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Title: The Fall of the Year
Author: Sharp, Dallas Lore, 1870-1929
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Fall of the Year" ***
[Illustration: “ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW ON
THE HEAD” _Chapter V_.]
The Dallas Lore Sharp Nature Series
THE FALL OF THE YEAR
BY
DALLAS LORE SHARP
AUTHOR OF “THE LAY OF THE LAND,” “THE FACE OF THE FIELDS,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1903, BY PERRY MASON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE GOLDEN RULE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
DOCTOR AND MRS. TRASK
OF THE
SOUTH JERSEY INSTITUTE
BEST OF TEACHERS, DEAREST OF FRIENDS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION xi
I. THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 1
II. ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 9
III. IN THE TOADFISH’S SHOE 21
IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL 29
V. WHIPPED BY EAGLES 36
VI. THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER’S FARM 46
VII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS FALL 52
VIII. THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING 61
IX. THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 67
X. AN OUTDOOR LESSON 76
XI. LEAFING 80
XII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 88
XIII. HONK, HONK, HONK! 96
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 105
ILLUSTRATIONS
“ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW
ON THE HEAD” _Frontispiece_
THE FALL OF THE YEAR 1
INITIAL, CHAPTER I 1
INITIAL, CHAPTER II 9
“OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DUST AND HOWLS” 18
INITIAL, CHAPTER III 21
“HERE I FOUND HIM KEEPING HOUSE” 24
INITIAL, CHAPTER IV 29
A SILKY SKEIN OF COBWEB 30
“A WILD CREATURE, THAT WON’T GET OUT OF YOUR WAY” 32
THE PYXIE 32
THE FIELD OF CORN IN THE SHOCK 33
THE WINGED, AND PLUMED, AND BALLOONED SEEDS 34, 35
INITIAL, CHAPTER V 36
INITIAL, CHAPTER VI 46
“THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES FLOW” 48
INITIAL, CHAPTER VII 52
A COON 54
QUAILS 55
SHAGBARKS 56
WILD SEA FOWL 57
BLACK HAWTHORN BERRIES 58
INITIAL, CHAPTER VIII 61
“TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE” 62
TAILPIECE 66
INITIAL, CHAPTER IX 67
A WHITEFOOT 68
A CHIPMUNK 70
A WOODCHUCK 72
FIVE DAYS OF LIFE AND PLENTY FOR THE BIRDS 74
INITIAL, CHAPTER X 76
INITIAL, CHAPTER XI 80
“BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!” 84
INITIAL, CHAPTER XII 88
A LOON 89
WHEN NIGHT COMES 90
A BLUE JAY 91
A RED SQUIRREL 92
A KINGLET 93
INITIAL, CHAPTER XIII 96
WILD GEESE 102
TAILPIECE 103
NOTE
It is interesting to observe that the subject of the initial for
chapter IV is witch-hazel; that for chapter VII, the cocoons of the
cecropia, the promethea, and the basket worm; and that for chapter
VIII, a sprig of alder, with the old fruit and a budded catkin. The
subjects of the other initials require no identification.
INTRODUCTION
There are three serious charges brought against nature books of the
present time, namely, that they are either so dull as to be
unreadable, or so fanciful as to be misleading, or so insincere as to
be positively harmful. There is a real bottom to each of these
charges.
Dull nature-writing is the circumstantial, the detailed, the
cataloguing, the semi-scientific sort, dried up like old Rameses and
cured for all time with the fine-ground spice of measurements, dates,
conditions--observations, so called. For literary purposes, one
observation of this kind is better than two. Rarely does the watcher
in the woods see anything so new that for itself it is worth
recording. It is not what one sees, so much as the manner of the
seeing, not the observation but its suggestions that count for
interest to the reader. Science wants the exact observation;
nature-writing wants the observation exact and the heart of the
observer along with it. We want plenty of facts in our nature books,
but they have all been set down in order before; what has not been set
down before are the author’s thoughts and emotions. These should be
new, personal, and are pretty sure therefore to be interesting.
More serious than dullness (and that is serious enough) is the charge
that nature books are untrustworthy, that they falsify the facts, and
give a wrong impression of nature. Some nature books do, as some
novels do with the facts of human life. A nature book all full of
extraordinary, better-class animals who do extraordinary stunts
because of their superior powers has little of real nature in it.
There are no such extraordinary animals, they do no such extraordinary
things. Nature is full of marvels--Niagara Falls, a flying swallow, a
star, a ragweed, a pebble; but nature is not full of dragons and
centaurs and foxes that reason like men and take their tea with lemon,
if you please.
I have never seen one of these extraordinary animals, never saw
anything extraordinary out of doors, because the ordinary is so
surprisingly marvelous. And I have lived in the woods practically all
of my life. And you will never see one of them--a very good argument
against anybody’s having seen them.
The world out of doors is not a circus of performing prodigies, nor
are nature-writers strange half-human creatures who know wood-magic,
who talk with trees, and call the birds and beasts about them as did
one of the saints of old. No, they are plain people, who have seen
nothing more wonderful in the woods than you have, if they would tell
the truth.
When I protested with a popular nature-writer some time ago at one of
his exciting but utterly impossible fox stories, he wrote back,--
“The publishers demanded that chapter to make the book sell.”
Now the publishers of this book make no such demands. Indeed they have
had an expert naturalist and woodsman hunting up and down every line
of this book for errors of fact, false suggestions, wrong sentiments,
and extraordinaries of every sort. If this book is not exciting it is
the publishers’ fault. It may not be exciting, but I believe, and
hope, that it is _true_ to all of my out of doors, and not untrue to
any of yours.
The charge of insincerity, the last in the list, concerns the author’s
style and sentiments. It does not belong in the same category with the
other two, for it really includes them. Insincerity is the mother of
all the literary sins. If the writer cannot be true to himself, he
cannot be true to anything. Children are the particular victims of the
evil. How often are children spoken to in baby-talk, gush, hollow
questions, and a condescension as irritating as coming teeth! They are
written to, also, in the same spirit.
The temptation to sentimentalize in writing of the “beauties of
nature” is very strong. Raptures run through nature books as regularly
as barbs the length of wire fences. The world according to such books
is like the Garden of Eden according to Ridinger, all peace, in spite
of the monstrous open-jawed alligator in the foreground of the
picture, who must be smiling, I take it, in an alligatorish way at a
fat swan near by.
Just as strong to the story-writer is the temptation to blacken the
shadows of the picture--to make all life a tragedy. Here on my table
lies a child’s nature-book every chapter of which ends in
death--nothing but struggle to escape for a brief time the bloody jaws
of the bigger beast--or of the superior beast, man.
Neither extreme is true of nature. Struggle and death go on, but,
except where man interferes, a very even balance is maintained, peace
prevails over fear, joy lasts longer than pain, and life continues to
multiply and replenish the earth. “The level of wild life,” to quote
my words from “The Face of the Fields,” “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.”
This is a divinely beautiful world, a marvelously interesting world,
the best conceivable sort of a world to live in, notwithstanding its
gypsy moths, tornadoes, and germs, its laws of gravity, and of cause
and effect; and my purpose in this series of nature books is to help
my readers to come by this belief. A clear understanding of the laws
of the Universe will be necessary for such a belief in the end, and
with the understanding a profound faith in their perfect working
together. But for the present, in these books of the Seasons, if I can
describe the out of doors, its living creatures and their doings, its
winds and skies with their suggestions--all of the out of doors, as it
surrounds and supports me here in my home on Mullein Hill, Hingham, so
that you can see how your out of doors surrounds and supports you,
with all its manifold life and beauty, then I have done enough. If
only I can accomplish a fraction of this I have done enough.
DALLAS LORE SHARP.
MULLEIN HILL, September, 1911.
THE FALL OF THE YEAR
CHAPTER I
THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE
“The clock strikes one,
And all is still around the house!
But in the gloom
A little mouse
Goes creepy-creep from room to room.”
The clock of the year strikes one!--not in the dark silent night of
winter, but in the hot light of midsummer.
It is a burning July day,--one o’clock in the afternoon of the
year,--and all is still around the fields and woods. All is still. All
is hushed. But yet, as I listen, I hear things in the dried grass, and
in the leaves overhead, going “creepy-creep,” as you have heard the
little mouse in the silent night.
I am lying on a bed of grass in the shade of a great oak tree, as the
clock of the year strikes one. I am all alone in the quiet of the hot,
hushed day. Alone? Are you alone in the big upstairs at midnight, when
you hear the little mouse going “creepy-creep” from room to room? No;
and I am not alone.
High overhead the clouds are drifting past; and between them, far
away, is the blue of the sky--and how blue, how cool, how far, far
away! But how near and warm seems the earth!
I lie outstretched upon it, feeling the burnt crisp grass beneath me,
a beetle creeping under my shoulder, the heat of a big stone against
my side. I throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot soil, and
try to take hold of the big earth as if I were a child clinging to my
mother.
And so I am. But I am not frightened, as I used to be, when the little
mouse went “creepy-creep,” and my real mother brought a candle to
scare the mouse away. It is because I am growing old? But I cannot
grow old to my mother. And the earth is my mother, my second mother.
The beetle moving under my shoulder is one of my brothers; the hot
stone by my side is another of my brothers; the big oak tree over me
is another of my brothers; and so are the clouds, the white clouds
drifting, drifting, drifting, so far away yonder, through the blue,
blue sky.
The clock of the year strikes one. The summer sun is overhead. The
flood-tide of summer life has come. It is the noon hour of the year.
The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field.
Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of
the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak
begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps
under the wide, white glare.
But already the noon is passing--to-day I see the signs of coming
autumn everywhere.
Of the four seasons of the year summer is the shortest, and the one we
are least acquainted with. Summer is hardly a pause between spring and
autumn, simply the hour of the year’s noon.
We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the
winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause and to be still
with the summer; to rest on our wings a little like the broad-winged
hawk yonder, far up in the wide sky.
But now the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to
lengthen. The hour is gone; and, wavering softly down the languid air,
falls a yellow leaf from a slender birch near by. I remember, too,
that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small flock of
robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were
gathering upon the telegraph wires. So quickly summer passes. It was
springtime but yesterday, it seems; to-day the autumn is here.
It is a July day. At dawn the birds were singing, fresh and
full-throated almost as in spring. Then the sun burned through the
mist, and the chorus ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewink and
the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tanager come
to me through the dry white heat of the noon, and the resonant song of
the indigo bunting--a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a “hot
and copper sky.”
There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs
or young in the bushes of the hillside; the scarlet tanager by some
accident has but lately finished his nest in the tall oaks. I looked
in upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But all of these
are late. Most of the year’s young are upon the wing.
A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening. I noticed the bees
upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; here and there is a stray
dandelion. But these are late. The season’s fruit has already set, is
already ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red
wood-lily is open. To-day is the noon of the year.
High noon! and the red wood-lily is aflame in the old fields, and in
the low tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that border the upland
woods.
The wood-lily is the flower of fire. How impossible it would be to
kindle a wood-lily on the cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted
only on this kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking
in the sun; the low mouldy moss that creeps over its thin breast
crackles and crumbles under my feet; the patches of sweet-fern that
blotch it here and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air
with their spicy breath; while the wood-lily opens wide and full,
lifting its spotted lips to the sun for his scorching kiss. See it
glow! Should the withered thicket burst suddenly into a blaze, it
would be no wonder, so hot and fiery seem the petals of this flower of
the sun.
How unlike the tender, delicate fragrant flowers of spring are these
strong flowers of the coming fall! They make a high bank along the
stream--milkweed, boneset, peppermint, turtle-head, joe-pye-weed,
jewel-weed, smartweed, and budding goldenrod! Life has grown lusty and
lazy and rank.
But life has to grow lusty and rank, for the winter is coming; and as
the woodchucks are eating and eating, enough to last them until spring
comes again, so the plants are storing fat in their tap-roots, and
ripening millions of seeds, to carry them safely through the long dead
months of winter.
The autumn is the great planting time out of doors. Every autumn wind
is a sower going forth to sow. And he must have seeds and to
spare--seeds for the waysides for the winter birds to eat, seeds for
the stony places where there is no depth of soil for them, seeds for
the ploughed fields where they are not allowed to grow, seeds for
every nook and corner, in order that somewhere each plant may find a
place to live, and so continue its kind from year to year.
Look at the seeds of the boneset, joe-pye-weed, milkweed, and
goldenrod! Seeds with wings and plumes and parachutes that go
floating and flying and ballooning.
“Over the fields where the daisies grow,
Over the flushing clover,
A host of the tiniest fairies go--
Dancing, balancing to and fro,
Rolling and tumbling over.
“Quivering, balancing, drifting by,
Floating in sun and shadow--
Maybe the souls of the flowers that die
Wander, like this, to the summer sky
Over a happy meadow.”
So they do. They wander away to the sky, but they come down again to
the meadow to make it happy next summer with new flowers; for these
are the seed-souls of thistles and daisies and fall dandelions seeking
new bodies for themselves in the warm soil of Mother Earth.
Mother Earth! How tender and warm and abundant she is! As I lie here
under the oak, a child in her arms, I see the thistle-down go floating
by, and on the same laggard breeze comes up from the maple swamp the
odor of the sweet pepper-bush. A little flock of chickadees stop in
the white birches and quiz me. “Who are you?” “Who are you-you-you?”
they ask, dropping down closer and closer to get a peek into my face.
Perhaps they don’t know who I am. Perhaps I don’t know who they are.
They are not fish hawks, of course; but neither am I an alligator or a
pumpkin, as the chickadees surely know. This much I am quite sure of,
however: that this little flock is a family--a family of young
chickadees and their two parents, it may be, who are out seeing the
world together, and who will stay together far into the cold coming
winter.
They are one of the first signs of the autumn to me, and one of my
surest, sweetest comforts as the bleak cold winds come down from the
north. For the winds will not drive my chickadees away, no matter how
cold and how hard they blow, no matter how dark and how dead the
winter woods when, in the night of the year, the clock strikes twelve.
The clock to-day strikes one, and all is still with drowsy sleep out
of doors. The big yellow butterflies, like falling leaves, are
flitting through the woods; the thistledown is floating, floating
past; and in the sleepy air I see the shimmering of the spiders’ silky
balloons, as the tiny aeronauts sail over on their strange voyages
through the sky.
How easy to climb into one of their baskets, and in the fairy craft
drift far, far away! How pleasant, too, if only the noon of the year
would last and last; if only the warm sun would shine and shine; if
only the soft sleepy winds would sleep and sleep; if only we had
nothing to do but drift and drift and drift!
But we have a great deal to do, and we can’t get any of it done by
drifting. Nor can we get it done by lying, as I am lying, outstretched
upon the warm earth this July day. Already the sun has passed
overhead; already the cattle are up and grazing; already the round
shadow of the oak tree begins to lie long across the slope. The noon
hour is spent. I hear the quivering click-clack of a mowing-machine in
a distant hay field. The work of the day goes on. My hour of rest is
almost over, my summer vacation is nearly done. Work begins again
to-morrow.
But I am ready for it. I have rested outstretched upon the warm earth.
I have breathed the sweet air of the woods. I have felt the warm
life-giving sun upon my face. I have been a child of the earth. I have
been a brother to the stone and the bird and the beetle. And now I am
strong to do my work, no matter what it is.
CHAPTER II
ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX
With only half a chance our smaller wild animals--the fox, the mink,
the ’coon, the ’possum, the rabbit--would thrive, and be happy forever
on the very edges of the towns and cities. Instead of a hindrance,
houses and farms, roads and railways are a help to the wild animals,
affording them food and shelter as their natural conditions never
could. So, at least, it seems; for here on Mullein Hill, hardly twenty
miles from the heart of Boston, there are more wild animals than I
know what to do with--just as if the city of Boston were a big skunk
farm or fox farm, from which the countryside all around (particularly
my countryside) were being continually restocked.
But then, if I seem to have more foxes than a man of chickens needs to
have, it is no wonder, living as I do on a main traveled road in
Foxland, a road that begins off in the granite ledges this side of
Boston, no one knows where, and, branching, doubling, turning, no one
knows how many times, comes down at last along the trout brook to the
street in front of my house, where, leaping the brook and crossing the
street, it runs beside my foot-path, up the hill, to the mowing-field
behind the barn.
When I say that last fall the hunters, standing near the brook where
this wild-animal road and the wagon road cross, shot seven foxes, you
will be quite ready to believe that this is a much-traveled road, this
road of the foxes that cuts across my mowing-field; and also that I am
quite likely to see the travelers, now and then, as they pass by.
