literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple
architecture of his essay plans, in their balance and finish, a
quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that
neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common fault
of outdoor books is the catalogue--raw data, notes. There are
paragraphs of notes in Mr. Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau. The
average nature-writer sees not too much of nature, but knows all too
little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning out of
nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which is
precisely what everybody may see; whereas, we want also what he thinks
and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and divine
and fathom--the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The bulk of
nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot, into a
note-book, as were the journals of Thoreau--fragmentary, yet with
Thoreau often exquisite fragments--bits of old stained glass,
unleaded, and lacking unity and design.
No such fault can be found with Mr. Burroughs. He goes pencilless
into the woods, and waits before writing until his return home, until
time has elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to blur and
blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for his pen.
Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from knots and
seams and sap-wood as a piece of old-growth pine. There is plan,
proportion, integrity to his essays--the naturalist living faithfully
up to a sensitive literary conscience.
Mr. Burroughs is a good but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and
Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon’s in part) upon us
is literary. He has been a watcher in the woods; has made a few
pleasant excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at
home, and his camera, too, thank Heaven! He has broken out no new
trail, discovered no new animal, no new thing. But he has seen all the
old, uncommon things, has seen them oftener, has watched them longer,
through more seasons, than any other writer of our out-of-doors; and
though he has discovered no new thing, yet he has made discoveries,
volumes of them,--contributions largely to our stock of literature,
and to our store of love for the earth, and to our joy in living upon
it. He has turned a little of the universe into literature; has
translated a portion of the earth into human language; has restored to
us our garden here eastward in Eden--apple tree and all.
For a real taste of fruity literature, try Mr. Burroughs’s chapter on
“The Apple.” Try Thoreau’s, too,--if you are partial to squash-bugs.
There are chapters in Mr. Burroughs, such as “Is it going to Rain?” “A
River View,” “A Snow-Storm,” which seem to me as perfect, in their
way, as anything that has ever been done--single, simple, beautiful in
form, and deeply significant; the storm being a piece of fine
description, of whirling snow across a geologic landscape, distant,
and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture lighted and warmed
at the end by a glowing touch of human life:--
“We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of
life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but
the mark of life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man--the
tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.”
There are many texts in these eleven volumes, many themes; and in them
all there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in;
that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good,
here and now, and altogether worth living.
VII
HUNTING THE SNOW
HUNTING THE SNOW
The hunt began at the hen-yard gate, where we saw tracks in the thin,
new snow that led us up the ridge, and along its narrow back, to a
hollow stump. Here the hunt began in earnest, for not until that trail
of close, double, nail-pointed prints went under the stump were the
three small boys convinced that we were tracking a skunk and not a
cat.
This creature had moved leisurely. That you could tell by the
closeness of the prints. Wide-apart tracks in the snow mean hurry. Now
a cat, going as slowly as this creature went, would have put down her
dainty feet almost in single line, and would have left round,
cushion-marked holes in the snow, not triangular, nail-pointed prints
like these. Cats do not venture into holes under stumps, either.
We had bagged our first quarry! No, no! We had not pulled that wood
pussy out of his hole and put him into our game-bag. We did not want
to do that. We really carried no bag; and if we had, we should not
have put the wood pussy in it, for we were hunting tracks, not the
animals, and “bagging our quarry” meant trailing a creature to its
den, or following its track until we had discovered something it had
done, or what its business was, and why it was out. We were on the
snow for animal _facts_, not animal pelts.
We were elated with our luck, for this stump was not five minutes by
the steep ridge path from the hen-yard. And here, standing on the
stump, we were only sixty minutes away from Boston Common by the
automobile, driving no faster than the law allows. So we were not
hunting in a wilderness, but just outside our dooryard and almost
within the borders of a great city.
And that is the interesting fact of our morning hunt. No one but a
lover of the woods and a careful walker on the snow would believe that
here in the midst of hay-fields, in sight of the smoke of city
factories, so many of the original wild wood-folk still live and
travel their night paths undisturbed.
Still, this is a rather rough bit of country, broken, ledgy,
boulder-strewn, which accounts for the swamps and woody hills that
alternate with small towns and cultivated fields all the way to the
Blue Hill Reservation, fifteen miles to the westward. This whole
region, this dooryard of Boston, is one of Nature’s own reservations,
a preserve that she has kept for her small and humble folk, who are
just as dear to her as we are, but whom we have driven, except in such
small places as these, quite off the earth.
