though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the
winter nearly passed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up
from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to
skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering
about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as
stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to
dust. The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and
stuck out like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and
through by woodpeckers, and now lay several feet away, buried in the
snow; and the bole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but
covered instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked
with fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small
animals. I almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of
the documentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there
were mice in the old corpse. The Hebrew scholar stared at the tree.
Then he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping
off my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we
heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor
me, though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then,
and would infinitely rather have substituted his skates. I insisted,
however, and he disappeared for the ax.
The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now
was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those
fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodpecker
holes since the last storm.
The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as
eager now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He
was anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense--a kind of X-ray
organ that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was
(shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of
the chase of--mice!
I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly
through the air; the preacher was repeating between strokes:
"_I'm--truly--sorry--man's--dominion--has--_" when suddenly there
was a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a
fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed
creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever
saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only
mouse captured.
We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound,
stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we
came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded
bark--a complete fortress against the siege of winter.
That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long
dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was
not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor
one half so full of goings on, as this same old shell of a pine, with
scarcely heart enough to stand.
WOOD-PUSSIES
[Illustration]
WOOD-PUSSIES
One real source of the joy in out-of-door study lies in its off-time
character. A serious, bread-winning study of birds must be a
lamentable vocation; it comes to measuring egg-shells merely, and
stuffing skins. To get its real tonic, nature study must not be
carried on with Walden Pond laboriousness, nor with the unrelieved
persistence of a five years aboard a _Beagle_. Darwin staggered under
the burden of his observations; and Thoreau says: "I would not have
any one adopt _my_ mode of living; for before he has fairly learned it
I may have found out another for myself"--and so he did.
No; the joy in wild things is the joy of being wild with
them--vacation joy. Think of being forced to gather ants and watch
spiders for a living! It would be quite as bad as making poetry or
prophecy one's profession. From the day Mohammed formally adopts
Koran-making as a business, he begins to lose his spontaneity and
originality, and grows prosy and artificial, even plagiaristic.
Nature shuns the professional. She makes her happiest visits as short
surprises, delightful interruptions and diversions in the thick of our
earnest business.
You can take no vacation in the mountains? Then snatch a few minutes
before the seven-o'clock whistle blows, or while you hoe, or between
office-hours, to look and listen. The glimpses of wild life caught
at such times will be flashes of revelation. It may be the instant
picture of a gray fox leaping at a buzzard from behind a bush as the
train drives across the wide, blank prairies of southern Kansas;
or a warm time with wasps while mowing in New Jersey; or the chirp
of sparrows in passing King's Chapel Burial-ground when a cold
winter twilight is settling over Boston; or the chance meeting of a
wood-pussy on your way home from singing-school in Maine. Whatever
the picture, and wherever obtained, coming in this unexpected way, it
is sure to be more lasting, meaningful, and happy than volumes of the
kind gathered after long days of tramping with gun and glass.
Any one can acquaint himself with the out-of-doors, if he keeps his
eyes and ears open and lives a little while, should his lines happen
to fall even in a city. Most cities have parks, or a river, or a
zoölogical garden. A zoölogical garden is not to be despised by the
naturalist. About ninety-nine hundredths of every wild animal remains
wild in spite of iron bars and peanuts and visitors.
There is one little creature, however, that you must live at least on
the edge of the country to know, for I never saw a zoölogical garden
that had a pit or cage for him. Yet he is not a blood-thirsty nor a
venomous beast; in fact, he is as harmless as a rabbit and every whit
as interesting as a prairie-dog. Nevertheless it is of no use to look
for him in the city. You must go out to the outskirts, to the farms
and pastures, if you would meet the wood-pussy. And even here you must
not look for _him_, but go to church or visit the neighbors after dark
and let the wood-pussy look for you. It will be altogether a rare and
interesting experience, an encounter to remember.
But what is a wood-pussy? That is the question I asked myself the
first night I spent in Maine. I had occasion to go down the road that
night, and as my hostess handed me the lantern she said warningly,
"Look out for the wood-pussies on the way." From what I was able to
put together that night I was sure that "wood-pussy" was a very pretty
down-east name for what, in New Jersey, I had always called a skunk.
I have had about a dozen unsought meetings with this greatly dreaded,
seldom-named, but much-talked-of creature. Most of them are moonlight
scenes--pictures of dimly lighted, shadow-flecked paths, with a
something larger than a cat in them, standing stock-still or moving
leisurely toward me, silvered now with pale light, now uncertain and
monstrous where the shadows lie deepest. With these memories always
come certain strange sensations of scalp-risings, chill feelings of
danger, of wild adventure, and of hair-breadth escape.
