been taught every manner of stirring, and this unwonted exercise of
being still takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts me
painfully out of breath in my soul. “Wisdom is the principal thing,”
my other teachers would repeat, “therefore get wisdom, but keep
exceedingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short. There are
_only_ twenty-four hours to the day. The Devil finds mischief for
idle hands to do. Let us then be up and doing”--all of this at random
from one of their lectures on “The Simple Life, or the Pace that
Kills.”
Of course there is more or less of truth in this teaching of theirs. A
little leisure has no doubt become a dangerous thing--unless one spend
it talking or golfing or automobiling, or aëroplaning or
elephant-killing, or in some other diverting manner; otherwise one’s
nerves, like pulled candy, might set and cease to quiver; or one might
even have time to think.
“Keep going,”--I quote from another of their lectures,--“keep going;
it is the only certainty you have against knowing whither you are
going.” I learned that lesson well. See me go--with half a breakfast
and the whole morning paper; with less of lunch and the 4:30 edition.
But I balance my books, snatch the evening edition, catch my car, get
into my clothes, rush out to dinner, and spend the evening lecturing
or being lectured to. I do everything but think.
But suppose I did think? It could only disturb me--my politics, or
ethics, or religion. I had better let the editors and professors and
preachers think for me. The editorial office is such a quiet
thought-inducing place; as quiet as a boiler factory; and the thinkers
there, from editor-in-chief to the printer’s devil, are so thoughtful
for the size of the circulation! And the college professors, they have
the time and the cloistered quiet needed. But they have pitiful
salaries, and enormous needs, and their social status to worry over,
and themes to correct, and a fragmentary year to contend with, and
Europe to see every summer, and-- Is it right to ask them, with all
this, to think? We will ask the preachers instead. They are set apart
among the divine and eternal things; they are dedicated to thought;
they have covenanted with their creeds to think; it is their business
to study, but, “to study to be careful and harmless.”
It may be, after all, that my politics and ethics and religion need
disturbing, as the soil about my fruit trees needs it. Is it the tree?
or is it the soil that I am trying to grow? Is it I, or my politics,
my ethics, my religion? I will go over to the toad, no matter the
cost. I will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the worry of
work even less. He has all time and no task; he is not obliged to
labor for a living, much less to think. My other teachers all are;
they are all professional thinkers; their thoughts are words:
editorials, lectures, sermons,--livings. I read them or listen to
them. The toad sits out the hour silent, thinking, but I know not
what, nor need to know. To think God’s thoughts after Him is not so
high as to think my own after myself. Why then ask this of the toad,
and so interrupt these of mine? Instead we will sit in silence and
watch Altair burn along the shore of the sky, and overhead Arcturus,
and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the apple
tree.
The darkness has come. The toad is scarcely a blur between me and the
stars. It is a long look from him, ten feet above me, on past the
fireflies to Arcturus and the regal splendors of the Northern
Crown--as deep and as far a look as the night can give, and as only
the night can give. Against the distant stars, these ten feet between
me and the toad shrink quite away; and against the light far off
yonder near the pole, the firefly’s little lamp becomes a brave but a
very lesser beacon.
There are only twenty-four hours to the day--to the day and the night!
And how few are left to that quiet time between the light and the
dark! Ours is a hurried twilight. We quit work to sleep; we wake up to
work again. We measure the day by a clock; we measure the night by an
alarm clock. Life is all ticked off. We are murdered by the second.
What we need is a day and a night with wider margins--a dawn that
comes more slowly, and a longer lingering twilight. Life has too
little selvage; it is too often raw and raveled. Room and quiet and
verge are what we want, not more dials for time, nor more figures for
the dials. We have things enough, too, more than enough; it is space
for the things, perspective, and the right measure for the things that
we lack--a measure not one foot short of the distance between us and
the stars.
If we get anything out of the fields worth while, it will be this
measure, this largeness, and quiet. It may be only an owl or a
tree-toad that we go forth to see, but how much more we find--things
we cannot hear by day, things long, long forgotten, things we never
thought or dreamed before.
The day is none too short, the night none too long; but all too narrow
is the edge between.
