PRELUDE: MORNING ON MOOSEHEADPRELUDE: MORNING ON MOOSEHEAD
PRELUDE: MORNING ON MOOSEHEAD
SUNRISE in the big woods, morning and springtime and fishing weather! For the new day Killooleet the white-throated sparrow has a song of welcome; fishing has its gleeman in Koskomenos the kingfisher, sounding his merry rattle along every shore where minnows are shoaling; and for the springtime even these dumb trees grow eloquent. Yesterday they were gray and dun, as if life had lost its sense of beauty; to-day a mist of tender green appears on every birch tree, a blush of rose color spreads over the hardwood ridges. Woods that all winter have been silent, as if deserted, are now alive with the rustling of eager feet, the flutter of wings, the call of birds returning with joy to familiar nesting places.
Above these quiet voices of rejoicing sounds another note, loud, rhythmic, jubilant, which saysthat Comedy, light of foot and heart, has once more renewed her lease of the wilderness. High on a towering hemlock a logcock has his sounding board, dry and resonant, where he makes all the hills echo to his lusty drumming. The morning light flames on his scarlet crest as he turns his head alertly, this way for the answer of a mate, that way for the challenge of a rival. Nearer, on the roof of my fishing camp, a downy woodpecker is thumping the metal cover of the stovepipe, a wonderful drum, on which he can easily make more noise than the big logcock.
Every day before sunrise that same little fellow appears on my roof, so punctually that one wonders if he keeps a clock, and bids me “Top o’ the Morning” by sending a fearful din clattering down the stovepipe. It is a love-call to his mate, no doubt; but the Seven Sleepers in my place must be roused by it as by dynamite. This morning he exploded me out of sleep at four-twenty, as usual; and so persistent was his rackety-packety that I lost patience, and threw a stick of wood at him. Away he went, crying “Yip! Yip!” at the meddlesome Philistine who had no heart for love, no ear for music. He was heading briskly for the horizon when, remembering his shy mate, he darted aside to the shell of a white pine, where he drummed out another message, only to meet violent oppositionfrom another Philistine. He had sounded one call, listened for the effect, and was in the midst of another ecstatic vibration when there came a scurry of leaves, a shaking of boughs, and Meeko the red squirrel appeared, threatening death and destruction to all drummers.
Evidently Meeko was planning a nest of his own in that vicinity, and had no mind to tolerate such a noisy fellow as a near neighbor. As he came headlong upon the scene, hurling abuse ahead of him, the woodpecker vanished like a wink, leaving the enemy to threaten the empty air; which he did in a fashion to make one shudder at what might happen if a red squirrel were half as big as his temper. Once I saw a bull-moose accidentally shake a branch on which Meeko happened to be sitting while he ate a mushroom, turning it around in his paws as he nibbled the edges; and the peppery little beast followed the sober great beast two or three hundred yards, running just above the antlered head, calling down the wrath of squirrel-heaven on all the tribe of moose. Now, in greater rage because the object of it was so small, he whisked all over the pine, declaring it,kilch-kilch!to be his property, and warning all woodpeckers,zit-zit!to keep forever away from it. Hardly had he ended his demonstration of squirrel rights and gone away, swearing,to his interrupted affairs when another hammering, louder and more jubilant, began on the pine shell.
Here was defiance as well as trespass, and Meeko came rushing back to deal with it properly. Sputtering like a lighted fuse he darted up the pine and took a flying leap after the drummer, determined this time to make an end of him or chase him clean out of the woods. Into a thicket of spruce he went, shrilling his battle yell. Out of the thicket flashed the woodpecker, unseen, and doubled back to the starting point. There a curious thing happened, one which strengthened my impression that all birds have more or less ventriloquial power to make their calling sound near or far at will. The woodpecker lit on precisely the same spot he had used before, and hammered it with the same rapidity and rhythm; but now his drum sounded faintly, distantly, as if on the other side of the ridge. Growing bolder he changed his note, put morehallelujahinto it, and was in the midst of a glorious rub-a-dub when Meeko came tearing back through the spruce thicket and hunted him away.
