drop into the cool shadows where he lurks. When he is about to take
your bait you need to be keen to know what is going on, for he suspects
you, and your least untoward motion of rod or line will cause him to
slip back like a shadow into his cavern, and there will be no bite
from him on that hook after that. You will say that it cannot possibly
be a bite; the bob simply stops and the hook has no doubt caught on
a snag on bottom. If you are not wise enough to know better you will
pull up here lest you lose your hook, and in so doing you will lose
your eel, for he is simply testing you. He has hold of the very bottom
of that hook, below point and barb, and if you pull you pull it out of
his mouth without hooking him. Then in cynical glee he’ll wag himself
deeper into his cavern beneath the stones, and that is the last of him.
You may fish the pool for a week before he will forget his caution and
try another angle-worm. If, however, nothing rouses his suspicions the
bob will gradually sink lower till it is more than half submerged,
hang there for a little, give another sag downward, and so by degrees
be drawn cautiously under. Your eel is cannily carrying the hook down
into his cavern, where he may finish his meal at leisure. Now is the
crucial moment. He must not be allowed to get in among the stones, for
even if your strike hooks him he will twist himself desperately around
them and then twist the hook out. A steady quick pull and you feel
him on. Then indeed you “give him the butt,” as the fly fishermen say
gloryingly. Your lithe birch rod bends in your hands till the tip is
near your wrist as you lean desperately back with all your strength.
The hold of a three-foot eel on the water is tremendous. Until he tires
a bit it is almost as good as yours on the birch pole, but steadily,
inch by inch, you draw him away out into the pool, where the fight
is a fair one. Now his head is above water and his great lithe body
whirls like a propeller beneath. Again look out; for when he leaves the
water it will be as if he shot out, and you are liable to go with him,
backward into the bushes, where he will tie your line into ten thousand
knots, break out the hook, and run for the brook as a snake might.
At the moment he leaves the surface you slow up. Up into the air he
shoots and drops till his tail welts the ground at your feet. Here let
him wriggle at the end of the taut line while you break a stout alder
switch with one hand, and as you drop him to earth belabor him with it.
This will stun him quicker than anything else, and you may then deal
with him as you will, only be quick about it, for he is very tenacious
of life.
Then, if you are a true fisherman, you will wind up what line is left
you and go your way, for the pool has no more foemen worthy of your
steel. There will be but one eel to a pool, and to go on catching
sunfish would be insipid indeed.
BROOK MAGIC
BROOK MAGIC
Brook magic does not begin until you have passed the deep fishing-pool
and traversed the reedy meadow where the flagroot loves to go swimming
and the muskrats come to spice their midnight lunches with its pungent
root and pile the broad flags for winter nests. You may, if you are
alert, feel a touch of its witchery as you wind among the rocks and
black alders of the level swamp beyond, for here the ostrich-feather
fern lifts its regal plumes as high as your head, and if by any chance
you duck under these you have been near the portals of a world where
sorcery is rife, for fern seed has a mysterious power of its own, and
the ferns of the alder swamp are decorations on the road to the realm
of the witch-hazel, where all sorts of strange things may come to pass.
The ferns and the witch-hazel are themselves mysterious and promoters
of mystery, and it is hard to tell which leads in waywardness and
subornation of sorcery. The ferns are the lingering representatives of
an elder world,--a world that was old before the first pine dropped
its cones or the leaves of the first deciduous tree fell on the first
greensward. Their ways are not the ways of modern plant life.
Take the cinnamon fern, for instance, one of the commonest of our
woods. It grows up each spring like a tender and succulent herb, to
wither and die down in the fall as the grass does. But take a spade
into the woods with you and try to transplant a good-sized cinnamon
fern. You will fail, unless you have brought an axe along too, for the
seemingly herbaceous plant has an underground trunk, sometimes two or
three feet in diameter, almost as solid and firm in texture as that of
a tree.
The fern shows no blossom to the world of butterfly or moth, no fruit
for the delectation of fox or field mouse. The curious little dots
growing along the margins of the leaves, which we call “fern seed”
by courtesy, grow no fern when planted. They simply grow a little
primitive leaf form which curiously imitates a blossom in its functions
and produces a new fern.
