GROWING UP WITH THE COUNTRY.
Have you ever seen a buckwheat field in bloom? Have you stood at its
margin and gazed over those acres of soft eider-down? Have your
nostrils inhaled the perfume of it all, the heavy sweetness toned
keenly with the whiff of pine from the adjacent wood? Have you noted
the wild bees in countless myriads working upon its surface and
gathering from each tiny flower's heart that which makes the clearest
and purest and most wine-like of all honey? Have you stood at the
forest's edge, perched high upon a fence, maybe of trees felled into a
huge windrow when first the field was cleared, or else of rails of oak
or ash, both black and white--the black ash lasts the longer, for worms
invade the white--and looked upon a field of growing Indian corn, the
green spread of it deep and heaving, and noted the traces of the
forest's tax-collectors left about its margins: the squirrel's dainty
work and the broken stalks and stripped ears upon the ground, leavings
of the old raccoon, the small bear of the forest, knowing enough to
become a friend of man when caught and tamed, and almost human in his
ways, as curious as a scandal-monger and selfish as a money-lender?
Have you gone into the hard maple wood, the sugar bush, in early
spring, the time of frosty nights and sunny days, and driven home the
gouge and spile, and gathered the flowing sap and boiled it in such
pots and kettles as later pioneers have owned, and gained such
wildwood-scented product as no confectioner of the town may ever hope
to equal? Have you lain beside some pond, a broadening of the creek
above an ancient beaver-dam, at night, in mellowest midsummer, and
watched the muskrats at their frays and feeding? Have you hunted the
common wildcat, short-bodied demon, whose tracks upon the snow are
discernible each winter morning, but who is so crafty, so gifted with
some great art of slyness, that you may grow to manhood with him all
about you, yet never see him in the sinewy flesh unless with dog and
gun, and food and determination, you seek his trail, and follow it
unreasoningly until you terminate the stolid quest with a discovery of
the quarry lying close along the body of some eloping, stunted tree,
and with a lively episode in immediate prospect? Did you ever chase a
wolverine, last of his kind in a clearing-overflowed region, strange
combination in character and form of bear and lynx, gluttonous and
voracious, and strong and fearless, a beast descended almost unchanged
from the time of the earliest cave-men, the horror of the bravest dog,
and end his too uncivilized career with a rifle-shot at thoughtful
distance?
Have you seen the wild pigeons, before pot-hunters invaded their
southern roosts and breeding-grounds and slaughtered them by millions,
exterminating one of the most wonderful of American game birds, sweep
over in such dense clouds that the sun would be obscured, and at times
so close to earth that a long pole thrust aloft from tree or hillock
would stun such numbers as would make a gallant pot-pie? Have you
followed the deer in the dense forest, clinging doggedly to his track
upon the fresh snow from the dusk of early morning, startling him again
and again from covert, and shooting whenever you caught even so much as
a glimpse of his gray body through distant interstices of tree and
brush, until, late in the afternoon, human endurance, which always
surpasses that of the wild beast, overcame him, and he leaped less
strongly with each new alarm and grew more reckless before twilight,
and came within easy range and fed his enemies on the morrow? Have you
watched for him beside the brackish waters of the lick, where, perched
upon a rude, high scaffold built beside a tree, mosquito-bitten and
uneasy, you waited and suffered, preserving an absolute silence and
immobility until came ghost-like flitting figures from the forest to
the shallow's edge, when the great gun, carrying the superstitious
number of buckshot, just thirteen, roared out, awakening a thousand
echoes of the night, and, clambering down, found a great antlered thing
in its death agony?