So I am, especially in the autumn, when game grows scarce; when the
keen frosty air sharpens the foxes’ appetites, and the dogs, turned
loose in the woods, send the creatures far and wide for--chickens!
For chickens? If you have chickens, I hope your chicken-coop does not
stand along the side of a fox road, as mine does. For straight across
the mowing-field runs this road of the foxes, then in a complete
circle right round the chicken yard, and up the bushy ridge into the
wood.
How very convenient! Very, indeed! And how thoughtful of me! Very
thoughtful! The foxes appreciate my kindness; and they make a point of
stopping at the hen-yard every time they pass this way.
It is interesting to know, too, that they pass this way almost every
night, and almost every afternoon, and at almost every other odd time,
so that the hens, with hundreds of grubby acres to scratch in, have to
be fenced within a bare narrow yard, where they can only be _seen_ by
the passing foxes.
Even while being driven by the dogs, when naturally they are in
something of a hurry, the foxes will manage to get far enough ahead of
the hounds to come by this way and saunter leisurely around the coop.
I have a double-barreled gun and four small boys; but terrible as that
combination sounds, it fails somehow with the foxes. It is a
two-barreled-four-boyed kind of a joke to them. They think that I am
fooling when I blaze away with both barrels at them. But I am not.
Every cartridge is loaded with BB shot. But that only means
_Blank-Blank_ to them, in spite of all I can do. The way they jump
when the gun goes off, then stop and look at me, is very irritating.
This last spring I fired twice at a fox, who jumped as if I had hit
him (I must have hit him), then turned himself around and looked all
over the end of the barn to see where the shots were coming from. They
were coming from the back barn window, as he saw when I yelled at him.
It was an April morning, cold and foggy, so cold and foggy and so very
early that my chattering teeth, I think, disturbed my aim.
It must have been about four o’clock when one of the small boys
tiptoed into my room and whispered, “Father, quick! there’s a fox
digging under Pigeon Henny’s coop behind the barn.”
I was up in a second, and into the boys’ room. Sure enough, there in
the fog of the dim morning I could make out the moving form of a fox.
He was digging under the wire runway of the coop.
The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks. It was she who had
awakened the boys.
There was no time to lose. Downstairs I went, down into the basement,
where I seized the gun, and, slipping in a couple of shells, slid out
of the cellar door and crept stealthily into the barn.
The back window was open. The thick wet fog poured in like dense
smoke. I moved swiftly in my bare feet and peered down upon the field.
There stood the blur of the coop,--a dark shadow only in the fog,--but
where was the fox?
Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun across the window-sill, I
waited. And there in the mist stood the fox, reaching in with his paw
under the wire that inclosed the coop.
Carefully, deliberately, I swung the gun on the window-sill until the
bead drew dead upon the thief; then, fixing myself as firmly as I
could with bare feet, I made sure of my mark and fired.
I do not wonder that the fox jumped. I jumped, myself, as both barrels
went off together. A gun is a sudden thing at any time of day, but so
early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silence and
ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling.
The fox jumped, as naturally he would. When, however, he turned
deliberately around and looked all over the end of the barn to see
where I was firing from, and stood there, until I shouted at him--I
say it was irritating.
But I was glad, on going out later, to find that neither charge of
shot had hit the coop. The coop was rather large, larger than the
ordinary coop; and taking that into account, and the thick, uncertain
condition of the atmosphere, I had not made a bad shot after all. It
was something not to have killed the hen.
But the fox had killed eleven of the chicks. One out of the brood of
twelve was left. The rascal had dug a hole under the wire; and then,
by waiting as they came out, or by frightening them out, had eaten
them one by one.
There are guns and guns, and some, I know, that shoot straight. But
guns and dogs and a dense population have not yet availed here against
the fox.
One might think, however, when the dogs are baying hard on the heels
of a fox, that one’s chickens would be safe enough for the moment from
that particular fox. But there is no pack of hounds hunting in these
woods swift enough or keen enough to match the fox. In literature the
cunning of the fox is very greatly exaggerated. Yet it is, in fact,
more than equal to that of the hound.
A fox, I really believe, enjoys an all-day run before the dogs. And as
for house dogs, I have seen a fox, that was evidently out for mischief
and utterly tired of himself, come walking along the edge of the knoll
here by the house, and, squatting on his haunches, yap down lonesomely
at the two farm dogs below.
This very week I heard the hounds far away in the ledges. I listened.
They were coming toward me, and apparently on my side of the brook. I
had just paused at the corner of the barn when the fox, slipping along
the edge of the woods, came loping down to the hen-yard within easy
gun-shot of me. He halted for a hungry look at the hens through the
wire fence, then trotted slowly off, with the dogs yelping fully five
minutes away in the swamp.
How many minutes would it have taken that fox to snatch a hen, had
there been a hen on _his_ side of the fence? He could have made
chicken-sandwiches of a hen in five minutes, could have eaten them,
too, and put the feathers into a bolster--almost! How many of my hens
he has made into pie in less than five minutes!
As desserts go, out of doors, he has a right to a pie for fooling the
dogs out of those five crowded minutes. For he does it against such
uneven odds, and does it so neatly--sometimes so very thrillingly! On
three occasions I have seen him do the trick, each time by a little
different dodge.
One day, as I was climbing the wooded ridge behind the farm, I heard a
single foxhound yelping at intervals in the hollow beyond. Coming
cautiously to the top, I saw the hound below me beating slowly along
through the bare sprout-land, half a mile away, and having a hard time
holding to the trail. Every few minutes he would solemnly throw his
big black head into the air, stop stock-still, and yelp a long doleful
yelp, as if begging the fox to stop its fooling and try to leave a
reasonable trail.
The hound was walking, not running; and round and round he would go,
off this way, off that, then back when, catching the scent again, he
would up with his muzzle and howl for all the woods to hear. But I
think it was for the fox to hear.
I was watching the curious and solemn performance, and wondering if
the fox really did hear and understand, when, not far from me, on the
crown of the ridge, something stirred.
Without moving so much as my eyes, I saw the fox, a big beauty, going
slowly and cautiously round and round in a small circle among the
bushes, then straight off for a few steps, then back in the same
tracks; off again in another direction and back again; then in and
out, round and round, until, springing lightly away from the top of a
big stump near by, the wily creature went gliding swiftly down the
slope.
The hound with absolute patience worked his sure way up the hill to
the circle and began to go round and round, sniffling and whimpering
to himself, as I now could hear; sniffling and whimpering with
impatience, but true to every foot-print of the trail. Round and
round, in and out, back and forth, he went, but each time in a wider
circle, until the real trail was picked up, and he was away with an
eager cry.
I once again saw the trick played, so close to me, and so
deliberately, with such cool calculating, that it came with something
of a revelation to me of how the fox may feel, of what may be the
state of mind in the wild animal world.
It was a late October evening, crisp and clear, with a moon almost
full. I had come up from the meadow to the edge of the field behind
the barn, and stood leaning back upon a short-handled hayfork,
looking. It was at everything that I was looking--the moonlight, the
gleaming grass, the very stillness, so real and visible it seemed at
the falling of this first frost. I was listening too, when, as far
away as the stars, it seemed, came the cry of the hounds.
You have heard at night the passing of a train beyond the mountains?
the sound of thole-pins round a distant curve in the river? the
closing of a barn door somewhere down the valley? Strange it may seem
to one who has never listened, but the far-off cry of the hounds is
another such friendly and human voice, calling across the vast of the
night.
They were coming. How clear their tones, and bell-like! How mellow in
the distance, ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, as round the
sides of a swinging silver bell. Their clanging tongues beat all in
unison, the sound rising and falling through the rolling woodland, and
spreading like a curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the
level meadows.
I waited. Rounder, clearer, came the cry. I began to pick out the
individual voices as now this one, now that, led the chorus across
some mighty measure of The Chase.
Was it a twig that broke? Some brittle oak leaf that cracked in the
path behind me? A soft sound of feet! Something breathed, stopped,
came on--and in the moonlight before me stood the fox!
The dogs were coming, but I was standing still. And who was I, anyway?
A stump? A post? No, he saw instantly that I was more than an ordinary
post. How much more?
The dogs were coming!
“Well,” said he, as plainly as anything was ever said, “I don’t know
what you are. But I will find out.” And up he came and sniffed at my
shoes. “This is odd,” he went on, backing carefully off and sitting
down on his tail in the edge of a pine-tree shadow. “Odd indeed. Not a
stump; not a man, in spite of appearances, for a man could never stand
still so long as that.”
The dogs were crashing through the underbrush below, their fierce
cries quivering through the very trees about me.
The fox got up, trotted back and forth in front of me for the best
possible view, muttering, “Too bad! Too bad! What an infernal nuisance
a pack of poodles can make of themselves at times! Here is something
new in the woods, and smells of the hen-yard, as I live! Those silly
dogs!” and trotting back, down the path over which he had just come,
he ran directly toward the coming hounds, leaped off into a pile of
brush and stones, and vanished as the hounds rushed up in a yelping,
panting whirl about me.
Cool? Indeed it was! He probably did not stop, as soon as he was out
of sight, and make faces at the whole pack. But that is because they
have politer ways in Foxland.
It is no such walking-match as this every time. It is nip and tuck,
neck and neck, a dead heat sometimes, when only his superior knowledge
of the ground saves the fox a whole skin.
Perhaps there are peculiar conditions, at times, that are harder for
the fox than for the dogs, as when the undergrowth is all adrip with
rain or dew, and every jump forward is like a plunge overboard. His
red coat is longer than the short, close hair of the hound, and his
big brush of a tail, heavy with water, must be a dragging weight over
the long hard course of the hunt. If wet fur to him means the same as
wet clothes to us, then the narrow escape I witnessed a short time ago
is easily explained. It happened in this way:--
I was out in the road by the brook when I caught the cry of the pack;
and, hurrying up the hill to the “cut,” I climbed the gravel bank for
a view down the road each way, not knowing along which side of the
brook the chase was coming, nor where the fox would cross.
[Illustration: “OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DUST AND HOWLS”]
Not since the Flood had there been a wetter morning. The air could not
stir without spilling; the leaves hung weighted with the wet; the very
cries of the hounds sounded thick and choking, as the pack floundered
through the alder swamp that lay at the foot of the hill where I was
waiting.
There must be four or five dogs in the pack, I thought; and surely now
they are driving down the old runway that crosses the brook at my
meadow.
I kept my eye upon the bend in the brook and just beyond the big swamp
maple, when there in the open road stood the fox.
He did not stand; he only seemed to, so suddenly and unannounced had
he arrived. Not an instant had he to spare. The dogs were smashing
through the briars behind him. Leaping into the middle of the road,
he flew past me straight up the street, over the ridge, and out of
sight.
I turned to see the burst of the pack into the road, when flash! a
yellow streak, a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust in the road,
and back was the fox, almost into the jaws of the hounds, as he shot
into the tangle of wild grapevines around which the panting pack was
even then turning!
With a rush that carried them headlong past the grapevines, the dogs
struck the warm trail in the road and went up over the hill in a
whirlwind of dust and howls.
They were gone. The hunt was over for that day. Somewhere beyond the
end of the doubled trail the pack broke up and scattered through the
woods, hitting a stale lead here and there, but not one of them, so
long as I waited, coming back upon the right track to the grapevines,
through whose thick door the hard-pressed fox had so narrowly won his
way.
CHAPTER III
IN THE TOADFISH’S SHOE
I was winding up my summer vacation with a little fishing party all by
myself, on a wharf whose piles stood deep in the swirling waters from
Buzzards Bay. My heavy-leaded line hummed taut in the swift current;
my legs hung limp above the water; my back rested comfortably against
a great timber that was warm in the September sun. Exciting? Of course
not. Fishing is fishing--any kind of fishing is fishing to me. But the
kind I am most used to, and the kind I like best, is from the edge of
a wharf, where my feet dangle over, where my “throw-out” line hums
taut over my finger, in a tide that runs swift and deep and dark below
me.
For what may you not catch in such dark waters? And when there are no
“bites,” you can sit and wait; and I think that sitting and waiting
with my back against a big warm timber is just as much fun now as it
used to be when I was a boy.
But after all it is fish that you want when you go fishing; and it is
exciting, moreover, just to sit as I was sitting on the wharf, with
all the nerves of your body concentrated in the tip of your right
forefinger, under the pressure of your line. For how do you know but
that the next instant you may get a bite? And how do you know what the
fish may be?
When you whip a trout stream for trout--why, you expect trout; when
you troll a pond for pickerel, you expect pickerel; but when you sit
on a wharf with your line far out in big, deep waters--why, you can
expect almost anything--except shoes!
Shoes? Yes, old shoes!
As I sat there on the wharf of Buzzards Bay, there was suddenly a
sharp tug at my line. A short quick snap, and I hooked him, and began
quickly hauling him in.
How heavily he came! How dead and stupid! Even a flounder or a cod
would show more fight than this; and very naturally, for on the end of
my line hung an old shoe!
“Well,” I thought, “I have fished for soles, and down on the Savannah
I have fished for ’gators, but I never fished for shoes before”; and
taking hold of my big fish (for it must have been a No. 12 shoe), I
was about to feel for the hook when I heard a strange grunting noise
inside, and nearly tumbled overboard at sight of two big eyes and a
monstrous head filling the whole inside of the shoe!
“In the name of Davy Jones!” I yelled, flinging line and shoe and
_thing_ (whatever it might be) far behind me, “I’ve caught the Old Man
of the Sea with his shoe on!” And, scrambling to my feet, I hurried
across the wharf to see if it really were a fish that now lay flapping
close beside the shoe.
It was really a fish; but it was also a hobgoblin, nightmare, and
ooze-croaker!--if you know what that is!
I had never seen a live toadfish before, and it is small wonder that I
sighed with relief to see that he had unhooked himself; for he looked
not only uncanny, but also dangerous! He was slimy all over, with a
tremendous head and a more tremendous mouth (if that could be), with
jaws studded on the inside with rows of sharp teeth, and fringed on
the outside with folds of loose skin and tentacles. Great glaring eyes
stared at me, with ragged bits of skin hanging in a ring about them.
Ugly? Oh, worse than ugly? Two thirds of the monster was head; the
rest, a weak, shapeless, slimy something with fins and tail, giving
the creature the appearance of one whose brain had grown at the
expense of the rest of his body, making him only a kind of living
head.
I looked at him. He looked at me, and croaked.
“I don’t understand you,” said I, and he croaked again. “But you are
alive,” said I; “and God made you, and therefore you ought not to look
so ugly to me,” and he flapped in the burning sun and croaked again.
Stooping quickly, I seized him, crowded him back into the old shoe,
and dipped him under water. He gasped with new life and croaked again.
“Now,” said I, “I begin to understand you. That croak means that you
are glad to taste salt water again”; and he croaked again, and I
dipped him in again.
Then I looked him over thoughtfully. He was about fifteen inches long,
brown in color, and coarsely marbled with a darker hue, which ran
along the fins in irregular wavy lines.
“You are odd, certainly, and peculiar, and altogether homely,” said I;
“but really you are not very ugly. Ugly? No, you are _not_ ugly. How
could anybody be ugly with a countenance so wise and learned?--so
thoughtful and meditative?” And the toadfish croaked and croaked
again. And I dipped him in again, and understood him better, and liked
him better all the time.
Then I took him in his shoe to the edge of the wharf.
“I am glad to have made your acquaintance, sir,” said I. “If I come
this way next summer, I shall look you up; for I want to know more
about you. Good-by.” And I heard him croak “Good-by,” as he and his
shoe went sailing out and dropped with a splash into the deep dark
water of the Bay.
[Illustration: “HERE I FOUND HIM KEEPING HOUSE”]
I meant what I said, and the next summer, along the shores of the Bay
I hunted him up. He was not in an old shoe this time, but under
certain rather large stones that lay just below ebb-tide mark, so that
they were usually, though not always, covered with water. Here I found
him keeping house; and as I was about to keep house myself, my heart
really warmed to him.
I was understanding him more and more, and so I was liking him better
and better. Ugly? Wait until I tell you what the dear fellow was
doing.
He was keeping house, and he was keeping it all alone! Now listen, for
this is what I learned that summer about the strange habits of Mrs.
Toadfish, and the handsome behavior of her husband.
