THE “CONY”
We were threading our slow way along the narrow divide of the Wallowa
Mountains that runs between the branches of the Snake River. Our guide
was a former “camp-tender,” one who carries provisions to the
sheep-herders in the mountains. As we were stopping a moment to
breathe our horses and to look down upon the head springs of Big Sheep
and Salt Lick Creeks on one side, and the narrow ribbon of the Imnaha
on the other, this guide and our mammal-collector rode on ahead. An
hour later I saw them round the breast of a peak far along on the
trail and disappear. That night they brought into camp a “cony,” or
pika, or little chief hare.
The year before, this camp-tender, in passing a certain rock-slide
among the high peaks of the pass, had heard and seen a peculiar little
animal about the size and shape of a small guinea-pig, whistling among
the broken rock. He had never seen the little creature before,--had
never heard of it. It was to this slide that he now took our
naturalist, in the hope of showing him the mountain guinea-pig, and,
sure enough, they brought one back with them, and showed me my first
“cony,” one of the rarest of American mammals.
But I was broken-hearted. That I should have been so near and missed
it! For we had descended to Aneroid Lake to camp that night, and there
were no cony slides below us on the trail.
While the men were busy about camp the next morning, I slipped off
alone on foot, and, following the trail, got back about ten o’clock to
the rock-slide where they had killed the cony.
A wilder, barrener, more desolate land of crags and peaks I never
beheld. Eternal silence seemed to wrap it round. The slide was of
broken pieces of rock, just as if the bricks from an immense chimney
had cracked off and rolled down into the valley of the roof. Stunted
vegetation grew around, with scraggly wild grass and a few snow-line
flowers, for this was on the snow-line, several melting banks
glistening in the morning sun about me.
I crept round the sharp slope of the peak and down to the edge of the
rock-slide. “Any living thing in that long heap of broken rock!” I
said to myself incredulously. That barren, blasted pile of splintered
peaks the home of an animal? Why, I was on the top of the world! A
great dark hawk was wheeling over toward Eagle Cap Mountain in the
distance; far below me flapped a band of ravens; and down, down,
immeasurably far down, glistened the small winding waters of the
Imnaha; while all about me were the peaks, lonely, solitary, mighty,
terrible! Such bleakness and desolation!
But here, they told me, they had shot the cony. I could not believe
it. Why should any animal live away up here on the roof of the world?
For several feet each side of the steep, piled-up rock grew spears of
thin, wiry grass about six inches high, and a few stunted
flowers,--pussy’s-paws, alpine phlox, and beardtongue, all of them
flat to the sand,--and farther down the sides of the ravine were low,
twisted pines,--mere prostrate mats of trees that had crept in narrow
ascending tongues, up and up, until they could hang on no longer to
the bare alpine slopes. But here above the stunted pines, here in the
slide rock, where only mosses and a few flat plants could
live,--plants that blossom in the snow,--dwell the conies.
I sat down on the edge of the slide, feeling that I had had my labor
for my pains. We had been climbing these peaks in the hope of seeing
one of the last small bands of mountain sheep that made these
fastnesses their home. But, much as I wished to see a wild mountain
sheep among the crags, I wished more to see the little cony among the
rocks. “As for the stork,” says the Bible, “the fir trees are her
house. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks
for the conies.” I had always wondered about those conies--what they
looked like and how they lived among the rocks.
I knew that these little conies here in the slide (if indeed they
_could_ be here) were not those of the mountain-peaks of Palestine.
What of that! The very rocks might be different in kind from the rocks
of Nebo or Lebanon; but peaks are peaks, and rocks are rocks, and the
strange little “rabbits” that dwell in their broken slides are all
conies to me. The cony of the Bible is the little hyrax, a relative of
the elephant.
I sat for a while watching. Was this the place? I must make sure
before I settled down to waiting, for when in all my life again might
I have this chance?
