Beyond the forest and beside the river lay the marsh where the Muskrats
lived. This was the same marsh to which the young Frog had taken some of
the meadow people's children when they were tired of staying at home and
wanted to travel. When they went with him, you remember, they were gay
and happy, the sun was shining, and the way did not seem long. When they
came back they were cold and wet and tired, and thought it very far
indeed. One could never get them to say much about it.
Some people like what others do not, and one's opinion of a marsh must
always depend on whether he is a Grasshopper or a Frog. But whether
people cared to live there or not, the marsh had always been a pleasant
place to see. In the spring the tall tamaracks along the edge put on
their new dresses of soft, needle-shaped green leaves, the
marsh-marigolds held their bright faces up to the sun, and hundreds of
happy little people darted in and out of the tussocks of coarse grass.
There was a warm, wet, earthy smell in the air, and near the
pussy-willows there was also a faint bitterness.
Then the Marsh Hens made their nests, and the Sand-pipers ran mincingly
along by the quiet pools.
In summer time the beautiful moccasin flowers grew in family groups, and
over in the higher, dryer part were masses of white boneset, tall spikes
of creamy foxglove, and slender, purple vervain. In the fall the
cat-tails stood stiffly among their yellow leaves, and the Red-winged
Blackbirds and the Bobolinks perched upon them to plan their journey to
the south.
Even when the birds were gone and the cat-tails were ragged and
worn--even then, the marsh was an interesting place. Soft snow clung to
the brown seed clusters of boneset and filled the open silvery-gray pods
of the milkweed. In among the brown tussocks of grass ran the dainty
footprints of Mice and Minks, and here and there rose the cone-shaped
winter homes of the Muskrats.
The Muskrats were the largest people there, and lived in the finest
homes. It is true that if a Mink and a Muskrat fought, the Mink was
likely to get the better of the Muskrat, but people never spoke of this,
although everybody knew that it was so. The Muskrats were too proud to
do so, the Minks were too wise to, and the smaller people who lived
near did not want to offend the Muskrats by mentioning it. It is said
that an impudent young Mouse did say something about it once when the
Muskrats could overhear him and that not one of them ever spoke to him
again. The next time he said "Good-evening" to a Muskrat, the Muskrat
just looked at him as though he didn't see him or as though he had been
a stick or a stone or something else uneatable and uninteresting.
The Muskrats were very popular, for they were kind neighbors and never
stole their food from others. That was why nobody was jealous of them,
although they were so fat and happy. Their children usually turned out
very well, even if they were not at all strictly brought up. You know
when a father and mother have to feed and care for fifteen or so
children each summer, there is not much time for teaching them to say
"please" and "thank you" and "pardon me." Sometimes these young
Muskrats did snatch and quarrel, as on that night when fifteen of them
went to visit their old home and all wanted to go in first. You may
recall how, on that dreadful night, their father had to spank them with
his scaly tail and their mother sent them to bed. They always remembered
it, and you may be very sure their parents did. It makes parents feel
dreadfully when their children quarrel, and it is very wearing to have
to spank fifteen at once, particularly when one has to use his tail with
which to do it.
There was one old Bachelor Muskrat who had always lived for himself, and
had his own way more than was good for him. If he had married, it would
not have been so, and he would have grown used to giving up to somebody
else. He was a fine-looking fellow with soft, short, reddish-brown fur,
which shaded almost to black on his back, and to a light gray
underneath. There were very few hairs on his long, flat, scaly tail,
and most of these were in two fringes, one down the middle of the upper
side, and the other down the middle of the lower side. His tiny ears
hardly showed above the fur on his head, and he was so fat that he
really seemed to have no neck at all. To look at his feet you would
hardly think he could swim, for the webs between his toes were very,
very small and his feet were not large.
He was like all other Muskrats in using a great deal of perfume, and it
was not a pleasant kind, being so strong and musky. He thought it quite
right, and it was better so, for he couldn't help wearing it, and you
can just imagine how distressing it would be to see a Muskrat going
around with his nose turned up and all the time finding fault with his
own perfume.
Nobody could remember the time when there had been no Muskrats in the
marsh. The Ground Hog who lived near the edge of the forest said that
his grandfather had often spoken of seeing them at play in the
moonlight; and there was an old Rattlesnake who had been married several
times and wore fourteen joints in his rattle, who said that he
remembered seeing Muskrats there before he cast his first skin. And it
was not strange that, after their people had lived there so long, the
Muskrats should be fond of the marsh.
One day in midsummer the farmer and his men came to the marsh with
spades and grub-hoes and measuring lines. All of them had on high rubber
boots, and they tramped around and measured and talked, and rooted up a
few huckleberry bushes, and drove a good many stakes into the soft and
spongy ground. Then the dinner-bell at the farmhouse rang and, they went
away. It was a dull, cloudy day and a few of the Muskrats were out. If
it had been sunshiny they would have stayed in their burrows. They
paddled over to where the stakes were, and smelled of them and gnawed at
them, and wondered why the men had put them there.
