In New England Fields And Woods

In New England Fields and Woods

By


Rowland E. Robinson

Boston and New York


Houghton, Mifflin and Company


The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1896,


By ROWLAND E. ROBINSON.




All rights reserved.

TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER

THIS BOOK

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

The weather and the changes of the seasons
are such common and convenient topics
that one need not apologize for talking about
them, though he says nothing new.

Still less need one make an apology if
he becomes garrulous in relation to scenes
which are now hidden from him by a curtain
of darkness, or concerning some humble
acquaintances with whom he was once on
familiar terms, but who now and hereafter
can only be memories, though they are yet
near him and he may still hear their voices.

So without excuse I offer this collection
of sketches, which with a few exceptions
were first published in the columns of "Forest
and Stream."

R. E. R.

[vii]

CONTENTS

[1]

IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS

I

THE NAMELESS SEASON

In the March page of our almanac, opposite
the 20th of the month we find the
bold assertion, "Now spring begins;"
but in the northern part of New England,
for which this almanac was especially
compiled, the weather does not bear out
the statement.

The snow may be gone from the fields
except in grimy drifts, in hollows and along
fences and woodsides; but there is scarcely
a sign of spring in the nakedness of pasture,
meadow, and ploughed land, now
more dreary in the dun desolation of lifeless
grass, débris of stacks, and black furrows
than when the first snow covered the
lingering greenness of December.[2]

It is quite as likely that the open lands
are still under the worn and dusty blanket
of snow, smirched with all the litter cast
upon it by cross-lot-faring teams, and wintry
winds blowing for months from every
quarter. The same untidiness pervades
all outdoors. We could never believe that
so many odds and ends could have been
thrown out of doors helter-skelter, in
three months of ordinary life, till the
proof confronts us on the surface of the
subsiding snow or lies stranded on the
bare earth. The wind comes with an
icier breath from the wintrier north, and
yet blows untempered from the south,
over fields by turns frozen and sodden,
through which the swollen brooks rush in
yellow torrents with sullen monotonous
complaint.

One may get more comfort in the woods,
though the snow still lies deep in their
shelter; for here may be found the sugar-maker's
camp, with its mixed odors of
pungent smoke and saccharine steam, its
wide environment of dripping spouts and
tinkling tin buckets, signs that at last the
pulse of the trees is stirred by a subtle
promise of returning spring.[3]

The coarse-grained snow is strewn
thickly with shards of bark that the trees
have sloughed in their long hibernation,
with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn
branches. But all this litter does
not offend the eye nor look out of place,
like that which is scattered in fields and
about homesteads. When this three
months' downfall of fragments sinks to
the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be
at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as
comely as the shifting mesh of browner
shadows that trunks and branches weave
between the splashes of sunshine. Among
these is a garnishment of green moss
patches and fronds of perennial ferns
which tell of life that the stress of winter
could not overcome. One may discover,
amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup
leaves, downy buds that promise
blossoms, and others, callower, but of like
promise, under the rusty links of the arbutus
chain.

One hears the resonant call of a woodpecker
rattled out on a seasoned branch
or hollow stub, and may catch the muffled
beat of the partridge's drum, silent since
the dreamy days of Indian summer, now[4]
throbbing again in slow and accelerated
pulsations of evasive sound through the
unroofed arches of the woodlands. And
one may hear, wondering where the poor
vagrants find food and water, the wild
clangor of the geese trumpeting their
aerial northward march, and the quick
whistle of the wild duck's pinions,—hear
the carol of an untimely bluebird and the
disconsolate yelp of a robin; but yet it is
not spring.

Presently comes a great downfall of
snow, making the earth beautiful again
with a whiteness outshining that of the
winter that is past. The damp flakes
cling to every surface, and clothe wall,
fence and tree, field and forest, with a
more radiant mantle than the dusty snow
and slanted sunshine of winter gave them.

There is nothing hopeful of spring but
a few meagre signs, and the tradition that
spring has always come heretofore.

It is not winter, it is not spring, but a
season with an individuality as marked as
either, yet without a name.[5]

II

MARCH DAYS

Back and forth across the land, in
swift and sudden alternation, the March
winds toss days of bitter cold and days of
genial warmth, now out of the eternal
winter of the north, now from the endless
summer of the tropics.

Repeated thawing and freezing has
given the snow a coarse grain. It is like
a mass of fine hailstones and with no
hint of the soft and feathery flakes that
wavered down like white blossoms shed
from the unseen bloom of some far-off
upper world and that silently transformed
the unseemliness of the black and tawny
earth into the beauty of immaculate purity.

One day, when the wind breathes from
the south a continuous breath of warmth,
your feet sink into this later coarseness
come of its base earthly association, with
a grinding slump, as in loose wet sand, so[6]
deep, perhaps, that your tracks are gray
puddles, marking your toilsome way.

As you wallow on, or perch for a moment's
rest on a naked fence-top among
the smirched drifts, you envy the crows
faring so easily along their aerial paths
above you. How pleasant are the voices
of these returning exiles, not enemies
now, but friendly messengers, bringing
tidings of spring. You do not begrudge
them the meagre feasts they find, the
frozen apple still hanging, brown and
wrinkled, in the bare orchard, or the winter-killed
youngling of flock or herd, cast
forth upon a dunghill, and which discovered,
one generous vagabond calls all his
black comrades to partake of.

Watching them as they lag across the
sky, yet swifter than the white clouds
drift above them, you presently note that
these stand still, as you may verify by
their blue shadows on the snow, lying
motionless, with the palpitating shadows
of the crows plunging into them on this
side, then, lost for an instant in the blue
obscurity, then, emerging on that side
with the same untiring beat of shadowy
wings. A puff of wind comes out of the[7]
north, followed by an angry gust, and
then a howling wintry blast that the
crows stagger against in labored flight as
they make for the shelter of the woods.

You, too, toil to shelter and fireside
warmth, and are thankful to be out of the
biting wind and the treacherous footing.
The change has come so suddenly that
the moist, grainy snow is frozen before it
has time to leach, and in a little while
gives you a surface most delightful to
walk upon, and shortens distances to half
what they were. It has lost its first pure
whiteness wherewith no other whiteness
can compare, but it is yet beyond all
things else, and in the sunlight dazzles
you with a broad glare and innumerable
scintillating points of light, as intense as
the sun itself.

The sunshine, the bracing air, the
swaying boughs of the pines and hemlocks
beckoning at the woodside, and the
firm smooth footing, irresistibly invite
you forth. Your feet devour the way
with crisp bites, and you think that nothing
could be more pleasant to them till
you are offered a few yards of turf, laid
bare by winds and sun, and then you realize[8]
that nothing is quite so good as the
old stand-by, a naked ground, and crave
more of it, even as this is, and hunger
for it with its later garnishing of grass
and flowers. The crows, too, are drawn
to these bare patches and are busy upon
them, and you wonder what they can find;
spiders, perhaps, for these you may see
in thawy days crawling sluggishly over
the snow, where they must have come
from the earth.

The woods are astir with more life than
a month ago. The squirrels are busy and
noisy, the chickadees throng about you,
sometimes singing their sweet brief song
of three notes; the nuthatches pipe their
tiny trumpets in full orchestra, and the
jays are clamoring their ordinary familiar
cries with occasional notes that you do
not often hear. One of these is a soft,
rapidly uttered cluck, the bird all the time
dancing with his body, but not with his
feet, to his own music, which is pleasant
to the ear, especially when you remember
it is a jay's music, which in the main cannot
be recommended. To-day, doubtless,
he is practicing the allurements of the
mating season.[9]

You hear the loud cackle of a logcock
making the daily round of his preserves,
but you are not likely to get more than a
glimpse of his black plumage or a gleam
of his blood-red crest.

By rare luck you may hear the little
Acadian owl filing his invisible saw, but
you are likelier to see him and mistake
him for a clot of last year's leaves lodged
midway in their fall to earth.

The forest floor, barred and netted with
blue shadows of trunks and branches, is
strewn with dry twigs, evergreen leaves,
shards of bark, and shreds of tree-moss
and lichen, with heaps of cone scales,—the
squirrel's kitchen middens,—the
sign of a partridge's nightly roosting,
similar traces of the hare's moonlight
wanderings, and perhaps a fluff of his
white fur, showing where his journeys
have ended forever in a fox's maw.

Here and there the top of a cradle
knoll crops out of the snow with its
patches of green moss, sturdy upright
stems and leaves and red berries of wintergreen,
as fresh as when the first snow
covered them, a rusty trail of mayflower
leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes[10]
of squirrelcup with a downy heart of
buds full of the promise of spring.

The woods are filled with a certain
subtle scent quite distinct from the very
apparent resinous and balsamic aroma of
the evergreens, that eludes description,
but as a kind of freshness that tickles the
nose with longing for a more generous
waft of it. You can trace it to no source,
as you can the odors of the pine and the
hemlocks or the sweet fragrance of the
boiling sap, coming from the sugar-maker's
camp with a pungent mixture of
wood-smoke. You are also made aware
that the skunk has been abroad, that
reynard is somewhere to windward, and
by an undescribed, generally unrecognized,
pungency in the air that a gray
squirrel lives in your neighborhood. Yet
among all these more potent odors you
still discover this subtle exhalation, perhaps
of the earth filtered upward through
the snow, perhaps the first awakening
breath of all the deciduous trees.

Warmer shines the sun and warmer
blows the wind from southern seas and
southern lands. More and more the[11]
tawny earth comes in sight among puddles
of melted snow, which bring the mirrored
sky and its fleecy flocks of clouds,
with treetops turned topsy-turvy, down
into the bounds of fields. The brooks
are alive again and babbling noisily over
their pebbled beds, and the lake, hearing
them, groans and cries for deliverance
from its prison of ice.

On the marshes you may find the ice
shrunken from the shores and an intervening
strip of water where the muskrat
may see the sun and the stars again.
You hear the trumpets of the wild geese
and see the gray battalion riding northward
on the swift wind.

The sun and the south wind, which
perhaps bears some faint breath of stolen
fragrance from far-off violet banks, tempt
forth the bees, but they find no flowers
yet, not even a squirrelcup or willow catkin,
and can only make the most of the
fresh sawdust by the wood-pile and the
sappy ends of maple logs.

Down from the sky, whose livery he
wears and whose song he sings, comes
the heavenly carol of the bluebird; the[12]
song sparrow trills his cheery melody;
the first robin is announced to-day, and
we cry, "Lo, spring has come." But to-morrow
may come winter and longer
waiting.[13]

III

THE HOME FIRESIDE

Weeks ago the camp-fire shed its last
glow in the deserted camp, its last thin
thread of smoke was spun out and vanished
in the silent air, and black brands
and gray ashes were covered in the even
whiteness of the snow. The unscared
fox prowls above them in curious exploration
of the desolate shanty, where
wood-mice are domiciled and to whose
sunny side the partridge comes to bask;
the woodpecker taps unbidden to enter
or departs from the always open door;
and under the stars that glitter through
the net of branches the owl perches on
the snowy ridge and mopes in undisturbed
solemnity.

For a time, camping-days are over
for the sportsman, and continue only for
the lumberman, the trapper, and the
merciless crust-hunter, who makes his
secret lair in the depths of the forest.[14]
In the chill days and evenings that fall
first in the interim between winter and
summer camping, the man who makes
his outings for sport and pleasure must
content himself by his own fireside,
whose constant flame burns throughout
the year.

Well may he be content when the untempered
winds of March howl like a
legion of wolves at his door, snow and
sleet pelt roof and pane with a continuous
volley from the lowering sky, or
when the chilly silence of the last winter
nights is broken by the sharp crack
of frozen trees and timbers, as if a hidden
band of riflemen were besieging
the house. Well may he be content,
then, with the snug corner of his own
hearthstone, around which are gathered
the good wife, the children, and his camp
companions, the dogs.

Better than the camp, is this cosy comfort
in days and nights such as these, or
in those that fall within that unnamed
season that lies between winter and
spring, when, if one stirs abroad, his feet
have sorry choice between saturated
snow and oozy mould,—a dismal season[15]
but for its promise of brighter days, of
free streams, green trees, and bird songs.

Better, now, this genial glow that
warms one's marrow than the camp-fire
that smokes or roasts one's front while
his back freezes. With what perfect
contentment one mends his tackle and
cleans his gun for coming days of sport,
while the good wife reads racy records
of camp-life from Maine to California,
and he listens with attention half diverted
by break or rust spot, or with
amused watching of the youngsters playing
at camping out. The callow campers
assail him with demands for stories, and
he goes over, for their and his own enjoyment,
old experiences in camp and
field, while the dogs dream by the fire
of sport past or to come,—for none but
dogs know whether dog's dreams run
backward or forward.

Long-used rod and gun suggest many
a tale of past adventure as they bring to
mind recollections of days of sport such
as may never come again. The great
logs in the fireplace might tell, if their
flaming tongues were given speech, of
camps made long ago beneath their lusty[16]
branches, and of such noble game as we
shall never see,—moose, elk, deer, panther,
wolf, and bear, which are but spectres
in the shadowy forest of the past.
But the red tongues only roar and hiss
as they lick the crackling sinews of oak
and hickory, and tell nothing that ordinary
ears may catch. Yet one is apt to
fall dreaming of bygone days, and then
of days that may come to be spent by
pleasant summer waters and in the woods
gorgeous with the ripeness of autumn.

So one is like to dream till he awakens
and finds himself left with only the dogs
for comrades, before the flameless embers,
deserted even by the shadows that
erstwhile played their grotesque pranks
behind him. Cover the coals as if they
were to kindle to-morrow's camp-fire, put
the yawning dogs to bed, and then to
bed and further dreaming.[17]

IV

THE CROW

The robin's impatient yelp not yet attuned
to happy song, the song sparrow's
trill, the bluebird's serene melody, do
not herald the coming of spring, but attend
its vanguard. These blithe musicians
accompany the soft air that bares
the fields, empurples the buds, and fans
the bloom of the first squirrelcups and
sets the hyla's shrill chime a-ringing.

Preceding these, while the fields are
yet an unbroken whiteness and the coping
of the drifts maintain the fantastic
grace of their storm-built shapes, before
a recognized waft of spring is felt or the
voice of a freed stream is heard, comes
that sable pursuivant, the crow, fighting
his way against the fierce north wind,
tossed alow and aloft, buffeted to this
side and that, yet staggering bravely onward,
and sounding his trumpet in the
face of his raging antagonist, and far in[18]
advance of its banners, proclaiming
spring.

It is the first audible promise of the
longed-for season, and it heartens us,
though there be weary days of waiting
for its fulfillment, while the bold herald
is beset by storm and pinched with hunger
as he holds his outpost and gleans
his scant rations in the winter-desolated
land.

He finds some friendliness in nature
even now. Though her forces assail him
with relentless fury, she gives him here
the shelter of her evergreen tents, in
windless depths of woodland; bares for
him there a rood of sward or stubble
whereon to find some crumb of comfort;
leaves for him ungathered apples on the
naked boughs, and on the unpruned
tangles of vines wild grapes,—poor
raisins of the frost,—the remnants of
autumnal feasts of the robins and partridges.

Thankful now for such meagre fare
and eager for the fullness of disgusting
repasts, in the bounty of other seasons,
he becomes an epicure whom only the
choicest food will satisfy. He has the[19]
pick of the fattest grubs; he makes
stealthy levies on the earliest robins'
nests; and from some lofty lookout or
aerial scout watches the farmer plant
the corn and awaits its sprouting into
the dainty tidbits, a fondness for whose
sweetness is his overmastering weakness.
For this he braves the terrible scarecrow
and the dread mystery of the cornfield's
lined boundary, for this risks life and
forfeits the good name that his better
deeds might give him. If he would not
be tempted from grubs and carrion, what
a worthy bird he might be accounted.
In what good if humble repute might he
live, how lamented, die. O Appetite!
thou base belly-denned demon, for what
sins of birds and men art thou accountable!

In the springtide days, the crow turns
aside from theft and robbery to the
softer game of love, whereunto you hear
the harsh voice attuned in cluttering
notes. After the wooing the pair begin
house building and keeping.

It is the rudest and clumsiest of all
bird architecture that has become the
centre of their cares—such a jumble of[20]
sticks and twigs as chance might pile on
its forked foundations; but woe betide
the hawk who ventures near, or owl who
dares to sound his hollow trumpet in
the sacred precincts. At the first alarm
signal, as suddenly and mysteriously as
Robin Hood's merry men appeared at
the winding of his horn, the black clansmen
rally from every quarter of the
greenwood, to assail the intruder and
force him to ignominious retreat.

When at last the young crows, having
clad their uncouth nakedness with full
sable raiment, are abroad in the world,
they, with unwary foolhardiness and incessant
querulous cries of hunger or
alarm, are still a constant source of anxiety
to parents and kindred. But in
the late summer, when the youngsters
have come to months of discretion and
the elders are freed from the bondage
of their care, a long holiday begins for
all the tribe. The corn has long since
ceased to tempt them, and the persecution
of man has abated. The shorn
meadows and the close-cropped pastures
swarm with grasshoppers, and field and
forest offer their abundant fruits.[21]

Careless and uncared for, what happy
lives they lead, sauntering on sagging
wing through the sunshine from chosen
field to chosen wood, and at nightfall
encamping in the fragrant tents of the
pines.

At last the gay banners of autumn
signal departure, and the gathered clans
file away in straggling columns, flecking
the blue sky with pulsating dots of blackness,
the green earth with wavering
shadows. Sadly we watch the retreat of
the sable cohorts, whose desertion leaves
our northern homes to the desolation of
winter.[22]

V

THE MINK

This little fur-bearer, whose color has
been painted darker than it is, singularly
making his name proverbial for blackness,
is an old acquaintance of the angler
and the sportsman, but not so familiar
to them and the country boy as it was
twoscore years ago.

It was a woeful day for the tribe of
the mink when it became the fashion for
other folk to wear his coat, which he
could only doff with the subtler garment
of life.

Throughout the term of his exaltation
to the favor of fashion, he was lain
in wait for at his own door and on his
thoroughfares and by-paths by the traps,
dead-falls, and guns of professional and
amateur trappers and hunters, till the
fate of his greater cousin the otter
seemed to overtake him. But the fickle
empress who raised him to such perilous[23]
estate, changing her mood, thrust him
down almost to his old ignoble but safer
rank, just in time to avert the impending
doom of extermination. Once more the
places that knew him of old, know him
again.

In the March snow you may trace the
long span of his parallel footprints where,
hot with the rekindled annual fire of love,
he has sped on his errant wooing, turning
not aside for the most tempting bait,
halting not for rest, hungering only for
a sweetheart, wearied with nothing but
loneliness. Yet weary enough would
you be if you attempted to follow the
track of but one night's wandering along
the winding brook, through the tangle
of windfalls, and across the rugged ledges
that part stream from stream. When
you go fishing in the first days of summer,
you may see the fruits of this early
springtide wooing in the dusky brood
taking their primer-lesson in the art that
their primogenitors were adepts in before
yours learned it. How proud one
baby fisher is of his first captured minnow,
how he gloats over it and defends[24]
his prize from his envious and less fortunate
brothers.

When summer wanes, they will be a
scattered family, each member shifting
for himself. Some still haunt the alder
thicket where they first saw light, whose
netted shadows of bare branches have
thickened about them to continued
shade of leafage, in whose midday twilight
the red flame of the cardinal flower
burns as a beacon set to guide the dusky
wanderer home. Others have adventured
far down the winding brook to
the river, and followed its slowing current,
past rapids and cataract, to where
it crawls through the green level of
marshes beloved of water fowl and of
gunners, whose wounded victims, escaping
them, fall an easy prey to the lurking
mink.

Here, too, in their season are the
tender ducklings of wood duck, teal, and
dusky duck, and, all the year round, fat
muskrats, which furnish for the price of
conquest a banquet that the mink most
delights in.

In the wooded border are homes ready
builded for him under the buttressed[25]
trunks of elms, or in the hollow boles of
old water maples, and hidden pathways
through fallen trees and under low green
arches of ferns.

With such a home and such bountiful
provision for his larder close at hand,
what more could the heart and stomach
of mink desire? Yet he may not be satisfied,
but longs for the wider waters of
the lake, whose translucent depths reveal
to him all who swim beneath him, fry innumerable;
perch displaying their scales
of gold, shiners like silver arrows shot
through the green water, the lesser bass
peering out of rocky fastnesses, all attainable
to this daring fisher, but not his
great rivals, the bronze-mailed bass and
the mottled pike, whose jaws are wide
enough to engulf even him.

Here, while you rest on your idle oar
or lounge with useless rod, you may see
him gliding behind the tangled net of
cedar roots, or venturing forth from a
cranny of the rocks down to the brink,
and launching himself so silently that
you doubt whether it is not a flitting
shadow till you see his noiseless wake[26]
breaking the reflections lengthening out
behind him.

Of all swimmers that breathe the free
air none can compare with him in swiftness
and in a grace that is the smooth
and even flow of the poetry of motion.
Now he dives, or rather vanishes from
the surface, nor reappears till his wake
has almost flickered out.

His voyage accomplished, he at once
sets forth on exploration of new shores
or progress through his established domain,
and vanishes from sight before
his first wet footprints have dried on the
warm rock where he landed.

You are glad to have seen him, thankful
that he lives, and you hope that,
sparing your chickens and your share of
trout, partridges, and wild ducks, he too
may be spared from the devices of the
trapper to fill his appointed place in the
world's wildness.[27]

VI

APRIL DAYS

At last there is full and complete assurance
of spring, in spite of the baldness
of the woods, the barrenness of
the fields, bleak with sodden furrows of
last year's ploughing, or pallidly tawny
with bleached grass, and untidy with the
jetsam of winter storms and the wide
strewn litter of farms in months of foddering
and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in
such incongruities as a phœbe a-perch
on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of
grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping
in airy loops of flight upon the flies
that buzz across this begrimed remnant
of winter's ermine, and of squirrelcups
flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face
of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter
gone, hangs in dull whiteness down
the ledges, greening the moss with the
moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.[28]

The woodchuck and chipmunk have
got on top of the world again. You
hear the half querulous, half chuckling
whistle of the one, the full-mouthed persistent
cluck of the other, voicing recognition
of the season.

The song of the brooks has abated
something of its first triumphant swell,
and is often overborne now by the jubilant
chorus of the birds, the jangled,
liquid gurgle and raucous grating of the
blackbirds, the robin's joyous song with
its frequent breaks, as if the thronging
notes outran utterance, the too brief
sweetness of the meadowlark's whistle,
the bluebird's carol, the cheery call of
the phœbe, the trill of the song sparrow,
and above them all the triumph of the
hawk in its regained possessions of northern
sky and earth.

The woods throb with the muffled
beat of the partridge's drum and the
sharp tattoo of the woodpecker, and are
filled again with the sounds of insect
life, the spasmodic hum of flies, the
droning monotone of bees busy among
the catkins and squirrelcups, and you
may see a butterfly, wavering among the[29]
gray trees, soon to come to the end of
his life, brief at its longest, drowned in
the seductive sweets of a sap bucket.

The squirrels are chattering over the
wine of the maple branches they have
broached, in merrier mood than the
hare, who limps over the matted leaves
in the raggedness of shifting raiment,
fitting himself to a new inconspicuousness.

