The woods are dense with full-grown leafage. Of all the trees, only the
basswood has delayed its blossoming, to crown the height of summer and
fill the sun-steeped air with a perfume that calls all the wild bees
from hollow tree and scant woodside gleaning to a wealth of honey
gathering, and all the hive-dwellers from their board-built homes to a
finer and sweeter pillage than is offered by the odorous white sea of
buckwheat. Half the flowers of wood and fields are out of bloom.
Herdsgrass, clover and daisy are falling before the mower. The early
grain fields have already caught the color of the sun, and the tasseling
corn rustles its broad leaves above the rich loam that the woodcock
delights to bore.
The dwindling streams have lost their boisterous clamor of springtide
and wimple with subdued voices over beds too shallow to hide a minnow
or his poised shadow on the sunlit shallows. The sharp eye of the angler
probes the green depths of the slowly swirling pools, and discovers the
secrets of the big fish which congregate therein.
The river has marked the stages of its decreasing volume with many lines
along its steep banks. It discloses the muskrat's doorway, to which he
once dived so gracefully, but now must clumsily climb to. Rafts of
driftwood bridge the shallow current sunk so low that the lithe willows
bend in vain to kiss its warm bosom. This only the swaying trails of
water-weeds and rustling sedges toy with now; and swift-winged swallows
coyly touch. There is not depth to hide the scurrying schools of
minnows, the half of whom fly into the air in a curving burst of silver
shower before the rush of a pickerel, whose green and mottled sides
gleam like a swift-shot arrow in the downright sunbeams.
The sandpiper tilts along the shelving shore. Out of an embowered harbor
a wood duck convoys her fleet of ducklings, and on the ripples of
their wake the anchored argosies of the water lilies toss and cast
adrift their cargoes of perfume. Above them the green heron perches on
an overhanging branch, uncouth but alert, whether sentinel or scout,
flapping his awkward way along the ambient bends and reaches. With slow
wing-beats he signals the coming of some more lazily moving boat, that
drifts at the languid will of the current or indolent pull of oars that
grate on the golden-meshed sand and pebbles.
Lazily, unexpectantly, the angler casts his line, to be only a
convenient perch for the dragonflies; for the fish, save the affrighted
minnows and the hungry pickerel, are as lazy as he. To-day he may enjoy
to the full the contemplative man's recreation, nor have his
contemplations disturbed by any finny folk of the under-water world,
while dreamily he floats in sunshine and dappled shadow, so at one with
the placid waters and quiet shores that wood duck, sandpiper, and heron
scarcely note his unobtrusive presence.
No such easy and meditative pastime attends his brother of the gun
who, sweating under the burden of lightest apparel and equipment, beats
the swampy covers where beneath the sprawling alders and arching fronds
of fern the woodcock hides. Not a breath stirs the murky atmosphere of
these depths of shade, hotter than sunshine; not a branch nor leaf moves
but with his struggling passage, or marking with a wake of waving
undergrowth the course of his unseen dog.
Except this rustling of branches, sedges and ferns, the thin, continuous
piping of the swarming mosquitoes, the busy tapping and occasional harsh
call of a woodpecker, scarcely a sound invades the hot silence, till the
wake of the hidden dog ceases suddenly and the waving brakes sway with
quickening vibrations into stillness behind him. Then, his master draws
cautiously near, with gun at a ready and an unheeded mosquito drilling
his nose, the fern leaves burst apart with a sudden shiver, and a
woodcock, uttering that shrill unexplained twitter, upsprings in a halo
of rapid wing-beats and flashes out of sight among leaves and branches.
As quick, the heelplate strikes the alert gunner's shoulder, and, as if
in response to the shock, the short unechoed report jars the silence of
the woods. As if out of the cloud of sulphurous smoke, a shower of
leaves flutter down, with a quicker patter of dry twigs and shards of
bark, and among all these a brown clod drops lifeless and inert to
mother earth.
A woodcock is a woodcock, though but three-quarters grown; and the shot
one that only a quick eye and ready hand may accomplish; but would not
the achievement have been more worthy, the prize richer, the sport
keener in the gaudy leafage and bracing air of October, rather than in
this sweltering heat, befogged with clouds of pestering insects, when
every step is a toil, every moment a torture? Yet men deem it sport and
glory if they do not delight in its performance. The anxious note and
behavior of mother song-birds, whose poor little hearts are in as great
a flutter as their wings concerning their half-grown broods, hatched
coincidently with the woodcock, is proof enough to those who would heed
it, that this is not a proper season for shooting. But in some northerly
parts of our wide country it is woodcock now or never, for the birds
bred still further northward are rarely tempted by the cosiest copse or
half-sunned hillside of open woods to linger for more than a day or two,
as they fare southward, called to warmer days of rest and frostless
moonlit nights of feeding under kindlier skies.
While the nighthawk's monotonous cry and intermittent boom and the
indistinct voice of the whippoorwill ring out in the late twilight of
the July evenings, the alarmed, half-guttural chuckle of the grass
plover is heard, so early migrating in light marching order, thin in
flesh but strong of wing, a poor prize for the gunner whose ardor
outruns his humanity and better judgment. Lean or fat, a plover is a
plover, but would that he might tarry with us till the plump
grasshoppers of August and September had clothed his breast and ribs
with fatness.
Well, let him go, if so soon he will. So let the woodcock go, to offer
his best to more fortunate sportsmen. What does it profit us to kill
merely for the sake of killing, and have to show therefor but a beggarly
account of bones and feathers? Are there not grouse and quail and
woodcock waiting for us, and while we wait for them can we not content
ourselves with indolent angling by shaded streams in these melting days
of July rather than contribute the blaze and smoke of gunpowder to the
heat and murkiness of midsummer? If we must shed blood let us tap the
cool veins of the fishes, not the hot arteries of brooding mother birds
and their fledgelings.