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THE LAY OF THE LAND
by
DALLAS LORE SHARP
Author of “Wild Life Near Home” and
“Roof and Meadow”
With Drawings by Elizabeth Myers Snagg
[Illustration: LOGO]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908
Copyright 1908 by Dallas Lore Sharp
All Rights Reserved
Published September 1908
To the Memory of my Friend
William Frank Morrison, M. D.
Contents
I. The Muskrats are Building 1
II. Christmas in the Woods 19
III. A Cure for Winter 35
IV. The Nature-Student 56
V. Chickadee 74
VI. The Missing Tooth 89
VII. The Sign of the Shad-bush 105
VIII. The Nature Movement 114
IX. June 127
X. A Broken Feather 137
XI. High Noon 148
XII. The Palace in the Pig-pen 161
XIII. An Account with Nature 175
XIV. The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp 189
XV. The Lay of the Land 200
[Illustration]
I
The Muskrats are Building
WE have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water is standing over
the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch, this wet, sedgy land in
the cold twilight, drearier than any part of the woods or the upland
pastures. They are empty, but the meadow is flat and wet, naked and all
unsheltered. And a November night is falling.
The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon
swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly over.
I button the heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down to the
river and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it meets the
main ditch at the sharp turn toward the swamp. Here at the bend, behind
a clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait.
I am not mad, nor melancholy; I am not after copy. Nothing is the
matter with me. I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats
building, for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but
a half-finished muskrat house.
The moon climbs higher. The water on the meadow shivers in the light.
The wind bites through my heavy coat and sends me back, but not until
I have seen one, two, three little figures scaling the walls of the
house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by the cold,
but not until I know that here in the desolate meadow is being rounded
off a lodge, thick-walled and warm, and proof against the longest,
bitterest of winters.
This is near the end of November. My wood is in the cellar; I am about
ready to put on the double windows and storm doors; and the muskrats’
house is all but finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the
muskrats even better prepared than I, for theirs is an adequate house,
planned perfectly.
Throughout the summer they had no house, only their tunnels into the
sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and their beds
under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps. All these
months the water had been low in the ditch, and the beds among the
tussocks had been safe and dry enough.
Now the autumnal rains have filled river and ditch, flooded the
tunnels, and crept up into the beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat
will creep out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in. What shall he
do for a house? He does not want to leave his meadow. The only thing
to do is to build,—move from under the tussock, out upon the top, and
here, in the deep, wiry grass, make a new bed, high and dry above the
rising water, and close the new bed in with walls that circle and dome
and defy the winter.
Such a house will require a great deal of work to build. Why not
combine, make it big enough to hold half a dozen, save labor and
warmth, and, withal, live sociably together? So they left, each one
his bed, and joining efforts, started, about the middle of October, to
build this winter house.
Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have been rising, although
for several nights at a time there would be no apparent progress with
the work. The builders were in no hurry, it seems; the cold was
far off; but it is coming, and to-night it feels near and keen. And
to-night there is no loafing about the lodge.
When this house is done, then the rains may descend, and the floods
come, but it will not fall. It is built upon a tussock; and a tussock,
you will know, who have ever grubbed at one, has hold on the bottom of
creation. The winter may descend, and the boys, and foxes, come,—and
they will come, but not before the walls are frozen,—yet the house
stands. It is boy-proof, almost; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and
fox-proof. Many a time I have hacked at its walls with my axe when
fishing through the ice, but I never got in. I have often seen, too,
where the fox has gone round and round the house in the snow, and
where, at places, he has attempted to dig into the frozen mortar; but
it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and utterly impossible for his
pick and shovel.
Yet strangely enough the house sometimes fails of the very purpose
for which it was erected. I said the floods may come. So they may,
ordinarily; but along in March when one comes as a freshet, it rises
sometimes to the dome of the house, filling the single bedchamber
and drowning the dwellers out. I remember a freshet once in the end
of February that flooded Lupton’s Pond and drove the muskrats of the
whole pond village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to whatever
wreckage the waters brought along.
The best laid schemes o’ _muskrats too_
Gang aft a-gley.
But ganging a-gley is not the interesting thing, not the point with
my muskrats: it is rather that my muskrats, and the mice that Burns
ploughed up, the birds and the bees, and even the very trees of the
forest, have foresight. They all look ahead and provide against
the coming cold. That a mouse, or a muskrat, or even a bee, should
occasionally prove foresight to be vain, only shows that the life of
the fields is very human. Such foresight, however, oftener proves
entirely adequate for the winter, dire as some of the emergencies are
sure to be.
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will Robin do then,
Poor thing?
And what will Muskrat do? and Chipmunk? and Whitefoot? and little
Chickadee? poor things! Never fear. Robin has heard the trumpets of the
north wind and is retreating leisurely toward the south, wise thing!
