of so well-known a sound as this woeful strain of the serenading
toad; but more than half a century might be spent in catching a
cricket-frog at his song. I tried to make my neighbor see one that was
clinging to a stick in the middle of the puddle; but her eyes were
dim. Deft hands have dressed these peepers. We have heard them by the
meadowful every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of one hand
number more than the peepers we have seen. One day I bent over three
lily-pads till nearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog that
was piping all the while somewhere near or upon them. At last, in
despair, I made a dash at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper
sank to the bottom an instant before my net struck the surface.
[Illustration: "A wretched little puddle."]
The entire frog family is as protectively colored as this least
member, the cricket-frog. They all carry fern-seed in their pockets
and go invisible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and black
cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops about over the brown leaves. I
have had him jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while I stared
hard at him. He lands with legs extended, purposely simulating the
shape of the ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only clue for
one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as his body dissolves against
the dead brown of the leaf-carpet. The tree-toad, _Hyla versicolor_,
still more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, to a certain
extent, he can change color to match the bark upon which he sits.
More than once, in climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon a
tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches of gray-green lichen
upon the limbs. But there is less of wonder in the tree-toad's
ability to change his colors than in the way he has of changing his
clothes. He is never troubled with the getting of a new suit; his
labor comes in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he disposes
of his cast-off clothes.
One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-toad that was stiff and
nearly dead with cold. I put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw,
and found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting with his toes
turned in, looking much surprised at his new quarters. He made himself
at home, however, and settled down comfortably, ready for what might
happen next.
The following day he climbed up the side of the bottle and slept
several hours, his tiny disked toes holding him as easily and
restfully as if he were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him
upside down; but he knew nothing of it until later when he awoke; then
he deliberately turned round with his head up and went to sleep again.
At night he was wide awake, winking and blinking at the lamp, and
watching me through his window of green glass.
[Illustration]
A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the bottom of his bottle
in a very queer attitude. His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent
down, his feet rolled up--his whole body huddled into a ball less
than half its normal size. After a time he began to kick and gasp as
if in pain, rolling and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he
was dying. He would double up into a bunch, then kick out suddenly
and stand up on his hind legs with his mouth wide open as if trying
to swallow something. He _was_ trying to swallow something, and the
thing had stuck on the way. It was a kind of cord, and ran out of
each corner of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thinning and
disappearing most strangely along his sides.
With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down a little, and, as it did
so, the skin along his sides rolled up. It was his old suit! He was
taking it off for a new one; and, instead of giving it to the poor,
he was trying to economize by eating it. What a meal! What a way to
undress! What curious economy!
Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads ate their skins--after
shedding them; but it was never made plain to me that they ate
them _while_ changing them--indeed, _swallowed_ them off! Three
great gulps more and the suit--shirt, shoes, stockings, and
all--disappeared. Then Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his
mouth, and settled back with the very air of one who has magnificently
sent away the waiter with the change.
[Illustration: "He _was_ trying to swallow something."]
Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I saw the entire operation
this time. It was almost a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over
his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were a shirt, then
crammed it into his mouth; kicked it over his back next; worked out
his feet and legs; then ate it off as before. The act was accomplished
with difficulty, and would have been quite impossible had not Hyla
found the most extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to the
ability to speak Russian with the tongue comes the power to skin one's
self with it. The tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can
skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his tongue is hung at the
front end, with the free end forked and pointing toward his stomach.
When my little captive had crammed his mouth full of skin, he stuck
this fork of a tongue into it and forced it down his throat and held
it down while he kicked and squirmed out of it.
Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our common toad, Bufo, is
just as carefully clothed. Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean,
narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of the lawn. On one side
of the house the shade lies all day long and the grass is cool and
damp. Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two summers. I
rarely pass that way without seeing him, well hidden in the grass. For
several days lately he had been missing, when, searching more closely
one morning, I found him sunk to the level of his back in the line of
pebbles, his spots and the glands upon his neck so mingling with the
varied collection of gravel about him that only a practised eye, and
that sharp with expectation, could have made him out.
In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh soil sticking to him,
what thing could look more like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump
of a toad? But there is a beauty even in this unlovely form; for here
is perfect adaptability.
Our canons of the beautiful are false if they do not in some way
include the toad. Shall we measure all the out-of-doors by the
linnet's song, the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's odor?
