Whether you live in the heart of a great city or in the open country, you ought to begin this fall to learn the names and habits of the birds and beasts (snakes, lizards, turtles, toads!) that live wild in your region. Even when all the summer birds have gone southfor the winter, there will remain in your woods and fields crows, jays, juncos, tree sparrows, chickadees, kinglets, nuthatches, screech owls, barred owls,—perhaps even snowy owls,—quails, partridges, goldfinches, with now and then a flock of crossbills, snow buntings, and other northern visitors, and even a flicker, robin, and bluebird left over from the fall migrations. These are plenty to begin on; and yet, as they are so few, compared with the numbers of the summer, the beginner’s work is thus all the easier in the autumn.
You should go out one of these frosty mornings for chestnuts, if they grow in your woods; or for “shagbarks,” if you live in New England; for black walnuts, if you live in the Middle States; for pecan nuts, if you live in the Gulf States; for butternuts,if you live in the states of the Middle West; for—what kind of nuts can you not go for, if you live in California where they make everything grow! It matters little whether you go for paper-shelled English walnuts or for plate-armored pignuts so long as yougo. It is the going that is worth while.
You ought to go “cocooning” this fall—to sharpen your eyes. But do not go often; for once you begin to look for cocoons, you are in danger of seeing nothing else—except brown leaves. And how many brown leaves, that look like cocoons, there are! They tease you to vexation. But a day now and then “cocooning” will do you no harm; indeed, it will cultivate your habit of concentration and close seeing as will no other kind of hunting I know.
Bring home with you the big brown silky cocoons of cecropia—the largest cocoon you will find, lashed all along its length to its twig, and usually near the ground. Look on the black cherry, the barberry, sassafras, and roadside and garden trees for the harder, whiter cocoon of the promethea moth. This hangs by its tip, because the caterpillarhas begun his house by using the leaf, spinning it into the cocoon as part of its walls, much as does the wretched “brown-tail.” The gray cocoons, or rather nests, of this “brown-tail” moth you must bring home to burn, for they are one of our greatest pests. You will find them full of tiny caterpillars as you tear them open.
Bring home your collection and, with the help of such a book as “Moths and Butterflies” by Mary C. Dickerson, identify them and hang them up for their “coming out” in the spring.
If you live in the city, you ought to go up frequently to your roof and watch for the birds that fly over. If in one of our many cities near the water, you will have a chance that those in the country seldom have, of seeing the seabirds—the white herring gulls (the young gulls are brown, and look like a differentspecies), as they pass over whistling plaintively, and others of the wild seafowl, that merely to hear and see in the smoky air of the city, is almost as refreshing as an ocean voyage. Then there are the parks and public gardens—never without their birds and, at the fall migrating time, often sheltering the very rarest of visitors.
In order to give point and purpose to one of these autumn outings, you should take your basket, or botanizing can, and scour the woods and fields for autumn berries. No bunch of flowers in June could be lovelier than the bunch of autumn berries that you can gather from thicket and wayside to carry home. And then, in order to enjoy the trip all over again, read James Buckham’s exquisite story, “A Quest for Fall Berries,” in his book, “Where Town and Country Meet.”
Take your botany can on a trip toward the end of November and see how many blossoming flowers you can bring home from the woods. Wild flowersafterThanksgiving in any northern state? Make the search, on all the southern slopes and in all the sheltered corners and see for yourselves. When you get back, you will want to read Mr. Bradford Torrey’s account of the flowers that he found blossoming out of doors in New England in the month of November. But who is Mr. Bradford Torrey? and where can you find this account of his November walk? You do not know? Well, then there is something more for you to do this fall.
While you are finding out who Mr. Torrey is and what he has written, you should also get acquainted with John Burroughs, Olive Thorne Miller, Thoreau, Frank Bolles, William Hamilton Gibson, C. C. Abbott, Edward Breck, Gilbert White, and—but these will do forthisfall. Don’t fail to read dear old Gilbert White’s “Natural History of Selborne”; though perhaps we grown-ups like it better than you may this fall. If you don’t understand Gilbert White, then read this year “The Life of a Scotch Naturalist” by Samuel Smiles, and Arabella Buckley’s two books, “Life and Her Children,” and “Winners in Life’s Race.”
