There is to be a rabbit party in the clover-field. The grass has long
been cut and the field is clean and shining; but still there is plenty
to eat. The rabbits from both sides of the woods are coming. The full
moon rises above the trees, and the cottontails start over. Now, of
course, they use the paths which they cut so carefully the longest
possible way round. They hop leisurely along, stopping now and then to
nibble the sassafras bark or to get a bite of wintergreen, even
quitting the path, here and there, for a berry or a bunch of sweet
wood-grass.
"Stop a moment; this won't do! Here is a side-path where the briers
have grown three inches since they were last cut off. This path must
be cleared out at once," and the old buck falls to cutting. By the
time he has finished the path a dozen rabbits have assembled in the
clover-field. When he appears there is a _thump_, and all look up;
some one runs to greet the new-comer; they touch whiskers and smell,
then turn to their eating.
The feast is finished, and the games are on. Four or five of the
rabbits have come together for a turn at hop-skip-and-jump. And such
hop-skip-and-jump! They are professionals at this sport, every one of
them. There is not a rabbit in the game that cannot leap five times
higher than he can reach on his tiptoes, and hop a clean ten feet.
[Illustration: "The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that
fox."]
Over and over they go, bounding and bouncing, snapping from their
marvelous hind legs as if shot from a spring-trap. It is the greatest
jumping exhibition that you will ever see. To have such legs as these
is the next best thing to having wings.
Right in the thick of the fun sounds a sharp _thump! thump!_ Every
rabbit "freezes." It is the stamp of an old buck, the call, _Danger!
danger!_ He has heard a twig break in the woods, or has seen a soft,
shadowy thing cross the moon.
As motionless as stumps squat the rabbits, stiff with the tenseness of
every ready muscle. They listen. But it was only a dropping nut or a
restless bird; and the play continues.
They are chasing each other over the grass in a game of tag. There go
two, round and round, tagging and re-tagging, first one being "it" and
then the other. Their circle widens all the time and draws nearer to
the woods. This time round they will touch the bush behind which we
are watching. Here they come--there they go; they will leap the log
yonder. Flash! squeak! scurry! Not a rabbit in the field! Yes; one
rabbit--the limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox
trotting off yonder in the shadows, along the border of the woods!
The picnic is over for this night, and it will be some time before the
cottontails so far forget themselves as to play in this place again.
It is small wonder that animals do not laugh. They have so little
play. The savage seldom laughs, for he hunts and is hunted like a wild
animal, and is allowed so scant opportunity to be off guard that he
cannot develop the power to laugh. Much more is this true of the
animals. From the day an animal is born, instinct and training are
bent toward the circumvention of enemies. There is no time to play, no
chance, no cause for laughter.
The little brown rabbit has least reason of all to be glad. He is
utterly inoffensive, the enemy of none, but the victim of many. Before
he knows his mother he understands the meaning of _Be ready! Watch!_
He drinks these words in with his milk. The winds whisper them; the
birds call them; every leaf, every twig, every shadow and sound, says:
_Be ready! Watch!_ Life is but a series of escapes, little else than
vigilance and flight. He must sleep with eyes open, feed with ears
up, move with muffled feet, and, at short stages, he must stop, rise
on his long hind legs, and listen and look. If he ever forgets, if he
pauses one moment for a wordless, noiseless game with his fellows, he
dies. For safety's sake he lives alone; but even a rabbit has fits of
sociability, and gives way at times to his feelings. The owl and the
fox know this, and they watch the open glades and field-edges. They
must surprise him.
The barred owl is quick at dodging, but Bunny is quicker. It is the
owl's soft, shadow-silent wings that are dreaded. They spirit him
through the dusk like a huge moth, wavering and aimless, with dangling
dragon-claws. But his drop is swift and certain, and the grip of those
loosely hanging legs is the very grip of death. There is no terror
like the ghost-terror of the owl.
The fox is feared; but then, he is on legs, not wings, and there are
telltale winds that fly before him, far ahead, whispering, _Fox, fox,
fox!_ The owl, remember, like the wind, has wings--wings that are
faster than the wind's, and the latter cannot get ahead to tell of his
coming. Reynard is cunning. Bunny is fore-sighted, wide awake, and
fleet of foot. Sometimes he is caught napping--so are we all; but if
in wits he is not always Reynard's equal, in speed he holds his own
very well with his enemy. Reynard is nimble, but give the little
cottontail a few feet handicap in a race for life, and he stands a
fair chance of escape, especially in the summer woods.
