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HEN Fergus Gilyan came up through the virgin wilderness to the rolling country within sight of the Blue Mountains, he did not place his cabin on any of the wooded knolls that he might have chosen. Instead, he made a small clearing in a dense canebrake bordering a creek and built his little log house there in the heart of the canes.

Some say he did this for safety's sake. The Muskogees were making war talks at the time, and a house on a height would have been a temptation to roving bands raiding the Overhills, as the mountain Cherokees called their high domain of purple peaks and ranges. But there was another reason besides this one.

Gilyan was a born hunter, and the canebrake, extending for miles along the stream, was alive with game. Around his cabin on every side the smooth straight stems towered thirty feet or more, an evergreen jungle walling in his tiny clearing, a jungle so dense that he could penetrate it only by following the winding trails made by the buffalo and the deer. These trails were his highways to the outside