Out in the middle of the slide was a pile of rocks with an uneven look
about them, as if they had been heaped up there by other hands than
those that hurled them from the peak. Going quietly out, I examined
them closely, and found the perfect print of a little bloody paw on
one of them.
This was the right place. Here was where they had shot the specimen
brought into camp. I got back to my seat, ready now to wait, even
while I knew that I was holding back the camp from its day’s march.
Perhaps I had been watching for half an hour, when from somewhere, in
the rock-slide surely, though I could not tell, there sounded a shrill
bleating whistle, not unlike the whistles of the ground squirrels and
marmots that I had heard all through the mountains, yet more
tremulous and not so piercing.
I waited. Presently a little gray form crept over a stone, stopped and
whistled, then disappeared. It was my cony!
If you can think of Molly Cottontail turned into the shape of a
guinea-pig about eight inches long, with positively no tail at all,
and with big round broad ears, and with all four legs of equal length
so that the creature walks instead of hopping,--if you can imagine
such a rabbit,--you will get a pretty clear picture of the cony, or
pika, or “little chief hare.”
I kept as still as the stones. Presently the plaintive, bleating
whistle sounded from nowhere again--behind me, beyond me, up the slide
or down, I could not tell. The rocks were rough, rusty chunks two or
three feet long, piled helter-skelter without form or order, so that
any one spot in the slide looked precisely like every other spot. I
could not tell just the piece the cony had crossed, once my eyes were
off of it, nor into which of the cracks he had disappeared. I could
only sit still and wait till I caught him moving, so completely did
his color blend with the rusty brown tone of the slide.
All the while the shrill, piteous call kept coming from anywhere in
the slide. But it was not the call of several voices, not a colony
whistling at once. The conies live in colonies, but, judging from the
single small haycock which they had curing in the sun, I think there
could not have been more than two or three pairs of them in this
particular slide. Possibly there was only the single pair, one of
which had been shot, for presently, when my eyes grew sharp enough to
pick the little creature out against the rocks, I found that one was
doing all the calling, and that for some reason he was greatly
disturbed.
Now he would stop on a slab and whistle, then dive into some long
passage under the stones, to reappear several feet or yards away. Here
he would pause to listen, and, hearing nothing, would call again,
waiting for an answer to his tremulous cry which did not come.
Under and over the stones, up and down the slide, now close to me, now
on the extreme opposite edge of the pile he traveled, nervously,
anxiously looking for something--for some _one_, I truly think; and my
heart smote me when I thought it might be for the dead mate whose
little bare foot-pads had left the bloody print upon the rock.
Up and down, in and out, he ran, calling, calling, calling, but
getting no answer back. He was the only one that showed himself, the
only live one I have ever seen, but this one I followed, as he went
searching and crying over the steep rock-slide, with my eye and with
the field-glasses, until long past noon--with a whole camp down the
cañon looking for me!
But they must know where to look. Let them climb out of the cañon,
back to the top of the world to the cony slide, if they could not wait
for me.
Higher up than the mountain sheep or the goat can live, where only the
burrowing pocket gopher and rare field mice are ever found, dwells the
cony. This particular slide was on one of the minor peaks,--loftier
ones towered all about,--nor do I know just how high it was, but the
cony dwells above the tree-line, up in the Arctic-Alpine Zone, in a
world of perpetual snow, from ten to fourteen thousand feet above the
sea.
By perpetual snow I mean that the snow-banks never melt in the
shadowed ravines and on the bare north slopes. Here, where I was
watching, the rock-slide lay open to the sun, the scanty grass was
green beyond the gully, and the squat alpine flowers were in bloom,
the saxifrage and a solitary aster (April and September together!)
blossoming in the edges of the snow just as fast as the melting banks
allowed them to lift their heads. But any day the wind might come down
from the north, keen and thick and white about the summits, and leave
the flowers and the cony slide covered deep beneath a drift.
Spring, summer, and autumn are all one season, all crowded together--a
kind of peak piercing for a few short weeks the long, bleak, unbroken
land of winter here on the roof of the world.
