When the returned crows have become such familiar objects in the forlorn
unclad landscape of early spring that they have worn out their first
welcome, and the earliest songbirds have come to stay in spite of
inhospitable weather that seems for days to set the calendar back a
month, the woods invite you more than the fields. There nature is least
under man's restraint and gives the first signs of her reawakening. In
windless nooks the sun shines warmest between the meshes of the slowly
drifting net of shadows.
There are patches of moss on gray rocks and tree trunks. Fairy islands
of it, that will not be greener when they are wet with summer showers,
arise among the brown expanse of dead leaves. The gray mist of branches
and undergrowth is enlivened with a tinge of purple. Here and there the
tawny mat beneath is uplifted by the struggling plant life below it or
pierced through by an underthrust of a sprouting seed. There is a
promise of bloom in blushing arbutus buds, a promise even now fulfilled
by the first squirrelcups just out of their furry bracts and already
calling the bees abroad. Flies are buzzing to and fro in busy idleness,
and a cricket stirs the leaves with a sudden spasm of movement. The
first of the seventeen butterflies that shall give boys the freedom of
bare feet goes wavering past like a drifting blossom.
A cradle knoll invites you to a seat on the soft, warm cushion of dead
leaves and living moss and purple sprigs of wintergreen with their blobs
of scarlet berries, which have grown redder and plumper under every snow
of the winter. This smoothly rounded mound and the hollow scooped beside
it, brimful now of amber, sun-warmed water, mark the ancient place of a
great tree that was dead and buried, and all traces by which its kind
could be identified were mouldered away and obliterated, before you were
born.
The incessant crackling purr of the wood-frogs is interrupted at your
approach, and they disappear till the wrinkled surface of the oblong
pool grows smooth again and you perceive them sprawled along the bottom
on the leaf paving of their own color. As you cast a casual glance on
your prospective seat, carelessly noting the mingling of many hues, the
brightness of the berries seems most conspicuous, till a moving curved
and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch
your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion.
With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick
or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out
one token of spring's awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in
it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter-snake.
He is so harmless to man, that, were it not for the old, unreasoning
antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were
not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and
gold, and in graceful motion--a motion that charms us in the undulation
of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins
and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the
flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of
wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs. His
colors are fresh and bright as ever you will see them, though he has but
to-day awakened from a long sleep in continual darkness.
He is simply enjoying the free air and warm sunshine without a thought
of food for all his months of fasting. Perhaps he has forgotten that
miserable necessity of existence. When at last he remembers that he has
an appetite, you can scarcely imagine that he can have any pleasure in
satisfying it with one huge mouthful of twice or thrice the ordinary
diameter of his gullet. If you chance to witness his slow and painful
gorging of a frog, you hear a cry of distress that might be uttered with
equal cause by victim or devourer. When he has fully entered upon the
business of reawakened life, many a young field-mouse and noxious
insect will go into his maw to his own and your benefit. If there go
also some eggs and callow young of ground-nesting birds, why should you
question his right, you, who defer slaughter out of pure selfishness,
that a little later you may make havoc among the broods of woodcock and
grouse?
Of all living things, only man disturbs the nicely adjusted balance of
nature. The more civilized he becomes the more mischievous he is. The
better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the
bison and the Indian shared a continent, but in two hundred years or so
the white man has destroyed the one and spoiled the other.
Surely there is little harm in this lowly bearer of a name honored in
knighthood, and the motto of the noble order might be the legend written
on his gilded mail, "Evil to him who evil thinks." If this sunny patch
of earth is not wide enough for you to share with him, leave it to him
and choose another for yourself. The world is wide enough for both to
enjoy this season of its promise.