out to be counted. It must have been the skunk, I was thinking, as I
went on into the brooding-house, where six hens were still sitting.
One of the hens was off her nest and acting queerly. Her nest was
empty! Not a chick, not a bit of shell! I lifted up the second hen in
the row, and of her thirteen eggs, only three were left. The hen next
to her had five eggs; the fourth hen had four. Forty chickens gone
(counting them before they were hatched), all in one night.
I hitched up the horse and drove thoughtfully to the village, where I
bought six skunk-traps.
“Goin’ skunkin’ some, this spring,” the store man remarked, as he got
me the traps, adding, “Well, they’s some on ’em. I’ve seen a scaac’ty
of a good many commodities, but I never yet see a scaac’ty o’ skunks.”
I didn’t stop to discuss the matter, being a trifle uncertain just
then as to my own mind, but hurried home with my six traps. Six, I
thought, would do to begin with, though I really had no conception of
the number of cats (or skunks) it had taken to dispose of the three
and one third dozens of eggs (at three dollars a dozen!) in a single
night.
Early that afternoon I covered each sitting hen so that even a mouse
could not get at her, and fixing the traps, I distributed them about
the brooding-house floor; then, as evening came on, I pushed a shell
into each barrel of the gun, took a comfortable perch upon a keg in
the corner of the house, and waited.
I had come to stay. Something was going to happen. And something did
happen, away on in the small hours of the morning, namely--one little
skunk. He walked into a trap while I was dozing. He seemed pretty
small hunting then, but he looms larger now, for I have learned
several more things about skunks than I knew when I had the talk with
my neighbor: I have learned, for one thing, that forty eggs, soon to
hatch, are just an average meal for the average half-grown skunk.
The catching of these two thieves put an end to the depredations, and
I began again to exhibit in my dreams, when one night, while sound
asleep, I heard a frightful commotion among the hens. I did the
hundred-yard dash to the chicken-house in my unforgotten college form,
but just in time to see the skunk cross the moonlit line into the
black woods ahead of me.
He had wrought dreadful havoc among the thoroughbreds. What
devastation a skunk, single-handed, can achieve in a pen of young
chickens beggars all description.
I was glad that it was dead of night, that the world was home and
asleep in its bed. I wanted no sympathy. I wished only to be alone,
alone in the cool, the calm, the quiet of this serene and beautiful
midnight. Even the call of a whippoorwill in the adjoining pasture
worried me. I desired to meditate, yet clear, consecutive thinking
seemed strangely difficult. I felt like one disturbed. I was out of
harmony with this peaceful environment. Perhaps I had hurried too
hard, or I was too thinly clothed, or perhaps my feet were cold and
wet. I only know, as I stooped to untwist a long and briery runner
from about my ankle, that there was great confusion in my mind, and in
my spirit there was chaos. I felt myself going to pieces,--I, the
nature-lover! Had I not advocated the raising of a few extra hens just
for the sake of keeping the screaming hawk in air and the wild fox
astir in our scanty picnic groves? And had I not said as much for the
skunk? Why, then, at one in the morning should I, nor clothed, nor in
my right mind, be picking my barefoot way among the tangled dewberry
vines behind the barn, swearing by the tranquil stars to blow the
white-striped carcass of that skunk into ten million atoms if I had to
sit up all the next night to do it?
One o’clock in the morning was the fiend’s hour. There could be no
unusual risk in leaving the farm for a little while in the early
evening, merely to go to the bean supper over at the chapel at the
Corner. So we were dressed and ready to start, when I spied one of my
hens outside the yard, trying to get in.
Hurrying down, I caught her, and was turning back to the barn, when I
heard a slow, faint rustling among the bushes behind the hen-house. I
listened! Something was moving cautiously through the dead leaves!
Tiptoeing softly around, I surprised a large skunk making his way
slowly toward the hen-yard fence.
