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Title: The Spring of the Year
Author: Sharp, Dallas Lore, 1870-1929
Language: English
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[Illustration: SPRING OF THE YEAR--SHADBUSH (CHAPTER I)]
The Dallas Lore Sharp Nature Series
THE SPRING OF THE YEAR
BY
DALLAS LORE SHARP
AUTHOR OF “THE LAY OF THE LAND,” “THE FACE OF THE
FIELDS,” “THE FALL OF THE YEAR,” “WINTER,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, AND 1906, BY THE CHAPPLE PUBLISHING CO., LTD.
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS BOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1908, 1911, AND 1912, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
TO MY SISTER
JENNIE THE BEST OF COMPANIONS
IN THE WOODS AND FIELDS
THROUGH WHICH WE WENT TO SCHOOL
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
I. SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 1
II. THE SPRING RUNNING 7
III. AN OLD APPLE TREE 13
IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING 26
V. IF YOU HAD WINGS 33
VI. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 41
VII. THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 48
VIII. IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 60
IX. THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 76
X. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 86
XI. TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 94
XII. AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 115
XIII. WOODS MEDICINE 127
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 137
ILLUSTRATIONS
SPRING OF THE YEAR--SHADBUSH _Frontispiece_
HYLAS PEEPING “SPRING!” 1
“THE EARLIEST BLOODROOT” 4
THE TURKEY-HEN--“HALF A MILE FROM HOME” 8
CATFISH FAMILY 12
SCREECH OWL--“OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS” 17
TREE-TOAD--“COMES FORTH TO THE EDGE OF HIS HOLE” 23
SKUNK-CABBAGE AND BUMBLEBEE 27
A SUNFISH OVER ITS NEST 29
CRESTED FLYCATCHER WITH SNAKE-SKIN 31
“ONE OF MY LITTLE BAND OF CROWS” 33
YOUNG PAINTED TURTLE, FROGS’ EGGS, SNAILS, AND
WHIRLIGIG BEETLES 45
“ONE LIVE TOAD UNDER YOUR DOORSTEP” 46
PHŒBE AND HER YOUNG 55
PIKE AND MINNOWS 62
FOX BARKING--“UPON THE BARE KNOLL NEAR THE HOUSE” 66
PINE MARTEN AND CHIPMUNK 71
“UPON ONE OF THESE THE BUZZARD SAT HUMPED” 79
YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD 83
BROWN THRASHER--“OUR FINEST, MOST GIFTED SONGSTER” 87
PAINTED TURTLE--“BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF” 103
CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS 117
“TWO TUMBLE-BUGS TRYING TO ROLL THEIR BALL UP HILL” 127
“THE BOX TURTLES SCUFF CARELESSLY ALONG” 130
INTRODUCTION
It has been my aim in the thirty-nine chapters of the three books in
this series to carry my readers through the weeks of all the school
year, not however as with a calendar, for that would be more or less
wooden and artificial; but by readings, rather, that catch in a large
way the spirit of the particular season, that give something definite
and specific in the way of suggestions for tramps afield with things
to look for and hear and do. Naturally many of the birds and animals
and flowers mentioned, as well as woods and aspects of sky and field,
are those of my own local environment--of my New England
surrounding--and so must differ in some details from those surrounding
you in your far Southern home or you on your distant Pacific coast, or
you in your rich and varied valley of the Mississippi, or you on your
wide and generous prairie. But the similarities and correspondences,
the things and conditions we have in common, are more than our
differences. Our sun, moon, sky, earth--our land--are the same, our
love for this beautiful world is the same, as is that touch of nature
which we all feel and which makes us all kin. Wherever, then, in these
books of the seasons, the things treated differ from the things
around you, read about those things for information, and in your
journeys afield fill in the gaps with whatever it is that completes
your landscape, or rounds out your cycle of the seasons, or links up
your endless chain of life.
While I have tried to be accurate throughout these books, still it has
not been my object chiefly to write a natural history--volumes of
outdoor facts; but to quicken the imaginations behind the sharp eyes,
behind the keen ears and the eager souls of the multitude of children
who go to school, as I used to go to school, through an open,
stirring, beckoning world of living things that I longed to range and
understand.
The best thing that I can do as writer, that you can do as teacher, if
I may quote from the last paragraph--the keynote of these volumes--is
to “go into the fields and woods, go deep and far and frequently, with
eyes and ears and all your souls alert.”
MULLEIN HILL, May, 1912
THE SPRING OF THE YEAR
CHAPTER I
“SPRING! SPRING! SPRING!”
Who is your spring messenger? Is it bird or flower or beast that
brings your spring? What sight or sound or smell spells S-P-R-I-N-G to
you, in big, joyous letters?
Perhaps it is the frogs. Certainly I could not have a real spring
without the frogs. They have peeped “Spring!” to me every time I have
had a spring. Perhaps it is the arbutus, or the hepatica, or the
pussy-willow, or the bluebird, or the yellow spice-bush, or, if you
chance to live in New England, perhaps it is the wood pussy that
brings your spring!
Beast, bird, or flower, whatever it is, there comes a day and a
messenger and--spring! You know that spring is here. It may snow again
before night: no matter; your messenger has brought you the news,
brought you the very spring itself, and after all your waiting
through the winter months are you going to be discouraged by a flurry
of snow?
“All white and still lie stream and hill--
The winter dread and drear!
When from the skies a bluebird flies,
And--spring is here!”
To be sure, it is here, if the bluebird is your herald.
But how much faith in the weather you must have, and how you must long
for the spring before the first bluebird brings it to you! Some sunny
March day he drops down out of the blue sky, saying softly, sweetly,
“Florida, florida!” as if calling the flowers; and then he is
gone!--gone for days at a time, while it snows and blows and rains,
freezes and thaws, thaws, thaws, until the March mud looks fitter for
clams than for flowers.
So it is with the other first signs. If you want springtime ahead of
time, then you must have it in your heart, out of reach of the
weather, just as you must grow cucumbers in a hothouse if you want
them ahead of time. But there comes a day when cucumbers will grow out
of doors; and there comes a day when the bluebird and the song sparrow
and all the other heralds stay, when spring has come whether you have
a heart or not.
What day is that in your out-of-doors, and what sign have you to mark
it? Mr. John Burroughs says his sign is the wake-robin, or trillium.
When I was a school-boy it used to be for me the arbutus; but
nowadays it is the shadbush: I have no sure settled spring until I see
the shadbush beginning to open misty white in the edge of the woods.
Then I can trust the weather; I can open my beehives; I can plough and
plant my garden; I can start into the woods for a day with the birds
and flowers; for when the shadbush opens, the great gate to the woods
and fields swings open--wide open to let everybody in.
But perhaps you do not know what the shadbush is? That does not
matter. You can easily enough find that out. Some call it June-berry;
others call it service-berry; and the botany calls it _A-me-lan’chi-er
ca-na-den’sis_! But that does not matter either. For this is not a
botany lesson. It is an account of how springtime comes to _me_, and
when and what are its signs. And I would have you read it to think how
springtime comes to _you_, and when and what are its signs. So, if the
dandelion, and not the shadbush, is your sign, then you must read
“dandelion” here every time I write “shadbush.”
There is an old saying, “He that would bring home the wealth of the
Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies out”; which is to say,
those who bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out some
kind of wealth in exchange. So you who would enjoy or understand what
my shadbush means to me must have a shadbush of your own, or a
dandelion, or something that is a sign to you that spring is here.
Then, you see, my chapter in the book will become your own.
There are so many persons who do not know one bird from another, one
tree from another, one flower from another; who would not know one
season from another did they not see the spring hats in the milliner’s
window or feel the need of a change of coat. I hope you are not one of
them. I hope you are on the watch, instead, for the first phœbe or
the earliest bloodroot, or are listening to catch the shrill, brave
peeping of the little tree-frogs, the hylas.
As for me, I am on the watch for the shadbush. Oh, yes, spring comes
before the shadbush opens, but it is likely not to stay. The wild
geese trumpet spring in the gray March skies as they pass; a February
rain, after a long cold season of snow, spatters your face with
spring; the swelling buds on the maples, the fuzzy kittens on the
pussy-willows, the opening marsh-marigolds in the meadows, the frogs,
the bluebirds--all of these, while they stay, are the spring. But they
are not sure to stay over night, here in New England. You may wake up
and find it snowing--until the shadbush opens. After that, hang up
your sled and skates, put away your overcoat and mittens; for spring
is here, and the honey-bees will buzz every bright day until the
October asters are in bloom.
I said if you want springtime ahead of time you must have it in your
heart. Of course you must. If your heart is warm and your eye is keen,
you can go forth in the dead of winter and gather buds, seeds,
cocoons, and living things enough to make a little spring. For the
fires of summer are never wholly out. They are only banked in the
winter, smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and
burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in January, and across your
thawing path crawls a woolly-bear caterpillar; a mourning-cloak
butterfly flits through the woods, and the juncos sing. That night a
howling snowstorm sweeps out of the north; the coals are covered
again. So they kindle and darken, until they leap from the ashes of
winter a pure, thin blaze in the shadbush, to burn higher and hotter
across the summer, to flicker and die away--a line of yellow
embers--in the weird witch-hazel of the autumn.
At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my springtime swing wide
open. My birds are back, my turtles are out, my long sleeping
woodchucks are wide awake. There is not a stretch of woodland or
meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the pasture the bluets
are beginning to drift, as if the haze on the distant hills, floating
down in the night, had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash
the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue. At the sign of
the shadbush the doors of my memory, too, swing wide open, and I am a
boy again in the meadows of my old home. The shadbush is in blossom,
and the fish are running--the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad up
Cohansey Creek; and through the Lower Sluice, these soft, stirring
nights, the catfish are slipping. Is there any real boy now in
Lupton’s Meadows to watch them come? Oh yes, doubtless; and doubtless
there ever shall be. But I would go down for this one night, down in
the May moonlight, and listen, as I used to listen years ago, for the
quiet _splash splash splash_, as the swarming catfish pass through the
shallows of the main ditch, up toward the dam at the pond.
At the sign of the shadbush how swiftly the tides of life begin to
rise! How mysteriously their currents run!--the fish swimming in from
the sea, the birds flying up from the South, the flowers opening fresh
from the soil, the insects coming out from their sleep: life moving
everywhere--across the heavens, over the earth, along the deep, dim
aisles of the sea!
CHAPTER II
THE SPRING RUNNING
This title is Kipling’s; the observations that follow are mine; but
the real spring running is yours and mine and Kipling’s and Mowgli the
wolf-child’s, whose running Kipling has told us about. Indeed, every
child of the earth has felt it, has had the running--every living
thing of the land and the sea.
Everything feels it; everything is restless, everything is moving. The
renter changes houses; the city dweller goes “down to the shore” or up
to the mountains to open his summer cottage; the farmer starts to
break up the land for planting; the schoolchildren begin to squirm in
their seats and long to fly out of the windows; and “Where are you
_going_ this summer?” is on every one’s lips.
They have all caught the spring running, the only infection I know
that you can catch from April skies. The very sun has caught it, too,
and is lengthening out his course, as if he hated to stop and go to
bed at night. And the birds, that are supposed to go to bed most
promptly, they sleep, says the good old poet Chaucer, with open eye,
these April nights, so bad is their case of spring running,--
“So priketh hem Nature in hir corages.”[1]
[Footnote 1: So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.]
Their long journey northward over sea and land has not cured them yet
of their unrest. Only one thing will do it (and I suppose we all
should be glad), one sovereign remedy, and that is _family cares_. But
they are yet a long way off.
Meantime watch your turkey-hen, how she saunters down the field alone,
how pensive she looks, how lost for something to do and somewhere to
go. She is sick with this disease of spring. Follow her, keeping out
of sight yourself, and lo, a nest, hidden under a pile of brush in a
corner of the pasture fence, half a mile from home!
The turkey-hen has wandered off half a mile to build her nest; but
many wild birds have come on their small wings all the way from the
forests of the Amazon and have gone on to Hudson Bay and the Fur
Countries, just to build their nests and rear their young. A wonderful
case of the spring running, you would say; and still more wonderful is
the annual journey of the golden plover from Patagonia to Alaska and
back, eight thousand miles each way. Yet there is another case that
seems to me more mysterious, and quite as wonderful, as the sea seems
more mysterious than the land.
It is the spring running of the fish. For when the great tidal waves
of bird-life begin to roll northward with the sun, a corresponding
movement begins among the denizens of the sea. The cold-blooded fish
feel the stirring; the spring running seizes them, and in they come
through the pathless wastes of the ocean, waves of them, shoals of
them,--sturgeon, shad, herring,--like the waves and flocks of wild
geese, warblers, and swallows overhead,--into the brackish water of
the bays and rivers and on (the herring) into the fresh water of the
ponds.
To watch the herring come up Weymouth Back River into Herring Run here
near my home, as I do every April, is to watch one of the most
interesting, most mysterious movements of all nature. It was about a
century ago that men of Weymouth brought herring in barrels of water
by ox-teams from Taunton River and liberated them in the pond at the
head of Weymouth Back River. These fish laid their eggs in the grassy
margins of the pond that spring and went out down the river to the
sea. Later on, the young fry, when large enough to care for
themselves, found their way down the river and out to sea.
And where did they go then? and what did they do? Who can tell? for
who can read the dark book of the sea? Yet this one thing we know they
did, for still they are doing it after all these hundred years,--they
came back up the river, when they were full-grown,--up the river, up
the run, up into the pond, to lay their eggs in the waters where they
were hatched, in the waters that to them were _home_.
Something very much like this all the other fish are doing, as are the
birds also. The spell of _home_ is over land and sea, and has been
laid upon them all. The bird companies of the fall went south at the
inexorable command of Hunger; but a greater than Hunger is in command
of the forces of spring. Now our vast bird army of North America, five
billion strong, is moving northward at the call of Home. And the hosts
of the sea, whose shining billions we cannot number,--they, too, are
coming up, some of them far up through the shallow streams to the
wood-walled ponds for a drink of the sweet waters of Home.
As a boy I used to go down to the meadows at night to hear the catfish
coming, as now I go down to the village by day to see the herring
coming. The catfish would swim in from the Cohansey, through the
sluices in the bank, then up by way of the meadow ditches to the dam
over which fall the waters of Lupton’s Pond.
It was a seven-or eight-foot dam, and of course the fish could not
climb it. Down under the splashing water they would crowd by hundreds,
their moving bodies close-packed, pushing forward, all trying to break
through the wooden wall that blocked their way. Slow, stupid things
they looked; but was not each big cat head pointed forward? each
slow, cold brain trying to follow and keep up with each swift, warm
heart? For the homeward-bound heart knows no barrier; it never stops
for a dam.
The herring, too, on their way up the run are stopped by a dam; but
the town, in granting to certain men the sole rights to catch the
fish, stipulated that a number of the live herring, as many as several
barrels full, should be helped over the dam each spring that they
might go on up to the pond to deposit their eggs. If this were not
done annually, the fish would soon cease to come, and the Weymouth
herring would be no more.
There was no such lift for the catfish under Lupton’s dam. I often
tossed them over into the pond, and so helped to continue the line;
but perhaps there was no need, for spring after spring they returned.
They were the young fish, I suppose, new each year, from parent fish
that remain inside the pond the year round.
I cannot say now--I never asked myself before--whether it is Mother or
Father Catfish who stays with the swarm (it is literally a swarm) of
kitten catfish. It may be father, as in the case of Father Stickleback
and Father Toadfish, who cares for the children. If it is--I take off
my hat to him. I have four of my own; and I think if I had eighteen or
twenty more I should have both hands full. But Father Catfish! Did you
ever see his brood?
I should say that there might easily be five hundred young ones in
the family, though I never have counted them. But you might. If you
want to try it, take your small scoop-net of coarse cheesecloth, or
mosquito-netting, and go down to the pond this spring. Close along the
margin you will see holes in the shallow water running up under the
overhanging grass and roots. The holes were made probably by the
muskrats. It is in here that the old catfish is guarding the brood.
As soon as you learn to know the holes, you can cover the entrance
with your net, and then by jumping or stamping hard on the ground
above the hole, you will drive out the old fish with a flop, the
family following in a fine, black cloud. The old fish will swim away,
then come slowly back to the scattered swarm, to the little black
things that look like small tadpoles, who soon cluster about the
parent once more and wiggle away into the deep, dark water of the
pond--the strangest family group that I know in all the spring world.
CHAPTER III
AN OLD APPLE TREE
Beyond the meadow, perhaps half a mile from my window, stands an old
apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary
between the “upper” and the “lower” pastures. It is a bent, broken,
hoary old tree, grizzled with suckers from feet to crown. No one has
pruned it for half a century; no one ever gathers its gnarly
apples--no one but the cattle who love to lie in its shadow and munch
its fruit.
The cows know the tree. One of their winding paths runs under its
low-hung branches; and as I frequently travel the cow-paths, I also
find my way thither. Yet I do not go for apples, nor just because the
cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is hollow, hollow all over,
trunk and branches, as hollow as a lodging-house; and I have never
known it when it was not “putting up” some wayfaring visitor or some
permanent lodger. So I go over, whenever I have a chance, to call upon
my friends or pay my respects to the distinguished guests.