We shall not find it unpleasant nor
unprofitable to take to the woods now,
for we may be sure that they are pleasanter
than the untidy fields. Where
nature has her own way with herself, she
makes her garb seemly even now, after
all the tousling and rents she gave it in
her angry winter moods. The scraps of
moss, bark, and twigs with which the
last surface of the snow was obtrusively
littered lie now unnoticed on the flat-pressed
leaves, an umber carpet dotted
here with flecks of moss, there sprigged
with fronds of evergreen fern, purple
leaves of squirrelcups, with their downy
buds and first blossoms. Between banks
so clad the brook babbles as joyously as
amid all the bloom and leafage of June,[30]
and catches a brighter gleam from the
unobstructed sunbeams. So befittingly
are the trees arrayed in graceful tracery
of spray and beads of purpling buds,
that their seemly nakedness is as beautiful
as attire of summer's greenness
or autumn's gorgeousness could make
them.

Never sweeter than now, after the
long silence of winter, do the birds'
songs sound, and never in all the round
of the year is there a better time to see
them than when the gray haze of the
branches is the only hiding for their gay
wedding garments.

If you would try your skill at still-hunting,
follow up that muffled roll that
throbs through the woods, and if you
discover the ruffed grouse strutting upon
his favorite log, and undiscovered by
him can watch his proud performance,
you will have done something better
worth boasting of than bringing him to
earth from his hurtling flight.

Out of the distant fields come, sweet
and faint, the call of the meadowlark
and the gurgle of the blackbirds that
throng the brookside elms. From high[31]
overhead come down the clarion note of
the goose, the sibilant beat of the wild
ducks' wings, the bleat of the snipe and
the plover's cry, each making his way to
northern breeding grounds. Are you not
glad they are going as safely as their uncaught
shadows that sweep swiftly across
the shadowy meshes of the forest floor?
Are you not content to see what you see,
hear what you hear, and kill nothing but
time?

Verily, you shall have a clearer conscience
than if you were disturbing the
voice of nature with the discordant uproar
of your gun, and marring the fresh
odors of spring with the fumes of villainous
saltpetre.

In the open marshes the lodges of the
muskrats have gone adrift in the floods;
but the unhoused inmates count this a
light misfortune, since they may voyage
again with heads above water, and go
mate-seeking and food-gathering in sunshine
and starlight, undimmed by roof
of ice. As you see them cutting the
smooth surface with long, swift, arrowy
wakes, coasting the low shore in quest of
brown sweethearts and wives, whimpering[32]
their plaintive call, you can hardly
imagine the clumsy body between that
grim head and rudder-like tail capable
of such graceful motion.

The painted wood drake swims above
the submerged tree roots; a pair of dusky
ducks splash to flight, with a raucous
clamor, out of a sedgy cove at your approach;
the thronging blackbirds shower
liquid melody and hail of discord from
the purple-budded maples above you.
All around, from the drift of floating and
stranded water weeds, arises the dry,
crackling croak of frogs, and from sunny
pools the vibrant trill of toads.

From afar come the watery boom of a
bittern, the song of a trapper and the
hollow clang of his setting pole dropping
athwart the gunwales of his craft, the
distant roar of a gun and the echoes
rebounding from shore to shore.

The grateful odor of the warming
earth comes to your nostrils; to your
ears, from every side, the sounds of
spring; and yet you listen for fuller confirmation
of its presence in the long-drawn
wail of the plover and the rollicking
melody of the bobolink.[33]

VII

THE WOODCHUCK

Chancing to pass a besmirched April
snowbank on the border of a hollow, you
see it marked with the footprints of an
old acquaintance of whom for months
you have not seen even so much as this.

It is not that he made an autumnal
pilgrimage, slowly following the swift
birds and the retreating sun, that you
had no knowledge of him, but because of
his home-keeping, closer than a hermit's
seclusion. These few cautious steps,
venturing but half way from his door to
the tawny naked grass that is daily edging
nearer to his threshold, are the first
he has taken abroad since the last bright
lingering leaf fluttered down in the Indian
summer haze, or perhaps since the
leaves put on their first autumnal tints.

He had seen all the best of the year,
the blooming of the first flowers, the
springing of the grass and its growth,[34]
the gathering of the harvests and the
ripening of fruits, and possibly the gorgeousness
of autumn melting into sombre
gray. He had heard all the glad songs
of all the birds and the sad notes of farewell
of bobolink and plover to their summer
home; he had seen the swallows
depart and had heard the droning of the
bumblebee among the earliest and latest
of his own clover blossoms. All the
best the world had to give in the round
of her seasons, luxuriant growth to feed
upon, warm sunshine to bask in, he had
enjoyed; of her worst, he would have none.

So he bade farewell to the gathering
desolation of the tawny fields and crept
closer to the earth's warm heart to sleep
through the long night of winter, till the
morning of spring. The wild scurry of
wind-tossed leaves swept above him unheard,
and the pitiless beat of autumnal
rain and the raging of winter storms that
heaped the drifts deeper and deeper over
his forsaken door. The bitterness of
cold, that made the furred fox and the
muffled owl shiver, never touched him
in his warm nest. So he shirked the
hardships of winter without the toil of a[35]
journey in pursuit of summer, while the
starved fox prowled in the desolate woods
and barren fields, the owl hunted beneath
the cold stars, and the squirrel delved in
the snow for his meagre fare.

By and by the ethereal but potent spirit
of spring stole in where the frost-elves
could not enter, and awakening the earth
awakened him. Not by a slow and often
impeded invasion of the senses, but as by
the sudden opening of a door, he sees the
naked earth again warming herself in the
sun, and hears running water and singing
birds. No wonder that with such surprise
the querulous tremolo of his whistle is
sharply mingled with these softer voices.

Day by day as he sees the sun-loved
banks blushing greener, he ventures further
forth to visit neighbors or watch his
clover, or dig a new home in a more favored
bank, or fortify himself in some
rocky stronghold where boys and dogs
may not enter. Now, the family may
be seen moving, with no burden of furniture
or provision, but only the mother
with her gray cubs, carried as a cat carries
her kittens, one by one to the new
home among the fresher clover.[36]

On the mound of newly digged earth
before it, is that erect, motionless, gray
and russet form a half decayed stump
uprising where no tree has grown within
your memory? You move a little nearer
to inspect the strange anomaly, and lo!
it vanishes, and you know it was your
old acquaintance, the woodchuck, standing
guard at his door and overlooking
his green and blossoming domain.

Are you not sorry, to-day at least, to
hear the boys and the dog besieging
him in his burrow or in the old stone
wall wherein he has taken sanctuary?
Surely, the first beautiful days of his
open-air life should not be made so miserable
that he would wish himself asleep
again in the safety and darkness of winter.
But you remember that you were
once a boy, and your sympathies are divided
between the young savages and
their intended prey, which after all is
likelier than not to escape.

He will tangle the meadow-grass and
make free with the bean patch if he
chances upon it, yet you are glad to see
the woodchuck, rejoicing like yourself in
the advent of spring.[37]

VIII

THE CHIPMUNK

As the woodchuck sleeps away the
bitterness of cold, so in his narrower
chamber sleeps the chipmunk. Happy
little hermit, lover of the sun, mate of
the song sparrow and the butterflies,
what a goodly and hopeful token of the
earth's renewed life is he, verifying the
promises of his own chalices, the squirrelcups,
set in the warmest corners of
the woodside, with libations of dew and
shower drops, of the bluebird's carol, the
sparrow's song of spring.

Now he comes forth from his long
night into the fullness of sunlit day, to
proclaim his awakening to his summer
comrades, a gay recluse clad all in the
motley, a jester, maybe, yet no fool.

His voice, for all its monotony, is
inspiring of gladness and contentment,
whether he utters his thin, sharp chip or
full-mouthed cluck, or laughs a chittering[38]
mockery as he scurries in at his narrow
door.

He winds along his crooked pathway
of the fence rails and forages for half-forgotten
nuts in the familiar grounds,
brown with strewn leaves or dun with
dead grass. Sometimes he ventures to
the top rail and climbs to a giddy ten-foot
height on a tree, whence he looks
abroad, wondering, on the wide expanse
of an acre.

Music hath charms for him, and you
may entrance him with a softly whistled
tune and entice him to frolic with a
herds-grass head gently moved before
him.

When the fairies have made the white
curd of mallow blossoms into cheeses
for the children and the chipmunk, it
is a pretty sight to see him gathering
his share handily and toothily stripping
off the green covers, filling his cheek
pouches with the dainty disks and scampering
away to his cellar with his ungrudged
portion. Alack the day, when
the sweets of the sprouting corn tempt
him to turn rogue, for then he becomes
a banned outlaw, and the sudden thunder[39]
of the gun announces his tragic fate.
He keeps well the secret of constructing
his cunning house, without a show of
heaped or scattered soil at its entrance.
Bearing himself honestly, and escaping
his enemies, the cat, the hawk, and the
boy, he lives a long day of happy inoffensive
life. Then when the filmy curtain
of the Indian summer falls upon the
year again, he bids us a long good-night.[40]

IX

SPRING SHOOTING

The Ram makes way for the Bull;
March goes out and April comes in with
sunshine and showers, smiles and tears.
The sportsman has his gun in hand
again with deadly purpose, as the angler
his rod and tackle with another intention
than mere overhauling and putting
to rights. The smiles of April are for
them.

The geese come wedging their way
northward; the ducks awaken the silent
marshes with the whistle of their pinions;
the snipe come in pairs and wisps
to the thawing bogs—all on their way
to breeding grounds and summer homes.
The tears of April are for them. Wherever
they stop for a day's or an hour's
rest, and a little food to strengthen and
hearten them for their long journey, the
deadly, frightful gun awaits to kill, maim,
or terrify, more merciless than all the[41]
ills that nature inflicts in her unkindest
moods.

Year after year men go on making
laws and crying for more, to protect
these fowl in summer, but in spring,
when as much as ever they need protection,
the hand of man is ruthlessly
against them.

When you made that splendid shot
last night in the latest gloaming that
would show you the sight of your gun,
and cut down that ancient goose, tougher
than the leather of your gun-case, and
almost as edible, of how many well-grown
young geese of next November did you
cheat yourself, or some one else of the
brotherhood?

When from the puddle, where they
were bathing their tired wings, sipping
the nectar of muddy water, and nibbling
the budding leaves of water weeds, you
started that pair of ducks yesterday, and
were so proud of tumbling them down
right and left, you killed many more
than you saw then; many that you
might have seen next fall.

When the sun was shining down so
warm upon the steaming earth that the[42]
robins and bluebirds sang May songs,
those were very good shots you made,
killing ten snipe straight and clean, and—they
were very bad shots. For in
November the ten might have been four
times ten fat and lusty, lazy fellows,
boring the oozy margins of these same
pools where the frogs are croaking and
the toads are singing to-day.

"Well, it's a long time to wait from
November till the earth ripens and
browns to autumn again. Life is short
and shooting days are few at most. Let
us shoot our goose while we may, though
she would lay a golden egg by and by."

Farmers do not kill their breeding
ewes in March, nor butcher cows that
are to calve in a month; it does not pay.
Why should sportsmen be less provident
of the stock they prize so dearly; stock
that has so few care-takers, so many
enemies? Certainly, it does not pay in
the long run.[43]

X

THE GARTER-SNAKE

When the returned crows have become
such familiar objects in the forlorn unclad
landscape of early spring that they
have worn out their first welcome, and
the earliest songbirds have come to stay
in spite of inhospitable weather that
seems for days to set the calendar back
a month, the woods invite you more than
the fields. There nature is least under
man's restraint and gives the first signs
of her reawakening. In windless nooks
the sun shines warmest between the
meshes of the slowly drifting net of
shadows.

There are patches of moss on gray
rocks and tree trunks. Fairy islands of
it, that will not be greener when they are
wet with summer showers, arise among
the brown expanse of dead leaves. The
gray mist of branches and undergrowth is
enlivened with a tinge of purple. Here[44]
and there the tawny mat beneath is uplifted
by the struggling plant life below
it or pierced through by an underthrust
of a sprouting seed. There is a promise
of bloom in blushing arbutus buds,
a promise even now fulfilled by the first
squirrelcups just out of their furry bracts
and already calling the bees abroad.
Flies are buzzing to and fro in busy
idleness, and a cricket stirs the leaves
with a sudden spasm of movement. The
first of the seventeen butterflies that shall
give boys the freedom of bare feet goes
wavering past like a drifting blossom.

A cradle knoll invites you to a seat on
the soft, warm cushion of dead leaves
and living moss and purple sprigs of
wintergreen with their blobs of scarlet
berries, which have grown redder and
plumper under every snow of the winter.
This smoothly rounded mound and the
hollow scooped beside it, brimful now of
amber, sun-warmed water, mark the ancient
place of a great tree that was dead
and buried, and all traces by which its
kind could be identified were mouldered
away and obliterated, before you were
born.[45]

The incessant crackling purr of the
wood-frogs is interrupted at your approach,
and they disappear till the
wrinkled surface of the oblong pool
grows smooth again and you perceive
them sprawled along the bottom on the
leaf paving of their own color. As you
cast a casual glance on your prospective
seat, carelessly noting the mingling of
many hues, the brightness of the berries
seems most conspicuous, till a moving
curved and recurved gleam of gold on
black and a flickering flash of red catch
your eye and startle you with an involuntary
revulsion.

With charmed eyes held by this new
object, you grope blindly for a stick or
stone. But, if you find either, forbear
to strike. Do not blot out one token of
spring's awakening nor destroy one life
that rejoices in it, even though it be so
humble a life as that of a poor garter-snake.
He is so harmless to man, that,
were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy,
our hands would not be raised
against him; and, if he were not a snake,
we should call him beautiful in his stripes
of black and gold, and in graceful motion[46]—a
motion that charms us in the undulation
of waves, in their flickering reflections
of sunlight on rushy margins and
wooded shores, in the winding of a brook
through a meadow, in the flutter of a
pennant and the flaunting of a banner,
the ripple of wind-swept meadow and
grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs.
His colors are fresh and bright as ever
you will see them, though he has but to-day
awakened from a long sleep in continual
darkness.

He is simply enjoying the free air and
warm sunshine without a thought of
food for all his months of fasting. Perhaps
he has forgotten that miserable necessity
of existence. When at last he
remembers that he has an appetite, you
can scarcely imagine that he can have
any pleasure in satisfying it with one
huge mouthful of twice or thrice the
ordinary diameter of his gullet. If you
chance to witness his slow and painful
gorging of a frog, you hear a cry of distress
that might be uttered with equal
cause by victim or devourer. When he
has fully entered upon the business of
reawakened life, many a young field-mouse[47]
and noxious insect will go into
his maw to his own and your benefit.
If there go also some eggs and callow
young of ground-nesting birds, why
should you question his right, you, who defer
slaughter out of pure selfishness, that
a little later you may make havoc among
the broods of woodcock and grouse?

Of all living things, only man disturbs
the nicely adjusted balance of nature.
The more civilized he becomes the more
mischievous he is. The better he calls
himself, the worse he is. For uncounted
centuries the bison and the Indian
shared a continent, but in two hundred
years or so the white man has destroyed
the one and spoiled the other.

Surely there is little harm in this
lowly bearer of a name honored in
knighthood, and the motto of the noble
order might be the legend written on
his gilded mail, "Evil to him who evil
thinks." If this sunny patch of earth is
not wide enough for you to share with
him, leave it to him and choose another
for yourself. The world is wide enough
for both to enjoy this season of its promise.[48]

XI

THE TOAD

During our summer acquaintance
with her, when we see her oftenest, a
valued inhabitant of our garden and a
welcome twilight visitor at our threshold,
we associate silence with the toad, almost
as intimately as with the proverbially
silent clam. In the drouthy or too moist
summer days and evenings, she never
awakens our hopes or fears with shrill
prophecies of rain as does her nimbler
and more aspiring cousin, the tree-toad.

A rustle of the cucumber leaves that
embower her cool retreat, the spat and
shuffle of her short, awkward leaps, are
the only sounds that then betoken her
presence, and we listen in vain for even
a smack of pleasure or audible expression
of self-approval, when, after a nervous,
gratulatory wriggle of her hinder
toes, she dips forward and, with a lightning-like
out-flashing of her unerring[49]
tongue, she flicks into her jaws a fly or
bug. She only winks contentedly to
express complete satisfaction at her performance
and its result.

Though summer's torrid heat cannot
warm her to any voice, springtime and
love make her tuneful, and every one
hears the softly trilled, monotonous song
jarring the mild air, but few know who
is the singer. The drumming grouse
is not shyer of exhibiting his performance.

From a sun-warmed pool not fifty
yards away a full chorus of the rapidly
vibrant voices arises, and you imagine
that the performers are so absorbed with
their music that you may easily draw
near and observe them. But when you
come to the edge of the pool you see
only a half-dozen concentric circles of
wavelets, widening from central points,
where as many musicians have modestly
withdrawn beneath the transparent curtain.

Wait, silent and motionless, and they
will reappear. A brown head is thrust
above the surface, and presently your
last summer's familiar of the garden[50]
and doorstep crawls slowly out upon a
barren islet of cobble-stone, and, assured
that no intruder is within the precincts
sacred to the wooing of the toads, she inflates
her throat and tunes up her long,
monotonous chant. Ere it ceases, another
and another take it up, and from
distant pools you hear it answered, till
all the air is softly shaken as if with
the clear chiming of a hundred swift-struck,
tiny bells. They ring in the returning
birds, robin, sparrow, finch and
meadow lark, and the first flowers, squirrelcup,
arbutus, bloodroot, adder-tongue
and moose-flower.

When the bobolink has come to his
northern domain again and the oriole
flashes through the budding elms and
the first columbine droops over the gray
ledges, you may still hear an occasional
ringing of the toads, but a little later the
dignified and matronly female, having
lost her voice altogether, has returned
to her summer home, while her little
mate has exchanged his trill for a disagreeable
and uncanny squawk, perhaps
a challenge to his rivals, who linger[51]
about the scenes of their courtship and
make night hideous until midsummer.
Then a long silence falls on the race of
toads—a silence which even hibernation
scarcely deepens.[52]

XII

MAY DAYS

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped
southward slopes and the tawny tangles
of the swales are kindling to living green
with the blaze of the sun and the moist
tinder of the brook's overflow.

The faithful swallows have returned,
though the faithless season delays. The
flicker flashes his golden shafts in the
sunlight and gladdens the ear with his
merry cackle. The upland plover wails
his greeting to the tussocked pastures,
where day and night rings the shrill
chorus of the hylas and the trill of the
toads continually trembles in the soft
air.

The first comers of the birds are already
mated and nest-building, robin and
song sparrow each in his chosen place
setting the foundations of his house with
mud or threads of dry grass. The crow
clutters out his softest love note. The[53]
flicker is mining a fortress in the heart of
an old apple-tree.

The squirrels wind a swift ruddy chain
about a boll in their love chase, and
even now you may surprise the vixen
fox watching the first gambols of her
tawny cubs by the sunny border of the
woods.

The gray haze of undergrowth and
lofty ramage is turning to a misty green,
and the shadows of opening buds knot
the meshed shadows of twigs on the
brown forest floor, which is splashed with
white moose-flowers and buds of bloodroot,
like ivory-tipped arrows, each in a
green quiver, and yellow adder-tongues
bending above their mottled beds, and
rusty trails of arbutus leaves leading to
the secret of their hidden bloom, which
their fragrance half betrays.

Marsh marigolds lengthen their golden
chain, link by link, along the ditches.
The maples are yellow with paler bloom,
and the graceful birches are bent with
their light burden of tassels. The dandelion
answers the sun, the violet the sky.
Blossom and greenness are everywhere;
even the brown paths of the plough[54]
and harrow are greening with springing
grain.

We listen to the cuckoo's monotonous
flute among the white drifts of orchard
bloom and the incessant murmur of bees,
the oriole's half plaintive carol as of departed
joys in the elms, and the jubilant
song of the bobolink in the meadows,
where he is not an outlaw but a welcome
guest, mingling his glad notes with the
merry voices of flower-gathering children,
as by and by he will with the ringing cadence
of the scythe and the vibrant chirr
of the mower. Down by the flooded
marshes the scarlet of the water maples
and the flash of the starling's wing are
repeated in the broad mirror of the still
water. The turtle basks on the long incline
of stranded logs.

Tally-sticks cast adrift are a symbol
that the trapper's warfare against the
muskrats is ended and that the decimated
remnant of the tribe is left in peace to
reëstablish itself. The spendthrift waste
of untimely shooting is stayed. Wild
duck, plover, and snipe have entered
upon the enjoyment of a summer truce
that will be unbroken, if the collector is[55]
not abroad at whose hands science ruthlessly
demands mating birds and callow
brood.

Of all sportsmen only the angler, often
attended by his winged brother the
kingfisher, is astir, wandering by pleasant
waters where the bass lurks in the
tangles of an eddy's writhing currents,
or the perch poises and then glides
through the intangible golden meshes
that waves and sunlight knit, or where
the trout lies poised beneath the silver
domes of foam bells.

The loon laughs again on the lake.
Again the freed waves toss the shadows
of the shores and the white reflections
of white sails, and flash back the sunlight
or the glitter of stars and the beacon's
rekindled gleam.

Sun and sky, forest, field, and water,
bird and blossom, declare the fullness of
spring and the coming of summer.[56]

XIII

THE BOBOLINK

The woods have changed from the
purple of swelling buds to the tender
grayish green of opening leaves, and the
sward is green again with new grass,
when this pied troubadour, more faithful
to the calendar than leaf or flower, comes
back from his southern home to New
England meadows to charm others than
his dusky ladylove with his merry song.
He seldom disappoints us by more than
a day in the date of his arrival, and never
fails to receive a kindly welcome, though
the fickle weather may be unkind.

"The bobolinks have come" is as joyful
a proclamation as announces the return
of the bluebird and robin. Here no
shotted salute of gun awaits him, and he
is aware that he is in a friendly country.
Though he does not court familiarity, he
tolerates approach; and permits you to
come within a dozen yards of the fence[57]
stake he has alighted on, and when you
come nearer he goes but to the next,
singing the prelude or finale of his song
as he flies. Fewer yards above your
head he poises on wing to sing it from
beginning to end, you know not whether
with intent to taunt you or to charm you,
but he only accomplishes the latter. He
seems to know that he does not harm
us and that he brings nothing that we
should not lose by killing him. Yet
how cunningly he and his mate hide
their nest in the even expanse of grass.
That is a treasure he will not trust us
with the secret of, and, though there
may be a dozen in the meadow, we
rarely find one.

Our New England fathers had as
kindly a feeling for this blithe comer to
their stumpy meadows, though they gave
him the uncouth and malodorous name
of skunk blackbird. He sang as sweetly
to them as he does to us, and he too was
a discoverer and a pioneer, finding and
occupying meadows full of sunshine
where had only been the continual shade
of the forest, where no bobolink had
ever been before. Now he has miles of[58]
grassy sunlit fields wherein he sings violet
and buttercup, daisy and clover into
bloom and strawberries into ripeness,
and his glad song mingles with the
happy voices of the children who come
to gather them, and also chimes with the
rarer music of the whetted scythe.

