THE MISSING TOOTH
The snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened,
faded, and stained with mud--a dull, dreary waste in the gray
February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the
matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the
narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the
hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They
had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the
heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the
winter snows. The spring was breaking now and the small bundle, gently
loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.
Shall I stop beside this small bundle of whitening bones or shall I
turn my head away and pass on? Shall I allow you to stop with me in
our winter ramble and let you see the tragedy here in the flattened
meadow grass, or shall I hide from your eyes the dark, the bitter, the
tragic in the lives of the wild things out of doors?
I think it is best to hide nothing from you. Real love for nature is
largely sympathy with nature; and there can be no sympathy without
intimate and full understanding of the struggle and suffering in the
lives out of doors. There is a dark story in this little bundle of
bones. Do you wish to hear it? There is a fierce, cruel threat in the
growl of the winter wind. Do you wish to hear that? There is menace
and death in the shrill scream of the hawk. Do you wish to hear that?
Or do you wish to hear only the song of the robin? only the whisper of
the summer breeze? only the story of the life and love and joy of
things?
No, there are two sides to life--two sides to your life, the bright
and dark sides; two sides to the lives of all men, and to the lives of
all things. Summer is the bright side of Nature’s life; winter is the
dark side. Summer and winter are both needed to round out the life of
the year; so tears and laughter seem to be needed in our lives; joy
and sorrow, peace and suffering, rest and hardship--these, or
something like them, seem to be needed in the lesser lives of birds
and beasts to round out their experience and make them keen and
strong.
Happily, the pain and suffering in nature are largely hidden from us.
Wild things when stricken “turn their faces to the wall,” retreat,
slink silently away out of sight to be alone. They do not wish us to
know. But we do know, and we need to know, if we would enter into
their lives as a sharer in them; and if we would enter into and
understand the larger, wider, deeper life of which they, and we, and
all things, are a part.
You must pause with me above this little bundle of bones until I tell
you their story.
* * * * *
I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton of a muskrat. But
it was something peculiar in the way they lay that had caused me to
pause. They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the
hands of sleep. They had not been flung down. The delicate ribs had
fallen in, but not a bone was broken nor displaced, not one showed the
splinter of shot, or the crack that might have been made by a steel
trap. No violence had been done them. They had been touched by nothing
rougher than the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had crept.
Death had passed by them here; but no one else in all the winter
months.
The creature had died--a “natural” death. It had starved, while a
hundred acres of plenty lay round about. Picking up the skull, I
found the jaws locked together as if they were a single solid bone.
One of the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing, and
apparently had never developed. The opposite tooth on the lower jaw,
thus unopposed and so unworn, had grown beyond its normal height up
into the empty socket above, then on, turning outward and piercing the
cheek-bone in front of the eye, whence, curving like a boar’s tusk, it
had slowly closed the jaws and locked them, rigid, set, as fixed as
jaws of stone.
At first the animal had been able to gnaw; but as the tooth curved
through the bones of the face and gradually tightened the jaws, the
creature got less and less to eat, until, one day, creeping out of the
burrow for food, the poor thing was unable to get back.
We seldom come upon the like of this. It is commoner than we think;
but, as I have said, it is usually hidden away and quickly over. How
often do we see a wild thing sick--a bird or animal suffering from an
accident, or dying, like this muskrat, because of some physical
defect? The struggle between animals--the falling of the weak as prey
to the strong--is ever before us; but this single-handed fight between
the creature and Nature is a far rarer, silenter tragedy. Nature is
too swift to allow us time for sympathy.
At best there is only a fighting chance in the meadow. Only strength
and craft may win; only those who have all of their teeth. The muskrat
with a single missing tooth never enters the real race of life at all.
He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and, if the owl and mink are not
watching, he dies alone in the grass, and we rarely know.
I shall never forget the impression made upon me by those quiet bones.
It was like that made by my first visit to a great city hospital--out
of the busy, cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick and
injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the woods and meadows and
never step from the sweet air and the pure sunlight of health into a
hospital. But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or injured are
there. The proportion is smaller than among us humans, and for very
good reasons, yet there is much real suffering, and to come upon it,
as we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our understanding and
deepen our sympathy with the life out of doors.
