WOODLAND PATHS
THE WORKS OF
WINTHROP PACKARD
WOODLAND PATHS
WILD PASTURES
WOOD WANDERINGS
WILDWOOD WAYS
_Each illustrated by Charles Copeland_
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SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS BOSTON
[Illustration: Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk
[_Page 33_]
]
WOODLAND PATHS
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES COPELAND
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall._
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for
permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally
contributed to its columns.
CONTENTS
PAGE
SOUTH RAIN 1
SPRING DAWN 21
MARCH WINDS 41
WOOD ROADS 65
THE BROOK IN APRIL 87
EXPLORATIONS 109
EARLIEST BUTTERFLIES 133
APRIL SHOWERS 153
PROMISE OF MAY 175
BOG BOGLES 197
BOBBING FOR EELS 219
THE VANISHING NIGHT HERONS 241
HARBINGERS OF SUMMER 259
INDEX 281
ILLUSTRATIONS
Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk _Frontispiece_
OPPOSITE PAGE
That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph
over the sudden death of a rabbit 4
He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from
fear, and goes whooping through the brush in
a frenzy 44
There was a clamor of blue jays as the hour grew
late 168
The air was vivid with friendly staccato calls 192
The wings arch in similar curves and lift him seemingly
a rod in air 254
Her bill pointed skyward in the trustful, prayerful
attitude of all birds on the nest 278
SOUTH RAIN
The night was dark and bitter cold, though it was early March. Over in
the dismal depths of Pigeon Swamp, where no pigeons have nested for
nearly a half century though it is as wild and lone to-day as it was
when they flocked there by thousands, a deep-toned, lonely cry
resounded. It was like the fitful baying of a dog in the distance, only
that it was too wild and eerie for that. Then there was silence for a
space and an eldritch screech rang out.
It was blood-curdling to a human listener, but it was reassuring to the
great horned owl snuggling down on her two great blotched eggs to keep
them secure from the cold, for it was the voice of her mate hunting.
Sailing silently on bat-like wings he was beating the open spaces of the
wood, hoping to find a partridge at roost, and I fancy the deep “whoo;
hoo, hoo, hoo; whoo, whoo,” all on the same note, was a grumble that
trained dogs and pump-guns are making the game birds so scarce. Perhaps
that blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of
a rabbit, for _Bubo virginiana_ is tremendously rapacious and will eat
any living thing which he can carry away in his claws.
It might, too, have been his method of expressing ecstasy over the nest
and the promise of spring which the horned owl alone has the courage to
anticipate with nest-building in these raw and barren days, when winter
seemingly still has his grip firmly set on us. Oftentimes his
[Illustration: That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the
sudden death of a rabbit]
housekeeping arrangements are completed by late February. No other bird
does that in Massachusetts, though farther north the Canada jay also
lays eggs about that time, way up near the Arctic Circle where the
thermometer registers zero or below and the snow is deep on the ground.
On what trees he cuts the notches of the passing days I do not know, but
surely the horned owl’s almanac is as reliable as the Old Farmer’s, and
he knows the nearness of the spring. I dare say the other birds which
winter with us know it too, though not being so big and husky they do
not venture to give hostages to the enemy quite so early in the season.
The barred owls will build in late March, and soon after April fool’s
day the woodcock will be stealing north and placing queer, pointed,
blotched eggs in some little hollow just above high water in the swamp.
The crows are cannier still. You will hardly find eggs in their nests
hereabouts before the fifteenth of April, and you will do well to
postpone your hunting till the twenty-fifth. Yet they all know, as well
as I do, when the spring is near, and I think I have the secret of the
message which has come to them. It is not the fact that a south wind has
blown, for this may happen at any time during the winter, but it is
something that reaches them on the wings of this same south wind.
This night on which the horned owl of Pigeon Swamp brooded her eggs so
carefully was lighted by the moon, but toward midnight a purple
blackness grew up all about the still sky and blotted out all things in
a velvety smear that sent even Bubo to perch beside his mate. There was
then no breath of wind. The faint air from the north that had brought
the deep chill had faltered and died, leaving its temperature behind it
over all the fields and forest. The air stung and the ground rang like
tempered steel beneath the foot, yet you had but to listen or breathe
deep to know what was coming. The stroke of twelve from the distant
steeple brought a resonance of romance along the clear miles and the air
left in your nostrils a quality that never winter air had a right to
hold. To one who knows the temper of the open field and the forest by
day and night the promise was unmistakable, though so subtle as to be
difficult to define.
Whether it was sound or smell or both I knew then that a south wind was
coming, bearing on its balmy breath those spicy, amorous odors of the
tropics that come to our frozen land only when spring is on the way. The
goddess scatters perfumes from her garments as she comes and the south
wind catches them and bears them to us in advance of her footsteps. You
may sniff these same odors of March far offshore along the West
Indies,--spicy, intoxicating scents, borne from the hearts of tropic
wild-flowers and floating off to sea on every breeze.
