MYSTICAL PASTURES
Two century-old pasture pines shelter my favorite sleeping spot in
the pasture, and croon solemn, mystical tunes all night long. If I
could but, with my dull ear grown finer, some day learn to
interpret these I might grow wise with the yet unfathomed wisdom
of the universe. Their runes are not of the gentle, vivid life
that thrills below them. Before the little creatures of the
pasture world were created, before pines grew upon earth, the
words they sing were set to the sagas of vast space, rhythmic
runes of unremembered ages taught by the great winds of the world
to these patriarchs that seem to tell them over and over lest they
forget. They tower virid and virile. They stretch wide arms over
the pasture people in benediction and sheltering love, but they
are not of them. The reading of the deep riddle of the universe
has made them prophets and seers and they dwell alone in their
dignity. I may make my home beneath their sheltering shade, caress
their rugged gray trunks and fall asleep to the mystical murmur of
their voices, but I can never be intimate with them.
There is nothing of this aloofness about the other pasture people.
The younger pines do not whisper solemn riddles, but are gently
friendly without mystery, and so are many of the myriad creatures
that crowd the spaces boldly or dwell quietly in unsuspected
seclusion. Of all the outdoor world the pasture is the most
friendly place, yet it is not obtrusively so and you must dwell in
it long before you know many of even your elbow neighbors by
sight. If you know them very well you will be able to detect their
nearness by sound, oftentimes, long before sight of them is
vouchsafed you. When they do appear it is usually a sort of
embodiment. They materialize as if out of thin air and disintegrate
by the same route. This is not because they fear you. It is simply
because it has been the habit of pasture people for untold
generations.
Thus it is that a lovely white moth flits often in the veriest
gray of dawn just to the eastward of where I lie. It always seems
as if he were a condensation out of the white mists that are born
in that darkest hour when the night winds cease and that runic
rhyme of the pines is lulled for a time. He seems as transparent
as they and is nothing but the ghost of a moth as he passes from
one head of goldenrod bloom to another. Some mornings he vanishes
in the amber glow that ushers in the daylight and then I think I
have merely been dreaming of lepidoptera. This morning he did not
appear, either in the early gray or the amber glow, and I went out
to look for him. The waning moon hung wan and white in the west, a
white paper ghost of a moon that had no light left in her. All the
east had the clear translucent yellow radiance of the yellow birch
leaves, a cool, pale gold, and between lay dead the morning mists,
chilled to white frost on all the pasture shrubs and the level
reaches of brown grass. Along the hedgerow of barberry, wild
cherry, raspberry, hardhack, meadow sweet, sweet fern and
goldenrod that deck the ancient wall I looked for the white
radiance of my moth's wings in vain, and I pictured him as dead
among the frozen grasses, and mourned him thus.
*****
The day grew with all the wonderful still radiance which so often
follows a frosty morning in October. The pine trees could not
sing; there was no wind to give them voice. The still flood of
golden sunshine warmed to the marrow, yet did not wilt as in
summer. Instead, it informed all things with a glow like an elixir
of life. To feel it well within one's flesh is to have a
forecasting of immortality, to know that one is to be born again
and again. I did not wonder that as I once more scanned the
hedgerow along the ancient wall I saw my white moth clamber
bravely up a goldenrod stem and begin a half-scrambling,
half-fluttering pilgrimage from one to another of the hardy blooms
that had survived the frost as well as he. Most of the goldenrod and
meadow sweet blooms are well past their prime and are showing gray
with age and ripening pappus, but here and there you find belated
specimens that hold color and honey still, and on these he paused
to breakfast. Then, as his wings rested for a moment, I could see
that his pure white was touched with tiny chain patterns of black
spots and I knew him for Cingalia catenaria, the chain-streak
moth. Somehow I am half-sorry to have found him out. I am not sure
but I would rather have remembered him as one of the mystical
fancies of the early dawn, some pure white dream materialized out
of the tenuous mists by the incantations of the Druid pines.
Neighborly and simple as are all the pasture people when we sit
quiet long enough to see them and gain their confidence by making
them feel that we are an integral portion of the place, as they
are, they all have something of the mystical about them. There are
four chipmunks, sleek and beautiful striped children of a this
year's late litter. These frolic about on the stones and among the
bushes at my very feet. They eat crusts almost from my hand. Yet
they might as well be mahatmas, for in their going and coming they
are as mysterious. I hear a scratching on a stone, and there sits
a chipmunk. With a swish he is gone, and unless I hear the
skittering of tiny feet a rod away I may not tell in what
direction or how. Then, too, the skittering may be that of some
entirely different creature. I prefer to think of them thus, as
furry bogles that bob up out of fairy tales and bob back again to
the making of a mythology that sniffs of sweet fern and bayberry
and has the flavor of barberry sauce.
