view a few feet away, watching its deadly enemy hunting for the clew.
How its little heart must have fairly stood still each time the fatal
branch was struck! Probably as a last resort it would again have let go
its hold and fallen to the ground, where it might have eluded its enemy
a while longer.
In the course of five or six minutes the weasel gave over the search,
and ran hurriedly down the tree to the ground. The chipmunk remained
motionless for a long time; then he stirred a little as if hope was
reviving. Then he looked nervously about him; then he had recovered
himself so far as to change his position. Presently he began to move
cautiously along the branch to the bole of the tree; then, after a few
moments' delay, he plucked up courage to descend to the ground, where I
hope no weasel has disturbed him since.
IX
SPRING JOTTINGS
For ten or more years past I have been in the habit of jotting down,
among other things in my note-book, observations upon the seasons as
they passed,—the complexion of the day, the aspects of nature, the
arrival of the birds, the opening of the flowers, or any characteristic
feature of the passing moment or hour which the great open-air panorama
presented. Some of these notes and observations touching the opening
and the progress of the spring season follow herewith.
I need hardly say they are off-hand and informal; what they have to
recommend them to the general reader is mainly their fidelity to actual
fact. The sun always crosses the line on time, but the seasons which
he makes are by no means so punctual; they loiter or they hasten, and
the spring tokens are three or four weeks earlier or later some seasons
than others. The ice often breaks up on the river early in March, but I
have crossed upon it as late as the 10th of April. My journal presents
many samples of both early and late springs.
But before I give these extracts let me say a word or two in favor
of the habit of keeping a journal of one's thoughts and days. To a
countryman, especially of a meditative turn, who likes to preserve the
flavor of the passing moment, or to a person of leisure anywhere, who
wants to make the most of life, a journal will be found a great help.
It is a sort of deposit account wherein one saves up bits and fragments
of his life that would otherwise be lost to him.
What seemed so insignificant in the passing, or as it lay in embryo
in his mind, becomes a valuable part of his experiences when it
is fully unfolded and recorded in black and white. The process of
writing develops it; the bud becomes the leaf or flower; the one is
disentangled from the many and takes definite form and hue. I remember
that Thoreau says in a letter to a friend, after his return from a
climb to the top of Monadnock, that it is not till he gets home that he
really goes over the mountain; that is, I suppose, sees what the climb
meant to him when he comes to write an account of it to his friend.
Every one's experience is probably much the same; when we try to tell
what we saw and felt, even to our journals, we discover more and deeper
meanings in things than we had suspected.
The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled
to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us. How
much of the flavor of Maine birch I should have missed had I not
compelled that vague, unconscious being within me, who absorbs so much
and says so little, to unbosom himself at the point of the pen! It
was not till after I got home that I really went to Maine, or to the
Adirondacks, or to Canada. Out of the chaotic and nebulous impressions
which these expeditions gave me, I evolved the real experience. There
is hardly anything that does not become much more in the telling than
in the thinking or in the feeling.
I see the fishermen floating up and down the river above their nets,
which are suspended far out of sight in the water beneath them. They
do not know what fish they have got, if any, till after a while they
lift the nets up and examine them. In all of us there is a region of
sub-consciousness above which our ostensible lives go forward, and in
which much comes to us, or is slowly developed, of which we are quite
ignorant until we lift up our nets and inspect them.
Then the charm and significance of a day are so subtle and fleeting!
Before we know it, it is gone past all recovery. I find that each
spring, that each summer and fall and winter of my life, has a hue
and quality of its own, given by some prevailing mood, a train of
thought, an event, an experience,—a color or quality of which I am
quite unconscious at the time, being too near to it, and too completely
enveloped by it. But afterward some mood or circumstance, an odor, or
fragment of a tune, brings it back as by a flash; for one brief second
the adamantine door of the past swings open and gives me a glimpse of
my former life. One's journal, dashed off without any secondary motive,
may often preserve and renew the past for him in this way.
These leaves from my own journal are not very good samples of this sort
of thing, but they preserve for me the image of many a day which memory
alone could never have kept.
