demure. Neither could get near enough to the lady to croak soft words of
love in her ear, for the other immediately flew at him in a rage. The
two tore about among the trees, hurling bad words at one another. It was
distinct profanity. They towered high in air and dove perilously one
after the other back into the woods again, screaming reckless oaths. Now
and then they came together, and one or the other yelled with pain. It
lasted but a few minutes, but it was a very hot scrimmage. Then one of
them evidently had enough, and abandoned the fight, taking refuge in a
thick fir very near me. No one of the three minded my presence.
The victor went back to his lady love on mincing wings, and though I
could not see them I knew that he was received with open favor, for the
cooing of cawing that followed was positively uncanny. As a reckless
freebooter, a wise and jovial latter-day Robin Hood of the woods, I
like the crow; but his love-making voice, dear me! One of Macbeth’s
witches might address the cauldron in the same tone. Evidently the
discomfited rival thought so too, for he began to jaw in an undertone
and flew grumbling away, mostly on one wing. I have no direct evidence,
of course, but I think my dead crow came to his untimely end in one of
these duels between rival lovers.
I was glad to leave the crows behind me for once, and then in the full
sunshine of the later morning I chanced upon a tree full of goldfinches.
It was a tree full, also, of most delightful music. Each bird was vying
with the other in a spring song that was more in tune with the
surroundings than any ever written by Bach or Schumann, a pure outgiving
of blossoming delight.
The birds themselves have just come into new bloom. Like the sweet gale
they seem to have put on new color of gold almost in a night, for they
made yellow gleams that were like blossoms all about on the bare twigs,
their black wings making the color more vivid by contrast. Yesterday it
was, or was it the day before, that these lovely singers were going
about in sober brown, like sparrows. Now suddenly they are splashes of
tropic sunshine.
It is their mating plumage which they will wear until late August puts
them in brown again. They are so happy about it, and their rich,
variable songs are such a delight that I am glad they do not quit wooing
and go to nest-building until late June, the latest, I think, of all our
birds.
And while I listened to the goldfinches a tiny bit of the sky fell. It
lighted on a leaf by me, and expanded its wings and enjoyed the full
sun. It was one of the least of butterflies and one of the loveliest,
the common blue, the winter form, so called because it comes thus in
April from a chrysalid that has passed the rigors of winter
successfully. Like the blossoming sweet gale the song of the swamp tree
frog and the gold of the goldfinch’s plumage this tiny, fearless bit of
blue is a seal of the actual soft presence of the spring, which comes
only when the April showers have made her calling and election sure.
To be sure, we might have a whiff of snow yet, but it will be only the
dust blown far from the fleeing feet of those winter ghosts now scuffing
the tundra up where the Saskatchewan empties into Hudson’s Bay.
PROMISE OF MAY
The first touch of the rose-gray morning air brought to my senses
suspicion of two new delights; one, the more sensuously pleasing, to be
sought, the other to be hoped for. It was easy to hope for things of
such a morning, for there come gracious days in the very passing of
April that presage all the seventh heaven of early June.
At such times the pasture people bestir themselves, and no longer march
sedately toward the full life of summer, but begin to riot and caper
forward. The old Greek myth of fauns dancing on new greensward is not
less than fact; by May-day the shrubs caracole. I suspect even the
cassandra of wiggling its toes under the morose morass; and though it
may not outwardly prance, it puts on the white of new buds as if it at
least were coming out of mourning.
By sunrise the riot of the robin symphony had become a fugue, and there
was some chance to hear the other birds. I had hoped for a soloist who
should certainly be here. The coming of the earlier bird migrants from
the South is sometimes delayed by storms or forwarded by pleasant
weather, but those which come now are almost sure to appear at a
definite date. There are always Baltimore orioles in the elms about my
house on the morning of the eighth day of May. No one has yet seen one
on the seventh, though the neighborhood takes an interest in the matter
and keeps careful watch. It is a matter of twenty-five years since the
observations began, and not yet has the date failed. If on that morning
I do not see the flash of an oriole’s orange, yellow, and black among
the young apple tree leaves, and hear that musical whistle, I shall
think something has gone dreadfully wrong with return tickets from
Nicaragua.
Of the brown thrush I am not quite so sure. He rarely calls on me.
