around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he
continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about
the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from
the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to
be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that
he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked
in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business
of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in
the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been
bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but
did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the
toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and
added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.
I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers
with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but
then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as
all folklore--which right or wrong we must perforce believe--informs us,
the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning
a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves
that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm
as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in
his walk as one
[Illustration: He lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black
neck feathers and strutted]
does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped
behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he
lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and
strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting
heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself
in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest,
and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive
meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his
strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar
circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace
trail was broken by a little fantastic _pas seul_, from which he dropped
suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down
arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He
was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he
forgot it.
On the white page of the path that lay open under groined arches of
alabaster no foot had written a record for many rods, then it seemed as
if from side to side stretched a highway. Back and forth in straight
lines had gone a creature that made a lovely decorative pattern of a
trail, a straight line firmly drawn as if with a stylus, on either side
at a distance say of three-fourths of an inch tiny footmarks just
opposite each other, while alternating with these and nearer the middle
line were fainter and finer footprints.
Here the tiny deer-mouse had drawn his long tail through the snow,
whisking from stump to stump in a quiver of excitement lest an enemy
gobble him up, shooting across like a gray shuttle weaving this
exquisite pattern that is like that of a dainty embroidery on a lady’s
collar. How he can gallop so regularly and make his tail mark so
straight is more than I can tell. Indeed, so sly he is and so swiftly
does he go that I have never seen him make it. Beside this tiny pattern
the marks where the gray squirrel has leaped across are like those of an
hippopotamus on a rampage and the print of my own snowshoe was as if
there had been a catastrophe and a section of the sky had fallen.
Along with the tiny mouse tracks were those of our least squirrel, the
chipmunk. There is no difficulty about seeing him. He will almost come
if you whistle for him. If you will camp near his burrow you may teach
him to come and eat nuts out of your hand, answering any prearranged
signal, such as whacking them together or chirping to him.
Even though you are a total stranger he will not hesitate to whisk out
of his hole under the brush heap right in your face and eyes, whisking
back again in great terror, no doubt, but immediately putting out his
whiskered nose to sniff and wrinkle it in comical confusion, half
friendly, half frightened. So I had but to wait a moment before little
_Tamias striatus_ was out from under the brush pile and had flipped over
to a fallen log, ploughing the soft snow off the end of it in a
comically frantic rush to his hole there, the entrance being snowed up.
He was in and out again in a jiffy, standing on his hind legs and
peering over the log and making noses at me, jumping to the
[Illustration: He was in and out again in a jiffy]
top and whirling and jumping down again, and then flashing out and
kicking up crystals in a rush across the road to another hole under
another brush pile, his scantily furred half tail erect and as
humorously vivacious as everything else about him. The chipmunk when he
thinks he is going to be captured and is filled with great fear--half of
it being, I believe, fear that he wont be--is the most delightfully
comical little chap that grows in the woods. If he’d only keep as wild
as that after he is tamed I’d like one for a pet.
Down in the open meadow where the unfrozen brook ran black in its banks
of snow, touched only here and there with the green of luxuriant
watercress, I found the trail of the crows. Not one was in sight and
there was no sound from them anywhere. It was as if the snow had
covered them under and they were unable to break through it. Here,
however, was evidence to the contrary. Surely they had breakfasted, and
no doubt well. They had marched all up and down the low banks, and where
a snowy island lay in midstream they had promenaded it from one end to
the other. Here and there I could see where they had stepped into
shallow water and waded. The marks of muddy claws in the white snow were
much in evidence where they had jumped out again. Just as summer bathers
“tread for quahaugs” in the summer shallows south of the cape, I could
fancy them feeling with their toes for shell-fish and prodding for them
with long bill when found. But they had had a salad, too, with
breakfast. I could see where they had pulled out the watercress all
along and cropped it down to the larger stems. Even in winter weather
when the snow lies deep the crow knows where to find what is good for
him.
