clumsy-footed kittens under the stove and scampered up back of the
hot-water tank, where they built a nest. Whenever Calico entered the
kitchen purring, out would pop their heads, and down they would come,
understanding the mother language as well as the kittens, and usually
beating the kittens to the mother's side.
So far from teaching them to climb and build nests behind water-tanks,
their foster-mother never got over her astonishment at it. All they needed
from her, all they needed and would have received from their own squirrel
mother, was nourishment and protection until their teeth and legs grew
strong. Wits were born with them; experience was sure to come to them; and
with wits and experience there is nothing known among squirrels of their
kind that these two would not learn for themselves.
And there was not much known to squirrels that these two did not know,
apparently without even learning. As they grew in size they increased
exceedingly in naughtiness, and were banished shortly from the kitchen to
an ell or back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction by dropping some
hickory-nuts into a rubber boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing a
hole through the toe of the boot in order to extract the hidden nuts. Was
it mischief that led them to gnaw through rather than go down the top? Or
did something get stuffed into the top of the boot after the nuts were
dropped in? And did the squirrels _remember_ that the nuts were in there,
or did they _smell_ them through the rubber?
One woodshed is big enough only for two squirrels. The family moved
everything out but the wood, and the squirrels took possession for the
winter. Their first nest had been built behind the hot-water tank. They
knew _how_ to build without any teaching. But knowing how is not all there
is to know about building; knowing _where_ is very important, and this
they had to learn.
Immediately on coming to the woodshed the squirrels began their winter
nest, a big, bulky, newspaper affair, which they placed up in the
northwest corner of the shed directly under the shingles. Here they slept
till late in the fall. This was the shaded side and the most exposed
corner of the whole house; but all went well until one night when the
weather suddenly turned very cold. A strong wind blew from the northwest
hard upon the squirrels' nest.
The next day there was great activity in the woodshed--a scampering of
lively feet, that began early in the morning and continued far toward
noon. The squirrels were moving. They gathered up their newspaper nest
and carried it--diagonally--across the shed from the shaded northwest to
the sunny southeast corner, where they rebuilt and slept snug throughout
the winter.
Calico did not teach them this; neither would their own squirrel mother
have taught them. They knew how, to begin with. They knew _where_ after
one night of experience, which in this case had to be a night of shivers.
THE SPARROW ROOST
[Illustration]
THE SPARROW ROOST
An early December twilight was settling over Boston, a thick foggy murk
that soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. The streets were oozy
with a wet snow which had fallen through the afternoon and had been
trodden into mud; and draughty with an east wind, that would have passed
unnoticed across the open fields, but which drew up these narrow flues and
sent a shiver down one's back in spite of coats. It was half-past five.
The stores were closing, their clerks everywhere eddying into the noisy
streams of wheels and hoofs still pouring up and down. The traffic tide
had turned, but had not yet ebbed away.
And this was evening! the coming night! I moved along with the crowd,
homesick for the wideness and quiet of the country, for the soughing of
the pines, the distant bang of a barn door, the night cry of guineas from
some neighboring farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the cry of
bird voices, and looking up, found that I had stumbled upon a bird
roost--at the very heart of the city! I was in front of King's Chapel
Burial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless trees were alive with noisy
sparrows.
The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste-barrel by the iron fence and
forgot the soughing pines and clacking guineas.
Bird roosts of this size are no common find. I remember a huge fireplace
chimney that stood near my home, into which a cloud of swallows used to
swarm for a few nights preceding the fall migration; I lived some years
close to the pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great flocks of
crows slept nightly throughout the winter; but these, besides now and
again a temporary resting-place, a mere caravansary along the route of the
migrants, were all I had happened upon. Here was another, bordering a city
street, overhanging the street, with a blazing electric light to get into
bed by!
Protected by the barrel from the jostle on the sidewalk, I waited by the
ancient graveyard until the electric lights grew bright, until every
fussing sparrow was quiet, until I could see only little gray balls and
blurs in the trees through the misty drizzle that came down with the
night. Then I turned toward my own snug roost, five flights up, next the
roof, and just a block away, as the sparrows fly, from this roost of
theirs. I was glad to have them so near me.
