this time. It was almost a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over
his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were a shirt, then
crammed it into his mouth; kicked it over his back next; worked out
his feet and legs, then ate it off as before. The act was accomplished
with difficulty, and would have been quite impossible had not Hyla
found the most extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to the
ability to speak Russian with the tongue comes the power to skin one's
self with it. The tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can
skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his tongue is hung at the
front end, with the free end forked and pointing toward his stomach.
When my little captive had crammed his mouth full of skin, he stuck
this fork of a tongue into it and forced it down his throat and held
it down while he kicked and squirmed out of it.
Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our common toad, Bufo, is
just as carefully clothed. Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean,
narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of the lawn. On one side
of the house the shade lies all day long and the grass is cool and
damp. Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two summers. I
rarely pass that way without seeing him, well hidden in the grass. For
several days lately he had been missing, when, searching more closely
one morning, I found him sunk to the level of his back in the line of
pebbles, his spots and the glands upon his neck so mingling with the
varied collection of gravel about him that only a practised eye, and
that sharp with expectation, could have made him out.
In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh soil sticking to him,
what thing could look more like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump
of a toad? But there is a beauty even in this unlovely form; for here
is perfect adaptability.
Our canons of the beautiful are false if they do not in some way
include the toad. Shall we measure all the out-of-doors by the
linnet's song, the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's odor?
Deeper, wider, more fundamental and abiding than these standards, lie
the intellectual principles of plan and purpose and the intellectual
quality of perfect execution. We shall love not alone with all our
heart, but with all our mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful
by the superficial standard of what happens to please our eye, we
shall see no more of the world than we do of the new moon. Whole
classes of animals and wide regions of the earth's surface must, by
this test, be excluded. The only way the batrachians could possibly
come in would be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and frying them.
Treated thus, they look good and taste good, but this is all that can
be said for the entire family. Studied, however, from the single
view-point of protective coloring, or again, as illustrating the ease
with which the clumsiest forms can be fitted to the widest variety of
conditions, the toads do not suffer by any comparison. In the light of
such study, Bufo loses his repulsiveness and comes to have a place
quite as unique as the duckbill's, and a personality not less
fascinating than the swallow's or the gray squirrel's.
However, the toad to the most of us is anything but a poem. What,
indeed, looks less lovely, less nimble and buoyant, more chained to
the earth, than a toad? But stretch the least web between his toes,
lengthen his hind legs, and--over he goes, the leopard-frog, champion
high diver of the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes with the
tiniest disks, and--there he swings, Pickering's little hyla, clinging
as easily to the under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as a
fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.
When a boy I climbed to the top of the flagpole on one of the State
geological survey stations. The pole rose far above the surrounding
pines--the highest point for miles around. As I clinched the top of
the staff, gripping my fingers into the socket for the flag-stick, I
felt something cold, and drawing myself up, found a tree-toad asleep
in the hole. Under him was a second toad, and under the second a
third--all dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all the region.
From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature carries this toad-form
simply by a thin web between the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips.
And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she
paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of
clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as
securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.
The frogs have innumerable enemies among the water-birds, the fish,
the snakes, and such animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink.
The toads fortunately are supplied with glands behind their heads
whose secretion is hateful to most of their foes, though it seems to
be no offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only chance, when a
snake is after him, lies in hiding. I once saw a race between a toad
and an adder snake, however, in which the hopper won.
One bright May morning I was listening to the music of the church
bells, as it floated out from the city and called softly over the
fields, when my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak and a thud
beside the log on which I sat; something dashed over my foot; and I
turned to catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, making hard
for the brush along the fence. He scarcely seemed to touch the ground,
but skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a midget
jack-rabbit. His case was urgent; and little wonder! At the opposite
end of the log, raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes
hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and astonishment all over
her face, swayed the flat, ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently
she, too, had never seen a toad get away in any such time before; and
after staring a moment, she turned under the log and withdrew from the
race, beaten.
Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death to the toads. Bufo would
almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty
road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular
about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew
lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in
numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those
ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along
their paths. There is no foe abroad at night, and life, during these
dark, quiet hours, has even for a toad something like a dash of
gaiety.