Then, long before the summer is past,
he assumes the sober dress of his mate
and her monosyllabic note, and fades so
gradually out of our sight and hearing
that he departs without our being aware
of it. Summer still burns with unabated
fervor, when we suddenly realize that
there are no bobolinks. Nor are there
any under the less changeful skies
whither our changed bird has flown to
be a reed-bird or rice-bird and to find
mankind his enemies. He is no longer
a singer but a gourmand and valued only
as a choice morsel, doubtless delicious,
yet one that should choke a New Englander.[59]

XIV

THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER

The migrant woodpecker whose cheery
cackle assures us of the certainty of
spring is rich in names that well befit
him. If you take to high-sounding
titles for your humble friends, you will
accept Colaptes auratus, as he flies above
you, borrowing more gold of the sunbeams
that shine through his yellow
pinions, or will be content to call him
simply golden-winged. When he flashes
his wings in straight-away flight before
you, or sounds his sharp, single note of
alarm, or peers down from the door of
his lofty tower, or hangs on its wooden
wall, or clinging to a fence stake displays
his mottled back, you recognize the fitness
of each name the country folk have
given him—flicker, yellow-hammer, yarrup,
highhole or highholder, and what
Thoreau often termed him, partridge-woodpecker.
It is a wonder that the[60]
joyous cackle wherewith he announces
his return from his winter sojourn in the
South has not gained him another, and
that love note, so like the slow whetting
of a knife upon a steel, still another.
Perhaps it is because they are especially
sounds of spring and seldom if ever
heard after the season of joyful arrival
and love-making.

During the same season you frequently
hear him attuning his harsh sharp voice
to its softest note of endearment, a long-drawn
and modulated variation of his
cackle. When household cares begin,
the lord and lady of the wooden tower,
like too many greater and wiser two-legged
folk, give over singing and soft
words. At home and abroad their deportment
is sober and business-like, and
except for an occasional alarm-cry they
are mostly silent.

As you wander through the orchard
of an early midsummer day and pause
beside an old apple-tree to listen to the
cuckoo's flute or admire the airy fabric
of the wood pewee's nest, a larger scale
of lichen on the lichened boughs, you
hear a smothered vibrant murmur close[61]
beside you, as if the heart of the old tree
was pulsating with audible life. It is
startlingly suggestive of disturbed yellow-jackets,
but when you move around
the trunk in cautious reconnoissance, you
discover the round portal of a flicker's
home, and the sound resolves itself into
harmlessness. It is only the callow
young clamoring for food, or complaining
of their circumscribed quarters.

Not many days hence they will be out
in the wide world of air and sunshine of
which they now know as little as when
they chipped the shell. Lusty fellows
they will be then, with much of their
parents' beauty already displayed in their
bright new plumage and capable of an
outcry that will hold a bird-eating cat
at bay. A little later they will be, as
their parents are, helpful allies against
the borers, the insidious enemies of our
apple-tree. It is a warfare which the
groundling habits of the golden-wings
make them more ready to engage in than
any other of the woodpecker clans.

In sultry August weather, when the
shrill cry of the cicada pierces the hot
air like a hotter needle of sound, and the[62]
dry husky beat of his wings emphasizes
the apparent fact of drouth as you walk
on the desiccated slippery herbage of
meadow and pasture, the golden-wings
with all their grown-up family fly up before
you from their feast on the ant hills
and go flashing and flickering away like
rockets shot aslant, into the green tent
of the wild cherry trees to their dessert
of juicy black fruit.

Early in the dreariness of November,
they have vanished with all the horde
of summer residents who have made
the season of leaf, flower, and fruit the
brighter by their presence. The desolate
leafless months go by, till at last
comes the promise of spring, and you are
aware of a half unconscious listening for
the golden-wings. Presently the loud,
long, joyous iteration breaks upon your
ear, and you hail the fulfillment of the
promise and the blithe new comer, a
golden link in the lengthening chain
that is encircling the earth.[63]

XV

JUNE DAYS

June brings skies of purest blue,
flecked with drifts of silver, fields and
woods in the flush of fresh verdure, with
the streams winding among them in
crystal loops that invite the angler with
promise of more than fish, something
that tackle cannot lure nor creel hold.

The air is full of the perfume of locust
and grape bloom, the spicy odor of pine
and fir, and of pleasant voices—the
subdued murmur of the brook's changing
babble, the hum of bees, the stir of
the breeze, the songs of birds. Out of
the shady aisles of the woods come the
flute note of the hermit thrush, the silvery
chime of the tawny thrush; and
from the forest border, where the lithe
birches swing their shadows to and fro
along the bounds of wood and field,
comes that voice of June, the cuckoo's
gurgling note of preparation, and then[64]
the soft, monotonous call that centuries
ago gave him a name.

General Kukushna the exiles in Siberia
entitle him; and when they hear
his voice, every one who can break
bounds is irresistibly drawn to follow
him, and live for a brief season a free
life in the greenwood. As to many
weary souls and hampered bodies there,
so to many such here comes the voice of
the little commander, now persuasive,
now imperative, not to men and women
in exile or wearing the convict's garb,
but suffering some sort of servitude laid
upon them or self-imposed. Toiling for
bread, for wealth, for fame, they are
alike in bondage—chained to the shop,
the farm, the desk, the office.

Some who hear, obey, and revel in
the brief but delightful freedom of June
days spent in the perfumed breath of
full-leafed woods, by cold water-brooks
and rippled lakes. Others listen with
hungry hearts to the summons, but cannot
loose their fetters, and can only answer
with a sigh, "It is not for me," or
"Not yet," and toil on, still hoping for
future days of freedom.[65]

But saddest of all is the case of such
as hear not, or, hearing, heed not the
voice of the Kukushna, the voices of the
birds, the murmurous droning of bees
amid the blossoms, the sweet prattle
of running waters and dancing waves.
Though these come to them from all
about, and all about them are unfolded
the manifold beauties of this joyous
month, no sign is made to them. Their
dull ears hear not the voices of nature,
neither do their dim eyes see the wondrous
miracle of spring which has been
wrought all about them. Like the man
with the muck-rake, they toil on, intent
only upon the filth and litter at their
feet. Sad indeed must it be to have
a soul so poor that it responds to no
caress of nature, sadder than any imposition
of servitude or exile which yet
hinders not one's soul from arising with
intense longing for the wild world of
woods and waters when Kukushna sounds
his soft trumpet call.[66]

XVI

THE BULLFROG

The flooded expanse of the marshes
has shrunken perceptibly along its shoreward
boundaries, leaving a mat of dead
weeds, bits of driftwood, and a water-worn
selvage of bare earth to mark its
widest limits. The green tips of the
rushes are thrust above the amber shallows,
whereon flotillas of water-shield lie
anchored in the sun, while steel-blue
devil's-needles sew the warm air with
intangible threads of zigzag flight.

The meshed shadows of the water-maples
are full of the reflections of the
green and silver of young leaves. The
naked tangle of button-bushes has become
a green island, populous with garrulous
colonies of redwings. The great
flocks of wild ducks that came to the
reopened waters have had their holiday
rest, and journeyed onward to summer
homes and cares in the further north.[67]
The few that remain are in scattered
pairs and already in the silence and seclusion
of nesting. You rarely see the
voyaging muskrat or hear his plaintive
love calls.

Your ear has long been accustomed
to the watery clangor of the bittern,
when a new yet familiar sound strikes
it, the thin, vibrant bass of the first bullfrog's
note. It may be lacking in musical
quality, but it is attuned to its surroundings,
and you are glad that the
green-coated player has at last recovered
his long-submerged banjo, and is twanging
its water-soaked strings in prelude
to the summer concert. He is a little
out of practice, and his instrument is
slightly out of tune, but a few days' use
will restore both touch and resonance,
when he and his hundred brethren shall
awaken the marsh-haunting echoes and
the sleeping birds with a grand twilight
recital. It will reach your ears a mile
away, and draw you back to the happy
days of boyhood, when you listened for
the bullfrogs to tell that fish would bite,
and it was time for boys to go a-fishing.

In the first days of his return to the[68]
upper world of water, this old acquaintance
may be shy, and neither permit nor
offer any familiarity. The fixed placidity
of his countenance is not disturbed by
your approach, but if you overstep by
one pace what he considers the proper
limit, down goes his head under cover of
the flood. Marking his jerky course with
an underwake and a shiver of the rushes,
he reappears, to calmly observe you from
a safer distance.

Custom outwears his diffidence, and
the fervid sun warms him to more genial
moods, when he will suffer you to come
quietly quite close to him and tickle
his sides with a bullrush, till in an ecstasy
of pleasure he loses all caution, and
bears with supreme contentment the
titillation of your finger tips. His flabby
sides swell with fullness of enjoyment,
his blinking eyes grow dreamy and the
corners of his blandly expressionless
mouth almost curve upward with an
elusive smile. Not till your fingers
gently close upon him does he become
aware of the indiscretion into which he
has lapsed, and with a frantic struggle
he tears himself away from your grasp[69]
and goes plunging headlong into his
nether element, bellowing out his shame
and astonishment.

Another day as you troll along the
channel an oar's length from the weedy
borders, you see him afloat on his lily-pad
raft, heeding you no more than
does the golden-hearted blossom whose
orange odor drifts about him, nor is he
disturbed by splash of oar nor dip of
paddle, nor even when his bark and her
perfume-freighted consort are tossed on
your undulating wake.

As summer wanes you see and hear
him less frequently, but he is still your
comrade of the marshes, occasionally announcing
his presence with a resonant
twang and a jerky splash among the
sedges.

The pickerel weeds have struck their
blue banners to the conquering frost,
and the marshes are sere, and silent, and
desolate. When they are warmed again
with the new life of spring, we shall listen
for the jubilant chorus of our old
acquaintance, the bullfrog.[70]

XVII

THE ANGLER

I

Angling is set down by the master
of the craft, whom all revere but none
now follow, as the Contemplative Man's
Recreation; but is the angler, while
angling, a contemplative man?

That beloved and worthy brother
whose worm-baited hook dangles in
quiet waters, placid as his mind—till
some wayfaring perch, or bream, or bullhead
shall by chance come upon it, he,
meanwhile, with rod set in the bank,
taking his ease upon the fresh June
sward, not touching his tackle nor regarding
it but with the corner of an eye—he
may contemplate and dream day
dreams. He may watch the clouds
drifting across the blue, the green
branches waving between him and
them, consider the lilies of the field,[71]
note the songs of the catbird in the
willow thicket, watch the poise and
plunge of the kingfisher, and so spend
all the day with nature and his own lazy
thoughts. That is what he came for.
Angling with him is only a pretense, an
excuse to pay a visit to the great mother
whom he so dearly loves; and if he carries
home not so much as a scale, he is
happy and content.

But how is it with him who comes
stealing along with such light tread that
it scarcely crushes the violets or shakes
the dewdrops from the ferns, and casts
his flies with such precise skill upon the
very handsbreadth of water that gives
most promise to his experienced eye; or
drops his minnow with such care into
the eddying pool, where he feels a bass
must lie awaiting it. Eye and ear and
every organ of sense are intent upon
the sport for which he came. He sees
only the images of the clouds, no branch
but that which impedes him or offers
cover to his stealthy approach. His ear
is more alert for the splash of fishes than
for bird songs. With his senses go all[72]
his thoughts, and float not away in day
dreams.

Howsoever much he loves her, for
the time while he hath rod in hand
Mother Nature is a fish-woman, and
he prays that she may deal generously
with him. Though he be a parson, his
thoughts tend not to religion; though a
savant, not to science; though a statesman,
not to politics; though an artist,
to no art save the art of angling. So
far removed from all these while he casts
his fly or guides his minnow, how much
further is his soul from all but the matter
in hand when a fish has taken the
one or the other, and all his skill is taxed
to the utmost to bring his victim to
creel. Heresy and paganism may prevail,
the light of science be quenched,
the country go to the dogs, pictures go
unpainted, and statues unmoulded till he
has saved this fish.

When the day is spent, the day's
sport done, and he wends his way homeward
with a goodly score, satisfied with
himself and all the world besides, he
may ponder on many things apart from
that which has this day taken him by[73]
green fields and pleasant waters. Now
he may brood his thoughts, and dream
dreams; but while he angles, the complete
angler is not a contemplative man.

II

The rivers roaring between their
brimming banks; the brooks babbling
over their pebbled beds and cross-stream
logs that will be bridges for the fox in
midsummer; the freed waters of lakes
and ponds, dashing in slow beat of waves
or quicker pulse of ripples against their
shores, in voices monotonous but never
tiresome, now call all who delight in the
craft to go a-fishing.

With the sap in the aged tree, the
blood quickens in the oldest angler's
veins, whether he be of the anointed
who fish by the book, or of the common
sort who practice the methods of the forgotten
inventors of the art.

The first are busy with rods and reels
that are a pleasure to the eye and touch,
with fly-books whose leaves are as bright
with color as painted pictures, the others
rummaging corner-cupboards for mislaid
lines, searching the sheds for favorite[74]
poles of ash, ironwood, tamarack, or cedar,
or perhaps the woods for one just
budding on its sapling stump.

Each enjoys as much as the other the
pleasant labor of preparation and the anticipation
of sport, though perhaps that
of the scientific angler is more æsthetic
enjoyment, as his outfitting is the daintier
and more artistic. But to each
comes the recollection of past happy days
spent on lake, river and brook, memories
touched with a sense of loss, of days that
can never come again, of comrades gone
forever from earthly companionship.

And who shall say that the plebeian
angler does not enter upon the untangling
of his cotton lines, the trimming
of his new cut pole, and the digging of
his worms, with as much zest as his brother
of the finer cast on the testing and
mending of lancewood or split bamboo
rod, the overhauling of silken lines and
leaders, and the assorting of flies.

III

Considering the younger generation
of anglers, one finds more enthusiasm
among those who talk learnedly of all[75]
the niceties of the art. They scorn all
fish not acknowledged as game. They
plan more, though they may accomplish
less than the common sort to whom all
of fishing tackle is a pole, a line, and a
hook. To them fishing is but fishing,
and fish are only fish, and they will go
for one or the other when the signs are
right and the day propitious.

Descending to the least and latest
generation of anglers, we see the conditions
reversed. The youth born to rod
and reel and fly is not so enthusiastic in
his devotion to the sport as the boy
whose birthright is only the pole that
craftsman never fashioned, the kinky
lines of the country store, and hooks
known by no maker's name. For it is
not in the nature of a boy to hold to any
nicety in sport of any sort, and this one,
being herein unrestrained, enters upon
the art called gentle with all the wild
freedom of a young savage or a half-grown
mink.

For him it is almost as good as going
fishing, to unearth and gather in an old
teapot the worms, every one of which is
to his sanguine vision the promise of a[76]
fish. What completeness of happiness
for him to be allowed to go fishing with
his father or grandfather or the acknowledged
great fisherman of the neighborhood,
a good-for-nothing ne'er-do-well,
but wise in all the ways of fish and their
taking and very careful of and kind to
little boys.

The high-hole never cackled so merrily,
nor meadow lark sang sweeter, nor
grass sprang greener nor water shone
brighter than to the boy when he goes
a-fishing thus accompanied. To him is
welcome everything that comes from the
waters, be it trout, bass, perch, bullhead,
or sunfish, and he hath pride even in the
abominable but toothsome eel and the
uneatable bowfin.

Well, remembering that we were once
boys and are yet anglers, though we seldom
go a-fishing, we wish, in the days
of the new springtide, to all the craft,
whether they be of high or low degree,
bent and cramped with the winter of
age or flushed with the spring of life,
pleasant and peaceful days of honest
sport by all watersides, and full creels
and strings and wythes.[77]

IV

In the soft evenings of April when the
air is full of the undefinable odor of the
warming earth and of the incessant rejoicing
of innumerable members of the
many families of batrachians, one may
see silently moving lights prowling along
the low shores of shallow waters, now
hidden by trunks of great trees that are
knee-deep in the still water, now emerging,
illuminating bolls and branches and
flashing their glimmering glades far
across the ripples of wake and light
breeze.

If one were near enough he could see
the boat of the spearers, its bow and the
intent figure of the spearman aglow in
the light of the jack which flares a backward
flame with its steady progress, and
drops a slow shower of sparks, while the
stern and the paddler sitting therein are
dimly apparent in the verge of the gloom.

These may be honest men engaged in
no illegal affair; they exercise skill of
a certain sort; they are enthusiastic in
the pursuit of their pastime, which is as
fair as jacking deer, a practice upheld by[78]
many in high places; yet these who by
somewhat similar methods take fish for
sport and food are not accounted honest
fishermen, but arrant poachers. If jacking
deer is right, how can jacking fish
be wrong? or if jacking fish be wrong,
how can jacking deer be right? Verily,
there are nice distinctions in the ethics
of sport.[79]

XVIII

FARMERS AND FIELD SPORTS

Happier still is such a one who has a
love for the rod and gun, and with them
finds now and then a day's freedom from
all cares by the side of the stream that
borders his own acres and in the woods
that crest his knolls or shade his swamp.

As a rule none of our people take so
few days of recreation as the farmer.
Excepting Sundays, two or three days at
the county fair, and perhaps as many
more spent in the crowd and discomfort
of a cheap railroad excursion, are all that
are given by the ordinary farmer to anything
but the affairs of the farm. It is
true that his outdoor life makes it less
necessary for him than for the man
whose office or shop work keeps him[80]
mostly indoors, to devote a month or a
fortnight of each year to entire rest from
labor. Indeed, he can hardly do this
except in winter, when his own fireside
is oftener the pleasantest place for rest.
But he would be the better for more
days of healthful pleasure, and many
such he might have if he would so use
those odd ones which fall within his
year, when crops are sown and planted
or harvested. A day in the woods or by
the stream is better for body and mind
than one spent in idle gossip at the village
store, and nine times out of ten
better for the pocket, though one come
home without fin or feather to show for
his day's outing. One who keeps his
eyes and ears on duty while abroad in
the field can hardly fail to see and hear
something new, or, at least, more interesting
and profitable than ordinary gossip,
and the wear and tear of tackle and
a few charges of ammunition wasted will
cost less than the treats which are pretty
apt to be part of a day's loafing.

Barring the dearth of the objects of
his pursuit, the farmer who goes a-fishing
and a-hunting should not be unsuccessful[81]
if he has fair skill with the rod and
gun. For he who knows most of the
habits of fish and game will succeed best
in their capture, and no man, except the
naturalist and the professional fisherman
and hunter, has a better chance to gain
this knowledge than the farmer, whose
life brings him into everyday companionship
with nature. His fields and woods
are the homes and haunts of the birds
and beasts of venery, from the beginning
of the year to its end, and in his streams
many of the fishes pass their lives. By
his woodside the quail builds her nest,
and when the foam of blossom has dried
away on the buckwheat field she leads
her young there to feed on the brown
kernel stranded on the coral stems. If
he chance to follow his wood road in
early June, the ruffed grouse limps and
flutters along it before him, while her
callow chicks vanish as if by a conjurer's
trick from beneath his very footfall. A
month later, grown to the size of robins,
they will scatter on the wing from his
path with a vigor that foretells the bold
whir and the swiftness of their flight in
their grown-up days, when they will stir[82]
the steadiest nerve, whether they hurtle
from an October-painted thicket or from
the blue shadows of untracked snow.
No one is likelier to see and hear the
strange wooing of the woodcock in the
soft spring evenings, and to the farmer's
ear first comes that assurance of spring,
the wail of the Bartram's sandpiper returning
from the South to breed in
meadow and pasture, and then in hollow
trees that overhang the river the wood
ducks begin to spoil their holiday attire
in the work and care of housekeeping.
The fox burrows and breeds in the
farmer's woods. The raccoon's den is
there in ledge or hollow tree. The hare
makes her form in the shadow of his
evergreens, where she dons her dress of
tawny or white to match the brown floor
of the woods or its soft covering of snow.
The bass comes to his river in May to
spawn, the pike-perch for food, and the
perch lives there, as perhaps the trout
does in his brook.

All these are his tenants, or his summer
boarders, and if he knows not something
of their lives, and when and where
to find them at home or in their favorite[83]
resorts, he is a careless landlord. His
life will be the pleasanter for the interest
he takes in theirs, and the skill he
acquires in bringing them to bag and
creel.[84]

XIX

TO A TRESPASS SIGN

Scene, A Wood. An old man with a fishing-rod speaks:—

What strange object is this which I
behold, incongruous in its staring whiteness
of fresh paint and black lettering,
its straightness of lines and abrupt irregularity
amid the soft tints and graceful
curves of this sylvan scene? As I live,
a trespass sign!

Thou inanimate yet most impertinent
thing, dumb yet commanding me with
most imperative words to depart hence,
how dost thou dare forbid my entrance
upon what has so long been my own,
even as it is the birds' and beasts' and
fishes', not by lease or title deed, but
of natural right? Hither from time immemorial
have they come at will and so
departed at no man's behest, as have I
since the happy days when a barefoot
boy I cast my worm-baited hook among[85]
the crystal foam bells, or bearing the
heavy burden of my grandsire's rusty
flint-lock, I stalked the wily grouse in
the diurnal twilight of these thickets.

Here was I thrilled by the capture of
my first trout; here exulted over the
downfall of my first woodcock; here,
grown to man's estate, I learned to cast
the fly; here beheld my first dog draw
on his game, and here, year after year,
till my locks have grown gray, have I
come, sharp set with months of longing,
to live again for a little while the carefree
days of youth.

Never have I been bidden to depart
but by storm or nightfall or satiety, until
now thou confrontest me with thy impudent
mandate, thou, thou contemptible,
but yet not to be despised nor unheeded
parallelogram of painted deal, with thy
legal phrases and impending penalties;
thou, the silent yet terribly impressive
representative of men whose purses are
longer than mine!

What is their right to this stream, these
woods, compared with mine? Theirs
is only gained by purchase, confirmed by
scrawled parchment, signed and sealed;[86]
mine a birthright, as always I hoped it
might be of my sons and my sons' sons.
What to the usurpers of our rights are
these woods and waters but a place for
the killing of game and fish? They do
not love, as a man the roof-tree where-under
he was born, these arches and low
aisles of the woods; they do not know as
I do every silver loop of the brook, every
tree whose quivering reflection throbs
across its eddies; its voice is only babble
to their ears, the song of the pines tells
them no story of bygone years.

Of all comers here, I who expected
most kindly welcome am most inhospitably
treated. All my old familiars, the
birds, the beasts, and the fishes, may fly
over thee, walk beneath thee, swim
around thee, but to me thou art a wall
that I may not pass.

I despise thee and spit upon thee, thou
most impudent intruder, thou insolent
sentinel, thou odious monument of selfishness,
but I dare not lay hands upon
thee and cast thee down and trample
thee in the dust of the earth as thou
shouldst of right be entreated. To rid
myself of thy hateful sight, I can only[87]
turn my back upon thee and depart with
sorrow and anger in my heart.

Mayst thou keep nothing but disappointment
for the greedy wretches who
set thee here.[88]

XX

A GENTLE SPORTSMAN

All the skill of woodcraft that goes
to the making of the successful hunter
with the gun, must be possessed by him
who hunts his game with the camera.
His must be the stealthy, panther-like
tread that breaks no twig nor rustles the
fallen leaves. His the eye that reads
at a glance the signs that to the ordinary
sight are a blank or at most are an
untranslatable enigma. His a patience
that counts time as nothing when measured
with the object sought. When by
the use and practice of these, he has
drawn within a closer range of his timid
game than his brother of the gun need
attain, he pulls trigger of a weapon that
destroys not, but preserves its unharmed
quarry in the very counterfeit of life and
motion. The wild world is not made
the poorer by one life for his shot, nor[89]
nature's peace disturbed, nor her nicely
adjusted balance jarred.

