The Project Gutenberg eBook ofWoodland PathsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Woodland PathsAuthor: Winthrop PackardIllustrator: Charles CopelandRelease date: August 16, 2021 [eBook #66072]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Steve Mattern, Chuck Greif. With thanks to James Baker and Jeff Kelley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOODLAND PATHS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Woodland PathsAuthor: Winthrop PackardIllustrator: Charles CopelandRelease date: August 16, 2021 [eBook #66072]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Steve Mattern, Chuck Greif. With thanks to James Baker and Jeff Kelley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
Title: Woodland Paths
Author: Winthrop PackardIllustrator: Charles Copeland
Author: Winthrop Packard
Illustrator: Charles Copeland
Release date: August 16, 2021 [eBook #66072]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Steve Mattern, Chuck Greif. With thanks to James Baker and Jeff Kelley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOODLAND PATHS ***
Contents.Index.
List of Illustrations(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)
(etext transcriber's note)
WOODLAND PATHS
THE WORKS OFW I N T H R O P  P A C K A R D———WOODLAND PATHSWILD PASTURESWOOD WANDERINGSWILDWOOD WAYSEach illustrated by Charles Copeland12mo. Ornamental cloth, gilt top, each volume $1.20net, postage 8 centsThe four volumes together constitute “The New England Year,†dealing, in the order given, with the four seasons. The set, boxed, $4.80;carriage extra. Sold separately.SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANYPublishersBoston
THE WORKS OFW I N T H R O P  P A C K A R D———
Each illustrated by Charles Copeland
12mo. Ornamental cloth, gilt top, each volume $1.20net, postage 8 cents
The four volumes together constitute “The New England Year,†dealing, in the order given, with the four seasons. The set, boxed, $4.80;carriage extra. Sold separately.
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANYPublishersBoston
Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk[Page 33
Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk[Page 33
Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk
[Page 33
BYWINTHROP PACKARDILLUSTRATED BYCHARLES COPELANDBOSTONSMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANYPUBLISHERSCopyright, 1910By Small, Maynard and Company(INCORPORATED)Entered at Stationers’ HallTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
Theauthor wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript†for permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally contributed to its columns.
THE night was dark and bitter cold, though it was early March. Over in the dismal depths of Pigeon Swamp, where no pigeons have nested for nearly a half century though it is as wild and lone to-day as it was when they flocked there by thousands, a deep-toned, lonely cry resounded. It was like the fitful baying of a dog in the distance, only that it was too wild and eerie for that. Then there was silence for a space and an eldritch screech rang out.
It was blood-curdling to a human listener, but it was reassuring to the great horned owl snuggling down on her two great blotched eggs to keep them securefrom the cold, for it was the voice of her mate hunting. Sailing silently on bat-like wings he was beating the open spaces of the wood, hoping to find a partridge at roost, and I fancy the deep “whoo; hoo, hoo, hoo; whoo, whoo,†all on the same note, was a grumble that trained dogs and pump-guns are making the game birds so scarce. Perhaps that blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of a rabbit, forBubo virginianais tremendously rapacious and will eat any living thing which he can carry away in his claws.
It might, too, have been his method of expressing ecstasy over the nest and the promise of spring which the horned owl alone has the courage to anticipate with nest-building in these raw and barren days, when winter seemingly still has his grip firmly set on us. Oftentimes his
That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of a rabbit
That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of a rabbit
That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of a rabbit
housekeeping arrangements are completed by late February. No other bird does that in Massachusetts, though farther north the Canada jay also lays eggs about that time, way up near the Arctic Circle where the thermometer registers zero or below and the snow is deep on the ground.
On what trees he cuts the notches of the passing days I do not know, but surely the horned owl’s almanac is as reliable as the Old Farmer’s, and he knows the nearness of the spring. I dare say the other birds which winter with us know it too, though not being so big and husky they do not venture to give hostages to the enemy quite so early in the season. The barred owls will build in late March, and soon after April fool’s day the woodcock will be stealing north and placing queer, pointed, blotched eggs in some little hollow just above high water in the swamp.
The crows are cannier still. You will hardly find eggs in their nests hereabouts before the fifteenth of April, and you will do well to postpone your hunting till the twenty-fifth. Yet they all know, as well as I do, when the spring is near, and I think I have the secret of the message which has come to them. It is not the fact that a south wind has blown, for this may happen at any time during the winter, but it is something that reaches them on the wings of this same south wind.
This night on which the horned owl of Pigeon Swamp brooded her eggs so carefully was lighted by the moon, but toward midnight a purple blackness grew up all about the still sky and blotted out all things in a velvety smear that sent even Bubo to perch beside his mate. There was then no breath of wind. The faint air from the north that had brought thedeep chill had faltered and died, leaving its temperature behind it over all the fields and forest. The air stung and the ground rang like tempered steel beneath the foot, yet you had but to listen or breathe deep to know what was coming. The stroke of twelve from the distant steeple brought a resonance of romance along the clear miles and the air left in your nostrils a quality that never winter air had a right to hold. To one who knows the temper of the open field and the forest by day and night the promise was unmistakable, though so subtle as to be difficult to define.
Whether it was sound or smell or both I knew then that a south wind was coming, bearing on its balmy breath those spicy, amorous odors of the tropics that come to our frozen land only when spring is on the way. The goddess scatters perfumes from her garments as she comesand the south wind catches them and bears them to us in advance of her footsteps. You may sniff these same odors of March far offshore along the West Indies,—spicy, intoxicating scents, borne from the hearts of tropic wild-flowers and floating off to sea on every breeze.