Where the path wound round the brow of the hill and the birches stand,
their granaries still full of manna for the wandering bird, it seemed
again as if my plunge into the white thicket had baptized me with
invisibility. Of a sudden the air was full of the sound of wings and a
flock of tree sparrows that must have numbered hundreds swung about my
head and charged the snow-covered birches. Their dash shook some snow
off and a few lighted, the others swinging off and having at them again.
This time all found a footing and began to feed eagerly on the seeds
from the tiny cones, scattering the birdlike scales in flocks far
greater than their own.
I had stopped stock-still at the sound of their wings, and they took no
more notice of me than if I had been a snowed-up fence post or a pasture
cedar. I tried to count them, but it was not easy. They seemed to
twinkle from twig to twig like wavelets in the sun, and though their
garb is sober their movements dazzle. Just as I would get a group on a
single tree nicely tallied they flashed as one bird over to another
tree, and mingling with their fellows there spoiled the count. I finally
estimated, rather roughly, that there were three hundred of them, a half
of a light brigade of as merry fellows as I wish to meet. They twittered
jovially and musically among themselves, and now and then one essayed a
little _sotto voce_ song which he never could finish because immediately
his mouth was full.
Once or twice some inaudible order seemed to thrill through the flock
and they whirled upward as if a single muscle moved every wing, swung a
short ellipse and lighted again, often in the same trees. As they worked
into the birches almost over my very head I could see every marking on
them; the black mandibles, the lower yellowish at the base, the reddish
brown crown and the back streaked with the same color, with black, and a
yellowish buff, the wing coverts tipped with white and the grayish white
breast with what looks like an indistinct dark spot in the center. In a
kaleidoscopic flock of three hundred or more it is not easy to give
every bird even a passing glance, but I am quite sure there were other
than tree sparrows present. I seemed to see birds without the faint dark
spot in the breast. A few, I know, had a distinctly rufous tint there,
and I fancy swamp sparrows, a few of which winter hereabouts, and
perhaps other birds for sociability’s sake, were with my winter
chippies.
The shaking of the snow from the trees and their gleaning among the
birch cones had scattered the little seeds which they love so well all
about on the snow and soon they followed them. The surface a little
before had been white. Before the birds were ready to come down it was
spiced so liberally with the seeds and scales that they had shaken down
that it was the color of cinnamon. Then with one motion the flock
dropped like autumn leaves and began a most systematic seed hunt in
which they left no bit of the space unsought. Yet when they were gone
you would hardly find two tracks that crossed; they hopped in winding
parallels that never went over the same ground a second time, leaving
figures much like the mazes which schoolboys of long ago used to draw
on their slates. They came almost to my feet and I was beginning to feel
that my fancy of invisibility was very real after all when with a
twitter of alarm and a single united action they whirred into the air
and vanished over the treetops.
I turned away in chagrin. The magic was destroyed, evidently, and in
turning I saw the cause. Just behind me in the snow with quivering tail
and green eyes glaring accusingly was the family cat. He was hunting far
from home, but I saw contemptuous recognition in his eyes and I knew he
was thinking that here was that great, clumsy creature that was always
scaring away his game.
THE ROAD TO MUDDY POND
Two days of greedy south wind had licked up the crisp snow till all the
fields and southerly slopes were bare. Then came the lull before the
north wind should come back, a lull in which you had but to sniff the
air to smell the coming spring; its faint perfume crisped with a frosty
odor that lured the senses like a flavor of stephanotis frappé. It was a
day that tempts a man to take staff and scrip and climb the hills due
south to meet the romance the two days’ wind has brought from far down
the map, perhaps from Venezuela and the highlands that border the banks
of Orinoco. By noon the north wind will be driving it back again, though
bits of it will still be tangled in southerly facing corners of the
hills.
Such a day is fine for cedar swamps. The boggy morasses under foot will
be firm with the winter’s ice still, but the warm wind has swept all
things clear of snow. Into the most tangled depths you may penetrate
with at least firm footing. Where in summer the treacherous mosses wait
to let you through into black depths of soft muck that have no bottom,
you may walk in safety on the way that the winter has laid for you.