It is along in June that the toadfish of our New England bays begin to
look round for their summer homes. As far as we now know, it is the
female who makes the choice and leaves her future mate to find her and
her home. A rock is usually chosen, always in shallow water, and
sometimes so far up on the shore that at low tide it is left high and
almost dry. The rock may vary in size from one as small as your hat up
to the very largest.
Having selected the place for her nest, she digs a pathway down under
the rock, and from beneath scoops out a hollow quite large enough to
swim round in. This completes the nest, or more properly burrow, in
which her little toadfish babies are to be reared.
She now begins to lay the eggs, but not in the sand, as one would
suppose; she deliberately pastes them on the under surface of the
rock. Just how she does this no one knows.
The eggs are covered with a clear, sticky paste which hardens in
contact with water, and is the means by which the mother sticks them
fast to the rock. This she must do while swimming on her back,
fastening one egg at a time, each close beside its neighbor in regular
order, till all the cleared surface of the rock is covered with
hundreds of beautiful amber eggs, like drops of pure, clear honey.
The eggs are about the size of buckshot; and, curiously enough, when
they hatch, the young come out with their heads all turned in the same
direction. Does the mother know which is the head end of the egg? Or
has some strange power drawn them around? Or do they turn themselves
for some reason?
It will be noticed, in lifting up the rocks, that the heads of the
fish are always turned toward the entrance to their nest, through
which the light and fresh water come; and it is quite easy to see that
these two important things have much to do with the direction in which
the little fish are turned.
After Mrs. Fish has finished laying her eggs, her maternal cares are
over. She leaves both eggs and cares to the keeping of Mr. Fish, swims
off, and crawls into a tin can--or old shoe!--to meditate in sober
satisfaction for the rest of the summer.
So it was _she_ that I caught, and not the gallant Mr. Toadfish at
all! I am glad of it. I have a deal of sympathy and down-right
admiration for Mr. Fish. He behaves most handsomely.
However, Mrs. Fish is very wise, and could not leave her treasures in
better keeping. If ever there was a faithful parent, it is a Father
Toadfish. For three weeks he guards the eggs before they hatch out,
and then they are only half hatched; for it has taken the little fish
all this time to get out on the top side of the eggs, to which they
are still attached by their middles, so that they can move only their
heads and tails.
They continue to wiggle in this fashion for some weeks, until the yolk
of the egg is absorbed, and they have grown to be nearly half an inch
long. They are then free from the rock and swim off, looking as much
like their parents as children can, and every bit as ugly.
Ugly? Did I say ugly? Is a baby ever ugly to its mother? Or a baby
toadfish to its father? No. You cannot love a baby and at the same
time see it ugly. You cannot love the out of doors with all your
_mind_ as well as with all your heart, and ever see it ugly.
All this time the father has been guarding the little toadfish; and
if, during the whole period, he goes out to get a meal, I have not
been able to find when it is, for I always find him at home, minding
the babies.
The toadfish lives entirely unmolested by enemies, so far as I can
learn; and his appearance easily explains the reason of it. I know of
nothing that would willingly enter a croaking, snapping, slimy
toadfish’s nest to eat him; and it takes some courage to put one’s
hand into his dark hole and pull him out.
His principal diet seems to be shrimp, worms and all kinds of small
fish. Yet he may be said to have no principal diet; for, no matter
what you are fishing for, or what kind of bait you are using, if there
is a toadfish in the vicinity you are sure to catch him. If fishing
along a wharf in September, you may catch the fish, and an old shoe
along with him--with _her_, perhaps I should say.
And if you do, please notice how wise and thoughtful the face, how
beautifully marbled the skin, how courageous the big strong jaw!
Ugly? Not if you will put yourself in the toadfish’s shoe.
CHAPTER IV
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL
I
You ought to see the sky--every day. You ought to see, as often as
possible, the breaking of dawn, the sunset, the moonrise, and the
stars. Go up to your roof, if you live in the city, or out into the
middle of the Park, or take a street-car ride into the edge of the
country--just to see the moon come up over the woods or over a rounded
hill against the sky.
II
You ought to see the light of the October moon, as it falls through a
roof of leafless limbs in some silent piece of woods. You have seen
the woods by daylight; you have seen the moon from many places; but to
be in the middle of the moonlit woods after the silence of the October
frost has fallen is to have one of the most beautiful experiences
possible out of doors.
III
You ought to see a wooded hillside in the glorious colors of the
fall--the glowing hickories, the deep flaming oaks, the cool, dark
pines, the blazing gums and sumacs! Take some single, particular
woodland scene and look at it until you can see it in memory forever.
IV
You ought to see the spiders in their airships, sailing over the
autumn meadows. Take an Indian Summer day, lazy, hazy, sunny, and lie
down on your back in some small meadow where woods or old rail fences
hedge it around. Lie so that you do not face the sun. The sleepy air
is heavy with balm and barely moves. Soon shimmering, billowing,
through the light, a silky skein of cobweb will come floating over.
Look sharply, and you will see the little aëronaut swinging in his
basket at the bottom of the balloon, sailing, sailing--
Away in the air air--
Far are the shores of Anywhere,
Over the woods and the heather.
V
You ought to see (only _see_, mind you,) on one of these autumn
nights, when you have _not_ on your party clothes--you ought to see a
“wood pussy.” A wood pussy is not a house pussy; a wood pussy is a
wood pussy; that is to say, a wood pussy is a--_skunk_! Yes, you ought
to see a skunk walking calmly along a moonlit path and not caring a
fig for you. You will perhaps never meet a wild buffalo or a grizzly
bear or a jaguar in the woods nearest your house; but you may meet a
wild skunk there, and have the biggest adventure of your life. Yes,
you ought to see a skunk some night, just for the thrill of meeting a
wild creature that won’t get out of your way.
VI
You ought to see the witch-hazel bush in blossom late in November. It
is the only bush or tree in the woods that is in full bloom after the
first snow may have fallen. Many persons who live within a few
minutes’ walk of the woods where it grows have never seen it. But
then, many persons who live with the sky right over their heads, with
the dawn breaking right into their bedroom windows, have never seen
the sky or the dawn to think about them, and wonder at them! There are
many persons who have never seen anything at all that is worth
seeing. The witch-hazel bush, all yellow with its strange blossoms in
November, is worth seeing, worth taking a great deal of trouble to
see.
There is a little flower in southern New Jersey called pyxie, or
flowering moss, a very rare and hidden little thing; and I know an old
botanist who traveled five hundred miles just to have the joy of
seeing that little flower growing in the sandy swamp along Silver Run.
If you have never seen the witch-hazel in bloom, it will pay you to
travel five hundred and five miles to see it. But you won’t need to go
so far,--unless you live beyond the prairies,--for the witch-hazel
grows from Nova Scotia to Florida and west to Minnesota and Alabama.
There is one flower that, according to Mr. John Muir (and he surely
knows!), it will pay one to travel away up into the highest Sierra to
see. It is the fragrant Washington lily, “the finest of all the Sierra
lilies,” he says. “Its bulbs are buried in shaggy chaparral tangles, I
suppose for safety from pawing bears; and its magnificent panicles
sway and rock over the top of the rough snow-pressed bushes, while
big, bold, blunt-nosed bees drone and mumble in its polleny bells. A
lovely flower worth going hungry and footsore endless miles to see.
The whole world seems richer now that I have found this plant in so
noble a landscape.”
[Illustration: “A WILD CREATURE THAT WON’T GET OUT OF YOUR WAY”]
And so it seemed to the old botanist who came five hundred miles to
find the tiny pyxie in the sandy swamps of southern New Jersey. So it
will seem to you--the whole world will not only _seem_ richer, but
will _be_ richer for you--when you have found the witch-hazel bush all
covered with summer’s gold in the bleak woods of November.
VII
You ought to see a big pile of golden pumpkins in some farmhouse shed
or beside the great barn door. You ought to see a field of corn in the
shock; hay in a barn mow; the jars of fruit, the potatoes, apples, and
great chunks of wood in the farmhouse cellar. You ought to see how a
farmer gets ready for the winter--the comfort, the plenty, the
sufficiency of it all!
VIII
You ought to see how the muskrats, too, get ready for the winter, and
the bees and the flowers and the trees and the frogs--everything.
Winter is coming. The cold will kill--if it has a chance. But see how
it has no chance. How is it that the bees will buzz, the flowers open,
the birds sing, the frogs croak again next spring as if there had been
no freezing, killing weather? Go out and see why for yourselves.
IX
You ought to see the tiny seed “birds” from the gray birches,
scattering on the autumn winds; the thistledown, too; and a dozen
other of the winged, and plumed, and ballooned, seeds that sail on the
wings of the winds. You should see the burdock burs in the cows’ tails
when they come home from the pasture, and the stick-tights and
beggar-needles in your own coat-tails when you come home from the
pastures. And seeing that, you should _think_--for that is what real
seeing means. Think what? Why, that you are just as good as a cow’s
tail to scatter Nature’s seeds for her, and not a bit better, as she
sees you.
X
You ought to see the migrating birds as they begin to flock on the
telegraph wires, in the chimneys, and among the reeds of the river.
You ought to see the swallows, blackbirds, robins, and bluebirds, as
they flock together for the long southern flight. There are days in
late September and in early October when the very air seems to be half
of birds, especially toward nightfall, if the sun sets full and clear:
birds going over; birds diving and darting about you; birds along the
rails and ridge-poles; birds in the grass under your feet--birds
everywhere. You should be out among them where you can see them. And
especially you should see--without fail, this autumn and every
autumn--the wedge of wild geese cleaving the dull gray sky in their
thrilling journey down from the far-off frozen North.
CHAPTER V
WHIPPED BY EAGLES
As you head into Maurice River Cove from Delaware Bay by boat, the
great eagle’s nest of Garren’s Neck Swamp soon looms into view. It is
a famous nest, and an ancient nest; for it has a place in the chart of
every boat that sails up the river, and has had for I don’t know how
many years. From the river side of the long swamp the nest is in sight
the year round, but from the land side, and from the house where we
lived, the nest could be seen only after the leaves of the swamp had
fallen. Then all winter long we could see it towering over the swamp;
and often, in the distance, we could see the eagles coming and going
or soaring in mighty circles high up in the air above it.
That nest had a strange attraction for me. It was the home of eagles,
the monarchs of this wide land of swamp and marsh and river.
Between me and the great nest lay a gloomy gum swamp, wet and wild,
untouched by the axe and untraveled, except in winter by the
coon-hunters. The swamp began just across the road that ran in front
of the house; and often at night I would hear the scream of a wild cat
in the dark hollows; and once I heard the _pat, pat_ of its feet as it
went leaping along the road.
Then beyond the swamp and the nest stretched a vast wild marsh-land,
where the reeds grew, and the tides came in, and the mud-hens lived.
And beyond that flowed the river, and beyond the river lay another
marsh, and beyond the marsh another swamp. And over all this vast wild
world towered the nest of the eagles, like some ancient castle; and
over it all--swamp and marsh and river--ruled the eagles, as bold and
free as the mighty barons of old.
Is it any wonder that I often found myself gazing away at that nest on
the horizon and longing for wings?--for wings with which to soar above
the swamp and the bay and the marsh and the river, to circle about and
about that lofty eyrie, as wild as the eagles and as free? Is it any
wonder that I determined some day to stand up in that nest, wings or
no wings, while the eagles should scream about me, and away below me
should stretch river and marsh and swamp?
To stand up in that nest, to yell and wave my arms with the eagles
wheeling and screaming over me, became the very peak of my boy
ambitions.
And I did it. I actually had the eggs of those eagles in my hands. I
got into the nest; but I am glad even now that I got out of the nest
and reached the ground.
It must have been in the spring of my fourteenth year when, at last, I
found myself beneath the eagle tree. It was a stark old white oak,
almost limbless, and standing out alone on the marsh some distance
from the swamp. The eagle’s nest capped its very top.
The nest, I knew, must be big; but not until I had climbed up close
under it did I realize that it was the size of a small haystack. There
was certainly half a cord of wood in it. I think that it must
originally have been built by fish hawks.
Holding to the forking top upon which the nest was placed, I reached
out, but could not touch the edge from any side.
I had come determined to get up into it, however, at any hazard; and
so I set to work. I never thought of how I was to get down; nor had I
dreamed, either, of fearing the eagles. A bald eagle is a bully. I
would as soon have thought of fearing our hissing old gander at home.
As I could not get out to the edge of the nest and scale the walls,
the only possible way up, apparently, was through the nest. The sticks
here in the bottom were old and quite rotten. Digging was easy, and I
soon had a good beginning.
The structure was somewhat cone-shaped, the smaller end down. It had
grown in circumference as it grew in years and in height, probably
because at the bottom the building materials had decayed and gradually
fallen away, until now there was a decided outward slant from bottom
to top. It had grown lopsided, too, there being a big bulge on one
side of the nest near the middle.
The smallness of the bottom at first helped me; there was less of the
stuff to be pulled out. I easily broke away the dead timbers and
pushed aside the tougher sticks. I intended to cut a channel clear to
the top and go up through the nest. Already my head and shoulders were
well into it.
Now the work became more difficult. The sticks were newer, some of
them being of seasoned oak and hickory, which the birds had taken from
cord-wood piles.
I had cut my channel up the side of the nest nearly halfway when I
came to a forked branch that I could neither break off nor push aside.
I soon found that it was not loose, but that it belonged to the oak
tree itself. It ran out through the nest horizontally, extending a
little more than a foot beyond the rough walls.
Backing down, I saw that this fork was the support of the bulge that
had given the nest its lopsided appearance. A few large timbers had
been rested across it, small loose pieces had gradually lodged upon
these, and thus in time brought about the big bulge.
I pushed off this loose stuff and the few heavy timbers and found that
the fork would bear my weight. It now projected a little way from the
walls of the nest. I got a firm hold on the forks out at their ends,
swung clear, and drew myself up between them. After a lively scramble,
I got carefully to my feet, and, clutching the sticks protruding from
the side, stood up, with my eyes almost on a level with the rim of the
great nest. This was better than cutting a channel, certainly--at
least for the ascent, and I was not then thinking of the descent.
I looked over the protruding sticks of the rim. I caught a glimpse of
large dull white eggs!
Eggs of shining gold could not have so fascinated me. There were
thousands of persons who could have gold eggs if they cared. But
eagles’ eggs! Money could not buy such a sight as this.
I was more than ever eager now to get into the nest. Working my
fingers among the sticks of the rim for a firm grip, I stuck my toes
into the rough wall and began to climb. At some considerable hazard
and at the cost of many rents in my clothing, I wriggled up over the
edge and into the hollow of the nest where the coveted eggs lay.
The eagles were wheeling and screaming overhead. The weird _cac, cac,
cac_ of the male came down from far above me; while the female,
circling closer, would swoop and shrill her menacing, maniacal
half-laugh almost in my ears.
Their wild cries thrilled me, and their mighty wings, wheeling so
close around me, seemed to catch me in their majestic sweep and almost
to carry me in swift, swinging circles through the empty air. An
ecstasy of excitement overcame me. I felt no body, no weight of
anything. I lost my head completely, and, seizing the eggs, rose to my
feet and stood upright in the nest.
The eagles swept nearer. I could feel the wind from their wings. I
could see the rolling of their gleaming eyes, and the glint of the sun
on their snow-white necks. And as they dipped and turned and careened
over me, I came perilously near trying to fly myself.
What a scene lay under me and rolled wide and free to the very edge of
the world! The level marsh, the blue, hazy bay, the far-off, unblurred
horizon beyond the bending hill of the sea! The wild, free wind from
the bay blew in upon my face, the old tree trembled and rocked beneath
me, the screaming eagles wove a mazy spell of double circles about me,
till I screamed back at them in wild delight.
The sound of my voice seemed to infuriate the birds. The male turned
suddenly in his round and swooped directly at me. The movement was
instantly understood by his mate, who, thus emboldened, cut under him
and hurled herself downward, passing with a vicious grab at my face. I
dodged, or she would have hit me.
For the moment I had forgotten where I stood; and, in dodging the
eagle, I almost stepped over the edge of the nest. I caught my balance
and dropped quickly to my knees, completely unnerved.
Fear like a panic took instant hold on me. Only one desire possessed
me--to get down. I crept to the edge and looked over. The sight made
me dizzy. Sixty feet of almost empty air! Far down, a few small limbs
intervened between me and the ground. But there was nothing by which
to descend.
I was dismayed; and my expression, my posture--something, betrayed my
confusion to the eagles. They immediately lost all dread of me. While
I was looking over, one of them struck me a stinging blow on the head,
knocking my cap off into the air.
