Some mountaineers are so energetic, however, that they engage in occupations such as the woodworking of Switzerland and the Black Forest. Since there is plenty of wood around them, the people have taken to carving it into all sorts of toys for children and also into elaborate patterns such as clock cases and paneling for churches. The women often make lace or embroidery. Woodworking, and embroidery, like the moonshine whisky described earlier, all represent a high value in a small compass, and can easily be transported out of the mountains. The mountaineers really export their skill, their raw material being of little or no value. Even so, the expense of marketing their products leaves the mountaineers a return much smaller than that of the lowlander for equally good work.
(3) Professions.—A large part of the new ideas of a community come from its professional people, its teachers, clergymen, lawyers, and doctors. Among the mountains they are under the same sort of disadvantage as the artisans. As the population is widely scattered, the schools and churches are small, and can pay only the most meager salaries. The schools are in session only a few months each year, and church services are held only occasionally. Only a few people are within reach of the lawyer and doctor who settle in a mountain valley.
Since the earnings of professional people are small, it is generally necessary to eke them out by engaging in some other occupation part of the time. The teacher may be also a carpenter, the lawyer a blacksmith, and the minister a mason, and all may carry on a little farming. Naturally such men do not have much time for study and the improvement of their minds; nor much money to buy the books and make the journeys to conventions that are essential if they are to keep up in their professions. Moreover, it is no easy life for a physi cian, for example, to have to take long rides on horseback in darkness and storm over poor roads or trails, and then be paid barely enough to live on. Unless teachers, ministers, lawyers, and physicians are working solely for the good they can do, those who have spent much time and money in preparing for their professions are unwilling to pass their lives in lonely places where the difficulties are so great and the rewards so few. Hence the mountains lose and the plains gain.
Why Mountaineers are Bolder than Plainsmen.—Mountaineers are generally bolder than the people of plains. This is partly because they are strong and healthy, but also because they have many exper iences which never come to lowlanders. A mountain boy has no
fear of wild animals because he often sees them. He dares to take off his clothes and wade through a cold turbulent stream that would give the city boy a bad fright and make him sick from the chill. The mountaineer is also bold because he frequently undergoes such hard ships as tramping a score of miles in a vain search for game, or spend ing the night alone in the woods when he hunts for stray cattle on the unfenced mountainside.
Again, in backward regions poverty often makes the mountaineer mountaineer bold and quarrelsome, for his envy of the richer people of the low lands may embolden him to try to get a share of their possessions. Hence when times are particularly hard the mountain tribes of Persia and Afghanistan, for example, descend On horseback to raid the farms, plunder the houses, and drive off the cattle. In some regions such raids occur almost every year at harvest time. The lowlanders are so used to them that they build special towers of sun-dried brick to which they run for refuge when raiders are seen. The boldness of mountaineers was illustrated by the Gurkhas from the Himalayas in the Great War. More than any other soldiers from India they made the most daring kind of raids right into and across the German trenches.
Why Feuds are Common in Mountains.—When one man wrongs another in the mountains it is difficult to get redress through the law because the officials are usually far away in the lowlands. Among cowardly people this might mean that wrongs would go unrighted. Among bold, sturdy mountaineers, however, it leads men to try to right their own wrongs. Thus if a man is murdered, his brothers, sons, and other relatives feel that it is their duty to kill the murderer themselves. If they do so, the relatives of the murderer try in their turn to take vengeance. Thus family feuds arise, and may last for many generations. Sometimes a little quarrel over some trifle arouses people's anger and blows are struck. The quarrel thus started may go on for decades and cause the children and grandchildren and even the great-grandchildren of the first pair to lie in wait by the roadside to shoot one another. Not many years ago a Kentucky feud led the members of one family to come down to the courthouse in the lowlands, take a man out of jail with the connivance of the jailer, and shoot him in the public square. Such things would not happen if the isolation of the mountains had not forced people to look out for their own rights.