hold resolutely to their dried leaves that the cry of the snow will most
astonish you. It is not at all the rustle of these oak leaves in a wind.
It is an outcry, an uproar, that drowns any other sound that might be in
the wood. It is impossible to distinguish voices or words. It is as if
ten thousand of the little people of the wood and field and sky had
suddenly come together in great excitement over something and were
shouting all up and down the gamut of goblin emotion. After I have stood
and listened to it for a minute or two I begin to look at one shoulder
and then the other fully expecting to see gabbling goblins grouped
there, yelling to one another in my very ears. Here with closed eyes you
may easily tell the quality of the snow about you by the sound. Each
sort of flake has its distinct tone which is easily recognized through
all the uproar. At nightfall of this first snow of ours it happened that
in the meeting of northerly and southerly currents which had brought the
storm, the north wind lulled and the south began to have its way again.
This gave us at first a great downfall of big flakes that seemed to blot
out all the world in an atmosphere of fluff. Then, evidently, the warmth
in the upper atmosphere increased for the big flakes gave way to a fine
fall of rounded sleet. Then, indeed, we got outcry the most astonishing
in the oak wood. The voices shrilled and fined and all crepitation was
lost in a vast chorus of a million peeping frogs. Nothing else ever
sounded like it. It was as if a goblin springtime had burst upon us in
the white gloom of the oak wood and all the hylas in the world were
piping their shrillest from the boughs.
I went home. I think it was time. People used to get among goblins at
dusk in this way in the old country and when they got back from goblin
land they found that they had been gone three years, and I didn’t care
to stay away so long.
During the night the sleet changed to rain which froze as it fell, and
in the morning the snow everywhere was but an inch or two deep and
covered with an icy crust that broke underfoot with a great noise and
effectually scared away any woodland thing that you approached, provided
it had powers of locomotion. Fox or crow, partridge or rabbit, must have
thought that Gulliver was once more walking in among the Lilliputians
with his very biggest boots on. Never were such thunderous footsteps
heard in my wood, at least not since the last icy crust. Frozen in the
icy surface were the trails that had been made when the snow was soft,
the squirrel’s long, plunging leaps with his hind feet dropping into the
hole his front feet had made, giving something you might mistake for
deer tracks, except that they went back up the tree. You saw where the
crow had dropped to earth and trailed his aristocratically long hind
toe, with its incurving claw. The crow’s foot is fine for grasping a
limb, but it does not fit the ground well. On the other hand, the trail
of the ruffed grouse which may lie beside it shows an ideal footprint
for walking woodland paths, the hind toe stubby nailed, short but firm,
and the whole print well planted and fitting the earth.
These and many more I found modeled in ice, but the trails that
interested me most were those beneath the crust, the long tunnels that
wound here and there, intersected and doubled and made portions of the
fields and forests for all the world like the blue veining of a white
skin. These were the trails of the shaggy-coated, crop-eared,
short-legged, shorttailed meadow mouse. This firm crust had opened to
him the opportunity of safety in paths that had been before dangerous in
the extreme. He knew where chestnuts had lain open to the sky for
months, but he dared not go into the open path to get them. Fox, cat,
skunk, weasel, hawk, owl, crow, all watched the paths and the edges of
the thick grass for him. He must burrow or die. So he does burrow all
the year through, just beneath the surface, in dirt if he must, under
light leaves and brush and matted grasses by preference, for there he
may go the more easily and quickly to his food. His eyesight and hearing
are good, and he moves like a little brown flash when he has to go into
the open.
If I wish to see him I watch well-worn footpaths through matted grass
and leaves. Here his tunnels end on one side of the path and begin on
the other and he takes the chance of crossing this risky opening to sun
and sky as often as he feels he must, but he wrecks the speed limit
every time he does it. So quickly does he go that you cannot be sure
what has happened; there was the stirring of a leaf on one side and a
grass stem on the other and a sudden vanishing touch of brown between
the two, but which way it went or whether it went at all is doubtful.
So, too, his tunnels come down and open at the water’s edge by the
meadow brook and if you are patient and have rare luck you may see him
swim across. Here trout and mink are on the watch for him. His numbers
need to be great if, with all his caution and agility, he is going to
survive all these huntsmen, and they are great. He may breed at two
months of age and have many litters a season and his progeny, if
unchecked, soon swarm. All the meadows are full of them this year, but
it is only when such a snow as we now have comes that we have a chance
to see what they may do.
