box for a seat. How did we ever endure it, riding over the roadless
prairies! Then, any one who owned a horse was considered an aristocrat
and despised accordingly. One yoke of oxen that we had were not to be
sneezed at as a fast team. They were trained to trot, and would make
good time, too. [I love to hear oxen praised. An old Michigan farmer,
an early settler, told me of a famous pair of oxen he once had; he
spoke of them with great affection. They would draw any log he hitched
them to. When they had felt of the log and found they had their match,
he said they would nudge each other, give their tails a kink, lift up
their heads, and say _eh-h-h-h!_ then something had to come.]
"One phrase you used in your last letter—'the start from the
stump'—shows how locality governs the illustrations we use. The start
was not from the _stump_ here, quite the reverse. Nature made the
land ready for man's hand, and there were no obstacles in the shape
of stumps and stones to overcome. Probably in the East a pine-stump
fence is not regarded as either particularly attractive or odd; but
to me, when I first saw one in York State, it was both. I had never
even heard of the stumps being utilized in that way. Seen for the
first time, there is something grotesque in the appearance of those
long arms forever reaching out after something they never find,
like a petrified octopus. Those fences are an evidence of Eastern
thrift,—making an enemy serve as a friend. I think they would frighten
our horses and cattle, used as they are to the almost invisible wire
fence. 'Worm' fences were the fashion at first. But they soon learned
the necessity of economizing wood. The people were extravagant, too,
in the outlay of power in tilling the soil, sixteen yoke of oxen being
thought absolutely necessary to run a breaking-plow; and I have seen
twenty yoke used, requiring three men to drive and attend the great
clumsy plow. Every summer you might see them in any direction, looking
like 'thousand-legged worms.' They found out after a while that two
yoke answered quite as well. There is something very queer about the
bowlders that are supposed to have been brought down from northern
regions during the glacial period; like Banquo's ghost, they refuse to
stay down. Other stones beside them gradually become buried, but the
bowlders are always on top of the ground. Is there something repellent
about them, that the earth refuses to cover them? They seem to be of no
use, for they cannot be worked as other stone; they have to be broken
open with heat in some way, though I did see a building made of them
once. The bowlders had been broken and put in big squares and little
squares, oblong pieces and triangles. The effect was curious, if not
fine.
"In those days there were such quantities of game-birds, it was the
sportsman's paradise, and during the summer a great many gunners from
the cities came there. Prairie-chickens without number, as great a
nuisance as the crows in the East, only we could eat them to pay for
the grain they ate; also geese, turkeys, ducks, quail, and pigeons.
Did you ever hear the prairie-chickens during the spring? I never felt
sure spring had come to stay till, in the early morning, there came the
boom of the chickens, _Poor old booff_. It is an indescribable sound,
as if there were a thousand saying the same thing and keeping perfect
time. No trouble then getting a child up early in the morning, for it
is time for hunting prairie-chickens' nests. In the most unexpected
places in the wild grass the nests would be found, with about sixteen
eggs in them, looking somewhat like a guinea-hen's egg. Of course, an
omelet made out of them tasted ever so much better than if made out
of home-laid eggs; now I should not like the taste so well, probably,
for there is a wild flavor to the egg, as there is to the flesh of the
bird. Many a time I've stepped right into the nest, so well was it
hidden. After a prairie fire is a good time to go egging, the nests
being in plain sight and the eggs already roasted. I have tried again
and again to raise the chickens by setting the eggs under the tame
hens, but it cannot be done; they seem to inherit a shyness that makes
them refuse to eat, and at the first opportunity they slip off in the
grass and are gone. Every kind of food, even to live insects, they
will refuse, and will starve to death rather than eat in captivity.
There are but few chickens here now; they have taken Horace Greeley's
advice and gone west. As to four-footed game, there were any number of
the little prairie-wolves and some big gray ones. Could see the little
wolves running across the prairie any time o' day, and at night their
continual _yap, yap_ was almost unendurable. They developed a taste for
barn-yard fowl that made it necessary for hens to roost high. They are
cowards in the daytime, but brave enough to come close to the house at
night. If people had only had foxhounds, they would have afforded an
opportunity for some sport. I have seen people try to run them down on
horseback, but never knew them to succeed.