Muskrat is building a warm winter lodge; Chipmunk has already dug his
but and ben, and so far down under the stone wall that a month of zeros
could not break in; Whitefoot, the woodmouse, has stored the hollow
poplar stub full of acorns, and has turned Robin’s deserted nest, near
by, into a cosy house; and Chickadee, dear thing, Nature herself looks
after him. There are plenty of provisions for the hunting, and a big
piece of suet on my lilac bush. His clothes are warm, and he will hide
his head under his wing in the elm-tree hole when the north wind doth
blow, and never mind the weather.
I shall not mind it either, not so much, anyway, on account of
Chickadee. He lends me a deal of support. So do Chipmunk, Whitefoot,
and Muskrat.
This lodge of my muskrats in the meadow makes a difference, I am sure,
of at least ten degrees in the mean temperature of my winter. How can
the out-of-doors freeze entirely up with such a house as this at the
middle of it? For in this house is life, warm life,—and fire. On the
coldest day I can look out over the bleak white waste to where the
house shows, a tiny mound in the snow, and I can see the fire burn,
just as I can see and feel the glow when I watch the slender blue
wraith rise into the still air from the chimney of the old farmhouse
along the road below. For I share in the life of both houses; and not
less in the life of the mud house of the meadow, because, instead of
Swedes, they are muskrats who live there. I can share the existence of
a muskrat? Easily. I like to curl up with the three or four of them in
that mud house and there spend the worst days of the winter. My own big
house here on the hilltop is sometimes cold. And the wind! If sometimes
I could only drive the insistent winter wind from the house corners!
But down in the meadow the house has no corners; the mud walls are
thick, so thick and round that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard,
and all unheeded the cold creeps over and over the thatch, then crawls
back and stiffens upon the meadow.
The doors of our house in the meadow swing open the winter through.
Just outside the doors stand our stacks of fresh calamus roots, and
iris, and arum. The roof of the universe has settled close and hard
upon us,—a sheet of ice extending from the ridge of the house far out
to the shores of the meadow. The winter is all above the roof—outside.
It blows and snows and freezes out there. In here, beneath the
ice-roof, the roots of the sedges are pink and tender; our roads are
all open and they run every way, over all the rich, rooty meadow.
The muskrats are building. Winter is coming. The muskrats are making
preparations, but not they alone. The preparation for hard weather is
to be seen everywhere, and it has been going on ever since the first
flocking of the swallows back in July. Up to that time the season still
seemed young; no one thought of harvest, of winter;—when there upon
the telegraph wires one day were the swallows, and work against the
winter had commenced.
The great migratory movements of the birds, mysterious in some of their
courses as the currents of the sea, were in the beginning, and are
still, for the most part, mere shifts to escape the cold. Why in the
spring these same birds should leave the southern lands of plenty and
travel back to the hungrier north to nest, is not easily explained.
Perhaps it is the home instinct that draws them back; for home to birds
(and men) is the land of the nest. However, it is very certain that
among the autumn migrants there would be at once a great falling off
should there come a series of warm open winters with abundance of food.
Bad as the weather is, there are a few of the seed-eating birds, like
the quail, and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are
so well provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the
great majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn,
must take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.
And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild
geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and
closing bays of the vast desolate north are empty now, except for the
few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow. The wild geese
pass, and I hear behind them the clang of the arctic gates, the boom of
the bolt—then the long frozen silence. Yet it is not for long. Soon
the bar will slip back, the gates will swing wide, and the wild geese
will come honking over, swift to the greening marshes of the arctic
bays once more.
Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready,
much comforting assurance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that
winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack, no
doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and death.
But what with the migrating, the strange deep sleeping, the building
and harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and
sociable living.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows
commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don’t
know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, chipmunk or
the provident ant. The ant has come by a reputation for thrift, which,
though entirely deserved, is still not the exceptional virtue it is
made to seem. Chipmunk is just as thrifty. So is the busy bee. It is
the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far beyond
her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter. By the
first of August she has filled the brood chamber with honey—forty
pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for the whole colony
until the willows tassel again. But who knows what the winter may be?
How cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So the harvesting is
pushed with vigor on to the flowering of the last autumn asters—on
until fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred pounds of surplus honey
are sealed in the combs, and the colony is safe should the sun not
shine again for a year and a day.
But here is Nature, in these extra pounds of honey, making preparation
for me, incapable drone that I am. I could not make a drop of honey
from a whole forest of linden bloom. Yet I must live, so I give the
bees a bigger gum log than they need; I build them greater barns; and
when the harvest is all in, this extra store I make my own. I too with
the others am getting ready for the cold.
It is well that I am. The last of the asters have long since gone; so
have the witch-hazels. All is quiet about the hives. The bees have
formed into their warm winter clusters upon the combs, and except “when
come the calm, mild days,” they will fly no more until March or April.
