on their gloomy side now. Toward the vivifying sun they turn every
cheerful atom within them and as you look down on them as the sun does
from some near by southern ridge you get the full effect of their
close-set masses of living green and realize the enormous virility
within them. It seems to me that our toughest tree here in eastern
Massachusetts is the red cedar. It grows on storm-swept rock cliffs
where nothing else but lichens can seem to find a foothold. Yet close
behind it I class this dweller in the rich, moist peat bogs. I find that
many botanists do not differentiate this tree that I call swamp cedar
from the red cedar, _Juniperus virginiana_. Yet it is nearer this than
it is to the arbor vitæ which is the so-called cedar of the Maine woods.
But it is not the red cedar in one important particular. It does not
have that wonderful red fragrant heart-wood that the red cedar has. That
alone, it seems to me, should give it a separate standing botanically.
Then its leaves are flatter and more of the arbor vitæ type than those
of the red cedar. And there you have it; but I know what happened. Long
ages ago, when staid and sober evergreens were more frisky than they
are now some particularly handsome young arbor vitæ lass came down from
the north woods and met and loved one of our husky red cedars. How could
she help it? Then there was a secret trip to Providence, or whatever
place was the Gretna Green of those days, and the elopers settled down
in Plymouth County, or perhaps here in Norfolk. That would account for
my white cedar, and it is the only way I can do it.
I was two miles further toward the Plymouth woods and was broiling a
chop for my dinner on the fork of a witch-hazel stick over the lovely
clear flame of dry white pine limbs, when I came across the second new
thing of my experience in the winter woods. That was black snow. It was
on the northerly edge of an open meadow, a spot so tangled with wild
rose and other slender shrubs that it was next to impossible to
penetrate it. For some reason the south wind had failed to carry off all
the snow here, and a thin coating of it lay on the ground. There was a
bit of open water on the edge of the tangle, and I noticed that this was
covered with a black coating. Going down to look closer I found that the
snow as far as I could look into the meadow was covered with this same
surface, making it fairly black. It looked quite like the soot from
black coal, but when I poked at it with my finger to see if it smutted
it hopped nimbly away. The open pool and the snow all about it was
covered with tiny black fleas or some similar skipping minute insect. I
was curious about these tiny black creatures, and I folded many of them
carefully in a leaf of my note book, creasing the edges firmly so that
I might keep them tight, and put them in my scrip. I intended to put
them under a microscope and see how many legs they had for all this
wonderful skipping; but they had too many for me. When I got home the
paper was blank. They had all skipped.
AMONG THE MUSKRAT LODGES
I always know the sound of the east wind as it comes over the Blue Hills
for the twanging of the bow from which winter has shot his Parthian
arrow. The keenest it is in all his quiver of keen darts, for it
penetrates joints in one’s armor that no gale from Arctic barrens has
been able to reach, that no fall of snow or of temperature has weakened.
Facing it to-day and feeling its barbs turn in the marrow of my
breastbone as I crossed Ponkapoag Pond I began to wonder how it fared
with my friends the muskrats who were wintering in the very teeth of it
over on the northwest shore. And so I turned my shoulder to the blow and
my face to the bog where tepees in a long line spire conically out of
the brown grasses on the bog edge, where the pickerel weed flaunted blue
banners all summer long.
The thermometer marked a temperature of but a few degrees below
freezing, but it was the coldest day of the winter. The bite of the wind
off Hudson’s Bay is as nothing to the chill which the Arctic sea-water
folds in its unfrozen heart as it sweeps from polar depths down the west
coast of Greenland, along the Labrador shore, round Newfoundland and
down again, shouldering into Massachusetts Bay; the reserve corps of the
winter’s assault, the Old Guard plunging desperately to its Waterloo in
the face of all-conquering spring. This chill the east wind had caught
up from the green depths of the surges he tossed, and made it the poison
of the points which he drove desperately home. Face this wind for a day
and you shall feel the venom working long after you have sought shelter,
nor shall even the cheer of a big open fire drive it easily from your
bones.
Yet you may draw from the chill this cheer, if you will, that no longer
is the worst yet to come; it is here and soon the prospect must mend. It
seems odd to think that some day next July we shall sniff this frigidity
drawn from the depths of the boreal current, borne on the wings of the
east wind, and revel in the intoxicating ozone with which it soothes our
heat-fevered nostrils.
Over on the bog edge are twenty-seven lodges, built of bog turf and
roots, dead grass and rushes, almost any rubbish in fact which
Mussascus, as Captain John Smith called him, has been able to get in the
neighborhood. Each has a foundation of some sort; one a stump submerged
in the muck, another a rude framework of alder sticks which the muskrat
cuts with his strong, chisel-like teeth and brings in his mouth as a
beaver would; others variously upheld, but all so placed that the
entrance may be beneath the water and beneath the ice also, however
thick it may freeze.