That started me. I must climb down or be knocked over. If only I had
continued with my channel to the top! If only that forked branch by
which I ascended were within reach! But how could I back over the
flaring rim to my whole length and swing my body under against the
inward-slanting nest until my feet could touch the fork? But if I ever
got down, that was what I must do; for the eagles gave me no chance to
cut a channel now.
Laying the eggs back for the time in the hollow, I began tearing away
the rim of the nest in order to clear a place over which to back down.
I was momentarily in danger of being hurled off by the birds; for I
could not watch them and work, too. And they were growing bolder with
every dash. One of them, driving fearfully from behind, flattened me
out on the nest. Had the blow been delivered from the front, I should
have been knocked headlong to the ground.
I was afraid to delay longer. A good-sized breach was opened in the
rim of the nest by this time. And now, if the sticks would not pull
out, I might let myself over and reach the fork. Once my feet touched
that, I could manage the rest, I knew.
Digging my hands deep into the nest for a firm hold, I began
cautiously to back over the rough, stubby rim, reaching with my feet
toward the fork.
The eagles seemed to appreciate the opportunity my awkward position
offered them. I could not have arranged myself more conveniently to
their minds, I am sure. And they made the most of it. I can laugh now;
but the memory of it can still make me shiver, too.
I had wriggled over just so that I could bend my body at the waist and
bring my legs against the nest when a sharp stub caught in my clothes
and held me. I could get neither up nor down. My handhold was of the
most precarious kind, and I dared not let go for a moment to get off
the snag.
I tried to back out and push off from it, but it seemed to come out
with me. It must be broken; and pulling myself up, I dropped with all
the force I could put into my body. That loosened, but did not break
it. Suddenly, while I was resting between the efforts, the thing gave
way.
I was wholly unprepared. All my weight was instantly thrown upon my
hands. The jagged sticks cut into my wrists, my grip was pried off,
and I fell.
Once, twice, the stubs in the wall of the nest caught and partly
stopped me, then broke. I clutched frantically at them, but could not
hold. Then, almost before I realized that I was falling, I hung
suspended between two limbs--the forks of the white oak branch in the
side of the nest.
I had been directly above it when the stub broke, and had fallen
through it; and the two branches had caught me right under both of my
arms.
For a second I was too dazed to think. Then a swish of wings, a hard
blow on the neck, and a shooting pain made my position clear. I was
not down yet nor out of danger. The angry birds still had me in reach.
Hanging with one arm, I twisted round until the other arm was free,
then seized the branches and swung under, but not before the eagles
had given me another raking dab.
Here beneath the branches, close up to the bottom of the nest, I was
quite out of the reach of the birds; and through the channel I had cut
in my ascent, I climbed quickly down into the tree.
It was now a mere matter of sliding to the ground. But I was so
battered and faint that I nearly tumbled. I was a sorry-looking
boy--my clothing torn, my hands bleeding, my head and neck clawed in a
dozen places.
But what did I do with the eagles’ eggs? Why, I allowed the old eagles
to hatch them. What else could I do? or what better?
CHAPTER VI
THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER’S FARM
Thanksgiving at Grandfather’s farm was more than a holiday. It was a
great date on the calendar, for it divided the year in halves as no
other single day of the three hundred and sixty-five did. It marked
the end of the outdoors, and the beginning of the indoors--the day
when everybody came home; when along with them into the house came all
the outdoors, too, as if the whole farm were brought in to toast its
toes before the great hearth fire!
For the hearth fire was big enough and cheery enough. And so was the
farmhouse--that is, if you added the big barn and the crib-house and
the wagon-house and the dog-house and the hen-house and the
“spring-house!”
Oh, there was plenty of room inside for everybody and for everything!
And there needed to be; for did not everybody come home to
Grandfather’s for Thanksgiving? And did not everything that anybody
could need for the winter, grow on Grandfather’s farm?
And it all had to be brought in by Thanksgiving Day--everything
brought in, everything housed and stored and battened down tight. The
preparations began along in late October, continuing with more speed
as the days shortened and darkened and hurried us into November. And
they continued with still more speed as the gray lowering clouds
thickened in the sky, and the wind began to whistle through the oak
grove. Then, with the first real cold snap, the first swift flurry of
snow, how the husking and the stacking and the chopping went on!
Thanksgiving must find us ready for winter indoors and out.
The hay-mows were full to the beams where the swallows built; the
north and west sides of the barnyard were flanked with a deep
wind-break of corn-fodder that ran on down the old worm-fence each
side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls; the big wooden pump under the
turn-o’-lane tree by the barn was bundled up and buttoned to the tip
of its dripping nose; the bees by the currant bushes were
doubled-hived, the strawberries covered with hay, the wood all split
and piled, the cellar windows packed, and the storm-doors put on.
The very cows had put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up
about their ears; the turkeys had changed their roost from the
ridge-pole of the corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny side of
the wagon-house; the squirrels had finished their bulky nests in the
oaks; the muskrats of the lower pasture had completed their lodges;
the whole farm--house, barn, fields, and wood-lot--had shuffled into
its greatcoat and muffler and settled comfortably down for the winter.
The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter. It looked its joy at
the prospect of the coming cold. Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled,
secluded in its wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts, sheltered
by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined, clung to by creeper and
honeysuckle, it stood where the roads divided, halfway between
everywhere, unpainted, unpretentious, as much a part of the landscape
as the muskrat-lodge, and, like the lodge, roomy, warm, and
hospitable.
Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the
kitchen; another led into the living-room; another, into the
store-room; and two big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery
with four generations of sliders, covered the cavernous way into
the cellar. But they let the smell of apples up, as the garret door
let the smell of sage and thyme come down; while from the door of the
store-room, mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling the
whole house and all my early memories, came the smell of broom-corn,
came the sound of Grandfather’s loom.
[Illustration: “THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES
FLOW”]
For Grandfather in the winter made brooms--the best brooms, I think,
that ever were made. The tall broom-corn was grown on the farm in the
summer, ripened and cut and seeded, and then, as soon as winter set
in, was loomed and wired and sewed into brooms.
But the cured and seeded broom-corn was not the main thing, after all,
that was brought in for the winter. Behind the stove in the kitchen,
stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato, you know, must be kept dry
and warm). An ample, ten-barrel box it was, fresh-papered like the
walls, full of Jersey sweets that _were_ sweet--long, golden, syrupy
potatoes, such as grow only in the warm sandy soil of southern New
Jersey.
Against that big box in Grandmother’s kitchen stood the sea-chest,
fresh with the same kitchen paper and piled with wood. There was
another such chest in the living-room near the old fireplace, and
still another in Grandfather’s work-room behind the “template” stove.
But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not all. There was music
also, the music of life, of young life and of old life--grandparents,
grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven of
us alone--a girl at each end of the seven and one in the middle.
Thanksgiving always found us all at Grandfather’s and brimming full of
thanks.
That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are different nowadays.
There are as many grandfathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don’t
make brooms in the winter and live on farms.
They live in flats. The old farm with its open acres has become a city
street; the generous old farmhouse has become a speaking-tube,
kitchenette, and bath--all the “modern conveniences”; the cows have
evaporated into convenient cans of condensed “milk”; the ten-barrel
box of potatoes has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the
wood-pile into a convenient five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a
tarred string, the fireplace into a convenient gas log, the seven
children into one or none, or into a little bull-terrier pup.
But is it so? No, it is not so--not so of a million homes. For there
is many an old-fashioned farmhouse still in the country, and many a
new-fashioned city house where there are more human children than
little bull-terrier pups.
And it is not so in my home, which is neither a real farm nor yet a
city home. For here are some small boys who live very much as I did
when I was a boy. No, they are not farmer’s boys; for I am not a
farmer, but only a “commuter”--if you know what that is. I go into a
great city for my work; and when the day’s work is done, I turn
homeward here to Mullein Hill--far out in the country. And when the
dark November nights come, I hang the lantern high in the stable, as
my father used to do, while four shining faces gather round, as four
small boys seat themselves on upturned buckets behind the cow. The
lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow--“Bucksy” stories
of the noble red-man; and stories of the heroes of old; and marvelous
stories of that greatest hero of all--their father, far away yonder
when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting things to do on
Grandfather’s farm just before Thanksgiving Day.
CHAPTER VII
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS FALL
I
You ought to go out into the fields and woods as many as six times
this fall, even though you have to take a long street-car ride to get
out of the city. Let me give you just six bits of sound advice about
going afield:--
First, go often to the same place, so that you can travel over and
over the same ground and become very familiar with it. The first trip
you will not see much but woods and fields. But after that, each
succeeding walk will show you _particular_ things--this dead tree with
the flicker’s hole, that old rail-pile with its rabbit-hole--until, by
and by, you will know every turn and dip, every pile of stones, every
hole and nest; and you will find a thousand things that on the first
trip you didn’t dream were there.
Secondly, when you go into the woods, go _expecting_ to see something
in particular--always looking for some particular nest, bird, beast,
or plant. You may not find that particular thing, but your eyes will
be sharpened by your expectation and purpose, and you will be pretty
sure therefore to see something. At worst you will come back with a
disappointment, and that is better than coming back without a thing!
Thirdly, go off when you can alone. Don’t be selfish, unsociable,
offish--by no means that. But you must learn to use your own eyes and
ears, think your own thoughts, make your own discoveries, and follow
the hints and hopes that you alone can have. Go with the school class
for a picnic, but for woodcraft go alone.
Fourthly, learn first of all in the woods to be as silent as an Indian
and as patient as a granite rock. Practice standing still when the
mosquitoes sing, and fixing your mind on the hole under the stump
instead of the hole the mosquito is boring between your eyes.
Fifthly, go out in every variety of weather, and at night, as well as
during the day. There are three scenes to every day--morning, noon,
and early evening--when the very actors themselves are changed. To one
who has never been in the fields at daybreak, the world is so new, so
fresh and strange, as to seem like a different planet. And then the
evening--the hour of dusk and the deeper, darker night! Go once this
autumn into the woods at night.
And lastly, don’t go into the woods as if they were a kind of Noah’s
Ark; for you cannot enter the door and find all the animals standing
in a row. You will go a great many times before seeing them all. Don’t
be disappointed if they are not so plentiful there as they are in your
books. Nature books are like menageries--the animals are caught and
caged for you. The woods are better than books and just as full of
things, as soon as you learn to take a hint, to read the signs, to put
two and two together and get--four--four paws--black paws, with a long
black snout, a big ringed and bushy tail--a coon!
II
Whether you live in the heart of a great city or in the open country,
you ought to begin this fall to learn the names and habits of the
birds and beasts (snakes, lizards, turtles, toads!) that live wild in
your region. Even when all the summer birds have gone south for the
winter, there will remain in your woods and fields crows, jays,
juncos, tree sparrows, chickadees, kinglets, nuthatches, screech owls,
barred owls,--perhaps even snowy owls,--quails, partridges,
goldfinches, with now and then a flock of crossbills, snow buntings,
and other northern visitors, and even a flicker, robin, and bluebird
left over from the fall migrations. These are plenty to begin on; and
yet, as they are so few, compared with the numbers of the summer, the
beginner’s work is thus all the easier in the autumn.
III
You should go out one of these frosty mornings for chestnuts, if they
grow in your woods; or for “shagbarks,” if you live in New England;
for black walnuts, if you live in the Middle States; for pecan nuts,
if you live in the Gulf States; for butternuts, if you live in the
states of the Middle West; for--what kind of nuts can you not go for,
if you live in California where they make everything grow! It matters
little whether you go for paper-shelled English walnuts or for
plate-armored pignuts so long as you _go_. It is the going that is
worth while.
IV
You ought to go “cocooning” this fall--to sharpen your eyes. But do
not go often; for once you begin to look for cocoons, you are in
danger of seeing nothing else--except brown leaves. And how many brown
leaves, that look like cocoons, there are! They tease you to vexation.
But a day now and then “cocooning” will do you no harm; indeed, it
will cultivate your habit of concentration and close seeing as will no
other kind of hunting I know.
Bring home with you the big brown silky cocoons of cecropia--the
largest cocoon you will find, lashed all along its length to its twig,
and usually near the ground. Look on the black cherry, the barberry,
sassafras, and roadside and garden trees for the harder, whiter cocoon
of the promethea moth. This hangs by its tip, because the caterpillar
has begun his house by using the leaf, spinning it into the cocoon as
part of its walls, much as does the wretched “brown-tail.” The gray
cocoons, or rather nests, of this “brown-tail” moth you must bring
home to burn, for they are one of our greatest pests. You will find
them full of tiny caterpillars as you tear them open.
Bring home your collection and, with the help of such a book as “Moths
and Butterflies” by Mary C. Dickerson, identify them and hang them up
for their “coming out” in the spring.
V
If you live in the city, you ought to go up frequently to your roof
and watch for the birds that fly over. If in one of our many cities
near the water, you will have a chance that those in the country
seldom have, of seeing the seabirds--the white herring gulls (the
young gulls are brown, and look like a different species), as they
pass over whistling plaintively, and others of the wild seafowl, that
merely to hear and see in the smoky air of the city, is almost as
refreshing as an ocean voyage. Then there are the parks and public
gardens--never without their birds and, at the fall migrating time,
often sheltering the very rarest of visitors.
VI
In order to give point and purpose to one of these autumn outings, you
should take your basket, or botanizing can, and scour the woods and
fields for autumn berries. No bunch of flowers in June could be
lovelier than the bunch of autumn berries that you can gather from
thicket and wayside to carry home. And then, in order to enjoy the
trip all over again, read James Buckham’s exquisite story, “A Quest
for Fall Berries,” in his book, “Where Town and Country Meet.”
VII
Take your botany can on a trip toward the end of November and see how
many blossoming flowers you can bring home from the woods. Wild
flowers _after_ Thanksgiving in any northern state? Make the search,
on all the southern slopes and in all the sheltered corners and see
for yourselves. When you get back, you will want to read Mr. Bradford
Torrey’s account of the flowers that he found blossoming out of doors
in New England in the month of November. But who is Mr. Bradford
Torrey? and where can you find this account of his November walk? You
do not know? Well, then there is something more for you to do this
fall.
VIII
While you are finding out who Mr. Torrey is and what he has written,
you should also get acquainted with John Burroughs, Olive Thorne
Miller, Thoreau, Frank Bolles, William Hamilton Gibson, C. C. Abbott,
Edward Breck, Gilbert White, and--but these will do for _this_ fall.
Don’t fail to read dear old Gilbert White’s “Natural History of
Selborne”; though perhaps we grown-ups like it better than you may
this fall. If you don’t understand Gilbert White, then read this year
“The Life of a Scotch Naturalist” by Samuel Smiles, and Arabella
Buckley’s two books, “Life and Her Children,” and “Winners in Life’s
Race.”
IX
You ought to tie up a piece of suet for the birds; keep your cat in
the house, except during the middle of the day, and--but I shall tell
you no more. There is no end to the interesting things to do in your
study of the out of doors and in your tramps afield this autumn.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING
We have had a week of almost unbroken rain, and the water is standing
over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch,--this wet, sedgy land
in the cold twilight,--drearier than any part of the woods or the
upland pastures. They are empty; but the meadow is flat and wet, it is
naked and all unsheltered. And a November night is falling.
The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon
swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly
over. I button my heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down
to the stream and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it
meets the main ditch. There is a sharp turn here toward the swamp;
and here at the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly
down and wait.
I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building; for that
small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished
muskrat house.
As I wait, the moon climbs higher over the woods. The water on the
meadow shivers in the light. The wind bites through my heavy coat and
drives me back, but not before I have seen one, two, three little
creatures scaling the walls of the house with loads of mud-and-reed
mortar. I am driven back by the cold, but not before I know that here
in the desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-walled and
warm, and proof against the longest, bitterest of winters.
This is near the end of November. My fire-wood is in the cellar; I am
about ready to put on the double-windows and the storm-doors. The
muskrats are even now putting on theirs, for their house is all but
finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the muskrats and I.
Throughout the summer the muskrats had no house, only their tunnels
into the sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and
their beds under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps.
All those months the water was low in the ditch, and the beds among
the tussocks were safe and dry enough.