But during this brief period the thin grass springs up, and the conies
cut and cure it, enough of it to last them from the falling of the
September snows until the drifts are once more melted and their
rock-slide warms in another summer’s sun.
For the cony does not hibernate. He stays awake down in his catacombs.
Think of being buried alive in pitch-black night with snow twenty-five
feet thick above you for nine out of twelve months of the year! Yet
here they are away up on the sides of the wildest summits, living
their lives, keeping their houses, rearing their children, visiting
back and forth through their subways for all this long winter,
protected by the drifts which lie so deep that they keep out the cold.
As I looked about me I could not see grass enough to feed a pair of
conies for a winter. Right near me was one of their little haycocks,
nearly cured and ready for storing in their barns beneath the rocks;
but this would not last long. It was already early August and what
haying they had to do must be done quickly or winter would catch them
hungry.
They cut the grass that grows in the vicinity of the slide, and cock
it until it is cured, then they carry it all below against the coming
of the cold; and naturalists who have observed them describe with what
hurry and excitement the colony falls to taking in the hay when bad
weather threatens to spoil it.
Hardy little farmers! Bold small folk! Why climb for a home with your
tiny, bare-soled feet above the aerie of the eagle and the cave of the
soaring condor of the Sierras? Why not descend to the warm valleys,
where winter, indeed, comes, but cannot linger?--or farther down where
the grass is always green, with never a need to cut and cure a
winter’s hay?
I do not know why--nor why upon the tossing waves the little petrel
makes her bed; nor why, beneath the waves, “down to the dark, to the
utter dark” on
“The great gray level plains of ooze,”
the “blind white sea-snakes” make their home; nor why at the north, in
the fearful, far-off, frozen north, the little lemmings dwell; nor
why, nor why. But as I sat there above the clouds, listening to the
plaintive, trembling whistle of the little cony, and hoping his mate
was not dead, and wondering why he stayed here in the barren peak, and
how he must fare in the black, bitter winter, I said over to myself
the lines of Kipling for an answer,--
“And God who clears the grounding berg
And steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow.”
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER I
TO THE TEACHER
Let me say again that the best thing any nature book can do for
its readers is to take them out of doors; and that the best
thing any nature-study teacher can do for them is to take them
out of doors. Think of going to school to a teacher so simple,
wholesome, vigorous, original, and rich in the qualities of the
soul that she (how naturally we say “she”!)--that she comes to
her classroom by way of the Public Garden, carrying a bird-glass
in her hand! or across the fields with a rare orchid in her
hand, and the freshness and sweetness of the June morning in her
face and spirit! Why, I should like to be a boy again just to
have such a teacher. Instead of bird-songs it is too often
school gossip, instead of orchids it is clothes, instead of the
open fields it is the round of the schoolroom that most teachers
are absorbed in. Most teachers can add and spell much better
than they can read, because they do not know the literary values
and suggestions of words. Nothing would so help the run of
teachers as the background, the observation and feeling, that
would come from an intimate knowledge of the out-of-doors in the
vicinity of their schoolrooms.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1
Learn first of all the joy of walking. It is enough at first to
say “I am going to take a woods walk,” with nothing smaller in
mind to do or hear or see. Such tramping itself is one of the
very best ways of meeting the wild folk, and getting acquainted
with nature. Go to a variety of places--the seashore, the
water-front, the upland pasture, the deep swamps, even if you
take a car-ride to reach them. Then select the place nearest at
hand to frequent and watch closely.
PAGE 3
There are many good books on the use of the camera for
nature-study. Among them read: “Nature and the Camera” by
Dugmore; “Home Life of Wild Birds,” by Herrick.
PAGE 4
_The clover blossom and the bumblebee_: Read the intensely
interesting book of Darwin’s on the cross-fertilization of
flowers. You will also find readable accounts in “Nature’s
Garden,” by Mrs. Blanchan.
PAGE 5
In what nursery book do you find the original account of _the
House that Jack Built_?
