CLOSE TO NATURE.
The great forest belt, oak, ash, beech and maple, sweeps southwestward
from New England through New York and trends westward and even to the
north again till one sees the same landscape very nearly reproduced in
Wisconsin wilds. Not far from where its continuity is broken by the
southern reach of Lake Huron was a clearing cut in the wood. The land
was rolling, and through the clearing ran a vigorous creek, already
alder-fringed--for the alder follows the chopper swiftly--and
glittering with countless minnows. In the spring great pickerel came
up, too, from the deep waters, miles away, to spawn and, sometimes, to
be speared. From either side of the creek the ground ascended
somewhat, and on one bank stood a little house. It was a house
pretentious for the time, since it was framed and boarded instead of
being made of logs, but it contained only three rooms: one, the general
living-room with the brick fireplace on one side, and the others,
smaller, for sleeping apartments. So close to the edge of the forest
was the house that the sweep of the wind through the tree-tops made
constant music, and the odd, squalling bark of the black squirrel, the
chatter of the red one, the drumming of the ruffed grouse, the pipe of
the quail and the morning gobble of the wild turkey were familiar
sounds. There were deer and bear in the depths of the green ocean, and
an occasional wolverine. Sometimes at night a red fox would circle
about the clearing and bark querulously, the cry contrasting oddly with
the notes of whippoorwills and the calls of loons. The trees were
largely oak and beech and ash and birch, and in the spring there were
great splashes of white where the Juneberry trees had burst into bloom.
In summer there was a dense greenness everywhere, and in autumn a great
blaze of scarlet and yellow leaves.
There was an outlined flower garden in front of the house, made in
virgin soil, and with the stumps of trees, close-hewn, still showing
above the surface. Beside the door were what they called "bouncing
Betties" and "old hen and chickens," and on each side of a short
pathway, that led to what was as yet little more than a trail through
the wood, were bunches of larkspur and phlox and old-fashioned pinks
and asters, and there were a few tall hollyhocks and sunflowers
standing about as sentinels. The wild flowers all about were so close
to these that all their perfumes blended, and the phlox and pinks could
see their own cousins but a few feet away. The short path ran through
a clump of bushes but a few yards from the creek. In these bushes
song-sparrows and "chippy-birds" built their nests.
In the doorway of the little house by the forests edge stood, one
afternoon in summer, a young man. He was what might perhaps be termed
an exceedingly young man, as his sixth birthday was but lately
attained, and his stature and general appearance did not contradict his
age. His apparel was not, strictly speaking, in keeping with the glory
of the general scene. His hat had been originally of the quality known
as "chip," but the rim was gone, and what remained had an air of
abandon about it. His clothing consisted of two garments, a striped,
hickory shirt and trousers of blue drilling. The trousers were
supported by suspenders, home-made, of the same material. Sometimes he
wore but one. It saved trouble. He was barefooted. He stood with a
hand in each pocket, his short legs rather wide apart, and looked out
upon the landscape. His air was that of a large landed proprietor,
one, for instance, who owned the earth.
This young man under consideration had not been in society to any great
extent, and of one world had seen very little. Of another he knew a
great deal, for his age. With people of the sort who live in towns he
was unacquainted, but with nature's people he was on closer terms. He
had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and
who had come to this frontier life from a broader field. This person
was his mother. With his father he was also on a relationship of
familiarity, but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of
the time, and so it came that the young man and his mother were more
literally growing up together with the country. To her he went with
such problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to
have a very good opinion of her indeed. Not that she was as wise as he
in many things; certainly not. She did not know how the new woodchuck
hole was progressing, nor where the coon tracks were thickest along the
creek, nor where the woodpecker was nesting; but she was excessively
learned, nevertheless, and could be relied upon in an emergency. He
approved of her, decidedly. Besides, he remembered her course on one
occasion when he was in a great strait. He was but three years old
then, but he remembered all about it. It was, in fact, this occurrence
which had given him his hobby.
The young man had a specialty. He had several specialties, but to one
yielded all the rest. He had an eye to chipmunks, and had made most
inefficient traps for them and hoped some day to catch one, but they
were nothing to speak of. As for the minnows in the creek, had he not
caught one with a dipper once, and had he not almost hit a big pickerel
with a stone? He knew where the liverwort and anemones grew most
thickly in the spring and had gathered fragrant bunches of them daily,
and he knew, too, of a hollow where there had been a snowy sheet of
winter-green blossoms earlier, and where there would soon be an
abundance of red berries such as his mother liked. At beech-nut
gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior. As for the habits
of the yellow-birds, particularly at the season when they were feeding
upon thistle-seed and made a golden cloud amid the white one as they
drifted with the down, well, he was the only one who really knew
anything about it! Who but he could take the odd-shaped pod of the
wild fleur-de-lis, the common flag, and, winding it up in the flag's
own long, narrow leaf, holding one end, and throwing the pod
sling-wise, produce a sound through the air like that of the swoop of
the night-hawk? And who better than he could pluck lobelia, and
smartweed, and dig wild turnips and bring all for his mother to dry for
possible use, should, he or his father or she catch cold or be ill in
any way? Hopes for the future had he, too. Sometimes a deer had come
in great leaps across the clearing, and once a bear had invaded the
hog-pen. The young man had an idea that as soon as he became a little
taller and could take down the heavy gun, an old "United States yager"
with a big bore, bloodshed would follow in great quantities. He had
persuaded his father to let him aim the piece once or twice, and had
confidence that if he could get a fair shot at any animal, that animal
would die. Were it a deer, he had concluded he would aim from a great
stump a few feet distant from the house. If a bear came, he would shut
the door and raise the window, not too far, and blaze away from there.
