environment as any tree or shrub. They have the appearance of having
grown here, quite as naturally as the bayberry and the sweet fern, and
are kindred of the savin, and the low-spreading juniper which circles
round them and hugs the stone like the lichen itself. The migrant
boulders from the North are congenial to these hardy northern plants
which reflect the somber character of the rock.
A field that has been entirely cleared of its pasture stones and left
to stand thus, somehow looks barren and deserted. You feel you would
like to restore a boulder here and there and invite the juniper and the
bayberry to return. There is character in these ancient pasture stones,
and they cannot be removed without depriving the landscape of that
which they imparted; it is no longer virile and forceful, but tame and
meek as though shorn of its strength.
If you would build your house on truly historic ground, lay it on
foundation of pasture stones, and incorporate, as it were, Time itself
into the structure. This is to let the very elements work for you. On
many a farm the boulders are as good a crop as any; when they are
gathered into the walls to give room for one more lucrative, this value
at least of the farm is still represented. The fields have produced but
one crop of boulders, and only the ages could mature this. If the
pastures must lose this ancient beauty, let the house gain by it. Build
it into your chimney. Take it to your hearth that it may not be lost.
Let the boulder tell its story by the light of the hickory logs.
There is a rustic notion that boulders somehow _grow_, in some
inexplicable manner enlarging like puff balls and drawing sustenance
from the earth--and what could be more puzzling to the uninitiated than
the presence of these pasture stones? His was an ingenious mind who
conjured up that remote ice age from this fragmentary evidence and
derived a history from these scattered letters and elliptical
sentences. It was like tracing the stars to their origin.
It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these familiar fields and
woods overlaid with a mile's thickness of ice; to recognize here in
this present landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made hospitable.
There was need of a solid foundation of fact, patiently garnered,
before such an arch of fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation
once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. Here was a frozen
waste as barren as the face of the moon. But beneath lay the soil that
was to nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a fine
satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to earth, to corner it and
see it resolve itself into the working of natural laws.
Nature appears as intent on breaking up the old rocks as in forming new
ones. The ledge is, after all, but a mass of masonry in which huge
blocks are set without mortar and as closely and evenly as jewels. What
a lathe was that ancient glacier in which to turn and smooth these
rough gems; or rather a great file which rasped their edges and
corners. In rectangular blocks that have weathered, the decay is deeper
at the corners, so that a cubical block tends to become a sphere as it
diminishes. Frost is the stone-cutter, who scatters his chips over the
world; Rain, the giant who is bent on turning these into soil. Consider
what power lay in this tongue of ice which licked up the crumbs of the
earth; carried Canada into New England and New England into New York,
depositing its burden as gently as the petal falls from a rose.
Boulders are to be considered veterans of glacial times, which carry
still the scars of that strenuous day. What tales they have to tell of
that mammoth conflict, that prehistoric incursion of the Arctic hosts,
but only to very good listeners are they unfolded. You must needs have
a sympathetic ear to become their confidant. The unconscious rock
assumes dignity in view of its past, as though here were an imprisoned
earth-spirit, proceeding thus through the strenuous life to some
ultimate freedom. Sermons in stones indeed! A terminal moraine is the
most ancient battle-ground of the world. Here are the very heroes
themselves, stretched upon the field in imperturbable granite, as
certain others were fixed in the heavens as constellations. To walk
among them is to see in fancy the advent of the wall of ice, mile-high,
which buried the primitive jungle forever. Here the great glacier
began its retreat, and over the spot there broods a silence, as over
historic ground once the theater of great actions. After untold
centuries, the wild rose and the hay-scented fern cluster round the
boulder, and dandelions star the grass.
I please myself with imagining the venerable pasture stones to have
been observant of events and to have retained the memory of it all, as
the Colosseum might have memories of Rome, or the Sphinx of Egypt and
the desert. Such have seen races live out their lives and disappear.
