THE FORKS OF PIGEON RIVER 283 
where near in the grass makes your sympathetic 
mouth water, while the roadside is gay with the pale 
leaflets and large bright-yellow, pea-shaped flowers 
of the Alleghany thermopsis. Green meadows where 
the cattle graze, orchards, thrifty-looking farm- 
houses, blue mountains showing in the distance — 
the West Fork does not seem so very wild. 
Then you enter a ravine under shady trees. The 
road crosses and recrosses the stream over fords that 
are deep and full of rocks. The horse at times seems 
about to disappear permanently. The water runs 
over the sides of the wagon-box as the wheels sink in 
a hole on one side or mount a rock on the other. That 
you will be precipitated into the laughing waters of 
the West Fork seems inevitable. But then the 
kalmia clusters thickly at the water's edge, and a 
bird is singing in a tree-top. 
At the narrowest places you meet loaded tanbark 
wagons, or a long line of oxen moving slowly forward 
with a load of lumber that looks absurdly small until 
you think of the state of the road, when the wonder 
is that they can move it at all. Where the river forks, 
one branch of it — there are no "prongs" to the 
streams here — goes to the right, the other to the 
left of Fork Mountain, a spur of Cold Mountain 
that lies between the two nearly parallel arms of the 
stream. The left-hand or Little East Fork lies at 
the bottom of a long narrow "cove" so tightly 
squeezed in between the sides of Cold Mountain and 
the wild Fork Mountain that road and river continu- 
ally become one. And here on either side are the 
