life passed before me, much as it may have passed before the pioneer as
he sat on his log doorstep and rested perhaps from labors in the
cornfield, whose hills of earth still checker the level, sandy plain
behind his hollow. Strange that the brawny, seventeenth-century
adventurer should be but vanished dust and a dream, while the loam that
he stirred with careless hoe holds the form that he gave it more than
two hundred years ago! Five or six times his cornfield has matured a
forest, and the great trees have been cut down and carted away, and yet
the corn hills linger. Thus easily does the clay outlast the potter.
When I first marched into the tiny clearing the place was silent, brown
and deserted, but that is the way of the woodland, and we soon learn to
understand it. A certain aboriginal courtesy is required before you are
allowed to become one of the company. Thus among the Eskimos you enter
an assembly and sit quietly a moment until one of those already present
notices and speaks to you. In this way you are admitted to fellowship.
It is very bad taste for the newcomer to speak first.
So at first I noticed only the brown of last year’s grasses, the dead
stems of goldenrod and aster, of St. John’s-wort and mullein. A tiny
cloud slid across the face of the sun and a scout of the north wind blew
down the slope and chilled the golden glow of sunlight with which the
hollow had seemed filled to the brim. Looking down into it from a
sheltered spot on the rim, I had thought the place full of dreams of
June. As I sat down in the shadow on the pioneer’s grass-plot with the
scouting north wind at my back, it was rather a recollection of
November.
A dead leaf, frightened by that scurrying wind, dashed down over the
tree tops and lighted, a brown splash on the pale, dead grass. Then all
in a moment the cloud blew by, the north wind saw the enemy all about
him in force and dashed over the rim of the hill, the amber warmth of
the sun descending and filling the cup to the brim with the gentle
ecstasy of returning summer.
In the still radiance the brown leaf floated into the air again, hovered
a moment before my very eyes, and lighted near by on the gray bones of
what had once been the pioneer’s apple tree. Thus I received my
introduction. I had been spoken to by one of the people of the place,
received my accolade as it were, and was privileged to see clearly. For
the brown leaf was not a brown leaf at all, but a hunter’s butterfly.
It is astonishing to find already so many forms of frail life stirring
in the sun, though just a night or two ago the thermometer registered
ten degrees of frost, and the ground was frozen solid the next morning.
Here was my hunter’s butterfly, a wee dab of pulpy cell that a touch of
my finger could crush, borne on wings of gossamer frailness that might
be whipped to tatters by a wind-snapped twig, yet sailing serenely
about, defying anything to harm him.
The strange part of it is that he has been somewhere hereabouts all
winter long. All about in the pastures are the frail ghosts of last
year’s cudweed, on which as a caterpillar he fed. But it is six months
at least since he cast off his chrysalis skin and emerged in his present
form to face bitter winds and a constantly lowering temperature, days of
chilling rain, smothering snow, and ice that coated all things with an
inch-thick armor for days. All the wrecks that these might have caused
him he has in some mysterious fashion escaped, and here he is, as merry
as a grig.
He did not seem to be hungry, unless, like me, he was eager to devour
the sunshine. He sat on the gray, weather-worn, fallen trunk of the
ancient apple tree, his wings gently rising and falling, while I noted
the beauty of his rich reds with their black and white markings and
margins of black just tipped with a blueish tinge on the tips of the
fore wings. Then he closed them for a minute, showing me the dark
blurring of the under parts that had made me think him a dead leaf as he
blew over the ridge with the wind, though now I could note the blue
ocelli of the after wings.
It was only for a moment that he rested motionless thus, and it was
hard not to think him a chip of ancient bark or a fragment of a leaf,
then he flipped himself into the air and was off over the hill again in
a tremendous hurry. All butterflies get occasional aerograms and go off
as if on a matter of life or death in response to the messages, but it
seems as if these over-winter chaps were especially subject to them in
the first warm days. Later an angle-wing came down into my valley, but
he did not stay long enough for me to find out which of the _Graptas_ he
was,--whether the question mark or the comma, _Grapta interrogationis_
or _Grapta comma_. I should call him the comma, for his stop was of the
shortest, if it were not that my doubt of his identity leaves me with
the query.
