A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER
I
First, select some bird or beast or insect that lives with you in your
dooryard or house or near neighborhood, and keep track of his doings
all summer long, jotting down in a diary your observations. You might
take the white-faced hornet that builds the big paper nests in the
trees; or the mud wasp, or the toad under the steps, or the swifts in
the chimney, or the swallows in the barn. It hardly matters what you
take, for every life is interesting. The object is to learn how to
follow up your study, how to watch one life long enough, and under
circumstances different enough, to discover its many-sidedness, its
fascination and romance. Such careful and prolonged study will surely
reveal to you something no one else has seen, too. It will be good
training in patience and independence.
II
Along with this study of _one_ life, keep a list of all the beasts,
birds, insects, flowers, etc., that live--I mean, that build nests or
dig holes and rear families--in your dooryard or in this “haunt” that
I told you in “The Spring of the Year” (see page 42, Sections III and
IV) you ought to pick out as your own field of study. This list will
grow all through the summer and from year to year. I have a list of
seventy-six wild neighbors (not counting the butterflies and insects)
that are sharing my fourteen-acre farm with me. How many and _what_
wild things are sharing your dooryard, your park, your favorite haunt
or farm with you? Such a list of names, with a blank place left for
each where observations can be entered from time to time, would be one
of the most useful and interesting journals you could keep.
III
All through June and into July you should have a round of birds’ nests
that you visit daily, and to which you can take your friends and
visitors--that is, if you live in or near the country. One will be in
the big unused chimney of the house, perhaps, and that will be the
first; then one in the barn, or in a bird-house in the yard; or in the
pear-or apple-tree hole; one in the lilac or honeysuckle bushes, and
then down into the orchard, out into the meadow, on into the woods and
back--taking in twenty to thirty birds’ nests with eggs and young! Did
you ever do it? Can you do it this summer? Don’t you think it would be
quite as exciting and interesting as going to the circus? I can do it;
and if you come out to Mullein Hill in June or July, any one of my
small boys will take you on his “birds’ nest round.”
IV
You should camp out--even if you have to pitch your tent in the back
yard or up on the roof! You should go to sleep on a bed of
boughs,--pine, or spruce, or hickory, if possible,--or swing your
hammock between the trunks of sweet-smelling forest trees, and turn
your face up to the stars! You will never want to sleep in a room with
closed windows after that. To see the stars looking down upon you; to
see the tree-tops swaying over you; to feel the fresh night wind
stealing across your face and breathing into your very soul--yes, you
must sleep at least _one_ night this summer right out on a bed of
boughs; but with a blanket of wool and a piece of sail-cloth or rubber
coat over you and under you, and perhaps some mosquito-netting.
V
But you must _not_ build a fire in the woods, unless you have a guide
or older people with a permit along. Fires are terrible masters, and
it is almost as dangerous to build a fire in the woods as to build one
in the waste-paper basket in the basement of some large store. Along
the seashore or by the margin of a river or lake, if you take every
precaution, it might be safe enough; but in the woods, if camping out,
make all preparations by clearing a wide space down to the bare
ground, then see that it is bare ground and not a boggy, rooty
peat-bed beneath, that will take fire and smoulder and burn away down
under the surface out of sight, to break through, perhaps, a week
after you have gone, and set the whole mountain-side afire. Build your
fire on bare, sandy earth; have a shovel and can of water at hand, and
put the fire out when you are done with it. It is against the law in
most States to set a fire out of doors after the 1st of April, without
a permit from the fire-warden.
Now, after this caution, you ought to go out some evening by the shore
with a small party and roast some green corn in the husk; then,
wrapping some potatoes in clay, bake them; if you have fish, wrap them
in clay with their scales on, and bake them. The scales will come off
beautifully when the clay is cracked off, and leave you the tastiest
meal of fish and potatoes and corn you ever ate. Every boy and girl
ought to have a little camp-life and ought to have each his share of
camp-work to perform this summer.
VI
At the close of some stifling July day you ought to go out into the
orchard or woods and watch the evening come on--to notice how the wild
life revives, flowers open, birds sing, animals stir, breezes start,
leaves whisper, and all the world awakes.