I will contract their entrances,—put on their storm-doors. And now
there is little else that I can do but put on my own.
The whole of my out-of-doors is a great hive, stored and sealed for the
winter, its swarming life close-clustered, and covering in its centre,
as coals in the ashes, the warm life-fires of summer.
I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length of
its frozen slope. The brown leaves have drifted into the entrances,
as if every burrow were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too,
littering and choking the doorways.
There is no sign of life. A stranger would find it hard to believe that
my whole drove of forty-six ground hogs (woodchucks) are gently snoring
at the bottoms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and
quite out of danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the
forgetful.
The woodchuck’s is a curious shift, a case of Nature outdoing herself.
Winter spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead
out of danger, would need wings. But he wasn’t given any. Must he
perish then? Winter spreads far, but does not go deep—down only about
four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps,
_under_land. So down he goes _through_ the winter, down into a mild and
even temperature, five long feet away—but as far away from the snow
and cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco.
Indeed, Woodchuck’s is a farther journey and even more wonderful than
Bobolink’s, for these five feet carry him beyond the bounds of time and
space into the mysterious realm of sleep, of suspended life, to the
very gates of death. That he will return with Bobolink, that he will
come up alive with the spring out of this dark way, is very strange.
For he went in most meagrely prepared. He took nothing with him,
apparently. The muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice
turned all the meadow into a well-stocked cellar. The beaver built a
dam, cut and anchored under water a plenty of green sticks near his
lodge, so that he too would be under cover when the ice formed, and
have an abundance of tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his
summer laying up food near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply
digged him a hole, a grave, then ate until no particle more of fat
could be got into his baggy hide, and then crawled into his tomb, gave
up the ghost, and waited the resurrection of the spring.
This is his shift! This is the length to which he goes, because he has
no wings, and because he cannot cut, cure, and mow away in the depths
of the stony hillside, enough clover hay to last him over the winter.
The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk selects
long-keeping things and buries them; the woodchuck makes of himself a
silo, eats all his winter hay in the summer while it is green, turns it
at once into a surplus of himself, then buries that self, feeds upon
it, and sleeps—and lives!
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect?
Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog, who
is also lacking in fur and feathers and fat, even he has no care at the
sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him too, in her way, which
is neither the way for the robin, the muskrat, nor the woodchuck. He
survives, and all he has to do about it is to dig into the mud at the
bottom of the ditch. This looks at first like the journey Woodchuck
takes. But it is really a longer, stranger journey than Woodchuck’s,
for it takes the frog far beyond the realms of mere sleep, on into the
cold, black land where no one can tell the quick from the dead.
The frost may or may not reach him here in the ooze. No matter. If the
cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he never knows. But he
will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for joy and love as
soon as his heart warms up enough to beat.
I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice in the
laboratory. Drop the lump on the floor, and the frog would break out
like a fragment of the ice itself. And this has happened more than once
to the same frog without causing him the least apparent suffering or
inconvenience. He would come to, and croak, and look as wise as ever.
The north wind _may_ blow,
but the muskrats are building; and it is by no means a cheerless
prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November
light. The frost will not fall to-night as falls the plague on men;
the brightness of the summer is gone, yet this chill gloom is not
the sombre shadow of a pall. Nothing is dying in the fields: the
grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling, but no square
foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in
my woodlot. There will be no less of life next April because of this
winter, unless, perchance, conditions altogether exceptional starve
some of the winter birds. These suffer most; yet as the seasons go,
life even for the winter birds is comfortable and abundant.
The fence-rows and old pastures are full of berries that will keep the
fires burning in the quail and partridge during the bitterest weather.
Last February, however, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of
hunger and cold. It was after an extremely long severe spell. But this
was not all. These two birds since fall had been feeding regularly in
the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field. One day all
the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of food suddenly
cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild
seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at once, although within
easy reach of plenty.
Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac
covered with berries; there were bayberries, rose hips, green brier,
bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries—hillsides of the
latter—that they might have found. These were hard fare, doubtless,
after an unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful,
and would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.
The smaller birds of the winter, like the tree sparrow and junco,
feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested along the
roadsides and waste places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived
several days last winter upon the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing.
The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was laid down to
clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked
at them, rising shoulder-high and seedy over the greening field, and
thought with dismay of how they would cover it by the next fall. After
a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the tops of
the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white; then the juncos,
goldfinches, and tree sparrows came, and there was a five-day shucking
of ragweed-seed in the mowing, and five days of life and plenty.
Then I looked and thought again—that, perhaps, into the original
divine scheme of things were put even ragweeds. But then, perhaps,
there was no original divine scheme of things. I don’t know. As I watch
the changing seasons, however, across the changeless years, I seem to
find a scheme, a plan, a purpose, and there are weeds and winters in
it, and it seems divine.
