WILD PASTURES
[Illustration: He was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of
the morning sun with melodious uproar [_Page 31_]
WILD PASTURES
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES COPELAND
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1909
By Small, Maynard & Company
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall_
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
MY WIFE AND THE WEE BOY
WHO HAVE MADE AND SHARED
THE PASTURE SUNSHINE
CONTENTS
PAGE
WAYLAYING THE DAWN 1
STALKING THE WILD GRAPE 25
THE FROG RENDEZVOUS 47
A BUTTERFLY CHASE 69
DOWN STREAM 89
BROOK MAGIC 109
IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS 131
SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS 151
THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS 173
THE POND AT LOW TIDE 193
HOW THE RAIN CAME 215
ILLUSTRATIONS
He was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of
the morning sun with melodious uproar _Frontispiece_
OPPOSITE PAGE
The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with
watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop 6
The mother bird, dancing and mincing along 38
Out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a
veritable queen of the fairies 64
There was the swish of wings, the snip-snap of a
bird’s beak, and it was all over 86
The way of the “kiver” is this. There is a single,
snappy, business-like bob, then another, then
three in quick succession 96
That such things are not seen oftener is simply
because people are dull and go to bed instead
of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight
of a full moon 114
Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the
muskrat grubbing roots there ... and hear his
snort and splash when he dives at sudden sight
of you 142
Every boy who knows the country in summer knows
him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered
wings with their black veins 160
The English sparrow has the true instincts of the
browbeating coward 180
The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he
isn’t even on his way 198
My lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped
his head back a little, swelled his white throat,
and whistled 222
WAYLAYING THE DAWN
WAYLAYING THE DAWN
The most beautiful place which can be found on earth of a June morning
is a New England pasture, and fortunate are we New Englanders who love
the open in the fact that, whatever town or city may be our home, the
old-time pastures lie still at our very doors.
The way to the one that I know best lies through the yard of an old,
old house, a yard that stands hospitably always open. It swings along
by the ancient barn and turns a right angle by a worn-out field. Then
you enter an old lane leading to what has been for more than a century
a cow pasture. Here the close-cropped turf is like a lawn between the
gray and mossy old stone fences that the farmer of a century and more
gone grubbed from the rocky fields and made into metes and bounds.
There they stand to-day, just as he set them, grim mementos of toil
which the softening hand of time has made beautiful. Where cattle still
travel such lanes day by day these walls are undecorated, but many of
the lanes are untraveled and have been so these fifty years. Such are
garlanded with woodbine, sentineled by red cedars, and fragrant with
the breath of wild rose, azalea, and clethra.
Side by side with this lawn-like lane is another which was once
traversed by the cattle of the next farm, but which has not been used
for a lifetime. In this the wild things of the wood are untrammeled,
save by one another, and they hold it in riotous possession. Just as
the first lane is tame and sleek this other is wild and unkempt. The
raspberry and blackberry tangle catches you by the leg if you enter,
as if to hold you until birch and alder, cedar and sassafras, look you
over and decide whether or not you are of their lodge. If you give them
the right grip you may pass. If not, you will be well switched and
scratched before you are allowed to go on.
Here the wild grape climbs unpruned from wall to cedar, from cedar to
birch and from birch to oak, whence it sends its witching fragrance
far on the morning air. You may stalk a wild grape in bloom a mile by
the scent and be well rewarded by finding the very place where the air
tingles with it.
This lane is wild, and the wild things of the woods that come on fleet
wing and nimble foot frequent it. You may never see a partridge in
the sleek lane, and if by chance the red fox crosses it he does so
gingerly and as if it were hot under foot. In the other, however, the
fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful eye on the
neighboring chicken coop, the red squirrel builds his nest in the
cedar, and the partridge leads her young brood among the blackberry
bushes of an early morning.
The azalea sends out its white fragrance from the one lane, and never a
buttercup, even, nods to the wind in the other; yet you love the smooth
shorn one best. It talks to you of the homely life of the farm, the
lazy cattle drowsing contentedly to the barn at milking time while the
farmer’s boy sings as he puts up the bars behind them. You love it best
because, however much you may love the wild things, the lure of the
home-leading and well-trodden paths is strong upon you. It is more than
a sturdy, rough-built stone wall that separates the two lanes; there is
all the long road from the wilderness down to civilization between them.
[Illustration: The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with
watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop]
For the story the pasture teaches us, more than anything else is the
story of how the fathers wrested the dominion of the New England earth
from the wilderness and of the way in which the wilderness still hems
their world about and not only waits the opportunity to spring upon us
and regain possession, but invests our fields like an invading army and
takes by stealth what it may not win by force.
The pasture bars divide the world of the smooth-trodden lane and
the close-shorn fields from the picket line of the wilderness. Let
us pause a moment upon the line of demarcation. Behind us are the
entrenchments of civilization, the farmhouse and barn and other
buildings,--its fort. The town road is the military way leading from
fortified camp to fortified camp, the mowing field its glacis, and
the stone walls its outer entrenchments. These the cohorts of the
wilderness continually dare, and are kept from carrying only by the
vigilance of the farmer and his men.