With them floats that wonderful grape-bloom tint that touches the
surface of all the waters to northward of these islands with its velvety
softness, the currents carrying it ever northward and eastward,
sometimes almost to the shores of the British Isles. You may see it all
about you in mid-ocean as your vessel steams from New York to Liverpool
or Southampton or Havre or the Hook of Holland. Some essence of all this
gets into the air on the southerly gales that are borne in the windward
islands and whirl up along our coast to die finally in Newfoundland or
Labrador or Greenland itself. I believe the horned owl knows it as well
as I do and begins his nest-building at the first sniff.
At daybreak the wind had begun to blow, all the keen chill was softened
out of the air, and blobs of rain blurred the southern window panes. The
temperature had risen already above freezing and was still on the upward
path. There was in all the atmosphere that rich, cool freshness that
comes with rain-clouds blown far over seas. It is the same quality which
we get in an east rain, but it had in it also that suggestion of
spiciness and that soft purple haze which drifts away from the tropic
islands that border the Caribbean. Stopping a moment in my study before
going out into this, I found another creature that had felt the faint
call of spring and answered it, I fear, too soon. This was a great
_Samia cecropia_ moth. The night before he had been safely tucked away
in his cocoon over my mantel, where I had hung it last December.
In the night he had answered the call and now was perched outside his
cell, gently expanding his wings with pulsing motions that seemed
tremulous with eagerness or delight. I noted the soft delicacy of the
coloring in his rich, fur-surfaced body and wings, shades which are reds
and grays and browns and ashes of roses, and a score of others so dainty
and delicate that we have no words to describe or define them.
A wonderful creature this to appear in a man’s house, sit poised on his
mantel and blink serenely at him, as if the man himself were the
intruder and the room the usual habitat of creatures out of fairy-land.
I studied him carefully, thinking, indeed, that he might vanish at any
moment, and then I went out into the woods in the soft south rain, only
to find that his colors that I thought so marvelous in the shadow of the
four walls of my room were reproduced in rich profusion all about me.
His velvety-white markings, lined and touched off with brown so deep in
places as to be either purple with density or black, were those of the
birch trunks all about me, and there were the rufous tints that shaded
down into pearl pinks and lavender all through the groups of distant
birch twigs. His gray fur was the softest and richest of the fur of the
gray squirrels, and this gray again shaded into red in spots that could
be matched only by the fur of the red squirrel. There were soft tans on
him of varying shades, from rich to delicate pale, and all the last
year’s leaves and grasses had them. Nor was there a color about him
which was not matched and repeated a thousand fold in bark and twigs and
lichens and shadows all through the wood.
I had but to stand by with the great moth in my mind’s eye to see the
whole woodland bursting from its cocoon and spreading its wings for
flight. As a matter of fact that is what it is going to do later--but
the time is not yet. Meanwhile the south rain was washing its colors
clear and laying bare their bright beauty. In it you saw without
question the promise of new growth and new life. Trees and shrubs stood
like school children with shining morning faces, newly washed for the
coming session. All trace of dinginess was gone. The yellow freckles on
the brown cheeks of the wild cherry gleamed from far; the pale, olive
green tint of the willow’s complexion was transparent in its new-found
brilliancy.
Looking down on the ruddy glow of healthy maple twigs, it seemed as if
they should have yellow hair and sunny blue eyes, so rich is the
coloring of these Saxons of the wood and so fresh it shone under the
ministering rain. Even the dour scrub oaks, surly Ethiopians, were not
so black as they have been painted all winter, but lost their ebon tint
in a hue of rich dark green that was a pleasing foil to the
cecropia-moth beauty of the rest of the woods.
The one color lacking was blue. The sky’s leaden gray was but a foil for
the rich woodland tints, and I wandered on seeking its hue elsewhere.
Over on the hillside are the hepaticas. Their color when open is hardly
blue, being more often purple or even lavender, yet they would do,
lacking a more pronounced shade. But I could not find a hepatica in
bloom as yet. Their tri-lobed leaves are still green and show but little
the wear and tear of the winter’s frosts and thaws. In the center of
each group is the pointed bud that encloses the furry blossoms, itself
as softly clad in protecting fur as the body of my moth visitor, but no
hint of color peeped from it as yet. You need to look carefully in very
early spring to be sure of this, too; for the hepatica is the shyest of
sweet young things, and when she first blooms it is with such modesty
that you have to chuck the flower-heads under the chin to get a glimpse
even of their eyes. Later on the coaxing sun reassures them and they
stare placidly and innocently up to it like wondering children.
Over on the sandy southern slope there might be violets, too. Later in
the year the whole field will be blue with them and all about are their
rosettes of sagittate leaves, which the cold has had to hold sternly in
check to keep them from growing the winter through. Indeed, I do not
believe it has fully succeeded. It has been a mild season, and I think
the violets have taken the opportunity during warm spells of several
days’ duration to surreptitiously put forth another leaf or so in the
very center of that rosette. If so, they might well have followed this
courage with the further audacity of buds, and buds, indeed, they had
but not one of them was open far enough to show even a faint hint of the
blue that I was seeking.
