always leads me across Ponkapog brook at the spot where rest the ruins
of the old mill. It is three-quarters of a century or more since it
ground grist, and of its timbers scarcely a moss-grown remnant remains.
The gate to the old dam has been gone almost as long, but the waters do
not forget. Every year the spring floods bring down what driftwood the
pond banks can spare and bar their own course with it at this spot. The
water rises as high as of old, for a brief time.
It is as if the brook paid a memorial tribute thus yearly to the honest
labor of the pioneers, now long gone. For a time it lasts, then the
cementing bonds of dead leaves fail and the black flood roars through to
the sea. Come two months later and where its highest rim touched you
will find that it planted flowers in loving remembrance also, and
saxifrage and dwarf blue violet lean in fragrant affection over the
waters. I like to think that on Memorial day at least the stream makes
echo of the clank of the old-time mill-wheel in its liquid prattle, and
that the shuttle of reflected sunshine dancing back and forth is a
glorified ghost of the old wheels whirling once more in memory of the
miller and his neighbors.
Farther on I reach the pond shore, and on the narrow ridge which marks
the old-time high tide of winter ice pressure, a dry moraine always,
though running through marshy land, I strike what must be the oldest
trail in this part of the country. Here is a path which was traveled
before the time of the Norman conquest, or, for that matter, before
Cæsar led his victorious legions into Gaul. Here the first Indians trod
dry-footed when they went back and forth about the pond in their hunting
and fishing, for then, as now, it was a natural causeway.
To-day a stranger, seeking his way about the pond for the first time,
would not fail to find it, and the habitual wood-rover of the region,
old or young, knows its every turn. Upon this to-day, between the marsh
and the bog in the alluring spring sunshine, I found a whole bird
convention. Such an uproar! It was as if the suffragettes in one grand
concerted movement had swooped down upon Parliament by the air-ship
route, as the cable says they threaten, and were in the heat of
battering down its walls of deafness with racket and roaring, after the
fashion of the attempt on Jericho of old.
The blackbirds were in the greatest numbers and made the most noise
individually. There were a hundred of them, more or less, sitting about
in the trees and bushes, a few on the ground, and all of them practicing
every call or song that blackbird was ever known to make. All the harsh
croaking of frogs that as young birds they heard from the nest by the
bog they voiced in their calls; all the liquid melody of gentle brooks
tinkling over shallows, and the piping of winds in hollow marsh reeds,
they reproduced in their songs, and the whole was jumbled in this
uproarious medley. They even shamed a robin or two into singing,--the
first time I have heard these laggards do it this year, though they have
been here in force for some weeks.
There seemed to be no cause for this other than the joy of living. It
was just an impromptu concert in honor of the spring. I think I never
noticed before how vigorously the blackbird uses his tail at one of
these concerts. All the long black tails present worked up and down as
if each were a pump-handle working a bellows to supply wind for the
pipings. It reminded me of the church organ-loft, and the labors of the
boy when the choir is in full swing and the organist has everything
opened up and is dancing on the pedal notes to keep up.
Either side of this trail the wood should be a paradise for woodpeckers,
for the trees are here allowed to grow old without interference. In
birch and maple stubs the flickers have dug hole after hole, sometimes
all up and down a single trunk. The downy woodpeckers have been active
also and the chickadees have reared many a nestful of fluffy chicks in
the same neighborhood. Yet, with all the opportunity that the flickers
have had to bore in soft decaying wood for food or for shelter, I see
that they have also dug a round hole through the inch boards in the peak
of the old cranberry house. This, too, was probably for shelter, for
many flickers winter with us, and there would be room in the old
cranberry house-loft for a whole community, but I wonder sometimes if
there is not another reason.
Just as beavers and squirrels must gnaw to keep their teeth from growing
too long, so I sometimes think that woodpeckers need to hammer about so
much, whether for food or not, to keep their bills in good condition. It
is difficult to otherwise account for their continual practice. I knew a
flicker once who used to drum a half-hour at a time on a sheet-iron
ventilator on the roof of a building. I think he did it to keep his bill
properly calloused and his muscle up, so that when he did tackle a
shagbark tree with a fat, inch-long borer waiting in its heart-wood the
chips would fly.