Let but this vigilance relax for a year, a spring month even, and
bramble and bayberry, sweet-fern and wild rose, daring scouts that they
are, will have a foothold that they will yield only with death. Close
upon these will follow the birches, the light infantry which rushes to
the advance line as soon as the scouts have found the foothold. These
intrench and hold the field desperately until pine and hickory, maple
and oak, sturdy men of the main line of battle, arrive, and almost
before you know it the farm is reclaimed. The wilderness has regained
its lost ground and the cosmos of the wild has wiped out that curious
chaos which we call civilization.
In this debatable land of the pasture, this Tom Tiddler’s ground where
the fight between man and the encroaching wilderness goes yearly in
favor of the wilderness, dwell the pasture people. The woodchuck, the
rabbit, and even the fox have their burrows here, the woodchuck and the
rabbit finding the farmer’s clover field and garden patch a convenient
foraging ground, the fox finding the chicken coop and the rabbit
equally convenient.
The pasture is the happy hunting-ground of the hawks and owls, though
they dwell by preference in the deep wood, the nearer approaching to
the forest primeval the better, but the crow often nests in a pine
among a group of several in the pasture. The pasture is peculiarly the
home of scores of varieties of what one might term the half wild birds,
the thrushes from honest robin down to the catbird, warblers, finches,
and a host of others who are as shy of the deep woods as they are of
the highway; and here, in those magic hours that come between the first
faint flush of dawn and sunrise, you may hear the full chorus of their
matins swell in triumphant jubilation.
Here in Eastern Massachusetts the dawn comes early, very early, in
June. It will be a little before three that if you watch the east
you will see it flush a bit like the coming of color on the face of a
dark-tressed maiden who has had sudden news of the coming of her lover.
This flush of color fades again soon, and it is evident that it is all
a mistake, for the darkness grows thicker than ever, and night, like
that of the Apocalypse, is upon the face of the world. The dawn is long
coming when you wait for it. Joshua evidently has arisen and is holding
the sun in Syria as of old, that he may have time further to confound
his enemies.
No one believes that there will be dawn at all. You cannot prove it by
the wood thrush. He sings best, indeed he sings only, in the shadow,
and often even in the darkest night he will send out a bell-like note
or two that has a soothing, sleepy tintinnabulation as of cow-bells
shaken afar off by drowsy cattle. No, the wood thrush is not a reliable
witness, but if you are wise in the ways of field and pasture before
dawn, you may take evidence from the chipping sparrow. He is the
earliest as he is one of the smallest of the morn-waking birds. In his
case the least shall be first. I do not know if he really sees the
dawn or if he smells it. There is a change in the air before there is
in the sky, and perhaps he notes it. Perhaps, too, being smaller, he
needs less sleep than the other birds, and his gentle inquiring note
is a plaint that the night is long rather than a prophecy that it is
ending. But it is he that first predicts with certainty the coming day,
and it will be many minutes after his first call before the growing
luminosity, a sort of pale halo that looms slowly about all things,
tells you that the sun is indeed coming. Even then you are likely to
hear no other bird note for what seems a long time.
Then from a treetop in the open comes a sort of surprised ejaculation,
as if some one said, “Why, bless me! It is morning already,” and then a
burst of song from the full throat of a robin. It is as if he were the
chorister of a choir invisible, for he pipes but a single strain before
from treetop to treetop, near and heaven only knows how far, bursts
forth the mingled melody of a great chorus of robins ringing clarion
notes of jubilee.
They have the overture to themselves all along in the open, for there
the song sparrow does not sing till some ten minutes later. Of these
again you shall hear a single bird, followed by a chorus in the
next breath, and close upon the heels of the sparrow voice come the
notes of innumerable warblers of many kinds whose songs you shall not
distinguish one from another and name unless you are an expert. Behind
these again come the chewinks and thrashers, not so early risers by any
means, and very late the catbird. The catbird is clever but, like many
clever people, he is lazy.
Over to the other side of the pasture, a mile from the lane as the crow
flies, is a swamp which is part of the pasture, indeed, but a part of
the wilderness beyond, also. It was on the edge of this that I had
chosen to meet the dawn, picking my way to it through the darkness in
part by scent, for the swamp has a musky fragrance of its own, which
it sends far on the night air. Coming down the slope to it you pass
through a tangle of scrub oak that leads you to a lower region of
alders snarled with greenbrier--“horse brier” we call it familiarly.
Here the ground begins to be soft, with occasional clumps of sphagnum
moss, which is like a gray-brown carpet of velvet, not yet made up,
but tacked together with yellow bastings of the goldthread. Among
the scrub oaks a stately pine here and there shoulders up, sending
you a reassuring sniff of pitchy aroma. The scrub oaks know their
allotted ground and cease wandering when their toes touch swamp water,
but the pines are more venturesome, and often lift with their roots
little mounds of firm brown carpeted ground in the midst of the quaky
sphagnum. Slender cedars crowd in from the swamp toward these pines,
plumed like vassal knights that rally to the support of their overlord.