The rush of his business was even greater than that of _Pyrameis
huntera_, and with one flip of his crooked-edged wings he was out of
sight.
Three other butterflies I saw during the day in the neighborhood of my
sunny hollow. One, the mourning cloak, _Vanessa antiopa_, I always
expect to see on warm days in the sunny brown woods of April, and am
rarely disappointed. Another which took the air from the hillocked
ground of the two-century-old cornfield I thought to be _Vanessa
j-album_, more familiarly known, perhaps, as the Compton tortoise. I
would have been glad to know this surely, for this butterfly is rather
rare here; but bless me, he went off over the hills at a rate that
shamed the flipperty angle-wing. These dilly-dallying butterflies of the
poet, indeed! They are the busiest creatures of the whole woodland.
Last of all was a little red chap that shot through the rich gold of the
sunlight quite like an agitated bullet, his motor doing its very
prettiest with the muffler off and both propellers roaring. Orville
Wright could not have caught him. It was but a brief glimpse that I got,
but I took him for one of the skippers, perhaps the silver-spotted,
which is common here, though I have never seen one so early before. He
was burly, thick-necked, short-winged, which is characteristic of the
hesperids.
I would be glad to know what these early butterflies find to eat.
Certain flowers are now in bloom, but you never find a mourning cloak or
a hunter, a question mark or a painted lady fluttering about them. The
bees are in the willow blooms and the alder catkins after pollen. The
maples are in bloom. You can find hepaticas and violets, chickweed,
crocus, snowdrop, and, I dare say, dandelions in blossom, and almost
every day some new shrub or shy herb sends perfumed invitation out on
the messenger winds.
Yet I find April butterflies most partial to such sunny spots as the
ancient cornfield, where pines and scrub oaks will give no hint of bloom
for weeks to come, and only dry lichens seem to flourish on the twig and
chip-encumbered earth. Here the dainty cladonias thrive, the
brown-fruited lifting tiny cups to the sun, while the scarlet-crested
help this and the fringed variety to make crisp, tiny, fairy gardens
that will show you great beauty if you will put your nose to the earth
as the butterfly does in looking at them.
Perhaps these earliest spring butterflies sip from brown cups or draw
from frost-moistened scarlet crests some potent elixir which warms the
cockles of their wee hearts during the frigid nights of our
Massachusetts Aprils. I hope so. I never catch them sipping honey at
this time from any of the recognized sources. Perhaps the full flow of
sap which is fairly bursting the young limbs of all trees now leaks
enough to give syrup for the tasting, and they are thus more fortunate
than their brethren, who will come later and dance attendance on lilac
and milkweed. Maple sugar is better than honey.
There will be blossoms enough for them in the little hollow by and by,
though at first it looked so brown and sere. Little by little, after my
initiation at the antennæ of _Pyrameis huntera_, I began to see them, a
rosette of green under my elbow, perhaps, or a serrate tip farther on.
All under the brown grass the green rosettes of biennials and perennials
have waited all winter long for a time like this. Out of the cores of
growth built with slow labor in the increasing chill of autumn they are
now sending new leaves, one after another in rapid succession, that top
the brown grasses and begin to wreathe them with the tender green of
spring.
There is joy in their very coloring as they stretch up to meet the
enfolding warmth of the sun. Here an early buttercup waves a cleft and
somewhat pinnate hand to me with jaunty assurance, though in the heart
of its cluster is as yet no sign of the ascending stem that is to bear
the glossy, yellow bloom aloft. Dandelion leaves shake their notched
spears all about, proud that their buds are already visible, though
still tucked down in the heart of the plant and showing no sign of
yellow.