It is not a time of year to find new things, this season of
mid-February, and yet I had hardly faced the bewildering sun a mile
before, seeking the cool depths of a hemlock-clad northern hillside to
rest my eyes from the glare, I found a yellow birch all hung with fluffy
tassels, as if the wine aroma of the air had fooled it into foliage. Now
the yellow birch is not exactly rare in our woods, here south-west of
Boston, but it is rare enough to be called occasional. Where the _Betula
alba_ is as common, almost, as the grass under foot, the _Betula lutea_
may not occur once in a square mile. I know it only on cold northern
hillsides or in dense swamps where cool springs bathe its roots all
summer long. There the silvery yellow, silky shreds of its outer bark
mark its trunk as a thing of beauty, winter or summer. You feel like
stroking these curls as if they were those of a flaxen-haired youngster
lost in the deep woods and brave but a bit troubled and in need of
comfort from one who knows. That is the only impression the yellow birch
had ever made on me in all my greetings of it, yet here it was wearing a
semblance of young leaves in this wine-sweet February air.
Even after the cool depths of the woods had cured my eyes of the sun
glare the illusion remained and I had to climb the tree and pluck some
of this foliage before I was sure what it could be. Surely eyes and no
eyes have we all, for, in all my life, I had never noticed what happens
in winter to the catkins of the yellow birch. Instead of hanging rigid
like wee cones, as do those of the white birch, giving up seeds and
scales to sprinkle the snow or the bare earth as the creatures of the
woods have need of them, these had shed their _fleur-de-lis_ scales and
then held them fluttering in the wind, each by a tiny thread. On looking
at them closely I saw the slim, rat-tail spindle sticking out, its
surface file-like with the sockets of seed and scale, but the effect of
the whole was that of fluffy tan-colored tassels hung along the twigs.
Here and there among these _fleur-de-lis_ the round, flat,
wing-margined seeds were still tangled by the two pistils which still
remained, seeming like tiny black roots, or something like those hooks
by which the tick-seed fastens to you for a free ride.
Surely the wilderness families have strongly marked individuality. Both
the white and yellow birches must hold their seeds and scatter them
little by little the whole season through, that they may have the better
chance to germinate and continue the race, and I can never see why they
should not do it in the same way. But they do not. Perhaps this infinite
variability is arranged wisely so that people who blunder about with
half seeing eyes may now and then have them opened a little wider and so
be pleased and teased into blundering on. Another season I shall watch
the yellow birches and find, if I can, on what winter date their
catkins blossom into tassels.
The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun
again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to
toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at
once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order.
Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth,
or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line.
Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts
that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through
some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your
ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in
front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and
the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to
the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along
my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and
kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a
pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of
the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette,
followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;
“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw
Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink
To westward--in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an eagle owl
Under the half-dead sunset glared;--”
That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of
which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some
first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant
only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee
gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no
eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green
sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary
pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink
wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the
pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps
the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again
against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All
about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the _Nesæa verticillata_,
which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags--decorations, I dare
say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a
midsummer-night’s tournament.
Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky
in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a
black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths;
and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden
bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in
the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of
chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the
mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets
of the _Nesæa verticillata_ were there because they tripped him. And
I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of
the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin
laughter--and all he heard was frogs.
Looking down upon it this brilliant February day, with a tiny cloud
drawn across the sun, it was a pearl. The winter and the distance made
the bog edging pure gold in which it shone with all the white radiance
of its opaque, foot-thick ice. Anon the sun came out and what had been a
pearl gathered subtle fires of blue and red in its crystalline heart and
flashed opaline tints back at me that changed again as I plunged down
the hill toward it, and it lay a Norwegian sunstone shooting forth
fire-yellow glows as the rays of the sun caught the right angle. Nor
was the ice less beautiful when I stood on it. Here opaqueness wove
sprightly patterns with crystalline purity. The surface was smooth under
foot and yet these patterns rose and fell in the ice itself, and it was
hard to believe they were not carved intaglio and then the surface iced
over to a level. It was no prettier ice than I had crossed on the big
pond, but its setting brought out the beauty.