I grabbed a stone and hurled it, jumping, as I let it drive, for
another. The flying missile hit within an inch of the creature’s nose,
hard upon a large flat rock over which he was crawling. The impact was
stunning, and before the old rascal could get to his groggy feet, I
had fallen upon him--literally--and done for him.
But I was very sorry. I hope that I shall never get so excited as to
fall upon another skunk,--never!
I was picking myself up, when I caught a low cry from the direction of
the house--half scream, half shout. It was a woman’s voice, the voice
of my wife, I thought. Was something the matter?
“Hurry!” I heard. But how could I hurry? My breath was gone, and so
were my spectacles, and other more important things besides, while all
about me poured a choking blinding smother. I fought my way out.
“Oh, hurry!”
I was on the jump; I was already rounding the barn, when a series of
terrified shrieks issued from the front of the house. An instant more
and I had come. But none too soon, for there stood the dear girl,
backed into a corner of the porch, her dainty robes drawn close about
her, and a skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confidently up the
steps toward her.
“Why _are_ you so slow!” she gasped. “I’ve been yelling here for an
hour!--Oh! do--don’t kill that little thing, but shoo it away, quick!”
She certainly had not been yelling an hour, nor anything like it. But
there was no time for argument now, and as for shooing little skunks,
I was past that. I don’t know exactly what I did say, though I am
positive that it wasn’t “shoo.” I was clutching a great stone, that I
had run with all the way from behind the hen-yard, and letting it
fly, I knocked the little creature into a harmless bunch of fur.
The family went over to the bean supper and left me all alone on the
farm. But I was calm now, with a strange, cold calmness born of
extremity. Nothing more could happen to me; I was beyond further harm.
So I took up the bodies of the two creatures, and carried them,
together with some of my late clothing, over beyond the ridge for
burial. Then I returned by way of my neighbor’s, where I borrowed two
sticks of blasting-powder and a big cannon fire-cracker. I had watched
my neighbor use these explosives on the stumps in a new piece of
meadow. The next morning, with an axe, a crowbar, shovel, gun,
blasting-powder, and the cannon-cracker, I started for the stump in
the wood-lot. I wished the cannon-cracker had been a keg of powder. I
could tamp a keg of powder so snugly into the hole of those skunks!
It was a beautiful summer morning, tender with the half-light of
breaking dawn, and fresh with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the
skunks’ den, I sat down on the stump to wait a moment, for the
loveliness and wonder of the opening day came swift upon me. From the
top of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple, earnest song
ringing down the wooded slope, and, soft as an echo, floated up from
the swampy tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes of a wood
thrush, mellow and globed, and almost fragrant of the thicket where
the white honeysuckle was in bloom. Voices never heard at other hours
of the day were vocal now; odors and essences that vanish with the dew
hung faint in the air; shapes and shadows and intimations of things
that slip to cover from the common light, stirred close about me. It
was very near--the gleam! the vision splendid! How close to a
revelation seems every dawn! And this early summer dawn, how near a
return of that
time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.
From the crest of my ridge I looked out over the treetops far away to
the Blue Hills still slumbering in the purple west. How huge and prone
they lie! How like their own constant azure does the spirit of rest
seem to wrap them round! On their distant slopes it is never common
day, never more than dawn, for the shadows always sleep among their
hollows, and a haze of changing blues, their own peculiar beauty,
hangs, even at high noon, like a veil upon them, shrouding them with
largeness and mystery.
A rustle in the dead leaves down the slope recalled me. I reached
instinctively for the gun, but stayed my hand. Slowly nosing his way
up the ridge, came a full-grown skunk, his tail a-drag, his head
swinging close to the ground. He was coming home to the den, coming
leisurely, contentedly, carelessly, as if he had a right to live. I
sat very still. On he came, scarcely checking himself as he winded me.
How like the dawn he seemed!--the black of night with the white of
day--the furtive dawn slipping into its den! He sniffed at the gun and
cannon-cracker, made his way over them, brushed past me, and calmly
disappeared beneath the stump.
