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| By Dallas Lore Sharp |
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| THE FACE OF THE FIELDS, 12mo, $1.25, |
| _net_. Postage extra. |
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| THE LAY OF THE LAND, 12mo, $1.25, _net_. |
| Postage, 15 cents. |
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| HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY |
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THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
AUTHOR OF “WILD LIFE NEAR HOME,” “ROOF AND
MEADOW,” AND “THE LAY OF THE LAND”
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published March 1911_
_TO MY GOOD FRIEND_
HINCKLEY GILBERT MITCHELL
_HONEST SCHOLAR_
CONTENTS
I. THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 1
II. TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 27
III. THE EDGE OF NIGHT 57
IV. THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 81
V. THE NATURE-WRITER 111
VI. JOHN BURROUGHS 141
VII. HUNTING THE SNOW 177
VIII. THE CLAM FARM 193
IX. THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING 217
All but two of these papers made their first appearance in _The
Atlantic Monthly_. “The Nature-Writer” was first printed in _The
Outlook_ and “Hunting the Snow” in _The Youth’s Companion_.
I
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
There was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, a cry of pain, a
squawking, cowering, scattering flock of hens, a weakly fluttering
pullet, and yonder, swinging upward into the October sky, a marsh
hawk, buoyant and gleaming silvery in the sun. Over the trees he beat,
circled once, and disappeared.
The hens were still flapping for safety in a dozen directions, but the
gray harrier had gone. A bolt of lightning could not have dropped so
unannounced, could not have vanished so completely, could scarcely
have killed so quickly. I ran to the pullet, but found her dead. The
harrier’s stroke, delivered with fearful velocity, had laid head and
neck open as with a keen knife. Yet a fraction slower and he would
have missed, for the pullet caught the other claw on her wing. The
gripping talons slipped off the long quills, and the hawk swept on
without his quarry. He dared not come back for it at my feet; and so
with a single turn above the woods he was gone.
The scurrying hens stopped to look about them. There was nothing in
the sky to see. They stood still and silent a moment. The rooster
_chucked_. Then one by one they turned back into the open pasture. A
huddled group under the hen-yard fence broke up and came out with the
others. Death had flashed among them, but had missed _them_. Fear had
come, but had gone. Within two minutes--in less time--from the fall of
the stroke, every hen in the flock was intent at her scratching, or as
intently chasing the gray grasshoppers over the pasture.
Yet, as they scratched, the high-stepping cock would frequently cast
up his eye toward the treetops; would sound his alarum at the flight
of a robin; and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge and
start to run. But instantly the shadow would pass, and instantly
chanticleer--
He loketh as it were a grim leoun,
And on his toos he rometh up and doun;
* * * * *
Thus roial, as a prince is in an halle.
He wasn’t afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he was, but not fearful.
No shadow of dread hangs dark and ominous across the sunshine of his
pasture. Shadows come--like a flash; and like a flash they vanish
away.
We cannot go far into the fields without sighting the hawk and the
snake, the very shapes of Death. The dread Thing, in one form or
another, moves everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane,
through the black close waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of
the winter sky, night and day, and every day, the four seasons
through. I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a
swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the
minnows leap from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak
of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike,
twisting and bending in the beak of the kingfisher. The killer is
killed; but at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sandbank,
swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs the black
snake, the third killer, and the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike,
darts off with a cry. I have been afield at times when one tragedy has
followed another in such rapid and continuous succession as to put a
whole shining, singing, blossoming world under a pall. Everything has
seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no
peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep
pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping,
or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face
an instant as he halted, winding me.
Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and
joy--except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death
in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long;
it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no
substance, no continuance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud
is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods, this Fear. The lowest
of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of
them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the
imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.
The present only toucheth thee!
It does more, it throngs him--our fellow mortal of the stubble field,
the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of
his life--none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a
mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole
of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are
moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant,
the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining
stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm
across these wintry fields.
We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have
chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most
difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us
back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us
afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with
pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap
and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we
shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the
muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bungalow floor. We shall always
creep around by the wall, whimpering.
