through with their songs for the year, piped in chorus as each cloud
slipped over the sun, and the leopard frogs yawned throatily, dreamily,
all about in the full sunshine. The hotter it was the more they liked
it, and in the brightest part of the day they cut up the yawns into
brief words and phrases which made a most language-like gabble.
Of course I could not see this peace congress of leopard frogs and can
prove only that it sounded like them. It may very well have been the
pukwudgies talking over my presence and wondering if white men were now
coming to oust them from their last stronghold in the bog, as they have
driven them and the once more visible Indians from the rough hills and
sandy plains about the pond. Indeed, as I sat quiet, hour after hour, in
this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and
unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog,
banshee or bird.
I began to get glints of sunlight reflecting from grassy islands all
about. It was as if some very human folk had held high carnival here the
night before and sown the dry spots with empty black bottles. But a
second look showed these to be spotted turtles, sitting up above the
water level, each with his head held up as if he wished especially to
get the warmth of the sun on his throat. On such a day one might well
envy the turtle for having his bones all on the outside. It is easy for
him to let the spring sunshine into his very marrow.
The turtle, in spite of the canticle which, bubbling over with the
enthusiastic poetry of spring, declares that “the voice of the turtle is
heard in our land,” is usually reckoned dumb. The commentators have
carefully announced that the turtle mentioned is the turtle-dove cooing
in the joy of springtime. That may be, but I do not see how they know,
for the turtle, denied a voice by naturalists and scriptural
commentators alike, nevertheless has one, and a song of its own.
A turtle, suddenly jolted, will give a quaint little squeak as he yanks
himself back into his shell. That is common enough, but this day there
were two, sitting up on nearby tussocks, that piped a musical little
song of spring, just a soft trill that was eminently frog-like but
distinct. I heard it and tried at first to make it the trill of hylas,
but it was more of a trill and different in quality. Try as I would I
could but locate this quaint little song in the throats of the two
turtles. I carefully scared one off his perch and one trill ceased. I
scared the other, and both voices were silent, though here and there in
the marsh I could hear others. It may have been the pukwudgies playing
ventriloquial tricks on me from the shade of the swamp cedars just
beyond, and laughing in their beaded sleeves at the joke; but if it was
not they, I am convinced that my turtles sang, and that Solomon not only
knew what he was talking about but meant exactly what he said.
While I was listening to the two turtles and wondering about them, I
kept hearing over among the white cedars raucous profanity of the most
outrageous sort. Bad words snarled in throaty squawks came oftener and
oftener, till by the time the turtles had gone down into oblivion
beneath the bog roots the most villainous language from at least two
squawkers gave evidence that a low-bred row was going on. I could
distinguish accusation and recrimination till it sounded like a family
quarrel between drunken bog bogles.
Then there was the sound of blows, and with a wild shriek of a most
reckless word a bittern flapped out, whirled round once or twice as if
undecided where he would go, then dropped in the grass down the bog a
way. Here he turned his black, stake-like head this way and that for a
moment, then pulled it down out of sight. I had known the bittern was
misanthropic, but I had never before realized that he was so
ill-tempered and profane. I am positive he was beating his wife, and the
whole affair sounded like a case of too much bog whiskey.
For an hour there was no sight or sound of this bittern, though uncouth
conversation seemed to be going on still in the tangle whence he flew,
but I heard no more profanity. Yet out of the heart of the bog curious
sounds came floating at intervals,--sounds which often I had difficulty
in getting any known creature to go bail for. I do not mean the ordinary
bird voices, though the air was full of these. It seems as if all the
small migrants made this a port of call or a refuge, and paid for their
safety with music. Warblers trilled their varied notes from the cedars
or the thicket of cassandra shrubs, some coming boldly near, others
giving sign of their presence only by the glint of a wing or the shaking
of a twig, others still invisible but vocal.
Thrush and catbird, song sparrow and chipping sparrow, chickadee and
creeper, all helped to fill the air with sound, but it was not to these
I listened. It was rather to obscure whinings and grumblings out of the
deep heart of the bog, goblin talk very likely that seemed to grow
louder and come nearer. Then after a little I heard splashing, and out
into a clear space of grassy shallows came a splendid great muskrat
followed by another just as large. In the middle of this tourney ground
the two faced each other, and after a second of sparring closed.
