Wild life near home

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WILD LIFE NEAR HOME

“The feast is finished and the games are on.”

Udild Life Wear
bome

Hy Dallas Lore Sharp

With Mustrations
By Bruce horstall

NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1901

Copyright, 1901, by
THE CENTURY Co.
Copyright, 1897, by Tux J. B. Lirpincorr Co.

Copyright, 1897, by Perry Mason & Co.
Copyright, 1898, by Franx Lesiin’s Pusuisuine House,

Published October, 1901,

TO
MY WIFE

CONTENTS

In PERSIMMON-TIME . : ‘ ‘ 2 ad
BIRDS’ WINTER BEDS : : : . 31
SoME SNUG WINTER BEDS : : . AT
A BIRD OF THE DARK : ‘ . . 65
THE PINE-TREE SWIFT ; 2 ‘ . 29
In THE OCTOBER Moon. ; : . 95
FEATHERED NEIGHBORS . ‘ ; . 111
“MUS’RATTIN’” . ‘ , és ‘ . 169
A Srupy In Brrp Morats . : . 185
RaBBit ROADS . ; A 4 ; . 207
BRICK-TOP . : : . F 5 . 233
SECOND CRoPs . i : i ‘ . 247
WOOD-PUSSIES . : : : ; . 277
From RIVER-00OZE TO TREE-TOP : . 295
A BUZZARDS’ BANQUET. . ; . 321
Up HERRING RUN : : , : . 341

Iwish to thank the editors of ‘‘ Lippincott’s Magazine,” “‘ Frank

Leslie’s Popular Monthly,” “ Zion’s Herald,” and the ‘‘ Youth’s

Companion” for allowing me to reprint here the chapters of

“Wild Life Near Home”’ that first appeared in their pages.
[ xi ] Darras Lore Saarp.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
The feast is finished and the games are on Frontispiece

Ripe and rimy with November’s frosts . : . 6
Swinging from the limbs by their ee ee
sile tails . - : «
Under such conditions is sistas quite like a ‘fore.
cious beast. 4 * . < . 10
Filing through the aoeatae: : : . 13
Here on the fence we waited . 5 ‘ : . 16
He had stopped for a meal on his way out . . 20
Playing possum . ‘ Z ‘ ‘ ‘ . 22
She was standing off a doe i , 26
The cheerful little ees that ‘bend the
dried ragweeds_ . ‘ 37
There she stood in the snow with fies high lis-
tening anxiously . : ‘ ‘ . 45
And — dreamed . ; ; 46
I shivered as the icy flakes fell fiicker i — 52
The meadow-mouse . : F ‘ . x . 55
It was Whitefoot . : 60
From his leafless mers he es ti into the
Hollow . . : : 3 . 63
It caught at the fisecta in thee air . . : . 71

[ xiii]

PAGE
Unlike any bird of thelight . : i i . 77
They peek around the tree-trunks . ‘ : . 83
The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them 88
In October they are building their winter lodges 103

The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight . . 106
They probe the lawns most diligently for worms. 117
Even he loves a listener . i ‘ Fi : . 118
She flew across the pasture. ; : . . 121
Putting things to rightsin hishouse . - . 122
A very ordinary New England ‘‘corner” . . 124
They are the first to returnin the spring. . 127
Where the dams are hawking for flies . ‘ . 1380
They cut across the rainbow . : F ‘i 135
The barn-swallows fetch the summer . : 137
From the barn to the orchard . ‘ ‘ . 138
Across the road, in an saa built a pair of
redstarts . ‘ . . 140
Gathered half the gray hairs of a dandelion into
her beak . . % - . 143

In the tree next to the shebesa was a brood of
robins. The crude nest was wedged carelessly
into the lowest fork of the tree, so that the cats
and roving boys could i themselves without
trouble. z . 145

I soon spied him on the wires en a te naphaiee 148

He will come if May comes. F . 151

Within a few feet of me oe the elonely hgh
ened quail ‘ . 152

On they gotoafence-stake . 3 é : . 154

[xiv ]

