When the charitable mantle of the snow has covered the ugliness of the
earth, as one looks towards the woodlands he may see a distant dark
speck emerge from the blue shadow of the woods and crawl slowly
houseward. If born to the customs of this wintry land, he may guess at
once what it is; if not, speculation, after a little, gives way to
certainty, when the indistinct atom grows into a team of quick-stepping
horses or deliberate oxen hauling a sled-load of wood to the farmhouse.
It is more than that. It is a part of the woods themselves, with much of
their wildness clinging to it, and with records, slight and fragmentary,
yet legible, of the lives of trees and birds and beasts and men coming
to our door.
Before the sounds of the creaking sled and the answering creak of the
snow are heard, one sees the regular puffs of the team's breath jetting
out and climbing the cold air. The head and shoulders of the muffled
driver then appear, as he sticks by narrow foothold to the hinder part
of his sled, or trots behind it beating his breast with his numb hands.
Prone like a crawling band of scouts, endwise like battering-rams, not
upright with green banners waving, Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane to
fight King Frost.
As the woodpile grows at the farmhouse door in a huge windrow of
sled-length wood or an even wall of cord wood, so in the woods there
widens a patch of uninterrupted daylight. Deep shade and barred and
netted shadow turn to almost even whiteness, as the axe saps the
foundations of summer homes of birds and the winter fastnesses of the
squirrels and raccoons. Here are the tracks of sled and team, where they
wound among rocks and stumps and over cradle knolls to make up a load;
and there are those of the chopper by the stump where he stood to fell
the tree, and along the great trough made by its fall. The snow is
flecked with chips, dark or pale according to their kind, just as they
alighted from their short flight, bark up or down or barkless or
edgewise, and with dry twigs and torn scraps of scattered moss.
When the chopper comes to his work in the morning, he finds traces of
nightly visitors to his white island that have drifted to its shores out
of the gray sea of woods. Here is the print of the hare's furry foot
where he came to nibble the twigs of poplar and birch that yesterday
were switching the clouds, but have fallen, manna-like, from skyward to
feed him. A fox has skirted its shadowy margin, then ventured to explore
it, and in a thawy night a raccoon has waddled across it.
The woodman is apt to kindle a fire more for company than warmth, though
he sits by it to eat his cold dinner, casting the crumbs to the
chickadees, which come fearlessly about him at all times. Blazing or
smouldering by turns, as it is fed or starved, the fire humanizes the
woods more than the man does. Now and then it draws to it a visitor,
oftenest a fox-hunter who has lost his hound, and stops for a moment to
light his pipe at the embers and to ask if his dog has been seen or
heard. Then he wades off through the snow, and is presently swallowed
out of sight by gray trees and blue shadows. Or the hound comes in
search of his master or a lost trail. He halts for an instant, with a
wistful look on his sorrowful face, then disappears, nosing his way into
the maw of the woods.
If the wood is cut "sled length," which is a saving of time and also of
chips, which will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the
tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the
woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a "day man,"
and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a
professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too
high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble
in making their way through them than over them; and the man comes and
goes according to his ambition to earn money.
In whichever capacity the chopper plies his axe, he is pretty sure to
bring no sentimentalism to his task. He inherits the feeling that was
held by the old pioneers toward trees, who looked upon the noblest of
them as only giant weeds, encumbering the ground, and best got rid of by
the shortest means. To him the tree is a foe worthy of no respect or
mercy, and he feels the triumph of a savage conquerer when it comes
crashing down and he mounts the prostrate trunk to dismember it; the
more year-marks encircling its heart, the greater his victory. To his
ears, its many tongues tell nothing, or preach only heresy. Away with
the old tree to the flames! To give him his due, he is a skillful
executioner, and will compel a tree to fall across any selected stump
within its length. If one could forget the tree, it is a pretty sight to
watch the easy swing of the axe, and see how unerringly every blow goes
to its mark, knocking out chips of a span's breadth. It does not look
difficult nor like work; but could you strike "twice in a place," or in
half a day bring down a tree twice as thick as your body? The wise
farmer cuts, for fuel, only the dead and decaying trees in his woodlot,
leaving saplings and thrifty old trees to "stand up and grow better," as
the Yankee saying is.
There is a prosperous and hospitable look in a great woodpile at a
farmhouse door. Logs with the moss of a hundred years on them, breathing
the odors of the woods, have come to warm the inmates and all in-comers.