It was hardly a scientific fight. They batted and clawed, butted and
scratched and bit, whining like eager dogs, and now and then yelping
with pain. But it was effective; in a very few minutes one had enough
and turned and fled, ploughing a straight furrow through the shallows,
to a plunge in a deep hole. The victor followed a few yards, then as if
convinced that the retreat was a real one, turned and went proudly back,
probably to the lady who was the cause of all this trouble. Muskrats are
such gentle creatures that I was amazed to see this happen, but affairs
of the heart are serious even in the depths of the bog. I lay a part of
the bog bogle talk which still went on in the eerie depths behind the
green of the cedars to the other muskrats. It does not seem as if they
could have been to blame for it all.
Then I remembered the vanished bittern and began to work my boat toward
the part of the bog where he disappeared. Very likely he had committed
suicide in repentance for his bad behavior and his profanity. He ought
to have, but he was simply sulking, after all. I think he felt so bad
about it that his usual wariness was at fault, for I was almost upon him
before he saw me. It may have been drunken stupor, but I like to believe
it was remorse.
When he did see me his dismay was ludicrous. He almost fell over himself
in getting into the air, and he flapped back toward the spot where the
quarrel had gone on with wild squawks that said “Help, help!” as
plainly as any language could. Out from among the cedars, in answer to
this frenzied appeal, came the other bittern, and then another. I
watched the three flapping down the bog and saw them light together at a
safe distance. Then I knew the cause of all the trouble in the bittern
family. The bog world, like the pasture world and the deep wood, at this
time of year is full of blissful love making, but it is also full of
heartrending jealousies and fights to a finish. No wonder the pukwudgies
and bog bogles are full of talk and excitement back there; there is
enough food for gossip.
Sitting quietly in the boat in this new part of the bog I had a queer
feeling of being grimly watched by, I could not tell what. I have read
tales of travelers in African jungles who felt the eyes of a lurking
boa constrictor resting balefully on them when the creature itself was
concealed. It was something like that, and I looked about rather
uneasily. Probably the bog voices were getting on my nerves and it was
time to go home. Then I glanced over one side of the boat and very
nearly jumped over the other, for there were the two grim eyes, in a
great horny head as big as my two fists, looking up at me.
I had been amusing myself with imagining that I heard the little people
of the bog, but here was the great dragon, the very devil himself,
sunning his black hulk on a fairy acre of bog grass. At its further end
I saw his tail, as large as my forearm at the base, tapering with
alligator-like corrugations to its tip. I saw his great webbed feet as
large as my hand and furnished with claws. I saw his thick neck, and
that was all of him in sight. The rest was concealed within a huge mound
of black, plated, horny shell that was fourteen inches from side to side
and sixteen inches from front to back. These were measurements which I
took after I had decided that he did not intend to eat me right away,
perhaps not at all.
_Chelydra serpentina_, the snapping turtle, or the alligator snapper, as
he is sometimes called, and with reason, for, except for his casing of
shell, he is very like an alligator, is not uncommon in the bog; but I
had never before seen so huge or so ancient appearing a specimen. His
black shell was worn gray with age and bore two deep scars where some
sharp instrument very like a spear had been jabbed into his back. I
suspect this to have been an Indian spear, and I fully believe that my
black dragon of the bog was a well-grown turtle before the white man
ever saw Ponkapog Pond.
There were parallel ridges in the structure of his shell that seemed to
show much wear as if this turtle had carried weight on his back. The
Indians have a legend that the world itself is held up on the back of a
great turtle. Very well; this is the one. I saw the marks of its
friction on his great muddy black structure as I looked him over, there
in the middle of the loneliest place in the bog.
I might have taken him by that alligator tail and swung his seventy or
eighty pounds into the boat, I suppose. Terrapin is valuable, and the
snapping turtle is own cousin to the terrapin. I have a fancy, though,
that if he had got into the boat I should have got out. No ordinary
Ponkapog boat was likely to hold us both, and I wisely refrained. Nor
did he molest me, but stood his ground, still gazing at me with that
cold, critical eye. After a time he moved on, pushing his great weight
with ease over the crushed bog growth and sliding with dignity down into
the muddy depths of an open channel.