Instead, I have to seek him out on the first few days of his arrival. He
likes the sprout land best, and the flash of rufous brown that you get
from him as he flits away among the scrub oaks might well be the color
of a fox’s brush, yet there is no mistaking his sunrise solo. It is
quite the most sonorously musical bird song of early spring, and I have
heard it often on the twenty-fifth of April.
I dare say it has always been here as early as that, though some years I
have failed of the concert-room and so of the singer. Always he is here
by May-day. This morning his rich contralto rang from a birch tip in the
pasture where he or some thrush just like him has sung each May-day
morning for I do not know how many years. I listened in vain for the
chewink, though he too is due. Like the brown thrush he is a
thicket-haunting bird, following soon on the trail of the fox sparrow,
cultivating the underbrush by claw as he does.
There is no rest for the weary brown leaves of last year, though they
may take passage on the March winds to the inmost recesses of the
green-brier tangle of the pasture corners. Through March and early April
the fox sparrow harries them, and they have hardly settled with a sigh
to a brief nap in his trail before the brown thrush and the chewink are
at them with bill and toe-nail, and these are here for the summer.
About a week later, generally on the very sixth of May, easy going
mister catbird will appear with great pretence of bustle. He is a
thicket bird, too, but unlike the chewink and the brown thrush his
farming is all folderol. He simply potters round on their trail,
gleaning. Whatever the thicket-bird name is for Ruth, that is his.
There are sweeter singers in the spring woodland than the brown thrush,
but I know of none whose rich voice carries so far, and this one’s rang
in my ears through all my wanderings till the sun was high and the dew
was well dried off the bushes. Now and then I must needs forget him and
even my quest in my joy over the fresh beauties that the shrubs were
putting on, seemingly every moment. It is something to look at an
olive-brown pasture cedar which has been as demure as a nun all winter
and spring, and see it suddenly in bloom from head to foot, as if before
your very eyes, coming out all sunclad in cloth of gold. It is no
illusion of the sun’s rays or the scintillation of the morning dew, but
a rich glow of gold out of the sturdy heart of the plant itself.
Last October I had thought nothing could make a cedar more beautiful
than that rich embroidery of blue beading on cloth of olive, which these
Indian children of the pasture world donned for winter wear. Now I know
their May robes to be lovelier. No doubt they are days in coming out,
these tiny blooms of the pasture cedars, yet they always reach the point
where I notice them in a flash. One moment they are somber and sedate,
the next they are all dipped in sunshine and dimple with a loveliness
which is the dearer because it is so unexpected.
You might think it just the foliage of the plant taking on a livelier
tint with the coming of glad weather, and there is a change there, but
that is only from brown to green. In the severe cold of the winter the
leaves seem to suffer a decomposition in the chlorophyl which gives them
their green tint and put on a winter garb of brownish hue, but with the
coming of the warm days the chlorophyl is reformed, and the brown is
rapidly giving place to green when this new transformation flashes on
the scene. Right out of the little green leaf-scales grow thousands of
tiny golden-brown spikes with a dozen golden mushroom caps ranged in
whorls of four about them.
They are not more than an eighth of an inch long, these pollen bearing
spikes which will presently loose upon the wind tiny balloons bearing
pollen grains to float down the field to the even more rudimentary
pistillate flower, but they are big enough to change the gloom of rocky
hillsides to a glow of delight, seemingly in an hour. You have but to
look about you if you will visit the pasture cedars on May-day, and you
may see the place light up with the change.
There is no fragrance to these blooms other than the resinous delight
which the leaves themselves distil at the caress of warm suns. It was no
odor of the pasture cedars which had given an object to my walk.
The larch is not a native of Massachusetts, but it will grow here fairly
well if you plant it, and there are long rows of these trees by the
roadside on the way to the pasture. These are all coming forth in the
fragile beauty of new ideas. The larch is the mugwump among conifers,
dallying irresolutely between two parties. Born a dyed-in-the-wool
Republican it has yet of late years leanings toward Democracy. So it
votes with the conifers on cones and the deciduous trees on leaves.
