by catching a lower limb as he falls--I have known boys to do it. Or he
may even land with no serious injury if he is fortunate enough and the
distance is not too great. The squirrel would be almost sure to land
safely either in the lower limb or on the ground. This is more sure in
the case of the red squirrel than in that of the gray, for the gray is
two or three times the weight of the red. Yet I have seen a gray
squirrel come down forty feet though the air and land uninjured.
My own method of loosing the unripe burs from their tenacious hold on
the limb tips lacks the finesse of that of the squirrel. I do my work
with a club. Nevertheless, it takes wisdom and precision. To stand
twenty feet or so below a bunch of chestnut burs and hurl your club at
them with such accuracy that it hits the limb just behind them at the
right spot to snap them off their perch is an art that you must learn in
boyhood or never.
You may hit the burs themselves or you may hit the limb farther back,
and nothing happens. With the burs on the ground your task is to open
them, which you must do by pounding with one stone upon another. Hit in
the right place and with the right force, the green, prickly envelope
yields and the soft, brown nuts roll out uncrushed. To me they are
sweetest when this brown is just beginning to tinge them, before the
shells are very hard and the kernel is too resilient and crunchy.
On these October mornings the chestnuts are ripe,--a wonderful rich
brown, still clinging in close companionship in the center of the burs,
which have opened and revealed the precious kernels within. To harvest
them now by the quart your task is more easy than it was to get a few
when they were three weeks younger. The squirrels know this. There is
no need to climb to the dangerous limb tips and cling there precariously
while gnawing them through. The ground is strewn with bounty, and the
reds and the grays both are busy among the rustling brown leaves
garnering what the winds, the boys, and I have shaken from the open burs
and failed to gather.
Now and then they eat one, but for the most part they are busy storing
them up for future use. In hollow trees, under stumps, they pile them in
little hoards. But beside that they dig little holes in the ground here
and there and put a nut at the bottom of them and pat the brown leaves
down on top. I have always inferred that these were for special
luncheons, stored ready to hand when the owner did not care to go to the
main larder. I know that they do go to these in the winter on
occasions, for I have often seen the hole through the crusted snow where
the squirrel resolutely dug his way in and left behind him the chipped
shells of the nut which he found there. But I do not believe that one
nut out of a hundred that is thus buried is ever resurrected by the
squirrels; it is nature’s method of getting her chestnut trees properly
planted, and I half believe that the squirrels realize this; that they
do not mean to dig these nuts up again, and only do so when hard pressed
by hunger.
My path to the chestnut wood to-day lay through a shallow sea of purple
wood-grass. It is a wild grass, scorned of the farmer and left
ungarnered of his scythe, standing now in clumps in all waste places of
the pasture,--an amber wine of autumn tint that intoxicates you as you
pass through. It is a stirrup cup for your expedition. Old as the hills,
amber-purple and clear, yet with a fine bubbling of hoary leaf tips, it
warms the heart as wine of the grape does, and already you begin to be
drunk with the beauty of the day. Afterward you pass through aisles of
birch wood, where the once green leaves are a translucent yellow, fining
the gold of the sunlight down to a soft radiance, a richness of pale
effulgence that I have seen matched only in one gem.
Some years ago there came from South African mines a wonderful lump of
crystallized carbon,--a great diamond that, cut and polished, yet
weighed one hundred and twenty-five carats,--the famous Tiffany yellow
diamond, in whose heart glows the same yellow radiance which wells
throughout the birch wood of a sunlit October day. The Tiffany gem is
worth its hundreds of thousands, and you might lose it from a hole in
your vest pocket. The birch wood is a half-mile wide, and once you have
felt its soft radiance flood your soul it is yours forever. Neither
deserts nor cities can take it from you.
Sitting secure in a crotch of the chestnut tree of my choice, beating
the chestnuts from the half-open burs with a birch pole and listening to
their patter on the dry leaves far beneath, I was conscious after a time
of a little gritting squeak,--a squeak that sounded much like a small,
unoiled joint that was very mad about it. It might have been two tree
limbs rubbing together, only that it was too personal. Creaking limbs
are always mournful in tone; this squeak was full of impotent, nervous
rage.