You ought to tie up a piece of suet for the birds; keep your cat in the house, except during the middle of the day, and—but I shall tell you no more. There is no end to the interesting things to do in your study of the out of doors and in your tramps afield this autumn.
WEhave had a week of almost unbroken rain, and the water is standing over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch,—this wet, sedgy land in the cold twilight,—drearier than any part of the woods or the upland pastures. They are empty; but the meadow is flat and wet, it is naked and all unsheltered. And a November night is falling.
The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly over. I button my heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down to the stream and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it meets the main ditch. Thereis a sharp turn here toward the swamp; and here at the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait.
I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building; for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished muskrat house.
As I wait, the moon climbs higher over the woods. The water on the meadow shivers in the light. The wind bites through my heavy coat and drives me back, but not before I have seen one, two, three little creatures scaling the walls of the house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by the cold, but not before I know that here in the desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-walled and warm, and proof against the longest, bitterest of winters.
This is near the end of November. My fire-wood is in the cellar; I am about ready to put on the double-windows and the storm-doors. The muskrats are even now putting on theirs, for their house is all but finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the muskrats and I.
Throughout the summer the muskrats had no house, only their tunnels into the sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and their beds under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps. All those months the water was low in the ditch, and the beds among the tussocks were safe and dry enough.
“TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE”
“TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE”
Now the November rains have filled river and ditch, flooded the tunnels, and crept up into the beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat will creep out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in. What shall he do for shelter? He knows. And long before the rains begin, he picks out the place for a house. He does not want to leave his meadow, therefore the only thing to do is to build,—move from under the tussock out upon the top of the tussock; and here, in its deep, wiry grass, make a new bed high and dry above the rising water; and close this new bed in with walls that circle and dome, and defy the very winter.
Such a house will require a great deal of work to build. Why should not two or three muskrats combine—make the house big enough to hold them all, save labor and warmth, too, and, withal, live sociably together? So they left, each one his single bed, and, joining efforts, started, about the middle of October, to build this winter house.
Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have been rising, although for several nights at a time I could see no apparent progress with the work. The builders were in no hurry. The cold was far off. But it is coming, and to-night it feels near and keen. And to-night there is no loafing about the lodge.
When this house is done, when the last hod of mud plaster has been laid on,—then the rains may descend and the floods come, but it will not fall. Itis built upon a tussock; and a tussock—did you ever try to pull up a tussock?
Winter may descend, and boys and foxes may come—and they will come, but not before the walls are frozen. Then, let them come. The house will stand. It is boy-proof, almost; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and fox-proof. I have often seen where the fox has gone round and round the house in the snow, and where, at places, he has attempted to dig into the frozen mortar. But it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and utterly impossible for his pick and shovel.
I said the floods, as well as the fox, may come. So they may, ordinarily; but along in March, when one comes as a freshet and rises to the dome of the house, then it fills the bed-chamber to the ceiling and drowns the dwellers out. I remember a freshet once in the end of February that flooded Lupton’s Pond and drove the muskrats of the whole pond village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to whatever wreckage the waters brought along.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and menGang aft agley”
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and menGang aft agley”
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley”
—and of muskrats, too.
But not very often do the muskrats’ plans go thus agley. For muskrats and wood mice and birds and bees, and even the very trees of the forest, have a kind of natural foresight. They all look ahead, at the approach of autumn, and begin to provide against thecoming cold. Yet, weather-wise as a muskrat may be, still he cannot know all that may happen; he cannot be ready for everything. And so, if now and then, he should prove foresight to be vain, he only shows that his plans and our plans, his life and our lives, are very much alike.
