It is a wise man who knows when to run away. To quote rightly the
words of a great poet, whose name has escaped me:--
He who works and runs away
May live to work another day.
So it was that, like Christian of old, I suddenly decided to escape
for my life from my city.
There were many reasons. It was a holiday. Then the sun rose on one of
the most perfect days that ever dawned since the calendar was
invented. Furthermore, there was the thought of a little cabin hidden
in the heart of the pine barrens. So I ran away through snow-covered
meadows and silent woods and past farmhouses that were old when this
republic was first born, until my law offices and the city and the
noise and the dust and the smoke were all behind the horizon.
An hour later I was following a little path that zigzagged back and
forth through thickets of scrub oak and stiff rows of pitch pines.
Above the trees was the rush of wings. The upper air was filled with
the victorious sound of going that heartened David from the tops of
the mulberry trees in that dread valley of Rephaim. Perhaps it was the
wind; but why did not the tree-tops sway instead of standing in
frozen rows? The sky above was the color of the eggs of the wood
thrush, a tender blue faintly washed with white. As the sun rose
higher and higher, the color deepened to that bluest of blues which
burns in May under the breast of the brooding catbird. Filtered
through frost, the sunlight shone, intensely bright but without heat.
The air was full of the spicery of a million pine trees. With every
breath it went tingling through my blood, carrying with it the joy of
the open and the freedom of the barrens.
At last I came to the cabin. It is set on the very edge of the
brownest, crookedest, sweetest stream in the world--the cedar-stained
Rancocas. The wide porch overhangs the water, and over the doorway is
a tiny horseshoe, which was dug out of the bog at Upper Mill,
undoubtedly cast by some fairy steed. One whole side of the cabin is
taken up by an arched fireplace built of brown and yellow and red
sandstone, the only stone that can be found in the Barrens. Squat and
curly, two massive andirons, hammered out of bog iron, stand among the
ashes. They have a story all their own.
Five miles through the woods is Upper Mill, which is not a mill at
all, but marks the place where, a century ago, one stood. The only
occupied house there is a log cabin built of imperishable white-cedar
logs in 1720, the date still showing on one of the logs. Charlie
Rogers lives there alone. It used to be an old tavern on the
cattle-road from Perth Amboy. Every now and then Charlie finds old
coins, King George III pennies and farthings, and the rare New Jersey
pennies which were coined only during two years, and which bear a
plough and the old name of New Jersey--Nova Cæsarea. One day, when I
was gossiping with Charlie, I told him that, if he took up the old
dirt floor and sifted it through an ash-sifter during the long winter
evenings, he might find a further store of rare coins. He took my
advice, and the first treasure he uncovered was these andirons buried
where once had been a hearth. Charlie gave them to me, and they hold
up logs now as well as they did two hundred years ago.
As I slipped into a well-worn suit of khaki, all the worry of the
month fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was drowned
in the golden water. Tucking a pair of field-glasses into one pocket
and a package of lunch into the other, I started off on an exploring
trip. In the barrens everywhere are paths that wind for miles in and
out among the trees and along the edges of brooks and bogs. Who made
them? Who keeps them open? No one knows. I have been able to follow a
few of them out to the end. One leads to Ong's Hat, a little clearing
in the heart of the woods, where grows an enormous white-oak tree. A
century and a half ago Ong, the Indian, lived there. One day he
disappeared. Nothing was ever found except his blood-stained hat. Then
there is the path that leads to Sheep-Pen Hill, where seven empty
houses and a well stand deserted and alone. Others lead to Gum Sprung,
which, being translated, means Gum-Tree Cove, and to Double Trouble
and Mount Misery, where the rattlesnake den is, and Apple-Pie Hill,
and Friendship, and a host of other places that I have not explored.
To-day I walked for miles and miles through stretches of low, gleaming
pines and past pools set in golden sphagnum moss. The wind had died
down, and the silence seeped in and carried with it the comfort of the
wilderness. The first friend I met was a little bird that dived like a
mouse into a pile of brush. I saw a brook, and hurried to it, knowing
that if the bird were a winter wren it could not possibly keep from
running along the edges of that brook. Sure enough, in a minute I saw
it darting in and out of holes and with cocked tail curtsying on the
stones. It is the next to the smallest of our five wrens--only the
rare short-billed marsh wren is tinier.