This low pond-bank moraine with its immemorial trail leads all along the
north side of the pond, skirting the shoreward edge of the great bog
nicely. It takes you through the Talbot plains where tan-brown levels
stretch far to the northward, seeming to shrink suddenly back from the
overhanging bulk of Great Blue Hill, and it leads again into the tall
oak woods, where later the warbling vireos will swing in the topmost
branches and cheer the solemn arches with their gentle carols. By-and-by
the bog ends and the path marks the dividing line between the bulrushes,
marsh grass, bog-hobble wickets, and mingled débris of last summer’s
thorough wort, and joepye weed, and marsh St. John’s-wort on the one
hand, and the soft pinky grays of the wood on the other.
The climbing sun shines in here fervently, and the clear waters lap on
the sand and croon among the water weeds with all the semblance of
summer. No wonder the wild ducks linger long. The pond is full of
them,--black ducks and sheldrake,--quacking and whistling back and
forth, sometimes forty of them in the air at once, and taking no notice
of the wanderer on the bank. It seems to be their jubilee day as well as
that of the birds on shore.
Thus by way of the long trail teeming with spring life I reach the
enchanted country of the wood roads. Here are no pastures reclaimed, no
ancient cellar holes to show the path of the pioneer. Woodland it was
when the first Englishman came to Cape Cod; woodland it remains to-day.
Somewhere in its depths the barred owls are nesting, and I hear the
shrill pæan of a hawk as he harries the distant hillside. But for the
most part there is a gentle silence, a dignified quiet that befits the
solitude. It is the hush of the elder years dwelling in places somewhat
man-harried indeed, but never by man possessed. In this country to the
east of Ponkapog Pond lingered longest the moose and bear. The fox makes
it his home and his hunting-ground still; I find his trail still warm,
and in summer you should tread with care, for an occasional rattlesnake
trails his slow length among the rocks. The most that man has ever done
here is to shoot and chop trees. The echoes of axe and gun die away
soon, the trees grow up again, and man’s only mark is the wood roads.
Roads in this world are supposed to lead from somewhere to somewhere
else, but no suspicion of such definiteness of purpose can ever be
attached to wood roads, unless you are willing to say that they lead
from the land of humdrum to the country of romance. Sometimes, in
following them, you unexpectedly come out on the highway, but far more
often you have better luck, and the plain trail grows gently vague,
shimmers away to nothing, and you find yourself, perhaps, in a beech
grove, out of which is no path. You can hear the young trees titter at
your embarrassment, but you cannot find the path that led you among
them.
Perhaps in all your future wanderings you may not come upon that beech
grove again, for the wood roads wind and interlace and play strange
tricks on all outsiders. Particularly over in this region wood-lot
owners sometimes lose their wood-lots, and are able to get track of them
only after prolonged search, tumbling upon them then more by accident
than wit. Sometimes a wood road innocently leads you round a hill and
slyly slips you into itself again through a gap in the thicket. Thus,
before you know it, you may have gone around the hill any number of
times, as strangers get coursing in revolving doors in the entrances to
city buildings and continue to revolve until rescued.
Nor can you tell where the most sedate and straightforward one which you
can pick out will lead you, except that you know it will be continually
through a land of delight, and that Eden is bound to be just ahead of
you.
It is difficult to understand, though, in all seriousness, how these
roads persist. Wood cut off over extensive areas grows up again in
thirty or forty years and fills in the gap in the forest till no trace
of it remains, yet the roads by which it was carted to the highway,
leading once as directly as possible, seem still to have some subtle
power of resistance whereby they are not overgrown, though they lose
their directness. After a few years it seems as if, glad to be relieved
of any responsibility, they took to strolling aimlessly about, meeting
one another and separating again casually.
I never see a wood-cart coming out with a load, yet the road seems as
definite in marking as it did a half-century ago. But that is one of the
fascinations of the region. You take the same road as usual, and by it
you come out at some strange and hitherto unheard-of garden of delight.
It is like the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, where one story leads
into another and you wander on with always a new climax just ahead of
you.