The windows of my roost look out over roofs of slate, painted tin, and
tarry pebbles, into a chimney-fenced plot of sky. Occasionally, during the
winter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue;
frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summer
dusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of
the forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his booming
roofward swoop. But winter and summer, save along through June, the
sparrows, as evening falls, cut across the sky field on their way to the
roost in the old burial-ground. There go two, there twoscore in a
whirling, scudding flurry, like a swift-blown bunch of autumn leaves. For
more than an hour they keep passing--till the dusk turns to darkness, till
all are tucked away in bed.
One would scarcely recognize the birds as they sweep past in these
flurries, their flight is so unlike their usual clumsy scuttle as they get
out of one's way along the street. They are lumpish and short-winged on
the street; they labor and lumber off with a sidewise twist to their
bodies that reminds one of a rheumatic old dog upon the trot. What
suggestion of grace or swiftness about them upon the ground? But watch
them in their evening flight. It is a revelation. They rise above the
houses and shoot across my sky like a charge of canister. I can almost
hear them whizz. Down by the cemetery I have seen them dash into view high
up in the slit of sky, dive for the trees, dart zigzag like a madly
plunging kite, and hurl themselves, as soft as breaths, among the
branches.
This is going to bed with a vengeance. I never saw any other birds get to
roost with such velocity. It is characteristic, however; the sparrow never
does anything by halves. The hurry is not caused by any mite of anxiety or
fear, rather from pure excess of spirit; for after rearing three broods
during the summer, he has such a superabundance of vim that a winter of
foraging and fighting is welcome exercise. The strenuous life is his kind
of life. When the day's hunt is over and he turns back to his bed, why not
race it out with his neighbors? And so they come--chasing, dodging,
tagging neck and neck, all spurting to finish first at the roost.
We may not love him; but he has constitution and snap. And these things do
count.
One April morning, the 6th, I went down to the roost at three o'clock. The
sparrows were sleeping soundly. It was yet night. Had the dawn been
reaching up above the dark walls that shut the east away from the high
tree-tops, the garish street light would have kept it dim. The trees were
silent and stirless, as quiet as the graves beneath them--more quiet; in
fact; for there issued from a grated hole among the tombs the sound of an
anvil, deep down and muffled, but unmistakably ringing, as if Governor
Winthrop were forging chains in his vault. Then came a rush, a deadened
roar, and an emanation of dank gaseous breath, such as the dead alone
breathe.
It was only the passing of a tool-car in the subway underneath the
cemetery, and the hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche of the
tunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it was gruesome and unearthly in the
night-quiet.
The sparrows did not mind the sound. Maybe it ascended as a pleasant
murmur to them and shaped their dreams, as dream-stuff drifts to their
sweet-voiced cousins in the meadows with the lap and lave of the streams.
A carriage rolled by. The clank of hoofs disturbed none of them. Some one
slammed the door of an apothecary-shop across the street, and hurried off.
Not a sparrow stirred.
I was trying to see whether the birds slept with their heads beneath their
wings. Apparently they did, for I could not make out a head, though some
of the sleepers hung over the street within ten feet of the lamp-post. But
they were all above the light, with only their breasts out of the shadows,
and to be certain I must make a bird move. Finding that the noises were
not likely to arouse them, I threw a stick against one of the laden limbs.
There were heads then, plenty of them, and every one, evidently, had been
turned back and buried in the warm wing-coverts.
My stick hit very near the toes of one of the sparrows, and he flew. There
was a twitter, then a stir all over the tree; but nothing further
happening, they tucked in their heads again and went back to bed.
I waited. At four o'clock they still slept. The moon had swung out from
behind the high buildings and now hung just above the slender spire of
Park Street Church, looking down into the deep, narrow street gulch. A cat
picked her way among the graves, sprang noiselessly to the top of a flat
tomb beneath the sparrows, and watched with me. The creature brought the
wilderness with her. After all, this was not so far removed from the
woods. In the empty street, beneath the silent, shuttered walls, with
something still of the mystery of the night winds in the bare trees, the
scene, for an instant, was touched with the spell of the dark and the
untamed.
