Hamilton Stark Read Online Free PDF Page A

our own mangy cur, even learn to admire him, if we can know something of his ancestry. For it is true that—though he may seem it and though we sometimes despise him for seeming it—he does not come wholly from nowhere out of nothing.
    He springs from the Valley of the Suncook, so named for the ululating river meandering gently southerly and westerly to the Merrimack, which is, in turn, a larger, coarser stream that poles the region south of the granitic mountains and widens and fills across bumpy flatlands all the way to the seaof Massachusetts, where at last it empties its finely ground contents onto the outflowing tide and adds yet another petulant lip to the North American continental shelf. To speak solely of the Suncook River, however, is to speak, at its head, of a man-stride-wide rill that breaks across boulders thrown in springtime thaws and by snowmelt from the sides of glacial morraines. It is to speak then of a confluence of brooks, streams, creeks—the Webster, the Perry, the Crooked Run—all of them southern outlets of muskegs, ponds, small lakes, with names like Halfmoon and Brindle, Huntress, Upper Suncook and Lower Suncook. Thus, in referring to the Valley of the Suncook, and specifically to its northern terminus, one is referring to the beginning of a system, if he follow nature’s path, and the end of a system, if he follow a manmade map, which inevitably traces the path of white settlement. These two paths, that of nature and that of white human settlement and the particularities thereof, are what determine the affective history of a people springing from that region, or any region, for hundreds of years afterward, long after the paths have been worn smooth and straightened with machinery, widened and bridged, overpassed, clover-leafed and median-stripped.
    It is tempting to make much of the observation that the essential movements of nature here have been from north to south, while those of white neo-European society have been from south to north. Regard the prevailing wind and water systems, the tendency of erosion to flow inevitably to the sea. What are now called the White Mountains were then ten-thousand-foot-high upthrust blocks of granite, stocky mountains in the prime of life, the craggy head of the robust Appalachian chain. In the blond valleys and sun-warmed plains below the peaks, herds of gigantic bison with horns like barrel hoops grazed peacefully, while lions the size of modernhorses loped lazily along behind, keeping to the shadows of the briars and the low nut trees, waiting hungrily for a straggler or a fat calf to wander from the herd’s protection. So far as is now known, this was a region without bipeds, human beings.
    Then the first signs of the glaciers—lingering winter snows, each summer shorter than the one before, streams and lakes that fail one spring to boom and break from ice to water and thus they complete a full year icebound, and winds, high, relentlessly cold winds, carting across the mountain barrier moisture-laden clouds from the snow blanket of the farther north, blotting out the sun for month after month, then year after year. The herds shift the loci of their grazing circles farther south, on to the Carolinas, and even through the gaps and west into the Valley of the Mississippi. Until there comes a time when the hard icy tongue of the glacier has carved a notch in the mountain wall and has extruded enough of its body through that notch into the soft valleys beyond to drag with it a never-melting pelt, finally covering even the very peaks with a mantle of ice, accelerating its march now by making its own weather unimpededly. And as the glacier, conjoined with several separate glacial forays from the two far sides of the mountains, crunches its way across those upthrust blocks of granite and the bumpy flats beyond, great wads of earth are scraped away, huge chunks of stone are ripped free of the mountain wall, deep trenches are gouged through the effluvial plain,