He bears home his game, wearing
still its pretty ways of life in the midst
of its loved surroundings, the swaying
hemlock bough where the grouse perched,
the bending ferns about the deer's couch,
the dew-beaded sedges where the woodcock
skulks in the shadows of the alders,
the lichened trunks and dim vistas of
primeval woods, the sheen of voiceless
waterfalls, the flash of sunlit waves that
never break.

His trophies the moth may not assail.
His game touches a finer sense
than the palate possesses, satisfies a nobler
appetite than the stomach's craving,
and furnishes forth a feast that, ever
spread, ever invites, and never palls upon
the taste.

Moreover, this gentlest of sportsmen
is hampered by no restrictions of close
time, nor confronted by penalties of
trespass. All seasons are open for his
bloodless forays, all woods and waters
free to his harmless weapon.

Neither is he trammeled by any nice
distinctions as to what may or may not[90]
be considered game. Everything counts
in his score. The eagle on his craggy
perch, the high-hole on his hollow tree,
are as legitimate game for him as the
deer and grouse. All things beautiful
and wild and picturesque are his, yet he
kills them not, but makes them a living
and enduring joy, to himself and all who
behold them.[91]

XXI

JULY DAYS

The woods are dense with full-grown
leafage. Of all the trees, only the basswood
has delayed its blossoming, to
crown the height of summer and fill the
sun-steeped air with a perfume that calls
all the wild bees from hollow tree and
scant woodside gleaning to a wealth of
honey gathering, and all the hive-dwellers
from their board-built homes to a
finer and sweeter pillage than is offered
by the odorous white sea of buckwheat.
Half the flowers of wood and fields are
out of bloom. Herdsgrass, clover and
daisy are falling before the mower. The
early grain fields have already caught
the color of the sun, and the tasseling
corn rustles its broad leaves above the
rich loam that the woodcock delights to
bore.

The dwindling streams have lost their
boisterous clamor of springtide and wimple[92]
with subdued voices over beds too
shallow to hide a minnow or his poised
shadow on the sunlit shallows. The
sharp eye of the angler probes the green
depths of the slowly swirling pools, and
discovers the secrets of the big fish which
congregate therein.

The river has marked the stages of
its decreasing volume with many lines
along its steep banks. It discloses the
muskrat's doorway, to which he once
dived so gracefully, but now must clumsily
climb to. Rafts of driftwood bridge
the shallow current sunk so low that
the lithe willows bend in vain to kiss
its warm bosom. This only the swaying
trails of water-weeds and rustling sedges
toy with now; and swift-winged swallows
coyly touch. There is not depth to
hide the scurrying schools of minnows,
the half of whom fly into the air in a
curving burst of silver shower before the
rush of a pickerel, whose green and mottled
sides gleam like a swift-shot arrow
in the downright sunbeams.

The sandpiper tilts along the shelving
shore. Out of an embowered harbor a
wood duck convoys her fleet of ducklings,[93]
and on the ripples of their wake
the anchored argosies of the water lilies
toss and cast adrift their cargoes of perfume.
Above them the green heron
perches on an overhanging branch, uncouth
but alert, whether sentinel or
scout, flapping his awkward way along
the ambient bends and reaches. With
slow wing-beats he signals the coming
of some more lazily moving boat, that
drifts at the languid will of the current
or indolent pull of oars that grate on
the golden-meshed sand and pebbles.

Lazily, unexpectantly, the angler casts
his line, to be only a convenient perch
for the dragonflies; for the fish, save
the affrighted minnows and the hungry
pickerel, are as lazy as he. To-day he
may enjoy to the full the contemplative
man's recreation, nor have his contemplations
disturbed by any finny folk of
the under-water world, while dreamily he
floats in sunshine and dappled shadow,
so at one with the placid waters and
quiet shores that wood duck, sandpiper,
and heron scarcely note his unobtrusive
presence.

No such easy and meditative pastime[94]
attends his brother of the gun who,
sweating under the burden of lightest apparel
and equipment, beats the swampy
covers where beneath the sprawling alders
and arching fronds of fern the woodcock
hides. Not a breath stirs the murky
atmosphere of these depths of shade,
hotter than sunshine; not a branch nor
leaf moves but with his struggling passage,
or marking with a wake of waving
undergrowth the course of his unseen
dog.

Except this rustling of branches,
sedges and ferns, the thin, continuous
piping of the swarming mosquitoes, the
busy tapping and occasional harsh call
of a woodpecker, scarcely a sound invades
the hot silence, till the wake of
the hidden dog ceases suddenly and the
waving brakes sway with quickening
vibrations into stillness behind him.
Then, his master draws cautiously near,
with gun at a ready and an unheeded
mosquito drilling his nose, the fern leaves
burst apart with a sudden shiver, and
a woodcock, uttering that shrill unexplained
twitter, upsprings in a halo of
rapid wing-beats and flashes out of sight[95]
among leaves and branches. As quick,
the heelplate strikes the alert gunner's
shoulder, and, as if in response to the
shock, the short unechoed report jars
the silence of the woods. As if out of
the cloud of sulphurous smoke, a shower
of leaves flutter down, with a quicker
patter of dry twigs and shards of bark,
and among all these a brown clod drops
lifeless and inert to mother earth.

A woodcock is a woodcock, though
but three-quarters grown; and the shot
one that only a quick eye and ready
hand may accomplish; but would not
the achievement have been more worthy,
the prize richer, the sport keener in the
gaudy leafage and bracing air of October,
rather than in this sweltering heat, befogged
with clouds of pestering insects,
when every step is a toil, every moment
a torture? Yet men deem it sport and
glory if they do not delight in its performance.
The anxious note and behavior
of mother song-birds, whose poor
little hearts are in as great a flutter as
their wings concerning their half-grown
broods, hatched coincidently with the
woodcock, is proof enough to those who[96]
would heed it, that this is not a proper
season for shooting. But in some northerly
parts of our wide country it is woodcock
now or never, for the birds bred
still further northward are rarely tempted
by the cosiest copse or half-sunned hillside
of open woods to linger for more
than a day or two, as they fare southward,
called to warmer days of rest and
frostless moonlit nights of feeding under
kindlier skies.

While the nighthawk's monotonous
cry and intermittent boom and the indistinct
voice of the whippoorwill ring out
in the late twilight of the July evenings,
the alarmed, half-guttural chuckle of the
grass plover is heard, so early migrating
in light marching order, thin in flesh but
strong of wing, a poor prize for the gunner
whose ardor outruns his humanity
and better judgment. Lean or fat, a
plover is a plover, but would that he
might tarry with us till the plump grasshoppers
of August and September had
clothed his breast and ribs with fatness.

Well, let him go, if so soon he will.
So let the woodcock go, to offer his best
to more fortunate sportsmen. What[97]
does it profit us to kill merely for the
sake of killing, and have to show therefor
but a beggarly account of bones and
feathers? Are there not grouse and
quail and woodcock waiting for us, and
while we wait for them can we not content
ourselves with indolent angling by
shaded streams in these melting days
of July rather than contribute the blaze
and smoke of gunpowder to the heat and
murkiness of midsummer? If we must
shed blood let us tap the cool veins of
the fishes, not the hot arteries of brooding
mother birds and their fledgelings.[98]

XXII

CAMPING OUT

"Camping out" is becoming merely
a name for moving out of one's permanent
habitation and dwelling for a few
weeks in a well-built lodge, smaller than
one's home, but as comfortable and almost
as convenient; with tables, chairs
and crockery, carpets and curtains, beds
with sheets and blankets on real bedsteads,
a stove and its full outfit of cooking
utensils, wherefrom meals are served
in the regular ways of civilization. Living
in nearly the same fashion of his
ordinary life, except that he wears a
flannel shirt and a slouch hat, and fishes
a little and loafs more than is his ordinary
custom, our "camper" imagines
that he is getting quite close to the primitive
ways of hunters and trappers; that
he is living their life with nothing lacking
but the rough edges, which he has ingeniously[99]
smoothed away. He is mistaken.
In ridding himself of some of its
discomforts, he has lost a great deal of
the best of real camp life; the spice of
small adventure, and the woodsy flavor
that its half-hardships and makeshift
appliances give it. If one sleeps a little
cold under his one blanket on his bed
of evergreen twigs, though he does not
take cold, he realizes in some degree the
discomfort of Boone's bivouac when he
cuddled beside his hounds to keep from
freezing—and feels slightly heroic. His
slumbers are seasoned with dreams of
the wild woods, as the balsamic perfume
of his couch steals into his nostrils; his
companions' snores invade his drowsy
senses as the growl of bears, and the
thunderous whir of grouse bursting out
of untrodden thickets. When he awakes
in the gray of early morning he finds
that the few hours of sleep have wrought
a miracle of rest, and he feels himself
nearer to nature when he washes his
face in the brook, than when he rinses
off his sleepiness in bowl or basin. The
water of the spring is colder and has a[100]
finer flavor when he drinks it from a
birch bark cup of his own making. Tea
made in a frying-pan has an aroma never
known to such poor mortals as brew
their tea in a teapot, and no mill ever
ground such coffee as that which is tied
up in a rag and pounded with a stone or
hatchet-head. A sharpened stick for a
fork gives a zest to the bit of pork "frizzled"
on as rude a spit and plattered on
a clean chip or a sheet of bark, and no
fish was ever more toothsome than when
broiled on a gridiron improvised of green
wands or roasted Indian fashion in a
cleft stick.

What can make amends for the loss of
the camp-fire, with innumerable pictures
glowing and shifting in its heart, and
conjuring strange shapes out of the surrounding
gloom, and suggesting unseen
mysteries that the circle of darkness
holds behind its rim? How are the wells
of conversation to be thawed out by a
black stove, so that tales of hunters' and
fishers' craft and adventure shall flow till
the measure of man's belief is overrun?
How is the congenial spark of true companionship
to be kindled when people[101]
brood around a stove and light their
pipes with matches, and not with coals
snatched out of the camp-fire's edge, or
with twigs that burn briefly with baffling
flame?

But it will not be long before it will be
impossible to get a taste of real camping
without taking long and expensive journeys,
for every available rod of lake shore
and river bank is being taken up and
made populous with so-called camps, and
the comfortable freedom and seclusion
of a real camp are made impossible
there. One desiring that might better
pitch his tent in the back woodlot of a
farm than in any such popular resort.
This misnamed camping out has become
a fashion which seems likely to last till
the shores are as thronged as the towns,
and the woods are spoiled for the real
campers, whom it is possible to imagine
seeking in the summers of the
future a seclusion in the cities that the
forests and streams no longer can give
them.

Yet, let it be understood that make-believe
camping is better than no camping.
It cannot but bring people into[102]
more intimate relations with nature than
they would be if they stayed at home,
and so to better acquaintance with our
common mother, who deals so impartially
with all her children.[103]

XXIII

THE CAMP-FIRE

If "the open fire furnishes the room,"
the camp-fire does more for the camp.
It is its life—a life that throbs out in
every flare and flicker to enliven the
surroundings, whether they be the trees
of the forest, the expanse of prairie,
shadowed only by clouds and night, or
the barren stretch of sandy shore. Out
of the encompassing gloom of all these,
the camp-fire materializes figures as real
to the eye as flesh and blood. It peoples
the verge of darkness with grotesque
forms, that leap and crouch and sway
with the rise and fall and bending of the
flame to the wind, and that beckon the
fancy out to grope in the mystery of night.

Then imagination soars with the updrift
of smoke and the climbing galaxy
of fading sparks, to where the steadfast
stars shine out of the unvisited realm
that only imagination can explore.[104]

The camp-fire gives an expression to
the human face that it bears in no other
light, a vague intentness, an absorption
in nothing tangible; and yet not a far-away
look, for it is focused on the flame
that now licks a fresh morsel of wood,
now laps the empty air; or it is fixed
on the shifting glow of embers, whose
blushes flush or fade under their ashen
veil. It is not the gaze of one who looks
past everything at nothing, or at the
stars or the mountains or the far-away
sea-horizon; but it is centred on and
revealed only by the camp-fire. You
wonder what the gazer beholds—the
past, the future, or something that is
neither; and the uncertain answer you
can only get by your own questioning of
the flickering blaze.

As the outers gather around this
cheerful centre their lips exhale stories
of adventure by field and flood, as naturally
as the burning fuel does smoke and
sparks, and in that engendering warmth,
no fish caught or lost, no buck killed
or missed, suffers shrinkage in size or
weight, no peril is lessened, no tale shorn[105]
of minutest detail. All these belong to
the camp-fire, whether it is built in conformity
to scientific rules or piled clumsily
by unskilled hands. What satisfaction
there is in the partnership of building
this altar of the camp, for though
a master of woodcraft superintends, all
may take a hand in its erection; the
youngest and the weakest may contribute
a stick that will brighten the blaze.

What hospitality the glow of the
camp-fire proclaims in inviting always
one more to the elastic circle of light
and warmth, that if always complete, yet
expands to receive another guest. A
pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night, it
is a beacon that guides the wanderer to
shelter and comfort.

The Indian weed has never such perfect
flavor as when, contending with heat
and smoke, one lights his pipe with a
coal or an elusive flame, snatched from
the embers of the camp-fire, and by no
other fireside does the nicotian vapor so
soothe the perturbed senses, bring such
lazy contentment, nor conjure such pleasant[106]
fancies out of the border of dreamland.

There is no cooking comparable with
that which the camp-fire affords. To
whatever is boiled, stewed, roasted,
broiled or baked over its blaze, in the
glow of its embers or in its ashes, it imparts
a distinctive woodsy flavor that it
distills out of itself or draws from the
spiced air that fans it; and the aroma
of every dish invites an appetite that is
never disappointed if the supply be large
enough.

It cannot be denied that the camp
stove gives forth warmth and, with more
comfort to the cook, serves to cook food
of such tame flavor as one may get at
home. But though the serviceable little
imp roar till its black cheeks glow red
as winter berries, it cannot make shanty
or tent a camp in reality or impart to an
outing its true flavor. This can only be
given by the generous camp-fire, whose
flames and embers no narrow walls inclose,
whose hearth is on every side,
whose chimney is the wide air.[107]

XXIV

A RAINY DAY IN CAMP

The plans of the camper, like those of
other men, "gang aft agley." The morrow,
which he proposed to devote to some
long-desired hunting or fishing trip, is no
more apt to dawn propitiously on him
than on the husbandman, the mariner,
or any other mortal who looks to the
weather for special favor. On the contrary,
instead of the glowing horizon and
the glory of the sunburst that should
usher in the morning, the slow dawn is
quite apt to have the unwelcome accompaniment
of rain.

The hearing, first alert of the drowsy
senses, catches the sullen patter of the
drops on tent or shanty, their spiteful,
hissing fall on the smouldering embers of
the camp-fire, and with a waft of damp
earth and herbage stealing into his nostrils,
the disappointed awakener turns
fretfully under his blanket, then crawls[108]
forth to have his lingering hope smothered
in the veil of rain that blurs the
landscape almost to annihilation.

He mutters anathemas against the
weather, then takes the day as it has
come to him, for better or for worse.
First, to make the best of it, he piles
high the camp-fire, and dispels with its
glow and warmth some cubic feet of
gloom and dampness. Then he sets
about breakfast-making, scurrying forth
from shelter to fire, in rapid culinary
forays, battling with the smoke, for
glimpses of the contents of kettle and
pan. His repast is as pungent with
smoke as the strong waters of Glenlivat,
but if that is valued for its flavor of peat-reek,
why should he scorn food for the
like quality?

Then if he delights in petty warfare
with the elements, to bide the pelting
of the rain, to storm the abatis of wet
thickets and suffer the sapping and mining
of insidious moisture, he girds up his
loins and goes forth with rod or gun, as
his desire of conquest may incline him.

But if he has come to his outing
with the intention of pursuing sport with[109]
bodily comfort, he is at once assured
that this is unattainable under the present
conditions of the weather. Shall he
beguile the tediousness of a wet day in
camp with books and papers?

Nay, if they were not left behind in
the busy, plodding world that he came
here to escape from, they should have
been. He wants nothing here that reminds
him of traffic or politics; nothing
of history, for now he has only to do
with the present; nothing of travel, for
his concern now is only with the exploration
of this wild domain. He does not
wish to be bothered with fiction, idealized
reality is what he desires. Neither does
he care for what other men have written
of nature. Her book is before him and
he may read it from first hands.

Looking forth from his snug shelter
on the circumscribed landscape, he
marvels at the brightness of a distant
yellow tree that shines like a living
flame through the veil of mist. The
blaze of his sputtering camp-fire is not
brighter. He notices, as perhaps he
never did before, how distinctly the
dark ramage of the branches is traced[110]
among the brilliant leaves, as if with
their autumnal hues they were given
transparency. Some unfelt waft of the
upper air casts aside for a moment the
curtain of mist and briefly discloses a
mountain peak, radiant with all the hues
of autumn, and it is as if one were
given, as in a dream, a glimpse of the
undiscovered country. He realizes a
dreamy pleasure in watching the waves
coming in out of the obscurity and dashing
on the shore, or pulsing away in
fading leaden lines into the mystery of
the wrack.

In the borders of the mist the ducks
revel in the upper and nether wetness,
and with uncanny laughter the loon rejoices
between his long explorations of
the aquatic depth. A mink, as heedless
of rain as the waterfowl, comes stealing
along the shore, thridding the intricacies
of driftwood and web of wave-washed
tree roots, often peering out in inquisitive
examination of the quiet camp.
Less cautious visitors draw nearer—the
friendly chickadee, hanging from the
nearest twig; the nuthatch, sounding
his penny trumpet, accompanied by the[111]
tap of the woodpecker, as one creeps
down, the other up a tree trunk; the
scolding jays, making as noisy protest
over human intrusion as if they had just
discovered it; a saucy squirrel, scoffing
and jeering, till tired of his raillery he
settles down to quiet nut-rasping under
shelter of his tail.

There are unseen visitors, too: wood-mice,
astir under cover of the fallen
leaves, and, just discernible among the
patter of the falling rain and of the squirrels'
filings, footfalls unidentified, till a
ruffed grouse starts new showers from
the wet branches in the thunder of his
flight.

Narrowed to the width of tent or
shanty front, the background but a
pallid shroud of mist, the landscape yet
holds much for pleasant study. But if
the weather-bound camper exhausts this
or tires of it, he may turn to gun-cleaning
or tackle-mending. If a guide be
with him, he can listen to his stories of
hunting, fishing, and adventure, or learn
woodcraft of him and the curious ways
of birds and beasts. He may fashion
birch-bark camp-ware, dippers, cups, and[112]
boxes, or whittle a paddle from a smooth-rifted
maple. If he is of artistic turn,
he can pleasantly devote an hour to
etching pictures on the white under surface
of the fungus that grows on decaying
trees, and so provide himself with
reminders of this rainy day in camp.

So, with one and another pastime,
he whiles away the sunless day, which,
almost before he has thought of it,
merges into the early nightfall, and he
is lulled to sleep by the same sound that
wakened him, the drip and patter of the
rain. And when he looks back to these
days of outing he may count this, which
dawned so unpropitiously, not the least
pleasant and profitable among them, and
mark with a white stone the rainy day
in camp.[113]

XXV

AUGUST DAYS

With such unmistakable signs made
manifest to the eye and ear the summer
signals its fullness and decline, that one
awakening now from a sleep that fell
upon him months ago might be assured
of the season with the first touch of
awakening.

To the first aroused sense comes the
long-drawn cry of the locust fading into
silence with the dry, husky clap of his
wings; the changed voice of the song
birds, no more caroling the jocund tunes
of mating and nesting time, but plaintive
with the sadness of farewell.

The bobolink has lost, with his pied
coat, the merry lilt that tinkled so continually
over the buttercups and daisies
of the June meadows; rarely the song
sparrow utters the trill that cheered us
in the doubtful days of early spring.
The bluebird's abbreviated carol floats[114]
down from the sky as sweet as then,
but mournful as the patter of autumn
leaves. The gay goldfinch has but
three notes left of his June song, as he
tilts on the latest blossoms and fluffy
seeds of the thistles. The meadowlark
charms us no more with his long-drawn
melody, but with one sharp, insistent
note he struts in the meadow stubble
or skulks among the tussocks of the
pasture and challenges the youthful gunner.
What an easy shot that even,
steady flight offers, and yet it goes onward
with unfaltering rapid wing-beats,
while the gun thunders and the harmless
shot flies behind him. The flicker
cackles now no more as when he was a
jubilant new comer, with the new-come
spring for his comrade, but is silent or
only yelps one harsh note as he flashes
his golden wings in loping flight from
fence-stake to ant-hill.

The plover chuckles while he lingers
at the bounteous feast of grasshoppers,
but never pierces the August air with
the long wail that proclaimed his springtime
arrival. After nightfall, too, is
heard his chuckling call fluttering down[115]
from the aerial path, where he wends
his southward way, high and distinct
above the shrill monotony of crickets
and August pipers. The listening sportsman
may well imagine that the departing
bird is laughing at him as much as
signaling his course to companion wayfarers.

The woodland thrushes' flutes and
bells have ceased to breathe and chime,
only the wood pewee keeps his pensive
song of other days, yet best befitting
those of declining summer.

The trees are dark with ripened leafage;
out of the twilight of the woodside
glow the declining disks of wild sunflowers
and shine the rising constellations
of asters. The meadow sides are
gay with unshorn fringes of goldenrod
and willow-herb, and there in the corners
of the gray fences droop the heavy clusters
of elderberries, with whose purple
juice the flocking robins and the young
grouse, stealing from the shadowed
copses along this belt of shade, dye their
bills.

The brook trails its attenuated thread
out of the woodland gloom to gild its[116]
shallow ripples with sunshine and redden
them with the inverted flames of the
cardinals that blaze on the sedgy brink.
Here the brown mink prowls with her
lithe cubs, all unworthy yet of the trapper's
skill, but tending toward it with
growth accelerated by full feasts of pool-impounded
minnows. Here, too, the
raccoon sets the print of his footsteps on
the muddy shores as he stays his stomach
with frogs and sharpens his appetite
with the hot sauce of Indian turnip while
he awaits the setting of his feast in the
cornfields. The hounds are more impatient
than he for the opening of his
midnight revel, and tug at their chains
and whimper and bay when they hear
his querulous call trembling through the
twilight. They are even fooled to melodiously
mournful protest when their ears
catch the shriller quaver of the screech
owl's note.

The woodcock skulks in the bordering
alders, and when forced to flight does
so with a stronger wing than when a
month ago his taking off was first legally
authorized. Another month will make
him worthier game; and then, too, the[117]
ruffed grouse need not be spared a shot,
as full grown and strong of pinion he
bursts from cover; nor need the wood
duck, now but a vigorous bunch of pin
feathers, be let go untried or unscathed,
when from his perch on a slanted log or
out of a bower of rushes he breaks into
the upper air with startling flutter of
wings and startled squeak of alarm.

