Western cloud, dark substance of cloud, gathered at the wintry horizon
of the short-lived days making them even shorter with the false sundown
of its rim. Now come the sea fowl and the wild fowl to the beach from
the lonely and darkening north, from the Arctic Ocean and the advancing
pack, from the continental fragments and great empty islands that lie
between the continent and the pole, from the tundra and the barrens,
from the forests, from the bright lakes, from the nest-strewn crevices
and ledges of Atlantic rocks no man has ever named or scaled. Over
the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living
streams, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the peoples
and flocks, the clans and families, the young and the old. And the
dying grasslands, the October snows, and the forests fall behind, and
presently the nations behold a first far glint of the sea.
There are many streams, and it is said that two of the greatest bear
down upon Cape Cod. A first river, rising in the interior of Alaska,
flows southeast across Canada to the Atlantic; on this stream move
birds from the north woods and the Canadian lakes together with birds
from the north barrens and the arctic isles and half lands; a second
stream, rising in the shadow of the pole, flows south along the coast
past Greenland and the bays of Labrador--on this move the hardy arctic
folk who get their living from the tides. Many species are common to
both streams. Somewhere north of the Cape, perhaps round and about
the mouth of the St. Lawrence, these streams immix their multitudes,
and south to New England moves the great united flood, peopling with
primeval life the seacoasts and the sky.
Ducks enter the channels, some flying in from the bay, others from the
outer ocean, geese settle at sundown in the golden skin of the western
coves, coveys of winter yellow-legs circle in the gloom, and hide
when disturbed in the taller salt grasses between the meadows and the
creeks. At nightfall and at daybreak I hear birds talking. Strangers in
rubber boots and khaki uniforms now visit my domain, and every Saturday
afternoon I look with philosophy through my western windows to a number
of tufts of grass disguised as gunners.
Now that I have settled down here for the winter, I find myself
becoming something of a beach comber. Every once in a while, when I
chance to look seaward, I spy an unknown something or other rising and
falling, appearing and disappearing in the offshore surges, and at this
sight the beach comber in me wakes. All kinds of things “come ashore”
on these vast sands, and even the most valueless have an air of being
treasure trove. The mysterious something moving from the swells into
the breakers may be nothing but a smelly bait tub washed overboard
from some Gloucester fisherman, or a lobster pot, or a packing case
stencilled with a liner’s name; but in the sea or on the beach a mile
ahead it is something for nothing, it is the unknown, it is hope
springing eternal in the human breast. The other day I found myself
thoughtfully examining a U. S. Navy blue undress jumper which lay flat
and soggy and solitary on the lower beach. It was not, in its day,
an unfamiliar garment, and I have an old friend in the village who
occasionally dons a rather good one he found just south of the light.
Alas, the cloth was rotted and the jumper much too small. But I cut off
and saved the buttons.
[Illustration: _Semipalmated Sandpiper_]
Now, while I stood there slicing off the buttons, I chanced to look up
a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the
only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing
along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high
and travelling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow’s
from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the
solemn unrest of ocean--their passing was more than music, and from
their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms
and heals.