Here are the wee strawberry-like leaves of the cinquefoil, pale
counterpart of the buttercup to which it looks up in gentle envy and
admiration. The cinquefoil follows hard upon the heels of the violet,
and already its buds are eager to be up and open. The linear root
leaves of aster and goldenrod sit snug and green, growing a bit, but in
no hurry to appear above the brown vegetation of last year. Their watch
comes late, and there is no reason for them to be stirring thus early.
And so the growth of lush green leaves is pushing up all over the
dooryard of the old-time settler getting ahead of the lazy wood grasses
that have hardly begun to put out tiny spears that eventually will stab
through the old fog and help the others to make a new tapestry carpet
for the empty woodland spaces.
Loveliest of all these now, and, indeed, the most germane to the spot,
is the mullein. All winter long it has sat serene and self-sufficient,
under the snow, armor-encased in pellucid ice, or in the bare, bitter
nights when the stars of heaven were one solid coruscation of silver
and the still cold bit very deep. Clad in kersey like the pioneer, its
homespun clothing has defied the weather, holding the cold away from its
thin leaf with all this padding of matted wool which makes the plant
seem so rough and coarse. In the summer it will defy the fierce heat of
the July sun with the same armor, sitting here with its feet in the
burning sand and its tall spike tossing back the sunshine with a laugh
from its golden efflorescence.
Like the pioneer, the mullein came from the Old World, well fitted to
bear the rigors and defy the dangers of the New. Like him it took root,
and its seed holds the land in the rough places, brave and beautiful,
though rough-coated, tender at heart, and helpful always.
So, when the sun has gone over the western ridge and the north wind
scouts have again mustered courage to invade the place, I leave the
little hollow to the wilderness that still enfolds dreams of the
one-time occupant. In its sheltered nooks some of the day’s golden
warmth will remain, even until the sun comes again. I cannot tell where
my busy butterflies will spend the night, but if I were one of them I
should flip back into the dooryard of the pioneer’s homestead and cuddle
down in the great heart of one of those rosettes of mullein leaves,
there to slumber, warm and serene, wrapped to the eyes in its blankets
of soft wool.
APRIL SHOWERS
At nightfall the wind ceased, ashamed perhaps of its prolonged violence,
and we felt the soft presence of April all about. Someone had suddenly
wrapped the world in a protecting mantle of perfumed dreams.
Hitherto it had been struggling to realize spring, succeeding here and
there indeed, but always against cold disfavor and sullen opposition.
Now, in a breath almost, joys and relaxation had come to all out-door
creatures, and the air itself was suffused with tears of relief that
brimmed over and made little laughing patterings on bare twigs and brown
grass. Till then we had had no green of spring. The woodland world had
been pink, and amber, and full of soft yearning of colors in hope and
promise; flowers had struggled bravely forth here and there, but they
had smiled patiently on a land brown with pasture grass of last year.
Yet in a night the full warmth of April fondness and her tears of joy at
being really home again changed all that. Under the patter of wee
showers the wan grasses of last year laid weary heads upon the black
earth beneath them and went to sleep, while up in their places sprang
the lush green spears of this year, glinting back a million joyous
facets to the next morning’s sun that thus seemed to sprinkle all things
with gleam of jewels.
They came very softly at first in the black dusk, these April showers,
growing out of the air so close to my cheek that their touch upon it was
infinitely fine and soothing. Thus the dew touches the grass on still
nights in summer. To be alone in the pasture on such a night is to
become one with all the primal gentleness of the universe. I could feel
the happiness of the pasture shrubs and perennial herbs and germinating
annuals, growing now on the warm bosom of mother earth, tucked away
beneath the perfumed robe of April night.
The night before the cold sky was blown miles high in the air by the
rough winds, and the pasture people sighed and shrank and shivered. The
night out of which April showers were to be born descended like a
benediction, and swathed all humble things in caressing warmth that was
tremulous with moisture and perfume.