In the summer-time they stick close to their meadows, living on
succulent roots and stems. They are especially fond of tuberous roots of
the wild morning-glory, which they store by the pound in their grass
larders near their nests. But under the welcome cover of the snow they
push their excursions far afield and their netted-veined trails come
even to your house itself, though they rarely dispute the wainscoting
with the house mouse. Now and then they do, however, and I fancy they
have no trouble in holding their own against their slighter and more
aristocratic cousins. When they do come you will know their presence by
the extraordinary noise of their gnawing. Once a stone crusher, no less
by the sound, got into my garret, and after one sleepless night I set
the biggest trap I had, expecting to get the most enormous brown rat
that ever happened, if not some new and more elephantine rodent. What I
caught was a well-grown field mouse, and the noise passed with him.
The rain which produced this thunderous and telltale snow crust brought
a new and gorgeous growth to the trees. From trunk to topmost twig, each
was garmented in regal splendor of crystal ice. I had been in goblin
land when I fled, at twilight, from the eerie shrilling of bogle hylas
among the oak trees. I had come back into fairyland with the rising sun.
The demure shrubs, gray Cinderellas of the ashes of the year, had been
touched by the magic wand and were robed in more gems than might glow in
the wildest dreams of the most fortunate princess of Arabian tale.
Ropes of pearl and festoons of diamonds weighed the more slender almost
to earth. The soft white shoulders of the birches drooped low in
bewildering curtsey, and to the fiddling of a little morning wind the
ball began with a tinkling of gem on gem, a stabbing of scintillant
azure, so that I was fain to shut my eyes with the splendor of it.
Then came the prince himself to dance with them, the morning sun,
flashing his gold emblazonry through their gems till the corruscation
drowned the sight in an outpouring of fire. The princesses all began to
speak as he came among them, a speech wherein dropped from their lips
all jewels and precious stones. Sunbursts of diamonds fell from dainty
young pines and ropes of pearls slid from the coral lips of slender
birches. The babble fell all about their feet in such ecstasies of
brilliant speech, such tinkling of fairy laughter as the wood had never
yet seen. Brave revels have the little people of the forest under the
moon of midsummer night, no doubt, but never could they show such royal,
dainty splendor as their own trees did this midwinter day when the sun
shone in upon them after the ice storm.
THE MINK’S HUNTING GROUND
I wish I could have seen the country about the great spring which goes
by the name, locally, of “Fountain Head” the year that the clock stopped
for the glaciers hereabout. That year when the last bit of the ice cap,
that for ages had slid down across southeastern Massachusetts and built
up its inextricable confusion of sand and gravel moraines, melted away,
would have shown a thousand great springs like it, bubbling up all
through the region, almost invariably from the northerly base of
gravelly cliffs over which the sun can hardly peep at noonday, so steep
they are. Here they flow to-day in the same mystery. Why should these
unfailing springs rush forth so steadily, be the weather hot or cold, or
the drought never so long or so severe? Why should their temperature
like their flow be changeless, summer or winter?
I sometimes believe that their waters filter through deep caverns from
far Arctic glaciers continually renewed. Perhaps to have looked at them
before the changing seasons of more thousands of years had clothed the
gravel and sand with humus, grown the forests all about and choked the
fountains themselves with acres of the muck of decayed vegetation no one
knows how deep, would have been to see them with clearer eyes and have
been led to an answer to the questions. Now I know them only as bits of
the land where time seems to have stood still, fastnesses where dwell
the lotus eaters of our New England woods, where winter’s cold howls
over their heads, but does not descend, and where summer’s heat rims
them round, but hardly dares dabble its toes in their cool retreat.
Progress has built its houses on the hills about them, freight trains
two miles away roar so mightily that the quaggy depths tremble with the
vibrations, and you may sit with the arethusas in mossy muck and hear
the honk of the automobile mingling with that of the wild geese as they
both go by in spring. Yet the one makes as much impression on the land
and its inhabitants as the other. The lotus eaters know not Ulysses; if
he wants them for his ships of progress he must capture them by force
and tie them beneath the rowers’ benches, else they return. Even the
temperature of those last days of the ice cap seems to have got tangled
in the spell and to dwell with the mild-eyed melancholy of the place the
year round. In midsummer the thermometer may stand at 120 in the
quivering nooks where the sun beats down upon the sandy plains above;
the waters of the fountain head are ice cold still, and give their
temperature to the brook and its borders. In midwinter the mercury may
register twenty below, and the gales from the very boreal pole freeze
the pines on those same sandy plains till their deep hearts burst; the
waters that flow from those mysterious fountains will have no skim of
ice on their surface.
From what unfathomed depths the waters draw their constancy we may never
know, nor on what day may well forth with them some new form of life
bred on the potency of their elixir. To-day is freezing cold and now
and then snow-squalls whirl in among the swamp maples, eddying in flocks
as the goldfinches do, yet the surface of the biggest pool where the
waters well up is covered with the vivid green of new plant life.
Millions of tiny boreal creatures swim free on the cool surface, plants
reduced to their simplest terms, born for aught I know in depths below
like those
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea,”
whence they ooze in the seeping of the upward current to our shores. No
one has here found the seeds of these stemless pinheads of green that
lie flat on the surface and send down for a wee fraction of an inch
their two or three tiny root hairs into the water.
