A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER
I
The fullness, the flood, of life has come, and, contrary to one’s
expectations, a marked silence has settled down over the waving fields
and the cool deep woods. I am writing these lines in the lamplight,
with all the windows and doors open to the dark July night. The summer
winds are moving in the trees. A cricket and a few small green
grasshoppers are chirping in the grass; but nothing louder is near at
hand. And nothing louder is far off, except the cry of the
whip-poor-will in the wood road. But him you hear in the spring and
autumn as well as in the summer. Ah, listen! My tree-toad in the
grapevine over the bulkhead door!
This is a voice you must hear--on cloudy summer days, toward twilight,
and well into the evening. Do you know what it is to feel lonely? If
you do, I think, then, that you know how the soft, far-off, eerie cry
of the tree-toad sounds. He is prophesying rain, the almanac people
think, but I think it is only the sound of rain in his voice, summer
rain after a long drouth, cooling, reviving, soothing rain, with just
a patter of something in it that I cannot describe, something that I
used to hear on the shingles of the garret over the rafters where the
bunches of horehound and catnip and pennyroyal hung.
II
You ought to hear the lively clatter of a mowing-machine. It is hot
out of doors; the roads are beginning to look dusty; the insects are
tuning up in the grass, and, like their chorus all together, and
marching round and round the meadow, moves the mower’s whirring blade.
I love the sound. Haying is hard, sweet work. The farmer who does not
love his haying ought to be made to keep a country store and sell
kerosene oil and lumps of dead salt pork out of a barrel. He could not
appreciate a live, friendly pig.
Down the long swath sing the knives, the cogs click above the square
corners, and the big, loud thing sings on again,--the song of
“first-fruits,” the first great ingathering of the season,--a song to
touch the heart with joy and sweet solemnity.
III
You ought to hear the Katydids--two of them on the trees outside your
window. They are not saying “Katy did,” nor singing “Katy did”; they
are fiddling “Katy did,” “Katy didn’t”--by rasping the fore wings.
Is the sound “Katy” or “Katy did”? or what is said? Count the notes.
Are they at the rate of two hundred per minute? Watch the
instrumentalist--till you make sure it is the male who is wooing Katy
with his persistent guitar. The male has no long ovipositors.
IV
Another instrumentalist to hear is the big cicada or “harvest-fly.”
There is no more characteristic sound of all the summer than his big,
quick, startling whirr--a minute mowing-machine up on the limb
overhead! Not so minute either, for the creature is fully two inches
long, with bulging eyes and a click to his wings when he flies that
can be heard a hundred feet away! “Dog-days-z-z-z-z-z-z-z” is the song
he sings to me.
[Illustration: “FLITTING AND WAVERING ABOUT”]
V
This is the season of small sounds. As a test of the keenness of your
ears go out at night into some open glade in the woods or by the side
of some pond and listen for the squeaking of the bats flitting and
wavering above in the uncertain light over your head. You will need a
stirless midsummer dusk; and if you can hear the thin, fine squeak as
the creature dives near your head, you may be sure your ears are
almost as keen as those of the fox. The sound is not audible to most
human ears.
VI
Another set of small sounds characteristic of midsummer is the
twittering of the flocking swallows in the cornfields and upon the
telegraph-wires. This summer I have had long lines of the young birds
and their parents from the old barn below the hill strung on the wires
from the house across the lawn. Here they preen while some of the old
birds hawk for flies, the whole line of them breaking into a soft
little twitter each time a newcomer alights among them. One swallow
does not make a summer, but your electric light wires sagging with
them is the very soul of the summer.
VII
In the deep, still woods you will hear the soft call of the robin--a
low, pensive, plaintive note unlike its spring cry or the
after-shower song. It is as if the voice of the slumberous woods were
speaking--without alarm, reproach, or welcome either. It is an
invitation to stretch yourself on the deep moss and let the warm
shadows of the summer woods steal over you with sleep.