With the rain came gentle woodland sprites; and while it played them a
merry, ghostly tune, they worked in harmony. They pressed the wan brown
grass lovingly down and patted the black earth over it till it went to
sleep. They pulled lustily at germinating blades, and in their labor,
there under the darkness, they painted out in a night the brown of last
year with the verdant pigment of this. They hammered and pried at the
tough, varnished outer husks of buds, and finally worked them open and
began unfolding the soft yellow-green of the young leaves within.
Thus the tips of huckleberry twigs, which had given a soft shade of wine
red to the pasture all winter long, lost this tint and bourgeoned into
palest green, and the shadbush buds began to shake loose their racemes
of bloom. The little people worked in squads, and showers played their
merry tunes hither and yon as they labored.
All through the night the fresh smell of the open pores of earth met you
everywhere, and moist air built upon this all other odors and carried
them very far. An opened kitchen door in the distance let out not only a
rainbow-edged blur of yellow light, but the smell of fresh-baked bread
cooling on the table before being put away in the big stone crock in the
pantry by some belated New England housewife.
With the lullaby roar of the distant brook came the odor of the willow
blooms, and with a shift of wind the faint resinous perfume of the pine
wood. The darkness which blots outlines from the sight leaves the
location of things to the other senses which serve faithfully. Scent and
sound are as apprehensive as sight. Often, walking in the darkness, one
may feel faintly the obscure workings of a sense which is none of these,
whereby he dodges a tree trunk or a fence corner which he feels is
there, yet through none of the five ordinary senses. The darkness gives
us antennæ.
The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things
and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open
forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge
like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in
solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow,
ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession
over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the
north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard
the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge
and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient
earth.
In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy
crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs
will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music
lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of
their homes.
But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music.
Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin,
swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of
delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that
the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but
more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any
other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules
ringing against their kindred water.
Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow
of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly
light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the
night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy,
heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree
frog.
As the pattering music of the April showers on the waiting land is a
rune of the ancient earth, so the love song of the swamp tree frog
dreams down the years to us all the way from the carboniferous age. When
the coal measures were forests of tree ferns, and the first men paddled
through steaming shallows in their shade, the swamp tree frog was a tree
frog indeed, and sang his soothing song from their branches. Since then
he has degenerated and has lost most of the adhesive power of the tiny
disks on fingers and toes. He no longer clings readily to trees, and is
but an awkward climber. So, too, the webbing between his toes has nearly
vanished, and he is not a strong swimmer. He haunts the shallows of the
swamps and the sunny pools on the margin of the deep cove.
Perhaps he knows that he is degenerate, and that his safety lies mainly
in silence and obscurity, for he sings rarely, except in the first
heyday of spring, when the air is full of soft mists and warmth that
stirs the deep-lying memories of the carboniferous age. He is a
beautiful fellow, hardly more than an inch long, often flesh-colored,
and with coppery iris tints that should make the mouths of frog-eating
creatures water. It is for desire of him I believe that the pickerel
haunt the veriest shallows at this time of year, where you may see them
of an evening with their back fins sticking out like the latticed sails
of a Chinese junk.
I do not believe there is anywhere to be heard a dreamier or more
soothing lullaby than that sung by the swamp tree frogs of a misty April
night to the tinkling accompaniment of showers pattering upon the
dancing surface of the pond. It begins in a sigh, swells till it stirs a
memory, and dies away in a dream of its own happiness.
All the warm, soothing night the swamp tree frogs sang, and the showers
made music for the laboring sprites, and when the morning came it was to
a world new clothed in all Easter finery. The raindrop sprites had
beaten and relaid the pasture carpets that had been so brown with the
dust of last year, and now they were so clean and had such a soft, green
nap that it was a renewed pleasure to walk on them. Green, too, was the
wear of many of the pasture shrubs, and the fripperies of the shadbush
made the more sober ones turn heads to look at her again. Already she
had creamed the sage green of her delicate gown with the white of
opening buds, and the berry bushes and the wild cherry, the viburnums,
and all the other early flowering shrubs felt a touch of their own
coming joy in just looking at her.