No one can say they are apetalous or monosepalous or sporangiferous or
call them other hard names in Latin having reference to their flowering
or fruiting for we may not say that they flower or fruit at all. These
minutest Lemnas give us no sign of stamin or spore, of carpel or
indusium, yet they multiply by millions and cover the surface of the
spring pools whence they depart constantly with the outflowing current,
voyaging gayly down Brobdingnagian rapids to the sea. The time of year
when it is winter in the sky above and on the bank a few feet up the
hillside, when all green life except that which grows with its roots in
this magic water from the deep caves of earth is either killed or
suspended, seems to be their time for growth.
They grow a little, to a certain stage when perhaps a plant covers
surface to the size of a pinhead and a half, then split and become
independent plants with a tiny root hair apiece. Brave equipment this
for facing the January gales and frost of a northern winter. Yet they
sail forth from the home pool as confidently as liners from the home
port and rollick all along down the stream, making harbor in every tiny
bay and collecting a fleet in each eddy. What potency of perpetual
spring they sow as they traverse all the ways that wind in and about the
levels below the fountain head we do not know, any more than we know
what elixir vitæ dwells in the waters on which they are borne, yet
something makes the region the lotus land of creatures of the wild where
they linger on unmindful of their vanished kindred.
Out of the rich vegetable mould of ages, in the cool, moist shadows grow
the rarer New England orchids in the summer, and the rarer migrant
birds of our summer woods find asylum here for their nests and young. In
the winter the ruffed grouse comes here to drink, finds gravel for his
crop always bare and unfrozen on the hillside where the first seepings
of water come forth, and no doubt gets an agreeable change of food in
the succulent green things of the shallows. Several of these birds cling
to the place, nor can I drive them away by simply flushing them. They
circle and come back to the brook margin or its immediate neighborhood
every time.
Where the swamp maples have grown large on the bank and lifted the soil
with their roots high enough to form miniature dry islands the mink have
built their burrows and thence they go forth to hunt the region all
about, but especially
[Illustration: 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]
the brook and its tributaries, most ravenously. If you are patient,
fortunate, and the wind is right you may at dusk get a glimpse of the
weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze
for game and enemies. In that light his fur will look black though it is
really a pretty shade of brown, but you will not fail to see the white
streak which runs from his chin downward. But, though you may not see
the animal himself you cannot, if there is snow on the ground, fail to
see his slender, aristocratic track with its clutching claws, for the
mink is a desperate hunter and always hungry. All is fish that comes to
his net,--trout, turtles, toads, snails, bugs, or anything he can find
in the brook that seems in the least edible.
The semi-aquatic life of the enchanted region is sadly destructive of
other life, and I feel little pity for the mink or the weasel, sleek
and beautiful wild creatures though they are, if they in turn fall into
the steel jaws which the trapper sets for them in the narrow passes all
up and down the stream. It is the common lot of the woods and only the
swiftest and most crafty can hope to escape it. The mink devour the
trout, and they, seemingly innocent and beautiful enough to have come
up, water sprites, from that unknown underground world whence well the
crystal waters in which they live, are as greedy and irresponsible in
their diet as the mink themselves. Like them, when hungry they will
devour the young of their own species and smack their lips over the
feast.
The trout will eat anything that looks to be alive either in the water
or on the surface. I often amuse myself in summer by biting small
chunks out of an apple and dropping them in, to see the trout swallow
them as ravenously as if they had suddenly become vegetarians and had
all the zeal of new converts. What the Jamaica ginger preparation of the
brook world is I don’t know, unless it is watercress. That grows, green
and peppery, all up and down the brook the year through. Perhaps the
trout go from my green apple luncheon over to that and thus join the
remedy to the disease.
One of the trout titbits is the gentle little caddice worm, grub of the
little miller-like caddice fly that flits in at the open window of a May
night and lights on the table under the glare of your lamp. He dwells on
the bottom in these same pure waters and he has much to do to defend
himself against the jaws of his nimble hunter. He is but a worm that
crawls, so speed may not save him. His skin is tender and he has no
weapon of defense save his brain which one would hardly think adequate
in so humble a creature. Yet if you will sit on the brink and watch what
goes on in the cool depths you will see how cleverly and in what a
variety of ways he and his kindred, for there are several varieties,
have become skilled in self-defense. The little fellow has, like most
grubs, the power to spin fine silk. This would count for little though
he spun a whole cocoon, for the trout would swallow him, silken overcoat
and all. But he does better than that. He collects bits of log from the
bottom and winds these in his silken warp till he has knotted himself
firmly within a log house. There is no incentive to a trout to eat twigs
from the bottom, so the defenseless caddice worm is passed unnoticed.