That every dog has his day might well be a maxim among these ancient
ones of the earth who saw a tropic jungle resolve itself into an Arctic
solitude and as slowly give way to a temperate zone. I salute the
pasture stone as having witnessed the advent of man upon the earth. It
is difficult to associate the tertiary animals with anything but the
museum, or to realize that those preposterous Paleozoic reptiles were
ever other than fossils. But here is a weather-beaten observer that was
actually contemporary with that life, to us so intangible and shadowy;
that knew the ancestor of the horse, and ages before the separation
from the mother ledge, it may be, was wont to see the sky darkened by
flying reptiles.
They were fashioned roughly, these boulders, cast in a rude mould, as
if they had emerged from chaos itself before form had become defined.
The sea would have all the pebbles on its shore of a size and shape. It
takes a block from the cliff and turns it in its lathe that it may
become a polished sphere, as in that larger and cosmic lathe the
planets are turned. On the beach are innumerable stones that look as
much alike as so many eggs. But no two pasture stones are the same.
They were turned in no such precise lathe as the sea's, but by a
rough-handed force, which here planed a surface and there gouged a
depression. Pasture stones are thus almost as individual in appearance
as men. Here is one squat like a toad, one humpbacked as a dromedary,
another flat as a cake--a mere slab of granite. They are wrinkled and
deformed, as so many gnomes, and covered with
excrescences--razor-backed or round-shouldered, lopsided or with
protruding paunch, while the great solitary boulders rise from the
pasture, massive domes and pinnacles of granite.
But none are polished, none are symmetrical; nowhere is there an
ellipsoid, such as the sea loves to turn, but rough outlines always.
Frequently one surface is rounded; the work of making a sphere was
begun but progressed only thus far. Again, two surfaces may be
approximately parallel and the remainder rough and angular. Commonly it
is an affair of many angles, all unequal, and of a multitude of curves
of different radii. It is cast in a mould it would be difficult to
classify. With the multiform aspects of crystals, they are still not so
varied as these pasture stones. For crystals, for leaves, for
snowflakes, there are definite patterns. But the boulder is a thing by
itself, subject to other laws and formed under a different order of
architecture--or under no order--but the will of the glacier, which has
left here and there the marks of its icy fingers.
There is a suggestion of friendliness in the way the lichens clothe
these stones, as though Nature aimed to cover the scars she could not
heal, or to hang them with such rich medallions as the parmelia in
token of that ancient service. Here are colors such as only Time can
mix,--shades which are the work of centuries, unspeakably softened and
mellowed, like ivory and meerschaum and bronze. In its day the
Acropolis may have been glaring and crude in tone; the raw marble,
fresh from the quarry, needed these centuries to subdue and mellow it.
It has acquired a tender beauty unknown to that classic day which saw
it in its splendor. Some such service has been rendered to the pasture
stone and the ledge. When the Archæan granite was poured out from the
depths it must have worn a new and crude look, albeit so fresh and
clean. Then it was but so much raw feldspar and quartz and mica. But it
has long been wooed by the air and the water, by moss and lichen; the
years have lent it beauty, softened its curves, rounded its angles and
brought it the richness of age.
Boulders are sometimes clothed with a larger growth. I have in mind
one, from whose apex springs a maple at least half a century old. It
lies at the head of a swamp, and in autumn this tree is always one of
the first to turn. In August when the tupelos show signs of change, the
maple is already glowing with color. The tree springs from the very
summit of the rock while its main root reaches through a split some
fifteen feet to the earth. Looking across the swamp, it appears to
crown the boulder with a noble dignity--a landmark in the country
round--as if reflecting those elementary forces which conspired to
bring about this unusual condition,--the glacier which brought the
boulder, the winds which carried the maple seed, the frost which split
the rock.
After their many vicissitudes, the boulders have settled down upon the
bosom of the pasture and come to be a fixture in the landscape. This
present age is to them the serene and mellow autumn of their troubled
life. Their day is a thousand years. But they are melting into soil--as
icicles dissolve in the sun--in that measureless and yet imperceptible
thaw which melts granite. The pasture land is perhaps the dust of a
still more primitive race whose life has been transmuted into the
dandelion and the thistle.