In one of the large pastures not far away stands a pump. It is shaded
by an ancient apple-tree, under which, when the days are hottest, the
cattle gather to doze and dream. They have worn away the grass about
the mossy trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the spot cool
and muddy the summer through. Here the toads congregate from every
quarter of the great field. I stretched myself out flat on the grass
one night and watched them in the moonlight. There must have been
fifty here that night, hopping about over the wet place--as grotesque
a band as ever met by woods or waters.
We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a
flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the
kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we
have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the
moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen
in the light of our moon.
There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the slightest sound, save
the small _pit-pat, pit-pat_, made by their hopping. There may have
been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I
could not catch a syllable of it.
Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this wet
spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? You
could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in
finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few
minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow
cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing
leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump
to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.
Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of
gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their
existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this
pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to
live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of
water. And yet this thirsty little beast never knows the pleasure of
a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.
I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never
allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never
saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their
big, expansive bellies, and _soak_ themselves full, as they did here
on the damp sand about the pump.
Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and the crickets and
katydids begin to chirp, the toad that sleeps under my front step hops
out of bed, kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look at the
weather. He seems to _think_ as he sits here on the gravel walk, sober
and still, with his face turned skyward. What does he think about? Is
he listening to the chorus of the crickets, to the whippoorwills, or
is it for supper he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of toad
life, and of the mutability of all sublunary things, that he
meditates. Who knows? Some day perhaps we shall have a batrachian
psychology, and I shall understand what it is that my door-step lodger
turns over and over in his mind as he watches the coming of the stars.
All I can do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remember one
evening when he sat thinking and winking a full hour without making a
single hop.
As the darkness comes down he makes off for a night of bug-hunting. At
the first peep of dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back for
home. Home to a toad usually means any place that offers sleep and
safety for the day; but if undisturbed, like the one under the step,
he will return to the same spot throughout the summer. This chosen
spot may be the door-step, the cracks between the bricks of a well, or
the dense leaves of a strawberry bed.
In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell between March and June
that I had to water my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morning
during this dry spell that I did not find several toads tucked away
for the day in these moist hills. These individuals had no regular
home, like the one under the step, but hunted up the coolest, shadiest
places in the soft soil and made new beds for themselves every
morning.
Their bed-making is very funny, but not likely to meet the approval of
the housewife. Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comes to the
cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once to kick himself into bed. He
backs and kicks and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can, then
screws and twists till he is worked out of sight beneath the soil,
hind end foremost. Here he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking
out, half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder crawls along, he
simply pulls in his eyes, the loose sand falls over them, and the
snake passes on.
When the nights begin to grow chilly and there are threatenings of
frost, the toads hunt up winter quarters, and hide deep down in some
warm burrow--till to-morrow if the sun comes out hot, or, it may be,
not to wake until next April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches
them, when any shelter must do, when even their snake-fear is put
aside or forgotten. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,"
said Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the storm. So might
the toad say in an early frost.
The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by dug out a bunch of toads one
winter, all mixed up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled and
squirmed together in a perfect jumble of legs, heads, and tails--all
in their dead winter sleep. Their common enemy, the frost, had taken
them unawares, and driven them like friends into the crevice of the
rocks, where they would have slept together until the spring had not
the quarrymen unearthed them.
There is much mystery shrouding this humble batrachian. Somewhere in
everybody's imagination is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading down
through literature, it is astonishing how often the little monster has
hopped into it. There is chance for some one to make a big book of the
fable and folk-lore that has been gathering through the ages about the
toads. The stories of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long
entombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells they induce, of
their eating fire and dropping from the clouds, are legion.
And there seems to be some basis of fact for all these tales. No one
has yet written for us the life-history of the toad. After having
watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly prepared to see toads
jump out of the fire, tumble from broken marble mantles, and fall from
the clouds. I never caught them in my hat during a shower; but I have
stood on Mauricetown Bridge, when the big drops came pelting down, and
seen those drops apparently turn into tiny toads as they struck the
planks, until the bridge was alive with them! Perhaps they had been
hiding from the heat between the cracks of the planks--but there are
people who believe that they came down from the clouds.
How, again, shall I explain this bit of observation? More than six
years I lived near a mudhole that dried up in July. I passed it almost
daily. One spring there was a strange toad-call in the hole, a call
that I had never heard anything like before--a deafening, agonizing
roar, hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that the water was
moving with spade-foot toads. Two days later the hole was still; every
toad was gone. They disappeared; and though I kept that little puddle
under watch for several seasons after that, I have not known a
spade-foot to appear there since.