Summer wanes, flowers fade, bird
songs falter to mournful notes of farewell;
but while regretfully we mark the
decline of these golden days, we remember
with a thrill of expectation that they
slope to the golden days of autumn,
wherein the farmer garners his latest
harvest, the sportsman his first worthy
harvest, and that to him that waits,
come all things, and even though he
waits long, may come the best.[118]

XXVI

A VOYAGE IN THE DARK

A few days ago, a friend who is kind
and patient enough to encumber himself
with the care of a blind man and a boy
took me and my twelve-year-old a-fishing.
It was with a fresh realization of my deprivation
that I passed along the watery
way once as familiar as the dooryard path,
but now shrouded for me in a gloom
more impenetrable than the blackness of
the darkest night. I could only guess at
the bends and reaches as the south wind
blew on one cheek or the other, or on my
back, only knowing where the channel
draws near the shore upon which the Indians
encamped in the old days by the
flutter of leaves overbearing the rustle of
rushes. By the chuckle of ripples under
the bow, I guessed when we were in mid-channel;
by the entangled splash of an
oar, when we approached the reedy border
where the water-lilies rode at anchor,[119]
and discharged their subtle freight
of perfume as they tossed in our wake.
I knew by his clatter, drawing nearer
only with our progress, that a kingfisher
was perched on a channel-side fishing-stake,
used in turn by him and bigger
but not more skillful fishers. I heard
his headlong plunge, but whether successful
or not the ensuing clatter did not tell
me, for he has but one voice for all expressions.
Yet as his rattling cry was
kept up till the rough edge of its harshness
was worn away in receding flight,
I fancied he was proclaiming an unusually
successful achievement. For the
sake of his reputation, he would never
make such a fuss over a failure, unless
he was telling, as we do, of the big fish
he just missed catching. At any rate, I
wished him good luck, for who would begrudge
a poor kingfisher such little fish
as he must catch! They would need
years of growth to make them worth our
catching or bragging over the loss of, and
by that time we may be done with fishing.

Suddenly there was a roar of multitudinous
wings as a host of redwings upburst[120]
from springing and swaying wild
rice stalks, all of which I saw through
the blackness illumined for an instant
by memory,—the dusky cloud uprising
like the smoke of an explosion, the bent
rice springing up beneath its lifted burden,
the dull-witted or greedy laggards
dribbling upward to join the majority.
My companions exclaimed in one voice at
the rare sight of a white bird in the flock,
and by the same light of memory I also
saw it as I saw one in an autumn forty
years ago, when, with my comrade of
those days, I came "daown the crik"
duck-shooting, or trolling as to-day.
Again and again we saw this phenomenal
bird like a white star twinkling through
a murky cloud. The fitful gleam was
seen day after day, till the north wind
blew him and his cloud away southward.

The pother of the blackbirds overhead
disturbed the meditations of a bittern,
who, with an alarmed croak, jerked his
ungainly form aloft in a flurry of awkward
wing-beats, and went sagging
across the marshes in search of safer
seclusion. I wished that he might find
it, and escape the ruthless gunners that[121]
will presently come to desolate these
marshes. Very different from his uprising
was that of a pair of wood ducks,
revealing their unsuspected presence
with startling suddenness, as they sprang
from water to air with a splash and
whistle of rapid wings and their squeaking
alarm cry, and then flew swiftly
away, the sibilant wing-beats pulsing out
in the distance. These, too, I wished
might safely run the gauntlet of all the
guns that will be arrayed against them
when the summer truce is broken. If
I had not been mustered out, or if my
boy were mustered in, no doubt I should
feel differently toward the inhabitants
of these marshes. Compulsory abstinence
makes one exceedingly virtuous,
and because I am virtuous there shall be
no cakes and ale for any one.

The absence of the rail's cackle was
noticeable, a clamor that used to be
provoked at this season by every sudden
noise. We never got sight of the
"ma'sh chickens" as they skulked
among the sedges; and when the birds
were pressed to flight, rarely caught
more than a fleeting glimpse as they[122]
topped the rushes for an instant, and
dropped again into the mazes of the
marsh. But they were always announcing
a numerous if invisible presence
where now not one answered to our
voices or the noise of our oars.

All this while our trolling gear was in
tow: the boy's a "phantom minnow"
bristling with barbs, a veritable porcupine
fish; mine a fluted spoon. The
larger fish seemed attracted by the better
imitation, or perhaps age and experience
had given them discernment to
shun the other more glaring sham, and
the best of them went to the boy's score;
but the unwise majority of smaller fish
were evidently anxious to secure souvenir
spoons of Little Otter, and in consequence
of that desire I was "high
hook" as to numbers. They were only
pickerel at best, though some of them,
bearing their spots on a green ground,
are honored with the name of "maskalonge"
by our fishermen. A scratch of
the finger-nail across the scaly gill-cover
gives proof enough to convince even a
blind man of the worthlessness of this
claim to distinction.[123]

Once I enjoyed an exaltation of spirit
only to suffer humiliation. There was
a tug at the hooks, so heavy that my
first thought was of a snag, and I was
on the point of calling out to my friend
to stop rowing. Then there was a
slight yielding, and the tremor that tells
unmistakably of a fish. "Now," said I,
with my heart but a little way back of
my teeth, "I am fast to something like
a fish, but I shall never be able to boat
him. He is too big to lift out with
the hooks, and I can't see to get him by
the gills, and so I shall lose him." As
he came in slowly, stubbornly fighting
against every shortening inch of line, I
almost wished he had not been hooked
at all only to be lost at last. When,
after a time, my fish was hauled near
the boat and in sight of my companions,
my catch proved to be no monster, but
a pickerel of very ordinary size hooked
by the belly, and so my hopes and fears
vanished together.

I think distances are magnified to the
blind, for it seemed twice as far as it did
of old from the East Slang to the South[124]
Slang, as we passed these oddly named
tributaries of Little Otter.

At last I sniffed the fragrance of
cedars and heard the wash of waves on
the southward-slanted shore of Garden
Island, and these informed me we were
at the lake. In confirmation thereof
was the testimony of my companions,
given out of their light to my darkness,
of an eagle's royal progress through his
ethereal realm, making inspection of his
disputed earthly possession. I was glad
to know that his majesty had escaped
the republican regicides who haunt the
summer shores.

We made a difficult landing on the
mainland, on the oozy shore of mixed
sawdust and mud, and followed the old
trail to the old camping ground under
the rocks, a place full of pleasant memories
for the elder two of our trio, and offering
to the boy the charms of freshness
and discovery. For him the cliff towered
skyward but little below the eagle's
flight; its tiny caves were unexplored
mysteries, their coral-beaded curtains of
Canada yew and delicate netting of
mountain-fringe strange foreign growths.[125]
Through his undimmed eyes I had
glimpses of those happy shores whereon
the sun always shines and no cloud
arises beyond. What a little way behind
they seem in the voyage that has
grown wearisome, and yet we can never
revisit them for a day nor for an hour,
and it is like a dream that we ever dwelt
there.

Bearing with us from this port something
not marketable nor even visible,
yet worth carrying home, we reëmbarked,
and the wind, blowing in my
face, informed me we were homeward
bound. One after another, we passed
five boats of fishing parties tied up at as
many stakes, the crews pursuing their
pastime with steadfast patience, as their
intent silence proclaimed. To me they
were as ships passed in the night. I
had no other knowledge of them than
this, except that my friend told me there
was a fat woman in each boat, and that
one of them boasted to us, with motherly
pride, of a big pickerel caught by her
little girl.

A blended hum of bumblebees droned
in among us, and my companions remarked[126]
that one of the aerial voyagers
had boarded our craft, while I maintained
there were two, which proved to
be the fact; whereupon I argued that
my ears were better than their eyes, but
failed to convince them or even myself.
I welcomed the bees as old acquaintances,
who, in the duck-shooting of past
years, always used to come aboard and
bear us company for awhile, rarely alighting,
but tacking from stem to stern on a
cruise of inspection, till at last, satisfied
or disappointed, they went booming out
of sight and hearing over marshfuls of
blue spikes of pickerel weed and white
trinities of arrowhead. I cannot imagine
why bees should be attracted to the barrenness
of a boat, unless by a curiosity
to explore such strange floating islands,
though their dry wood promises neither
leaf nor bloom.

I hear of people every year who forsake
leafage and bloom to search the
frozen desolation of the polar north for
the Lord knows what, and I cease to
wonder at the bees, when men so waste
the summers that are given them to enjoy
if they will but bide in them.[127]

We passed many new houses of the
muskrats, who are building close to the
channel this year in prophecy of continued
low water. But muskrats are
not infallible prophets, and sometimes
suffer therefor in starvation or drowning.
The labor of the night-workers was suspended
in the glare of the August afternoon,
and their houses were as silent as
if deserted, though we doubted not there
were happy households inside them, untroubled
by dreams of famine or deluge,
or possibly of the unmercifulness of
man, though that seems an abiding terror
with our lesser brethren. Winter
before last the marshes were frozen to
the bottom, blockading the muskrats in
their houses, where entire families perished
miserably after being starved to
cannibalism. Some dug out through
the house roofs, and wandered far across
the desolate wintry fields in search of
food. Yet nature, indifferent to all
fates, has so fostered them since that
direful season that the marshy shores
are populous again with sedge-thatched
houses.

As we neared our home port we met[128]
two trollers, one of whom lifted up
for envious inspection a lusty pickerel.
"He's as big as your leg," my friend
replied to my inquiry concerning its
dimensions, and in aid of my further inquisitiveness
asked the lucky captor how
much the fish would weigh. "Wal, I
guess he ought to weigh abaout seven
pounds," was answered, after careful
consideration. We learned afterwards
that its actual weight was nine pounds,
and I set that man down as a very honest
angler.

Presently our boat ran her nose into
the familiar mire of well-named Mud
Landing, and we exchanged oars for
legs, which we plied with right good
will, for a thunderstorm was beginning
to bellow behind us.[129]

XXVII

THE SUMMER CAMP-FIRE

A thin column of smoke seen rising
lazily among the leafy trees and fading
to a wavering film in the warm morning
air or the hotter breath of noon, a flickering
blaze kindling in the sultry dusk
on some quiet shore, mark the place of
the summer camp-fire.

It is not, like the great hospitable
flare and glowing coals of the autumn
and winter camp-fires, the centre to
which all are drawn, about which the
life of the camp gathers, where joke and
repartee flash to and fro as naturally and
as frequently as its own sparks fly upward,
where stories come forth as continuously
as the ever-rising volume of
smoke.

Rather it is avoided and kept aloof
from, held to only by the unhappy
wretch upon whom devolves the task of
tending the pot and frying-pan, and he[130]
hovers near it fitfully, like a moth about
a candle, now backing away to mop his
hot face, now darting into the torrid
circle to turn a fish or snatch away a
seething pot or sizzling pan. Now and
then the curious and hungry approach to
note with what skill or speed the cookery
is progressing, but they are content to
look on at a respectful distance and to
make suggestions and criticisms, but not
to interfere with aid. The epicurean
smoker, who holds that the finest flavor
of tobacco is evoked only by coal or blazing
splinter, steals down upon the windward
side and snatches a reluctant ember
or an elusive flame that flickers out
on the brink of the pipe bowl, but most
who burn the weed are content now to
kindle it with the less fervid flame of a
match.

And yet this now uncomfortable necessity
is still the heart of the camp,
which without it would be but a halting
place for a day, where one appeases hunger
with a cold bite and thirst with
draughts of tepid water, and not a temporary
home where man has his own
fireside, though he care not to sit near[131]
it, and feasts full on hot viands and refreshes
himself with the steaming cup
that cheers but not inebriates.

Its smoke drifted far through the
woods may prove a pungent trail, scented
out among the odors of balsams and the
perfume of flowers that shall lead hither
some pleasant stranger or unexpected
friend, or its firefly glow, flashing but
feebly through the gloaming, may be a
beacon that shall bring such company.
In its praise may also be said that the
summer camp-fire demands no laborious
feeding nor careful tending, is always a
servant, seldom a master.[132]

XXVIII

THE RACCOON

Summer is past its height. The songless
bobolink has forsaken the shorn
meadow. Grain fields, save the battalioned
maize, have fallen from gracefulness
and beauty of bending heads and ripple
of mimic waves to bristling acres of
stubble. From the thriftless borders of
ripening weeds busy flocks of yellowbirds
in faded plumage scatter in sudden
flight at one's approach like upblown
flurries of dun leaves. Goldenrod gilds
the fence-corners, asters shine in the
dewy borders of the woods, sole survivors
of the floral world save the persistent
bloom of the wild carrot and succory—flourishing
as if there had never
been mower or reaper—and the white
blossoms of the buckwheat crowning the
filling kernels. The fervid days have
grown preceptibly shorter, the lengthening
nights have a chilly autumnal[133]
flavor, and in the cool dusk the katydids
call and answer one to another out
of their leafy tents, and the delicate
green crickets that Yankee folks call
August pipers play their monotonous
tune. Above the katydid's strident cry
and the piper's incessant notes, a wild
tremulous whinny shivers through the
gloom at intervals, now from a distant
field or wood, now from the near orchard.
One listener will tell you that
it is only a little screech owl's voice, another
that it is the raccoon's rallying
cry to a raid on the cornfield. There
is endless disputation concerning it and
apparently no certainty, but the raccoon
is wilder than the owl, and it is
pleasanter to believe that it is his voice
that you hear.

The corn is in the milk; the feast is
ready. The father and mother and well
grown children, born and reared in the
cavern of a ledge or hollow tree of a
swamp, are hungry for sweets remembered
or yet untasted, and they are
gathering to it, stealing out of the thick
darkness of the woods and along the
brookside in single file, never stopping to[134]
dig a fiery wake-robin bulb nor to catch
a frog nor harry a late brood of ground-nesting
birds, but only to call some laggard,
or distant clansfolk. So one fancies,
when the quavering cry is repeated
and when it ceases, that all the free-booters
have gained the cornfield and are
silent with busy looting. Next day's examination
of the field may confirm the
fancy with the sight of torn and trampled
stalks and munched ears. These are
the nights when the coon hunter is
abroad and the robbers' revel is likely
to be broken up in a wild panic.

Hunted only at night, to follow the
coon the boldest rider must dismount,
yet he who risks neck and limbs, or
melts or freezes for sport's sake, and
deems no sport manly that has not a
spice of danger or discomfort in it, must
not despise this humble pastime for such
reason.

On leaving the highway that leads
nearest to the hunting ground, the way
of the coon hunters takes them, in darkness
or feeble lantern light, over rough
and uncertain footing, till the cornfield's
edge is reached and the dogs cast off.[135]
Away go the hounds, their course only
indicated by the rustling of the corn
leaves, as they range through the field,
until one old truth-teller gives tongue
on the track of a coon who perhaps has
brought his whole family out on a nocturnal
picnic. The hounds sweep straight
away, in full cry, on the hot scent to hill
or swamp, where their steadfast baying
proclaims that the game is treed.

Then follows a pell-mell scramble toward
the musical uproar. Stones, cradle
knolls, logs, stumps, mud holes,
brambles and all the inanimate enemies
that lie in wait for man when he hastens
in the dark, combine to trip, bump,
bruise, sprain, scratch, and bemire the
hurrying hunters.

Then when all have gathered at the
centre of attraction, where the excited
hounds are raving about the boll of some
great tree, the best and boldest climber
volunteers to go aloft into the upper
darkness and shake the quarry down or
shoot him if may be. If he succeeds
in accomplishing the difficult task, what
a mêlée ensues when the coon crashes
through the branches to the ground and[136]
becomes the erratic centre of the wild
huddle of dogs and men.

Fewer voices never broke the stillness
of night with sounds more unearthly
than the medley of raging, yelping,
growling, cheering, and vociferous orders
given forth by dogs, coon, and hunters,
while hillside and woodland toss to and
fro a more discordant badinage of echo.
The coon is not a great beast, but a
tough and sharp-toothed one, who carries
beneath his gray coat and fat ribs a stout
heart and wonderful vitality; and a
tussle with a veteran of the tribe of
cornfield robbers tests the pluck of the
dogs.

If the coon takes refuge in a tree too
tall and limbless for his pursuers to
climb, there is nothing for them but to
keep watch and ward till daylight discovers
him crouched on his lofty perch.
A huge fire enlivens the long hours of
guard keeping. A foraging party repairs
to the nearest cornfield for roasting ears,
and the hunters shorten the slow nighttide
with munching scorched corn,
sauced by joke and song and tales of the
coon hunts of bygone years.[137]

The waning moon throbs into view
above a serrated hill-crest, then climbs
the sky, while the shadows draw eastward,
then pales in the dawn, and when
it is like a blotch of white cloud in the
zenith, a sunrise gun welcomes day and
brings the coon tumbling to earth. Or
perhaps not a coon, but some vagrant
house cat is the poor reward of the long
watch. Then the weary hunters plod
homeward to breakfast and to nail their
trophies to the barn door.

When the sweet acorns, dropping in
the frosty night, tempt the coon to a
later feast, there is as good sport and
primer peltry. In any of the nights
wherein this sport may be pursued, the
man of lazy mould and contemplative
mind loves best the hunt deemed unsuccessful
by the more ardent hunters,
when the hounds strike the trail of a
wandering fox and carry a tide of wild
music, flooding and ebbing over valley
and hilltop, while the indolent hunter
reclines at ease, smoking his pipe and
listening, content to let more ambitious
hunters stumble over ledges and wallow
through swamps.[138]

When winter begins, the coon retires
for a long and comfortable sleep, warmly
clothed in fur and fat. A great midwinter
thaw awakens him, fooled out of
a part of his nap by the siren song of
the south wind, and he wanders forth in
quest of something. If food, he never
finds it, and as far as I have been able
to determine, does not even seek it. I
should imagine, reading the record of his
journey as he prints it in his course from
hollow tree or hollow ledge to other
hollow trees and hollow ledges, that he
had been awakened to a sense of loneliness
and was seeking old friends in
familiar haunts, with whom to talk over
last year's cornfield raids and frogging
parties in past summer nights—perchance
to plan future campaigns. Or is
it an inward fire and no outward warmth
that has thawed him into this sudden
activity? Has he, like many of his biggers
and betters, gone a-wooing in winter
nights?

At such times the thrifty hunter who
has an eye more to profit and prime peltry
than to sport, goes forth armed only
with an axe. Taking the track of the[139]
wanderers, he follows it to their last
tarrying place. If it be a cave, they are
safe except from the trap when they
come forth to begin another journey; but
if it is a hollow tree, woe betide the poor
wretches. The hunter saps the foundation
of their castle, and when it crashes
to its fall he ignominiously knocks the
dazed inmates on the head. It is fashionable
for others to wear the coat which
becomes the raccoon much better than
them and which once robbed of he can
never replace.

During the spring and early summer
little is seen of the raccoon. His tracks
may be found on a sandy shore or margin
of a brook and occasionally his call can
be heard, if indeed it be his, but beyond
these he gives little evidence of his existence.
There must be nocturnal excursions
for food, but for the most part old
and young abide in their rocky fortress
or wooden tower. They are reported to
be a playful family, and the report is
confirmed by the pranks of domesticated
members of it. Sometimes there will be
found in one of their ravaged homes a
rounded gnarl worn smooth with much[140]
handling or pawing, the sole furniture
of the house and evidently a plaything.

This little brother of the bear is one
of the few remaining links that connect
us with the old times, when there were
trees older than living men, when all the
world had not entered for the race to
gain the prize of wealth, or place, or renown;
when it was the sum of all happiness
for some of us to "go a-coonin'."
It is pleasant to see the track of this
midnight prowler, this despoiler of cornfields,
imprinted in the mud of the lane
or along the soft margin of the brook, to
know that he survives, though he may
not be the fittest. When he has gone
forever, those who outlive him will know
whether it was his quavering note that
jarred the still air of the early fall evenings
or if it was only the voice of the
owl—if he too shall not then have gone
the inevitable way of all the wild world.[141]

XXIX

THE RELUCTANT CAMP-FIRE

The depressing opposite of the fire
that is the warm heart of the camp is
the pile of green or rain-soaked fuel that
in spite of all coaxing and nursing refuses
to yield a cheerful flame. Shavings
from the resin-embalmed heart of a
dead pine and scrolls of birch bark fail
to enkindle it to more than flicker and
smoke, while the wet and hungry campers
brood forlornly over the cheerless centre
of their temporary home, with watery
eyes and souls growing sick of camp life.

Night is falling, and the shadows of
the woods thicken into solid gloom that
teems with mysterious horrors, which
stretch their intangible claws through
the darkness to chill the backs of the
timid with an icy touch, and the silence
is terrible with unuttered howlings of
imaginary beasts.

Each one is ready to blame the other
for the common discomfort, and all, the[142]
high priest, who so far fails to kindle
the altar fire. He is an impostor, who
should be smothered in the reek of his
own failure. Yet, as the group regard
him with unkind glances and mutterings
of disapproval, he perseveres, feeding
the faint flame with choice morsels of
fat wood and nursing it with his breath,
his bent face and puffed cheeks now a
little lightened, now fading into gloom,
till suddenly the sullenness of the reluctant
fuel is overcome, wings of flame flutter
up the column of smoke, and the
black pile leaps into a lurid tower of
light, from whose peak a white banner
of smoke flaunts upward, saluted by the
waving boughs that it streams among.

Tent and shanty, familiar trees, and
moving figures with their circle of
grotesque, dancing shadows, spring into
sudden existence out of the blank darkness.
The magic touch of the firelight
dispels every sullen look, warms every
heart to genial comradeship; jokes flash
back and forth merrily, and the camp
pulses again with reawakened cheerful
life. Verily, fire worketh wonders in
divers ways.[143]

XXX

SEPTEMBER DAYS

September days have the warmth of
summer in their briefer hours, but in
their lengthening evenings a prophetic
breath of autumn. The cricket chirps
in the noontide, making the most of
what remains of his brief life; the bumblebee
is busy among the clover blossoms
of the aftermath; and their shrill
cry and dreamy hum hold the outdoor
world above the voices of the song birds,
now silent or departed.

What a little while ago they were our
familiars, noted all about us in their accustomed
haunts—sparrow, robin, and
oriole, each trying now and then, as if
to keep it in memory, a strain of his
springtime love song, and the cuckoo
fluting a farewell prophecy of rain. The
bobolinks, in sober sameness of traveling
gear, still held the meadowside thickets
of weeds; and the swallows sat in sedate[144]
conclave on the barn ridge. Then, looking
and listening for them, we suddenly
become aware they are gone; the adobe
city of the eave-dwellers is silent and
deserted; the whilom choristers of the
sunny summer meadows are departed to
a less hospitable welcome in more genial
climes. How unobtrusive was their exodus.
We awake and miss them, or we
think of them and see them not, and
then we realize that with them summer
too has gone.

This also the wafted thistledown and
the blooming asters tell us, and, though
the woods are dark with their latest
greenness, in the lowlands the gaudy
standard of autumn is already displayed.
In its shadow the muskrat is thatching
his winter home, and on his new-shorn
watery lawn the full-fledged wild duck
broods disport in fullness of feather and
strength of pinion. Evil days are these
of September that now befall them.
Alack, for the callow days of peaceful
summer, when no honest gunner was
abroad, and the law held the murderous
gun in abeyance, and only the keel of
the unarmed angler rippled the still[145]
channel. Continual unrest and abiding
fear are their lot now and henceforth,
till spring brings the truce of close time
to their persecuted race.

