Underneath the dry leaves, close to the ground, the fragrant
pink-and-white blossoms of the trailing arbutus showed here and there;
while deeper in the woods leathery trefoil leaves, green above and
dark violet beneath, vainly tried to hide the blue-and-white-porcelain
petals of the hepatica. In bare spots the crowded tiny white blossoms
of the saxifrage showed in the withered grass, and the bloodroot,
with its golden heart and snowy, short-lived petals, and gnarled root
which drips blood when broken. A little later the hillsides were blue
with violets, and yellow with adder's-tongue with its drooping
blossoms and spotted fawn-colored leaves. Then came days of feasting,
which made up for the long lean weeks that had gone before. There were
droning, blundering June-bugs, crickets, grubs, grasshoppers,
field-mice, snakes, strawberries, and so many other delicacies that
the skunk's walk was fast becoming a waddle.
It was on one of those late spring days that the Artist and the Skunk
had their first and last meeting. Said artist was none other than
Reginald De Haven, whose water-colors were world-famous. Reginald had
a rosy face, and wore velvet knickerbockers and large chubby legs, and
made the people of Cornwall suspect his sanity by frequently
telescoping his hands to look at color-values. This spring he was
boarding with old Mark Hurlbutt, over on Cream Hill. On the day of the
meeting, he had been sketching down by Cream Pond and had taken a
wood-road home. Where it entered one of Mark's upper pastures, he saw
a strange black-and-white animal moving leisurely toward him, and
stood still lest he frighten it away. He might have spared his fears.
The stranger moved toward him, silent, imperturbable, and with an
assured air. As it came nearer, the artist was impressed with its
color-scheme. The snowy stripe down the pointed black nose, the mass
of white back of the black head, and, above all, the resplendent,
waving pompon of a tail, made it a spectacular study in blacks and
whites.
With tiny mincing steps the little animal came straight on toward him.
It seemed so tame and unconcerned, that De Haven planned to catch it
and carry it back to the farm wrapped up in his coat. As he took a
step forward, the stranger seemed for the first time to notice him. It
stopped and stamped with its forepaws, in what seemed to the artist a
playful and attractive manner. This, if he had but known it, was
signal number one of the prescribed three which a well-bred skunk
always gives, if there be time, even to his bitterest enemies.
As De Haven moved toward the animal, he was again interested to see
the latter hoist aloft the gorgeous black-and-white banner of its
clan. Rushing on to his ruin, he went unregardingly past this second
danger-signal. By this time, he was within six feet of the skunk,
which had now come to a full stop and was watching him intently out of
its deep-set eyes. As he approached still nearer, he noticed that
the white tip of the tail, which heretofore had hung dangling,
suddenly stiffened and waved erect. "Like a flag of truce," he
observed whimsically to himself. Never was there a more dreadful
misapprehension. That raising of the white tail-tip is the skunk's
ultimate warning. After that, remains nothing but war and carnage and
chaos.
If even then the artist had but stood stony still, there might have
been room for repentance, for the skunk is long-suffering and loath to
go into action. No country-bred guardian angel came to De Haven's
rescue. Stepping quickly forward, he stooped to seize the motionless
animal. Even as he leaned forward, his fate overtook him. Swinging his
plumed tail to one side, the skunk bent its back at the shoulders, and
brought its secondary batteries into action. A puff of what seemed
like vapor shot toward the unfortunate artist, and a second later he
had an experience in atmospheric values which had never come into his
sheltered life before. From the crown of his velour hat with the
little plume at the side, down to his suede shoes, he was Maranatha
and Anathema to the whole world, including himself. Coughing,
sneezing, gasping, strangling, racked by nausea and wheezing for
breath, his was the motto of the Restless Club: "Anywhere but here."
His last sight of the animal which had so influenced his life showed
it demurely moving along the path from which it had never once
swerved.
The wind was blowing toward the farmhouse, and although it was half a
mile away, old Mark Hurlbutt soon had advance reports of the battle.
"A skunk b'gosh!" he remarked to himself, stopping on his way to the
barn; "and an able-bodied one, too," he continued, sniffing the
breeze.
A minute later he saw someone running toward him, and recognized his
boarder. Even as he saw him, a certain aura which hung about the
approaching figure made plain to Mark what had happened.
"Hey! stop right where you be!" shouted the old man. "Another step an'
I'll shoot," he went on, aiming the shovel which he had in his hand
directly at the distressed artist's head, and trying not to breathe.