The chewink still sang from the top of the sapling, but the tame broad
day had come. I stayed a little while, looking off still at the
distant hills. We had sat thus, my six-year-old and I, only a few
days before, looking away at these same hills, when the little fellow,
half questioningly, half pensively asked, “Father, how can the Blue
Hills be so beautiful and have rattlesnakes?”
I gathered up the kit, gun and cannon-cracker, and started back toward
home, turning the question of hills and snakes and skunks over and
over as I went along. Over and over the question still turns: How can
the Blue Hills be so beautiful? The case of my small wood-lot is
easier: beautiful it must ever be, but its native spirit, the untamed
spirit of the original wilderness, the free wild spirit of the
primeval forest, shall flee it, and vanish forever, with this last den
of the skunks.
V
THE NATURE-WRITER
THE NATURE-WRITER
Dwelling inland, far from those of us who go down to the sea in
manuscripts, may be found the reader, no doubt, to whom the title of
this essay is not anathema, to whom the word nature still means the
real outdoors, as the word culture may still mean things other than
“sweetness and light.” It is different with us. We shy at the _word_
nature. Good, honest term, it has suffered a sea-change with us; it
has become literary. Piety suffers the same change when it becomes
professional. There has grown up about nature as a literary term a
vocabulary of cant,--nature-lover, nature-writer, nature-- Throw the
stone for me, you who are clean! Inseparably now these three travel
together, arm in arm, like Tom, Dick, and Harry--the world, the flesh,
and the devil. Name one, and the other two appear, which is sad enough
for the nature-writer, because a word is known by the company it
keeps.
The nature-writer deserves, maybe, his dubious reputation; he is more
or less of a fraud, perhaps. And perhaps everybody else is, more or
less. I am sure of it as regards preachers and plumbers and
politicians and men who work by the day. Yet I have known a few honest
men of each of these several sorts, although I can’t recall just now
the honest plumber. I have known honest nature-writers, too; there are
a number of them, simple, single-minded, and purposefully poor. I have
no mind, however, thus to pronounce upon them, dividing the sheep from
the goats, lest haply I count myself in with the wrong fold. My
desire, rather, is to see what nature-writing, pure and undefiled, may
be, and the nature-writer, what manner of writer he ought to be.
For it is plain that the nature-writer has now evolved into a
distinct, although undescribed, literary species. His origins are not
far to seek, the course of his development not hard to trace, but very
unsatisfactory is the attempt, as yet, to classify him. We all know a
nature-book at sight, no matter how we may doubt the nature in it; we
all know that the writer of such a book must be a nature-writer; yet
this is not describing him scientifically by any means.
Until recent years the nature-writer had been hardly more than a
variant of some long-established species--of the philosopher in
Aristotle; of the moralizer in Theobaldus; of the scholar and
biographer in Walton; of the traveler in Josselyn; of the poet in
Burns. But that was in the feudal past. Since then the land of letters
has been redistributed; the literary field, like every other field,
has been cut into intensified and highly specialized patches--the
short story for you, the muck-rake essay for me, or magazine verse, or
wild animal biography. The paragraph of outdoor description in Scott
becomes the modern nature-sketch; the “Lines to a Limping Hare” in
Burns run into a wild animal romance of about the length of “The Last
of the Mohicans”; the occasional letter of Gilbert White’s grows into
an annual nature-volume, this year’s being entitled “Buzz-Buzz and Old
Man Barberry; or, The Thrilling Young Ladyhood of a Better-Class
Bluebottle Fly.” The story that follows is how she never would have
escaped the net of Old Man Barberry had she been a butterfly--a story
which only the modern nature-writing specialist would be capable of
handling. Nature-writing and the automobile business have developed
vastly during the last few years.