But the witch-hazel is stranger yet in its ways. In the spring, when it
should by all tokens of the plant world be putting out blossoms, it is
busy growing nuts which are the product of last year’s blossoms. Then
in the late autumn, even November, you will find it in bloom, twisting
yellow petal fingers in mourning at the fall of its own leaves.
[Illustration: 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]
Pluck one of the nuts of a midsummer evening and look it intently in
the face. Note the little shrewd pig eyes of the witch far ingrown in
it, the funny shrewish tip-tilted nose, the puffy cheeks and eyelids.
See that slender horn in the forehead, the sure mark of the witch.
No wonder that it has the name witch-hazel with such ways and such
faces growing all over it at a time when most other trees and shrubs
have but finished blossoming. But if you want further proof that this
shrub harbors witches you need but to examine its oval, wavy-toothed
leaves just at this time of the year and see the little conical red
witch-caps hung on them. There need be but little doubt that, sitting
under it at midnight of a full moon, you may see the witch faces detach
themselves from the limbs, put on these red caps and sail off across
the great yellow disk. 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.
To be sure there are scientific men, gray-bearded entomologists, who
will tell us that these little red caps are galls, the rearing-place of
plant aphids, caused by the laying of the mother insect’s egg within
the tissue of the leaf, but one might as well believe that the witches
hang their hats on the witch-hazel over night as to believe that the
laying of a minute egg in the tissue of a leaf could cause the plant
to grow a witch hat.
No doubt these same wise men would explain to you that it is not
possible to become invisible by sprinkling fern seed on your head
during the dark of the moon and saying the right words, but did one of
them ever try it?
It is appropriate that the witch-hazel should shade the portals through
which the brook enters the glen at the foot of the pasture, for the
path here enters you into a world of witchery where the glamour of the
place will hold you long of a summer afternoon.
At the foot of the glen an ancient mill-dam once blocked the free
passage of the water and a mill-wheel vexed its current. Now only the
rude embankment remains with half-century old hickories and maples
growing on it, arching in and shading the glen with their imbricated
branches. No rust of mill-wheel, no trace of building remains, and
the very tradition of the mill and its owners is gone. No one to-day
knows whether it ground corn or sawed boards for the pioneer who built
it, who laid the sill of its dam so firm and level that the wear of
two centuries of swift water has not entirely obliterated it. At the
very bottom of the glen it forms a shallow pool where brook magic and
witch-hazel glamour shall show you many midsummer fantasies if you will
but look for them.
It was in the glen that I found the first real relief from the heat of
midday. The grasses of the sun-parched pasture had crisped under foot
and broken off, so dry were they, all the way down to the sweet-flag
meadow. Here the brook water keeps all growing things lush and green,
but the glare of the sun is only the more intense. It follows you
into the alder swamp, and you may sit under the arching fronds of the
ostrich-plume ferns in vain.
But after you have scrambled through them and ducked under the mock
benediction of the witch-hazel limbs that stretch above your head
while the witch-hazel faces grin a cynical “Bless you, my child,” you
feel that you are willing to take your chances with swamp witchery and
brook magic. For in the glen cool waters crisp over cold stones and the
breeze sighs up stream and fans you as you sit on the brink of the pool
and lean your head against the ledge from whose crannies drip the fairy
fronds of the rock fern.
These are but little fellows of our fern world, and the magic which
distills from their fern seed is no doubt less potent than that from
greater ferns, but added to the witch-hazel glamour it makes brook
magic which will initiate you into many mysteries of the pasture world
if you are but patient. Sitting there with the tiny brown spores of the
rock fern dripping upon your shoulders with infinitesimal rattle, you
seem to see more clearly the glen life and to know the meaning of many
sounds hitherto only half understood.
Always there is the sleepy song which the brook sings to itself in
summer,--a song to which the warble of the vireo in the overhead
leafage adds but a dreamy staccato. But if you listen through this
you shall presently hear the water goblins grumbling to themselves in
their abodes under flat stones. They are old and grumpy, these water
goblins, and they never cease to mumble to themselves about their
troubles.