On one of these pine islands on the edge of the swamp an oven bird had
built her nest, and on this particular night in June she was in much
distress because she could not get into it. The oven bird builds a
nest on the ground among low bushes and vines, choosing often a spot
where pine needles are scattered among the dead leaves. She roofs this
nest with care--and dried grass--and builds a tunnel-like entrance to
it so that you may see neither the eggs nor the bird sitting on them.
You may step on an oven bird’s nest before you will see it, even when
looking for it, and you may know for a certainty that it is within a
definite small patch of ground, and yet hunt long before you find it.
The mother bird had been frightened from her nest by the crush of my
foot at its side in the darkness, and she did not dare come back, for I
had unwittingly sat down beneath the pine almost across the entrance.
Frightened for her nest as well as herself, she fluttered about like
a bird ghost, now dozing in the thicket for a time, then waking to
strangeness and fear, and making her plaint again.
The wood thrush, brooding her eggs in the thicket near by, heard it and
was wakeful, and her mate, never far off, now and again lifted his head
from beneath his wing and drowsily tintinnabulated a reassuring note
or two, but I did not stir. I was not sure that I was the cause of the
oven bird’s trouble, and if so to move about in the darkness might well
bring her worse disaster.
The false dawn reddened and vanished, the gray of the real dawn was
streaked and then flushed with rosy light shot through with gold, and
a thousand voices of jubilee rang from treetop to treetop the whole
pasture through and far out into the wood beyond, and still I waited,
stretched motionless. A man might have thought me dead, the victim of
some midnight tragedy, but the denizens of the pasture are wiser in
their own province than that.
In the gray of that first dusk, that was hardly streaked with the
reassuring red of dawn, a crow slipped silent and bat-like from the
top of a neighboring pine. In that twilight of early dawn you could
not see him continually as he flapped along. The motions of his wings
gave him strange appearances and disappearances as if he dodged back
and forth, flitting up under cover of pillars of mist, yet there was
no mist there, only the uncertainties of early light which seems to
come in squads rather than in company front. This crow turned suddenly
in his flight as he neared my pine island in the swamp and lighted
in noiseless excitement on a dead limb. A moment he craned his neck,
peering sharply at my motionless figure. The crow is at times a
scavenger, and if there were dead men about he wanted to know it. For
that matter if there was anything else about he wanted to know it, for
the crow is likewise a gossip. A moment then he gazed at the motionless
figure, then he vaulted from the limb and the vigor of his call
resounded far and near as he flapped away eastward into the crimson.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” he shouted. “Fellow citizens, there’s a man in the woods
here. He is motionless, but he is only making believe dead. Look out
for him!”
Far and near the cry rang and was taken up by others of his tribe who
passed the word along. “There’s a man in the woods!” they shouted,
“look out for him.” The birds singing near by ceased their songs for a
moment that they might have a look at the man, for they understand the
crow’s note of warning as well as if they too spoke his language.
The thrushes were singing now, and after a while the catbird, lazy
reprobate, awoke. He too, like the crow, is a gossip, and more than
that he is a tease. He shook his head a little to straighten the
ruffled feathers of the neck, disturbed by their position for the
night. He stretched one leg and the wing on that side simultaneously,
then the other leg and the other wing, a bird yawn as expressive as
the human one. Then he cocked his head on one side with a gesture of
pleased surprise and excitement and said, “Mi-a-aw!” He too had seen
the invader of the swamp.
The catbird is a good singer, that is, a good mimic. His taste is good,
too, for he imitates only the best. Here in the North he imitates the
brown thrush, no doubt, all things considered, our best vocalist.
So well does he imitate him that you shall not say of a surety that
this is the catbird singing and yonder is the thrush. In the South he
imitates the mocking-bird with equal fidelity. You would say on casual
acquaintance that he was our ablest singer and most exemplary bird as
he masquerades in the voices of others, but let him once be frightened,
or angered, or over-excited about anything and the reprobate part of
him reasserts itself and he says “Mi-a-aw!” Hence his name, the catbird.
The catbird, however, has the courage of his convictions, and one of
these convictions is that he has the right to the satisfaction of
an ungovernable and enormous curiosity. Bait your bird trap in the
woods with something which strikes a bird as a curiosity that courts
immediate investigation and you will catch a catbird. Other birds
might start for it but the catbird would distance them. So, after
saying “Mi-a-aw!” a few times and drawing no response to his challenge,
he flew up to a twig within a foot of my head, sat there a moment,
motionless except his beady black eyes which traversed my form from
foot to head, finally resting on my eyes. Inadvertently I winked; that
was the only motion I made, but it was enough. With a flirt of his tail
and a flip of his wings the catbird was through the thicket and out
on the other side like a gray flash, scolding away at the top of his
voice and seeming to shout as the crow had, “There’s a man in the wood!
There’s a man in the wood! Look out for him!”
The crimson and gold of the dawn had softened and diffused into
diaphanous mother-of-pearl mists of early day. The June morning miracle
was complete and it was high time I allowed the oven bird to come back
and be assured that her nest and eggs were safe.