The white smoke of these chimneys is spicy with the smell of seasoned
hard wood, and has a savor of roasts and stews that makes one hungry. If
you take the back track on a trail of pitchy smoke, it is sure to lead
you to a squalid threshold with its starved heap of pine roots and
half-decayed wood. Thrown down carelessly beside it is a dull axe,
wielded as need requires with spiteful awkwardness by a slatternly
woman, or laboriously upheaved and let fall with uncertain stroke by a
small boy.
The Yankees who possess happy memories of the great open fires of old
time are growing few, but Whittier has embalmed for all time, in
"Snow-Bound," their comfort and cheer and picturesqueness. When the
trees of the virgin forest cast their shadows on the newly risen roof
there was no forecasting provision for winter. The nearest green tree
was cut, and hauled, full length, to the door, and with it the nearest
dry one was cut to match the span of the wide fireplace; and when these
were gone, another raid was made upon the woods; and so from hand to
mouth the fire was fed. It was not uncommon to draw the huge backlogs on
to the hearth with a horse, and sometimes a yoke of oxen were so
employed. Think of a door wide enough for this: half of the side of a
house to barricade against the savage Indians and savage cold! It was
the next remove from a camp-fire. There was further likeness to it in
the tales that were told beside it, of hunting and pioneer hardships, of
wild beasts and Indian forays, while the eager listeners drew to a
closer circle on the hearth, and the awed children cast covert scared
backward glances at the crouching and leaping shadows that thronged on
the walls, and the great samp-kettle bubbled and seethed on its trammel,
and the forgotten johnny-cake scorched on its tilted board.
As conveniently near the shed as possible, the pile of sled-length wood
is stretching itself slowly, a huge vertebrate, every day or two gaining
in length; a joint of various woods, with great trunks at the bottom,
then smaller ones, gradually growing less to the topping out of saplings
and branches. Here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt,
with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of
them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method
of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew
the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the
aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable
tools for the purpose as any they had for another. These more distinct
marks show where the auger of later years made its wounds. The old tree
has distilled its sweets for two races and many generations of men,
first into the bark buckets of Waubanakis, then into the ruder troughs
of Yankee pioneers, then into the more convenient wide-bottomed wooden
sap-tubs; and at last, when the march of improvement has spoiled the
wilderness of the woods with trim-built sugar-houses and patent
evaporators, the sap drips with resounding metallic tinkle into pails of
shining tin. Now the old maple has come to perform its last office, of
warming and cooking the food for a generation that was unborn when it
was yet a lusty tree.
Beside it lies a great wild-cherry tree that somehow escaped the cabinet
maker when there was one in every town and cherry wood was in fashion.
Its fruit mollified the harshness of the New England rum of many an
old-time raising and husking. Next is a yellow birch with a shaggy mane
of rustling bark along its whole length, like a twelve-foot piece of the
sea serpent drifted ashore and hauled inland; then a white birch, no
longer white, but gray with a coating of moss, and black with belts of
old peelings, made for the patching of canoes and roofing of shanties.
With these lies a black birch, whose once smooth bark age has scaled and
furrowed, and robbed of all its tenderness and most of its pungent,
aromatic flavor. Some of it yet lingers in the younger topmost twigs
which the hired man brings home to the little folks, who fall to gnawing
them like a colony of beavers. By it is an elm, whose hollow trunk was
the home of raccoons when it stood on its buttressed stump in the swamp.
Near by is a beech, its smooth bark wrinkled where branches bent away
from it, and blotched with spots of white and patches of black and gray
lichen. It is marked with innumerable fine scratches, the track of the
generations of squirrels that have made it their highway; and among
these, the wider apart and parallel nail-marks of a raccoon, and also
the drilling of woodpeckers. Here, too, are traces of man's visitation,
for distorted with the growth of years are initials, and a heart and
dart that symbolized the tender passion of some one of the past, who
wandered, love-sick, in the shadow of the woods. How long ago did
death's inevitable dart pierce his heart? Here he wrote a little of his
life's history, and now his name and that of his mistress are so
completely forgotten one cannot guess them by their first letters
inscribed in the yesterday of the forest's years.