Very likely they complain incessantly because they are hungry and the
supply of demoiselle nymphs is running short. There are plenty of
demoiselles, flitting back and forth across the pools on glittering
black wings, which they fold closely to their iridescent green bodies
when they light. They are such ladylike dragon-flies that it is no
wonder that the name “demoiselle,” which French scientists with
admirable gallantry have given them, has stuck. With all their ladylike
short and modest flights and the saintly way in which they fold their
wings when they light on some leaf beside the pool, a folding as of
hands in prayer, the demoiselles are dragon-flies, and each prayer may
well be for the soul of some midge or other wee insect captured in the
short flight.
The true dragon-fly--the one which rests with wings widespread--hunts
like a hawk, but the demoiselles seem to take their prey with a gentle
grace and charm of manner which ought to make the midge’s last moments
his happiest ones. I always suspect them of folding him in a perfumed
napkin and eating him with salad dressing and a spoon after they get
back to their boudoir, but I cannot prove this any more than I can that
it is really a water goblin that grumbles under the flat stone.
Many a time I have turned the stones over suddenly, but I never yet
was quick enough to surprise the goblin. I have found him there, mind
you, but never in his true shape. Always he has managed to transform
himself into something different,--perhaps into a spotted turtle or
a grouchy horn-pout. I have even known him to turn into an ugly,
many-legged helgramite worm, not having time to make the more reputable
transformation. It is hard to catch a grumbling goblin asleep,
especially in a pool below the witch-hazels, where the brook magic is
strong.
It is easier to see the demoiselle nymphs. They are not very beautiful
or seemingly very savory, and if the water goblins do eat them it
is no wonder they grumble. You may have seen a hawk-like dragon-fly
skimming about over an open pool dip in swallow fashion to the surface.
These sudden and repeated dips are not for a bath nor yet for a drink.
What you see is a female dragon-fly laying eggs which shall later
hatch and become under-water nymphs, the larvæ of the dragon-fly. But
the demoiselles, still rightly named, do nothing so brazen as that.
Instead, they pick out some nodding water weed, fold their wings a
little more tightly to their iridescent bodies and crawl down it into
the water. Here, in proper seclusion beneath the surface, they pierce
the reed’s stem with keen ovipositor and lay their eggs. Then they
saunter forth again and discreetly eat more midges with salad dressing
and a spoon.
If you look closely among the water weeds in the transparent water
at the pool margin you may see the demoiselle nymphs crawling about,
breathing through feathers in their tails, and scooping up food with a
big shovel which sticks out under their chins. They show little traces
of their coming beauty. It is the awkward age of the demoiselle, and I
fancy each is right glad to do up the hair, get into long black skirts
with iridescent green bodices, and join the afternoon tea flitters.
What the magic is in the brook, whereby these strange, awkward,
crawling creatures, living beneath the water, some day crawl up the
stem of a water weed, burst, stretch their wings and fly away the
saintly and demure demoiselles of the pool, I do not know--whether it
be distilled from the witch-hazel by the summer sun, or whether it
slips more mysteriously from beneath the breast-plate of the spore of
the polypody growing just above my head in the rock crevice. It must
be the same magic whereby the many-legged, crawling helgramite worm,
after living that sort of life sometimes for several years, one day
crawls ashore, goes to sleep beneath a stone, and in another month
wakes up and finds himself a _Corydalus cornutus_, a three-inch-long
bug with extraordinary wings and great horns,--a bug that might well
make one of those witches, met face to face on the moon’s disk, shriek
and fall off her broomstick. If he can be that thing, changed from a
helgramite worm, why can he not be a helgramite worm, changed from the
water goblin which you can hear grumbling beneath the flat stone at the
entrance to the pool beneath the witch-hazels?
The answer is to be found neither in the rhyme of the poet nor in the
reason of the scientific man.
Musing on these things I suddenly sat up from my quiet seat beneath the
rock ferns, for more magic yet was being displayed before my eyes.
Over on the further side, in the shallow eddy, the pool was troubled
a second, then there rose from it a wee sunfish, not more than three
inches long, rose from it tail first and began balancing across the
pool surface toward me, on his head. His tail quivered in the air, and
I could see his freckles growing in the yellow transparency of his
skin, yet, though I watched with wide eyes, he was two-thirds the way
across the pool toward me before I noticed beneath him the tip of the
nose and the wicked little dark eye of a water snake. At sight of him
the demoiselles should have shrieked and flown away, but they made no
move. I, however, indignant, arose, and seizing broken fragments of
rock was about to lacerate him and loose his prey when I quite suddenly
thought better of it. Had not I a few days before come down stream to
the deep pool above and carried off a string of perch, sunfish, pouts,
and an eel? Had not the water snake also a right to his dinner?