Out of the great pudding-stone boulders of this region, of which you may
find specimens as large as an ordinary dwelling-house standing in lonely
dignity, you may see cunning workmen making soil for the nourishment of
these forest trees. Here will be a round blot of yellow-gray lichen,
perhaps a _Parmelia conspersa_, clinging to the smoothest surface of
flint with ease and sending down its microscopic rhizoids into the
tiniest crevice between the round pebble, which is the plum, and the
slate which makes the body of the pudding.
On another part of the boulder you may find a slanting surface, where
the parmelia’s work is already done. Its tiny root-organs have dissolved
off and split away enough of the slate to loosen some tiny pebbles,
which fall to the ground as gravel, leaving hollows in which dew and
dead lichens make a soil for the roots of soft pads of mosses. Some of
the boulders over here are like Western buttes, densely tenanted by
these hardy cliff-dwellers, the many-footed rock lovers finding
foothold where you would hardly think the lichens even would survive.
I never tramp these roads, which it sometimes seems as if the pukwudgies
moved about in the night for the confusion of men, without being lost,
at least for a time, and finding a new boulder to worship. Once, thus
lost, I found a little gem of a pond, which hides in the hollows a
half-mile or so east from Ponkapog Pond. This, too, I fear the
pukwudgies move about in the night, for I hear of many men who have
found it once and sought it again in vain.
To-day I came upon it once more,--a cup of clear water in the hollow of
the forest’s hand, smiling up at the sky with neither inlet or outlet.
The black ducks had found it, too. They greeted my approaching footsteps
with quacks of alarm, and I had hardly rounded the bushes on the bank
before sixteen of them, with much splashing, rose heavily into the air
and sailed off toward the big pond.
Even in their fright I noticed that they went out as the animals did
from the ark,--two by two,--and I smiled, for it is one more sign of
spring. I noticed the crows in couples to-day for the first time. A few
black duck breed hereabout, and the little pond with the button-bushes
growing along one shallow shore as thick as mangroves in a West India
swamp might well be considered by house-hunting couples. Sitting under a
mountain laurel whose leaves furnish the only shade on the bank, I
watched quietly for nearly half an hour. Then there was a soft swish of
sailing wings, and a pair dropped lightly in without splash enough to be
heard. Yet there was little to see, after all. They simply sat mirrored
in the motionless water for another half-hour by the town clock, looking
adoration into one another’s eyes, then snuggled close and swam in among
the button-bushes as if with one foot. That was all. It was a veritable
quaker-meeting love-making; but just the same I shall look for the nest
among the button-bush mangroves in another month, and I do hope that
pukwudgies will not have mixed the wood roads and hidden the pond so
well that I cannot find it.
THE BROOK IN APRIL
The pond is a mile long, but it is shallow, with a level bottom that was
once a peat meadow, and the water, holding some of this peat in
solution, has a fine amber tinge. It is as if the sphagnums that wrought
for ages in the bog and died to give it its black levels held in reserve
vast stores of their own rich wine reds and mingled them with the
yellows of hemlock heart-wood and the soft tan of marsh grasses that lie
dead, all robed in funereal black at the pond bottom.
By what mystery of alchemy the water compounds during its winter wait
under the thick ice this amethystine glow in its pellucid depths I do
not know, but the spring sunlight always shows it as it sends its shafts
down into the quivering shallows, and it creams the foam that fluffs
beneath the gate of the old dam and flows seaward.
This gate is always lifted a little and the stream never fails. In
spring its brimming volume floods the meadows and roars down miniature
rocky gorges,--a soothing lullaby of a roar that you may hear crooning
in at your window of an April night to surely sing you to sleep. In
summer the gateman comes along and puts a mute on the stream by dropping
the gate a little, and it lisps and purls through the little gorges,
slipping from one rock-bound pool to another.
In April the suckers come up, breasting the flood from another pond a
half-mile down stream, to spawn; great, sturdy, lithe, shiny-sided
fellows they are, at this time of year almost as beautiful and as alert
as salmon, weighing sometimes five or six pounds. The same intoxication
which makes the flood froth and dance and shout as it tumbles down the
steeps from meadow to meadow seems to thrill in their veins and give
them strength to cleave an arrow flight through the quivering rapids and
gambol up the falls with an exultant agility that seems strange in this
fish that is so sluggish and dull on the pond bottom in midsummer.
