His drop is swift and certain"His drop is swift and certain."
"His drop is swift and certain."
The fox is feared; but then, he is on legs, not wings, and there are telltale winds that fly before him, far ahead, whispering,Fox, fox, fox!The owl, remember, like the wind, has wings—wings that are faster than the wind's, and the latter cannot get ahead to tell of his coming.Reynard is cunning. Bunny is fore-sighted, wide awake, and fleet of foot. Sometimes he is caught napping—so are we all; but if in wits he is not always Reynard's equal, in speed he holds his own very well with his enemy. Reynard is nimble, but give the little cottontail a few feet handicap in a race for life, and he stands a fair chance of escape, especially in the summer woods.
When the hounds are on his trail the rabbit saves his legs by outwitting his pursuers. He will win a long distance ahead of them, and before they overtake him he will double on his track, approaching as near as he dare to the dogs, then leap far aside upon a log, into a stream, or among the bushes, and strike out in a new direction, gradually making back toward the starting-place. He rises on his haunches to listen, as he goes along, and before the dogs have again picked up the trail, he has perhaps had time to rest and lunch.
If it were a matter of dogs only, life would be just full enough of excitement to be interesting. He can double, balk, and mix trails on them, and enjoy it. They are nothing to fool. But the gun! Ah, that's a foe which he cannot get upwith. He may double and confuse the dogs; but as he comes back along a side-road, with them yelping far in the rear, he often hops right into a game-bag.
To do justice to the intelligence of the dog, and to be truthful about the rabbit, it must be remembered that, in the chase, Bunny usually has the advantage of knowing the lay of the land. The short cuts, streams, logs, briers, and roads are all in mind before he takes a jump. The dog is often on strange ground. Free the rabbit for the hunt, as you do the fox, on unknown territory, and the dogs will soon take the frightened, bewildered little creature.
There is no braver or more devoted mother in all the wilds than Molly Cottontail. She has a mother's cunning and a mother's resourcefulness, also. But this is to be expected. If number of children count for experience, then, surely, Molly ought to be resourceful. There are seasons when she will raise as many as three families—and old-fashioned families for size, too. It is not uncommon to find ten young rabbits in a nest. Five times twins! And all to be fed, washed, and kept covered up in bed together!But animal children, as a rule, behave better than human children, so we may not measure the task of Mother Molly by any standard of our own. It is task enough, however, since you can scarcely count the creatures that eat young rabbits, nor the enemies that unwittingly destroy them. A heavy rain may drown them, cattle may crush them, mowing-machines may cut them to pieces, and boys who are starting menageries may carry them away to starve.
Molly's mother-wit and craft are sufficient for most of these things. She picks out a sunny hillside among high grasses and bushes for the nest, so that the rain will flow off and not flood it, and because that here the cows are not so likely to trample, nor the plow and mowing-machine to come. She must also have ready and hidden access to the nest, which the grass and bushes afford.
She digs a little hollow in the sand about a foot deep and as big around as a duck's nest, lines it first with coarse grasses and leaves, then with a layer of finer grass, and fills the whole with warm, downy fur plucked from her own sides and breast. This nest, not being situated at theend of an inaccessible burrow, like the tame rabbit's or woodchuck's, requires that all care be taken to conceal every sign of it. The raw sand that is thrown out is artfully covered with leaves and grass to blend with the surrounding ground; and over the nest itself I have seen the old rabbit pull vines and leaves until the inquisitive, nosing skunk would have passed it by.
Molly keeps the young ones in this bed for about two weeks, after which time, if frightened, they will take to their heels. They are exceedingly tender at this age and ought not to be allowed to run out. They do not know what a man is, and hardly understand what their hind legs are. I saw one that was at least a month old jump up before a mowing-machine and bolt across the field. It was his first real scare, and the first time that he had been called upon to test his legs. It was funny. He didn't know how to use them. He made some tremendous leaps, and was so unused to the powerful spring in his hind feet that he turned several complete somersaults in the air.
Molly feeds the family shortly after nightfall, and always tucks them in when leaving, with thecaution to lie quiet and still. She is not often surprised with her young, but lingers near on guard. You can easily tell if you are in the neighborhood of her nest by the way she thumps and watches you, and refuses to be driven off. Here she waits, and if anything smaller than a dog appears she rushes to meet it, stamping the ground in fury. A dog she will intercept by leaving a warm trail across his path, or, in case the brute has no nose for her scent, by throwing herself in front of him and drawing him off on a long chase.