I have never met a skunk at night that did not demand (and receive)
the whole path, even when that path was the State highway. Dispute the
authority of a skunk? No more than I should the best-known ranger's
in Texas when requested to hold up my hands. The skunk is the only
animal left in the East that you will not parley with. Try to stare
the Great Stone Face out of countenance if you wish, but when a skunk
begins to sidle toward you, do not try to stare him out of the path;
just sidle in the direction he sidles, and sidle as fast as you can.
Late one afternoon I was reading by the side of a little ravine on
one of the islands in Casco Bay. The sharp, rocky walls of the cut
were shaded by scrub-pines and draped with dewberry-vines. Presently
the monotonous slop of the surf along the shore, growing fainter as
the tide ebbed, was broken by a stir in the dry leaves at the bottom
of the ravine. I listened. Something was moving below me. Creeping
cautiously to the edge, I looked down, and there, in a narrow yard
between two boulders, not ten feet beneath me, was a family of seven
young skunks.
They were about three weeks old,--"kittens," the natives called
them,--and seemed to be playing some kind of a rough-and-tumble game
together. Funny little bunches of black and white they were, with
pointed noses, beady black eyes, and very grand tails. They were
jet-black, except for white tips to their tails and a pure white mark
beginning on the top of their heads and dividing down their sides like
the letter V.
[Illustration: "A family of seven young skunks."]
My presence was unsuspected and their play went on. It was a sight
worth the rest of the vacation. When you find wild animals so far off
their guard as to play, do as Captain Cuttle suggests--"make a note of
it." It is a red-letter experience.
I doubt if there is another set of children in all the out-of-doors
so apparently incapable of playing as a set of young skunks. You
have watched lambs stub and wabble about in their gambols, clumsy
and unsafe upon their legs because there was so little body to
hold down so much legs. These young skunks were clumsier than the
wabbliest-legged lambkin that you ever saw, and for just the opposite
reason--there was so little legs to hold up so much body. Such
humpty-dumpty babies! They fell over each other, over the stones, and
over their paws as if paws were made only to be tumbled over. Their
surest, quickest way of getting anywhere was to upset and roll to it.
It was a silent playground, as all animal playgrounds are. The stir of
the dead leaves and now and then a faint hiss was all I could hear.
Who has ever heard any noise from untamed animals at play? One day I
came softly upon two white-footed mice playing in the leaves along
a wood-road and squeaking joyously; but as a rule the children of
the wilds, no matter how exciting their games, rarely utter a word.
Silence is the first lesson they are taught. Or is it now instinctive?
Have not generations of bitter life-struggle made the animals so timid
and wary that the young are born with a dread of discovery so strong
that they never shout in their play? This softness and silence was the
only striking difference to be seen in the play of these young skunks
here in the falling twilight, safely hidden among the rocks of the
wild ravine, and that of school-children upon a village green.
The child is much the same, whether the particular species is
four-footed or whether it goes on two feet. Here below me one of the
little toddlers got a bump that hurt him, and it made him just as mad
as a bump ever did me. There was a fuss in a twinkling. He stamped
with both fore feet, showed his teeth, humped his back, and turned
both ends of his tiny body, like a pinched wasp, toward every one
that came near him. The others knew what that particular twist meant
and kept their distance. I knew the import of that movement, too.
These young things had already learned their lesson of self-defense.
I believe that a three-weeks-old skunk could hold his own against the
world.
The dusk was deepening rapidly in the ravine; and I was just about
to shout to see how they would take it, when a long black snout was
thrust slowly out from beneath a piece of the ledge, and the mother of
the young skunks appeared. Without giving them a look, she crawled off
around a rock. The family followed; and here they all fell to eating
something--what, I could not see. I tried to scare them away, but at
my commands they only switched their tails and doubled into defensive
attitudes. Finally with some stones I drove them, like so many huge
crabs, into the den, and--horrors! they were eating one of their own
kin, a full-grown skunk, the father of their family, for all they
knew or cared, that had been killed the night before in one of the
islander's chicken-coops.
The skunk is no epicure. The matter of eating one's husband or wife,
one's father or mother, has never struck the skunk as out of the
ordinary. As far as my observation goes, the supreme question with
him is, Can this thing be swallowed? Such thoughts as, What is it?