Ice grown old, after all, is far more beautiful than young ice.
Character is built into it. Living has taught it the highest form of
art, which is to repeat beauty without sameness. What designs might the
makers of floor coverings win from this surface if they would but study
it, and how trite and tame in comparison seem their tiresome
interweaving of square and circle and their endless repetition!
This solid floor, woven by winter witchery, goes on through the spongy
surface of the bog, mingling with it, yet by some necromancy never
interfering with its own intricate patterns of growth. The sphagnum
fluffs up through it with its delicate fiber unharmed. The pitcher
plants sit jauntily holding their ewers to the sky, filled with ice
instead of water, to be sure, but uncracked and waiting in rows as if
for bogle bellboys to rush with them to unseen guests. I found one
flower-scape with its nodding head still persistent. The seed pod had
cracked along the sides, but the umbrella-like style was still there,
opened and inverted, and it had caught many of the seeds that the pod
had spilled and was holding them for a more favorable season, without
doubt.
Everywhere the solemn cassandra pushed its black twigs up through the
moss and held its leathery leaves, brown and discouraged, drooping yet
persistent. The cassandra always reminds me of thin, elderly New England
spinsters who enjoy poor health. It is so homely and solemn; even in
joyous June it never cracks a smile, but is just as lugubrious and
sallow and barely holds on to an unprofitable life. And all about,
indeed in many places crowding the very life out of it, grow these
brave, virid, white cedars. You’d think it might catch geniality from
them. Their footing is as precarious as its own. Of course, now, the ice
has set all things in its firm grip, but in summer there is little
enough to hold up the swamp cedars and it is only by entwining their
roots and growing them firmly together in a mat that they are able to
keep their sprightly uprightness. So closely are the young trees set on
the edge of their grove that it is difficult to penetrate their
intertwining branches, and even when you have passed this barrier you
find the trunks so close that often there is no room to go between them.
Here all branches have passed and the straight trunks run upward in
close parallels making all their struggle at the top. And a struggle it
has been indeed for all that are now alive. You may note this by the
bare poles of those that have lagged behind a little in the fight and
lost the magic touch of sunlight on their tops. These are dead and bare,
and their companions have so immediately taken up their slender space
that you wonder how the dead ones ever got so far as they did. It is a
very solemn temple under these cedars. The living wall the dead within
the catacombs and the sighing of the motionless leaves above your head
still leaves you in doubt. It may be trees that sorrow for dead
neighbors or gasp in the struggle to retain their own breathing space.
Little obstructs your passage, now that the firm ice is underfoot,
unless it is the too close set tree trunks. Goldthread and partridge
berry creep in the moss that mounds about the very stumps of the cedars,
but no other vine or shrub seems to have the vitality to grow here, or
if it had it has wisely used it to flee to more sunny uplands. Not even
in tropical jungles have I seen the struggle for existence so fierce as
it is among these too closely set swamp cedars. One in ten eventually
survives and makes a marketable growth. Other things bring them to
disaster than the choking crowding of their neighbors, however. Here
and there you can see big trees that lurch in strange fashion, some
this way and some that. This is most often true of a pine that by some
chance has grown among them. The cause is the uncertain footing of the
slimpsy bog. As they get heavier and taller they cannot find sufficient
anchorage in the yielding wallop beneath their roots, and sooner or
later a wind comes that tips them over. But I found in places among the
sheltering larger trees, groups of young ones, cedars, that could have
suffered from no wind, they were so well protected and walled round by
their elders. These were laid down in brief windrows all in the same
direction, and I wonder still what force accomplished it. If it had been
a tropical jungle I should have said that here a hippopotamus wandered
up out of the depths and back again, or here an elephant fled from some
retired statesman, but these are not beasts of our frozen forests.
In one place was another tropical suggestion that was a bit startling.
This was the cast skin of a snake that must have been four inches in
diameter. It was only the white bark of a dead birch that had fallen and
rotted, as to its heart-wood, all away, but the tougher bark remained,
dangling in white folds just as a snake’s skin does when cast.