The water was almost jellied with their spawn, and a little later was
swarming with spade-foot tadpoles. Then it began to dry up, and some
of the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot-prints of the
cows along the edge of the hole. Just as fast as the water disappeared
in these foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were absorbed and legs
formed, and they hopped away--some of them a week before their
brothers, that were hatched at the same time, but who had stayed in
the middle of the pond, where the deeper water allowed them a longer
babyhood for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pressure, can
nature work with this adaptable body of the toad!
Long before the sun-baked mud began to crack these young ones had
gone--where? And whence came their parents, and whither went they?
When will they return?
[Illustration: design]
[Illustration: scene]
RABBIT ROADS
In your woods walks did you ever notice a little furrow or tunnel
through the underbrush, a tiny roadway in the briers and
huckleberry-bushes? Did you ever try to follow this path to its
beginning or end, wondering who traveled it? You have, doubtless. But
the woods must be wild and the undergrowth thick and you must be as
much at home among the trees as you are in your own dooryard, else
this slight mark will make no impression upon you.
But enter any wild tract of wood or high swamp along the creek, and
look sharp as you cut across the undergrowth. You will not go far
before finding a narrow runway under your feet. It is about five
inches wide, leading in no particular direction, and is evidently made
by cutting off the small stems of vines and bushes at an inch or more
from the ground. The work looks as if it had been laid out by rule and
done with a sharp knife, it is so regular and clean.
This is a rabbit road. Follow it a few rods and you will find it
crossed by another road, exactly similar. Take this new path now, and
soon you are branching off, turning, and joining other roads. You are
in rabbit-land, traveling its highways--the most complicated and
entangling system of thoroughfares that was ever constructed. The
individual roads are straight and plain enough, but at a glance one
can see that the plan of the system is intended to bewilder and lead
astray all who trespass here. Without a map and directions no one
could hope to arrive at any definite point through such a snarl.
There often comes along with the circus a building called the
"Moorish Maze," over whose entrance is this invitation:
COME IN AND GET LOST!
This is what one reads at the cross-roads in rabbit-land. There are
finger-boards and milestones along the way; but they point nowhere and
mark no distances except to the rabbits.
An animal's strong points usually supplement each other; its
well-developed powers are in line with its needs and mode of life. So,
by the very demands of his peculiar life, the beaver has become chief
among all the animal engineers, his specialty being dams. He can make
a good slide for logging, but of the construction of speedways he
knows absolutely nothing. The rabbit, on the other hand, is a runner.
He can swim if he is obliged to. His interests, however, lie mostly in
his heels, and hence in his highways. So Bunny has become an expert
road-maker. He cannot build a house, nor dig even a respectable den;
he is unable to climb, and his face is too flat for hole-gnawing: but
turn him loose in a brambly, briery wilderness, and he will soon
thread the trackless waste with a network of roads, and lay it open
to his nimble feet as the sky lies open to the swallow's wings.
[Illustration: "Calamity is hot on his track."]
But how maddening these roads are to the dogs and foxes! In the first
place, they have a peculiar way of beginning nowhere in particular,
and of vanishing all at once, in the same blind fashion. I am not sure
that I ever found a satisfactory end to a rabbit's road--that is, a
nest, a playground, or even a feeding-place. Old Calamity, the hound,
is always tormented and undone whenever she runs foul of a rabbit
road.
She will start Bunny in the open field, and trail away after him in
full tongue as fast as her fat bow-legs will carry her. The rabbit
makes for the woods. Calamity is hot on his track, going down toward
the creek. Suddenly she finds herself plunging along a rabbit road,
breaking her way through by sheer force where the rabbit slipped along
with perfect ease. She is following the path now rather than the
scent, and, all at once, discovers that she is off the trail. She
turns and goes back. Yes, here the rabbit made a sharp break to the
right by a side-path; the track is fresh and warm, and the old hound
sings in her eager delight. On she goes with more haste, running the
path again instead of the trail, and--there is no path! It is gone.
This bothers the old dog; but her nose is keen and she has picked up
the course again. Here it goes into another road. She gives tongue
again, and rushes on, when--_Wow!_ she has plunged into a thick and
thorny tangle of greenbrier.