Usually, however, the muskrat’s plans work out as he would have them. His foresight proves to be equal to all that the winter can bring. On the coldest winter days I shall look out over the bleak white waste to where his house shows, a tiny mound in the snow, and think of him safe and warm inside, as safe and warm as I am, in my house, here on the hilltop.
Indeed, I think the muskrat will be the warmer; for my big house here on Mullein Hill is sometimes cold. And the wind! If only I could drive the winter wind away from the corners of the house! But the house down in the meadow has no corners. It has walls, mud walls, so thick and round that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard by the dwellers within; and all unheeded the cold creeps over and over the low thatch, to crawl back and stiffen upon the meadow.
The doors of this meadow house swing wide open throughout the winter; for they are in the bottom of the house, beneath the water, where only the muskrat can enter. Just outside the doors, down under the water and the roof of ice that covers allthe flooded meadow, are fresh calamus roots, and iris and arum—food in abundance, no matter how long the winter lasts.
No, the winter has not yet come; but it is coming, for the muskrats are building. Let it come. Let the cold crawl stiff and gray across the meadow. Let the whirling snow curl like smoke about the pointed top of the little tepee down by the meadow ditch. Let the north wind do its worst. For what care the dwellers in that thick-walled lodge beneath the snow? Down under the water their doors are open; their roadways up the ditches as free as in the summer; and the stems of the sedges just as juicy and pink and tender.
The muskrats are building. The buds are leaving. Winter is coming. I must get out my own storm-windows and double-doors; for even now a fire is blazing cheerily on my wide, warm hearth.
“The north wind doth blow,And we shall have snow,And what will poor Robin do then,Poor thing?”
“The north wind doth blow,And we shall have snow,And what will poor Robin do then,Poor thing?”
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing?”
ANDwhat will Muskrat do? and Chipmunk? and Whitefoot, the wood mouse? and Chickadee? and the whole world of poor things out of doors?
Never fear. Robin knows as well as you that the north wind doth blow, and is now far away on his journey to the South; Muskrat knows, too, and is building his warm winter lodge; Chipmunk has already made his bed deep down under the stone wall, where zero weather is unheard of; Whitefoot, the wood mouse, has stored his hollow poplar stub full of acorns, and, taking possession of Robin’s deserted nest near by, has roofed it and lined it and turned it into a cosey, cold-proof house, while Chickadee,dear thing—has done nothing at all. Not so much as a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored up for the winter. But he knows where there is a big piece of suet for him on a certain lilac bush. And he knows where there is a snug little hole in a certain elm tree limb. The north wind may blow, blow, blow! It cannot get through Chickadee’s feathers, nor daunt for one moment his brave little heart.
The north wind sweeping the bare stubble fields and winding its shivering horn through the leafless trees does sometimes pierce my warm coat and strike a chill into my heart. Then how empty and cold seems the outdoor world! How deadly the touch of the winter! How fearful the prospect of the coming cold!
Does Muskrat think so? Does Whitefoot? Does Chickadee? Not at all, for they are ready.
The preparations for hard weather may be seen going on all through the autumn, beginning as far back as the flocking of the swallows late in July. Up to that time no one had thought of a coming winter, it would seem; but, one day, there upon the telegraph-wireswere the swallows—the first sign that the getting ready for winter has begun.
The great migratory movements of the birds are very mysterious; but they were in the beginning, I think, and are still, for the most part, mere shifts to escape the cold. Yet not so much to escape the cold itself do the birds migrate, as to find a land of food. When the northland freezes, when river and lake are sealed beneath the ice and the soil is made hard as flint, then the food supplies for most of the birds are utterly cut off, causing them to move southward ahead of the cold, or starve.
There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds, like the quail, and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are so well provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the great majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn, must take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.
And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and closing bays of the vast desolate North are empty now, except for the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow.
Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready, much comforting assurance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack,no doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and death. But what with the building, the strange deep sleeping, and the harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and sociable, living.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don’t know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, Chipmunk or the provident ant. The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and verses have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just as thrifty. So is the busy bee.
