AN OLD APPLE TREE
Beyond the meadow, perhaps half a mile from my window, stands an old
apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary
between the “upper” and the “lower” pastures. It is a bent, broken,
hoary old tree, grizzled with suckers from feet to crown. No one has
pruned it for half a century; no one ever gathers its gnarly
apples--no one but the cattle who love to lie in its shadow and munch
its fruit.
The cows know the tree. One of their winding paths runs under its
low-hung branches; and as I frequently travel the cow-paths, I also
find my way thither. Yet I do not go for apples, nor just because the
cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is hollow, hollow all over,
trunk and branches, as hollow as a lodging-house; and I have never
known it when it was not “putting up” some wayfaring visitor or some
permanent lodger. So I go over, whenever I have a chance, to call upon
my friends or pay my respects to the distinguished guests.
This old tree is on the neighboring farm. It does not belong to me,
and I am glad; for if it did, then I should have to trim it, and
scrape it, and plaster up its holes, and put a burlap petticoat on
it, all because of the gruesome gypsy moths that infest my trees. Oh,
yes, that would make it bear better apples, but what then would become
of its birds and beasts? Everybody ought to have _one_ apple tree that
bears birds and beasts--and Baldwin apples, too, of course, if the
three sorts of fruit can be made to grow on the same tree. But only
the birds and beasts grow well on the untrimmed, unscraped,
unplastered, unpetticoated old tree yonder between the pastures. His
heart is wide open to every small traveler passing by.
Whenever I look over toward the old tree, I think of the old
vine-covered, weather-beaten house in which my grandfather lived,
where many a traveler put up over night--to get a plate of
grandmother’s buckwheat cakes, I think, and a taste of her keen wit.
The old house sat in under a grove of pin oak and pine,--“Underwood”
we called it,--a sheltered, sheltering spot; with a peddler’s stall in
the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in the herby
garret, a boundless, fathomless featherbed, of a piece with the house
and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the
neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the
tavern, two miles farther down the pike, was half so central, or so
homelike, or so full of sweet and juicy gossip. The old apple tree
yonder between the woods and the meadow is as central, as hospitable,
and, if animals talk with one another, just as full of neighborhood
news as was grandfather’s roof-tree.
Of course you would never suspect it, passing by. But then, no lover
of wild things passes by--never without first stopping, and especially
before an old tree all full of holes. Whenever you see a hole in a
tree, in a sand-bank, in a hillside, under a rail-pile--anywhere out
of doors, stop!
Stop here beside this decrepit apple tree. No, you will find no sign
swinging from the front, no door-plate, no letter-box bearing the name
of the family residing here. The birds and beasts do not advertise
their houses so. They would hide their houses, they would have you
pass by; for most persons are rude in the woods and fields, breaking
into the homes of the wood-folk as they never would dream of doing in
the case of their human neighbors.
There is no need of being rude anywhere, no need of being an unwelcome
visitor even to the shyest and most timid of the little people of the
fields. Come over with me--they know me in the old apple tree. It is
nearly sundown. The evening is near, with night at its heels, for it
is an early March day.
We shall not wait long. The doors will open that we may enter--enter
into a home of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of
the fields, for, as I have said, this old tree has a small dweller of
some sort the year round.
On this March day we shall be admitted by my owls. They take
possession late in winter and occupy the tree, with some curious
fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count upon these small
screech owls by February,--the forlorn month, the seasonless,
hopeless, lifeless month of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its
lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possible bluebirds, and
its being the year’s end! At least the ancients called February, not
December, the year’s end, maintaining, with some sense, that the
making of the world was begun in March, that is, with the spring. The
owls do not, like the swallows, bring the spring, but they
nevertheless help winter with most seemly haste into an early grave.
If, as the dusk comes down, I cannot go over to the tree, I will go to
my window and watch. I cannot see him, the grim-beaked baron with his
hooked talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes, but I know
that he has come to his window in the apple-tree turret yonder against
the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop
downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the meadow, beating,
dangling, dropping between the flattened tussocks; nor can I hear him,
as, back on the silent shadows, he slants upward again to his tower.
Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared meadow mouse did
not hear until the long talons closed and it was too late.
[Illustration: SCREECH OWL--“OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS”]
But there have been times when, like some belated traveler, I have
been forced to cross this wild night-land of his; and I have _felt_
him pass--so near at times that he has stirred my hair, by the
wind--dare I say?--of his mysterious wings. At other times I have
heard him. Often on the edge of night I have listened to his
quavering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me by the meadow. But
oftener I have watched at the casement here in my castle wall.
Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient
keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out
over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to
my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except
he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry
cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.
Now let us go over again to the old tree, this time in May. It will be
curious enough, as the soft dusk comes on, to see the round face of
the owl in one hole and, out of another hole in the broken limb above,
the flat, weazened face of a little tree-toad.
