left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen,
the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech
owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house,
and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have
taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but,
beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting
only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles),
there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on
this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy species
of wild things--thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning
in the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, four
in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)--seventy-five in
all.
Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in an
environment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated
by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of the
ancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpen
behind the barn. From this very joist, however, she has already
brought off two broods since March, one of four and one of five.
As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be as long as the human race
endures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure? The case of
the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more room than a pigpen;
but as long as the domestic hen endures, if we will but give the fox
half the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure.
I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, and
stood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm
moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the hounds
baying in the swamp far away to the west of me. You have heard at
night the passing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak of
thole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barn
door somewhere down the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was
another such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of the
night.
How clear their cries and bell-like! How mellow in the distance,
ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging
silver bell! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the sound
rising and falling through the rolling woodland and spreading like a
curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows.
I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for an
instant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the
drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase swept
unhindered across the meadows.
What was that? A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that cracked
in the path behind me! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feet
came up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on--as into the
moonlight, beyond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked the fox.
The dogs were now very near and coming as swift as their eager legs
could carry them. But I was standing still, so still that the fox did
not recognize me as anything more than a stump.
No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately. But how
much more than a stump?
The dogs were coming. But what was I? The fox was curious,
interested, and after trying to make me out from a distance, crept
gingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!
But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in the dew of the meadow and
seemed to tell him little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his
tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch me. He might have
outwatched me, though I kept amazingly still, but the hounds were
crashing through the underbrush below, and he must needs be off.
Getting carefully up, he trotted first this side of me, then that, for
a better view, then down the path up which he had just come, and into
the very throat of the panting clamor, when, leaping lightly aside over
a pile of brush and stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly about
me.
Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation to me of what may be the
mind of Nature. I have never seen anything in the woods, never had a
glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidence
in the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wild
life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms in
the midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of
the fox.
At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always
of taking every advantage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably
never will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits in
the wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazing
resourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yet
have in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead of
against, them.
I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only
my helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldom
been due to other than natural causes--very rarely man-made. On the
contrary, man-made conditions out of doors--the multiplicity of fences,
gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or
prairie--are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild
life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more
kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths
and short cuts and chances for escape--all things that help preserve
life.
One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along the
road, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woods
all night, bearing down in my direction.
It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges
beaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping
into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road
to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight,
but where I could see a long stretch of the road.
On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the
trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the
meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross--and there he
stood!
I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of
wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his
heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.
He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big
brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a race
burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit
of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open
road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket that
had clogged his long course.
On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bend
in the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on the
road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!--back
into the very jaws of the hounds!--Instead he broke into the tangle of
grapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke into
the road from _behind_ the mass of thick, ropy vines.
Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise and
speed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, a
whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on.
Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyond
the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail,
on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had
discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.
If I had had a _gun_! Yes, but I did not. But if I _had_ had a gun,
it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun that
makes the difference--all the difference between much or little wild
life--life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, as
once the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of the
Lord.
[Illustration: Our calendar]
XIII
OUR CALENDAR
There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with the
Sundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one with
the Thursdays in red,--Thursday being publication day for the periodical
sending out the calendar,--and one, our own calendar, with several sorts
of days in red--all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the last
to be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15.
Pup's Christian name is Jersey,--because he came to us from that dear
land by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar,--an
explanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naming
him. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling him
anything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from the
city New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, the
cognomen done in red, this declaration:--
January 1, 1915
No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY. If anybody calls
him any other name but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to
clean out his coop two times a day.
This was as plain as if it had been written on the wall. Somebody at
last had spoken, and not as the scribes, either.
We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on
the calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our six
hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed
Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck,
but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that is because
I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first
dog! And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp
dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again.
One can hardly imagine what that means exactly. Of course, we have had
other things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams,
the woods and fields, books and kindling--and I have had Her and the four
boys,--the family that is,--till at times, I will say, I have not felt
the need of anything more. But none of these things is a dog, not even
the boys. A dog is one of man's primal needs. "We want a dog!" had been
a kind of family cry until Babe's last birthday.
Some six months before that birthday Babe came to me and said:--
"Father, will you guess what I want for my birthday?"
"A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," I replied.
"Skates in August!" he shouted in derision. "Try again."