Above these logs, rolled up on skids or sled stakes, are smaller yet
goodly bodies of white ash, full of oars for the water and rails for the
land; and of black ash, as full of barrel hoops and basket splints, the
ridged and hoary bark shagged with patches of dark moss; and a pine too
knotty for sawing, with old turpentine boxes gashing its lower part, the
dry resin in them half overgrown, but odorous still; and oaks that have
borne their last acorns; and a sharded hickory that will never furnish
another nut for boy or squirrel, but now, and only this once, flail
handles, swingles, and oxbows, and helves for axes to hew down its
brethren, and wood to warm its destroyers, and smoke and fry ham for
them; and a basswood that will give the wild bees no more blossoms in
July, hollow-hearted and unfit for sleigh or toboggan, wood straight
rifted and so white that a chip of it will hardly show on the snow, but
as unprofitable food for fires as the poplars beside it, which, in the
yellow-green of youth or the furrowed gray of age, have shivered their
last.
Still higher in the woodpile are white birches, yet in the smooth skin
of their prime, which is fit to be fashioned into drinking cups and
berry baskets, or to furnish a page for my lady's album. Here are
hardhacks, some with grain winding like the grooves of a rifle. This is
the timber the Indians made their bows of, and which now serves the same
purpose for the young savages whom we have always with us. There are
sinewy blue beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads and the "beech seals"
of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a man's thigh, a
size at which they mostly stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet unlike
them, sets folks to guessing what kind of wood it is. He will hit the
mark who fires at random the names "shadblow," "service-berry," or
"amelanchier." If the axe had been merciful, in early May its branches
would have been as white with blossoms as if the last April snow still
clung to them. Tossed on a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small
stuff,--saplings improvidently cut, short-lived striped maple, and
dogwood, the slender topmost lengths of great trees, once the perches of
hawks and crows, and such large branches as were not too crooked to lie
still on the sled.
The snow-fleas, harbingers and attendants of thaws, are making the snow
in the woods gray with their restless myriads, when the sled makes its
last trip across the slushy fields, which are fast turning from white to
dun under the March winds and showers and sunshine.
The completed woodpile basks in the growing warmth, as responsive to the
touch of spring as if every trunk yet upheld its branches in the forest.
The buds swell on every chance-spared twig, and sap starts from the
severed ducts. From the pine drip slowly lengthening stalactites of
amber, from the hickory thick beads of honeydew, and from the maples a
flow of sweet that calls the bees from their hives across the melting
drifts. Their busy hum makes an island of summer sound in the midst of
the silent ebbing tide of winter.
As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy
bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on
while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled odors of the
many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home
in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher
music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the
longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of
the axe,--fiddle, bass-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all
somehow in tune. The parts stop a little when the fiddler saws off his
string, the two drawers of the long bass-viol bow sever theirs, and the
drummer splits his drum, but each is soon outfitted again, and the
funeral march of the woodpile goes on. Here is the most delightful of
places for those busy idlers the children, for it is full of pioneers'
and hunters' cabins, robbers' caves and bears' dens, and of treasures of
moss and gum and birch, and of punk, the tinder of the Indians and our
forefathers, now gone out of use except for some conservative Canuck to
light his pipe or for boys to touch off their small ordnance.
It is a pretty sight to watch the nuthatches and titmice searching the
grooves of the bark for their slender fare, or a woodpecker chopping
his best for a living with his sharp-pointed axe, all having followed
their rightful possessions from the woods, taking perhaps the track of
the sled. It is wonderful to hear the auger of the pine-borer, now
thawed into life, crunching its unseen way through the wood. Then there
is always the chance of the axe unlocking the stores of deermice, quarts
of beechnuts with all the shells neatly peeled off; and what if it
should happen to open a wild-bee hive full of honey!
If the man comes who made the round of the barns in the fall and early
winter with his threshing-machine, having exchanged it for a sawing
machine, he makes short work of our woodpile. A day or two of stumbling
clatter of the horses in their treadmill, and the buzzing and screeching
of the whirling saw, gnaws it into a heap of blocks.
Our lounging-place and the children's wooden playground have gone, and
all the picturesqueness and woodsiness have disappeared as completely as
when splitting has made only firewood of the pile. It will give warmth
and comfort from the stove, but in that black sepulchre all its beauty
is swallowed out of sight forever. If it can go to a generous fireplace,
it is beautified again in the glowing and fading embers that paint
innumerable shifting pictures, while the leaping flames sing the old
song of the wind in the branches.
L