Then follow that up by getting out the next morning before sunrise,
say at half-past three o’clock, an hour before the sun bursts over the
eastern hills. If you are not a stump or a stone, the sight and the
smell--the whole indescribable freshness and wonder of it all--will
thrill you. Would you go to the Pyramids or Niagara or the Yellowstone
Park? Yes, you would, and you would take a great deal of trouble to
see any one of these wonders! Just as great a wonder, just as
thrilling an experience, is right outside of your bedroom early any
June, July, or August morning! I know boys and girls who _never_ saw
the sun get up!
VII
You ought to spend some time this summer on a real farm. Boy or girl,
you need to feel ploughed ground under your feet; you need the contact
with growing things in the ground; you need to handle a hoe, gather
the garden vegetables, feed the chickens, feed the pigs, drive the
cows to pasture, help stow away the hay--and all the other interesting
experiences that make up the simple, elemental, and wonderfully varied
day of farm life. A mere visit is not enough. You need to take part in
the digging and weeding and planting. The other day I let out my cow
after keeping her all winter in the barn. The first thing she did was
to kick up her heels and run to a pile of fresh earth about a newly
planted tree and fall to eating it--not the tree, but the earth, the
raw, rich soil--until her muzzle was muddy halfway to her eyes. You do
not need to eat it; but the need to smell it, to see it, to feel it,
to work in it, is just as real as the cow’s need to eat it.
VIII
You ought to learn how to browse and nibble in the woods. What do I
mean? Why, just this: that you ought to learn how to taste the woods
as well as to see them. Maurice Thompson, in “Byways and Bird Notes,”
a book you ought to read (and that is another “ought to do” for this
summer), has a chapter called “Browsing and Nibbling” in which his
mountain guide says: “What makes me allus a-nibblin’ an’ a-browsin’ of
the bushes an’ things as I goes along? I kinder b’lieve hit keeps a
feller’s heart stiddy an’ his blood pure for to nibble an’ browse
kinder like a deer does. You know a deer is allus strong an’ active,
an’ hit is everlastin’ly a-nibblin’ an’ a-browsin’. Ef hit is good for
the annymel, hit otter be good for the feller.”
[Illustration: SASSAFRAS]
[Illustration: DEADLY NIGHTSHADE]
The guide may not be right about the strength to be had from tasting
the roots and barks and buds of things, but I know that I am right
when I tell you that the very sap of the summer woods will seem to
mingle with your blood at the taste of the aromatic sassafras root,
the spicy bark of the sweet birch and the biting bulb of the Indian
turnip. Many of the perfumes, odors, resins, gums, saps, and nectars
of the woods can be known to you only by sense of taste.
IX
[Illustration: POISON SUMACH]
“But I shall bite into something poisonous,” you say. Yes, you must
look out for that, and you must take the pains this summer to learn
the poisonous things of our woods and fields. So before you begin to
browse and nibble, make a business of learning the deadly nightshade
with its green or its red berries; the poison sumach with its _loose_
panicles or clusters of grayish-white berries; the three-leaved poison
ivy or “ground oak” (which you can easily tell from the five-leaved
Virginia creeper); and the deadly mushrooms with their _bulbous_
roots. These are the poisonous plants that you will meet with most
frequently, but there are a few others, and it will be safest not to
nibble any plant that is strange to you. Nor am I suggesting that you
make a meal on the pitch of the pine trees or anything else. Do not
_eat_ any of these things; taste them only. I was once made
desperately ill by eating poke root (I was a very little child) which
I took for sweet potato. Poke berries are not good to _eat_. Take
along a few good sandwiches from home to eat. But learn to know the
mints, the medicinal roots and barks, and that long list of
old-fashioned “herbs” that our grandmothers hung from the garret
rafters and made us take occasionally as “tea.”
[Illustration: POISON IVY]
[Illustration: VIRGINIA CREEPER]
X
[Illustration: THE DEADLY AMANITA]
Finally, as a lover of the woods and wild life, you ought to take a
personal responsibility for the preservation of the trees and woods in
your neighborhood, and of the birds and beasts and other lowlier forms
of wild life. Year by year the wild things are vanishing never to
return to your woods, and never to be seen again by man. Do what you
can to stop the hunting and ignorant killing of every sort. You ought
to get and read “Our Vanishing Wild Life,” by William T. Hornaday, and
then join the growing host of us who, alarmed at the fearful increase
of insect pests, and the loss to the beauty and interest of the
out-of-doors through the extermination of wild life, are doing our
best to save the wild things we still have and to increase their
numbers.
[Illustration: POKE]