When the hounds are on his trail the rabbit saves his legs by
outwitting his pursuers. He will win a long distance ahead of them,
and before they overtake him he will double on his track, approaching
as near as he dare to the dogs, then leap far aside upon a log, into a
stream, or among the bushes, and strike out in a new direction,
gradually making back toward the starting-place. He rises on his
haunches to listen, as he goes along, and before the dogs have again
picked up the trail, he has perhaps had time to rest and lunch.
If it were a matter of dogs only, life would be just full enough of
excitement to be interesting. He can double, balk, and mix trails on
them, and enjoy it. They are nothing to fool. But the gun! Ah, that's
a foe which he cannot get up with. He may double and confuse the
dogs; but as he comes back along a side-road, with them yelping far in
the rear, he often hops right into a game-bag.
[Illustration: "His drop is swift and certain."]
To do justice to the intelligence of the dog, and to be truthful about
the rabbit, it must be remembered that, in the chase, Bunny usually
has the advantage of knowing the lay of the land. The short cuts,
streams, logs, briers, and roads are all in mind before he takes a
jump. The dog is often on strange ground. Free the rabbit for the
hunt, as you do the fox, on unknown territory, and the dogs will soon
take the frightened, bewildered little creature.
There is no braver or more devoted mother in all the wilds than Molly
Cottontail. She has a mother's cunning and a mother's resourcefulness,
also. But this is to be expected. If number of children count for
experience, then, surely, Molly ought to be resourceful. There are
seasons when she will raise as many as three families--and
old-fashioned families for size, too. It is not uncommon to find ten
young rabbits in a nest. Five times twins! And all to be fed, washed,
and kept covered up in bed together! But animal children, as a rule,
behave better than human children, so we may not measure the task of
Mother Molly by any standard of our own. It is task enough, however,
since you can scarcely count the creatures that eat young rabbits, nor
the enemies that unwittingly destroy them. A heavy rain may drown
them, cattle may crush them, mowing-machines may cut them to pieces,
and boys who are starting menageries may carry them away to starve.
Molly's mother-wit and craft are sufficient for most of these things.
She picks out a sunny hillside among high grasses and bushes for the
nest, so that the rain will flow off and not flood it, and because
that here the cows are not so likely to trample, nor the plow and
mowing-machine to come. She must also have ready and hidden access to
the nest, which the grass and bushes afford.
She digs a little hollow in the sand about a foot deep and as big
around as a duck's nest, lines it first with coarse grasses and
leaves, then with a layer of finer grass, and fills the whole with
warm, downy fur plucked from her own sides and breast. This nest, not
being situated at the end of an inaccessible burrow, like the tame
rabbit's or woodchuck's, requires that all care be taken to conceal
every sign of it. The raw sand that is thrown out is artfully covered
with leaves and grass to blend with the surrounding ground; and over
the nest itself I have seen the old rabbit pull vines and leaves until
the inquisitive, nosing skunk would have passed it by.
Molly keeps the young ones in this bed for about two weeks, after
which time, if frightened, they will take to their heels. They are
exceedingly tender at this age and ought not to be allowed to run out.
They do not know what a man is, and hardly understand what their hind
legs are. I saw one that was at least a month old jump up before a
mowing-machine and bolt across the field. It was his first real scare,
and the first time that he had been called upon to test his legs. It
was funny. He didn't know how to use them. He made some tremendous
leaps, and was so unused to the powerful spring in his hind feet that
he turned several complete somersaults in the air.
Molly feeds the family shortly after nightfall, and always tucks them
in when leaving, with the caution to lie quiet and still. She is not
often surprised with her young, but lingers near on guard. You can
easily tell if you are in the neighborhood of her nest by the way she
thumps and watches you, and refuses to be driven off. Here she waits,
and if anything smaller than a dog appears she rushes to meet it,
stamping the ground in fury. A dog she will intercept by leaving a
warm trail across his path, or, in case the brute has no nose for her
scent, by throwing herself in front of him and drawing him off on a
long chase.
One day, as I was quietly picking wild strawberries on a hill, I heard
a curious grunting down the side below me, then the quick _thud!
thud!_ of an angry rabbit. Among the bushes I caught a glimpse of
rabbit ears. A fight was on.
Crouching beside a bluish spot, which I knew to be a rabbit's nest,
was a big yellow cat. He had discovered the young ones, and was making
mouths at the thought of how they would taste, when the mother's thump
startled him. He squatted flat, with ears back, tail swelled, and hair
standing up along his back, as the rabbit leaped over him. It was a
glimpse of Molly's ears, as she made the jump, that I had caught. It
was the beginning of the bout--only a feint by the rabbit, just to try
the mettle of her antagonist.
The cat was scared, and before he got himself together, Molly, with a
mighty bound, was in the air again, and, as she flashed over him, she
fetched him a stunning whack on the head that knocked him endwise. He
was on his feet in an instant, but just in time to receive a stinging
blow on the ear that sent him sprawling several feet down the hill.