STALKING THE WILD GRAPE
STALKING THE WILD GRAPE
It was to be a moonlight night, yet the moon was on the wane and
would not rise until eleven. It seemed as if the pasture birds missed
the moon, or expected it, for beginning with the June dusk at eight
o’clock one after another made brief queries from red cedar shelter
or greenbrier thicket. One or two indeed insisted on pouring forth
snatches of morning song, sending them questing through the darkness
for several minutes, then ceasing as if ashamed of having been misled.
The cuckoo, of course, you may hear often on any warm night, springing
his watchman’s rattle chuckle from the denser part of the thicket. But
for the brown thrush to be announcing morning every half-hour through
the darkness was an absurdity to be accounted for only on the theory
that here was a gay young blood who was practising for a moonlight
serenade. And when the moon did come, touching the tops of the pines
first with a fine edging of gold, dropping a luminous benediction to
the birches and diffusing it lower and lower till the whole pasture was
gold and dusk, the ecstasy of the thrush knew no limit. He poured forth
a perfect uproar of liquid melody, punctuated with such hurroos and
whoops of delight that he made me wonder if his lady love would like
such college-song methods of serenading.
I sat up from my couch on the green moss under the huckleberry bush to
listen. The people of the pasture seemed to have trooped up to the
call of the music. The red cedars, the birches, the huckleberry bushes
in the daytime have individuality indeed, but in the night-time they
have personality. They loom up in spots where by day you did not notice
them at all. Some red cedars stand erect and stiff as military men
might on sentinel duty, others gowned in black like monks of old group
together and seem to consult, while all about them mingling in gracious
beauty are the birches and the berry bushes,--the birches slender,
dainty aristocrats gowned in the thinnest of whispering silk, the berry
bushes sturdy and comfortable in homespun. You are half afraid of the
cedars, they are so black and seem to watch you so intently, more than
half in love with the birches, so graceful and enticing, as they lean
toward you in their diaphanous drapery, but it is the berry bushes
shouldering up to greet you in hearty bourgeois welcome that make you
feel at home.
I listened to the thrush, but soon I found that I had only one ear to
do it with, for on the other side of me a bird was rapidly approaching
with greater and equally persistent clamor. It was a whip-poor-will,
seemingly roused to rivalry by the challenge of the thrush. So far as
I know the thrush paid no attention to him but simply kept up his song
in the birch near by, but the whip-poor-will came up little by little
till he seemed almost over my head, and I could hear plainly the hoarse
intake of breath between each call. Very brief gasps these intakes
were, for the whip-poor-wills fairly tumbled over one another without
cessation.
Now the bird went away for a distance, again he came back, but always
he kept up his call, while the thrush never wavered from his perch in
the birch. A dozen times I waked in the night to find them still at
it, and when the gray of dawn finally silenced the whip-poor-will,
the thrush let out like a tenor that has just got his second wind. He
sang up the dawn and the grand matutinal bird chorus, and the last I
heard of him he was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of the
morning sun with melodious uproar.
A blind man who knows the pasture should know what part of it he is
in and the pasture people that are about him of a June morning simply
by the use of his other senses. The birds he would know by sound, the
shrubs and trees by smell. Each has its distinctive set of odors
differing with differing circumstances, but never varying under the
same conditions. The barberry fruit when fully ripe, especially if
the frost has mellowed it, has a faint, pleasant, vinous smell which,
with the crimson beauty of the clustered berries, might well tempt our
grandmothers to make barberry sauce, however much the men folk might
declare that it was but shoe-pegs and molasses.
The blossoms are equally beautiful in their pendant yellow racemes
which seem to flood the bush with golden light, but the odor of the
blossoms, though the first sniff is sweet, has an after touch which is
not pleasant. Crush the leaves as you pass and you shall get a smell
as of cheap vinegar with something of the back kick of a table d’hôte
claret. Crush the leaves of the swamp azalea and get a strawberry-musk
flavor that is faint but delightful.
Sniff as you shoulder your way through the high blueberry bushes and
you may note that the crushed leaves have a certain vinous odor like
one of the flavors of a good salad. The blossoms of the high-bush
blackberry, whose thorns tear your hands, have a faint and endearing
smell as of June roses that are so far away that you get just a whiff
of them in a dream. The azalea that a month later will make the moist
air swoon with sticky sweetness now gives out from its leaves something
that reminds you of wild strawberries that you tasted years ago. It is
as delicate and as reminiscent as that.
Under your foot the sweet-fern breathes a resin that is “like pious
incense from a censer old,” the bayberry sniffs of the wax of altar
candles lighted at high mass in fairy land, and over by the brook the
sweet-gale gives a finer fragrance even than these. There are but three
members of this family,--the Myrica or Sweet-Gale family,--yet it is
one that the pasture could least afford to miss. The fragrance of their
spirits descends like a benediction on all about them, and I have a
fancy that it is steadily influencing the lives of the other pasture
folk. I know that the low-bush black huckleberry, the kind of the
sweet, glossy black fruit that crisps under your teeth because of the
seeds in it, grows right amongst sweet-fern whenever it can. Now if you
crush the leaves of the low-bush black huckleberry you shall get from
them a faint ghost of resinous aroma which is very like that of the
sweet-fern. Thus do sweet lives pass their fragrance on to those about
them.