Sometimes I cut a larch limb to see if this year one isn’t turning
endogenous, and am never sure but the fruit for the new season will turn
out to be acorns instead of cones. You never can be sure in what way
these independents will surprise you. It is lucky the trees do not have
the Australian ballot on what their year’s output shall be. If they did
there would be no possibility of predicting what would be the larch
crop.
As might be expected, larches are not virile trees, but have a slender
beauty which is quite effeminate. Just now their this year’s leaves are
a third grown, and are very lovely in their feathery softness, but
lovelier yet are the young larch cones, growing along the branches,
sessile among the young green of the leaves, translucent, deep rose-pink
cameos of cones, that remind you of an etherealized tiny pineapple, a
strawberry, and a stiff blossom carved in coral, all in one.
After all, I am convinced that the larches may do as they please about
their leaves, vote with the deciduous trees if they wish to, and flout
their coniferous ancestry if they will, provided they continue to grow
yearly on May first these most delectable of cones. No blossom of the
year can show greater beauty.
Baffled in my search for the origin of the sensuous odor which had lured
me and which seemed still to drift hither and thither on the variable
air, I got the canoe and paddled over alongshore to a cove that I know,
a new-moon shaped hiding place behind a barrier reef of rough rocks,
further screened by brittle willows that struggle forward year after
year, waist deep in water, bravely endeavoring to be trees. They almost
succeed, too, in that their trunks tower a modest twenty feet and some
of their limbs remain on throughout the year. So brittle are the slender
twigs, however, that the least touch seems to take them from the parent
tree; and as I push my canoe between them in a favorable channel of the
reef I collect an armful in it in brushing by. It is a wonder that the
March gales have left any.
Past the barrier and afloat on the slender, placid crescent I found a
new-moon world with a life of its own. Rough waves may roll outside, but
only the gentlest undulations crinkle the reflections on the mirror
surface within. The winds may blow, but rarely a flaw strikes in far
enough to ruffle the water. Here, with the sun on my back, I might sit
quietly, and soon the normal life of the place, if at first disturbed by
my entrance, would go on.
Yet here is no drowsy silence, such as will fill the cove with sleep in
August. Passing April may leave things quiet, but they are awake. The
first sound which disturbed this quiet was a kerplunk at my side,
followed by the grating of a turtle shell over rough rock and a second
plunge. Two spotted turtles that had been sunning themselves on a rock
at my very elbow as I glided in thus became submarines, and slipped
silently away to Ooze Harbor between two sheltering rocks at bottom.
These two had been contemplating nature with the sun on their backs, as
I planned to, and had been loth to leave such pleasant employment. I
think the turtle’s brain may work quickly, but his motions are as slow
as those of the Federal Government.
Round about me were the mangrove-like buttonball bushes, showing no
signs of green, and the brown heads of hardhack and meadow-sweet blooms
of last year bent over their own reflections in the water. Here were
gray and brown sackcloth and ashes. Did not the little cove know that
Lent was long past? Yes, for here, too, were the maples scattering their
red blooms all along the surface; and as I looked again I saw the sage
green of young willow leaves just pushing out along the yellow bark of
those brittle shoots.
Under the brown heads of the _Spiræa formentosa_ and _salicifolia_ were
vivid leaves putting forth, and just as the pasture cedars seemed to
jump into bloom before my eyes, so the little crescent cove seemed to
garb itself in green as I looked. Under water, too, were all kinds of
succulent young herbs just coming up, like the water-parsnip, whose root
leaves start in the pond bottom, but which, with the receding waters of
summer, will grow rank in the mud of the margin.
A leopard frog sounded his call from the roots of last year’s reeds,--a
gentle drawl which has been compared to the sound produced by tearing
stout cotton cloth, and perhaps that is as near as one can come to
characterizing it, though the sound is a far more mellow and soothing
rattle than that. The hylas have ceased their peeping and the wood frogs
no longer croak. They have laid their eggs in the warming waters and
gone up into the woods. Hitched to a twig a foot beneath the surface I
found a jelly-like mass as big as my two fists, which contained a
thousand or so of the eggs of the green frog,--_Rana clamitans_,--and no
doubt those of the hylas and wood frogs were to be found nearby. The
new-moon cove is a famous frog rendezvous, and a month from now the
night there will be clamorous with the cries of many species. You would
never believe there were so many varieties till you begin to hunt them
by ear.