With them floats that wonderful grape-bloom tint that touches the surface of all the waters to northward of these islands with its velvety softness, the currents carrying it ever northward and eastward, sometimes almost to the shores of the British Isles. You may see it all about you in mid-ocean as your vessel steams from New York to Liverpool or Southampton or Havre or the Hook of Holland. Some essence of all this gets into the air on the southerly gales that are borne in the windward islands and whirl up along our coast to die finally inNewfoundland or Labrador or Greenland itself. I believe the horned owl knows it as well as I do and begins his nest-building at the first sniff.
At daybreak the wind had begun to blow, all the keen chill was softened out of the air, and blobs of rain blurred the southern window panes. The temperature had risen already above freezing and was still on the upward path. There was in all the atmosphere that rich, cool freshness that comes with rain-clouds blown far over seas. It is the same quality which we get in an east rain, but it had in it also that suggestion of spiciness and that soft purple haze which drifts away from the tropic islands that border the Caribbean. Stopping a moment in my study before going out into this, I found another creature that had felt the faint call of spring and answered it, I fear, toosoon. This was a greatSamia cecropiamoth. The night before he had been safely tucked away in his cocoon over my mantel, where I had hung it last December.
In the night he had answered the call and now was perched outside his cell, gently expanding his wings with pulsing motions that seemed tremulous with eagerness or delight. I noted the soft delicacy of the coloring in his rich, fur-surfaced body and wings, shades which are reds and grays and browns and ashes of roses, and a score of others so dainty and delicate that we have no words to describe or define them.
A wonderful creature this to appear in a man’s house, sit poised on his mantel and blink serenely at him, as if the man himself were the intruder and the room the usual habitat of creatures out of fairy-land. I studied him carefully, thinking, indeed, that he might vanish at any moment, and then I went out into the woods in the soft south rain, only to find that his colors that I thought so marvelous in the shadow of the four walls of my room were reproduced in rich profusion all about me.
His velvety-white markings, lined and touched off with brown so deep in places as to be either purple with density or black, were those of the birch trunks all about me, and there were the rufous tints that shaded down into pearl pinks and lavender all through the groups of distant birch twigs. His gray fur was the softest and richest of the fur of the gray squirrels, and this gray again shaded into red in spots that could be matched only by the fur of the red squirrel. There were soft tans on him of varying shades,from rich to delicate pale, and all the last year’s leaves and grasses had them. Nor was there a color about him which was not matched and repeated a thousand fold in bark and twigs and lichens and shadows all through the wood.
I had but to stand by with the great moth in my mind’s eye to see the whole woodland bursting from its cocoon and spreading its wings for flight. As a matter of fact that is what it is going to do later—but the time is not yet. Meanwhile the south rain was washing its colors clear and laying bare their bright beauty. In it you saw without question the promise of new growth and new life. Trees and shrubs stood like school children with shining morning faces, newly washed for the coming session. All trace of dinginess was gone. The yellow freckles on the brown cheeks of the wild cherry gleamedfrom far; the pale, olive green tint of the willow’s complexion was transparent in its new-found brilliancy.
Looking down on the ruddy glow of healthy maple twigs, it seemed as if they should have yellow hair and sunny blue eyes, so rich is the coloring of these Saxons of the wood and so fresh it shone under the ministering rain. Even the dour scrub oaks, surly Ethiopians, were not so black as they have been painted all winter, but lost their ebon tint in a hue of rich dark green that was a pleasing foil to the cecropia-moth beauty of the rest of the woods.
The one color lacking was blue. The sky’s leaden gray was but a foil for the rich woodland tints, and I wandered on seeking its hue elsewhere. Over on the hillside are the hepaticas. Their color when open is hardly blue, being moreoften purple or even lavender, yet they would do, lacking a more pronounced shade. But I could not find a hepatica in bloom as yet. Their tri-lobed leaves are still green and show but little the wear and tear of the winter’s frosts and thaws. In the center of each group is the pointed bud that encloses the furry blossoms, itself as softly clad in protecting fur as the body of my moth visitor, but no hint of color peeped from it as yet. You need to look carefully in very early spring to be sure of this, too; for the hepatica is the shyest of sweet young things, and when she first blooms it is with such modesty that you have to chuck the flower-heads under the chin to get a glimpse even of their eyes. Later on the coaxing sun reassures them and they stare placidly and innocently up to it like wondering children.
Over on the sandy southern slope there might be violets, too. Later in the year the whole field will be blue with them and all about are their rosettes of sagittate leaves, which the cold has had to hold sternly in check to keep them from growing the winter through. Indeed, I do not believe it has fully succeeded. It has been a mild season, and I think the violets have taken the opportunity during warm spells of several days’ duration to surreptitiously put forth another leaf or so in the very center of that rosette. If so, they might well have followed this courage with the further audacity of buds, and buds, indeed, they had but not one of them was open far enough to show even a faint hint of the blue that I was seeking.
It was hardly to be expected of the violets. They are so sturdy and full of simple, homely, common sense that it israre that you find them doing things out of the usual routine. Warm skies and south winds may tease them long before they will respond by blooming earlier than their wonted date. They know the ways of the world well and realize how unwise it is for proper young people to overstep the bounds of strict conventionality. On the other hand, the hepaticas, with all their innocence, perhaps because of it, care little for the conventions. Indeed, I doubt if they know there are such things, or if they have heard of them would recognize them. It is likely that in some sunny, sheltered nook some rash youngster, all clad in furs of pearl gray, is in bloom now, though so shy and so hidden that I was unable to find the hint of color. I have known them to half-open those lavender-blue eyes under the protecting crust of winter snow.
Toward nightfall the rain ceased and the clouds simply faded out of a pale sky, letting the sun shine through with gentle warmth. Whither the mists went it was hard to tell, but they were gone, and a soft spring sun began wiping the tears from all things. Under its caress it seemed as if you could see the buds swell a little, and I am quite sure, though I was not there to see, that at this moment the willow catkins down by the brook slipped forth from their protecting brown sheaths and boldly proclaimed the spring.