Many of these familiar odors had come to me during the night as I half
slept and half listened to the vocal duel between the thrush and the
whip-poor-will, but as I sprang to my feet at sunrise from my dent in
the pasture moss I got a whiff of another which seemed more subtly
elusive, more faintly fine than these, perhaps because, though I seemed
to recognize it, I could not name it.
Many things I could name as I have named them here, but this escaped
me. It had in it some of that real fragrance, a joy without alloy,
which you get in late July or August from the clethra, the white alder
which lines the brook and the pond shore with its beautiful clusters of
odoriferous white spikes. But by no stretch of the imagination could I
bring the white alder to bloom in early June. Moreover, it had only a
suggestion of that in its purity of fragrance. There was more to this.
There was a spicy, teasing titillation that made me think of bubbles in
a tall glass, and it is a wonder that that thought did not name it for
me, but it didn’t.
The sun was tipping the dew-wet bush tops with opal scintillations
that soak you to the skin as you shoulder through them, but that did
not matter; I was dressed for it, and so on I went, taking continual
shower-baths cheerfully, but always with that teasing, alluring scent
in my nostrils. Now and then I lost it; often it was confused and
overridden by other stronger odors. Once I forgot it.
That was when I sprang over a stone wall and landed fairly in the
middle of a covey of partridges made up of a mother bird and what
seemed a small whirlwind of young ones no bigger than my thumb. My
plunge startled the mother so that she thundered away through the
bushes, a thing that a mother partridge, surprised with her young, will
rarely do. At the same moment the young scurried into the air. It was
like a gust among a dozen brown leaves, whirling them breast high for a
moment and then letting them settle to earth again. You go to pick them
up and they surely are brown leaves! It is as if some woodland Merlin
had waved his wand. They were young partridges, they are brown leaves.
It is as quick as that.
Yet this was my lucky morning, for one of these little birds failed
to dematerialize, and I noted him wriggling down under a clump of
woodland grass and picked him up. He made pretense of keeping still
for a moment, then wriggled in fright in my hand, a pathetically
silent, frightened, bright-eyed little chick, mostly down. How his few
feathers helped him to make as much of a flight as he had is beyond my
conception. He must have mental-scienced himself up into the air and
down again.
Holding him gently, I pursed my lips and drew the air sharply in
between lips and teeth. The result was a peculiar squeaking chirp which
I have often used on similar occasions with many different birds and
almost always with success. Then there came a sudden materialization.
Out of the atmosphere, apparently, appeared the mother bird, dancing
and mincing along toward me till she was very near, her head up, her
eyes blazing with excitement, her wings half spread and her feathers
fluttering.
[Illustration: The mother bird, dancing and mincing along]
It was a sort of pyrrhic dance by a creature as different from the
usual partridge as may be conceived. It lasted but a moment; at a
sudden, indescribable note from the mother bird the fledgling gave
an answering jump and slipped from my relaxed hold, fluttered and
dematerialized before my eyes just as the mother bird went into
nothingness in the same way. Truly, there are bogies in the wood, for
that morning I saw them at their work. It was the illusion and evasion
of old Merlin; no less.
Going on down the pasture, I picked up the musky scent of the swamp I
was approaching, instead of the thing I sought. The scent of the swamp
is cool with humid humus, musky with the breath of the skunk-cabbage,
woodsy with that quaint exhalation which you get from the ferns, our
oldest form of plant life, still retaining and lending to you as you
pass the odor of the very forest primeval. These are the base, and they
carry the lighter and daintier odors as ambergris, a vile and dreadful
but very strong smell, carries the dainty scents of the perfumer, and
just as they in turn give you no hint of the ambergris which is their
base, so the odor of the swamp gives you little hint of these three but
is a delight of its own.
Beyond the little corner which I must cross in the straight line I had
taken was a small hillock of open pasture, fringed on the farther side
with alder and button bush which stand ankle deep in the water of the
pond. Here on the little knoll daisies sent out that faint, hay-like
smell which is common to most of the compositæ. The squaw weed in the
meadowy edge between the swamp and the knoll had given me the same
fragrance. But standing on the top of the knoll while the soft morning
wind swept the daisy fragrance by me knee high, I caught, head high,
the elusive, alluring odor that I was seeking. It led me down to the
pond side and called me, dared me, to come on. Why not? I was dressed
for it, and I was wet to the skin with the drench of the morning dew
already.
The cove was but a hundred yards across, and I stood on the bank
wishing to note carefully the direction I must take. The lazy morning
wind drifted across, just kissing the water here and there, leaving
the surface for the most part smooth. I wet my finger and held it
up, dropping it cool side down till it was level. It pointed exactly
toward the opposite point at the other side of the cove and between it
and the next one. There a low, sloping, broad flat rock hung with a
canopy of green leaves was the dock at which I might land conveniently,
and I splashed resolutely into the water, scaring almost to death
with my plunge a big green frog that was sunning himself on a little
foot-square cranberry bog island. He gave a shrill little yelp of
terror and dived before I could.