PAGE 6
_Coccinella septempunctata_: The ladybirds, or ladybugs, are
named according to the number of their spots: _septempunctata_
means seven-spotted. Another is called _novemnotata_,
nine-spotted.
_Sixty species of birds_: Make your own list. Study your woods,
your neighborhood, minutely day and night in order to find them
all.
CHAPTER II
TO THE TEACHER
Set the students to watching and reporting this rare but very
interesting phase of wild animal life. Nothing will tax their
patience and ingenuity more; nor will any of their reports need
so careful scrutiny and weighing, so easy is it to be mistaken.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 10
_“line”_: the end of the race; the “tape” or mark set for
runners in a contest.
_“set-to”_: a combat or fight.
_mix-up_: is the same half-slangy word or newspaper expression
for a general fight.
PAGE 11
_Paramœcium_: this is one of the best known of the
single-celled animals. You can get them by making an “infusion”
of raw potato, a little hay, and stagnant water.
PAGE 12
_A writer in one of our magazines_: The account is found in “St.
Nicholas” for May, 1913.
_two big slanting cellar-doors_: These were in the shed of my
grandfather’s farmhouse, “Underwood,” and covered the
“bulkhead” of the cellar.
PAGE 13
_The [Massachusetts] Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals_: has its headquarters in Boston. It does a great work
for “dumb” animals, and publishes a paper called “Our Dumb
Animals” that every home and school should have.
PAGE 14
_follow my leader_: a game that all boys know and love,
especially when a strong, daring leader takes the game in hand.
PAGE 15
_Mount Hood_: is the highest peak of the Cascade Range in
Oregon. The _rope_ hanging down from the summit was brought up
on a pack-horse or mule (I forget which) as far as Tie-up Rock,
then carried to the summit by the professional guides and there
fastened for the safety of those whom they take to the top
during the summer.
PAGE 17
_a wild snowstorm_: for a fuller description of this storm and
the whole climb see the chapter in “Where Rolls the Oregon”
entitled “The Butterflies of Mount Hood.”
CHAPTER III
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 19
_"All heaven and earth are still,” etc._: this is from Byron’s
“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” a poem you ought to read.
PAGE 21
_Mr. William L. Finley’s story_ of the condor appeared in the
“Century Magazine.” It is one of the most interesting bird
stories ever written.
_This is the season of flowers_: among the helpful and
interesting flower books for field use are “Gray’s Manual,”
Mrs. Dana’s “How to Know the Wild Flowers,” and Chester A.
Reed’s little vest-pocket _Guide_ with colored plates of the
common flowers.
PAGE 25
_rain down little toads_: I saw it again in the deserts of
Oregon, the quick shower making millions of western spadefoot
toads hop up out of the sand. As the sun came out again, presto!
all were gone--into the sand out of sight.
CHAPTER IV
TO THE TEACHER
In reading this story point out the very narrow margin of life
among the wild animals; that is to say, show how little a thing
it often is that turns the scales, that makes for life or death.
We need all our powers, and all of them developed to their very
highest degree of efficiency for the race of life. Only the
fittest survive, and for these the race is often under too great
handicaps.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 27
_plumers_: those who used to kill birds for their beautiful
plumage.
_Klamath Lake Reservation_: is partly in California. It was set
aside by President Roosevelt.
_the coyote_: is the prairie or desert wolf. He is larger than
the red fox, but smaller than the gray, or timber, wolf.
PAGE 29
_homesteader_: one who settles upon land under the Federal
home-steading laws.
CHAPTER V
TO THE TEACHER
With a map of Boston follow the course of this title--from the
crowded wharf and water-front to the wide, country-like fields
of Franklin Park. It is a five-cent car-ride, a good half-day’s
walk if you watch the wild life on the way. Map out such a
course in your own city and take your pupils over it on a
tramp, watching for glimpses of animal and bird life and for the
sight of Nature’s face--the sky, the wind, the sunshine, trees,
grass, flowers, etc. Make the most of your city chance for
nature-study. It is an important matter.