The muskrats are building; the last of the migrating geese have
gone over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have
clustered; the woodchucks are asleep; and the sap in the big hickory by
the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the
frost. I will put on the storm-doors and the double windows. Even now
the logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.
[Illustration]
II
Christmas in the Woods
ON the night before this particular Christmas every creature of the
woods that could stir was up and stirring, for over the old snow was
falling swiftly, silently, a soft, fresh covering that might mean a
hungry Christmas unless the dinner were had before morning.
But when the morning dawned, a cheery Christmas sun broke across the
great gum swamp, lighting the snowy boles and soft-piled limbs of the
giant trees with indescribable glory, and pouring, a golden flood,
into the deep spongy bottoms below. It would be a perfect Christmas
in the woods, clear, mild, stirless, with silent footing for me, and
everywhere the telltale snow.
[Illustration]
And everywhere the Christmas spirit, too. As I paused among the
pointed cedars of the pasture, looking down into the cripple at the
head of the swamp, a clear wild whistle rang in the thicket, followed
by a flash through the alders like a tongue of fire, as a cardinal
grosbeak shot down to the tangle of greenbrier and magnolia under the
slope. It was a fleck of flaming summer. As warm as summer, too, the
stag-horn sumac burned on the crest of the ridge against the group of
holly trees,—trees as fresh as April, and all aglow with berries. The
woods were decorated for the holy day. The gentleness of the soft new
snow touched everything; cheer and good-will lighted the unclouded
sky and warmed the thick depths of the evergreens, and blazed in the
crimson-berried bushes of the ilex and alder. The Christmas woods were
glad.
Nor was the gladness all show, mere decoration. There was real cheer
in abundance, for I was back in the old home woods, back along
the Cohansey, back where you can pick persimmons off the trees at
Christmas. There are persons who say the Lord might have made a better
berry than the strawberry, but He didn’t. Perhaps He didn’t make the
strawberry at all. But He did make the Cohansey Creek persimmon, and
He made it as good as He could. Nowhere else under the sun can you find
such persimmons as these along the creek, such richness of flavor, such
gummy, candied quality, woodsy, wild, crude,—especially the fruit of
two particular trees on the west bank, near Lupton’s Pond. But they
never come to this perfection, never quite lose their pucker, until
midwinter,—as if they had been intended for the Christmas table of the
woods.
It had been nearly twenty years since I crossed this pasture of the
cedars on my way to the persimmon trees. The cows had been crossing
every year, yet not a single new crook had they worn in the old paths.
But I was half afraid as I came to the fence where I could look down
upon the pond and over to the persimmon trees. Not one of the Luptons,
who owned pasture and pond and trees, had ever been a boy, so far as I
could remember, or had ever eaten of those persimmons. Would they have
left the trees through all these years?
I pushed through the hedge of cedars and stopped for an instant,
confused. The very pond was gone! and the trees! No, there was the
pond,—but how small the patch of water! and the two persimmon trees?
The bush and undergrowth had grown these twenty years. Which way? Ah,
there they stand, only their leafless tops showing; but see the hard
angular limbs, how closely globed with fruit! how softly etched upon
the sky!
I hurried around to the trees and climbed the one with the two broken
branches, up, clear up to the top, into the thick of the persimmons.
Did I say it had been twenty years? That could not be. Twenty years
would have made me a man, and this sweet, real taste in my mouth only a
_boy_ could know. But there was college, and marriage, a Massachusetts
farm, four boys of my own, and—no matter! it could not have been
_years_—twenty years—since. It was only yesterday that I last climbed
this tree and ate the rich rimy fruit frosted with a Christmas snow.
And yet, could it have been yesterday? It was storming, and I clung
here in the swirling snow and heard the wild ducks go over in their
hurry toward the bay. Yesterday, and all this change in the vast
treetop world, this huddled pond, those narrowed meadows, that shrunken
creek! I should have eaten the persimmons and climbed straight down,
not stopped to gaze out upon the pond, and away over the dark ditches
to the creek. But reaching out quickly I gathered another handful,—and
all was yesterday again.
I filled both pockets of my coat and climbed down. I kept those
persimmons and am tasting them to-night. Lupton’s Pond may fill to
a puddle, the meadows may shrivel, the creek dry up and disappear,
and old Time may even try his wiles on me. But I shall foil him to
the end; for I am carrying still in my pocket some of yesterday’s
persimmons,—persimmons that ripened in the rime of a winter when I was
a boy.
High and alone in a bare persimmon tree for one’s dinner hardly sounds
like a merry Christmas. But I was not alone. I had noted the fresh
tracks beneath the tree before I climbed up, and now I saw that the
snow had been partly brushed from several of the large limbs as the
’possum had moved about in the tree for his Christmas dinner. We
were guests at the same festive board, and both of us at Nature’s
invitation. It mattered not that the ’possum had eaten and gone this
hour or more. Such is good form in the woods. He was expecting me, so
he came early, out of modesty, and, that I too might be entirely at my
ease, he departed early, leaving his greetings for me in the snow.