IV
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS
The ragged quilt of snow had slipped from the shoulders of the slopes,
the gray face of the maple swamp showed a flush of warmth, and the
air, out of the south to-day, breathed life, the life of buds and
catkins, of sappy bark, oozing gum, and running water--the life of
spring; and through the faintly blending breaths, as a faster breeze
ran down the hills, I caught a new and unmistakable odor, single,
pointed, penetrating, the sign to me of an open door in the wood-lot,
to me, indeed, the Open Sesame of spring.
“When does the spring come? And who brings it?” asks the watcher in
the woods. “To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders and the
pussy-willows begin to swell,” writes Mr. Burroughs, “when the ice
breaks up on the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting
northward.” So I have written, also; written verses even to the
pussy-willow, to the bluebird, and to the hepatica, as spring’s
harbingers; but never a line yet to celebrate this first forerunner of
them all, the gentle early skunk. For it is his presence, blown far
across the February snow, that always ends my New England winter and
brings the spring. Of course there are difficulties, poetically, with
the wood-pussy. I don’t remember that even Whitman tried the theme.
But, perhaps, the good gray poet never met a spring skunk in the
streets of Camden. The animal is comparatively rare in the densely
populated cities of New Jersey.
It is rare enough here in Massachusetts; at least, it used to be;
though I think, from my observations, that the skunk is quietly on the
increase in New England. I feel very sure of this as regards the
neighborhood immediate to my farm.
This is an encouraging fact, but hard to be believed, no doubt. I,
myself, was three or four years coming to the conviction, often
fearing that this little creature, like so many others of our thinning
woods, was doomed to disappear. But that was before I turned to
keeping hens. I am writing these words as a naturalist and
nature-lover, and I am speaking also with the authority of one who
keeps hens. Though a man give his life to the study of the skunk, and
have not hens, he is nothing. You cannot say, “Go to, I will write an
essay about my skunks.” There is no such anomaly as professional
nature-loving, as vocational nature-writing. You cannot go into your
woods and count your skunks. Not until you have kept hens can you
know, can you even have the will to believe, the number of skunks that
den in the dark on the purlieus of your farm.
That your neighbors keep hens is not enough. My neighbors’ hens were
from the first a stone of stumbling to me. That is a peculiarity of
next-door hens. It would have been better, I thought, if my neighbors
had had no hens. I had moved in among these half-farmer folk, and
while I found them intelligent enough, I immediately saw that their
attitude toward nature was wholly wrong. They seemed to have no
conception of the beauty of nature. Their feeling for the skunk was
typical: they hated the skunk with a perfect hatred, a hatred
implacable, illogical, and unpoetical, it seemed to me, for it was
born of their chicken-breeding.
Here were these people in the lap of nature, babes in nature’s arms,
knowing only to draw at her breasts and gurgle, or, the milk failing,
to kick and cry. Mother Nature! She was only a bottle and rubber
nipple, only turnips and hay and hens to them. Nature a mother? a
spirit? a soul? fragrance? harmony? beauty? Only when she cackled like
a hen.
Now there is something in the cackle of a hen, a very great deal,
indeed, if it is the cackle of your own hen. But the morning stars did
not cackle together, and there is still a solemn music in the
universe, a music that is neither an anvil nor a barnyard chorus. Life
ought to mean more than turnips, more than hay, more than hens to
these rural people. It ought, and it must. I had come among them. And
what else was my coming but a divine providence, a high and holy
mission? I had been sent unto this people to preach the gospel of the
beauty of nature. And I determined that my first text should be the
skunk.
All of this, likewise, was previous to the period of my hens.
It was now, as I have said, my second February upon the farm, when the
telltale wind brought down this poignant message from the wood-lot.
The first spring skunk was out! I knew the very stump out of which he
had come--the stump of his winter den. Yes, and the day before, I had
actually met the creature in the woods, for he had been abroad now
something like a week. He was rooting among the exposed leaves in a
sunny dip, and I approached to within five feet of him, where I stood
watching while he grubbed in the thawing earth. Buried to the
shoulders in the leaves, he was so intent upon his labor that he got
no warning of my presence. My neighbors would have knocked him over
with a club,--would have done it eagerly, piously, as unto the Lord.
