THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing?”
And what will Muskrat do? and Chipmunk? and Whitefoot, the wood mouse?
and Chickadee? and the whole world of poor things out of doors?
Never fear. Robin knows as well as you that the north wind doth blow,
and is now far away on his journey to the South; Muskrat knows, too,
and is building his warm winter lodge; Chipmunk has already made his
bed deep down under the stone wall, where zero weather is unheard of;
Whitefoot, the wood mouse, has stored his hollow poplar stub full of
acorns, and, taking possession of Robin’s deserted nest near by, has
roofed it and lined it and turned it into a cosey, cold-proof house,
while Chickadee, dear thing--has done nothing at all. Not so much as
a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored up for the winter. But he
knows where there is a big piece of suet for him on a certain lilac
bush. And he knows where there is a snug little hole in a certain elm
tree limb. The north wind may blow, blow, blow! It cannot get through
Chickadee’s feathers, nor daunt for one moment his brave little heart.
The north wind sweeping the bare stubble fields and winding its
shivering horn through the leafless trees does sometimes pierce my
warm coat and strike a chill into my heart. Then how empty and cold
seems the outdoor world! How deadly the touch of the winter! How
fearful the prospect of the coming cold!
Does Muskrat think so? Does Whitefoot? Does Chickadee? Not at all, for
they are ready.
The preparations for hard weather may be seen going on all through the
autumn, beginning as far back as the flocking of the swallows late in
July. Up to that time no one had thought of a coming winter, it would
seem; but, one day, there upon the telegraph-wires were the
swallows--the first sign that the getting ready for winter has begun.
The great migratory movements of the birds are very mysterious; but
they were in the beginning, I think, and are still, for the most part,
mere shifts to escape the cold. Yet not so much to escape the cold
itself do the birds migrate, as to find a land of food. When the
northland freezes, when river and lake are sealed beneath the ice and
the soil is made hard as flint, then the food supplies for most of the
birds are utterly cut off, causing them to move southward ahead of the
cold, or starve.
There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds, like the quail,
and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are so well
provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the great
majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn, must
take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.
And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild
geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and
closing bays of the vast desolate North are empty now, except for the
few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow.
Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready,
much comforting assurance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that
winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack, no
doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and
death. But what with the building, the strange deep sleeping, and the
harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and
sociable, living.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows
commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don’t
know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, Chipmunk or
the provident ant. The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and
verses have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just as thrifty.
So is the busy bee.
It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far
beyond her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter.
By the first of August she has filled the brood chamber of the hive
with honey--forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for
the whole colony until the willows tassel again. But who knows what
the winter may be? how cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So
the harvesting is pushed with vigor on, until the frosts kill the last
of the autumn asters--on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three
hundred pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is
safe should the sun not shine again for a year and a day.
The last of the asters have long since gone; so have the witch-hazels.
All is quiet about the hives. The bees have formed into their warm
winter clusters upon the combs; and except “when come the calm, mild
days,” they will fly no more until March or April. I will half close
their entrances--and so help them to put on their storm-doors.
The whole out of doors around me is like a great beehive, stored and
sealed for the winter, its swarming life close-clustered, and safe and
warm against the coming cold.
I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length
of its frozen slope. There is no sign of life. The brown leaves have
drifted into the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every burrow
were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too, littering and
choking the doorways. A stranger would find it hard to believe that
all of my forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bottoms of
these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and quite out of
danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.
The woodchuck’s manner of providing for winter is very curious. Winter
spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of
danger, would need wings. But wings weren’t given him. Must he perish
then? Winter spreads far, but it does not go deep--down only about
four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps,
escape _under_land. So down he goes _through_ the winter, down into a
mild and even temperature, _five feet away_--only five feet, but as
far away from the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the
distant Orinoco.
Indeed, Woodchuck’s is a farther journey and even more wonderful than
Bobolink’s; for these five feet carry him to the very gates of death.
That he will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive with the
spring out of this dark way, is passing strange.
Muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all the
meadow into a well-stocked cellar. Beaver built him a dam, cut and
anchored under water a plenty of green sticks near his lodge, so that
he too would be under cover when the ice formed, with an abundance of
tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his summer laying up food
near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole,--a
grave,--then ate until no particle more of fat could be got within his
baggy hide, then crawled into his bed to sleep until the dawn of
spring!
This is his shift! This is the length to which he goes, because he has
no wings, and because he cannot cut, cure, and store away, in the
depths of the stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through
the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk
selects long-keeping things and buries them; but the woodchuck simply
fattens himself, then buries himself, and sleeps--and lives!
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,”
but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect?
Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog,
who is also without fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at the
sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him, too, in her own
motherly way. All he has to do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of
the ditch and sleep--and sometimes freeze!
No matter. If the cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he
never knows. He will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for
joy and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat. I have seen
frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice. Drop the lump on
the floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment of the ice
itself. And this has happened more than once to the same frog without
causing him the least ache or pain. He would gradually limber up, and
croak, and look as wise as ever.
The north wind _may_ blow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect,
this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light. The
grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square
foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in
all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because
of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.
Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger
and cold. It was after an extremely long “severe spell”; but this was
not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding
regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field.
One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of
food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and
tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at
once, although within easy reach of plenty.
Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac
covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier,
bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have
found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an
unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and
would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.
The smaller birds that stay through the winter, like the tree sparrow
and the junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested
along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these
small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the
ragweed in my mowing-field.
The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to
clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked
at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by
another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it,
till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white.
Then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there was a
five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the crusty snow--five days of
life and plenty for the birds.
Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and winters, which were
made when the world was made--that even ragweeds and winters have a
part in the beautiful divine scheme of things.
“The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow”--
but the wild geese are going over; the wild mice have harvested their
acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks have gone to sleep;
the muskrats have nearly finished their lodge; the sap in the big
hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of
the fingers of the frost. And what has become of Robin, poor thing?