"One of my standard amusements was to go every little while to a den
the wolves had, where the rocks cropped out of the ground, and poke
in there with a stick, to see a wolf pop out scared almost to death.
As to the big wolves, it was dangerous sport to meddle with them. I
had an experience with them one winter that would have begotten a
desire to keep a proper distance from them, had I not felt it before.
An intensely cold night three of us were riding in an open wagon on
one seat. The road ran for about a mile through the woods, and as we
entered it four or five gray wolves sprang out at us; the horse needed
no urging, you may be sure, but to me it seemed an age before we got
out into the moonlight on the prairie; then the wolves slunk back into
the woods. Every leap they made it seemed as if they would jump into
the wagon. I could hear them strike against the back of it, and hear
their teeth _click_ together as they barely missed my hand where I held
on to the seat to keep from being thrown out. My most prominent desire
about that time was to sit in the middle, and let some one else have
the outside seat.
"Grandfather was very fond of trapping, and used to catch a great many
wolves for their skins and the bounty; also minks and muskrats. I
always had to help skin them, which I considered dreadful, especially
skinning the muskrats; but as that was the only condition under which
I was allowed to go along, of course I submitted, for I wouldn't
miss the excitement of seeing whether we had succeeded in outwitting
and catching the sly creatures for any consideration. The beautiful
minks, with their slender satiny bodies, it seemed a pity to catch
them. Muskrats I had no sympathy for, they looked so ratty, and had so
unpleasant a smell. The gophers were one of the greatest plagues the
farmers had. The ground would be dotted with their mounds, so round and
regular, the black dirt pulverized so finely. I always wondered how
they could make them of such a perfect shape, and wished I could see
way down into their houses. They have more than one entrance to them,
because I've tried to drown them out, and soon I would see what I took
to be my gopher, that I thought I had covered so nicely, skipping off.
They took so much corn out of the hills after it was planted that it
was customary to mix corn soaked with strychnine with the seed corn. Do
they have pocket gophers in the East? [No.] They are the cutest little
animals, with their pockets on each side of their necks, lined with
fur; when they get them stuffed full they look as broad as they are
long, and so saucy. I have met them, and had them show fight because I
wouldn't turn out of their path,—the little impudent things!
"One nuisance that goes along with civilization we escaped until the
railroad was built, and that was _rats_. The railroads brought other
nuisances, too, the weeds; they soon crowded out the native plants.
I don't want to be understood as calling _all_ weeds nuisances; the
beautiful flowers some of them bear save their reputations,—the
dandelion, for instance; I approve of the dandelion, whatever others
may think. I shall never forget the first one I found in the West; it
was like meeting an old friend. It grew alongside of an emigrant road,
about five miles from my home; here I spied the golden treasure in the
grass. Some of the many 'prairie schooners' that had passed that way
had probably dropped the one seed. Mother dug it up and planted it
in our flower-bed, and in two years the neighborhood was yellow with
them,—all from that one root. The prairies are gone now, and the wild
flowers, those that have not been civilized to death like the Indians,
have taken refuge in the fence-corners."
I had asked her what she knew about cranes, and she replied as
follows:—
"During the first few years after we came West, cranes, especially
the sand-hill variety, were very plentiful. Any day in the summer you
might see a triangle of them flying over, with their long legs dragging
behind them; or, if you had sharp eyes, could see them stalking
along the sloughs sometimes found on the prairie. In the books I see
them described as being brown in color. Now I should not call them
brown, for they are more of a yellow. They are just the color of a
gosling, should it get its down somewhat soiled, and they look much
like overgrown goslings set up on stilts. I have often found their
nests, and always in the shallow water in the slough, built out of
sticks,—much as the children build cob-houses,—about a foot high,
with two large flat eggs in them. I have often tried to catch them on
their nests, so as to see how they disposed of their long legs, but
never quite succeeded. They are very shy, and their nests are always
so situated as to enable them to see in every direction. I had a great
desire to possess a pet crane, but every attempt to raise one resulted
in failure, all on account of those same slender legs.
