WILDWOOD WAYS
[Illustration: The muskrats have built higher than common this year]
WILDWOOD WAYS
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
AUTHOR OF “WILD PASTURES”
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall_
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for
permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally
contributed to its columns.
CONTENTS
PAGE
SNUGGING-DOWN DAYS 1
CERTAIN WHITE-FACED HORNETS 23
THIN ICE 45
WINTER FERN-HUNTING 65
THE BARE HILLS IN MIDWINTER 87
SOME JANUARY BIRDS 107
WHEN THE SNOW CAME 129
THE MINK’S HUNTING GROUND 151
IN THE WHITE WOODS 169
THE ROAD TO MUDDY POND 191
AMONG THE MUSKRAT LODGES 215
THICK ICE 235
ILLUSTRATIONS
The muskrats have built higher than common this
year _Frontispiece_
OPPOSITE PAGE
Their paper fort ... had by September grown to
the dimensions of a water-bucket and contained
a prodigious swarm of valiant fighters 34
There are other feathered folk who seem to delight
in the cold 118
Here in a little tangle of tiny undergrowth and
brown leaves, with a fallen trunk for overhead
shelter, you might find him any forenoon 132
You may ... get a glimpse of the weasel-like head
of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the
breeze for game and enemies 160
He lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy
black neck feathers and strutted 179
He was in and out again in a jiffy 182
SNUGGING-DOWN DAYS
To-day came with a flashing sun that looked through crystal-clear
atmosphere into the eyes of a keen northwest wind that had dried up all
of November’s fog and left no trace of moisture to hold its keenness and
touch you with its chill. It was one of those days when the cart road
from the north side to the south side of a pine wood leads you from
early December straight to early May. On the one side is a nipping and
eager air; on the other sunny softness and a smell of spring. It is more
than that difference of a hundred miles in latitude which market
gardeners say exists between the north and south side of a board fence.
It is like having thousand league boots and passing from Labrador to
Louisiana at a stride.
On the north side of a strip of woodland which borders the boggy outlet
to Ponkapoag Pond lies a great mowing field, and here among the sere
stubble I stand in the pale shadow of deciduous trees and face the wind
coming over the rolling uplands as it might come across Arctic barrens,
singing down upon the northerly outposts of the timber line. On the
south side the muskrat teepees rise from blue water at the bog edge like
peaks of Teneriffe from the sunny seas that border the Canary Isles.
Such contrasts you may find on many an early December day, when walking
in the rarefied brightness of the open air is like moving about in the
heart of a diamond.
Yet even the big mowing field shows unmistakable signs of having been
snugged down for the winter. Here and there a tree, still afloat in its
brown undulating ocean, seems to be scudding for the shelter of the
forest under bare poles, while the stout white oaks lie to near the
coast under double-reefed courses, the brown leaf-sails still holding to
the lower yards while all the spars above have been blown bare. The
woodchuck paths, that not long ago led from one clover patch to another
and then on to well-hidden holes, lie pale and untravelled, while their
fat owners are snugged down below in warm burrows with their noses
folded in under their forepaws. Tradition has it that they will wake in
a warm spell in midwinter and peer out of their burrows to see what the
prospect of spring may be. Hence, the second of February is not only
Candlemas day, but ground-hog day in rural tradition, the day on which
the woodchuck is fabled to appear at the mouth of his underground
retreat and look for weather signs, but I don’t know anyone who has ever
seen him do it. You may often find skunk tracks in the snow or mud
during a good midwinter thaw, but I have never seen those of the
woodchuck then, and I am quite confident that he stays snugged down the
winter through.
Scattered here and there about the borders of the field are groups of
dwarf goldenrod still in full leaf and flower, so far as form goes. The
crowded terminal panicles of bloom bend gracefully towards earth like
stout ostrich plumes, and I think they are more beautiful in the
feathery russet of crowded seed-masses than they were in their September
finery of golden yellow. Their stems are lined with leaves still, but
these have lost their sombre green to put on the color of deep seal
brown. It is as if they had donned their sealskin cloaks for winter
wear.
But all these clumps are doubly protected in another way, not for their
own sake, for they are but dead stems, but for the birds, who will need
their seeds when the snows later in the month shall have covered the
ground far out of their reach. All the autumn the winds have been
whirling dry leaves back and forth, and each clump has trapped them
cunningly till the slender stems that might otherwise be buried and
broken by the snow are reënforced on all sides by elastic leaves that
will hold them bravely up. Here is an open larder, a free-lunch counter
for the goldfinches and chickadees of next January. Here they may glean
and glean again, for except they be plucked by eager beaks some of
these seeds will not let go their grip on the receptacles till spring
rains loosen them and the ground is fit for their sowing.
