BEYONDthe meadow, nearly half a mile away, yet in sight from my window, stands an apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the upper and lower pastures. For an apple tree it is unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and grizzled, with suckers from feet to crown. Unkempt and unesteemed, it attracts only the cattle for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly, bitter fruit.
But that old tree is hollow, trunk and limb; and if its apples are of Sodom, there is still no tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, none even in my own private Eden, carefully kept as they are, that is half as interesting—I had almost said, as useful. Among the trees of the Lord, an apple tree that bears good Baldwins or greenings or rambos comes first for usefulness; but when one has thirty-five of such trees, which the town has compelled one to trim and scrape and plaster-upand petticoat against the grewsome gypsy moth, then those thirty-five are dull indeed, compared with the untrimmed, unscraped, unplastered, undressed old tramp yonder on the knoll, whose heart is still wide open to the birds and beasts—to every small traveler passing by who needs, perforce, a home, a hiding, or a harbor.
When I was a small boy everybody used to put up overnight at grandfather’s—for grandmother’s wit and buckwheat cakes, I think, which were known away down into Cape May County. It was so, too, with grandfather’s wisdom and brooms. The old house sat in behind a grove of pin-oak and pine, a sheltered, sheltering spot, with a peddler’s stall in the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-bed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the tavern, two miles farther down the Pike, was half as central, or as homelike, or as full of sweet and juicy gossip.
The old apple tree yonder between the woodsand the meadow is as central, as hospitable, and, if animals communicate with one another, just as full of neighborhood news as was grandfather’s roof-tree.
Did I say none but the cattle seek its shade? Go over and watch. That old tree is no decrepit, deserted shack of a house. There is no door-plate, there is no christened letter-box outside the front fence, because the birds and beasts do not advertise their houses that way. But go over, say, toward evening, and sit quietly down outside. You will not wait long, for the doors will open that you may enter—enter into a home of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of the fields, for this old tree has a small dweller of some sort the year round.
If it is February or March you will be admitted by my owls. They take possession late in winter and occupy the tree, with some curious fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count upon these small screech-owls by February,—the forlorn month, the seasonless, hopeless, lifeless stretch of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possibility of swallows, and its being the year’s end.At least the ancients called February the year’s end, maintaining, with fine poetic sense, that the world was begun in March; and they were nearer the beginnings of things than we are.
But the owls come in February, and if they are not swallows with the spring, they, nevertheless, help winter with most seemly haste into an early grave. Yet across the faded February meadow the old apple tree stands empty and drear enough—until the shadows of the night begin to fall.
As the dusk comes down, I go to my window and watch. I cannot see him, the grim-beaked baron with his hooked talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes; but I know that he has come to his window in the turret yonder on the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the flattened tussocks; nor hear him, back on the silent shadows, slant upward again to his turret. Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared meadow-mouse did not hear.
But I have been belated and forced to crossthis wild night-land of his; and I havefelthim pass—so near at times that he has stirred my hair, by the wind, dare I say, of his mysterious wings? At other times I have heard him. Often on the edge of night I have listened to his quavering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me by the meadow. But oftener I have watched at the casement here in my castle wall.
Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.
Yes, yes, but one must be pretty much of a child, with most of his childish things not yet put away, to get any such romance out of a rotten apple tree, plus a bunch of feathers no bigger than one’s two fists. One must be pretty far removed from the real world, the live world that swings, no longer through the heavens, but at the distributing end of a news wire—pretty far removedto spend one’s precious time watching screech-owls.
And so one is, indeed,—sixteen miles removed by space, one whole day by post, one whole hour by engine and horse, one whole half-minute by the telephone in the back hall. Lost! cut off completely! hopelessly marooned!
I fear so. Perhaps I must admit that the watching of owls is for babes and sucklings, not for men with great work to do, that is, with money to make, news to get, office to hold, and clubs to address. For babes and sucklings, and, possibly, for those with a soul to save, yet I hasten to avow that the watching of owls is not religion; for I entirely agree with our Shelburne essayist when he finds, “in all this worship of nature,”—by Traherne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and those who seek the transfigured world of the woods,—“there is a strain of illusion which melts away at the touch of the greater realities ... and there are evils against which its seduction is of no avail.”
But let the illusion melt. Other worships have shown a strain of illusion at times, and against certain evils been of small avail. And let it beadmitted that calling regularly at an old apple tree is far short of a full man’s work in the world, even when such calling falls outside of his shop or office-hours. For there are no such hours. The business of life allows no spare time any more. One cannot get rich nowadays in office-hours, nor become great, nor keep telegraphically informed, nor do his share of talking and listening. Everybody but the plumber and paper-hanger works overtime. How the earth keeps up a necessary amount of whirling in the old twenty-four-hour limit is more than we can understand. But she can’t keep up the pace much longer. She must have an extra hour. And how to snatch it from the tail-end of eternity is the burning cosmological question.