But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will
be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you
see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the
red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your
purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part,
or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let
some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices
take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder,
until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.
So must we listen to the winter winds, to the whistle of the soaring
hawk, to the cry of the trailing hounds.
I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly, and with almost a
command bid me hear the music of the baying pack. There are hollow
halls in the swamps that lie to the east and north and west of me,
that catch up the cry of the fox hounds, that blend it, mellow it,
round it, and roll it, rising and falling over the meadows these
autumn nights in great globes of sound, as pure and sweet as the
pearly notes of the wood thrush rolling around their silver basin in
the summer dusk.
It is a different kind of music when the pack breaks into the open on
the warm trail: a chorus then of individual tongues singing the
ecstasy of pursuit. My blood leaps; the natural primitive wild thing
of muscle and nerve and instinct within me slips its leash, and on
past with the pack it drives, the scent of the trail single and sweet
in its nostrils, a very fire in its blood, motion, motion, motion in
its bounding muscles, and in its being a mighty music, spheric and
immortal, a carol, chant and pæan, nature’s “unjarred chime,”--
The fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed
In perfect diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.
But what about the fox and his share in this gloria? It is a solemn
music to him, certainly, loping wearily on ahead; but what part has he
in the chorus? No part, perhaps, unless we grimly call him its
conductor. But the point is the chorus, that it never ceases, the
hounds at this moment, not the fox, in the leading rôle.
“But the chorus ceases for me,” you say. “My heart is with the poor
fox.” So is mine, and mine is with the dogs too. Many a night I have
bayed with the pack, and as often, oftener, I think, I have loped and
dodged and doubled with the fox, pitting limb against limb, lung
against lung, wit against wit, and always escaping. More than once, in
the warm moonlight of the early fall, I have led them on and on,
spurring their lagging muscles with a sight of my brush, on and on,
through the moonlit night, through the day, on into the moon again,
and on until--only the stir of my own footsteps has followed me. Then
doubling once more, creeping back a little upon my track, I have
looked at my pursuers, silent and stiff upon the trail, and, ere the
echo of their cry has died away, I have caught up the chorus and
carried it single-throated through the wheeling singing spheres.
There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That a fox ever purposely
ran a dog to death, would be hard to prove; but that the dogs run
themselves to death in a single extended chase after a single fox is a
common occurrence here in the woods about the farm. Occasionally the
fox may be overtaken by the hounds; seldom, however, except in the
case of a very young one or of a stranger, unacquainted with the lay
of the land, driven into the rough country here by an unusual
combination of circumstances.
I have been both fox and hound; I have run the race too often not to
know that both enjoy it at times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago
the dogs carried a young fox around and around the farm, hunting him
here, there, everywhere, as if in a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox
would have led them on a long coursing run across the range. It was
early fall and warm, so that at dusk the dogs were caught and taken
off the trail. The fox soon sauntered up through the mowing field
behind the barn, came out upon the bare knoll near the house, and sat
there in the moonlight yapping down at Rex and Dewy, the house dogs in
the two farms below. Rex is a Scotch collie, Dewy a dreadful mix of
dog-dregs. He had been tail-ender in the pack for a while during the
afternoon. Both dogs answered back at the young fox. But he could not
egg them on. Rex was too fat, Dewy had had enough; not so the young
fox. It had been fun. He wanted more. “Come on, Dewy!” he cried. “Come
on, Rex, play tag again. You’re still ‘it.’”
I was at work with my chickens one day when the fox broke from cover
in the tall woods, struck the old wagon road along the ridge, and came
at a gallop down behind the hencoops, with five hounds not a minute
behind. They passed with a crash and were gone--up over the ridge and
down into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack had broken,
deploying in every direction, beating the ground over and over.
Reynard had given them the slip, on the ridge-side, evidently, for
there were no cries from below in the swamp.