Everywhere in wood and pasture the numbers of seeds of plants and trees
that are thus held waiting the winter gleaners are incomputable; nor
will these need to seek them on the plant itself, for little by little
as the winter winds come and go they will loose their hold and scatter
themselves about as we scatter crumbs for the snow-birds and sparrows.
Here are the birches, for instance, holding fast still to their wealth.
If bursting spring buds could be gray-brown in color instead of
sage-green we well might think the trees had another almanac than our
own and that with them it was late April, for wherever the trees are
silhouetted against the light we see every twig decorated with new
life. It is new life, indeed, but not that of spring leaves. Every tree
has a thousand cones, and every cone is packed with tiny seeds about a
central core of stiff fibre that is like a fine wire.
Holding the seeds tight in their places are little flat scales, having
an outline like that of a conventionalized fleur-de-lis or somewhat like
tiny flying birds. The whole is so keyed by the tip that as they hang
head down it is possible to dislodge only the topmost scales and seeds.
A very vigorous shake of the tree sends a cloud of these flying, but
when you look at the tree you find that not a thousandth part of its
store has been dispensed. When the midwinter snows lie deep all about,
the paymaster wind will requisition these stores as needed for the tiny
creatures of the wood and scatter them wide on the white surface, till
it will look as if spiced by the confectioner, so well does the forest
take care of its own. The Lady Amina of the Arabian tale picking single
grains of rice at the banquet might not seem to dine more daintily. The
spring will be near at hand when the last of these birch seeds will have
been dispensed. Thus innumerable graneries are stored the woodland and
pasture through, so lightly locked that all may pilfer, and so
abundantly filled, pressed down and running over that there shall be no
lack in either quantity or variety.
Far other and stranger forms of winter-guarding forethought are to be
seen all about the big mowing field and in the coppices that divide it
from the open marsh and the pond shore, if we will but look for them. In
many places has witchery been at work as well as forethought, and
strange and unaccountable things have been brought to pass that tiny
creatures may be kept safe until spring. Here and there among the
goldenrod stems you find one that is swollen to the size of a hickory
nut, a smooth globe which is merely the stem expanded from the diameter
of a toothpick to three-quarters of an inch. When I split this bulb with
my knife I find it made up of tough pith shot through with the growing
fibres of the plant, but having a tiny hollow in the centre.
Here, snugly ensconced and safe from all the cold and storms, is a lazy
creature so fat that he looks like a globular ball of white wax. Only
when I poke him does he squirm, and I can see his mouth move in protest.
His fairy language is too fine for my ear, tuned to the rough accents
of the great world, but if I am any judge of countenances he is saying:
“Why, damme, sir! how dare you intrude on my privacy!”
After all he has a right to be indignant, for I have not only wrecked
his winter home, but turned him out, unclothed and unprotected, to die
in the first nip of the shrewish wind. Unmolested he would have
leisurely enlarged his pith hall by eating away its substance and in the
spring have bored himself a cunning hole whence he might emerge, spread
tiny wings and enjoy the sunshine and soft air of summer. His own
transformations from egg to grub, from grub to gall-fly, are curious
enough; yet stranger yet and far more savoring of magic is the growth of
his winter home. By what hocus-pocus the mother that laid him there made
the slender stem of the goldenrod grow about him this luxurious home,
is known only to herself and her kindred, and until I learn to hear and
translate the language which the grub used in swearing at me when I
broke into his home, it is probable that I shall still remain ignorant.
But let us leave Labrador and let ourselves loose upon Louisiana, for we
may do it in five minutes. The oaks and the pines, the maples, the
birches and the shrubs of the close-set thickets which guard the bog
edge, I know not what straining and restraining power they have upon
this keen wind, but when it has filtered through them it has lost its
shrewishness and, meeting the warm embrace of the low hung sun, bears
aromas of spring. It is as if wood violets had shot his garments full of
tiny odors of April as he traversed the wood, or perhaps the perpetual
magic of life which seems to well up from swampy woodland had seized
upon him as it seizes upon all that passes and made him the bearer of
its potency. Across the bog to the pond outlet, through this spring-soft
atmosphere lies a slender road, lined with thickets, where I do not
wonder the _Callosamia promethia_, the spice-bush silk-moth, likes to
spin his own winter snuggery and dangle in the soft air till the real
spring taps at his silken doorway and soft rains lift the latch and let
him out.
