walls, while the trunks of others, which must have begun their growth before the roof fell in, protrude through the high, wide windows.

It was a grotesque and melancholy sight, all the more tragical because this old house had once been the home of one of the great Low Country families, which had given many distinguished men to the colony and to the state. But the strangest thing about it to my mind was the wide, deep, bricked-in well, which we found within the walls of the house; and to me at that moment the most interesting thing about the well was what we saw at the bottom of it. For the water of the well, thirty feet or so below the surface of the ground, was alive with snakes, the coppercolored snakes for which I had been looking; and with them was another snake worth seeing — a huge diamondback rattler.

The copper-colored serpents — redbellied water-snakes, a vicious though not a venomous species — swam sinuously about in the water, or hung in long loops upon sticks and small branches that had fallen into the well; but the great rattlesnake lay in the water, with two thirds of its thick body submerged, and after a few moments we realized that it was dead. Then for the first time I suspected that the place was not a serpent den, but a serpent mausoleum, and the negro woodsman who had guided us to the spot confirmed the guess. Many snakes, he said, lived amid these ruins, and now and then one of them, crawling to the edge of the well or along the branches overhanging it, fell in. For these, he declared, there was no escape, for the brick walls of the well were sound and unbroken and there was no subterranean passageway through which the reptiles could leave their prison.

There they must stay until the end came, the water-snakes surviving for a long while, the land-snakes succumbing quickly. No one knew, the old woodsman said, how many dead serpents lay hidden under the waters of the well; and I wondered how many hundreds of them had perished in this ambuscade during the long years that had passed since the manor fell into decay, and the snakes of the surrounding woods had come to live in it, instead of the powdered gentlemen and brocaded ladies who had danced the stately old dances there in the palmy days of the Santee plantation country.

Year after year this yawning deathtrap in this house of serpents has taken its toll of the scaly inhabitants of the place. Those that we saw — the writhing red water-snakes and the great dead rattler — were only a few of its many scores of victims, and they would not be the last. It is as strange a sepulchre as the tall grave in the woods, where, if we can trust the legend, the daughter of the old house stands upright in her shroud, awaiting the Judgment Day.

Sometimes, as if tiring of her accustomed methods, Nature beguiles her victims with novel stratagems. There is a long, narrow island, with the sea on one side and wide green marshlands on the other, which, if it were properly named, would be called the Isle of Pirate Ghosts.

Off this island, in the old buccaneer days, the black-flag fleet of Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet lay in ambush for unsuspecting merchantmen who came sailing out of Charles Town; and it is reasonable to suppose, even if there be no mention of it in the record, that more than once, on moonlight nights, the corsair chiefs came ashore here to stretch their legs and tap a cask of wine on the beach.

Like all the rest of the Low Country, the lonely barrier islands along the edge of the sea are crowded with old memories; and since most ghosts are nothing but old memories that have taken human shape, as gray or white clouds in the sky sometimes assume the form of familiar things, it is safe to say that ghosts of pirates haunt this island. Once or twice, in the dusk, I have thought for an instant that I caught sight of them.

One morning I was fishing for channel bass in the surf on this Isle of Pirate Ghosts, when I saw something which brought back to my mind a story told to me years ago by an old negro fisherman. My attention was attracted by a shrill screaming behind me, and, turning, I saw an osprey circling high over the island woods, while just above him circled and swooped and swerved a bald eagle.

I watched the drama with interest, knowing what would happen; and presently the osprey dropped his fish, and the eagle, his body slanting sharply, slid downward through the air. Whether he overtook the fish and grasped it before it fell into the woods or the marsh behind the island, I do not know, for a tall dune behind me hid the plunging bird from view; but the incident recalled the fisherman’s story — a story which, like many of the tales told by the negro boatmen of the coast, seems to me now less improbable than it appeared at the time when I heard it.

He was fishing in his small rowboat in one of the inlets between two barrier islands, when he saw an eagle overtake and attack an osprey which was flying across the inlet with a fish in its claws. The birds were not very high in the air, and the hawk, instead of holding on to his fish for some minutes and circling upward, as the osprey often does, apparently in an effort to get above the eagle, gave up the struggle quickly and dropped his prey.

The eagle plunged after it; but so short was the distance that the fish fell into the water before he could seize it. The big bird checked his descent and hung poised for a moment. Then, half closing his wings, he shot down again and struck the water in a shower of spray.

That was the last of him. Seen dimly through the spray for a fraction of a second, his dark wings had seemed to beat the air desperately; then the place where they had been was empty. Sharks were very abundant that morning, the fisherman said. He had caught a number of small ones, from a foot and a half to two feet in length, and had seen several large ones swimming close to the top of the water near his boat. It was his belief that the poised eagle, scanning the water for the fish that the osprey had dropped, saw a dark object just beneath the surface and, plunging instantly, struck his talons into the back of a large shark and was carried down.

A fitting death for the king of the air, cut off, in the prime of his splendid powers, in combat with the king of the sea. But I remember, that, when the old man told me the story, I hoped with all my heart it was not true.