GOOD-BYE TO SUMMER
I think the daintiest scent that can be found in the woodland in
these last days of September is that of the coral-root flower,
which looks like a wan, tan ghost of a blossom, but nevertheless
is sweet and succulent. The plant is by no means common in my
world. Many a year goes by without my seeing it at all. In autumn
it grows from among dry pine leaves, a slender spike that has
neither root leaves nor stem leaves, but looks like the dried
flower scape of some spring blooming plant. So protective is its
coloration that I stand among its blooms and look long before I
see them at all. It is only by getting very close that one can see
that the tiny forests scattered along the pale brown scape are
themselves beautifully colored with purple and white on the same
soft tan foundation as the scape. They have, too, the quaintly
mysterious formation of all orchid blooms and that alluring,
elusive odor which must be sought intimately to be known. You must
get this dainty perfume where it grows. If you pluck the blooms
and take them home they will hold their beauty and color for days,
but the scent will have strangely slipped from them and trembled
along the still, soft air back to the woodland haunts whence it
came. You might find it there, wandering disconsolate in the
lonely brown spaces seeking for its own heart of bloom, but from
under your roof it has departed.
The flower is a strange one, anyway, in all its growth. Fibrous
roots it has none, just a bunch of coral-like tubercles which draw
nourishment by their own subtle processes from the roots of trees
that shade them. Leaves it has none, just a scarious brown bract
that encloses a part of the stem. Living upon canned food, so to
speak, it has lost its ability to win sustenance from earth and
air. It seems to live, not upon the sap of these trees, but upon
the dead roots and decayed wood, a specially prepared humus
without which it may not thrive, even in its own limited, elusive
way. Among our wild flowers doomed to ultimate extinction I fancy
this will be one of the first to disappear. In the days of great
stretches of moist, deep woodland it may well have flourished. In
my town it is rare and any year I may find it for the last time.
On many counts I would not miss it, and yet that faint, refined
odor which somehow always reminds me of ghosts of mignonette, of
tender, almost forgotten memories once more stirred, gives a
gentle melancholy to the woodland that all the glories of October
will not be able to assuage.
*****
It is by such subtle hints as this that autumn announces her
presence among us. The prevailing tone of the upland wood is yet
that of summer. Hardly will you see a splash of color in all the
miles of green. It is in shady woods where no frost has yet
penetrated, spots like that in which the coral-root is sheltered
and befriended that nevertheless you read the open tale of what is
to come. In low-lying open meadows the frost has spoken. In these
on one night the chill of frozen space weighed down and turned the
dew to ice and wrecked some tender herbage, leaving it brown as if
touched by fire instead of frost. But it is only here and there in
places peculiarly subject to this warning that this has happened.
In shielding forest depths the coverlets of multiple green leaves
have kept the tender things of the wood wrapped warm through the
nights and the frost has said no word. Yet there too the message
has penetrated, by what means I cannot say. The ferns have heard
it and have turned pale. The tender, slender fronds of the
hay-scented Dicksonia are very wan and the odor from them now as you
tramp through is not so much that of new-mown hay, as it was in
June, but rather that of the stack or the mow, always with their
own inimitable woodsy flavor added. The brake whose woody stems
have held its ternate, palm-like fronds bravely aloft all summer
is now a sallow yellow, and the lovely Osmundas and stately
Struthiopteris are bowing their heads in brown acquiescence with
the inevitable. I doubt if it is a message from the air. It is
rather a command from the nerve centres at the base of the stalk,
a message from the brain of the heart-roots that gives the fronds
warning that their day is over. If it were in the air the
polypodys, the Christmas ferns and the spinulose wood ferns would
have lost their color also. It is different with these. There is a
hardier quality in their nature and they seem to revel in the
killing frosts of late autumn and the ice and snow of winter; I
find them as green and as hearty in December as I do now.
Next to the tender ferns it is the woody undergrowth that
recognizes the season first. Long ago some limb of a red maple
growing in the shade has been seen to flare up with a sudden flame
while else all the wood was green. But this in itself is no sign.