After a swift warming walk of fifteen minutes I returned to the roost.
There were signs of waking now: a flutter here, a twitter there, then
quiet again, with no general movement until half-past four, when the city
lights were shut off. Then, instantly, from a dozen branches sounded loud,
clear chirps, and every sparrow opened his eyes. The incandescent bulbs
about the border of the roost were moon and stars to them, lights in the
firmament of their heaven to divide the night from the day. When they
blazed forth, it was evening--bedtime; when they went out, it was
morning--the time to wake up.
The softness of dusk, how unknown to these city dwellers! and the fresh
sweet beauty of the dawn!
Morning must have begun to break along near four o'clock, for the cold
gray across the sky was already passing into pearl. The country birds had
been up half an hour, I am sure. However, the old cemetery was wide enough
awake now. There was chirping everywhere. It grew louder and more general
every moment, till shortly the six thousand voices, and more, were raised
in the cheerful din--the matin, if you please, for as yet only a few of
the birds were fighting.
But the fight quickly spread. It is the English sparrow's way of waking
up; his way of whetting his appetite for breakfast; his way of digesting
his dinner; his way of settling his supper--his normal waking way.
To the clatter of voices was added the flutter of wings; for the birds had
begun to shift perches, and to exchange slaps as well as to call
names--the movement setting toward the tree-tops. None of the sparrows had
left the roost. The storm of chatter increased and the buzz of wings
quickened into a steady whir, the noise holding its own with that of the
ice-wagons pounding past. The birds were filling the top-most branches, a
gathering of the clans, evidently, for the day's start. The clock in
Scollay Square station pointed to five minutes to five, and just before
the hour struck, two birds launched out and spun away.
The exodus had commenced. The rest of Boston was not stirring yet. It was
still early; hardly a flush of warmth had washed the pearl. But the
sparrows had many matters to attend to before all the milkmen and bakers
got abroad: they must take their morning dust-bath, for one thing, in the
worn places between the cobble-stones, before the street-sprinkler began
its sloppy rounds.
There was a constant whirl out of the tree-tops now. Occasionally a bird
flew off alone, but most of them left in small flocks, just as I should
see them return in the evening. Doubtless the members of these flocks were
the birds belonging to certain neighborhoods, those that nested and fed
about certain squares, large door-yards, and leafy courts. They may indeed
have been families that were hatched last summer.
The birds that left singly went away, as a rule, over the roofs toward the
denser business sections of the city, while the bands, as I had noticed
them come in at night, took the opposite course, toward Cambridge and
Charlestown. Not more than one in a hundred flew south across the city.
Of course there are sparrows all over Boston. There is no street too
narrow, too noisy, too dank with the smell of leather for them. They seem
as numerous where the rush of drays is thickest as in the open
breathing-places where the fountains play. They are in every quarter, yet
those to the east and south of the old burial-ground do not belong to the
roost. Perhaps they have graveyards of their own in their sections, though
I have been unable to find them. So far as I know, this is the only roost
in or about Boston. And this is the stranger since so few of the total
number of the Boston sparrows sleep here. A careful estimate showed me
that there could not have been more than six or seven thousand in the
roost. One would almost say there were as many millions in Boston. And
where do these millions sleep? For the most part, each one alone behind
his sign-board or shutter near his local feeding-grounds.
Now, why should the sparrows of the roost prefer King's Chapel Burial
Ground to the Old Granary, a stone's throw up the street? I passed the
Old Granary yard on my way to the roost and found the trees empty. I
searched the limbs with my glass; there was not a sparrow to be seen.
Still, the Granary is the less exposed of the two. It may not formerly
have been so; but at present high sheltering walls bend about the trees
like a well. Years ago, perhaps, when the sparrows began to roost in the
trees at King's Chapel, the Old Granary elms were more open to the winds,
and now force of habit and example keep the birds returning to the first
lodge.