One day, as I was quietly picking wild strawberries on a hill, I heard a curious grunting down the side below me, then the quickthud! thud!of an angry rabbit. Among the bushes I caught a glimpse of rabbit ears. A fight was on.
Crouching beside a bluish spot, which I knew to be a rabbit's nest, was a big yellow cat. He had discovered the young ones, and was making mouths at the thought of how they would taste, when the mother's thump startled him. He squatted flat, with ears back, tail swelled, and hair standing up along his back, as the rabbit leaped over him. It was a glimpse of Molly'sears, as she made the jump, that I had caught. It was the beginning of the bout—only a feint by the rabbit, just to try the mettle of her antagonist.
The cat was scared, and before he got himself together, Molly, with a mighty bound, was in the air again, and, as she flashed over him, she fetched him a stunning whack on the head that knocked him endwise. He was on his feet in an instant, but just in time to receive a stinging blow on the ear that sent him sprawling several feet down the hill. The rabbit seemed constantly in the air. Back and forth, over and over the cat she flew, and with every bound landed a terrific kick with her powerful hind feet, that was followed by a puff of yellow fur.
The cat could not stand up to this. Every particle of breath and fight was knocked out of him at about the third kick. The green light in his eyes was the light of terror. He got quickly to a bush, and ran away, else I believe that the old rabbit would have beaten him to death.
The seven young ones in the nest were unharmed. Molly grunted and stamped at me for looking at them; but I was too big to kick as shehad just kicked the cat, and I could not be led away to chase her, as she would have led a dog. The little fellows were nearly ready to leave the nest. A few weeks later, when the wheat was cut in the field above, one of the seven was killed by the long, fearful knife of the reaper.
Seven young ones in the nest"Seven young ones in the nest."
"Seven young ones in the nest."
Perhaps the other six survived until November, the beginning of the gunning season. But when the slaughter was past, if one lived, he remembered more than once the cry of the hounds, the crack of the gun, and the sting of shot. He has won a few months' respite from his human enemies; but this is not peace. There is no peace for him. He may escape a long time yet; but his foes are too many for him. He fights a good fight, but must lose at last.
BRICK-TOP
That man was not only an item in the reckoning when the world was made, but that his attributes were anticipated too, is everywhere attested by the way nature makes use of his wreckage. She provides bountifully for his comfort, and, not content with this, she takes his refuse, his waste, what he has bungled and spoiled, and out of it fashions some of her rarest, daintiest delicacies. She gathers up his chips and cobs, his stubble and stumps,—the crumbs which fall from his table,—and brings them back to him as the perfection of her culinary art.
So, at least, any one with an imagination and a cultivated taste will say after he has eaten that October titbit, the brick-top mushroom.
The eating of mushrooms is a comparatively unappreciated privilege in our country. The taste is growing rapidly; but we have such an abundance of more likely stuff to live upon thatthe people have wisely abstained from a fungus diet. All things considered, it is a legitimate and wholesome horror, this wide-spread horror of toadstools. The woods, the wild fields, and the shaded roadsides gleam all through July and August with that pale, pretty "spring mushroom," the deadlyAgaricus (Amanita) vernus; yet how seldom we hear of even a child being poisoned by eating it! Surely it seems as if our fear of toadstools, like our hatred for snakes, has become an instinct. I have never known a mushroom enthusiast who had not first to conquer an almost mortal dread and to coax his backward courage and appetite by the gentlest doses. And this is well. An appetite for mushrooms is not wholly to be commended. Strangely enough, it is not the novice only who happens to suffer: the professional, the addicted eater, not infrequently falls a victim.
The risk the beginner runs is mainly from ignorance of the species. In gathering anything one naturally picks the fairest and most perfect. Now among the mushrooms the most beautiful, the ideal shapes are pretty sure to be of the poisonousAmanitatribe, whose toxic breaththrows any concentrated combination of arsenic, belladonna, and Paris green far into the shade. There is nothing morally wrong in the mushroom habit, yet for downright fatality it is eclipsed only by the opium habit and the suicidal taste for ballooning.