Little does the muskrat care for my marrow-piercing east wind. I’ll
wager that he never knows it blows, for rarely indeed at this time of
year does he put his nose out where he might feel it. His stairway leads
from the under-water entrance to a cosy and comfortable nest lined with
soft grass where he and his fellows cuddle. The mud-smeared,
water-soaked material of their walls is frozen to adamant. It is porous
enough in spots to give them air for breathing but does not let the
cold wind enter. It is as snug and safe a place as any one could devise.
An enemy must break through from without and long before he can smash
the frozen walls Mussascus has slipped into the water and gone his way
beneath the ice, first to another tepee, or if driven from that on again
to his burrows in the hard bank a thousand feet away.
Bending my ear close to the nearest lodge I rapped sharply on the rough
wall and listened. There was no sound. Again I rapped and my knock was
all that disturbed the silence within. Outside the frozen marsh grasses
sawed silkily one on another and the frost crystals that the wind was
sweeping from the thick white ice shrilled infinitesimally as they slid
by, but no sound came from the lodge. Evidently no one was at home. At
the next lodge it was different. The rap was succeeded by a second of
breathless silence, then there was the sound of scrambling, and as I
watched the dark clear ice that always obtains just about the lodge I
saw three silver gleams shoot athwart the clear space and vanish under
the opaque ice just beyond. Three Mussascuses had fled, their dense,
dark, close-set under fur holding the air entangled in its fine fuzz
which is impervious to water, thus accounting for the gleam.
Like the fur-seal the muskrat has an outer coat of rather coarse hair
and an undervest of much finer, more silky texture. This provides an air
space which enfolds him, however long he remains under water, and its
chill may not reach him nor can the moisture. Only the soles of his feet
and the very tip of his muffle, the nose-pad, are bare. His ears are set
down within his fur, and when he is beneath the surface each holds an
earful of air that catches under-water sounds and transmits them as
faithfully as it does the sounds of the upper world. He swims by
vigorous “dog-paddle” motions of his hind feet, which are large and
furnished with stiff, coarse hair that answers for a webbing between the
toes. Moreover, these feet are “hung-in” a little in a peculiar
club-footed way that makes his gait on land an awkward shamble, but
which allows them to “feather” as an oar does in swimming, thus giving
his propulsive apparatus the greatest possible efficiency.
People who know Mussascus best differ about the use of his tail. I have
never seen him use it except as a very efficient steering oar, but I
have been told that he sculls with it as a fish does with his, and thus
helps his progress. It is admirably adapted for either purpose, but it
is a tail that does not look as if it belonged to any fur-bearing
animal. It is almost as long as the muskrat himself and has never a hair
from butt to tip. Instead, it is furnished with small stiff scales which
might just as well be those of a snake. It is flattened sidewise and
trimmed down to almost a knife-edge at top and bottom, and the muskrat
uses it most efficiently.
But however well adapted their feet and tails are for swimming and their
fur for keeping them warm and dry beneath the ice, it would seem as if
the three little soft-furred, brown chaps that I had just driven from
their snug wigwam had a far greater problem to solve than that of warmth
or locomotion. How were they to breathe in the water beneath this
foot-thick coating where was no hole to give them an outlet to the air?
In a few minutes their lungs must have a new supply of oxygen, and if
let alone they are able to get it in a rather curious fashion. Coming up
beneath the ice, they expel the vitiated air, making a bubble which in a
short time absorbs new oxygen from the ice and water; then they
re-breathe it and go on.
In the early autumn when the ice is thin and clear you may capture
Mussascus by first driving him from his lodge, then following him as he
swims, a silvery streak beneath the ice, till he makes that telltale
bubble. Then go up and hit the ice sharply over the bubble and you drive
the little fellow away from his own breath and drown him. But you would
be unable to play any such mean trick as this along the Ponkapoag bog
edge now, for the muskrats are abundantly provided for, and I believe
they did it themselves. Here and there along by their tepees you find
open breathing holes. These, I am quite sure, the little fellows keep
open, just to be able now and then to take a glimpse at the upper world,
though they do not need them otherwise. But that is not the provision
which I mean. As far along the bog front as the tepees go there are
everywhere big white air-bubbles. From the tepees out into the pond they
show in many places for a distance of a hundred feet or more, and then
cease. Nowhere else in the pond are these bubbles and I believe the
muskrats have stored them here in their various excursions as relays,
providing against just such folk as myself, who might come along, force
them from their homes, and drown them beneath the thick ice covering.
Thus provided, the three that I had driven out would have no trouble in
reaching the most distant tepee or the higher bank beyond the bog edge,
where are their summer burrows.
Nor need they trouble their minds the winter through about provisions.
Some curious skater or perhaps a would-be fur dealer has been along at
one end of the bog and broken into a number of houses and scattered
others all to bits. A long thaw enabled him to do this, else the winter
had kept them so safe from vandals that only a heavy ax or pick would
give entrance. Among the ruins that this human earthquake caused are fat
roots of the yellow pond lily, the spatter dock, as long as my arm. It
looks as if some of the houses were half built of these petrified
reptiles broken in chunks, scaly looking remnants of a previous
geological age. These are the muskrat’s bread, or perhaps we might
better say his potatoes. Rough and forbidding as they look they are
white and crisp inside, and though their taste is as flat and insipid as
that of a raw potato to you and me the muskrat votes them delicious and
satisfying. The bottom of the pond is stored with them and he has but to
dive and dig, and he even buttresses his winter wigwams with them.
If he wants something a little more spicy there are spots in the bog,
now safe under water and ice but within easy reach of a submarine like
himself, where grow the pungent roots of the calamus, the sweet flag, of
which he is very fond and which, when dried and sugared, most humans
like to nibble. Stored all along the shallows are his shell-fish, the
fresh water mussels whose thin shells he can easily tear open and whose
white flesh he finds exceedingly toothsome. These, too, are as
available in winter as in summer. Indeed some of his houses are built in
the autumn, not so much for winter homes as restaurants where he may
dine in seclusion on these very mollusks. Quite a distance from the bog,
over in a shallow part of the pond, is a bed of these mussels with a
flat-topped rock near by rising above the surface. Here last fall the
muskrats built a lodge, right on the rock, which they used for this
purpose. The first skaters kicked this lodge to pieces. It was fairly
crammed with the empty shells of many a rare feast, showing that here
Mussascus had undoubtedly entertained his friends in true Bohemian
style.
So, while I shivered in the searching east wind on the sky side of the
ice, the muskrats were well fed and comfortable in a region of even
higher temperature, a country where the spring, which we say comes up
out of the south, but the muskrat knows wells up out of the ground
beneath, is already at his door. Its warmth is in the bog below and has
softened and even melted the ice all about the tepees. The ice on the
pond is a foot thick still, but the water beneath it is thrilled with
this same potency and you have but to stir it to sniff its fragrance.
Below the pond the brook which is its outlet splashes over the
long-abandoned sills of what was a gristmill dam in the days of the
early settlers. Here in spite of the keen lances of the wind and its
roar in the frozen maples overhead, I heard the soft tones of the coming
season in every babble of the brook. All the air was full of a fresh,
inviting fragrance which the water gives off as it flows. All the pond
is full of it beneath the ice already, and the muskrat breathes it in
his every excursion under the crystal depths. Soon he will abandon the
winter houses, which as soon as the frost leaves them will sag and
flatten and begin to sink into the bog itself, building its outer edge a
little firmer here and there, and thus helping it in its yearly
encroachment on the pond itself. As the ages have gone by, Mussascus has
been a pretty potent factor in this encroachment.
As the beaver has been a maker of ponds and a conserver of streams,
holding and delaying their waters with his dams, so the muskrat has
helped in the making of meadows and the sanding and grading of pond
edges. The first is done by his winter nests, the second by his summer
burrows which start under water at the pond edge and slant along near
the surface for thirty to fifty feet. Many cubic yards of sand and loam
are dug from these burrows and spread along in the shallows. His river
habits are strong upon him in this work, for he usually makes a delta of
entrances, three or four leading up into the same passage which often
has a wee exit above water, near the edge. Here if you are particularly
fortunate you may in midsummer see his young poke their noses up,
longing for a peek at the great world, before they are big enough to
swim out into it. Here, too, weasel and mink sometimes find entrance and
devour his family. But there are three litters a year, as a rule, so the
occasional weasel serves to keep down a too great increase in the
population.
His greatest enemy, however, is man, who so pollutes the streams with
sewage and factory refuse that no self-respecting muskrat can live in
many of them, and who hunts him for his fur for the making of automobile
coats. Yet in the case of my Ponkapoag Pond friends man’s hand for once
is for him rather than against. His home there is now a part of the park
system and he may be shot or trapped only under penalty of the law. This
has been so for some years now and I think it explains the numbers of
the winter lodges which are this year greater than ever before.
THICK ICE
In the winter the pond finds a voice. The great sheet of foot-thick,
white ice is like a gigantic disk in a telephone, receiver and
transmitter in one, sending and receiving messages between the earth and
space. Probably these messages pass equally in summer, only the
instruments are so tuned then that our finite ears may not perceive
them; for the surface of the pond has its water disk in the summer no
less than in winter, but an exquisitely thinner and finer one.
