faded, and stained with mud,—a dull, dreary waste in the gray
February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the
matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the
narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the
hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They
had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the
heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the
winter snows. The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle, gently
loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.
I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton of a muskrat. It was
something peculiar in the way they lay that had caused me to pause.
They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands of
Sleep. They had not been flung down. The delicate ribs had fallen in,
but not a bone was broken or displaced, not one showed the splinter
of shot, or the crack that might have been made by a steel trap. No
violence had been done them. They had been touched by nothing rougher
than the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had
passed them here; but no one else in all the winter months.
The creature had died—a “natural” death. It had starved, while a
hundred acres of plenty lay round about. Picking up the skull, I found
the jaws locked together as if they were a single solid bone. One of
the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing, and apparently had
never developed. The opposite tooth on the lower jaw, thus unopposed
and so unworn, had grown beyond its normal height up into the empty
socket above, then on, turning outward and piercing the cheek-bone in
front of the eye, whence, curving like a boar’s tusk, it had slowly
closed the jaws and locked them, rigid, set, as fixed as jaws of stone.
Death had lingered cruelly. At first the animal had been able to gnaw;
but as the tooth curved through the bones of the face and gradually
tightened the jaws, the creature got less and less to eat, until, one
day, creeping out of the burrow for food, the poor wretch was unable to
get back.
One seldom comes upon the like of this. It is commoner than we think;
but it is usually hidden away and quickly over. How often do we see
a wild thing sick,—a bird or animal suffering from an accident, or
dying, like this muskrat, because of some physical defect? The struggle
between two lives for life—the falling of the weak as prey to the
strong—is ever before us; but this single-handed fight between the
creature and Nature is a far rarer, silenter tragedy. Nature is too
swift, too merciless to allow us time for sympathy. It was she who
taught the old Roman to take away his weak and malformed offspring and
expose it on the hills.
There is, at best, scarcely a fighting chance in the meadow. Only
strength and craft may win. The muskrat with the missing tooth never
enters the race at all. He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and,
if the owl and mink are not watching, dies alone in the grass, and we
rarely know.
I shall never forget the impression made upon me by those quiet bones.
It was like that made by my first visit to a great city hospital,—out
of the busy, cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick and
injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the woods and meadows and
never step from the sweet air and the pure sunlight of health into a
hospital. But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or injured are
there. The proportion is smaller than among us humans, and for very
good reasons, yet there is much real suffering, and to come upon it,
as we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our understanding and
deepen our sympathy with the life out of doors.
No sensible person could for a moment believe the animals capable
of suffering as a human being can suffer, or that there is any such
call for our sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. But an
unselfish sharing of the life of the fields demands that we take part
in all of it,—and all of it is but little short of tragedy. Nature
wears a brave face. Her smile is ever in the open, her laughter quick
and contagious. This brave front is no mask. It is real. Sunlight,
song, color, form, and fragrance are real. And so our love and joy in
Nature is real. Real, also, should be our love and sorrow with Nature.
For do I share fully in as much of her life as even the crow lives as
long as I think of the creature only with admiration for his cunning or
with wrath for his destruction of my melons and corn?
A crow has his solemn moments. He frequently knows fear, pain, hunger,
accident, and disease; he knows something very like affection and love.
For all that, he is a mere crow. But a mere crow is no mean thing. Few
of us, indeed, are ourselves, and as much besides as a mere crow. A
real love, however, will give us part in all of his existence. We will
forage and fight with him; we will parley and play; and when the keen
north winds find him in the frozen pines, we will suffer, too.
With Nature as mere waters, fields, and skies, it is, perhaps,
impossible for us to sorrow. She is too self-sufficient, too
impersonal. She asks, or compels, everything except tears. But when she
becomes birds and beasts,—a little world of individuals among whom
you are only one of a different kind,—then all the others, no matter
their kind, are earth-born companions and fellow mortals.
Here are the meadow voles. I know that my hay crop is shorter every
year for them,—a very little shorter. And I can look with satisfaction
at a cat carrying a big bobtailed vole out of my mowing. The voles are
rated, along with other mice, as injurious to man. I have an impulse to
plant both of my precious feet upon every one that stirs in its runway.
If that feeling was habitual once, it is so no longer; for now it is
only when the instincts of the farmer get the better of me that I
spring at this quiet stir in the grass. Perhaps, long ago, my forbears
wore claws, like pussy; and, perhaps (there isn’t the slightest doubt),
I should develop claws if I continued to jump at every mouse in the
grass because he is a mouse, and because I have a little patch of mucky
land in hay.
