the white clouds, soaring round and round, and watching all that was
proceeding. Almost before he could look down again a shadow went by,
and a cuckoo flew along very low, just over the drinking place.
"Cuckoo!" he cried, "cuckoo! The goldfinch has the prettiest dress;"
and off he went.
Now the hawk had bribed the cuckoo, who was his cousin, to do this,
and the cuckoo was not at all unwilling, for he had an interest
himself in keeping the birds divided, so he said that although he had
made up his mind to go on his summer tour, leaving his children to be
taken care of by the wagtail, he would stop a day or two longer to
manage this little business. No sooner had the cuckoo said this, than
there was a most terrible uproar, and all the birds cried out at once.
The blackbird was so disgusted that he flew straight off, chattering
all across the field and up the hedge. The bullfinch tossed his head,
and asked the goldfinch to come up in the bush and see which was
stronger. The greenfinch and the chaffinch shrieked with derision; the
wood-pigeon turned his back and said "Pooh!" and went off with a
clatter. The sparrow flew to tell his mates on the house, and you
could hear the chatter they made about it right down at the brook.
But the wren screamed loudest of all, and said that the goldfinch was
a painted impostor, and had not got half so much gold as the
yellow-hammer. So they were all scattered in a minute, and Bevis stood
up and hurried homeward.
[Illustration]
THE LOON
(FROM WALDEN.)
BY HENRY D. THOREAU.
[Illustration]
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free, though secret,
in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of
towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to
live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy,
perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly
saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and
probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an
hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch,
and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a
brook, oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field.
The approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy
hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the
swamp.
There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading
white-pine, there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug out
the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a
pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost
every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the
wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot
above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at
last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round
me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken
wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who
would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single
file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the
young when I could not see the parent bird.
There, too, the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from
bough to bough of the soft white-pines over, my head; or the red
squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar
and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some
attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit
themselves to you by turns....
In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult
and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter
before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen
are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three,
with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come
rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one
loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that,
for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come
up there.
But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling
the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though
his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound
with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily,
taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat
to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often
successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I
frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few
rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how
he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did
not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day.
But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went
off in a rain.
As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like
the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon,
suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods
in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued
with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than
before. He dived again but I miscalculated the direction he would
take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this
time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed
long and loud, and with more reason than before.
He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen
rods of him. Each time when he came to the surface, turning his head
this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and
apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was
the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the
boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his
resolve into execution. He led me at once to the wildest part of the
pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing
in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was
a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against
a loon.
Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and
the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again.
Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me,
having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was
he and so unweariable, that when he had swam farthest he would
immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine
where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be
speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the
bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have
been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface,
with hooks set for trout,--though Walden is deeper than that. How
surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another
sphere speeding his way amid their schools!
Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the
surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple
where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre,
and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest
on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where
he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over
the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly
laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he
invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh?
Did not his white breast enough betray him?
He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the plash
of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an
hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet
farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed
off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the
work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac
laughter, yet somewhat like that of a waterfowl; but occasionally when
he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he
uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf
than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and
deliberately howls. This was his looning,--perhaps the wildest sound
that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I
concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his
own resources.
Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that
I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His
white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the
water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off,
he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of
loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and
rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I
was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his
god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the
tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer
and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which
they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When
compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over
the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to
other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I
thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down
by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which
was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the
middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the
same reason that I do.
[Illustration]
THE DARTMOOR PONIES, OR THE WANDERINGS OF THE HORSE TRIBE
(FROM "THROUGH MAGIC GLASSES.")
BY ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY.
[Illustration]
I want you to take a journey with me which I took in imagination a few
days ago, as I lay on my back on the sunny moor and watched the
Dartmoor ponies.
It was a calm misty morning one day last week, giving promise of a
bright and sunny day, when I started off for a long walk across the
moor to visit the famous stone-circles, many of which are to be found
not far off the track, called Abbot's Way, leading from Buckfast
Abbey, on the Dart, to the Abbey of Tavistock, on the Tavy.
My mind was full of the olden times as I pictured to myself how, seven
hundred years or more ago, some Benedictine monk from Tavistock Abbey,
in his black robe and cowl, paced this narrow path on his way to his
Cistercian brethren at Buckfast, meeting some of them on his road as
they wandered over the desolate moor in their white robes and black
scapularies in search of stray sheep. For the Cistercians were
shepherds and wool-weavers, while the Benedictines devoted themselves
to learning, and the track of about twenty-five miles from one abbey
to the other, which still remains, was worn by the members of the two
communities and their dependents, the only variety in whose lives
consisted probably in these occasional visits one to the other.
Yet even these monks belonged to modern times compared to the ancient
Britons who raised the stone-circles, and buried their dead in the
barrows scattered here and there over the moor; and my mind drifted
back to the days when, long before that pathway was worn, men clad in
the skins of beasts hunted wild animals over the ground on which I was
treading, and lived in caves and holes of the ground.