This happens here and there in low ground even in very early
summer. Now, however, it is not only here and there but everywhere
that you will find this occasional limb adding scarlet beauty to
the sombre shade of the deep wood, and as your glance passes from
the cool pale ferns to this it slips on and finds color growing on
many things in the woodland shadow. Here is the cornel, whose
lovely blooms filled the forest with butterfly beauty, it seems no
longer ago than yesterday. Today I find the cornel foliage green
still as to midrib and veining, but with the woof of the leaf gone
such a fine apple red that it is surely good enough to eat. If
color counts the deer should find rich browse in the shrubbery
these days. The hazels that were so green are suddenly a ripe
brown that is all warm with red tones, and where the summac grows
there is forest fire without smoke burning in the scarlet
flame-tongues of the pointed leaflets of this modern burning bush.
And all this is beneath the shelter of the still green forest into
which we must go to find it. From without the full green of summer
ripeness prevails, and we must seek other signs of the autumn
season.
But must we, after all? Yesterday or the day before it was true
and we were saying that the summer held on well. Today, so
suddenly does the change seem to become visible, I saw them blaze
up out of a cool swamp at the foot of the hill on which I stood.
The smoke of autumn's peace pipe was blue on all the distant
hills, and he must have dropped his match in my swamp, where it
smouldered and flared and caught the maple even as I looked in the
full expectancy of seeing nothing but green. The red fire of
greeting seemed to run from tree to tree, and all the lowlands for
a mile were ablaze, as if some subdominant political party had won
an unexpected victory and could not wait for night to light its
fires of celebration. All the little swamp maples were red with
this fire, and though I suppose they have been days in turning the
effect was that of their flashing up as I looked. Then I saw that
the birches among them were all set with candles, whose pale
yellow flames lighted them with a most chaste fire, just as in the
old days of torchlight enthusiasm over political campaigns we used
to put rows of them in the windows on the night that the parade
was to pass. Seeing all that I felt as if autumn were again
triumphantly elected, and we all ought to take off our hats and
"give three cheers far the illumination on the right."
*****
Surely autumn is the finest season of the year. I always know that
as soon as it gets here. Yesterday I revelled in the summer that
had stayed with us so long and, still seemed to show few signs of
going. Today the fall coloring is burning, like a wood fire on a
still day, slowly up from the swamps into the upland woods. Now
that I have begun to notice it I see that the coloring is touching
the underleaves of the hillside birches, those nearest the stem,
and that perhaps one in five has the same cool, pale yellow fire
alight. Thus rapidly does the conflagration spread from swamp to
hillside, from the shade of the grove to its topmost boughs and
before we know it the year will have once more set the world on
fire.
As far those other signs, there is a whole calendar of bird voices
and bird movements that might well give us the dates, day by day.
To me the first warning of the passing of summer comes in the
tin-trumpet notes of the blue jays. While the nesting season is on the
blue jay is as dumb as an oyster. The woods may be full of him and
his tribe, but never an old bird says a word. After the young can
fly you may hear them if you slip quietly along in the pine woods.
You have to be pretty near though, to do it. They sit in a family
group in the treetops and complain, under the breath, hungrily. It
is not until the young are well grown, the moulting season is over
and the summer pretty nearly the same that any blue jay gets his
voice. Then, almost as suddenly as the coming of autumn coloring
in the trees the racket begins. You may not have seen a blue jay
in the woods for months. Suddenly they appear in flocks, swooping
down on the orchard in brand new uniforms of conspicuous blue,
white and black, yelling tooting and chattering. They have been
shy and careful. They are now tame and reckless. They troop into
the pasture after the wild cherries which they eat with chattering
and scolding. On vibrant limbs they give spirit rappings in
imitation of a woodpecker. Then they laugh and scream about it.
Hearing them we always say, "How fallish it sounds."