Both creatures love the dusk; both have come forth to their open doors
to watch the darkening; both will make off under the cover of the
night--one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for slugs and
insects over the crooked, tangled limbs of the apple tree.
It is strange enough to see them together, but it is stranger still
to think of them together; for it is just such prey as this little
toad that the owl has gone over the meadow to catch.
Why does he not take the supper ready here on the shelf? There may be
reasons that we, who do not eat tree-toad, know nothing of; but I am
inclined to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow lodger in
the doorway above, though he must often have heard him trilling gently
and lonesomely in the gloaming, when his skin cries for rain!
Small wonder if they have never met! for this gray, squat, disk-toed
little monster in the hole, or flattened on the bark of the tree like
a patch of lichen, may well be one of the things that are hidden from
even the sharp-eyed owl. It is always a source of fresh amazement, the
way that this largest of the hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old
tree, can utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes.
The common toads and all the frogs have enemies enough, and it would
seem from the comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they must
have enemies, too; but I do not know who they are. This scarcity of
the tree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that,
to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree,
now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several toads, you say, not
one; for who can tell one tree-toad from another? Nobody; and for that
reason I made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order to see
how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own natural
environment.
Upon moving into this house, about nine years ago, we found a
tree-toad living in the big hickory by the porch. For the next three
springs he reappeared, and all summer long we would find him, now on
the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up
against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Then we marked him; and
for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many
more years he might have lived in the hickory for us all to pet, I
should like to know; but last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy
moth killers, poking in the hole, hit our little friend and left him
dead.
It was very wonderful to me, the instinct for home--the love for home,
I should like to call it--that this humble little creature showed.
Now, a toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an ugly gnome with a
jeweled eye, to the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for
its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or
a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf,
who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the summer rain,
who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his waking up for the
spring--to such a one, I say, a tree-toad means more than the jeweled
eye and the strange amphibious habits.
This small tree-toad had a home, had it in a tree, too,--in a hickory
tree,--this toad that dwelt by my house.
“East, west,
Hame’s best,”
croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive song that wakened
memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things
than any other voice I ever knew.
These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the
hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a
home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land
than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have
never had a home; and none of us has ever had, perhaps, more than one,
or could have--that home of our childhood.
This toad seemed to feel it all. Here in the hickory for four years
(more nearly seven, I am sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go
down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs;
but back he would come, without mate or companion, to his tree.
Stronger than love of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant
in his slow cold heart was his instinct for home.
If I go down to the orchard and bring up from an apple tree some other
toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might
remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the
gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing; and
guided by it, as bee and pigeon and dog and man are guided, he makes
his sure way back to his orchard home.
Would my toad of the Baldwin tree go back beyond the orchard, over the
road, over the wide meadow, over to the old tree, half a mile away, if
I brought him from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I
shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I
shall then watch the old apple tree yonder to see if he returns. It
will be a hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not let him
rest; and, guided by his mysterious sense of direction,--for that
_one_ place,--he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the way.
Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great deal more than
that. There in the old Baldwin he has made his home for I don’t know
how long, hunting over its world of branches in the summer, sleeping
down in its deep holes during the winter--down under the chips and
punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my
toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the débris at
the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he preserved
himself until thawed out by the spring.
I never pass the old apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my
respects to the toad; nor in the winter that I do not pause and think
of him asleep in there. He is no longer mere toad. He has passed into
the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against
worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of
life, within the thin ribs, as if to save the old shell of a tree to
another summer.
Often in the dusk, especially the summer dusk, I have gone over to sit
at his feet and learn some of the things that my school-teachers and
college professors did not teach me.
Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait. The toad
comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself
comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer
evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the fields.
We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is the
lesson--one of the primary lessons in this course with the toad.
The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out
and drifts away; a whip-poor-will drops on the bare knoll near me,
clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand
times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long
empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is
gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, is blotted out by
the darkness, blazes again, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing
into a night that seems the darker for his quick, unsteady glow.
We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had
been taught every manner of stirring, and this strange exercise of
being still takes me where my body is weakest, and puts me almost out
of breath.
What! out of breath by keeping still? Yes, because I had been hurrying
hither and thither, doing this and that--doing them so fast for so
many years that I no longer understood how to sit down and keep still
and do nothing inside of me as well as outside. Of course _you_ know
how to keep still, for you are children. And so perhaps you do not
need to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am grown up, and
a man, with a world of things to do, a great many of which I do not
need to do at all--if only I would let the toad teach me all he knows.
So, when I am tired, I will go over to the toad. 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 sits out the hour silent, thinking--I know
not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in silence, the toad and I,
watching Altair burn along the shore of the horizon, and overhead
Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of
the apple tree. And as we watch, I shall have time to rest and to
think. Perhaps I shall have a thought, a thought all my own, a rare
thing for any one to have, and worth many an hour of waiting.