Here, however, they are still at home, as this hole of the skunk’s
under the stump proved. But there was more proof. As we topped the
ridge on the trail of the skunk, we crossed another trail, made up of
bunches of four prints,--two long and broad, two small and
roundish,--spaced about a yard apart.
A hundred times, the winter before, we had tried that trail in the
hope of finding the form or the burrow of its maker, the great
Northern hare, but it crossed and turned and doubled, and always led
us into a tangle, out of which we never got a clue.
As this was the first tracking snow of the winter, we were relieved to
see the strong prints of our cunning neighbor again, for what with
the foxes and the hunters, we were afraid it might have fared ill with
him. But here he was, with four good legs under him; and after bagging
our skunk, we returned to pick up the hare’s trail, to try our luck
once more.
We brought him in long, leisurely leaps down the ridge, out into our
mowing field, and over to the birches below the house. Here he had
capered about in the snow, had stood up on his haunches and gnawed the
bark from off a green oak sucker two and a half feet from the ground.
This, doubtless, was pretty near his length, stretched out--an
interesting item; not exact to the inch, perhaps, but close enough for
us; and much more fascinating, guessed at by such a rule, than if
measured dead, with scientific accuracy.
Nor was this all, for up the foot-path through the birches came the
marks of two dogs. They joined the marks of the hare. And then, back
along the edge of the woods to the bushy ridge, we saw a pretty race.
It was all in our imaginations, all done for us by those long-flinging
footprints in the snow. But we saw it all--the white hare, the
yelling hounds, nip and tuck, in a burst of speed across the open
field that left a gap in the wind behind.
It had all come as a surprise. The hounds had climbed the hill on the
scent of a fox, and had “jumped” the hare unexpectedly. But just such
a jump of fear is what a hare’s magnificent legs were intended for.
They carried him a clear twelve feet in some of the longest leaps for
the ridge, and they carried him to safety, so far as we could read the
snow. In the medley of hare-and-hound tracks on the ridge there was no
sign of a tragedy. He had escaped again--but how and where we have
still to learn.
We had bagged our hare,--yet still we have him to bag,--and taking up
the trail of one of the dogs, we continued our hunt.
One of the joys of this snow-walking is having a definite road or
trail blazed for you by knowing, purposeful feet. You do not have to
blunder ahead, breaking your way into this wilderness world, trusting
luck to bring you somewhere. The wild animal or the dog goes this way,
and not that, for a reason. You are following that reason all along;
you are pack-fellow to the hound; you hunt with him.
Here the hound had thrust his muzzle into a snow-capped pile of
slashings, had gone clear round the pile, then continued on his way.
But we stopped, for out of the pile, in a single, direct line, ran a
number of mice-prints, going and coming. A dozen white-footed mice
might have traveled that road since the day before, when the snow had
ceased falling.
We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as
good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the
garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a
hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle,
ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a
single straying footprint beyond the tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of
pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop! I pushed in again,
and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several
neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or
family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good
reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak.
Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my
barn is the year round? It was not all plain. But this question, this
constant riddle of the woods,--small, indeed, in the case of the
mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution,--is part of our
constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always
fascinating.
It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one
knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the
tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the
jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the
whole small story of these prints? What purpose, intention, feeling do
they spell? What and why?--a hundred times!
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such
questions worth answering, just as under the species _Mus_ they make
no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that--Burns, the farmer! The
woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not
know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a
wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what
root and all, and all in all,
the humblest flower is.
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact,
and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak,
we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought
that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn
to the comfort of this snowy winter world.
The squirrel’s track wound up and down the hillside, wove in and out
and round and round, hitting every possible tree, as if the only road
for a squirrel was one that looped and doubled and tied up every stump
and zigzagged into every tree trunk in the woods.
But all this maze was no ordinary journey. The squirrel had not run
this coil of a road for breakfast, because when he travels, say, for
distant nuts, he goes as directly as you go to your school or office;
but he goes not by streets, but by trees, never crossing more of the
open in a single rush than the space between him and the nearest tree
that will take him on his way.
What interested us here in the woods was the fact that a second series
of tracks just like the first, only about half as large, dogged the
larger tracks persistently, leaping tree for tree, and landing track
for track with astonishing accuracy--tracks which, had they not been
evidently those of a smaller squirrel, would have read to us most
menacingly.