[Illustration: THE RED-EYED VIREO]
And this, too, is a thing to learn. Doing something, hearing
something, seeing something by no means exhausts our whole business
with the out-of-doors. To lie down and do nothing, to be able to keep
silence and to rest on the great whirling globe is as needful as to
know everything going on about us.
VIII
There is one bird-song so characteristic of midsummer that I think
every lover of the woods must know it: the oft-repeated, the constant
notes of the red-eyed vireo or “preacher.” Wilson Flagg says of him:
“He takes the part of a deliberative orator who explains his subject
in a few words and then makes a pause for his hearers to reflect upon
it. We might suppose him to be repeating moderately with a pause
between each sentence, ‘You see it--you know it--do you hear me?--do
you believe it?’ All these strains are delivered with a rising
inflection at the close, and with a pause, as if waiting for an
answer.”
IX
A few other bird-notes that are associated with hot days and stirless
woods, and that will be worth your hearing are the tree-top song of
the scarlet tanager. He is one of the summer sights, a dash of the
burning tropics is his brilliant scarlet and jet black, and his song
is a loud, hoarse, rhythmical carol that has the flame of his feathers
in it and the blaze of the sun. You will know it from the cool, liquid
song of the robin both by its peculiar quality and because it is a
short song, and soon ended, not of indefinite length like the robin’s.
Then the peculiar, coppery, reverberating, or _confined_ song of the
indigo bunting--as if the bird were singing inside some great kettle.
One more--among a few others--the softly falling, round, small,
upward-swinging call of the wood pewee. Is it sad? Yes, sad. But
sweeter than sad,--restful, cooling, and inexpressibly gentle. All day
long from high above your head and usually quite out of view, the
voice--it seems hardly a voice--breaks the long silence of the summer
woods.
X
When night comes down with the long twilight there sounds a strange,
almost awesome _quawk_ in the dusk over the fields. It sends a thrill
through me, notwithstanding its nightly occurrence all through July
and August. It is the passing of a pair of night herons--the
black-crowned, I am sure, although this single pair only fly over.
Where the birds are numerous they nest in great colonies.
It is the wild, eerie _quawk_ that you should hear, a far-off,
mysterious, almost uncanny sound that fills the twilight with a vague,
untamed something, no matter how bright and civilized the day may have
been.
XI
From the harvest fields comes the sweet whistle of Bob White, the
clear, round notes rolling far through the hushed summer noon; in the
wood-lot the crows and jays have already begun their cawings and
screamings that later on become the dominant notes of the golden
autumn. They are not so loud and characteristic now because of the
insect orchestra throbbing with a rhythmic beat through the air. So
wide, constant, and long-continued is this throbbing note of the
insects that by midsummer you almost cease to notice it. But stop and
listen--field crickets, katydids, long-horned grasshoppers, snowy
tree-crickets: _chwĭ-chwĭ-chwĭ-chwĭ--thrr-r-r-r-r-r-r
--crrri-crrri-crrri-crrri--gru-gru-gru-gru--
retreat-retreat-retreat-treat-treat_--like the throbbing of the
pulse.
XII
One can do no more than suggest in a short chapter like this; and all
that I am doing here is catching for you some of the still, small
voices of _my_ summer. How unlike those of your summer they may be I
can easily imagine, for you are in the Pacific Coast, or off on the
vast prairies of Canada, or down in the sunny fields and hill-country
of the South.
I have done enough if I have suggested that you stop and listen; for
after all it is having ears which hear _not_ that causes the trouble.
Hear the voices that make your summer vocal--the loud and still voices
which alike pass unheeded unless we pause to hear.
As a lesson in listening, go out some quiet evening, and as the
shadows slip softly over the surface of the wood-walled pond, listen
to the breathing of the fish as they come to the top, and the splash
of the muskrats, or the swirl of the pickerel as he ploughs a furrow
through the silence.