A pair of robins came and inspected their last year’s nest in a willow
over the water, and I saw there a left-over kingbird’s, still holding
the space, though the kingbirds themselves will not be back to claim it
before the fifth or sixth of May. A silent black and white creeper
slipped up and down and all in and about the shoreward bushes, gleaning
stealthily and persistently, always with a watchful eye out for possible
danger. This watchfulness did not cease when the bird finished hunting
and settled down for a noonday nap. It chose for this a spot on the
black and white angle of a red alder shrub, where it would look exactly
like a knot on the wood. Then it fluffed down into a fat ball of
feathers and for a half-hour seemed to snooze, motionless except for its
head, that every few seconds turned and looked this way and then that.
It was a noonday nap, but it was sleeping with both eyes open.
The kingfisher, always an example of nervous energy, flitted back and
forth outside the willow barrier, springing his rattle in short vigorous
calls. Once he fell into the water with a splash, and came out again
with a young white perch in his mouth. By and by he gave an extra shout
and went off over the hill and was gone an hour. Then two came back and
the air was vivid with friendly
[Illustration: The air was vivid with friendly staccato calls]
staccato calls. But there seemed to be a disagreement later, for after a
little the first bird was alone again. Then he began to fly back and
forth, high over the cove, till his white throat seemed a sister to the
young moon, paper white in the zenith.
All the kingfisher calls before that had been brief, but now as he flew
he clattered like an alarm clock,--the kind that begins at ghostly hours
and continues without intermission till you finally get up in despair
and throw it out the window. His cry would begin with his leaving the
point beyond the cove on one side, continue without a break as he swung
high, and only cease when he had dropped to earth again on the other
side. Where he got the wind for this continuous vaudeville I cannot say.
I have never heard a kingfisher call so long without an interval before,
but I take it to have been a far cry sent out for that vanished mate.
Perhaps she answered finally, for he betook himself off after a little,
I hope to a rendezvous.
While I listened in the silence for the returning call of the
kingfisher, a little shore wind came over my shoulder and brought to me
the same delicious, sensuous perfume that I had noticed in the early
morning, only where it had then been as slender as a hope it was now
rich and full with the joy of fulfilment. I looked back in some wonder
at the rocky marsh behind the cove, but now I saw farther than the
alders and maples that fringed its edge.
Just as the golden glow of the cedars in the upland pasture had seemed
to come all of a sudden, as if turned up by the pressure of a button
which made electrical connection, and set the machinery of fantasy at
work, so the inner swamp suddenly grew all sun-stricken with the yellow
of the spicebush bloom. Bare twigs bore clusters of it everywhere, and
its intoxicating odor thrilled all my senses with rich dreams of June.
So all this day of passing April the sun shone in the placid heart of
the little cove with the full fervor of summer. The leopard frog
throated his dreamy yawn from the bog, and the rich, soft perfume of the
spicebush seemed to wrap all the senses in longing that thrilled and
disquieted even while it lulled. There is a call to _vagabondia_ in the
odor of the spicebush, that gipsy of the wilder wood, which finds ready
echo in the hearts of us all. If it bloomed the year round there would
be no cities.
While I breathed the witchery to the full there fell from the sky above
a gentle call, a single bird note out of the blue, that made me sit up
straight and look eagerly.
A swift wing stabbed the air above the tree tops, and the note sounded
nearer. “Quivit, quivit,” it said in liquid gentleness, and the first
barn swallow of my season slipped down toward the pond and skimmed the
surface in graceful flight. May is welcome. She could be ushered in by
no sweeter music than the gentle call of the barn swallow, nor could she
send before her more dignified couriers than the glowing pasture cedars
or more richly sensuous odors than that of the spicebush which makes all
the swamps yellow with sunshine in her honor.
BOG BOGLES
A spirit of mystery always broods over the great bog of Ponkapog Pond.
Only occasionally does man disturb its quaking, sinking surface with his
foot. You may wade all about on it, even to the edge where the billowing
moss yields to the scarcely less stable pond surface; but to do so in
safety you must know it intimately, else you will go down below,
suddenly, to become a nodule in the peat, and perhaps be dug up intact a
thousand years from now and put in a museum.