For myself, I turned the boat’s prow toward the distant landing and
pushed, as he had, over the yielding shallows to the open pond. I had
seen a hundred beauties in the lonely bog and been well initiated into
its mysteries. For me the spotted turtles had sung, the muskrats had
fought a tourney, the bitterns had voiced a family quarrel. And now it
was nightfall, and the big old dragon of the bog had looked me over with
measuring eye. It was high time that I headed for home if I expected to
get there.
BOBBING FOR EELS
It is fortunate that the angleworm is born without a voice, else
throughout the length and breadth of the land were now resounding a
chorus of doleful shrieks, for great is the dismemberment of angleworms
about this time. The same warmth of imminent summer which made the grass
jump six inches in length over night, has brought him forth in great
numbers, over night also, for the angleworm is a lover of darkness.
I know Darwin thought earthworm a more proper designation of him, but it
is to be believed that Darwin was not a fisherman. Had he been he would
have known that the chief end of worm is to become bait. There may be
nicer things to have than these somewhat attenuated hermits of the
mold, but if there are the fishes do not know it, and there are few
anglers but on May fifteenth would give their weight in gold for them if
such was the price. It is fortunate, therefore, that angleworms are
inhabitants of the earth, so to speak, and not of any one neighborhood.
It is, no doubt, possible to catch fish with other bait. There are
grasshoppers, to be sure, though not at this time of year. There are
various artificial flies and lures, spoon hooks and other wastrel
inventions. Of these little is to be said; indeed, some of them are
unspeakable.
On fortunate springs April showers linger into May, finally hastening
northward lest summer catch them here and make a wet June of it. The
seductive warmth of summer is in them now, and as they go spilling by of
perfumed nights they work all kinds of wonder. Things that were
beginning to grow up suddenly blow up. My cherry tree has exploded over
night. Two days ago the grass, we noted with delight, was really quite
green. This morning it waves in the wind, and I am confident that by
to-morrow, at this rate, it will be full of bobolinks and mowing
machines. Yesterday you could see far through the woodland. To-day it is
clouded with its own green leaves, and along aisles that begin to be
shady the truant ovenbirds are shouting “Teacher, teacher, teacher,
teacher,” in warning to one another every time they hear a human
footfall in the path.
The first dragon flies have come, and in woodland places lovely little
brown butterflies skip about like mad. No wonder the Hesperidæ are
commonly known as skippers. These that I saw to-day, most of them
_Thanaos brizo_, the sleepy dusky-wing, defied any but the most alert
eye to follow them as they dashed from invisibility on some dark fallen
limb to vanishment on brown mud of the path. They seemed to skip in and
out of existence at will. I call them brown, for you will see that they
are that if you have a chance to see one sitting at rest. You may get
near enough to see the beautiful blueish spots surrounded with dark
rings on the fore wings, and the double row of yellow spots on the hind
wings. For all that _Thanaos brizo_ is as black as your hat to the eye
when he is in flight. Perhaps that is why he vanishes so readily. You
are looking for a black butterfly, and what you see is nothing but a
brown bit of bark or leaf.
Darwin was convinced that the earthworm, as he called him, was of
inestimable value to man, and he cites how he works over the mold and
loosens it up, ploughing it, as it were, for future planters who should
thus be able to enjoy the fruits of the earth, leveling it and working
in various ways for the good of mankind. But Darwin never says a word of
the inestimable value of earthworms as angleworms. Thus often do our
greatest scientists fail to interpret things at their true value. Very
likely Darwin never had an opportunity to bob for eels in a New England
pond. If so he would have seen worms as they are, for no man can really
know things till he has yearned for them.
In the winter time the angleworm goes down well below the reach of frost
which will kill him. Indeed, he is sensitive to the cold, and comes to
the surface only when the sun has warmed the earth so that it is
comfortable. Under the May moon he comes, sometimes clear out of his
hole, and wanders far in search of friends or new countries. Often of a
moist early morning you may find big ones caught out on the concrete
sidewalk or marooned in the dry dust of the road, remaining to be an
easy prey for early birds.