But in none of all these things, either present exploits or imaginings
for the future, was his interest most entangled. His specialty was
Snakes.
Not intended by nature for a naturalist was this youthful individual
whose specialty was snakes. Very much enamored was he of most of
nature's products, but not at all of the family _ophidia_. Snakes were
his specialty simply because he did not approve of them. All dated
back to the affair of three years before. Snakes were abundant in the
wood, but were not of many kinds. There were garter-snakes, dreaded of
the little frogs, but timid of most things; there was a small snake of
wonderful swiftness and as green as the grass into which it darted;
there were the water pilots, sunning themselves in coils upon the
driftwood in the water, swart of color, thick of form and offensive of
aspect; there were the milk-snakes, yellowish gray, with wonderful
banded sides and with checker-board designs in black upon their yellow
bellies. Sometimes a pan of milk from the solitary cow, set for its
cream in the dug-out cellar beneath the house, would be found with its
yellow surface marred and with a white puddling about the floor, and
then the milk remaining would be thrown away and there would be a
washing and scalding of the pan, because the thief was known. There
were, in the lowlands, the massasaugas; short, sluggish rattle-snakes,
venomous but cowardly, and, finally, there were the black-snakes
ranging everywhere, for no respecter of locality is _bascanion
constrictor_ when in pursuit of prey. Largest of all the snakes of the
region, the only constrictor among them, at home in the lowlands, on
the hill-sides or in the tree-tops, the black-snake was the dread of
all small creatures of the wood. There was a story of how one of them
had dropped upon a hunter, coiled himself about his neck and strangled
him.
This young man of six remembered how, one day, three years back, before
he had assumed trousers or become familiar with all the affairs of the
world, he was alone in the house, his mother having gone into the
little garden. He remembered how, looking up, he saw, lifted above the
doorsill, a head with beady, glittering eyes, and how, after a moment's
survey, the head was lifted higher and there came gliding over the
floor toward him a black monster, with darting tongue and long, curved
body and evident fierce intent. He remembered how he leaped for a high
stool which served him at the table, how he clambered to its top and
there set up a mighty yell for succor--for he had great lungs. He
could, by shutting his eyes, even now, see his mother as she came
running from the garden, see her look of terror as she caught sight of
the circling thing upon the floor, and then the look of desperation as
the mother instinct rose superior and she dashed into the room, seized
the great iron shovel that stood before the fireplace, and began
dealing reckless blows at the hissing serpent. A big black-snake is
not a pleasant customer, but neither--for a black-snake--is a frenzied
mother with an iron fire shovel in her hand, and this particular snake
turned tail, a great deal of it, by the way, since it extended to its
head, and disappeared over the doorsill in a cataract of black and into
the wood again.
From that hour the individual so beleaguered on a stool had been no
friend of snakes. Talk about vendettas! No Sicilian feud was ever
bitterer or more relentlessly pursued, as the boy increased in size and
confidence. Scores of garter-snakes had been his victims; once even a
milk-snake had yielded up the ghost, and once--a great day that--he had
seen a black-snake in the open and had assailed it valorously with
stones hurled from a distance. When it came toward him he retreated,
but did not abandon the bombardment, and finally drove it into a cover
of deep bushes. Come to close quarters with a black-snake he had never
done, for a double reason: firstly, because stones did almost as well
as a club, and, secondly, because his father, fearing for him, had
threatened him with punishment if he essayed such combat, and the firm
old rule of "spare the rod and spoil the child" was adhered to
literally by the father and indorsed by the mother with hesitation.
And, growing close to the house, were slender sprouts of birch and
willow, each of which leaned forward as if to say, "I am just the thing
to lick a boy with," and such a sprout as one of these, especially the
willow, does, under proper conditions, so embrace one's shoulders and
curl about one's legs and make itself familiar. But the feud was on,
and as a permanency, though, on this particular afternoon, the young
man, as he stood there in the doorway, had no thought of snakes.
Something else this summer was attracting much of his attention. He
had a family on his hands.