I dropped my rock fragments, but there was no longer pleasure in
waiting to woo the demure coquetry of the demoiselles. The serpent had
entered Eden and the man was driven forth. I lingered only long enough
to see the grace and strength of the snake as he glided over the sill
of the old dam, now black and sinuous, now giving me a glimpse of the
vivid red of the under parts of his body, but always keeping his grip
secure on the little sunfish whom he was taking away to luncheon with
him.
I climbed out of the glen, glad to go for once, but at the top of
the rock where the sunburnt pasture path begins again I was in for
another shudder, for here the dragon had entered fairy land. He came,
writhing his horrid length along the path, his scales shining in the
sun, his great mouth gaping, and up near his abnormally great head two
little impotent forelegs wriggling. Who wouldn’t turn and run before
such a creature as this? To be sure he was scarce three feet long, and
his curiously mottled-brown back was that of the common adder, one of
our harmless snakes, though he looks ugly enough to be stuffed with
venom. But this great gaping head and the wriggling forelegs; never did
flat-head adder have such a front as this!
My compassion for snakes that had a right to their dinner vanished
before this creature. It is different when it seems as if you might be
the dinner. Those forelegs beckoned, and how could I tell but, in this
land of witch-hazel, fern seed, and brook magic, I might not shrink
sufficiently to be taken in by that huge mouth in that misapplied head?
Death were better,--that is, death for the dragon,--and I caught up a
jagged piece of the top of the glen and hurled it at him. It struck
the beast fair amidships. The dragon whirled and writhed for a second
or two and lay motionless, and behold! the head separated from the
body and began to limp away. Then first was the spell broken and I saw
clearly. It was simply a flat-head adder that had taken a good-sized
garden toad for his dinner, had swallowed him whole as far as the
forelegs, but failed to engulf these. It was the combination which made
the dragon.
Somehow I haven’t cared for the glen since. The early glamour of brook
magic is pleasant, but I fear that, like the hasheesh of the Orient,
its end is very bad dreams.
IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS
IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS
I do not find in all my wanderings, afield or afloat, a more quaintly
delightful plant than the floating-heart. In my pasture world it grows
in one place only,--along the shallow edges of the bogs of Ponkapoag
Pond. I think no other pond or stream in this immediate region has
it, and so sweetly shy is it that you may pass it year after year
without noting its existence. It waits until the summer has marked
its meridian before it ventures to send up its dainty little _crêpe
de chine_ petals, each fairy-like bloom appearing for one day only in
the very throb of the mottled olive and bronze heart, which is a leaf.
The leaf itself is barely an inch across, the exquisite bloom less
than half that; yet once you know it you love it beyond all other bog
plants as being the most fairy-like of water-lilies, though it is not a
water-lily at all when it comes to botanical classification, being of
the gentian family.
However, not to be a water-lily is not so bad if one may be classed
with the fringed and closed gentians which are to bloom later on the
landward edges of the bog. As the little blossom fades at nightfall,
its short stalk curls back beneath the water to ripen the seeds there,
hung just beneath the leaf from a peculiar bulb-like nodule just an
inch or so down on the petiole. The next morning another wee white bud
shoots up in the heart angle of the leaf and opens fragile petals in
the sun.
I recall no other plant that sends up blooms from the leaf stalk in
this way. When the seeds have ripened I suspect the plant of setting
this bulb-like nodule free to float away to another shore, take root as
a real corm or tuber might, and produce more floating-hearts.
This bog on the westerly shore of Ponkapoag Pond was not long ago made
a part of Boston’s park system, which thus moves ever sedately toward
the Berkshire hills, yet it is a bit of nature as wild and untrammeled
as it was in the days when Myles Standish may have looked down upon
it from the top of great Blue Hill, as it had stood unchanged in his
day for many and many a long century. So I fancy it will remain for
centuries to come, for Nature holds her own here well. Indeed, she
encroaches, for a bog grows wherever it has free water to grow into.
So, after many centuries, frequenters of the Blue Hill Reservation
will note a broad expanse of swamp land where once sparkled the waters
of this hundred-acre pond. For the way of the bog is this.
