red by the quart. They had more than caught up to the squirrels. I
dropped my stones and picked. The squirrels picked, too, so did the
toads and robins. Everybody picked. It was free for all. We picked
them and ate them, jammed them and canned them. I almost carried some
over to my neighbor, but took peas instead. You simply can’t give your
strawberries in New England to ordinary neighbors, who are not of your
choosing. You have no fears at all as to what they will say to your
peas.
The season closed on the Fourth of July, and our taste was not dim nor
this natural love for strawberries abated; but all four of the small
boys had the hives from over-indulgence, so bountifully did nature
provide, so many did the seven chipmunks leave us!
Peace between me and the chipmunks had been signed before the
strawberry season closed, and the pact still holds. Other things have
occurred since to threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a
recent number of a carefully edited out-of-door magazine, of wide
circulation. Herein the chipmunk family was most roundly rated, in fact
condemned to annihilation because of its wicked taste for birds’ eggs
and for young birds. Numerous photographs accompanied the article,
showing the red squirrel with eggs in his mouth, but no such proof
(even the red squirrel photographs I strongly believe were done from a
_stuffed_ squirrel) of chipmunk’s guilt, though he was counted equally
bad and, doubtless, will suffer with chickaree at the hands of those
who took the article seriously.
I believe that is a great mistake. Indeed, I believe the whole
article a deliberate falsehood, concocted in order to sell the fake
photographs. Chipmunk is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found
it out. But because I never caught him at it does not mean that no one
else has. It does mean, however, that if chipmunk robs at all he does
it so seldom as to call for no alarm nor for any retribution.
There is scarcely a day in the nesting season when I fail to see
half a dozen chipmunks about the walls, yet I never noticed one
even suspiciously near a bird’s nest. In an apple tree, barely six
jumps from the home of the family in the orchard wall, a brood of
white-bellied swallows came to wing one spring; while robins, chippies,
and red-eyed vireos—not to mention a cowbird, which I wish they had
devoured—have also hatched and flown away from nests that these
squirrels might easily have rifled.
It is not often that one comes upon even the red squirrel in the very
act of robbing a nest. But the black snake, the glittering fiend! and
the dear house cats! If I run across a dozen black snakes in the early
summer, it is safe to say that six of them will be discovered by the
cries of the birds they are robbing. Likewise the cats. No creature,
however, larger than a June-bug was ever distressed by a chipmunk.
In a recent letter to me Mr. Burroughs says: “No, I never knew the
chipmunk to suck or destroy eggs of any kind, and I have never heard of
any well-authenticated instance of his doing so. The red squirrel is
the sinner in this respect, and probably the gray squirrel also.”
It will be difficult to find a true bill against him. Were the evidence
all in, I believe that instead of a culprit we should find chipmunk a
useful citizen. I reckon that the pile of June-bug bodies on the flat
stone leaves me still in debt to him even after the strawberries have
been credited. He may err occasionally, and may, on occasion, make a
nuisance of himself,—but so do my four small boys, bless them! And,
well—who doesn’t? When a family of chipmunks, which you have fed all
summer on the veranda, take up their winter quarters inside the closed
cabin, and chew up your quilts, hammocks, table-cloths, and whatever
else there is of chewable properties, then they are anathema.
The litter and havoc that those squirrels made were dreadful. But
instead of exterminating them root and branch, a big box was prepared
the next summer and lined with tin, in which the linen was successfully
wintered.
But how real was the loss, after all? Here is a rough log cabin on
the side of Thorn Mountain. What sort of a tablecloth ought to be
found in such a cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed by
chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to the woods in summer?
The chipmunks are well worth a tablecloth now and then,—well worth,
besides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they can steal
from my small patch.
Only it isn’t stealing. Since I ceased throwing stones and began to
watch the chipmunks carefully, I do not find their manner that of
thieves in the least. They do not act as if they were taking what they
have no right to. For who has told chipmunk to earn his oats in the
sweat of his brow? No one. Instead he seems to understand that he is
one of the innumerable factors ordained to make me sweat,—a good and
wholesome experience for me so long as I get the necessary oats.
And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though I don’t like to guess
at how much they carried off,—anywhere, I should say, from a peck
to a bushel, which they stored, as they tried to store the berries,
somewhere in the big recesses of the stone wall.