Have you wandered through new clearings neglected for a season and
waded ankle-deep in strawberry blooms, and, later, fed there upon such
scarlet fruit, so fragrant and with such a flavor of its own that the
scientific horticulturist owns to-day his weakness? Have you looked
out upon the flats some bright spring morning and found them
transformed into a shallow lake by the creek's first flood, and seen
one great expanse of shining gold as the sun smote the thin ice made in
the night but to disappear long before mid-day and leave a surface all
ripples and shifting lights and shadows, upon which would come an
occasional splash and great out-extending circles, as some huge mating
pickerel leaped in his glee? Have you stood sometime, in sheer delight
of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air clarified by hundreds of
miles of sweep over an inland sea, the nearest shore not a score of
miles away, and filtered through aromatic forests to your senses, an
invisible elixir, exhilarating, without a headache as the price? Have
you seen the tiger-lilies and crimson Indian-tobacco blossoms flashing
in the lowlands? Have you trapped the mink and, visiting his haunts,
noticed there the old blue crane flitting ever ahead of you through
dusky corridors, uncanny, but a friend? Have you--but there are a
thousand things!
If you have not seen or known or felt all these fair things--so jumbled
together in the allusion here, without a natural sequence or thought or
reason or any art--if you have not owned them all and so many others
that may not here be mentioned, then you have missed something of the
gifts and glories of growth in a new land. Such experience comes but
to one generation. But one generation grows with the conquest, and it
is a great thing. It is man-making.
And from the east came more hewers of wood, not drawers of water, and
the axe swung all around, and new clearings were made and earlier ones
broadened, and where fireweed first followed, the burning of the logs
there were timothy and clover, though rough the mowing yet, and the
State was "settled." Roads through the woods showed wagon-ruts, now
well defined; houses were not so far apart, and about them were young
orchards. The wild was being subjugated. The tame was growing. The
boy was growing with it.
There was nothing particularly novel in the manner of this youth's
development, save that, as he advanced in years, he became almost a
young Indian in all woodcraft, and that the cheap, long,
single-barreled shotgun, which was his first great personal possession,
became, in his skilled hands, a deadly thing. Wild turkey and ruffed
grouse, and sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder,
and he had it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older,
and become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux.
The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at. Those
remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live
to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin admirably,
and he approved of them. With the Sioux it was quite different. He
had read of them in the weekly paper, which was now a part of progress,
and he had learned something of them at the district school--for the
district school had come, of course. It springs up in the United
States after forests have been cut away, just as springs the wheat or
corn. And the district school was, to the youth, a novelty and a vast
attraction. It took him into Society.
Through forest paths and from long distances in each direction came the
pupils to this first school of the region, and there were perhaps a
score of them in all, boys and girls, and the teacher was a fair young
woman from the distant town. The school-house was a structure of a
single room, built in the wood, and squirrels dropped nuts upon its
roof from overhanging boughs and peeped in at the windows, and
sometimes a hawk would chase a fleeing bird into the place, where it
would find a sure asylum, but create confusion. Once a flock of quail
came marching in demurely at the open door, while teacher and pupils
maintained a silence at the pretty sight. And once the place was
cleared by an invasion of hornets enraged at something. That was a
great day for the boys.
The studies were not as varied as in the cross-roads schools to-day.
There was the primer, and there were a few of the old Webster
spelling-books, but, while the stories of the boy in the apple tree and
the overweening milkmaid were familiar, the popular spelling-book was
Town's, and the readers were First, Second, Third and Fourth, and their
"pieces" included such classics as "Webster's Reply to Hayne" and
"Thanatopsis," and numerous clever exploits of S. P. Willis in blank
verse. Davie's Arithmetic was dominant, and, as for grammar, whenever
it was taught, Brown's was the favorite. There was, even then, in the
rural curriculum the outlining of that system of the common schools
which has made them of this same region unexcelled elsewhere in all the
world. There were strong men, men who could read the future,
controlling the legislation of some of the new States.
The studies mentioned, and geography were the duties now in hand, and
there was indifference or hopefulness or rivalry among those of the
little group as there is now in every school, from some new place in
Oklahoma to old Oxford, over seas. In all scholarship, it chanced that
this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead. His mother, an
ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had
taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste
that way and a retentive memory. So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he
had a certain prestige. Outside, he took his chances.