It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far beyond her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter. By the first of August she has filled the brood chamber of the hive with honey—forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for the whole colony until the willows tassel again. But who knows what the winter may be? how cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So the harvesting is pushed with vigor on, until the frosts kill the last of the autumn asters—on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is safe should the sun not shine again for a year and a day.
The last of the asters have long since gone; so have the witch-hazels. All is quiet about the hives. The bees have formed into their warm winter clusters upon the combs; and except “when come the calm, mild days,” they will fly no more until March or April. I will half close their entrances—and so help them to put on their storm-doors.
The whole out of doors around me is like a great beehive, stored and sealed for the winter, its swarming life close-clustered, and safe and warm against the coming cold.
I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length of its frozen slope. There is no sign of life. The brown leaves have drifted into the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every burrow were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too, littering and choking the doorways. A stranger would find it hard to believe that all of my forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bottoms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and quite out of danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.
The woodchuck’s manner of providing for winter is very curious. Winter spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of danger, would need wings. But wings weren’t given him. Must he perish then? Winter spreads far, but it does not go deep—down only about four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can,perhaps, escapeunderland. So down he goesthroughthe winter, down into a mild and even temperature,five feet away—only five feet, but as far away from the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco.
Indeed, Woodchuck’s is a farther journey and even more wonderful than Bobolink’s; for these five feet carry him to the very gates of death. That he will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive with the spring out of this dark way, is passing strange.
Muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all the meadow into a well-stocked cellar. Beaver built him a dam, cut and anchored under water a plenty of green sticks near his lodge, so that he too would be under cover when the ice formed, with an abundance of tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his summer laying up food near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole,—a grave,—then ate until no particle more of fat could be got within his baggy hide, then crawled into his bed to sleep until the dawn of spring!
This is his shift! This is the length to which he goes, because he has no wings, and because he cannotcut, cure, and store away, in the depths of the stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk selects long-keeping things and buries them; but the woodchuck simply fattens himself, then buries himself, and sleeps—and lives!
“The north wind doth blow,And we shall have snow,”
“The north wind doth blow,And we shall have snow,”
“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,”
but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect? Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog, who is also without fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at the sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him, too, in her own motherly way. All he has to do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of the ditch and sleep—and sometimes freeze!
No matter. If the cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he never knows. He will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for joy and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat. I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice. Drop the lump on the floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment of the ice itself. And this has happened more than once to the same frog without causing him the least ache or pain. He would gradually limber up, and croak, and look as wise as ever.
The north windmayblow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world ofmine in the gray November light. The grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.
Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger and cold. It was after an extremely long “severe spell”; but this was not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field. One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at once, although within easy reach of plenty.
Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier, bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.
The smaller birds that stay through the winter,like the tree sparrow and the junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing-field.
The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white. Then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there was a five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the crusty snow—five days of life and plenty for the birds.
Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and winters, which were made when the world was made—that even ragweeds and winters have a part in the beautiful divine scheme of things.
“The north wind doth blowAnd we shall have snow”—
“The north wind doth blowAnd we shall have snow”—
“The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow”—
but the wild geese are going over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks have gone to sleep; the muskrats have nearly finished their lodge; the sap in the big hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. And what has become of Robin, poor thing?
IHAVEhad many a person ask me, “What is the best way to learn about the out of doors?” and I always answer, “Don’t try to learnaboutit, but first go out of the house and get into the out of doors. Then open both eyes, use both of your ears, and stand in one place stock still as long as you can; and you will soon know the out of doors itself, which is better than knowing about it.”
“But,” says my learner, “if I go out of the house, I don’t get into the out of doors at all, but into a city street!”
Look there—in the middle of the street! What is it? An English sparrow? Yes, an English sparrow—six English sparrows. Are they not a part of the out of doors? And look up there, over your head—a strip of sky? Yes—is not a strip of blue sky a part of the out of doors?
Now let me tell you how I learned an outdoor lesson one night along a crowded city street.