Not far away, among the leaves that lie ankle deep among the shrubbery
that skirts the hickories and oaks, are the cocoons of _Actias luna_;
among them, shed from the oaks, are those of _Telia Polyphemus_, and if
I seek, it is not difficult to find the big pouch where _Samia
cecropia_ waits for the same call. Some May evening there shall be a
brave awakening in the glades and on the borders of the bog. It shall be
as if the tans and pinky purples and rose and yellow of the finest
autumn leaves took wing again in the spring twilight and floated about
at will owing nothing to the winds, and then the luna moth, the fairy
queen of dusk, all clad in daintiest green trimmed with ermine and seal
and ostrich plumes, shall come among them and reign by right of such
beauty as the night rarely sees, all this sprung from the papery cocoons
swung in the roadside bushes or tumbled neglectfully among the shifting
autumn leaves in the tangle at the roots of the wild smilax.
Here is magic for you, indeed, of the kind that the parlor magician is
wont to supply; frail and beautiful things grown at a breath, almost,
from obscure and trivial sources. Yet I seem to find a more potent if
less spectacular witchery in what has been done to the willows that here
and there grow in the thicket that borders the slender bog road. Some
winged sprite has touched their branch tips with fairy wand and
whispered a potent word to them, and the willows have obeyed and grown
cones! These are an inch or more in length and as perfect with scales as
those of the pines up in the wood. But there are no seeds of willow life
in them. Instead there is at the core an orange-yellow, minute grub, the
larva of a fly that stung the willow tip last spring and, stinging it,
laid her egg therein.
That the egg should become a grub and that later the grub in turn should
become a fly is nothing in the way of magic, or that it should fatten
in the meanwhile on willow fibre. The necromancy comes in the fact that
every willow tip that is made the home of this grub should thenceforth
forsake all its recognized methods of growth and produce a cone for the
harboring of the grub during the winter’s cold. There are many varieties
of these gall-producing insects. The oaks still hold spherical
attachments to their leaves, produced in the same way. Look among your
small fruits and you will find the blackberry stems swollen and
tuberculous from a similar cause, and full of squirming life. It is all
necromancy out of the same book, the book of the witchery of insects
that makes human life and growth seem absurdly simple by comparison. The
snugging down of the open world in preparation for winter is full of
such tales, and he who runs through the wood on such a day in December
may read them.
Standing in the spring-like warmth at the pond outlet and looking down
the line where bog meets water I can count the dark peaks of the muskrat
teepees, receding like a coast range toward the other shore. The
muskrats have built higher than common this year, because, I fancy, they
expect much water, having had it low all summer and fall. Some of them
are half as high as I am and must have cost tremendous labor in tearing
out the marsh roots and sods and collecting them thus in pyramidal form.
Their roads run hither and yon across the bog and are so well travelled
that the travellers must be numerous as well as active. They have laid
in a store of lily roots and sweet-flag for the winter, and their
underwater entrances lead upward to quarters that are dry and snug.
Here they are as secure from frost as was the white grub that I hewed
from his pith hall in the goldenrod stem. When the ice is thick all
about, their house will be as hard of outside wall as if built of black
adamant yet their water-entrance will be free, beneath the ice, and they
will go to and fro by it, seeking supplies or perhaps making friendly
calls.
All the morning the marsh grass billowed and the water sparkled, one to
another, about their houses, and if you listened to the grass you might
hear its fine little sibilant song, a soft susurrus of words whose only
consonant is s, set to a sleepy swing. It is a song that seems to
harmonize with the fine tan tones of the bog as they fade into silvery
white where the sun reflects from smooth spears. Over on the distant
hillside the pines, navy blue under cloud shadows, hummed in the wind
like bassoons; distant and muted cornets sang clear in the maples, and
all about the feathery heads of the olive swamp cedars you caught the
faint shrilling of fifes if you would but listen intently. Now and then
the glocken-spiel tinkled in mellow yellow notes among the dry reeds on
the marge, but these echoed but familiar runes. The tan-white bog grass
that is so wild it never heard the swish of scythe, sang, soft and
sibilant, an elfin song of the lonely and untamed.
With the singing of the wind into the tender spring of the south side
the day grew cold with clouds. The sky was no longer softly blue, but
gray and chilling, the pond lost its sparkle and grew purple and numb
with cold, and all among the bare limbs you heard the song of the
promise of snow. But the clouds stopped at a definite line in the west
and at setting the sun dropped below this and sent a golden flood
rolling through the trees that mark the boundary between field and pond,
lighting up all the bog with glory and gilding the muskrat teepees and
the tall bog grass and the distant trees across the water till all the
sere and withered leaves were bathed in serenity, as softly and serenely
bright as if the golden age had come to us all. In this wise the crystal
day, with its sheltered exultation of spring and its gray promise of
winter’s snow all fused into one golden delight of sunset glory, marched
on over the western hills trailing paths of gilded shadow behind it
along which one walked the homeward way as if into the perfect day.