"The egg I placed under a 'sitting hen' (one was as much as a hen
could conveniently manage); it would hatch out all right, and I had no
difficulty in feeding the young crane, for it would eat anything, and
showed no shyness,—quite different from a young prairie-chicken; in
fact, their tameness was the cause of their death, for, like Mary's
little lamb, they insisted on going everywhere I went. When they
followed me into the house, and stepped upon the smooth floor, one
leg would go in one direction and the other in the opposite, breaking
one or both of them. They seemed to be unable to walk upon any smooth
surface. Such ridiculous-looking things they were! I have seen a few
pure white ones, but only on the wing. They seem more shy than the
yellow ones.
"Once I saw a curious sight; I saw seven or eight cranes dance a
cotillon, or something very much like it. I have since read of wild
fowl performing in that way, but then I had never heard of it. They
were in a meadow about half a mile from the house; I did not at all
understand what they were doing, and proceeded to investigate. After
walking as near as I could without frightening them, I crept through
the tall grass until I was within a rod of the cranes, and then lay
and watched them. It was the most comical sight to see them waltz
around, sidle up to each other and back again, their long necks and
legs making the most clumsy motions. With a little stretch of the
imagination one might see a smirk on their faces, and suspect them of
caricaturing human beings. There seemed to be a regular method in their
movements, for the changes were repeated. How long they kept it up I
do not know, for I tired of it, and went back to the house, but they
had danced until the grass was trampled down hard and smooth. I always
had a mania for trying experiments, so I coaxed my mother to cook one
the men had shot, though I had never heard of any one's eating crane.
It was not very good, tasted somewhat peculiar, and the thought that
maybe it was poison struck me with horror. I was badly scared, for I
reflected that I had no proof that it was _not_ poison, and I had been
told so many times that I was bound to come to grief, sooner or later,
from trying to find out things."
I am always glad to have the views of a sensible person, outside of
the literary circles, upon my favorite authors, especially when the
views are spontaneous. "Speaking of Thoreau," says my correspondent,
"I am willing to allow most that is said in his praise, but _I do not
like him_, all the same. Do you know I feel that he was not altogether
human. There is something uncanny about him. I guess that, instead
of having a human soul, his body was inhabited by some sylvan deity
that flourished in Grecian times; he seemed out of place among human
beings."
Of Carlyle, too, she has an independent opinion. "It is a mystery to
me why men so universally admire Carlyle; women do not, or, if there
is occasionally one who does, she does not _like_ him. A woman's first
thought about him would be, 'I pity his wife!' Do you remember what he
said in answer to Mrs. Welsh's proposal to come and live with them and
help support them? He said they could only live pleasantly together on
the condition that she looked up to him, not he to her. Here is what
he says: 'Now, think, Liebchen, whether your mother will consent to
forget her riches and our poverty, and uncertain, more probably scanty,
income, and consent in the spirit of Christian meekness to make me her
guardian and director, and be a second wife to her daughter's husband?'
Now, isn't that insufferable conceit for you? To expect that a woman
old enough to be his mother would lay aside her self-respect and
individuality to accept him, a comparatively young and inexperienced
man, as her master? The cheekiness of it! Here you have the key-note of
his character,—'great I and little u.'
"I have tried faithfully to like him, for it seemed as if the fault
must be in me because I did not; I have labored wearily through nearly
all his works, stumbling over his superlatives (why, he is an adjective
factory; his pages look like the alphabet struck by a cyclone. You call
it picturesqueness; I call it grotesqueness). But it was of no use; it
makes me tired all over to think of it. All the time I said to myself,
'Oh, do stop your scolding; you are not so much better than the rest
of us.' One is willing to be led to a higher life, but who wants to be
pushed and cuffed along? How can people place him and our own Emerson,
the dear guide and friend of so many of us, on the same level? It may
be that the world had need of him, just as it needs lightning and rain
and cold and pain, but must we _like_ these things?"[109:1]
[109:1] My correspondent was Mrs. Beardslee of Manchester,
Iowa. She died in October, 1885.