Deeper, wider, more fundamental and abiding than these standards, lie
the intellectual principles of plan and purpose and the intellectual
quality of perfect execution. We shall love not alone with all our
heart, but with all our mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful
by the superficial standard of what happens to please our eye, we
shall see no more of the world than we do of the new moon. Whole
classes of animals and wide regions of the earth's surface must, by
this test, be excluded. The only way the batrachians could possibly
come in would be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and frying them.
Treated thus, they look good and taste good, but this is all that
can be said for the entire family. Studied, however, from the single
view-point of protective coloring, or again, as illustrating the ease
with which the clumsiest forms can be fitted to the widest variety
of conditions, the toads do not suffer by any comparison. In the
light of such study, Bufo loses his repulsiveness and comes to have a
place quite as unique as the duckbill's, and a personality not less
fascinating than the swallow's or the gray squirrel's.
[Illustration]
However, the toad to the most of us is anything but a poem. What,
indeed, looks less lovely, less nimble and buoyant, more chained to
the earth, than a toad? But stretch the least web between his toes,
lengthen his hind legs, and--over he goes, the leopard-frog, champion
high diver of the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes with the
tiniest disks, and--there he swings, Pickering's little hyla, clinging
as easily to the under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as a
fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.
When a boy I climbed to the top of the flagpole on one of the State
geological survey stations. The pole rose far above the surrounding
pines--the highest point for miles around. As I clinched the top of
the staff, gripping my fingers into the socket for the flag-stick, I
felt something cold, and drawing myself up, found a tree-toad asleep
in the hole. Under him was a second toad, and under the second a
third--all dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all the region.
From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature carries this toad-form
simply by a thin web between the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips.
And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she
paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of
clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as
securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.
The frogs have innumerable enemies among the water-birds, the fish,
the snakes, and such animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink.
The toads fortunately are supplied with glands behind their heads
whose secretion is hateful to most of their foes, though it seems to
be no offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only chance, when a
snake is after him, lies in hiding. I once saw a race between a toad
and an adder snake, however, in which the hopper won.
One bright May morning I was listening to the music of the church
bells, as it floated out from the city and called softly over the
fields, when my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak and a thud
beside the log on which I sat; something dashed over my foot; and
I turned to catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, making
hard for the brush along the fence. He scarcely seemed to touch the
ground, but skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a midget
jack-rabbit. His case was urgent; and little wonder! At the opposite
end of the log, raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes
hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and astonishment all over
her face, swayed the flat, ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently
she, too, had never seen a toad get away in any such time before; and
after staring a moment, she turned under the log and withdrew from the
race, beaten.
Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death to the toads. Bufo would
almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty
road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular
about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew
lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in
numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those
ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along
their paths. There is no foe abroad at night, and life, during these
dark, quiet hours, has even for a toad something like a dash of
gaiety.
In one of the large pastures not far away stands a pump. It is shaded
by an ancient apple-tree, under which, when the days are hottest, the
cattle gather to doze and dream. They have worn away the grass about
the mossy trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the spot cool
and muddy the summer through. Here the toads congregate from every
quarter of the great field. I stretched myself out flat on the grass
one night and watched them in the moonlight. There must have been
fifty here that night, hopping about over the wet place--as grotesque
a band as ever met by woods or waters.
We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a
flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the
kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we
have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the
moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen
in the light of our moon.
There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the slightest sound, save
the small _pit-pat_, _pit-pat_, made by their hopping. There may have
been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I
could not catch a syllable of it.
Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this
wet spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture?
You could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in
finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few
minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow
cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing
leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump
to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.
[Illustration]
Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of
gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their
existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this
pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to
live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of
water. And yet this thirsty little beast never knows the pleasure of
a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.
I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never
allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never
saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their
big, expansive bellies, and _soak_ themselves full, as they did here
on the damp sand about the pump.
Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and the crickets and
katydids begin to chirp, the toad that sleeps under my front step hops
out of bed, kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look at the
weather. He seems to _think_ as he sits here on the gravel walk, sober
and still, with his face turned skyward. What does he think about?