The noon whistles blew, and leaving my work I went down to re-stake my
cow in the meadow. I had just drawn her chain-pin when down the road
through the orchard behind me came the fox, hopping high up and down,
his neck stretched, his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a white hen of
my neighbor’s, he made for her, clear to the barnyard wall. Then,
hopping higher for a better view, he sighted another hen in the front
yard, skipped in gayly through the fence, seized her, loped across the
road, and away up the birch-grown hills beyond.
The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes before. He had fooled
them. He had done it again and again. They were even now yelping at
the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge. Let them yelp. It is a
kind and convenient habit of dogs, this yelping, one can tell so
exactly where they are. Meantime one can take a turn for one’s self at
the chase, get a bite of chicken, a drink of water, a wink or two of
rest, and when the yelping gets warm again, one is quite ready to pick
up one’s heels and lead the pack another merry dance. The fox is
almost a humorist.
This is the way the races are all run off. Now and then they may end
tragically. A fox cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun. Only dogs
entered into the account when the balance in the scheme of things was
struck for the fox. But, mortal finish or no, the spirit of the chase
is neither rage nor terror, but the excitement of a matched game, the
ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of escape for the fox,
without fury or fear--except for the instant at the start and at the
finish--when it is a finish.
This is the spirit of the chase--of the race, more truly, for it is
always a race, where the stake is not life and death, as we conceive
of life and death, but rather the joy of being. The hound cares as
little for his own life as for the life he is hunting. It is the race,
instead; it is the moment of crowded, complete, supreme existence for
him--“glory” we call it when men run it off together. Death, and the
fear of death, are inconceivable to the animal mind. Only enemies
exist in the world out of doors, only hounds, foxes, hawks--they, and
their scents, their sounds and shadows; and not fear, but readiness
only. The level of wild life, of the soul of all nature, is a great
serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a higher level,
intenser, faster, more exultant.
The serrate pines on my horizon are not the pickets of a great pen. My
fields and swamps and ponds are not one wide battlefield, as if the
only work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and the whole of their
existence a reign of terror. This is a universe of law and order and
marvelous balance; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful,
joyous life. Life and not death is the law, joy and not fear is the
spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, of very matter itself.
And ever at the loom of Birth
The Mighty Mother weaves and sings;
She weaves--fresh robes for mangled earth;
She sings--fresh hopes for desperate things.
“For the rest,” says Hathi, most unscientific of elephants, in the
most impossible of Jungle Stories, “for the rest, Fear walks up and
down the Jungle by day and by night.... And only when there is one
great Fear over all, as there is now, can we of the Jungle lay aside
our little fears and meet together in one place as we do now.”
Now, the law of the Indian Jungle is as old and as true as the sky,
and just as widespread and as all-encompassing. It is the identical
law of my New England pastures. It obtains here as it holds far away
yonder. The trouble is all with Hathi. Hathi has lived so long in a
British camp, has seen so few men but British soldiers, and has felt
so little law but British military law in India, that very naturally
Hathi gets the military law and the Jungle law mixed up.
Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump
is--Obey!
else one of the little fears, or the BIG FEAR, will get you!
But this is the Law of the Camp, and as beautifully untrue of the
Jungle, and of my woods and pastures, as Hathi’s account of how,
before Fear came, the First of the Tigers ate grass. Still,
Nebuchadnezzar ate grass, and he also grew eagles’ feathers upon his
body. Perhaps the First of the Tigers had feathers instead of fur,
though Hathi is silent as to that, saying only that the First of the
Tigers had no stripes. It might not harm us to remember, however, that
nowadays--as was true in the days of the Sabretooth tiger (he is a
fossil)--tigers eat grass only when they feel very bad, or when they
find a bunch of catnip. The wild animals that Hathi knew are more
marvelous than the Wild Animals I Have Known, but Hathi’s knowledge of
Jungle law is all stuff and nonsense.
There is no ogre, Fear, no command, Obey, but the widest kind of a
personal permit to live--joyously, abundantly, intensely, frugally at
times, painfully at times, and always with large liberty; until,
suddenly, the time comes to Let Live, when death is almost sure to be
instant, with little pain, and less fear.