PAGE
It wasalove-song . : . 156

But the pair kept on ieacthee seine brightly 161

In a dead yellow birch . ‘ i : i . 163
So close I can look directly into it . : . . 164
Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and
went chuckling down the bank . ; : . 170
The big moon was rising over the meadows . . 173
Section of muskrat’s house. 4 : . 174
The snow has drifted over their house till only a
tiny mound appears. ‘ 7 é ‘ 177
They rubbed noses . A ‘s A ‘ a . 179
Two little brown creatures washing calamus . 180
She melted away among the dark ai like a
shadow . . . 186
She called me every wicked thing tint oy sola
think of . ; . 189
It was one of those aiid like ee : . 191
They were watching me . , : : é . 192
A triumph of love and duty over fear . : 199
He wants to know whereI am and what Iam about 203
In the agony of death F : ‘ ‘ ‘ . 205
Calamity is hot on histrack . : ‘ : . 212
Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the
next brier-patch . F i : ‘ 3 . 215
The squat is a cold place . : : : ; . 217
The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of
that fox . F j § ; : ‘ ‘ . 220
His drop is swift and certain . . : ‘ . 225
Seven young ones in the nest . 4 , e . 231

[xv ]

PAGE -

The land ofthe mushroom . : : : . 239
Witch-hazel ‘ ; F ‘ is : : . 244
I knew it suited exactly . ‘ : . 252
With tail up, head cocked, very much denned,
and commenting vooiforously u ‘ ‘ . 254
In a solemn row upon the wire fence. . 257
Young flying-squirrels . F e ‘ : . 258
The sentinel crows are posted ‘ : . 260
She turned and fixed her big black eyes hand on
me . 265
Wrapped up > lilke little Eskimos : : : . 266
It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken
stumps . . . 269
Even the Rncceueet isa iging iting of ivy . 272
A family of seven young skunks . : : . 284
The family followed . 5 ; ‘ ‘ - . 289
“Spring! spring! spring!” . : : ‘ . 800
A wretched little puddle . : : ‘ 5; . 803
He was trying to swallow something . : . 307
In a state of soured silence. P : ; . 822
Ugliness incarnate . : : . : : . 825
Sailing over the pines. ‘ : 2 . . 328
A banquet this sans toasts and cheer. ‘ . 333
Floating without effort among the clouds. . 337
From unknown regions of the ocean. : . 845
A crooked, fretful little stream : ‘ . 346
Swimming, jumping, flopping, ora up he
comes! . . : ‘ : : 3 . 349
Here again hungry enemies await ‘on : . 855

[xvi]

IN PERSIMMON-TIME

WILD LIFE NEAR HOME
&

IN PERSIMMON-TIME

HE season of ripe persimmons in the pine-

barren region of New Jersey falls during
the days of frosty mornings, of wind-strewn
leaves and dropping nuts. Melancholy days
these may be in other States, but never such
here. The robin and the wren—I am not sure
about all of the wrens—are flown, just as the
poet says; but the jay and the crow are by no
means the only birds that remain. Bob White
calls from the swales and “cut-offs”; the cardi-
nal sounds his clear, brilliant whistle in the
thickets; and the meadow-lark, scaling across

[3]

the pastures, flirts his tail from the fence-stake
and shouts, Can you see-e me? These are some
of the dominant notes that still ring through
the woods and over the fields. Nor has every
fleck of color gone from the face of the out-of-
doors. She is not yet a cold, white body
wrapped in her winding-sheet. The flush of
life still lingers in the stag-horn sumac, where
it will burn brighter and warmer as the short-
ening days darken and deaden; and there is
more than a spark—it is a steady glow—on the
hillsides, where the cedar, pine, and holly
stand, that will live and cheer us throughout
the winter. What the-soil has lost of life and
vigor the winds have gained; and if the birds
are fewer now, there is a stirring of other ani-
mal life in the open woods and wilder places that
was quite lost in the bustle of summer.