This old tree is on the neighboring farm. It does not belong to me,
and I am glad; for if it did, then I should have to trim it, and
scrape it, and plaster up its holes, and put a burlap petticoat on
it, all because of the gruesome gypsy moths that infest my trees. Oh,
yes, that would make it bear better apples, but what then would become
of its birds and beasts? Everybody ought to have _one_ apple tree that
bears birds and beasts--and Baldwin apples, too, of course, if the
three sorts of fruit can be made to grow on the same tree. But only
the birds and beasts grow well on the untrimmed, unscraped,
unplastered, unpetticoated old tree yonder between the pastures. His
heart is wide open to every small traveler passing by.
Whenever I look over toward the old tree, I think of the old
vine-covered, weather-beaten house in which my grandfather lived,
where many a traveler put up over night--to get a plate of
grandmother’s buckwheat cakes, I think, and a taste of her keen wit.
The old house sat in under a grove of pin oak and pine,--“Underwood”
we called it,--a sheltered, sheltering spot; with a peddler’s stall in
the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in the herby
garret, a boundless, fathomless featherbed, of a piece with the house
and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the
neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the
tavern, two miles farther down the pike, was half so central, or so
homelike, or so full of sweet and juicy gossip. The old apple tree
yonder between the woods and the meadow is as central, as hospitable,
and, if animals talk with one another, just as full of neighborhood
news as was grandfather’s roof-tree.
Of course you would never suspect it, passing by. But then, no lover
of wild things passes by--never without first stopping, and especially
before an old tree all full of holes. Whenever you see a hole in a
tree, in a sand-bank, in a hillside, under a rail-pile--anywhere out
of doors, stop!
Stop here beside this decrepit apple tree. No, you will find no sign
swinging from the front, no door-plate, no letter-box bearing the name
of the family residing here. The birds and beasts do not advertise
their houses so. They would hide their houses, they would have you
pass by; for most persons are rude in the woods and fields, breaking
into the homes of the wood-folk as they never would dream of doing in
the case of their human neighbors.
There is no need of being rude anywhere, no need of being an unwelcome
visitor even to the shyest and most timid of the little people of the
fields. Come over with me--they know me in the old apple tree. It is
nearly sundown. The evening is near, with night at its heels, for it
is an early March day.
We shall not wait long. The doors will open that we may enter--enter
into a home of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of
the fields, for, as I have said, this old tree has a small dweller of
some sort the year round.
On this March day we shall be admitted by my owls. They take
possession late in winter and occupy the tree, with some curious
fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count upon these small
screech owls by February,--the forlorn month, the seasonless,
hopeless, lifeless month of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its
lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possible bluebirds, and
its being the year’s end! At least the ancients called February, not
December, the year’s end, maintaining, with some sense, that the
making of the world was begun in March, that is, with the spring. The
owls do not, like the swallows, bring the spring, but they
nevertheless help winter with most seemly haste into an early grave.
If, as the dusk comes down, I cannot go over to the tree, I will go to
my window and watch. I cannot see him, the grim-beaked baron with his
hooked talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes, but I know
that he has come to his window in the apple-tree turret yonder against
the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop
downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the meadow, beating,
dangling, dropping between the flattened tussocks; nor can I hear him,
as, back on the silent shadows, he slants upward again to his tower.
Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared meadow mouse did
not hear until the long talons closed and it was too late.
[Illustration: SCREECH OWL--“OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS”]
But there have been times when, like some belated traveler, I have
been forced to cross this wild night-land of his; and I have _felt_
him pass--so near at times that he has stirred my hair, by the
wind--dare I say?--of his mysterious wings. At other times I have
heard him. Often on the edge of night I have listened to his
quavering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me by the meadow. But
oftener I have watched at the casement here in my castle wall.
Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient
keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out
over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to
my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except
he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry
cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.
Now let us go over again to the old tree, this time in May. It will be
curious enough, as the soft dusk comes on, to see the round face of
the owl in one hole and, out of another hole in the broken limb above,
the flat, weazened face of a little tree-toad.
Both creatures love the dusk; both have come forth to their open doors
to watch the darkening; both will make off under the cover of the
night--one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for slugs and
insects over the crooked, tangled limbs of the apple tree.
It is strange enough to see them together, but it is stranger still
to think of them together; for it is just such prey as this little
toad that the owl has gone over the meadow to catch.
Why does he not take the supper ready here on the shelf? There may be
reasons that we, who do not eat tree-toad, know nothing of; but I am
inclined to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow lodger in
the doorway above, though he must often have heard him trilling gently
and lonesomely in the gloaming, when his skin cries for rain!
Small wonder if they have never met! for this gray, squat, disk-toed
little monster in the hole, or flattened on the bark of the tree like
a patch of lichen, may well be one of the things that are hidden from
even the sharp-eyed owl. It is always a source of fresh amazement, the
way that this largest of the hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old
tree, can utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes.
The common toads and all the frogs have enemies enough, and it would
seem from the comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they must
have enemies, too; but I do not know who they are. This scarcity of
the tree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that,
to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree,
now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several toads, you say, not
one; for who can tell one tree-toad from another? Nobody; and for that
reason I made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order to see
how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own natural
environment.
Upon moving into this house, about nine years ago, we found a
tree-toad living in the big hickory by the porch. For the next three
springs he reappeared, and all summer long we would find him, now on
the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up
against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Then we marked him; and
for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many
more years he might have lived in the hickory for us all to pet, I
should like to know; but last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy
moth killers, poking in the hole, hit our little friend and left him
dead.
It was very wonderful to me, the instinct for home--the love for home,
I should like to call it--that this humble little creature showed.
Now, a toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an ugly gnome with a
jeweled eye, to the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for
its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or
a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf,
who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the summer rain,
who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his waking up for the
spring--to such a one, I say, a tree-toad means more than the jeweled
eye and the strange amphibious habits.
This small tree-toad had a home, had it in a tree, too,--in a hickory
tree,--this toad that dwelt by my house.
“East, west,
Hame’s best,”
croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive song that wakened
memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things
than any other voice I ever knew.
These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the
hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a
home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land
than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have
never had a home; and none of us has ever had, perhaps, more than one,
or could have--that home of our childhood.
This toad seemed to feel it all. Here in the hickory for four years
(more nearly seven, I am sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go
down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs;
but back he would come, without mate or companion, to his tree.
Stronger than love of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant
in his slow cold heart was his instinct for home.
If I go down to the orchard and bring up from an apple tree some other
toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might
remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the
gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing; and
guided by it, as bee and pigeon and dog and man are guided, he makes
his sure way back to his orchard home.
Would my toad of the Baldwin tree go back beyond the orchard, over the
road, over the wide meadow, over to the old tree, half a mile away, if
I brought him from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I
shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I
shall then watch the old apple tree yonder to see if he returns. It
will be a hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not let him
rest; and, guided by his mysterious sense of direction,--for that
_one_ place,--he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the way.
Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great deal more than
that. There in the old Baldwin he has made his home for I don’t know
how long, hunting over its world of branches in the summer, sleeping
down in its deep holes during the winter--down under the chips and
punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my
toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the débris at
the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he preserved
himself until thawed out by the spring.
I never pass the old apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my
respects to the toad; nor in the winter that I do not pause and think
of him asleep in there. He is no longer mere toad. He has passed into
the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against
worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of
life, within the thin ribs, as if to save the old shell of a tree to
another summer.
Often in the dusk, especially the summer dusk, I have gone over to sit
at his feet and learn some of the things that my school-teachers and
college professors did not teach me.
Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait. The toad
comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself
comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer
evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the fields.
We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is the
lesson--one of the primary lessons in this course with the toad.
The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out
and drifts away; a whip-poor-will drops on the bare knoll near me,
clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand
times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long
empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is
gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, is blotted out by
the darkness, blazes again, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing
into a night that seems the darker for his quick, unsteady glow.
We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had
been taught every manner of stirring, and this strange exercise of
being still takes me where my body is weakest, and puts me almost out
of breath.
What! out of breath by keeping still? Yes, because I had been hurrying
hither and thither, doing this and that--doing them so fast for so
many years that I no longer understood how to sit down and keep still
and do nothing inside of me as well as outside. Of course _you_ know
how to keep still, for you are children. And so perhaps you do not
need to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am grown up, and
a man, with a world of things to do, a great many of which I do not
need to do at all--if only I would let the toad teach me all he knows.
So, when I am tired, I will go over to the toad. I will sit at his
feet, where time is nothing, and the worry of work even less. He has
all time and no task. He sits out the hour silent, thinking--I know
not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in silence, the toad and I,
watching Altair burn along the shore of the horizon, and overhead
Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of
the apple tree. And as we watch, I shall have time to rest and to
think. Perhaps I shall have a thought, a thought all my own, a rare
thing for any one to have, and worth many an hour of waiting.
CHAPTER IV
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING
Out of the multitude of sights, which twelve sights this spring shall
I urge you to see? Why the twelve, of course, that I always look for
most eagerly. And the first of these, I think, is the bluebird.
I
“Have you seen a bluebird yet?” some friend will ask me, as March
comes on. Or it will be, “I have seen my first bluebird!” as if seeing
a first bluebird were something very wonderful and important. And so
it is; for the sight of the first March bluebird is the last sight of
winter and the first sight of spring. The brown of the fertile earth
is on its breast, the blue of the summer sky is on its back, and in
its voice is the clearest, sweetest of all invitations to come out of
doors.
Where has he spent the winter? Look it up. What has brought him back
so early? Guess at it. What does he say as he calls to you? Listen.
What has John Burroughs written about him? Look it up and read.
II
You must see the skunk-cabbage abloom in the swamp. You need not pick
it and carry it home for the table--just see it. But be sure you see
it. Get down and open the big purple-streaked spathe, as it spears the
cold mud, and look at the “spadix” covered with its tiny but perfect
flowers. Now wait a minute. The woods are still bare; ice may still be
found on the northern slopes, while here before you, like a wedge
splitting the frozen soil, like a spear cleaving through the earth
from the other, the summer, side of the world, is this broad blade of
life letting up almost the first cluster of the new spring’s flowers.
Wait a moment longer and you may hear your first bumblebee, as he
comes humming at the door of the cabbage for a taste of new honey and
pollen.
III
Among the other early signs of spring, you should see a flock of
red-winged blackbirds! And what a sight they are upon a snow-covered
field! For often after their return it will snow again, when the
brilliant, shining birds in black with their red epaulets make one of
the most striking sights of the season.
IV
Another bird event that you should witness is the arrival of the
migrating warblers. You will be out one of these early May days when
there will be a stirring of small birds in the bushes at your side, in
the tall trees over your head--everywhere! It is the warblers. You are
in the tide of the tiny migrants--yellow warblers, pine warblers,
myrtle warblers, black-throated green warblers--some of them on their
way from South America to Labrador. You must be in the woods and see
them as they come.
V
You should see the “spice-bush” (wild allspice or fever-bush or
Benjamin-bush) in bloom in the damp March woods. And, besides that,
you should see with your own eyes under some deep, dark forest trees
the blue hepatica and on some bushy hillside the pink arbutus. (For
fear I forget to tell you in the chapter of things to do, let me now
say that you should take a day this spring and go “may-flowering.”)
VI
There are four nests that you should see this spring: a hummingbird’s
nest, saddled upon the horizontal limb of some fruit or forest tree,
and looking more like a wart on the limb than a nest; secondly, the
nest, eggs rather, of a turtle buried in the soft sand along the
margin of a pond or out in some cultivated field; thirdly, the nest of
a sun-fish (pumpkin-seed) in the shallow water close up along the
sandy shore of the pond; and fourthly, the nest of the red squirrel,
made of fine stripped cedar bark, away up in the top of some tall pine
tree! I mean by this that there are many other interesting
nest-builders besides the birds. Of all the difficult nests to find,
the hummingbird’s is the most difficult. When you find one, please
write to me about it.
VII
You should see a “spring peeper,” the tiny Pickering’s frog--_if you
can_. The marsh and the meadows will be vocal with them, but one of
the hardest things that you will try to do this spring will be to see
the shrill little piper, as he plays his bagpipe in the rushes at your
very feet. But hunt until you do see him. It will sharpen your eyes
and steady your patience for finding other things.
VIII
You should see the sun come up on a May morning. The dawn is always a
wonderful sight, but never at other times attended with quite the
glory, with quite the music, with quite the sweet fragrance, with
quite the wonder of a morning in May. Don’t fail to see it. Don’t fail
to rise with it. You will feel as if you had wings--something better
even than wings.
IX
You should see a farmer ploughing in a large field--the long straight
furrows of brown earth; the blackbirds following behind after worms;
the rip of the ploughshare; the roll of the soil from the smooth
mould-board--the wealth of it all. For in just such fields is the
wealth of the world, and the health of it, too. Don’t miss the sight
of the ploughing.
X
Go again to the field, three weeks later, and see it all green with
sprouting corn, or oats, or one of a score of crops. Then--but in “The
Fall of the Year” I ask you to go once more and see that field all
covered with shocks of ripened corn, shocks that are pitched up and
down its long rows of corn-butts like a vast village of Indian tepees,
each tepee full of golden corn.
XI
You should see, hanging from a hole in some old apple tree, a long
thin snake-skin! It is the latch-string of the great crested
flycatcher. Now why does this bird always use a snake-skin in his
nest? and why does he usually leave it hanging loose outside the hole?
Questions, these, for you to think about. And if you will look sharp,
you will see in even the commonest things questions enough to keep you
thinking as long as you live.
XII
You should see a dandelion. A dandelion? Yes, a dandelion, “fringing
the dusty road with harmless gold.” But that almost requires four
eyes--two to see the dandelion and two more to see the gold--the two
eyes in your head, and the two in your imagination. Do you really know
how to see anything? Most persons have eyes, but only a few really
see. This is because they cannot look hard and steadily at anything.
The first great help to real seeing is to go into the woods knowing
what you hope to see--seeing it in your eye, as we say, before you see
it in the out-of-doors. No one would ever see a tree-toad on a mossy
tree or a whip-poor-will among the fallen leaves who did not have
tree-toads and whip-poor-wills in mind. Then, secondly, look at the
thing _hard_ until you see in it something peculiar, something
different from anything like it that you ever saw before. Don’t dream
in the woods; don’t expect the flowers to tell you their names or the
wild things to come up and ask you to wait while they perform for
you.
CHAPTER V
IF YOU HAD WINGS
If you had wings, why of course you would wear feathers instead of
clothes, and you might be a crow! And then of course you would steal
corn, and run the risk of getting three of your big wing feathers shot
away.
All winter long, and occasionally during this spring, I have seen one
of my little band of crows flying about with a big hole in his
wing,--at least three of his large wing feathers gone, shot away
probably last summer,--which causes him to fly with a list or limp,
like an automobile with a flattened tire, or a ship with a shifted
ballast.
Now for nearly a year that crow has been hobbling about on one whole
and one half wing, trusting to luck to escape his enemies, until he
can get three new feathers to take the places of those that are
missing. “Well, why doesn’t he get them?” you ask. If you were that
crow, how would you get them? Can a crow, by taking thought, add three
new feathers to his wing?
Certainly not. That crow must wait until wing-feather season comes
again, just as an apple tree must wait until apple-growing season
comes to hang its boughs with luscious fruit. The crow has nothing to
do with it. His wing feathers are supplied by Nature once a year
(after the nesting-time), and if a crow loses any of them, even if
right after the new feathers had been supplied, that crow will have to
wait until the season for wing feathers comes around once more--if
indeed he can wait and does not fall a prey to hawk or owl or the
heavy odds of winter.
But Nature is not going to be hurried on that account, nor caused to
change one jot or tittle from her wise and methodical course. The
Bible says that the hairs of our heads are numbered. So are the
feathers on a crow’s body. Nature knows just how many there are
altogether; how many there are of each sort--primaries, secondaries,
tertials, greater coverts, middle coverts, lesser coverts, and
scapulars--in the wing; just how each sort is arranged; just when each
sort is to be moulted and renewed. If Master Crow does not take care
of his clothes, then he will have to go without until the time for a
new suit comes; for Mother Nature won’t patch them up as your mother
patches up yours.
But now this is what I want you to notice and think about: that just
as an apple falls according to a great law of Nature, so a bird’s
feathers fall according to a law of Nature. The moon is appointed for
seasons; the sun knoweth his going down; and so light and
insignificant a thing as a bird’s feather not only is appointed to
grow in a certain place at a certain time, but also knoweth its
falling off.
Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, than the way a hen’s
feathers seem to drop off at moulting time. The most forlorn, undone,
abject creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen. There is one
in the chicken-yard now, so nearly naked that she really is ashamed of
herself, and so miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all
night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It is a critical
experience with the hen, this moulting of her feathers; and were it
not for the protection of the yard it would be a fatal experience, so
easily could she be captured. Nature seems to have no hand in the
business at all; if she has, then what a mess she is making of it!
But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and
lo! here is law and order, every feather as important to Nature as a
star, every quill as a planet, and the old white hen as mightily
looked after by Nature as the round sphere of the universe!
Once a year, usually after the nesting-season, it seems a physical
necessity for most birds to renew their plumage.
We get a new suit (some of us) because our old one wears out. That is
the most apparent cause for the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with
them, as with some of us, the feathers go out of fashion, and then the
change of feathers is a mere matter of style, it seems.
