THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS 243 
is fairly covered with the bounty of the tree. The 
path you travel is red with plums. 
One remembers another union of road and river 
near the headwaters of the Linville, and alongside 
which a footpath has been cut in the laurel. There 
used to be a short one near Traumfest, where the 
overarching bushes were twined with the clematis 
that bears large pink, urn-shaped flowers, and — 
but enough, one could recall a bookful about the 
fords and riverbed roads of the mountains. 
When you get to where the shining Oconolufty 
forks, you take the left-hand "prong" and goon 
until the next fork when you turn to the right, the 
stream becoming ever wilder and narrower and, if 
possible, more sparkling. The farther you go the 
more difficult the road becomes. There are few people 
living as far as this, for you have gone beyond the 
Indian boundary and are close to the uninhabited 
mountain. Yet here one's artist friend got one of her 
loveliest pictures composed of a long, gray old house, 
pale-blue cabbages, bright flowers, and mountains 
so divinely blue as to make the senses swim. 
When you reach "Jim Mac's place," you stop, for 
this is the end of what has ceased to deserve the name 
of road. There is nothing beyond but the steeply 
rising mountain with its primeval forest, where the 
red deer and the brown bear yet roam, and the pan- 
ther and the wildcat make their home. Big trout 
lie hid in the bright waters of Laurel Fork that comes 
leaping down icy cold from its embowering springs 
three thousand feet above your head. At Jim Mac's 