No sensible person could for a moment believe the animals capable of
suffering as a human being can suffer; nor that there is any such call
for our sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. But an
unselfish sharing of the life of the fields demands that we take part
in all of it.
Nature wears a brave face. Her smile is ever in the open, her laughter
quick and contagious. This brave front is no mask. It is real.
Sunlight, song, color, form, and fragrance are real. And so is our
love and joy in Nature real. Real, also, should be our sympathy and
sorrow with Nature.
Here, for instance, are my crows: do I share fully in the life of
Nature so long as I think of the crow only with admiration for his
cunning or with wrath at his destruction of my melons and corn?
A crow has his solemn moments. He knows fear, pain, hunger, accident,
and disease; he knows something very like affection and love. For all
that, he is a mere crow. But a mere crow is no mean thing. He is my
brother, and a real love will give me part in all his existence. I
will forage and fight with him; I will parley and play; and when the
keen north winds find him in the frozen pines, I will suffer with him,
too.
Here again are my meadow voles. I know that my hay crop is shorter
every year for them,--a very little shorter. And I can look with
satisfaction at a cat carrying a big bob-tailed vole out of my
“mowing,” for the voles, along with other mice, are injurious to man.
But one day I came upon two of my voles struggling for life in the
water, exhausted and well-nigh dead. I helped them out, as I should
have helped out any other creature, and having saved them, why, what
could I do but let them go--even into my own meadow? This has happened
several times.
When the drought dries the meadow, the voles come to the deep,
plank-walled spring at the upper end, to drink. The water usually
trickles over the curb, but in a long dry spell it shrinks to a foot
or more below the edge, and the voles, once within for their drink,
cannot get out. Time and again I had fished them up, until I thought
to leave a board slanting down to the water, so that they could climb
back to the top.
It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a meadow mouse, to pour
out, even waste, a little of the oil and wine of sympathy on the
humblest of our needy neighbors.
Here are the chimney swallows, too. One can look with complacency,
with gratitude, indeed, upon the swallows of other chimneys, as they
hawk in the sky; yet, when the little creatures, so useful, but so
uncombed and unfumigated, set up their establishments in _your_
chimney, to the jeopardy of the whole house, then you need an
experience like mine.
I had had a like experience years before, when the house did not
belong to me. This time, however, the house was mine, and if it became
infested with vermin because of the swallows, I could not move away;
so I felt like burning them in the chimney, bag and baggage. There
were four nests, as nearly as I could make out, and, from the
frequent squeakings, I knew they were all filled with young. Then one
day, when the young were nearly ready to fly, there came a rain that
ran wet far down the sooty chimney, loosened the mortar of the nests,
and sent them crashing into the fireplace.
Some of the young birds were killed outright; the others were at my
mercy, flung upon me,--helpless, wailing infants! Of course I made it
comfortable for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flutter
down unhindered to feed them. Had I understood the trick, I would have
hawked for them and helped feed them myself!
They made a great thunder in the chimney; they rattled down into the
living-room a little soot; but nothing further came of it. We were not
quarantined. On the contrary, we had our reward, according to promise;
for it was an extremely interesting event to us all. It dispelled some
silly qualms, it gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so
foreign, yet so closely linked to our own; and it made us pause with
wonder that even our empty, sooty chimney could be made use of by
Nature to our great benefit.
I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows came tumbling down when
the birds used to build in caves and hollow trees? It is a most
extraordinary change, this change from the trees to the chimneys, and
it does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase of
architectural wisdom necessary to meet all the conditions of the new
hollow. The mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the empty
trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so that the nest,
especially when crowded with young, is easily loosened by the rain,
and sometimes even broken away by the slight wing stroke of a
descending swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird as it
settles with food.
We little realize how frequent fear is among the birds and animals,
and how often it proves fatal. A situation that would have caused no
trouble ordinarily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a trap.
I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast express train and fall
dead. Last winter I left the large door of the barn open, so that my
flock of juncos could feed inside upon the floor. They found their way
into the hayloft and went up and down freely. On two or three
occasions I happened in so suddenly that they were thoroughly
frightened and flew madly into the cupola to escape through the
windows. They beat against the glass until utterly dazed, and would
have perished there, had I not climbed up later and brought them down.
