turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years
ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds
have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.
We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle
stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet
birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes
between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing
and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.
You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump
you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you
under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig.
You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are;
you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy
capers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods and
the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays
and the crows?
The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees;
the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of
the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.
You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile,
thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm
glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if
it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that
rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful
to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket
of down over his own winter bed.
Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten
o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through
and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud,
and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in
his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to
hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of
his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my
heart.
So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work
for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and
storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should
surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should
be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better
things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch
into light a number of objects that would never come within the range
of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a
twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a
microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.
And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the
rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably
gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the
touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out
a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry
into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the
white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and
high-bred-looking as greyhounds.
Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large
stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which
something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the
mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.
Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too,
hear a "fine, plaintive" sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket,
rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.
Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak
out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no
salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered
summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is
surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this
north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.
We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope,
hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover
trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson
berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and
wintergreen red with ripe berries--a whole bouquet of evergreens,
exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas
table.
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope
all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole
garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows
shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very
first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in
saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.
Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the
hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile,
discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming
upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a
yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel
of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould,
digging into a woodchuck's--
"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we
want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."
Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuff
in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and pack
the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag.
Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and
let us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!
Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for the
stump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything that
your heart does with you?--even though you do it for a pig!
Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper,
spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his
laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't
weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. There
is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of
pure pig joy.
"Boosh! Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind,
scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest
stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.
He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white,
sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he
still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the
taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down
within him.
And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the
forest for him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the
smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of
pig, _roast_ pig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no
less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.
Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to give
my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into
that he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not want
to; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did
not escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into the
wide, sweet woods, my ancestral home.
[Illustration: The little foxes]
XII
THE LITTLE FOXES
I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out
from the road:--
"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"
I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region,
and answered:--
"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens
lately."
"Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's been trapped and killed.
Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups
starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 've
hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em." And he
disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so
utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had
had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the
ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling
foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that
spread in every direction about him. I did not see which way he went,
for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing
through the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump to
think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up
and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs
and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after
hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of
little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did
not return.
He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open
field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! I
don't know how he found them. But patience and knowledge and love, and
a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his
primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursed
them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they
could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then,
that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a
holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.
But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes were shot at my lower
bars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an old
she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard
fence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the
ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun.
For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save,
in human nature and in all nature--to preserve a remnant, that no line
perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come
and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but
life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient
families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and
smaller-growing globe of ours.
And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.
Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being
swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is
cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown
thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the
scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not
unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in
from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this
morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing
line toward the chicken-yard.
I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory
outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in
wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or
egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on
the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded
that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank
like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but
vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley,
on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a
single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon,
where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested.
He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely
plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the
family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly
swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.
A few men with guns--for money--had done it. And the wild areas of the
world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now
that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of
life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to
have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things
under his feet"--literally, and he must go softly now lest the very
fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my
memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently
become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter
by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed
the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests.
So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we
have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant
has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the
Gulf coast--so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the
mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!
With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from
these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the
South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.
The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing
in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of
mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon
Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who
saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while
extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the
future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest
of our animals for a long time to come.
The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the
power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief
until one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled
region.
The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is
somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there
are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there
were all told over all of North America when the white men first came
here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been
given protection--pens!
Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and
repression, if given only a measure of protection.
Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet
life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps
himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.
Nature--man-nature--has been hard on the little brute--to save him!
His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with
wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in
and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens
within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful,
quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that
keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all
life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the
earth.
For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear
down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the
bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon his
four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the
henyard open.
There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of
the fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of the
way Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature
will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too
small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of
man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not
for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.
If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in the
remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the
distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this
determined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancy
chickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see
him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming. He knows it, and
comes just the same. At least the gun does not keep him away. My
neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him away. Guns, dogs, traps,
poison--nothing can keep the foxes away.
It must have been about four o'clock the other morning when one of my
children tiptoed into my room and whispered, "Father, there's the old
fox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind the barn."
I got up and hurried with the little fellow into his room, and sure
enough, there in the fog of the dim morning I could make out the form
of a fox moving slowly around the small coop.
The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks, her cries having
awakened the small boys.