It was difficult to locate exactly, and I had thinned out the chestnuts
pretty well and was about to climb down before I discovered what it was
that made it. Hanging head down from a twig that protruded from the
under side of a large limb was a great bat, swinging from one hind toe.
His furry, gray body was half loosely wrapped in his wings, that looked
like wrinkled folds of dark sheet rubber. His ugly little face was all
screwed up with rage and his sputtering squeaks were a ludicrous
exposition of impotent fury.
Every blow of my pole on the tree had jarred him. In his darkness of our
daytime he could not see what it was that troubled him, nor could he
venture to fly away from it lest he rush into worse danger. So he simply
hung on and protested in all the voice and vocabulary that he had, and
when I plucked him carefully by that hind claw and wrapped him in a
handkerchief and stowed him in the side pocket of my coat, he continued
to mutter bat profanity.
You will find in the velvety heart of a chestnut bur usually three nuts,
sometimes but one of these plump, and with a ripened kernel within the
shell. The two others in this case will be but flat walls of shell with
no kernel. Sometimes two of the three are meaty, and occasionally all
three, only the fat ones being fertile seeds. Poking about among the
brown leaves on the ground beneath the tree for these, now and then
pricking my fingers in separating a particularly fat one from the bur,
that had come down with it, I found another unfamiliar denizen of the
chestnut tree that my clubbing had dislodged.
This was the larva of _Telia polyphemus_, the _polyphemus_ moth. The
moth himself is a beautiful creature with a six-inch spread of
pinky-brown wings with a wonderful eye-spot of peacock-blue,
dark-maroon, and yellow-white in the after wing. The form that I had
picked up was a fat worm, nearly four inches long and fully an inch in
diameter, of a clear, transparent, yellowish-green texture ornamented on
the sides by raised lines of a silvery white,--a strikingly beautiful
object so far as coloring is concerned.
The larva of the _Telia polyphemus_ is no uncommon creature among oak
and chestnut trees, although, so near is he in coloring to the leaves on
which he feeds and so high in air does he spend his life, you may live
in the woods for years without seeing one. Him I carefully stowed in
another handkerchief, tucked into another side pocket, and started for
home with my chestnuts and my menagerie. One more adventure, however,
was in store for me.
In the open pasture stands a tall hickory, clad in the golden tan of
autumn foliage, dripping gray nuts and blackened husks upon the pasture
grass beneath it. Taking his pick among these was a splendid great gray
squirrel, and as I approached, instead of bounding across the open to
the thick wood, where he would have been surely safe, he sprang to the
trunk, and hiding behind it, eyed me over the lowest limb.
There was something of roguish defiance in his look and I accepted the
challenge. I dropped my coat on the grass, that the bat and caterpillar
might be uncrushed in the mêlée and swung into the tree toward the
squirrel, who promptly scampered up the trunk fifteen feet or so, poked
his head over another limb, and undeniably winked at me.
The gray squirrel is clever, but even on his own tree his reasoning did
not go very far. I was steadily driving him to the top, where he would
be cornered, but he did not run out on a limb and drop to a lower one
and then scramble down the tree and away, as he so easily might. He went
straight on toward the top, and I after him. Hickory is tough, and even
its small limbs will hold much weight. I could go as high as the
squirrel could.
On the topmost bough he poised. I was within arm’s reach. A gray
squirrel has long, keen teeth and knows well how to use them in
self-defence, yet you may grasp one safely if you will do it right. Take
him with the full hand from behind with the thumb and finger round his
neck and meeting below his jaw. Thus you may hold him securely,
uninjured, and be free from harm yourself. I have often pulled grown
squirrels from the nest in this way.
But before my hand reached him the squirrel launched himself into the
air with a bound that carried him in his flight clear of all limbs. It
was forty feet to the drought-hardened pasture turf, and immediately I
keenly regretted my frolic. A fall from that height, I thought, could
but end in the death or injury of my friend. I looked to see him go to
his finish, but he did nothing of the kind. Instead, he spread his legs
wide, stiffened his tail, and fairly seemed to flatten himself as he
went down, scaling to the ground instead of falling inertly, and though
he struck with a considerable thud, he was up and scampering for the
wood immediately.