March 3, 1879. The sun is getting strong, but winter still holds his
own. No hint of spring in the earth or air. No sparrow or sparrow song
yet. But on the 5th there was a hint of spring. The day warm and the
snow melting. The first bluebird note this morning. How sweetly it
dropped down from the blue overhead!
March 10. A real spring day at last, and a rouser! Thermometer between
fifty and sixty degrees in the coolest spot; bees very lively about the
hive, and working on the sawdust in the wood-yard; how they dig and
wallow in the woody meal, apparently squeezing it as if forcing it to
yield up something to them! Here they get their first substitute for
pollen. The sawdust of hickory and maple is preferred. The inner milky
substance between the bark and the wood, called the cambium layer, is
probably the source of their supplies.
In the growing tree it is in this layer or secretion that the vital
processes are the most active and potent. It has been found by
experiment that this tender, milky substance is capable of exerting a
very great force; a growing tree exerts a lifting and pushing force of
more than thirty pounds to the square inch, and the force is thought to
reside in the soft fragile cells that make up the cambium layer. It
is like the strength of Samson residing in his hair. Saw one bee enter
the hive with pollen on his back, which he must have got from some open
greenhouse; or had he found the skunk cabbage in bloom ahead of me?
The bluebirds! It seemed as if they must have been waiting somewhere
close by for the first warm day, like actors behind the scenes, for
they were here in numbers early in the morning; they rushed upon the
stage very promptly when their parts were called. No robins yet. Sap
runs, but not briskly. It is too warm and still; it wants a brisk day
for sap, with a certain sharpness in the air, a certain crispness and
tension.
March 12. A change to more crispness and coolness, but a delicious
spring morning. Hundreds of snowbirds with a sprinkling of song and
Canada sparrows are all about the house, chirping and lisping and
chattering in a very animated manner. The air is full of bird voices:
through this maze of fine sounds comes the strong note and warble
of the robin, and the soft call of the bluebird. A few days ago not
a bird, not a sound; everything rigid and severe; then in a day the
barriers of winter give way, and spring comes like an inundation. In a
twinkling all is changed.
Under date of February 27, 1881, I find this note: "Warm; saw the male
bluebird warbling and calling cheerily. The male bluebird spreads his
tail as he flits about at this season, in a way to make him look very
gay and dressy. It adds to his expression considerably, and makes him
look alert and beau-like, and every inch a male. The grass is green
under the snow, and has grown perceptibly. The warmth of the air seems
to go readily through a covering of ice and snow. Note how quickly the
ice lets go of the door-stones, though completely covered, when the day
becomes warm."
The farmers say a deep snow draws the frost out of the ground. It is
certain that the frost goes out when the ground is deeply covered for
some time, though it is of course the warmth rising up from the depths
of the ground that does it. A winter of deep snows is apt to prove
fatal to the peach buds. The frost leaves the ground, the soil often
becomes so warm that angle-worms rise to near the surface, the sap in
the trees probably stirs a little; then there comes a cold wave, the
mercury goes down to ten or fifteen below zero, and the peach buds are
killed. It is not the cold alone that does it; it is the warmth at one
end and the extreme cold at the other. When the snow is removed so that
the frost can get at the roots also, peach buds will stand fourteen or
fifteen degrees below zero.
March 7, 1881. A perfect spring day at last,—still, warm, and without
a cloud. Tapped two trees; the sap runs, the snow runs, everything
runs. Bluebirds the only birds yet. Thermometer forty-two degrees in
the shade. A perfect sap day. A perfect sap day is a crystalline day;
the night must have a keen edge of frost, and the day a keen edge of
air and sun, with wind north or northwest. The least film, the least
breath from the south, the least suggestion of growth, and the day is
marred as a sap day. Maple sap is maple frost melted by the sun. (9
P. M.) A soft, large-starred night; the moon in her second
quarter; perfectly still and freezing; Venus throbbing low in the west.
A crystalline night.