It was a cold, wet night; and the thick, foggy twilight, settling down into the narrow streets, was full of smoke and smell and chill. A raw wind blew in from the sea and sent a shiver past every corner.The street lights blinked, the street mud glistened, the street noises clashed and rattled, and the street crowds poured up and down and bore me along with them.
I was homesick—homesick for the country. I longed to hear the sound of the wind in the pine trees; I longed to hear the single far-away bark of the dog on the neighboring farm, or the bang of a barndoor, or the clack of a guinea going to roost. It was half-past five, and thousands of clerks were pouring from the closing stores; but I was lonely, homesick for the quiet, the wideness, the trees and sky of the country.
Feeling thus, and seeing only the strange faces all about me, and the steep narrow walls of the street high above me, I drifted along, until suddenly I caught the sound of bird voices shrill and sharp through the din.
I stopped, but was instantly jostled out of the street, up against a grim iron fence, to find myself peering through the pickets into an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston.
As I looked, there loomed up in the fog and rain overhead the outlines of three or four gaunt trees, whose limbs were as thick with sparrows as they had ever been with leaves. A sparrow roost! Birds, ten thousand birds, gone to roost in the business section of a great city, with ten thousand human beings passing under them as they slept!
I got in behind a big waste-barrel by the iron fence and let the crowd surge past. It was such a sight as I had never seen. I had seen thousands of chimney swallows go to roost in the deserted chimneys of a great country house; I had many a time gone down at night to the great crow-roost in the pines at Cubby Hollow; but I had never stumbled upon a bird-roost on a crowded city street before!
The hurrying throng behind me thinned and straggled while I waited, watching by the iron fence. The wind freshened, the mist thickened into fine rain that came slanting down through the half-lighted trees; the sleeping sparrows twittered and shifted uneasily on the limbs.
The streets were being deserted. It was going to be a wild night on the water, and a wild night in the swaying, creaking tops of these old elm trees. I shivered at the thought of the sparrows sleeping out in such a night as this, and turned away toward my own snug roost hardly two blocks away.
The night grew wilder. The wind rattled down our street past a hundred loose shutters; the rain slapped against the windows, and then stopped as a heavy gust curled over the line of roofs opposite. I thought of the sparrows. Had they been driven from the tossing limbs? Could they cling fast in such a wind, and could they sleep?
Going to the window I looked down into the street. Only the electric light at the corner showedthrough the blur of the storm. The street was empty.
I slipped into my coat and went out; not even a policeman was in sight. Only the whirling sheets of rain, only the wild sounds of the wind were with me. The lights flared, but only to fill the streets with fantastic shadows and to open up a yawning cavern in every deep, dark doorway.
Keeping in the lee of the shuttered buildings, I made my way to the sparrow roost. I shall never forget the sight! Not a sparrow had left his perch, but every bird had now turned, facing the wind—breasting the wind, I should say; for every head was under a wing, as near as I could make out, and every breast was toward the storm. Here, on the limbs, as close as beads on a string, they clung and rocked in the arms of the wind, every one with his feathers tight to his body, his tail lying out flat on the storm.
Now there is the outdoor lesson I learned, and that is how I learned it. And what was the lesson? Why, this: that you are not shut away from Nature even in the heart of a great city; that the out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a crowded city street.
NO, you never went “leafing”—not unless you are simon-pure country-bred. You do not know what the word means. You cannot find it in the unabridged dictionary—not in the sense in which I am using it. But there are many good words we country people use that are not, perhaps, in the dictionary.
And what do I mean by “leafing”? Get down that bundle of meal sacks, hitch into the one-horse hay-rig, throw in the rakes, and come. We are going into the woods for pig-bedding, for leaves to keep the pigs dry and warm this winter!
You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen. And if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and zest enough to the labor.
But leafing, like every other humble labor, has itsown rewards, not the least of them being the leaves themselves and the getting of them!
We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cord wood was carted years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill, the winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.
We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle stumps; bend down saplings; stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch; tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of whoa-ing and oh-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.