The squirrel had won, though I can but think it was a foolhardy trick,
and he would have done much better to slip down from tip to tip of the
hickory limbs and circumvent me by circumnavigating me.
The crimson of the sunset lighted the path home with lambent radiance
that made a twilight of the yellow glow beneath the birches and dulled
the fire of the sumacs on the upland to a red as of dying embers. The
purple wood-grass caught and held the complementaries of these fires
reflected in its shadows till I seemed to stride through ashes of roses
to the dun shadows of the lilacs in my own dooryard.
Here I bethought me of the bat, too long enshrouded in my pocket for
his comfort, perhaps, and I unknotted the handkerchief, planning to
slip him into an empty squirrel cage for a day’s observation before I
set him free. But I had forgotten that the sun was now below the horizon
and that the bat could see as well as I could. Seemingly, he could see
quicker, for before I could put fingers on him he slipped from the fold
of the handkerchief, dove into the air, and with swift, sculling wings
mounted over the tree tops and was away like the wind.
However, I had my chestnuts left, and my _Telia polyphemus_ larva. Him I
put in the butterfly cage without delay, along with some chestnut
leaves, on which he might feed. He proceeded instead to spin himself a
cocoon, rolling himself in one of the leaves in the corner of the box.
There he will sleep lightly till spring, when I hope to see him come
out a full-grown moth. I shall watch for him with much interest, for
this species is very variable, and many aberrant forms and local races
occur. There are even albinos, and melanic specimens also have been
noted with the wings almost black.
AMONG AUTUMN LEAVES
The deep woods catch all the rich colors of the autumn sunsets in their
foliage. The dull reds and the vivid ones, the maroons and the scarlets,
the golden yellows and the wondrously soft and mellow shades of tan and
brown they hold till from a hilltop you see the forest afire. Flames
flutter, embers glow and fall, and brown ashes and cinders remain.
Yet, if you walk far below the fire, in the forest aisles that are
beginning to crisp under foot with the fallen embers of this
conflagration, you are conscious of but one color sensation. A subtle
glow pervades all things,--an atmosphere that is a yellow from which
the sap has run, a very ghost of color. The domes of the hickories that
grow in the open pasture are a rich brown, a most lovable shade; those
hickory saplings that are rooted in the shade, and wait so patiently for
fate to carry off the big trees that they may take their places, take an
autumnal tint of this ghost of yellow also, and all the leaves of the
wood ferns are pale with it,--a paleness that becomes with the more
delicate an almost transparent whiteness.
We may ingeniously say that the reason that these leaves are so anæmic
is that they grew in the shade and had not in their veins the good green
blood of those that flourished in the open and absorbed from the sun and
wind of summer the burn and tan that were to show in autumn. Yet, how
can we be sure of this when those leaves which grow side by side on the
same tree vary so in their autumnal tints?
Here upon a maple I find leaves that are still green, while others just
beside them are scarlet. From the hilltop those maples which show the
fieriest flame are the ones that on close inspection show leaves where
the green and red mingle either in the same leaf or contiguous leaves.
Perhaps the green, complementary color of the red takes the part of
shadow background and throws up the more vivid color in greater
prominence.
The swamp maples are unique in their way of taking on autumnal tints,
anyway. In common with all trees that stand with their feet in the
water, they lose the rich green of full summer growth long before the
frosts touch them, and long before similar trees standing on upland
slopes have any idea that autumn is approaching. Occasionally a maple
branch growing on some swamp tree, bowered in a little cove of woodland
greenery, will flame up in early July, as if some _ignis fatuus_,
wandering in by ghostly moonlight from a near-by ditch, had touched the
bough with strange fire that crimsoned but did not consume.
There is nothing the matter with the tree; it is well nourished and of
vigorous growth, yet it flares this early signal that winter with her
train is sooner or later to whistle down the tracks of the great
northern road. Such a maple is like an over-zealous flagman who stands
on the crossing and waves his signal before the train has even started
from the distant city. I do not recall seeing this trait exhibited by
other trees.