There are good people, nevertheless, who will eat mushrooms-toadstools even, if you please. The large cities have their mycological societies in spite of muscarine and phallin, as they have kennel clubs in spite of hydrophobia. Therefore, let us take the frontispiece of skull and crossbones, which Mr. Gibson thoughtfully placed in his poetic book on toadstools, for the centerpiece of our table, bring on the broiled brick-tops, and insist that, as for us, weknowthese to be the very ambrosia of the gods.
The development of a genuine enthusiasm for mushrooms—for anything, in fact—is worth the risk. Eating is not usually a stimulus to the imagination; but one cannot eat mushrooms in any other than an ecstatic frame of mind. If it chances to be your first meal of brick-tops (you come to the task with the latest antidote at hand), there is a stirring of the soul utterlyimpossible in the eating of a prosaic potato. You are on the verge all the time of discovery—of quail on toast, oysters, beefsteak, macaroni, caviar, or liver, according to your nationality, native fancy, and mycological intensity. The variety of meats, flavors, and wholesome nutrients found in mushrooms by the average mycologist beggars all the tales told by breakfast-food manufacturers. After listening to a warm mycologist one feels as Caleb felt at sight of the grapes and pomegranates: the children of Anak may be there, but this land of the mushroom is the land of milk and honey; let us go up at once and possess it.
The land of the mushroom"The land of the mushroom."
"The land of the mushroom."
If eating mushrooms quickens the fancy, the gathering of them sharpens the eye and trains the mind to a scientific accuracy in detail that quite balances any tendency toward a gustato-poetic extravagance. When one's life, when so slight a matter as one's dinner, depends upon the nicest distinctions in stem, gills, color, and age, even a Yankee will cease guessing and make a desperate effort to know what he is about.
Here is where brick-top commends itself over many other species of mushroom that approachthe shape of the deadlyAmanita. It is umbrella-shaped, moderately long-stemmed, regularly gilled, and without a "cup" or bulge at the root, rather pointed instead. It is a rich brick-brown or red at the center of the cap, shading off lighter toward the circumference. The gills in fresh young specimens are a light drab, turning black later with the black spores. It comes in September, and lasts until the heavy snows fall, growing rarely anywhere but in the woods uponoakstumps. I have found a few scattering individuals among the trees, and I took two out of my lawn one autumn. But oak-trees had stood in the lawn until a few years before, and enough of their roots still remained to furnish a host for the mushrooms. A stump sometimes will be covered with them, cap over cap, tier crowding tier so closely that no particle of the stump is seen. This colony life is characteristic. I have more than once gathered half a peck of edible specimens from a single stump.
The most inexperienced collector, when brick-top has been pointed out to him, can hardly take any other mushroom by mistake. It is strange, however, that this delicious, abundant, andperfectly harmless species should be so seldom pictured among the edible fungi in works upon this subject. I have seen it figured only two or three times, under the namesHypholoma perplexumandH. sublateritius, with the mere mention that it was safe to eat. Yet its season is one of the longest, and it is so abundant and so widely distributed as to make the gathering of the more commonly known but really rarer species quite impractical.
No one need fear brick-tops. When taken young and clean, if they do not broil into squab or fry into frogs' legs, they will prove, at any rate, to be deliciously tender, woodsy sweetmeats, good to eat and a joy to collect.
And the collecting of mushrooms is, after all, their real value. Our stomachs are too much with us. It is well enough to beguile ourselves with large talk of rare flavors, high per cents. of proteids, and small butcher's bills; but it is mostly talk. It gives a practical, businesslike complexion to our interest and excursions; it backs up our accusing consciences at the silly waste of time with a show of thrift and economy; but here mushroom economy ends. There is aboutas much in it as there is of cheese in the moon. No doubt tons and tons of this vegetable meat go to waste every day in the woods and fields, just as the mycologists say; nevertheless, according to my experience, it is safer and cheaper to board at a first-class hotel than in the wilderness upon this manna, bounty of the skies though it be.