Is he listening to the chorus of the crickets, to the whippoorwills,
or is it for supper he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of
toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary things, that he
meditates. Who knows? Some day perhaps we shall have a batrachian
psychology, and I shall understand what it is that my door-step lodger
turns over and over in his mind as he watches the coming of the stars.
All I can do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remember one
evening when he sat thinking and winking a full hour without making a
single hop.
As the darkness comes down he makes off for a night of bug-hunting.
At the first peep of dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back
for home. Home to a toad usually means any place that offers sleep and
safety for the day; but if undisturbed, like the one under the step,
he will return to the same spot throughout the summer. This chosen
spot may be the door-step, the cracks between the bricks of a well, or
the dense leaves of a strawberry-bed.
In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell between March and June
that I had to water my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morning
during this dry spell that I did not find several toads tucked away
for the day in these moist hills. These individuals had no regular
home, like the one under the step, but hunted up the coolest, shadiest
places in the soft soil and made new beds for themselves every morning.
Their bed-making is very funny, but not likely to meet the approval
of the housewife. Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comes
to the cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once to kick himself into
bed. He backs and kicks and elbows into the loose sand as far as he
can, then screws and twists till he is worked out of sight beneath
the soil, hind end foremost. Here he lies, with only his big pop-eyes
sticking out, half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder crawls along,
he simply pulls in his eyes, the loose sand falls over them, and the
snake passes on.
When the nights begin to grow chilly and there are threatenings of
frost, the toads hunt up winter quarters, and hide deep down in some
warm burrow--till to-morrow if the sun comes out hot, or, it may be,
not to wake until next April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches
them, when any shelter must do, when even their snake-fear is put
aside or forgotten. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,"
said Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the storm. So might
the toad say in an early frost.
The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by dug out a bunch of toads one
winter, all mixed up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled and
squirmed together in a perfect jumble of legs, heads, and tails--all
in their dead winter sleep. Their common enemy, the frost, had taken
them unawares, and driven them like friends into the crevice of the
rocks, where they would have slept together until the spring had not
the quarrymen unearthed them.
There is much mystery shrouding this humble batrachian. Somewhere in
everybody's imagination is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading down
through literature, it is astonishing how often the little monster has
hopped into it. There is chance for some one to make a big book of the
fable and folk-lore that has been gathering through the ages about the
toads. The stories of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long
entombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells they induce, of
their eating fire and dropping from the clouds, are legion.
[Illustration]
And there seems to be some basis of fact for all these tales. No one
has yet written for us the life-history of the toad. After having
watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly prepared to see toads
jump out of the fire, tumble from broken marble mantles, and fall
from the clouds. I never caught them in my hat during a shower; but
I have stood on Mauricetown Bridge, when the big drops came pelting
down, and seen those drops apparently turn into tiny toads as they
struck the planks, until the bridge was alive with them! Perhaps they
had been hiding from the heat between the cracks of the planks--but
there are people who believe that they came down from the clouds.
How, again, shall I explain this bit of observation? More than six
years I lived near a mud-hole that dried up in July. I passed it
almost daily. One spring there was a strange toad-call in the hole,
a call that I had never heard anything like before--a deafening,
agonizing roar, hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that the
water was moving with spade-foot toads. Two days later the hole was
still; every toad was gone. They disappeared; and though I kept that
little puddle under watch for several seasons after that, I have not
known a spade-foot to appear there since.
[Illustration]
The water was almost jellied with their spawn, and a little later was
swarming with spade-foot tadpoles. Then it began to dry up, and some
of the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot-prints of the
cows along the edge of the hole. Just as fast as the water disappeared
in these foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were absorbed and
legs formed, and they hopped away--some of them a week before their
brothers, that were hatched at the same time, but who had stayed in
the middle of the pond, where the deeper water allowed them a longer
babyhood for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pressure, can
nature work with this adaptable body of the toad!
Long before the sun-baked mud began to crack these young ones had
gone--where? And whence came their parents, and whither went they?
When will they return?
[Illustration]
A BUZZARDS' BANQUET
[Illustration: "In a state of soured silence."]
A BUZZARDS' BANQUET
Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic
lover of nature ever find her unlovely? We know that she is supremely
utilitarian, and we have only wonder and worship for her prodigal and
perfect economy. But does she always couple beauty with her utility?