The tender glow of still October days seems to fill the pasture
with such mysteries as this. Commonplace things are touched with
the softening haze of romance, and in the crystal stillness, the
happy aloofness of the place, the consciousness goes groping for
the unseen. It may be that by digging and grubbing I might unearth
the veritable home of my chipmunks, trace their cunning runways
under stone and through fog and brush and prove that there is
nothing of the theosophist about them. But not for worlds would I
do it, nor would I believe it if I found them. Therein lies the
inscrutability of faith.
*****
In the golden morning glow the sounds of the far and near world
seem to come without interference from intervening space and the
roar of the steam whistle on the liner at sea, eighteen miles away
over rough hilltops, is as intimate as the drumming of the
partridge in the swamp, scarcely more than a stone's throw away.
Indeed it is less aloof, far less mysterious. Its raucous bellow
is soothed to a deep musical tone by distance. It speaks of the
human touch and the man-made whistle. I may measure, define, place
it; know the steamer that it speaks far and the man that pulls the
throttle cord. I may find the pitch, touch the identical note on
guitar or cornet. I have neither wind nor stringed instrument that
will record so low a note as that of the drumming of the
partridge. I count the vibrations of the first of it with ease.
They speed up toward the end, but they do not raise the pitch. I
know nothing in our human musical notation that will touch its
depth. Yet it is a musical tone and a most goblin-like and eerie
one. The partridge may be commonplace enough and his drumming but
a strut of complacency and self-satisfaction. With patience and
good luck I may see him doing it and follow him from his roost in
the morning till he returns to it at night. But I cannot fathom
the mystery which haunts the pasture in the genial melancholy of
these sunny October days, to which his drum seems to sound the
marching note.
In the midday stillness when the blue sky arches over the place
like a crystal bell which no winds may penetrate it seems as if
the witchery grew. The warmth of the sun is like that of summer
though without languor. The world is in a breathless swoon in the
midst of which I wonder dreamily how this soft brown grass on
which I lie could have been crisp and white with frost six hours
ago. The morning waked all the hardier forest creatures who seemed
to revel in the crisp exhilarating air. Red and gray squirrels
crashed about in the tree tops making noisy merriment in their
indescribable squirrel jargon. Their thrashing and chattering in
the trees was almost equal to a crowd of schoolboys nutting. With
them the blue jays blew trumpets and clanged bells, the
woodpeckers drummed and shrieked and crows and chewinks added to
the clamor. Even my chipmunks blew squeaky shrill whistles in
staccato notes. The pasture was full of picnic.
The drowse of noon seemed to put them all to sleep. The pond was
like glass and the black duck flock which had quacked noisily
there at daybreak and drawn white lines of ripples across its
black surface had gone south. Everywhere was silence.
Everywhere silence, indeed, but it was the silence only of the
slumbering, deeper voiced denizens. The swoon of heat in which
they lay had served to rouse other lives that the frost of the
morning had silenced. There are people who never can hear a
partridge drum. The vibrations are pitched below the register of
their ear. There are others, far more in number who never hear the
shrilling of the pasture insects. Their voices are so thin and
shrill that they are above the common register. Indeed they are
apt to pass the average person as unnoticed as the tick of a clock
in a room where one is accustomed to its presence. I do not know
how long they had been at it, the black night chirping crickets
which now make up for frozen nights by singing all the warm part
of the day, the green day crickets whose note is pitched far
higher, and a dozen other chirping, shrilling things that one
never sees and rarely hears, however numerous and insistent their
voices, unless something forces his attention in that direction
and bids him listen. I think it was the zoon of a cicada which
waked my attention, and once I heard them they seemed to fill the
air with shrieking. If the drum of the partridge is the lowest
pitched note of which the pasture people are capable, surely the
piping of same of these tiny creatures is the highest. It is very
difficult to determine the spot whence comes the pulsing of the
partridge's wings. It is born out of nowhere and reaches your ear
from no particular direction. The shrilling of the pasture insects
is everywhere and it is equally impossible to locate it. They are
veritable spirit voices, these, and fill the spaces among the red
cedars and barberry bushes, the forests of sweet fern and the fox
paths that wind among the berry bushes, with invisible fays and
sprites. Only the tiniest of these could have such shrill tenuous
voices. Having heard them in all their uproar it is even then
difficult to hold your attention on them, more difficult than with
any other pasture or woodland creatures I know. There will be
times when the ear refuses them and it seems as if blank silence
had settled on the whole field, then after a little it will all
come pulsing back to you.