How does it taste? Will it digest? Is it good form?--no skunk since
the line began ever allowed to interfere with his dinner. An enviable
disregard, this of dietetics! To eat everything with a relish! If the
testimony of Maine farmers can be credited, this animal is absolutely
omnivorous. During the winter the skunks burrow and sleep, several of
them in the same hole. When they go in they are as fat as September
woodchucks; but long before spring, the farmers tell me, the skunks
grow so lean and hungry that, turning cannibal, they fall upon their
weaker comrades and devour them, only the strongest surviving until
the spring.
[Illustration: "The family followed."]
In August, along the Kennebec, I found the skunks attacking the sugar
corn. They strip the ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw
the milky grain. But they do most damage among the chickens. For
downright destructiveness, a knowing old skunk, with a nice taste for
pullets and a thorough acquaintance with the barn-yard, discounts even
Reynard. Reynard is the reputed arch-enemy of poultry, yet there is
a good deal of the sportsman about him; he has some sort of honor, a
sense of the decency of the game. The skunk, on the contrary, is a
poacher, a slaughterer for the mere sake of it. My host, in a single
night, had fourteen hens killed by a skunk that dug under the coop and
deliberately bit them through the neck. He is not so cunning nor so
swift as the fox, but the skunk is no stupid. He is cool and calm and
bold. He will advance upon and capture a hen-house, and be off to his
den, while a fox is still studying his map of the farm.
Yet, like every other predatory creature, the skunk more than balances
his debt for corn and chickens by his credit for the destruction of
obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and mice, destroying great
numbers of the latter by digging out the nests and eating the young.
But we forget our debt when the chickens disappear, no matter how
few we lose. Shall we ever learn to say, when the redtail swoops among
the pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage, when the robins
rifle the cherry-trees, and when a skunk helps himself to a hen for
his Thanksgiving dinner--shall we ever learn to love and understand
the fitness of things out of doors enough to say,
But then, poor beastie, thou maun live?
The skunk is a famous digger. There are gigantic stories in Maine,
telling how he has been seen to escape the hound by digging himself
out of sight in the middle of an open field. I have never tried to
run down a skunk, and so never gave one the opportunity of showing
me all he is capable of as a lightning excavator; but, unless all my
experience is wrong, a skunk would rather fight or run or even die
than exert himself to the extent of digging a home. In the majority of
cases their lairs are made by other paws than their own.
One of the skunk's common tricks is to take up his abode with a
woodchuck. As woodchucks, without exception, are decent sort of
folk, they naturally object; but the unwelcome visitor, like Tar
Baby, says nothing; simply gives his host the privilege of remaining
in his own house if he chooses. He chooses to go, of course, and the
easy-minded interloper settles down comfortably at home. But it is not
long before a second wanderer chances upon this hole, and, without
thanks or leave, shares the burrow with the first. This often goes on
until the den is crowded--until some farmer's boy digs out a round
half-dozen.
From such a lair as headquarters the skunks forage at night, each
making off alone to a favorite haunt, and returning before daybreak
for safety and sleep. But a peculiar thing about these lodges, as
about the family den in the ravine, is their freedom from the hateful
musk. One rarely detects any odor about a skunk's burrow. I had been
within twenty feet of this one on the island most of the afternoon
and had not known it. How are a number of skunks living in a single
burrow for weeks able to keep it sweet, when one of them, by simply
passing through a ten-acre field of blossoming clover, will make it
unendurable? It certainly speaks well for the creature's personal
cleanliness, or else is proof of his extreme caution against discovery.
The odor will easily carry with the wind three miles. On the spot
where the animal has been shot, you will remember it a twelvemonth
after whenever it rains. "Do you want to know how to shoot a skunk on
your kitchen steps and never know it twenty-four hours after?" queried
my Kennebec authority on these beasts. I did, of course, though I
never expected a skunk to take up his stand on my kitchen steps and
compel me to despatch him.
"Well, shoot him dead, of course; then let him lie there three days.
All that smell will come back to him, no matter how far off it's gone.
It'll all come up out of the boards, too, and go into him, and you can
carry him away by the tail and never know a skunk's been on the farm.
It's curious how a skunk can make a smell, but never have any; and
it's curious how it all returns to him when he dies. Most things are
curious, ain't they?" I agreed that they were.