It was hardly to be expected of the violets. They are so sturdy and full
of simple, homely, common sense that it is rare that you find them
doing things out of the usual routine. Warm skies and south winds may
tease them long before they will respond by blooming earlier than their
wonted date. They know the ways of the world well and realize how unwise
it is for proper young people to overstep the bounds of strict
conventionality. On the other hand, the hepaticas, with all their
innocence, perhaps because of it, care little for the conventions.
Indeed, I doubt if they know there are such things, or if they have
heard of them would recognize them. It is likely that in some sunny,
sheltered nook some rash youngster, all clad in furs of pearl gray, is
in bloom now, though so shy and so hidden that I was unable to find the
hint of color. I have known them to half-open those lavender-blue eyes
under the protecting crust of winter snow.
Toward nightfall the rain ceased and the clouds simply faded out of a
pale sky, letting the sun shine through with gentle warmth. Whither the
mists went it was hard to tell, but they were gone, and a soft spring
sun began wiping the tears from all things. Under its caress it seemed
as if you could see the buds swell a little, and I am quite sure, though
I was not there to see, that at this moment the willow catkins down by
the brook slipped forth from their protecting brown sheaths and boldly
proclaimed the spring.
They might have done so, and I would not have seen had I been there, for
just then I had a message. “Cheerily we, cheerily we,” came a faint
voice out of the sky. An echo from distant angel choirs practicing
carols for Easter could not have seemed more musical or brought more
delight to me down at the bottom of the soft blue haze that was taking
golden radiance from the setting sun. Up through it I looked to the pale
blue of the sky and saw two motes dancing down the sunshine,--motes that
caroled and grew to glints of heavenly blue that fluttered down on an
ancient apple tree like bits of benediction.
Just a pair of bluebirds, of course, and I don’t know now whether they
are the first of the migrants to reach my part of the pasture or whether
they are the two that have wintered here and that I have seen before on
bright days. Wherever they came from they supplied the one bit of blue
that I had sought, and their presence was like an embodiment of joy.
Then the gentle prattling sweetness of their carol; what a range there
was between that and the wild voice of the great-horned owl, heard not
twenty-four hours before! It was all the vast range between Arctic
winter night and soft summer sunshine. The owl had voiced the savage
grumble of the winter, the bluebird caroled the gentle promise of the
spring.
The promise may be long in finding its fulfilment, of course. The snow
may lie deep and the frost nip the willow catkins,--though little
they’ll care for that,--and the bluebirds may be driven more than once
to the deep shelter of the cedar swamp, but that does not take away the
promise that came on the wings of the south wind,--the promise that set
the great horned owl to laying her eggs in that abandoned crow’s nest,
and that made the bluebirds seek the ancient apple tree as their very
first perch. March is no spring month, in spite of the “Old Farmer’s
Almanack.” It is just a blank page between the winter and the spring,
but if you scan it closely you will find on it written the promise we
all seek,--the hope that lured my great _Samia cecropia_ out of his snug
cocoon.
SPRING DAWN
I have been night-clerking a bit lately--social settlement work, you
know--at the Pasture Pines Hotel, paying especial attention to the crow
lodgers, and in so doing have come to the conclusion that in the last
score or so of years the crows in my town have changed their habits.
It used to be their custom to roost in flocks, winters. Over on the
Wheeler place in the big pines you could find a rookery of several
hundred of a winter evening, dropping in from all directions and making
a perfect uproar of crow talk, or rather crow yells, till darkness sent
them all to sleep, sitting together in long rows on the upper limbs, I
suppose for mutual warmth. Here, each with head poked deep under his
wing, they would remain till dawn, when with more uproar they would all
whirl off together to some common breakfasting place. Later in the day
they would become separated, only to drop in at night to the usual
roost.
It was not a very safe proceeding, for farm boys, eager to use that new
gun, used to go down before sunset and hide beneath the pines, letting
go both barrels with great slaughter after the crows had become settled.
Perhaps this had something to do with the breaking up of the custom, for
now, though many crows roost on the Wheeler place, they do so singly,
each in his own room, so to speak.
The same is true of the crow guests at the Pasture Pines Hotel. I had
the pleasure of waking them early there this morning, incidentally, and
vicariously, waking all crow-town. Last night, just as the last tint of
amber was fading from the sunset sky, letting a yellow-green evening
star come through, almost like a first daffodil, a crow slipped bat-wise
across the amber and dropped into a certain pine to roost.
I noted the tree, and this morning, before hardly a glimmer of dawn had
come, slipped along beneath the dark boughs, planning to get just
beneath his tree and see him first. But I had planned without the
obstructions in the path and the uncertain light. I approached unheard
on the needle-carpeted avenue beneath the big trees, but when I started
across the field, still twenty rods away from my bird, I kicked a dry,
broken branch.
“What? What’s that?” It was an unmistakable crow inquiry, fairly shouted
from the tree I had marked as the roosting place. There wasn’t the space
of a breath between the snap of that branch and the answer of the bird.
