The flooded expanse of the marshes has shrunken perceptibly along its
shoreward boundaries, leaving a mat of dead weeds, bits of driftwood,
and a water-worn selvage of bare earth to mark its widest limits. The
green tips of the rushes are thrust above the amber shallows, whereon
flotillas of water-shield lie anchored in the sun, while steel-blue
devil's-needles sew the warm air with intangible threads of zigzag
flight.
The meshed shadows of the water-maples are full of the reflections of
the green and silver of young leaves. The naked tangle of button-bushes
has become a green island, populous with garrulous colonies of redwings.
The great flocks of wild ducks that came to the reopened waters have had
their holiday rest, and journeyed onward to summer homes and cares in
the further north. The few that remain are in scattered pairs and
already in the silence and seclusion of nesting. You rarely see the
voyaging muskrat or hear his plaintive love calls.
Your ear has long been accustomed to the watery clangor of the bittern,
when a new yet familiar sound strikes it, the thin, vibrant bass of the
first bullfrog's note. It may be lacking in musical quality, but it is
attuned to its surroundings, and you are glad that the green-coated
player has at last recovered his long-submerged banjo, and is twanging
its water-soaked strings in prelude to the summer concert. He is a
little out of practice, and his instrument is slightly out of tune, but
a few days' use will restore both touch and resonance, when he and his
hundred brethren shall awaken the marsh-haunting echoes and the sleeping
birds with a grand twilight recital. It will reach your ears a mile
away, and draw you back to the happy days of boyhood, when you listened
for the bullfrogs to tell that fish would bite, and it was time for boys
to go a-fishing.
In the first days of his return to the upper world of water, this old
acquaintance may be shy, and neither permit nor offer any familiarity.
The fixed placidity of his countenance is not disturbed by your
approach, but if you overstep by one pace what he considers the proper
limit, down goes his head under cover of the flood. Marking his jerky
course with an underwake and a shiver of the rushes, he reappears, to
calmly observe you from a safer distance.
Custom outwears his diffidence, and the fervid sun warms him to more
genial moods, when he will suffer you to come quietly quite close to him
and tickle his sides with a bullrush, till in an ecstasy of pleasure he
loses all caution, and bears with supreme contentment the titillation of
your finger tips. His flabby sides swell with fullness of enjoyment, his
blinking eyes grow dreamy and the corners of his blandly expressionless
mouth almost curve upward with an elusive smile. Not till your fingers
gently close upon him does he become aware of the indiscretion into
which he has lapsed, and with a frantic struggle he tears himself away
from your grasp and goes plunging headlong into his nether element,
bellowing out his shame and astonishment.
Another day as you troll along the channel an oar's length from the
weedy borders, you see him afloat on his lily-pad raft, heeding you no
more than does the golden-hearted blossom whose orange odor drifts about
him, nor is he disturbed by splash of oar nor dip of paddle, nor even
when his bark and her perfume-freighted consort are tossed on your
undulating wake.
As summer wanes you see and hear him less frequently, but he is still
your comrade of the marshes, occasionally announcing his presence with a
resonant twang and a jerky splash among the sedges.
The pickerel weeds have struck their blue banners to the conquering
frost, and the marshes are sere, and silent, and desolate. When they are
warmed again with the new life of spring, we shall listen for the
jubilant chorus of our old acquaintance, the bullfrog.