It is the hunt for mushrooms, the introduction through their door into a new and wondrous room of the out-of-doors, that makes mycology worthy and moral. The genuine lover of the out-of-doors, having filled his basket with fungi, always forces his day's gleanings upon the least resisting member of the party before he reaches home, while he himself feeds upon the excitement of the hunt, the happy mental rest, the sunshine of the fields, and the flavor of the woods. After a spring with the birds and a summer with the flowers, to leave glass and botany-can at home and go tramping through the autumn after mushrooms is to catch the most exhilarating breath of the year, is to walk of a sudden into a wonder-world. With an eye single for fungi, we see them of every shape and color and in every imaginableplace—under leaves, up trees, in cellars, everywhere we turn. Rings of oreads dance for us upon the lawns, goblins clamber over the rotting stumps, and dryads start from the hollow trees to spy as we pass along.
Brick-top is in its prime throughout October—when, in the dearth of other interests, we need it most. By this time there are few of the birds and flowers left, though the woods are far from destitute of sound and color. The chickadees were never friendlier; and when, since last autumn, have so many flocks of goldfinches glittered along our paths? Some of the late asters and goldenrods are still in bloom, and here and there a lagging joepye-weed, a hoary head of boneset, and a brilliant tuft of ironweed show above the stretches of brown.
October is not the month of flowers, even if it does claim the witch-hazel for its own. It is the month of mushrooms. There is something unnatural and uncanny about the witch-hazel, blossoming with sear leaf and limbs half bare. I never come upon it without a start. The sedges are dead, the maples leafless, the robins gone, the muskrats starting their winter lodges;and here, in the yellow autumn sun, straggles this witch-hazel, naked like the willows and alders, but spangled thick with yellow blossoms! Blossoms, indeed, but not flowers. Hydras they look like, from the dying lily-pads, crawling over the bush to yellow and die with the rest of the dying world.
Witch-hazelWitch-hazel.
Witch-hazel.
No natural, well-ordered plant ought to be in flower when its leaves are falling; but if stumps and dead trees are to blossom, of course leaf-falling time would seem a proper enough season. And what can we call it but blossoming, when an old oak-stump, dead and rotten these ten years, wakes up after a soaking rain, some October morning, a very mound of delicate, glistening, brick-red mushrooms? It is as great a wonder and quite as beautiful a mystery as the bursting into flower of the marsh-marigolds in May. But no deeper mystery, for—"dead," did I call these stumps? Rotten they may be, but not dead. There is nothing dead out of doors. There is change and decay in all things; but if birds and bugs, if mosses and mushrooms, can give life, then the deadest tree in the woods is the very fullest of life.
SECOND CROPS
Take it the year round, the deadest trees in the woods are the livest and fullest of fruit—for the naturalist. Dr. Holmes had a passion for big trees; the camera-carriers hunt up historic trees; boys with deep pockets take to fruit-trees: but dead trees, since I developed a curiosity for dark holes, have yielded me the most and largest crops.
An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There is nothingunreasonable in it, as in—bibliomania, for instance. I discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath, the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really with some cause; for—sh! look! In that round hole up there, just under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker—a light in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of some tottering, limbless old stump.
Within the reach of my landscape four of these ancient derelicts hold their stark arms against the horizon, while every wood-path, pasture-lane, and meadow-road leads past hollow apples, gums, or chestnuts, where there are sure to be happenings as the seasons come and go. Sooneror later, every dead tree in the neighborhood finds a place in my note-book. They are all named and mentioned, some over and over,—my list of Immortals,—all very dead or very hollow, ranging from a big sweet-gum in the swamp along the creek to an old pump-tree, stuck for a post within fifty feet of my window. The gum is the hollowest, the pump the deadest, tree of the lot.
The nozle-hole of the one-time pump stares hard at my study window like the empty socket of a Cyclops. There is a small bird-house nailed just above the window, which gazes back with its single eye at the staring pump. For some time one April the sputtering sparrows held this box above the window against the attacks of two tree-swallows. The sparrows had been on the ground all winter, and had staked their claim with a nest that had already outgrown the house when the swallows arrived. In love of fair play, and remembering more than one winter day made alive and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not interfere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose the pretty pair of swallows as summer neighbors.
The swallows disappeared. All was quiet fora few days, when, one morning, I saw the flutter of steel-blue wings at the hole in the pump, and there, propped hard with his tail over the hole, hung my tree-swallow. I should have that pair as tenants yet, and in a house where I could see everything they did. He peered quickly around, then peeped cautiously into the opening, and slipped out of sight through the dark, round hole.