They might have done so, and I would not have seen had I been there, for just then I had a message. “Cheerily we, cheerily we,†came a faint voice out of the sky. An echo from distant angel choirs practicing carols for Easter could not have seemed more musical or brought more delight to me down at the bottomof the soft blue haze that was taking golden radiance from the setting sun. Up through it I looked to the pale blue of the sky and saw two motes dancing down the sunshine,—motes that caroled and grew to glints of heavenly blue that fluttered down on an ancient apple tree like bits of benediction.
Just a pair of bluebirds, of course, and I don’t know now whether they are the first of the migrants to reach my part of the pasture or whether they are the two that have wintered here and that I have seen before on bright days. Wherever they came from they supplied the one bit of blue that I had sought, and their presence was like an embodiment of joy. Then the gentle prattling sweetness of their carol; what a range there was between that and the wild voice of the great-horned owl, heard not twenty-fourhours before! It was all the vast range between Arctic winter night and soft summer sunshine. The owl had voiced the savage grumble of the winter, the bluebird caroled the gentle promise of the spring.
The promise may be long in finding its fulfilment, of course. The snow may lie deep and the frost nip the willow catkins,—though little they’ll care for that,—and the bluebirds may be driven more than once to the deep shelter of the cedar swamp, but that does not take away the promise that came on the wings of the south wind,—the promise that set the great horned owl to laying her eggs in that abandoned crow’s nest, and that made the bluebirds seek the ancient apple tree as their very first perch. March is no spring month, in spite of the “Old Farmer’s Almanack.†It is just a blankpage between the winter and the spring, but if you scan it closely you will find on it written the promise we all seek,—the hope that lured my greatSamia cecropiaout of his snug cocoon.
IHAVE been night-clerking a bit lately—social settlement work, you know—at the Pasture Pines Hotel, paying especial attention to the crow lodgers, and in so doing have come to the conclusion that in the last score or so of years the crows in my town have changed their habits.
It used to be their custom to roost in flocks, winters. Over on the Wheeler place in the big pines you could find a rookery of several hundred of a winter evening, dropping in from all directions and making a perfect uproar of crow talk, or rather crow yells, till darkness sent them all to sleep, sitting together in long rows on the upper limbs, I suppose formutual warmth. Here, each with head poked deep under his wing, they would remain till dawn, when with more uproar they would all whirl off together to some common breakfasting place. Later in the day they would become separated, only to drop in at night to the usual roost.
It was not a very safe proceeding, for farm boys, eager to use that new gun, used to go down before sunset and hide beneath the pines, letting go both barrels with great slaughter after the crows had become settled. Perhaps this had something to do with the breaking up of the custom, for now, though many crows roost on the Wheeler place, they do so singly, each in his own room, so to speak.
The same is true of the crow guests at the Pasture Pines Hotel. I had thepleasure of waking them early there this morning, incidentally, and vicariously, waking all crow-town. Last night, just as the last tint of amber was fading from the sunset sky, letting a yellow-green evening star come through, almost like a first daffodil, a crow slipped bat-wise across the amber and dropped into a certain pine to roost.
I noted the tree, and this morning, before hardly a glimmer of dawn had come, slipped along beneath the dark boughs, planning to get just beneath his tree and see him first. But I had planned without the obstructions in the path and the uncertain light. I approached unheard on the needle-carpeted avenue beneath the big trees, but when I started across the field, still twenty rods away from my bird, I kicked a dry, broken branch.
“What? What’s that?†It was an unmistakable crow inquiry, fairly shouted from the tree I had marked as the roosting place. There wasn’t the space of a breath between the snap of that branch and the answer of the bird. Surely a night-clerk in crow-town has an easy task. There need be no prolonged hammering on the door of the guest who would be called early. One tap is sufficient. I had hoped to stand beneath that tree and sight my crow in the gray of dawn, see him yawn with that prodigious black beak after he had withdrawn it from under his wing, then stretch one wing and one leg, as birds do, look the world over, catch sight of me and go off at a great pace, shouting a hasty warning to the world in general.
But he did not need to see me. That breaking branch had opened his eyes andears with one snap. He heard the crisp of my footfall on the frozen grass of the field and immediately there was a great flapping in the marked pine tree and he was off over the tops of its neighbors to a safe place an eighth of a mile away. He said three things, and so plain were they that any listener could have understood them. Languages vary, but emotions and the inflections they cause are the same in all creatures. The veriest tyro in wood-lore could have understood that crow.
His first ejaculation was plainly surprise and query blended. In his sleep he had heard a noise. He thought it, very likely, a fellow calling to him to get up and start the day’s work. Then when the answer was a man’s footfall he flew to safety, sounding the short, nervous yelp which is always the danger signal. Thenwhen he had again alighted in safety he realized that it was morning again and he was awake and it was time that the gang got together. “Hi-i, hi-i, hi-i-i,†it said. It was neither musical nor polite, but it was intended to wake every crow within a half-mile in a spirit of riotous good-fellowship. There was no further need of my services; every crow within a half-mile answered that call. Then I could hear those farther on rousing and taking up the cry, and so it went on, no doubt indefinitely.
I have a feeling that I waked every crow in eastern Massachusetts a full half-hour before his accustomed time, simply by kicking that dead limb. However, I learned one thing, and hereby report it to the Lodging-House Commission: that is, that the crows hereabouts have now given up the dormitory idea and occupyindividual rooms after nightfall. They were scattered all through the pasture and woodland but no two were within twenty rods of one another.