Singular thing that little half squeak, half screech, of alarm. I have
heard a girl make an almost identical sound when coming suddenly on a
particularly fuzzy and well-developed caterpillar. Rabbit, dog, and
bird have it as well; indeed, it seems to be the one word which is
common to all races and to all articulate creatures. Like the scent of
brakes it began with the beginning of things and has survived all the
changes of creation.
The muskrat ferry is a pleasant one. Little dancing sprites of mist,
the height of your head above water, tiptoe off the surface and slip
away as you swim toward them. You may see these only of a morning when
you take the muskrat ferry. They are invisible from the shore or from
the height of a canoe seat.
It is probable that just as some of the pasture people make sounds too
shrill or too soft for our human ears to hear them, so there are other
things about the pasture less visible even than the little mist folk
that we might see were our sight fine enough or soft enough.
Two-thirds of the way across a little puff of wind sparkled its way
out from the shore to meet me. It brought with it, full and rich,
the fragrance which had led me so long; and as I looked at the broad
leaves overhanging my rock port, their under sides and the young shoots
covered with a soft, cottony down, I laughed to think that I should
not have known what it was I sought. For it was there in plain sight;
indeed the rock was canopied with it.
A long time I sat on that rock on the farther side of the cove, the
June sun warming me, the fragrance of the fox-grape blooms over my head
alluring, soothing, wrapping my senses in a dreamy delight.
He who would attempt to classify and define the perfume that drifts
through the pasture from the bloom of the fox-grape may. I only know
that it makes me dream of pipes of Pan playing in the morning of the
world, while all the wonder creatures of the old Greek myths dance in
rhythm and sing in soft undertones, and the riot of young life bubbles
within them.
The pasture, indeed, could ill afford to lose the pious incense from
the sweet-fern’s censer, the fragrance of the altar candles of the
bayberry, and the subtle essence of the sweet-gale. These are the holy
incense of the church of out-of-doors, and it is well that we should
always find them when we come to worship; yet he who would dare all
to steal for one elusive moment the fragrance of the deep heart of
delight, let him come to the pasture on just that rare, brief period of
all the year when the fox-grape sends forth its perfume.
THE FROG RENDEZVOUS
THE FROG RENDEZVOUS
The pasture meets the pond all along for a mile or so. It lays its lip
to it and drinks only here and there. It drinks deepest of all in a
cove. You will hardly know where pasture leaves off and cove begins,
the two mingle so gently. The pasture creatures here slip down into the
cove, and those of the pond make their way well up into the pasture.
You yourself, approaching the cove from the pasture side on foot, will
be splashing ankle deep in it before you know you are coming to it at
all, so well do the pasture bushes, standing to their knees in the cool
water, screen it from you.
Coming from the pond side you might think you saw the margin in this
same screen of bushes, but there are roods of cove beyond and behind
them. The shrubs of the pasture love to come down and dabble their feet
in the warm pond water and sun themselves in the sheltered, fragrant
air.
The afternoon sun has more resilience here than elsewhere. It bounds
with fervent flashes of elasticity from the glossy leaves of the
bushes that have waded out farthest and made islands of themselves.
The high-bush blueberries are the most daring of all, and stand in the
largest clumps farthest out. These, late in May with an off-shore wind,
shower the whole surface of the water with their fallen corollas. More
than once have I seen the cove white with them on Memorial Day, as if
the bushes, standing with bowed heads, strewed the waves with memorial
flowers for the pasture people who have died at sea.
Earlier in the year the elms have made the whole surface of the cove
brown with their round, wing-margined seeds, and after the memorial
flowers of the blueberry bushes are gone the maples will send out
millions of two-sailed seed boats, reddening the whole surface with
their argosies as they go out to sea, wing and wing. Now all these
things have passed and the surface of the water is clean again to
dimple with the under-water swirl of a minnow-hunting pickerel or lap
lazily against your canoe with the dying undulations of the waves from
outside.
After the bold blueberry bushes, less daring but still eager pasture
people have waded in and formed lesser island clumps of their own.
These were led by the sweet-gale, holding her dark-green silken skirt
daintily up, so fragrant-souled that she fears no evil, trailed by the
saucy wild rose, cheerful spiræa, gloomy cassandra, and chubby baby
alders. If you watch these you will note that they shiver in the lazy
breeze as if they feared the pass to which their temerity may have
brought them. Yet there they stand, and the miniature tides swirl about
their pink toes and die in the pools behind them, so closely grow the
sedges and little marsh plants that fill them until the fishes from the
cove nose about their stalks in vain attempt to enter.
Just outside the bush fringe, where the maples are mirrored in
undulations, whirl and skip, each according to his kind, the surface
insects of the cove. Of these I hail with greatest joy, as any boy
should, the “lucky bug.” You know the one I mean. He is a third of
an inch long, almost as broad, oval, a sort of whaleback monitor
without any turret. He is hard shelled and a Baptist, judged from the
pertinacity with which he sticks to deep water, but a Baptist gone
sadly wrong, for he waltzes continually with his fellows. Round and
round they go in a mazy whirl that would make you dizzy if at the last
gasp they did not reverse.