NEIGHBORS
All wild animals are wary and suspicious, even when they do not prey
upon one another. What friend has the rabbit, the chipmunk or the
weasel? They lead friendless lives and die tragic deaths. Why should
not a rabbit gossip with a woodchuck, for instance? One would think
their common danger might draw them together, and that they might
perhaps learn a little woodcraft one of the other. But caste is nowhere
stronger than in the woods. They do not sit at meat together unless,
indeed, one is himself the repast.
Like a subtle atmosphere the spirit of the wild pervades the forest.
Whoever enters comes under its spell. In the woods the dog tends to
revert to the wolf, and savage instincts come to light. On the street
he may pay no heed to people, will move in and out among them, himself
a bit of civilization; but let him leave the village and go into the
woods, and he is suspicious and on his guard.
We have so fostered this attitude of fear and distrust that our wild
neighbors are at best but casual acquaintances, if not complete
strangers to us. We are like sharpshooters ambushed around the outposts
of an encampment. A stray inmate pokes his head out of the trenches and
essays to go to the spring for water. Perhaps we let him drink and make
a note of that, then--whiz! we let fly at him. We discover what he has
had for dinner and a few other trifling matters--and we get his skin.
His ways remain strange to us and his language no more familiar than
Choctaw. Sometimes we catch him and put him in a cage. But what can be
learned of a poor, sullen prisoner fretting away his life with terrible
thoughts of distant sunlight and running streams and friendly woods?
The acquaintance of a wild animal is not to be made with a gun.
Practically nothing is learned in this way; it is difficult enough to
know them without this barrier. But never to have loved the wild things
is to have lost much--to have lived less. Any dolt can shoot an animal
and have a bag of bones for his pains, but to win over such a creature
in the smallest degree implies a victory, and is evidence of the
redeeming power of the heart. There is a rare pleasure in encountering
deer when you have no designs upon them. Such furtive meetings are in
themselves adequate. They have the fascination of lovely faces seen for
a fleeting moment in a crowd, instantly to be lost sight of. How little
we really know about the lives of animals. We can surmise a few things
and imagine a great many, but we _know_ next to nothing. Perhaps there
is not so very much to know. Their emotions are not complex but simple;
their lives run in narrow grooves. That they suffer, much as we suffer,
is certain, and the main thing is to be kind. It is impossible to come
upon a wild animal and watch it unobserved without deriving a subtle
impression foreign to our usual life. There is something in the free,
savage existence which is a shock to the thought-burdened, educated
mind, and breaks for a moment its prison of glass.
A glen to which I often go is, like most others in the sequestered
woods, really populous, while being to all appearances quite deserted.
Its inhabitants are closely associated with the brook; they drink at it
and all their lives hear its song. This glen is _their_ world, and yet
they possess it and live in it in virtue of persistent self-effacement.
There are mice and shrews, chipmunks, red and gray squirrels, a
woodchuck or two, a skunk, a little gray rabbit, a weasel and a mink.
Far from being alone, you are watched by numerous unblinking eyes. From
the grass, the rocks, the trees, motionless and in silence these
creatures are observing you.
The squirrels have overcome somewhat their hereditary fear, doubtless
because we are more kindly disposed to them. As I take my lunch from my
pocket, thinking to eat it alone, a chipmunk approaches and sniffs at
the package as I put it down. The aroma of bread and butter tickles his
nostrils, suggesting some unaccustomed variety of fare, and presently
he loses all fear and begins tearing the paper. After a little coaxing
he takes a piece of bread from my hand, licking the butter off first
with his small pink tongue. He has no sooner eaten it than another
chipmunk appears and sniffs the whiskers of the first one. He, too, is
overcome by the seductive aroma, and apparently receives some
assurances, for he cautiously approaches and takes a morsel of bread.
The package is returned to my pocket, and both chipmunks climb in
without hesitation, tear off the paper and help themselves. Meanwhile a
third arrives, having somehow learned of the good cheer, and it is not
long before all three are scrambling over me.
One cold February day, when no gray squirrels were to be seen, and the
snow lay deep in the glen, a solitary red squirrel appeared and looked
long in my direction. Then by as direct a course as the ground would
permit, he came toward me, over the intervening boulders, until he
reached the one on which I sat, whereupon he immediately ate the bits
of apple I gave him. He had been with me some little time when I
chanced to look over my shoulder, and there at my elbow was the mink.