Taking to-day my first canoe trip of the year about the edges where the
imperative orders of the coming spring have opened clear water for a
half-hundred feet, I could not help noticing this thinner disk. The
west wind blew keen, but lightly, and had crowded the ice over toward
the eastern shore, leaving me free northwest passage in sunny shallows
where no ripple disturbed. Every dip of the paddle threw drops of water
on the surface, drops that shone like diamonds in the warm sun, but
sought, always for a time in vain, to reunite with their kindred water.
This invisible barrier held them up and they rolled about without
wetting it, just as they might have on a glossy disk of metal, though
they finally vanished into it. Like the drops the disk was made up of
molecules of water, but the fact that these rested on the very summit of
their fellows and between them and the air seemed to change their
character and give them a property of impenetrability.
It is this disk of water on water that holds up the summer water
striders, lean and ferocious-looking insects that skip about on the
surface, the tips of their long legs denting it but never being wet.
There is a big black land spider that lives on the water’s edge summers,
who is husky and heavy, yet will run along the surface, galloping and
jumping just as if on a dry and sandy beach and neither falling in nor
wetting his feet.
When I see the silver dimples that the water strider’s feet make in this
elastic surface and note this land spider galloping across a cove, the
disk of the pond’s summer telephone receiver and transmitter becomes
very real to my eyes. Very likely the under-water people, mullet and
bream and perch, read these messages in summer and know in advance what
the weather is going to be. If not, what is it that stops their feeding
and disturbs them before any rumble of the approaching thunderstorm has
reached my ears? Perhaps in this way they learn of other universe
happenings, if such are the subjects of messages that pass, though I am
not sure of this, for such information as I have been able to intercept
has always referred to approaching meteorological conditions.
They come to my ears only in winter, after the ice has reached a
thickness of a foot or so, these promptings out of unknown space.
Sometimes you need to be very near the receiver to note them. It is not
possible for a mile-square, foot-thick telephone disk to whisper, yet
often it grumbles only a hoarse word or two at so deep a pitch that you
would hardly know it was spoken. The lowest note on a piano is shrill in
comparison to this tone, audible only when the ear is within a few feet
of the ice. But there are other times when the winter ice on the pond
whoops and roars, and bellows and whangs as if all Bedlam were let loose
and were celebrating Guy Fawkes day. A mile away, of a still winter
evening, you may hear this and be dismayed, for the groanings and
bellowings are such as belong to no monsters of the present day, though
they might be echoes of antedeluvian battles corked within the earth for
ages and now for the first time let loose.
It is all very simple, of course, says my friend the scientist. It is
caused by vibrations due to the expanding or contracting of the ice, or
the expanding or contracting of a portion of it causing big cracks to
run hither and thither. It means simply that a change in temperature is
going on.
But does it? Or if so, is that all it means? I crossed the pond not
long ago of a beautiful springlike morning, after the sun had been up
for two hours or more. There was then no voice in the receiver other
than the gentle thrumming caused by the chopping of the fishermen,
making holes wherein to set pickerel traps, nor was there a cloud in the
sky. An hour later the soft haze of a coming warm gale spread over the
horizon to the southward, and as if at the touch of a key the pond began
to speak a word now and then that rapidly changed to full conversation.
From the near hilltop where I stood it was as if I had cut in on a
telephone line where two giants were eagerly talking under conditions
that made the hearing a difficult matter. There was question and answer,
query and interruption and repetition and change of tone from a low
voice to a shout.
It was humorously like a fellow townsman having trouble with Central so
far as inflection went, but there was a quality in the tone which barred
the human. You had but to listen with closed eyes to know that here
spoke the primal forces of nature. You may hear that same quality in the
voice of a gale at sea. I don’t mean the shrilling of the wind in the
rigging, or the cry of the waters, even, but that burbling undertone of
the upper air currents, growling and shouting at one another as they
roar by far overhead. An Arabian might say these are the voices of
Afrites, journeying through the air to the kingdom of Ethiopia. So even
in the bright sun of that springlike morning these solemn voices of the
winter ice seemed like echoes of messages superhuman, passing from deep
to deep.
At the time I laid the cause to the changes in temperature produced by
the warmth of the morning sun on the thick ice. Yet the uproar began
after the sun had been shining for an hour or two, and it ceased within
a half-hour. That night came the south blow and a warm storm.
In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and
strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest
and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the
erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered
steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of
temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond
never uttered a word--audible to my listening human ears. Here were the
conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was
said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the
sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of
the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call,
followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their
houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the
thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet
here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another
and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were
crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal
forces themselves were out of sorts.
I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get
farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the
line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone
booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly
and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the
night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant
hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be
heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low
and tremendously deep.
Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was
pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter
hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket,
when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in
temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is
that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a
region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the
pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned
in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No
wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.