VI
EYE-BEAMS
I
A WEASEL AND HIS DEN
My most interesting note of the season of 1893 relates to a weasel.
One day in early November, my boy and I were sitting on a rock at the
edge of a tamarack swamp in the woods, hoping to get a glimpse of some
grouse which we knew were in the habit of feeding in the swamp. We had
not sat there very long before we heard a slight rustling in the leaves
below us, which we at once fancied was made by the cautious tread of a
grouse. (We had no gun.) Presently, through the thick brushy growth,
we caught sight of a small animal running along, that we at first took
for a red squirrel. A moment more, and it came into full view but a few
yards from us, and we saw that it was a weasel. A second glance showed
that it carried something in its mouth which, as it drew near, we saw
was a mouse or a mole of some sort. The weasel ran nimbly along, now
the length of a decayed log, then over stones and branches, pausing
a moment every three or four yards, and passed within twenty feet of
us, and disappeared behind some rocks on the bank at the edge of the
swamp. "He is carrying food into his den," I said; "let us watch him."
In four or five minutes he reappeared, coming back over the course
along which he had just passed, running over and under the same stones
and down the same decayed log, and was soon out of sight in the swamp.
We had not moved, and evidently he had not noticed us. After about six
minutes we heard the same rustle as at first, and in a moment saw the
weasel coming back with another mouse in his mouth. He kept to his
former route as if chained to it, making the same pauses and gestures,
and repeating exactly his former movements. He disappeared on our left
as before, and, after a few moments' delay, reëmerged and took his
course down into the swamp again. We waited about the same length of
time as before, when back he came with another mouse. He evidently
had a big crop of mice down there amid the bogs and bushes, and he
was gathering his harvest in very industriously. We became curious
to see exactly where his den was, and so walked around where he had
seemed to disappear each time, and waited. He was as punctual as usual,
and was back with his game exactly on time. It happened that we had
stopped within two paces of his hole, so that, as he approached it, he
evidently discovered us. He paused, looked steadily at us, and then,
without any sign of fear, entered his den. The entrance was not under
the rocks as we had expected, but was in the bank a few feet beyond
them. We remained motionless for some time, but he did not reappear.
Our presence had made him suspicious, and he was going to wait a while.
Then I removed some dry leaves and exposed his doorway, a small, round
hole, hardly as large as the chipmunk makes, going straight down into
the ground. We had a lively curiosity to get a peep into his larder. If
he had been carrying in mice at this rate very long, his cellars must
be packed with them. With a sharp stick I began digging into the red
clayey soil, but soon encountered so many roots from near trees that I
gave it up, deciding to return next day with a mattock. So I repaired
the damages I had done as well as I could, replaced the leaves, and we
moved off.
The next day, which was mild and still as usual, I came back armed, as
I thought, to unearth the weasel and his treasures. I sat down where
we had sat the day before and awaited developments. I was curious to
know if the weasel was still carrying in his harvest. I had sat but a
few minutes when I heard again the rustle in the dry leaves, and saw
the weasel coming home with another mouse. I observed him till he had
made three trips; about every six or seven minutes, I calculated, he
brought in a mouse. Then I went and stood near his hole. This time he
had a fat meadow-mouse. He laid it down near the entrance, went in and
turned around, and reached out and drew the mouse in after him. That
store of mice I am bound to see, I thought, and then fell to with the
heavy mattock. I followed the hole down about two feet, when it turned
to the north. I kept the clew by thrusting into the passage slender
twigs; these it was easy to follow. Two or three feet more and the hole
branched, one part going west, the other northeast. I followed the west
one a few feet till it branched. Then I turned to the easterly tunnel,
and pursued it till it branched. I followed one of these ways till it
divided. I began to be embarrassed and hindered by the accumulations
of loose soil. Evidently this weasel had foreseen just such an assault
upon his castle as I was making, and had planned it accordingly. He was
not to be caught napping. I found several enlargements in the various
tunnels, breathing spaces, or spaces to turn around in, or to meet
and chat with a companion, but nothing that looked like a terminus, a
permanent living-room. I tried removing the soil a couple of paces away
with the mattock, but found it slow work. I was getting warm and tired,
and my task was apparently only just begun. The farther I dug the more
numerous and intricate became the passages. I concluded to stop, and
come again the next day, armed with a shovel in addition to the mattock.