The squirrel saw him at once and made off toward the trees. The mink
appeared to take no notice of him, but his presence had evidently
disturbed the harmony of the occasion.
The red squirrel stands in no awe of man, but he is as untamable as
anything in the woods, none the less. Sit quietly under the hemlocks
and the chances are that before long he will be scolding at you from
somewhere in the tree tops. Presently he will come down the trunk,
head foremost, moving mechanically with little jerks, as though pulled
by a string, his hind legs stretched straight out above him. Down
almost to the ground he comes, holding himself well out from the tree
and eyeing you inquisitively. Suddenly he turns and scurries up the
tree, chippering volubly meanwhile, to rush out on a limb and continue
the denunciation, adding emphasis with his tail with which he seems to
gesticulate.
There is no merrier sight in the woods than a pair of gray squirrels in
a frisky mood; it is unmistakable fun. The gray is averse to the
coniferous woods and the red prefers them; thus each has its territory.
Apparently the red is more self-contained and readily amuses himself.
He is of a more caustic mood; his fun is not so childlike and
guileless. Nor is he himself, for there is a dark streak in his
make-up, a certain taint in his disposition and always a satirical note
in his laughter among the tree tops.
Eight inches or more of snow, and a hard crust, and it becomes poor
pickings for the wild things. Here and there are holes where the gray
squirrel has been prospecting. Near by, in most cases, lies the cup of
an acorn and strips of shell, showing the squirrel went directly to the
right place. It is to be observed how many of these excavations are
under pines, sometimes several under a single tree. As late as the 1st
of April I have noticed a gray squirrel busy under a pignut, burying
the nuts which had lain on the ground through the winter. He would
first rapidly shuck them, then dig a small hole, force them well into
the earth with a vigorous push with his jaws, and as rapidly cover them
again. In this way he would bury a dozen in as many minutes, and then
make off through the woods.
Between the squirrels and the mink family the difference is as much a
matter of disposition as of structure. The mink is the evil genius of
the place. His character has written itself in his physiognomy,
glitters in his eye and shows itself in the serpentine motion of his
head. His silence speaks. But his presence is agreeable in a way, for
it is a touch of that savage nature we do not otherwise get without
going back into the wilderness. A squirrel reveals his candor in his
inquisitiveness and in his noisy ways; curiosity gets the better of his
fears. These psychologic differences are as marked with animals as with
men.
I once surprised the weasel in this glen, with a young robin in her
mouth which she had just taken from the nest and was carrying home for
her family. She dropped the bird when I threw a stone, whereupon I
stood by the dead robin and waited, anticipating her return, for I knew
the weasel's boldness of old. Almost immediately the sinister-looking
creature poked her head from the bushes and, without hesitation,
approached and seized the bird where it lay between my feet. Another
stone caused her to drop it again before she had gone far. This time I
moved the robin some little distance away and stood beside it as
before. Soon the weasel reappeared, and going to the spot where she had
last dropped it, became visibly excited on finding it gone. She then
began rapidly following the scent, like a hound, and at length by a
circuitous course, approached, and again took the bird from under my
feet.
Almost every fine day in autumn the woodchuck is to be met. He emerges
from the bushes with deliberation and ambles out into the open where
there is a little clover to tempt him, his tawny legs showing in strong
contrast with his grayish back and scraggly black tail. His enjoyment
is evident; the sun feels good to him. He is a chilly body, and, like
the snakes, cannot get any too much warmth. Now he sits upon his
haunches and takes a deliberate survey, then pokes some greens into his
mouth with his forepaws. If his sharp ears bring him no suspicious
sound, he drops upon all fours and goes to browsing again.