Again, individual trees of many species will show ruddy tints in the
swamp, sometimes in early September, before other trees of the same
species, standing near by, have even a suspicion of it. Yet this rule
holds good; the swamp trees color first and lose their leaves first, the
maples first of all. Sometimes by October first precocious specimens are
bald, their gray polls conspicuous spots among the surrounding greenery.
With their vivid colors, their premature baldness, their usually smaller
size, and a generally devil-may-care air which, perhaps, is only seeming
because of these facts, the swamp maples always appear to me like
swashbucklers, roistering young blades in whom riots the wine of life,
whose red faces early in the morning of the autumn and whose premature
baldness both hint of dissipation. Their roots are deep in the richest
of mold dissolved in the water of copious springs. The most bounteous
of banquets and the warmest of wine is continually at their lips. It is
no wonder if their youth is tempted to excesses.
Most of the lady birches stand aloof on the upland slopes; I notice not
far enough away to forbid the handsome young maples from climbing out of
their mire of dissipation to nibble the dry husks of gravel-bank
breakfast food and drink dew among them if they have the courage. But
not all thus withdraw in whispering groups. Down into the swamp others
have stepped and stand, erect and dainty, among the rubicund roisterers.
Social workers these without doubt, missionaries of the Birch C. T. U.,
who thus give their lives nobly to teaching by example.
Among the same temptations they stand, their shimmering green skirts
drawn slimly about them, their slight forms erect, the very visible
essence of virtue. The fervor of autumn touches them only with a
pale-yellow aureola, which marks at once their freedom from taint of
temptation and their saintliness. There is not much to prove it in a
bird’s-eye view of the swamp this October, yet I can but feel that these
pure lives radiate an influence among the sensuous swamp maples.
Here and there you will find one of these the rich green of whose summer
leaves turns to yellow hue at this time of year, though it is a
creature-comfort yellow compared with the soft ethereality of the
birches. Such, I believe, are on the road to conversion. The
spirituality of their neighbors has touched them and they are beginning
to be conscious of the beauty of temperate living and strive toward it.
Perhaps some autumn we shall note the presence of a great revival and
the October swamp will be all one pale, misty nimbus of spirituality, a
soft yellow radiance of saints who have spurned riotous living and glow
with ethereal fires of renunciation. Then will the Birch C. T. U. hold a
praise service.
On higher ground another maple which from its autumn coloration as well
as other characteristics is a very near relative of the swamp maples is
the white maple, sometimes called the silver-leaved maple. This, too,
turns a vivid red in early October, though it holds its leaves a little
longer than the red maples of the swamp. On the other hand, the imported
Norway maples, more shapely and stately trees in their full growth than
our own, line our streets and parks with noble round heads that are
still green except for a slight frosting of bronzy yellow on top, giving
the tree a richness of dignified maturity that is beautiful to look
upon. There is nothing of the missionary about these; they simply stand
serene, placid reminders of the value of noble example.
Like these trees in the formation of symmetrical, rounded heads are the
chestnuts, which are still green when the other deciduous trees of the
wood have been caught in the conflagration of autumn coloring. Now, the
first week in October being past, they show a certain yellowness of
foliage which is enhanced by the yellow-brown of the ripe burs which
throng the tips of their upper branches.
Twice during the year does the rich green of the chestnut leafage bloom
with a richer tinting,--first in June, when the long staminate blossoms
seem to pour in cascades from their billowed tops, and again at this
time of year, when the ripened nuts push open the green burs of
September and the failing sap leaves them at first a yellow-green and
later a golden tan-brown. Walking beneath the trees to-day you are
likely to get a rap on the head from a solid seal-brown chestnut, or
even find your neck full of prickers where the fretful porcupine of a
descending bur has jabbed you.
Already the ash trees, whose foliage has passed with much rapidity
through olive-green and olive-yellow to tan-brown, which still holds a
little of the olive tint, stand bare and gray against the sky, like the
red maples, sure prophets of winter. The ash is never profuse of leaves.
It drops them first of all in the autumn and is among the latest to put
them forth in the spring. Even in the height of summer you cannot say
that its foliage is dense; and when the slender brown leaves lie upon
the ground they do not make a thick carpet. They merely crisp under foot
instead of rustling.