And this is the burning question with regard to our individual whirling—How to add time, or, what amounts to exactly the same, How to increase the whirling.
There have been many hopeful answers. The whirl has been vastly accelerated. The fly-wheel of the old horse treadmill is now geared to an electric dynamo. But it is not enough; it is not the answer. And I despair of the answer—of the perfect whirl, the perpetual, invisible, untimable.
Hence the apple tree, the owls, the illusions, the lost hours—the neglect of fortune and of soul! But then you may worship nature and still find your way to church; you may be intensely interested in the life of an old apple tree and still cultivate your next-door neighbor, still earn all the fresh air and bread and books that your children need.
The knoll yonder may be a kind of High Place, and its old apple tree a kind of altar for you when you had better not go to church, when your neighbor needs to be let alone, when your children are in danger of too much bread and of too many books—for the time when you are in need of that something which comes only out of the quiet of the fields at the close of day.
“But what is it?” you ask. “Give me its formula.” I cannot. Yet you need it and will get it—something that cannot be had of the day, something that Matthew Arnold comes very near suggesting in his lines:—
The evening comes, the fields are still.The tinkle of the thirsty rill,Unheard all day, ascends again;Deserted is the half-mown plain,Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarmsAll housed within the sleeping farms!The business of the day is done,The last-left haymaker is gone.And from the thyme upon the heightAnd from the elder-blossom whiteAnd pale dog-roses in the hedge,And from the mint-plant in the sedge,In puffs of balm the night-air blowsThe perfume which the day foregoes.
The evening comes, the fields are still.The tinkle of the thirsty rill,Unheard all day, ascends again;Deserted is the half-mown plain,Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarmsAll housed within the sleeping farms!The business of the day is done,The last-left haymaker is gone.And from the thyme upon the heightAnd from the elder-blossom whiteAnd pale dog-roses in the hedge,And from the mint-plant in the sedge,In puffs of balm the night-air blowsThe perfume which the day foregoes.
The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,
The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms
All housed within the sleeping farms!
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.
I would call it poetry, if it were poetry. And it is poetry, yet it is a great deal more. It is poetry and owls and sour apples and toads; for in this particular old apple dwells also a tree-toad.
It is curious enough, as the summer dusk comes on, to see the round face of the owl in one hole, and out of another in the broken limb above, the flat weazened face of the tree-toad. Philosophic countenances they are, masked with wisdom, both of them: shrewd and penetrating that of the slit-eyed owl; contemplative and soaring in its serene composure the countenance of the transcendental toad. Both creatureslove the dusk; both have come forth to their open doors in order to watch the darkening; both will make off under the cover—one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for slugs and insects over the crooked, tangled limbs of the tree.
It is strange enough to see them together, but it is stranger still to think of them together, for it is just such prey as this little toad that the owl has gone over the meadow to catch.
Why does he not take the supper ready here on the shelf? There may be reasons that we, who do not eat tree-toad, know nothing of; but I am inclined to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow lodger in the doorway above, though he must often have heard him piping his gentle melancholy in the gloaming, when his skin cries for rain!
Small wonder if they have never met! for this gray, squat, disc-toed little monster in the hole, or flattened on the bark of the tree like a patch of lichen, may well be one of those things which are hidden from the sharp-eyed owl. Whatever purpose be attributed to his peculiar shape and color,—protective, obliterative, mimicking,—itis always a source of fresh amazement, the way this largest of our hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old tree, can utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes.
The common toads and all the frogs have enemies enough, and it would seem from the comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they must have enemies, too, but I do not know who they are. The scarcity of the tree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that, to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree, now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several, and not one; for who can tell one tree-toad from another? Nobody; and for that reason I made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order to see how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own natural environment.
Upon moving into this house, about seven years ago, we found a tree-toad living in the big hickory by the porch. For the next three springs he reappeared, and all summer long we would find him, now on the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Thenwe marked him; and for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many more years he might have lived in the hickory for us all to pet, I should like to know; but last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy-moth killers, poking in the hole, did our little friend to death.
He was worth many worms.
It was interesting, it was very wonderful to me, the instinct for home—the love for home I should like to call it—that this humble little creature showed. A toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an ugly gnome with a jeweled eye to the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the summer rain, who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his waking up for the spring—to such an one the jeweled eye and the amphibious habits are but the forewords of a long, marvelous life-history.
This small tree-toad had a home, had it in his soul, I believe, precisely where John HowardPayne had it, and where many another of us has it. He had it in a tree, too,—in a hickory tree, this one that dwelt by my house; he had it in an apple tree, that one yonder across the meadow.
