I
I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room
brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the
ticking of my watch. Unable and half unwilling to sleep again, I
dressed and went out upon the dunes. When something wakes me thus at
night, I often dress and go quietly forth on an exploring expedition.
It was mildly cold in my ocean world, a light westerly breeze was
flowing in fitful eddies close along the earth, the moon was full
and high in a cloudless heaven, the surf was but a wash along the
ebb. Staff in hand, I crossed the beach to the good footing along the
water’s edge, and walked south at a slow pace toward big dune.
As I approached the shadow of the dune, I heard from behind it, and
ever so faint and high and far away, a sound in the night. The sound
began to approach and to increase in its wild music, and after what
seemed a long minute, I heard it again from somewhere overhead and a
little out to sea. I stared into the sky but could see nothing; the
sound that I had heard died away. Again from behind the dune and to
the west of south I heard the lovely, broken, chorusing, bell-like
sound--the sound of a great flight of geese going north on a quiet
night under the moon.
I climbed big dune then, the peak of these sand mountains; the moon
shadow was dark upon its eastern slope, but the crest was lifted to
the light and commanded both marsh and sea. The channels were still as
moonlit forest lakes, the sea was a great deep surfaced with a thin
moon splendour of golden green. I lingered there till the moon began
to pale, listening to the wild music of the great birds, for a river
of life was flowing that night across the sky. Over the elbow of the
Cape came the flights, crossing Eastham marsh and the dunes on their
way to the immensity of space above the waters. There were little
flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty,
there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died
away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings,
and once in a while I could see the birds--they were flying fast--but
scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.
[Illustration: _The Bay Side_]
An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean
lingers on the edge of winter. Day after day the April sun pours an
increasing splendour on the ocean plain, a hard, bright splendour of
light, but the Atlantic mirror drinks no warmth. A chance cloud upon
the sun, a shadow, and the sea of an instant returns to February.
No shadow of cloud may do the same upon the dunes. Under this April
light the mound and landward slopes of the great wall have put on a
strange and lovely colour which lies upon them with the delicacy of a
reflection in a pool. This colour is a tint of palest olive, even such
a ghost of it as one may see in spring on the hillsides of Provence,
and it is born of the mingling of pale sand, blanched grass, and new
grass spears of a certain eager green.
The birds of outer ocean, the “coots” or scoters, the old squaws,
dipper ducks, eiders and widgeons, the auks and their kin, have
practically all of them forsaken the Cape and returned to their
breeding grounds in the North. After the fifteenth of April these sea
peoples are rarely encountered on the Cape. The lakes of Manitoba are
theirs, the glacial hillocks of Greenland and the matted grasses of
the tundra. The spring migrations here do not fill the air and the
hours with birds as do the autumnal visitations. Urged on by their own
imperious instinct and Nature’s general will, the creatures have a
hurried air, and night flights are more frequent with them than on the
southward journeyings.
The first shore birds to pause here on their way back to the Northern
country were “ringnecks”--the semipalmated plover, _Charadrius
semipalmatus_--and even as the last shore birds I saw were strays,
so were these first solitaries and adventurers. On April 2d, I saw a
single ringneck running ahead of me along the upper beach; on the 5th I
met with another stray; on the 8th I put up a flock of twelve. I have
since encountered flocks on several occasions, and sent them wheeling
off above the breakers, uttering their melodious and plaintive cry. The
note is much like that of the piping plover, _Charadrius melodus_, but
without the piping plover’s flutelike purity of tone.
Since April 5th a small company of gannets, _Moris bassana_, have been
fishing just off the Fo’castle. Gannets have long been favourites
of mine. The word “white,” applied to the plumage of birds, covers
a multitude of minor tintings; some birds are yellowish white, some
greyish white, some ivory white, some white with an undertone of rose.
To my eye, the gannet wears as pure and as positive a white as one may
find in nature, and, moreover, the black tips of his wings are a black
past excelling. The bird is large--ornithologists grant him a length
between thirty-three and forty inches--and he has a way of using his
wings as if they were hinged fins. When sea and sky are a pleasant
midday blue, it is a charming bit of life and decorative colour to see
these creatures diving. They make a famous plunge. The birds off the
Fo’castle, as far as I can judge, hover between forty and fifty feet
above the sea and are fishing the shallows on a bar. On catching sight
of fish, they fall on the prey like arrows from a cloud. The impact of
each body strikes a tiny fountain from the sea. When fish are plentiful
on the bar, these living plummets fall, climb, and fall again till the
whole fishing ground is sown with darts of spray. Like the ringnecks,
these gannets are on their way North to the breeding grounds.
Early in March, my friend Kenneth Young of Orleans brought me down a
load of groceries in his Ford, and as we stood talking on the porch of
the Fo’castle I called his attention to the ducks who were stirring
about that morning in the channels and making an unusual noise.
“Surely,” said I, “they are not beginning to mate so early in the
year.” “Well, not exactly,” said my friend, “but they’re ‘choosing
partners.’” Somehow or other, much of the etiquette, of the “tone” of
courtship among gregarious birds has been caught in this phrase born
of the older dance; it has a flavour of the bowings and noddings,
the showing offs, the coy approaches, the coy escapes, the expected
pursuits, the endless conversational whistlings, mewings, squawkings,
and quackings which cover the primitive tensity under the politeness.
Under this April blue, the great marshes are emptier of life than I
have ever known them; no longer do westerly winds carry to my ears a
sound of spring and wooing. The marsh ducks have sought their ponds and
wilderness lakes, the larks have climbed the sky to Labrador, even
the herring gulls are scattering. Though the breeding season of the
latter bird does not begin till the first or second week in May, the
marriageable are already wandering east to Maine. Hundreds of isles
and islets on the Maine coast are as wild to-day as they were when
Champlain visited the archipelago, and the herring gull breeds there by
the twice ten thousands.
The sand has entirely resumed its looseness, its fluidity, but its
colour still tells of winter in a faintest hint of grey. The golden
warmth is there and is emerging; the climbing sun will soon exorcise
this ghost of cold. Through the winter flows and spreadings of the
sand, the new spears of dune grass rise, the leaves rolled into a green
poignard with a tip of rhubarb bed and a terminal spike as piercing
as a thorn. Other leaves, other spikes grow from the withered fists
of the old plant, and what are left of last year’s leaves now crack
from brittleness and drop away. Even the oozy vegetation of the flats
is sharing in the spring. At dead low tide the streaming eel grass of
the channel beds, _Zostera marina_, reveals new patches of wet, bright
yellow-green; these stains dominate the spring colours of my world and
are very beautiful to see when the April sun is shining.
Mammalian life was the first to emerge from the sterility of winter--I
found skunk tracks on the dunes after the certain warm nights in
March--and after the mammals came returning birds. Insect life has
scarce stirred, though a few stray unknown flies have made their
way into the house. In that kingdom life must begin again from the
beginning.
April and the sun advancing, the disk rising each day to the north of
where it leaped from yesterday’s ocean and setting north of yesterday’s
setting, the solar disk burning, burning, consuming winter in fire.