Back they come, no matter what the weather. There are a thousand cozy
corners into which a sparrow might creep on a stormy night, where even the
winds that know their way through Boston streets could not search him out.
But the instinct to do as he always has done is as strong in the sparrow,
in spite of his love for pioneering, as it is in the rest of us. He was
brought here to roost as soon as he could fly, when the leaves were on and
the nights delicious. If the leaves go and the nights change, what of
that? Here he began, here he will continue to sleep. Let it rain, blow,
snow; let the sleet, like a slimy serpent, creep up the trunk and wrap
around the twigs: still he will hold on. Many a night I have seen them
sleeping through a driving winter rain, their breasts to the storm, their
tails hanging straight down, shedding every drop. If a gale is blowing,
and it is cold, they get to the leeward of the tree, as close to the trunk
as possible, and anchor fast, every bill pointing into the wind, every
feather reefed, every tail lying out on the flat of the storm.
As I watched the bands starting from the tree-tops of the roost I wondered
if they really crossed the river into Cambridge and Charlestown. A few
mornings later I was again up early, hastening down to the West Boston
Bridge to see if I could discover the birds going over. As I started out I
saw bunches moving toward the river with a free and easy flight, but
whether I reached the bridge too late, or whether they scattered and went
over singly, I do not know. Only now and then did a bird cross, and he
seemed to come from along the shore rather than from above the house-tops.
I concluded that the birds of the roost were strictly Bostonians. One
evening, however, about a week later, as I was upon this bridge coming
from Cambridge, a flock of sparrows whizzed past me, dipped over the rail
to the water, swung up above the wall of houses, and disappeared toward
the roost. They were on their way from Cambridge, from the classic elms of
Harvard campus, who knows, to the elms of the ancient burial-ground.
It was five that April morning when the first sparrow left the roost. By
half-past five the trees were empty, except for the few birds whose
hunting-ground included the cemetery. By this time the city, too, had
yawned, and rubbed its eyes, and tumbled out of bed.
"MUX"
[Illustration]
"MUX"
No, "Mux" is not an elegant name--not to to be compared with Ronald or
Claudia, for instance; and I want to say it is not the name of one of my
children, though its owner was once a member of my household. Mux was a
tame half-grown coon, with just the ordinary number of rings around his
tail, but with the most extraordinary amount of mischief in his little
coon soul. Perhaps he had no real soul, and I should have located his
mischief somewhere else. If so, then I should say in his feet. I never saw
any other feet so expressive. The essence of the little beast seemed
concentrated in his lore paws. If they made trouble, whose fault was it?
They were designed for trouble. You could see this purpose in them as
plainly as you could see the purpose in a swallow's wings. Whenever Mux
ran across the yard these paws picked up trouble out of the turf, just as
if the grass were trouble-filings, and Mux a kind of four-footed magnet.
He never went far before they clogged and stopped him.
One day, the first day that Mux was given the liberty of the yard, who
should he run foul of but Tom! The struggle had to come sometime, and it
was just as well that it came thus early, while Tom and Mux were on an
equal footing as to size, for Mux was young and growing.
Tom was boss of the yard. Every farmer's dog that went to town by our gate
knew enough to pass by on the other side. Tom had grown a little lordly
and opinionated. He was sleeping in the sun on the shed-step as Mux ambled
up. At sight of the coon Tom rose in more than his usual feline mightiness
and cast such a look of surprise, scorn, and annihilating intent upon the
interloper as ought to have struck terror to the stoutest heart. But Mux
hardly seemed to understand. On he came, right into certain destruction, a
very lamb of innocence and meekness. O you unsuspecting little stranger!
Don't you see this awful monster swelling, swelling into this hideous
hump? No, Mux did not see him. Tom was raging. His teeth gleamed; his eyes
blazed green; his claws worked in a nervous way that made my flesh creep.
He was vanishing, not, like the Cheshire Cat, into a long lovely grin, but
vanishing from a four-legged cat into a yellow, one-legged hump. All that
was left of him now was hump.