One day I came upon two of my voles struggling in the water. They were
exhausted and well-nigh dead. I helped them out as I should have helped
out any other creature, and having saved them, why, what could I do
but let them go—even into my own meadow? This has happened several
times.
When the drought dries the meadow, the voles come to the deep, walled
spring at the upper end, apparently to drink. The water usually
trickles over the curb, but in a long dry spell it shrinks a foot or
more below the edge, and the voles, once within for their drink, cannot
get out. Time and time again I had fished them up, until I thought to
leave a board slanting down to the water, so that they could climb back
to the top.
It is stupid and careless to drown thus. The voles are blunderers.
White-footed mice and house mice are abundant in the stumps and grass
of the vicinity, but they never tumble into the spring. Still, I am
partly responsible for the voles, for I walled up the spring and
changed it into this trap. I owe them the drink and the plank, for
certainly there are rights of mice, as well as of men, in this meadow
of mine, where I do little but mow. But even if they have no rights,
surely
A daimen icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request
for such of them as the foxes, cats, skunks, snakes, hawks, and owls
leave! Rights or no, hay or no, I don’t jump at _my_ meadow mice any
more, for fear of killing one who has taken a cup of cold water from
me off the plank, or has had my helping hand out of the depths of the
spring.
It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a meadow mouse, to pour
out, even waste, a little of the oil and wine of sympathy on the
humblest of our needy neighbors.
Here are the chimney swallows. One can look with complacency, with
gratitude, indeed, upon the swallows of other chimneys, as they hawk
in the sky; yet, when the little creatures, so useful, but so uncombed
and unfumigated, set up their establishments in _your_ chimney, to the
jeopardy of the whole house, then you need an experience like mine.
I had had a like experience years before, when the house did not belong
to me. Now, however, the house was mine, and if it became infested
because of the swallows, I could not move away; so I felt like burning
them in the chimney, bag and baggage. There were four nests, as
nearly as I could make out, and, from the frequent squeakings, I knew
they were all filled with young. Then one day, when the birds were
feathered and nearly ready to fly, there came a rain that ran wet far
down the sooty chimney, loosened the mortar of the nests, and sent them
crashing into the fireplace.
Some of the young birds were killed outright; the others were at my
mercy, flung upon me,—helpless, wailing infants! Of course I made it
comfortable for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flutter
down unhindered to feed them. Had I understood the trick, I would have
hawked for them and helped feed them myself.
They made a great thunder in the chimney; they rattled down into the
living-room a little soot; but nothing further came of it. We were not
quarantined. On the contrary, we had our reward, according to promise;
for it was an extremely interesting event to us all. It dispelled some
silly qualms, it gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so
foreign, yet so closely linked to our own, and it made us pause with
wonder that even our empty, sooty chimney could be made use of by
Nature to our great benefit.
I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows came tumbling down when
the birds used to build in caves and hollow trees? It is a most
extraordinary change, this change from the trees to the chimneys,
and it does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase of
architectural wisdom necessary to meet all the contingencies of the
new hollow. The mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the
empty trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so that the nest,
especially when crowded with young, is easily loosened by the rain, and
is sometimes even broken away by the slight wing-stroke of a descending
swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird as it settles with
food.
We little realize how frequent fear is among the birds and animals,
nor how often it proves fatal. A situation which would have caused
no trouble ordinarily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a
trap. I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast express train and
fall dead. Last winter I left the large door of the barn open, so
that my flock of juncos could feed inside upon the floor. They found
their way into the hayloft, and went up and down freely. On two or
three occasions I happened in so suddenly that they were thoroughly
frightened, and flew madly into the cupola to escape through the
windows. They beat against the glass until utterly dazed, and would
have perished there, had I not climbed up later and brought them down.
So thousands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying wildly
against the dazzling lanterns of the lighthouses, and thousands more
lose their way in the thick darkness of the stormy nights, or are blown
out of their course, and drift away to sea.
Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not as frequent among the
careful wild folk as among us, perhaps; but there is abundant evidence
of their occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal results.
Several instances are recorded of birds that have been tangled in the
threads of their nests; and one case of a bluebird that was caught in
the flying meshes of an oriole’s nest into which it had been spying.
I once found the mummied body of a chippy twisting and swinging in the
leafless branches of a peach tree. The little creature was suspended in
a web of horsehair about two inches below the nest. It looked as if she
had brought a snarled bunch of the hair and left it loose in the twigs.
Later on, a careless step and her foot was fast, when every frantic
effort for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest above were
four other tiny mummies,—a double tragedy that might with care have
been averted.