All boys who fish know that these bugs carry stores of luck within
their hard shells, and for one even to approach your line in his mad
waltz is a sign of coming success, and should he actually touch the
line and cling, it presages a big fish. But if you would propitiate
the gods in most definite fashion before you cast line you should
catch several lucky bugs, the more the better, bury them on the bank
with their heads to the shore, and recite over them an incantation as
follows:
“Bug, bug, bug,
I’ve spit on the worms I dug;
Bug, bug, give me my wish,
A great big string of great big fish.”
Properly managed this was never known to fail; if it does it is because
you have buried one or more of your bugs bottom up.
It is not so easy to catch a lucky bug, however. He is a very modern
type of monitor, for his engine power is of the highest, steam is
always at the top notch, and he can dart away in a straight line
with all the concentrated fury of a torpedo boat. Moreover, he is
convertible, and I have seen him when completely surrounded by enemies
become a submarine and dive straight for the bottom and stay there.
He may have an oxygen tank; anyway, he doesn’t come up until he gets
ready, when he appears fresh and hearty and ready for another waltz.
A fellow surface sailor of his, or rather skipper, is a different type
of bug. This is the water-strider, a veritable Cassius of the cove,
with the lean and hungry look of an overgrown, underfed mosquito. There
is no merry waltz with his fellows about this piratical-looking chap.
He spreads his four long legs like a Maltese cross, and the tips of
them are all that touch the water. These dent it into minute dimples,
but do not penetrate, and his bug-ship skips energetically about on
the four dents, hopping at times like a veritable flea. Sometimes he
jumps a half-inch high and skitters along the surface as a boy skips a
stone; again he poises, lowers his body till it all but rests on the
water, then raises it till he is high on four stilts, and all the time
not even his toes are wet.
Entering the cove in mid-afternoon you might think the swooning
heat had left it no life awake other than the water insects and the
dragon-flies that race them in airship fashion above. Yet you have but
to ground your canoe on a sedgy shallow, sit motionless, and wait. Nor
have you to wait long. There is a breathless pause as if all things
waited to see what this leviathan of the outer deep meant to do next;
then a voice at your very elbow says reassuringly, “Tu-g-g-g!” That is
as near as you can come to it with type. There are no characters that
will express its guttural vehemence which strikes you like a blow on
the chest, or its sympathetic resonance. Take your violin, drop the G
string to a tension so low that it will hardly vibrate musically, then
twang it. That suggests the tone. But you know it well enough without
description.
Immediately there comes an answering chorus of “tu-g-gs,” here, there,
in a score of places all along the shore line and among the island
clumps of bushes, prelude of frog talk galore for a moment or two,
followed by brief silence. Then, taking advantage of the oratorical
pause, an old-timer sets up a tremendously hoarse and vibrant bellow.
“A-hr-r-h-h-u-m-mm!” he says, “A-hr-r-h-h-u-m-mm!” with the accent
on the rum. You can hear him half a mile, and immediately there is a
“chug-squeak-splash” from a little fellow, as if, unable to furnish
the beverage at short notice, he became affrighted and without delay
decided that a sequestered nook on bottom between two stones was for
him. Then the cove goes to sleep again; you can almost hear the silence
snore.
Little by little, if you look about you shall see them, some right
within reach of your paddle. I never know whether they slip under when
the canoe approaches and bob up again noiselessly after all is still,
or whether they are there all the time, only so well concealed by
nature that the eye does not note them at first; but I do know that you
never see them until you have waited a bit. Their brown backs are just
under water, their green-brown heads just enough above the surface so
that the nostrils will get air; and there they wait, motionless, for
hours and hours, for time and tide to serve luncheon. Even with only
the tops of their heads visible they make you laugh, for their pop eyes
are popped so high above the tops of their flat heads that they make
you think of automobile bug lights set well up above the motor hood.
I note a shipwrecked June beetle clinging half drowned to a spear
of grass and I toss him over within six inches of a frog. There
is a splash, a gulp, and the beetle with his frantically clawing,
thorny-toed legs is passed on to kingdom come without a crunch. Once or
twice after that this frog stirred as if he had an uneasy conscience,
but he seemed to suffer no internal pangs, indeed he winked the
circular yellow lining of his eye at me these times as if he enjoyed
it. It had all the effects of smacking the lips.
The afternoon dreams down from its pinnacle of hazy heat to the soft
level of eventide. Under the pines of the west side of the cove the
level sun slips in and seems to caress the green trunks, and the tops
above sing a little sighing song of contentment. Strange you have not
heard this before, for the wind has been there all the afternoon. But
it is toward nightfall that the cove wakes up and you hear many lisping
elfin sounds that you have never noticed during the mid-afternoon heat.
You hear the sedges talking in the undulations now. You did not hear
them before, yet the undulations have been gliding dreamily among the
sedges all day. The pasture birds are waking up their preludes of
evensong, and the sun across the cove to the west is glorifying all
the quivering canopy of green leaves through which it shines with a
luminous, diaphanous quality which makes magic all along that side of
the cove.
You are on the borderland between the clear definition of reality and
the mystic haze of nightfall. To the west, looking away from the glow,
all is gently but clearly defined; to the east, looking into the golden
rose of the sunset through the shimmering illusion of leaves, lies the
pathway to the land that the king’s son saw in the Arabian Night’s tale.