[Illustration: “TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE”]
Now the November rains have filled river and ditch, flooded the
tunnels, and crept up into the beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat
will creep out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in. What shall
he do for shelter? He knows. And long before the rains begin, he picks
out the place for a house. He does not want to leave his meadow,
therefore the only thing to do is to build,--move from under the
tussock out upon the top of the tussock; and here, in its deep, wiry
grass, make a new bed high and dry above the rising water; and close
this new bed in with walls that circle and dome, and defy the very
winter.
Such a house will require a great deal of work to build. Why should
not two or three muskrats combine--make the house big enough to hold
them all, save labor and warmth, too, and, withal, live sociably
together? So they left, each one his single bed, and, joining efforts,
started, about the middle of October, to build this winter house.
Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have been rising, although
for several nights at a time I could see no apparent progress with the
work. The builders were in no hurry. The cold was far off. But it is
coming, and to-night it feels near and keen. And to-night there is no
loafing about the lodge.
When this house is done, when the last hod of mud plaster has been
laid on,--then the rains may descend and the floods come, but it will
not fall. It is built upon a tussock; and a tussock--did you ever try
to pull up a tussock?
Winter may descend, and boys and foxes may come--and they will come,
but not before the walls are frozen. Then, let them come. The house
will stand. It is boy-proof, almost; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and
fox-proof. I have often seen where the fox has gone round and round
the house in the snow, and where, at places, he has attempted to dig
into the frozen mortar. But it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and
utterly impossible for his pick and shovel.
I said the floods, as well as the fox, may come. So they may,
ordinarily; but along in March, when one comes as a freshet and rises
to the dome of the house, then it fills the bed-chamber to the ceiling
and drowns the dwellers out. I remember a freshet once in the end of
February that flooded Lupton’s Pond and drove the muskrats of the
whole pond village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to whatever
wreckage the waters brought along.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley”
--and of muskrats, too.
But not very often do the muskrats’ plans go thus agley. For muskrats
and wood mice and birds and bees, and even the very trees of the
forest, have a kind of natural foresight. They all look ahead, at the
approach of autumn, and begin to provide against the coming cold.
Yet, weather-wise as a muskrat may be, still he cannot know all that
may happen; he cannot be ready for everything. And so, if now and
then, he should prove foresight to be vain, he only shows that his
plans and our plans, his life and our lives, are very much alike.
Usually, however, the muskrat’s plans work out as he would have them.
His foresight proves to be equal to all that the winter can bring. On
the coldest winter days I shall look out over the bleak white waste to
where his house shows, a tiny mound in the snow, and think of him safe
and warm inside, as safe and warm as I am, in my house, here on the
hilltop.
Indeed, I think the muskrat will be the warmer; for my big house here
on Mullein Hill is sometimes cold. And the wind! If only I could drive
the winter wind away from the corners of the house! But the house down
in the meadow has no corners. It has walls, mud walls, so thick and
round that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard by the dwellers
within; and all unheeded the cold creeps over and over the low thatch,
to crawl back and stiffen upon the meadow.
The doors of this meadow house swing wide open throughout the winter;
for they are in the bottom of the house, beneath the water, where only
the muskrat can enter. Just outside the doors, down under the water
and the roof of ice that covers all the flooded meadow, are fresh
calamus roots, and iris and arum--food in abundance, no matter how
long the winter lasts.
No, the winter has not yet come; but it is coming, for the muskrats
are building. Let it come. Let the cold crawl stiff and gray across
the meadow. Let the whirling snow curl like smoke about the pointed
top of the little tepee down by the meadow ditch. Let the north wind
do its worst. For what care the dwellers in that thick-walled lodge
beneath the snow? Down under the water their doors are open; their
roadways up the ditches as free as in the summer; and the stems of the
sedges just as juicy and pink and tender.
The muskrats are building. The buds are leaving. Winter is coming. I
must get out my own storm-windows and double-doors; for even now a
fire is blazing cheerily on my wide, warm hearth.
CHAPTER IX
THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing?”
And what will Muskrat do? and Chipmunk? and Whitefoot, the wood mouse?
and Chickadee? and the whole world of poor things out of doors?
Never fear. Robin knows as well as you that the north wind doth blow,
and is now far away on his journey to the South; Muskrat knows, too,
and is building his warm winter lodge; Chipmunk has already made his
bed deep down under the stone wall, where zero weather is unheard of;
Whitefoot, the wood mouse, has stored his hollow poplar stub full of
acorns, and, taking possession of Robin’s deserted nest near by, has
roofed it and lined it and turned it into a cosey, cold-proof house,
while Chickadee, dear thing--has done nothing at all. Not so much as
a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored up for the winter. But he
knows where there is a big piece of suet for him on a certain lilac
bush. And he knows where there is a snug little hole in a certain elm
tree limb. The north wind may blow, blow, blow! It cannot get through
Chickadee’s feathers, nor daunt for one moment his brave little heart.
The north wind sweeping the bare stubble fields and winding its
shivering horn through the leafless trees does sometimes pierce my
warm coat and strike a chill into my heart. Then how empty and cold
seems the outdoor world! How deadly the touch of the winter! How
fearful the prospect of the coming cold!
Does Muskrat think so? Does Whitefoot? Does Chickadee? Not at all, for
they are ready.
The preparations for hard weather may be seen going on all through the
autumn, beginning as far back as the flocking of the swallows late in
July. Up to that time no one had thought of a coming winter, it would
seem; but, one day, there upon the telegraph-wires were the
swallows--the first sign that the getting ready for winter has begun.
The great migratory movements of the birds are very mysterious; but
they were in the beginning, I think, and are still, for the most part,
mere shifts to escape the cold. Yet not so much to escape the cold
itself do the birds migrate, as to find a land of food. When the
northland freezes, when river and lake are sealed beneath the ice and
the soil is made hard as flint, then the food supplies for most of the
birds are utterly cut off, causing them to move southward ahead of the
cold, or starve.
There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds, like the quail,
and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are so well
provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the great
majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn, must
take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.
And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild
geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and
closing bays of the vast desolate North are empty now, except for the
few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow.
Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready,
much comforting assurance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that
winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack, no
doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and
death. But what with the building, the strange deep sleeping, and the
harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and
sociable, living.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows
commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don’t
know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, Chipmunk or
the provident ant. The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and
verses have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just as thrifty.
So is the busy bee.
It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far
beyond her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter.
By the first of August she has filled the brood chamber of the hive
with honey--forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for
the whole colony until the willows tassel again. But who knows what
the winter may be? how cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So
the harvesting is pushed with vigor on, until the frosts kill the last
of the autumn asters--on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three
hundred pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is
safe should the sun not shine again for a year and a day.
The last of the asters have long since gone; so have the witch-hazels.
All is quiet about the hives. The bees have formed into their warm
winter clusters upon the combs; and except “when come the calm, mild
days,” they will fly no more until March or April. I will half close
their entrances--and so help them to put on their storm-doors.
The whole out of doors around me is like a great beehive, stored and
sealed for the winter, its swarming life close-clustered, and safe and
warm against the coming cold.
I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length
of its frozen slope. There is no sign of life. The brown leaves have
drifted into the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every burrow
were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too, littering and
choking the doorways. A stranger would find it hard to believe that
all of my forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bottoms of
these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and quite out of
danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.
The woodchuck’s manner of providing for winter is very curious. Winter
spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of
danger, would need wings. But wings weren’t given him. Must he perish
then? Winter spreads far, but it does not go deep--down only about
four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps,
escape _under_land. So down he goes _through_ the winter, down into a
mild and even temperature, _five feet away_--only five feet, but as
far away from the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the
distant Orinoco.
Indeed, Woodchuck’s is a farther journey and even more wonderful than
Bobolink’s; for these five feet carry him to the very gates of death.
That he will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive with the
spring out of this dark way, is passing strange.
Muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all the
meadow into a well-stocked cellar. Beaver built him a dam, cut and
anchored under water a plenty of green sticks near his lodge, so that
he too would be under cover when the ice formed, with an abundance of
tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his summer laying up food
near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole,--a
grave,--then ate until no particle more of fat could be got within his
baggy hide, then crawled into his bed to sleep until the dawn of
spring!
This is his shift! This is the length to which he goes, because he has
no wings, and because he cannot cut, cure, and store away, in the
depths of the stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through
the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk
selects long-keeping things and buries them; but the woodchuck simply
fattens himself, then buries himself, and sleeps--and lives!
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,”
but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect?
Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog,
who is also without fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at the
sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him, too, in her own
motherly way. All he has to do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of
the ditch and sleep--and sometimes freeze!
No matter. If the cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he
never knows. He will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for
joy and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat. I have seen
frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice. Drop the lump on
the floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment of the ice
itself. And this has happened more than once to the same frog without
causing him the least ache or pain. He would gradually limber up, and
croak, and look as wise as ever.
The north wind _may_ blow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect,
this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light. The
grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square
foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in
all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because
of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.
Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger
and cold. It was after an extremely long “severe spell”; but this was
not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding
regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field.
One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of
food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and
tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at
once, although within easy reach of plenty.
Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac
covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier,
bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have
found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an
unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and
would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.
The smaller birds that stay through the winter, like the tree sparrow
and the junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested
along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these
small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the
ragweed in my mowing-field.
The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to
clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked
at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by
another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it,
till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white.
Then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there was a
five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the crusty snow--five days of
life and plenty for the birds.
Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and winters, which were
made when the world was made--that even ragweeds and winters have a
part in the beautiful divine scheme of things.
“The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow”--
but the wild geese are going over; the wild mice have harvested their
acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks have gone to sleep;
the muskrats have nearly finished their lodge; the sap in the big
hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of
the fingers of the frost. And what has become of Robin, poor thing?
CHAPTER X
AN OUTDOOR LESSON
I have had many a person ask me, “What is the best way to learn about
the out of doors?” and I always answer, “Don’t try to learn _about_
it, but first go out of the house and get into the out of doors. Then
open both eyes, use both of your ears, and stand in one place stock
still as long as you can; and you will soon know the out of doors
itself, which is better than knowing about it.”
“But,” says my learner, “if I go out of the house, I don’t get into
the out of doors at all, but into a city street!”
Look there--in the middle of the street! What is it? An English
sparrow? Yes, an English sparrow--six English sparrows. Are they not a
part of the out of doors? And look up there, over your head--a strip
of sky? Yes--is not a strip of blue sky a part of the out of doors?
Now let me tell you how I learned an outdoor lesson one night along a
crowded city street.
It was a cold, wet night; and the thick, foggy twilight, settling down
into the narrow streets, was full of smoke and smell and chill. A raw
wind blew in from the sea and sent a shiver past every corner. The
street lights blinked, the street mud glistened, the street noises
clashed and rattled, and the street crowds poured up and down and bore
me along with them.
I was homesick--homesick for the country. I longed to hear the sound
of the wind in the pine trees; I longed to hear the single far-away
bark of the dog on the neighboring farm, or the bang of a barndoor, or
the clack of a guinea going to roost. It was half-past five, and
thousands of clerks were pouring from the closing stores; but I was
lonely, homesick for the quiet, the wideness, the trees and sky of the
country.
Feeling thus, and seeing only the strange faces all about me, and the
steep narrow walls of the street high above me, I drifted along, until
suddenly I caught the sound of bird voices shrill and sharp through
the din.
I stopped, but was instantly jostled out of the street, up against a
grim iron fence, to find myself peering through the pickets into an
ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston.
As I looked, there loomed up in the fog and rain overhead the outlines
of three or four gaunt trees, whose limbs were as thick with sparrows
as they had ever been with leaves. A sparrow roost! Birds, ten
thousand birds, gone to roost in the business section of a great city,
with ten thousand human beings passing under them as they slept!
I got in behind a big waste-barrel by the iron fence and let the crowd
surge past. It was such a sight as I had never seen. I had seen
thousands of chimney swallows go to roost in the deserted chimneys of
a great country house; I had many a time gone down at night to the
great crow-roost in the pines at Cubby Hollow; but I had never
stumbled upon a bird-roost on a crowded city street before!
The hurrying throng behind me thinned and straggled while I waited,
watching by the iron fence. The wind freshened, the mist thickened
into fine rain that came slanting down through the half-lighted trees;
the sleeping sparrows twittered and shifted uneasily on the limbs.
The streets were being deserted. It was going to be a wild night on
the water, and a wild night in the swaying, creaking tops of these old
elm trees. I shivered at the thought of the sparrows sleeping out in
such a night as this, and turned away toward my own snug roost hardly
two blocks away.
The night grew wilder. The wind rattled down our street past a hundred
loose shutters; the rain slapped against the windows, and then stopped
as a heavy gust curled over the line of roofs opposite. I thought of
the sparrows. Had they been driven from the tossing limbs? Could they
cling fast in such a wind, and could they sleep?
Going to the window I looked down into the street. Only the electric
light at the corner showed through the blur of the storm. The street
was empty.
I slipped into my coat and went out; not even a policeman was in
sight. Only the whirling sheets of rain, only the wild sounds of the
wind were with me. The lights flared, but only to fill the streets
with fantastic shadows and to open up a yawning cavern in every deep,
dark doorway.
Keeping in the lee of the shuttered buildings, I made my way to the
sparrow roost. I shall never forget the sight! Not a sparrow had left
his perch, but every bird had now turned, facing the wind--breasting
the wind, I should say; for every head was under a wing, as near as I
could make out, and every breast was toward the storm. Here, on the
limbs, as close as beads on a string, they clung and rocked in the
arms of the wind, every one with his feathers tight to his body, his
tail lying out flat on the storm.
Now there is the outdoor lesson I learned, and that is how I learned
it. And what was the lesson? Why, this: that you are not shut away
from Nature even in the heart of a great city; that the out of doors
lies very close about you, as you hurry down a crowded city street.
CHAPTER XI
LEAFING
No, you never went “leafing”--not unless you are simon-pure
country-bred. You do not know what the word means. You cannot find it
in the unabridged dictionary--not in the sense in which I am using it.
But there are many good words we country people use that are not,
perhaps, in the dictionary.
And what do I mean by “leafing”? Get down that bundle of meal sacks,
hitch into the one-horse hay-rig, throw in the rakes, and come. We are
going into the woods for pig-bedding, for leaves to keep the pigs dry
and warm this winter!
You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a
pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in
the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.
And if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing,
snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and
zest enough to the labor.
But leafing, like every other humble labor, has its own rewards, not
the least of them being the leaves themselves and the getting of them!
We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and
turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cord wood was carted
years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill, the
winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost
knee-deep.
We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle
stumps; bend down saplings; stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet
birch; tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes
between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of whoa-ing
and oh-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.
You can yell all you want to when you go leafing; yell at every stump
you hit; yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you
under the chin; yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig. You
can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are, you
can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves and cut all the crazy
capers you know; for this is a Saturday, these are the wild woods and
the noisy leaves, and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays
and the crows?
The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees;
the dull cloud hangs low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of
the maple swamp below you, peers the face of Winter.
You start up the ridge with your rake and draw down another pile,
thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm
glow all over your body strikes into your heart. You rake away as if
it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that
rakes for his pig, rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful
to his beast; and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket
of down over his own winter bed.
Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten
o’clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it warms my feet through and
through to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and
the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his
golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig’s pen, to hear
him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his
leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my heart, too!
So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work
for! What zest and purpose it lends to one’s raking and piling and
storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should
surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should
be obliged, occasionally, to carry a rake and a bag with me--much
better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to
scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within
the range of opera-glass or gun or walking stick. To see things
through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as
through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.
And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the
rake uncovers--here, under a rotten stump, a hatful of acorns,
probably gathered by the white-footed wood mouse. For the stump gives
at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down the hill,
spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures
that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the
white-footed wood mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and
high-bred looking as greyhounds.
Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large
stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf mould, in
which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of
the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.
This is not the “red” salamander that Mr. Burroughs tells us is “the
author of that fine plaintive piping to be heard more or less
frequently, according to the weather, in our summer and autumn woods.”
His “red” salamander is really a “dull orange, variegated with minute
specks or spots,” a species I have never found here in my New England
woods.
Nor have I ever suspected my red-backed salamander of piping; though
he may do it, as may the angleworms, for aught I am able to hear, so
filled with whir of iron wheels are my dull ears. But listen!
Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we also hear a “fine
plaintive” sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather,
about the bigness of a penny whistle.
Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call--it seems to speak
out of every tree trunk--and find the piper clinging to a twig, no
salamander at all, but a tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered
summer by his tiny, mighty “skirl.” Take him nose and toes, he is
surely as much as an inch long, not very large to pipe against the
north wind turned loose in the leafless woods.