A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I discovered hanging dead
upon a barbed-wire fence. By some chance it had slipped a foot through
an open place between the two twisted strands, and then, fluttering
along, had wedged the leg and broken it in the struggle to escape.
We have all held our breath at the hazardous traveling of the squirrels
in the treetops. What other animals take such risks,—leaping at dizzy
heights from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still smaller,
saving themselves again and again by the merest chance.
But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful watcher in the woods,
was hunting on one occasion, when he saw a gray squirrel miss its
footing in a tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.
I have frequently known them to fall short distances, and once I saw
a red squirrel come to grief like the gray squirrel above. He was
scurrying through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little hurried
and flustered at sight of me, and nearing the end of a high branch was
in the act of springing, when the dead tip cracked under him and he
came tumbling headlong. The height must have been forty feet, so that
before he reached the ground he had righted himself,—his tail out and
legs spread,—but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with a dull
thud, and before I could reach him lay dead upon the needles, with
blood oozing from his eyes and nostrils.
Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things suffer as we hardly yet
understand. No one can estimate the deaths of a year from severe cold,
heavy storms, high winds and tides. I have known the nests of a whole
colony of gulls and terns to be swept away in a great storm; and I have
seen the tides, over and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out
the nests in the grass,—those of the clapper-rails by thousands.
I remember a late spring storm that came with the returning redstarts
and, in my neighborhood, killed many of them. Toward evening of that
day one of the little black and orange voyageurs fluttered against the
window and we let him in, wet, chilled, and so exhausted that for a
moment he lay on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was another
soft tapping at the window,—and two little redstarts were sharing our
cheer and drying their butterfly wings in our warmth.
During the summer of 1903 one of the commonest of the bird calls about
the farm was the whistle of the quails. A covey roosted down the
hillside within fifty yards of the house. Then came the winter,—such
a winter as the birds had never known. Since then, just once have we
heard the whistle of a quail, and that, perhaps, was the call of one
which a game protective association had liberated in the woods about
two miles away.
The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as we; they cannot
foretell as far ahead nor provide as certainly against need, despite
the popular notion to the contrary.
We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat houses, and the
hoards of the squirrels, and say, “How wise and far-sighted these
nature-taught children are!” True, they are, but only for conditions
that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the exceptional. The gray
squirrels did not provide for the unusually hard weather of the winter
of 1904. Three of them from the woodlot came begging of me, and lived
on my wisdom, not on their own.
Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap, that have neither
storehouse nor barn, yet they are fed,—but not always. Indeed, there
are few of our winter birds that go hungry so often, and that die in so
great numbers for lack of food and shelter, as the crows.
After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a
crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and wounded.
Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen
fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and less able
to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter wind breaks
loose and sweeps down upon the pines.
List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the owrie cattle,
and how often I have thought me on the crows biding the night yonder in
the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe, have I
watched them returning at night, that the crows will never cease flying
through my wintry sky,—an endless line of wavering black figures,
weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.
To-night another wild storm sweeps across the January fields. All the
afternoon the crows have been going over, and at five o’clock are still
passing though the darkness settles rapidly. Now it is eight, and the
long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind shrieks
about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the
corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the fields.
I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines where the
fields roll into the woods,—a vast surf sound, but softer and higher,
with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.
I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark forms.
As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling the
crows, their breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty and
bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for
thirteen hours of night!
Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that the small flames
flicker and go out?
[Illustration]
VII
The Sign of the Shad-bush
THE shad-bush is open! My bees have seen the sign. They are dropping
down upon the alighting-boards of their hives and running with little
bags of gold into the still half-closed entrances. During the sunny
hours of the last three weeks there has been a quiet buzzing about the
hives: the bees have been visiting the early alders, the soft maples,
and the dusty-catkined willows; but not before to-day, the first day of
the blowing shad-bush, have things been busy at the hives,—have they
hummed.
Off along the meadows I can see large patches of garnet against the
purple of the sky,—the bloom of the red maples. As I approach, a soft
murmur around and through the misty garnet fills the air, like the
murmur of a million tiny tongues. Nearer still, and I can see the
bees. Here is where they are getting their gold. But not all of it.
Some of it to-day is coming from the marsh marigolds.
Early in April, before the shad-bush had opened, or a bee had ventured
to the meadows, I picked the first hardy blossom of the marigolds
out of icy water, out of mud that had barely thawed. A token this, a
promise; but not the sure sign of spring. The bees did not see it;
they were waiting, like me, for the shad-bush. So were the marigolds,
for to-day the low, wet edge of the meadow ditch is all aglow with the
shining of their gold, which the bees are pocketing by the thighful.