I wondered, as I thought of them, whether the cultured monks and the
uncivilized Britons delighted as much in the rugged scenery of the
moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor
stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the
mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture
from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the
landscape; while the early mist was rising off the _tors_, or
hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the
rugged and stony summits, as it dispersed gradually in the increasing
heat of the day.
The cattle which were scattered in groups here and there feeding on
the dewy grass were enjoying the happiest time of the year. The moor,
which in winter affords them scarcely a bare subsistence, is now
richly covered with fresh young grass, and the sturdy oxen fed
solemnly and deliberately, while the wild Dartmoor ponies and their
colts scampered joyously along, shaking their manes and long flowing
tails, and neighing to each other as they went; or clustered together
on some verdant spot, where the colts teased and bit each other for
fun, as they gambolled round their mothers.
It was a pleasure, there on the open moor, with the lark soaring
overhead, and the butterflies and bees hovering among the
sweet-smelling furze blossoms, to see horses free and joyous, with no
thought of bit or bridle, harness or saddle, whose hoofs had never
been handled by the shoeing-smith, nor their coats touched with the
singeing iron. Those little colts, with their thick heads, shaggy
coats, and flowing tails, will have at least two years more freedom
before they know what it is to be driven or beaten. Only once a year
are they gathered together, claimed by their owners and branded with
an initial, and then left again to wander where they will. True, it is
a freedom which sometimes has its drawbacks, for if the winter is
severe the only food they can get will be the furze-tops, off which
they scrape the snow with their feet; yet it is very precious in
itself, for they can gallop when and where they choose, with head
erect, sniffing at the wind and crying to each other for the very joy
of life.
Now as I strolled across the moor and watched their gambols, thinking
how like free wild animals they seemed, my thoughts roamed far away,
and I saw in imagination scenes where other untamed animals of the
horse tribe are living unfettered all their lives long.
First there rose before my mind the level grass-covered pampas of
South America, where wild horses share the boundless plains with
troops of the rhea, or American ostrich, and wander, each horse with
as many mares as he can collect, in companies of hundreds or even
thousands in a troop. These horses are now truly wild, and live freely
from youth to age, unless they are unfortunate enough to be caught in
the more inhabited regions by the lasso of the hunter. In the broad
pampas, the home of herds of wild cattle, they dread nothing. There,
as they roam with one bold stallion as their leader, even beasts of
prey hesitate to approach them, for, when they form into a dense mass
with the mothers and young in their centre, their heels deal blows
which even the fierce jaguar does not care to encounter, and they
trample their enemy to death in a very short time. Yet these are not
the original wild horses we are seeking, they are the descendants of
tame animals, brought from Europe by the Spaniards to Buenos Ayres in
1535, whose descendants have regained their freedom on the boundless
pampas and prairies.
As I was picturing them careering over the plains, another scene
presented itself and took their place. Now I no longer saw around me
tall pampas-grass with the long necks of the rheas appearing above it,
for I was on the edge of a dreary, scantily covered plain between the
Aral Sea and the Balkash Lake in Tartary. To the south lies a barren
sandy desert, to the north the fertile plains of the Kirghiz steppes,
where the Tartar feeds his flocks, and herds of antelopes gallop over
the fresh green pasture; and between these is a kind of no-man's
land, where low scanty shrubs and stunted grass seem to promise but a
poor feeding-ground.
Yet here the small long-legged but powerful "Tarpans," the wild horses
of the treeless plains of Russia and Tartary, were picking their
morning meal. Sturdy wicked little fellows they are, with their shaggy
light-brown coats, short wiry manes, erect ears, and fiery watchful
eyes. They might well be supposed to be true wild horses, whose
ancestors had never been tamed by man; and yet it is more probable
that even they escaped in early times from the Tartars, and have held
their own ever since, over the grassy steppes of Russia and on the
confines of the plains of Tartary. Sometimes they live almost alone,
especially on the barren wastes where they have been seen in winter,
scraping the snow off the herbage as our ponies do on Dartmoor. At
other times, as in the south of Russia, where they wander between the
Dnieper and the Don, they gather in vast herds and live a free life,
not fearing even the wolves, which they beat to the ground with their
hoofs. From one green oasis to another they travel over miles of
ground.
"A thousand horse--and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils--never stretched by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarred by spur or rod,
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea."[11]
[11] Byron's _Mazeppa_.
As I followed them in their course I fancied I saw troops of yet
another animal of the horse tribe, the "Kulan," or _Equus hemionus_,
which is a kind of half horse, half ass (p. 393), living on the
Kirghiz steppes of Tartary and spreading far beyond the range of the
Tarpan into Tibet. Here at last we have a truly wild animal, never
probably brought into subjection by man. The number of names he
possesses shows how widely he has spread. The Tartars call him
"Kulan," the Tibetans "Kiang," while the Mongolians give him the
unpronounceable name of "Dschiggetai." He will not submit to any of
them, but if caught and confined soon breaks away again to his old
life, a "free and fetterless creature."
No one has ever yet settled the question whether he is a horse or an
ass, probably because he represents an animal truly between the two.