FOR THE PUPIL
T wharf, long one of the busiest fish wharves in the world,
perhaps the busiest, is, as I write, on the point of being
abandoned by the fish-dealers of Boston, who are to occupy a
huge new pier at South Boston, built by the State at a cost of
about a million dollars. Franklin Field is a great athletic
field adjoining Franklin Park in the southern part of Boston.
PAGE 39
_list of saints_: these immortal names are carved in various
places on the outer walls of the Public Library.
_cranium_: the head, or rather the skull.
_herring gull_: _Larus argentatus_, one of the largest and
commonest of the harbor birds, and very much like the Western
gull of Three-Arch Rocks. It is a pearl-gray and pure white
creature with black on the wings. The immature birds are a
brownish gray and look like an entirely different species for
the first year.
PAGE 40
_Boston, Baltimore, etc._: Make a study of your city parks and
the spots of green and the open spaces where the wild things may
be found. Go to the Public Library and ask for the books that
treat of the wild life of your city: “Wild Birds in City Parks,”
by Walter, will be such a book for Chicago; “Birds in the Bush,”
by Torrey, and “Birds of the Boston Public Garden,” by Wright,
for Boston.
_Charles River Basin_: the wide fresh-water part of Charles
River just above the dam and near Beacon and Charles Streets.
_Scup_: another name is porgie, porgy, scuppaug.
_Squid_: (_Ommastrephes illecebrosus_), a cephalopod, or
cuttlefish, used for bait along the Atlantic coast.
The “cuttle-bone” in canaries’ cages is taken from the genus
_Sepia_.
_Squeteague_: pronounced skwe-tēg´; also called weakfish and
sea-trout.
_Scallops_: are shellfish the large muscle of which is much
prized for food.
These are only a few of the fish kinds brought in at T Wharf.
PAGE 41
_Grand Banks_: a submarine plateau in the Atlantic, eastward
from Newfoundland; noted as a fishing-ground. Its depth is
thirty to sixty fathoms.
_the Georges_: a smaller bank lying off Cape Cod.
“_We’re Here_”: the name of the schooner in Kipling’s “Captains
Courageous.”
_Quincy Market_: an old well-known market in Boston.
_King’s Chapel_: on Tremont Street. It was begun in 1749 and is
still used for worship. See “Roof and Meadow” for a fuller
account of the sparrows.
PAGE 42
_rim rock_: the edging of rock around the flats and plains of
the sage deserts of Oregon.
_Boston Common_: known to every child who has read the history
of our country. The “Garden” is across Charles Street from the
Common.
PAGE 43
_Agassiz Museum_: the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard
University. It is popularly called the Agassiz Museum in honor
of the great naturalist Louis Agassiz, who founded it.
See Sarah K. Bolton’s “Famous Men of Science.”
_Arnold Arboretum_: is near the western edge of Boston; one of
the most celebrated gardens of trees in the world.
_Through the heaven’s wide pathless way_: from “Il Penseroso,”
by Milton.
PAGE 44
_Swales_: wet, grassy, or even bushy, meadows.
CHAPTER VI
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 46
_The tree-toad_: (_Hyla versicolor_); he is said by country
people to prophesy rain.
_pennyroyal_: is one of the small aromatic mints.
_Wilson Flagg_: one of our earliest outdoor writers. Look up
his life in any American biographical dictionary.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
For a fuller account of this Wild Bird Reservation see the
chapter in “Where Rolls the Oregon,” called “Three-Arch Rocks
Reservation.” Bring out in your reading the point I wished to
make, namely that these great reservations of State and Federal
Government are not only to preserve bird and animal life, but
also to preserve nature--a portion of the earth--wild and
primitive and thrilling, against the constant encroachments of
civilization. Interest your pupils in their own local parks,
preserves, etc., and if they have farms or wood-lots, have them
post them and set them aside as their personal sanctuaries for
wild life.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 57
_Tillamook_: the name of a town near the coast of Oregon.