Adam’s ale is brewed the year round, but it is the spring drought that
works miracles of agility in the blood of somber creatures. Winter
fishes are like some middle-class Englishmen sitting glum and motionless
in their stalls. Only when tapster Spring draws the ale and the barmaid
brooks dance blithely down with foaming mugs do we learn how jovial and
athletic they may be. Thus the suckers, suddenly waking to exuberant
activity, swim the frothing current, leap the miniature falls like
gleaming salmon, and congregate just below the dam.
Some years the gateman has kindly instincts at just the psychological
moment and comes over and shuts down the gate of a Saturday afternoon in
the presence of many boys, in whose veins also froths the exultant foam
of spring joy. Then, indeed, does low water spell Waterloo for the
suckers. In the shoaling current they flee down stream, seeking the
deeper pools and hiding under stones in water-worn hollows wherever they
can find refuge.
There is a crude instrument, formerly a familiar output of the local
blacksmith, known as a sucker spear. It is composed of two cast-off
horseshoes, one being straightened and welded across the other in the
middle of the bend. This gives a rough imitation of Neptune’s trident
with the three prongs a good half-inch broad and usually sharpened to a
cutting edge. Mounted on a long pole it is complete, and its possession
makes of a boy a vengeful Poseidon having dominion over the shallows of
the brook. Boys who know no better because they have been taught by
their elders that this is the way to do it, “spear” suckers with these
instruments. A handy youngster can guillotine a five-pound fish into two
separate, bloody sections with this plunging death, and fork the limp
and quivering remnants up on the bank with it.
Even the boy who does it, though he whoops with the wild delight of
bloody conquest, knows that this is not sport. There is a better way to
catch suckers, and he who has once learned it willingly discards the
crude instrument of the blacksmith for the fine touch of the true
sportsman. He matches boy against fish, and feels the man thrill through
his marrow every time he wins. It is the same game that great John Ridd
learned from his primitive forbears on the West of England’s moors,
whereby he went forth to tickle trout in the icy stream and was led into
the enchanted valley where dwelt huge outlaws--and Lorna Doone.
Bare-legged and bare-armed you wade into the icy water and slip your
hands gently under the big stones at bottom, wherever there are crevices
into which a fish might enter. If you have the requisite fineness of
touch, experience will soon tell you what it is you feel beneath in the
darkness of the watery cave. It may be nothing but the fine play of
currents across your fingers, in which all sensitiveness and expectation
seem to center. It is wonderful how much soul crowds down into your
finger-tips when they feel for something you cannot see in places where
things may bite.
There may be a turtle there, and if so you have leave to withdraw. It
may be an eel, and you need not mind, for the eel will take care of
himself; you can no more grasp him than you can the quivering currents.
It is customary to expect water-snakes, and there is a fineness of
delight about the dread that the expectation inspires that is just a
little more than mortal. Orpheus, seeking dead Eurydice, must have
turned the corners on the way down with some such feeling. Perhaps it is
because the dread is groundless that it is so deific. It has no basis in
the senses, but is purely a creature of the finer imaginings. The
water-snake is harmless if by any chance he could be there. But there is
no chance of this. At the sucker time of the year he is still sleeping
his winter sleep, tucked away in some rock crevice of the upper bank,
safe from flood and frost.
If you prod crudely the big fish will take flight and rush to another
hiding place. But if you are wise and careful enough you will feel
something swaying in the current and stroking your fingers like the soft
touch of a feather duster. It is the big fellow’s tail and you will soon
learn better than to grab it. The muscular strength of one of these big
fish is beyond belief. Howsoever tight your grip on him here, he will
swing his body from side to side with such force and swiftness that he
will writhe from your hold before you can get him out of water.
That is not the way to do it. Instead, you cunningly slip your hand
gently along from his tail toward his head. You will likely go over your
rolled-up sleeve; perhaps it will be necessary to plunge shoulder and
even head in the effort to reach far enough.