De Haven halted in his tracks.
"But--but--I require assistance," he pleaded.
"You sure do," agreed his landlord; "somethin' tells me so. Hustle
over back of the smoke-house and get your clothes off an' I'll join
you in a minute."
Mark hurried into the house, and was out again almost immediately with
a large bottle of benzine, a wagon-sponge, a calico shirt, and a pair
of overalls. As he came around the corner, the sight of the artist
posing all pink and white against the smoke-house, with a pile of
discarded clothes at his feet, was too much for the old man, and he
cackled like a hen.
"Darned if you don't look like one of them fauns you're all the time
paintin'," he gasped.
"Shut up!" snapped the artist. "You fix me up right away, or I'll put
these clothes on again and walk through every room in your house."
This threat brought immediate action, and a few moments later an
expensive and artistic suit of clothes reposed in a lonely grave back
of Mark's smoke-house, where they remain even to this day. Thereafter
the artist, scrubbed with benzine until he smelt like a garage, left
Cornwall forever. He was wearing a mackintosh of his own. Everything
else belonged to Mark.
"It's lucky for you that he went when he did," said old Hen Root the
next evening, when the story was told at Silas Dean's store at the
Centre. "You're gettin' on, Mark," he continued solemnly. "If he'd a'
stayed you might have got some kind of a stroke or other from
over-laughin' yourself. I didn't dare to do any work for nigh a week
after I first saw him telescopin' round in them velvet short pants."
"That's right," agreed Silas Dean heartily; "an' you ain't done any
since--nor before," he concluded, carefully closing the cracker-barrel
next to Hen.
It was, perhaps, the meeting with an eminent artist that aroused a new
ambition in the skunk's mind. At any rate, from that day he began to
haunt the farmyard. The first news that Mark had of his presence was
when a motherly old hen, who had been sitting contentedly on twelve
eggs for nearly a week, wandered around and around her empty nest
clucking disconsolately. During the night some sly thief had slipped
egg after egg out from under her brooding wings, so deftly that she
never even clucked a protest. In the morning there were left only
scattered egg-shells and a telltale track in the dust.
"Blamed old rascal," roared Mark. "First he loses me a good boarder
an' now he's ate up a full clutch of pedigree white Wyandotte eggs.
I'm goin' to shoot that skunk on sight."
Mark was mistaken. Early the next morning he opened the spring-house
to set in a pail of milk. There, right beside the magnificent spring
which boiled and bubbled in the centre of the cement floor, a
black-and-white stranger was contentedly drinking from a pan of milk
that had been placed there to cool. As Mark opened the door, the skunk
looked at him calmly, and then quietly raised the banner which had
waved over many a bloodless victory. Whereupon the owner of the
spring-house backed away, and waited until his visitor had finished
his drink and disappeared in a patch of bushes back of the milk-house.
"What about all that talk of shootin' that skunk at sight?" queried
Jonas, the hired man, that evening at supper.
"The trouble was, Jonas," returned Mark confidentially, "he got the
drop on me. If I'd shot I'd of lost one spring, six gallons of milk,
an' a suit of clothes."
"You men are a lot of cowards," scolded his wife. "I'd of found some
way to stop that skunk a-drinkin' up a whole pan of good milk right in
front of my eyes. He'd not bluff me."
"Mirandy," said Mark solemnly, "you take it from me that skunk ain't
no bluffer. If you don't believe it, telegraph Mr. De Haven."
In spite of her threat, it was Miranda herself who afterwards insisted
that the skunk should continue to live on the farm without fear or
reproach. Late one afternoon she had been coming down Pond Hill on a
search for a new-born calf which, as usual, had been hidden by its
mother somewhere in the thick woods. The path was sunken deep between
banks covered with the yellow blossoms of the hardhack. At one spot,
where the way widened into a rude road, a crooked green stem stretched
out across the pathway, and from it swayed a great rose-red flower
like some exquisite carved shell. It was the moccasin flower, the most
beautiful of our early orchids. Miranda bent down to pick it with a
little gasp of delight.