Their minds have not yet turned to nest-building and mating, though the time is near, for they still flock in hilarious good-fellowship at sunrise, and you may hear them whooping and hurrahing about in crowds all day long. They may be beginning to “take noticeâ€; I suspect some of the hilarity is over that. But they have not come to the pairing-off stage. When they reach that the flocks will disappear and you would hardly think there was a crow left in the whole wood. You might by stepping softly surprise a pair of them inspecting a likely pine in the pasture, planning for the nest. You might, by listening in secluded places, hear the curious, low-toned, prolongedcroak, which is a love-song. I have heard this described as musical, but it is not. It is as if a barn-door hinge should try to sing “O Promise Me.†But there will be no more congregations.
Certainly there was not much in the aspect of the night which was just slipping away when I waked my crow that would seem to justify plans of nest-building. The thermometer marked twenty in my sheltered front porch when I stepped out. It must have been some degrees below that in the open. The ground was flint with the frost in it. The old thick ice was gone from the pond, indeed, broken up by the disintegrating insinuation of the sun and the vigorous lashing of northwest gales, but in its place was a skim of new ice formed that night. Standing still, you felt the lance of the north wind still; it was winter. Yetyou had but to breathe deep to get the soft assurance of the near presence of spring, and if you walked briskly for a moment the north wind’s lances fell clattering to the icy ground and you moved in a new atmosphere of warmth and geniality. Thus point to point are the picket lines of the contending forces.
In the west the pale, cold moon, now a few days past the full, was sinking in a blue-black sky that might have been that of the keenest night in December. In the east, out of a low bank of dark clouds that marked the dun spring mists rising from the sea twenty miles away, flashed iris tints of dawn upward into a clear, pale sky that bore dapplings of softest apple-green. On the one hand were night and the winter, on the other dawn and the spring, and down the pine-sheltered path I walked between the two to a pointwhere I stopped in delight. The pine path ended, and the willows let the spring dawn filter through their delicate sprays. Just here I caught the hum of the water rolling over the dam and the prattle of the brook below, and right through it all, clear, mellow, and elated, came the voice of a song sparrow.
“Kolink, kolink, chee chee chee chee chee, tseep seedle, sweet, sweet,†he sang and it fitted so well with the rollicking tinkle of the brook that I knew he was down among the alders where he could smell the rich spring odor of the purling water. The two sounds not only complemented one another as do two parts in music, but they were of the same quality, though so distinctly different. It was as if tenor and alto were being sung.
I had gone forth expecting bluebirds;I had half hoped for a robin when it came time for matins, for robins have been about all winter, and here a song sparrow, no doubt the first spray from the northward surging wave of migratory birds, was the first to break the winter stillness. He had hardly piped his first round, though, before the voices of bluebirds murmured in the air above, and two lighted on the willows, caroling in that subdued manner which is the epitome of gentleness. I think these two were migrants, for later in the morning I heard others.
Then in a half minute there was a shrilling of wings that beat the air rapidly and six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk. Most ducks make a swishing sound with the wings when in rapid flight, but this was so marked a sibillation that I am quite sure it was a flock ofgoldeneyes, more commonly called whistlers, because they so excel in wing music. They swung a wide circle over my head and then dropped back into the pond, where an opening in the young ice gave them opportunity. Curiosity probably brought them up. They wanted to see what that was prowling on the pond shore in the uncertain light,—a prompting that might have cost them dear had I carried a gun, for they came within easy range; then, having seen, they went back to their fishing. Their presence added a touch of wildness to the scene that was not without its charm, for you can hardly call the bluebird or the song sparrow wild birds. They are almost as domestic as the garden shrubbery.
For the moment the bird songs and the whistling of the ducks’ wings through the rosy morning light made me forget thegrip of the winter cold that was in all the air, yet when I had crossed the dam and begun to clamber along the other shore of the pond the winter reasserted itself. Here was no promise of changing season. The thick ice in its disintegration had been pushed far ashore by the westerly gales, and here it was frozen in pressure ridges which were not so far different from those one may see on the Arctic shores. To them was cemented the young ice of the night, and I could walk along shore in places on its surface, its structure as elastic as that of early December.
Here, too, was piled high the débris not only of that great battle in which the spring forces had ripped the thick ice from the water, but of the daily skirmishes in which winter and north wind have set a half-inch of ice all along the surface and spring sunshine has brokenit away from its moorings, obliging the very north wind that made it to pile it in long windrows high on shore. To clamber along these pressure ridges and hear the crunching cakes resound under my tread in hollow, frosty tones, to feel the bite of the north wind which drifted across the new ice, was to step out of the spring promise which the birds had given me, back into the Arctic. I was almost ready to look for seal and wonder if I wouldn’t soon hear the wild wolf-howl of Eskimo dogs and round a point onto one of their snow-igloo villages.
The song sparrow was far out of hearing and here we were in mid-winter again. Only in the east was there promise. Through the dark tracery of pond-bordering trees I could see the sky all a soft, unearthly green, like an impressionist lawn, and all through this the sun, nowclose below the horizon, had forced into bloom red tulips and blue and yellow crocuses of spring dawn. From the ice ridges it was all as unreal as if it were hung in a frozen gallery, and I were an unwilling tourist shivering as I observed it.
Again, I had to go but a short distance to find a new country. Here the warmer waters of a little brook came babbling down the slope and had pushed away all the ice ridges and warmed its own path far out into the new ice. Along its edge the alder catkins hung in grouped tassels of venetian red, and here and there a group had so thrilled to the warmth of the running water that even in the face of the cold wind they had begun to relax a bit and show cracks in the varnished surface that has kept the stamens secure all winter.
It will not be long now before these favored ones will begin to shake the yellow pollen from their curls. Already they are giving the hint of it. A little way upstream, however, was a far more potent reminder of the coming season. I caught a whiff of its fragrance and smiled before I saw it.