All this, however, is beside the point. It isn’t a case of oats and
berries against June-bugs. You don’t haggle with Nature after that
fashion. The farm is not a marketplace where you get exactly what
you pay for. You must spend on the farm all you have of time and
strength and brains; but you must not expect merely your money’s
worth. Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farming is like
virtue,—its own reward. It pays the man who loves it, no matter how
short the oats and corn.
So it is with chipmunk. Perhaps his books don’t balance,—a few
June-bugs short on the credit side. What then? It isn’t mere bugs
and berries, as I have just suggested, but stone piles. What is the
difference in value to me between a stone pile with and without a
chipmunk in it. Just the difference, relatively speaking, between the
house with or without my four boys in it.
Chipmunk, with his sleek, round form, his rich color and his stripes,
is the daintiest, most beautiful of all our squirrels. He is one of the
friendliest of my tenants, too, friendlier even than chickadee. The two
are very much alike in spirit, but however tame and confiding chickadee
may become, he is still a bird, and, despite his wings, belongs to a
different and a lower order of beings. Chickadee is often curious
about me; he can be coaxed to eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than
curious; he is interested; and it is not crumbs that he wants, but
friendship. He can be coaxed to eat from my lips, sleep in my pocket,
and even come to be stroked.
I have sometimes seen chickadee in winter when he seemed to come to me
out of very need for living companionship. But in the flood-tide of
summer life chipmunk will watch me from his stone pile and tag me along
with every show of friendship.
The family in the orchard wall have grown very familiar. They
flatter me. I really believe, to be Emersonian, that I am the great
circumstance in this household. One of the number is sure to be sitting
upon the high flat slab to await my coming. He sits on the very edge of
the crack, to be truthful, and if I take a single step aside toward him
he flips, and all there is left of him is a little angry squeak from
the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass properly along, do not
stop or make any sudden motions, he sees me past, then usually follows
me, especially if I get well off and pause.
During a shower one day I halted under a large hickory just beyond his
den. He came running after me, so interested that he forgot to look
to his footing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his nose hard
against a stone,—so hard that he sat up immediately and vigorously
rubbed it. Another time he followed me across to the garden and on to
the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. Here he climbed a post and
continued after me by way of the middle strand of the wire, wriggling,
twisting, even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain his
balance. He got midway between the posts, when the sagging strand
tripped him and he fell with a splash into a shallow pool below.
Did the family in the orchard wall stay together as a family for the
first summer, I should like to know. As late as August they all seemed
to be in the wall, for in August I cut my oats, and during this harvest
they all worked together.
I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow, cocking them to
cure for hay. It was necessary to let them “make” for six or seven
days, and all this time the squirrels raced back and forth between the
cocks and the stone wall. They might have hidden their gleanings in
a dozen crannies nearer at hand; but evidently they had a particular
storehouse, near the home nest, where the family could get at their
provisions in bad weather without coming forth.
Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest, I should have found
a tunnel leading into the ground for a few feet and opening into a
chamber filled with a bulky grass nest,—a bed capable of holding half
a dozen chipmunks, and adjoining this, by a short passageway, the
storehouse of the oats.
How many trips they made between this crib and the oat patch, how many
kernels they carried in their pouches at a trip, and how big a pile
they had when all the grains were in,—these are more of the questions
I should like to know.
I might have killed one of the squirrels and numbered the contents of
his pouches, but my scientific zeal does not quite reach that pitch any
more. The knowledge of just how many oat kernels a chipmunk can stuff
into his left cheek (into _both_ cheeks he can put twenty-nine kernels
of corn) is really not worth the cost of his life. Of course some one
has counted them,—just as some one has counted the hairs on the tail
of the dog of the child of the wife of the Wild Man of Borneo, or at
least seriously guessed at the number.
But this is thesis work for the doctors of philosophy, not a task
for farmers and mere watchers in the woods. The chipmunks are in no
danger because of my zeal for science; not that I am uninterested in
the capacity of their cheeks in terms of oats, but that I am more
interested in the whole squirrel, the whole family of squirrels.
When the first frosts come, the family—if they are still a
family—seek the nest in the ground beneath the stone wall. But they do
not go to sleep immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet been
closed. There is still plenty of fresh air, and, of course, plenty of
food,—acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and oats. They doze quietly
for a time and eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls into some side
passage prepared beforehand to receive the débris.