To her real lover nature is never tiresome nor uninteresting; but
often she is most fascinating when veiled. She has moods and tempers
and habits, even physical blemishes, that are frequently discovered to
the too pressing suitor; and though these may quicken his interest and
faith, they often dissipate that halo of perfection with which first
fancy clothed her. This intimacy, this "seeing the very pulse of the
machine," is what spoils poets like Burroughs and Thoreau: spoils them
for poets to make them the truer philosophers.
Like the spots on the sun, all of nature's other blemishes disappear
in the bright blaze of her loveliness when viewed through a veil,
whether of shadows, or mists, or distance. This is half the secret of
the spell of the night, of the mystery of the sea, and the enchantment
of an ancient forest. From the depths of a bed in the meadow-grass
there is perfection of motion, the very soul of poetry, in the flight
of a buzzard far up under the blue dome of the sky; but look at the
same bald-headed, snaky-necked creature upon a fence-stake, and you
wonder how leagues into the clouds ever hid his ugly visage from you.
Melrose must be seen by moonlight. The light to see the buzzard in
has never been on land or sea, has come no nearer than the high white
clouds that drift far away in the summer sky.
From an economic point of view the buzzard is an admirable creation.
So are the robin, the oriole, and most other birds; but these are
admirable also from the esthetic point of view. Not so the buzzard.
He has the wings of Gabriel--the wings only; for, truly, his neck
and head are Lucifer's. If ugliness be an attribute of nature, then
this bird is its expression incarnate. Not that he is wicked, but
worse than wicked--repulsive. Now the jackal is a mean, sordid scamp,
a miserable half-dog beast, a degenerate that has not fallen far,
since he was never up very high. The buzzard, on the other hand, _was_
a bird. What he is now is unnamable. He has fallen back below the
reptiles, into a harpy with snake's head and bird's body--a vulture
more horrid than any mythical monster.
[Illustration: "Ugliness incarnate."]
Having once seen a turkey-buzzard feeding, one has no difficulty in
accounting for the origin of those "angry creations of the gods"
that defiled the banquets of King Phineus. If there is any holiness
of beauty, surely the turkey-buzzard with clipped wing is the most
unholy, the most utterly lost soul in the world.
One bright, warm day in January--a frog-waking day in southern New
Jersey--I saw the buzzards in unusual numbers sailing over the pines
beyond Cubby Hollow. Hoping for a glimpse of something social in the
silent, unemotional solitaries, I hurried over to the pines, and
passing through the wood, found a score of the birds feasting just
beyond the fence in an open field.
Creeping up close to the scene, I quietly hid in a big drift of
leaves and corn-blades that the winds had piled in a corner of the
worm-fence, and became an uninvited guest at the strangest, gruesomest
assemblage ever gathered--a buzzards' banquet.
The silence of the nether world wrapped this festive scene. Like ugly
shades from across the Styx came the birds, deepening the stillness
with their swishing wings. It was an unearthly picture: the bare,
stub-stuck corn-field, the gloomy pines, the silent, sullen buzzards
in the yellow winter sunlight!
The buzzards were stalking about when I arrived, all deliberately
fighting for a place and a share of the spoil. They made no noise;
and this dumb semblance of battle heightened the unearthliness of the
scene. As they lunged awkwardly about, the ends of their over-long
wings dragged the ground, and they tripped and staggered like drunken
sailors on shore. The hobbling hitch of seals on land could not be
less graceful than the strut of these fighting buzzards. They scuffled
as long as there was a scrap to fight for, wordless and bloodless, not
even a feather being disturbed, except those that rose with anger,
as the hair rises on a dog's back. But the fight was terrible in its
uncanniness.
[Illustration: "Sailing over the pines."]
Upon the fence and in the top of a dead oak near by others settled,
and passed immediately into a state of semi-consciousness that was
almost a stupor. Gloomy and indifferent they sat, hunched up with
their heads between their shoulders, perfectly oblivious of all
mundane things. There was no sign of recognition between the birds
until they dropped upon the ground and began fighting. Let a crow join
a feeding group of its fellows, and there will be considerable cawing;
even a sparrow, coming into a flock, will create some chirping: but
there was not so much as the twist of a neck when a new buzzard joined
or left this assemblage. Each bird sat as if he were at the center of
the Sahara Desert, as though he existed alone, with no other buzzard
on the earth.