The rabbit seemed constantly in the air. Back and forth, over and over
the cat she flew, and with every bound landed a terrific kick with her
powerful hind feet, that was followed by a puff of yellow fur.
The cat could not stand up to this. Every particle of breath and fight
was knocked out of him at about the third kick. The green light in his
eyes was the light of terror. He got quickly to a bush, and ran away,
else I believe that the old rabbit would have beaten him to death.
The seven young ones in the nest were unharmed. Molly grunted and
stamped at me for looking at them; but I was too big to kick as she
had just kicked the cat, and I could not be led away to chase her, as
she would have led a dog. The little fellows were nearly ready to
leave the nest. A few weeks later, when the wheat was cut in the field
above, one of the seven was killed by the long, fearful knife of the
reaper.
[Illustration: "Seven young ones in the nest."]
Perhaps the other six survived until November, the beginning of the
gunning season. But when the slaughter was past, if one lived, he
remembered more than once the cry of the hounds, the crack of the gun,
and the sting of shot. He has won a few months' respite from his human
enemies; but this is not peace. There is no peace for him. He may
escape a long time yet; but his foes are too many for him. He fights a
good fight, but must lose at last.
[Illustration: winter]
SECOND CROPS
I
Take it the year round, the deadest trees in the woods are the livest
and fullest of fruit--for the naturalist. Dr. Holmes had a passion for
big trees; the camera-carriers hunt up historic trees; boys with deep
pockets take to fruit-trees: but dead trees, since I developed a
curiosity for dark holes, have yielded me the most and largest crops.
An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There
is nothing unreasonable in it, as in--bibliomania, for instance. I
discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing
among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath,
the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a
Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really
with some cause; for--sh! look! In that round hole up there, just
under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker--a light
in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What
people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was
full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a
reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed
forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of
some tottering, limbless old stump.
Within the reach of my landscape four of these ancient derelicts hold
their stark arms against the horizon, while every wood-path,
pasture-lane, and meadow-road leads past hollow apples, gums, or
chestnuts, where there are sure to be happenings as the seasons come
and go. Sooner or later, every dead tree in the neighborhood finds a
place in my note-book. They are all named and mentioned, some over and
over,--my list of Immortals,--all very dead or very hollow, ranging
from a big sweet-gum in the swamp along the creek to an old pump-tree,
stuck for a post within fifty feet of my window. The gum is the
hollowest, the pump the deadest, tree of the lot.
The nozle-hole of the one-time pump stares hard at my study window
like the empty socket of a Cyclops. There is a small bird-house nailed
just above the window, which gazes back with its single eye at the
staring pump. For some time one April the sputtering sparrows held
this box above the window against the attacks of two tree-swallows.
The sparrows had been on the ground all winter, and had staked their
claim with a nest that had already outgrown the house when the
swallows arrived. In love of fair play, and remembering more than one
winter day made alive and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not
interfere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose the pretty pair
of swallows as summer neighbors.
The swallows disappeared. All was quiet for a few days, when, one
morning, I saw the flutter of steel-blue wings at the hole in the
pump, and there, propped hard with his tail over the hole, hung my
tree-swallow. I should have that pair as tenants yet, and in a house
where I could see everything they did. He peered quickly around, then
peeped cautiously into the opening, and slipped out of sight through
the dark, round hole.
[Illustration: "I knew it suited exactly."]
I knew it suited exactly by the glad, excited way he came out and
darted off. He soon returned with the little shining wife; and through
a whole week there was a constant passing of blue backs and white
breasts as the joyous pair fitted up the inside of that pump with
grass and feathers fit for the cradle of a fairy queen.
By the rarest fortune I was on hand when one of the sparrows
discovered what had happened in the pump. There is not a single
microbe of Anglophobia in my system. But need one's love for things
English include this pestiferous sparrow? Anyhow, I feel just a mite
of satisfaction when I recall how that sparrow, with the colonizing
instinct of his race, dropping down upon the pump with the notion that
he "had a duty to the world," dropped off that pump straightway,
concluding that his "duty" did not relate to that particular pump any
longer. The sparrows had built everywhere about the place, but that
that pump--a post, and a post to a pair of bars at that--was worth
settling had not dawned on them. When they saw that the swallows had
taken it, one of them lighted there instantly, with tail up, head
cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously. He looked into
the hole from every possible point, and was about to enter, when there
came a whizz of wings, a flash of blue, and a slap that sent him
spinning. When the indignant swallow low swooped back, like a
boomerang, the sparrow had scuttled off to an apple-tree.
[Illustration: "With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and
commenting vociferously."]