For severe and methodical as Mother Nature must be (and what mother or
teacher or ruler, who has great things to do and a multitude of little
things to attend to, must not be severe and methodical?)--severe, I
say, as Mother Nature must be in looking after her children’s clothes,
she has for all that a real motherly heart, it seems.
For see how she looks after their wedding garments--giving to most of
the birds a new suit, gay and gorgeous, especially to the bridegrooms,
as if fine feathers _did_ make a fine bird! Or does she do all of this
to meet the fancy of the bride, as the scientists tell us? Whether so
or not, it is a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is
adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers come by a
special moult--an extra suit for him!
Take Bobolink, for instance. He has two complete moults a year, two
new suits, one of them his wedding suit. Now, as I write, I hear him
singing over the meadow--a jet-black, white, and cream-buff lover,
most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass, looks as little
like him as a sparrow looks like a blackbird. But after the
breeding-season he will moult again, changing color so completely that
he and his wife and children will all look alike, all like sparrows,
and will even lose their names, flying south now under the name of
“reed-birds.”
Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil; and in the spring, just before
the long northward journey begins, he lays aside his fall traveling
clothes and puts on his gay wedding garments and starts north for his
bride. But you would hardly know he was so dressed, to look at him;
for, strangely enough, he is not black and white, but still colored
like a sparrow, as he was in the fall. _Apparently_ he is. Look at him
more closely, however, and you will find that the brownish-yellow
color is all caused by a veil of fine fringes hanging from the edges
of the feathers. The bridegroom wearing the wedding veil? Yes!
Underneath is the black and white and cream-buff suit. He starts
northward; and, by the time he reaches Massachusetts, the fringe veil
is worn off and the black and white bobolink appears. Specimens taken
after their arrival here still show traces of the brownish-yellow
veil.
Many birds do not have this early spring moult at all; and with most
of those that do, the great wing feathers are not then renewed as are
bobolink’s, but only at the annual moult after the nesting is done.
The great feathers of the wings are, as you know, the most important
feathers a bird has; and the shedding of them is so serious a matter
that Nature has come to make the change according to the habits and
needs of the birds. With most birds the body feathers begin to go
first, then the wing feathers, and last those of the tail. But the
shedding of the wing feathers is a very slow and carefully regulated
process.
In the wild geese and other water birds the wing feathers drop out
with the feathers of the body, and go so nearly together that the
birds really cannot fly. On land you could catch the birds with your
hands. But they keep near or on the water and thus escape, though
times have been when it was necessary to protect them at this season
by special laws; for bands of men would go into their nesting-marshes
and kill them with clubs by hundreds!
The shedding of the feathers brings many risks to the birds; but
Nature leaves none of her children utterly helpless. The geese at this
time cannot fly because their feathers are gone; but they can swim,
and so get away from most of their natural enemies. On the other hand,
the hawks that hunt by wing, and must have wings always in good
feather, or else perish, lose their feathers so slowly that they never
feel their loss. It takes a hawk nearly a year to get a complete
change of wing feathers, one or two dropping out from each wing at a
time, at long intervals apart.
Then here is the gosling, that goes six weeks in down, before it gets
its first feathers, which it sheds within a few weeks, in the fall.
Whereas the young quail is born with quills so far grown that it is
able to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are real mature
feathers; but the bird is young and soon outgrows these first flight
feathers, so they are quickly lost and new ones come. This goes on
till fall, _several_ moults occurring the first summer to meet the
increasing weight of the little quail’s growing body.
I said that Nature was severe and methodical, and so she is, where she
needs to be, so severe that you are glad, perhaps, that you are not a
crow. But Nature, like every wise mother, is severe only where she
needs to be. A crow’s wing feathers are vastly important to him. Let
him then take care of them, for they are the best feathers made and
are put in to stay a year. But a crow’s tail feathers are not so
vastly important to him; he could get on, if, like the rabbit in the
old song, he had no tail at all.
In most birds the tail is a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not
of equal importance with the wings. Nature, consequently, seems to
have attached less importance to the feathers of the tail. They are
not so firmly set, nor are they of the same quality or kind; for,
unlike the wing feathers, if a tail feather is lost through accident,
it is made good, no matter when. How do you explain that? Do you think
I believe that old story of the birds roosting with their tails out,
so that, because of generations of lost tails, those feathers now grow
expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and therefore have only a
temporary hold?
The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a lost feather with
a new one as soon as possible. But, in order to give extra strength to
the wing feathers, Nature has found it necessary to check their
frequent change; and so complete is the check that the annual moult is
required to replace a single one. The Japanese have discovered the
secret of this check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers in
the tails of their cocks growing until they reach the enormous length
of ten to twelve feet.
My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers last summer just after his
annual moult; the three broken shafts he carries still in his wing,
and must continue to carry, as the stars must continue their courses,
until those three feathers have rounded out their cycle to the annual
moult. The universe of stars and feathers is a universe of law, of
order, and of reason.
CHAPTER VI
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING
I do not know where to begin--there are so many interesting things to
do this spring! But, while we ought to be interested in all of the
out-of-doors, it is very necessary to select some _one_ field, say,
the birds or flowers, for _special_ study. That would help us to
decide what to do this spring.
I
If there is still room under your window, or on the clothes-pole in
your yard, or in a neighboring tree, nail up another bird-house. (Get
“Methods of Attracting Birds” by Gilbert H. Trafton.) If the
bird-house is on a pole or post, invert a large tin pan over the end
of the post and nail the house fast upon it. This will keep cats and
squirrels from disturbing the birds. If the bird-house is in a tree,
saw off a limb, if you can without hurting the tree, and do the same
there. Cats are our birds’ worst enemies.
II
Cats! Begin in your own home and neighborhood a campaign against the
cats, to reduce their number and to educate their owners to the need
of keeping them well fed and shut up in the house from early evening
until after the early morning; for these are the cats’ natural hunting
hours, when they do the greatest harm to the birds.
This does not mean any cruelty to the cat--no stoning, no persecution.
The cat is not at fault. It is the keepers of the cats who need to be
educated. Out of every hundred nests in my neighborhood the cats of
two farmhouses destroy ninety-five! The state must come to the rescue
of the birds by some new rigid law reducing the number of cats.
III
Speaking of birds, let me urge you to begin your watching and study
early--with the first robins and bluebirds--and to select some near-by
park or wood-lot or meadow to which you can go frequently. There is a
good deal in getting intimately acquainted with a locality, so that
you know its trees individually, its rocks, walls, fences, the very
qualities of its soil. Therefore you want a small area, close at hand.
Most observers make the mistake of roaming first here, then there,
spending their time and observation in finding their way around,
instead of upon the birds to be seen. You must get used to your paths
and trees before you can see the birds that flit about them.
IV
In this haunt that you select for your observation, you must study not
only the birds but the trees, and the other forms of life, and the
shape of the ground (the “lay” of the land) as well, so as to know
_all_ that you see. In a letter just received from a teacher, who is
also a college graduate, occurs this strange description: “My window
faces a hill on which straggle brown houses among the deep green of
elms or oaks or maples, I don’t know which.” Perhaps the hill is far
away; but I suspect that the writer, knowing my love for the
out-of-doors, wanted to give me a vivid picture, but, not knowing one
tree from another, put them all in so I could make my own choice!
Learn your common trees, common flowers, common bushes, common
animals, along with the birds.
V
Plant a garden, if only a pot of portulacas, and _care_ for it, and
watch it grow! Learn to dig in the soil and to love it. It is amazing
how much and how many things you can grow in a box on the window-sill,
or in a corner of the dooryard. There are plants for the sun and
plants for the shade, plants for the wall, plants for the very cellar
of your house. Get you a bit of earth and plant it, no matter how busy
you are with other things this spring.
VI
There are four excursions that you should make this spring: one to a
small pond in the woods; one to a deep, wild swamp; one to a wide
salt marsh or fresh-water meadow; and one to the seashore--to a wild
rocky or sandy shore uninhabited by man.
There are particular birds and animals as well as plants and flowers
that dwell only in these haunts; besides, you will get a sight of four
distinct kinds of landscape, four deep impressions of the face of
nature that are altogether as good to have as the sight of four
flowers or birds.
VII
Make a calendar of _your_ spring (read “Nature’s Diary” by Francis H.
Allen)--when and where you find your first bluebird, robin, oriole,
etc.; when and where you find your first hepatica, arbutus, saxifrage,
etc.; and, as the season goes on, when and where the doings of the
various wild things take place.
VIII
Boy or girl, you should go fishing--down to the pond or the river
where you go to watch the birds. Suppose you do not catch any fish.
That doesn’t matter; for you have gone out to the pond with a pole in
your hands (a pole is a _real_ thing); you have gone with the _hope_
(hope is a _real_ thing) of catching _fish_ (fish are _real_ things);
and even if you catch no fish, you will be sure, as you wait for the
fish to bite, to hear a belted kingfisher, or see a painted turtle, or
catch the breath of the sweet leaf-buds and clustered catkins opening
around the wooded pond. It is a very good thing for the young
naturalist to learn to sit still. A fish-pole is a great help in
learning that necessary lesson.
IX
One of the most interesting things you can do for special study is to
collect some frogs’ eggs from the pond and watch them grow into
tadpoles and on into frogs. There are glass vessels made particularly
for such study (an ordinary glass jar will do). If you can afford a
small glass aquarium, get one and with a few green water plants put in
a few minnows, a snail or two, a young turtle, water-beetles, and
frogs’ eggs, and watch them grow.
X
You should get up by half past three o’clock (at the earliest streak
of dawn) and go out into the new morning with the birds! You will
hardly recognize the world as that in which your humdrum days (there
are no such days, really) are spent! All is fresh, all is new, and the
bird-chorus! “Is it possible,” you will exclaim, “that this can be the
earth?”
Early morning and toward sunset are the best times of the day for
bird-study. But if there was not a bird, there would be the sunrise
and the sunset--the wonder of the waking, the peace of the closing,
day.
XI
I am not going to tell you that you should make a collection of
beetles or butterflies (you should _not_ make a collection of birds or
birds’ eggs) or of pressed flowers or of minerals or of arrow-heads or
of--anything. Because, while such a collection is of great interest
and of real value in teaching you names and things, still there are
better ways of studying living nature. For instance, I had rather
have you tame a hop-toad, feed him, watch him evening after evening
all summer, than make any sort of dead or dried or pressed collection
of anything. Live things are better than those things dead. Better
know one live toad under your doorstep than bottle up in alcohol all
the reptiles of your state.
XII
Finally you should remember that kindliness and patience and close
watching are the keys to the out-of-doors; that only sympathy and
gentleness and quiet are welcome in the fields and woods. What, then,
ought I to say that you should do finally?
CHAPTER VII
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN
“You have taken a handful of my wooded acres,” says Nature to me, “and
if you have not improved them, you at least have changed them greatly.
But they are mine still. Be friendly now, go softly, and you shall
have them all--and I shall have them all, too. We will share them
together.”
And we do. Every part of the fourteen acres is mine, yielding some
kind of food or fuel or shelter. And every foot, yes, every foot, is
Nature’s; as entirely hers as when the thick primeval forest stood
here. The apple trees are hers as much as mine, and she has ten
different bird families that I know of, living in them this spring. A
pair of crows and a pair of red-tailed hawks are nesting in the
wood-lot; there are at least three families of chipmunks in as many of
my stone-piles; a fine old tree-toad sleeps on the porch under the
climbing rose; a hornet’s nest hangs in a corner of the eaves; a small
colony of swifts thunder in the chimney; swallows twitter in the
hay-loft; a chipmunk and a half-tame gray squirrel feed in the barn;
and--to bring an end to this bare beginning--under the roof of the
pig-pen dwell a pair of phœbes.
To make a bird-house of a pig-pen, to divide it between the pig and
the bird--this is as far as Nature can go, and this is certainly
enough to redeem the whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or a
scavenger to dwell in the pen, but a bird of character, however much
he may lack in song or color. Phœbe does not make up well in a
picture; neither does he perform well as a singer; there is little to
him, in fact, but personality--personality of a kind and (may I say?)
quantity, sufficient to make the pig-pen a decent and respectable
neighborhood.
Phœbe is altogether more than his surroundings. Every time I go to
feed the pig, he lights upon a post near by and says to me, “It’s what
you are! Not what you do, but how you do it!”--with a launch into the
air, a whirl, an unerring snap at a cabbage butterfly, and an easy
drop to the post again, by way of illustration. “Not where you live,
but how you live there; not the feathers you wear, but how you wear
them--it is what you are that counts!”
There is a difference between being a “character” and having one. My
phœbe “lives over the pig,” but I cannot feel familiar with a bird
of his air and carriage, who faces the world so squarely, who settles
upon a stake as if he owned it, who lives a prince in my pig-pen.
Look at him! How alert, able, free! Notice the limber drop of his
tail, the ready energy it suggests. By that one sign you would know
the bird had force. He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold; and he
migrates only because he is a flycatcher, and is thus compelled to.
The earliest spring day, however, that you find the flies buzzing in
the sun, look for phœbe. He is back, coming alone and long before
it is safe. He was one of the first of my birds to return this spring.
And it was a fearful spring, this of which I am telling you. How
Phœbe managed to exist those miserable March days is a mystery. He
came directly to the pen as he had come the year before, and his
presence in that bleakest of Marches gave the weather its only touch
of spring.
The same force and promptness are manifest in the domestic affairs of
the bird. One of the first to arrive this spring, he was the first to
build and bring off a brood--or, perhaps, _she_ was. And the size of
the brood--of the broods, for there was a second, and a third!
Phœbe appeared without his mate, and for nearly three weeks he
hunted in the vicinity of the pen, calling the day long, and, toward
the end of the second week, occasionally soaring into the air,
fluttering, and pouring forth a small, ecstatic song that seemed
fairly forced from him.
These aerial bursts meant just one thing: _she_ was coming, was coming
soon! Was she coming or was he getting ready to go for her? Here he
had been for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his mind at
rest, his heart beating faster with every sunrise. It was as plain as
day that he knew--was certain--just how and just when something lovely
was going to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in love with her
myself; and I, too, watched for her.
On the evening of April 14th, he was alone as usual. The next morning
a pair of phœbes flitted in and out of the windows of the pen. Here
she was. Will some one tell me all about it? Had she just come along
and fallen instantly in love with him and his fine pig-pen? It is
pretty evident that he nested here last year. Was she, then, his old
mate? Did they keep together all through the autumn and winter? If so,
then why not together all the way back from Florida to Massachusetts?
Here is a pretty story. But who will tell it to me?
For several days after she came, the weather continued raw and wet, so
that nest-building was greatly delayed. The scar of an old, last
year’s nest still showed on a stringer, and I wondered if they had
decided on this or some other site for the new nest. They had not made
up their minds, for when they did start it was to make three
beginnings in as many places.
Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick, branching at right
angles, I made a little bracket and tacked it up on one of the
stringers. It appealed to them at once, and from that moment the
building went steadily on.
Saddled upon this bracket, and well mortared to the stringer, the
nest, when finished, was as safe as a castle. And how perfect a thing
it was! Few nests, indeed, combine the solidity, the softness, and the
exquisite inside curve of Phœbe’s.
In placing the bracket, I had carelessly nailed it under one of the
cracks in the loose board roof. The nest was receiving its first
linings when there came a long, hard rain that beat through the crack
and soaked the little cradle. This was serious, for a great deal of
mud had been worked into the thick foundation, and here, in the
constant shade, the dampness would be long in drying out.
The builders saw the mistake, too, and with their great good sense
immediately began to remedy it. They built the bottom up thicker,
carried the walls over on a slant that brought the outermost point
within the line of the crack, then raised them until the cup was as
round-rimmed and hollow as the mould of Mrs. Phœbe’s breast could
make it.
The outside of the nest, its base, is broad and rough and shapeless
enough; but nothing could be softer and lovelier than the inside, the
cradle, and nothing drier, for the slanting walls of the nest shed
every drop from the leafy crack above.
Wet weather followed the heavy rain until long after the nest was
finished. The whole structure was as damp and cold as a newly
plastered house. It felt wet to my touch. Yet I noticed that the birds
were already brooding. Every night and often during the day I would
see one of them in the nest--so deep in, that only a head or a tail
showed over the round rim.
After several days I looked to see the eggs, but to my surprise found
the nest empty. It had been robbed, I thought, yet by what creature I
could not imagine. Then down cuddled one of the birds again--and I
understood. Instead of wet and cold, the nest to-day was warm to my
hand, and dry almost to the bottom. It had changed color, too, all the
upper part having turned a soft silver-gray. She (I am sure it was
she) had not been brooding her eggs at all; she had been brooding her
mother’s thought of them; and for them had been nestling here these
days and nights, _drying and warming_ their damp cradle with the fire
of her life and love.
In due time the eggs came,--five of them, white, spotless, and
shapely. While the little phœbe hen was hatching them, I gave my
attention further to the cock.
Our intimate friendship revealed a most pleasing nature in phœbe.
Perhaps such close and continued association would show like qualities
in every bird, even in the kingbird; but I fear only a woman, like
Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller, could find them in him. Not much can be said
of this flycatcher family, except that it is useful--a kind of virtue
that gets its chief reward in heaven. I am acquainted with only four
of the other nine Eastern members,--crested flycatcher, kingbird, wood
pewee, and chebec,--and each of these has some redeeming attribute
besides the habit of catching flies.