It is Charles Kingsley, I think, who defines “a thoroughly good
naturalist” as one “who knows his own parish thoroughly,” a
definition, all questions of style aside, that accurately describes
the nature-writer. He has field enough for his pen in a parish; he can
hardly know more and know it intimately enough to write about it. For
the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is
never mere scientist--zoölogist or botanist. Animals are not his
theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is
his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his
immediate neighborhood.
His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary,
not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his
world, its great circumference, rather than any fact--any flower, or
star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the
particular species _Thalassochelys kempi_; of the family Testudinidæ;
of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch
Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to
capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this
string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that,
particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which
has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s
friend, and which “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in
order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just
beside a great tuft of hepaticas.
“P. S.--In about three days after I left Sussex, the tortoise retired
into the ground under the hepatica.”
This is a bit of nature-writing by Gilbert White, of Selborne, which
sounds quite a little like science, but which you noticed was really
spoiled as science by its “tuft of hepaticas.” There is no buttonhole
in science for the nosegay. And when, since the Vertebrates began, did
a scientific tortoise ever _retire_?
One more quotation, I think, will make clear my point, namely, that
the nature-writer is not detached from himself and alone with his
fact, like the scientist, but is forever relating his tortoise to
himself. The lines just quoted were from a letter dated April 12,
1772. Eight years afterwards, in another letter, dated Selborne, April
21, 1780, and addressed to “the Hon. Daines Barrington,” the good
rector writes:--
“DEAR SIR,--The old Sussex tortoise, that I have mentioned to you so
often, is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in
March last, when it was enough awakened to express its resentments by
hissing, and, packing it in a box with earth, carried it eighty miles
in post-chaises. The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly
roused it that, when I turned it out on the border, it walked twice
down to the bottom of my garden.”
Not once, not three times, but _twice_ down to the bottom of the
garden! We do not question it for a moment; we simply think of the
excellent thesis material wasted here in making a mere popular page of
nature-writing. Gilbert White never got his Ph. D., if I remember,
because, I suppose, he stopped counting after the tortoise made its
second trip, and because he kept the creature among the hepaticas of
the garden, instead of on a shelf in a bottle of alcohol. Still, let
us admit, and let the college professors, who do research work upon
everything except their students, admit, that walking twice to the
bottom of a garden is not a very important discovery. But how
profoundly interesting it was to Gilbert White! And how like a passage
from the Pentateuch his record of it! Ten years he woos this tortoise
(it was fourteen that Jacob did for Rachel) and wins it--with a serene
and solemn joy. He digs it out of its winter dormitory (a hole in the
ground), packs it carefully in a box, carries it hurriedly, anxiously,
by post-chaises for eighty miles, rousing it perfectly by the end of
the journey, when, liberating it in the rectory yard, he stands back
to see what it will do; and, lo! _it walks twice to the bottom of the
garden_!
By a thoroughly good naturalist Kingsley may have meant a thoroughly
good nature-writer, for I think he had in mind Gilbert White, who
certainly was a thoroughly good naturalist, and who certainly knew his
own parish thoroughly. In the letters from which I have quoted the
gentle rector was writing the natural history of Selborne, his parish.
But how could he write the natural history of Selborne when his
tortoise was away over in Sussex!
A tortoise down by Sussex’s brim
A Sussex tortoise was to him,
And it was nothing more--
nothing at all for the “Natural History of Selborne” until he had gone
after it and brought it home.
Thus all nature-writers do with all their nature in some manner or
other, not necessarily by post-chaise for eighty miles. It is
characteristic of the nature-writer, however, to bring home his
outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His
is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a
hop-pole in his garden--a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and
cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond
whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the
road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.
He is limited to his parish because he writes about only so much of
the world as he lives in, as touches him, as makes for him his home.
He may wander away, like Thoreau, to the Maine woods, or down along
the far-off shores of Cape Cod; but his best writing will be that
about his hut at Walden.