Suddenly, from just beyond, came a warning hiss, and in front of her
reared the bloated swollen body of a fearsome snake. The reptile's
head was flattened out until it was half as wide as her hand, and it
swelled and hissed rhythmically like the exhaust of a steam-pipe, and
repeatedly struck out in her direction, the very embodiment of blind,
venomous rage. Half paralyzed with fear, Miranda moved backward and
began to wonder what she would do. Night was coming on, and if she
went back over the hill, it would be dark before she could reach home.
As for going around, no power on earth would have persuaded her to
step into the thick bushes on either side of the path, convinced as
she was that they must be swarming with snakes.
At this psychological moment, ambling unconcernedly up the path, came
the same black-and-white beast about which she had spoken so bitterly
the day before. As it caught sight of the snake coiling and rearing
and hissing, the skunk's gait quickened, and it approached the
threatening figure with cheerful alacrity. The snake puffed and
hissed and struck, but the skunk never even hesitated. Holding the
reptile down with its slim paws it nibbled off the threatening head,
neatly skinned the squirming body, and before Mrs. Hurlbutt's
delighted eyes ate it up. Then, without apparently noticing her at
all, it went on up the hill until lost to sight among the hardhacks.
It would have been impossible to convince Miranda that the snake was
nothing but a harmless puff-adder, and that, in spite of its bluffing
ways, it had no fangs and never was known to bite. From that day on
the skunk was envisaged in her mind as the guardian angel of the farm,
and the edict went out that on no account was it to be molested. Not
even when most of the bees from one of Mark's cherished swarms
disappeared into its leather-lined interior, would Miranda permit any
adverse action.
"Some skunk that!" jeered Mark. "You let it get away with bees an'
boarders an' milk an' eggs, an' never say a word. I wisht you cared as
much for your husband."
"I might, if he was as brave--an' good-looking," murmured Miranda.
It was the sweet influences of the month of June which settled the
dispute. Jonas had been down in the sap-works, where the vast
sugar-maples grew below the milk-house meadow. As he came back up the
slope, the great golden moon of June was showing its rim over Pond
Hill. Ahead of him he saw a familiar black-and-white shape moving
toward the woods. Even as he watched, a procession came down to meet
him. At its head marched another full-grown skunk, while back of her
was a long winding procession of little skunks. One, two, three, four,
five, six--Jonas counted them up to ten, and the last one of all was
jet-black except for a tiny stripe of white on its muzzle. There was a
long pause as the lone skunk met the band. Then suddenly he was at the
head of it, and the long procession trailed contentedly after him.
Separated from him by a winter and a spring, Mrs. Skunk had rejoined
her mate, bringing her sheaves with her. Away from the tame folk to
return no more, the wild folk moved on and on into the heart of the
summer woods.
IV
HIGH SKY
"Clang! Clang! Clang!"--the sound drifted down from mid-sky, as if the
ice-cold gates of winter were opening. A gaggle of Canada geese,
wearing white bibs below their black heads and necks, came beating
down the wind, shouting to earth as they flew. Below them, although it
was still fall, the tan-colored marsh showed ash-gray stretches of new
ice, with here and there blue patches of snow. Suddenly, faint and far
sounded other notes, as of a distant horn, and a company of
misty-white trumpeter swans swept along the sky, gleaming like silver
in the sun. Down from the Arctic tundras they had come, where during
the short summer their great nests had stood like watchtowers above
the level sphagnum bogs; for the trumpeter swan, like the eagle,
scorns to hide its nest and fears no foe of earth or air.
As their trumpet notes pealed across the marsh, they were answered
everywhere by the confused cries and calls of innumerable waterfowl;
for when the swan starts south, it is no time for lesser breeds to
linger. Wisps of snipe and badlings of duck sprang into the air. The
canvasback ducks, with their dark red heads and necks, grunted as they
flew; the wings of the golden-eye whistled, the scaup purred, the
black ducks, and the mallards with emerald-green heads, quacked, the
pintails whimpered--the air was full of duck-notes. As they swept
southward, the different families took their places according to their
speed. Well up in the van were the canvasbacks, who can travel at the
rate of one hundred and sixty feet per second. Next came the pintails,
and the wood-ducks, whose drakes have wings of velvet-black, purple,
and white. The mallards and the black ducks brought up the rear; while
far behind a cloud of blue-winged teal whizzed down the sky, the
lustrous light blue of their wings glinting like polished steel in the
sunlight. Flying in perfect unison, the distance between them and the
main flock rapidly lessened; for the blue-winged teal, when it settles
down to fly, can tick off two miles a minute. A few yards back of
their close cloud followed a single green-winged teal, a tiny drake
with a chestnut-brown head brightly striped with green, who wore an
emerald patch on either wing.