They are all good nest-builders, good parents, and brave, independent
birds; but aside from phœbe and pewee--the latter in his small way
the sweetest voice of the oak woods--the whole family is an odd lot,
cross-grained, cross-looking, and about as musical as a family of
ducks. A duck seems to know that he cannot sing. A flycatcher knows
nothing of his shortcomings. He believes he can sing, and in time he
will prove it. If desire and effort count for anything, he certainly
must prove it in time. How long the family has already been training,
no one knows. Everybody knows, however, the success each flycatcher of
them has thus far attained. It would make a good minstrel show,
doubtless, if the family would appear together. In chorus, surely,
they would be far from a tuneful choir. Yet individually, in the wide
universal chorus of the out-of-doors, how much we should miss the
kingbird’s metallic twitter and the chebec’s insistent call!
There was little excitement for phœbe during this period of
incubation. He hunted in the neighborhood and occasionally called to
his mate, contented enough perhaps, but certainly sometimes appearing
tired.
[Illustration: PHŒBE AND HER YOUNG]
One rainy day he sat in the pig-pen window looking out at the gray,
wet world. He was humped and silent and meditative, his whole attitude
speaking the extreme length of his day, the monotony of the drip,
drip, drip from the eaves, and the sitting, the ceaseless sitting, of
his brooding wife. He might have hastened the time by catching a few
flies for her or by taking her place on the nest; but I never saw him
do it.
Things were livelier when the eggs hatched, for it required a good
many flies a day to keep the five young ones growing. And how they
grew! Like bread sponge in a pan, they began to rise, pushing the
mother up so that she was forced to stand over them; then pushing her
out until she could cling only to the side of the nest at night; then
pushing her off altogether. By this time they were hanging to the
outside themselves, covering the nest from sight almost, until finally
they spilled off upon their wings.
Out of the nest upon the air! Out of the pen and into a sweet, wide
world of green and blue and of golden light! I saw one of the broods
take this first flight, and it was thrilling.
The nest was placed back from the window and below it, so that in
leaving the nest the young would have to drop, then turn and fly up to
get out. Below was the pig.
As they grew, I began to fear that they might try their wings before
this feat could be accomplished, and so fall to the pig below. But
Nature, in this case, was careful of her pearls. Day after day they
clung to the nest, even after they might have flown; and when they did
go, it was with a sure and long flight that carried them out and away
to the tops of the neighboring trees.
They left the nest one at a time and were met in the air by their
mother, who, darting to them, calling loudly, and, whirling about
them, helped them as high and as far away as they could go.
I wish the simple record of these family affairs could be closed
without one tragic entry. But that can rarely be of any family. Seven
days after the first brood were awing, I found the new eggs in the
nest. Soon after that the male bird disappeared. The second brood had
now been out a week, and in all that time no sight or sound was had of
the father.
What happened? Was he killed? Caught by a cat or a hawk? It is
possible; and this is an easy and kindly way to think of him. It is
not impossible that he may have remained as leader and protector to
the first brood; or (perish the thought!) might he have grown weary at
sight of the second lot of five eggs, of the long days and the neglect
that they meant for him, and out of jealousy and fickleness wickedly
deserted?
I hope it was death, a stainless, even ignominious death by one of my
neighbor’s many cats.
Death or desertion, it involved a second tragedy. Five such young ones
at this time were too many for the mother. She fought nobly; no mother
could have done more. All five were brought within a few days of
flight; then, one day, I saw a little wing hanging listlessly over the
side of the nest. I went closer. One had died. It had starved to
death. There were none of the parasites in the nest that often kill
whole broods. It was a plain case of sacrifice,--by the mother,
perhaps; by the other young, maybe--one for the other four.
But she did well. Nine such young birds to her credit since April. Who
shall measure her actual use to the world? How does she compare in
value with the pig? Weeks later I saw several of her brood along the
meadow fence hawking for flies. They were not far from my
cabbage-patch.
I hope a pair of them will return to me next spring and that they will
come early. Any bird that deigns to dwell under roof of mine commands
my friendship. But no other bird takes Phœbe’s place in my
affections; there is so much in him to like, and he speaks for so much
of the friendship of nature.
“Humble and inoffensive bird” he has been called by one of our leading
ornithologies--because he comes to my pig-pen! Inoffensive! this bird
with the cabbage butterfly in his beak! The faint and damning praise!
And humble? There is not a humble feather on his body. Humble to
those who see the pen and not the bird. But to me--why, the bird has
made a palace of my pig-pen!
The very pig seems less a pig because of this exquisite association;
and the lowly work of feeding the creature has been turned for me by
Phœbe into a poetic course in bird study.
CHAPTER VIII
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR?
There was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, a cry of pain; a
squawking, cowering, scattering flock of hens; a weakly fluttering
pullet; and yonder, swinging upward into the sky, a marsh hawk,
buoyant and gleaming silvery in the sun. Over the trees he beat,
circled once, and disappeared.
The hens were still flapping for safety in a dozen directions, but the
gray harrier had gone. A bolt of lightning could hardly have dropped
so unannounced, could hardly have vanished so completely, could
scarcely have killed so quickly. I ran to the pullet, but found her
dead. The harrier’s stroke, delivered with fearful velocity, had laid
head and neck open as with a keen knife. Yet a little slower and he
would have missed, for the pullet warded off the other claw with her
wing. The gripping talons slipped off the long quills, and the hawk
swept on without his quarry. He dared not come back for it at my feet;
so, with a single turn above the woods he was gone.
The scurrying hens stopped to look about them. There was nothing in
the sky to see. They stood still and silent a moment. The rooster
_chucked_. Then one by one they turned back into the open pasture. A
huddled group under the hen-yard fence broke up and came out with the
others. Death had flashed among them, but had missed _them_. Fear had
come, but it had gone. Within two minutes from the fall of the stroke,
every hen in the flock was intent at her scratching, or as intently
chasing the gray grasshoppers over the pasture.
Yet, as the flock scratched, the high-stepping cock would frequently
cast up his eye toward the tree-tops; would sound his alarum at the
flight of a robin; and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge
and start to run. But instantly the shadow would pass, and instantly
Chanticleer--
“He looketh as it were a grym leoun,
And on hise toos he rometh up and doun;
* * * * *
Thus roial as a prince is in an halle.”
He wasn’t afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he was, but not afraid. No
shadow of dread lay dark and ominous across the sunshine of his
pasture. Shadows came--like a flash; and like a flash they vanished
away.
We cannot go far into the fields without sighting the hawk and the
snake, whose other names are Death. In one form or another Death moves
everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black
waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the April sky, night
and day, and every day, the four seasons through.
I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl,
and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows
leap from the jaws of the terrible pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak
of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike
twisting and bending in the beak of the terrible kingfisher. The
killer is killed. But at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep
sand-bank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs
the terrible black snake, the third killer; and the belted kingfisher,
dropping the pike, darts off with a startled cry.
I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in
such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining,
singing, blossoming springtime under a pall. Everything has seemed to
cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no
stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for
here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I
would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen, hungry face an
instant as he halted, winding me.
There is struggle, and pain, and death in the woods, and there is fear
also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow
and terrify; it has no being, no shape, no lair. The shadow of the
swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this Fear-shadow in the
woods. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling fear; yet the
very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it. For them Fear is
not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.
“The present only toucheth thee!”
It does more, it throngs him--our little fellow mortal of the
stubble-field. Into the present is lived the whole of his life--he
remembers none of it; he anticipates none of it. And the whole of this
life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of
fear in an animal’s life are few and vanishing. Action and joy are
constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature--of the
shining stars that sing together, of the little mice that squeak
together, of the bitter northeast storms that roar across the wintry
fields.
I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly, and with almost a
command bid me hear the music of the baying pack. There are hollow
halls in the swamps that lie to the east and north and west of me,
that catch up the cry of the foxhounds, that blend it, mellow it,
round it, and roll it, rising and falling over the meadows in great
globes of sound, as pure and sweet as the pearly notes of the veery
rolling round their silver basin in the summer dusk.
What music it is when the pack breaks into the open on the warm trail!
A chorus then of tongues singing the ecstasy of pursuit! My blood
leaps; the natural primitive wild thing of muscle and nerve and
instinct within me slips its leash, and on past with the pack I drive,
the scent of the trail single and sweet in my nostrils, a very fire in
my blood, motion, motion, motion in my bounding muscles, and in my
being a mighty music, spheric and immortal!
“The fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed....”
But what about the fox, loping wearily on ahead? What part has he in
the chorus? No part, perhaps, unless we grimly call him its conductor.
But the point is the chorus--that it never ceases, the hounds at this
moment, not the fox, in the leading rôle.
“But the chorus ceases for me,” you say. “My heart is with the poor
fox.” So is mine, and mine is with the dogs too. No, don’t say “Poor
little fox!” For many a night I have bayed with the pack, and as
often--oftener, I think--I have loped and dodged and doubled with the
fox, pitting limb against limb, lung against lung, wit against wit,
and always escaping. More than once, in the warm moonlight, I, the
fox, have led them on and on, spurring their lagging muscles with a
sight of my brush, on and on, through the moonlit night, through the
day, on into the moon again, and on until--only the stir of my own
footsteps has followed me. Then, doubling once more, creeping back a
little upon my track, I have looked at my pursuers, silent and stiff
upon the trail, and, ere the echo of their cry has died away, I have
caught up the chorus and carried it single-throated through the
wheeling, singing spheres.
There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That a fox ever purposely
led a dog to run to death would be hard to prove; but that the dogs
run themselves to death in a single extended chase after a single fox
is a common occurrence here in the woods about the farm. Occasionally
the fox may be overtaken by the hounds; seldom, however, except in the
case of a very young one or of one unacquainted with the lay of the
land, a stranger that may have been driven into the rough country
here.
I have been both fox and hound; I have run the race too often not to
know that both enjoy it at times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago
the dogs carried a young fox around and around the farm, hunting him
here, there, everywhere, as if in a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox
would have led the dogs on a long coursing run across the range. But
the young fox, after the dogs were caught and taken off the trail,
soon sauntered up through the mowing-field behind the barn, came out
upon the bare knoll near the house, and sat there in the moonlight
yapping down at Rex and Dewey, the house-dogs in the two farms below.
Rex is a Scotch collie, Dewey a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been
tail-ender in the pack for a while during the afternoon. Both dogs
answered back at the young fox. But he could not egg them on. Rex was
too fat, Dewey had had enough; not so the young fox. It had been fun.
He wanted more. “Come on, Dewey!” he cried. “Come on, Rex, play tag
again! You’re still ‘it.’”
I was at work with my chickens one spring day when the fox broke from
cover in the tall woods, struck the old wagon-road along the ridge,
and came at a gallop down behind the hen-coops, with five hounds not a
minute behind. They passed with a crash and were gone--up over the
ridge and down into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack had
broken, deploying in every direction, beating the ground over and
over. Reynard had given them the slip--on the ridge-side, evidently,
for there were no cries from below in the swamp.
Leaving my work at noon, I went down to restake my cow in the meadow.
I had just drawn her chain-pin when down the road through the orchard
behind me came the fox, hopping high up and down, his neck stretched,
his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a white hen of my neighbor’s, he
made for her, clear to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher for a
better view, he sighted another hen in the front yard, skipped in
gayly through the fence, seized her, and loped across the road and
away up the birch-grown hills beyond.
The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes before. He had fooled
them. And no doubt he had done it again and again. They were even now
yelping at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge. Let them
yelp. It is a kind and convenient habit of dogs, this yelping, one can
tell so exactly where they are. Meantime one can take a turn for one’s
self at the chase, get a bite of chicken, a drink of water, a wink or
two of rest, and when the yelping gets warm again, one is quite ready
to pick up one’s heels and lead the pack another merry dance. The fox
is quite a jolly fellow.
This is the way the races out of doors are all run off. Now and then
they may end tragically. A fox cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun.
He is racing against the pack of hounds. But, mortal finish or no, the
spirit of the chase is neither rage nor terror, but the excitement of
a matched game, the ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of
escape for the fox, without fury or fear--except for the instant at
the start and at the finish--when it is a finish.
This is the spirit of the chase--of the race, more truly; for it is
always a race, where the stake is not life and death, but rather the
joy of winning. The hound cares as little for his own life as for the
life of the fox he is hunting. It is the race, instead, that he loves;
it is the moments of crowded, complete, supreme existence for
him--“glory” we call it when men run it off together. Death, and the
fear of death, the animals can neither understand nor feel. Only
enemies exist in the world out of doors, only hounds, foxes,
hawks--they, and their scents, their sounds and shadows; and not fear,
but readiness only. The level of wild life, of the soul of all nature,
is a great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a
higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant.
The serrate pines on my horizon are not the pickets of a great pen. My
fields and swamps and ponds are not one wide battle-field, as if the
only work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and the whole of their
existence a reign of terror. This is a universe of law and order and
marvelous balance; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful,
joyous life. Life and not death is the law; joy and not fear is the
spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, of very matter itself.
“And ever at the loom of Birth
The Mighty Mother weaves and sings;
She weaves--fresh robes for mangled earth;
She sings--fresh hopes for desperate things.”
But suppose the fox were a defenseless rabbit, what of fear and terror
then?
Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of southern New Jersey.
The rabbit seldom runs in blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid,
and as gentle as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set of
legs was never bestowed by nature than the little cottontail’s. They
are as wings compared with the bent, bow legs that bear up the
ordinary rabbit-hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear map
of the country in his head,--its stumps, railpiles, cat-brier tangles,
and narrow rabbit-roads,--with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well
run his usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as even, the
chances quite as good, and the contest every bit as interesting to him
as to Reynard.
I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and let a hound pass
yelping within a few feet of him, but waiting on his toes as ready as
a hair-trigger should he be discovered.
I have seen him leap for his life as the dog sighted him, and,
bounding like a ball across the stubble, disappear in the woods, the
hound within two jumps of his flashing tail. I have waited at the end
of the wood-road for the runners to come back, down the home-stretch,
for the finish. On they go through the woods, for a quarter, or
perhaps a half a mile, the baying of the hound faint and intermittent
in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again, louder now.
They have turned the course.
I wait.
The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed; for the voice of the hound
is only an echo, not unlike the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging
bell. The leaves stir as a wood mouse scurries from his stump; an
acorn rattles down; then in the winding wood-road I hear the _pit-pat,
pit-pat_, of soft furry feet, and there at the bend is the rabbit. He
stops, rises high up on his haunches, and listens. He drops again upon
all fours, scratches himself behind the ear, reaches over the cart-rut
for a nip of sassafras, hops a little nearer, and throws his big ears
forward in quick alarm, for he sees me, and, as if something had
exploded under him, he kicks into the air and is off,--leaving a
pretty tangle for the dog to unravel, later on, by this mighty jump to
the side.
My children and a woodchopper were witnesses recently of an exciting,
and, for this section of Massachusetts, a novel race, which, but for
them, must certainly have ended fatally. The boys were coming through
the wood-lot where the man was chopping, when down the hillside toward
them rushed a little chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with terror; for
close behind him, with the easy, wavy motion of a shadow, glided a
dark-brown animal, which the man took on the instant for a mink, but
which must have been a large weasel or a pine marten. When almost at
the feet of the boys, and about to be seized by the marten, the
squeaking chipmunk ran up a tree. Up glided the marten, up for twenty
feet, when the chipmunk jumped. It was a fearfully close call.
The marten did not dare to jump, but turned and started down, when the
man intercepted him with a stick. Around and around the tree he
dodged, growling and snarling and avoiding the stick, not a bit
abashed, stubbornly holding his own, until forced to seek refuge among
the branches. Meanwhile, the terrified chipmunk had recovered his
nerve and sat quietly watching the sudden turn of affairs from a
near-by stump.
I frequently climb into the cupola of the barn during the winter, and
bring down a dazed junco that would beat his life out up there against
the window-panes. He will lie on his back in my open hand, either
feigning death or really powerless with fear. His eyes will close, his
whole tiny body throb convulsively with his throbbing heart. Taking
him to the door, I will turn him over and give him a gentle toss.
Instantly his wings flash; they take him zigzag for a yard or two,
then bear him swiftly round the corner of the house and drop him in
the midst of his fellows, where they are feeding upon the lawn. He
will shape himself up a little and fall to picking with the others.
From a state of collapse the laws of his being bring the bird into
normal behavior as quickly and completely as the collapsed rubber ball
is rounded by the laws of its being. The memory of the fright seems to
be an impression exactly like the dent in the rubber ball--as if it
had never been.
Memories, of course, the animals surely have; but little or no power
to use them. The dog will sometimes seem to cherish a grudge; so will
the elephant. Some one injures or wrongs him, and the huge beast
harbors the memory, broods it, and awaits his opportunity for revenge.
Yet the records of these cases usually show that the creature had been
living with the object of his hatred--his keeper, perhaps--and that
the memory goes no farther back than the present moment, than the
sight of the hated one.
At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke of great sleepy,
bald-faced oxen, that look as much alike as two blackbirds. Their
driver knows them apart; but as they stand there, bound to one another
by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it would puzzle anybody else
to tell Buck from Berry. But not if he approach them wearing an
overcoat. At sight of me in an overcoat the off ox will snort and back
and thrash about in terror, twisting the head of his yoke-fellow,
nearly breaking his neck, and trampling him miserably. But the nigh ox
is used to it. He chews and blinks away placidly, keeps his feet the
best he can, and doesn’t try to understand at all why greatcoats
should so frighten his cud-chewing brother. I will drop off my coat
and go up immediately to smooth the muzzles of both oxen, now blinking
sleepily while the lumber is being loaded on.
Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox was badly frightened by a
big woolly coat, the sight or smell of which probably suggested to the
creature some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a bear. The memory
remained, but beyond recall except in the presence of its first cause,
the greatcoat.
To us there are such things as terror and death, but not to the lower
animals except momentarily. We are clutched by terror even as the
junco was clutched in my goblin hand. When the mighty fingers open, we
zigzag, dazed, from the danger; but fall to planning before the
tremors of the fright have ceased. Upon the crumbled, smoking heap of
San Francisco a second splendid city has arisen and shall ever rise.
Terror can kill the living, but it cannot hinder them from forgetting,
or prevent them from hoping, or, for more than an instant, stop them
from doing. Such is the law of life--the law of heaven, of my
pastures, of the little junco, of myself. Life, Law, and Matter are
all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the
beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with
them all, come out of the same divine dust; we all breathe the same
divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine laws; only
they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine.
If, with all that I know of fear, I can so readily forget it, and can
so constantly feel the hope and the joy of life within me, how soon
for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all
memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the
necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience, what joy!
The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every
passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying
hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are
reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass
utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or
seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child,--asleep in
winter, awake in spring and summer,--a face of life and health always,
as much in the falling leaf as in the opening bud, as much under the
covers of the snow as in the greensward of the spring, as much in the
wild, fierce joy of fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling
paths of the woodlands in their fateful race as in the song of brook
and bird on a joyous April morning.
CHAPTER IX
THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP
No, I do not believe that any one of you ever went into a swamp to
find a turkey buzzard’s nest. Still, if you had been born on the edge
of a great swamp, as I was, and if the great-winged buzzards had been
soaring, soaring up in your sky, as all through my boyhood they were
soaring up in mine, then why should you not have gone some time into
the swamp to see where they make their nests--these strange
cloud-winged creatures?
Boys are boys, and girls are girls, the world over; and I am pretty
sure that little Jack Horner and myself were not the only two boys in
all the world to do great and wonderful deeds. Any boy with a love for
birds and a longing for the deep woods, living close to the edge of
the Bear Swamp, would have searched out that buzzard’s nest.
Although I was born within the shadows of the Bear Swamp, close enough
to smell the magnolias along its margin, and lived my first ten years
only a little farther off, yet it was not until after twice ten years
of absence that I stood again within sight of it, ready for the first
time to cross its dark borders and find the buzzard’s nest.
Now here at last I found myself, looking down over the largest, least
trod, deepest-tangled swamp in southern New Jersey--wide, gloomy,
silent, and to me,--for I still thought of it as I used to when a
child,--to me, a mysterious realm of black streams, hollow trees,
animal trails, and haunting shapes, presided over by this great bird,
the turkey buzzard.
For he was never mere bird to me, but some kind of spirit. He stood to
me for what was far off, mysterious, secret, and unapproachable in the
deep, dark swamp; and, in the sky, so wide were his wings, so majestic
the sweep of his flight, he had always stirred me, caused me to hold
my breath and wish myself to fly.
No other bird did I so much miss from my New England skies when I came
here to live. Only the other day, standing in the heart of Boston, I
glanced up and saw, sailing at a far height against the billowy
clouds, an aeroplane; and what should I think of but the flight of the
vulture, so like the steady wings of the great bird seemed the steady
wings of this great monoplane far off against the sky.
And so you begin to understand why I had come back after so many years
to the swamp, and why I wanted to see the nest of this strange bird
that had been flying, flying forever in my imagination and in my sky.
But my good uncle, whom I was visiting, when I mentioned my quest,
merely exclaimed, “What in thunderation!”
You will find a good many uncles and other folk who won’t understand a
good many things that you want to do. Never mind. If you want to see a
buzzard’s nest, let all your relations exclaim while you go quietly
off alone and see it.
I wanted to find a buzzard’s nest--the nest of the Bear Swamp buzzard;
and here at last I stood; and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the
distance, floated the bird. It was coming toward me over the wide
reach of the swamp.
Silent, inscrutable, and alien lay the swamp, and untouched by human
hands. Over it spread a quiet and reserve as real as twilight. Like a
mask it was worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach. I could
feel the silent spirit of the place drawing back away from me. But I
should have at least a guide to lead me through the shadow land, for
out of the lower living green towered a line of limbless stubs, like a
line of telegraph-poles, their bleached bones gleaming white, or
showing dark and gaunt against the horizon, and marking for me a path
far out across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard winding
slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral changed to a long
pendulum-swing, till just above the skeleton trees the great bird
wheeled and, bracing itself with its flapping wings, dropped heavily
upon one of the headless tree-trunks.
It had come leisurely, yet I could see that it had come with a
directness and purpose that was unmistakable and also meaningful. It
had discovered me in the distance, and, while still invisible to my
eyes, had started down to perch upon that giant stub in order to watch
me. It was suspicious, and had come to watch me, because somewhere
beneath its perch, I felt sure, lay a hollow log, the creature’s den,
holding its two eggs or its young. A buzzard has something like a
soul.
Marking the direction of the stub, and its probable distance, I waded
into the deep underbrush, the buzzard perched against the sky for my
guide, and, for my quest, the stump or hollow log that held the
creature’s nest.
The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up, and shut out at times
even the sight of the sky and the buzzard. It was not until half an
hour’s struggle that, climbing a pine-crested swell in the low bottom,
I sighted the bird again. It had not moved.
I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. It was a land of
tree giants: huge tulip poplar and swamp white oak, so old that they
had become solitary, their comrades having fallen one by one; while
some of them, unable to loose their grip upon the soil, which had
widened and tightened through centuries, were still standing, though
long since dead. It was upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped.
Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white oak, the greatest
tree, I think, that I have ever seen. It was not the highest, nor the
largest round, perhaps, but in years and looks the greatest. Hoary,
hollow, and broken-limbed, his huge bole seemed encircled with the
centuries.
“For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree.”
Above him to twice his height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-boled for
thirty feet and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a
resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old
monarch wore the crown! His girth more than balanced the poplar’s
greater height; and, as for blossoms, he had his tiny-flowered
catkins; but nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty,
and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak.
My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen
through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was
nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was
startled by the _burrh! burrh! burrh!_ of three partridges taking wing
just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding flight seemed
all the more like a real explosion when three little clouds of
dust-smoke rose out of the low, _wet_ bottom of the swamp and drifted
up against the green.
Then I saw an interesting sight. The pine, in its fall, had snatched
with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots at the shallow bottom and
torn out a giant fistful of earth, leaving a hole about two feet deep
and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had
gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it
lay high and dry above the level of the wet swamp. This the swamp
birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use,
evidently. Not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it
were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the
partridges but also the quail and such small things as the warblers
bathed here,--though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe
in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury,
evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it?
I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough
to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my buzzard guide. The
buzzard saw me, too, and began to twist its head and to twitch its
wing-tips nervously. Then the long, black wings began to open, as you
would open a two-foot rule, and, with a heavy lurch that left the dead
stub rocking, the bird dropped and was soon soaring high up in the
blue.
This was the locality of the nest; now where should I find it?
Evidently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The
underbrush was so thick that I could hardly see farther than my nose.
A half-rotten tree-trunk lay near, the top end resting across the
backs of several saplings that it had borne down in its fall. I crept
up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself
staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log
lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.
It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the
buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled
and felled with an axe, by coon-hunters probably, and still lay with
one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking,
something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.
Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow
log and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a
thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I
had found my buzzard’s nest!
[Illustration: YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD]
Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as
evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern
floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear
down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the
buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back.
The wonder is that they had ever hatched.
But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. Nature never
intended a young buzzard for any eye but his mother’s, and _she_ hates
the sight of him. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her
eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her
unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!
The two strange nestlings in the log must have been three weeks old, I
should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered,
as young owls are, with deep snow-white down, out of which protruded
their black scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these long black
legs, their receding heads drawn back, shoulders thrust forward, and
bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tom-cats.
In order to examine them, I crawled into the den--not a difficult act,
for the opening measured four feet and a half across at the mouth. The
air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was
absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick
coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a
red-beaded tapestry over the walls.
I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for
I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take
no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I
could catch the fresh breeze that pulled across the end, and where I
had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly, across this field of
blue, there swept a meteor of black--the buzzard! and evidently in
that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she
spied me in the log.
I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen
kinds of cramps, the unworried mother was soaring serenely far up in
the clear, cool sky.
CHAPTER X
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING
I
The frogs! You can have no spring until you hear the frogs. The first
shrill notes, heard before the ice is fairly out of the marshes, will
be the waking call of the hylas, the tiny tree-frogs that later on in
the summer you will find in the woods. Then, as the spring advances
and this silvery sleigh-bell jingle tinkles faster, other voices will
join in--the soft croak of the spotted leopard frogs, the still softer
melancholy quaver of the common toad, and away down at the end of the
scale the deep, solemn bass of the great bullfrog saying, “Go round!
Better go round!”
II
You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the bluebird and the
robin, four bird songs this spring. First (1) the song of the wood
thrush or the hermit thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood.
No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness, the spiritual
quality of the wood thrush’s simple “Come to me.” It is the voice of
the tender twilight, the voice of the tranquil forest, speaking to
you. After the thrush (2) the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted
songster, as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard them
both), as the Southern mockingbird. Then (3) the operatic catbird. She
sits lower down among the bushes than the brown thrasher, as if she
knew that, compared with him, she must take a back seat; but for
variety of notes and length of song, she has few rivals. I say _she_,
when really I ought to say _he_, for it is the males of most birds
that sing, but the catbird seems so long and slender, so dainty and
feminine, that I think of this singer as of some exquisite operatic
singer in a woman’s rôle. Then (4) the bobolink; for his song is just
like Bryant’s bubbling poem, only better! Go to the meadows in June
and listen as he comes lilting and singing over your head.
III
There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted kingfisher, for
instance; he can only rattle. You must hear him rattle. You can do as
well yourself if you will shake a “pair of bones” or heave an anchor
and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole. You then must hear
the downy woodpecker doing his rattling _rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat_
(across the page and back again), as fast as _rat-ta-tat_ can _tat_.
How he makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he drums upon
it with his chisel bill. He can be heard half a mile around.
Then high-hole, the flicker (or golden-winged woodpecker), you must
hear him yell, _Up-up-up-up-up up-up-up-up-up-up_,--a ringing,
rolling, rapid kind of yodel that echoes over the spring fields.
IV
You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor-will. Both birds are to
be heard at twilight, and the whip-poor-will far into the night. At
the very break of dawn is also a good time to listen to them.
At dusk you will see (I have seen him from the city roofs in Boston) a
bird about the size of a pigeon mounting up into the sky by short
flights, crying _peent_, until far over your head the creature will
suddenly turn and on half-closed wings dive headlong toward the
earth, when, just before hitting the ground, upward he swoops, at the
same instant making a weird booming sound, a kind of hollow groan with
his wings, as the wind rushes through their large feathers. This diver
through the dim ocean of air is the nighthawk. Let one of the birds
dive close to your head on a lonely dusky road, and your hair will try
to jump out from under your hat.
The whip-poor-will’s cry you all know. When you hear one this spring,
go out into the twilight and watch for him. See him spring into the
air, like a strange shadow, for flies; count his _whip-poor-wills_ (he
may call it more than a hundred times in as many seconds!). But hear a
circle of the birds, if possible, calling through the darkness of a
wood all around you!
V
There is one strange bird song that is half song and half dance that
perhaps most of you may never be able to hear and see; but as it is
worth going miles to hear, and nights of watching to witness, I am
going to set it here as one of your outdoor tasks or feats: you must
hear the mating song of the woodcock. I have described the song and
the dance in “Roof and Meadow,” in the chapter called “One Flew East
and One Flew West.” Mr. Bradford Torrey has an account of it in his
“Clerk of the Woods,” in the chapter named “Woodcock Vespers.” To hear
the song is a rare experience for the habitual watcher in the woods,
but one that you might have the first April evening that you are
abroad.
Go down to your nearest meadow--a meadow near a swampy piece of woods
is best--and here, along the bank of the meadow stream, wait in the
chilly twilight for the _speank_, _speank_, or the _peent_, _peent_,
from the grass--the signal that the song is about to begin.
VI
One of the dreadful--positively dreadful--sounds of the late spring
that I hear day in and day out is the gobbling, strangling, ghastly
cries of young crows feeding. You will surely think something is being
murdered. The crying of a hungry baby is musical in comparison. But it
is a good sound to hear, for it reminds one of the babes in the
woods--that a new generation of birds is being brought through from
babyhood to gladden the world. It is a tender sound! The year is still
young.
VII
You should hear the hum of the honey-bees on a fresh May day in an
apple tree that is just coming into perfect bloom. The enchanting
loveless of the pink and white world of blossoms is enough to make one
forget to listen to the _hum-hum-hum-humming-ing-ing-ing-ing_ of the
excited bees. But hear their myriad wings, fanning the perfume into
the air and filling the sunshine with the music of work. The whir, the
hum of labor--of a busy factory, of a great steamship dock--is always
music to those who know the blessedness of work; but it takes that
knowledge, and a good deal of imagination besides, to hear the music
in it. Not so with the bees. The season, the day, the colors, and
perfumes--they are the song; the wings are only the million-stringed
æolian upon which the song is played.
VIII
You should hear the grass grow. What! I repeat, you should hear the
grass grow. I have a friend, a sound and sensible man, but a lover of
the out-of-doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it is the
soft stir of the working earthworms that he hears. Try it. Go out
alone one of these April nights; select a green pasture with a slope
to the south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad; lay your
ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move for ten minutes. You
hear something--or do you feel it? Is it the reaching up of the grass?
is it the stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throbbing
universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse? It is all of these, I
think; call it the heart of the grass beating in every tiny living
blade, if you wish to. You should listen to hear the grass grow.
IX
The fires have gone out on the open hearth. Listen early in the
morning and toward evening for the rumbling, the small, muffled
thunder, of the chimney swallows, as they come down from the open sky
on their wonderful wings. Don’t be frightened. It isn’t Santa Claus
this time of year; nor is it the Old Nick! The smothered thunder is
caused by the rapid beating of the swallows’ wings on the air in the
narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down from the top of the
chimney and hover over their nests. Stick your head into the fireplace
and look up! Don’t smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter how much
racket they make.
X
Hurry out while the last drops of your first May thunder-shower are
still falling and listen to the robins singing from the tops of the
trees. Their liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the
raindrops in falling were running down from the trees in song--as
indeed they are in the overflowing trout-brook. Go out and listen, and
write a better poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon
when listening to the birds in our first spring shower:--
The warm rain drops aslant the sun
And in the rain the robins sing;
Across the creek in twos and troops,
The hawking swifts and swallows wing.
The air is sweet with apple bloom,
And sweet the laid dust down the lane,
The meadow’s marge of calamus,
And sweet the robins in the rain.
O greening time of bloom and song!
O fragrant days of tender pain!
The wet, the warm, the sweet young days
With robins singing in the rain.
CHAPTER XI
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the
four volumes of Agassiz’s “Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States.” I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster,
had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are a monumental
work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on
stone, showing the turtles of the United States, and their
life-history. The work was published more than half a century ago, but
it looked old beyond its years--massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug
from the rocks; and I soon turned with a sigh from the weary learning
of its plates and diagrams to look at the preface.
Then, reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks
for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:--
“In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also
received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of
Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro.” And then it hastens on with the thanks
in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only
thing of real importance in all the world.
Turtles are important--interesting; so is the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson
of Burlington. Indeed any reverend gentleman who would catch turtles
for Agassiz must have been interesting. If Agassiz had only put a
chapter into his turtle book about him! and as for the Mr. Jenks of
Middleboro (at the end of the quotation) I know that he was
interesting; for years later, he was an old college professor of mine.
He told me some of the particulars of his turtle contributions,
particulars which Agassiz should have found a place for in his big
book. The preface says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to
Cambridge by the thousands--brief and scanty recognition. For that is
not the only thing this gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not
turtles, but turtle _eggs_ to Cambridge--_brought_ them, I should say;
and all there is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a
small drawing of a bit of one of the eggs!
Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that drawing, and had to have a
_fresh_ turtle egg to draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it.
A great man, when he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time,
always gets it, for he gets some one else to get it for him. I am glad
he got it. But what makes me sad and impatient is that he did not
think it worth while to tell us about the getting of it.
It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or
interesting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them.
Nothing at all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to
find them. So with anything else. But if you want turtle eggs _when_
you want them, and are bound to have them, then you must--get Mr.
Jenks, or somebody else to get them for you.
Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them--not a minute
over three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does
not seem exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hens’
eggs only three hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have
had his private turtle-coop in Harvard College Yard; and provided he
could have made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, like
hens, to meat-scraps and the warm mash. The professor’s problem was
not to get from a mud turtle’s nest in the back yard to his work-table
in the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in Cambridge to some
pond when the turtles were laying, and back to the laboratory within
the limited time. And this might have called for nice and
discriminating work--as it did.
Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his “Contributions.” He
had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed,
finished but for one small yet very important bit of observation: he
had carried the turtle egg through every stage of its development with
the single exception of one--the very earliest. That beginning stage
had brought the “Contributions” to a halt. To get eggs that were fresh
enough to show the incubation at this period had been impossible.
There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might
have got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory
to some pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should
catch the reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in
all of that--as those who are college professors and naturalists know.
As this was quite out of the question, he did the easiest thing--asked
Mr. Jenks of Middleboro to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them.
Agassiz knew all about his getting of them; and I say the strange and
irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth while to tell
us about it, at least in the preface to his monumental work.
It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college
professor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.
“I was principal of an academy, during my younger years,” he began,
“and was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly
filled the doorway of the room, smiled to the four corners of the
room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor
Agassiz.
“Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it
to me across the room.
“Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would
I get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were
laid? Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did
it only once.
“When I promised Agassiz those eggs, I knew where I was going to get
them. I had got turtle eggs there before--at a particular patch of
sandy shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.
“Three hours was the limit. From the railroad station to Boston was
thirty-five miles; from the pond to the station was perhaps three or
four miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles.
Forty miles in round numbers! We figured it all out before he
returned, and got the trip down to two hours,--record time:--driving
from the pond to the station; from the station by express train to
Boston; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This left an easy hour for
accidents and delays.
“Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what we
didn’t figure on was the turtle.” And he paused abruptly.
“Young man,” he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly hiding
the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, “young man,
when _you_ go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! No!
that’s bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle--and youth seldom
ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got
those turtle eggs to Agassiz.
“It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long
before there was any likelihood of the turtles’ laying. But I was
eager for the quest, and so fearful of failure that I started out to
watch at the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles
might be expected to lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May
14th.
“A little before dawn--along near three o’clock--I would drive over to
the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some
thick cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my
kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here
among the cedars I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good
season to open the academy for the morning session.
“And so the watch began.
“I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept
to my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and
melt away, they would stick up their heads through the quiet water;
and as the sun slanted down over the ragged rim of tree-tops, the slow
things would float into the warm lighted spots, or crawl out and doze
comfortably on the hummocks and snags.
“What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and unbreathed!
The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields--of
water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste them
yet, and hear them yet--the still, large sounds of the waking day--the
pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping
anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the
thought of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare
mornings!
“But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no
desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon
the sand as if she intended to help on the great professor’s book. The
story of her eggs was of small concern to her; her contribution to the
Natural History of the United States could wait.
“And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th of May; June 1st found
me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every
morning, Sundays and rainy days alike. June 1st was a perfect morning,
but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a
matter strictly of next year.
“I began to grow uneasy,--not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns
his lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to
fear lest, by some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be known
to the creatures; that they might have gone to some other place to
lay, while I was away at the schoolroom.
“I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the
second week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning,
and along with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early
morning vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the
same clump of cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month
of morning mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my
bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those
turtle eggs and I would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no
use bringing a china nest-egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such
delicate suggestion.
“Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little
after three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from
the level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it
any morning before.
“This was the day. I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can
hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is
nigh. For a month I had been watching, had been brooding over this
pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse of things that
the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could the clods and
I.
“Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, understood, I slipped
eagerly into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large
pickerel ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his
wake rose the head of a large painted turtle. Swinging slowly round,
the creature headed straight for the shore, and, without a pause,
scrambled out on the sand.
“She was nothing unusual for a turtle, but her manner was unusual and
the gait at which she moved; for there was method in it and fixed
purpose. On she came, shuffling over the sand toward the higher open
fields, with a hurried, determined see-saw that was taking her
somewhere in particular, and that was bound to get her there on time.
“I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic
footprints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the
Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when
compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.
“But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a
narrow cow-path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow
cow-path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into
the high wet grass along the fence.
“I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a
wide trail of flattened grass behind. I wanted to stand up,--and I
don’t believe I could have turned her back with a rail,--but I was
afraid if she saw me that she might return indefinitely to the pond;
so on I went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the lower rails of
the fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It was nothing
of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of dewberry
vines, and very discouraging. They were excessively wet vines and
briery. I pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could get
them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging from between my teeth to
avoid noise, I stumped fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle.
[Illustration: “TAIL FIRST, BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF”]
“She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of
this dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove
to, warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me. I
warped about, too, and in her wake bore down across the corner of the
pasture, across the powdery public road, and on to a fence along a
field of young corn.
“I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before
wallowing through the deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a
large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows and saw the
turtle stop, and begin to paw about in the loose, soft soil. She was
going to lay!
“I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that
place, and the other place. But _the_ place, evidently, was hard to
find. What could a female turtle do with a whole field of possible
nests to choose from? Then at last she found it, and, whirling about,
she backed quickly at it and, tail first, began to bury herself before
my staring eyes.
“Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those moments
came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest, most
dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were hours
long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the
sand alongshore. And how long would she stay there? and how should I
know if she had laid an egg?
“I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened
fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.
“Four o’clock! Why there was no train until seven! No train for three
hours! The eggs would spoil! Then with a rush it came over me that
this was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven o’clock
train,--none till after nine.
“I think I should have fainted had not the turtle just then begun
crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; but there, there in the sand, were
the eggs! and Agassiz! and the great book! Why, I cleared the
fence--and the forty miles that lay between me and Cambridge--at a
single jump! He should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should go
to Agassiz by seven o’clock, if I had to gallop every mile of the way.
Forty miles! Any horse could cover it in three hours, if he had to;
and, upsetting the astonished turtle, I scooped out her long white
eggs.
“On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I laid them, with what
care my trembling fingers allowed; filled in between them with more
sand; so with layer after layer to the rim; and covering all smoothly
with more sand, I ran back for my horse.
“That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles had laid, and that he
was to get those eggs to Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the
road on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, doubling
me up before the dashboard, the pail of eggs miraculously lodged
between my knees.
“I let him out. If only he could keep this pace all the way to
Cambridge!--or even halfway there, I would have time to finish the
trip on foot. I shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand,
holding the pail of eggs with the other, not daring to get off my
knees, though the bang on them, as we pounded down the wood-road, was
terrific. But nothing must happen to the eggs; they must not be
jarred, or even turned over in the sand before they came to Agassiz.
“In order to get out on the pike it was necessary to drive back away
from Boston toward the town. We had nearly covered the distance, and
were rounding a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, ahead
of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the quick, sharp whistle of a
locomotive.
“What did it mean? Then followed the _puff, puff, puff_, of a starting
train. But what train? Which way going? And jumping to my feet for a
longer view, I pulled into a side road that paralleled the track, and
headed hard for the station.
“We reeled along. The station was still out of sight, but from behind
the bushes that shut it from view, rose the smoke of a moving engine.
It was perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head on, and,
topping a little hill, I swept down upon a freight train, the black
smoke pouring from the stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself
together for its swift run down the rails.
“My horse was on the gallop, following the track, and going straight
toward the coming train. The sight of it almost maddened me--the bare
thought of it, on the road to Boston! On I went; on it came, a half--a
quarter of a mile between us, when suddenly my road shot out along an
unfenced field with only a level stretch of sod between me and the
engine.
“With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, I swung him into the
field and sent him straight as an arrow for the track. That train
should carry me and my eggs to Boston!
“The engineer pulled the whistle. He saw me stand up in the rig, saw
my hat blow off, saw me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my
teeth, and he jerked out a succession of sharp Halts! But it was he
who should halt, not I; and on we went, the horse with a flounder
landing the carriage on top of the track.
“The train was already grinding to a stop; but before it was near a
standstill, I had backed off the track, jumped out, and, running down
the rails with the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung aboard
the cab.
“They offered no resistance; they hadn’t had time. Nor did they have
the disposition, for I looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless,
dew-soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were a baby
or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand!
“‘Crazy,’ the fireman muttered, looking to the engineer for his cue.
“I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy now.
“‘Throw her wide open,’ I commanded. ‘Wide open! These are fresh
turtle eggs for Professor Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them
before breakfast.’
“Then they knew I was crazy, and, evidently thinking it best to humor
me, threw the throttle wide open, and away we went.
“I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing unconcernedly in the open
field, and gave a smile to my crew. That was all I could give them,
and hold myself and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. And
they smiled through their smut at me, though one of them held fast to
his shovel, while the other kept his hand upon a big ugly wrench.
Neither of them spoke to me, but above the roar of the swaying engine
I caught enough of their broken talk to understand that they were
driving under a full head of steam, with the intention of handing me
over to the Boston police, as perhaps the safest way of disposing of
me.
“I was only afraid that they would try it at the next station. But
that station whizzed past without a bit of slack, and the next, and
the next; when it came over me that this was the through freight,
which should have passed in the night, and was making up lost time.
“Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept me from shaking hands
with both men at this discovery. But I beamed at them; and they at me.
I was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet was wrinkling my
diaphragm with spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the
engineer, with a look that said, ‘See the lunatic grin; he likes it!’
“He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me as they took the
rails! How the rushing wind in my ears sang to me! From my stand on
the fireman’s side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track
just ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to leap into the
throat of the mile-devouring monster. The joy of it! of seeing space
swallowed by the mile!
“I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought of my horse, of
Agassiz, of the great book, of my great luck,--luck,--luck,--until the
multitudinous tongues of the thundering train were all chiming ‘luck!
luck! luck!’ They knew! they understood! This beast of fire and
tireless wheels was doing its best to get the eggs to Agassiz!
“We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder flashed the morning sun
from the towering dome of the State House. I might have leaped from
the cab and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not caught the eye
of the engineer watching me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in
Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a train,
and forced it to carry me from Middleboro to Boston.
“Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business. Suppose these two men
should take it into their heads to turn me over to the police, whether
I would or no? I could never explain the case in time to get the eggs
to Agassiz. I looked at my watch. There were still a few minutes left
in which I might explain to these men, who, all at once, had become my
captors. But how explain? Nothing could avail against my actions, my
appearance, and my little pail of sand.
“I had not thought of my appearance before. Here I was, face and
clothes caked with yellow mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone,
and in my full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been
digging all night with a tiny tin shovel on the shore! And thus to
appear in the decent streets of Boston of a Sunday morning!
“I began to _feel_ like a lunatic. The situation was serious, or
might be, and rather desperately funny at its best. I must in some way
have shown my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.
“Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freight-yard, the train slowed
down and came to a stop. I was ready to jump, but still I had no
chance. They had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I looked
at my watch again. What time we had made! It was only six o’clock,--a
whole hour left in which to get to Cambridge!
“But I didn’t like this delay. Five minutes--ten--went by.
“‘Gentlemen,’ I began, but was cut short by an express train coming
past. We were moving again, on--into a siding--on to the main
track--on with a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes, running
the length of the train--on, on at a turtle’s pace, but on,--when the
fireman, quickly jumping for the bell-rope, left the way to the step
free, and--
“I never touched the step, but landed in the soft sand at the side of
the track, and made a line for the freight-yard fence.
“There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my shoulder to see if they
were after me. Evidently their hands were full, or they didn’t know I
had gone.
“But I had gone; and was ready to drop over the high board-fence, when
it occurred to me that I might drop into a policeman’s arms. Hanging
my pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously over--a
very wise thing to do before you jump a high board-fence. There,
crossing the open square toward the station, was a big, burly fellow
with a club--looking for me!
“I flattened for a moment, when some one in the freight-yard yelled at
me. I preferred the policeman, and, grabbing my pail, I slid softly
over to the street. The policeman moved on past the corner of the
station out of sight. The square was free, and yonder stood a cab.
“Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me coming,
and squared away. I waved a dollar-bill at him, but he only stared the
more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for one
dollar. I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged into
the cab, calling, ‘Cambridge!’
“He would have taken me straight to the police-station, had I not
said, ‘Harvard College. Professor Agassiz’s house! I’ve got eggs for
Agassiz,’ pushing another dollar up at him through the hole.
“It was nearly half past six.
“‘Let him go!’ I ordered. ‘Here’s another dollar if you make Agassiz’s
house in twenty minutes. Let him out; never mind the police!’
“He evidently knew the police, or there were none around at that time
on a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone
down the wood-roads from the pond two hours before, but with the
rattle and crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into
Cambridge Street, we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting
out something in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and
brass buttons.
“Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in
jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones, we went. Half standing, to
lessen the jar, I held the pail in one hand and held myself in the
other, not daring to let go even to look at my watch.
“But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near
to seven o’clock it might be. The sweat was dropping down my nose, so
close was I running to the limit of my time.
“Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dived forward, ramming my head into
the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me across
the small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs
helter-skelter over the floor.
“We had stopped. Here was Agassiz’s house; and without taking time to
pick up the eggs that were scattered, I jumped out with my pail and
pounded at the door.
“No one was astir in the house. But I would stir some one. And I did.
Right in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.
“‘Agassiz,’ I gasped, ‘I want Professor Agassiz, quick!’ And I pushed
by her into the hall.
“‘Go ’way, sir. I’ll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go
’way, sir!’
“‘Call him--Agassiz--instantly, or I’ll call him myself.’
“But I didn’t; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a great
white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick loud
voice called excitedly,--
“‘Let him in! Let him in. I know him. He has my turtle eggs!’
“And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic
gown, came sailing down the stairs.
“The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with
both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with
a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my
trembling hands ticked its way to seven--as if nothing unusual were
happening to the history of the world.”
CHAPTER XII
AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE
There were chipmunks everywhere. The stone walls squeaked with them.
At every turn, from early spring to early autumn, a chipmunk was
scurrying away from me. Chipmunks were common. They did no particular
harm, no particular good; they did nothing in particular, being only
chipmunks and common, or so I thought, until one morning (it was
June-bug time) when I stopped and watched a chipmunk that sat atop the
stone wall down in the orchard. He was eating, and the shells of his
meal lay in a little pile upon the big flat stone which served as his
table.
They were acorn-shells, I thought; yet June seemed rather late in the
season for acorns, and, looking closer, I discovered that the pile was
entirely composed of June-bug shells--wings and hollow bodies of the
pestiferous beetles!
Well, well! I had never seen this before, never even heard of it.
Chipmunk, a _useful_ member of society! actually eating bugs in this
bug-ridden world of mine! This was interesting and important. Why, I
had really never known Chipmunk, after all!
So I hadn’t. He had always been too common. Flying squirrels were
more worth while, because there were none on the farm. Now, however, I
determined to cultivate the acquaintance of Chipmunk, for there might
be other discoveries awaiting me. And there were.
A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and my garden-patch. It
was on my way to the garden that I most often stopped to watch this
chipmunk, or rather the pair of them, in the orchard wall. June
advanced, the beetles disappeared, and the two chipmunks in the wall
were now seven, the young ones almost as large as their parents, and
both young and old on the best of terms with me.
For the first time in four years there were prospects of good
strawberries. Most of my small patch was given over to a new variety,
one that I had originated; and I was waiting with an eagerness which
was almost anxiety for the earliest berries.
I had put a little stick beside each of the three big berries that
were reddening first (though I could have walked from the house
blindfolded and picked them). I might have had the biggest of the
three on June 7th, but for the sake of the flavor I thought it best to
wait another day. On the 8th I went down to get it. The big berry was
gone, and so was one of the others, while only half of the third was
left on the vine!
Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of despair--and wrath,
too. Had a toad showed himself at that moment, he might have fared
badly, for more than likely, I thought, it was he who had stolen my
berries. On the garden wall sat a friendly chipmunk eying me
sympathetically.
[Illustration: CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS]
A few days later several fine berries were ripe, and I was again on my
way to the garden when I passed the chipmunks in the orchard. A
shining red spot among the vine-covered stones of their wall brought
me to a stop. For an instant I thought that it was my rose-breasted
grosbeak, and that I was about to get a clew to its nest. Then up to
the slab where he ate the June-bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the
rose-red spot on the breast of the supposed grosbeak dissolved into a
big scarlet-red strawberry. And by its long wedge shape I knew it was
one of my new variety.
I hurried across to the patch and found every berry gone, while a line
of bloody fragments led me back to the orchard wall, where a
half-dozen fresh calyx crowns completed my second discovery.
No, it did not complete it. It took a little watching to find out that
the whole family--all seven!--were after those berries. They were
picking them half ripe, even, and actually storing them away, canning
them, down in the cavernous depths of the stone-pile!
Alarmed? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste for strawberries is
innate, original; you can’t be human without it. But joy in chipmunks
is a cultivated liking. What chance in such a circumstance has the
nature-lover with the human man? What shadow of doubt as to his choice
between the chipmunks and the strawberries?
I had no gun and no time to go over to my neighbor’s to borrow his. So
I stationed myself near by with a fistful of stones, and waited for
the thieves to show themselves. I came so near to hitting one of them
with a stone that the sweat started all over me. After that there was
no danger. I had lost my nerve. The little scamps knew that war had
been declared, and they hid and dodged and sighted me so far off that
even with a gun I should have been all summer killing the seven of
them.
Meantime, a good rain and the warm June days were turning the berries
red by the quart. They had more than caught up to the chipmunks. I
dropped my stones and picked. The chipmunks picked, too; so did the
toads and the robins. Everybody picked. It was free for all. We picked
them and ate them, jammed them, and canned them. I almost carried some
over to my neighbor, but took peas instead.
The strawberry season closed on the Fourth of July; and our taste was
not dimmed, nor our natural love for strawberries abated; but all four
of the small boys had hives from over-indulgence, so bountifully did
Nature provide, so many did the seven chipmunks leave us!