So thousands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying wildly
against the dazzling lanterns of the lighthouses, and thousands more
either lose their course in the thick darkness of the stormy nights,
or else are blown out of it, and drift far away to sea.
Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not as frequent among the
careful wild folk as among us, perhaps; but there is abundant evidence
of their occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal results.
Several instances are recorded of birds that have been tangled in the
threads of their nests; and one instance of a bluebird that was caught
in the flying meshes of an oriole’s nest into which it had been
spying.
I once found the mummied body of a chippy twisting and swinging in the
leafless branches of a peach tree. The little creature was suspended
in a web of horsehair about two inches below a nest. It looked as if
she had brought a snarled bunch of the hair and left it loose in the
twigs. Later on, a careless step and her foot was fast, when every
frantic effort for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest
above were four other tiny mummies--a double tragedy that might with
care have been averted.
A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I discovered hanging dead
upon a barbed-wire fence. By some chance it had slipped a foot through
an open place between the two twisted strands, and then, fluttering
along, had wedged the leg and broken it in the struggle to escape.
We have all held our breath at the hazardous traveling of the
squirrels in the treetops. What other animals take such
risks?--leaping at dizzy heights from bending limbs to catch the tips
of limbs still smaller, saving themselves again and again by the
merest chance.
But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful watcher in the woods,
on one occasion when he was hunting, saw a gray squirrel miss its
footing in a tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.
I have frequently known squirrels to fall short distances, and once I
saw a red squirrel come to grief like this gray squirrel. He was
scurrying through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little hurried
and flustered at sight of me, and, nearing the end of a high branch,
was in the act of springing, when the dead tip cracked under him and
he came tumbling headlong. The height must have been forty feet, so
that before he reached the ground he had righted himself,--his tail
out and legs spread,--but the fall was too great. He hit the earth
heavily, and before I could reach him he lay dead upon the needles,
with blood oozing from his eyes and nostrils.
Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things suffer as we hardly
yet understand. No one can estimate how many of our wild creatures die
in a year from severe cold, heavy storms, high winds and tides. I
have known the nests of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept
away in a great storm; while the tides, over and over, have flooded
the inlet marshes and drowned out the nests in the grass--those of the
clapper rails by thousands.
I remember a late spring storm that came with the returning redstarts
and, in my neighborhood, killed many of them. Toward evening of that
day one of the little black-and-orange voyageurs fluttered against the
window and we let him in, wet, chilled, and so exhausted that for a
moment he lay on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was
another soft tapping at the window,--and _two_ little redstarts were
sharing our cheer and drying their butterfly wings in our warmth. Both
of these birds would have perished had we not harbored them for the
night.
The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as we; they cannot
foretell as far ahead nor provide as certainly against need, despite
the popular notion to the contrary.
We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat houses, to the hoards
of the squirrels, and say, “How wise and far-sighted these
Nature-taught children are!” True, they are, but only for conditions
that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the unusual. The gray
squirrels did not provide for the unusually hard weather of last
winter. Three of them from the woodlot came begging of me, and lived
on my wisdom, not their own.
Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap, that have neither
storehouse nor barn, yet they are fed--but not always. Indeed, there
are few of our winter birds that go hungry so often as do the cousins
of the ravens, the crows, and that die in so great numbers for lack of
food and shelter.
After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a
crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and
wounded. Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the
frozen fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and
less able to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter
wind breaks loose and sweeps down upon the pines.
“List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the ourie cattle,”--
and how often I have thought me of the crows biding the night yonder
in the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe,
have I watched them returning at night, that the crows will never
cease flying through my wintry sky,--an endless line of wavering black
figures, weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.
And to-night another wild storm sweeps across the winter fields. All
the afternoon the crows have been going over, and are still passing as
the darkness settles at five o’clock. Now it is nearly eight, and the
long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind
shrieks about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past
the corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the
fields. I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines
where the fields roll into the woods--a vast surf sound, but softer
and higher, with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.
I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark
forms. As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling
the crows, their breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty and
bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for
thirteen hours of night.
Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that sometimes the small
flames flicker and go out?