Thus I was not alone; here was good company and plenty of it. I never
lack a companion in the woods when I can pick up a trail. The ’possum
and I ate together. And this was just the fellowship I needed, this
sharing the persimmons with the ’possum. I had broken bread, not with
the ’possum only, but with all the out-of-doors. I was now fit to enter
the woods, for I was filled with good-will and persimmons, as full as
the ’possum; and putting myself under his gentle guidance, I got down
upon the ground, took up his clumsy trail, and descended toward the
swamp. Such an entry is one of the particular joys of the winter. To
go in with a fox, a mink, or a ’possum through the door of the woods
is to find yourself at home. Any one can get inside the out-of-doors,
as the grocery boy or the census man gets inside our houses. You
can bolt in at any time on business. A trail, however, is Nature’s
invitation. There may be other, better beaten paths for mere feet. But
go softly with the ’possum, and at the threshold you are met by the
spirit of the wood, you are made the guest of the open, silent, secret
out-of-doors.
I went down with the ’possum. He had traveled home leisurely and
without fear, as his tracks plainly showed. He was full of persimmons.
A good happy world this, where such fare could be had for the picking!
What need to hurry home, except one were in danger of falling asleep
by the way? So I thought, too, as I followed his winding path; and if
I was tracking him to his den, it was only to wake him for a moment
with the compliments of the season. But it was not even a momentary
disturbance; for when I finally found him in his hollow gum, he was
sound asleep, and only half realized that some one was poking him
gently in the ribs and wishing him a merry Christmas.
The ’possum had led me to the centre of the empty, hollow swamp, where
the great-boled gums lifted their branches like a timbered, unshingled
roof between me and the wide sky. Far away through the spaces of the
rafters I saw a pair of wheeling buzzards, and under them, in lesser
circles, a broad-winged hawk. Here, at the feet of the tall, clean
trees, looking up through the leafless limbs, I had something of a
measure for the flight of the birds. The majesty and the mystery of the
distant buoyant wings were singularly impressive.
I have seen the turkey-buzzard sailing the skies on the bitterest
winter days. To-day, however, could hardly be called winter. Indeed,
nothing yet had felt the pinch of the cold. There was no hunger yet in
the swamp, though this new snow had scared the raccoons out, and their
half-human tracks along the margin of the swamp stream showed that, if
not hungry, they at least feared that they might be.
For a coon hates snow. He will invariably sleep off the first light
snowfalls, and even in the late winter he will not venture forth in
fresh snow unless driven by hunger or some other dire need. Perhaps,
like a cat or a hen, he dislikes the wetting of his feet. Or it may be
that the soft snow makes bad hunting—for him. The truth is, I believe,
that such a snow makes too good hunting for the dogs and the gunner.
The new snow tells too clear a story. His home is no inaccessible den
among the ledges; only a hollow in some ancient oak or tupelo. Once
within, he is safe from the dogs, but the long fierce fight for life
taught him generations ago that the nest-tree is a fatal trap when
behind the dogs come the axe and the gun. So he has grown wary and
enduring. He waits until the snow grows crusty, when without sign, and
almost without scent, he can slip forth among the long shadows and
prowl to the edge of dawn.
Skirting the stream out toward the higher back woods, I chanced to spy
a bunch of snow in one of the great sour gums that I thought was an old
nest. A second look showed me tiny green leaves, then white berries,
then mistletoe.
It was not a surprise, for I had found it here before,—a long, long
time before. It was back in my schoolboy days, back beyond those
twenty years, that I first stood here under the mistletoe and had
my first romance. There was no chandelier, no pretty girl, in that
romance,—only a boy, the mistletoe, the giant trees, and the sombre
silent swamp. Then there was his discovery, the thrill of deep delight,
and the wonder of his knowledge of the strange unnatural plant! All
plants had been plants to him until, one day, he read the life of the
mistletoe. But that was English mistletoe; so the boy’s wonder world of
plant life was still as far away as Mars, when, rambling alone through
the swamp along the creek, he stopped under a big curious bunch of
green, high up in one of the gums, and—made his first discovery.
So the boy climbed up again this Christmas Day at the peril of his
precious neck, and brought down a bit of that old romance.
I followed the stream along through the swamp to the open meadows, and
then on under the steep wooded hillside that ran up to the higher land
of corn and melon fields. Here at the foot of the slope the winter
sun lay warm, and here in the sheltered briery border I came upon the
Christmas birds.
There was a great variety of them, feeding and preening and chirping
in the vines. The tangle was a-twitter with their quiet, cheery talk.