“East, west,Hame’s best,”
“East, west,Hame’s best,”
“East, west,
Hame’s best,”
croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive minor that wakened memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things than any other voice I ever knew.
These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have never had a home; and none of us has ever had more than one. There can be but one—mine—and that has always been, must always be, as imperishable as memory, and as far beyond all barter as the gates of the sunset are beyond my horizon’s picket fence of pines.
The toad seems to feel it all, but feels it whole, not analyzed and itemized as a memory. Here in the hickory for four years (for seven, I amquite sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs, but back he would come, without mate or companion, to his tree. Stronger than love of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow cold heart is his instinct for home.
If I go down to the orchard and bring up from the apple tree another toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing, theHeimwehwhich he shares with me; and guided by it, as the bee and the pigeon and the dog are guided, he makes his sure way back to the orchard home.
Would he go back beyond the orchard, over the road, over the wide meadow, over to the Baldwin tree, half a mile away, if I brought him from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then watch the old apple tree yonder. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not let him rest; and guided by his mysterious senseof direction—for thisoneplace—he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the way.
Yet I could wish there were another tree here, besides the apple, and another toad. Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great deal more than that. Here in the old Baldwin he has made his home for I don’t know how long, hunting over its world of branches in the summer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the winter—down under the chips and punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the débris at the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he preserved himself until thawed out by the spring. I never pass the old apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my respects to the toad; nor in the winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep in there. He is no mere toad any more. He has passed into agenius loci, the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within the tree’s thin ribs, as if to save the old shell to another summer.
A toad is a toad, and if he never got back to the tree there would be one toad less, nothing more. If anything more, then it is on paper, and it is cant, not toad at all. And so, I suppose, stones are stones, trees trees, brooks brooks—not books and tongues and sermons at all—except on paper and as cant. Surely there are many things in writing that never had any other, any real existence, especially in writing that deals with the out-of-doors. One should write carefully about one’s toad; fearfully, indeed, when that toad becomes one’s teacher; for teacher my toad in the old Baldwin has many a time been.
Often in the summer dusk I have gone over to sit at his feet and learn some of the things my college professors could not teach me. I have not yet taken my higher degrees. I was graduated A. B. from college. It is A. B. C. that I am working toward here at the old apple tree with the toad.
Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait; the toad comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer evening steals out with the wood-shadowsand softly covers the fields. We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is the lesson—one of the majors in this graduate course with the toad.
The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whippoorwill drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, but is blotted out by the darkness, only to blaze again, and again be blotted, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker for the quick, unsteady glow.
We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had been taught every manner of stirring, and this unwonted exercise of being still takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts me painfully out of breath in my soul. “Wisdom is the principal thing,” my other teachers would repeat, “therefore get wisdom, but keep exceedingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short. There areonlytwenty-four hours to the day. TheDevil finds mischief for idle hands to do. Let us then be up and doing”—all of this at random from one of their lectures on “The Simple Life, or the Pace that Kills.”
Of course there is more or less of truth in this teaching of theirs. A little leisure has no doubt become a dangerous thing—unless one spend it talking or golfing or automobiling, or aëroplaning or elephant-killing, or in some other diverting manner; otherwise one’s nerves, like pulled candy, might set and cease to quiver; or one might even have time to think.
“Keep going,”—I quote from another of their lectures,—“keep going; it is the only certainty you have against knowing whither you are going.” I learned that lesson well. See me go—with half a breakfast and the whole morning paper; with less of lunch and the 4:30 edition. But I balance my books, snatch the evening edition, catch my car, get into my clothes, rush out to dinner, and spend the evening lecturing or being lectured to. I do everything but think.
But suppose I did think? It could only disturb me—my politics, or ethics, or religion. I had better let the editors and professors andpreachers think for me. The editorial office is such a quiet thought-inducing place; as quiet as a boiler factory; and the thinkers there, from editor-in-chief to the printer’s devil, are so thoughtful for the size of the circulation! And the college professors, they have the time and the cloistered quiet needed. But they have pitiful salaries, and enormous needs, and their social status to worry over, and themes to correct, and a fragmentary year to contend with, and Europe to see every summer, and— Is it right to ask them, with all this, to think? We will ask the preachers instead. They are set apart among the divine and eternal things; they are dedicated to thought; they have covenanted with their creeds to think; it is their business to study, but, “to study to be careful and harmless.”
It may be, after all, that my politics and ethics and religion need disturbing, as the soil about my fruit trees needs it. Is it the tree? or is it the soil that I am trying to grow? Is it I, or my politics, my ethics, my religion? I will go over to the toad, no matter the cost. I will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the worry of work even less. He has all time and no task; he is not obliged tolabor for a living, much less to think. My other teachers all are; they are all professional thinkers; their thoughts are words: editorials, lectures, sermons,—livings. I read them or listen to them. The toad sits out the hour silent, thinking, but I know not what, nor need to know. To think God’s thoughts after Him is not so high as to think my own after myself. Why then ask this of the toad, and so interrupt these of mine? Instead we will sit in silence and watch Altair burn along the shore of the sky, and overhead Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the apple tree.