But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth
overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off the
supply of fresh air, and one day, though not sound sleepers, the family
cuddles down and forgets to wake,—until the frost has begun to creep
back toward the surface, and down through the softened soil is felt the
thrill of the waking spring.
[Illustration]
XIV
The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp
TO most eyes, no doubt, the prospect would have seemed desolate,
even forbidding. A single track of railroad lay under my feet, while
down and away in front of me stretched the Bear Swamp, the largest,
least-trod area of primeval swamp in southern New Jersey.
To me it was neither desolate nor forbidding, because I knew it
well,—its gloomy depths, its silent streams, its hollow stumps,
its trails, and its haunting mysteries. Yet I had never crossed its
borders. I was born within its shadows, close enough to smell the
magnolias of the margin, and had lived my first ten years only a little
farther off; but not till now, after twice ten years of absence, had
I stood here ready to enter and tread the paths where so long I had
slipped to and fro as a shadow.
But what a pity ever to cross such a country! ever to map these
unexplored child-lands to a scale of after years! I tramped the Bear
Swamp over from edge to edge, letting the light of day into the deepest
of its recesses, and found—a turkey buzzard’s nest.
The silent streams, the stumps, the trails, I found, too, and there, it
seems, they must be found a century hence; but the haunting mysteries
of the great swamp fled away before me, and are gone forever. So much
did I pay for my buzzard’s nest.
The cost in time and trouble was what came near undoing my good uncle,
with whom I was staying near the swamp. “What in thunderation!” he
exclaimed, when I made known my desires. “From Boston to Haleyville to
see a buzzard’s nest!” As there are some things that even one’s wife
cannot quite understand, I didn’t try to reason the matter of buzzards’
nests with an uncle. If it had been a hawk’s nest or a cardinal’s, he
would have thought nothing strange. But a buzzard’s!
Perhaps my years of absence from the skies of the buzzard account for
it. Yet it was never mere bird, mere buzzard, to me; so much more than
buzzard, indeed, that I often wish it would sail into these empty New
England skies. How eagerly I watch for it when homeward bound toward
Jersey! The moment I cross the Delaware I begin to search the skies,
and I know, for sure, when it swims into view, that I am near the
blessed fields once more. No matter how wide and free, how full of
clouds and color, my sky to the end will always need a soaring buzzard.
This is a burst of sentiment, truly, and doesn’t explain at all why I
should want to see the creature of these divine wings in the gruesome
light of an earth-view, on its nesting stump or in its hollow log.
Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!
It must, or we shall rue it:
We have a vision of our own;
Ah! why should we undo it?
I understand. Nevertheless, I wanted to find a buzzard’s nest,—the
nest of the Bear Swamp buzzard; and here at last I stood; and yonder on
the clouds, a mere mote in the distance, floated one of the birds. It
was coming toward me over the wide reach of the swamp.
Its coming seemed perfectly natural, as the sight of the swamp seemed
entirely familiar, though I had never looked upon it from this point
before. Silent, inscrutable, and alien it lay, untouched by human hands
except for this narrow braid of railroad binding its outer edges.
Over it hung a quiet and reserve as real as twilight. Like a mask it
was worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach. I could feel
the silent spirit of the place drawing back away from me, though not
to leave me quite alone. I should have at least a guide to lead me
through the shadow land, for out of the lower living green towered a
line of limbless stubs, their bleached bones gleaming white, or showing
dark and gaunt against the horizon and marking for me a path far out
across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard winding slowly down
the clouds. Soon its spiral changed to a long pendulum swing, till
just above the skeleton trees it wheeled, and bracing itself with its
flapping wings, dropped heavily upon one of their headless trunks.
It had come leisurely, yet with a definiteness that was unmistakable
and that was also meaningful. It had discovered me in the distance,
and while still invisible to my eyes, had started down to perch upon
that giant stub in order to watch me. Its eye had told it that I was
not a workman upon the track, nor a traveler between stations. If there
was a purpose to its movements that suggested just one thing to me,
there was a lack of purpose in mine that meant many things to it. It
was suspicious, and had come because somewhere beneath its perch lay
a hollow log, the creature’s den, holding the two eggs or young. A
buzzard has some soul.