Among the “flowers,” the marigolds are the first here to offer a
harvest for the hives.
The procession is under way. The assembling began weeks ago, with the
March hepatica, the stray April arbutus, windflower, spice-bush, and
bloodroot. There were saxifrage and everlasting out, too; but they
all came singly and timidly. There was no movement of the flowers
until the shad-bush opened. Now the marigolds appear in companies, the
windflowers drift together, and the hepaticas, leading the line, make a
show. The procession of the flowers has started; spring is here.
_My_ spring, I should have said. Your spring came long ago, perhaps, or
still delays. “The dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow, the
dog-tooth violet when to expect the wood thrush, and when I have found
the wake-robin in bloom I know the season is fairly inaugurated. With
me this flower is associated, not merely with the awakening of Robin,
for he has been awake some weeks, but with the universal awakening and
rehabilitation of Nature.”
I watch for the sign of the shad-bush. Spring! There is the smell of
spring in the yellow spice-bush; the sound of spring in the trills of
the hylas; the color of spring in the blue of the hepatica. A February
rain spatters your face with spring; the wild geese trumpet spring in
the gray skies as they pass; the bluebird brings spring in spite of
your fears and the weather:—
All white and still lie stream and hill—
The winter cold and drear!
When from the skies, a bluebird flies
And—spring is here!
True enough. But then suddenly the bluebird disappears; a heavy
snowstorm sets in (as happened not many springs ago), and thousands of
the birds perish. Spring was here. It has gone again. And so it will
come and go until the shad-bush blooms—for me.
You will not miss one of the returning birds, not even the wild geese;
not one of the early flowers, either, by waiting for the shad-bush.
The skunk-cabbage and pussy-willow are still in blossom; and still in
the woods and fields is the smell of the soil,—that fragrance, that
essence which is the breath of the wakening earth. You can yet taste
it on the lips of the hepatica, the arbutus, and bloodroot. It still
lingers on the early catkins, too,—a strangely rare and delicate odor,
that is not of the flowers at all, but of the earth, and sweeter than
any perfume that the summer can distill.
It has been a slow, unwilling season until to-day, so slow that the
green still shows richest in the sheltered meadows, and the lively
color on the rocky slope that runs up from my tiny river is largely
the color of mosses and Christmas ferns. Here is a stretch of southern
exposure, however, and here are spots where springtime came weeks ago.
Already the dog-tooth violets are out in a sunny saucer between the
rocks; just above them, on an unshaded shelf, is a patch of saxifrage,
and close at hand among the clefts, their “honey pitcher upside down,”
swing the first of my columbines.
Yet Spring does not come thus by spots; she does not crawl out and sun
herself like a lizard. The columbine seeks the sun, but the hepaticas
came up and opened their exquisite eyes in the deepest, dampest shadows
of the woods. I have seen them and the lingering snowdrifts together.
Many of them are never touched with a sunbeam, their warmth and life
coming from within, from a store saved through the winter, rather than
from without. Here under the mat of fallen leaves and winter snow they
have kept enough of the summer to make a spring.
The fires of summer are never out. They are only banked in the winter,
smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst
into blaze. There came a warm day in January, and across my thawing
path crawled a woolly bear caterpillar, a vanessa butterfly flitted
through the woods, and the juncos sang. That night a howling snowstorm
swept out of the north. The coals were covered again. So they kindled
and darkened, until to-day they leap from the ashes of winter, a pure,
thin blaze in the shad-bush, to burn higher and hotter across the
summer, to flicker and die away, a line of yellow embers in the weird
witch-hazel of the autumn.
At the sign of the shad-bush the doors of my springtime swing wide
open. My birds are back, my turtles are out, my squirrels and
woodchucks show themselves, my garden is ready to plough and plant.
There is not a stretch of woodland or meadow now that shows a trace of
winter. Over the pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the
haze, on the distant hills, floating down in the night, had been caught
in the dew-wet grass. They wash the field to its borders in their
delicate azure hue.
Along with the bluets (“innocence” we should always call them), under
the open sky, there unroll in the wet shaded bottoms of the maple
swamps the pointed arum leaves of the Jacks, or Indian turnips. How
they fight for room! There are patches where all the pews are pulpits,
with some of the preachers standing three deep.
Now why should there be such a scramble for place among the Jacks,
while just above them in the dry woods the large showy lady’s-slipper
opens in isolated splendor? Here is one, yonder another, with room
between for a thousand. Occasionally you will see a dozen together,
though not in a crowd; but more often the solitary blossom opens alone
and far removed from any of its kind.