That was a _coup de grâce_. Peace reigned after that; and along in
July the five white eggs had found wings and were skimming about the
fly-filled air or counting and preening themselves demurely in a
solemn row upon the wire fence.
Between two pastures, easily seen from the same study window, stands a
wild apple-tree, pathetically diseased and rheumatic, which, like one
of Mr. Burroughs's trees, never bore very good crops of apples, but
four seasons a year is marvelously full of animals. It is chiefly
noted for a strange collection I once took out of its maw-like cavity.
It was a keen January morning, and I stopped at the tree, as usual,
and thumped. No lodgers there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail
fence and looked in. Darkness. No; there at the bottom was a patch of
gray, and--I pulled out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down went my
hand again, and a second owl came blinking to the light--this one in
rich brown plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched claws held
fistfuls of possum hair. Once more I pushed my hand down the hole,
gingerly, and up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum was in there,
and after a little manoeuvering I seized him by the collar, and out he
came grinning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white winter day.
And how exactly like a possum! "There is a time for all things," comes
near an incarnation in him. There is a time for eating owls--at night,
of course, if owls can then be had. But day is the time to sleep; and
if owls want to share his bed and roost upon him, all right. He
_will_ sleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And he would sleep
on here till dusk, in spite of my rude awakening, if I gave him leave.
I dropped him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the two owls
back upon him, and went my way, knowing I should find the three still
sleeping on my return. And it was so. The owls were just as surprised
and just as sleepy when I disturbed them the second time that day. I
left them to finish their nap. But the possum was served for dinner
the following evening--for this, too, is strictly in accord with his
time-for-all-things philosophy.
This pair of owls were most persistent in their attachment to the
apple-tree. Several times in the course of the winter I found them
sleeping soundly in this same deep cavity, making their winter
lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty which, standing not far from
the woods and between the uplands and meadows, has been home, hotel,
post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for many of the wild folk
about the fields.
A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very city of hollows-loving
animals. Not far away is one such orchard with a side bordering an
extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse meet is an apple-tree
that has been the ancestral home of unnumbered generations of
flying-squirrels. The cavity was first hollowed out by flickers. The
squirrels were interlopers. When the young come in April the large
opening is stuffed with shredded chestnut bark, leaving barely room
enough for the parents to squeeze through. The sharpest-eyed hawk
awing would never dream of waiting outside that insignificant door for
a meal of squirrel.
[Illustration: "In a solemn row upon the wire fence."]
[Illustration: "Young flying-squirrels."]
But such precautions are not always proof against boys. I robbed that
home one spring of its entire batch of babies (no one with any love of
wild things could resist the temptation to kidnap young
flying-squirrels), and tried to bring them up in domestic ways. But
somehow I never succeeded with pets. Something always happened. One
of these four squirrels was rocked on, a second was squeezed in a
door, a third fell before he could fly, and the fourth I took to
college with me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other room-mate.
I set aside one hour a day to putting corks, pens, photographs, and
knives back in their places, for him to tuck away the next day in one
of my shoes or under my pillow. More than once I have awakened to find
him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, the dearest little bedfellow
alive. But it was three stories from my window to the street; and one
day he tried his wings. They were not equal to the flight. Since then
I have left my wild pets in the woods.
If one wants to know what birds are about, especially the larger, more
cautious species, let him get under cover near a tall dead oak or
walnut, standing alone in the middle of open fields. Such a tree is
the natural rest and lookout for every passer. Here come the hawks to
wait and watch; here the sentinel crows are posted while the flock
pilfers corn and plugs melons; here the flickers and woodpeckers
light for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company or telegraph
across the fields on one of the resonant limbs; here the flocking
blackbirds swoop and settle, making the old tree look as if it had
suddenly leaved out in mourning--leaves black and crackling; and here
the turkey-buzzards halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight.
With good field-glasses there is no other vantage-ground for bird
study equal to this. Not in a day's tramp will one see so many birds,
and have such chances to observe them, as in a single hour, when the
sun is rising or setting, in the neighborhood of some great, gaunt
tree that has died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten by a bolt
from the summer clouds.
[Illustration: "The sentinel crows are posted."]
II
Nature's prodigality and parsimony are extremes farther apart than her
east and west. Why should she be so lavish of interstellar space, and
crowd a drop of stagnant water so? Why give the wide sea surface to
the petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks on Grand Manan?
Why scatter in Delaware Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every one
hatched, while each mite of a paramecium is cut in two, and wholes
made of the halves? Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines
for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the rottenest old stump
into a submerged-tenth tenement?
Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror
of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a
lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying
paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give
them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees is
an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter
live.
Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting--and marvelous
too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the
tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the
empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let
any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and
straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these
other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood,
yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than
come from the native stock.