March 21, 1884. The top of a high barometric wave, a day like a crest,
lifted up, sightly, sparkling. A cold snap without storm issuing in
this clear, dazzling, sharp, northern day. How light, as if illuminated
by more than the sun; the sky is full of light; light seems to be
streaming up all around the horizon. The leafless trees make no
shadows; the woods are flooded with light; everything shines; a day
large and imposing, breathing strong masculine breaths out of the
north; a day without a speck or film, winnowed through and through,
all the windows and doors of the sky open. Day of crumpled rivers and
lakes, of crested waves, of bellying sails, high-domed and lustrous
day. The only typical March day of the bright heroic sort we have yet
had.
March 24, 1884. Damp, still morning, much fog on the river. All the
branches and twigs of the trees strung with drops of water. The grass
and weeds beaded with fog drops. Two lines of ducks go up the river,
one a few feet beneath the other. On second glance the under line
proves to be the reflection of the other in the still water. As the
ducks cross a large field of ice, the lower line is suddenly blotted
out, as if the birds had dived beneath the ice. A train of cars across
the river,—the train sunk beneath a solid stratum of fog, its plume of
smoke and vapor unrolling above it and slanting away in the distance; a
liquid morning; the turf buzzes as you walk over it.
Skunk cabbage on Saturday the 22d, probably in bloom several days. This
plant always gets ahead of me. It seems to come up like a mushroom in
a single night. Water newts just out, and probably piping before the
frogs, though not certain about this.
March 25. One of the rare days that go before a storm; the flower of
a series of days increasingly fair. To-morrow, probably, the flower
falls, and days of rain and cold prepare the way for another fair day
or days. The barometer must be high to-day; the birds fly high. I feed
my bees on a rock, and sit long and watch them covering the combs,
and rejoice in the multitudinous humming. The river is a great mirror
dotted here and there by small cakes of ice. The first sloop comes
lazily up on the flood tide, like the first butterfly of spring; the
little steamer, our river omnibus, makes her first trip, and wakes the
echoes with her salutatory whistle, her flags dancing in the sun.
April 1. Welcome to April, my natal month; the month of the swelling
buds, the springing grass, the first nests, the first plantings, the
first flowers, and, last but not least, the first shad! The door of
the seasons first stands ajar this month, and gives us a peep beyond.
The month in which to begin the world, in which to begin your house,
in which to begin your courtship, in which to enter upon any new
enterprise. The bees usually get their first pollen this month and
their first honey. All hibernating creatures are out before April is
past. The coon, the chipmunk, the bear, the turtles, the frogs, the
snakes, come forth beneath April skies.
April 8. A day of great brightness and clearness,—a crystalline April
day that precedes snow. In this sharp crisp air the flakes are forming.
As in a warm streaming south wind one can almost smell the swelling
buds, so a wind from the opposite quarter at this season as often
suggests the crystalline snow. I go up in the sugar bush [this was up
among the Catskills], and linger for an hour among the old trees. The
air is still, and has the property of being "hollow," as the farmers
say; that is, it is heavy, motionless, and transmits sounds well. Every
warble of a bluebird or robin, or caw of crow, or bark of dog, or
bleat of sheep, or cackle of geese, or call of boy or man, within the
landscape, comes distinctly to the ear. The smoke from the chimney goes
straight up.
I walk through the bare fields; the shore larks run or flit before me;
I hear their shuffling, gurgling, lisping, half-inarticulate song. Only
of late years have I noticed the shore larks in this section. Now they
breed and pass the summer on these hills, and I am told that they are
gradually becoming permanent residents in other parts of the State.
They are nearly as large as the English skylark, with conspicuous black
markings about the head and throat; shy birds squatting in the sear
grass, and probably taken by most country people who see them to be
sparrows.
Their flight and manner in song is much like that of the skylark.
The bird mounts up and up on ecstatic wing, till it becomes a mere
speck against the sky, where it drifts to and fro, and utters at
intervals its crude song, a mere fraction or rudiment of the skylark's
song, a few sharp, lisping, unmelodious notes, as if the bird had a
bad cold, and could only now and then make any sound,—heard a long
distance, but insignificant, a mere germ of the true lark's song; as
it were the first rude attempt of nature in this direction. After due
trial and waiting, she develops the lark's song itself. But if the
law of evolution applies to bird-songs as well as to other things,
the shore lark should in time become a fine songster. I know of no
bird-song that seems so obviously struggling to free itself and reach
a fuller expression. As the bird seems more and more inclined to abide
permanently amid cultivated fields, and to forsake the wild and savage
north, let me hope that its song is also undergoing a favorable change.