CERTAIN WHITE-FACED HORNETS
The lonesomest spot in all the pasture, the one which the winter has
made most vacant of all, is the corner where hangs the great gray nest
of the white-faced hornets. Its door stands hospitably open but it is no
longer thronged with burly burghers roaring to and fro on business that
cannot wait. It was wide enough for half a dozen to go and come at the
same time, yet they used to jostle one another continually in this
entrance, so great was the throng of workers and so vigorous the energy
that burbled within them. While the warm sun of an August day shines a
white-faced hornet is as full of pent forces, striving continually to
burst him, as a steam fire-engine is when the city is going up in flame
and smoke and the fire chief is shouting orders through the megaphone
and the engineer is jumping her for the honor of the department and the
safety of the community. He burbles and bumps and buzzes and bursts,
almost, in just the same way.
It is no wonder that people misunderstand such roaring energy, driving
home sometimes too fine a point, and speak of _Vespa maculata_ and his
near of kin the yellow jackets, and even the polite and retiring common
black wasp, with dislike. In this the genial Ettrick Shepherd, high
priest of the good will of the open world, does him, I think, much
wrong. “O’ a’ God’s creatures the wasp,” he says, “is the only one that
is eternally out of temper. There’s nae sic thing as pleasing him.”
This opinion is so universal that there is little use in trying to
controvert it, and yet these white-faced hornets which I have known, if
not closely, at least on terms of neighborliness, do not seem to merit
this opprobrium. That they are hasty I do not deny. They certainly brook
no interference with their right to a home and the bringing up of the
family. But I do not call that a sign of ill temper; I think it is
patriotism.
Probably the trouble with most of us is that we have happened to come
into quite literal contact with white-face after the fashion of one of
the early explorers of the country about Massachusetts Bay. Obadiah
Turner, the English explorer and journalist, thus chronicles the
adventure in the quaint phraseology of the year 1629.
“Ye godlie and prudent captain of ye occasion did, for a time, sit on
ye stumpe in pleasante moode. Presentlie all were hurried together in
great alarum to witness ye strange doing of ye goode olde man. Uttering
a lustie screme he bounded from ye stumpe and they, coming upp, did
descrie him jumping aboute in ye oddest manner. And he did lykwise puff
and blow his mouthe and roll uppe his eyes in ye most distressful waye.
“All were greatlie moved and did loudlie beg of him to advertise them
whereof he was afflicted in so sore a manner, and presentlie, he
pointing to his foreheade, they did spy there a small red spot and
swelling. Then did they begin to think yt what had happened to him was
this, yt some pestigeous scorpion or flying devil had bitten him.
Presentlie ye paine much abating he saide yt as he sat on ye stumpe he
did spye upon ye branch of a tree what to him seemed a large fruite, ye
like of wch he had never before seen, being much in size and shape like
ye heade of a man, and having a gray rinde, wch as he deemed, betokened
ripenesse. There being so manie new and luscious fruites discovered in
this fayer lande none coulde know ye whole of them. And, he said, his
eyes did much rejoice at ye sight.
“Seizing a stone he hurled ye same thereat, thinking to bring yt to ye
grounde. But not taking faire aime he onlie hit ye branch whereon hung
ye fruit. Ye jarr was not enow to shake down ye same but there issued
from yt, as from a nest, divers little winged scorpions, mch in size
like ye large fenn flies on ye marshe landes of olde England. And one of
them, bounding against hys forehead did give in an instant a most
terrible stinge, whereof came ye horrible paine and agonie of wch he
cried out.”
Let go on the even tenor of his home-building and home-keeping way,
white-face is another creature. One of his kind used to make trips to
and from my tent all one summer, and we got to be good neighbors. At
first I viewed him with distrust and was inclined to do him harm, but he
dodged my blow and without deigning to notice it landed plump on a
house-fly that was rubbing his forelegs together in congratulatory
manner on the tent roof. He had been mingling with germs of superior
standing, without doubt, this house-fly, but his happiness over the
success of the event was of brief duration. There came from his wings
just one tenuous screech of alarm followed by an ominous silence of as
brief duration. Then came the deep roar of the hornet’s propellers as
he rounded the curve through the tent door and gave her full-speed ahead
on the home road. An hour later he was with me again, had captured
another fly almost immediately, and was off. He came again, many times a
day, and day after day, till I began to know him well and follow his
flights with the interest of an old friend.
He never bothered me or anyone else. He had no time for men; the capture
of house-flies was his vocation and it demanded all his energy and
attention. In fact that he might succeed it was necessary that he should
put his whole soul into earnest endeavor, for he was not particularly
well equipped for his work. He had neither speed nor agility as compared
with his quarry, and if house-flies can hear and know what is after
them, the roar of his machinery, even at slowest speed, must have given
them ample warning. It was like a freighter seeking to capture torpedo
boats. They could turn in a circle of a third the radius of his and
could fly three miles to his one, yet he was never a minute in getting
one.