To-day all through the tree-tops I heard the high-pitched tiny notes
of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Its forked tail,
striped head, and wing-bars are the field-marks by which it can be
told in spite of its quick movements. It is the third smallest of all
our birds: only the hummingbird and the short-billed marsh wren are
smaller. Beyond the kinglet I heard the clicking alarm-notes and saw a
flutter of the white skirts of a junco as it flew up ahead of me,
showing its white tail-feathers, while in the woods a silver-and-blue
bird sprang out of the bushes, for a wonder without a sound. It was
the blue jay, which scolds and squalls all day long. Overhead, in
spite of the bitter cold, the grim black buzzards, with their fringed
wings and black-and-gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the
smaller crow flapped laboriously beneath them.
Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare climbing fern, an
evergreen fern which climbs like a vine and has flat, veined leaves
that look like little green hands with four and five fingers. The stem
is like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met the pale-gray poison
sumac, with its corpse-colored berries growing out from the sides of
the twigs instead of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless
varieties.
I followed Pond-Lily Path through the white sand that in the
springtime is all golden with barrens-heather. It winds in and out
through the scattered clumps of low pitch pine and thickets of scrub
oak, and finally leads to a still brook all afloat in midsummer with
pond lilies. When the path reached the bogs, which to-day were frozen
solid, I turned in, crossing them on the snow-covered ice. Everywhere
were lines of four-toed crow tracks, and here and there were rabbit
trails, a series of four round holes in the snow.
The next morning, when I followed my own tracks, I found that for more
than a mile I had been trailed by some animal making a series of
little paw-prints like those of a small cat, except that they were
close together and sometimes doubled, showing where the animal had
given sudden bounds. It was none other than the trail of a weasel,
probably the long-tailed variety, although that is rare in the
barrens. Like others of his family, this animal oftens follows a
man's tracks for a long distance, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps in
the hope of finding food. As I looked at the trail of this little
killer, I was glad that he was not larger. If weasels, or those other
killers, the shrews, were as large as a dog, no man's life would be
safe out of doors.
I explored so far that the sun had set before I turned back for the
cabin. Suddenly, from far over where the tree-trunks were inked black
against the golden afterglow, I heard a hoot, deep rather than loud.
"_Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo!_" it went, and sometimes, "_Hoo-hoo-hoo!_"
Usually, though, the second note was doubled. It meant that the great
horned owl with its speckled gray back and white collar was hunting
rabbits through the silent woods. If it had been the barred owl, the
third note would have been doubled and the last note would have had a
drop in its cadence.
In the frosty twilight I hurried along the winding path, back to the
cabin and a long, dreamy evening before the roaring fire. First came a
wonderful exhibition of free-hand cooking. Then I piled the great
fireplace well up the chimney with masses of pitch-pine knots and
stumps that I had dug up in the dry bogs. All of the sapwood had
decayed, leaving nothing except the resinous bones of the fallen
trees. They burned at the touch of a match, with a red smoky flame.
Above them I banked dry lengths of swamp maple and post oak. Then,
drawing up a vast rocker well within the circle of the heat, I settled
down to read and dream in front of the red coals.
[Illustration: THE LONG-TAILED WEASEL]
There is nothing in life sweeter than a little loneliness. Nowadays we
live and die in crowds, like ants and bees, so that solitude is likely
to become one of the lost arts. No book ever tastes so well as before
a great fire in the heart of a wilderness, even if the wilderness be
only a few miles away. In my cabin I keep a special shelf of the books
which I have always wanted to read, and for which in some way I never
find time in the hurry of everyday life. That evening I sat for long
over the Saga of Burnt Njal, and read again of the bill of Gunnar and
the grim axe, the "ogress of war," of Skarphedinn and the sword of the
dauntless Kari. In the flickering firelight I pictured the death-fight
of Gunnar of Lithend, one of the four great fights of one man against
a multitude in history, and heard again Hallgarda, the fair and the
false, forsake him to his death.
"Give me two locks of thy hair," said Gunnar to Hallgarda, when that
his bow-string was cut in twain; "and ye two, my mother and thou,
twist them together into a bow-string for me."
"Does aught lie on it?" she says.
"My life lies on it," he said.
"I will not do it," said Hallgarda; "for know ye now that I never
cared a whit for thee."