Surely a night-clerk in crow-town has an easy task. There need be no
prolonged hammering on the door of the guest who would be called early.
One tap is sufficient. I had hoped to stand beneath that tree and sight
my crow in the gray of dawn, see him yawn with that prodigious black
beak after he had withdrawn it from under his wing, then stretch one
wing and one leg, as birds do, look the world over, catch sight of me
and go off at a great pace, shouting a hasty warning to the world in
general.
But he did not need to see me. That breaking branch had opened his eyes
and ears with one snap. He heard the crisp of my footfall on the frozen
grass of the field and immediately there was a great flapping in the
marked pine tree and he was off over the tops of its neighbors to a safe
place an eighth of a mile away. He said three things, and so plain were
they that any listener could have understood them. Languages vary, but
emotions and the inflections they cause are the same in all creatures.
The veriest tyro in wood-lore could have understood that crow.
His first ejaculation was plainly surprise and query blended. In his
sleep he had heard a noise. He thought it, very likely, a fellow calling
to him to get up and start the day’s work. Then when the answer was a
man’s footfall he flew to safety, sounding the short, nervous yelp which
is always the danger signal. Then when he had again alighted in safety
he realized that it was morning again and he was awake and it was time
that the gang got together. “Hi-i, hi-i, hi-i-i,” it said. It was
neither musical nor polite, but it was intended to wake every crow
within a half-mile in a spirit of riotous good-fellowship. There was no
further need of my services; every crow within a half-mile answered that
call. Then I could hear those farther on rousing and taking up the cry,
and so it went on, no doubt indefinitely.
I have a feeling that I waked every crow in eastern Massachusetts a full
half-hour before his accustomed time, simply by kicking that dead limb.
However, I learned one thing, and hereby report it to the Lodging-House
Commission: that is, that the crows hereabouts have now given up the
dormitory idea and occupy individual rooms after nightfall. They were
scattered all through the pasture and woodland but no two were within
twenty rods of one another.
Their minds have not yet turned to nest-building and mating, though the
time is near, for they still flock in hilarious good-fellowship at
sunrise, and you may hear them whooping and hurrahing about in crowds
all day long. They may be beginning to “take notice”; I suspect some of
the hilarity is over that. But they have not come to the pairing-off
stage. When they reach that the flocks will disappear and you would
hardly think there was a crow left in the whole wood. You might by
stepping softly surprise a pair of them inspecting a likely pine in the
pasture, planning for the nest. You might, by listening in secluded
places, hear the curious, low-toned, prolonged croak, which is a
love-song. I have heard this described as musical, but it is not. It is
as if a barn-door hinge should try to sing “O Promise Me.” But there
will be no more congregations.
Certainly there was not much in the aspect of the night which was just
slipping away when I waked my crow that would seem to justify plans of
nest-building. The thermometer marked twenty in my sheltered front porch
when I stepped out. It must have been some degrees below that in the
open. The ground was flint with the frost in it. The old thick ice was
gone from the pond, indeed, broken up by the disintegrating insinuation
of the sun and the vigorous lashing of northwest gales, but in its place
was a skim of new ice formed that night. Standing still, you felt the
lance of the north wind still; it was winter. Yet you had but to
breathe deep to get the soft assurance of the near presence of spring,
and if you walked briskly for a moment the north wind’s lances fell
clattering to the icy ground and you moved in a new atmosphere of warmth
and geniality. Thus point to point are the picket lines of the
contending forces.
In the west the pale, cold moon, now a few days past the full, was
sinking in a blue-black sky that might have been that of the keenest
night in December. In the east, out of a low bank of dark clouds that
marked the dun spring mists rising from the sea twenty miles away,
flashed iris tints of dawn upward into a clear, pale sky that bore
dapplings of softest apple-green. On the one hand were night and the
winter, on the other dawn and the spring, and down the pine-sheltered
path I walked between the two to a point where I stopped in delight.
The pine path ended, and the willows let the spring dawn filter through
their delicate sprays. Just here I caught the hum of the water rolling
over the dam and the prattle of the brook below, and right through it
all, clear, mellow, and elated, came the voice of a song sparrow.
“Kolink, kolink, chee chee chee chee chee, tseep seedle, sweet, sweet,”
he sang and it fitted so well with the rollicking tinkle of the brook
that I knew he was down among the alders where he could smell the rich
spring odor of the purling water. The two sounds not only complemented
one another as do two parts in music, but they were of the same quality,
though so distinctly different. It was as if tenor and alto were being
sung.
I had gone forth expecting bluebirds; I had half hoped for a robin when
it came time for matins, for robins have been about all winter, and here
a song sparrow, no doubt the first spray from the northward surging wave
of migratory birds, was the first to break the winter stillness. He had
hardly piped his first round, though, before the voices of bluebirds
murmured in the air above, and two lighted on the willows, caroling in
that subdued manner which is the epitome of gentleness. I think these
two were migrants, for later in the morning I heard others.
