THE SPRING RUNNING
This title is Kipling’s; the observations that follow are mine; but
the real spring running is yours and mine and Kipling’s and Mowgli the
wolf-child’s, whose running Kipling has told us about. Indeed, every
child of the earth has felt it, has had the running--every living
thing of the land and the sea.
Everything feels it; everything is restless, everything is moving. The
renter changes houses; the city dweller goes “down to the shore” or up
to the mountains to open his summer cottage; the farmer starts to
break up the land for planting; the schoolchildren begin to squirm in
their seats and long to fly out of the windows; and “Where are you
_going_ this summer?” is on every one’s lips.
They have all caught the spring running, the only infection I know
that you can catch from April skies. The very sun has caught it, too,
and is lengthening out his course, as if he hated to stop and go to
bed at night. And the birds, that are supposed to go to bed most
promptly, they sleep, says the good old poet Chaucer, with open eye,
these April nights, so bad is their case of spring running,--
“So priketh hem Nature in hir corages.”[1]
[Footnote 1: So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.]
Their long journey northward over sea and land has not cured them yet
of their unrest. Only one thing will do it (and I suppose we all
should be glad), one sovereign remedy, and that is _family cares_. But
they are yet a long way off.
Meantime watch your turkey-hen, how she saunters down the field alone,
how pensive she looks, how lost for something to do and somewhere to
go. She is sick with this disease of spring. Follow her, keeping out
of sight yourself, and lo, a nest, hidden under a pile of brush in a
corner of the pasture fence, half a mile from home!
The turkey-hen has wandered off half a mile to build her nest; but
many wild birds have come on their small wings all the way from the
forests of the Amazon and have gone on to Hudson Bay and the Fur
Countries, just to build their nests and rear their young. A wonderful
case of the spring running, you would say; and still more wonderful is
the annual journey of the golden plover from Patagonia to Alaska and
back, eight thousand miles each way. Yet there is another case that
seems to me more mysterious, and quite as wonderful, as the sea seems
more mysterious than the land.
It is the spring running of the fish. For when the great tidal waves
of bird-life begin to roll northward with the sun, a corresponding
movement begins among the denizens of the sea. The cold-blooded fish
feel the stirring; the spring running seizes them, and in they come
through the pathless wastes of the ocean, waves of them, shoals of
them,--sturgeon, shad, herring,--like the waves and flocks of wild
geese, warblers, and swallows overhead,--into the brackish water of
the bays and rivers and on (the herring) into the fresh water of the
ponds.
To watch the herring come up Weymouth Back River into Herring Run here
near my home, as I do every April, is to watch one of the most
interesting, most mysterious movements of all nature. It was about a
century ago that men of Weymouth brought herring in barrels of water
by ox-teams from Taunton River and liberated them in the pond at the
head of Weymouth Back River. These fish laid their eggs in the grassy
margins of the pond that spring and went out down the river to the
sea. Later on, the young fry, when large enough to care for
themselves, found their way down the river and out to sea.
And where did they go then? and what did they do? Who can tell? for
who can read the dark book of the sea? Yet this one thing we know they
did, for still they are doing it after all these hundred years,--they
came back up the river, when they were full-grown,--up the river, up
the run, up into the pond, to lay their eggs in the waters where they
were hatched, in the waters that to them were _home_.
Something very much like this all the other fish are doing, as are the
birds also. The spell of _home_ is over land and sea, and has been
laid upon them all. The bird companies of the fall went south at the
inexorable command of Hunger; but a greater than Hunger is in command
of the forces of spring. Now our vast bird army of North America, five
billion strong, is moving northward at the call of Home. And the hosts
of the sea, whose shining billions we cannot number,--they, too, are
coming up, some of them far up through the shallow streams to the
wood-walled ponds for a drink of the sweet waters of Home.
As a boy I used to go down to the meadows at night to hear the catfish
coming, as now I go down to the village by day to see the herring
coming. The catfish would swim in from the Cohansey, through the
sluices in the bank, then up by way of the meadow ditches to the dam
over which fall the waters of Lupton’s Pond.
It was a seven-or eight-foot dam, and of course the fish could not
climb it. Down under the splashing water they would crowd by hundreds,
their moving bodies close-packed, pushing forward, all trying to break
through the wooden wall that blocked their way. Slow, stupid things
they looked; but was not each big cat head pointed forward? each
slow, cold brain trying to follow and keep up with each swift, warm
heart? For the homeward-bound heart knows no barrier; it never stops
for a dam.
The herring, too, on their way up the run are stopped by a dam; but
the town, in granting to certain men the sole rights to catch the
fish, stipulated that a number of the live herring, as many as several
barrels full, should be helped over the dam each spring that they
might go on up to the pond to deposit their eggs. If this were not
done annually, the fish would soon cease to come, and the Weymouth
herring would be no more.
There was no such lift for the catfish under Lupton’s dam. I often
tossed them over into the pond, and so helped to continue the line;
but perhaps there was no need, for spring after spring they returned.
They were the young fish, I suppose, new each year, from parent fish
that remain inside the pond the year round.
I cannot say now--I never asked myself before--whether it is Mother or
Father Catfish who stays with the swarm (it is literally a swarm) of
kitten catfish. It may be father, as in the case of Father Stickleback
and Father Toadfish, who cares for the children. If it is--I take off
my hat to him. I have four of my own; and I think if I had eighteen or
twenty more I should have both hands full. But Father Catfish! Did you
ever see his brood?
I should say that there might easily be five hundred young ones in
the family, though I never have counted them. But you might. If you
want to try it, take your small scoop-net of coarse cheesecloth, or
mosquito-netting, and go down to the pond this spring. Close along the
margin you will see holes in the shallow water running up under the
overhanging grass and roots. The holes were made probably by the
muskrats. It is in here that the old catfish is guarding the brood.
As soon as you learn to know the holes, you can cover the entrance
with your net, and then by jumping or stamping hard on the ground
above the hole, you will drive out the old fish with a flop, the
family following in a fine, black cloud. The old fish will swim away,
then come slowly back to the scattered swarm, to the little black
things that look like small tadpoles, who soon cluster about the
parent once more and wiggle away into the deep, dark water of the
pond--the strangest family group that I know in all the spring world.