*****
How dependent these disembodied voices are upon the sun is seen
toward nightfall, when the shadows begin to grow long. Where these
fall across the grasses there grow triangles of silence which
travel fast. Oftentimes as the point of one of these progresses
you may locate a chirper by the sudden ceasing of his chirp and
find him in the tip of shadow, already numb. The black crickets
keep up their tune longest, singing from beneath sheltering stones
and bark or fallen leaves. With the direct sun vanish also other
summer pasture people who have made the warmth of the day
beautiful. Under an old apple tree the ground is yellow with the
apples that it has shed and here all through the sunny hours two
vanessa butterflies have alternately floated and feasted, one a
mourning cloak, the other a Compton tortoise, Vanessa antiopa and
Vanessa j-album. These are late arrivals that have come from the
cocoon upon a cold world and are doing their best to make good in
it. Both are of a species that are hardy beyond belief and both
may well winter in the crevice within the gnarled trunk of the old
tree into which they creep benumbed when the chill of night begins
to fall. The pasture at midday was bright with the yellow of
colias butterflies which dashed madly about from one fall
dandelion bloom to another, eager to eat enough while the warmth
should linger. I saw many of the American copper with them, these
with a more conspicuous white margin to the tiny wings than I have
ever seen before, a fall form I fancy rather than anything
permanently new in this rather variable insect.
All these the first chill of nightfall sends to crevices and with
them go the black wasps which have been feeding desperately in the
sun on goldenrod and aster. The hornets are dead. Not one was
about even in the middle of the day fly hunting though house flies
are still plentiful. The hornets seem to be almost the first
insects to succumb to the cold. The black wasps are far hardier.
With their passing goes that tiny shrill uproar of the pasture and
in the amber quiet of sunset the place becomes a vast whispering
gallery. Tiny sounds seem to be entangled here and made audible
from very far. The quack of incoming ducks a mile away across the
pond sounds as if on the nearer shore. The laughter of children
comes as far, nor can you readily locate the direction. At such
times the mystical quality of the place deepens with the peace of
it. I notice then, as I did not notice in midday, the fairy rings
in the grass on the little rise of ground and am half-willing to
believe I stand by a fairy rath and call the childish shouts and
laughter that seem to rise from it the glee of fairies over the
coming of night. After dark any one of these fairy rings now
growing beneath my eyes may open and let out the troop. Their
comings and goings need be only a little more mysterious than
those of the chipmunks in the old wall or the Cingalia catenaria
that is again flitting forth in the chill of gray dusk to seek
what honey the coleuses and the coppers, the vanessas and the wasp
have left behind.
*****
The pale yellow glow of autumn twilight settles in deep peace upon
the place. You seem to be at once in a vast silence and yet able
to note all that goes on in the world for many miles about by
unobtrusive sounds. To stand here in the open with the night
descending in blessing upon you is to be in touch with the
universe: In town night shuts you away from the rest of the world,
wraps you in your own tiny seclusion. Out here it makes you one
with the deep secrets of common life. The mystical quality for the
time vanishes and the radiance which long holds the sky seems but
the light of home, a light which is no longer within a room or
shut off by the walls of a house, but the real home of all the
world's creatures to which you have come at last.
As the glow fades and the darkness deepens it seems good to lie
down beneath the silent pines that stretch their great arms over
you in protecting fatherliness and become an integral part of the
peace of the place. Sleep that comes thus is deep and refreshing.
Yet always with it there goes a subtle sub-consciousness which
makes you alert to what goes on about you. Thus with the piping up
of the night wind you hear once more the rapt voices of the great
pines, the chanting of those weird sages of the unknown. All the
mystical comes back to the pasture with the sound and the deep
song of the elder trees comes nearer to finding words for you
than, it can at any other time. I fancy that all the wee lives
that sleep and wake beneath it are part of its mystery, its
longing and its unfathomable promise.