In a moment the blue-wings had passed the quacking mallards and black
ducks as if they had been anchored in the sky. The whistlers and
pintails were overtaken next, and then, more slowly, the little flock,
flying in perfect form, began to cut down the lead of the canvasbacks
in front. Little by little, the tiny teal edged up, in complete
silence, to the whizzing, grunting leaders, until at last they were
flying right abreast of them. At first slowly, and then more and more
rapidly, they drew away, until a clear space of sky showed between the
two flocks, including the green-winged follower. Then, for the first
time, the blue-wings spoke, voicing their victory in soft, lisping
notes, which were echoed by a mellow whistle from the green-wing.
The sound of his own voice seemed suddenly to remind the latter that
he was one of the speed-kings of the sky. An inch shorter than his
blue-winged brother, the green-winged teal is yet a hardier and a
swifter bird. Unhampered by any flock-formation, the wing-beats of
this lone flyer increased until he shot forward like a projectile. In
a moment he was up to the leaders, then above them; and then, with a
tremendous burst of speed, he passed and went slashing down the sky
alone. Farther and farther in front flashed the little green-striped
head, and more and more faintly his short whistles came back to the
flock behind.
Perhaps it was his call, or it might have been the green gleam of his
speeding head, that caught the attention of a sky-pirate hovering in a
reach of sky far above. Like other pirates, this one wore a curling
black moustache in the form of a black stripe around its beak which,
with the long, rakish wings and hooked, toothed beak, marked it as the
duck-hawk, one of the fiercest and swiftest of the falcons. As the
hawk caught sight of the speeding little teal, his telescopic eyes
gleamed like fire, and curving down through the sky, in a moment he
was in its wake. Every feather of the little drake's taut and tense
body showed his speed, as he traveled at a two-mile-a-minute clip.
Not so with the lithe falcon who pursued him. The movements of his
long, narrow wings and arrowy body were so effortless that it seemed
impossible that he could overtake the other. Yet every wing-beat
brought him nearer and nearer, in a flight so swift and silent that
not until the shadow of death fell upon the teal did the latter even
know that he was being pursued. Then, indeed, he squawked in mortal
terror, and tried desperately to increase a speed which already seemed
impossible. Yet ever the shadow hung over him like a black shroud, and
then, in a flash, the little green-wing's fate overtook him. Almost
too quickly for eye to follow, the duck-hawk delivered the terrible
slash with which falcons kill their prey, and in an instant the teal
changed from a live, vibrant, arrow-swift bird to a limp mass of
fluttering feathers, which dropped like a plummet through the air.
With a rush, the duck-hawk swung down after his dead quarry, and
catching it in his claws, swooped down to earth to feast full at his
leisure.
Far, far above the lower reaches of the sky, where the cloud of
waterfowl were flying, above rain and storm and snow, was a solitude
entered by only a few of the sky-pilgrims. There, three miles high,
were naked space and a curved sky that shone like a great blue sun. In
the north a cluster of black dots showed against the blue. Swiftly
they grew in size, until at last, under a sun far brighter than the
one known to the earthbound, there flashed through the glittering air
a flock of golden plover. They were still wearing their summer suits,
with black breasts and sides, while every brown-black feather on back
and crown was widely margined with pure gold. Before they reached
Patagonia the black would be changed for gray; for the Arctic summer
of the golden plover is so short that he must moult, and even do his
courting, on the wing.
This company had nested up among the everlasting snows, and the
mileage of their flight was to be measured by thousands instead of
hundreds. To-day they were on their first lap of fifteen hundred miles
to the shores of Nova Scotia. There they would rest before taking the
Water Route which only kings of the air can follow. Straight across
the storm-swept Atlantic and the treacherous Gulf of Mexico, two
thousand four hundred miles, they would fly, on their way to their
next stop on the pampas of the Argentine. Fainter-hearted flyers
chose the circuitous Island Passage, across Cuba, Porto Rico, and
the Antilles, to the northern shore of South America. The
chuck-will's-widow of the Gulf States, cuckoos from New England,
gray-checked thrushes from Quebec, bank-swallows from Labrador,
black-poll warblers from Alaska, and hosts and myriads of bobolinks
from everywhere took the Bobolink Route from Florida to Cuba, and the
seven hundred miles across the Gulf to South America.