And yet! it is a bare world, in spite of the
snap and crispness and the signs of harvest every-
where ; a wider, silenter, sadder world, though I
cannot own a less beautiful world, than in sum-
mer. The corn is cut, the great yellow shocks
standing over the level fields like weather-
beaten tepees in deserted Indian villages ; frosts

[4]

have mown the grass and stripped the trees, so
that, from a bluff along the creek, the glistening
Cohansey can be traced down wiles of its course,
and through the parted curtains, wide vistas of
meadow and farm that were entirely hidden by
the green foliage lie open like a map.

This is persimmon-time. Since most of the
leaves have fallen, there is no trouble in finding
the persimmon-trees. They are sprinkled about
the woods, along the fences and highways, as

“ Ripe and rimy with November's frosts.”

naked as the other trees, but conspicuous among
them all because of their round, dark-red fruit.

What a season of fruit ours is! Opening down
in the grass with the wild strawberries of May,
and continuing without break or stint, to close
high in the trees with the persimmon, ripe and
rimy with Novembei’s frosts! The persimmon

[5]

is the last of the fruits. Long before November
the apples are gathered —even the “grindstones”
are buried by this time; the berries, too, have
disappeared, except for such seedy, juiceless
things as hang to the cedar, the dogwood, and
greenbrier ; and the birds have finished the scat-
tered, hidden clusters of racy chicken-grapes.
The persimmons still hold on; but these are not
for long, unless you keep guard over the trees,
for they are marked: the possums have counted
every persimmon.

You will often wonder why you find so few
persimmons upon the ground after a windy,
frosty night. Had you happened under the
trees just before daybreak, you would have seen
a possum climbing about in the highest branches,
where the frost had most keenly nipped the fruit.
You would probably have seen two or three up
the trees, if persimmons were scarce and possums
plentiful in the neighborhood, swinging from
the limbs by their long prehensile tails, and
reaching out to the ends of the twigs to gather
in the soft, sugary globes. Should the wind be
high and the fruit dead ripe, you need not look
into the trees for the marauders; they will be

[6]

upon the ground, nosing out the lumps as they
fall. A possum never does anything for him-
self that he can let the gods do for him.

Your tree is perhaps near the road and an old
rail-pile. Then you may expect to find your per-
simmons rolled up in possum fat among the rails ;
for here the thieves are sure to camp through-
out the persimmon season, as the berry-pickers
camp in the pines during huckleberry-time.

Possums and persimmons come together, and
Uncle Jethro pronounces them “‘bofe good fruit.”
He is quite right. The old darky is not alone in
his love of possums. To my thinking, he shows
a nice taste in preferring November possum to
chicken.

It is a common thing, in passing through
Mount Zion or Springtown in the winter, to see
what, at first glance, looks like a six-weeks’ pig
hanging from an up-stairs window, but which,

[7]

“Swinging from the
limbs by their long
prehensile tails.”

on inspection, proves to be a possum, scalded,
scraped, and cleaned for roasting, suspended
there, out of the reach of dogs and covetous
neighbors, for the extra flavor of a freezing.
Now stuff it and roast it, and I will swap my
Thanksgiving turkey for it as quickly as will
Uncle Jethro himself.

Though the possum is toothsome, he is such
a tame, lumbering dolt that few real sportsmen
care for the sorry joy of killing him. Innumer-
able stories have been told of the excitement of
possum-hunting ; but after many winters, well
sprinkled with moonlight tramps and possums,
I can liken the sport to nothing more thrilling
than a straw-ride or a quilting-party.

There is the exhilarating tramp through the
keen, still night, and if possum-hunting will take
one out to the woods for such tramps, then it
is quite worth while.

No one could hunt’ possums except at night.
It would be unendurably dull by daylight. The
moon and the dark lend a wonderful largeness
to the woods, transforming the familiar day-
scenes into strange, wild regions through which
it is an adventure merely to walk. There is

[8]

magic in darkness. However dead by day, the
fields and woods are fully alive at night. We
stop at the creaking of the bare boughs over-
head as if some watchful creature were about to
spring upon us; every stump and bush is an
animal that we have startled into sudden fixed-
ness; and out of every shadow we expect a
live thing to rise up and withstand us. The
hoot of the owl, the bark of the fox, the whinny
of the coon, send shivers of excitement over us.
‘We jump at a mouse in the leaves near by.