Peace between me and the chipmunks had been signed before the
strawberry season closed, and the pact still holds. Other things have
occurred since to threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a
recent number of an out-of-door magazine, of wide circulation. Herein
the chipmunk family was most roundly rated, in fact condemned to
annihilation because of its wicked taste for birds’ eggs and for the
young birds. Numerous photographs accompanied the article, showing the
red squirrel with eggs in his mouth, but no such proof (even the red
squirrel photographs, I strongly believe, were done from a _stuffed_
squirrel) of Chipmunk’s guilt, though he was counted equally bad and,
doubtless, will suffer with Chickaree at the hands of those who have
taken the article seriously.
I believe that would be a great mistake. Indeed, I believe the article
a deliberate falsehood, concocted in order to sell the made-up
photographs. Chipmunk is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found
it out. But of course that does not mean that no one else has found it
out. It does mean, however, that if Chipmunk robs at all he does it so
seldom as to call for no alarm or retribution.
There is scarcely a day in the nesting-season when I fail to see half
a dozen chipmunks about the walls, yet I have never noticed one even
suspiciously near a bird’s nest. In an apple tree, scarcely six jumps
from the home of the family in the orchard wall, a brood of tree
swallows came to wing this spring; while robins, chippies, and
red-eyed vireos--not to mention a cowbird, which I wish they had
devoured--have also hatched and flown away from nests that these
squirrels might easily have rifled.
It is not often that one comes upon even the red squirrel in the very
act of robbing a nest. But the black snake, the glittering fiend! and
the dear house cats! If I run across a dozen black snakes in the early
summer, it is safe to say that six of them are discovered to me by the
cries of the birds that they are robbing. So is it with the cats. No
creature larger than a June-bug, however, is often distressed by a
chipmunk. In a recent letter to me Mr. Burroughs says:--
“No, I never knew the chipmunk to suck or destroy eggs of any kind,
and I have never heard of any well-authenticated instance of his doing
so. The red squirrel is the sinner in this respect, and probably the
gray squirrel also.”
It will be difficult to find a true bill against him. Were the
evidence all in, I believe that instead of a culprit we should find
Chipmunk a useful citizen. Does not that pile of June-bug bodies on
the flat stone leave me still in debt to him? He may err occasionally,
and may, on occasion, make a nuisance of himself--but so do my four
small boys, bless them! And, well,--who doesn’t? When a family of
chipmunks, which you have fed all summer on the veranda, take up their
winter quarters inside the closed cabin, and chew up your quilts,
hammocks, table-cloths, and whatever else there is of chewable
properties, then they are anathema.
The havoc certain chipmunks in the mountains once made among our
possessions was dreadful. But instead of exterminating them root and
branch, a big box was prepared the next summer and lined with tin, in
which the linen was successfully wintered.
But how real was the loss, after all? Here was a rough log cabin on
the side of Thorn Mountain. What sort of table-cloth ought to be found
in such a cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed by
chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to the woods in summer?
The chipmunks are well worth a table-cloth now and then--well worth,
besides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they can steal
from my small patch.
Only it isn’t stealing. Since I ceased throwing stones and began to
watch the chipmunks carefully, I do not find that their manner is in
the least the manner of thieves. They do not act as if they were
taking what they have no right to. For who has told Chipmunk to earn
his oats in the sweat of his brow? No one. Instead, he seems to
understand that he is one of the innumerable factors ordained to make
me sweat--a good and wholesome experience for me so long as I get the
necessary oats.
And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though I don’t like to
guess at the quantity of oats they have carried off--anywhere, I
should say, from a peck to a bushel, which they have stored as they
tried to store the berries, somewhere in the big recesses of the stone
wall.
All this, however, is beside the point. It isn’t a case of oats and
berries against June-bugs. You don’t haggle with Nature after that
fashion. The farm is not a market-place where you get exactly what you
pay for. You must spend on the farm all you have of time and strength
and brains; but you must not expect in return merely your money’s
worth. Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farming is like
virtue,--its own reward. It pays the man who loves it, no matter how
short the crop of oats and corn.
So it is with Chipmunk. Perhaps his books don’t balance--a few
June-bugs short on the credit side. What then? It isn’t mere bugs and
berries, as I have just suggested, but stone-piles. What is the
difference in value to me between a stone-pile with a chipmunk in it
and one without. Just the difference, relatively speaking, between the
house with my four boys in it, and the house without.
Chipmunk, with his sleek, round form, his rich color and his stripes,
is the daintiest, most beautiful of all our squirrels. He is one of
the friendliest of my tenants, too, friendlier even than the
friendliest of my birds--Chickadee. The two are very much alike in
spirit; but however tame and confiding Chickadee may become, he is
still a bird and belongs to a different and, despite his wings, lower
order of beings. Chickadee is often curious about me; he can be coaxed
to eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than curious; he is interested;
and it is not crumbs that he wants, but friendship. He can be coaxed
to eat from my lips, sleep in my pocket, and even come to be stroked.
I have sometimes seen Chickadee in winter when he seemed to come to me
out of very need for living companionship. But in the flood-tide of
summer life Chipmunk will watch me from his stone-pile and tag me
along with every show of friendship.
The family in the orchard wall have grown very familiar. They flatter
me. One or another of them, sitting upon the high flat slab, sees me
coming. He sits on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful; and if
I take a single step aside toward him, he flips, and all there is left
of him is a little angry squeak from the depths of the stones. If,
however, I pass properly along, do not stop or make any sudden motion,
he sees me past, then usually follows me, especially if I get well off
and pause.
During a shower one day I halted under a large hickory just beyond his
den. He came running after me, so interested that he forgot to look to
his footing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his nose hard
against a stone--so hard that he sat up immediately and vigorously
rubbed it. Another time he followed me across to the garden and on
until he came to the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. Here he
climbed a post and continued after me by way of the middle strand of
the wire, wriggling, twisting, even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts
to maintain his balance. He got midway between the posts, when the
sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a splash into a shallow
pool below. No, he did not drown, but his curiosity did get a ducking.
Did the family in the orchard wall stay together as a family for the
first summer? I should like to know. As late as August they all seemed
to be in the wall; for in August I cut my oats, and during this
harvest we all worked together.
I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow, cocking them to cure
for hay. It was necessary to let them “make” for six or seven days,
and all this time the chipmunks raced back and forth between the cocks
and the stone wall. They might have hidden their gleanings in a dozen
crannies nearer at hand; but evidently they had a particular
storehouse, near the home nest, where the family could get at their
provisions in bad weather without coming forth.
Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest, I should have found a
tunnel leading into the ground for a few feet and opening into a
chamber filled with a bulky grass nest--a bed capable of holding half
a dozen chipmunks--and, adjoining this, by a short passageway, the
storehouse of the oats.
How many trips they made between this crib and the oat-patch, how
many kernels they carried in their pouches at a trip, and how big a
pile they had when all the grains were in,--these are more of the
things I should like to know.
When the first frosts come, the family--if they are still a
family--seek the nest in the ground beneath the stone wall. But they
do not go to sleep immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet
been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air and, of course, plenty
of food--acorns, chestnuts, hickory-nuts, and oats. They doze quietly
for a time and then they eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls into
some side passage prepared beforehand to receive the débris.
But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth
overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off
the supply of fresh air; and one day, though not sound sleepers, the
family cuddle down and forget to wake entirely until the frost has
begun to creep back toward the surface, and in through the softened
soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring.
CHAPTER XIII
WOODS MEDICINE
The real watcher in the woods usually goes off by himself. He hates to
have anybody along; for Anybody wants to be moving all the time, and
Anybody wants to be talking all the time, and Anybody wants to be
finding a circus, or a zoo, or a natural history museum in the middle
of the woods, else Anybody wishes he had stayed at home or gone to the
ball-game.
Now I always say to Mr. Anybody when he asks me to take him into the
woods, “Yes, come along, if you can stand stock-still for an hour,
without budging; if you can keep stock-still for an hour, without
talking; if you can get as excited watching two tumble-bugs trying to
roll their ball up hill, as you do watching nine baseball men trying
to bat their ball about a field.”
The doctor pulled a small blankbook out of his vest pocket, scribbled
something in Latin and Chinese (at least it looked like Chinese), and
then at the bottom wrote in English, “Take one teaspoonful every
hour”; and, tearing off the leaf, handed it to the patient. It was a
prescription for some sort of medicine.
Now I am going to give you a prescription,--for some woods
medicine,--a magic dose that will cure you of blindness and deafness
and clumsy-footedness, that will cause you to see things and hear
things and think things in the woods that you have never thought or
heard or seen in the woods before. Here is the prescription:--
WOOD CHUCK, M. D.,
MULLEIN HILL.
Office Hours: 5.30 A.M. until Breakfast.
Rx: No moving for one hour.... No talking for one hour.... No
dreaming or thumb-twiddling the while....
_Sig_: The dose to be taken from the top of a stump with a bit
of sassafras bark or a nip of Indian turnip every time you go
into the woods.
WOOD CHUCK.
I know that this compound will cure if you begin taking it early
enough--along, I should say, from the Fifth to the Eighth Grades. It
is a very difficult dose to take at any age, but it is almost
impossible for grown-ups to swallow it; for they have so many things
to do, or think they have, that they can’t sit still a whole hour
anywhere--a terrible waste of time! And then they have been talking
for so many years that to stop for a whole hour might--kill them, who
knows! And they have been working nervously with their hands so long
that their thumbs will twiddle, and to sleep they will go the minute
they sit down, in spite of themselves. It is no use to give this
medicine to grown-ups. They are what Dr. Wood Chuck calls
“chronics”--hopeless hurriers who will never sit down upon a stump,
who, when the Golden Chariot comes for them, will stand up and drive
all the way to heaven.
However, I am not giving this medicine to grown-ups, but to you. Of
course you will make a bad face over it, too; for, young or old, it is
hard to sit still and even harder to keep still--I mean not to talk. I
have closely watched four small boys these several years now, and I
never knew one of them to sit still for a whole hour _at home_--not
once in his whole life! And as for his tongue! he might tuck that into
his cheek, hold it down between his teeth, crowd it back behind his
fist--no matter. The tongue is an unruly member. But let these four
boys get into the woods, and every small pale-face of them turns
Indian instinctively, tip-toeing up and down the ridges with lips as
close-sealed as if some finger of the forest were laid upon them. So
it must be with you when you enter the fields and woods.
The wood-born people are all light-footed and cautious in their
stirring. Only the box turtles scuff carelessly along; and that is
because they can shut themselves up--head, paws, tail--inside their
lidded shells, and defy their enemies.
The skunk, however, is sometimes careless in his going; for he knows
that he will neither be crowded nor jostled along the street, so he
naturally behaves as if all the woods were his. Yet, how often do you
come upon a skunk? Seldom--because, he is quite as unwilling to meet
you as you are to meet him; but as one of your little feet makes as
much noise in the leaves as all four of his, he hears you coming and
turns quietly down some alley or in at some burrow and allows you to
pass on.
Louder than your step in the woods is the sound of your voice. Perhaps
there is no other noise so far-reaching, so alarming, so silencing in
the woods as the human voice. When your tongue begins, all the other
tongues cease. Songs stop as by the snap of a violin string;
chatterings cease; whisperings end--mute are the woods and empty as a
tomb, except the wind be moving aloft in the trees.
Three things all the animals can do supremely well: they can hear
well; they can see motion well; they can wait well.
If you would know how well an animal can wait, scare Dr. Wood Chuck
into his office, then sit down outside and wait for him to come out.
It would be a rare and interesting thing for you to do. No one has
ever done it yet, I believe! Establish a world’s record for keeping
still! But you should scare him in at the beginning of your summer
vacation so as to be sure you have all the waiting-time the state
allows: for you may have to leave the hole in September and go back to
school.
When the doctor wrote the prescription for this medicine, “No moving
for an hour,” he was giving you a very small, a homeopathic dose of
patience, as you can see; for _an hour_ at a time, every wood-watcher
knows, will often be only a waste of time, unless followed
immediately by another hour of the same.
On the road to the village one day, I passed a fox-hunter sitting atop
an old stump. It was about seven o’clock in the morning.
“Hello, Will!” I called, “been out all night?”
“No, got here ’bout an hour ago,” he replied.
I drove on and, returning near noon, found Will still atop the stump.
“Had a shot yet?” I called.
“No, the dogs brought him down ’tother side the brook, and carried him
over to the Shanty field.”
About four o’clock that afternoon I was hurrying down to the station,
and there was Will atop that same stump.
“Got him yet?” I called.
“No, dogs are fetching him over the Quarries now”--and I was out of
hearing.
It was growing dark when I returned; but there was Will Hall atop the
stump. I drew up in the road.
“Grown fast to that stump, Will?” I called. “Want me to try to pull
you off?”
“No, not yet,” he replied, jacking himself painfully to his feet.
“Chillin’ up some, ain’t it?” he added shaking himself. “Might’s well
go home, I guess”--when from the direction of Young’s Meadows came the
eager voice of his dogs; and, waving me on, he got quickly back atop
the stump, his gun ready across his knees.
I was nearly home when, through the muffle of the darkening woods, I
heard the quick _bang! bang!_ of Will’s gun.
Yes, he got him, a fine red fox. And speaking to me about it one day,
he said,--
“There’s a lot more to sittin’ still than most folks thinks. The
trouble is, most folks in the woods can’t stand the monopoly of it.”
Will’s English needs touching up in spots; but he can show the
professors a great many things about the ways of the woods.
And now what does the doctor mean by “No dreaming or thumb-twiddling”
in the woods? Just this: that not only must you be silent and
motionless for hours at a time, but you must also be alert--watchful,
keen, ready to take a hint, to question, guess, and interpret. The
fields and woods are not full of life, but full only of the sounds,
shadows, and signs of life.
You are atop of your stump, when over the ridge you hear a slow, quiet
rustle in the dead leaves--a skunk; then a slow, _loud_ rustle--a
turtle; then a _quick_, loud--_one-two-three_--rustle--a chewink; then
a tiny, rapid rustle--a mouse; then a long, rasping rustle--a snake;
then a measured, galloping rustle--a squirrel; then a light-heavy,
hop-thump rustle--a rabbit; then--and not once have you seen the
rustlers in the leaves beyond the ridge; and not once have you stirred
from your stump.
Perhaps this understanding of the leaf-sounds might be called
“interpretation”; but before you can interpret them, you must hear
them; and no dozing, dreaming, fuddling sitter upon a stump has ears
to hear.
As you sit there, you notice a blue jay perched silent and unafraid
directly over you--not an ordinary, common way for a blue jay to act.
“Why?” you ask. Why, a nest, of course, somewhere near! Or, suddenly
round and round the trunk of a large oak tree whirls a hummingbird.
“Queer,” you say. Then up she goes--and throwing your eye ahead of her
through the tree-tops you chance to intercept her bee-line flight--a
hint! She is probably gathering lichens for a nest which she is
building somewhere near, in the direction of her flight. A whirl! a
flash!--as quick as light! You have a wonderful story!
Now do not get the impression that all one needs to do in order to
become acquainted with the life of the woods is to sit on a
stump a long time, say nothing, and listen hard. All that is
necessary--rather, the ability to do it is necessary; but in the woods
or out it is also necessary to exercise common sense. Guess, for
instance, when guessing is all that you can do. You will learn more,
however, and learn it faster, generally, by following it up, than by
sitting on a stump and guessing about it.
At twilight, in the late spring and early summer, we frequently hear
a gentle, tremulous call from the woods or from below in the orchard.
“What is it?” I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times had
guessed that it might be the hen partridge clucking to her brood; or
else I had replied that it made me think of the mate-call of a coon,
or that I half inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks, or
that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, I didn’t know the
peculiar call, and year after year I kept guessing at it.
We were seated one evening on the porch listening to the
whip-poor-wills, when some one said, “There’s your woodchuck
singing again.” Sure enough, there sounded the tremulous
woodchuck-partridge-owl-coon cry. I slipped down through the birches
determined at last to know that cry and stop guessing about it, if I
had to follow it all night.
The moon was high and full, the footing almost noiseless, and
everything so quiet that I quickly located the clucking sounds as
coming from the orchard. I came out of the birches into the wood-road,
and was crossing the open field to the orchard, when something dropped
with a swish and a vicious clacking close upon my head. I jumped from
under my hat, almost,--and saw the screech owl swoop softly up into
the nearest apple tree. Instantly she turned toward me and uttered the
gentle purring cluck that I had been guessing at so hard for at least
three years. And even while I looked at her, I saw in the tree
beyond, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, two round bunches,--young
owls evidently,--which were the explanation of the calls. These two,
and another young one, were found in the orchard the following day.
I rejoined the guessers on the porch and gave them the satisfying
fact, but only after two or three years of guessing about it. I had
laughed once at some of my friends over on the other road who had
bolted their front door and had gone out of the door at the side of
the house for precisely twenty-one years because the key in the
front-door lock wouldn’t work. They were intending to have it fixed,
but the children being little kept them busy; then the children grew
up, and of course kept them busier; got married at last and left
home--all but one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to fix
that front door. One day this unmarried daughter, in a fit of
impatience, got at that door herself, and found that the key had been
inserted just twenty-one years before--_upside down_!
There I had sat on the porch--on a stump, let us say, and guessed
about it. Truly, my key to this mystery had been left long in the
lock, upside down, while I had been going in and out by the side door.