It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-place, a large faith in
the entire reasonableness of its economy, a large joy in all its
manifold life, that moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most
marvelously good to live in--himself its very dust; a place beautiful
beyond his imagination, and interesting past his power to realize--a
mystery every way he turns. He comes into it as a settler into a new
land, to clear up so much of the wilderness as he shall need for a
home.
Thoreau perhaps, of all our nature-writers, was the wildest wild man,
the least domestic in his attitude. He went off far into the woods, a
mile and a half from Concord village, to escape domestication, to seek
the wild in nature and to free the wild in himself. And what was his
idea of becoming a wild man but to build a cabin and clear up a piece
of ground for a bean-patch! He was solid Concord beneath his
war-paint--a thin coat of savagery smeared on to scare his friends
whenever he went to the village--a walk which he took very often. He
differed from Gilbert White as his cabin at Walden differed from the
quaint old cottage at Selborne. But cabin and cottage alike were to
dwell in; and the bachelor of the one was as much in need of a wife,
and as much in love with the earth, as the bachelor in the other.
Thoreau’s “Walden” is as parochial and as domestic with its woodchuck
and beans as White’s “Natural History of Selborne” with its tame
tortoise and garden.
In none of our nature-writers, however, is this love for the earth
more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in
him, an expression of his religion. He can see the earth only as the
best possible place to live in--to live _with_ rather than in or on;
for he is unlike the rector of Selborne and the wild-tame man of
Walden in that he is married and a farmer--conditions, these, to
deepen one’s domesticity. Showing somewhere along every open field in
Burroughs’s books is a piece of fence, and among his trees there is
always a patch of gray sloping roof. He grew up on a farm (a most
excellent place to grow up on), became a clerk, but not for long, then
got him a piece of land, built him a home out of unhewn stone, and set
him out an eighteen-acre vineyard. And ever since he has lived in his
vineyard, with the Hudson River flowing along one side of it, the
Catskills standing along another side of it, with the horizon all
around, and overhead the sky, and everywhere, through everything, the
pulse of life, the song of life, the sense of home!
He loves the earth, for the earth is home.
“I would gladly chant a pæan,” he exclaims, “for the world as I find
it. What a mighty interesting place to live in! If I had my life to
live over again, and had my choice of celestial abodes, I am sure I
should take this planet, and I should choose these men and women for
my friends and companions. This great rolling sphere with its sky, its
stars, its sunrises and sunsets, and with its outlook into
infinity--what could be more desirable? What more satisfying?
Garlanded by the seasons, embosomed in sidereal influences, thrilling
with life, with a heart of fire and a garment of azure seas and
fruitful continents--one might ransack the heavens in vain for a
better or a more picturesque abode.”
A full-throated hymn, this, to the life that is, in the earth that is,
a hymn without taint of cant, without a single note of that fevered
desire for a land that is fairer than this, whose gates are of pearl
and whose streets are paved with gold. If there is another land, may
it be as fair as this! And a pair of bars will be gate enough, and
gravel, cinders, grass, even March mud, will do for paving; for all
that one will need there, as all that one needs here--here in New
England in March--is to have “arctics” on one’s feet and an equator
about one’s heart. The desire for heaven is natural enough, for how
could one help wanting more after getting through with this? But he
sins and comes short of the glory of God who would be quit of this
world for the sake of a better one. There isn’t any better one. This
one is divine. And as for those dreams of heaven in old books and
monkish hymns, they cannot compare for glory and for downright
domestic possibilities with the prospect of these snow-clad Hingham
hills from my window this brilliant winter morning.
That “this world is not my resting-place” almost any family man can
believe nowadays, but that “this world is not my home” I can’t believe
at all. However poor a resting-place we make of it, however certain of
going hence upon a “longe journey,” we may not find this earth
anything else than home without confessing ourselves tenants here by
preference, and liable, therefore, to pay rent throughout eternity.
The best possible use for this earth is to make a home of it, and for
this span of life, to live it like a human, earth-born being.