I got myself down into the basement, seized my gun, and, gliding out
through the cellar door, crept stealthily into the barn.
The back window was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like
smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down
into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but where was
the fox?
Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun out across the
window-sill, I waited.
Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the fox! What a shot!
The old rascal cocked his ears toward the house. All was still.
Quickly under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old hen fluttering
and crying in fresh terror.
Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of the gun around on the
window-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief. The cow in her
stall beside me did not stir. I knew that four small boys in the
bedroom window had their eyes riveted upon that fox waiting for me to
fire. It was a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in the
cold, white fog, and without anything much but slippers on. Usually,
of course, I shot in boots.
But there stood the fox clawing out my young chickens, and, steadying
the gun as best I could on the moving window-sill, I fired.
That the fox jumped is not to be wondered at. I jumped myself as both
barrels went off together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of day,
but so early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silence
and the ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling.
I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, after jumping, turned
around and looked all over the end of the barn to see if the shooting
were going to happen again. I wished then that I had saved the other
barrel.
All I could do was to shout at him, which made him run off.
The boys wanted to know if I thought I had killed the hen. On going
out later I found that I had not even hit the coop--not so bad a shot,
after all, taking into account the size of the coop and the thick,
distorting qualities of the weather.
There is no particular credit to the fox in this, nor do I come in for
any particular credit this time; but the little drama does illustrate
the chances in the game of life, chances that sometimes, usually
indeed, are in favor of the fox.
He not only got away, but he also got away with eleven out of the
twelve young chicks in that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire of
the coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by frightening the chicks
out, had eaten all of them but one.
That he escaped this time was sheer luck; that he got his breakfast
before escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so many
instances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, I
could believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the olden
days of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, too!
One day last autumn I was climbing the steep ridge behind the
mowing-field when I heard a fox-hound yelping over in the hollow
beyond. Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw the hound
off below me on the side of the parallel ridge across the valley. He
was beating slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and evidently
having a hard time holding the trail. Now and then he would throw his
head up into the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in protest,
begging the fox to stop its fooling and play fair.
The hound was walking, not running, and at a gait almost as deliberate
as his howl. Round and round in one place he would go, off this way,
off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, or in despair of
ever hitting it (I don't know which), he would stand stock-still and
howl.
That the hound was tired I felt sure; but that he was on the trail of a
fox I could not believe; and I was watching him curiously when
something stirred on the top of the ridge almost beside me.
Without turning so much as my head, I saw the fox, a beautiful
creature, going slowly round and round in a circle--in a figure eight,
rather--among the bushes; then straight off it went and back; off again
in another direction and back; then in and out, round and round,
utterly without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the steep
hillside, the wily creature was off at an easy trot.
The hound did know what he was about. Across the valley, up the ridge,
he worked his sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy.
Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, he began to weave in
and out, back and forth, sniffling and whimpering like a tired child,
beating gradually out into a wider and wider circle, and giving the fox
all the rest it could want, before taking up the lead again and
following on down the trail.
The hound knew what he was about; but so did the fox: the latter,
moreover, taking the initiative, inventing the trick, leading the run,
and so in the end not only escaping the hound, but also vastly widening
the distance between their respective wits and abilities.
I recently witnessed a very interesting instance of this superiority of
the fox. One of the best hunters in my neighborhood, a man widely
known for the quality of his hounds, sold a dog, Gingles, an
extraordinarily fine animal, to a hunter in a near-by town. The new
owner brought his dog down here to try him out.
The hound was sent into the woods and was off in a moment on a warm
trail. But it was not long before the baying ceased, and shortly
after, back came the dog. The new owner was disappointed; but the next
day he returned and started the dog again, only to have the same thing
happen, the dog returning in a little while with a sheepish air of
having been fooled. Over and over the trial was made, when, finally,
the dog was taken back to its trainer as worthless.
Then both men came out with the dog, the trainer starting him on the
trail and following on after him as fast as he could break his way
through the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials before, the baying
ceased, but before the baffled dog had had time to grow discouraged,
the men came up to find him beating distractedly about in a small,
freshly burned area among the bushes, his nose full of strong ashes,
the trail hopelessly lost. With the help of the men the fox was
dislodged, and the dog carried him on in a course that was to his new
owner's entire satisfaction.