Having discounted the Plutonian water-snakes you will find this but
giving zest to the game; indeed, it is doubtful if you know that it has
happened until it is all over. Your palm slides gingerly over the dorsal
fin and goes on till you feel the gentle waving of the pectorals. Then
suddenly you grip a thumb and finger into the gills, showing the iron
hand through the velvet, and with one strong surge lift your fish from
beneath his rock and fling him high upon the bank.
There is a fundamental joy in this kind of fishing that you can get in
no other. If there were fish in the rivers of Paradise Adam caught them
for Eve in this way. I have always been sorry that big John Ridd found
nothing but fingerling trout on his way up the little stream that led to
the Doone Valley. He should have tackled our brook in April.
Along the stream to-day, noting the pussy-willows all out in spring
garments of pearl gray and the alders swaying and sifting yellow dust
from their open stamens, I passed the spot where Bose and I met as early
a spring run of fish as often occurs. Bose would corroborate it if he
could, but, unfortunately, Bose is somewhat dead, as much so as a dog of
his spirit and imagination can be. His bones lie decently buried down
under the great oak where he loved to sit and think about foxes, but I
am not so sure about the rest of it. If there are any happy
hunting-grounds where the souls of game flee away I warrant Bose leads
the pack. He was a full-blooded foxhound, deep-chested, musical,
lop-eared; and he didn’t know a fox from a buff cochin. He hunted
continually, but rarely on a real trail. His nose was for visions.
It was on a first day of April that we came out of the door together,
and Bose took one sniff, lifted his head, bayed musically, and was off
into the pasture with me following, both of us ripe for any adventure.
There was a smell of spring in the air; indeed, I was not sure but it
was the green-robed, violet-crowned goddess whom the dog set forth to
hunt. If so, I was more than glad to follow, for the winters seem long
in my town. We know that the sun-god is pursuing Daphne northward. We
have signs of her in the yearning of willow twigs and the shy blooming
of hepaticas. If she should already be hiding in some sunny, sheltered
nook of the pasture Bose would be as likely to go after her as any other
vision.
March had gone out like a lamb, trailing a shorn fleece of mists behind
him,--mists that morning sun tinted with opal fires that burned out
after a little and left pale-blue ashes smeared in the hollows and blown
soft against the distant hills. All through the air thrilled the glamor
of those new-born hopes that attend the goddess, and I wanted to give
tongue with Bose when I found him quartering the barberry slope of the
upper pasture with clumsy gallop.
He had led me plump into fairy-land at the first plunge, for the brown
leaves of last year rustled with the tread of brownies, and I came up
in time to see a fat gnome rolling along, humping his shoulders and
jiggling with laughter before the uproarious onslaught of the dog,
turning at the burrow’s mouth to grin in the teeth of eager jaws and
vanish into thin air as they clicked. A woodchuck? So Hodge would call
it, seeing according to his kind. Probably Bose knew it for a fox, a
silver-gray at least, according to his foxhound dreams. I myself knew
that spring glamor was on all the woodland and that this was a
round-paunched gnome, guardian of buried treasure, out for an April day
frolic, and going back reluctantly to his post after having a moment’s
fun with the dog.
As for the brownies, they were signs, or rather forerunners, pacemakers
to the spring. I could see the little black eyes and droll-pointed
noses of them as they worked eagerly all about in the shrubbery, passing
the word that the goddess might arrive at any moment and that it was
time to dress for her. Now they whispered it to terminal buds, and now
to lateral, but mostly they put their brown heads down among the leaves,
giving the message to bulb and corm, tuber and root stock. I could hear
them calling all about, a quaint little elfin note of “tseep, tseep,”
and anon one would turn a roguish handspring and vanish, thus
hocus-pocusing himself to the next northward grove.
Busy brownies they were,--hop-o’-my-thumbs clad in rufous-brown feather
coats that so harmonized with the dead leaves among which they worked
that it was difficult to see them except when they moved.
Ornithologists, bound by the letter of their knowledge, would, I dare
say, name these fox sparrows; but even these might have hesitated and
forgotten their literalness, looking into newborn April’s smiling face
that blue-misted morning, out trailing the spring with Bose.