"A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear and an electric
self-starter and stopper."
"No. Now, Father,"--and the little face in its Dutch-cut frame sobered
seriously,--"it's something with four legs."
"A duck," I suggested.
"That has only two."
"An armadillo, then."
"No."
"A donkey."
"No."
"An elephant?"
"No."
"An alligator?"
"No."
"A h-i-p hip, p-o, po, hippo, p-o-t pot, hippopot, a hippopota, m-u-s
mus--hippopotamus, _that's_ what it is!"
This had always made him laugh, being the way, as I had told him, that I
learned to spell when I went to school; but to-day there was something
deep and solemn in his heart, and he turned away from my lightness with
close-sealed lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed suspiciously
open. I was half inclined to call him back and guess again. But had not
every one of the four boys been making me guess at that four-legged thing
since they could talk about birthdays? And were not the conditions of
our living as unfit now for four-legged things as ever? Besides, they
already had the cow and the pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More live
stock was simply out of the question at present.
The next day Babe snuggled down beside me at the fire.
"Father," he said, "have you guessed yet?"
"Guessed what?" I asked.
"What I want for my birthday?"
"A nice little chair to sit before the fire in?"
"Horrors! a chair! why, I said a four-legged thing."
"Well, how many legs has a chair?"
"Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four legs?"
"Certainly."
"Then it must have four feet, hasn't it?"
"Cert--why--I--don't--know exactly about that," I stammered. "But if you
want a rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have it, feet or fins,
four legs or two, though I must confess that I don't exactly know,
according to legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong."
"I don't want any chair, nor anything else with wooden legs."
"What kind of legs, then?"
"Bone ones."
"Why! why! I don't know any bone-legged things."
"Bones with hair on them."
"Oh, you want a Teddybear--_you_, and coming eight! Well! Well! But
Teddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone."
The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk
ceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had me
guessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossil
forms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had
Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently,
persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though
long since my only question had been--What breed? August came finally,
and a few days before the 24th we started by automobile for New Jersey.
We were speeding along the road for Princeton when all four boys leaned
forward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:--
"Shall I have any birthday down here, Father?"
"Certainly."
"Have you guessed _what_ yet?"
I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle till the words were
snatched from his teeth by the swirling dust behind and conversation was
made impossible. Two days later, the birthday found us at Uncle Joe's.
Babe was playing with Trouble, the little Scotch-Irish terrier, when
Uncle Joe and I came into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe looked
up and asked:--
"Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged thing I want for my
birthday?"
"You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I caught up the dear child in my
arms and kept back his cries with kisses.
"And you shall have one, too, if you will give me three or four weeks to
get him for you. Trouble here is the daddy of--goodness! I suppose he
is--of I don't know how many little puppies--but a good many--and I am
giving you one of them right now, for this birthday, only, you will wait
till their mother weans them, of course?"
"Yes, yes, of course!"
And so it happened that several weeks later a tiny black-and-tan puppy
with nothing much of a tail came through from New Jersey to Hingham to
hearts that had waited for him very, very long.
Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter day of that kind on the
calendar. These are only the beginning of such days, our own peculiar
days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because in one way or another
these days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of the
soul.
There is Melon Day, for example,--a movable feast-day in August, if
indeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, you
ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul?
This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of
Jersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who,
walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated
ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even to
the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of
something out of Eden before the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah,
the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I
fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines
themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the
heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to
split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off,
muffled thud,--the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and
cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into
the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and
quail gathered daily at the grocer's.
We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That is
everybody's day, while the red-letter days on our
calendar--Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the day
close to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; or
the Day of the First Snow--these days are peculiarly, privately our own,
and these are red.
[Illustration: The Fields of Fodder]
XIV
THE FIELDS OF FODDER
It is doubtless due to early associations, to the large part played by
cornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these New
England farms without a touch of homesickness. It was always the
autumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and there
was something connected with the husking and the shocking of the corn
that took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single event
of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautiful
and significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shock
not so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth's
life, or rather of life--here on the earth as one could wish it to
be--lived to the end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered and
set in order over a broad field.
Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I was
a boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted
cornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played--the notes
of the wind coming over the field of corn-butts and stirring the loose
blades as it moved among the silent shocks. I have more than a memory
of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winter
rain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillment
of some solemn compact between us--between me and the fields and skies.