What did the Almighty make such vermin for, anyway? No one will phrase
an answer; but every one will act promptly, as by command and
revelation.
I stood several minutes watching, before the little wood-pussy paused
and pulled out his head in order to try the wind. How shocked he was!
He had been caught off his guard, and instantly snapped himself into a
startled hump, for the whiff he got on the wind said _danger!_--and
nigh at hand! Throwing his pointed nose straight into the air, and
swinging it quickly to the four quarters, he fixed my direction, and
turning his back upon me, tumbled off in a dreadful hurry for home.
This interesting, though somewhat tame, experience, would have worn
the complexion of an adventure for my neighbors, a bare escape,--a
ruined Sunday suit, or, at least, a lost jumper or overalls. I had
never lost so much as a roundabout in all my life. My neighbors had
had innumerable passages with this ramping beast, most of them on the
edge of the dark, and many of them verging hard upon the tragic. I had
small patience with it all. I wished the whole neighborhood were with
me, that I might take this harmless little wood-pussy up in my arms
and teach them again the first lesson of the Kingdom of Heaven, and of
this earthly Paradise, too, and incidentally put an end forever to
these tales of Sunday clothes and nights of banishment in the barn.
As nobody was present to see, of course I did not pick the wood-pussy
up. I did not need to prove to myself the baselessness of these wild
misgivings; nor did I wish, without good cause, further to frighten
the innocent creature. I had met many a skunk before this, and nothing
of note ever had happened. Here was one, taken suddenly and unawares,
and what did he do? He merely winked and blinked vacantly at me over
the snow, trying vainly to adjust his eyes to the hard white daylight,
and then timidly made off as fast as his pathetic legs could carry
him, fetching a compass far around toward his den.
I accompanied him, partly to see him safely home, but more to study
him on the way, for my neighbors would demand something else than
theory and poetry of my new gospel: they would require facts. Facts
they should have.
I had been a long time coming to my mind concerning the skunk. I had
been thinking years about him; and during the previous summer (my
second here on the farm) I had made a careful study of the creature’s
habits, so that even now I had in hand material of considerable bulk
and importance, showing the very great usefulness of the animal.
Indeed, I was about ready to embody my beliefs and observations in a
monograph, setting forth the need of national protection--of a
Committee of One Hundred, say, of continental scope, to look after
the preservation and further introduction of the skunk as the friend
and ally of man, as the most useful of all our insectivorous
creatures, bird or beast.
What, may I ask, was this one of mine doing here on the edge of the
February woods? He was grubbing. He had been driven out of his winter
bed by hunger, and he had been driven out into the open snowy sunshine
by the cold, because the nights (he is nocturnal) were still so chill
that the soil would freeze at night past his ploughing. Thus it
chanced, at high noon, that I came upon him, grubbing among my soft,
wet leaves, and grubbing for nothing less than obnoxious insects!
My heart warmed to him. He was ragged and thin, he was even weak, I
thought, by the way he staggered as he made off. It had been a hard
winter for men and for skunks, particularly hard for skunks on account
of the unbroken succession of deep snows. This skunk had been frozen
into his den, to my certain knowledge, since the last of November.
Nature is a severe mother. The hunger of this starved creature! To be
put to bed without even the broth, and to be locked in, half awake,
for nearly three months. Poor little beastie! Perhaps he hadn’t
intelligence enough to know that those gnawings within him were pain.
Perhaps our sympathy is all agley. Perhaps. But we are bound to feel
it when we watch him satisfying his pangs with the pestiferous insects
of our own wood-lot.
I saw him safely home, and then returned to examine the long furrows
he had ploughed out among the leaves. I found nothing to show what
species of insects he had eaten, but it was enough to know that he had
been bent on bugs--gypsy-moth eggs, maybe, on the underside of some
stick or stone, where they had escaped the keen eye of the
tree-warden. We are greatly exercised over this ghastly caterpillar.