But these are the adventurous or unfortunate few. The many have remained
all night stretched far from the mouths of their burrows, indeed, but
with tails still hooked into the door jamb, and able to make a rapid
backward scramble into safety. It is this habit of the worm of warm
summer evenings that the wise angler utilizes for his capture. The robin
knows it too, and he spices his rapture of matin song with trips across
the lawn, where, between staccato hops, he eyes the grass sidewise and
catches late roisterers before they can get under cover. These he takes
by the scruff of the neck, as one might say, hauls them, stretching and
resisting, forth from their homes and swallows them.
Thus with the unrighteous, but even the upright, or rather the
downright, who are that, snugly ensconced as they intended to be, he is
apt to see and seize, for the robin’s eye is good and his bill is long
enough. Angleworms, after the joys or labors of the night are over,
withdraw into their holes, but often not very far. They like to lie with
the head drawn back just out of sight, near enough to the surface to
bask in the warmth of the sun.
Some line the outer ends of their burrows with leaves to keep them from
the damp of the earth, thus further to enjoy themselves. Some, too, on
retiring, draw leaves and sticks in, thus going into their holes and
pulling the holes in after them, as the saying goes. Some merely pile
small stones in a sort of an ant heap about the mouth. In the gravel
walk these little mounds are often taken for those piled by the
industrious ants. The robin gets many of these as he hops, and it is no
wonder that his chestnut-red front looms as round as a pumpkin and
almost as big.
There are many ways of getting angleworms and many ways of using them
after you get them; but he who wants them in bulk will do well to
imitate the robin,--only do it in the night instead of the day. Of
course you may go out with a spade and assault likely spots in the
garden. That is often satisfactory, though crude. It is likely to result
in small numbers and not well assorted sizes.
I knew a man once who used to jab for angleworms with a crowbar, and it
was a rather astonishing thing to watch him and see the results. The
angleworm’s hearing is crude in the extreme. Indeed, hearing in the
ordinary sense of the word he has none. Mary Garden might sing at the
mouth of his burrow and he would never know it. Sousa’s finest march on
fifty instruments--count ’em fifty--might be played on the bandstand
just over his head and he would never feel one thrill. The only sound he
gets is a crunching and grubbing in the earth near him. This he feels,
for he is the chief food of the grubbing mole, and that sound means but
one thing to him,--that he is being dug for. So when he heard that
crowbar wriggling and crunching in the gravel beneath he used to flee to
the surface in numbers.
This man always whistled an eerie little tune while he wriggled the bar.
He said he was calling them, and it was quite like magic the way in
which they hustled to the surface and crawled about his feet. Most
people fail in this method. It takes a peculiar motion to the bar and a
good eye in choosing the spot where the worms are. And then, few people
know the tune.
Nightfall and the robin’s method are best. Wait till the full darkness
of a moist night. Hang a lantern about your neck and get down on your
marrow bones by a grassy roadside. Worms do not see, and are not
sensitive to light. You have but to crawl quietly forward and pick them
up with a quick snatch, for the worm can feel, and he gets back into his
burrow with an agility which is surprising.
On the right kind of a May night I have seen the roadside of a
Massachusetts village the scene of more than one such spectacle. A
stranger from the big world, seeing a very fat man crawling by the
roadside with a lantern hung about his neck, making frantic dabs here
and there, and hauling forth great worms that resisted and hung on
valiantly and stretched like red rubber, might well have said that here
was voodoo worship or a Dickey initiate gone mad. But it was nothing of
the sort,--merely the crack local fisherman getting his bait.
I have looked in vain in Izaak Walton for a pæan on angleworms or a
description of a proper method for making a bob for eels, and I thereby
find the “Compleat Angler” incomplete. However, Izaak was an admirable
fisherman in the rather patient and conservative way of the England of
his time. He advises to bait for eels “with a little, a very little,
lamphrey, which some call a pride, and may in the hot months be found
many of them in the river Thames, and in many mud-heaps in other rivers;
yea, almost as usually as one finds worms in a dung-hill.”