But am I not generalizing from the single case of the fox and hounds?
or at most from two cases--the hen and the hawk? And are not these
cases far from typical? Fox and hound are unusually matched, both of
them are canines, and so closely related that the dog has been known
to let a she-fox go unharmed at the end of an exciting hunt. Suppose
the fox were a defenseless rabbit, what of fear and terror then?
Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of southern New Jersey.
The rabbit seldom runs in blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid,
and as gentle as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set of
legs was never bestowed by nature than the little cotton-tail’s. They
are as wings compared with the deformities that bear up the ordinary
rabbit hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear map of the
country in his head,--its stumps, rail-piles, cat-brier tangles, and
narrow rabbit-roads,--with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well run
his usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as even, the
chances quite as good, and the contest as interesting, to him as to
Reynard.
I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and let a hound pass
yelping within a few feet of him, but as ready as a hair-trigger
should he be discovered. I have seen him leap for his life as the dog
sighted him, and bounding like a ball across the stubble, disappear in
the woods, the hound within two jumps of his flashing tail. I have
waited at the end of the wood-road for the runners to come back, down
the home-stretch, for the finish. On they go for a quarter, or perhaps
half a mile, through the woods, the baying of the hound faint and
intermittent in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again,
louder now. They have turned the course. I wait.
The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed, for the voice of the hound
is only an echo, not unlike the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging
bell. The leaves stir as a wood-mouse scurries from his stump; an
acorn rattles down; then in the winding wood-road I hear the _pit-pat,
pit-pat_, of soft furry feet, and there at the bend is the rabbit. He
stops, rises high up on his haunches, and listens. He drops again upon
all fours, scratches himself behind the ear, reaches over the cart-rut
for a nip of sassafras, hops a little nearer, and throws his big ears
forward in quick alarm, for he sees me, and, as if something had
exploded under him, he kicks into the air and is off,--leaving a
pretty tangle for the dog to unravel later on, by this mighty jump to
the side.
My children and the man were witnesses recently of an exciting, and,
for this section of Massachusetts, a novel race, which, but for them,
must certainly have ended fatally. The boys had picked up the morning
fall of chestnuts, and were coming through the wood-lot where the man
was chopping, when down the hillside toward them rushed a little
chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with terror, for close behind him, with
the easy wavy motion of a shadow, glided a dark brown animal, which
the man took on the instant for a mink, but which must have been a
large weasel or a pine marten. When almost at the feet of the boys,
and about to be seized by the marten, the squeaking chipmunk ran up a
tree. Up glided the marten, up for twenty feet. Then the chipmunk
jumped. It was a fearfully close call. The marten did not dare to
jump, but turned and started down, when the man intercepted him with a
stick. Around and around the tree he dodged, growling and snarling and
avoiding the stick, not a bit abashed, stubbornly holding his own,
until forced to seek refuge among the branches. Meanwhile the
terrified chipmunk had recovered his nerve and sat quietly watching
the sudden turn of affairs from a near-by stump.
I climbed into the cupola of the barn this morning, as I frequently do
throughout the winter, and brought down a dazed junco that was beating
his life out up there against the window-panes. He lay on his back in
my open hand, either feigning death or really powerless with fear. His
eyes were closed, his whole tiny body throbbing convulsively with his
throbbing heart. Taking him to the door, I turned him over and gave
him a gentle toss. Instantly his wings flashed, they zigzagged him for
a yard or two, then bore him swiftly around the corner of the house
and dropped him in the midst of his fellows, where they were feeding
upon the lawn. He shaped himself up a little and fell to picking with
the others.
From a state of collapse the laws of his being had brought the bird
into normal behavior as quickly and completely as the collapsed rubber
ball is rounded by the laws of its being. The memory of the fright
seems to have been an impression exactly like the dent in the rubber
ball--as if it had never been.
Yet the analogy only half holds. Memories of the most tenacious kind
the animals surely have; but little or no voluntary, unaided power to
use them. Memory is largely a mechanical, a crank process with the
animals, a kind of magic-lantern show, where the concrete slide is
necessary for the picture on the screen; else the past as the future
hangs a blank. The dog will sometimes seem to cherish a grudge; so
will the elephant. Some one injures or wrongs him, and the huge beast
harbors the memory, broods it, and waits his opportunity for revenge.