Marking the direction of the stub, and the probable distance, I waded
into the deep underbrush, the buzzard for my guide, and for my quest
the stump or hollow log that held the creature’s nest.
The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up, and shut out at times
even the sight of the sky. Nothing could be seen of the buzzard. Half
an hour’s struggle left me climbing a pine-crested swell in the low
bottom, and here I sighted the bird again. It had not moved.
I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. It was a land of
giants; huge tulip poplar and swamp white oak, so old that they had
become solitary, their comrades having fallen one by one, or else,
unable to loose the grip upon the soil that had widened and tightened
through centuries, they had died standing. It was upon one of these
that the buzzard sat humped.
Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white oak, the greatest
tree, I think, that I have ever seen. It was not the highest, nor the
largest round, perhaps, but individually, spiritually, the greatest.
Hoary, hollow, and broken-limbed, its huge bole seemed encircled with
the centuries, and into its green and grizzled top all the winds of
heaven had some time come.
One could worship in the presence of such a tree as easily as in the
shadow of a vast cathedral.
For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree.
Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the dignity, the
majesty, the divinity of life? And what life was here! Life whose
beginnings lay so far back that I could no more reckon the years than I
could count the atoms it had builded into this majestic form.
Looking down upon the oak from twice its height loomed a tulip poplar,
clean-bolled for thirty feet, and in the top all green and gold
with blossoms. It was a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how
unmistakably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown. Its girth more
than balanced the poplar’s greater height, and as for blossoms, Nature
knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no
boutonnière upon the oak.
My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen
through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was nearing
the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled
by the _burrh! burrh! burrh!_ of three partridges taking flight just
beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding seemed all the more
real when three little clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet
bottom and drifted up against the green.
Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the pine with its
wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had snatched at the shallow, sandy
bottom and torn out a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep
and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had
gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it
lay high and dry above the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds
had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use, surely, for
not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it were pits
and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges,
but also the quails, and such small things as the warblers, washed
here,—though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe in the
dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. I
wonder if the buzzards used it?
I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough
to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my guide. It saw me, too,
and began to twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips
nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened, and with a heavy
lurch that left the stub rocking, it dropped and was soon soaring high
up in the blue.
This was the right locality; now where should I find the nest?
Apparently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The
underbrush was so thick that I could see hardly farther than my nose.
A half-rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across the
backs of several saplings which it had borne down in its fall. I crept
up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself
staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log
lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.
It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the
buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled
and felled with an axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay
with one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking,
something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.
Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow
and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a
thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I
had found my buzzard’s nest.
Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as
evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern
floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear
down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the
buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back.
The wonder is that they ever hatched.
But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. It was a right
instinct which led the mother to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp
and there hide her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness of
things should have equaled hers, certainly, and I should have allowed
her the privacy of the swamp. It was unfair of me and rude. Nature
never intended a young buzzard for any eye but its mother’s, and _she_
hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured
her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her
unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!
The two freaks in the log must have been three weeks old, I should say,
the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered, as young
owls are, with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded their
legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these, their
receding heads drawn back, their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies
humped between the featherless wings like challenging tomcats.
In order to examine them, I crawled into the den;—not a difficult
act, for the opening measured four feet and a half at the mouth. The
air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor
was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a
thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a
red-beaded tapestry over the walls.
I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for
I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take
no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I
could catch the fresh breeze that pulled at the end, and where I had a
view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as
you have seen an infusorian scud across the field of your microscope,
there swept a meteor of black,—the buzzard! and evidently in that
instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied
me in the log.
I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen
kinds of cramps, the maternal creature was soaring serenely far up in
the clear, cool sky.
[Illustration]
XV
The Lay of the Land
SHE loved nature—from a veranda, a dog-cart, the deck of a vessel.
She had been to the seashore for a whole June, the next June to
the mountains, then a June to an inland farm. “And I enjoyed it!”
she exclaimed; “the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and the green
of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs and chewinks and
woodchucks—_things_! why, I simply didn’t. In fact, I believe that
most of your fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philosophizing
woodchucks are simply the creatures of a disordered imagination.”
I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and the philosophizing;
I disagreed, however, as to the reality of the crabs and the
woodchucks; for it was not the attributes and powers of these creatures
that she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of the creatures
themselves,—along _her_ seashore, and upon the farm that _she_ visited.