_at the mouth of the bay_: Tillamook Bay, where the bar is only
about thirty feet wide, making the passage extremely difficult
and dangerous.
_Three-Arch Rocks Reservation_: was set aside by President
Roosevelt. Credit for this and the other Oregon Reservations is
largely due to Mr. William L. Finley and the Audubon Societies.
PAGE 59
_Shag Rock_: so named for the black cormorants that nest upon
it, for these birds are commonly known as “shags.”
PAGE 60
_the sea-lions_: were of the species known as Steller’s
sea-lions.
_reversed in shape_: I mean the close hind flippers, the
tapering hind end of the body, gave them an unnatural
shape--reversed.
_Æolus_: the god of the winds.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE TEACHER
Set the pupils to watching for evidences of mother-love among
the lower creatures, where we do not think of finding it; stir
them to look for unreported acts, and the hidden, less easily
observed ways. Such a suggestion might be the turning of a new
page for them in the book of nature.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 65
_Cud_: the ball of grass or hay that the cow keeps bringing up
from her first stomach to be chewed and swallowed, going then
into the second stomach, where it is digested.
_stanchions_: the iron or wooden fastening about the cow’s neck
in the stall.
_mother-principle_: the instinct or unconscious impulse of all
living things to reproduce their kind.
PAGE 66
_spores_: the name of the seed dust of the ferns.
_the hunter family_: these are the spiders that build no nets
or webs for snaring their prey, but hunt their prey over the
ground.
PAGE 69
_Toadfish_: See the chapter in the “Fall of the Year” called “In
the Toadfish’s Shoe.”
PAGE 70
_Surinam toads_: pronounced sōō-rī-näm´.
_Mother-passion ... in the life of reptiles_: many readers,
seeing this statement in the “Atlantic Monthly,” where the
essay first appeared, have written me of how when they were
_boys_ they saw snakes swallow their young--or at least killed
the old snakes with young in them! Isn’t that mother-love among
the reptiles? But every time the story has been about garter
snakes or moccasins or some other ovoviviparous snake; that is,
a snake that does not lay eggs, but keeps them within her body
till they hatch, then _gives birth_ to the young. I have never
seen a snake swallow its young; though big snakes do _eat_
little ones whenever they can get them.
CHAPTER IX
FOR THE PUPIL
Mother Carey’s chickens are any of the small petrels. The little
_stormy petrels_ of poetry and story belong to the Old World and
only wander occasionally over to our side of the Atlantic.
PAGE 79
_petrel_: pronounced _pět´rel_, so called in allusion,
perhaps, to Saint Peter’s walking on the sea.
CHAPTER X
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 88
_P Ranch_: is one of the Hanley system of cattle ranches, which
cover a wide area almost seventy-five miles long. The buildings
and tree-fences, the stockades and sheds make it one of the most
picturesque I have ever seen. This story was told to me by Jack
Wade, the “boss of the buckaroos.” “Buckaroo” is a corruption of
the Spanish _vaquero_, cowherd.
_Winnemucca_: find the place on the map.
PAGE 91
_buckskin_: a horse of a soft yellowish color. He got his name
Peroxide Jim from the resemblance of the color of his coat to
that of human hair bleached by peroxide of hydrogen.
CHAPTER XI
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 100
_paper nests in trees_: The common yellow-jacket hornet builds
similar large round nests in bushes, and other wasps build paper
nests behind walls, under the ground, in holes, etc.
PAGE 107
_bite into something poisonous_: Send to the Department of
Agriculture at Washington for the little booklet on our
poisonous plants. It is free.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE TEACHER
Try to bring home to the class the profoundly interesting facts
of animal distribution--where they live, and how they came to
live where they do. Point out the strange shifts resorted to by
various creatures who live at the various extremes of height or
depth or cold or heat to enable them to get a living.
FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 121
“_And God who clears_”: these lines of Kipling I am quoting as I
first found them printed. I see in his collected verse that they
are somewhat changed.