We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope,
hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we
uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with
crimson berries; we rake up the prince’s pine, pipsissewa, creeping
jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries,--a whole bouquet of
evergreens,--exquisite, fairy-like forms, that later shall gladden our
Christmas table.
[Illustration: “BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!”]
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope
all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole
garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows
shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the
very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up
in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.
Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the
hillside, “jumping” a rabbit from its form, or bed, under a
brush-pile; discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading
hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery, in a hollow hickory stump;
turning up a yellow-jacket’s nest, built two-thirds underground;
tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in
the leaf mould; digging into a woodchuck’s--
“But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig
that we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck holes.” Two
small boys catch up a bag and hold it open, while the third boy stuffs
in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet and pack
the leaves in tight, and onto the rig goes the bulging thing!
Exciting? If you can’t believe it exciting, hop up on the load and let
us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!--Hold on
to your ribs! Look out for the stump! Isn’t it fun to go leafing?
Isn’t it fun to do anything that your heart does with you--even though
you do it for a pig?
Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper,
spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his
laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can’t
weep, and he can’t double himself up, so he doubles up his tail. There
is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of
pure pig joy!
_Boosh! Boosh!_ he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind,
scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest
stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.
He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest,--this snow-white,
sawed-off, pug-faced little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he
still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the
taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig in his soul.
And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the
forest hunting him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember
the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest
fruits--and of pig, _roast_ pig! And if the pig in his heart is still
a wild boar, no less are we, at times, wild savages in our hearts.
Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go “leafing.” I want to give
my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep
into that he cannot see his pen. I can feel the joy of it myself. No,
I do not live in a pen; but then, I might, if once in a while I did
not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little daily round
into the wide, wild woods--my ancestral home.
CHAPTER XII
A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL
I
You ought to hear the scream of the hen-hawks circling high in the
air. In August and September and late into October, if you listen in
the open country, you will hear their piercing whistle,--shrill,
exultant _scream_ comes nearer to describing it,--as they sail and
sail a mile away in the sky.
II
You ought to go out upon some mowing hill or field of stubble and hear
the crickets, then into the apple orchard and hear the katydids, then
into the high grass and bushes along the fence and hear the whole
stringed chorus of green grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets. You
have heard them all your life; but the trouble is that, because you
have heard them so constantly in the autumn, and because one player
after another has come gradually into the orchestra, you have taken
them as part of the natural course of things and have never really
heard them individually, to know what parts they play. Now anybody can
hear a lion roar, or a mule bray, or a loon laugh his wild crazy laugh
over a silent mountain lake, and know what sound it is; but who can
hear a cricket out of doors, or a grasshopper, and know which is
which?
III
Did you ever hear a loon laugh? You ought to. I would go a hundred
miles to hear that weird, meaningless, melancholy, maniacal laughter
of the loon, or great northern diver, as the dusk comes down over some
lonely lake in the wilderness of the far North. From Maine westward to
northern Illinois you may listen for him in early autumn; then, when
the migration begins, anywhere south to the Gulf of Mexico. You may
never hear the call of the bull moose in the northern woods, nor the
howl of a coyote on the western prairies, nor the wild _cac_, _cac_,
_cac_ of the soaring eagles, nor the husky _yap_, _yap_, _yap_ of the
fox. But, if you do, “make a note of it,” as Captain Cuttle would say;
for the tongues that utter this wild language are fast ceasing to
speak to us.
IV
One strangely sweet, strangely wild voice that you still may hear in
our old apple orchards, is the whimpering, whinnying voice of the
little screech owl. “When night comes,” says the bird book, “one may
hear the screech owl’s tremulous, wailing whistle. It is a weird,
melancholy call, welcomed only by those who love Nature’s voice,
whatever be the medium through which she speaks.” Now listen this
autumn for the screech owl; listen until the weird, melancholy call
_is_ welcomed by you, until the shiver that creeps up your back turns
off through your hair, as you hear the low plaintive voice speaking to
you out of the hollow darkness, out of the softness and the silence of
night.
V
You ought to hear the brown leaves rustling under your feet.
“Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”
And they should rustle to your tread as well. Scuff along in them
where they lie in deep windrows by the side of the road; and hear them
also, as the wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends them
rattling over the fields.
VI
You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the caw of the crow in
the autumn woods.
“The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.”
Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, because everybody has heard
that loud scream of the jay in the lonesome woods, and the _caw_,
_caw_, _caw_ of the sentinel crow from the top of some tall tree. The
robins may not be all gone, for I heard and saw a flock of them this
year in January; but they are silent now, and so many of the birds
have gone, and the woods have become so empty, that the cries of the
jay and the crow seem, on a gloomy day, to be the only sounds in all
the hollow woods. There could hardly be an autumn for me if I did not
hear these two voices speaking--the one with a kind of warning in its
shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn,
like the color of its sable coat.
VII
You ought to hear, you ought to _catch_, I should say, a good round
scolding from the red squirrel this fall. A red squirrel is always
ready to scold you (and doubtless you are always in need of his
scolding), but he is never so breathless and emphatic as in the fall.
“Whose nuts are these in the woods?” he asks, as you come up with your
stick and bag. “Who found this tree first? Come, get out of here! Get
right back to the city and eat peanuts! Come, do you hear? Get out of
this!”
No, don’t be afraid; he won’t “eat you alive”--though I think he might
if he were big enough. He won’t blow up, either, and burst! He is the
kind of fire-cracker that you call a “sizzler”--all sputter and no
explosion. But isn’t he a tempest! Isn’t he a whirlwind! Isn’t he a
red-coated cyclone! Let him blow! The little scamp, he steals birds’
eggs in the summer, they say; but there are none now for him to steal,
and the woods are very empty. We need a dash of him on these autumn
days, as we need a dash of spice in our food.
In the far western mountains he has a cousin called the Douglas
squirrel; and Mr. John Muir calls him “the brightest of all the
squirrels I have ever seen, a hot spark of life, making every tree
tingle with his prickly toes, a condensed nugget of fresh mountain
vigor and valor, as free from disease as a sunbeam. How he scolds, and
what faces he makes, all eyes, teeth, and whiskers!”
You must hear him this fall and take your scolding, whether you
deserve it or not.
VIII
You ought to hear in the cedars, pines, or spruces the small thin
_cheep_, _cheep_, _cheep_ of the chickadees or the kinglets. You must
take a quiet day on the very edge of winter and, in some sunny dip or
glade, hear them as they feed and flit about you. They speak in a
language different from that of the crow and the jay. This tiny talk
of the kinglet is all friendly and cheerful and personal and
confidential, as if you were one of the party and liked spiders’ eggs
and sunshine and didn’t care a snap for the coming winter! In all the
vast gray out of doors what bits of winged bravery, what crumbs of
feathered courage, they seem! One is hardly ready for the winter
until he has heard them in the cedars and has been assured that they
will stay, no matter how it snows and blows.
IX
You ought to hear, some quiet day or moonlit night in October or
November, the baying of the hounds as they course the swamps and
meadows on the heels of the fox. Strange advice, you say? No, not
strange. It is a wild, fierce cry that your fathers heard, and their
fathers, and theirs--away on back to the cave days, when life was
hardly anything but the hunt, and the dogs were the only tame animal,
and the most useful possession, man had. Their deep bass voices have
echoed through all the wild forests of our past, and stir within us
nowadays wild memories that are good for us again to feel. Stand
still, as the baying pack comes bringing the quarry through the forest
toward you. The blood will leap in your veins, as the ringing cries
lift and fall in the chorus that echoes back from every hollow and
hill around; and you will on with the panting pack--will on in the
fierce, wild exultation of the chase; for instinctively we are
hunters, just as all our ancestors were.
No, don’t be afraid. You won’t catch the fox.
X
You ought to hear by day--or better, by night--the call of the
migrating birds as they pass over, through the sky, on their way to
the South. East or west, on the Atlantic or on the Pacific shore, or
in the vast valley of the Mississippi, you may hear at night, so high
in air that you cannot see the birds, these voices of the passing
migrants. _Chink_, _chink_, _chink!_ will drop the calls of the
bobolinks--fine, metallic, starry notes; _honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ the
clarion cry of the wild geese will ring along the aërial way, as they
shout to one another and to you, listening far below them on the
steadfast earth.
Far away, yonder in the starry vault, far beyond the reach of human
eyes, a multitude of feathered folk, myriads of them, are streaming
over; armies of them winging down the long highway of the sky from the
frozen North, down to the rice fields of the Carolinas, down to the
deep tangled jungles of the Amazon, down beyond the cold, cruel reach
of winter.
Listen as they hail you from the sky.
CHAPTER XIII
HONK, HONK, HONK!
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ Out of the silence of the November night, down
through the depths of the darkened sky, rang the thrilling call of the
passing geese.
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ I was out of bed in an instant; but before I
had touched the floor, there was a patter of feet in the boys’ room,
the creak of windows going up, and--silence.
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ A mighty flock was coming. The stars shone
clear in the far blue; the trees stood dark on the rim of the North;
and somewhere between the trees and the stars, somewhere along a
pathway running north and south, close up against the distant sky, the
wild geese were winging.
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ They were overhead. Clear as bugles, round and
mellow as falling flute notes, ordered as the tramp of soldiers, fell
the _honk_, _honk_, _honk_, as the flock in single line, or double
like the letter V, swept over and was gone.
We had not seen them. Out of a sound sleep they had summoned us, out
of beds with four wooden legs and no wings; and we had heard the wild
sky-call, had heard and followed through our open windows, through the
dark of the night, up into the blue vault under the light of the
stars.
Round and dim swung the earth below us, hushed and asleep in the soft
arms of the night. Hill and valley lay close together, farm-land and
wood-land, all wrapped in the coverlet of the dark. City and town,
like watch fires along the edge of a sleeping camp, burned bright on
the rivers and brighter still on the ragged line of shore and sea, for
we were far away near the stars. The mountains rose up, but they could
not reach us; the white lakes beckoned, but they could not call us
down. For the stars were bright, the sky-coast was clear, the wind in
our wings was the keen, wild wind of the North, and the call that we
heard--ah! who knows the call? Yet, who does not know it--that distant
haunting call to fly, fly, fly?
I found myself in my bed the next morning. I found the small boys in
their beds. I found the big round sun in the sky that morning and not
a star in sight! There was nothing unusual to be seen up there,
nothing mysterious at all. But there was something unusual, something
mysterious to be seen in the four small faces at the breakfast-table
that morning--eyes all full of stars and deep with the far, dark
depths of the midnight sky into which they had gazed--into which those
four small boys had flown!
We had often heard the geese go over before, but never such a flock as
this, never such wild waking clangor, so clear, so far away, so
measured, swift, and--gone!
I love the sound of the ocean surf, the roar of a winter gale in the
leafless woods, the sough of the moss-hung cypress in the dark
southern swamps. But no other voice of Nature is so strangely, deeply
thrilling to me as the _honk_, _honk_, _honk_ of the passing geese.
For what other voice, heard nowadays, of beast or bird is so wild and
free and far-resounding? Heard in the solemn silence of the night, the
notes fall as from the stars, a faint and far-off salutation, like the
call of sentinels down the picket line--“All’s well! All’s well!”
Heard in the open day, when you can see the winged wedge splitting
through the dull gray sky, the notes seem to cleave the dun clouds,
driven down by the powerful wing-beats where the travelers are passing
high and far beyond the reach of our guns.
The sight of the geese going over in the day, and the sound of their
trumpetings, turn the whole world of cloud and sky into a wilderness,
as wild and primeval a wilderness as that distant forest of the far
Northwest where the howl of wolves is still heard by the trappers.
Even that wilderness, however, is passing; and perhaps no one of us
will ever hear the howl of wolves in the hollow snow-filled forests,
as many of our parents have heard. But the _honk_ of the wild geese
going over we should all hear, and our children should hear; for this
flock of wild creatures we have in our hands to preserve.
The wild geese breed in the low, wet marshes of the half-frozen North,
where, for a thousand years to come they will not interfere with the
needs of man. They pass over our northern and middle states and spend
the winter in the rivers, marshes, and lagoons of the South, where,
for another thousand years to come, they can do little, if any, harm
to man, but rather good.
But North and South, and all along their journey back and forth, they
are shot for sport and food. For the wild geese cannot make this
thousand-mile flight without coming down to rest and eat; and wherever
that descent is made, there is pretty sure to be a man with a gun on
the watch.
Here, close to my home, are four ponds; and around the sides of each
of them are “goose blinds”--screens made of cedar and pine boughs
fixed into the shore, behind which the gunners lie in wait. More than
that, out upon the surface of the pond are geese swimming, but tied so
that they cannot escape--geese that have been raised in captivity and
placed there to lure the flying wild flocks down. Others, known as
“flyers,” are kept within the blind to be let loose when a big flock
is seen approaching--to fly out and mingle with them and decoy them
to the pond. These “flyers” are usually young birds and, when thrown
out upon their wings, naturally come back, bringing the wild flock
with them, to their fellows fastened in the pond.
A weary flock comes winging over, hungry, and looking for a place to
rest. Instantly the captive geese out on the pond see them and set up
a loud honking. The flying flock hear them and begin to descend. Then
they see one (tossed from the blind) coming on to meet them, and they
circle lower to the pond, only to fall before a fury of shots that
pour from behind the blind.
Those of the flock that are not killed rise frightened and bewildered
to fly to the opposite shore, where other guns riddle them, the whole
flock sometimes perishing within the ring of fire!
Such shooting is a crime because it is unfair, giving the creature no
chance to exercise his native wit and caution. The fun of hunting, as
of any sport, is in playing the game--the danger, the exercise, the
pitting of limb against limb, wit against wit, patience against
patience; not in a heap of carcasses, the dead and bloody weight of
mere meat!
If the hunter would only play fair with the wild goose, shoot him (the
wild Canada goose) only along the North Carolina coast, where he
passes the winter, then there would be no danger of the noble bird’s
becoming extinct. And the hunter then would know what real sport is,
and what a long-headed, far-sighted goose the wild goose really
is--for there are few birds with his cunning and alertness.
Along the Carolina shore the geese congregate in vast numbers; and
when the day is calm, they ride out into the ocean after feeding, so
far off shore that no hunter could approach them. At night they come
in for shelter across the bars, sailing into the safety of the inlets
and bays for a place to sleep. If the wind rises, and a storm blows
up, then they must remain in the pools and water-holes, where the
hunter has a chance to take them. Only here, where the odds, never
even, are not all against the birds, should the wild geese be hunted.
With the coming of March there is a new note in the clamor of the
flocks, a new restlessness in their movements; and, before the month
is gone, many mated pairs of the birds have flocked together and are
off on their far northern journey to the icy lakes of Newfoundland and
the wild, bleak marshes of Labrador.
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ Shall I hear them going over,--going
northward,--as I have heard them going southward this fall? Winter
comes down in their wake. There is the clang of the cold in their
trumpeting, the closing of iron gates, the bolting of iron doors for
the long boreal night. They pass and leave the forests empty, the
meadows brown and sodden, the rivers silent, the bays and lakes close
sealed. Spring will come up with them on their return; and their
_honk_, _honk_, _honk_ will waken the frogs from their oozy slumbers
and stir every winter sleeper to the very circle of the Pole.
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ Oh, may I be awake to hear you, ye
strong-winged travelers on the sky, when ye go over northward, calling
the sleeping earth to waken, calling all the South to follow you
through the broken ice-gates of the North!
_Honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ The wild geese are passing--southward!
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER I
TO THE TEACHER
Go yourself frequently into the fields and woods, or into the
city parks, or along the water front--anywhere so that you can
touch nature directly, and look and listen for yourselves. Don’t
try to teach what you do not know, and there is nothing in this
book that you cannot know, for the _lesson_ to be taught in each
chapter is a spiritual lesson, not a number of bare facts. This
spiritual lesson you must first learn before you can teach
it--must _feel_, I should say; and a single thoughtful excursion
alone into the autumn fields will give you possession of it. And
what is the lesson in this chapter? Just this: that the strong
growths of summer, the ripening of seeds and fruits, the languid
lazy spirit, and the pensive signs of coming autumn are all the
manifold preparations of nature for a fresh outburst of life
with the coming of spring.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1
_The clock of the year strikes one_: When, in the daytime, the
clock strikes one, the hour of noon is past; the afternoon
begins. On the 21st of June the clock of the year strikes
twelve--noon! By late July the clock strikes one--the noon hour
is past! Summer is gone; autumn--the afternoon of the
year--begins.