No, you must _go_ into the fields and woods, go deep and far and
frequently, with eyes and ears and all your souls alert!
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER I
TO THE TEACHER
Put the question to your scholars individually: Who is _your_
messenger of spring? Make the reading of this book not an end in
itself, but only a means toward getting the pupils out of doors.
Never let the reading stop with the end of the chapter, any more
than you would let your garden stop with the buying of the
seeds. And how eager and restless a healthy child is for the
fields and woods with the coming of spring! Do not let your
opportunity slip. Go with them after reading this chapter
(re-reading if you can the first chapter in “The Fall of the
Year”) out to some meadow stream where they can see the fallen
stalks and brown matted growths of the autumn through which the
new spring shoots are pushing, green with vigor and promise. The
seal of winter has been broken; the pledge of autumn has been
kept; the life of a new summer has started up from the grave of
the summer past. Here by the stream under your feet is the whole
cycle of the seasons--the dead stalks, the empty seed-vessels,
the starting life.
Let the children watch for the returning birds and report to
you; have them bring in the opening flowers, giving them credit
(on the blackboard) for each _new_ flower found; go with them
(so that they will not _bring_ the eggs to you) to see the new
nests discovered, teaching them by every possible means the
folly and cruelty of robbing birds’ nests, of taking life;
while at the same time you show them the beauty of life, its
sacredness, and manifold interests.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1
Have you ever _seen_ a “spring peeper” peeping? You will hear,
these spring nights, many distinct notes in the marshes, and
when you have seen all of the lowly musicians you will be a
fairly accomplished naturalist. Let the discovery of “Who’s Who
among the Frogs” this spring be one of your first outdoor
studies. The picture shows you Pickering’s hyla, blowing his
bagpipe. _Arbutus_: trailing arbutus (_Epigæa repens_),
sometimes called ground-laurel, and mayflower, fishflower (in
New Jersey).
_hepatica_: liver-leaf (_Hepatica triloba_).
_Spice-bush_: wild allspice, fever-bush, Benjamin-bush
(_Benzoin æstivale_).
_Wood-pussy_: the skunk, who comes out of his winter den very
early in spring, and whose scent is one of the characteristic
odors of a New England spring.
PAGE 2
_All white and still_: The whole poem will be found on the last
page of “Winter,” the second book in this series.
_trillium_: the wake-robin. Read Mr. Burroughs’s book
“Wake-Robin,”--the first of his outdoor books.
PAGE 4
_phœbe_: See the chapter called “The Palace in the Pig-Pen.”
_bloodroot_: _Sanguinaria canadensis_. See the picture on this
page. So named because of the red-orange juice in the
root-stalks, used by the Indians as a stain.
_marsh-marigolds_: The more common but _incorrect_ name is
“cowslip.” The marsh-marigold is _Caltha palustris_ and belongs
with the buttercup and wind-flower to the Crowfoot Family. The
cowslip, a species of primrose, is a European plant and belongs
to the Primrose Family.
PAGE 5
_woolly-bear_: caterpillar of the isabella tiger moth, the
common caterpillar, brown in the middle with black ends, whose
hairs look as if they had been clipped, so even are they.
_mourning-cloak_: See picture, page 77 of “Winter,” the second
book of this series. The antiopa butterfly.
_juncos_: the common slate-colored “snowbirds.”
_witch-hazel_: See picture, page 28 of “The Fall of the Year”;
read description of it on pages 31-33 of the same volume.
_bluets_: or “innocence” (_Houstonia cœrulea_).
PAGE 6
_the Delaware_: the Delaware River, up which they come in order
to lay their eggs. As they come up they are caught in nets and
their eggs or “roe” salted and made into caviar.
_Cohansey Creek_: a small river in New Jersey.
_Lupton’s Meadows_: local name of meadows along Cohansey Creek.
CHAPTER II
TO THE TEACHER
Read Kipling’s story in “The Second Jungle Book” called “The
Spring Running.” Both Jungle Books ought to be in your school
library. Spring is felt on the ocean as well as over the land;
life is all of one piece; the thrill we feel at the touch of
spring is felt after his manner and degree by bird and beast and
by the fish of the sea. Go back to the last paragraph of chapter
I for the _thought_. Here I have expanded that thought of the
tides of life rising. See the picture of the herring on their
deep sea run on page 345 of the author’s “Wild Life Near Home.”
Let the chapter suggest to the pupils the mysterious powers of
the minds of the lower animals.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 7
_Mowgli_: Do you know Mowgli of “The Jungle Book”?
_Chaucer_: the “Father of English Poetry.” This is one of the
opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
PAGE 8
_migrating birds_: See “The Great Tidal Waves of Bird Life” by
D. Lange, in the “Atlantic Monthly” for August, 1909.
PAGE 9
_The cold-blooded_: said of those animals lower than the mammals
and birds, that have not four-chambered hearts and the complete
double blood-circulation.
_Weymouth Back River_: of Weymouth, Massachusetts.
PAGE 10
_catfish_: or horn-pout or bull-pout, see picture, page 12.
PAGE 11
_stickleback_: The little male stickleback builds a nest, drives
the female into it to lay her eggs, then takes charge of the
eggs until the fry hatch out and go off for themselves.
CHAPTER III
TO THE TEACHER
You will try to get three suggestions out of this chapter for
your pupils: First, that an old tree with holes may prove to be
the most _fruitful_ and interesting tree in the neighborhood,
that is to say, nothing out of doors is so far fallen to pieces,
dead, and worthless as to be passed by in our nature study.
(Read to them “Second Crops” in the author’s “A Watcher in the
Woods.”) Secondly: the humble tree-toad is well worth the most
careful watching, for no one yet has told us all of his
life-story. Thirdly: one of the benefits of this simple, sincere
love of the out-of-doors will come to us as rest, both in mind
and body, as contentment, too, and clearer understanding of what
things are worth while.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 14
_burlap petticoat_: a strip of burlap about six inches wide tied
with a string and folded over about the trunks of the trees
under which the night-feeding gypsy moth caterpillars hide by
day. The burlaps are lifted and the worms killed.
_a peddler’s stall_: In the days of the author’s boyhood
peddlers sold almost everything that the country people could
want.
PAGE 16
_grim-beaked baron_: the little owl of the tree.
_keep_: an older name for castle; sometimes for the dungeon.
PAGE 20
_for him to call the summer rain_: alluding to his evening and
his cloudy-day call as a sign of coming rain.
PAGE 22
_castings_: the disgorged lumps of hair and bones of the small
animals eaten by the owls.
PAGE 24
_Altair and Arcturus_: prominent stars in the northern
hemisphere.
CHAPTER IV
TO THE TEACHER
See the suggestions for the corresponding chapter in “The Fall
of the Year,” the first volume in this series. Lest you may not
have that book at hand, let me repeat here the gist of what I
said there: that you make this chapter the purpose of one or
more field excursions with the class--in order to see with your
own eyes the characteristic sights of spring as recorded here;
secondly, that you use this, and chapters VI and X, as school
tests of the pupil’s knowledge and observation of his own fields
and woods; and thirdly, let the items mentioned here be used as
possible subjects for the pupil’s further study as themes for
compositions, or independent investigations out of school hours.
The finest fruit the teacher can show is a school full of
children personally interested in things. And what better things
than live things out of doors?
CHAPTER V
TO THE TEACHER
I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the
lesson involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken
feathers. But these three feathers will do for your pupils as
the falling apple did for Sir Isaac Newton. The point of the
chapter is: that the feathers like the stars must round out
their courses; that this universe is a universe of law, of
order, and of reason, even to the wing feathers of a crow. Try
to show your pupils the beauty and wonder of order and law (not
easy to do) as well as the beauty and wonder of shapes and
colors and sounds, etc.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 34
_primaries, secondaries, tertials_: Turn to your dictionary
under “Bird” (or at the front of some good bird book) and study
out just which feathers of the wing these named here are.
PAGE 35
_half-moulted hen_: Pick her up and notice the regular and
systematic arrangement of the young feathers. Or take a plucked
hen and draw roughly the pin-feather scheme as you find it on
her body.
PAGE 37
_reed-birds_: The bobolink is also called “rice-bird” from its
habit of feeding in the rice-fields of the South on its fall
migration.
CHAPTER VI
FOR THE PUPIL
Do not stop doing or seeing or hearing when you have done, seen,
and heard the few things suggested in this chapter and in
chapters IV and X; for these are only suggestions, and merely
intended to give you a start, as if your friend had said to you
upon your visiting a new city, “Now, don’t fail to see the
Common and the old State House, etc.; and don’t fail to go down
to T Wharf, etc.,”--knowing that all the time you would be doing
and seeing and hearing a thousand interesting things.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
I called this chapter when I first wrote it “The Friendship of
Nature”--a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the
thought and the lesson in the story here. This was first written
about six years ago, and to-day, May 12, 1912, that pair of
phœbes, or another pair, have their nest out under the
pig-pen roof as they have had every year since I have known the
pen. Repeat and expand the thought as I have put it into the
mouth of Nature in the first paragraph--“We will share them [the
acres] together.” Instill into your pupils’ minds the large
meaning of obedience to Nature’s laws and love for her and all
her own. Show them also how ready Nature is (and all the birds
and animals and flowers) to be friendly; and how even a city
dooryard may hold enough live _wild_ things for a small zoo.
This chapter might well be made use of by the city teacher to
stir her pupils to see what interesting live things their city
or neighborhood has, although the woods and open fields are
miles away.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 48
_a hornet’s nest_: the white-faced hornet, that builds the great
cone-shaped paper nests.
_swifts thunder in the chimney_: See chapter VII (and notes) in
“Winter.” For the “thunder” see section IX in chapter X of this
book.
PAGE 49
_cabbage butterfly_: a pest; a small whitish butterfly with a
few small black spots. Its grubs eat cabbage.
PAGE 54
_the crested flycatcher_: is the largest of the family; builds
in holes; distinguished by its use of cast-off snake-skins in
its nests.
_kingbird_: Everybody knows him, for it is usually he who
chases the marauding crows; he builds, out in the apple tree if
he can, a big, bulky nest with strings a-flying from it: also
called “bee-martin,” a most useful bird.
_wood pewee_: builds on the limbs of forest trees a most
beautiful nest, much like a hummingbird’s, only larger. Pewee’s
soft, pensive call of “pe-e-e-wee” in the deep, quiet,
dark-shrouded summer woods is one of the sweetest of bird
notes.
_chebec_: a little smaller than a sparrow; builds a beautiful
nest in orchard trees and says “chebec, chebec, chebec.”
PAGE 58
_One had died_: After phœbe brings off her first brood
sprinkle a little, tobacco-dust or lice-powder, such as you use
in the hen-yard, into the nest to kill the vermin. Otherwise the
second and third broods may be eaten alive by lice or mites.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE TEACHER
In “Winter” I put a chapter called “The Missing Tooth,” showing
the dark and bitter side of the life of the wild things; here I
have taken that thought as most people think of it (see
Burroughs’s essay, “A Life of Fear” in “Riverby”) and in the
light of typical examples tried to show that wild life is not
fear, but peace and joy. The kernel of the chapter is found in
the words: “The level of wild life, the soul of all nature, is a
great serenity.” Let the pupils watch and report instances of
fear (easy to see) and in the same animals instances of peace
and joy.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 60
_gray harrier_: so named because of his habit of flying low and
“harrying,” that is, hunting, catching small prey on or near the
ground. “Harry” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for army.
PAGE 61
“_He looketh as it were a grym leoun_”: from Chaucer’s
description of the Cock in the story of the Cock and the Fox.
PAGE 62
_terrible pike_: closely related to the pickerel.
_kingfisher_: builds in holes in sand-banks near water. Its
peculiar rattle sounds like the small boys’ “clapper.”
PAGE 63
“_The present only toucheth thee!_”: Burns’s poem “To a Mouse.”
PAGE 64
“_The fair music that all creatures made_”: from Milton’s poem
“To a Solemn Music,” “solemn” meaning “orchestral” music.
PAGE 65
_then doubling once more_: This is all figurative language. I am
thinking of myself as the fox. The dogs have run themselves to
death on my trail, and I am turning back, “doubling,” to have a
look at them and to rejoice over their defeat.
PAGE 71
_pine marten_: The marten is so rare in this neighborhood that I
am inclined to think the creature was the large weasel.
PAGE 73
_the heavy bar across their foreheads_: a very unusual way of
yoking oxen in the United States. The only team I ever saw here
so yoked.
PAGE 74
_San Francisco_: alluding to the earthquake and fire which
nearly wiped out the city in 1906.
CHAPTER IX
FOR THE PUPIL
The picture of the young buzzard is as true as a photograph; the
bumped-up drawing of the old bird looks precisely as she did
atop her dead tree, watching my approach. This vulture rarely
soars into New England skies; down South, especially along the
coast, the smaller black vulture (_Catharista urubu_) is found
very tame and in great abundance; while in the far Southwest
lives the great condor.
PAGE 80
_tulip poplar_: tulip-tree (_Liriodendron tulipifera_).
“_For it had bene an auncient tree_”: from Edmund Spenser’s
“Shepherd’s Calendar.”
PAGE 85
_a dozen kinds of cramps_: Perhaps you will say I didn’t find
much in finding the buzzard’s nest, and got mostly cramps! Yes,
but I also got the buzzard’s nest--a thing that I had wanted to
see for many years. It was worth seeing, however, for its own
sake. Even a buzzard is interesting. See the account of him in
“Wild Life Near Home,” the chapter called “A Buzzard’s Banquet.”
CHAPTER XI
TO THE TEACHER
The point of the story is the enthusiasm of the naturalists for
their work--work that to the uncaring and unknowing seemed not
even worth while. But all who do great things do them with all
their might. No one can stop to count the cost whose soul is
bent on great things.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 94
_Burlington_: in Vermont.
_Concord and Middleboro_: in Massachusetts.
_Zadoc Thompson_: a Vermont naturalist.
_D. Henry Thoreau_: better known as Henry D. Thoreau; author of
“Walden,” etc.
_J. W. P. Jenks_: for many years head of Pierce Academy,
Middleboro, and later Professor of Agricultural Zoölogy in
Brown University.
PAGE 96
_Contributions_: used in place of the whole name: Go yourself
into the public library and read this and look at the four large
volumes.
PAGE 101
_spatter-docks_: yellow pond-lily (_Nuphar advena_).
PAGE 102
_dinosaurian_: one of the fossil reptile monsters of the
Mesozoic, or “middle,” period of the earth’s history, before the
age of man.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE TEACHER
In this story I have tried to settle the difficult question of
debit and credit between me and the out-of-doors. Shall we
exterminate the red squirrels, the hawks, owls, etc., is a
question that is not so easily answered as one might think. The
fact is we do not want to exterminate _any_ of our native forms
of life--we need them all, and owe them more, each of them, for
the good they do us, than they owe us for the little harm they
may do us. Read this over with the children with its moral and
economic lesson in view. Send to the National Association of
Audubon Societies, New York City, for their free leaflets upon
this matter. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture,
Harrisburg, Pa., has a bulletin upon this same subject which
will be sent free upon application.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 115
_June-bug_: the very common brown beetle whose big white grubs
you dig up under the sod and in composts.
PAGE 118
_rose-breasted grosbeak_: one of the most beautiful of our
birds, and a lovely singer.
PAGE 120
_Chickaree_: the common name of the red squirrel. The red
squirrel does not need to be destroyed.
_tree swallows_: They build in holes in orchard trees, etc.; to
be distinguished on the wing from the barn swallows by their
white bellies and plain, only slightly forked tails.
_chippies_: the little chipping sparrow, or hair-bird.
_red-eyed vireos_: the most common of the vireos; see picture
of its nest on page 40 of “Winter.”
PAGE 121
_cowbird_: the miserable brown-headed blackbird that lays its
egg or eggs in smaller birds’ nests and leaves its young to be
fed by the unsuspecting foster-mother. As the young cowbird is
larger than the rightful young, it gets all the food and causes
them to starve.
PAGE 122
_Thorn Mountain_: one of the smaller of the White Mountains; it
overlooks the village of Jackson, N. H.
CHAPTER XIII
TO THE TEACHER
If you have read through “The Fall of the Year” and “Winter” and
to this chapter in “The Spring of the Year,” you will know that
the upshot of these thrice thirteen readings has been to take
you and your children into the woods; you will know that the
last paragraph of this last chapter is the aim and purpose and
key of all three books. You must _go_ into the woods, you must
lead your children to go, deep and far and frequently. The Three
R’s first--but after them, before dancing, or cooking, or
sewing, or manual training, or anything, send your children out
into the open, where they belong. The school can give them
nothing better than the Three R’s, and can only fail in trying
to give them more, except it give them the freedom of the
fields. Help Nature, the old nurse, to take your children on her
knee.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 128
_Here is the prescription_: Think you can swallow it? Go out and
try.
PAGE 129
_Golden Chariot_: In what Bible story does the Golden Chariot
descend? and whom does it carry away?
_pale-face_: an Indian name for the white man.
PAGE 130
_box turtles_: They are sometimes found as far north as the
woods of Cape Cod, Massachusetts; but are very abundant farther
south.
PAGE 133
_Chewink_: towhee, or ground-robin; to be distinguished by his
loud call of “chewink” and his vigorous scratching among the
leaves.
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