Loveliest of all these pasture folk was the sweet gale. If you would
know how beautiful just catkins can make a slender, modest creature you
should hasten into the pasture now and take note of her. Until last
night you would have passed her by without noting, so modest and
reticent she is.
The other two members of her family have been for months more in
evidence. The sweet fern keeps some of her last year’s leaves still, and
as you pass tosses a bouquet of perfume to you that you may know she is
by. The bayberry holds blue candles to the wind all winter, and the
incense of them carries far. But the sweet gale is too modest and shy
for such things. She just sits quiet and unobserved, and thinks holy
thoughts, and because she does so it seems as if all the warmth and
kindness of April sun and April showers touched her first.
The catkins of the sweet fern were still hard and varnished, and had not
cracked a smile this morning after the night of April showers. Not a
candle of the bayberry had melted or shown flame in all this softness
and warmth, yet there stood the gentle sweet gale all aflame with soft
amber and pale gold, a veritable burning bush of beauty. There is no
perfume from these blossoms, so gently shy and self-contained is the
plant. Both the bayberry and sweet fern will woo you from a distance
with rich aroma, but only after the leaves have come, and then only if
you bruise them, will you get a message from the shy heart of the sweet
gale.
On such a morning it seems as if all the birds were here, flitting back
and forth through the soft blue early mists and singing for pure joy in
the soft air and gentle warmth. For the first time the robins sang as if
they meant it, not in great numbers, though there are legions of them
here, but enough so that you can easily forecast the power of the full
chorus which will tune up a little later. Blackbirds and bluebirds
caroled, and song sparrows fairly split their throats, and now and then
a flicker would sit up on a top bough, clear his throat, throw out his
chest and pipe up “Tucker-tucker-tucker-tucker-tucker,” then, abashed at
the noise he had made, go off on tiptoe, very much ashamed, as well he
might be.
Not a fox sparrow could I see; I think they went on the day before, but
a kingfisher was flying from cove to cove, springing that cheerful cry
of his, which sounds as if someone were rattling a stick on his slats. A
meadow lark piped a clear whistle from the top of a pitch pine, then
alternately fluttered and sailed down into the grass for an early bite.
The chipping sparrow swelled his little gray throat and trilled a
homely, contented note, and there was a clamor of blue jays as the hour
grew late.
I find the blue jay a lazy chap. No early morning revelry is for him.
Breakfast is a serious matter, not to be entered into lightly or with
chattering. Later in the day he is apt to be noisy enough, though he
never sings in public. The nearest he
[Illustration: There was a clamor of blue jays as the hour grew late]
ever comes to it is when, in a crowd of good fellows, he gives you an
imitation of some other bird, for the blue jay is a good deal of a
mimic. But it is always a burlesque, and it rarely gets beyond the first
few notes before a jeering chorus from his companions cuts it off, nor
do you ever know whether they are jeering at him or the bird he is
burlesquing. I fancy it does not matter to them as long as they have a
chance to jeer.
The crows are rather silent now, though occasionally there is a dreadful
towrow over a love affair which does not run smooth. Crows are such
canny Scotchmen of the woods that you would hardly expect them to throw
caution to the winds and have a riot and a duel with much loud talk over
a love affair, but it does happen. Among the pines a day or two ago I
heard a great screaming and scolding, cries of anger and distress, and
then, before I could reach the scene, silence.
When I got there all I saw was two crows slipping shamefacedly away
behind the tree tops. I thought it merely a lovers’ quarrel, but the
next day I found beneath the pines not far from the spot a handsome
young crow dandy, dead. It puzzled me a bit. He bore no marks of shot,
but seemingly had died by violence. He was a stout youngster and had
been in the prime of life and vigor. This morning, when all the soft
glamor of the spring seemed made for lovers, and many of the birds were
very happy about it, I heard another crow quarrel going on, and was mean
enough to spy on it.