IV

The geese were not much profit--they had to be sold, finally, for little

or nothing; but their soft and woolly goslings were a great pleasure to

all the children, who were plunged in grief when the miller’s sow made a

foray among them.

This was a fierce and predatory, animal that was in some sort a

neighborhood terror. She made her lair in the reeds by the river-side,

breaking out a perfect circle, which she kept against all comers,

especially boys, till her young were born; then she returned to her sty

near the miller’s house, convenient to the young turkeys, chickens, and

goslings, leading forth her brood in a savage defiance which no one

dared to front, except the miller, who did so with a shot-gun at times,

when her depredations became outrageous. Wherever she appeared the

children ran screaming, and the boldest boy was glad of the top rail of

a fence.

She was, in fact, a wild beast; but our own pigs were very social

creatures. We had got some of them, I believe, from the old Virginians

whom we had succeeded in the cabin, and these kept, as far as they

could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had

indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us,

humble as it was, and being repelled, they took up their quarters on

cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear

them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones.

All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were

perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly

regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far

from barbaric. But children, and more particularly boys, take every

natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs

were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed

with long cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to

come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out of

the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered

corn with an intelligence we were proud of.

V

As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of

that latitude, our chief recreation, where all our novel duties were

delightful, was hunting with the long smooth-bore shot-gun which had

descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of

the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went

out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to

beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did

the shooting, left the other to rush upon him as soon as he fired with

tumultuous cries of “Did you hit it? Did you hit it?” Usually he had not

hit it, though now and then our murderous young blood was stirred by the

death agonies of some of the poor creatures whose destruction boys exult

in.

We fell upon the wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare

occasions, and put them to death with what I must now call a sickening

ferocity. If sometimes the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we

were rearing, rushed upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his

death upon the dog’s nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the

applause of all his other enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we

never wantonly killed things that could not be eaten; we should have

thought it sacrilege to shoot a robin or a turtle-dove, but we were

willing to be amused, and these were the chances of war.

The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the

wood-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of

the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were

of all sorts--gray, and black, and even big red fox-squirrels, a variety

I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the

poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the

sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms.

I recall with a thrill one memorable morning in such woods--early, after

an overnight rain, when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the

sun pierced to kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from

leaf and twig. I can smell the tulip blossoms and the odor of the

tree-bark yet, and the fresh, strong fragrance of the leafy mould under

my bare feet; and I can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of

the trunks, or the swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to

bough in the air-tops. I hope we came away without any of them.

The only one I ever killed was a black squirrel, which fell from aloft

and lodged near the first crotch of a tall elm. The younger brother, who

followed me as I followed my elder, climbed up to get the squirrel, but

when he mounted into the crotch he found himself with his back tight

against the main branch, and unable either to go up or come down. It was

a terrible moment, which we deplored with many tears and vain cries for

help.

It was no longer a question of getting the dead squirrel, but the live

boy to the ground. It appeared to me that to make a rope fast to the

limb, and then have him slip down, hand over hand, was the best way;

only, we had no rope, and I could not have got it to him if we had. I

proposed going for help, but my brother would not consent to be left

alone; and, in fact, I could not bear the thought of leaving him perched

up there, however securely, fifty feet from the earth. I might have

climbed up and pull him out, but we decided that this would only be

swifter destruction.

I really cannot tell how he contrived to free himself, or why he is not

in that tree to this day. The squirrel is.

In a region where the cornfields and wheat-fields were often fifty and

sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember again

but one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but

they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems

without harm to themselves. After they began to mate, and the air was

full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched to find their nests,

and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we

found them; and in June, when the pretty little mother strutted across

the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves

with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at

sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could

hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but

we were charmed just the same.

It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the

mother snipe and mother wild-duck that haunted our dam, as well as by

the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother

would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on

one of her young--a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray

pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang

to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange

mixture--as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded

knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but

this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

I had no such regrets in respect to the young wild-ducks, which, indeed,

I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder

and flutter away as she would; and took to the swamp where her young

sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters

that were often up to my waist, and full of ugly possibilities of

mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the

ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of

air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not

struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it

home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its

native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved

family somewhere under the water.