His head is graceful, his body light, his legs slender and fleet, yet
his ears are long and ass-like; he has narrow hoofs, and a tail with a
tuft at the end like all the ass tribe; his color is a yellow brown,
and he has a short dark mane and a long dark stripe down his back as a
donkey has, though this last character you may also see in many of our
Devonshire ponies. Living often on the high plateaux, sometimes as
much as fifteen hundred feet above the sea, this "child of the
steppes" travels in large companies even as far as the rich meadows of
Central Asia; in summer wandering in green pastures, and in winter
seeking the hunger-steppes where sturdy plants grow. And when autumn
comes the young steeds go off alone to the mountain heights to survey
the country around and call wildly for mates, whom, when found, they
will keep close to them through all the next year, even though they
mingle with thousands of others.
Till about ten years ago the _Equus hemionus_ was the only truly wild
horse known, but in the winter of 1879-80 the Russian traveller
Przevalsky brought back from Central Asia a much more horse-like
animal, called by the Tartars "Kertag" and by the Mongols "Statur." It
is a clumsy, thick-set, whitish-gray creature with strong legs and a
large, heavy, reddish-colored head; its legs have a red tint down to
the knees, beyond which they are blackish down to the hoofs. But the
ears are small, and it has the broad hoofs of the true horse, and
warts on his hind legs, which no animal of the ass tribe has. This
horse, like the Kiang, travels in small troops of from five to
fifteen, led through the wildest parts of the Dsungarian desert,
between the Altai and Tianschan Mountains, by an old stallion. They
are extremely shy, and see, hear, and smell very quickly, so that they
are off like lightning whenever anything approaches them.
So having travelled over America, Europe, and Asia, was my quest
ended? No; for from the dreary Asiatic deserts my thoughts wandered to
a far warmer and more fertile land, where between the Blue Nile and
the Red Sea rise the lofty highlands of Abyssinia, among which the
African wild ass (_Asinus taeniopus_), the probable ancestor of our
donkeys, feeds in troops on the rich grasses of the slopes, and then
onwards to the bank of a river in Central Africa where on the edge of
a forest, with rich pastures beyond, elephants and rhinoceroses,
antelopes and buffaloes, lions and hyaenas, creep down in the cool of
the evening to slake their thirst in the flowing stream. There I saw
the herds of Zebras in all their striped beauty coming down from the
mountain regions to the north, and mingling with the darker-colored
but graceful quaggas from the southern plains, and I half-grieved at
the thought how these untamed and free rovers are being slowly but
surely surrounded by man closing in upon them on every side.
I might now have travelled still farther in search of the Onager, or
wild ass of the Asiatic and Indian deserts, but at this point a more
interesting and far wider question presented itself, as I flung myself
down on the moor to ponder over the early history of all these tribes.
Where have they all come from? Where shall we look for the first
ancestors of these wild and graceful animals? For the answer to this
question I had to travel back to America, to those Western United
States where Professor Marsh has made such grand discoveries in horse
history. For there, in the very country where horses were supposed
never to have been before the Spaniards brought them a few centuries
ago, we have now found the true birthplace of the equine race.
Come back with me to a time so remote that we cannot measure it even
by hundred of thousands of years, and let us visit the territories of
Utah and Wyoming. Those highlands were very different then from what
they are now. Just risen out of the seas of the Cretaceous Period,
they were then clothed with dense forests of palms, tree-ferns, and
screw-pines, magnolias and laurels, interspersed with wide-spreading
lakes, on the margins of which strange and curious animals fed and
flourished. There were large beasts with teeth like the tapir and the
bear, and feet like the elephant; and others far more dangerous, half
bear, half hyaena, prowling around to attack the clumsy paleotherium or
the anoplotherium, something between a rhinoceros and a horse, which
grazed by the waterside, while graceful antelopes fed on the rich
grass. And among these were some little animals no bigger than foxes,
with four toes and a splint for the fifth, on their front feet, and
three toes on the hind ones.
These clumsy little animals, whose bones have been found in the rocks
of Utah and Wyoming, have been called _Eohippus_, or horses of the
dawn, by naturalists. They were animals with real toes, yet their
bones and teeth show that they belonged to the horse tribe, and
already the fifth toe common to most other toed animals was beginning
to disappear.
This was in the Eocene Period, and before it passed away with its
screw-pines and tree-ferns, another rather larger animal, called the
Orohippus, had taken the place of the small one, and he had only four
toes on his front feet. The splint had disappeared, and as time went
on still other animals followed, always with fewer toes, while they
gained slender fleet legs, together with an increase in size and in
gracefulness. First one as large as a sheep (Mesohippus) had only
three toes and a splint. Then the splint again disappeared, and one
large and two dwindling toes only remained, till finally these two
became mere splints, leaving one large toe or hoof with almost
imperceptible splints, which may be seen on the fetlock of a horse's
skeleton.
You must notice that a horse's foot really begins at the point which
we call his knee in the front legs, and at his hock in his hind legs.
His true knee and elbow are close up to the body. What we call his
foot or hoof is really the end of the strong, broad, middle toe
covered with a hoof, and farther up his foot we can feel two small
splints, which are remains of two other toes.