No one has explained why the woodchuck holes up so early in the autumn
and comes out at such an unseasonable time in the spring. He goes in
while there is still plenty to eat, and reappears when there is
scarcely anything to be had. Possibly the habit was acquired in some
remote past when the winter may have come earlier in the year, and the
woodchucks, being a conservative race and loath to change their ways,
have never adapted themselves, but go to bed now as it were in the
middle of the afternoon and get up before daybreak, impelled to this
early rising by hunger. Soon we shall be walking over his head, but it
will not disturb his nap. He will have rolled himself up in a ball for
a four or five months' snooze in company with all the little frogs and
snakes--a sleepy crowd. The chipmunk is likewise a chilly body, but he
is not going to fast--not he--so he lays in a good store of chestnuts
and makes all snug for the cold weather.
While the moral of the ant and the grasshopper will doubtless always
hold good, there is little incentive for the grasshopper to become
thrifty as few would live to enjoy the results. But the woodchuck might
well profit by the example of the chipmunk, who loves his comfort and a
well-stocked larder in which to snooze away the winter months, a round
of dinners and after-dinner naps. Besides his hordes of beech and
chestnuts, he is credited with gathering the seeds of the buttercup as
well as buckwheat and grass seed. I have seen him on the tips of
witch-hazel twigs biting off the nutlets of the preceding year. He has
some variety at his table then. The buttercups must be in the nature of
a delicacy--his sweetcakes perhaps.
As the weather grows colder the vegetation seems to droop hourly, the
bare earth becoming visible, except where the dry leaves have roofed
themselves over the huckleberry bushes or in the thick tangle of
briers. The rabbit must feel himself rather too much in evidence as the
ground is thus exposed, and perforce relies more on his protective
coloration to escape notice. An adept at dissimulation, he turns into a
stump and remains so indefinitely. Yet looking at him recently, as he
sat motionless on some dry leaves among the bare stems of the blackcap
raspberries, I was struck with how poor a refuge his colors really do
afford when once your eye is upon him. At the first glance, and before
he had come into the mental vision as a rabbit, he appeared as a small
grayish stump covered with buff-tinted shelf fungi. But the moment I
looked sharply at him, he was a rabbit in every detail. His colors did
not greatly harmonize with the oak leaves on which he sat, yet he
allowed me to approach and walk around him. It is all a matter of the
attention; by remaining quiet the animal does not arrest the eye
readily, but once this is directed upon him the disguise is seen to be
very thin.
Save for his nose, which wobbled slightly, he was motionless as a
stone. After some time his ear moved gently, much as a leaf is turned
over by the wind, but his eye never winked and its expression was one
of extreme alertness. On too near an approach he made off in haste.
Noting his direction, I followed to see if I could again locate him.
For some time no rabbit was visible, when I chanced again upon a little
gray stump covered with buff-tinted fungi, which appeared this time on
the pine-needles and just within the charmed precincts of the briers.
I produced an apple as a peace offering and in token of my good-will
and desire to be of service to the tribe of gray rabbits. He remained
like a stone while the bits of apple descended about him and lay at a
tempting distance. At last there was a more vigorous wobbling of the
nose, the long ears moved--as a leaf turns--and with two little hops he
approached and accepted the token, and we were brought together in
amity in the silent woods. A humble offering, indeed, but it served for
the moment to bring me in touch with the wild and to strike a common
chord. The seemingly impassable barrier of caste, which lies between
man and the wild things, was crossed, and we broke bread together.
After a light fall of snow it is instructive to read what the rabbit
has written in his diary. Such scattered notes as he leaves are wholly
personal and do not seem to imply interest in anything but himself. You
may see where he has hopped through his runways and stopped now and
then when the necessity appealed to him of removing certain briers to
keep the passageway clear. Sometimes it is a stem of the catbrier;
again a rose or blackberry. In every case it is cut obliquely and as
sharply and neatly as with a knife. Frequently stems are severed
thickly set with thorns and prickers, and the wonder is how he closed
his teeth upon them without getting an unpleasant mouthful. Hundreds of
cuts reveal never a slip or break, but each is sharply defined as if
done by one stroke of a razor. His track shows places where he sat upon
his haunches, and where he stood up to reach the buds of a stunted wild
apple; again he followed the shore of the pond and nibbled the small
willows and clethra. Occasionally he appears to have cut a large brier
merely for practice in using his teeth.