So the little comedy ran on, charge and retreat, till a second Meeko appeared and held the fort, while the first ran after the drummer. Now, as I watch the play, there is triumphant squirrel talk on the pine shell, and the woodpecker is again drumming lustily on the stovepipe cover.
Farther back in the woods sounds the roll of another drum, a muffledbrum, brum, brum, which you must hear many times before you learn to locate it accurately. Of all forest sounds it is the vaguest, the most mysterious, the hardest to associate with distance or direction. Now it comes to you from above, like a dim echo of distant thunder, and suddenly you understand the bird’s Indian name, Seksagadagee, little thunder-maker; again it drifts in vaguely from all directions, filling the air like the surge of a waterfall at night. Listen attentively, and the drum seems to be near at hand, quite distinctly in front of you; but take a few careless steps in that direction and it is gone, like a flame that is blown out, and when you hear it once more it sounds faintly from the valley behind you.
Somewhere out yonder, not nearly so remote as you think, a cock partridge or ruffed grouse is finding a mate by the odd method of drumming her up; for he never goes in quest of her, but rumbles his drum day after day, sometimes also on moonlit nights, till she appears in answer to his summons. Though I have often seen little Thunder-maker when he was filling hill and valley with his love-call, never yet have I learned how he sounds his drum; so I must have another look at him. Taking every precaution against noise, moving only when the muffled thunder rollsthrough the woods, I creep nearer and nearer till I locate a great mossy log and— Ah! there he is, a beautiful creature, standing tense as if listening. There is a flash of wings up and down, so swift that I cannot follow the motion or tell whether the hollowbrumsounds when the stiffened wings are above the bird’s back or in front of his pouting chest. He does not beat the log; I have an impression that the booming sound is made by columns of air caught under the wings and driven together when the grouse strikes forward. If you cup your hands and drive them almost against your ears, repeating the action till you hear the air boom, you will have a faint but excellent imitation of the partridge’s drum call. The explanation remains theoretical, however, for even with the bird under my eyes I cannot say for a certainty how the sound is made. I see flash after flash of the wings, and with each comes an answeringbrum; then the wing-beats follow faster and faster till individual sounds merge in a continuous roll; which suddenly grows faint, as if moving away, and seems to vanish in the far distance.
Thunder-maker now stands at attention, his ear cocked to something I cannot hear. In a few moments, as if well satisfied, he droops his wing-tips, spreads wide his tail, erects his crest and his bronzed ruff, and begins to strut, showing all hisfine feathers. There is a stir beyond him; from behind a yellow birch a hen-grouse appears and glides on, pretending to be merely passing this way; while the drummer pretends not to see her or to be interested in anything save his own performance. So it seems to me, watching the play through the branches of a low fir. Thunder-maker drums again, as if his mate were yet to come; while the audience moves coyly away, picking at a seed here or there, till she enters the shadowy underbrush. There she hides and remains motionless, where she can see without being seen.
As I creep away, trying not to disturb the little comedy, I am startled by a rush behind me, and have glimpse of two deer bounding through the leafless woods. They take needlessly high jumps for such easy going, it seems; one has an impression that they are kicking up their heels in delight at being out of their winter yard, free to wander at will and find abundance of fresh food, tender and delicious, wherever they seek. A loon blows his wild bugle from the lake below. Multitudes of little warblers, the first ripple of a mighty wave, are sweeping northward with exultation, singing as they go. Frogs are piping, kingfishers clattering, thrushes chiming their silver bells,—everywhere the full tide of life, the impulse of play, the spirit of happy adventure.
One such morning, when every blessed bird or beast appears like a bit of happiness astray, should be enough to open one’s eyes to the meaning of nature; but yesterday was just like this in the woods, and in the back of my head is a memory of other mornings in that far, misty time when all days came as holidays, when one leaped out of bed with the wordless thought that life was too precious to waste any of its sunny hours in sleeping. Suddenly it occurs to me, looking out from my “Commoosie” at the sunrise on Moosehead, while the woods around are vocal and jubilant, that this inspiring morning is simply natural and as it should be; that this new day, with its tingle of life and joy, is typical of the whole existence of the wood folk. For them every day is a new day, joyous and expectant, without regret for yesterday or anxiety for the morrow.