I wonder why we always smile at this most beautiful spring flower,—for it was a spring blossom, the very first of the season, which was growing in the soft green of the brookside grass, its yellow head all swathed in a maroon and green, striped and flecked, pointed hood, lifted bravely above the protecting herbage into the nipping air. The flowering spadix I could not see; only the handsome, protecting spathe which was wound about the tender blooms to protect them from the cold. When the sun is high in the skythis spathe will loosen a bit and let visiting insects enter for the fertilization of the blossom. But in that cold air of early morning it was wrapped tight.
I have seen orchids tenderly nurtured in conservatories that had not half the honest beauty of this flower. Neither to me is the odor of the derided skunk-cabbage more unpleasant than that of many a coddled and admired garden bloom—a dahlia, for instance. Yet I smiled in derision on catching the first whiff of it, and so do we all. If thesymplocarpuscared it would be too bad, but it does not. Unconscious of its caddish critics, it blooms serenely on in the swamps and takes the tiny insects into its confidence and its hood, and adds a bit of rich color to the place when no other blossom dares. And even as I looked at it the sun slipped out of the low band of dark horizon-mists and sent a golden good-morning like a benediction right down upon the head of the humble, courageous, sturdy beauty of the brookside. After that approval why should any blossom care?
FOR two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale, setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside, ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component leaves skitter through the wood and over the hill out of sight, leaving him denuded.
The usually dignified and gentle trees howl like beagles on his trail. The protecting scrub oaks, gone mad, too, dab and flip at him till he gets fidgety with thoughts of horned owls, and things rattle down out of the sky as if he were being pelted with buckshot. All these matters get on his nerves after a little, and if he sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy, there is small blame to him. Even man, whose mental girth and weight are supposed to be ballast sufficient against all buffetings, going forth on such a day needs the buttons of his composure well sewed on or he will find it ripped from him like the hare’s form and sent skittering down the lea along with his hat, while he himself bolts here and there fighting phantoms and objurgating the unseen.
Mad March winds are a good test of stability of soul. He who can stand their weltings with serenity, can watch his
He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy
He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy
He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy
un-anchored personal belongings go mad with the March hare and still thrid the sombre boskage of the wood with sunny thought and no venom beneath his tongue, ought to be President. Even the New York papers could not make him bring suit.
And after the two days of gale how sweet the serenity that came to the thrashed and winnowed pastures and woodland. I fancy it all feeling like a boy at school who, after being soundly flogged, gets back to the soothing calm of his accustomed seat. There is a gentle joy about that feeling that, as many of us know, has neither alloy nor equal. The whole woodland, thus spanked and put away to cool, feels the winter of its discontent vanishing behind it and has no room in its heart for aught but the peace and joy of regeneration.
The gale began to fail during the secondday and before midnight it was dead; thus short-lived is frenzy. I do not know now if those last gentle sighs were those of the wind in sorrow of its misdeeds, thus on its death-bed repentant, or those of the trees, themselves given a chance to sleep at last after a forty-hour fight for their lives. In the threshing and winnowing of the woodland none but the physically fit may survive. Oaks that have held their last year’s leaves lovingly on the twig had to let them go like the veriest chaff, and all twigs and limbs that have been weakened.
And as chaff and débris is thus pruned from the forest, so those trees themselves that are not physically fit for the struggle for existence are weeded out. The eye may not be able to pick these, but the gale finds them. If the whelming pressure of its steady onrush is not sufficient to bringthem down, the racking of varying force and the torsion of sudden changes in direction will snap the weakened trunk or tear out the loosened roots. Then there is a groan and a crash, and space for the younger growth to spread toward more light and air.
At no time of year is the weakness of roothold so liable to be fatal to a tree as now. During the winter a gale may snap a tree off at the trunk and smash it bodily to the ground. But if there is no weakness in the trunk there can be none in the roots, for the frost that is set about them holds even the shortest, as if embedded in stone. But now, when the solvent ice has loosened the whole surface for a depth of a foot or more, leaving it fluffy and disintegrated, those trees which have no tap-roots and hold only in this lightened surface are in the greatestdanger of uprooting of the whole year. Farmers often clear a shrubby pasture in late March or early April hereabout by taking advantage of this fact. They make a trace-chain fast about the base of a pasture cedar or a stout huckleberry bush, and with a word to the old horse the shrub is dragged from the softened earth, root and all. In mid-summer, after the ground has become compact, this is not to be done.
It is the spring house-cleaning time of the year, when nature is sweeping and picking up, preparatory to laying new carpets and getting new furnishings throughout, and if any of the old furniture of the woodland is not able to stand the strain it has to go to the woodpile. Without the mad March winds the forest would lose much of its fresh virility, the old deadwood would cumber the new growth,and the mild melancholy of decay would prevail as it does in some swamps where sheltering surrounding hills and close growth shunt the gales.
Yet, though house-cleanings are no doubt necessary and beneficient, few of us love them, and we hail with equal joy the resultant cleanliness and the cessation of the uproar. The two days’ gale finally got all the winds of the world piled up somewhere to the southward and ceased, and the piled-up atmosphere drifted back over us, bringing mild blue haze that was like smoke from the fires of summer floating far. All things that had been taut and dense relaxed into dimples or softened into tears. The frost went out of the plowed fields that morning, though the sun was too blurred with the kindly blue mist to have any force. It was just the general relaxation which did it.
Then is apt to come a halcyon day, and though the kingfisher is not here to brood, nor will he be for a month, his fabled weather slips on in advance to cheer us. It may not last a day. March is as mad as April is fickle, and you will need to start early to be sure of it. Then, even if you come home in a snowstorm, you will at least have had a brief glimpse of that sunny softness which is dearer in March than in any other month.