Yet the records of these cases usually show the creature to be living
with the object of his hatred--keeper or animal--and that his memory
goes no further back than the present moment, than the sight of the
enemy; memory always taking an immediate, concrete shape.
At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke of great sleepy,
bald-faced oxen, that look as much alike as two blackbirds. Their
driver knows them apart; but as they stand there bound to one another
by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it would puzzle anybody else
to tell Buck from Berry. But not if he approach them wearing an
overcoat. At sight of me in an overcoat the off ox will snort and back
and thresh about in terror, twisting the head of his yoke-fellow,
nearly breaking his neck, and trampling him miserably. But the nigh ox
is used to it. He chews and blinks away placidly, keeps his feet the
best he can, and doesn’t try to understand at all why great-coats
should so frighten his cud-chewing brother. I will drop off my coat
and go up immediately to smooth the muzzles of both oxen, blinking
sleepily while the lumber is being loaded on.
Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox was badly frightened by a
big woolly coat, the sight or smell of which suggested to the creature
some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a bear. The memory
remained, but beyond recall except in the presence of its first cause,
the great-coat.
To us, and momentarily to the lower animals, no doubt, there is a
monstrous, a desperate aspect to nature--night and drouth and cold,
the lightning, the hurricane, the earthquake: phases of nature that to
the scientific mind are often appalling, and to the unthinking and
superstitious are usually sinister, cruel, personal, leading to much
dark talk of banshees and of the mysteries of Providence--as if there
were still necessity to justify the ways of God to man! We are
clutched by these terrors even as the junco was clutched in my goblin
hand. When the mighty fingers open, we zigzag, dazed from the danger;
but fall to planning, before the tremors of the earth have ceased, how
we can build a greater and finer city on the ruins of the old. Upon
the crumbled heap of the second Messina the third will rise, and upon
that the fourth, unless the quaking site is forever swallowed by the
sea. Terror can kill the living, but it cannot hinder them from
forgetting, or prevent them from hoping, or, for more than an instant,
stop them from doing. Such is the law of being--the law of the Jungle,
of Heaven, of my pastures, of myself, and of the little junco. The
light of the sun may burn out, motion may cease, matter vanish away,
and life come to an end; but so long as life continues it must
continue to assert itself, to obey the law of being--to multiply and
replenish the earth, and rejoice.
Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece. The horse in my
stable, the robin, the toad, the beetle, the vine in my garden, the
garden itself, and I together with them all, come out of the same
divine dust; we all breathe the same divine breath; we have our beings
under the same divine law; only they do not know that the law, the
breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know, and yet can so readily
forget such knowledge, can so hardly cease from being, can so
eternally find the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me, how
soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear,
all memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the
necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience what joy!
The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every
passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying
hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are so many
emotions reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come,
they pass utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old
or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child,--asleep
in winter, awake in summer,--a face of life and health always, if we
will but see what pushes the falling leaves off, what lies in slumber
under the covers of the snow; if we will but feel the strength of the
north wind, and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as they
course the turning, tangling paths of the woodlands in their race with
one another against the record set by Life.
II
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
It is one of the wonders of the world that so few books are written.
With every human being a possible book, and with many a human being
capable of becoming more books than the world could contain, is it not
amazing that the books of men are so few? And so stupid!
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the
four volumes of Agassiz’s “Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States.” I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster,
had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are an
excessively learned, a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit of
vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the
turtles of the United States, and their embryology. The work was
published more than half a century ago (by subscription); but it
looked old beyond its years--massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from
the rocks. It was difficult to feel that Agassiz could have written
it--could have built it, grown it, for the laminated pile had
required for its growth the patience and painstaking care of a process
of nature, as if it were a kind of printed coral reef. Agassiz do
this? The big, human, magnetic man at work upon these pages of capital
letters, Roman figures, brackets, and parentheses in explanation of
the pages of diagrams and plates! I turned away with a sigh from the
weary learning, to read the preface.