Then in a half minute there was a shrilling of wings that beat the air
rapidly and six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk. Most ducks
make a swishing sound with the wings when in rapid flight, but this was
so marked a sibillation that I am quite sure it was a flock of
goldeneyes, more commonly called whistlers, because they so excel in
wing music. They swung a wide circle over my head and then dropped back
into the pond, where an opening in the young ice gave them opportunity.
Curiosity probably brought them up. They wanted to see what that was
prowling on the pond shore in the uncertain light,--a prompting that
might have cost them dear had I carried a gun, for they came within easy
range; then, having seen, they went back to their fishing. Their
presence added a touch of wildness to the scene that was not without its
charm, for you can hardly call the bluebird or the song sparrow wild
birds. They are almost as domestic as the garden shrubbery.
For the moment the bird songs and the whistling of the ducks’ wings
through the rosy morning light made me forget the grip of the winter
cold that was in all the air, yet when I had crossed the dam and begun
to clamber along the other shore of the pond the winter reasserted
itself. Here was no promise of changing season. The thick ice in its
disintegration had been pushed far ashore by the westerly gales, and
here it was frozen in pressure ridges which were not so far different
from those one may see on the Arctic shores. To them was cemented the
young ice of the night, and I could walk along shore in places on its
surface, its structure as elastic as that of early December.
Here, too, was piled high the débris not only of that great battle in
which the spring forces had ripped the thick ice from the water, but of
the daily skirmishes in which winter and north wind have set a half-inch
of ice all along the surface and spring sunshine has broken it away
from its moorings, obliging the very north wind that made it to pile it
in long windrows high on shore. To clamber along these pressure ridges
and hear the crunching cakes resound under my tread in hollow, frosty
tones, to feel the bite of the north wind which drifted across the new
ice, was to step out of the spring promise which the birds had given me,
back into the Arctic. I was almost ready to look for seal and wonder if
I wouldn’t soon hear the wild wolf-howl of Eskimo dogs and round a point
onto one of their snow-igloo villages.
The song sparrow was far out of hearing and here we were in mid-winter
again. Only in the east was there promise. Through the dark tracery of
pond-bordering trees I could see the sky all a soft, unearthly green,
like an impressionist lawn, and all through this the sun, now close
below the horizon, had forced into bloom red tulips and blue and yellow
crocuses of spring dawn. From the ice ridges it was all as unreal as if
it were hung in a frozen gallery, and I were an unwilling tourist
shivering as I observed it.
Again, I had to go but a short distance to find a new country. Here the
warmer waters of a little brook came babbling down the slope and had
pushed away all the ice ridges and warmed its own path far out into the
new ice. Along its edge the alder catkins hung in grouped tassels of
venetian red, and here and there a group had so thrilled to the warmth
of the running water that even in the face of the cold wind they had
begun to relax a bit and show cracks in the varnished surface that has
kept the stamens secure all winter.
It will not be long now before these favored ones will begin to shake
the yellow pollen from their curls. Already they are giving the hint of
it. A little way upstream, however, was a far more potent reminder of
the coming season. I caught a whiff of its fragrance and smiled before I
saw it.
I wonder why we always smile at this most beautiful spring flower,--for
it was a spring blossom, the very first of the season, which was growing
in the soft green of the brookside grass, its yellow head all swathed in
a maroon and green, striped and flecked, pointed hood, lifted bravely
above the protecting herbage into the nipping air. The flowering spadix
I could not see; only the handsome, protecting spathe which was wound
about the tender blooms to protect them from the cold. When the sun is
high in the sky this spathe will loosen a bit and let visiting insects
enter for the fertilization of the blossom. But in that cold air of
early morning it was wrapped tight.
I have seen orchids tenderly nurtured in conservatories that had not
half the honest beauty of this flower. Neither to me is the odor of the
derided skunk-cabbage more unpleasant than that of many a coddled and
admired garden bloom--a dahlia, for instance. Yet I smiled in derision
on catching the first whiff of it, and so do we all. If the
_symplocarpus_ cared it would be too bad, but it does not. Unconscious
of its caddish critics, it blooms serenely on in the swamps and takes
the tiny insects into its confidence and its hood, and adds a bit of
rich color to the place when no other blossom dares. And even as I
looked at it the sun slipped out of the low band of dark horizon-mists
and sent a golden good-morning like a benediction right down upon the
head of the humble, courageous, sturdy beauty of the brookside. After
that approval why should any blossom care?
MARCH WINDS
For two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale,
setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He
lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his
fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee
green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside,
ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a
condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component
leaves skitter through the wood and over the hill out of sight, leaving
him denuded.
The usually dignified and gentle trees howl like beagles on his trail.
The protecting scrub oaks, gone mad, too, dab and flip at him till he
gets fidgety with thoughts of horned owls, and things rattle down out of
the sky as if he were being pelted with buckshot. All these matters get
on his nerves after a little, and if he sets his cotton-tail white flag
at half mast from fear and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy,
there is small blame to him. Even man, whose mental girth and weight are
supposed to be ballast sufficient against all buffetings, going forth on
such a day needs the buttons of his composure well sewed on or he will
find it ripped from him like the hare’s form and sent skittering down
the lea along with his hat, while he himself bolts here and there
fighting phantoms and objurgating the unseen.