Accordingly, I came back on the morrow, and fell to work vigorously.
I soon had quite a large excavation; I found the bank a labyrinth of
passages, with here and there a large chamber. One of the latter I
struck only six inches under the surface, by making a fresh breach a
few feet away.
While I was leaning upon my shovel-handle and recovering my breath, I
heard some light-footed creature tripping over the leaves above me just
out of view, which I fancied might be a squirrel. Presently I heard
the bay of a hound and the yelp of a cur, and then knew that a rabbit
had passed near me. The dogs came hurrying after, with a great rumpus,
and then presently the hunters followed. The dogs remained barking not
many rods south of me on the edge of the swamp, and I knew the rabbit
had run to hole. For half an hour or more I heard the hunters at work
there, digging their game out; then they came along and discovered me
at my work. (An old trapper and woodsman and his son.) I told them what
I was in quest of. "A mountain weasel," said the old man. "Seven or
eight years ago I used to set deadfalls for rabbits just over there,
and the game was always partly eaten up. It must have been this weasel
that visited my traps." So my game was evidently an old resident of
the place. This swamp, maybe, had been his hunting-ground for many
years, and he had added another hall to his dwelling each year. After
further digging, I struck at least one of his banqueting halls, a
cavity about the size of one's hat, arched over by a network of fine
tree-roots. The occupant evidently lodged or rested here also. There
was a warm, dry nest, made of leaves and the fur of mice and moles. I
took out two or three handfuls. In finding this chamber I had followed
one of the tunnels around till it brought me within a foot of the
original entrance. A few inches to one side of this cavity there was
what I took to be a back alley where the weasel threw his waste; there
were large masses of wet, decaying fur here, and fur pellets such as
are regurgitated by hawks and owls. In the nest there was the tail
of a flying squirrel, showing that the weasel sometimes had a flying
squirrel for supper or dinner.
I continued my digging with renewed energy; I should yet find the grand
depot where all these passages centred; but the farther I excavated,
the more complex and baffling the problem became; the ground was
honeycombed with passages. What enemy has this weasel, I said to
myself, that he should provide so many ways of escape, that he should
have a back door at every turn? To corner him would be impossible; to
be lost in his fortress were like being lost in Mammoth Cave. How he
could bewilder his pursuer by appearing now at this door, now at that;
now mocking him from the attic, now defying him from the cellar! So
far, I had discovered but one entrance; but some of the chambers were
so near the surface that it looked as if the planner had calculated
upon an emergency when he might want to reach daylight quickly in a new
place.
Finally I paused, rested upon my shovel a while, eased my aching back
upon the ground, and then gave it up, feeling as I never had before the
force of the old saying, that you cannot catch a weasel asleep. I had
made an ugly hole in the bank, had handled over two or three times a
ton or more of earth, and was apparently no nearer the weasel and his
store of mice than when I began.
Then I regretted that I had broken into his castle at all; that I
had not contented myself with coming day after day and counting his
mice as he carried them in, and continued my observation upon him each
succeeding year. Now the rent in his fortress could not be repaired,
and he would doubtless move away, as he most certainly did, for his
doors, which I had closed with soil, remained unopened after winter had
set in.
But little seems known about the intimate private lives of any of our
lesser wild creatures. It was news to me that any of the weasels lived
in dens in this way, and that they stored up provision against a day of
need. This species was probably the little ermine, eight or nine inches
long, with tail about five inches. It was still in its summer dress of
dark chestnut-brown above and whitish below.
It was a mystery where the creature had put the earth which it must
have removed in digging its den; not a grain was to be seen anywhere,
and yet a bushel or more must have been taken out. Externally, there
was not the slightest sign of that curious habitation there under the
ground. The entrance was hidden beneath dry leaves, and was surrounded
by little passages and flourishes between the leaves and the ground.
If any of my readers find a weasel's den, I hope they will be wiser
than I was, and observe his goings and comings without disturbing his
habitation.
II
KEEN PERCEPTIONS