THE BROWN FRONTIER
[Illustration]
One warm March noon a hushing wing is lifted from the piping nest of
earth. Voices of forest floor, tree trunk, and lowground break forth,
never to be silent again until Thanksgiving weather finds a muted world.
Croon and murmur from the swaying grasses, brief lyrics from the top of
the thorn, a sunrise chant from the bee tree, rise and fall through all
the hours of dew and light, intense in the sun-rusted fields, climbing
to an ecstatic swan song when frosts hover close. Whoever walks through
middle realms of the woods, never lying on the mosses nor winning to
skyward branches of the trees, has not shared the earth's most ardent
life--the pensive songs a bird sings merely for himself; his impulsive,
goalless flights; and rarer still the industry and traffic at the roots
of growth: the epic of the ground.
Cricket follows pickering frog and cicada cricket. That earliest
invisible singer asks only a little warmth in the waters of the pond to
melt the springs of frozen song. He comes with lady's-tresses, pussy
willows, and unfurling lily pads. The cricket, sleepy-voiced in the
August afternoon, grows gay at twilight, and does his best when the
firefly and bat are abroad, darting out from the creeper-veiled bark and
setting sail upon the placid air. Locusts play persistently a G string
out of tune until, when the first goldenrod peers above the yarrow, the
overwhelming night chorus of the katydids is heard, lifted bravely again
and again within the domains of autumn, not quenched before the
bittersweet berry and the chestnut fling open portals and surrender to
the cold.
Little they know of trees who have not seen spruce and larches against
the deep October sky, looking straight up from a yielding club-moss
pillow. The outlines and colors of the quiet branches are shown most
memorably upon the vault of that arching lapis-lazuli roof, draped with
floating chiffon of the clouds. Climb up among the boughs, and the
carven quality is gone. They are dim and soft. You must go close to
earth to behold tree-top forms. The supine view is magical.
Revealed in uncanny splendor by the death of verdure, brilliant and evil
fungi come from the dark mold in fall, orange and copper, vermilion and
cinnabar, dwelling as vampires upon trees brought low. Some wear the
terra-cotta of the alert little lizards that, inquisitive as squirrels,
will lift their heads from bark or stone and give back gaze for gaze. As
leaves that came from the sap of roots go back to the roots in ashes, so
ants take care that fallen oaks shall be transformed into the soil from
which young oaks will spring, and brown dust, when they have ended, is
all that abides of the tallest tree. Among them pass the bobbing,
glistening beetles. This immortal and thronging activity of the loam
can be heard, if you bend low enough and listen long.
When the air is frost-clear fairy landscapes, hidden since spring came
with mists and masking leaves, rise with an effect of unbeheld creation.
Small pools appear, and avenues among the bracken that still wave
banners of chestnut and old gold. The lonely homes of ground-nesting
birds grow visible. Trinkets are scattered as the forest makes ready for
night--tiny cones, abandoned snail shells, and feathers which the
woodpecker and oriole dropped when they took leave. The sun dapples with
yellow the partridge haunts where once drooped films of maidenhair fern.
The home that the squirrel built for his summer idyl is shattered by the
winds aloft and falls to earth with other finished things. The feathery
wrack of cat-tails sails the waters and is hung upon the grasses of the
marsh. Fallow fields spread a tangle of livid stems, but jewels lie in
the wood road, for berries, the last harvest, are shaken down by bird
gleaners from vine and shrub, where they hang in festal plenty, so that
all hardy creatures that do not fly from winter to the South or to an
underground Nirvana may here find reward. Dark blue beads drop from the
woodbine. The rose keeps her carmine caskets, full of other roses; but
the bayberry is generous with dove-gray pebble seeds. Witch-hazel,
reversing seasons like the eccentric trout--who, after all, probably
enjoys the solitude at the stream-heads after the other fish have
gone--sends wide her mysterious fusillade, and that, too, finds its aim
in the floor of the forest.
Life more remote than that of snowfield or jungle, beneath our tread,
guarded from our glances and our hearing unless we seek it out, the
subtle cycles of the soil go on everlastingly, alien even to those who
know in intimacy the meadows and the woods. Vigorously though it toils,
there is a peace in the vision of continuity delicately given. Most of
the singers in the mowing grass live for a day, yet next morning the
song ascends unbroken. Here on the frontier between the world of the air
and that within the earth passports are granted back and forth--the red
lily is summoned from the depths; the topmost acorn, lifting its cup
toward the sky, obediently falls and passes through the dark barrier, to
return when the life-call bids. Steadily go on arrival and departure.
The gorgeous lichen is hung upon the rotting log. White rue rises and
white snows sink. Fire demons split the rocks, and after them in a
thousand years comes bloodroot. Floods rush down, and windflowers and
cities follow; and leisurely, another spring, the gates that received
them part, and a legion of new cowslips marches out.