"I know," said one young Muskrat, who had married and set up a home of
his own that spring. "I know why they put these stakes in."
"Oh, do listen!" cried the young Muskrat's wife. "He knows and will tell
us all about it."
"Nobody ever told me this," said the young husband. "I thought it out
myself. The Ground Hog once said that they put small pieces of potato
into the ground to grow into whole big ones, and they have done the same
sort of thing here. You see, the farmer wanted a fence, and so he stuck
down these stakes, and before winter he will have a fence well grown."
"Humph!" said the Bachelor Muskrat. It seemed as though he had meant to
say more, but the young wife looked at him with such a frown on her
furry forehead that he shut his mouth as tightly as he could (he never
could quite close it) and said nothing else.
"Do you mean to tell me," said one who had just sent five children out
of her burrow to make room for another lot of babies, "that they will
grow a fence here where it is so wet? Fences grow on high land."
"That is what I said," answered the young husband, slapping his tail on
the water to make himself seem more important.
"Well," said the anxious mother, "if they go to growing fences and such
things around here I shall move. Every one of my children will want to
play around it, and as like as not will eat its roots and get sick."
Then the men came back and all the Muskrats ran toward their burrows,
dived into the water to reach the doors of them, and then crawled up the
long hallways that they had dug out of the bank until they got to the
large rooms where they spent most of their days and kept their babies.
That night the young husband was the first Muskrat to come out, and he
went at once to the line of stakes. He had been lying awake and thinking
while his wife was asleep, and he was afraid he had talked too much. He
found that the stakes had not grown any, and that the men had begun to
dig a deep ditch beside them. He was afraid that his neighbors would
point their paws at him and ask how the fence was growing, and he was
not brave enough to meet them and say that he had been mistaken. He went
down the river bank and fed alone all night, while his wife and
neighbors were grubbing and splashing around in the marsh or swimming
in the river near their homes. The young Muskrats were rolling and
tumbling in the moonlight and looking like furry brown balls. After it
began to grow light, he sneaked back to his burrow.
Every day the men came in their high rubber boots to work, and every day
there were more ditches and the marsh was drier. By the time that the
flowers had all ripened their seeds and the forest trees were bare, the
marsh was changed to dry ground, and the Muskrats could find no water
there to splash in. One night, and it was a very, very dark one, they
came together to talk about winter.
"It is time to begin our cold-weather houses," said one old Muskrat, "I
have never started so soon, but we are to have an early winter."
"Yes, and a long one, too," added his wife, who said that Mr. Muskrat
never told things quite strongly enough.
"It will be cold," said another Muskrat, "and we shall need to build
thick walls."
"Why?" asked a little Muskrat.
"Sh!" said his mother.
"The question is," said the old Muskrat who had first spoken, "where we
shall build."
"Why?" asked the little Muskrat, pulling at his mother's tail.
"Sh-h!" said his mother.
"There is no water here except in the ditches," said the oldest Muskrat,
"and of course we would not build beside them."
"Why not?" asked the little Muskrat. And this time he actually poked his
mother in the side.
"Sh-h-h!" said she. "How many times must I speak to you? Don't you know
that young Muskrats should be seen and not heard?"
"But I can't be seen," he whimpered. "It is so dark that I can't be
seen, and you've just got to hear me."
Of course, after he had spoken in that way to his mother and interrupted
all the others by his naughtiness, he had to be punished, so his mother
sent him to bed. That is very hard for young Muskrats, for the night,
you know, is the time when they have the most fun.
The older ones talked and talked about what they should do. They knew,
as they always do know, just what sort of winter they were to have, and
that they must begin to build at once. Some years they had waited until
a whole month later, but that was because they expected a late and mild
winter. At last the oldest Muskrat decided for them. "We will move
to-morrow night," said he. "We will go to the swamp on the other side of
the forest and build our winter homes there."
All the Muskrats felt sad about going, and for a minute it was so still
that you might almost have heard a milkweed seed break loose from the
pod and float away. Then a gruff voice broke the silence. "I will not
go," it said. "I was born here and I will live here. I never have left
this marsh and I never will leave it."
They could not see who was speaking, but they knew it was the Bachelor.
The oldest Muskrat said afterward that he was so surprised you could
have knocked him over with a blade of grass. Of course, you couldn't
have done it, because he was so fat and heavy, but that is what he said,
and it shows just how he felt.
The other Muskrats talked and talked and talked with him, but it made no
difference. His brothers told him it was perfectly absurd for him to
stay, that people would think it queer, and that he ought to go with the
rest of his relatives. Yet it made no difference. "You should stay," he
would reply. "Our family have always lived here."
When the Muskrat mothers told him how lonely he would be, and how he
would miss seeing the dear little ones frolic in the moonlight, he
blinked and said: "Well, I shall just have to stand it." Then he sighed,
and they went away saying to each other what a tender heart he had and
what a pity it was that he had never married. One of them spoke as
though he had been in love with her some years before, but the others
had known nothing about it.
The Muskrat fathers told him that he would have no one to help him if a
Mink should pick a quarrel with him. "I can take care of myself then,"
said he, and showed his strong gnawing teeth in a very fierce way.
It was only when the dainty young Muskrat daughters talked to him that
he began to wonder if he really ought to stay. He lay awake most of one
day thinking about it and remembering the sad look in their little eyes
when they said that they should miss him. He was so disturbed that he
ate only three small roots during the next night. The poor old Bachelor
had a hard time then, but he was so used to having his own way and doing
what he had started to do, and not giving up to anybody, that he stayed
after all.
The others went away and he began to build his winter house beside the
biggest ditch. He placed it among some bushes, so that if the water in
the ditch should ever overflow they would help hold his house in place.
He built it with his mouth, bringing great mouthfuls of grass roots and
rushes and dropping them on the middle of the heap. Sometimes they
stayed there and sometimes they rolled down. If they rolled down he
never brought them back, for he knew that they would be useful where
they were. When it was done, the house was shaped like a pine cone with
the stem end down, for after he had made it as high as a tall milkweed
he finished off the long slope up which he had been running and made it
look like the other sides.
After that he began to burrow up into it from below. The right way to
do, he knew, was to have his doorway under water and dive down to it.
Other winters he had done this and had given the water a loud slap with
his tail as he dived. Now there was not enough water to dive into, and
when he tried slapping on it his tail went through to the ditch bottom
and got muddy. He had to fix the doorway as best he could, and then he
ate out enough of the inside of his house to make a good room and poked
a small hole through the roof to let in fresh air.
[Illustration: THE MARSH SEEMED SO EMPTY AND LONELY. _Page 127_]
After the house was done, he slept there during the days and prowled
around outside at night. He slept there, but ate none of the roots of
which it was made until the water in the ditch was frozen hard. He knew
that there would be a long, long time when he could not dig fresh roots
and must live on those.
At night the marsh seemed so empty and lonely that he hardly knew what
to do. He didn't enjoy his meals, and often complained to the Mice that
the roots did not taste so good to him as those they used to have when
he was young. He tried eating other things and found them no better.
When there was bright moonlight, he sat upon the highest tussock he
could find and thought about his grandfathers and grandmothers. "If they
had not eaten their houses," he once said to a Mouse, "this marsh would
be full of them."
"No it wouldn't," answered the Mouse, who didn't really mean to
contradict him, but thought him much mistaken. "If the houses hadn't
been eaten, they would have been blown down by the wind and beaten down
by rains and washed away by floods. It is better so. Who wants things to
stay the way they are forever and ever? I'd rather see the trees drop
their leaves once in a while and grow new ones than to wear the same old
ones after they are ragged and faded."
The Bachelor Muskrat didn't like this very well, but he couldn't forget
it. When he awakened in the daytime he would think about it and at night
he thought more. He was really very forlorn, and because he had nobody
else to think about he thought too much of himself and began to believe
that he was lame and sick. When he sat on a tussock and remembered all
the houses which his grandparents had built and eaten, he became very
sad and sighed until his fat sides shook. He wished that he could sleep
through the winter like the Ground Hog, or through part of it like the
Skunk, but just as sure as night came his eyes popped open and there he
was--awake.
When spring came he thought of his friends who had gone to the swamp and
he knew that last year's children were marrying and digging burrows of
their own. The poor old Bachelor wanted to go to them, yet he was so
used to doing what he had said he would, and disliked so much to let
anybody know that he was mistaken, that he chose to stay where he was,
without water enough for diving and with hardly enough for swimming. How
it would have ended nobody knows, had the farmer not come to plough up
the old drained marsh for planting celery.
Then the Bachelor went. He reached his new home in the early morning,
and the mothers let their children stay up until it was quite light so
that he might see them plainly. "Isn't it pleasant here?" they cried.
"Don't you like it better than the old place?"
"Oh, it does very well," he answered, "but you must remember that I only
moved because I had to."
"Oh, yes, we understand that," said one of the mothers, "but we hope you
will really like it here."
Afterward her husband said to her, "Don't you know he was glad to come?
What's the use of being so polite?"
"Poor old fellow," she answered. "He is so queer because he lives alone,
and I'm sorry for him. Just see him eat."
And truly it was worth while to watch him, for the roots tasted sweet to
him, and, although he had not meant to be, he was very happy--far
happier than if he had had his own way.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]