All along its under-water front the obscure under-water weeds grow up
and die year after year, generation after generation, forming fertile
banks of beautiful soft mud, into whose lower depths the great thick
rootstocks of the pond-lilies push, and in which the fibrous roots of
the tape grass, the fresh-water eel grass, find a hold. The growth
and decay of these, with the water shield, with its jelly-protected
foliage, the yellow dog-lily, and in lesser depths the bulrush, add to
the growing bank as coral insects grow and die in tropic seas, until it
is near enough to the surface for the pickerel weed to find roothold.
Then indeed the bog steps forward with vigor, for the pickerel weed is
its firing line. All summer you shall see its blue banners flaunting
gayly in the southern breezes, tempting the land-loving bumble-bee to
sea, calling the honey-bee from the mile-distant hive, and offering
rest and luncheon to a myriad lesser insects, all with genial
hospitality. Its serried millions in close ranks breast the waves in a
broad blue line from one end of the bog to the other, a half-mile or so.
Behind these are shallow pools, where again you find the white
water-lilies. Here they bloom in enormous profusion from late June
until early September, reaching their grand climax during late July.
On such a day, standing in the boat at the southerly end of the bog,
counting those within a given space and multiplying, I estimated that
there were ten thousand of the fragrant white blooms in sight. Twice
as many more were hidden by bulrush and pickerel weed. On Sundays
and holidays boatloads of trolley trippers paddle and push among
them and carry them off by the hundred, yet they make no mark on the
visible supply. The decay of the leaves and stems of these add to the
under-water foothold of the bog, but after all it must be the reedy
stems, sagittate leaves, and interwoven roots of the pickerel weed that
are its main foundation.
Steadily seaward over the foundation thus laid progresses the long,
definite front of the saw-edged marsh grass. Once it interlocks its
roots along the mud surface formed for it, it leaves no room for the
freer-growing denizens of the shallows. In among the marsh grass grows
no flaunting flag of pickerel weed, no pure white nymphæa sends forth
its rich odor.
Only the bog cranberry may hold its own in any quantity against the
throttling squeeze of those grass roots. Where these grow is the high
sea of the bog, its waves rising and falling in the free winds. Yet,
just as pickerel weed and water-lily give way before the advance of
the marsh grass, so it in turn falls on the landward side before the
advancing hosts of the swamp.
A steady phalanx of swamp cedars pushes its foothold farther and
farther out upon it, year by year, scouting with button bush and black
alder and holding every inch that they obtain for it. Now and then
something happens to a brief area of marsh grass and cranberries so
that their dense packed minions faint and release their root grip on
the quaking mud. Every such opening is seized by the alder or the
button bush, and the cedars follow them; indeed, sometimes the cedars,
favored by the right wind or the right bird carriers at seeding time,
slip in first, and little island clumps of their dark bronze green
stand here and there over against the cadet blue of Blue Hill which
hangs like a beautiful drop-curtain always on the westerly sky.
Once, a half-century ago or more, a farmer and his men came down from
the pastures, and for purposes of their own cut a ditch straight
through the middle of the bog to the open water. The hundreds of
scrawny night herons, sitting on pale blue eggs in scraggly nests in
the cedar swamp must have heard the cedars laugh as this went on.
It was the swamp’s opportunity. Where the farmer and his men with
incredible labor cut and tore away the marsh-grass roots the cedars
planted their seeds, and called upon the alders and the swamp maples
and the thoroughwort, the Joe Pye weed, and a host of other good
citizens of the swamp, to help them.
So vigorous was the sortie and so well did they hold their ground that
you may trace the farmer’s wide ditch to-day only as a causeway down
which the swamp has come to build a great wooded area in the midst of
the bog, accomplishing in half a century what it might not have done in
five times that had it not been for human aid. Thus, slowly as you and
I count time, only an inch or two a year perhaps, yet all too rapidly
for the joy of future generations, the bog encroaches upon the pond and
the swamp follows towards complete possession, which as the centuries
go by will make the quaking sphagnum firm meadow land.
For all you and I know, the Metropolitan Park Commission of the year
3908 will be fixing up a second Franklin Field here for the camping
ground of visiting Pythians. Meanwhile let us hasten to enjoy our bog
and its reedy borders.