Such a medley of notes you could not hear at any other season outside a
city bird store. How far the different species understood one another
I should like to know, and whether the hum of voices meant sociability
to them, as it certainly meant to me. Doubtless the first cause of
their flocking here was the sheltered warmth and the great numbers
of berry-laden bushes, for there was no lack either of abundance or
variety on the Christmas table.
In sight from where I stood hung bunches of withering chicken or frost
grapes, plump clusters of blue-black berries of the greenbrier, and
limbs of the smooth winterberry bending with their flaming fruit. There
were bushes of crimson ilex, too, trees of fruiting dogwood and holly,
cedars in berry, dwarf sumac and seedy sedges, while patches on the
wood slopes uncovered by the sun were spread with trailing partridge
berry and the coral-fruited wintergreen. I had eaten part of my dinner
with the ’possum; I picked a quantity of these wintergreen berries, and
continued my meal with the birds. And they also had enough and to spare.
Among the birds in the tangle was a large flock of northern fox
sparrows, whose vigorous and continuous scratching in the bared spots
made a most lively and cheery commotion. Many of them were splashing
about in tiny pools of snow-water, melted partly by the sun and partly
by the warmth of their bodies as they bathed. One would hop to a
softening bit of snow at the base of a tussock, keel over and begin
to flop, soon sending up a shower of sparkling drops from his rather
chilly tub. A winter snow-water bath seemed a necessity, a luxury
indeed, for they all indulged, splashing with the same purpose and
zest that they put into their scratching among the leaves.
A much bigger splashing drew me quietly through the bushes to find a
marsh hawk giving himself a Christmas souse. The scratching, washing,
and talking of the birds; the masses of green in the cedars, holly, and
laurels; the glowing colors of the berries against the snow; the blue
of the sky, and the golden warmth of the light made Christmas in the
heart of the noon that the very swamp seemed to feel.
Three months later there was to be scant picking here, for this was the
beginning of the severest winter I ever knew. From this very ridge, in
February, I had reports of berries gone, of birds starving, of whole
coveys of quail frozen dead in the snow; but neither the birds nor I
dreamed to-day of any such hunger and death. A flock of robins whirled
into the cedars above me; a pair of cardinals whistled back and forth;
tree sparrows, juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, and cedar-birds cheeped
among the trees and bushes; and from the farm lands at the top of the
slope rang the calls of meadowlarks.
Halfway up the hill I stopped under a blackjack oak, where, in the
thin snow, there were signs of something like a Christmas revel. The
ground was sprinkled with acorn shells and trampled over with feet
of several kinds and sizes,—quail, jay, and partridge feet; rabbit,
squirrel, and mice feet, all over the snow as the feast of acorns had
gone on. Hundreds of the acorns were lying about, gnawed away at the
cup end, where the shell was thinnest, many of them further broken and
cleaned out by the birds.
As I sat studying the signs in the snow, my eye caught a tiny trail
leading out from the others straight away toward a broken pile of
cord-wood. The tracks were planted one after the other, so directly in
line as to seem like the prints of a single foot. “That’s a weasel’s
trail,” I said, “the death’s-head at this feast,” and followed it
slowly to the wood. A shiver crept over me as I felt, even sooner than
I saw, a pair of small sinister eyes fixed upon mine. The evil pointed
head, heavy but alert, and with a suggestion of fierce strength out
of all relation to the slender body, was watching me from between the
sticks of cord-wood. And so he had been watching the mice and birds and
rabbits feasting under the tree!
I packed a ball of snow round and hard, slipped forward upon my knees,
and hurled it. “Spat!” it struck the end of a stick within an inch
of the ugly head, filling the crevice with snow. Instantly the head
appeared at another crack, and another ball struck viciously beside it.
Now it was back where it first appeared, and did not flinch for the
next, nor the next ball. The third went true, striking with a “chug”
and packing the crack. But the black, hating eyes were still watching
me a foot lower down.
It is not all peace and good-will in the Christmas woods. But there
is more of peace and good-will than of any other spirit. The weasels
are few. More friendly and timid eyes were watching me than bold and
murderous. It was foolish to want to kill—even the weasel. For one’s
woods are what one makes them, and so I let the man with the gun, who
chanced along, think that I had turned boy again, and was snowballing
the woodpile, just for the fun of trying to hit the end of the biggest
stick.
I was glad he had come. As he strode off with his stained bag I
felt kindlier toward the weasel. There were worse in the woods than
he,—worse, because all of their killing was pastime. The weasel must
kill to live, and if he gloated over the kill, why, what fault of his?
But the other weasel, the one with the blood-stained bag, he killed for
the love of killing. I was glad he was gone.
The crows were winging over toward their great roost in the pines when
I turned toward the town. They, too, had had good picking along the
creek flats and ditches of the meadows. Their powerful wing-beats and
constant play told of full crops and no fear for the night, already
softly gray across the white silent fields. The air was crisper; the
snow began to crackle under foot; the twigs creaked and rattled as I
brushed along; a brown beech leaf wavered down and skated with a thin
scratch over crust; and pure as the snow-wrapped crystal world, and
sweet as the soft gray twilight, came the call of a quail.