The darkness has come. The toad is scarcely a blur between me and the stars. It is a long look from him, ten feet above me, on past the fireflies to Arcturus and the regal splendors of the Northern Crown—as deep and as far a look as the night can give, and as only the night can give. Against the distant stars, these ten feet between me and the toad shrink quite away; and against the light far off yonder near the pole, the firefly’s little lamp becomes a brave but a very lesser beacon.
There are only twenty-four hours to the day—to the day and the night! And how few areleft to that quiet time between the light and the dark! Ours is a hurried twilight. We quit work to sleep; we wake up to work again. We measure the day by a clock; we measure the night by an alarm clock. Life is all ticked off. We are murdered by the second. What we need is a day and a night with wider margins—a dawn that comes more slowly, and a longer lingering twilight. Life has too little selvage; it is too often raw and raveled. Room and quiet and verge are what we want, not more dials for time, nor more figures for the dials. We have things enough, too, more than enough; it is space for the things, perspective, and the right measure for the things that we lack—a measure not one foot short of the distance between us and the stars.
If we get anything out of the fields worth while, it will be this measure, this largeness, and quiet. It may be only an owl or a tree-toad that we go forth to see, but how much more we find—things we cannot hear by day, things long, long forgotten, things we never thought or dreamed before.
The day is none too short, the night none too long; but all too narrow is the edge between.
IVTHE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS
THEragged quilt of snow had slipped from the shoulders of the slopes, the gray face of the maple swamp showed a flush of warmth, and the air, out of the south to-day, breathed life, the life of buds and catkins, of sappy bark, oozing gum, and running water—the life of spring; and through the faintly blending breaths, as a faster breeze ran down the hills, I caught a new and unmistakable odor, single, pointed, penetrating, the sign to me of an open door in the wood-lot, to me, indeed, the Open Sesame of spring.
“When does the spring come? And who brings it?” asks the watcher in the woods. “To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders and the pussy-willows begin to swell,” writes Mr. Burroughs, “when the ice breaks up on the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward.” So I have written, also; written verses even to the pussy-willow, to the bluebird, and to the hepatica,as spring’s harbingers; but never a line yet to celebrate this first forerunner of them all, the gentle early skunk. For it is his presence, blown far across the February snow, that always ends my New England winter and brings the spring. Of course there are difficulties, poetically, with the wood-pussy. I don’t remember that even Whitman tried the theme. But, perhaps, the good gray poet never met a spring skunk in the streets of Camden. The animal is comparatively rare in the densely populated cities of New Jersey.
It is rare enough here in Massachusetts; at least, it used to be; though I think, from my observations, that the skunk is quietly on the increase in New England. I feel very sure of this as regards the neighborhood immediate to my farm.
This is an encouraging fact, but hard to be believed, no doubt. I, myself, was three or four years coming to the conviction, often fearing that this little creature, like so many others of our thinning woods, was doomed to disappear. But that was before I turned to keeping hens. I am writing these words as a naturalist and nature-lover, and I am speaking also with theauthority of one who keeps hens. Though a man give his life to the study of the skunk, and have not hens, he is nothing. You cannot say, “Go to, I will write an essay about my skunks.” There is no such anomaly as professional nature-loving, as vocational nature-writing. You cannot go into your woods and count your skunks. Not until you have kept hens can you know, can you even have the will to believe, the number of skunks that den in the dark on the purlieus of your farm.
That your neighbors keep hens is not enough. My neighbors’ hens were from the first a stone of stumbling to me. That is a peculiarity of next-door hens. It would have been better, I thought, if my neighbors had had no hens. I had moved in among these half-farmer folk, and while I found them intelligent enough, I immediately saw that their attitude toward nature was wholly wrong. They seemed to have no conception of the beauty of nature. Their feeling for the skunk was typical: they hated the skunk with a perfect hatred, a hatred implacable, illogical, and unpoetical, it seemed to me, for it was born of their chicken-breeding.
Here were these people in the lap of nature,babes in nature’s arms, knowing only to draw at her breasts and gurgle, or, the milk failing, to kick and cry. Mother Nature! She was only a bottle and rubber nipple, only turnips and hay and hens to them. Nature a mother? a spirit? a soul? fragrance? harmony? beauty? Only when she cackled like a hen.