I knew it suited exactly"I knew it suited exactly."
"I knew it suited exactly."
I knew it suited exactly by the glad, excited way he came out and darted off. He soon returned with the little shining wife; and through a whole week there was a constant passing of blue backs and white breasts as the joyous pair fitted up the inside of that pump with grass and feathers fit for the cradle of a fairy queen.
By the rarest fortune I was on hand when one of the sparrows discovered what had happened in the pump. There is not a single microbe of Anglophobia in my system. But need one's love for things English include this pestiferous sparrow? Anyhow, I feel just a mite of satisfaction when I recall how that sparrow, with the colonizing instinct of his race, dropping down upon the pump with the notion that he "had a duty to the world," dropped off that pump straightway, concluding that his "duty" did not relate to that particular pump any longer. The sparrows had built everywhere about the place, but that that pump—a post, and a post to a pair of bars at that—was worth settling had not dawned on them. When they saw that the swallows had taken it, one of them lighted there instantly, with tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, andcommenting vociferously. He looked into the hole from every possible point, and was about to enter, when there came a whizz of wings, a flash of blue, and a slap that sent him spinning. When the indignant swallow swooped back, like a boomerang, the sparrow had scuttled off to an apple-tree.
With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously"With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously."
"With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously."
That was acoup de grâce. Peace reigned after that; and along in July the five white eggs had found wings and were skimming about the fly-filled air or counting and preening themselves demurely in a solemn row upon the wire fence.
Between two pastures, easily seen from the same study window, stands a wild apple-tree, pathetically diseased and rheumatic, which like one of Mr. Burroughs's trees, never bore very good crops of apples, but four seasons a year is marvelously full ofanimals. It is chiefly noted for a strange collection I once took out of its maw-like cavity.
It was a keen January morning, and I stopped at the tree, as usual, and thumped. No lodgers there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail fence and looked in. Darkness. No; there at the bottom was a patch of gray, and—I pulled out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down went my hand again, and a second owl came blinking to the light—this one in rich brown plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched claws held fistfuls of possum hair. Once more I pushed my hand down the hole, gingerly, and up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum was in there, and after a little manœuvering I seized him by the collar, and out he came grinning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white winter day.
And how exactly like a possum! "There is a time for all things," comes near an incarnation in him. There is a time for eating owls—at night, of course, if owls can then be had. But day is the time to sleep; and if owls want to share his bed and roost upon him, all right. Hewillsleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And he would sleep on here till dusk, in spite of my rude awakening, if I gave him leave. I dropped him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the two owls back upon him, and went my way, knowing I should find the three still sleeping on my return. And it was so. The owls were just as surprised and just as sleepy when I disturbed them the second time that day. I left them to finish their nap. But the possum was served for dinner the following evening—for this, too, is strictly in accord with his time-for-all-things philosophy.
This pair of owls were most persistent in their attachment to the apple-tree. Several times in the course of the winter I found them sleeping soundly in this same deep cavity, making their winter lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty which, standing not far from the woods and between the uplands and meadows, has been home, hotel, post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for many of the wild folk about the fields.
In a solemn row upon the wire fence"In a solemn row upon the wire fence."
"In a solemn row upon the wire fence."
A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very city of hollows-loving animals. Not far away is one such orchard with a side bordering anextensive copse. Where the orchard and copse meet is an apple-tree that has been the ancestral home of unnumbered generations of flying-squirrels. The cavity was first hollowed out by flickers. The squirrels were interlopers. Whenthe young come in April the large opening is stuffed with shredded chestnut bark, leaving barely room enough for the parents to squeeze through. The sharpest-eyed hawk awing would never dream of waiting outside that insignificant door for a meal of squirrel.
Young flying-squirrels"Young flying-squirrels."
"Young flying-squirrels."
But such precautions are not always proof against boys. I robbed that home one spring of its entire batch of babies (no one with any love of wild things could resist the temptation to kidnap young flying-squirrels), and tried to bring them up in domestic ways. But somehow I never succeeded withpets. Something always happened. One of these four squirrels was rocked on, a second was squeezed in a door, a third fell before he could fly, and the fourth I took to college with me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other room-mate. I set aside one hour a day to putting corks, pens, photographs, and knives back in their places, for him to tuck away the next day in one of my shoes or under my pillow. More than once I have awakened to find him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, the dearest little bedfellow alive. But it was three stories from my window to the street; and one day he tried his wings. They were not equal to the flight. Since then I have left my wild pets in the woods.