More silently than the fisher's craft
the skiff of the sportsman now invades
the rush-paled thoroughfares. Noiseless
as ghosts, paddler and shooter glide
along the even path till, alarmed by
some keener sense than is given us, up
rise wood duck, dusky duck, and teal
from their reedy cover. Then the ready
gun belches its thunder, and suddenly
consternation pervades the marshes.
All the world has burst forth in a burning
of powder. From end to end, from
border to border, the fenny expanse
roars with discharge and echo, and nowhere
within it is there peace or rest for
the sole of a webbed foot. Even the
poor bittern and heron, harmless and
worthless, flap to and fro from one to
another now unsafe retreat, in constant
danger of death from every booby gunner
who can cover their slow flight.

The upland woods, too, are awakened
from the slumber of their late summer
days. How silent they had grown when[146]
their songsters had departed, rarely
stirred but by the woodpecker's busy
hammer, the chatter and bark of squirrels,
and the crows making vociferous
proclamation against some winged or
furred enemy. The grouse have waxed
fat among the border patches of berry
bushes, rarely disturbed in the seclusion
of the thickets but by the soft footfall
of the fox, the fleeting shadow of a cruising
hawk, and the halloo of the cowboy
driving home his herd from the hillside
pasture. Now come enemies more relentless
than beast or bird of prey, a
sound more alarming than the cowboy's
distant call—man and his companion
the dog, and the terrible thunder of the
gun. A new terror is revealed to the
young birds, a half-forgotten one brought
afresh to the old. The crows have found
fresh cause for clamor, and the squirrels
lapse into a silence of fear.

Peace and the quietness of peace have
departed from the realm of the woods,
and henceforth while the green leaves
grow bright as blossoms with the touch
of frost, then brown and sere, and till
long after they lie under the white[147]
shroud of winter, its wild denizens shall
abide in constant fear and unrest.

So fares it with the wood-folk, these
days of September, wherein the sportsman
rejoiceth with exceeding gladness.[148]

XXXI

A PLEA FOR THE UNPROTECTED

Why kill, for the mere sake of killing
or the exhibition of one's skill, any wild
thing that when alive harms no one and
when killed is of no worth? The more
happy wild life there is in the world, the
pleasanter it is for all of us.

When one is duck-shooting on inland
waters, sitting alert in the bow of the
skiff with his gun ready for the expected
gaudy wood duck, or plump mallard, or
loud quacking dusky duck, or swift-winged
teal, to rise with a splashing
flutter out of the wild rice, and there is
a sudden beating of broad wings among
the sedges with a startled guttural quack,
and one's heart leaps to his throat and
his gun to his shoulder, and then—only
an awkward bittern climbs the September
breeze with a slow incline, there is
a vengeful temptation to let drive at
the disappointing good-for-nothing. But[149]
why not let the poor fellow go? If you
dropped him back into the marsh to
rot unprofitably there, disdained even by
the mink, unattainable to the scavenger
skunk, what good would it do you? If
he disappointed you, you disturbed him
in his meditations, or in the pursuit of
a poor but honest living. Perhaps a
great heron too intent on his fishing
or frogging, or dozing in the fancied seclusion
of his reedy bower, springs up
within short range and goes lagging
away on his broad vans. He may be
taken home to show, for he is worth
showing even when killed. But if you
wish your friends to see him at his best,
bring them to him and let them see how
well he befits these sedgy levels—a
goodly sight, whether he makes his lazy
flight above them or stands a motionless
sentinel in the oozy shallows. The
marshes would be desolate without him,
or if one desires the charm of loneliness,
his silent presence adds to it.

A kingfisher comes clattering along
the channel. As he jerks his swift way
over the sluggish water he may test
your marksmanship, but as he hangs[150]
with rapid wing-beats over a school of
minnows, as steadfast for a minute as a
star forever, needing no skill to launch
him to his final unrewarded plunge, do
not kill him! In such waters he takes
no fish that you would, and he enlivens
the scene more than almost any other
frequenter of it, never skulking and hiding,
but with metallic, vociferous clatter
heralding his coming. One never tires
of watching his still mid-air poise, the
same in calm or wind, and his unerring
headlong plunge.

When one wanders along a willowy
stream with his gun, cautiously approaching
every lily-padded pool and shadowed
bend likely to harbor wood duck or teal,
and finds neither, and his ears begin to
ache for the sound of his gun—if a
green heron flaps off a branch before him
he is sorely tempted to shoot the ungainly
bird, but if the gun must be heard,
let it speak to a stump or a tossed chip,
either as difficult a target as he, and let
the poor harmless little heron live. Uncouth
as he is, he comes in well in the
picture of such a watercourse, which has
done with the worry of turning mills,[151]
left far behind with their noise and bustle
on foaming rapids among the hills, and
crawls now in lazy ease through wide intervales,
under elms and water maples
and thickets of willows.

On the uplands, where the meadow
lark starts out of the grass with a
sharp, defiant "zeet!" and speeds away
on his steady game-like flight, remember
before you stop it, or try to, of how
little account he is when brought to
bag; and how when the weary days of
winter had passed, his cheery voice welcomed
the coming spring, a little later
than the robin's, a little earlier than
the flicker's cackle; and what an enlivening
dot of color his yellow breast
made where he strutted in the dun, bare
meadows.

In some States the woodpeckers are
unprotected and are a mark for every
gunner. Their galloping flight tempts
the ambitious young shooter to try his
skill, but they are among the best friends
of the arboriculturist and the fruit-grower,
for though some of them steal
cherries and peck early apples, and one
species sucks the sap of trees, they are[152]
the only birds that search out and kill
the insidious, destructive borer.

In some States, too, the hare is unprotected
by any law, and it is common custom
to hunt it, even so late as April, for
the mere sake of killing, apparently; or
perhaps the charm of the hound's music,
which makes the butchery of Adirondack
deer so delightful a sport to some,
adds a zest to the slaughter of these innocents—though,
be it said, there is
no comparison in the marksmanship required.
Alive, the northern hare is one
of the most harmless of animals; dead,
he is, in the opinion of most people, one
of the most worthless; so worthless that
hunters frequently leave the result of all
their day's "sport" in the woods where
they were killed. Yet the hare is legitimate
game, and should be hunted
as such, and only in proper seasons,
and not be ruthlessly exterminated. A
woodland stroll is the pleasanter if one
sees a hare there in his brown summer
suit, or white as the snow about him in
his winter furs.

Where there are no statute laws for
the protection of game and harmless[153]
creatures not so classed, an unwritten
law of common sense, common decency,
and common humanity should be powerful
enough to protect all these. The fox
is an outlaw; it is every one's legal right
to kill him whenever and however he
may, and yet wherever the fox is hunted
with any semblance of fair play, whether
in New England with gun and hound,
or elsewhere with horse and hound, the
man who traps a fox, or kills one unseasonably,
or destroys a vixen and her cubs,
bears an evil reputation. A sentiment
as popular and as potent ought to prevail
to protect those that, though harmless,
are as unshielded by legislative enactments
as the fox, and much less guarded
by natural laws and inborn cunning.[154]

XXXII

THE SKUNK

Always and everywhere in evil repute
and bad odor, hunted, trapped, and
killed, a pest and a fur-bearer, it is a
wonder that the skunk is not exterminated,
and that he is not even uncommon.

With an eye to the main chance, the
fur-trapper spares him when fur is not
prime, but when the letter "R" has become
well established in the months the
cruel trap gapes for him at his outgoing
and incoming, at the door of every
discovered burrow, while all the year
round the farmer, sportsman, and poultry-grower
wage truceless war against him.

Notwithstanding this general outlawry,
when you go forth of a winter
morning, after a night of thaw or tempered
chill, you see his authentic signature
on the snow, the unmistakable
diagonal row of four footprints each, or[155]
short-spaced alternate tracks, where he
has sallied out for a change from the
subterranean darkness of his burrow, or
from his as rayless borrowed quarters
beneath the barn, to the starlight or pale
gloom of midnight winter landscape.

More often are you made aware of his
continued survival by another sense than
sight, when his far-reaching odor comes
down the vernal breeze or waft of summer
air, rankly overbearing all the fragrance
of springing verdure, or perfume
of flowers and new-mown hay, and you
well know who has somewhere and somehow
been forced to take most offensively
the defensive.

It may be said of him that his actions
speak louder than his words. Yet
the voiceless creature sometimes makes
known his presence by sound, and
frightens the belated farm boy, whom
he curiously follows with a mysterious,
hollow beating of his feet upon the
ground.

Patches of neatly inverted turf in
a grub-infested pasture tell those who
know his ways that the skunk has been
doing the farmer good service here, and[156]
making amends for poultry stealing,
and you are inclined to regard him with
more favor. But when you come upon
the empty shells of a raided partridge
nest, your sportsman's wrath is enkindled
against him for forestalling your
gun. Yet who shall say that you had a
better right to the partridges than he to
the eggs?

If you are so favored, you can but admire
the pretty sight of the mother with
her cubs basking in a sunny nook or
leading them afield in single file, a black
and white procession.

If by another name the rose would
smell as sweet, our old acquaintance is
in far better odor for change of appellation
from that so suggestive of his rank
offenses. What beauty of fair faces
would be spoiled with scorn by a hint of
the vulgar name which in unadorned
truth belongs to the handsome glossy
black muff and boa that keep warm those
dainty fingers and swan-like neck. Yet
through the furrier's art and cunning
they undergo a magic transformation
into something to be worn with pride,
and the every-day wear of the despised[157]
outlaw becomes the prized apparel of
the fair lady.

If unto this humble night wanderer is
vouchsafed a life beyond his brief earthly
existence, imagine him in that unhunted,
trapless paradise of uncounted eggs and
callow nestlings, grinning a wide derisive
smile as he beholds what fools we mortals
be, so fooled by ourselves and one
another.[158]

XXXIII

A CAMP-FIRE RUN WILD

Some wooden tent-pins inclosing a
few square yards of ground half covered
with a bed of evergreen twigs, matted
but still fresh and odorous, a litter of
paper and powder-smirched rags, empty
cans and boxes, a few sticks of fire wood,
a blackened, primitive wooden crane, with
its half-charred supporting crotches, and
a smouldering heap of ashes and dying
brands, mark the place of a camp recently
deserted.

Coming upon it by chance, one could
not help a feeling of loneliness, something
akin to that inspired by the cold
hearthstone of an empty house, or the
crumbling foundations of a dwelling long
since fallen to ruin. What days and
nights of healthful life have been spent
here. What happy hours, never to return,
have been passed here. What
jokes have flashed about, what merry[159]
tales have been told, what joyous peals
of laughter rung, where now all is silence.
But no one is there to see it.
A crow peers down from a treetop to
discover what pickings he may glean,
and a mink steals up from the landing,
which bears the keelmarks of lately departed
boats, both distrustful of the old
silence which the place has so suddenly
resumed; and a company of jays flit silently
about, wondering that there are
no intruders to assail with their inexhaustible
vocabulary.

A puff of wind rustles among the
treetops, disturbing the balance of the
crow, then plunges downward and sets
aflight a scurry of dry leaves, and out
of the gray ashes uncoils a thread of
smoke and spins it off into the haze of
leaves and shadows. The crow flaps in
sudden alarm, the mink takes shelter in
his coign of vantage among the driftwood,
and the jays raise a multitudinous
clamor of discordant outcry. The dry
leaves alight as if by mischievous guidance
of evil purpose upon the dormant
embers, another puff of wind arouses a
flame that first tastes them, then licks[160]
them with an eager tongue, then with
the next eddying breath scatters its
crumbs of sparks into the verge of the
forest. These the rising breeze fans till
it loads itself with a light burden of
smoke, shifted now here, now there, as
it is trailed along the forest floor, now
climbing among the branches, then soaring
skyward.

Little flames creep along the bodies
of fallen trees and fluffy windrows of
dry leaves, toying like panther kittens
with their assured prey, and then, grown
hungry with such dainty tasting, the
flames upburst in a mad fury of devouring.
They climb swifter than panthers
to treetops, falling back they gnaw savagely
at tree roots, till the ancient lords
of the forest reel and topple and fall before
the gathering wind, and bear their
destroyer still onward.

The leeward woods are thick with a
blinding, stifling smoke, through which
all the wild creatures of the forest flee
in terror, whither they know not—by
chance to safety, by equal chance perhaps
to a terrible death in the surging deluge
of fire. The billows of flame heave and[161]
dash with a constant insatiate roar, tossing
ever onward a red foam of sparks and
casting a jetsam of lurid brands upon
the ever-retreating strand that is but
touched with the wash of enkindling,
when it is overrun by the sea of fire.

The ice-cold springs grow hot in its
fierce overwhelming wave, the purling
rills hiss and boil and shrink before it,
then vanish from their seared beds. All
the living greenness of the forest is utterly
consumed—great trees that have
stood like towers, defying the centuries,
with the ephemeral verdure of the
woodland undergrowth; and to mark
the place of all this recent majesty and
beauty, there is but smouldering ruin
and black and ashen waste. Little
farms but lately uncovered to the sun
out of the wilderness, cosy homesteads
but newly builded, are swept away, and
with them cherished hopes and perhaps
precious lives. What irreparable devastation
has been wrought by the camp-fire
run wild!

Meanwhile the careless begetters of
this havoc are making their leisurely
way toward the outer world of civilization,[162]
serenely noting that the woods are
on fire, and complacently congratulating
themselves that the disaster did not come
to spoil their outing; never once thinking
that by a slight exercise of that
care which all men owe the world, this
calamity, which a century cannot repair,
might have been avoided.[163]

XXXIV

THE DEAD CAMP-FIRE

A heap of ashes, a few half-burned
brands, a blackened pair of crotched
sticks that mark the place of the once
glowing heart of the camp, furnish food
for the imagination to feed upon or give
the memory an elusive taste of departed
pleasures.

If you were one of those who saw
its living flame and felt its warmth, the
pleasant hours passed here come back
with that touch of sadness which accompanies
the memory of all departed pleasures
and yet makes it not unwelcome.
What was unpleasant, even what was
almost unendurable, has nearly faded out
of remembrance or is recalled with a
laugh.

It was ten years ago, and the winds
and fallen leaves of as many autumns
have scattered and covered the gray
heap. If it was only last year, you fancy[164]
that the smell of fire still lingers in the
brands. How vividly return to you the
anxious deliberation with which the site
was chosen with a view to all attainable
comfort and convenience, and the final
satisfaction that followed the establishment
of this short-lived home, short-lived
but yet so much a home during its existence.
Nothing contributed so much to
make it one as the camp-fire. How intently
you watched its first building and
lighting, how labored for its maintenance
with awkwardly-wielded axe, how you inhaled
the odors of its cookery and essayed
long-planned culinary experiments
with extemporized implements, over its
beds of coals, and how you felt the consequent
exaltation of triumph or mortification
of failure.

All these come back to you, and the
relighting of the fire in the sleepy dawn,
the strange mingling of white sunlight
and yellow firelight when the sun shot
its first level rays athwart the camp, the
bustle of departure for the day's sport,
the pleasant loneliness of camp-keeping
with only the silent woods, the crackling
fire, and your thoughts for company; the[165]
incoming at nightfall and the rekindling
of the fire, when the rosy bud of sleeping
embers suddenly expanded into a great
blossom of light whose petals quivered
and faded and brightened among the encircling
shadows of the woods. You
laugh again at the jokes that ran around
that merry circle and wonder again and
again at the ingenuity with which small
performances were magnified into great
exploits, little haps into strange adventure,
and with which bad shots and poor
catches were excused.

At last came breaking camp, the desolation
of dismantling and leave-taking.
How many of you will ever meet again?
How many of those merry voices are
stilled forever, from how many of those
happy faces has the light of life faded?

Who lighted this camp-fire? Years
have passed since it illumined the nightly
gloom of the woods, for moss and lichens
are creeping over the charred back-log.
A green film is spread over the ashes,
and thrifty sprouts are springing up
through them.

You know that the campers were tent-dwellers,
for there stand the rows of[166]
rotten tent pins inclosing a rusty heap of
mould that once was a fragrant couch of
evergreens inviting tired men to rest,—or
you know they spent their nights in a
shanty, for there are the crumbling walls,
the fallen-in roof of bark which never
again will echo song or jest.

This pile of fish-bones attests that
they were anglers, and skillful or lucky
ones, for the pile is large. If you are
an ichthyologist, you can learn by these
vestiges of their sport whether they satisfied
the desire of soul and stomach with
the baser or the nobler fishes; perhaps
a rotting pole, breaking with its own
weight, may decide whether they fished
with worm or fly; but whether you relegate
them to the class of scientific or
unscientific anglers, you doubt not they
enjoyed their sport as much in one way
as in the other.

You know that they were riflemen, for
there is the record of their shots in the
healing bullet wounds on the trunk of a
great beech. For a moment you may
fancy that the woods still echo the laughter
that greeted the shot that just raked[167]
the side of the tree; but it is only the
cackle of a yellow-hammer.

There is nothing to tell you who they
were, whence they came, or whither they
went; but they were campers, lovers of
the great outdoor world, and so akin to
you, and you bid them hail and farewell
without a meeting.[168]

XXXV

OCTOBER DAYS

Fields as green as when the summer
birds caroled above them, woods more
gorgeous with innumerable hues and
tints of ripening leaves than a blooming
parterre, are spread beneath the azure
sky, whose deepest color is reflected
with intenser blue in lake and stream.
In them against this color are set the
scarlet and gold of every tree upon their
brinks, the painted hills, the clear-cut
mountain peaks, all downward pointing
to the depths of this nether sky.

Overhead, thistledown and the silken
balloon of the milkweed float on their
zephyr-wafted course, silver motes
against the blue; and above them are
the black cohorts of crows in their straggling
retreat to softer climes. Now the
dark column moves steadily onward, now
veers in confusion from some suspected
or discovered danger, or pauses to assail[169]
with a harsh clangor some sworn enemy
of the sable brotherhood. Their gay-clad
smaller cousins, the jays, are for the
most part silently industrious among the
gold and bronze of the beeches, flitting
to and fro with flashes of blue as they
gather mast, but now and then finding
time to scold an intruder with an endless
variety of discordant outcry.

How sharp the dark shadows are cut
against the sunlit fields, and in their
gloom how brightly shine the first fallen
leaves and the starry bloom of the asters.
In cloudy days and even when rain is
falling the depths of the woods are not
dark, for the bright foliage seems to
give forth light and casts no shadows
beneath the lowering sky.

The scarlet maples burn, the golden
leaves of poplar and birch shine through
the misty veil, and the deep purple of
the ash glows as if it held a smouldering
fire that the first breeze might fan
into a flame, and through all this luminous
leafage one may trace branch and
twig as a wick in a candle flame. Only
the evergreens are dark as when they
bear their steadfast green in the desolation[170]
of winter, and only they brood
shadows.

In such weather the woodland air is
laden with the light burden of odor,
the faintly pungent aroma of the ripened
leaves, more subtle than the scent of
pine or fir, yet as apparent to the nostrils,
as delightful and more rare, for in
the round of the year its days are few,
while in summer sunshine and winter
wind, in springtime shower and autumnal
frost, pine, spruce, balsam, hemlock, and
cedar distill their perfume and lavish it
on the breeze or gale of every season.

Out of the marshes, now changing
their universal green to brown and
bronze and gold, floats a finer odor than
their common reek of ooze and sodden
weeds—a spicy tang of frost-ripened
flags and the fainter breath of the landward
border of ferns; and with these
also is mingled the subtle pungency of
the woodlands, where the pepperidge is
burning out in a blaze of scarlet, and the
yellow flame of the poplars flickers in the
lightest breeze.

The air is of a temper neither too hot
nor too cold, and in what is now rather[171]
the good gay wood than green wood,
there are no longer pestering insects to
worry the flesh and trouble the spirit.
The flies bask in half torpid indolence,
the tormenting whine of the mosquito is
heard no more. Of insect life one hears
little but the mellow drone of the bumblebee,
the noontide chirp of the cricket,
and the husky rustle of the dragonfly's
gauzy wing.

Unwise are the tent-dwellers who have
folded their canvas and departed to the
shelter of more stable roof-trees, for these
are days that should be made the most
of, days that have brought the perfected
ripeness of the year and display it in the
fullness of its glory.[172]

XXXVI

A COMMON EXPERIENCE

The keenest of the sportsman's disappointments
is not a blank day, nor a
series of misses, unaccountable or too
well accountable to a blundering hand or
unsteady nerves, nor adverse weather,
nor gun or tackle broken in the midst of
sport, nor perversity of dogs, nor uncongeniality
of comradeship, nor yet even
the sudden cold or the spell of rheumatism
that prevents his taking the field
on the allotted morning.

All these may be but for a day. To-morrow
may bring game again to haunts
now untenanted, restore cunning to the
awkward hand, steady the nerves, mend
the broken implement, make the dogs
obedient and bring pleasanter comrades
or the comfortable lonesomeness of one's
own companionship, and to-morrow or
next day or next week the cold and[173]
rheumatic twinges may have passed into
the realm of bygone ills.

For a year, perhaps for many years,
he has yearned for a sight of some beloved
haunt, endeared to him by old
and cherished associations. He fancies
that once more among the scenes of
his youthful exploits there will return to
him something of the boyish ardor, exuberance
of spirit and perfect freedom
from care that made the enjoyment of
those happy hours so complete. He
imagines that a draught from the old
spring that bubbles up in the shadow of
the beeches or from the moss-brimmed
basin of the trout brook will rejuvenate
him, at least for the moment while its
coolness lingers on his palate, as if he
quaffed Ponce de Leon's undiscovered
fountain. He doubts not that in the
breath of the old woods he shall once
more catch that faint, indescribable, but
unforgotten aroma, that subtle savor of
wildness, that has so long eluded him,
sometimes tantalizing his nostrils with a
touch, but never quite inhaled since its
pungent elixir made the young blood
tingle in his veins.[174]

He has almost come to his own again,
his long-lost possession in the sunny
realm of youth. It lies just beyond the
hill before him, from whose crest he
shall see the nut-tree where he shot his
first squirrel, the southing slope where
the beeches hide the spring, where he
astonished himself with the glory of
killing his first grouse, and he shall see
the glint of the brook flashing down the
evergreen dell and creeping among the
alder copses.

He does not expect to find so many
squirrels or grouse or trout now as thirty
years ago, when a double gun was a wonder,
and its possession the unrealized
dream of himself and his comrades, and
none of them had ever seen jointed rod
or artificial fly, and dynamite was uninvented.
Yet all the game and fish
cannot have been driven from nor exterminated
in haunts so congenial and
fostering as these, by the modern horde
of gunners and anglers and by the latter-day
devices of destruction, and he
doubts not that he shall find enough to
satisfy the tempered ardor of the graybeard.[175]

Indeed, it is for something better than
mere shooting or fishing that he has
come so far. One squirrel, flicking the
leaves with his downfall, one grouse
plunging to earth midway in his thunderous
flight, one trout caught as he can
catch him, now, will appease his moderate
craving for sport, and best and most
desired of all, make him, for the nonce, a
boy again. He anticipates with quicker
heartbeat the thrill of surprised delight
that choked him with its fullness when
he achieved his first triumph.

At last the hilltop is gained, but what
unfamiliar scene is this which has taken
the place of that so cherished in his
memory and so longed for? Can that
naked hillside slanting toward him from
the further rim of the valley, forlorn in
the desolation of recent clearing, be the
wooded slope of the other day? Can
the poor, unpicturesque thread of water
that crawls in feeble attenuation between
its shorn, unsightly banks be the wild,
free brook whose voice was a continual
song, every rod of whose amber and silver
course was a picture? Even its fringes of
willow and alders, useful for their shade[176]
and cover when alive, but cut down
worthless even for fuel, have been swept
from its margin by the ruthless besom of
destruction, as if everything that could
beautify the landscape must be blotted
out to fulfill the mission of the spoiler.