As this was the mating season for squirrels, I suggested that it might
have been a kind of Atalanta’s race here in the woods. But why did so
little a squirrel want to marry one so big? They would not look well
together, was the answer of the small boys. They thought it much more
likely that Father Squirrel had been playing wood-tag with one of his
children.
Then, suddenly, as sometimes happens in the woods, the true meaning of
the signs was literally hurled at us, for down the hill, squealing and
panting, rushed a large male gray squirrel, with a red squirrel like a
shadow, like a weasel, at his heels.
For just an instant I thought it was a weasel, so swift and silent and
gliding were its movements, so set and cruel seemed its expression, so
sure, so inevitable its victory.
Whether it ever caught the gray squirrel or not, and what it would
have done had it caught the big fellow, I do not know. But I have seen
the chase often--the gray squirrel put to the last extremity with
fright and fatigue, the red squirrel an avenging, inexorable fate
behind. They tore round and round us, then up over the hill, and
disappeared.
One of the rarest prints for most snow-hunters nowadays, but one of
the commonest hereabouts, is the quick, sharp track of the fox. In the
spring particularly, when my fancy young chickens are turned out to
pasture, I have spells of fearing that the fox will never be
exterminated here in this untillable but beautiful chicken country. In
the winter, however, when I see Reynard’s trail across my lawn, when I
hear the music of the baying hounds, and catch a glimpse of the
white-tipped brush swinging serenely in advance of the coming pack, I
cannot but admire the capable, cunning rascal, cannot but be glad for
him, and marvel at him, so resourceful, so superior to his almost
impossible conditions, his almost innumerable foes.
We started across the meadow on his trail, but found it leading so
straightaway for the ledges, and so continuously blotted out by the
passing of the pack, that, striking the wallowy path of a muskrat in
the middle of the meadow, we took up the new scent to see what the
shuffling, cowering water-rat wanted from across the snow.
A man is known by the company he keeps, by the way he wears his hat,
by the manner of his laugh; but among the wild animals nothing tells
more of character than their manner of moving. You can read animal
character as easily in the snow as you can read act and direction.
The timidity, the indecision, the lack of purpose, the restless,
meaningless curiosity of this muskrat were evident from the first in
the loglike, the starting, stopping, returning, going-on track he had
ploughed out in the thin snow.
He did not know where he was going or what he was going for; he knew
only that he insisted upon going back, but all the while kept going
on; that he wanted to go to the right or to the left, yet kept moving
straight ahead.
We came to a big wallow in the snow, where, in sudden fear, he had had
a fit at the thought of something that might not have happened to him
had he stayed at home. Every foot of the trail read, “He would if he
could; but if he wouldn’t, how could he?”
We followed him on, across a dozen other trails, for it is not every
winter night that the muskrat’s feet get the better of his head, and,
willy-nilly, take him abroad. Strange and fatal weakness! He goes and
cannot stop.
Along the stone wall of the meadow we tracked him, across the
highroad, over our garden, into the orchard, up the woody hill to the
yard, back down the hill to the orchard, out into the garden, and back
toward the orchard again; and here, on a knoll just in the edge of the
scanty, skeleton shadow where the moon fell through the trees, we lost
him.
Two mighty wings had touched the snow lightly here, and the lumbering
trail had vanished as into the air.
Close and mysterious the silent wings hang poised indoors and out.
Laughter and tears are companions. Comedy begins, but tragedy often
ends the trail. Yet the sum of life indoors and out is peace,
gladness, and fulfillment.
VIII
THE CLAM FARM
THE CLAM FARM:
A CASE OF CONSERVATION
Our hunger for clams and their present scarcity have not been the
chief factors in the new national movement for the conservation of our
natural resources; nor are the soaring prices of pork and lumber and
wheat immediate causes, although they have served to give point and
application to the movement. Ours is still a lavishly rich country. We
have long had a greed for land, but we have not felt a pang yet of the
Old World’s land-hunger. Thousands of acres, the stay for thousands of
human lives, are still lying as waste places on the very borders of
our eastern cities. There is plenty of land yet, plenty of lumber,
plenty of food, but there is a very great and growing scarcity of
clams.
