"Happy the man whose only care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
On his own ground."
Happier still is such a one who has a love for the rod and gun, and with
them finds now and then a day's freedom from all cares by the side of
the stream that borders his own acres and in the woods that crest his
knolls or shade his swamp.
As a rule none of our people take so few days of recreation as the
farmer. Excepting Sundays, two or three days at the county fair, and
perhaps as many more spent in the crowd and discomfort of a cheap
railroad excursion, are all that are given by the ordinary farmer to
anything but the affairs of the farm. It is true that his outdoor life
makes it less necessary for him than for the man whose office or shop
work keeps him mostly indoors, to devote a month or a fortnight of each
year to entire rest from labor. Indeed, he can hardly do this except in
winter, when his own fireside is oftener the pleasantest place for rest.
But he would be the better for more days of healthful pleasure, and many
such he might have if he would so use those odd ones which fall within
his year, when crops are sown and planted or harvested. A day in the
woods or by the stream is better for body and mind than one spent in
idle gossip at the village store, and nine times out of ten better for
the pocket, though one come home without fin or feather to show for his
day's outing. One who keeps his eyes and ears on duty while abroad in
the field can hardly fail to see and hear something new, or, at least,
more interesting and profitable than ordinary gossip, and the wear and
tear of tackle and a few charges of ammunition wasted will cost less
than the treats which are pretty apt to be part of a day's loafing.
Barring the dearth of the objects of his pursuit, the farmer who goes
a-fishing and a-hunting should not be unsuccessful if he has fair skill
with the rod and gun. For he who knows most of the habits of fish and
game will succeed best in their capture, and no man, except the
naturalist and the professional fisherman and hunter, has a better
chance to gain this knowledge than the farmer, whose life brings him
into everyday companionship with nature. His fields and woods are the
homes and haunts of the birds and beasts of venery, from the beginning
of the year to its end, and in his streams many of the fishes pass their
lives. By his woodside the quail builds her nest, and when the foam of
blossom has dried away on the buckwheat field she leads her young there
to feed on the brown kernel stranded on the coral stems. If he chance to
follow his wood road in early June, the ruffed grouse limps and flutters
along it before him, while her callow chicks vanish as if by a
conjurer's trick from beneath his very footfall. A month later, grown to
the size of robins, they will scatter on the wing from his path with a
vigor that foretells the bold whir and the swiftness of their flight in
their grown-up days, when they will stir the steadiest nerve, whether
they hurtle from an October-painted thicket or from the blue shadows of
untracked snow. No one is likelier to see and hear the strange wooing of
the woodcock in the soft spring evenings, and to the farmer's ear first
comes that assurance of spring, the wail of the Bartram's sandpiper
returning from the South to breed in meadow and pasture, and then in
hollow trees that overhang the river the wood ducks begin to spoil their
holiday attire in the work and care of housekeeping. The fox burrows and
breeds in the farmer's woods. The raccoon's den is there in ledge or
hollow tree. The hare makes her form in the shadow of his evergreens,
where she dons her dress of tawny or white to match the brown floor of
the woods or its soft covering of snow. The bass comes to his river in
May to spawn, the pike-perch for food, and the perch lives there, as
perhaps the trout does in his brook.
All these are his tenants, or his summer boarders, and if he knows not
something of their lives, and when and where to find them at home or in
their favorite resorts, he is a careless landlord. His life will be the
pleasanter for the interest he takes in theirs, and the skill he
acquires in bringing them to bag and creel.