The nightly entertainment, the evening minstrel show, is about to begin
in the cove, an entertainment in which the frogs are the minstrels, an
all star performance, for every one of them is capable of being an end
man or interlocutor or soloist as the case may require.
Already the audience is beginning to gather. First comes a gray
squirrel scratching down a maple trunk, his strong clawed hind feet
digging into the bark and holding him wherever he wishes them to, as
if he were an inverted lineman. Suddenly he sights the canoe and its
occupant and--blows up. Nothing else will express his sudden outpouring
of scolding and denunciation of this creature that has usurped a
front seat. The sounds burst out of him like the escaping steam from
a great mogul engine waiting on a siding for its freight, and he
quivers from head to foot, like the engine, with the intensity of the
ebullition. Suddenly there is a “quawk!” directly over his head, a
single cry shot out from the catarrhal throat of a night heron that is
just sailing down. The gray squirrel shoots three feet into the air,
lands on another maple, flashes up a birch and goes crashing through
the birch tops off into the woods, where you faintly hear him jawing
still. The night heron whirls with a great flapping and puts to sea
with more quawks of alarm. But these two were not especially wanted
at the concert. The night heron particularly is an unlovely bird in
appearance, voice, and manner. The skippers and the lucky bugs crowd
in together, each among its kind, close to the reedy margin, to be as
near the performers as possible, and behold, there come sailing in from
sea tiny argosies of dainty people, the loveliest free swimmers of the
pond. Golden heads nodding in gracious recognition, they come, slender
bodied and graceful, trailing long robes of filmy lace beneath them in
the water.
The botanists, who shall be hung some day for their literalness,
have named these lovely denizens of the cove bladder-worts, or
_Utricularia_, if you wish the Latin form, because they float on their
air-inflated leaves and trail their roots beneath them, free in the
water, scorning the contaminating touch of earth. The off-shore wind of
noon had sailed these out well beyond the mouth of the cove, now the
evening breeze is bringing them in again for the concert.
They should have been named after some dainty lady of the old Greek
mythology, some fair sailor lass who crossed the wake of Ulysses,
perchance, and lingers on placid seas waiting his return to this day,
for you will see their golden heads nodding along on the little
waves of the cove all summer.
[Illustration: Out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a
veritable queen of the fairies]
These are the patricians of the concert. There is a great tuning of
instruments going on already and a trying out of voices, yet for some
reason there is delay. Then comes the queen herself. The golden shimmer
on the eastern shore has faded and dusk dances up from the undergrowth
on the west. It is time, and out from among the birches she sails
gracefully, a veritable queen of the fairies, clad in ostrich plumes
and softest of white velvet, with the most beautiful trailing and
undulating opera cloak of softest, delicate green, trimmed with brown
and white. You may call her a luna moth if you will. The thing which
somewhat resembles her, stuck on a pin in your collection, may be that,
but this graceful, soaring creature, pulsing and quivering with life,
floating through perfumed dusk, is the queen of the fairies--no less.
Her arrival is a signal for the olio to begin. Then, indeed, you learn
the astonishing number and variety of the frog performers within the
cove. The basso profundos sing “Ah-r-h-u-m-m” with amazing gusto.
Surely that waiter frog has got over his fright and brought it in
quantity. “T-u-g-gs” resound all about like the rattle of a drum corps.
There are altos whose voices sound like rasping a stick cheerfully
on a picket fence, others whose strain hath a dying fall of internal
agony outwardly expressed. A lone belated hyla pipes his plaintive
soprano, but the tenors are the strongest of all. The tree toad flutes
a fluttering, liquid tremolo, and the toad, the common toad, sits on
the grassy margin and swells his throat and sings “Wha-a-a-a-” in
long-drawn, dreamy cadence.
You may imitate this sound after a fashion if you wish. Purse your lips
and say the French “Eu” in a long drawl once or twice, then the next
time you do it whistle at the same time. You will have a very tolerable
imitation of this dreamy note. It invites to slumber and it is time to
paddle home, for the dusk has deepened to darkness and there is little
more for you to see in the cove.
A BUTTERFLY CHASE
A BUTTERFLY CHASE
It was a great purple butterfly which led me over the brow of the
hill, one of the “white admirals,” curiously enough so called, though
this one had but four minute spots of white on him near the tips of
his wings. Some members of his genus have a right to the name for they
have broad bands of white across all four wings, but this one, the
_Basilarchia astyanax_, is a black sheep.
Nevertheless he is a beautiful creature, well worth following under any
circumstances to note the ease and sureness of his floating flight and
admire the beauty of his velvety rufous-black, shoaling into lustrous
blue in the rounded crenulations of the after wings. This one I
thought worth following for another reason, however, for he seemed to
have something on his mind. Not that his flight was direct. A bird with
something to do goes to his work in a straight line; but a butterfly
must dance along, even if it were to a funeral in the family. And yet
with all this my blue and rufous-black white admiral carried in his
dancing progress something which told me he was troubled and led me to
follow him over the brow of the hill.