How conspicuous the crows in the brown fields, or against the lingering
snowbanks, or in the clear sky! How still the air! One could carry
a lighted candle over the hills. The light is very strong, and the
effect of the wall of white mountains rising up all around from the
checkered landscape, and holding up the blue dome of the sky, is
strange indeed.
April 14. A delicious day, warm as May. This to me is the most
bewitching part of the whole year. One's relish is so keen, and the
morsels are so few and so tender. How the fields of winter rye stand
out! They call up visions of England. A perfect day in April far excels
a perfect day in June, because it provokes and stimulates while the
latter sates and cloys. Such days have all the peace and geniality of
summer without any of its satiety or enervating heat.
April 15. Not much cloud this morning, but much vapor in the air. A
cool south wind with streaks of a pungent vegetable odor, probably from
the willows. When I make too dead a set at it I miss it; but when I
let my nose have its own way, and take in the air slowly, I get it, an
odor as of a myriad swelling buds. The long-drawn call of the high-hole
comes up from the fields, then the tender rapid trill of the bush or
russet sparrow, then the piercing note of the meadowlark, a flying
shaft of sound.
April 21. The enchanting days continue without a break. One's senses
are not large enough to take them all in. Maple buds just bursting,
apple-trees full of infantile leaves. How the poplars and willows stand
out! A moist, warm, brooding haze over all the earth. All day my little
russet sparrow sings and trills divinely. The most prominent bird
music in April is from the sparrows.
The yellowbirds (goldfinches) are just getting on their yellow coats. I
saw some yesterday that had a smutty, unwashed look, because of the new
yellow shining through the old drab-colored webs of the feathers. These
birds do not shed their feathers in the spring, as careless observers
are apt to think they do, but merely shed the outer webs of their
feathers and quills, which peel off like a glove from the hand.
All the groves and woods lightly touched with new foliage. Looks
like May; violets and dandelions in bloom. Sparrow's nest with two
eggs. Maples hanging out their delicate fringe-like bloom. First barn
swallows may be looked for any day after April 20.
This period may be called the vernal equipoise, and corresponds to the
October calm called the Indian summer.
April 2, 1890. The second of the April days, clear as a bell. The eye
of the heavens wide open at last. A sparrow day; how they sang! And the
robins, too, before I was up in the morning. Now and then I could hear
the rat-tat-tat of the downy at his drum. How many times I paused at my
work to drink in the beauty of the day!
How I like to walk out after supper these days! I stroll over the lawn
and stand on the brink of the hill. The sun is down, the robins pipe
and call, and as the dusk comes on they indulge in that loud chiding
note or scream, whether in anger or in fun I never can tell. Up the
road in the distance the multitudinous voice of the little peepers,—a
thicket or screen of sound. An April twilight is unlike any other.
April 12. Lovely, bright day. We plow the ground under the hill for the
new vineyard. In opening the furrow for the young vines I guide the
team by walking in their front. How I soaked up the sunshine to-day!
At night I glowed all over; my whole being had had an earth-bath; such
a feeling of freshly plowed land in every cell of my brain. The furrow
had struck in; the sunshine had photographed it upon my soul.
April 13. A warm, even hot April day. The air full of haze; the
sunshine golden. In the afternoon J. and I walk out over the country
north of town. Everybody is out, all the paths and byways are full of
boys and young fellows. We sit on a wall a long time by a meadow and
orchard, and drink in the scene. April to perfection, such a sentiment
of spring everywhere. The sky is partly overcast, the air moist,
just enough so to bring out the odors,—a sweet perfume of bursting,
growing things. One could almost eat the turf like a horse. All about
the robins sang. In the trees the crow blackbird cackled and jingled.
Athwart these sounds came every half minute the clear, strong note of
the meadowlark. The larks were very numerous and were lovemaking. Then
the high-hole called and the bush sparrow trilled. Arbutus days these,
everybody wants to go to the woods for arbutus; it fairly calls one.