But is it entomologists, and national appropriations, and imported
parasites that we need to check the ravaging plague? These things
might help, doubtless; but I was intending to show in my monograph
that it is only skunks we need; it is the scarcity of skunks that is
the whole trouble--and the abundance of cats.
My heart warmed, I say, as I watched my one frail skunk here by the
snowy woodside, and it thrilled as I pledged him protection, as I
acknowledged his right to the earth, his right to share life and
liberty and the pursuit of happiness with me. He could have only a
small part in my life, doubtless, but I could enter largely into his,
and we could live in amity together--in amity here on _this_ bit of
the divine earth, anyhow, if nowhere else under heaven.
This was along in February, and I was beginning to set my hens.
A few days later, in passing through the wood-lot, I was surprised and
delighted to see three skunks in the near vicinity of the
den,--residents evidently of the stump! “Think!” I exclaimed to
myself, “think of the wild flavor to this tame patch of woods! And the
creatures so rare, too, and beneficial! They multiply rapidly,
though,” I thought, “and I ought to have a fine lot of them by fall. I
shall stock the farm with them.”
This was no momentary enthusiasm. In a book that I had published some
years before I had stoutly championed the skunk. “Like every predatory
creature,” I wrote, “the skunk more than balances his debt for corn
and chickens by his destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon
insects and mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by digging
out the nests and eating the young. But we forget our debt when the
chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever learn to
say, when the red-tail swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get
into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry trees, and when the
skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving dinner--shall we
ever learn to love and understand the fitness of things out-of-doors
enough to say, ‘But then, poor beastie, thou maun live’?”
Since writing those warm lines I had made further studies upon the
skunk, all establishing the more firmly my belief that there is a big
balance to the credit of the animal. Meantime, too, I had bought this
small farm, with a mowing field and an eight-acre wood-lot on it; with
certain liens and attachments on it, also, due to human mismanagement
and to interference with the course of Nature in the past. Into the
orchard, for instance, had come the San José scale; into the wood-lot
had crawled the gypsy-moth--human blunders! Under the sod of the
mowing land had burrowed the white grub of the June-bugs. On the whole
fourteen acres rested the black shadow of an insect plague. Nature had
been interfered with and thwarted. Man had taken things into his own
clumsy hands. It should be so no longer on these fourteen acres. I
held the deed to these, not for myself, nor for my heirs, but for
Nature. Over these few acres the winds of heaven should blow free, the
birds should sing, the flowers should grow, and through the gloaming,
unharmed and unaffrighted, the useful skunk should take his own sweet
way.
The preceding summer had been a season remarkable for the ravages of
the June-bug. The turf in my mowing went all brown and dead suddenly
in spite of frequent rains. No cause for the trouble showed on the
surface of the field. You could start and with your hands roll up the
tough sod by the yard, as if a clean-cutting knife had been run under
it about an inch below the crowns. It peeled off under your feet in
great flakes. An examination of the soil brought to light the big fat
grubs of the June-bugs, millions of the ghastly monsters! They had
gone under the grass, eating off the roots so evenly and so
thoroughly that not a square foot of green remained in the whole
field.
It was here that the skunk did his good work (I say “the skunk,” for
there was only one on the farm that summer, I think). I would go into
the field morning after morning to count the holes he had made during
the night in his hunt for the grubs. One morning I got over a hundred
holes, all of them dug since last sundown, and each hole representing
certainly one grub, possibly more; for the skunk would hear or smell
his prey at work in the soil before attempting to dig.
A hundred grubs for one night, by one skunk! It took me only a little
while to figure out the enormous number of grubs that a fair-sized
family of skunks would destroy in a summer. A family of skunks would
rid my farm of the pest in a single summer and make inroads on the
grubs of the entire community.
Ah! the community! the ignorant, short-sighted, nature-hating
community! What chance had a family of skunks in this community? And
the fire of my mission burned hot within me.
And so did my desire for more skunks. My hay crop was short, was
_nil_, in fact, for the hayfield was as barren of green as the
hen-yard. I had to have it ploughed and laid down again to grass. And
all because of this scarcity of skunks.
