LEAFING
No, you never went “leafing”--not unless you are simon-pure
country-bred. You do not know what the word means. You cannot find it
in the unabridged dictionary--not in the sense in which I am using it.
But there are many good words we country people use that are not,
perhaps, in the dictionary.
And what do I mean by “leafing”? Get down that bundle of meal sacks,
hitch into the one-horse hay-rig, throw in the rakes, and come. We are
going into the woods for pig-bedding, for leaves to keep the pigs dry
and warm this winter!
You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a
pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in
the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.
And if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing,
snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and
zest enough to the labor.
But leafing, like every other humble labor, has its own rewards, not
the least of them being the leaves themselves and the getting of them!
We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and
turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cord wood was carted
years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill, the
winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost
knee-deep.
We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle
stumps; bend down saplings; stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet
birch; tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes
between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of whoa-ing
and oh-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.
You can yell all you want to when you go leafing; yell at every stump
you hit; yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you
under the chin; yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig. You
can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are, you
can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves and cut all the crazy
capers you know; for this is a Saturday, these are the wild woods and
the noisy leaves, and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays
and the crows?
The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees;
the dull cloud hangs low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of
the maple swamp below you, peers the face of Winter.
You start up the ridge with your rake and draw down another pile,
thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm
glow all over your body strikes into your heart. You rake away as if
it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that
rakes for his pig, rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful
to his beast; and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket
of down over his own winter bed.
Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten
o’clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it warms my feet through and
through to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and
the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his
golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig’s pen, to hear
him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his
leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my heart, too!
So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work
for! What zest and purpose it lends to one’s raking and piling and
storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should
surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should
be obliged, occasionally, to carry a rake and a bag with me--much
better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to
scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within
the range of opera-glass or gun or walking stick. To see things
through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as
through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.
And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the
rake uncovers--here, under a rotten stump, a hatful of acorns,
probably gathered by the white-footed wood mouse. For the stump gives
at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down the hill,
spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures
that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the
white-footed wood mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and
high-bred looking as greyhounds.
Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large
stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf mould, in
which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of
the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.
This is not the “red” salamander that Mr. Burroughs tells us is “the
author of that fine plaintive piping to be heard more or less
frequently, according to the weather, in our summer and autumn woods.”
His “red” salamander is really a “dull orange, variegated with minute
specks or spots,” a species I have never found here in my New England
woods.
Nor have I ever suspected my red-backed salamander of piping; though
he may do it, as may the angleworms, for aught I am able to hear, so
filled with whir of iron wheels are my dull ears. But listen!
Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we also hear a “fine
plaintive” sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather,
about the bigness of a penny whistle.
Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call--it seems to speak
out of every tree trunk--and find the piper clinging to a twig, no
salamander at all, but a tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered
summer by his tiny, mighty “skirl.” Take him nose and toes, he is
surely as much as an inch long, not very large to pipe against the
north wind turned loose in the leafless woods.
We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope,
hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we
uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with
crimson berries; we rake up the prince’s pine, pipsissewa, creeping
jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries,--a whole bouquet of
evergreens,--exquisite, fairy-like forms, that later shall gladden our
Christmas table.
[Illustration: “BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!”]
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope
all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole
garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows
shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the
very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up
in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.
Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the
hillside, “jumping” a rabbit from its form, or bed, under a
brush-pile; discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading
hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery, in a hollow hickory stump;
turning up a yellow-jacket’s nest, built two-thirds underground;
tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in
the leaf mould; digging into a woodchuck’s--
“But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig
that we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck holes.” Two
small boys catch up a bag and hold it open, while the third boy stuffs
in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet and pack
the leaves in tight, and onto the rig goes the bulging thing!
Exciting? If you can’t believe it exciting, hop up on the load and let
us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!--Hold on
to your ribs! Look out for the stump! Isn’t it fun to go leafing?
Isn’t it fun to do anything that your heart does with you--even though
you do it for a pig?
Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper,
spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his
laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can’t
weep, and he can’t double himself up, so he doubles up his tail. There
is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of
pure pig joy!
_Boosh! Boosh!_ he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind,
scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest
stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.
He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest,--this snow-white,
sawed-off, pug-faced little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he
still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the
taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig in his soul.
And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the
forest hunting him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember
the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest
fruits--and of pig, _roast_ pig! And if the pig in his heart is still
a wild boar, no less are we, at times, wild savages in our hearts.
Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go “leafing.” I want to give
my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep
into that he cannot see his pen. I can feel the joy of it myself. No,
I do not live in a pen; but then, I might, if once in a while I did
not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little daily round
into the wide, wild woods--my ancestral home.