Near it, and sucking in frequent
draughts from the faint stream, is a
thirsty and hungry little sawmill, the
most obtrusive and most ignoble feature
of the landscape, whose beauty its
remorseless fangs have gnawed away.
Every foot of the brook below it is foul
with its castings, and the fragments of
its continual greedy feasting are thickly
strewn far and near. Yet it calls to the
impoverished hills for more victims; its
shriek arouses discordant echoes where
once resounded the music of the brook,
the song of birds, the grouse's drum call,
and the mellow note of the hound.

Though sick at heart with the doleful
scene, the returned exile descends to his
harried domain hoping that he may yet
find some vestige of its former wealth,
but only more disappointments reward
his quest. Not a trout flashes through
the shrunken pools. The once limpid[177]
spring is a quagmire among rotting
stumps. The rough nakedness of the
hillside is clad only with thistles and
fireweed, with here and there a patch of
blanched dead leaves, dross of the old gold
of the beech's ancient autumnal glory.

Of all he hoped for nothing is realized,
and he finds only woful change, irreparable
loss. His heart heavy with sorrow
and bursting with impotent wrath
against the ruthless spoiler, he turns his
back forever on the desolated scene of
his boyhood's sports.

Alas! That one should ever attempt
to retouch the time-faded but beautiful
pictures that the memory holds.[178]

XXXVII

THE RED SQUIRREL

A hawk, flashing the old gold of his
pinions in the face of the sun, flings
down a shrill, husky cry of intense
scorn; a jay scolds like a shrew; from
his safe isolation in the midwater, a loon
taunts you and the awakening winds
with his wild laughter; there is a jeer in
the chuckling diminuendo of the woodchuck's
whistle, a taunt in the fox's
gasping bark as he scurries unseen behind
the veil of night; and a scoff on
hunters and hounds and cornfield owners
is flung out through the gloaming in
the raccoon's quavering cry. But of all
the wild world's inhabitants, feathered or
furred, none outdo the saucy red squirrel
in taunts, gibes, and mockery of their
common enemy.

He is inspired with derision that is
expressed in every tone and gesture.
His agile form is vibrant with it when[179]
he flattens himself against a tree-trunk,
toes and tail quivering with intensity of
ridicule as fully expressed in every motion
as in his nasal snicker and throaty
chuckle or in the chattering jeer that
he pours down when he has attained a
midway or topmost bough and cocks his
tail with a saucy curve above his arched
back.

When he persistently retires within
his wooden tower, he still peers out
saucily from his lofty portal, and if he
disappears you may yet hear the smothered
chuckle wherewith he continues to
tickle his ribs. When in a less scornful
mood, he is at least supremely indifferent,
deigning to regard you with but the
corner of an eye, while he rasps a nut
or chips a cone.

Ordinarily you must be philosophical
or godly to suffer gibes with equanimity,
but you need be neither to endure
the scoffs of this buffoon of the woods
and waysides. They only amuse you
as they do him, and you could forgive
these tricks tenfold multiplied if he had
no worse, and love him if he were but
half as good as he is beautiful.[180]

He exasperates when he cuts off your
half-grown apples and pears in sheer
wantonness, injuring you and profiting
himself only in the pleasure of seeing
and hearing them fall. But you are
heated with a hotter wrath when he reveals
his chief wickedness, and you catch
sight of him stealthily skulking along
the leafy by-paths of the branches, silently
intent on evil deeds and plotting
the murder of callow innocents. Quite
noiseless now, himself, his whereabouts
are only indicated by the distressful outcry
of the persecuted and sympathizing
birds and the fluttering swoops of their
futile attacks upon the marauder. Then
when you see him gliding away, swift
and silent as a shadow, bearing a half-naked
fledgeling in his jaws, if this is
the first revelation of such wickedness,
you are as painfully surprised as if you
had discovered a little child in some
wanton act of cruelty.

It seems quite out of all fitness of nature
that this merry fellow should turn
murderer, that this dainty connoisseur
of choice nuts and tender buds, and
earliest discoverer and taster of the[181]
maple's sweetness, should become so
grossly carnivorous and savagely bloodthirsty.
But anon he will cajole you
with pretty ways into forgetfulness and
forgiveness of his crimes. You find
yourself offering, in extenuation of his
sins, confession of your own offenses.
Have not you, too, wrought havoc among
harmless broods and brought sorrow to
feathered mothers and woodland homes?
Is he worse than you, or are you better
than he? Against his sins you set his
beauty and tricksy manners, and for them
would not banish him out of the world
nor miss the incomparable touch of wild
life that his presence gives it.[182]

XXXVIII

THE RUFFED GROUSE

The woods in the older parts of our
country possess scarcely a trait of the
primeval forest. The oldest trees have
a comparatively youthful appearance,
and are pygmies in girth beside the decaying
stumps of their giant ancestors.
They are not so shagged with moss nor
so scaled with lichens. The forest floor
has lost its ancient carpet of ankle-deep
moss and the intricate maze of fallen
trees in every stage of decay, and looks
clean-swept and bare. The tangle of
undergrowth is gone, many of the species
which composed it having quite disappeared,
as have many of the animals
that flourished in the perennial shade of
the old woods.

If in their season one sees and hears
more birds among their lower interlaced
branches, he is not likely to catch sight
or sound of many of the denizens of the[183]
old wilderness. No startled deer bounds
away before him, nor bear shuffles awkwardly
from his feast of mast at one's
approach, nor does one's flesh creep at
the howl of the gathering wolves or the
panther's scream or the rustle of his
stealthy footsteps.

But as you saunter on your devious
way you may hear a rustle of quick feet
in the dry leaves and a sharp, insistent
cry, a succession of short, high-pitched
clucks running into and again out of
a querulous "ker-r-r-r," all expressing
warning as much as alarm. Your ears
guide your eyes to the exact point from
which the sounds apparently come, but
if these are not keen and well trained
they fail to detach any animate form
from the inanimate dun and gray of
dead leaves and underbrush.

With startling suddenness out of the
monotony of lifeless color in an eddying
flurry of dead leaves, fanned to erratic
flight by his wing-beats, the ruffed
grouse bursts into view, in full flight
with the first strokes of his thundering
pinions, and you have a brief vision of
untamed nature as it was in the old days.[184]
On either side of the vanishing brown
nebula the ancient mossed and lichened
trunks rear themselves again, above it
their lofty ramage veils the sky, beneath
it lie the deep, noiseless cushion of moss,
the shrubs and plants that the old wood
rangers knew and the moose browsed on,
and the tangled trunks of fallen trees.
You almost fancy that you hear the long-ago
silenced voices of the woods, so vividly
does this wild spirit for an instant
conjure up a vision of the old wild world
whereof he is a survival.

Acquaintance with civilized man has
not tamed him, but has made him the
wilder. He deigns to feed upon apple-tree
buds and buckwheat and woodside
clover, not as a gift, but a begrudged
compensation for what you have taken
from him, and gives you therefor not
even the thanks of familiarity; and notwithstanding
his acquaintance with generations
of your race he will not suffer
you to come so near to him as he would
your grandfather.

If, when the leaves are falling, you
find him in your barnyard, garden, or
out-house, or on the porch, do not think[185]
he has any intention of associating with
you or your plebeian poultry. You can
only wonder where he found refuge from
the painted shower when all his world
was wooded. If he invites your attendance
at his drum solo, it is only to fool
you with the sight of an empty stage,
for you must be as stealthy and keen-eyed
as a lynx to see his proud display
of distended ruff and wide spread of
barred tail and accelerated beat of wings
that mimic thunder, or see even the
leafy curtain of his stage flutter in the
wind of his swift exit.

How the definite recognition of his
motionless form evades you, so perfectly
are his colors merged into those of his
environment, whether it be in the flush
greenness of summer, the painted hues
of autumn or its later faded dun and
gray, or in the whiteness of winter.
Among one or the other he is but a clot
of dead leaves, a knot upon a branch,
the gray stump of a sapling protruding
from the snow, or, covered deep in the
unmarked whiteness, he bursts from it
like a mine exploded at your feet, leaving
you agape till he has vanished from[186]
your sight and your ears have caught the
last flick of his wings against the dry
branches.

In May, his mate sits on her nest, indistinguishable
among the brown leaves
and gray branches about her. Later,
when surprised with her brood, how conspicuous
she makes herself, fluttering
and staggering along the ground, while
her callow chicks, old in cunning though
so lately their eyes first beheld the world,
scatter in every direction like a shattered
globule of quicksilver and magically disappear
where there is no apparent hiding-place.
Did they con the first lesson
of safety in the dark chamber of the egg,
or absorb it with the warmth of the
brooding breast that gave them life?

Listen, and out of the silence which
follows the noisy dispersion of the family
hear the low sibilant voice of the mother
calling her children to her or cautioning
them to continued hiding. Perhaps you
may see her, alertly skulking among the
underbrush, still uttering that tender,
persuasive cry, so faint that the chirp of
a cricket might overbear it. Scatter her
brood when the members are half grown[187]
and almost as strong of wing as herself,
and you presently hear her softly calling
them and assuring them of her continued
care.

Among many things that mark the
changing season, is the dispersion of
this wildwood family. Each member is
now shifting for itself in matters of seeking
food, safety, pleasure, and comfort.
You will come upon one in the ferny
undergrowth of the lowland woods where
he is consorting with woodcock, frighten
another from his feast on the fence-side
elderberries, scare one in the thick
shadows of the evergreens, another on
the sparsely wooded steep of a rocky
hillside, and later hear the drum-beat of
a young cock that the soft Indian summer
has fooled into springtime love-making,
and each has the alertness that complete
self-dependence has enforced.

Still, you may come upon them gathered
in social groups, yet each going his
own way when flushed. Upon rare occasions
you may surprise a grand convention
of all the grouse of the region
congregated on the sunny lee of a hillside.
It is a sight and sound to remember[188]
long, though for the moment you
forget the gun in your hands, when by
ones, twos, and dozens the dusky forms
burst away up wind, down wind, across
wind, signalling their departure with volleys
of intermittent and continuous thunder.
Not many times in your life will
you see this, yet, if but once, you will be
thankful that you have not outlived all
the old world's wildness.[189]

XXXIX

TWO SHOTS

A boy of fourteen, alert, but too full
of life to move slowly and cautiously, is
walking along an old road in the woods,
a road that winds here and there with
meanderings that now seem vagrant
and purposeless but once led to the various
piles of cordwood and logs for
whose harvesting it was hewn. Goodly
trees have since grown up from saplings
that the judicious axe then scorned.
Beeches, whose flat branches are shelves
of old gold; poplars, turned to towers of
brighter metal by the same alchemy of
autumn; and hemlocks, pyramids of unchanging
green, shadow the leaf-strewn
forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting
of gray and russet stumps. How happy
the boy is in the freedom of the woods;
proud to carry his first own gun, as he
treads gingerly but somewhat noisily
over the fallen leaves and dry twigs,[190]
scanning with quick glances the thickets,
imagining himself the last Mohican on
the warpath, or Leather-Stocking scouting
in the primeval wilderness.

Under his breath he tells the confiding
chickadees and woodpeckers what
undreamed-of danger they would be in
from such a brave, were he not in pursuit
of nobler game. Then he hears
a sudden rustle of the dry leaves, the
quit! quit! of a partridge, catches a
glimpse of a rapidly running brown object,
which on the instant is launched into
a flashing thunderous flight. Impelled
by the instinct of the born sportsman,
he throws the gun to his shoulder, and
scarcely with aim, but in the direction of
the sound, pulls trigger and fires.

On the instant he is ashamed of his
impulsive haste, which fooled him into
wasting a precious charge on the inanimate
evergreen twigs and sere leaves
that come dropping and floating down
to his shot, and is thankful that he is
the only witness of his own foolishness.

But what is that? Above the patter
and rustle of falling twigs and leaves
comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid[191]
beat of wings upon the leaf-strewn earth.
With heart beating as fast he runs toward
the sound, afraid to believe his senses,
when he sees a noble grouse fluttering
out feebly his last gasp. He cannot be
sure that it is not all a dream that may
vanish in a breath, till he has the bird
safe in his hand, and then he is faint
with joy. Was there ever such a shot?
Would that all the world were here to
see, for who can believe it just for the
telling? There never will be another
such a bird, nor such a shot, for him.
He fires a dozen ineffectual ones at fair
marks that day, but the glory of that
one shot would atone for twice as many
misses, and he need not tell of them,
only of this, whereof he bears actual
proof, though he himself can hardly accept
it, till again and again he tests it by
admiring look and touch.

Years after the killing of grouse on
the wing has become a matter-of-course
occurrence in his days of upland shooting,
the memory of this stands clearest
and best. Sixty years later the old
wood road winds through the same
scene, by some marvel of kindliness or[192]
oversight, untouched by the devastating
axe, unchanged but by the forest growth
of half a century and its seemly and
decorous decay. A thicker screen of
undergrowth borders the more faintly
traced way. The golden-brown shelves
of the beech branches sweep more
broadly above it, the spires of the evergreens
are nearer the sky, and the yellow
towers of the poplars are builded
higher, but they are the same trees and
beneath them may yet be seen the gray
stumps and trunks mouldered to russet
lines, of their ancient brethren who fell
when these were saplings.

The gray-bearded man who comes
along the old wood road wonders at the
little change so many years have made
in the scene of the grand achievements
of his youth, and in his mind he runs
over the long calendar to assure himself
that so many autumns have glowed
and faded since that happy day. How
can he have grown old, his ear dull to
the voices of the woods, his sight dim
with the slowly but surely falling veil of
coming blindness, so that even now the
road winds into a misty haze just before[193]
him, yet these trees be young and
lusty?

As they and the unfaded page of memory
record the years, it was but a little
while ago that his heart was almost
bursting with pride of that first triumph.
Would that he might once more feel that
delicious pang of joy.

Hark! There is the quit! quit! of
a grouse, and there another and another,
and the patter and rustle of their retreating
footsteps, presently launching
into sudden flight, vaguely seen in swift
bolts of gray, hurtling among gray tree
trunks and variegated foliage. True to
the old instinct his gun leaps to his
shoulder, and he fires again and again
at the swift target. But the quick eye
no longer guides the aim, the timely
finger no longer pulls the trigger, and
the useless pellets waste themselves on
the leaves and twigs.

The woods are full of grouse, as if all
the birds of the region had congregated
here to mock his failing sight and skill.
On every side they burst away from him
like rockets, and his quick but futile
charges in rapid succession are poured[194]
in their direction, yet not a bird falls,
nor even a feather wavers down through
the still October air. His dim eyes refuse
to mark down the birds that alight
nearest; he can only vaguely follow their
flight by the whirring rush of wings and
the click of intercepting branches.

He is not ashamed of his loss of skill,
only grieved to know that his shooting
days are over, yet he is glad there is
no one near to see his failure. He
makes renunciation of all title to the
name of a crack shot, too well knowing
that this is no brief lapse of skill,
but the final, inevitable falling off of the
quick eye and sure hand. Slowly and
sadly he makes his way to where the
shaded path merges into the sunny
clearing. There, from the cover of the
last bush, a laggard bird springs as if
thrown from a catapult, describing in
his flight an arc of a great circle, and
clearly defined against the steel-blue
sky.

Again the gun springs instinctively to
the shoulder, the instantaneous aim is
taken well ahead on the line of flight,
the trigger pressed in the nick of time,[195]
the charge explodes, and out of a cloud
of feathers drifting and whirling in the
eddies of his own wing-beats, the noble
bird sweeps downward in the continuation
of the course that ends with a dull
thud on the pasture sward.

The old sportsman lifts his clean-killed
bird without a thrill of exultation—he
is only devoutly thankful for the
happy circumstance which made successful
the last shot he will ever fire,
and that not as a miss he may remember
it. Henceforth untouched by him
his gun shall hang upon the wall, its
last use linked with the pleasant memory
of his last shot.[196]

XL

NOVEMBER DAYS

In a midsummer sleep one dreams of
winter, its cold, its silence and desolation
all surrounding him; then awakes, glad
to find himself in the reality of the light
and warmth of summer.

Were we dreaming yesterday of woods
more gorgeous in their leafage than a
flower garden in the flush of profusest
bloom, so bright with innumerable tints
that autumnal blossoms paled beside
them as stars at sunrise? Were we
dreaming of air soft as in springtime, of
the gentle babble of brooks, the carol of
bluebirds, the lazy chirp of crickets, and
have we suddenly awakened to be confronted
by the desolation of naked forests,
the more forlorn for the few tattered
remnants of gay apparel that flutter in
the bleak wind? To hear but the sullen
roar of the chill blast and the clash of
stripped boughs, the fitful scurry of wind-swept[197]
leaves and the raving of swollen
streams, swelling and falling as in changing
stress of passion, and the heavy
leaden patter of rain on roof and sodden
leaves and earth?

Verily, the swift transition is like a
pleasant dream with an unhappy awakening.
Yet not all November days are
dreary. Now the sun shines warm from
the steel-blue sky, its eager rays devour
the rime close on the heels of the retreating
shadows, and the north wind sleeps.
The voice of the brimming stream falls
to an even, softer cadence, like the murmur
of pine forests swept by the light
touch of a steady breeze.

Then the wind breathes softly from
the south, and there drifts with it from
warmer realms, or arises at its touch
from the earth about us, or falls from
the atmosphere of heaven itself, not
smoke, nor haze, but something more
ethereal than these: a visible air, balmy
with odors of ripeness as the breath of
June with perfume of flowers. It pervades
earth and sky, which melt together
in it, till the bounds of neither are discernible,
and blends all objects in the[198]
landscape beyond the near foreground,
till nothing is distinct but some golden
gleam of sunlit water, bright as the orb
that shines upon it. Flocks of migrating
geese linger on the stubble fields, and
some laggard crows flap lazily athwart
the sky or perch contentedly upon the
naked treetops as if they cared to seek
no clime more genial. The brief heavenly
beauteousness of Indian summer
has fallen upon the earth, a few tranquil
days of ethereal mildness dropped
into the sullen or turbulent border of
winter.

In November days, as in all others,
the woods are beautiful to the lover of
nature and to the sportsman who in
their love finds the finer flavor of his
pastime. Every marking of the gray
trunks, each moss-patch and scale of
lichen on them, is shown more distinctly
now in the intercepted light, and the
delicate tracery of the bare branches
and their netted shadows on the rumpled
carpet of the forest floor, have a
beauty as distinctive as the fullness of
green or frost-tinted leafage and its silhouette
of shade.[199]

No blossom is left in woods or fields,
save where in the one the witch-hazel
unfolds its unseasonable flowers yellow
beneath cold skies, or a pink blossom of
herb-robert holds out with modest bravery
in a sheltered cranny of the rocks;
and where in the other, the ghostly
bloom of everlasting rustles above the
leafless stalks in the wind-swept pastures.
There are brighter flashes of color in
the sombre woods where the red winter-berries
shine on their leafless stems and
the orange and scarlet clusters of the
twining bitter-sweet light up the gray
trellis of the vagrant climber.

No sense of loss or sadness oppresses
the soul of the ardent sportsman as he
ranges the unroofed aisles alert for the
wary grouse, the skulking woodcock,
full-grown and strong of wing and keen-eyed
for every enemy, or the hare flashing
his half-donned winter coat among
the gray underbrush as he bounds away
before the merry chiding of the beagles.
The brown monotony of the marshes is
pleasant to him as green fields, while the
wild duck tarries in the dark pools and
the snipe probes the unfrozen patches of[200]
ooze. To him all seasons are kind, all
days pleasant, wherein he may pursue
his sport, though the rain pelt him, chill
winds assail him, or the summer sun
shower upon him its most fervent rays,
and in these changeful days of November
he finds his full measure of content.[201]

XLI

THE MUSKRAT

A little turning of nature from her
own courses banishes the beaver from
his primal haunts, but his less renowned
and lesser cousin, the muskrat, philosophically
accommodates himself to the
changed conditions of their common foster
mother and still clings fondly to her
altered breast.

The ancient forests may be swept
away and their successors disappear, till
there is scarcely left him a watersoaked
log to use as an intermediate port in his
coastwise voyages; continual shadow may
give place to diurnal sunshine, woodland
to meadow and pasture, the plough tear
the roof of his underground home, and
cattle graze where once only the cloven
hoofs of the deer and the moose trod the
virgin mould, yet he holds his old place.

In the springtides of present years as
in those of centuries past his whining[202]
call echoes along the changed shores,
his wake seams with silver the dark garment
of the water, and his comically
grim visage confronts you now as it did
the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days
when the otter and the beaver were his
familiars.

Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing
crops, his food supply is constantly provided
in the annual growth of the
marshes. Here in banks contiguous
to endless store of succulent sedge and
lily roots and shell-cased tidbits of mussels,
he tunnels his stable water-portaled
home, and out there, by the channel's
edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut before
the earliest frost falls upon the
marshes. In its height, some find prophecy
of high or low water, and in the
thickness of its walls the forecast of a
mild or severe winter, but the prophet
himself is sometimes flooded out of his
house, sometimes starved and frozen
in it.

In the still, sunny days between the
nights of its unseen building, the blue
spikes of the pickerel-weed and the
white trinities of the arrow-head yet[203]
bloom beside it. Then in the golden
and scarlet brightness of autumn the departing
wood drake rests on the roof to
preen his plumage, and later the dusky
duck swims on its watery lawn. Above
it the wild geese harrow the low, cold
arch of the sky, the last fleet of sere
leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind,
and then ice and snow draw the veil of
the long winter twilight over the muskrat's
homes and haunts.

These may be gloomy days he spends
groping in the dark chambers of his hut
and burrow, or gathering food in the
dimly lighted icy water, with never a
sight of the upper world nor ever a sunbeam
to warm him.

But there are more woful days when
the sun and the sky are again opened to
him, and he breathes the warm air of
spring, hears the blackbirds sing and the
bittern boom. For, amid all the gladness
of nature's reawakened life, danger
lurks in all his paths; the cruel, hungry
trap gapes for him on every jutting log,
on every feeding-bed, even in the doorway
of his burrow and by the side of his
house.[204]

The trapper's skiff invades all his
pleasant waters; on every hand he hears
the splash of its paddles, the clank of its
setting pole, and he can scarcely show
his head above water but a deadly shower
of lead bursts upon it. He hears the
simulated call of his beloved, and voyaging
hot-hearted to the cheating tryst
meets only death.

At last comes the summer truce and
happy days of peace in the tangled jungle
of the marsh, with the wild duck
and bittern nesting beside his watery
path, the marsh wren weaving her rushy
bower above it.

So the days of his life go on, and the
days of his race continue in the land
of his unnumbered generations. Long
may he endure to enliven the drear
tameness of civilization with a memory
of the world's old wildness.[205]

XLII

NOVEMBER VOICES

With flowers and leaves, the bird
songs have faded out, and the hum and
chirp of insect life, the low and bleat of
herds and flocks afield, and the busy
sounds of husbandry have grown infrequent.
There are lapses of such silence
that the ear aches for some audible signal
of life; and then to appease it there
comes with the rising breeze the solemn
murmur of the pines like the song of
the sea on distant shores, the sibilant
whisper of the dead herbage, the clatter
of dry pods, and the fitful stir of fallen
leaves, like a scurry of ghostly feet fleeing
in affright at the sound of their own
passage.