Of course the clam might vanish utterly from the earth and be
forgotten; our memory of its juicy, salty, sea-fat flavor might vanish
with it; and we, ignorant of our loss, be none the poorer. We should
live on,--the eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave live on,--but life,
nevertheless, would not be so well worth living. For it would be
flatter, with less of wave-wet freshness and briny gusto. No
kitchen-mixed seasoning can supply the wild, natural flavors of life;
no factory-made sensations the joy of being the normal, elemental,
primitive animal that we are.
The clam is one of the natural flavors of life, and no longer ago than
when I was a freshman was considered one of life’s necessities. Part
of the ceremony of my admission to college was a clambake down the
Providence River--such a clambake as never was down any other river,
and as never shall be again down the Providence River, unless the
Rhode Island clam-diggers take up their barren flats and begin to grow
clams.
This they will do; our new and general alarm would assure us of that,
even if the Massachusetts clam-diggers were not leading the way. But
Rhode Island already has one thriving clam farm of her own at Rumstick
Point along the Narragansett. The clam shall not perish from our tidal
flats. Gone from long reaches where once it was abundant, small and
scattering in its present scanty beds, the clam (the long-neck clam)
shall again flourish, and all of New England shall again rejoice and
be glad.
We are beginning, as a nation, while still the years are fat with
plenty, to be troubled lest those of the future come hungry and lean.
Up to the present time our industrial ethics have been like our
evangelical religion, intensely, narrowly individualistic,--_my_
salvation at all costs. “Dress-goods, yarns, and tops” has been our
industrial hymn and prayer. And religiously, even yet, I sing of my
own salvation:--
While in this region here below,
_No other good will I pursue_:
I’ll bid this world of noise and show,
With all its glittering snares, adieu;
A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too common in both
religion and business, yet far from representing, to-day, the guiding
spirit of either business or religion. For the growing conception of
human brotherhood is mightily expanding our narrow religious
selfishness; and the dawning revelation of industrial solidarity is
not only making men careful for the present prosperity of the ends of
the earth, but is making them concerned also for the future prosperity
of the Farther-Off.
Priests and prophets we have had heretofore. “Woodman, woodman, spare
that tree,” they have wailed. And the flying chips were the woodman’s
swift response. The woodman has not heard the poet’s prayer. But he is
hearing the American public’s command to let the sapling alone; and he
is beginning to heed. It is a new appeal, this for the sapling; there
is sound scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too. We
shall save our forests, our watersheds, and rivers; we shall conserve
for time to come our ores and rich deposits; we shall reclaim the last
of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of our eastern farms;
we shall herd our whales of the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific,
number and multiply our truant schools of mackerel that range the
waters of the sea; just as we shall restock with clams the waste,
sandy shores of the sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were as
fruitful as Eden, but which through years of digging and no planting
have become as barren as the bloodless sands of the Sahara.
It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the course of time, what
one sows--even clams if one sows clams; but it is a more solemn saying
that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for all eternity, what
one has not sown--even clams out of the exhausted flats of the New
England coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run brackish to
the sea.
Hitherto we have reaped where we have not sown, and gathered where we
have not strawed. But that was during the days of our industrial
pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the wilderness, where manna
and quails and clams are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only
barberries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had nowadays for the
gathering. There are still enough barberries to go round without
planting or trespassing, for the simple, serious reason that the
barberries do not carry their sugar on their bushes with them, as the
clams carry their salt. The Sugar Trust carries the barberries’ sugar.
But soon or late every member of that trust shall leave his bag of
sweet outside the gate of Eden or the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it
now, lest once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his eternal
feeding, but barberries!
We have not sown the clam hitherto: we have only digged; so that now,
for all practical purposes, that is to say, for the old-time,
twenty-five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, uncultivated clam
has had its day; as the unenterprising, unbelieving clammers
themselves are beginning to see.
The Providence River fishermen are seeking distant flats for the
matchless Providence River clams, bringing them overland from afar by
train. So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Duxbury clams come
out of flats that reach all the way from the mouth of the St. Johns,
on the down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake. And this, while
eight hundred acres of superb clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town,
which might be producing yearly, for the joy of man, eighty thousand
bushels of real Duxbury clams!
What a clambake Duxbury does not have each year! A multitude of twice
eighty thousand might sit down about the steaming stones and be
filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more, that Duxbury does
not hunger thus alone. For this is the story of fifty other towns in
Massachusetts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to Dighton--a tale
with a minus total of over two million bushels of clams, and an annual
minus of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.