I saw a race--a race for life, too--that interested me the other day
more than any that I have seen this year. It occurred in mid-air, in
a kingdom not our own; but the fresh air was sweet where the race for
life went on, and the fields were green beneath, and the brooks purled
below and the sun shone gloriously over all, and to the poor creature
who raced for his life I doubt not but he took it all in and life was
as sweet to him as it is to us.
It was a golden-winged butterfly, one of those beautiful creatures
that is more of heaven than of earth, more of the blossom than of the
brown heath, and it seemed cruel to me that this beautiful thing,
thrown off from the film of a rainbow and made with an organism so
spiritual that it lives on the nectar of flowers, dwells on the bosom
of a nodding lily and floats on the breath of a zephyr, must come under
the great selfish law of life and be forced to fight for its brief but
beautiful existence. Man must fight, we know--and all history, if it
lie not, is but a chronicle of battle, blood and death, in which the
survival of the fittest and the achievements of human destiny have been
gauged by the brains that were behind gunpowder, and the courage that
comes of God. Man, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes--it is a survival
merely--and “nature, red in tooth and claw,” has been demonstrated to
be more merciful than nature rotting in the decrepitude of age. But, O,
that this ethereal thing--half rainbow and rose, half light and lily
blossom, half child and cherubim--might have been spared!
And who were its enemies--two glorious mocking birds, that had sung
like spirits from an angel choir around my home all spring and
summer--that had reared their young in contentment and happiness and
should have had nothing against any of God’s creatures, whose life had
been a poem, whose breath a summer song--alas, that these should have
been its murderers! It almost makes me despair of the ethics of life. I
feel like saying to man: “Go, murder your fellow men--it is nature. Go,
rob, steal and plunder--it is law.”
And is it not law? In spite of the ethics of religion and dictates
of equity, is it not at last a question of one getting and the other
giving--of money, love--ay, even life?
Golden Wings was in my garden and he was content until that which
sustained his life gave out--food. He had sucked every flower--he
must go to pastures new. The distance to my neighbor’s garden was
some two hundred yards, and there was nothing but air between us.
He thought of it a long time--he hovered from flower to flower and
thought--of his mate, of life, of death. Had he been all spirit he
had stayed forever among the flowers. He had run no chance of death.
But he was half spirit and half life and that life was rebelling
and begging for food. He must go. It was life or death. He rose
reluctantly--frightened--straight up--every sense awake--every nerve
keyed--every eye on the lookout for an enemy--the spirit which had
never harmed even a flower, and which should have had no enemy. Up,
straight up, he arose--quivering, scared, frightened--then winged his
way across the blue ether in a flight, as it proved, for its life.
The mocking-bird is a fly catcher, but not an expert one. Compared
with the swallow, the marten, the crested fly-catcher, the expert king
bird, the wood pewee, and Phoebe, he is a poor imitation. But the
mocking-bird is a poet, and everything is grist that comes to a poet’s
mill--from the grasshopper on the ground to the butterfly in the air.
The male bird saw Golden Wings first and gave him the first heat for
his life. Up in the air he darted, circled and swooped. Poor Golden
Wings fled, turned, ducked, dived--and escaped. The poet dropped to
his twig in disgust, and his mate took up the race. Golden Wings saw
her coming and his heart bursted with fear. He fairly quivered in the
air. He knew not which way to turn. She darted, and all but caught
him. For a moment, in mid-air, I saw them whirling and twisting and
tumbling--poor Golden Wings panting and fluttering for a chance once
more for home and life, and the poetess for a morsel to eat. It ended
in the butterfly getting above the bird--which seemed always its
tactics--while the latter dropped down in disgust to her mate. Then
they both started after poor Golden Wings, and it looked as if his time
had come. But all the time he had been heading straight for the thick
trees beyond, where rested, perhaps, his distressed mate, waiting for
his return.
It was a terrible chase the two poets gave him--the tumbling, darting,
circling of the birds in fiendish delight, in maddened earnestness.
Their very wings were often so close that they fanned him about until
he looked like a speck of gold tissue paper hurled about by contrary
winds. Twice they got above him, dropped on him and--missed. Twice I
lost him altogether, and, except that I saw the birds fluttering and
darting in the air, I had thought he was lost. When I saw him again
he had gotten above his enemies and was safely pursuing his zig-zag,
frightened, graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the trees and life.
“Success to you, O, Golden Wings,” I said, “for already have you taught
me a lesson in life. Let us keep above our enemies, if we would be
safe--not beneath them, for there we are a prey to their dirty talons;
not on their level, for then we are no better than they; but above
them where they cannot reach us and where we may go on to our destiny
with only the sunlight around us and the stars above us.”
The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar maple.
They had evidently lost their tempers, and, between panting and hard
breathing, I could hear them quarreling: “It was you,” said the
wife--“you conceited thing--all your fault. I had him once if you had
let me alone.”
“O, you had him, you did--‘over the left.’ If your talents equaled
your tongue we’d be better off.” They screeched and shuffled about and
almost spat at each other. They were beaten, chagrined and mad, and
they took it out on each other.
And if you want to see the refinement of ill-temper, stir up two poets!
Golden Wings was safe. He was high in the air, his very flight was now
the flight of victory, his poise the poise of one who had won. Twenty
yards more he would drop down into the green trees where his mate,
perhaps, awaited him, and be safe.
I was about to hurrah with delight, when I saw a lightning bolt of red
and white drop from the jagged bark of the dead limb of a towering oak
in the midst of the forest and high above poor, weary, fluttering yet
happy Golden Wings. I paled at the thought, for I knew no butterfly
ever escaped him. Even Golden Wings recognized his doom and, paralyzed
with fear, stopped his flight in mid-air and, in a few yards of his
goal, and lay floating in the air in hopeless fear. And well he might,
for the red and white bolt was the red-headed woodpecker, not generally
known to be a fly-catcher, but an expert in it, nevertheless. Often had
I seen him poise above a luckless moth, drop like a plummet, and no
moth would be there. I despised him as a marauder, besides, for only
yesterday I’d seen him pounce on a helpless young humming-bird and rend
it as if it had been a worm.
Straight at poor Golden Wings he came. The race was up.
He performed his old tactics, darted above the butterfly, some two
yards higher in the air, gauged instinctively a plummet line from the
point of his own beak to Golden Wings and then drops with folded wings
like a ball of lead.
I forgot to say that I was out that morning with the twelve-gauge,
smokeless shells and one and a half ounces of No. 7 chilled, thinking I
might see a certain thieving crow that I had a grudge against.
Thoughts are lightning--words thunder, and when I caught the first
glimpse of the red-headed marauder of the air all this went through my
mind: “Nature is nature--tooth and claw. And yet there is a God who
says even when a butterfly shall fall. He makes our lives and marks out
our destiny. Sometimes amid injustice He calls Himself Retribution, and
then He has been known to raise up a man and a gun, invent smokeless
powder and deadly chilled shot, give accuracy of aim and, most
wonderful of all, the voice of a purpose to say that harm shall not
happen even to a butterfly.”
There was no smoke from the report and so I distinctly saw Golden Wings
drop joyfully among the green leaves. But a red-headed marauder lies in
the field where he fell.
And if some one who knows, will tell me why I happened to be there, why
I carried my gun that morning, why I fired, I will tell him who God is.