Mad March winds are a good test of stability of soul. He who can stand
their weltings with serenity, can watch his
[Illustration: He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from
fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy]
un-anchored personal belongings go mad with the March hare and still
thrid the sombre boskage of the wood with sunny thought and no venom
beneath his tongue, ought to be President. Even the New York papers
could not make him bring suit.
And after the two days of gale how sweet the serenity that came to the
thrashed and winnowed pastures and woodland. I fancy it all feeling like
a boy at school who, after being soundly flogged, gets back to the
soothing calm of his accustomed seat. There is a gentle joy about that
feeling that, as many of us know, has neither alloy nor equal. The whole
woodland, thus spanked and put away to cool, feels the winter of its
discontent vanishing behind it and has no room in its heart for aught
but the peace and joy of regeneration.
The gale began to fail during the second day and before midnight it was
dead; thus short-lived is frenzy. I do not know now if those last gentle
sighs were those of the wind in sorrow of its misdeeds, thus on its
death-bed repentant, or those of the trees, themselves given a chance to
sleep at last after a forty-hour fight for their lives. In the threshing
and winnowing of the woodland none but the physically fit may survive.
Oaks that have held their last year’s leaves lovingly on the twig had to
let them go like the veriest chaff, and all twigs and limbs that have
been weakened.
And as chaff and débris is thus pruned from the forest, so those trees
themselves that are not physically fit for the struggle for existence
are weeded out. The eye may not be able to pick these, but the gale
finds them. If the whelming pressure of its steady onrush is not
sufficient to bring them down, the racking of varying force and the
torsion of sudden changes in direction will snap the weakened trunk or
tear out the loosened roots. Then there is a groan and a crash, and
space for the younger growth to spread toward more light and air.
At no time of year is the weakness of roothold so liable to be fatal to
a tree as now. During the winter a gale may snap a tree off at the trunk
and smash it bodily to the ground. But if there is no weakness in the
trunk there can be none in the roots, for the frost that is set about
them holds even the shortest, as if embedded in stone. But now, when the
solvent ice has loosened the whole surface for a depth of a foot or
more, leaving it fluffy and disintegrated, those trees which have no
tap-roots and hold only in this lightened surface are in the greatest
danger of uprooting of the whole year. Farmers often clear a shrubby
pasture in late March or early April hereabout by taking advantage of
this fact. They make a trace-chain fast about the base of a pasture
cedar or a stout huckleberry bush, and with a word to the old horse the
shrub is dragged from the softened earth, root and all. In mid-summer,
after the ground has become compact, this is not to be done.
It is the spring house-cleaning time of the year, when nature is
sweeping and picking up, preparatory to laying new carpets and getting
new furnishings throughout, and if any of the old furniture of the
woodland is not able to stand the strain it has to go to the woodpile.
Without the mad March winds the forest would lose much of its fresh
virility, the old deadwood would cumber the new growth, and the mild
melancholy of decay would prevail as it does in some swamps where
sheltering surrounding hills and close growth shunt the gales.
Yet, though house-cleanings are no doubt necessary and beneficient, few
of us love them, and we hail with equal joy the resultant cleanliness
and the cessation of the uproar. The two days’ gale finally got all the
winds of the world piled up somewhere to the southward and ceased, and
the piled-up atmosphere drifted back over us, bringing mild blue haze
that was like smoke from the fires of summer floating far. All things
that had been taut and dense relaxed into dimples or softened into
tears. The frost went out of the plowed fields that morning, though the
sun was too blurred with the kindly blue mist to have any force. It was
just the general relaxation which did it.
Then is apt to come a halcyon day, and though the kingfisher is not here
to brood, nor will he be for a month, his fabled weather slips on in
advance to cheer us. It may not last a day. March is as mad as April is
fickle, and you will need to start early to be sure of it. Then, even if
you come home in a snowstorm, you will at least have had a brief glimpse
of that sunny softness which is dearer in March than in any other month.
This morning, in that calm which is most apt to settle on the land just
before sunrise, the whole woodland seemed to breathe freely and beam in
the soft air. The bluebirds caroled all about, and where a few days ago
one song sparrow surprised me with his song, a dozen jubilated in the
pasture bushes. A half-dozen blackbirds flew over, and though I could
not see a single red epaulet in the gray light, and listened in vain for
that melodious “kong-quer-ree” which no other bird can sing, I knew them
as well by their call of “chut-chuck,” which is equally characteristic.