The voices, colors, odors, and forms of summer were gone. The very
face of things had changed; all had been reduced, made plain, simple,
single, pure! There was less for the senses, but how much keener now
their joy! The wide landscape, the frosty air, the tinkle of tiny
icicles, and, out of the quiet of the falling twilight, the voice of
the quail!
There is no day but is beautiful in the woods; and none more beautiful
than one like this Christmas Day,—warm and still and wrapped, to the
round red berries of the holly, in the magic of the snow.
[Illustration]
III
A Cure for Winter
FOR, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone—
yet the snow lies white upon the fields, my little river huddles under
the ice, and a new calendar hangs against the faded wall. But the storm
is spent, the sun is out, there is a cheery _drip, drip, drip_ from the
eaves, eggs are sixty cents a dozen, and I am writing to the golden
cackle of my hens. New Year’s Day, and winter gone! No, not quite gone,
with eggs at such a price; still, it must be plain to every one that I
can have but little of winter left: eggs are liable to come down any
day.
It would be different, of course, were I buying eggs at sixty
cents,—all the difference between a winter-sick and a winter-well
condition. Selling eggs for sixty cents is a cure, though not for
poverty when one has only thirty hens; but it is a cure for winter. The
virtue, however, is not in the sixty cents. There is no cure for winter
in mere money. The virtue is in the eggs, or, perhaps, it is really
found in keeping the hens.
Keeping the hens, and the two pigs, the horse, the cow, the four boys,
and the farm, for the year around, is a sure cure for winter, and for
a great many other ills. In addition to the farm, one must have some
kind of a salary, and a real love for nature; but given the boys and
the farm, the love will come, for it lies dormant in human nature, as
certain seeds seem to lie dormant in the soil; and as for the salary,
one must have a salary—farm or flat.
The prescription, then, should read:—
[Rx]
A small farm—of an acre or more,
A small income—of a thousand or more,
A small family—of four boys or more,
A real love of nature.
_Sig._ Morning and evening chores. The dose to be taken daily, as long
as winter lasts.
This will cure. It is an old-fashioned household mixture that can be
compounded in any country kitchen. But that is the trouble with it,—it
is a _home_ remedy that cannot be bought of the apothecary. There is
more trouble with it, too, largely on account of the regularity with
which milking time returns and the dose of chores. But it is effective.
A farm and congenial chores are a sovereign cure for uncongenial time.
Here on the farm the signs of coming winter are not ominous signs. The
pensive, mellowing days of early autumn have been preparing the garden
and your mind for the shock of the first frost. Once past this and
winter is welcome; it becomes a physical, spiritual need. The blood
reddens at the promise of it; the soul turns comfortingly in and finds
itself; and the digging of the potatoes commences, and the shocking of
the corn, the picking of the apples, the piling up on the sunny side of
the barn of the big golden squashes.
A single golden squash holds over almost enough of the summer to keep
a long winter away from the farm; and the six of them in the attic,
filling the rafter room with sunshine, never allow the hoary old
monarch to show more than his face at the skylight. Pie is not the
only thing one brings in with his winter squashes. He stores the ripe
September in their wrinkled rinds, rinds that are ridged and bossy with
the summer’s gold.
To dig one’s own potatoes! to shock one’s own corn! to pick one’s
own apples! to pile one’s own squashes at one’s own barn! It is
like filling one’s system with an antitoxin before going into a
fever-plagued country. One is immune to winter after this, provided
he stays to bake his apples in his own wood fire. One works himself
into a glow with all this digging, and picking, and piling that lasts
until warm weather comes again; and along with this harvest glow comes
stealing over him the after-harvest peace. It is the serenity of Indian
summer, the mood of the after-harvest season, upon him,—upon him and
his fields and woods.
The stores are all in: the acorns have ripened and lie hidden where the
squirrels will forget some of them, but where none of the forgotten
will forget to grow; the winged seeds of the asters have drifted down
the highways, over the hillsides and meadows; the birds are gone; the
muskrats’ lodge is all but finished; the hickories and the leaf-hid
hepaticas are budded against the coming spring. All is ready, all is
safe,—the stores are all in. Quiet and a golden peace lie warm upon
the fields. It is Indian summer.
Such a mood is a necessary condition for the cure. Such a mood _is_ the
cure, indeed, for such a mood means harmony with earth and sky, and
every wind that blows. In all his physical life man is as much a part
of Nature, and as subject to her inexorable laws, as the fields and the
trees and the birds. I have seen a maple growing out of the pavement of
a city street, but no such maple as stands yonder at the centre of my
neighbor’s meadow. I lived and grew on the same street with the maple;
but not as I live and grow here on the farm. Only on a farm does a man
live in a normal, natural environment, only here can he comply with all
the demands of Nature, can he find a cure for winter.