If one wants to know what birds are about, especially the larger, more cautious species, let him get under cover near a tall dead oak or walnut, standing alone in the middle of open fields. Such a tree is the natural rest and lookout for every passer. Here come the hawks to wait and watch; here the sentinel crows are posted while the flock pilfers corn and plugs melons; here the flickers and woodpeckers lightfor a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company or telegraph across the fields on one of the resonant limbs; here the flocking blackbirds swoop and settle, making the old tree look as if it had suddenly leaved out in mourning—leaves black and crackling; and here the turkey-buzzards halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight.
With good field-glasses there is no other vantage-ground for bird study equal to this. Not in a day's tramp will one see so many birds, and have such chances to observe them, as in a single hour, when the sun is rising or setting, in the neighborhood of some great, gaunt tree that has died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten by a bolt from the summer clouds.
The sentinel crows are posted"The sentinel crows are posted."
"The sentinel crows are posted."
Nature's prodigality and parsimony are extremes farther apart than her east and west. Why should she be so lavish of interstellar space, and crowd a drop of stagnant water so? Why give the wide sea surface to the petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks on Grand Manan? Why scatter in Delaware Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every one hatched, while each mite of a paramecium is cut in two, and wholes made of the halves? Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the rottenest old stump into a submerged-tenth tenement?
Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees is an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter live.
Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting—and marvelous too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood, yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than come from the native stock.
Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of the swamp-gums (Nyssa uniflora) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value trees according to their capacity for cavities,—the naturalist has a right to such a scale of valuation,—then these gums rank first. The deliberate purpose of a swamp-gum, through its hundred years of life, is to grow as big as possible, that it may hollow out accordingly. They are the natural home-makers of the swamps that border the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. What would the coons, the turkey-buzzards, andthe owls do without them? The wild bees believe the gums are especially built for them. No white-painted hive, with its disappearing squares, offers half as much safety to these free-booters of the summer seas as the gums, open-hearted, thick-walled, and impregnable.
When these trees alone make up the swamp, there is a roomy, empty, echo-y effect among the great gray boles, with their high, horizontal limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by no other trees I know. It is worth a trip across the continent to listen, under a clear autumn moon, to the cry of a coon-dog far away in the empty halls of such a swamp. To get the true effect of a barred owl's hooting, one wants to find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. I know such a home, along Cohansey Creek, where, the neighboring farmer tells me, he has heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since he remembers hearing anything.
I cannot reach around the butt of the tree that holds the nest. Tapering just a trifle and a little on the lean, it runs up smooth and round for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just above which is the capacious opening to the owls'cave. There was design in the bulge, or foresight in the owls' choice; for that excrescence is the hardest thing to get beyond I ever climbed up to. But it must be mounted, or the queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will go unseen.
The owls themselves first guided me to the spot. I was picking my way through this piece of woods, one April day, when a shadowy something swung from one high limb to another overhead, following me. It was the female owl. Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and watchful. As I pushed deeper among the gums, she began to snap her beak and drop closer. Her excitement grew every moment. I looked about for the likely tree. The instant I spied the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the direction of my eyes, and made a swoop at me that I thought meant total blindness.
I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair, perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully:Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a!And faint and far away came back a timidWoo-hoo, woo-a!from her mate, safely hid across the creek.
She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me"She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."
"She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."
The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reëchoing as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted into hiding.
I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It wasa raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here, backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos—tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.
Wrapped up like little Eskimos"Wrapped up like little Eskimos."
"Wrapped up like little Eskimos."
Very green babies of all kinds are queer,uncertain, indescribable creations-faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal instincts.
But quite as astonishing as the appearance of the young owls was the presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were fresh—thecrumbsof one night's dinner, the leavings ofonenight's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?
Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two evening hours a day?The record at the summer's end is almost beyond belief.
Not counting what the two old owls ate, and leaving out of the count the two frogs, it is within limits to reckon not less than six small animals brought to the hollow gum every night of the three weeks that these young owls were dependent for food—a riddance in this short time of not less than one hundred and twenty-five muskrats, mice, and voles. What four boys in the same time could clear the meadows of half that number? And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.
Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a more profitable crop. When fruit-growing in Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic farmer with a love for natural history will find large reward in his orchards of gums, that now are only swamps.
Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond all calculation in its sweetening effects upon our village life, is the annual yield of swallows by the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring tide carried away the south wing of the oldbridge, but left the piles, green and grown over with moss, standing with their heads just above flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are holes, bored to pass lines through, or left by rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and wind. Besides these there are a few genuine excavations made by erratic woodpeckers. This whole clump of water-logged piles has been colonizedby blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and cranny wide enough and deep enough to hold a nest being appropriated for domestic uses by a pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps; it is a swallow-Venice. And no gayer gondoliers ever glided over wave-paved streets than these swallows on the river. When the days are longest the village does its whittling on the new bridge in the midst of this twittering bird life, watching the swallows in the sunset skim and flash among the rotting timbers over the golden-flowing tide.
It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps"It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps."
"It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps."
If I turn from the river toward the woods again, I find that the fences all the way are green with vines and a-hum with bumblebees. Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a living pillar of ivy. All is life. There are no dead, no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made cemetery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, where the forest-fire came down and drank of the river, is a stretch of charred stumps; but every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. Not one of these stumps is a tombstone. We have graves and slabs and names in ourburial-place, and nothing more. But there is not so much as a slab in the fields and woods. When the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut, the stumps are immediately prepared for new life, and soon begin blossoming into successive beds of mosses and mushrooms, while the birds are directed to follow the bare poles and make them live again.
A double line of these pole-specters stretches along the road in front of my door, holding hands around the world. I have grown accustomed to the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the sound. But one May morning recently there was a new note in the pole just outside the yard. I laid my ear to the wood.Pick—pick—pick; then all was still. Again, after a moment's pause, I heardpick—pick—pickon the inside. At my feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Backing off a little, I discovered the hole, about the size of my fist, away up near the cross-bars. It was not the first time I had found High-hole laying claim to the property of the telegraph companies. I stole back and thumped. Instantly a dangerous bill and a flashing eye appeared, and High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning redin the top of his cap lunged off across the fields in some ill humor, no doubt.
Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy"Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy."
"Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy."
Throughout the summer there was telegraphing with and without wires on that dry, resonant pole. And meantime, if there was anything unintelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washington, it was high-hole talk. For there was reared inside that pole as large, as noisy, and as red-headed a family of flickers as ever hatched. What a brood they were! They must have snarled the wires and Babelized their talk terribly.
While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up, only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek but brave little mother.
There is still another dead-tree crop that the average bird-lover and summer naturalist rarely gathers—I mean the white-footed mice. They are the jolliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. It is when the woods are bare and deep with snow, when the cold, dead winter makes outside living impossible, that one really appreciates the coziness and protection of the life in these deep rooms, sunk like wells into the hearts of the trees. With what unconcern the mice await nightfall and the coming of the storms! They can know nothing of the anxiety and dread of the crows; they can share little of the crows' suffering in the bitter nights of winter. A warm, safe bed is a large item in out-of-doors living when it is cold; and I have seen where these mice tuck themselves away from the dark and storm in beds so snug and warm that Iwished to be an elf myself, with white feet and a long tail, to creep in with them.
I had some wood-choppers near the house on the lookout for mice, but, though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the winter nearly passed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to dust. The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and stuck out like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and through by woodpeckers, and now lay several feet away, buried in the snow; and the bole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but covered instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked with fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small animals. I almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there were mice in the old corpse. TheHebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping off my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor me, though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, and would infinitely rather have substituted his skates. I insisted, however, and he disappeared for the ax.
The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodpecker holes since the last storm.
The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as eager now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense—a kind of X-ray organ that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was (shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of the chase of—mice!
I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly through the air; thepreacher was repeating between strokes: "I'm—truly—sorry—man's—dominion—has—" when suddenly there was a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only mouse captured.
We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound, stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded bark—a complete fortress against the siege of winter.
That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor one half so full of goings on, as this same old shell of a pine, with scarcely heart enough to stand.