Under a Norway maple the ground will later be half-leg deep in dense
curled leaves that rustle and swish under your stride. You plough
through them and they leap up and dance away from your progress, a
splashing, undulating brown tide. Under oaks, much later, you find a
similar sea, though its flood does not rise so high and there is a
crisper rustle that is yet a large-hearted and generous sound. Under
willows there is a silky crispness that is quite different from either.
So, blindfolded and led from one part of the forest to another, you
might tell every tree under which you passed by the sound of its dead
leaves under foot. So, too, knowing your tree, you might tell with
accuracy the time of the year, the definite week of autumn in which your
pilgrimage was taking place. Under the oaks to-day, though but a few
leaves are yet on the ground, you would feel the round acorns under
foot, and you would know that these were not chestnuts because of the
lack of burs; so, too, you might know that you were under the white oak
instead of the black by the different shape of the acorn.
If your foot-sense were not sufficiently subtle to note this
difference--though if you were much addicted to life in the open
woodland it would be--you still might, blindfolded, know the white oak
from the black by the sweetness of its acorns. I sometimes think they
are more pleasing to the palate than the chestnuts, though they have a
slight astringency. Yet their meat is sweeter and, aside from the slight
bitterness, has more of flavor, as you will see if you will test first
one and then the other. I think you will agree with me that the chestnut
flavor is pale and insipid in comparison.
The black-oak acorn is a different fruit. Like the tree it seems to have
absorbed all the bitterness of the wood. The white oak always seems to
me to glow with the generous hospitality of the sunshine, the black oak
to be morose and vindictive, a tree of dull days and shadow. I have
little excuse for this feeling, unless it is because of their fruits.
The two trees grow side by side in the woodland, the black, if anything,
the more vigorous in growth, yet the scaly whiteness of the bark of the
one always seems hospitable, the rugose blackness of that of the other
unfriendly. So with the fruit; the rich flavor of the white oak acorns
is inviting, the meracious bitterness of the others is repellent. Out of
the fact of this palatableness on the part of the one and repulsiveness
on the part of the other has grown a singular condition in the southern
states, where the trees as here once grew in equal profusion, side by
side in the forests.
There it is the custom, and has been since the days of first settlement,
to turn swine loose in the forests, where in the autumn they fatten on
“mast,” which is an old English name still in use there, but little
known in New England. It means forest nuts of any kind, but especially
acorns. These southern, forest-feeding swine have so loved the
white-oak mast that they have in a large measure kept the trees from
reproducing by eating all the seeds. The black-oak mast, on the
contrary, they have rejected, as any wise animal would, leaving the
seeds to be scattered about in profusion and reproduce more black oaks.
Hence a scarcity of white oaks in southern forests where they would be
welcome.
The oaks are more tenacious of their leaves than any other deciduous
tree, though they are fairly early in showing autumn tints. Long after
the reds of other trees of the wood are buried in the brown drifts that
cover the roots from the too fierce frosts of winter the rich deep
crimsons and red-browns of the oak remain. Indeed, the leaves of some
species hold on all winter, and let go their grip only reluctantly when
pushed off by the swelling buds of next spring’s growth.
Their rustle, as they cling to the twigs in December, makes the wood
vocal as the winter winds sift the snow softly down among them.
Oftentimes before you see the first fine, far-apart flakes of the coming
storm you may hear them pat here and there on a resonant oak leaf, and
their presence makes the winter outlook more perfectly and comfortingly
bleak as the fine flakes whirl through them. Snow amongst perfectly bare
twigs fails of its full effect. You need the shiver of its sifting among
the dry, persistent leaves of the oaks to realize all the beauty of its
bleakness.
Now, however, the rich wine reds, the vivid crimsons, and the deep
maroons that deepen on the one leaf into bluish purples and on the other
into violet-browns mingled, as they are yet with the vigorous
chlorophyl-green of the untinted leaf, these all are beginning to make
up the more permanent glory of the full tide of autumn color. Come with
me, if you will, at sunset to the scrubby hill where three years ago the
woodchoppers swept through like locusts, devouring every green thing
that lay in their path.