A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL
I
You ought to hear the scream of the hen-hawks circling high in the
air. In August and September and late into October, if you listen in
the open country, you will hear their piercing whistle,--shrill,
exultant _scream_ comes nearer to describing it,--as they sail and
sail a mile away in the sky.
II
You ought to go out upon some mowing hill or field of stubble and hear
the crickets, then into the apple orchard and hear the katydids, then
into the high grass and bushes along the fence and hear the whole
stringed chorus of green grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets. You
have heard them all your life; but the trouble is that, because you
have heard them so constantly in the autumn, and because one player
after another has come gradually into the orchestra, you have taken
them as part of the natural course of things and have never really
heard them individually, to know what parts they play. Now anybody can
hear a lion roar, or a mule bray, or a loon laugh his wild crazy laugh
over a silent mountain lake, and know what sound it is; but who can
hear a cricket out of doors, or a grasshopper, and know which is
which?
III
Did you ever hear a loon laugh? You ought to. I would go a hundred
miles to hear that weird, meaningless, melancholy, maniacal laughter
of the loon, or great northern diver, as the dusk comes down over some
lonely lake in the wilderness of the far North. From Maine westward to
northern Illinois you may listen for him in early autumn; then, when
the migration begins, anywhere south to the Gulf of Mexico. You may
never hear the call of the bull moose in the northern woods, nor the
howl of a coyote on the western prairies, nor the wild _cac_, _cac_,
_cac_ of the soaring eagles, nor the husky _yap_, _yap_, _yap_ of the
fox. But, if you do, “make a note of it,” as Captain Cuttle would say;
for the tongues that utter this wild language are fast ceasing to
speak to us.
IV
One strangely sweet, strangely wild voice that you still may hear in
our old apple orchards, is the whimpering, whinnying voice of the
little screech owl. “When night comes,” says the bird book, “one may
hear the screech owl’s tremulous, wailing whistle. It is a weird,
melancholy call, welcomed only by those who love Nature’s voice,
whatever be the medium through which she speaks.” Now listen this
autumn for the screech owl; listen until the weird, melancholy call
_is_ welcomed by you, until the shiver that creeps up your back turns
off through your hair, as you hear the low plaintive voice speaking to
you out of the hollow darkness, out of the softness and the silence of
night.
V
You ought to hear the brown leaves rustling under your feet.
“Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”
And they should rustle to your tread as well. Scuff along in them
where they lie in deep windrows by the side of the road; and hear them
also, as the wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends them
rattling over the fields.
VI
You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the caw of the crow in
the autumn woods.
“The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.”
Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, because everybody has heard
that loud scream of the jay in the lonesome woods, and the _caw_,
_caw_, _caw_ of the sentinel crow from the top of some tall tree. The
robins may not be all gone, for I heard and saw a flock of them this
year in January; but they are silent now, and so many of the birds
have gone, and the woods have become so empty, that the cries of the
jay and the crow seem, on a gloomy day, to be the only sounds in all
the hollow woods. There could hardly be an autumn for me if I did not
hear these two voices speaking--the one with a kind of warning in its
shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn,
like the color of its sable coat.
VII
You ought to hear, you ought to _catch_, I should say, a good round
scolding from the red squirrel this fall. A red squirrel is always
ready to scold you (and doubtless you are always in need of his
scolding), but he is never so breathless and emphatic as in the fall.
“Whose nuts are these in the woods?” he asks, as you come up with your
stick and bag. “Who found this tree first? Come, get out of here! Get
right back to the city and eat peanuts! Come, do you hear? Get out of
this!”
No, don’t be afraid; he won’t “eat you alive”--though I think he might
if he were big enough. He won’t blow up, either, and burst! He is the
kind of fire-cracker that you call a “sizzler”--all sputter and no
explosion. But isn’t he a tempest! Isn’t he a whirlwind! Isn’t he a
red-coated cyclone! Let him blow! The little scamp, he steals birds’
eggs in the summer, they say; but there are none now for him to steal,
and the woods are very empty. We need a dash of him on these autumn
days, as we need a dash of spice in our food.
In the far western mountains he has a cousin called the Douglas
squirrel; and Mr. John Muir calls him “the brightest of all the
squirrels I have ever seen, a hot spark of life, making every tree
tingle with his prickly toes, a condensed nugget of fresh mountain
vigor and valor, as free from disease as a sunbeam. How he scolds, and
what faces he makes, all eyes, teeth, and whiskers!”
You must hear him this fall and take your scolding, whether you
deserve it or not.
VIII
You ought to hear in the cedars, pines, or spruces the small thin
_cheep_, _cheep_, _cheep_ of the chickadees or the kinglets. You must
take a quiet day on the very edge of winter and, in some sunny dip or
glade, hear them as they feed and flit about you. They speak in a
language different from that of the crow and the jay. This tiny talk
of the kinglet is all friendly and cheerful and personal and
confidential, as if you were one of the party and liked spiders’ eggs
and sunshine and didn’t care a snap for the coming winter! In all the
vast gray out of doors what bits of winged bravery, what crumbs of
feathered courage, they seem! One is hardly ready for the winter
until he has heard them in the cedars and has been assured that they
will stay, no matter how it snows and blows.
IX
You ought to hear, some quiet day or moonlit night in October or
November, the baying of the hounds as they course the swamps and
meadows on the heels of the fox. Strange advice, you say? No, not
strange. It is a wild, fierce cry that your fathers heard, and their
fathers, and theirs--away on back to the cave days, when life was
hardly anything but the hunt, and the dogs were the only tame animal,
and the most useful possession, man had. Their deep bass voices have
echoed through all the wild forests of our past, and stir within us
nowadays wild memories that are good for us again to feel. Stand
still, as the baying pack comes bringing the quarry through the forest
toward you. The blood will leap in your veins, as the ringing cries
lift and fall in the chorus that echoes back from every hollow and
hill around; and you will on with the panting pack--will on in the
fierce, wild exultation of the chase; for instinctively we are
hunters, just as all our ancestors were.
No, don’t be afraid. You won’t catch the fox.
X
You ought to hear by day--or better, by night--the call of the
migrating birds as they pass over, through the sky, on their way to
the South. East or west, on the Atlantic or on the Pacific shore, or
in the vast valley of the Mississippi, you may hear at night, so high
in air that you cannot see the birds, these voices of the passing
migrants. _Chink_, _chink_, _chink!_ will drop the calls of the
bobolinks--fine, metallic, starry notes; _honk_, _honk_, _honk!_ the
clarion cry of the wild geese will ring along the aërial way, as they
shout to one another and to you, listening far below them on the
steadfast earth.
Far away, yonder in the starry vault, far beyond the reach of human
eyes, a multitude of feathered folk, myriads of them, are streaming
over; armies of them winging down the long highway of the sky from the
frozen North, down to the rice fields of the Carolinas, down to the
deep tangled jungles of the Amazon, down beyond the cold, cruel reach
of winter.
Listen as they hail you from the sky.