THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING
We have had a week of almost unbroken rain, and the water is standing
over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch,--this wet, sedgy land
in the cold twilight,--drearier than any part of the woods or the
upland pastures. They are empty; but the meadow is flat and wet, it is
naked and all unsheltered. And a November night is falling.
The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon
swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly
over. I button my heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down
to the stream and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it
meets the main ditch. There is a sharp turn here toward the swamp;
and here at the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly
down and wait.
I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building; for that
small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished
muskrat house.
As I wait, the moon climbs higher over the woods. The water on the
meadow shivers in the light. The wind bites through my heavy coat and
drives me back, but not before I have seen one, two, three little
creatures scaling the walls of the house with loads of mud-and-reed
mortar. I am driven back by the cold, but not before I know that here
in the desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-walled and
warm, and proof against the longest, bitterest of winters.
This is near the end of November. My fire-wood is in the cellar; I am
about ready to put on the double-windows and the storm-doors. The
muskrats are even now putting on theirs, for their house is all but
finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the muskrats and I.
Throughout the summer the muskrats had no house, only their tunnels
into the sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and
their beds under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps.
All those months the water was low in the ditch, and the beds among
the tussocks were safe and dry enough.
[Illustration: “TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE”]
Now the November rains have filled river and ditch, flooded the
tunnels, and crept up into the beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat
will creep out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in. What shall
he do for shelter? He knows. And long before the rains begin, he picks
out the place for a house. He does not want to leave his meadow,
therefore the only thing to do is to build,--move from under the
tussock out upon the top of the tussock; and here, in its deep, wiry
grass, make a new bed high and dry above the rising water; and close
this new bed in with walls that circle and dome, and defy the very
winter.
Such a house will require a great deal of work to build. Why should
not two or three muskrats combine--make the house big enough to hold
them all, save labor and warmth, too, and, withal, live sociably
together? So they left, each one his single bed, and, joining efforts,
started, about the middle of October, to build this winter house.
Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have been rising, although
for several nights at a time I could see no apparent progress with the
work. The builders were in no hurry. The cold was far off. But it is
coming, and to-night it feels near and keen. And to-night there is no
loafing about the lodge.
When this house is done, when the last hod of mud plaster has been
laid on,--then the rains may descend and the floods come, but it will
not fall. It is built upon a tussock; and a tussock--did you ever try
to pull up a tussock?
Winter may descend, and boys and foxes may come--and they will come,
but not before the walls are frozen. Then, let them come. The house
will stand. It is boy-proof, almost; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and
fox-proof. I have often seen where the fox has gone round and round
the house in the snow, and where, at places, he has attempted to dig
into the frozen mortar. But it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and
utterly impossible for his pick and shovel.
I said the floods, as well as the fox, may come. So they may,
ordinarily; but along in March, when one comes as a freshet and rises
to the dome of the house, then it fills the bed-chamber to the ceiling
and drowns the dwellers out. I remember a freshet once in the end of
February that flooded Lupton’s Pond and drove the muskrats of the
whole pond village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to whatever
wreckage the waters brought along.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley”
--and of muskrats, too.
But not very often do the muskrats’ plans go thus agley. For muskrats
and wood mice and birds and bees, and even the very trees of the
forest, have a kind of natural foresight. They all look ahead, at the
approach of autumn, and begin to provide against the coming cold.
Yet, weather-wise as a muskrat may be, still he cannot know all that
may happen; he cannot be ready for everything. And so, if now and
then, he should prove foresight to be vain, he only shows that his
plans and our plans, his life and our lives, are very much alike.
Usually, however, the muskrat’s plans work out as he would have them.
His foresight proves to be equal to all that the winter can bring. On
the coldest winter days I shall look out over the bleak white waste to
where his house shows, a tiny mound in the snow, and think of him safe
and warm inside, as safe and warm as I am, in my house, here on the
hilltop.
Indeed, I think the muskrat will be the warmer; for my big house here
on Mullein Hill is sometimes cold. And the wind! If only I could drive
the winter wind away from the corners of the house! But the house down
in the meadow has no corners. It has walls, mud walls, so thick and
round that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard by the dwellers
within; and all unheeded the cold creeps over and over the low thatch,
to crawl back and stiffen upon the meadow.
The doors of this meadow house swing wide open throughout the winter;
for they are in the bottom of the house, beneath the water, where only
the muskrat can enter. Just outside the doors, down under the water
and the roof of ice that covers all the flooded meadow, are fresh
calamus roots, and iris and arum--food in abundance, no matter how
long the winter lasts.
No, the winter has not yet come; but it is coming, for the muskrats
are building. Let it come. Let the cold crawl stiff and gray across
the meadow. Let the whirling snow curl like smoke about the pointed
top of the little tepee down by the meadow ditch. Let the north wind
do its worst. For what care the dwellers in that thick-walled lodge
beneath the snow? Down under the water their doors are open; their
roadways up the ditches as free as in the summer; and the stems of the
sedges just as juicy and pink and tender.
The muskrats are building. The buds are leaving. Winter is coming. I
must get out my own storm-windows and double-doors; for even now a
fire is blazing cheerily on my wide, warm hearth.