Mux was only a few feet away. Tom began to advance, not directly, but just
a trifle on the bias, across Mux's bows so to speak, as if to give him a
broadside. They were within range. Tom was heaving to. I trembled for the
young coon. Suddenly there was a hiss, a flash of yellow in the air,
and--a very big surprise awaiting Thomas! That little coon was no stupid
after all. He had not rolled up his sleeves, nor doubled up his fists, nor
put a chip upon his shoulder; but he knew what was expected of him, just
the same. He snapped instantly upon his back, received the cat with all
four of his feet, and gave Mr. Tom such a combing down that his golden fur
went flying off like thistle-down in autumn.
It was all over in less than half a minute. I think Tom must have made a
new record for himself in the running high jump when he broke away from
his ring-tailed antagonist. He struck out across the yard and landed
midway up the clothes-post with a single bound. And Mux? He ambled on
around the yard, as calm and unconcerned as if he had only stopped to
scratch himself.
Much of this unconcern, however, was a quiet kind of swagger. When he
thought no one fiercer than a chicken or the humbled Mr. Tom was looking,
he would shuffle across the yard with his coat collar turned up, his hat
over his eye, his elbows angled--just as if he had been born and bred on
the Bowery instead of in the Bear Swamp. He was king of the yard, but I
could see that he wore his crown uneasily. He kept a bold front, accepted
every challenge, and even went out of his way to pick a quarrel; yet he
quaked at heart continually. He feared and hated the noises of the yard,
particularly the crowing of our big buff cochin rooster and the screaming
of the guineas. This was one of the swamp-fears that he had brought with
him and could not outlive. It haunted him. If he had a conscience, its
only warnings were of coming noises great and terrible.
But Mux had no conscience, unless it was one that troubled him only when
he was out of mischief. His face was never so long and so solemn as when I
had caught him in some questionable act or spoiled some wayward plan.
Mux, however, was possessed by a much stubborner spirit than this
interesting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented--the
only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject of
dirt, mad to wash things, especially his victuals.
He was not particular about what he ate; almost anything that could be
swallowed would do, provided that it could be washed, and washed by
himself, after his own approved fashion.
If I gave him half of my apple, he would squat down by his wash-tub and
begin to hunt for dirt. He would look the apple over and over, pick
around the blossom end, inspect carefully, then pull out the stem, if
there happened to be a stem, dig out the seeds and peek into the core,
then douse it into the water and begin to wash. He would rub with might
and main for a second or two, then rinse it, take a bite, and douse it
back again for more scrubbing, until it was scrubbed and chewed away.
Even when the water was thick with mud, this crazy coon persisted in
washing his clean cake and cabbage therein. Indeed, the muddier the water,
the more vigorously would he wash. The habit was a part of him, as real a
thing in his constitution as the black ring in his fur. It was a very
dirty habit, here in captivity, even if it went by the name of washing. Of
course Mux could not be blamed for his soiled wash-water. That was my
fault; only I couldn't be changing it every time he soaked up a fistful of
earth in his endeavor to wash something to eat out of it. No; he was not
at fault, altogether, for the mud in his tub. Out in the Bear Swamp, the
streams that wandered about under the great high-spreading gums, and lost
their way in the shadows, were crystal-clear and pure; and out there it
was intended that he should dwell, and in those sweet streams that he
should wash. But what a modicum of wit, of originality the little beast
had, that, because he was born a washer, wash he must, though he washed in
mud, nay, though he washed upon the upturned bottom of his empty tub!--for
this is what Mux did sometimes.
I never blamed Aunt Milly for insisting upon this rather ill-sounding name
of "Mux" for the little coon. She was standing by his cage, shortly after
his arrival, watching him eat cabbage. He washed every clean white piece
of it in his oozy tub before tasting it, coating the bits over with mud as
you do the lumps of fondant with chocolate in making "chocolate creams."
Aunt Milly looked at him for some time with scornful face and finally
exclaimed: