A WOODLAND VALENTINE
[Illustration]
Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of
frost. Bulbs try the door. February's stillness is charged with a faint
anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth's center
and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds,
who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must
whisper over and over, "Not yet, not yet!" Better to stay behind the
frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of
cold are still aprowl. Wisely the snow places a white hand over
eager--life unseen, but perceived in February's woods as a swimmer feels
the changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick
stars, closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn
alert and serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent
to lonely peoples--herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers--who are
abroad in the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It
is in the long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers.
February knows the beat of twilight wings. Drifting north again come
birds who only pretended to forsake us--adventurers, not so fond of
safety but that they dare risk finding how snow bunting and pine finch
have plundered the cones of the evergreens, while chickadees, sparrows,
and crows are supervising from established stations all the more
domestic supplies available; a sparrow often making it possible to annoy
even a duck out of her share of cracked corn. Ranged along a
brown-draped oak branch in the waxing light, crows show a lordly
glistening of feathers. (Sun on a sweeping wing in flight has the
quality of sun on a ripple.) Where hemlocks gather, deep in somber
woods, the great horned owl has thus soon, perhaps working amid snows at
her task, built a nest wherein March will find sturdy balls of fluff.
The thunderous love song of her mate sounds through the timber. By the
time the wren has nested these winter babies will be solemn with the
wisdom of their famous race.
There is no season like the end of February for cleaning out brooks.
Hastening yellow waters toss a dreary wreckage of torn or ashen leaves,
twigs, acorn cups, stranded rafts of bark, and buttonballs from the
sycamore, never to come to seed. Standing on one bank or both, according
to the sundering flood's ambition, the knight with staff and bold
forefinger sets the water princess free. She goes then curtsying and
dimpling over the shining gravel, sliding from beneath the ice that
roofs her on the uplands down to the softer valleys, where her quickened
step will be heard by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish,
recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she brings.
Down from the frozen mountains, in summer, birds and winds must bear
the seed of alpine flowers--lilies that lean against unmelting snows,
poppies, bright-colored herbs, and the palely gleaming, fringed beauties
that change names with countries. How just and reasonable it would seem
to be that flowers which edge the ice in July should consent to bloom in
lowlands no colder in February! The pageant of blue, magenta, and
scarlet on the austere upper slopes of the Rockies, where nights are
bitter to the summer wanderer--why should it not flourish to leeward of a
valley barn in months when icicles hang from the eaves in this tamer
setting? But no. Mountain tempests are endurable to the silken-petaled.
The treacherous lowland winter, with its coaxing suns followed by
roaring desolation, is for blooms bred in a different tradition.
[Illustration]
The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no means the mighty
vintage of April. February has no intoxication; the vague eagerness that
gives the air a pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret
stirring of imprisoned life. Spring and sunrise are forever miracles,
but the early hour of the wonder hardly hints the exuberance of its
fulfillment. Even the forest dwellers move gravely, thankful for any
promise of kindness from the lord of day as he hangs above a sea-gray
landscape, but knowing well that their long duress is not yet to end.
Deer pathetically haunt the outskirts of farms, gazing upon cattle
feeding in winter pasture from the stack, and often, after dark,
clearing the fences and robbing the same disheveled storehouse. Not a
chipmunk winks from the top rail. The woodchuck, after his single
expeditionary effort on Candlemas, which he is obliged to make for
mankind's enlightenment, has retired without being seen, in sunshine or
shadow, and has not the slightest intention of disturbing himself just
yet. Though snowdrops may feel uneasy, he knows too much about the Ides
of March! Quietest of all Northern woods creatures, the otter slides
from one ice-hung waterfall to the next. The solitary scamperer left is
the cottontail, appealing because he is the most pursued and politest of
the furry; faithfully trying to give no offense, except when starvation
points to winter cabbage, he is none the less fey. So is the mink,
though he moves like a phantom.
Mosses, whereon March in coming treads first, show one hue brighter in
the swamps. Pussy willows have made a gray dawn in viny caverns where
the day's own dawn looks in but faintly, and the flushing of the red
willow betrays reveries of a not impossible cowslip upon the bank
beneath. The blue jay has mentioned it in the course of his voluble
recollections. He is unwilling to prophesy arbutus, but he will just
hint that when the leaves in the wood lot show through snow as early as
this ... Once he found a hepatica bud the last day of February ...
Speaking with his old friend, the muskrat, last week ... And when you
can see red pebbles in the creek at five o'clock in the afternoon ...
But it is no use to expect yellow orchids on the west knoll this spring,
for some people found them there last year, and after that you might as
well ... Of course cowslips beside red willows are remarkably pretty,
just as blue jays in a cedar with blue berries.... He is interminable,
but then he has seen a great deal of life. And February needs her blue
jays' unwearied and conquering faith.