At last it was time to go to bed. I went out to get a drink of the
most wonderful water in the world. Near the cabin a little bog was
frozen over a foot deep with white bubbled ice. In one place a round,
black hole had betrayed the secret spring that flooded the whole
swale. In the coldest weather this spring-hole remains unfrozen. I
dipped up a pitcherful of the soft, spicy cedar-water pulsing from the
very heart of the marsh. The Pinies have a saying that he who drinks
cedar-water will always come back to the barrens, no matter how far
afield he may wander.
As I came to the porch-steps, in the dark stream just below me I saw a
strange thing. Underneath the water a ball of fire flashed down the
stream and disappeared around the bend. For a long time I tried to
puzzle out what it could be. There was no form of aquatic
phosphorescent life that would swim through a northern stream in the
depths of winter. It was only when I started to tell the time by the
sky clock that the mystery was solved. I was looking at the star Caph
in Cassiopeia, which is the hour-hand of the clock, when suddenly a
meteor flashed down the sky, and I realized that my submarine of a few
moments before had been only the reflection of another shooting star.
As I stopped on the porch with my pitcher, the open door made a long
lane of light. Just across the creek, not fifty feet away, sounded a
crash in the brush, and there in the spotlight, held by the glare,
stood a big buck. For a moment I looked right into his beautiful,
liquid, gleaming eyes. Then, with a snort, he plunged into the woods
and was gone. For years I had tramped through the barrens and had
found the tracks of the deer that still live not thirty miles from the
third largest city in America, but until that night I had never seen
one.
It grew colder and colder, and the little cabin snapped and cracked
with the frost. Banking up the fireplace with logs, I pulled my bed up
into the circle of heat, and fell asleep to the flickering of the fire
and the croon of the wind among the pine trees outside. Through the
window I could see the winter sky ablaze with stars, while the late
moon shone like a bowl of frozen gold through the black tree-trunks.
The next morning I had to leave on the nine-o'clock train; and so I
rose early and after breakfast took a last walk down to Lower Mill and
back, to see if I could add any more winter birds to my list. It was a
cold, clear, snapping winter morning, and as the sun came up through
the pine trees I met first one and then another of the bird-folk
abroad after their breakfasts. First I heard the "Pip, pip!" of the
downy woodpecker, all black and white, with a bloodstain at the back
of his head. He is a tree-climber who can go up a tree head-foremost,
but must always back down. The nuthatches, with their white cheeks and
grunting notes, can go up and down a tree either head-first or
tail-first and the last of the tree-climbers, the brown creeper,
climbs up in a spiral, but has to fly down.
Farther on, I heard the call of the big hairy woodpecker, which looks
almost like the downy except that he is nearly twice as large. He was
drilling a hole in the under side of a branch and sucking out
hibernating ants with his long, sticky trident tongue. Next came a
tree sparrow, with his white wing-bar and brown-red patch on the crown
of his head. He was busily scratching on the ground; he is called a
tree sparrow because never by any chance is he found in a tree. On the
side of a white-oak tree a bit of bark seemed to move upward in a
spiral, and I recognized the brown creeper, the last of the climbers.
He went up the tree in a series of tiny hops and then, true to his
training, flew down and started up again.
As I turned the curve by Lower Mill, I saw in a thicket near the dam a
number of white-throated sparrows, with their striped white heads and
white throat-patches. Near them suddenly hopped a bird that ought to
have been far south. It was reddish brown with a long tail, and I
recognized the female chewink. She hopped around and scratched among
the leaves like a little hen, in true chewink style, as if the month
were April instead of January.
I hurried around a bend in the road and heard over my head a series of
loud _pips_, much like the note of an English sparrow. I looked
up--and there was my great adventure. A little locust tree was filled
with a flock of plump, large birds. At first I thought that they were
cedar birds, but in a moment I caught sight of their coloring. Six of
the males out of the flock of seventy-four were in full plumage. Their
forked tails were velvet black. Their wings were the golden white of
old ivory, with a broad black edge, their heads grayish black, and
their breasts and backs a deep, rich gold; and, strangest of all,
their thick beaks were of a greenish-white color.
It was a great moment. For the first time in my life I had met the
evening grosbeaks, and had found what afterwards proved to be the
largest flock ever reported of this rare bird of the far north so far
south. For a delightful hour I followed them. They were restless, but
not shy. Sometimes they alighted on the ground and then flew up all
together, like a flock of starlings. They looked like overgrown
goldfinches, just as the pine grosbeak looks like an overgrown purple
finch, and the blue grosbeak of the south for all the world like a
monstrous indigo bunting. As I followed them, suddenly I heard a sharp
_chip_, and to my delight there flashed into sight the crested
cardinal grosbeak, blood-red against the snow. For a moment the lithe,
nervous, flaming bird of the south met its squat, strong, stolid
cousin of the far north.