“Ah, but wait!” you say. “Wait till winter returns with its hunger and snow and bitter cold. Then we shall see nothing of this springtime comedy, but a stern and terrible struggle for existence.”
That owlish hoot expresses the prevalent theory of wild life, I know; but forget all such borrowed notions here in the budding woods, and open your eyes to behold life as it is. “Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee, or the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee” that animal life is frombeginning to end a gladsome comedy. The “tragedy” is a romantic invention of our story-writers; the “struggle for existence” is a bookish theory passed from lip to lip without a moment’s thought or observation to justify it. I would call it mythical were it not that myths commonly have some hint of truth or gleam of beauty in them; but this struggle notion is the crude, unlovely superstition of one who used neither his eyes nor his imagination. To quote Darwin as an authority is to deceive yourself; for he borrowed the notion of natural struggle from the economist Malthus, who invented it not as a theory of nature (of which he knew nothing), but to explain from his easy-chair the vice and misery of massed humanity. Moreover, Darwin used the “struggle for existence” as a crude figure of speech; but later writers accept it as a literal gospel, or rather bodespel, without once putting it to the test of out-door observation.[1]
A moment’s reflection here may suggest two things: first, that from lowly protozoans, which always unite in colonies, to the mighty elephant that finds comfort and safety in a herd of his fellows, coöperation of kind with kind is the universal law of nature; second, that the evolutionary processes, to which the violent name of struggle is thoughtlessly applied, are all so leisurely that centuries must pass before the change is noticeable, and so effortless that subject creatures are not even aware they are being changed. Meanwhile individual birds and beasts go their alert ways, finding pleasure in the exercise of every natural faculty. Singing or feeding, playing or resting, courting their mates or roving freely with their little ones, all wild creatures have every appearance of gladness, but give you never a sign that they are under a terrible law of strife or competition. And why? Because there is absolutely no such thing as a struggle for existence in nature. There is no evidence of struggle, no reason for struggle, no impression of the spirit of struggle, when you look on the natural world with frank unprejudiced eyes.
As for the coming winter, let not theory be as a veil over your sight to obscure the facts or to blur your impressions. One who camps in these big woods when they are white with snow findsthem quite as cheery as the woods of spring or summer. Most of the birds that now fill the solitude with rejoicing will then be far away, pursuing the happy adventure under other skies; but the friendliest of them all, the tiny chickadee, will bide contentedly in his cold domain, and greet the sunrise with a note in which you detect no lack of cheerfulness. A few of the animals will then be snug in their dens, with the bear and chipmunk; others will show the same spirit of play—a little subdued, but still brave and confident—which moves them now as they go seeking their mates to the sound of running brooks and the fragrance of swelling buds. Keeonekh the otter will spend a large part of his time happily sliding downhill. Pequam the fisher will save his short legs much travel by putting his nose into every fox track till he finds one which tells him that Eleemos has been digging at a frozen carcass, and has the smell of it on his feet; then he will cunningly back-trail that fellow, knowing that food is somewhere ahead of him. Tookhees the wood mouse will be building his assembly rooms deep under the snow, and Meeko the red squirrel (mischief-maker the Indians call him) will still be making tragi-comedy of every passing event, berating the jays that spy upon him when he hides food, chasing the woodpeckers that hammeron his hollow tree, and scolding every big beast that pays no attention to him.
To sum up this prelude of the sunrise: whether you enter the solitude in the expectant spring or the restful winter, “nothing is here to wail or knock the breast.” The wood folk are invincibly cheerful, and need no pity for their alleged tragic fate. If I dared voice their unconscious philosophy, I might say that the lines are fallen unto them in pleasant places, and that, if ever they grow discontented with the place, they quickly change it for a better or for hope of a better. The world is wide and all theirs, and through it they go like perpetual Canterbury pilgrims.