That is where the torment comes in. These roads have a habit of taking
in the brier-patches. Calamity will go round a patch if she can; she
will work her way through if she must--but it is at the cost of bloody
ears and a thousand smarting pricks. Bunny, meantime, is watching
just inside the next brier-patch, counting the digs of his clumsy
pursuer.
I suppose that this "blind alley" kind of road is due to the fact that
the rabbits have no regular homes. They make a nest for the young; but
they never have dens, like minks and coons. In New England they often
live in holes and among the crannies of the stone walls; and there, as
far as I have seen, they rarely or never make roads. Farther south,
where the winters are less severe, they dig no holes, for they prefer
an open, even an exposed, bed to any sort of shelter.
Shelters are dangerous. Bunny cannot back into a burrow and bare his
teeth to his enemy; he is not a fighter. He can run, and he knows it;
legs are his salvation, and he must have room to limber them. If he
has to fight, then give him the open, not a hole; for it is to be a
kangaroo kicking match, and a large ring is needed. He had as well
surrender himself at once as to run into a hole that has only one
opening.
During the cold, snowy weather the rabbits usually leave the bare
fields for the woods, though the older and wiser ones more frequently
suffer the storms than risk the greater danger of such a move. When
pressed by hunger or hounded hard, they often take to a rail-pile, and
sometimes they grow so bold as to seek hiding under a barn or house.
One young buck lived all winter in the wood-pile of one of my
neighbors, becoming so tame that he fed with the chickens.
[Illustration: "Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next
brier-patch."]
The nearest approach that a rabbit makes to a house is his "squat," or
form. This is simply a sitting-place in the fields or along the woods,
that he will change every time he is thoroughly frightened out of it.
Undisturbed he will stay in this squat for months at a time.
Occasionally a rabbit will have two or three squats located over his
range, each one so placed that a wide view on every side may be had.
If it is along the woods, then he sits facing the open fields, with
his ears laid back toward the trees. He can hear as far as he can see,
and his nose tells him who is coming up the wind sooner than either
eyes or ears.
It is cold, lonely living here in the winter. But everybody, except
the mice and little birds, are enemies, his only friends being his
wits and legs. In the long run, wits and legs are pretty safe
insurance. "He who fights and runs away will live to fight another
day," is Bunny's precept--and it works well; he still thrives.
The squat is a cold place. The sky is its roof, and its only
protection is the tuft of grass, the stone, or the stump beside which
it is placed. Bunny may change to the lee or windward side, as suits
him, during a storm; but usually he keeps his place and lies close to
the ground, no matter how the wind blows, or how fiercely falls the
rain and snow. I have frequently started them from their squats in
bleak, wind-swept fields, when the little brown things were
completely snowed under.
There is great individuality among all animals, and though the rabbits
look as much alike as peas, they are no exception to the rule. This
personality is especially shown in their whimsical fancies for certain
squats. Here, within sight of the house and the dog, an old rabbit
took up her abode on a big, flat rail in the corner of the fence. Of
course no hawk or owl could touch her here, for they dared not swoop
between the rails; the dog and cat could scent her, but she had
already whipped the cat, and she had given Calamity so many long runs
that the hound was weary of her. The strategic value of such a
situation is plain: she was thus raised just above the level of the
field and commanded every approach. Perhaps it was not whim, but
wisdom, that led to this selection.
I knew another, a dwarf rabbit, that always got into a bare or plowed
field and squatted beside a brown stone or clod of earth. Experience
had taught him that he looked like a clod, and that no enemy ever
plagued him when he lay low in the brown soil.
[Illustration: "The squat is a cold place."]
One summer I stumbled upon a squat close along the public road.
Cart-loads of trash had been dumped there, and among the debris was a
bottomless coal-scuttle. In the coal-scuttle a rabbit made his squat.
Being open at both ends, it sheltered him beautifully from sun and
rain. Here he sat, napping through the day, watching the interesting
stream of passers-by, himself hidden by the rank weeds and grass. When
discovered by a dog or boy, he tripped out of one of his open doors
and led the intruder a useless run into the swamp.
At one time my home was separated from the woods by only a
clover-field. This clover-field was a favorite feeding-ground for the
rabbits of the vicinity. Here, in the early evening, they would gather
to feed and frolic; and, not content with clover, they sometimes went
into the garden for a dessert of growing corn and young cabbage.