To Nature man is just as precious as a woodchuck or a sparrow, but
not more. She cares for the woodchuck as long as he behaves like a
woodchuck; so she cares for the sparrow, the oyster, the orchid, and
for man. But he must behave like a natural man, must live where she
intended him to live, and at the approach of winter he must neither
hibernate nor migrate, for he is what the naturalists call a “winter
resident.” It is not in his nature to fly away nor to go to sleep, but,
like the red squirrel and the muskrat, to prepare to live up all the
winter. So his original, unperverted animal instinct leads him to store.
Long ago he buried his provisions in pits and hung them up on poles.
Even his vocabulary he gathered together as his word-hoard. He is still
possessed of the remnant of the instinct; he will still store. Cage him
in a city, give him more than he needs for winter, relieve him of all
possibility of want, and yet he will store. You cannot cage an instinct
nor eradicate it. It will be obeyed, if all that can be found in the
way of pit and pole be a grated vault in the deep recesses of some city
bank.
Cage a red squirrel and he will store in the cage; so will the
white-footed mouse. Give the mouse more than he can use, put him in a
cellar, where there is enough already stored for a city of mice, and he
will take from your piles and make piles of his own. He must store or
be unhappy and undone.
A white-footed mouse got into my cellar last winter and found it, like
the cellar of the country mouse in the fable,—
Full benely stuffit, baith but and ben,
Of beirris and nuttis, peis, ry and quheit—
all of it, ready stored, so that,
Quhen ever scho list scho had aneuch to eit.
Enough to eat? Certainly; but is enough to eat all that a mouse wants?
So far from being satisfied with mere meat was this particular mouse,
that finding herself in the cellar in the midst of plenty, she at once
began to carry my winter stores from where I had put them, and to make
little heaps for herself in every dark cranny and corner of the cellar.
A pint, or less, of “nuttis”—shagbarks—she tucked away in the toe of
my hunting boot. The nuts had been left in a basket in the vegetable
cellar; the boots stood out by the chimney in the furnace room, and
there were double doors and a brick partition wall between. No matter.
Here were the nuts she had not yet stored, and out yonder was the hole,
smooth and deep and dark, to store them in. She found a way past the
partition wall.
Every morning I shook those nuts out of my boot and sent them rattling
over the cellar floor. Every night the mouse gathered them up and put
them snugly back into the toe of the boot. She could not have carried
more than one nut at a time,—up the tall boot-leg and down the oily,
slippery inside. I should have liked to see her scurrying about the
cellar, looking after her curiously difficult harvest. Apparently,
they were new nuts to her every evening. Once or twice I came down to
find them lying untouched. The mouse, perhaps, was away over night on
other business. But the following night they were all gathered and
nicely packed in the boot as before. And as before I sent them sixty
ways among the barrels and boxes of the furnace room. But I did it once
too often, for it dawned upon the mouse one night that these were the
same old nuts that she had gathered now a dozen times; and that night
they disappeared. Where? I wondered. Weeks passed, and I had entirely
forgotten about the nuts, when I came upon them, the identical nuts of
my boot, tiered carefully up in a corner of the deep, empty water-tank
away off in the attic.
Store? The mouse had to store. She had to, not to feed her body,—there
was plenty in the cellar for that,—but to satisfy her soul. A mouse’s
soul, that something within a mouse which makes for more than meat, may
not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of blind instincts. The human
soul, that thing whose satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates
and a silk petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of a
mouse, may be a different thing indeed; but originally it, too, had
simple, healthful instincts; and among them, atrophied now, but not
wholly gone, may still be found the desire for a life that is more than
something to eat and something to put on.
To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his potatoes, his
corn, his beans and squashes before the long, lean winter comes to an
end. But if squashes _to eat_ were all, then he could buy squashes,
bigger, fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the grocery
store. He may need to eat the squash, but what he needs more, and
cannot buy, is the raising of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering
of it. He needs to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his
neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic and look at it. He
almost hates to _eat_ it.
A man may live in the city and buy a squash and eat it. That is all he
can do with a boughten squash; for a squash that he cannot raise, he
cannot store, nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man live
where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a grocery? his bins,
cribs, mows, and attics so many pasteboard boxes, bottles, and tin
cans? Tinned squash in pie may taste like any squash pie; but it is no
longer squash; and is a squash nothing if not pie? Oh, but he gets a
lithograph squash upon the can to show him how the pulp looked as God
made it. This is a sop to his higher sensibilities; it is a commercial
reminder, too, that life even in the city should be more than pie,—it
is also the commercial way of preserving the flavor of the canned
squash, else he would not know whether he were eating squash or pumpkin
or sweet potato. But then it makes little difference, all things taste
the same in the city,—all taste of tin.