Only a few of the highest-powered water-birds shared the Water Route
with the plover. When this flock started, they had circled and wheeled
and swooped in the wonderful evolutions of their kind, but had
finally swung into their journey-gait--and when a plover settles down
to straight flying, it would seem to be safe from anything slower than
a bullet.
Far above the flock floated what seemed a fleck of white cloud blown
up from the lower levels. As it drifted swiftly down toward the
speeding plover, it grew into a great bird sparsely mottled with
pearl-gray, whose pointed wings had a spread of nearly five feet.
Driven down from Greenland by cold and famine, a white gyrfalcon was
haunting these solitudes like some grim ghost of the upper sky. His
fierce eyes were of a glittering black, as was the tip of his blue
hooked beak.
As the plover whizzed southward on their way to Summer, some shadow of
the coming of the falcon must have fallen upon them; for suddenly the
whole flock broke and scattered through the sky, like a dropped
handful of beads, each bird twisting and doubling through the air, yet
still shooting ever southward at a speed which few other flyers could
have equaled. Unluckily for the plover, the gyrfalcon is perhaps the
fastest bird that flies, and moreover it has all of that mysterious
gift of the falcon family of following automatically every double and
twist and turn of any bird which it elects to pursue. This one chose
his victim, and in a flash was following it through the sky. Here and
there, back and forth, up and down, in dizzy circles and bewildering
curves, the great hawk sped after the largest of the plover. As if
driven in some invisible tandem, the white form of the falcon kept an
exact distance from the plover, until at last the latter gave up
circling and doubling for a stretch of straight flight. In an instant,
the flashing white wings of the falcon were above it; there was the
same arrowy pounce with which the lesser falcon had struck down the
teal; and, a moment later, the gyrfalcon had caught the falling body,
and was volplaning down to earth with the dead plover in its claws.
For a time after this tragedy the sky seemed empty, as the scattered
plover passed out of sight, to come together as a flock many miles
beyond. Then a multitude of tiny black specks showed for an instant in
the blue. They seemed almost like motes in the sunlight, save that,
instead of dancing up and down, they shot forward with an almost
inconceivable swiftness. It was as if a stream of bullets had suddenly
become visible. Immeasurably faster than any bird of even twice its
size, a flock of ruby-throated humming-birds, the smallest birds in
the world, sped unfalteringly toward the sunland of the South. Their
buzzing flight had a dipping, rolling motion, as they disappeared in
the distance on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, whose seven hundred
miles of treacherous water they would cover without a rest.
As the setting sun approached the rim of the world, the lower clouds
changed from banks of snow into masses of fuming gold, splashed and
blotched with an intolerable crimson. Again the sky was full of birds.
Those last of the day-flyers were the swallow-folk. White-bellied tree
swallows; barn swallows, with long forked tails; cliff swallows, with
cream-white foreheads; bank and rough-winged swallows, with brown
backs--the air was full of their whirling, curving flight. With them
went their big brothers, the purple martins, and the night hawks, with
their white-barred wings, which at times, as they whirled downward,
made a hollow twanging noise. With the flock, too, were the swifts,
who sleep and nest in chimneys, and whose winter home no man yet has
discovered.
As the turquoise of the curved sky deepened into sapphire, a shadowy
figure came toward the circling, flashing throng of swifts and
swallows. The newcomer's great bare wings seemed made of sections of
brown parchment jointed together unlike those of any bird. Nor did any
bird ever wear soft brown fur frosted with silver, nor have wide
flappy ears and a hobgoblin face. Miles above the ground this
earth-born mammal was beating the birds in their own element. None of
the swallows showed any alarm as the stranger overtook them, for they
recognized him as the hoary bat, the largest of North American bats,
who migrates with the swallows and, like them, feeds only on insects.
As the sun sank lower, the great company of the bird-folk swooped down
toward the earth, for swallows, swifts, and martins are all
day-flyers. Not so with the bat. In the fading light, he flew steadily
southward alone--but not for long. Up from earth came again the great
gyrfalcon, his fierce hunger unsatisfied with the few mouthfuls torn
from the plover's plump breast. As his fierce eyes caught sight of
the flitting bat, his wings flashed through the air with the same
speed that had overtaken the plover. No bird that flies could have
kept ahead of the rush of the great hawk through the air.