You can yell all you want to when you go leafing; yell at every stump you hit; yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you under the chin; yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the twigs and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig. You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are, you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves and cut all the crazy capers you know; for this is a Saturday, these are the wild woods and the noisy leaves, and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays and the crows?
The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees; the dull cloud hangs low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of the maple swamp below you, peers the face of Winter.
You start up the ridge with your rake and draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all over your body strikes into your heart. You rake away as if it were your own bed you were gathering—as really it is. He that rakes for his pig, rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful to his beast; and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed.
Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o’clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it warms my feet through and through to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig’s pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my heart, too!
So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work for! What zest and purpose it lends to one’s raking and piling and storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged, occasionally, to carrya rake and a bag with me—much better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within the range of opera-glass or gun or walking stick. To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.
And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the rake uncovers—here, under a rotten stump, a hatful of acorns, probably gathered by the white-footed wood mouse. For the stump gives at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down the hill, spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the white-footed wood mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and high-bred looking as greyhounds.
Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf mould, in which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.
This is not the “red” salamander that Mr. Burroughs tells us is “the author of that fine plaintive piping to be heard more or less frequently, according to the weather, in our summer and autumn woods.” His “red” salamander is really a “dull orange,variegated with minute specks or spots,” a species I have never found here in my New England woods.
Nor have I ever suspected my red-backed salamander of piping; though he may do it, as may the angleworms, for aught I am able to hear, so filled with whir of iron wheels are my dull ears. But listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we also hear a “fine plaintive” sound—no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.
Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call—it seems to speak out of every tree trunk—and find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at all, but a tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty “skirl.” Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an inch long, not very large to pipe against the north wind turned loose in the leafless woods.
We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince’s pine, pipsissewa, creeping jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries,—a whole bouquet of evergreens,—exquisite, fairy-like forms, that later shall gladden our Christmas table.
“BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!”
“BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!”
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.
Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside, “jumping” a rabbit from its form, or bed, under a brush-pile; discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery, in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jacket’s nest, built two-thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf mould; digging into a woodchuck’s—
“But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig that we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck holes.” Two small boys catch up a bag and hold it open, while the third boy stuffs in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet and pack the leaves in tight, and onto the rig goes the bulging thing!
Exciting? If you can’t believe it exciting, hop up on the load and let us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!—Hold on to your ribs! Look out for the stump! Isn’t it fun to go leafing?Isn’t it fun to do anything that your heart does with you—even though you do it for a pig?
Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can’t weep, and he can’t double himself up, so he doubles up his tail. There is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of pure pig joy!
Boosh! Boosh!he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short—the shortest stop!—and fall to rooting for acorns.
He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest,—this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-faced little porker of mine—ages and ages ago. But he still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig in his soul.
And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the forest hunting him—ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits—and of pig,roastpig! And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we, at times, wild savages in our hearts.
Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go “leafing.” I want to give my pig a taste of acorns,and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that he cannot see his pen. I can feel the joy of it myself. No, I do not live in a pen; but then, I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little daily round into the wide, wild woods—my ancestral home.
YOUought to hear the scream of the hen-hawks circling high in the air. In August and September and late into October, if you listen in the open country, you will hear their piercing whistle,—shrill, exultantscreamcomes nearer to describing it,—as they sail and sail a mile away in the sky.
You ought to go out upon some mowing hill or field of stubble and hear the crickets, then into the apple orchard and hear the katydids, then into the high grass and bushes along the fence and hear the whole stringed chorus of green grasshoppers, katydids,and crickets. You have heard them all your life; but the trouble is that, because you have heard them so constantly in the autumn, and because one player after another has come gradually into the orchestra, you have taken them as part of the natural course of things and have never really heard them individually, to know what parts they play. Now anybody can hear a lion roar, or a mule bray, or a loon laugh his wild crazy laugh over a silent mountain lake, and know what sound it is; but who can hear a cricket out of doors, or a grasshopper, and know which is which?