Hence man rather shuns the bog, and it has become, or perhaps I might
better say it has remained, the home of all sorts of shy creatures that
shun man. It would not be surprising if the little people that the
Ponkapog Indians knew so well, the pukwudgies which were their fairies,
the little manitous which were guardian spirits, and the fearsome folk,
the Indian bogies, still linger here, though the Indians are long gone.
This morning in the lonesomest spot I thought I heard speech of them
all, and though various creatures appeared later and claimed the voices,
it is to be believed that these merely came out of the tall grass to go
straw bail for them. At this time of year you may reach this lonesomest
spot by boat, if you will take a light one with smooth flat bottom and
push valiantly through winding passages where you may not row and boldly
ride over grassy surfaces that yield beneath you.
It is a different bog edge from that of last summer; a new world. The
Nesæa, which made wickets of bog-hopple all about, is hardly to be
seen, and you will wonder at the absence of the millions of serried
stems of pickerel weed that held the outer defences with halberds and
made them blue with flaunting banners of the bog’s advance guard.
If you will look over the boat’s side as you glide through open water
near the edge you will see these, lying in heaps, blades pointing
bravely to seaward almost a half-fathom deep, slain by the winter’s
cold, indeed, but their bodies a bulwark on which younger warriors will
stand firmly in the skirmish line this year. Already the slender spears
of these prick upward out of the gray tangle at bottom, and it will not
be long before they stab the surface, eager for the accolade of the
field marshal sun.
In the little channels up which you glide tiny tides flow back and
forth, driven, no doubt, by the undulations of the waves in the open
pond, and here through the dark depths the brownish green clusters of
pointed peat-moss roll along like Russian tumble-weeds driven across the
Dakotas by prairie winds, to grow again in new soil. On either side are
island clumps of meadow grass, and in the shallows you may see, as
carefully planted as if by some landscape gardener of the pond bottom,
most wonderfully beautiful fairy gardens of young water-lily leaves.
Out of the brown ooze at varied dignified distances apart spring the
slender, erect stems, some only a few inches long, others longer, till a
precocious few tickle the surface with the upper rim of the rounded
leaf. These leaves are set at quaint angles that give the garden a
perky, Alice-in-Wonderland effect. The Welsh rabbit and the mock turtle
might well come down these garden paths hand in hand, or the walrus and
the carpenter sit beneath the flat shade of these dado-decoration leaves
and swap poems.
But, after all, the wonder of it is not the quaint beauty of the
arrangement but the bewildering richness of the coloring of these
leaves. Only the faintest suggestion of green is in them. Instead, they
glow with a velvety crimson maroon in varying shades, a color
inexpressibly soft and rich. The blood-red of last year’s cranberries
that form a floating bead edge to the bog in many places is more vivid,
but not so rich. The lilies of next July will be lovely, indeed, but
never so sumptuously beautiful or so full of quaint delight.
At the end of the waterway you come to a barrier of cassandra, which
blocks your further passage and half surrounds you with a low, irregular
hedge. I fear I have misnamed the cassandra. I thought it dour and
morose; but that was in late April. Now it is early May, and by some
trick of the bog pukwudgies the gloom of its still clinging last year’s
leaves is lightened into a soft sage green that is prim indeed, but
lovely in its primness, while all underneath these leaves, in festoons
along the arching stems, are tiny white blossoms that are like ropes of
dripping pearls.
Grim and morose, indeed! The cassandra is like a gentle, pure-souled
girl of the elder Puritans, arrayed for her coming-out party, her
primness of garb only enhancing the beauty of soul that shines through
it and finds visible expression in the pearls. And already lovers buzz
about her. Their cheerful hum is like the sound of soft stringed
instruments fanned by the warm breeze in this fairy-peopled land of
loneliness. Here I see my first bumblebee of the season, seemingly less
dunderheaded out here among the wild blooms than he will be later in the
white clover of the lawn.
Perhaps the prim and definite arrangement of the cassandra blossoms,
hung so close in long strings that he has a straight road to follow,
helps keep his wits about him. Here are honeybees a-plenty, adding the
clarinet to his bassoon, and many a wild bee, too, bringing the
scintillation of iridescent thorax or wing, and his own peculiar pitch
to the symphony. I dare say the hymenopterists know each bee by ear as
well as by sight.