But to return to my family in the ravine. The next morning I went
back to the glen and caught three of these young ones. They made
no resistance,--merely warned me to be careful,--and I took them to
the house. For several days I fed them fish and fruit until they
became so tame that I could handle them without caution. But they
were hopelessly dull and uninteresting pets, never showing the least
intelligence, curiosity, or affection. I finally turned them loose
among their native rocks, and they strayed off as unconcerned as if
they had not spent two weeks away from home, shut up in a soap-box.
There seems to be little excuse, in this broad land of opportunity,
for any one's going into skunk-farming for a business; but these
animals have a good market value, and so, in spite of a big country
and rich resources, our hands are so eager for gold that every summer
we hear of new skunk farms. Still, why not raise skunks? They are more
easily kept than pigs or pigeons; they multiply rapidly; their pelts
make good (?) marten-skins; and I see no reason why any one having a
piece of woodland with a stream in it, and a prairie or an ocean on
each side of it, could not fence it in, stock it with skunks, and do a
profitable and withal an interesting business.
FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP
[Illustration]
FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP
There are many lovers of the out-of-doors who court her in her robes
of roses and in her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. Now a
lover that never sees her barefoot in the meadow, that never hears
her commonplace chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in her
lowly, humdrum life among the toads and snakes, has little genuine
love for his mistress.
To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the long Latin name of the
ragweed, to exclaim over the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at
a glorious sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at all. One who
does all this sincerely, but who stuffs his ears to the din of the
spring frogs, is in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty airs
and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies deeper down. When one has
gone down to that, then a March without peepers will be as lonesome
as a crowd without friends; then an orchard without the weather-wise
hyla can never make good his place with mere apples; and the front
door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath its step will lack
something quite as needful to its evening peace and homeness as it
lacks when the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are gone.
We are not humble nor thoughtful out of doors. There is too much
sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems
to her. All honor to the poets! especially to those who look carefully
and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what
the common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more
poetry, but a scientific course in biology. How a little study in
comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal to us the fearful and
wonderful in the make-up of all animal forms! And the fearful and
wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.
We all respond to the flowers and birds, for they demand no mental
effort. What about the snakes and frogs? Do we shiver at them? Do
we more than barely endure them? No one can help feeling the comfort
and sympathy of the bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears.
He comes some March morning in a flurry of snow, or drops down out of
a cheerless, soaking sky, and assures us that he has just left the
South and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to tell us that
spring is on the way. Yet, here is another voice, earlier than the
bluebird's often, with the bluebird's message, and with even more than
the bluebird's authority; but who will listen to a frog? A prophet is
not without honor save in his own country. One must needs have wings
and come from a foreign land to be received among us as a prophet of
the spring. Suppose a little frog noses his way up through the stiff,
cold mud, bumps against the ice, and pipes, _Spring! spring! spring!_
Has he not as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops down from
no one knows where, with the same message? The bluebird comes because
he has seen the spring; Hyla comes because he has the spring in his
heart. He that receives Hyla in the name of a prophet shall receive a
prophet's reward.
[Illustration: "'Spring! spring! spring!'"]
For me there is no clearer call in all the year than that of the
hylas' in the break-up days of March. The sap begins to start in my
roots at the first peep. There is something in their brave little
summons, as there is in the silvery light on the pussy-willows, that
takes hold on my hope and courage, and makes the March mud good to
tramp through. And this despite the fact that these early hylas so
aggravated my first attack of homesickness that I thought it was to be
fatal. The second night I ever spent away from home and my mother was
passed with old Mrs. Tribbet, who had a large orchard, behind which
was a frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins and comfort me
with apples. I was sick for home. And those frogs! When the guineas
got quiet, how dreadful they made the long May twilight with their
shrieking, strangling, homesick cries! After all these years I cannot
listen to them in the evenings of early spring without catching an
echo from the back of that orchard, without just a throb of that pain
so near to breaking my heart.
Close by, in a corner lot between the two cross-roads of the village,
lies a wretched little puddle, the home of countless hylas until the
June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or more people who live in the
vicinity and who pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am the
only one who, until recently, was sure he had ever seen a peeper, and
knew that they were neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As I
was standing by the puddle, one May day, a good neighbor came along
and stopped with me. The chorus was in full blast--cricket-frogs,
Pickering's frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all, the melancholy
quaver of Bufo, the "hop-toad."
"What is it that makes the _dreadful_ noise?" my neighbor asked,
meaning, I knew, by "dreadful noise," the song of the toad. I handed
her my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the doleful bagpipe
sprawling at the surface of the water, and, after sixty years of
wondering, she saw with immense satisfaction that one part in this
familiar spring medley was taken by the common toad.