The breeze puffs itself into a fury of
wind, and the writhing branches shriek
and moan and clash as if the lances of
phantom armies were crossed in wild
mêlée.[206]

The woods are full of unlipped voices
speaking one with another in pleading,
in anger, in soft tones of endearment;
and one hears his name called so distinctly
that he answers and calls again,
but no answer is vouchsafed him, only
moans and shrieks and mocking laughter,
till one has enough of wild voices and
longs for a relapse of silence.

More softly it is broken when through
the still air comes the cheery note of
the chickadee and the little trumpet
of his comrade the nuthatch and far
away the muffled beat of the grouse's
drum, or from a distance the mellow
baying of a hound and its answering
echoes, swelling and dying on hilltop
or glen, or mingling in melodious confusion.

From skyward comes the clangor of
clarions, wild and musical, proclaiming
the march of gray cohorts of geese advancing
southward through the hills and
dales of cloudland. There come, too,
the quick whistling beat of wild ducks'
pinions, the cry of a belated plover, and
the creaking voice of a snipe. Then the[207]
bawling of a ploughman in a far-off field—and
farther away the rumble and shriek
of a railroad train—brings the listening
ear to earth again and its plodding busy
life.[208]

XLIII

THANKSGIVING

Doubtless many a sportsman has
bethought him that his Thanksgiving
turkey will have a finer flavor if the
feast is prefaced by a few hours in the
woods, with dog and gun. Meaner fare
than this day of bounty furnishes forth is
made delicious by such an appetizer, and
the Thanksgiving feast will be none the
worse for it.

What can be sweeter than the wholesome
fragrance of the fallen leaves?
What more invigorating than the breath
of the two seasons that we catch: here
in the northward shade of a wooded hill
the nipping air of winter, there where
the southern slope meets the sun the
genial warmth of an October day. Here
one's footsteps crunch sharply the frozen
herbage and the ice-bearded border of a
spring's overflow; there splash in thawed
pools and rustle softly among the dead
leaves.[209]

The flowers are gone, but they were
not brighter than the winter berries and
bittersweet that glow around one. The
deciduous leaves are fallen and withered,
but they were not more beautiful than
the delicate tracery of their forsaken
branches, and the steadfast foliage of
the evergreens was never brighter. The
song-birds are singing in southern woods,
but chickadee, nuthatch, and woodpecker
are chatty and companionable
and keep the woods in heart with a stir
of life.

Then from overhead or underfoot a
ruffed grouse booms away into the gray
haze of branches, and one hears the
whirr and crash of his headlong flight
long after he is lost to sight, perchance
long after the echo of a futile shot has
died away. Far off one hears the intermittent
discharge of rifles where the
shooters are burning powder for their
Thanksgiving turkey, and faintly from
far away comes the melancholy music of
a hound. Then nearer and clearer, then
a rustle of velvet-clad feet, and lo, reynard
himself, the wildest spirit of the
woods, materializes out of the russet indistinctness[210]
and flashes past, with every
sense alert. Then the hound goes by,
and footstep, voice, and echo sink into
silence. For silence it is, though the
silver tinkle of the brook is in it, and the
stir of the last leaf shivering forsaken on
its bough.

In such quietude one may hold heartfelt
thanksgiving, feasting full upon a
crust and a draught from the icy rivulet,
and leave rich viands and costly wines
for the thankless surfeiting of poorer
men.[211]

XLIV

DECEMBER DAYS

Fewer and more chill have become
the hours of sunlight, and longer stretch
the noontide shadows of the desolate
trees athwart the tawny fields and the
dead leaves that mat the floor of the
woods.

The brook braids its shrunken strands
of brown water with a hushed murmur
over a bed of sodden leaves between
borders of spiny ice crystals, or in the
pools swirl in slow circles the imprisoned
fleets of bubbles beneath a steadfast roof
of glass. Dark and sullen the river
sulks its cheerless way, enlivened but by
the sheldrake that still courses his prey
in the icy water, and the mink that like
a fleet black shadow steals along the
silent banks. Gaudy wood duck and
swift-winged teal have long since departed
and left stream and shore to these
marauders and to the trapper, who now
gathers here his latest harvest.[212]

The marshes are silent and make no
sign of life, though beneath the domes
of many a sedge-built roof the unseen
muskrats are astir, and under the icy
cover of the channels fare to and fro on
their affairs of life, undisturbed by any
turmoil of the upper world.

When the winds are asleep the lake
bears on its placid breast the moveless
images of its quiet shores, deserted now
by the latest pleasure seekers among
whose tenantless camps the wild wood-folk
wander as fearlessly as if the foot of
man had never trodden here. From the
still midwaters far away a loon halloos
to the winds to come forth from their
caves, and yells out his mad laughter
in anticipation of the coming storm. A
herald breeze blackens the water with
its advancing steps, and with a roar of
its trumpets the angry wind sweeps
down, driving the white-crested ranks of
waves to assault the shores. Far up the
long incline of pebbly beaches they rush,
and leaping up the walls of rock hang
fetters of ice upon the writhing trees.
Out of the seething waters arise lofty
columns of vapor, which like a host of[213]
gigantic phantoms stalk, silent and majestic,
above the turmoil, till they fall in
wind-tossed showers of frost flakes.

There are days when almost complete
silence possesses the woods, yet listening
intently one may hear the continual
movement of myriads of snow fleas pattering
on the fallen leaves like the soft
purr of such showers as one might imagine
would fall in Lilliput.

With footfall so light that he is seen
close at hand sooner than heard, a hare
limps past; too early clad in his white
fur that shall make him inconspicuous
amid the winter snow, his coming shines
from afar through the gray underbrush
and on the tawny leaves. Unseen amid
his dun and gray environment, the ruffed
grouse skulks unheard, till he bursts away
in thunderous flight. Overhead, invisible
in the lofty thicket of a hemlock's
foliage, a squirrel drops a slow patter of
cone chips, while undisturbed a nuthatch
winds his spiral way down the smooth
trunk. Faint and far away, yet clear,
resound the axe strokes of a chopper,
and at intervals the muffled roar of a
tree's downfall.[214]

Silent and moveless cascades of ice
veil the rocky steeps where in more
genial days tiny rivulets dripped down
the ledges and mingled their musical
tinkle with the songs of birds and the
flutter of green leaves.

Winter berries and bittersweet still
give here and there a fleck of bright
color to the universal gray and dun of
the trees, and the carpet of cast-off
leaves and the dull hue of the evergreens
but scarcely relieve the sombreness of
the woodland landscape.

Spanning forest and field with a low
flat arch of even gray, hangs a sky as
cold as the landscape it domes and whose
mountain borders lie hidden in its hazy
foundations. Through this canopy of
suspended snow the low noontide sun
shows but a blotch of yellowish gray, rayless
and giving forth no warmth, and,
as it slants toward its brief decline, grows
yet dimmer till it is quite blotted out in
the gloom of the half-spent afternoon.

The expectant hush that broods over
the forlorn and naked earth is broken
only by the twitter of a flock of snow
buntings which, like a straight-blown[215]
flurry of flakes, drift across the fields,
and, sounding solemnly from the depths
of the woods, the hollow hoot of a great
owl. Then the first flakes come wavering
down, then blurring all the landscape
into vague unreality they fall faster, with
a soft purr on frozen grass and leaves till
it becomes unheard on the thickening
noiseless mantle of snow. Deeper and
deeper the snow infolds the earth, covering
all its unsightliness of death and
desolation.

Now white-furred hare and white-feathered
bunting are at one with the
white-clad world wherein they move, and
we, so lately accustomed to the greenness
of summer and the gorgeousness of
autumn, wondering at the ease wherewith
we accept this marvel of transformation,
welcome these white December
days and in them still find content.[216]

XLV

WINTER VOICES

Out of her sleep nature yet gives forth
voices betokening that life abides beneath
the semblance of death, that her
warm heart still beats under the white
shroud that infolds her rigid breast.

A smothered tinkle as of muffled bells
comes up from the streams through their
double roofing of snow and ice, and the
frozen pulse of the trees complains of its
thralldom with a resonant twang as of a
strained cord snapped asunder.

Beneath their frozen plains, the lakes
bewail their imprisonment with hollow
moans awakening a wild and mournful
chorus of echoes from sleeping shores
that answer now no caress of ripples nor
angry stroke of waves nor dip and splash
of oar and paddle.

The breeze stirs leafless trees and
shaggy evergreens to a murmur that is
sweet, if sadder than they gave it in the[217]
leafy days of summer, when it bore the
perfume of flowers and the odor of green
fields, and one may imagine the spirit of
springtime and summer lingers among
the naked boughs, voicing memory and
hope.

Amid all the desolation of their woodland
haunts the squirrels chatter their
delight in windless days of sunshine, and
scoff at biting cold and wintry blasts.
The nuthatch winds his tiny trumpet,
the titmouse pipes his cheery note, the
jay tries the innumerable tricks of his
unmusical voice, and from their rollicking
flight athwart the wavering slant of
snowflakes drifts the creaking twitter of
buntings.

The sharp, resonant strokes of the
woodman's axe and the groaning downfall
of the monarchs that it lays low,
the shouts of teamsters, the occasional
report of a gun, the various sounds of
distant farmstead life, the jangle of
sleigh bells on far-off highways, the
rumbling roar of a railroad train rushing
and panting along its iron path, and the
bellowing of its far-echoed signals, all
proclaim how busily affairs of life and[218]
pleasure still go on while the summer-wearied
earth lies wrapped in her winter
sleep.

Night, stealing upon her in dusky
pallor, under cloudy skies, or silvering
her face with moonbeams and starlight,
brings other and wilder voices. Solemnly
the unearthly trumpet of the owl
resounds from his woodland hermitage,
the fox's gasping bark, wild and uncanny,
marks at intervals his wayward
course across the frozen fields on some
errand of love or freebooting, and, swelling
and falling with puff and lapse of
the night wind, as mournful and lonesome
as the voice of a vagrant spirit,
comes from the mountain ridges the
baying of a hound, hunting alone and
unheeded, while his master basks in the
comfort of his fireside.[219]

XLVI

THE VARYING HARE

It is wonderful that with such a host
of enemies to maintain himself against,
the varying hare may still be counted as
one of our familiar acquaintances. Except
in the depths of the great wildernesses,
he has no longer to fear the
wolf, the wolverine, the panther, and the
lesser felidæ, but where the younger
woodlands have become his congenial
home, they are also the home of a multitude
of relentless enemies. The hawk,
whose keen eyes pierce the leafy roof
of the woods, wheels above him as he
crouches in his form. When he goes
abroad under the moon and stars, the
terrible shadow of the horned owl falls
upon his path, and the fox lurks beside
it to waylay him, and the clumsy raccoon,
waddling home from a cornfield
revel, may blunder upon the timid wayfarer.[220]

But of all his enemies none is more
inveterate than man, though he is not,
as are the others, impelled by necessity,
but only by that savagery, the survival
of barbarism, which we dignify by the
name of the sporting instinct.

Against them all, how slight seem
the defenses of such a weak and timid
creature. Yet impartial nature, having
compassed him about with foes, has shod
his feet with swiftness and silence, and
clad his body with an almost invisible
garment. The vagrant zephyrs touch
the fallen leaves more noisily than his
soft pads press them. The first snow
that whitens the fading gorgeousness
of the forest carpet falls scarcely more
silently.

Among the tender greens of early
summer and the darker verdure of midsummer,
the hare's brown form is as inconspicuous
as a tuft of last year's leaves,
and set in the brilliancy of autumnal
tints, or the russet hue of their decay,
it still eludes the eye. Then winter
clothes him in her own whiteness so he
may sit unseen upon her lap.

When he has donned his winter suit[221]
too early and his white coat is dangerously
conspicuous on the brown leaves
and among the misty gray of naked
undergrowth, he permits your near approach
as confidently as if he were of a
color with his surroundings. Is he not
aware that his spotless raiment betrays
him, or does he trust that he may be
mistaken for a white stone or a scroll
of bark sloughed from a white birch?
That would hardly save him from the
keener-sensed birds and beasts of prey,
but may fool your dull eyes.

In summer wanderings in the woods
you rarely catch sight of him, though
coming upon many faintly traced paths
where he and his wife and their brown
babies make their nightly way among
the ferns. Nor are you often favored
with a sight of him in more frequent
autumnal tramps, unless when he is fleeing
before the hounds whose voices
guide you to a point of observation.
He has now no eyes nor ears for anything
but the terrible clamor that pursues
him wherever he turns, however he
doubles. If a shot brings him down and
does not kill him, you will hear a cry so[222]
piteous that it will spoil your pleasant
dreams of sport for many a night.

After a snowfall a single hare will in
one night make such a multitude of
tracks as will persuade you that a dozen
have been abroad. Perhaps the trail is
so intricately tangled with a purpose of
misleading pursuit, perhaps it is but the
record of saunterings as idle as your
own.

As thus you wander through the
pearl-enameled arches, your roving
glances are arrested by a rounded form
which, as white and motionless as everything
around it, yet seems in some
way not so lifeless. You note that the
broad footprints end there, and then become
aware of two wide, bright eyes,
unblinkingly regarding you from the
fluffy tuft of whiteness. How perfectly
assured he is of his invisibility, and if
he had but closed his bright eyes you
might not guess that he was anything
but a snow-covered clump of moss.
How still and breathless he sits till you
almost touch him, and then the white
clod suddenly flashes into life and impetuous
motion, bounding away in a[223]
halo of feathery flakes as if he himself
were dissolving into white vapor.

Happy he, if he might so elude all
foes; but alas for him, if the swift-winged
owl had been as close above
him or the agile fox within leap. Then
instead of this glimpse of beautiful wild
life to treasure in your memory, you
would only have read the story of
a brief tragedy, briefly written, with a
smirch of blood and a tuft of rumpled
fur.[224]

XLVII

THE WINTER CAMP-FIRE

The chief requisite of a winter camp-fire
is volume. The feeble flame and
meagre bed of embers that are a hot
discomfort to the summer camper, while
he hovers over coffee-pot and frying-pan,
would be no more than the glow of a
candle toward tempering this nipping
air. This fire must be no dainty nibbler
of chips and twigs that a boy's
hatchet may furnish, but a roaring
devourer of logs, for whose carving the
axe must be long and stoutly wielded—a
very glutton of solid fuel, continually
demanding more and licking with its
broad red tongues at the branches that
sway and toss high above in its hot
breath.

So fierce is it that you approach cautiously
to feed it and the snow shrinks
away from it and can quench of it only
the tiny sparks that are spit out upon it.[225]
You must not be too familiar with it,
yet it is your friend after its own manner,
fighting away for you the creeping
demon of cold, and holding at bay, on
the rim of its glare, the wolf and the
panther.

With its friendly offices are mingled
many elfish tricks. It boils your pot
just to the point you wish, then boils
it over and licks up the fragrant brew
of celestial leaf or Javanese berry. It
roasts or broils your meat to a turn,
then battles with you for it and sears
your fingers when you strive to snatch
the morsel from its jaws, and perhaps
burns it to a crisp before your very
eyes, vouchsafing but the tantalizing fragrance
of the feast.

Then it may fall into the friendliest
and most companionable of moods, lazily
burning its great billets of ancient wood
while you burn the Virginian weed, singing
to you songs of summer, its tongues
of flame murmuring like the south wind
among green leaves, and mimicking the
chirp of the crickets and the cicada's
cry in the simmer of exuding sap and
vent of gas, and out of its smoke blossom[226]
sparks, that drift away in its own
currents like red petals of spent flowers.

It paints pictures, some weird or
grotesque, some beautiful, now of ghosts
and goblins, now of old men, now of
fair women, now of lakes crinkled with
golden waves and towers on pine-crowned
crags ruddy with the glow of sunset,
sunny meadows and pasture lands, with
farmsteads and flocks and herds.

The ancient trees that rear themselves
aloft like strong pillars set to hold up
the narrow arch of darkness, exhale an
atmosphere of the past, in which your
thoughts, waking or sleeping, drift backward
to the old days when men whose
dust was long since mingled with the
forest mould moved here in the rage of
war and the ardor of the chase. Shadowy
forms of dusky warriors, horribly
marked in war paint, gather about the
camp-fire and sit in its glare in voiceless
council, or encircle it in the grotesquely
terrible movement of the war
dance.

Magically the warlike scene changes
to one of peace. The red hunters steal[227]
silently in with burdens of game. The
squaws sit in the ruddy light plying
their various labors, while their impish
children play around them in mimicry
of battle and the chase.

All then vanish, and white-clad soldiers
of France bivouac in their place—or
red-coated Britons, or Provincial rangers,
unsoldierly to look upon, in home-spun
garb, but keen-eyed, alert, and the
bravest of the brave.

These dissolve like wreaths of smoke,
and a solitary white hunter, clothed all
in buckskin, sits over against you. His
long flint-lock rifle lying across his lap,
he is looking with rapt gaze into the
fire, dreaming as you are.

So, growing brighter as the daylight
grows dim and the gloaming thickens
to the mirk, and paling again as daylight
creeps slowly back upon the world,
but always bright in the diurnal twilight
of the woods, the camp-fire weaves
and breaks its magic spells, now leaping,
now lapsing, as its own freaks
move it. Then, perhaps, when it has
charmed you far across the border of[228]
dreamland and locked your eyes in the
blindness of sleep, it will startle you
back to the cold reality of the wintry
woods with a crash and roar of sudden
revival.[229]

XLVIII

JANUARY DAYS

In these midwinter days, how muffled
is the earth in its immaculate raiment, so
disguised in whiteness that familiar places
are strange, rough hollows smoothed to
mere undulations, deceitful to the eye
and feet, and level fields so piled with
heaps and ridges that their owners
scarcely recognize them. The hovel is
as regally roofed as the palace, the rudest
fence is a hedge of pearl, finer than a
wall of marble, and the meanest wayside
weed is a white flower of fairyland.

The woods, which frost and November
winds stripped of their leafy thatch, are
roofed again, now with an arabesque of
alabaster more delicate than the green
canopy that summer unfolded, and all
the floor is set in noiseless pavement,
traced with a shifting pattern of blue
shadows. In these silent aisles the
echoes are smothered at their birth.[230]
There is no response of airy voices to
the faint call of the winter birds. The
sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther
than the pungent fragrance of the smoke
that drifts in a blue haze from the
chopper's fire. The report of the gun
awakes no answering report, and each
mellow note of the hound comes separate
to the ear, with no jangle of reverberations.

Fox and hound wallow through the
snow a crumbling furrow that obliterates
identity of either trail, yet there are
tracks that tell as plain as written words
who made them. Here have fallen,
lightly as snowflakes, the broad pads of
the hare, white as the snow he trod;
there, the parallel tracks of another winter
masker, the weasel, and those of the
squirrel, linking tree to tree. The leaps
of a tiny wood-mouse are lightly marked
upon the feathery surface to where there
is the imprint of a light, swift pinion on
either side, and the little story of his
wandering ends—one crimson blood
drop the period that marks the finis.

In the blue shadow at the bottom of
that winding furrow are the dainty footprints[231]
of a grouse, and you wonder why
he, so strong of wing, should choose to
wade laboriously the clogging snow even
in his briefest trip, rather than make
his easy way through the unresisting
air, and the snow-written record of his
wayward wanderings tells not why.
Suddenly, as if a mine had been sprung
where your next footstep should fall and
with almost as startling, though harmless
effect, another of his wild tribe
bursts upward through the unmarked
white floor and goes whirring and clattering
away, scattering in powdery ruin
the maze of delicate tracery the snowfall
wrought; and vanishes, leaving only
an aerial pathway of naked twigs to mark
his impetuous passage.

In the twilight of an evergreen thicket
sits a great horned owl like a hermit in
his cell in pious contemplation of his
own holiness and the world's wickedness.
But this recluse hates not sin,
only daylight and mankind. Out in the
fields you may find the white-robed brother
of this gray friar, a pilgrim from
the far north, brooding in the very face
of the sun, on some stack or outlying[232]
barn, but he will not suffer you to come
so near to him as will this solemn anchorite
who stares at you unmoved as a
graven image till you come within the
very shadows of his roof.

Marsh and channel are scarcely distinguishable
now but by the white domes
of the muskrats' winter homes and here
and there a sprawling thicket or button
bush, for the rank growth of weeds is
beaten flat, and the deep snow covers it
and the channel ice in one unbroken
sheet.

Champlain's sheltered bays and coves
are frozen and white with snow or frost,
and the open water, whether still or
storm-tossed, black beneath clouds or
bluer than the blue dome that arches it,
looks as cold as ice and snow. Sometimes
its steaming breath lies close
above it, sometimes mounts in swaying,
lofty columns to the sky, but always
cold and ghostly, without expression of
warmth or life.

So far away to hoary peaks that shine
with a glittering gleam against the blue
rim of the sky, or to the furthest bluegray
line of woodland that borders the[233]
horizon, stretches the universal whiteness,
so coldly shines the sun from the
low curve of his course, and so chilly
comes the lightest waft of wind from
wheresoever it listeth, that it tasks the
imagination to picture any land on all
the earth where spring is just awakening
fresh life, or where summer dwells amid
green leaves and bright flowers, the music
of birds and running waters, and of
warm waves on pleasant shores, or autumn
yet lingers in the gorgeousness of
many hues. How far off beyond this
world seems the possibility of such seasons,
how enduring and relentless this
which encompasses us.

And then, at the close of the brief
white day, the sunset paints a promise
and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the
sky. The gray clouds kindle with red
and yellow fire that burns about their
purple hearts in tints of infinite variety,
while behind them and the dark blue
rampart of the mountains flames the last
glory of the departing sun, fading in a
tint of tender green to the upper blue.
Even the cold snow at our feet flushes
with warm color, and the eastern hills[234]
blush roseate against the climbing, darkening
shadow of the earth.

It is as if some land of summer whose
brightness has never been told lay unveiled
before us, its delectable mountains
splendid with innumerable hues,
its lakes and streams of gold rippling to
purple shores seeming not so far before
us but that we might, by a little journey,
come to them.[235]

XLIX

A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE

When the charitable mantle of the
snow has covered the ugliness of the
earth, as one looks towards the woodlands
he may see a distant dark speck
emerge from the blue shadow of the
woods and crawl slowly houseward. If
born to the customs of this wintry land,
he may guess at once what it is; if not,
speculation, after a little, gives way to certainty,
when the indistinct atom grows
into a team of quick-stepping horses or
deliberate oxen hauling a sled-load of
wood to the farmhouse.

It is more than that. It is a part of
the woods themselves, with much of
their wildness clinging to it, and with
records, slight and fragmentary, yet legible,
of the lives of trees and birds and
beasts and men coming to our door.

Before the sounds of the creaking sled
and the answering creak of the snow are[236]
heard, one sees the regular puffs of the
team's breath jetting out and climbing
the cold air. The head and shoulders
of the muffled driver then appear, as he
sticks by narrow foothold to the hinder
part of his sled, or trots behind it beating
his breast with his numb hands. Prone
like a crawling band of scouts, endwise
like battering-rams, not upright with
green banners waving, Birnam wood
comes to Dunsinane to fight King Frost.