It is generally an orderly crowd, and arrangements are soon made for the first shot. At sixty yards from the white piece of black-centered paper, the shooter lays himself flat on the ground; and, with his rifle (covered with a long tin shade to keep out the glaring sunlight) resting over a rail, he takes deliberate aim and pulls the trigger. A center shot meets with applause. Thus the day goes by, until every share has been blazed away, the beef is butchered and divided, and the lucky marksmen stagger homeward, each with his quarter in a sack on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. If daylight still remains, some of the crowd often engage in a squirrel hunt. It is no trouble to kill gray squirrels in any of the woods. The crack marksman with a rifle generally barks his squirrel. Barking a squirrel is one of the fine arts. The hunter takes aim and fires at the upper edge of the limb on which the squirrel sits, instantly killing him from concussion created by the splintered bark. But let us pursue the river from the Cheowah mountain to the Little Tennessee. It is a distance of twelve miles, and not once do the road and stream part company. At Widow Nelson’s it is a white winding-sheet of rapids, as far as the eye can reach. A hundred yards by the house, and the mountains draw themselves together again. The road straggles around the foot of a cliff. The waters roar and splash beside it. Overhead, the foliage is of a brilliant green, and the sky usually a transparent blue. By the dilapidated dwelling of Widow Jarett you soon pass. There is a cleared tract of land here. Across the river, with its foot in the water, one of the Nantihala range towers 2,000 feet above the valley. You must lean back to look upward along its green face and see the edge of the summit. Up one steep ravine is a trail leading to Brier Town. It is termed the Cat’s Stairs. Your mule must be dragged by the bridle if you attempt the ascent. Three miles down the stream, as you issue from the forest on the brow of a gentle declivity, a wild picture lies spread before the eyes. You are looking across a long pent-in vale. On one side the Anderson Roughs, lofty and impending, with steep ridges, one behind the other, descending to the river, reach away to where the blue sky dips in between them and the last visible perpendicular wall that frowns along the valley’s opposite border. The wildness of the scene is heightened instead of softened by the vision of Campbell’s lowly cabin in the center of the narrow corn-fields. You see the smoke above its blackened roof; several uncombed children tumbling in the sunshine; the rail fence close by its frail porch; and, beyond it, the limpid Nantihala, smooth and turbulent alternately, and filling the ears with its loud monotone. (See Frontispiece.)