_going “creepy-creep”_: In the quiet of some July day in fields
or woods, listen to the stirring of the insects and other small
wood creatures. All summer long they are going about their
business, but in the midst of stronger noises we are almost
deaf to their world of little sounds.
PAGE 3
_begins to shift_: Why is the oak’s shadow likely to be “round”
at noon? What causes the shadow to “shift”; or move? In which
direction would it move?
_falls a yellow leaf from a slender birch near by ... small
flock of robins from a pine ... swallows were gathering upon
the telegraph wires_: Next summer, note the exact date on which
you first see signs of autumn--the first falling of the leaves,
the first gathering of birds for their southern trip. Most of
the migrating birds go in flocks for the sake of companionship
and protection.
_chewink_ (named from his call, ch[=e]-wink´; accent on
second, not on first, syllable, as in some dictionaries) or
ground robin, or towhee or joree; one of the finch family. You
will know him by his saying “chewink” and by his vigorous
scratching among the dead leaves, and by his red-brown body and
black head and neck.
_vireo_ (v[vi]r´-[=e]-[=o]]): the red-eyed vireo, the commonest
of the vireo family; often called “Preacher”; builds the little
hanging nest from a small fork on a bush or tree so low often
that you can look into it.
_fiery notes of the scarlet tanager_ (t[)a]n´-a-j[~e]r): His
notes are loud and strong, and he is dressed in fiery red
clothes and sings on the fieriest of July days.
PAGE 4
_resonant song of the indigo bunting_: or indigo-bird, one of
the finch family. He sings from the very tip of a tree as if to
get up close under the dome of the sky. Indeed, his notes seem
to strike against it and ring down to us; for there is a
peculiar ringing quality to them, as if he were singing to you
from inside a great copper kettle.
_scarlet tanager by some accident_: The tanager arrives among
the last of the birds in the spring, and builds late; but, if
you find a nest in July or August, it is pretty certain to be a
second nest, the first having been destroyed somehow--a too
frequent occurrence with all birds.
_half-fledged cuckoos_: The cuckoo also is a very late builder.
I have more than once found its eggs in July.
_red wood-lily_: Do you know the wood-lily, or the “wild
orange-red lily” as some call it (_Lilium philadelphicum_)? It
is found from New England to North Carolina and west to
Missouri, but only on hot, dry, sandy ground, whereas the
turk’s-cap and the wild yellow lily are found only where the
ground is rich and moist.
_low mouldy moss_: Bring to school a flake, as large as your
hand, of the kind of lichen you think this may be. Some call it
“reindeer moss.”
_sweet-fern_: Put a handful of sweet-fern (_Myrica
asplenifolia_) in your pocket, a leaf or two in your book; and
whenever you pass it in the fields, pull it through your
fingers for the odor. Sweet gale and bayberry are its two sweet
relatives.
PAGE 5
_milkweed, boneset, peppermint, turtle-head, joe-pye-weed,
jewel-weed, smartweed, and budding goldenrod_: Go down to the
nearest meadow stream and gather for school as many of these
flowers as you can find. Examine their seeds.
_wind is a sower going forth to sow_: Besides the winds what
other seed-scatterers do you know? They are many and very
interesting.
PAGE 6
“_Over the fields where the daisies grow...._”
From “Thistledown” in a volume of poems called “Summer-Fallow,”
by Charles Buxton Going.
_seed-souls of thistles and daisies and fall dandelions seeking
new bodies for themselves in the warm soil of Mother Earth_: On
your country walks, watch to see where such seeds have been
caught, or have fallen. They will be washed down into the earth
by rain and snow. If you can mark the place, go again next
spring to see for yourself if they have risen in “new bodies”
from the earth.
_sweet pepper-bush_: The sweet pepper-bush is also called white
alder and clethra.
_chickadees_: Stand stock-still upon meeting a flock of
chickadees and see how curious they become to know you. You may
know the chickadee by its tiny size, its gray coat, black cap
and throat, its saying “chick-a-dee,” and its plaintive call of
“ph[oe]be” in three distinct syllables.
PAGE 7
_clock strikes twelve_: As we have thought of midsummer as the
hour from twelve to one in the day, so the dead of winter seems
by comparison the twelve o’clock of midnight.
_shimmering of the spiders’ silky balloons_: It is the curious
habit of many of the spiders to travel, especially in the fall,
by throwing skeins of silky web into the air, which the breezes
catch and carry up, while the spiders, like balloonists, hang
in their web ropes below and sail away.
CHAPTER II
TO THE TEACHER
I have chosen the fox in this chapter to illustrate this very
interesting and striking fact that wild animals, birds and
beasts, thrive in the neighborhood of man if given the least
protection; for if the fox holds his own (as surely he does) in
the very gates of one of the largest cities in the United
States, how easy it should be for us to preserve for generations
yet the birds and smaller animals! I might have written a very
earnest chapter on the need for every pupil’s joining the
Audubon Society and the Animal Rescue League; but young pupils,
no less than their elders, hate to be preached to. So I have
recounted a series of short narratives, trusting to the
suggestions of the chapter, and to the quiet comment of the
teacher to do the good work. _Every pupil a protector of wild
life is the moral._
FOR THE PUPIL
There are two species of foxes in the eastern states--the gray
fox, common from New Jersey southward, and the larger red fox,
so frequent here in New England and northward, popularly known
at Reynard. Far up under the Arctic circle lives the little
white or Arctic fox, so valuable for its fur; and in California
still another species known as the coast fox. The so-called
silver or blue, or black, or cross fox, is only the red fox with
a blackish or bluish coat.
PAGE 9
_Mullein Hill_: the name of the author’s country home in
Hingham, Massachusetts. The house is built on the top of a
wooded ridge looking down upon the tops of the orchard trees and
away over miles of meadow and woodland to the Blue Hills, and at
night to the lights that flash in Boston Harbor. Years before
the house was built the ridge was known as Mullein Hill because
of the number and size of the mulleins (_Verbascum Thapsus_)
that grew upon its sides and top.
PAGE 10
_mowing-field_: a New England term for a field kept permanently
in grass for hay.
PAGE 11
_grubby acres_: referring to the grubs of various beetles found
in the soil and under the leaves of its woodland.
_BB_: the name of shot about the size of sweet pea seed.
PAGE 12
_Pigeon Henny’s coop_: a pet name for one of the hens that
looked very much like a pigeon.
_shells_: loaded cartridges used in a breech-loading gun.
_bead drew dead_: when the little metal ball on the end of the
gun-barrel, used to aim by, showed that the gun was pointing
directly at the fox.
PAGE 16
_the mind in the wild animal world_: how the animals may really
feel when being chased, namely, not frightened to death, as we
commonly think, but perhaps cool and collected, taking the chase
as a matter of course, even enjoying it.
PAGE 17
_The Chase_: The sound of the hunting is likened to a chorus of
singing voices; the changing sounds, as when the pack emerges
from thick woods into open meadow, being likened to the various
measures of the musical score; the whole musical composition or
chorus being called _The Chase_.
PAGE 18
_dead heat_: a race between two or more horses or boats where
two of the racers come out even, neither winning.
PAGE 19
_Flood_: Why spelled with a capital? What flood is meant?
PAGE 20
_hard-pressed fox had narrowly won his way_: In spite of the
author’s attempt to shoot the fox that was stealing his chickens
do you think the author would be glad if there were no foxes in
his woods? How do they add interest to his out of doors? What
other things besides chickens do they eat? Might it not be that
their destruction of woodchucks (for they eat woodchucks) and
mice and muskrats quite balances their killing of poultry? (The
author thinks so.)
CHAPTER III
TO THE TEACHER
The thought in this chapter is evident, namely, that love for
the out of doors is dependent upon knowledge of the out of
doors. The more we _know_ and the better we _understand_, the
more perfect and marvelous nature seems and the more lovely. The
toadfish _looks_ loathly, but upon closer study he becomes very
interesting, even admirable--one of the very foundations of real
love. So, as a teacher and as a lover of nature, be careful
never to use the words “ugly” or “nasty” or “loathly”; never
shrink from a toad; never make a wry face at a worm; never show
that you are having a nervous fit at a snake; for it all argues
a lack of knowledge and understanding. All life, from Man to the
Am[oe]ba, is one long series of links in a golden chain, one
succession of wonderful life-histories, each vastly important,
all making up the divinely beautiful world of life which our
lives crown, but of which we are only a part, and, perhaps, no
more important a part than the toadfish.
FOR THE PUPIL
The toadfish of this story is _Batrachus tau_, sometimes called
oyster-fish or sapo. The fishing-frog or angler is by some
called toadfish, as is also the swell-fish or common puffer of
the Atlantic Coast.
PAGE 21
_Buzzards Bay_: Where is Buzzards Bay? Do you know Whittier’s
beautiful poem, _The Prayer of Agassiz_, which begins:--
“On the isle of Penikese
Ringed about by sapphire seas.”
Where is Penikese? What waters are those “sapphire seas,” and
what was Agassiz doing there?
PAGE 23
_Davy Jones_: Who is Davy Jones? Look him up under _Jones,
Davy_, in your dictionary of _Proper Names_. Get into the
“looking up” habit. Never let anything in your reading, that you
do not understand, go unlooked up.
_Old Man of the Sea_: Look him up too. Are he and Davy Jones
any relation?
_It was really a fish_: What names do you think of that might
fit this fish?
PAGE 24
_coarsely marbled with a darker hue_: What is the meaning of
_marbled_?
PAGE 25
_covered with water_: The author means that the _rock_ is not
always covered with water, not the _hole_ under the rock. Of
course the hole is always built so that it is full of water,
else the fish would perish at low tide.
PAGE 27
_love the out of doors with all your mind_: Do you know what is
meant by loving the out of doors with your mind? Just this: that
while you feel (with your heart) the beauty of a star, at the
same time you know (with your mind) that that particular star,
let us say, is the Pole Star, the guide to the sailors on the
seas; that it is also only one of a vast multitude of stars each
one of which has its place in the heavens, its circuit or path
through the skies, its part in the whole orderly universe--a
_thought_ so vast and wonderful that we cannot comprehend it.
All this it means to love with our minds. Without minds a star
to us is only a point of light, as to Peter Bell
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And it was nothing more.”
Does the toadfish become anything more than a mere toadfish in
a shoe before the end of the chapter?
PAGE 28
_in the toadfish’s shoe_: What does the author mean by asking
you to put yourself in the toadfish’s shoe? Only this: to try,
even with the humblest of creatures, to share sympathetically
their lives with them. The best way to do this with man as well
as with toadfish is to learn about their lives.
CHAPTER IV
TO THE TEACHER
There are several practical uses to which you can put this
chapter, and the similar chapters, VII and XII: they can be made
the purpose for field excursions with the class. Such excursions
might be quite impossible for many a teacher in school hours;
and we know how the exacting duties overcrowd the after-school
hours; but one field excursion each season of the year, no
matter how precious your time, would do more for you and your
class than many books about nature read inside your four
plastered walls. Better the books than nothing; but take the
book and go with your pupils into the real out of doors.
Again, you can make these chapters a kind of nature test,
asking each pupil to try to see each of the things suggested
here; or, if these do not chance to be the sights
characteristic of the autumn in your region, then such sights
as are characteristic. So the chapter can serve as a kind of
field guide to the pupil, and a kind of test of his knowledge
of nature.
Again, you can make each item mentioned here the subject for a
short composition direct from the pupil’s experience--the only
kind of subject for him to write upon. Or make each item (say,
No. IV, the Ballooning Spiders) the beginning for a short
course of study or collateral reading for the individual pupil
particularly interested in spiders!
CHAPTER V
TO THE TEACHER
The real point of this story (but first of all it is a story and
should not be spoiled with any moral) is the thought in the
lines:--
“There were thousands of persons who could have gold eggs if
they cared. But eagles’ eggs! Money could not buy such a sight
as this.” Which means, that the simple joys of the out of
doors, and the possession of youth and health, are better than
any joys that money can create, and more precious possessions
than all the money in the world can buy. One can get all the
thrilling sensations of height by standing up in a quaking
eagle’s nest sixty feet from the ground, that one can possibly
get from the top of the Eiffel Tower or on the peak of Mount
Washington, or from a flying-machine among the clouds. And then
who among the rich of the world ever saw eagles’ eggs in a
nest, or had eagles dig him with their talons? To be alive to
all the wonder of the life, to all the beauty of the world
about us, is the very secret of living. An eagle’s nest to
climb into is as good as a flying-machine.
Take occasion, too, at the end of the story to say how much
better, how much more interesting, an act it was to leave the
eggs to hatch than to rob the nest and thus destroy two young
eagles. Some years later, for instance, two young eagles were
taken from a neighboring nest and were sent to the Zoölogical
Gardens at Philadelphia, where they may still be living for
thousands of visitors each year to see. Who knows but that one
of the parents of these two captive birds may have been in the
eggs laid back by the boy in that nest?
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 36
_Maurice River Cove_: Where is Maurice River Cove? What is the
Cove famous for?
_great eagle’s nest_: Look up the habits of the bald eagle in
some natural history. Is he a very great enemy to man? If a
pair of the noble birds lived in your neighborhood would you
want their nest destroyed and the birds shot? Do you know the
story of “Old Abe”? Look that up also.
PAGE 37
_scream of a wild cat_: The wild cat is still to be found
throughout the United States wherever the country is very wild
and wooded. Its cry or scream is an indescribable thrill that
shoots cold all over you, freezing fast in the roots of your
hair.
_mud-hens_: The mud-hen or American coot, a dark bluish
slate-colored bird of the marshes about the size of a large
bantam, with an ivory-white bill and peculiar lobed toes,
instead of webbed like a duck’s.
_eyrie_: What does the word mean? Are there any other ways of
spelling it?
PAGE 38
_size of a small haystack_: This is no exaggeration. From one
nest of a fish hawk (and this nest was probably built first by a
fish hawk) that blew down from the top of an old house chimney
in the Maurice River Marshes, the author knew six one-horse
cartloads of loose sticks to be taken.
PAGE 40
_such a sight as this_: Have you ever seen a sunset more
gorgeous than any artist could paint and any rich man could buy?
Ever had a smell of trailing arbutus that no perfumer could
equal, that all the money in the world could not create? Old
Midas had a golden touch and turned his daughter into gold. Was
he not more than willing to be the poorest man in his kingdom if
only he might be rid of the fatal touch, be a natural man again
and have his loving little daughter a natural child again? To be
your natural selves, and to enjoy your beautiful natural world
is better than to be anything else, or to have anything else, in
the world.
CHAPTER VI
TO THE TEACHER
We hear so much of the drudgery of farm life, of its dreariness,
and meagre living that this chapter, aside from its picture of
cheer and plenty, should be made the text for a good deal of
comment upon the many other phases of farm life that make for
the fullest kind of existence; namely, the independence of the
farmer; the vast and interesting variety of his work; his
personal contact with domestic animals, his fruit-trees, garden,
and fields of grain; his intimate acquaintance with the weather;
his great resourcefulness in meeting insect plagues, blights,
and droughts; his out-of-door life that makes him strong and
long-lived, etc., etc.
If you are a country teacher it is one of your great missions
to show the boys that they should stay upon the farm, or rather
that the farm is a good place to stay on for life; if you are a
city teacher it should be your mission to head many a boy
countryward for life with the understanding that it requires
more sound sense and resourcefulness to make a successful
farmer than it does to make a bank president.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 46
_end of the outdoors_: The fall plowing, even the digging of the
ditches--all the work in the soil is about over by Thanksgiving
when the ground begins to freeze.
PAGE 47
_crib-house_: Where the writer lived as a boy the corn was
husked and left in the ear and stored in long, narrow houses
built of beveled slats spaced about half an inch apart to allow
the wind free play, but like the thin slats of a shutter so
arranged that the rain ran down and, except in a driving wind,
did not wet the grain.
“_spring-house_”: Spring-houses took the place of modern
ice-chests, being little cupboard-like houses well ventilated
and screened, built near the farmhouse and usually over a
spring of water that kept the milk and other contents cool.
_battened_: Is this a “land” term or a “sea” term? What does it
mean? Look it up and report.
_the swallows_: These were the barn swallows--the beautiful
swallows with the long, finely-forked tail. You will always
know them on the wing by the brown breast and _fine_ forked
tail.