This morning, in that calm which is most apt to settle on the land just before sunrise, the whole woodland seemed to breathe freely and beam in the soft air. The bluebirds caroled all about, and where a few days ago one song sparrow surprised me with his song, a dozen jubilated in the pasture bushes. A half-dozen blackbirds flew over, and though I couldnot see a single red epaulet in the gray light, and listened in vain for that melodious “kong-quer-ree†which no other bird can sing, I knew them as well by their call of “chut-chuck,†which is equally characteristic.
A flock of goldfinches lighted in the pines with much twittering and suggestions of the summer flight-note of “perchicoree.†But that is no more than they have been doing all winter. In a moment, though, the twittering changed. A melodious note began to come into it, and soon several in the flock were singing rival songs as sweet, though I do not think as loud, as those they will sing when June warmth sets the whole bird world a-choiring. It was a happy note in the cool spring air, for it was more than a spring song. The bluebirds and song sparrows voice that, but the song of the goldfinch is asong of summer, and irresistibly reminds one of fervid June heat and full-leaved trees. It was a warming, winning chorus, and it brought the sun up over the horizon, seemingly with a bound.
In all this joy of early matins I still miss one bird note that surely ought to be heard by now, and that is the robin’s. Robins are here in considerable numbers, but not one of them have I heard sing. I’m afraid the robin is lazy, but, perhaps, it is just his honest, matter-of-fact nature which does not believe in forcing the season. He will sing loud and long enough by-and-by.
Such a spring morning is the best season of the year for moth hunting. The moths are all sound asleep still, tucked away in their cocoons, that are also tucked away in the woodland where it is not so easy to see them in winter. Nowthe mad March winds have swept the last brown leaves from the bushes, and such moths as hang up there for the winter sleep are easily seen. You may take them home and hang them up wherever you see fit, and you will then be on hand to greet the moth when at his leisure he feels prompted to come forth from his snug sleeping-bag.
I always find more of the spice-bush silk-moth than any others,—perhaps because we both love the same woodland spots, borders of the ponds and streams where the benzoin and sassafras flourish, or upland pastures where the wild cherry hangs out its white racemes in May. They dangle freely in the wind, looking for all the world like a left-over leaf rolled by accident into a rude cylinder. Yet the moth is safe and warm within, rolled up in a silken coat that is firmlyglued to the leaf; and not only that, but extends in silky fabric all up along the petiole, and firmly holds it to the twig itself. The mad winds which have scoured the bush clean of all leaves and débris have had no strength which can pluck this “last leaf upon the tree.â€
If left to itself it will still hang there a year or two, perhaps more, after the moth has emerged, gradually bleaching to a soft gray, but still clinging. It is a splendid quality of silk, but no one has yet succeeded in reeling or carding it.Callosamia promethiathus escapes becoming a product of the farm rather than the pasture. It is a fine species to have hanging in winter cradles above your mantel, for theimagois large and beautiful, with deep browns and tans softly shading into grays that are tinted with iris, the male being distinct with a bodycolor of deep brown less diversified than the coloring of his mate.
TheSamia cecropiais another of our silk-worm moths whose cocoon is not difficult to find. Thececropia, instead of rolling up in a pendant leaf, constructs his cocoon without protection, and glues it right side up beneath a stout twig or even a considerable limb. I have one now that I took from the under side of a big leaning alder bole, skiving it off with the bark, but most of those I have collected have been attached to slender twigs of low shrubs.
But, though thececropiadoes not roll up in a leaf, he is apt to place his winter home where dead leaves will persist about him. I have never found him so plentiful as thepromethea, though he is commonly reported as numerous. Perhaps this habit of hiding among the dead leaveshas to do with this. He is our largest moth, and in beauty of coloring is surpassed, to my mind, only by two others.
One of these isTelia polyphemus,—a wonderful creature, almost as large as thececropia, all a soft, rosy tan with fleckings of gray and white and bands of soft violet-gray and pink, and great eyespots of white margined with yellow, browed with peacock blue, and ringed with violet-black. The larva, which is bigger than a big man’s thumb, is a beautiful shade of transparent green with side slashings of silvery white, and feeds on most of our deciduous forest trees.
I have had most luck in finding them on chestnuts. Last fall, when beating a chestnut tree for the nuts, I dislodged several, one of which I brought home and put in a cage with some leaves. He refused to eat, but in a day or so spun acocoon down in the corner of the box with a chestnut leaf glued over him. No wonder we rarely see either moth, caterpillar, or cocoon. The larva dwells in the higher trees, rolls himself in leaves in the autumn, and spends the winter on the ground, usually covered out of sight by the other leaves. Then the moth, wary and swift, flies only by night.
TheActias luna, the beautiful, long-tailed, green luna moth, is, I think, better known, for it has a way of flitting about woodland glades in late June or July, before nightfall. But in the caterpillar or the cocoon it is as hard to find as thepolyphemus, and for similar reasons. It, too, feeds upon walnut and hickory, and in the fall spins a papery cocoon among the dried leaves on the ground.
Thelunamoth is to me the highest type of moth beauty, and it is worth along search among leaves to find a cocoon of either this or thepolyphemus, and have the splendid privilege of seeing the lovely inmate later emerge, spread its fairy-like wings, and soar away into the soft spring twilight. It is as great a wonder as it would be to step some mid-summer midnight into a fairy ring and, after having speech with Mab and Titania and Puck and Ariel, see them flit daintily across the face of the rising moon and vanish in the purple dusk. The world of thepolyphemusand theluna, thececropiaand thepromethea, is as far removed from ours and as full of strange romance as that.