Now, as the green of the springing blades began to show through the
melting snow, it was with immense satisfaction that I thought of the
three skunks under the stump. That evening I went across to my
neighbor’s, the milkman’s, and had a talk with him over the
desirability, the necessity indeed, of encouraging the skunks about
us. I told him a good many things about these harmless and useful
animals that, with all his farming and chicken-raising, he had never
known.
But these rural folk are quite difficult. It is hard to teach them
anything worth while, so hopelessly surrounded are they with
things--common things. If I could only get them into a college
class-room--removed some way from hens and hoes--I might, at least,
put them into a receptive attitude. But that cannot be. Perhaps,
indeed, I demand too much of them. For, after all, it takes a
naturalist, a lover of the out-of-doors, to appreciate the beautiful
adjustments in nature. A mere farmer can hardly do it. One needs a
keen eye, but a certain aloofness of soul also, for the deeper
meaning and poetry of nature. One needs to spend a vacation, at least,
in the wilderness and solitary place, where no other human being has
ever come, and there, where the animals know man only as a brother, go
to the school of the woods and study the wild folk, one by one, until
he discovers them personally, temperamentally, all their likes and
dislikes, their little whimseys, freaks, and fancies--all of this,
there, far removed from the cankering cares of hens and chickens, for
the sake of the right attitude toward nature.
My nearest neighbor had never been to the wilderness. He lacked
imagination, too, and a ready pen. Yet he promised not to kill my
three skunks in the stump; a rather doubtful pledge, perhaps, but at
least a beginning toward the new earth I hoped to see.
Now it was perfectly well known to me that skunks will eat chickens if
they have to. But I had had chickens--a few hens--and had never been
bothered by skunks. I kept my hens shut up, of course, in a pen--the
only place for a hen outside of a pie. I knew, too, that skunks like
honey, that they had even tampered with my hives, reaching in at
night through the wide summer entrances and tearing out the brood
combs. But I never lost much by these depredations. What I felt more
was the destruction of the wild bees and wasps and ground-nesting
birds, by the skunks.
But these were trifles! What were a few chickens, bees,
yellow-jackets, and even the occasional bird’s-nest, against the
hay-devouring grubs of the June-bug! And as for the characteristic
odor which drifted in now and again with the evening breeze, that had
come to have a pleasant quality for me, floating down across my two
wide acres of mowing.
February passed gently into March, and my chickens began to hatch.
Every man must raise chickens at some period of his life, and I was
starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my specialty heretofore,
making two blades grow where there had been one very thin one. But
once your two acres are laid down, and you have a stump full of
skunks, near by, against the ravages of the June-bugs, then there is
nothing for you but chickens or something, while you wait. I got Rhode
Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,--for what is the use of chickens
if you cannot take them to the show?
The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls of yellow, with their
pedigrees showing right through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew!
I never lost one. And now the second batch of sitters would soon be
ready to come off.
Then one day, at the morning count, five of one hen’s brood were gone!
I counted again. I counted all the other broods. Five were gone!
My nearest neighbor had cats, mere barn cats, as many as ten, at the
least. I had been suspicious of those cats from the first. So I got a
gun. Then more of my chickens disappeared. I could count only
forty-seven.
I shifted the coop, wired it in, and stretched a wire net over the top
of the run. Nothing could get in, nor could a chicken get out. All the
time I was waiting for the cat.
A few nights after the moving of the coop a big hole was dug under the
wire fence of the run, another hole under the coop, and the entire
brood of Rhode Island Reds was taken.
Then I took the gun and cut across the pasture to my neighbor’s.
“Hard luck,” he said. “It’s a big skunk. Here, you take these traps,
and you’ll catch him; anybody can catch a skunk.”
And I did catch him. I killed him, too, in spite of the great scarcity
of the creatures. Yet I was sorry, and, perhaps, too hasty; for
catching him near the coop was no proof. He might have wandered this
way by chance. I should have put him in a bag and carried him down to
Valley Swamp and liberated him.
That day, while my neighbor was gone with his milk wagon, I slipped
through the back pasture and hung the two traps up on their nail in
the can-house.