A flock of goldfinches lighted in the pines with much twittering and
suggestions of the summer flight-note of “perchicoree.” But that is no
more than they have been doing all winter. In a moment, though, the
twittering changed. A melodious note began to come into it, and soon
several in the flock were singing rival songs as sweet, though I do not
think as loud, as those they will sing when June warmth sets the whole
bird world a-choiring. It was a happy note in the cool spring air, for
it was more than a spring song. The bluebirds and song sparrows voice
that, but the song of the goldfinch is a song of summer, and
irresistibly reminds one of fervid June heat and full-leaved trees. It
was a warming, winning chorus, and it brought the sun up over the
horizon, seemingly with a bound.
In all this joy of early matins I still miss one bird note that surely
ought to be heard by now, and that is the robin’s. Robins are here in
considerable numbers, but not one of them have I heard sing. I’m afraid
the robin is lazy, but, perhaps, it is just his honest, matter-of-fact
nature which does not believe in forcing the season. He will sing loud
and long enough by-and-by.
Such a spring morning is the best season of the year for moth hunting.
The moths are all sound asleep still, tucked away in their cocoons, that
are also tucked away in the woodland where it is not so easy to see them
in winter. Now the mad March winds have swept the last brown leaves
from the bushes, and such moths as hang up there for the winter sleep
are easily seen. You may take them home and hang them up wherever you
see fit, and you will then be on hand to greet the moth when at his
leisure he feels prompted to come forth from his snug sleeping-bag.
I always find more of the spice-bush silk-moth than any others,--perhaps
because we both love the same woodland spots, borders of the ponds and
streams where the benzoin and sassafras flourish, or upland pastures
where the wild cherry hangs out its white racemes in May. They dangle
freely in the wind, looking for all the world like a left-over leaf
rolled by accident into a rude cylinder. Yet the moth is safe and warm
within, rolled up in a silken coat that is firmly glued to the leaf;
and not only that, but extends in silky fabric all up along the petiole,
and firmly holds it to the twig itself. The mad winds which have scoured
the bush clean of all leaves and débris have had no strength which can
pluck this “last leaf upon the tree.”
If left to itself it will still hang there a year or two, perhaps more,
after the moth has emerged, gradually bleaching to a soft gray, but
still clinging. It is a splendid quality of silk, but no one has yet
succeeded in reeling or carding it. _Callosamia promethia_ thus escapes
becoming a product of the farm rather than the pasture. It is a fine
species to have hanging in winter cradles above your mantel, for the
_imago_ is large and beautiful, with deep browns and tans softly shading
into grays that are tinted with iris, the male being distinct with a
body color of deep brown less diversified than the coloring of his
mate.
The _Samia cecropia_ is another of our silk-worm moths whose cocoon is
not difficult to find. The _cecropia_, instead of rolling up in a
pendant leaf, constructs his cocoon without protection, and glues it
right side up beneath a stout twig or even a considerable limb. I have
one now that I took from the under side of a big leaning alder bole,
skiving it off with the bark, but most of those I have collected have
been attached to slender twigs of low shrubs.
But, though the _cecropia_ does not roll up in a leaf, he is apt to
place his winter home where dead leaves will persist about him. I have
never found him so plentiful as the _promethea_, though he is commonly
reported as numerous. Perhaps this habit of hiding among the dead
leaves has to do with this. He is our largest moth, and in beauty of
coloring is surpassed, to my mind, only by two others.
One of these is _Telia polyphemus_,--a wonderful creature, almost as
large as the _cecropia_, all a soft, rosy tan with fleckings of gray and
white and bands of soft violet-gray and pink, and great eyespots of
white margined with yellow, browed with peacock blue, and ringed with
violet-black. The larva, which is bigger than a big man’s thumb, is a
beautiful shade of transparent green with side slashings of silvery
white, and feeds on most of our deciduous forest trees.
I have had most luck in finding them on chestnuts. Last fall, when
beating a chestnut tree for the nuts, I dislodged several, one of which
I brought home and put in a cage with some leaves. He refused to eat,
but in a day or so spun a cocoon down in the corner of the box with a
chestnut leaf glued over him. No wonder we rarely see either moth,
caterpillar, or cocoon. The larva dwells in the higher trees, rolls
himself in leaves in the autumn, and spends the winter on the ground,
usually covered out of sight by the other leaves. Then the moth, wary
and swift, flies only by night.
The _Actias luna_, the beautiful, long-tailed, green luna moth, is, I
think, better known, for it has a way of flitting about woodland glades
in late June or July, before nightfall. But in the caterpillar or the
cocoon it is as hard to find as the _polyphemus_, and for similar
reasons. It, too, feeds upon walnut and hickory, and in the fall spins a
papery cocoon among the dried leaves on the ground.
The _luna_ moth is to me the highest type of moth beauty, and it is
worth a long search among leaves to find a cocoon of either this or the
_polyphemus_, and have the splendid privilege of seeing the lovely
inmate later emerge, spread its fairy-like wings, and soar away into the
soft spring twilight. It is as great a wonder as it would be to step
some mid-summer midnight into a fairy ring and, after having speech with
Mab and Titania and Puck and Ariel, see them flit daintily across the
face of the rising moon and vanish in the purple dusk. The world of the
_polyphemus_ and the _luna_, the _cecropia_ and the _promethea_, is as
far removed from ours and as full of strange romance as that.