He should have seen a Yankee catch eels with a pole and line with a big
wad of worms tied on the end of the line and no hook at all, for such is
a “bob,” as we know it in Norfolk County. The making of a bob is not a
pleasant affair for the angleworms, which seem born for destruction, so
many are the creatures that prey on them, and I am glad of Darwin’s
assurance that, in spite of the fact that they wriggle when rent, they
have little fineness of perception and feeling and do not suffer--much.
This crack fisherman who was so stout and who used to get his bait by
lantern light at night, to whom my memory runs, always made a bob of
shoemaker’s thread, because it was fine and of great strength. He had a
long wire needle like an upholsterer’s needle, and with this he would
deftly string great angleworms from head to tail, sliding them one by
one down upon his shoemaker’s thread till he had a rope of them twelve
feet long or so. Then tying the ends together he looped this up till it
hung in a wad of loops as big as his two fists. This, hung upon the end
of his line, was all he needed for a night’s fishing.
The way of its use is this. First catch your night, one of those nights
when there is a promise of soft rain in the sky and the wind that is to
bring it just sighs gently over the trees from the southward. Too much
wind is bad, for it so ruffles the surface that the fish cannot find
you. A very gentle ripple, on the contrary, is helpful, for it makes a
dancing path of light from your fire, up which the eels may trail you to
the very spot where hangs the bob.
The stout fisherman used to take along at least two boys who would be
useful in gathering wood for the fire and in other matters. Then,
picking the exactly most favorable spot on the dam where the deep, dark
water shoulders the bank, he built his fire after the full darkness had
come. In common with many others I regret the passing of the old-time
cedar rail fence. Wire abominations may be cheaper, but who ever heard
of building a fishing fire out of tariff-nurtured, wire-trust, fencing
material? Fishing fire material of the proper sort is rare nowadays, and
I can but feel that the youth of the present generation are born to
barren years.
With the fire well alight and the deep half-bushel basket placed handy
by, the fisherman would make his line fast to the tip of that long,
light, supple but strong birch pole and cast the big bob far from him
with a generous splash into the water, letting it sink till within a
foot or two of bottom. How far under the dark water the eels might see
that flickering fire and be drawn to it as moths circle about a light at
night I cannot say, but I think it was very far, for on favorable nights
it seemed as if all the eels in the pond must have been drawn thither. I
know that fishing without a fire you may catch one eel or perhaps two,
but you will never get such numbers as come to a proper blaze made of
the dryest of good old cedar rails.
In South American waters there is an electric eel which can give a stout
shock to such as touch him; but I think all eels must be electric, else
why the shock that one in the deep water off the pond bank can send
through a dozen feet of line and as much more of birch pole to your hand
the moment he pokes his nose against a bob? It tingles in your palms,
and is as good as prescribed electric treatment from a battery, for it
thrills you with a quickening of life and nerve and a magical alertness.
The eel is not nearly so cautious with a bob as with a hook. He nibbles,
which is the first shock; he bites, which is the second and stronger;
then he takes hold. I can see the stout fisherman now with the fire
gleam on his rugged face, his feet planted wide apart and his weight
well on the hinder one, his hands wide apart on the pole and his whole
attitude that of a lion couchant for a back somersault.
At the nibble his face twitches, at the bite his knee bends, and then
the end of the pole sags quickly downward with the line as taut as a
violin string. The eel has taken hold, his throat-pointing teeth are
tangled in the thread of the bob, and the stout fisherman’s weight has
gone far back of his point of support. If the line should break so
would the fisherman’s neck.
They prate much to me about the stance and the swing, the addressing and
the following through in driving a ball at golf. The words are used
glibly, but I doubt if many know their real significance. Whatever that
is it all applies, and more, to the proper bobbing of an eel. It is the
summoning of all the forces of a man’s vigor and personality in one
supreme stroke. Holding on, quite literally by the skin of his teeth,
the eel circles a section of the pond with his tail and seems to lift it
with him. The line sings and the birch pole bends nearly double. It is
for a second a question which will win, but the shoemaker’s thread is
very strong, and so is the stout fisherman.