I could come quite near without alarming them, and then suddenly they
would all fly away together to some other tree without any apparent
reason. Besides the sparrow-like note that I first heard, they had a
sort of trilling chirp. Once they all started like a flock of
goldfinches or grackles in a chirping chorus. When they flew, they
sometimes gave a single, clear flight-note, but never made a sound
when feeding on the ground. The birds had short, slightly forked
tails, and the yellow ring around the eye gave them, when seen in
profile, a curious spectacled appearance; while the huge beak and
short tail made them seem clumsy as compared with the other grosbeaks.
The plumage of the females showed mottled black-and-white wings and
greenish-yellow backs and breasts. The iris of the eye in both sexes
was red, the legs of a bluish-gray pink, and the feet of a
grayish-pink color.
Later I found that the birds fed on the berries of the poison ivy, red
cedar, climbing bittersweet, and the buds and embryo needles of the
pitch pine, together with the seeds of the box elder. The favorite
food of the flock that I watched seemed always to be the pits of the
wild black cherry (_Prunus serotina_). They would take the pits well
out of sight back into their beaks, keeping their bills half open in a
comical manner, as if they had a bone in the throat. A second later
there would be a cracking noise and out would drop two nicely split
segments of the cherry pits, the meat having been swallowed. Sometimes
in the trees they would sidle along the limbs exactly as a parrot does
along its perch.
The authorities state that the evening grosbeak has no immature
plumage, but passes after its first moulting immediately into full
plumage. I saw one, however, that I am sure was in immature plumage.
The back was yellowish instead of being gray, like the females', and
the wings were of a dirty white color instead of being mottled black
and white, like the plumage of the females, or half black and half
white, like the plumage of the males. Both sexes seemed to have the
same call and gave it equally often.
The history of the evening grosbeak illustrates the far-reaching and
never-ending consequences of a falsehood. This bit of moralizing is
called forth because of the name of this sorely misdescribed bird. In
three languages, English, Greek and Latin, the myth is perpetuated
that the evening grosbeak, or _Hesperiphona vespertina_,
sings only at twilight. It all began in 1823, when one Major
Delafield, a boundary agent of the United States government, was
camping northwest of Lake Superior. There he met a flock of evening
grosbeaks in the twilight, and instantly jumped to the conclusion that
the birds were accustomed to spend the day in the dark recesses of
impassable swamps and come out and sing only at evening.
As a matter of fact, the evening grosbeak goes to bed at dark, like
all other respectable, reputable birds. Its song is a wandering, jerky
warble that the singer himself recognizes as a miserable failure, for
he often stops and looks discontented and then remains silent for a
minute before trying again. It sounds like the early part of a
robin's song, but is always suddenly checked as if the performer
were out of breath. The guess of the imaginative major was later
elaborated by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Nuttall, and even by later
ornithologists,--Coues among them,--not one of whom had ever seen or
heard the bird. Coues's description in his "Key to North American
Birds" is worth quoting as a specimen of the rhetoric in which a past
generation of ornithologists dared to indulge.
"A bird of distinguished appearance, whose very name suggests the
far-away land of the dipping sun and the tuneful romance which the
wild bird throws around the close of day. Clothed in striking color
contrast of black, white and gold, he seems to represent the allegory
of diurnal transmutation, for his sable pinions close around the
brightness of his vesture, as night encompasses golden hues of sunset,
while the clear white space enfolded in these tints foretells the dawn
of the morrow."
That morning I knew nothing of the history or the habits of this
unknown and misrepresented bird. All I knew was that for me the
twenty-ninth day of January, 1917, would be marked in my calendar
forever by a bird from the north, all dusky gold and velvet black and
ivory white--the Day of the Evening Grosbeak.
At last the time came to leave them. As I started back for home, the
sun showed through the trees like a vast red coal, with a smoke of
clouds drifting across its face, and I traveled back to town in the
full glory of a clear winter morning, filled with the measureless
content of a great discovery. It was good to be alive and to look
forward to more work and to more glorious, adventure-filled runaway
days.
V