_worm-fence_: A worm-fence is built of rails laid one on top of
the other, running zigzag, each corner held together by two
upright stakes, set in the ground and crossed just above the
next-to-the-top rail. The top rail is laid in the crotch of the
two stakes.
_turn-o’-lane_: name of a very excellent old-fashioned apple
that got its name from the fact that the original tree of the
kind grew at a turn of the lane--the writer does not know whose
lane.
PAGE 48
_double-hived_: It is customary to cover beehives with
newspapers, then slip an outside box down over papers and all to
keep the swarm from the cutting cold winds of winter. Bees are
frequently brought into the cellar for the winter in northern
latitudes.
_put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their
ears_: What does the writer mean?
_changed their roost from the ridge-pole_: Turkeys roost high;
but the ridge-pole of the crib-house used to be too cold in the
dead of winter, so they would change to the more protected
apple-tree, still roosting high, however.
_pearmain_: name of a “summer” apple in New Jersey; of a winter
apple in this section of Massachusetts.
_garden of box_: the box bush.
_bleeding-hearts_: an old-fashioned flower; a low shrub with
pendent blossoms shaped like a heart.
_creeper_: the Virginia creeper, or woodbine.
PAGE 49
_”template” stove_: from template or templet, a strip of sheet
iron used in boiler-making. A simple long stove made of a single
piece of sheet iron, bent like an inverted U, and riveted to a
cast iron bottom. It had a single door in the front; and burnt
pieces of wood about two feet long. Often called “tenplate”
stove.
PAGE 50
_seven of us alone_: seven brothers and sisters in the writer’s
family.
_flats_: Describe the outside appearance of a city “flat,” and
also the inside if you have ever been in a flat. Is it like a
farmhouse?
_kitchenette_: What kind of a kitchen is a kitchen_ette_?
_neither a farm nor a city home_: By which the writer means a
farm in the ordinary sense of land cultivated for a living. His
is a home only, with several acres around it, largely in woods
and grass.
PAGE 51
“_Bucksy_”: the invented name of a little Indian hero about whom
the writer tells stories to his little boys.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
Suggestions as to the practical uses to which this chapter can
be put may be gathered from the notes to chapter IV and chapter
XII, each of which is similar to this one.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE TEACHER
This chapter and the next (chapter IX) should be taken together
as a single study of the provision of nature against the
severity of winter’s cold, chapter VIII being a detailed account
of one creature’s preparations, while chapter IX follows,
showing how the foresight and care obtain even among the plants
and trees. The two chapters together should give the pupils a
glad thought for winter, should utterly change their
conventional language and feeling for it as a time of _death_.
And instead of lamenting the season as a necessary evil, you
must show them that it is to be welcomed as a period of sleep
for nature from which she will waken in all the freshness of a
springtime such as is nowhere to be had outside of the temperate
zone. “It is not always May,” wails the poet; but ask them: Who
wants it always May? We want the variety, the contrasts of our
four seasons, and as to winter, let the North Wind blow at will,
redden our cheeks, quicken our step, put purpose into our wills
and--it won’t starve us; for we, too, like the muskrat, are
provided for.
FOR THE PUPIL
If there is a muskrat house or village of houses in your
neighborhood, report to the class, or better, take teacher and
class, as soon as freezing weather comes, to see it. Go out
yourselves and try to see the muskrats plastering their walls on
one of the bright October nights.
PAGE 63
_muskrats combine_: The author has frequently found as many as
six rats in a single house; but whether all of these helped in
the building or not, he is unable to say.
_winter house_: If the house is undisturbed (as when situated
out in a stumpy pond) it will stand for years, the rats
dwelling in it the year around.
PAGE 64
_pick and shovel_: What is meant by a fox’s “pick and shovel”?
_Lupton’s Pond_: the name of a little wood-walled pond that the
author haunted as a boy.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley.”
Learn this poem (“To A Mouse”) by heart. Burns is the author.
PAGE 65
_very much alike_: Name some other respects in which animals and
men are alike in their lives. What famous line in the poem just
quoted is it that makes men and mice very closely related?
_bottom of the house_: Down in the very foundation walls of the
muskrat’s house are two runways or “doors” that open under
water and so far under that they rarely if ever freeze. See
picture of such a house with its door in the author’s “Wild
Life Near Home,” page 174.
PAGE 66
_tepee_: What is a tepee?
_juicy and pink and tender_: The muskrats eat grass stems and
roots, so that under the water near the lodge you will often
find in winter little stacks of these tender pink stems and
roots ready for eating--much as the beaver stores up sticks of
tender bark under the water near his lodge for food when the
ice forms overhead.
_Winter is coming_: Are you glad or sorry? Are you ready?
CHAPTER IX
TO THE TEACHER
Let the pupils continue this list of examples of winter
preparations by watching and observing for themselves. Every
field, every tree, every roadside, will reveal the work done or
going on under their eyes. Without preaching you may draw many
an interesting and telling parallel with their own
preparation--in school for instance.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 67
“The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And what
will the Robin do then, Poor thing?”
Where does the verse come from? Mother Goose? Yes, but who was
she?
_Chipmunk_: Our little striped ground squirrel, interesting
because he has cheek-pouches and thus forms a link between the
arboreal squirrels (gray squirrels, etc.) and the ground
squirrels or spermophiles, of which the beautiful little
thirteen-lined squirrel of the prairies is an example.
_Whitefoot, the wood mouse_: The white-footed or wood mouse or
deer mouse.
PAGE 68
_Not so much as a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored_:
Why not, seeing that these are his food?
_a piece of suet for him on a certain lilac bush_: Whose bush
might it be? Is there a piece on yours?
_upon the telegraph-wires were the swallows--the first sign
that the getting ready for winter has begun_: What kind or
kinds of swallows? Have you any earlier sign?
PAGE 69
_the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow_: Name
four of the _animals_ that so find their food and shelter. Are
there any others? Look them up.
PAGE 70
_there will be suffering and death_: In your tramps afield this
winter look out for signs of suffering. There are many little
things that you can do to lessen it--a little seed scattered, a
piece of suet nailed up on a tree, a place cleared in the snow
where gravel stones can be picked up.
_or even three hundred pounds of honey_: By not allowing the
bees to swarm, and thus divide their strength, bee-keepers
often get more than three hundred pounds of comb-honey (in the
little pound boxes or sections) from a single hive. The bees
themselves require only about twenty to twenty-five pounds to
carry them through the winter.
PAGE 71
_the witch-hazels_: The witch-hazels do not yield honey so far
as the author has observed. Suppose you watch this autumn to see
if the honey-bees (do you know a honey-bee when you see _her_?)
visit it. Whence comes this quotation? From which poem of
Bryant’s:--
“when come the calm, mild days.”
_put on their storm-doors_: In modern bee-hives there is a
movable board in front upon which the bees alight when entering
the hive; this can be so turned as to make a large doorway for
the summer, and a small entrance for the cold winter.
_whole drove of forty-six woodchucks_: The author at one time
had forty-six inhabited woodchuck holes on his farm.
PAGE 72
_as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco_: The
bobolink winters even farther south--beyond the banks of the
Amazon.
_to sleep until dawn of spring_: What is the name for this
strange sleeping? What other American animals do it? Name
three.
PAGE 73
_frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice_: Of course,
this was never done intentionally: each time the frogs were
forgotten and left in the laboratory, where they froze.
PAGE 74
_they seem to have given up the struggle at once ..._: This may
not be the explanation. One of the author’s friends suggests
that it may have been caused by exposure, due to their having
been frightened in the night from their usual bed and thus
forced to roost where they could until morning.
PAGE 75
_timothy_: “Herd’s-grass” or “English hay”--as it is sometimes
called in New England.
_plenty for the birds_: What are the “weeds” made for? You
growl when you are set to pulling them in the garden. What are
they made for? Can you answer?
CHAPTER X
TO THE TEACHER
Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great
city. What can you do for your pupils there? But what _can’t_
you do? You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can
for earth, a sprig of something to plant--and surely you have
English sparrows behind the rain pipe or shutter! You may have
the harbor too, and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the
fish stores with their windows full of the sea. You have the
gardens and parks, burial-grounds and housetops, bird stores,
museums--why, bless you, you have the hand-organ man and his
monkey; you have--but I have mentioned enough. It is a hungry
little flock that you have to feed, too, and no teacher can ask
more.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 76
_An English sparrow_: Make a long and careful study of the
sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to
drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes.
The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but
carefully pulling down a sparrow’s nest with eggs in it--if you
are _sure_ it is a sparrow’s nest--is kindness, he believes, to
the other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th,
he saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a
hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author was
fishing. It is not easy to say just what our duty is in this
matter.
PAGE 77
_clack of a guinea going to roost_: The guinea-fowl as it goes
to roost frequently sets up a clacking that can be heard half a
mile away.
_an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston_: The cemetery
was the historic King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, Boston. Some
of the elm trees have since been cut down.
PAGE 78
_Cubby Hollow_: a small pond near the author’s boyhood home,
running, after a half-mile course through the woods, into
Lupton’s Pond, which falls over a dam into the meadows of
Cohansey Creek.
_on the water_: What water is it that surrounds so large a part
of the City of Boston?
PAGE 79
_the shuttered buildings_: Along some of the streets, especially
in the wholesale district, the heavy iron shutters, closed
against the high walls of the buildings, give the deserted
streets a solemn, almost a forbidding aspect.
_facing the wind_: like an anchored boat, offering the least
possible resistance to the storm.
_out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a
crowded city street_: Opportunities for watching the wild
things, for seeing and hearing the things of nature, cannot be
denied you even in the heart of the city, if you have an eye
for such things. Read Bradford Torrey’s “Birds on Boston
Common,” or the author’s “Birds from a City Roof” in the
volume called “Roof and Meadow.”
CHAPTER XI
TO THE TEACHER
This is a chapter on the large wholesomeness of contact with
nature; that even the simple, humble tasks out of doors are
attended with a freedom and a naturalness that restore one to
his real self by putting him into his original primitive
environment and by giving him an original primitive task to do.
Then, too, how good a thing it is to have something alive and
responsive to work for--if only a goat or a pig! Take occasion
to read to the class Lamb’s essay on Roast Pig--even fifth
grade pupils will get a lasting picture from it.
Again--and this is the apparent purpose of the chapter--how
impossible it is to go into the woods with anything--a
hay-rake--and not find the woods interesting!
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 80
_the unabridged dictionary_: What does “unabridged” mean?
_hay-rig_: a simple farm wagon with a “rigging” put on for
carting hay.
PAGE 81
_cord wood_: wood cut into four-foot lengths to be cut up
smaller for burning in the stove. What are the dimensions of a
cord of wood?
PAGE 82
_through the cold gray of the maple swamp below you, peers the
face of Winter_: What does one see in a maple swamp at this time
of year that looks like the “face of winter.” Think.
_he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down
over his own winter bed_: How is this meant to be taken?
_round at the barn_: It is a common custom with farmers to make
this nightly round in order to see that the stock is safe for
the night. Were you ever in a barn at night where the horses
were still munching hay, and the cattle rattling their
stanchions and horns? Recall the picture in Whittier’s
“Snow-Bound.”
PAGE 83
_diameters_: the unit of measure in the “field” or the lens of
the microscope, equivalent to “times.”
_white-footed wood mouse_: Text should read _or_ wood mouse.
There are other wood mice, but Whitefoot is known as the wood
mouse.
_gives at the touch_: an idiom, meaning _moves_ back, gives
way.
_red-backed salamander_: very common under stones; his
scientific name is _Plethodon erythronolus_.
_His “red” salamander_: Read chapter V in “Pepacton,” by
Burroughs. His salamander is the red triton, _Spelerpes ruber_.
PAGE 84
_dull ears_: Our ears are dulled by the loud and ceaseless
noises of our city life, so that we cannot hear the small voices
of nature that doubtless many of the wild creatures are capable
of hearing.
_tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla_: the one who peeps so shrill
from the meadows in spring.
“_skirl_”: a Scotch term; see “Tam O’Shanter,” by Burns: “He
screwed the pipes and gart them skirl.”
_bunches of Christmas fern_: Gathered all through the winter
here in the ledges about Mullein Hill by the florists for
floral pieces.
PAGE 85
_yellow-jacket’s nest_: one of the Vespa Wasps, _Vespa
Germanica_. Read the first chapter of “Wasps Social and
Solitary,” by G. W. and E. G. Peckham.
PAGE 86
_long-tusked boar of the forest_: The wild boar, the ancestor of
our domestic pigs is still to be found in the great game
preserves in European forests; in this country only in
zoölogical gardens.
_live in a pen_: How might one, though living in a big modern
house, well furnished and ordered, still make a “pen” of it
only.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE TEACHER
Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do
and hear a few of the _characteristic_ sights and sounds and
doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these
three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen
for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the
season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the
characteristic notes and actions of individual things--birds,
animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the
galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker’s flight, if his ear
is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a
hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil _knows_ that bird
and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy,
his habits, his family traits.
The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to
separate and distinguish things; and there is no better
training for this than to get in the way of looking and
listening for what is characteristic.
Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild
life; so that some of the _sounds_ in this chapter may need to
have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember
that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a
suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where
it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good
teacher is a very much better thing.
FOR THE PUPIL
Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard
these ten sounds; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not
stop listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing
else, learn just the day’s lesson and nothing more, your teacher
may think you a very “good scholar,” but I will tell you that
you are a poor student of nature. The woods are full of
sounds--voices, songs, whisperings--that are to be heard when
none of these ten are speaking.
PAGES 88 AND 90
_hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the
fox_: It is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as
it is usually the young foxes in the summer and fall that bark.
PAGE 91
“Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie
dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s
tread.”
“The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy
day.”
Study this whole poem (“The Death of the Flowers,” by Bryant)
for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written
it had he been ignorant of nature? Can you appreciate it all
unless you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can
sound them again to you as you read? Nature is not only
interesting for herself; but also absolutely necessary for you
to know if you would know and love poetry.
_the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive
cry; the other with a message slow and solemn_: What is the
warning, would you say, in the scream of the jay? the solemn
message in the caw of the crow?
PAGE 94
_cave days_: Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the
history of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost
wholly upon the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone
weapons.
PAGE 95
_to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon_: Some of the birds
go even farther south--away into Patagonia at the end of the
southern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no
more thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating
birds--the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for
the few weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start
back again on the long, perilous journey!
CHAPTER XIII
TO THE TEACHER
Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling
as possible to the paragraph beginning, “I love the sound of the
surf,” etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not
try to _teach_ anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful
pupil read the next section as far as, “_Honk, honk, honk_,”
beginning the third paragraph from the end. This contains the
lesson, the moral, and if you stop anywhere to talk about
bird-protection, do it here. Let a third pupil read the rest of
the chapter. Better than a moral lesson directly taught (and
such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will be the
touching of the child’s imagination by the picture of the long
night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them “To a Water Fowl,”
by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by
D. Lange (“The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life”) in the
_Atlantic_ _Monthly_ for August, 1909. Read to them Audubon’s
account of the wild goose, in his “Birds.”
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 97
_followed through our open windows_: “followed” how? Must one
have wings or a flying-machine in order to “follow” the wild
geese?
_Round and dim swung the earth below us...._: What is the
picture? It is seen from what point of view?
_the call to fly, fly, fly_: Did you ever feel the call to fly?
Ever wish you had wings? Ever start and run as Mowgli did, or
long to get up and go somewhere as the pilgrims did in the
Canterbury Tales?
PAGE 99
_in our hands to preserve_: Do you belong to the Audubon
Society, to the “Grange,” or to any of the organizations that
are trying to protect and preserve the birds? And are you doing
all you can in your neighborhood to protect them?
PAGE 100
_not in a heap of carcasses, the dead and bloody weight of mere
meat_: We may be hunters by instinct; we may love the chase, and
we may like to kill things. But do you think that means we ought
to, or that we any longer may, kill things? No; bird life has
become so scarce that even if we do want to, it is now our duty
to give over such sport in the larger interests of the whole
country, and try to find a higher, finer kind of pleasure,--as
we can in trying to photograph, or “shoot” with the camera, a
bird, getting an interesting picture in place of a dead body.
PAGE 101
_the mated pairs of the birds have flocked together_: In
domestic geese the mated pairs often live together for life; and
among the wild geese this, doubtless, is often true.
PAGE 102
_may I be awake to hear you_: In what sense “awake”?
_The wild geese are passing--southward_: the end of the autumn,
the sign that winter is here.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
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