Along the pond shore these mad March days one gets glimpses of another world, too, that is, I dare say, as regardless of us as we are of that of the moths. This morning in the dusk of young dawn the pond was like a black mirror reflectingthe shadows of the sky. But across it, near the middle, was drawn a silver streak, the path of ducks swimming. Presently I heard their voices,—the resonant quack of a black duck and the hoarse “pra-a-p pr-a-a-p†of the drake. As they called, into the pond with a splash came a small flock of divers, showing white as they whirled to settle. The two species swam together, seemed to look each other over, held who knows what conversations in their own way, then separated. It is not for black duck and buffleheads to congregate, especially in the spring; and while the black duck and drake swam sedately away, the buffleheads began to hunt the small white perch which swim in schools near the surface, making a splash as if a stone was thrown into the water at every lightning-like dive.
Just as many a man here in Massachusetts lives his life and dies without ever having seen or heard of apolyphemusmoth or a bufflehead, though both may fly over his own head on many a dusky twilight, so the migrating thousands of ducks each year fly over our cities and know little of their uproar and bustle, nothing of their yearnings toward art or theology, or of the inspiration of poets or the agony of the down-trodden. Their world is all-important to them; ours is nothing, so they escape our guns, which they vaguely feel will harm them.
Even we with our books, our laboratories, and our concerted research into all things under heaven and in earth, do not get very far into the lives of other creatures. I have said all the moths are still in their cocoons. Perhaps they are, all but one, at least. That is a smallbrown fellow that came flying across the brook in the chill air of a sunset a night or two ago and now lies dead on my desk.
I caught him, for I wanted to know what moth dared come forth when the ground was still frozen and no bud had yet burst. But I would better have let him fly along to work out his own destiny, for in all the moth-book there is no mention of this wee brown creature that dared the frosty night with frail wings. I do not think he was an uncommon specimen. Moths are so numerous that only the most characteristic varieties of the more important species can be noticed in the text-books.
On my way home I crossed a sunny glade among the pines, and here I met an old friend, and had another example of the workings of other lives whose wisdom or ability is beyond our ken. On the dark trunk of a pine was sitting the spring’s first specimen, so far as my observation goes, of butterfly life, anAntiopa vanessa, his mourning cloak so closely folded that it made him invisible against the pine-tree bark. As I drew near he flipped into the air and sailed by, beautiful in his tan-yellow border with its spots of soft blue.
I say he was on the pine bark, but I did not see him there. For aught I know, so well was he concealed, the tree opened and let him out, then closed, that his hiding place might not be revealed. I would almost as soon believe this as to believe, what lepidopterists assure me is true, that this frail creature lives through the zero gales and deep snows of five months of winter to come out in the first bright days of early spring unharmed. Itis as likely that a pine trunk would voluntarily conceal him as that he could survive, frozen solid in some crevice in a stone wall or hollow stump. At any rate, he is out again, along with the hepaticas and song sparrows, and though the March winds and the March hare may both go mad again, we have had moments when the spring was very near.
SOME time in the night the tender gray spring mists that the hot afternoon sun had coaxed up from all the meadowy places realized that they were deserted, lost in the darkness. The young moon had gone decorously to bed at nine o’clock, pulling certain cloud puffs of white down over even the tip of her nose, that she might not be tempted to come out and dance with these lovely pale creatures.
They were dancing then, but later they trembled together in fright, for the kindly stars, their shining eyes grown tremulous with tender tears, vanished too, withdrawn behind the black haze which the north wind sends before it. A nimbus, wind-blown from distant mountain tops,was spreading over the zenith, and through it the gentle spring mists heard resound the crack of doom, the voice of the north wind itself, made up of echoes of crashing ice floes out of Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic. Then the spring mists fled to earth again, but had no strength left to enter in. Instead, they lay there dead, covering all things a half-inch deep with soft bodies of purest white, and we looked forth in the morning and said that there had been a robin-snow.
It is a pity that those gentle, innocent gray-blue spring mists should die, even to be lovely in death as they are, but it is their way of getting back home. In the morning the repentant sun came and dissolved the white, silent ones into gentle tears,—dayborn dew that slipped down among the grass roots and laid moist cheeks close to daisy and violet buds asthey went by, and almost loved them into bloom. A few more robin-snows and they will all be out. Very likely somewhere a dandelion, some sturdy, rough-and-ready youngster, quivered into yellow florescence at the caress. Robin-snows and the cajoling sun of the last week of March often make summer enough for this honest, fearless flower.
Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind, which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days, for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into wood roads.
These on such days have an atmosphere of their own. Here the thrill of the sun is as potent as the push of the X-ray. Itslips through clothes and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is the very gate itself.
My way to the most secret and withdrawn country of these wood roads always leads me across Ponkapog brook at the spot where rest the ruins of the old mill. It is three-quarters of a century or more since it ground grist, and of its timbers scarcely a moss-grown remnant remains. The gate to the old dam has been gone almost as long, but the watersdo not forget. Every year the spring floods bring down what driftwood the pond banks can spare and bar their own course with it at this spot. The water rises as high as of old, for a brief time.
It is as if the brook paid a memorial tribute thus yearly to the honest labor of the pioneers, now long gone. For a time it lasts, then the cementing bonds of dead leaves fail and the black flood roars through to the sea. Come two months later and where its highest rim touched you will find that it planted flowers in loving remembrance also, and saxifrage and dwarf blue violet lean in fragrant affection over the waters. I like to think that on Memorial day at least the stream makes echo of the clank of the old-time mill-wheel in its liquid prattle, and that the shuttle of reflected sunshine dancing back and forth is a glorified ghost of theold wheels whirling once more in memory of the miller and his neighbors.
Farther on I reach the pond shore, and on the narrow ridge which marks the old-time high tide of winter ice pressure, a dry moraine always, though running through marshy land, I strike what must be the oldest trail in this part of the country. Here is a path which was traveled before the time of the Norman conquest, or, for that matter, before Cæsar led his victorious legions into Gaul. Here the first Indians trod dry-footed when they went back and forth about the pond in their hunting and fishing, for then, as now, it was a natural causeway.