I think they simply took him for an enlarged edition of their own kind
and never knew the difference until his mandibles gripped them. He used
to go bumbling and butting about the tent in a near-sighted excitement
that was humorous to the onlooker. He didn’t know a fly from a hole in
the tentpole, and there was a tack in the ridgepole whose head he
captured in exultation and let go in a sort of slow wonder every time he
came in. He got to know me as part of the scenery and didn’t mind
lighting on top of my head in his quest, and he never thought of
stinging me. I timed his visits one sunny, still day and found that he
arrived once in forty seconds. But this was only under most favorable
weather conditions. A cloud over the sun delayed him and in wet weather
he was never to be seen.
His method with the fly in hand was direct and effective. The first buzz
was followed by the snip-snip of his shear-like maxillaries. You could
hear the sound and immediately see the gauzy wings flutter slowly to the
tent floor. If the fly kicked much his legs went in the same way. Then
white-face took a firmer grip on his prize and was off with him to the
nest. The bee line is spoken of as a model of mathematical directness,
but the laden bee seeking the hive makes no straighter course than did
my hornet to his nest in the berry bush down in the pasture.
Flies were plentiful and, knowing how many hornets there are in a nest,
I expected at first that he would bring companions and perhaps overwhelm
my hospitality with mere numbers, but he did nothing of the kind. I have
an idea that he was detailed to the fly catching work just as other
workers were busy gathering nectar and honey dew for the young and
others still were nest and comb building. Later in the summer another
did come, but I am convinced that he happened on the other’s game
preserve by accident and was not invited. The two between them must have
captured thousands of flies and carried them off alive to their nest.
Thus their paper fort, hung from the twigs of a blueberry bush, had by
September grown to the dimensions of a water-bucket and contained a
prodigious
[Illustration: Their paper fort had by September grown to the dimensions of a
water-bucket and contained a prodigious swarm of valiant fighters]
swarm of valiant fighters and mighty laborers, so much will persistent
labor, even by near-sighted, dunder-headed hornets, accomplish. I say
near-sighted, for the two specimens of _Vespa maculata_ who used to hunt
flies in my tent were certainly that. I say also dunder-headed, for if
not that they would have learned eventually the location of that tack
head and ceased to capture it. Barring these failings, no doubt
congenital, I know of no pasture people who show greater virtues or more
of them than the white-faced hornets.
The weak beginnings of their great community home in the berry bush were
made in early May when a single lean and hungry queen mother crept from
a crevice in the heart of a great hollow chestnut where she had survived
the winter. She sunned herself for a time at the opening, then began
eagerly chewing fibre from a gray and bare dead limb near by. She chewed
this and when it was softened to a pulp she flew straight to the berry
bush and began her long summer’s work. Laboring patiently she made and
brought enough of the paper pulp moistened with her own saliva to form a
nest half the size of an egg containing just a few cells in a single
comb that was horizontal and opened downward. In these she laid an egg
each, worker’s eggs.
Always the first brood is of workers only, and it would seem that the
mother hornet is able by some strange necromancy to lay an egg which
shall produce, as she wills, a worker, a drone or another queen, for the
hornet hive, like that of the honey-bee, has the three varieties. While
these eggs hatch she completes the nest and then begins feeding the
funny little white maggots which hang head down in the cells, stuck to
the top by a sort of glue which was deposited with the egg.
Honey and pollen is the food which the youngsters receive, varied as
they grow up with a meat hash of insects caught by the mother and chewed
fine. Soon they fill the cells, stop eating, and spin for themselves a
sort of silk night shirt and a cap with which they close the mouth of
the cell. Here they remain quiet for a few days, changing from grub to
winged creature as does a butterfly during the chrysalis stage of its
existence.
Those were busy days for the queen mother, for she had the work and the
care of the whole wee hive on her hands, and she showed herself capable
not only of doing her own feminine part in the hive economy, but that of
half a dozen workers as well, making paper, doing construction work,
finding and bringing honey and pollen and insects for the food of the
young grubs, and finally helping them cut away the seals to the cells
and grasping the young hornets in her mandibles and hauling them out of
their comb.
These young hornets washed their faces, cleaned their antennæ, ate one
more free meal and set to work. Thereafter the queen mother, having
reared her retinue, worked no more, but kept the hive and produced
worker eggs as new cells were provided for them, now and then perhaps
feeding the children when the workers were busiest.
The first care of the new-born workers was to clean out the once used
cells and to build new ones. But there was no room for new comb within
the thin paper envelope which the mother had built as a first hive.
They therefore cut this away, chewing it to pulp again, and building new
cells with a larger covering all about them. Then below the first comb
they hung a second by paper columns so that there was space for them to
pass between the two, standing on top of one comb while they fed the
young hanging head down in the comb above.
They also added cells to the sides of the old comb, making it much
wider. The first little round egg-shaped nest was all of one color, a
soft gray, but the new additions are apt to be lighter or darker in
color, according to the idiosyncrasies of the individual worker. Some
indeed have a faint touch of brown when newly added to the structure
though these soon fade, yet you may recognize always the dividing line
between one hornet’s work and another’s by the difference in shade.
Thus the work went on during the summer, more cells being added to the
existing combs, new combs being hung below, and always the surrounding
envelope being cut away and replaced to accommodate the internal growth.
Late August saw the last additions made. The hive then roared with life.
The summer had been a good one and food was plentiful. Under the bounty
of fierce summer heat and ample food the workers had developed a new
faculty.
I have given them the masculine pronoun in speaking of them, for they
certainly seemed to deserve it. Surely only males could be at once so
sharp and so blunt, so burly, so strenuous and so devoid of interest in
anything but their work. Yet it is a fact that in August some of the
workers began to lay eggs, and if the old proverb that “Like produces
like” holds good they still deserve the masculine pronoun, for these
eggs produced only males.
At the same time the queen began to lay eggs which were destined to
produce other queens. How all this could have been known about
beforehand it is hard to tell, but such must have been the fact, for the
cells in which these eggs were to be laid were made larger than the
others as the greater size of males and females requires.
Thus the climax of the work of the great paper hive was reached. The new
queens had been safely reared and had reached maturity when the first
chill days of autumn came. These days brought rain, and the change from
bustling life to silence was most startling. Almost in a day the hive
was deserted. It was as if the entire colony had swarmed, and so they
had, but not as a hive of bees swarms. They had left the old home never
to return, but not as a colony seeking a new land in which to prosper.
The first chill of autumn laid the cold hand of death on their busy
life. They went away as individuals and stopped, numbed with cold,
wherever the chill caught them.
Where they went it is hard to say, but one hornet or a thousand crawling
into a crevice to escape the cold is easily lost in the great world of
out-of-doors. No worker survives the winter. I think the intensity of
their labors during the summer, the continued use of that energy that
bubbles within them all summer long, exhausts them and they succumb
easily, worked out. With the young queens it is different. Their work is
yet to come, and the strong young life within them gives them vitality
to endure the winter, though seemingly frozen stiff in their crevices.
Yet only a few of these come through in safety. If the queens of one
hive all built next year, the pasture would be a far too busy place for
mere man to visit.
It is just as well as it is, yet I am glad that each year sees at least
one queen white-face pulp-making in the May sun. Pasture life without
her uproarious progeny would lack spice. The great gray nest is pathetic
in its emptiness, and I am glad to forget it and its bustling throng,
remembering only the one busy worker that used to come into the tent
and, having caught his fly, hang head downward from ridge-pole or
canvas-edge by one hind foot while all his other feet were busy holding
his lamb for the shearing.
THIN ICE
Toward midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with
the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the
face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface,
dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the
low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the
sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from
shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.
As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous
stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The
nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter
night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in
the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost
vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early
starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown
suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad
miles of interstellar space.
Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are
the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine
with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is
forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand
lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward
through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable
distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed
constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is
very deep on still winter nights.
If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is
complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth
remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your
nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations
only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is
there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of
incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the
paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into
a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the
bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth
coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but
it has carried you far.
No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long
winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep
and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north
wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and
waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been
below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the
dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind
were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water
lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some
degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir
it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.
Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast
universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the
eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of
vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its
surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in
the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and
prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when
the pond was young.
These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and
joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn
faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only,
while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of
open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations,
and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next
morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to
shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold
has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange
vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.
New ice thus formed has a wonderful strength in proportion to its
thickness. It is by no means smooth, however. The embossing of the
reproductions of these pond dreams of fern and palm and plesiosaurus
makes hubbles under your steel as you glide over it, though little you
care for that on your first skate of the year. The embossing it is, I
think, that largely gives it its strength, and though it may crack and
sag beneath you as you strike out, you know that its black texture is
made up of interlacing crystals that slip by one another in the bending,
but take a new grip and hold until your weight fairly tears them apart.
The small boy knows this instinctively and applies it as he successfully
runs “teetley-bendoes” to the amazement and terror of the uninitiated
grown-ups. If you have the heart of the small boy still, though with an
added hundred pounds in weight, you may yet dare as he does and add to
the exhilaration born of the wine-sweet air the spice of audacity. An
inch or so of transparent ice lies between you and a ducking among the
fishes which dart through the clear depths, fleeing before the under
water roar of your advance, for the cracks, starting beneath your feet
and flashing in rainbow progress before you and to the right and left,
send wild vibrations whooping and whanging through the ice all over the
pond. Now the visible bottom drops away beneath you to an opaqueness
that gives you a delicious little sudden gasp of fear, for you realize
the depth into which you might sink; again it rises to meet you and here
you may bear down and gain added impetus, for you know that the ice will
be thicker in shallow water.
So you go on, and ever on. It is not wise to retrace your strokes, for
those ice crystals that gave to let you through and then gripped one
another again to hold you up may not withstand a second impact; nor is
it wise to stop. Mass and motion have given you momentum and you have
acquired some of the obscure stability of the gyroscope. You tend to
stay on your plane of motion, though the ice itself has strength to hold
only part of your weight. Thus the wild duck, threshing the air with
mighty strokes, glides over it, held up by the same obscure force. The
ice has no time to break and let you through. You are over it and onto
another bit of uncracked surface before it can let go.
The day warmed a little with a clear sun but the frost that night bit
deep again and the next morning the ice had nearly doubled in thickness
and would not crack under any strain which my weight could put upon it.
A second freezing, even though both be thin, gives a stronger ice than a
single freezing of equal depth, just as the English bowmaker of the old
days used to glue together a strip of lancewood and a strip of yew, or
even two strips of the same wood, thus making a far stiffer bow than one
made of a single piece of equivalent dimensions.
This ice was much smoother too. That evaporation which is steadily going
on from the surface of ice even in the coldest weather, the crystals
passing to vapor without the intervening stage of water, had worn off
the embossing. The ice instead of being black was gray with countless
air bubbles all through its texture. You will always find these after a
day’s clear sun on a first freezing. I fancy the ice crystals make
minute burning glasses under the sun’s rays and thus cause tiny meltings
within its own bulk, the steam of the fusing making the bubbles; or it
may be that the air with which the north wind of two days before had
been saturating the water was thus escaping from solution.
It was midday of this second day of skating weather before I reached the
pond. The sky was overcast, the wind piped shrill again, and there were
snow-squalls about. The pond was empty and lone. I thought no living
creature there beside myself, and it was only at the second call of a
familiar voice that I believed I heard it. Then, indeed, I stopped and
listened up the wind. It came again, a wild and lonely whistle that was
half a shout, beginning on the fifth of the scale, sliding to the top of
the octave, and then to a third above, and I heard it with amazement.
The pond was firmly covered with young ice. Why should a loon be sitting
out on it and hooting to me?
There was silence for a space while I looked in vain, for the first
flakes of a snow-squall were whitening the air and had made the distant
shore indistinct. Then it spoke again, almost confidentially, that still
lonely but more pleasing whinny, a sort of “Who-who-who-who” that is
like a tremulous question, weird laughter, or a note of pain as best
fits the mind of the listener. The voice came from the geographical
centre of the pond’s loneliness, the one point where a wild bird like
the loon, obliged to make a stand, would find himself farthest from all
frequented shores. I skated up the wind in that direction, but the snow
blew in my eyes and I could see but little.
Suddenly right in front of me there was a wild yell of dismay, despair
and defiance all mingled in a single loon note, but so clearly expressed
that you could not fail to recognize them, then a quick splash, and I
had almost skated into a hole in the ice, perhaps some ten feet across.
Then I knew what had happened. A loon, wing-tipped by some poor
marksman, had dropped into the pond before the freeze. He could dive and
swim, no doubt, as well as ever but could not leave the water. When the
pond began to freeze he did the only thing possible in his losing fight.
That was to seek the loneliest spot in the surface and keep an opening
in the ice when it began to form. I could see the fifteen-foot circle
which had been his haven for the first night and day. Then with the
second freezing night he had been obliged to shorten this. Two feet and
a half of new ice showed his inner line of defence rimmed accurately
within the greater circle and showing much splashing where he had, I
thought, breasted it desperately all the long night in his brave fight
to keep it open.
How long without human intervention he might brave the elements and keep
his narrowing circle unfrozen would of course depend on the weather. If
it did not come on too severe he might live on there till his wing
healed and by a miracle win again to flight and safety. The cold would
not trouble him nor the icy water. The loon winters anywhere from
southern Massachusetts south and, strong and well, has no fear of
winter. But there entered into this the human equation. The next man
along would likely go home and get a shotgun.
As I noted all this a head appeared above the water in the pool. There
was another shriek of alarm and it vanished in a flash and a splash. It
was forty seconds by my watch before the bird appeared again. This time
he rose almost fully to the surface and sounded a war cry, then dove
again and was under for seventy seconds. And so as long as I stood my
distance motionless he came and went, never above water for more than a
few seconds, varying in length of time that he stayed below from half a
minute to a minute and a quarter, and never going below without sounding
the eerie heartbreak of his call.
Then I skated away to get my camera and was gone three-quarters of an
hour. Returning I saw him in the distance, for the snow had almost
passed. He saw me too and dived. Gliding up I knelt at the very edge of
the hole and was fixing the camera when he came up. He sat level on the
surface for a second, seemingly not noticing me. Then, warned by a
motion that I made in trying to adjust the focus, he sounded a wild and
plaintive call that seemed to have in it mingled fear and defiance,
heartbreak and triumph, and plunged beneath the surface with a vigor and
decision that sent him far beneath the ice, his great webbed feet
driving him with great jumps, as a frog swims.
I saw him shoot away from the hole, trailing bubbles. I waited kneeling,
watch in hand and thumb on bulb, a minute, two minutes, three, five,
ten. The snow shut in again thick, the north wind sang a plaintive dirge
and I realized that the picture would never be taken. Instead I was
kneeling at the deathbed of a wild Northern spirit that perhaps
deliberately took that way of ending the unequal struggle.
The loon knows not the land. Even his nest he builds on the water’s
edge and clambers awkwardly to it with wings and bill as well as feet.
The air and water are his home, the water far more than the air, and he
knows the underwater world as well as he does the surface. I shall never
know whether my loon went so far in his flight beneath the ice that he
failed to find his way back, or whether his strength gave out. Knowing
his untamed and fearless spirit I am inclined to believe that he
deliberately elected to die at home, in the cool depths that he loved
rather than come back to his poor refuge in the narrowing ice circle and
face that strange creature that knelt at the edge.
WINTER FERN-HUNTING
The spring of this, our new year of 1909, is set by the wise makers of
calendars to begin at the vernal equinox, say the twenty-first of March,
but the weatherwise know that on that date eastern Massachusetts is
still in the thrall of winter, and spring, as they see it, is not due
till a month later.
Yet they are both wrong, and we need but go into the woods now to prove
it. The spring in fact is already here. The new life in which it is to
express itself in a thousand forms is already growing and much of it had
its beginning in late August or early September of last year. The wind
out of the north may retard it indeed, but it needs but a touch of the
south wind to start it in motion again, and the deep snows that are yet
to come and bury it so that the waves of arctic atmosphere that may roll
over its head for weeks will never be able to touch it are a help.
Many a hardy little spring plant blooms first, not in April as we are
apt to think, but more likely in January, though it may be two feet deep
beneath the snow and ice and unseen by any living creature. To go no
farther than my own garden, I have known a late January thaw, rapidly
carrying off deep snow, to reveal the “ladies’ delights” in bloom
beneath an overarching crust of ice. The warm snow blankets had
effectually insulated the autumn grown buds from the zero temperature
two feet above, and the warmth of the earth beneath had not only passed
through the frost but melted a little cavern beneath the snow, and
there the hardy plants had responded to the impulse of the spring that
was already with them.
In this wise the chickweed blooms the year round though rarely are
circumstances such that we note it in the winter months. Now and then
the hepatica opens shy blue eyes beneath the enfolding snow and it is
common in times of open weather in midwinter to read newspaper reports
of the blooming of dandelions in December, or January. These are just as
much in bloom on other winters but the snow covers them from sight and
it takes a thaw which sweeps the ground clear of snow to reveal them.
It is good now and then to get a green Christmas such as we have just
had, for in it we may go forth into the fields and realize that the
spring has not retreated to the Bahamas, but merely to the subsoil,
whence it slips, full of warmth and thrill, on any sunshiny day. If we
will but seek the right places we need not search long to find April all
about us, though they may be cutting ten-inch ice on the pond and winter
overcoats be the prevailing wear.
To-day I found young and thrifty plants, green and succulent, of two
varieties of fern that are not common in my neighborhood and that I had
never suspected in that location. I had passed them amid the universal
green of summer without noticing them, but now their color stood out
among the prevailing browns and grays as vividly as yellow blossoms do
in a June meadow.
Yet I sought the greater ferns of my acquaintance in vain in many an
accustomed place. Down by the fountain head is a spot where the black
muck, cushioned with yielding sphagnum, slopes gently upward to firmer
ground beneath the maples till these give way to the birches on the
drier hillside. Here the ostrich fern waved its seven-foot fronds in
feathery beauty amid the musky twilight of the swamp all summer long.