When a great man writes a great book he usually flings a preface after
it, and thereby saves it, sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not,
the best things in most books are their prefaces. It was not, however,
the quality of the preface to these great volumes that interested me,
but rather the wicked waste of durable book-material that went to its
making. Reading down through the catalogue of human names and of
thanks for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:--
“In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also
received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of
Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro’.” And then it hastens on with the
thanks in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and
only thing of real importance in all the world.
Turtles no doubt are important, extremely important, embryologically,
as part of our genealogical tree; but they are away down among the
roots of the tree as compared with the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of
Burlington. I happen to know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me
he looks very interesting. Indeed, any reverend gentleman of his name
and day who would catch turtles for Agassiz must have been
interesting. And as for D. Henry Thoreau, we know he was interesting.
The rarest wood-turtle in the United States was not so rare a specimen
as this gentleman of Walden Woods and Concord. We are glad even for
this line in the preface about him; glad to know that he tried, in
this untranscendental way, to serve his day and generation. If Agassiz
had only put a chapter in his turtle book about it! But this is the
material he wasted, this and more of the same human sort; for the “Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro’” (at the end of the quotation) was, some
years later, an old college professor of mine, who told me a few of
the particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars which Agassiz
should have found a place for in his big book. The preface, in another
paragraph, says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge
by the thousands--brief and scanty recognition! For that is not the
only thing this gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not turtles,
but turtle _eggs_ to Cambridge--_brought_ them, I should say; and all
there is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a sectional
drawing of a bit of the mesoblastic layer of one of the eggs!
Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that mesoblastic drawing, or some
other equally important drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg
to draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when
he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, always gets it, for
he gets some one else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what makes
me sad and impatient is that he did not think it worth while to tell
about the getting of it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of
what might have been an exceedingly interesting human book.
It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or
interesting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them.
Nothing at all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to
find them. So with anything else,--good copper stock, for instance, if
you should chance to want it, and should chance to be along when they
chance to be giving it away. But if you want copper stock, say of C &
H quality, _when_ you want it, and are bound to have it, then you must
command more than a college professor’s salary. And likewise,
precisely, when it is turtle eggs that you are bound to have.
Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them--not a minute
over three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does
not seem exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hen eggs
only three hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have had
his private turtle-coop in Harvard Yard; and provided he could have
made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, like hens, to
meat-scraps and the warm mash. The professor’s problem was not to get
from a mud turtle’s nest in the back yard to the table in the
laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in Cambridge to some pond
when the turtles were laying, and back to the laboratory within the
limited time. And this, in the days of Darius Green, might have called
for nice and discriminating work--as it did.
Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his “Contributions.” He
had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed,
finished but for one small yet very important bit of observation: he
had carried the turtle egg through every stage of its development with
the single exception of one--the very earliest--that stage of first
cleavages, when the cell begins to segment, immediately upon its being
laid. That beginning stage had brought the “Contributions” to a halt.
To get eggs that were fresh enough to show the incubation at this
period had been impossible.
There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might
have got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory
to some pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should
catch the reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in
all of that--as those who are college professors and naturalists
know. As this was quite out of the question, he did the easiest
thing--asked Mr. Jenks of Middleboro’ to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks
got them. Agassiz knew all about his getting of them; and I say the
strange and irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth
while to tell us about it, at least in the preface to his monumental
work.
It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college
professor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.
“I was principal of an academy, during my younger years,” he began,
“and was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly
filled the doorway of the room, smiled to the four corners of the
room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor
Agassiz.
“Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it
to me across the room.
“Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would
I get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were
laid? Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did
it only once.
“When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew where I was going to get
them. I had got turtle eggs there before--at a particular patch of
sandy shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.
“Three hours was the limit. From my railroad station to Boston was
thirty-five miles; from the pond to the station was perhaps three or
four miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles.
Forty miles in round numbers! We figured it all out before he
returned, and got the trip down to two hours,--record time: driving
from the pond to the station; from the station by express train to
Boston; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This left an easy hour for
accidents and delays.
“Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what we
didn’t figure on was the turtle.” And he paused abruptly.
“Young man,” he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly hiding
the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, “young man,
when _you_ go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! no!
that’s bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle--and youth seldom
ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got
those turtle eggs to Agassiz.
“It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long
before there was any likelihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager
for the quest, and so fearful of failure, that I started out to watch
at the pond fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles might
be expected to lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May 14.
“A little before dawn--along near three o’clock--I would drive over to
the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some
thick cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my
kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here
among the cedars I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good
season to open the academy for the morning session.
“And so the watch began.
“I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept
to my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and
melt away, they would stick up their heads through the quiet water;
and as the sun slanted down over the ragged rim of treetops, the slow
things would float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out and
doze comfortably on the hummocks and snags.
“What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and unbreathed!
The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields--of
water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste them
yet, and hear them yet--the still, large sounds of the waking day--the
pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping
anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the
thought of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare
mornings!
“But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no
desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon
the sand as if she intended to help on the great professor’s book. The
embryology of her eggs was of small concern to her; her Contribution
to the Natural History of the United States could wait.
“And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th of May; June 1st found
me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every
morning, Sundays and rainy days alike. June 1st was a perfect morning,
but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a
matter strictly of next year.
“I began to grow uneasy,--not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns
his lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to
fear lest, by some subtle sense, my presence might somehow be known to
the creatures; that they might have gone to some other place to lay,
while I was away at the schoolroom.
“I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the
second week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning,
and along with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early
morning vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the
same clump of cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month
of morning mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my
bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those
turtle eggs; and I would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no
use bringing a china nest-egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such
delicate suggestion.
“Then came the mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little
after three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from
the level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it
any morning before.
“This was the day. I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can
hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is
nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully believe, and I believe
they can be sharpened by cultivation. For a month I had been brooding
over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse of
things that the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could
the clods and I.
“Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, understood, I slipped
eagerly into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large
pickerel ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his
wake rose the head of an enormous turtle. Swinging slowly around, the
creature headed straight for the shore, and without a pause scrambled
out on the sand.
“She was about the size of a big scoop-shovel; but that was not what
excited me, so much as her manner, and the gait at which she moved;
for there was method in it and fixed purpose. On she came, shuffling
over the sand toward the higher open fields, with a hurried,
determined see-saw that was taking her somewhere in particular, and
that was bound to get her there on time.
“I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic
footprints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the
Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when
compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.
“But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a
narrow cow-path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow
cow-path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into
the high wet grass along the fence.
“I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a
trail of flattened grass a foot and a half wide. I wanted to stand
up,--and I don’t believe I could have turned her back with a
rail,--but I was afraid if she saw me that she might return
indefinitely to the pond; so on I went, flat to the ground, squeezing
through the lower rails of the fence, as if the field beyond were a
melon-patch. It was nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable
pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very discouraging. They were
excessively wet vines and briery. I pulled my coat-sleeves as far over
my fists as I could get them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging
from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped fiercely but silently
on after the turtle.
“She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of
this dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove
to, warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me, at
a clip that was thrilling. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore
down across the corner of the pasture, across the powdery public road,
and on to a fence along a field of young corn.
“I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before
wallowing through the deep dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a
large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows and saw the
turtle stop, and begin to paw about in the loose soft soil. She was
going to lay!
“I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that
place, and the other place--the eternally feminine!--But _the_ place,
evidently, was hard to find. What could a female turtle do with a
whole field of possible nests to choose from? Then at last she found
it, and whirling about, she backed quickly at it, and, tail first,
began to bury herself before my staring eyes.
“Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those moments
came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest, most
dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were hours
long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the
sand along shore. And how long would she stay there? and how should I
know if she had laid an egg?
“I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened
fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.
“Four o’clock! Why, there was no train until seven! No train for three
hours! The eggs would spoil! Then with a rush it came over me that
this was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven o’clock
train,--none till after nine.