Along the pond shore these mad March days one gets glimpses of another
world, too, that is, I dare say, as regardless of us as we are of that
of the moths. This morning in the dusk of young dawn the pond was like a
black mirror reflecting the shadows of the sky. But across it, near the
middle, was drawn a silver streak, the path of ducks swimming. Presently
I heard their voices,--the resonant quack of a black duck and the hoarse
“pra-a-p pr-a-a-p” of the drake. As they called, into the pond with a
splash came a small flock of divers, showing white as they whirled to
settle. The two species swam together, seemed to look each other over,
held who knows what conversations in their own way, then separated. It
is not for black duck and buffleheads to congregate, especially in the
spring; and while the black duck and drake swam sedately away, the
buffleheads began to hunt the small white perch which swim in schools
near the surface, making a splash as if a stone was thrown into the
water at every lightning-like dive.
Just as many a man here in Massachusetts lives his life and dies without
ever having seen or heard of a _polyphemus_ moth or a bufflehead, though
both may fly over his own head on many a dusky twilight, so the
migrating thousands of ducks each year fly over our cities and know
little of their uproar and bustle, nothing of their yearnings toward art
or theology, or of the inspiration of poets or the agony of the
down-trodden. Their world is all-important to them; ours is nothing, so
they escape our guns, which they vaguely feel will harm them.
Even we with our books, our laboratories, and our concerted research
into all things under heaven and in earth, do not get very far into the
lives of other creatures. I have said all the moths are still in their
cocoons. Perhaps they are, all but one, at least. That is a small brown
fellow that came flying across the brook in the chill air of a sunset a
night or two ago and now lies dead on my desk.
I caught him, for I wanted to know what moth dared come forth when the
ground was still frozen and no bud had yet burst. But I would better
have let him fly along to work out his own destiny, for in all the
moth-book there is no mention of this wee brown creature that dared the
frosty night with frail wings. I do not think he was an uncommon
specimen. Moths are so numerous that only the most characteristic
varieties of the more important species can be noticed in the
text-books.
On my way home I crossed a sunny glade among the pines, and here I met
an old friend, and had another example of the workings of other lives
whose wisdom or ability is beyond our ken. On the dark trunk of a pine
was sitting the spring’s first specimen, so far as my observation goes,
of butterfly life, an _Antiopa vanessa_, his mourning cloak so closely
folded that it made him invisible against the pine-tree bark. As I drew
near he flipped into the air and sailed by, beautiful in his tan-yellow
border with its spots of soft blue.
I say he was on the pine bark, but I did not see him there. For aught I
know, so well was he concealed, the tree opened and let him out, then
closed, that his hiding place might not be revealed. I would almost as
soon believe this as to believe, what lepidopterists assure me is true,
that this frail creature lives through the zero gales and deep snows of
five months of winter to come out in the first bright days of early
spring unharmed. It is as likely that a pine trunk would voluntarily
conceal him as that he could survive, frozen solid in some crevice in a
stone wall or hollow stump. At any rate, he is out again, along with the
hepaticas and song sparrows, and though the March winds and the March
hare may both go mad again, we have had moments when the spring was very
near.
WOOD ROADS
Some time in the night the tender gray spring mists that the hot
afternoon sun had coaxed up from all the meadowy places realized that
they were deserted, lost in the darkness. The young moon had gone
decorously to bed at nine o’clock, pulling certain cloud puffs of white
down over even the tip of her nose, that she might not be tempted to
come out and dance with these lovely pale creatures.
They were dancing then, but later they trembled together in fright, for
the kindly stars, their shining eyes grown tremulous with tender tears,
vanished too, withdrawn behind the black haze which the north wind sends
before it. A nimbus, wind-blown from distant mountain tops, was
spreading over the zenith, and through it the gentle spring mists heard
resound the crack of doom, the voice of the north wind itself, made up
of echoes of crashing ice floes out of Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic. Then
the spring mists fled to earth again, but had no strength left to enter
in. Instead, they lay there dead, covering all things a half-inch deep
with soft bodies of purest white, and we looked forth in the morning and
said that there had been a robin-snow.
It is a pity that those gentle, innocent gray-blue spring mists should
die, even to be lovely in death as they are, but it is their way of
getting back home. In the morning the repentant sun came and dissolved
the white, silent ones into gentle tears,--dayborn dew that slipped down
among the grass roots and laid moist cheeks close to daisy and violet
buds as they went by, and almost loved them into bloom. A few more
robin-snows and they will all be out. Very likely somewhere a dandelion,
some sturdy, rough-and-ready youngster, quivered into yellow florescence
at the caress. Robin-snows and the cajoling sun of the last week of
March often make summer enough for this honest, fearless flower.
Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth
under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind,
which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days,
for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you
out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into
wood roads.
These on such days have an atmosphere of their own. Here the thrill of
the sun is as potent as the push of the X-ray. It slips through clothes
and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a
vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of
those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the
woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind
may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out
of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is
the very gate itself.