Now there is something in the cackle of a hen, a very great deal, indeed, if it is the cackle of your own hen. But the morning stars did not cackle together, and there is still a solemn music in the universe, a music that is neither an anvil nor a barnyard chorus. Life ought to mean more than turnips, more than hay, more than hens to these rural people. It ought, and it must. I had come among them. And what else was my coming but a divine providence, a high and holy mission? I had been sent unto this people to preach the gospel of the beauty of nature. And I determined that my first text should be the skunk.
All of this, likewise, was previous to the period of my hens.
It was now, as I have said, my second February upon the farm, when the telltale wind broughtdown this poignant message from the wood-lot. The first spring skunk was out! I knew the very stump out of which he had come—the stump of his winter den. Yes, and the day before, I had actually met the creature in the woods, for he had been abroad now something like a week. He was rooting among the exposed leaves in a sunny dip, and I approached to within five feet of him, where I stood watching while he grubbed in the thawing earth. Buried to the shoulders in the leaves, he was so intent upon his labor that he got no warning of my presence. My neighbors would have knocked him over with a club,—would have done it eagerly, piously, as unto the Lord. What did the Almighty make such vermin for, anyway? No one will phrase an answer; but every one will act promptly, as by command and revelation.
I stood several minutes watching, before the little wood-pussy paused and pulled out his head in order to try the wind. How shocked he was! He had been caught off his guard, and instantly snapped himself into a startled hump, for the whiff he got on the wind saiddanger!—and nigh at hand! Throwing his pointed nose straightinto the air, and swinging it quickly to the four quarters, he fixed my direction, and turning his back upon me, tumbled off in a dreadful hurry for home.
This interesting, though somewhat tame, experience, would have worn the complexion of an adventure for my neighbors, a bare escape,—a ruined Sunday suit, or, at least, a lost jumper or overalls. I had never lost so much as a roundabout in all my life. My neighbors had had innumerable passages with this ramping beast, most of them on the edge of the dark, and many of them verging hard upon the tragic. I had small patience with it all. I wished the whole neighborhood were with me, that I might take this harmless little wood-pussy up in my arms and teach them again the first lesson of the Kingdom of Heaven, and of this earthly Paradise, too, and incidentally put an end forever to these tales of Sunday clothes and nights of banishment in the barn.
As nobody was present to see, of course I did not pick the wood-pussy up. I did not need to prove to myself the baselessness of these wild misgivings; nor did I wish, without good cause,further to frighten the innocent creature. I had met many a skunk before this, and nothing of note ever had happened. Here was one, taken suddenly and unawares, and what did he do? He merely winked and blinked vacantly at me over the snow, trying vainly to adjust his eyes to the hard white daylight, and then timidly made off as fast as his pathetic legs could carry him, fetching a compass far around toward his den.
I accompanied him, partly to see him safely home, but more to study him on the way, for my neighbors would demand something else than theory and poetry of my new gospel: they would require facts. Facts they should have.
I had been a long time coming to my mind concerning the skunk. I had been thinking years about him; and during the previous summer (my second here on the farm) I had made a careful study of the creature’s habits, so that even now I had in hand material of considerable bulk and importance, showing the very great usefulness of the animal. Indeed, I was about ready to embody my beliefs and observations in a monograph, setting forth the need of national protection—of a Committee of One Hundred, say, ofcontinental scope, to look after the preservation and further introduction of the skunk as the friend and ally of man, as the most useful of all our insectivorous creatures, bird or beast.
What, may I ask, was this one of mine doing here on the edge of the February woods? He was grubbing. He had been driven out of his winter bed by hunger, and he had been driven out into the open snowy sunshine by the cold, because the nights (he is nocturnal) were still so chill that the soil would freeze at night past his ploughing. Thus it chanced, at high noon, that I came upon him, grubbing among my soft, wet leaves, and grubbing for nothing less than obnoxious insects!
My heart warmed to him. He was ragged and thin, he was even weak, I thought, by the way he staggered as he made off. It had been a hard winter for men and for skunks, particularly hard for skunks on account of the unbroken succession of deep snows. This skunk had been frozen into his den, to my certain knowledge, since the last of November.
Nature is a severe mother. The hunger of this starved creature! To be put to bed without eventhe broth, and to be locked in, half awake, for nearly three months. Poor little beastie! Perhaps he hadn’t intelligence enough to know that those gnawings within him were pain. Perhaps our sympathy is all agley. Perhaps. But we are bound to feel it when we watch him satisfying his pangs with the pestiferous insects of our own wood-lot.
I saw him safely home, and then returned to examine the long furrows he had ploughed out among the leaves. I found nothing to show what species of insects he had eaten, but it was enough to know that he had been bent on bugs—gypsy-moth eggs, maybe, on the underside of some stick or stone, where they had escaped the keen eye of the tree-warden. We are greatly exercised over this ghastly caterpillar. But is it entomologists, and national appropriations, and imported parasites that we need to check the ravaging plague? These things might help, doubtless; but I was intending to show in my monograph that it is only skunks we need; it is the scarcity of skunks that is the whole trouble—and the abundance of cats.
My heart warmed, I say, as I watched my onefrail skunk here by the snowy woodside, and it thrilled as I pledged him protection, as I acknowledged his right to the earth, his right to share life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness with me. He could have only a small part in my life, doubtless, but I could enter largely into his, and we could live in amity together—in amity here onthisbit of the divine earth, anyhow, if nowhere else under heaven.
This was along in February, and I was beginning to set my hens.
A few days later, in passing through the wood-lot, I was surprised and delighted to see three skunks in the near vicinity of the den,—residents evidently of the stump! “Think!” I exclaimed to myself, “think of the wild flavor to this tame patch of woods! And the creatures so rare, too, and beneficial! They multiply rapidly, though,” I thought, “and I ought to have a fine lot of them by fall. I shall stock the farm with them.”
This was no momentary enthusiasm. In a book that I had published some years before I had stoutly championed the skunk. “Like every predatory creature,” I wrote, “the skunk morethan balances his debt for corn and chickens by his destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by digging out the nests and eating the young. But we forget our debt when the chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever learn to say, when the red-tail swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry trees, and when the skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving dinner—shall we ever learn to love and understand the fitness of things out-of-doors enough to say, ‘But then, poor beastie, thou maun live’?”
Since writing those warm lines I had made further studies upon the skunk, all establishing the more firmly my belief that there is a big balance to the credit of the animal. Meantime, too, I had bought this small farm, with a mowing field and an eight-acre wood-lot on it; with certain liens and attachments on it, also, due to human mismanagement and to interference with the course of Nature in the past. Into the orchard, for instance, had come the San José scale; into the wood-lot had crawled the gypsy-moth—humanblunders! Under the sod of the mowing land had burrowed the white grub of the June-bugs. On the whole fourteen acres rested the black shadow of an insect plague. Nature had been interfered with and thwarted. Man had taken things into his own clumsy hands. It should be so no longer on these fourteen acres. I held the deed to these, not for myself, nor for my heirs, but for Nature. Over these few acres the winds of heaven should blow free, the birds should sing, the flowers should grow, and through the gloaming, unharmed and unaffrighted, the useful skunk should take his own sweet way.
The preceding summer had been a season remarkable for the ravages of the June-bug. The turf in my mowing went all brown and dead suddenly in spite of frequent rains. No cause for the trouble showed on the surface of the field. You could start and with your hands roll up the tough sod by the yard, as if a clean-cutting knife had been run under it about an inch below the crowns. It peeled off under your feet in great flakes. An examination of the soil brought to light the big fat grubs of the June-bugs, millions of the ghastly monsters! They had gone under the grass, eatingoff the roots so evenly and so thoroughly that not a square foot of green remained in the whole field.
It was here that the skunk did his good work (I say “the skunk,” for there was only one on the farm that summer, I think). I would go into the field morning after morning to count the holes he had made during the night in his hunt for the grubs. One morning I got over a hundred holes, all of them dug since last sundown, and each hole representing certainly one grub, possibly more; for the skunk would hear or smell his prey at work in the soil before attempting to dig.
A hundred grubs for one night, by one skunk! It took me only a little while to figure out the enormous number of grubs that a fair-sized family of skunks would destroy in a summer. A family of skunks would rid my farm of the pest in a single summer and make inroads on the grubs of the entire community.
Ah! the community! the ignorant, short-sighted, nature-hating community! What chance had a family of skunks in this community? And the fire of my mission burned hot within me.
And so did my desire for more skunks. My haycrop was short, wasnil, in fact, for the hayfield was as barren of green as the hen-yard. I had to have it ploughed and laid down again to grass. And all because of this scarcity of skunks.
Now, as the green of the springing blades began to show through the melting snow, it was with immense satisfaction that I thought of the three skunks under the stump. That evening I went across to my neighbor’s, the milkman’s, and had a talk with him over the desirability, the necessity indeed, of encouraging the skunks about us. I told him a good many things about these harmless and useful animals that, with all his farming and chicken-raising, he had never known.
But these rural folk are quite difficult. It is hard to teach them anything worth while, so hopelessly surrounded are they with things—common things. If I could only get them into a college class-room—removed some way from hens and hoes—I might, at least, put them into a receptive attitude. But that cannot be. Perhaps, indeed, I demand too much of them. For, after all, it takes a naturalist, a lover of the out-of-doors, to appreciate the beautiful adjustments in nature. A mere farmer can hardly do it. One needs a keen eye,but a certain aloofness of soul also, for the deeper meaning and poetry of nature. One needs to spend a vacation, at least, in the wilderness and solitary place, where no other human being has ever come, and there, where the animals know man only as a brother, go to the school of the woods and study the wild folk, one by one, until he discovers them personally, temperamentally, all their likes and dislikes, their little whimseys, freaks, and fancies—all of this, there, far removed from the cankering cares of hens and chickens, for the sake of the right attitude toward nature.
My nearest neighbor had never been to the wilderness. He lacked imagination, too, and a ready pen. Yet he promised not to kill my three skunks in the stump; a rather doubtful pledge, perhaps, but at least a beginning toward the new earth I hoped to see.
Now it was perfectly well known to me that skunks will eat chickens if they have to. But I had had chickens—a few hens—and had never been bothered by skunks. I kept my hens shut up, of course, in a pen—the only place for a hen outside of a pie. I knew, too, that skunks like honey, that they had even tampered with myhives, reaching in at night through the wide summer entrances and tearing out the brood combs. But I never lost much by these depredations. What I felt more was the destruction of the wild bees and wasps and ground-nesting birds, by the skunks.
But these were trifles! What were a few chickens, bees, yellow-jackets, and even the occasional bird’s-nest, against the hay-devouring grubs of the June-bug! And as for the characteristic odor which drifted in now and again with the evening breeze, that had come to have a pleasant quality for me, floating down across my two wide acres of mowing.
February passed gently into March, and my chickens began to hatch. Every man must raise chickens at some period of his life, and I was starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my specialty heretofore, making two blades grow where there had been one very thin one. But once your two acres are laid down, and you have a stump full of skunks, near by, against the ravages of the June-bugs, then there is nothing for you but chickens or something, while you wait. I got Rhode Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,—for what is the use of chickens if you cannot take them to the show?
The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls of yellow, with their pedigrees showing right through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew! I never lost one. And now the second batch of sitters would soon be ready to come off.
Then one day, at the morning count, five of one hen’s brood were gone! I counted again. I counted all the other broods. Five were gone!
My nearest neighbor had cats, mere barn cats, as many as ten, at the least. I had been suspicious of those cats from the first. So I got a gun. Then more of my chickens disappeared. I could count only forty-seven.
I shifted the coop, wired it in, and stretched a wire net over the top of the run. Nothing could get in, nor could a chicken get out. All the time I was waiting for the cat.
A few nights after the moving of the coop a big hole was dug under the wire fence of the run, another hole under the coop, and the entire brood of Rhode Island Reds was taken.
Then I took the gun and cut across the pasture to my neighbor’s.
“Hard luck,” he said. “It’s a big skunk. Here, you take these traps, and you’ll catch him; anybody can catch a skunk.”
And I did catch him. I killed him, too, in spite of the great scarcity of the creatures. Yet I was sorry, and, perhaps, too hasty; for catching him near the coop was no proof. He might have wandered this way by chance. I should have put him in a bag and carried him down to Valley Swamp and liberated him.
That day, while my neighbor was gone with his milk wagon, I slipped through the back pasture and hung the two traps up on their nail in the can-house.
I went anxiously to the chicken-yard the next morning. All forty came out to be counted. It must have been the skunk, I was thinking, as I went on into the brooding-house, where six hens were still sitting.
One of the hens was off her nest and acting queerly. Her nest was empty! Not a chick, not a bit of shell! I lifted up the second hen in the row, and of her thirteen eggs, only three were left. The hen next to her had five eggs; the fourth hen had four. Forty chickens gone (countingthem before they were hatched), all in one night.
I hitched up the horse and drove thoughtfully to the village, where I bought six skunk-traps.
“Goin’ skunkin’ some, this spring,” the store man remarked, as he got me the traps, adding, “Well, they’s some on ’em. I’ve seen a scaac’ty of a good many commodities, but I never yet see a scaac’ty o’ skunks.”
I didn’t stop to discuss the matter, being a trifle uncertain just then as to my own mind, but hurried home with my six traps. Six, I thought, would do to begin with, though I really had no conception of the number of cats (or skunks) it had taken to dispose of the three and one third dozens of eggs (at three dollars a dozen!) in a single night.
Early that afternoon I covered each sitting hen so that even a mouse could not get at her, and fixing the traps, I distributed them about the brooding-house floor; then, as evening came on, I pushed a shell into each barrel of the gun, took a comfortable perch upon a keg in the corner of the house, and waited.
I had come to stay. Something was going tohappen. And something did happen, away on in the small hours of the morning, namely—one little skunk. He walked into a trap while I was dozing. He seemed pretty small hunting then, but he looms larger now, for I have learned several more things about skunks than I knew when I had the talk with my neighbor: I have learned, for one thing, that forty eggs, soon to hatch, are just an average meal for the average half-grown skunk.
The catching of these two thieves put an end to the depredations, and I began again to exhibit in my dreams, when one night, while sound asleep, I heard a frightful commotion among the hens. I did the hundred-yard dash to the chicken-house in my unforgotten college form, but just in time to see the skunk cross the moonlit line into the black woods ahead of me.
He had wrought dreadful havoc among the thoroughbreds. What devastation a skunk, single-handed, can achieve in a pen of young chickens beggars all description.
I was glad that it was dead of night, that the world was home and asleep in its bed. I wanted no sympathy. I wished only to be alone, alone inthe cool, the calm, the quiet of this serene and beautiful midnight. Even the call of a whippoorwill in the adjoining pasture worried me. I desired to meditate, yet clear, consecutive thinking seemed strangely difficult. I felt like one disturbed. I was out of harmony with this peaceful environment. Perhaps I had hurried too hard, or I was too thinly clothed, or perhaps my feet were cold and wet. I only know, as I stooped to untwist a long and briery runner from about my ankle, that there was great confusion in my mind, and in my spirit there was chaos. I felt myself going to pieces,—I, the nature-lover! Had I not advocated the raising of a few extra hens just for the sake of keeping the screaming hawk in air and the wild fox astir in our scanty picnic groves? And had I not said as much for the skunk? Why, then, at one in the morning should I, nor clothed, nor in my right mind, be picking my barefoot way among the tangled dewberry vines behind the barn, swearing by the tranquil stars to blow the white-striped carcass of that skunk into ten million atoms if I had to sit up all the next night to do it?
One o’clock in the morning was the fiend’shour. There could be no unusual risk in leaving the farm for a little while in the early evening, merely to go to the bean supper over at the chapel at the Corner. So we were dressed and ready to start, when I spied one of my hens outside the yard, trying to get in.
Hurrying down, I caught her, and was turning back to the barn, when I heard a slow, faint rustling among the bushes behind the hen-house. I listened! Something was moving cautiously through the dead leaves! Tiptoeing softly around, I surprised a large skunk making his way slowly toward the hen-yard fence.
I grabbed a stone and hurled it, jumping, as I let it drive, for another. The flying missile hit within an inch of the creature’s nose, hard upon a large flat rock over which he was crawling. The impact was stunning, and before the old rascal could get to his groggy feet, I had fallen upon him—literally—and done for him.
But I was very sorry. I hope that I shall never get so excited as to fall upon another skunk,—never!
I was picking myself up, when I caught a low cry from the direction of the house—half scream,half shout. It was a woman’s voice, the voice of my wife, I thought. Was something the matter?
“Hurry!” I heard. But how could I hurry? My breath was gone, and so were my spectacles, and other more important things besides, while all about me poured a choking blinding smother. I fought my way out.
“Oh, hurry!”
I was on the jump; I was already rounding the barn, when a series of terrified shrieks issued from the front of the house. An instant more and I had come. But none too soon, for there stood the dear girl, backed into a corner of the porch, her dainty robes drawn close about her, and a skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confidently up the steps toward her.
“Whyareyou so slow!” she gasped. “I’ve been yelling here for an hour!—Oh! do—don’t kill that little thing, but shoo it away, quick!”
She certainly had not been yelling an hour, nor anything like it. But there was no time for argument now, and as for shooing little skunks, I was past that. I don’t know exactly what I did say, though I am positive that it wasn’t “shoo.” I was clutching a great stone, that I had run withall the way from behind the hen-yard, and letting it fly, I knocked the little creature into a harmless bunch of fur.
The family went over to the bean supper and left me all alone on the farm. But I was calm now, with a strange, cold calmness born of extremity. Nothing more could happen to me; I was beyond further harm. So I took up the bodies of the two creatures, and carried them, together with some of my late clothing, over beyond the ridge for burial. Then I returned by way of my neighbor’s, where I borrowed two sticks of blasting-powder and a big cannon fire-cracker. I had watched my neighbor use these explosives on the stumps in a new piece of meadow. The next morning, with an axe, a crowbar, shovel, gun, blasting-powder, and the cannon-cracker, I started for the stump in the wood-lot. I wished the cannon-cracker had been a keg of powder. I could tamp a keg of powder so snugly into the hole of those skunks!
It was a beautiful summer morning, tender with the half-light of breaking dawn, and fresh with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the skunks’ den, I sat down on the stump to wait amoment, for the loveliness and wonder of the opening day came swift upon me. From the top of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple, earnest song ringing down the wooded slope, and, soft as an echo, floated up from the swampy tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes of a wood thrush, mellow and globed, and almost fragrant of the thicket where the white honeysuckle was in bloom. Voices never heard at other hours of the day were vocal now; odors and essences that vanish with the dew hung faint in the air; shapes and shadows and intimations of things that slip to cover from the common light, stirred close about me. It was very near—the gleam! the vision splendid! How close to a revelation seems every dawn! And this early summer dawn, how near a return of that