The blue jay has not only a whole vocabulary of his own, both in
conversation, from twittering to oratory, and in calls from
assembly cries and notes of warning to screams of derision and
defiance, but he is an imitator in certain lines. He will imitate
the red-shouldered hawk and the sparrow hawk and I suspect him of
mixing it in conversation with the flicker. Often at this time of
year I hear a subdued, rather sweet-voiced murmur in the wood as
if a ladies' sewing society was just beginning to get busy pulling
out the bastings. I know very well it is a convention composed of
blue jays or flickers, but it is not so easy to tell which until I
slip up and surprise them at it. The subdued tones of both birds
in such conventions assembled are very much alike and I suspect
that their polite conversation is in a common language. But I
never can prove this, for they do not fraternize. The convention
is sure to be of one feather or the other. They do not flock
together. That is no doubt just as well, for I have great respect
for the flicker. He is a whimsical old codger, very prone to talk
to himself and go through strange gymnastics in a rather
ridiculous way, but the flicker is honest. He brings up a large
family in the strictest probity and I have never known a flicker
to do a wrong thing. On the other hand, the blue jay is a thief, a
mocker and a murderer. Just now he is living honestly on nuts and
wild fruit, taking almost as many acorns as the squirrels and
making a great deal of talk about it. You would think him the most
open-hearted chap in the world, but if you will watch him
carefully in the spring you will learn things which are to his
disadvantage. You will likely find him taking a raw egg or two
with his breakfast, to the sorrow of some small bird. Later, the
fledglings are not safe from him, and if you shake a blue jay up
in a bag with a crow and then open the bag, two arrant rogues will
fly out, and it is hard telling which will have the other's tail
feathers. For all that, I rather like the blue jay. If we are
going strictly to condemn all who have a liking for an occasional
small hot bird, there will be but few of us left. At this season
he is the town crier of the wood, clanging his bell loudly at
every wood-road corner and announcing in strident monotones that
straw hats are called in and there is an exhibition sale of fall
garments at Wood & Field's.
Even in August we get the first spray on the great wave of
southward migrating warblers, and all through early September the
woods are again full of their slender, flitting forms and their
gentle voices. If you know your locality well you may mark the
very dates of the month by their coming and going. So with equal
definiteness the earlier departing of our summer residents leaves
gaps in our hearts and the woodland on pretty definite September
days. The cry-baby young of the orioles have hardly ceased to
complain about the house, making the midsummer peevish, before the
birds are flocking. They take August off the calendar with them.
On the date that I miss them and the kingbirds September first is
very near if not among those present. The redwing blackbird may linger
a day or two after these, but he does not wait to any more than
see September arrive before he, too, is off. The bobolinks,
perfectly unrecognizable in plain brown coats, continue to flock
sparrow-wise about the meadows until say, the tenth. Then they go
chink-chinking down the marshes southward by way of Florida to
Central America. Yucatan and the delta of the Orinoco may be
lonely places in summer, but I do not think one need to be
homesick there in mid-winter with all these intimate friends
sitting about on the palm trees and chatting about the way things
went in my meadows and woods a few months before.
As our summer residents go and the passing migrants arrive and
depart we may begin to expect the winter visitants. I am looking
for myrtle warblers now. Their usual date of arrival is the
twentieth, and if I do not find them here it is probably my fault.
The pastures are blue now with bayberries, which seem to be their
favorite food. Feeding on these the myrtle warblers should be
spicy, sprightly creatures, full of quaint romance, as indeed they
are. The junco may come as early as this, according to the best
authorities, though I confess I never have any luck in finding him
much before November. The junco is a snowbird, anyway, his colors
match leaden skies, and he seems to me out of place without a
fellow flock of snow flakes.
The golden crowned kinglet and the winter wren, the white-throated
sparrow and the brown creeper, all may be looked for between the
20th of September and the passing of the month, though as for the
brown creeper those two ardent bird students, Frederic H. Kennard
and Fred McKechnie have demonstrated that it is not a winter
visitant only but an occasional all-the-year resident, they having
found nests and eggs in the Ponkapoag swamp. So the list might be
enlarged vastly till we found a new comer or a new goer or both
for every day in this month of transition, September.
*****
To me, though, the most potent signs of the presence of autumn are
neither the migrants nor the changing foliage. They are the
mysterious voices of the woodland which change at about this time
often to an eerier and lonelier note. The voice of late September
winds in the trees has a wild call of melancholy in it. There is a
spot in my wood where an ancient pine, dead and stark long ago,
lies in the arms of a sturdy scarlet oak. All summer the leaning
trunk has shed bark and small limbs, silently, patiently waiting,
final dissolution. With the coming of cool autumn winds it has
begun to complain. On rainy days especially I have heard this low
lonesome voice crying softly to itself through the dusk and been
at a loss to know what creature made it. Foxes in the mating
season along about St. Valentine's day make strange outcry in the
wood, but at this time of year the fox if he speaks at all simply
barks. A raccoon might whimper thus but there were some cries that
no coon ever made. Once I stalked it for a lost child and I was
long in locating the exact spot whence it came. After all it was
only the complaining of the old tree as it rubbed on its support
in the swaying wind, but it voiced all the loneliness of the
good-byes which a thousand bright creatures have been saying to the
wood these pleasant September days.