“I think I should have fainted had not the turtle just then begun
crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; but there, there in the sand,
were the eggs! and Agassiz! and the great book! And I cleared the
fence, and the forty miles that lay between me and Cambridge, at a
single jump. He should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should go
to Agassiz by seven o’clock, if I had to gallop every mile of the way.
Forty miles! Any horse could cover it in three hours, if he had to;
and upsetting the astonished turtle, I scooped out her round white
eggs.
“On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I laid them, with what
care my trembling fingers allowed; filled in between them with more
sand; so with another layer to the rim; and covering all smoothly with
more sand, I ran back for my horse.
“That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles had laid, and that he
was to get those eggs to Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the
road on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, doubling
me up before the dashboard, the pail of eggs miraculously lodged
between my knees.
“I let him out. If only he could keep this pace all the way to
Cambridge! or even halfway there; and I would have time to finish the
trip on foot. I shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand,
the pail of eggs with the other, not daring to get off my knees,
though the bang on them, as we pounded down the wood-road, was
terrific. But nothing must happen to the eggs; they must not be
jarred, or even turned over in the sand before they came to Agassiz.
“In order to get out on the pike it was necessary to drive back away
from Boston toward the town. We had nearly covered the distance, and
were rounding a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, ahead
of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the quick sharp whistle of a
locomotive.
“What did it mean? Then followed the _puff, puff, puff_, of a starting
train. But what train? Which way going? And jumping to my feet for a
longer view, I pulled into a side road, that paralleled the track, and
headed hard for the station.
“We reeled along. The station was still out of sight, but from behind
the bushes that shut it from view, rose the smoke of a moving engine.
It was perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head on, and
topping a little hill I swept down upon a freight train, the black
smoke pouring from the stack, as the mighty creature got itself
together for its swift run down the rails.
“My horse was on the gallop, going with the track, and straight toward
the coming train. The sight of it almost maddened me--the bare thought
of it, on the road to Boston! On I went; on it came, a half--a quarter
of a mile between us, when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced
field with only a level stretch of sod between me and the engine.
“With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, I swung him into the
field and sent him straight as an arrow for the track. That train
should carry me and my eggs to Boston!
“The engineer pulled the rope. He saw me standing up in the rig, saw
my hat blow off, saw me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my
teeth, and he jerked out a succession of sharp halts! But it was he
who should halt, not I; and on we went, the horse with a flounder
landing the carriage on top of the track.
“The train was already grinding to a stop; but before it was near a
standstill, I had backed off the track, jumped out, and, running down
the rails with the astonished engineers gaping at me, swung aboard the
cab.
“They offered no resistance; they hadn’t had time. Nor did they have
the disposition, for I looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless,
dew-soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were a baby
or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand.
“‘Crazy,’ the fireman muttered, looking to the engineer for his cue.
“I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy now.
“‘Throw her wide open,’ I commanded. ‘Wide open! These are fresh
turtle eggs for Professor Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them
before breakfast.’
“Then they knew I was crazy, and evidently thinking it best to humor
me, threw the throttle wide open, and away we went.
“I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing unconcernedly in the open
field, and gave a smile to my crew. That was all I could give them,
and hold myself and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. And
they smiled through their smut at me, though one of them held fast to
his shovel, while the other kept his hand upon a big ugly wrench.
Neither of them spoke to me, but above the roar of the swaying engine
I caught enough of their broken talk to understand that they were
driving under a full head of steam, with the intention of handing me
over to the Boston police, as perhaps the safest way of disposing of
me.
“I was only afraid that they would try it at the next station. But
that station whizzed past without a bit of slack, and the next, and
the next; when it came over me that this was the through freight,
which should have passed in the night, and was making up lost time.
“Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept me from shaking hands
with both men at this discovery. But I beamed at them; and they at me.
I was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet was wrinkling my
diaphragm with spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the
engineer, with a look that said, ‘See the lunatic grin; he likes it!’
“He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me as they took the
rails! How the rushing wind in my ears sang to me! From my stand on
the fireman’s side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track
just ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to leap into the
throat of the mile-devouring monster. The joy of it! of seeing space
swallowed by the mile!