Is this too much for a boy to feel? Not if he is father to the man! I
have heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this is
the 21st of June, the longest day of the year--as if the shadows were
already lengthening, even across their morning way.
If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come a
four-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoon
shadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals. No, I
would return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn is
cut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing to
the ground.
At that word "sighing" many trusting readers will lay this essay down.
They have had more than enough of this brand of pathos from their youth
up.
"The 'sobbing wind,' the 'weeping rain,'--
'Tis time to give the lie
To these old superstitious twain--
That poets sing and sigh.
"Taste the sweet drops,--no tang of brine,
Feel them--they do not burn;
The daisy-buds, whereon they shine,
Laugh, and to blossoms turn"--
that is, in June they do; but do they in October? There are no daisies
to laugh in October. A few late asters fringe the roadsides; an
occasional bee hums loudly in among them; but there is no sound of
laughter, and no shine of raindrops in the broken hoary seed-stalks
that strew the way. If the daisy-buds _laugh_,--as surely they do in
June,--why should not the wind sob and the rain weep--as surely they
do--in October? There are days of shadow with the days of sunshine;
the seasons have their moods, as we have ours, and why should one be
accused of more sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, in
yielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the slow, slanting rain
of October weeps, and the soughing wind comes sobbing through the trees?
Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat off the fading
leaves and flatten them into shapeless patterns on the soaking floor.
Fall and slant and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, through
the creaking branches, blow about the whispering corners; parley there
outside my window; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hiding, and if
I am sad, sigh with me and sob.
May one not indulge in gentle melancholy these closing days of autumn,
and invite the weather in, without being taken to task for it? One
should no more wish to escape from the sobering influence of the
October days than from the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the
wide wonder of the stars.
"If winds have wailed and skies wept tears,
To poet's vision dim,
'T was that his own sobs filled his ears,
His weeping blinded him"--
of course! And blessed is the man who finds winds that will wail with
him, and skies that love him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves his
friends and next of kin a great deal of perfunctory weeping.
There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October. A
single, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacity
for joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still ache
for more. So it happens that June is only a memory of individual days,
while October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a spirit, a soul,
beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So much is already gone, so many things
seem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the wooded
hillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the very
sunshine of October.
In June the day itself was the great event. It is not so in October.
Then its coming and going were attended with ceremony and splendor, the
dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all the pageantry and pomp
of a regal fête. Now the day has lessened, and breaks tardily and
without a dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades into the
night. The warp of dusk runs through even its sunlit fabric from
daybreak to dark.
It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, this
screen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of
the fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October mood of things.
For it is the inner mood of things that has changed as well as the
outward face of things. The very heart of the hills feels it. The
hush that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. The
blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not grown green again. No new
buds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the old
leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the cornfield is only an
area of stubs and long lines of yellow shocks; and in the corners of
the meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks,--joe-pye-weed, boneset,
goldenrod,--bare and already bleaching; and deep within their matted
shade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amber
pendant of the jewel-weed, to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings
so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe to listen!
There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry of the hyla is
stilled--the cawing of crows beyond the wood, the scratching of a
beetle in the crisp leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tiny
chirrup of a cricket in the grass--remnants of sounds from the summer,
and echoes as of single strings left vibrating after the concert is
over and the empty hall is closed.
But how sweet is the silence! To be so far removed from sounds that
one can hear a single cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the
leaves! Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. One cannot
sit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged to
stand up--in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silence
in life's desert of confusion and din. If October brought one nothing
else but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough. For the
silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm. There
is none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, none
of the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of the
death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, none
of the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars,
none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without bound
or break, eternal--none of these qualities in the sweet silence of
October. I have listened to all of these, and found them answering to
mute tongues within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such moods are
rare--moods that can meet death, that can sweep through the heavens
with the constellations, and that can hold converse with the dumb,
stirless desert; whereas the need for the healing and restoration found
in the serene silence of October is frequent.
There are voices here, however, many of them; but all subdued, single,
pure, as when the chorus stops, and some rare singer carries the air
on, and up, and far away till it is only soul.
The joyous confusion and happy tumult of summer are gone; the mating
and singing and fighting are over; the growing and working and
watch-care done; the running even of the sap has ceased; the grip of
the little twigs has relaxed, and the leaves, for very weight of peace,
float off into the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, lies in the
after-summer sun, and dreams.