He is snugly rolled in silk within his rough house and moves about by
cautiously putting out a leg or two and crawling with the logs on his
back. Another variety uses small pebbles instead of logs. Taking a stone
from bottom in the swift running water of a tiny rapid to-day I found it
covered with little gravel barnacles that clung like limpets to the
proverbial rock.
I could pry them off only by the use of considerable force and even when
I did this the wee bits of gravel, carefully fitted together in a
hemisphere, still remained, bound in strong bands. Within the hollow was
the little creature that had built the structure, his silken netting
still holding him snug within his rock castle, so much brain has this
seemingly blind and helpless worm for the preservation of himself. But
more than this, the builder and riveter of this adamantine castle has
other use for his silken bands than to bind stone or to weave himself a
silken garment against the damp weather at the brook bottom. He is a
fisherman as well, and stretched between two stones near by or perhaps
hanging over the edge of the larger stone on which he dwells is his net,
built funnel-form with the larger end toward the oncoming current, the
smaller closed with silken netting, all carefully spread to catch tiny
creatures slipping down stream with the current, on which the
net-builder, castle-dweller, may feed. These homely, home-building,
home-keeping fishermen lead an humble and pious life compared with that
of the rakish, cannibalistic trout, and they have their reward. Some
day, before the spring is very old, they will give up casting their
nets, build their house firmer, though still leaving a chance for a
circulation of water, and fall asleep. They will awaken to glide
heavenward out of the swirl of the current, veritable white angels with
downy wings which they will spread and on which they will soar away to a
new world which is as different from that in which they bound themselves
in logs or granite to escape their enemies as is the old-time orthodox
heaven from the world in which the preachers of it lived.
IN THE WHITE WOODS
The snow came out of the north at a temperature of only twenty degrees
above zero, yet, strange to say, for some hours it came damp and froze
immediately on every tree-trunk or twig that it struck. The temperature
remained the same all day and through the night, but the streak of soft
weather somewhere up above which was responsible for the damp snow soon
passed away and frozen crystals sifted down that had in them no
suspicion of moisture. Yet these tangled tips with those already frozen
firmly to the trees, and made a wonderful snow growth the whole woodland
through. The next morning it hung there untouched in the crystal
stillness and as the woodland people waked they might well have rubbed
their eyes, for they had found a new world.
It was a mystical white world that had crowded in and mocked the slender
growth of all trees and shrubs with swollen facsimiles in white. The
northerly side of tree-trunks, large or small, showed no longer gray
bark or brown, rough or smooth. Instead, fluffy white boles rose from
the white ground and divided into white limbs, which separated again
into mighty twigs of white. The dark outlines of bare trees, the
delicate tracery of gray and black that massed day before yesterday in
the exquisite dark shades of the winter woods, existed only as a faint
definition of the world of whiteness which had descended upon us in a
night.
Upon each shrub and tree had grown another, its fellow in exact
reproduction of line and curve, only swollen to forty times the size.
This enormity of limb and twig shut off all vistas. Where it had been
easy to see through the bare wood, the brush merely latticing your view
and softening up the middle distance with gray or pink or brown,
according to the growth, now the gaze was tangled in a narrow grotto
heavily decorated with buttress and baluster, with fluting, frieze, and
fillet, with mantel, moulding, mullion, and machicolation, and beat in
vain against a solid wall of alabaster just beyond. The greater pines
were pointed cones of white, each limb drooping with the weight of snow
to its fellow below, and the hangings of the outer tips joining to form
a surface wherein miniature domes, set strangely askew, yet massed in
curves of superb beauty to the making of the symmetrical whole.
In it all there was no feeling of weight. As a matter of fact it pressed
the smaller shrubs and trees well down toward earth. The narrow woodland
path was barred with a woven portcullis of white that had swung down
from either side. Here and there in the open the smaller pasture cedars
were bowed to the ground, doing reverence to the garment of mystic
purity with which the earth was sanctified as if for the passing of the
grail. In a moment you expected to see some Galahad rise from his knees
with shining face, take horse beneath the marble towers of this woodland
Camelot, and ride down white lanes in holy quest. In the deep wood the
seedling pines broke through the drifts like gnomes from mines of
alabaster, whimsical green faces showing beneath grotesque caps and
shoulder capes that were part of the whelming snow. Yet it all looked as
light and airy as any structure of the imagination, seeming as if it
might rise and float away with a change of mood, some substance of which
air castles are built, some great white dream poised to drift lightly
into the realm of the remembered, as white dreams do.
In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so
that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was
noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible.
The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back
with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in
avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was
like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you
found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds,
drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter
magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged.
It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated
into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable.
Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the
fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and
unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had
fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These
had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow,
too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill
joy of it.