The soil calls for the plow, too, the garden calls for the spade, the
vineyard calls for the hoe. From all about the farm voices call, Come
and do this, or do that. At night how the "peepers" pile up the sound!
How I delight to see the plow at work such mornings! the earth is ripe
for it, fairly lusts for it, and the freshly turned soil looks good
enough to eat. Plucked my first blood-root this morning,—a full-blown
flower with a young one folded up in a leaf beneath it, only just the
bud emerging, like the head of a pappoose protruding from its mother's
blanket,—a very pretty sight. The blood-root always comes up with the
leaf shielding the flower-bud, as one shields the flame of the candle
in the open air with his hand half closed about it.
These days the song of the toad—_tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r_
—is heard in the land. At nearly all hours I hear it, and it is as
welcome to me as the song of any bird. It is a kind of gossamer of
sound drifting in the air. Mother toad is in the pools and puddles now
depositing that long chain or raveling of eggs, while her dapper little
mate rides upon her back and fertilizes them as they are laid. As I
look toward the fields where the first brown thrasher is singing, I see
emerald patches of rye. The unctuous confident strain of the bird seems
to make the fields grow greener hour by hour.
May 4. The perfection of early May weather. How green the grass, how
happy the birds, how placid the river, how busy the bees, how soft
the air!—that kind of weather when there seems to be dew in the air
all day,—the day a kind of prolonged morning,—so fresh, so wooing,
so caressing! The baby leaves on the apple-trees have doubled in size
since last night.
March 12, 1891. Had positive proof this morning that at least one song
sparrow has come back to his haunts of a year ago. One year ago to-day
my attention was attracted, while walking over to the post-office, by
an unfamiliar bird-song. It caught my ear while I was a long way off.
I followed it up and found that it proceeded from a song sparrow. Its
chief feature was one long, clear high note, very strong, sweet, and
plaintive. It sprang out of the trills and quavers of the first part
of the bird-song, like a long arc or parabola of sound. To my mental
vision it rose far up against the blue, and turned sharply downward
again and finished in more trills and quavers. I had never before heard
anything like it. It was the usual long, silvery note in the sparrow's
song greatly increased; indeed, the whole breath and force of the bird
put in this note, so that you caught little else than this silver
loop of sound. The bird remained in one locality—the bushy corner of
a field—the whole season. He indulged in the ordinary sparrow song,
also. I had repeatedly had my eye upon him when he changed from one to
the other.
And now here he is again, just a year after, in the same place, singing
the same remarkable song, capturing my ear with the same exquisite
lasso of sound. What would I not give to know just where he passed the
winter, and what adventures by flood and field befell him!
(I will add that the bird continued in song the whole season,
apparently confining his wanderings to a few acres of ground. But the
following spring he did not return, and I have never heard him since,
and if any of his progeny inherited this peculiar song I have not heard
them.)
X
GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE
I
Any glimpse of the wild and savage in nature, especially after long
confinement indoors or in town, always gives a little fillip to my
mind. Thus, when, in my walk from the city the other day, I paused,
after a half hour, in a thick clump of red cedars crowning a little
hill that arose amid a marshy and bushy bit of landscape, and found
myself in the banqueting-hall of a hawk, something more than my natural
history tastes stirred within me.
No hawk was there then, but the marks of his nightly presence were
very obvious. The branch of a cedar about fifteen feet from the ground
was his perch. It was worn smooth, with a feather or two adhering to
it. The ground beneath was covered with large pellets and wads of
mouse-hair; the leaves were white with his droppings, while the dried
entrails of his victims clung here and there to the bushes. The bird
evidently came here nightly to devour and digest its prey. This was its
den, its retreat; all about lay its feeding-grounds. It revealed to
me a new trait in the hawk,—its local attachments and habits; that
it, too, had a home, and did not wander about like a vagabond. It had
its domain, which it no doubt assiduously cultivated. Here it came to
dine and meditate, and a most attractive spot it had chosen, a kind of
pillared cave amid the cedars. It was such a spot as the pedestrian
would be sure to direct his steps to, and, having reached it, would be
equally sure to tarry and eat his own lunch there.