To-day a stranger, seeking his way about the pond for the first time, would not fail to find it, and the habitual wood-rover of the region, old or young, knows its every turn. Upon this to-day, betweenthe marsh and the bog in the alluring spring sunshine, I found a whole bird convention. Such an uproar! It was as if the suffragettes in one grand concerted movement had swooped down upon Parliament by the air-ship route, as the cable says they threaten, and were in the heat of battering down its walls of deafness with racket and roaring, after the fashion of the attempt on Jericho of old.
The blackbirds were in the greatest numbers and made the most noise individually. There were a hundred of them, more or less, sitting about in the trees and bushes, a few on the ground, and all of them practicing every call or song that blackbird was ever known to make. All the harsh croaking of frogs that as young birds they heard from the nest by the bog they voiced in their calls; all the liquidmelody of gentle brooks tinkling over shallows, and the piping of winds in hollow marsh reeds, they reproduced in their songs, and the whole was jumbled in this uproarious medley. They even shamed a robin or two into singing,—the first time I have heard these laggards do it this year, though they have been here in force for some weeks.
There seemed to be no cause for this other than the joy of living. It was just an impromptu concert in honor of the spring. I think I never noticed before how vigorously the blackbird uses his tail at one of these concerts. All the long black tails present worked up and down as if each were a pump-handle working a bellows to supply wind for the pipings. It reminded me of the church organ-loft, and the labors of the boy when the choir is in full swing and the organist has everything opened up and is dancing on the pedal notes to keep up.
Either side of this trail the wood should be a paradise for woodpeckers, for the trees are here allowed to grow old without interference. In birch and maple stubs the flickers have dug hole after hole, sometimes all up and down a single trunk. The downy woodpeckers have been active also and the chickadees have reared many a nestful of fluffy chicks in the same neighborhood. Yet, with all the opportunity that the flickers have had to bore in soft decaying wood for food or for shelter, I see that they have also dug a round hole through the inch boards in the peak of the old cranberry house. This, too, was probably for shelter, for many flickers winter with us, and there would be room in the old cranberry house-loft for a whole community, but I wonder sometimes if there is not another reason.
Just as beavers and squirrels must gnaw to keep their teeth from growing too long, so I sometimes think that woodpeckers need to hammer about so much, whether for food or not, to keep their bills in good condition. It is difficult to otherwise account for their continual practice. I knew a flicker once who used to drum a half-hour at a time on a sheet-iron ventilator on the roof of a building. I think he did it to keep his bill properly calloused and his muscle up, so that when he did tackle a shagbark tree with a fat, inch-long borer waiting in its heart-wood the chips would fly.
This low pond-bank moraine with its immemorial trail leads all along the north side of the pond, skirting the shoreward edge of the great bog nicely. It takesyou through the Talbot plains where tan-brown levels stretch far to the northward, seeming to shrink suddenly back from the overhanging bulk of Great Blue Hill, and it leads again into the tall oak woods, where later the warbling vireos will swing in the topmost branches and cheer the solemn arches with their gentle carols. By-and-by the bog ends and the path marks the dividing line between the bulrushes, marsh grass, bog-hobble wickets, and mingled débris of last summer’s thorough wort, and joepye weed, and marsh St. John’s-wort on the one hand, and the soft pinky grays of the wood on the other.
The climbing sun shines in here fervently, and the clear waters lap on the sand and croon among the water weeds with all the semblance of summer. No wonder the wild ducks linger long. Thepond is full of them,—black ducks and sheldrake,—quacking and whistling back and forth, sometimes forty of them in the air at once, and taking no notice of the wanderer on the bank. It seems to be their jubilee day as well as that of the birds on shore.
Thus by way of the long trail teeming with spring life I reach the enchanted country of the wood roads. Here are no pastures reclaimed, no ancient cellar holes to show the path of the pioneer. Woodland it was when the first Englishman came to Cape Cod; woodland it remains to-day. Somewhere in its depths the barred owls are nesting, and I hear the shrill pæan of a hawk as he harries the distant hillside. But for the most part there is a gentle silence, a dignified quiet that befits the solitude. It is the hush of the elder years dwelling in placessomewhat man-harried indeed, but never by man possessed. In this country to the east of Ponkapog Pond lingered longest the moose and bear. The fox makes it his home and his hunting-ground still; I find his trail still warm, and in summer you should tread with care, for an occasional rattlesnake trails his slow length among the rocks. The most that man has ever done here is to shoot and chop trees. The echoes of axe and gun die away soon, the trees grow up again, and man’s only mark is the wood roads.
Roads in this world are supposed to lead from somewhere to somewhere else, but no suspicion of such definiteness of purpose can ever be attached to wood roads, unless you are willing to say that they lead from the land of humdrum to the country of romance. Sometimes, in following them, you unexpectedly comeout on the highway, but far more often you have better luck, and the plain trail grows gently vague, shimmers away to nothing, and you find yourself, perhaps, in a beech grove, out of which is no path. You can hear the young trees titter at your embarrassment, but you cannot find the path that led you among them.
Perhaps in all your future wanderings you may not come upon that beech grove again, for the wood roads wind and interlace and play strange tricks on all outsiders. Particularly over in this region wood-lot owners sometimes lose their wood-lots, and are able to get track of them only after prolonged search, tumbling upon them then more by accident than wit. Sometimes a wood road innocently leads you round a hill and slyly slips you into itself again through a gapin the thicket. Thus, before you know it, you may have gone around the hill any number of times, as strangers get coursing in revolving doors in the entrances to city buildings and continue to revolve until rescued.