Helped out by the spell of moonlight and
the collusion of a ready fancy, it is possible to
have a genuine adventure by seizing a logy,
grinning possum by the tail and dragging him
out of a stump. Under such conditions he
looks quite like a ferocious beast, grunting and
hissing with wide-open mouth; and you may
feel just a thrill of the real savage’s joy as you
sling him over your shoulder.

But never go after possums alone, nor with a
white man. If you must go, then go with Uncle
Jethro and Calamity. I remember particularly
one night’s hunt with Uncle Jethro. I had come
upon him in the evening out on the kitchen steps

[9]

“Under such conditions he looks quite like a ferocious beast.”

watching the rim of the rising moon across the
dark, stubby corn-field. It was November, and
the silver light was spreading a plate of frost over
the field and its long, silent rows of corn-shocks.

When Uncle Jethro studied the clouds or the
moon in this way, it meant a trip to the mea-
dows or the swamp ; it was a sure sign that geese
had gone over, that the possums and coons were
running.

I knew to-night—for I could smell the per-
fume of the ripe persimmons on the air—that
down by the creek, among the leafless tops of
the persimmon-trees, Uncle Jethro saw a possum.

“Ts it Br’er Possum or Br’er Coon, Uncle
Jethro?” Lasked, slyly, just as if I did not know.

“Boosh! boosh!” sputtered the old darky,
terribly scared by my sudden appearance.
“Wat yo’ ’xplodin’ my cogitations lak dat fo’?
W’at I know ’bout any possum? Possum, boy?
Possum? W’at yo’ mean?”

“Don’t you sniff the ’simmons, Uncle Jeth?”

Instinctively he threw his nose into the air.

“G way, boy; g’’wayfum yhere! Tain’t seen
no possum. I ’s thinkin’ ’bout dat las’ camp-
meetin’ in de pines”; and he began to hum:

[11 }

“Lawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry,
In de la-ane, in de lane.”

Half an hour later we were filing through
the corn-stubs toward the ereek. Uncle Jethro
carried his long musket under his arm ; I had a
stout hickory stick and a meal-sack ; while ahead
of us, like a sailor on shore, rolled Calamity, the
old possum-dog.

If in June come perfect days, then perfect
nights come in November. There is one thing,
at least, as rare as a June day, and that is a clear,
keen November night, enameled with frost and
set with the hunter’s moon.

Uncle Jethro was not thinking of last summer’s
camp-meeting now; but still he crooned softly a
camp-meeting melody :

“Sheep an’ de goats a-
Gwine to de pastcha,
Sheep tell de goats, ‘ Ain’t yo’
Walk a leetle fasta?’

“TLawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry,
In de la-ane, in de lane.

“Coon he up a gum-tree,
Possum in de holla;
Coon he roll hi’self in ha’r,
Possum roll in talla.

“Lawd, I wunda—”

[12]

until we began to skirt Cubby Hollow, when he
suddenly brought himself up with a snap.

It was Calamity “‘talkim’ in one of her tongues.”
The short, sharp bark came down from the fence
at the brow of the hill. Unele Jethro listened.

“Piling through the corn-stubs.””

“Jis squirrel-talk, dat. She ’ll talk possum
by-wm-bit, she will. Ain’t no possum-dog in des
diggin’s kin talk possum wid C’lamity. An’
wen she talk possum, o? man possum gotter
listen. Sell C’lamity? Dat dog can’t be bought,

she can’t.”

[13]

As we came under the persimmon-trees at the
foot of Lupton’s Pond, the moon was high enough
to show us that no possum had been here yet,
for there was abundance of the luscious, frost-
nipped fruit upon the ground. In the bare trees
the persimmons hung like silver beads. We
stopped to gather a few, when Calamity woke
the woods with her cry.

“Dar he is! C’lamity done got ol’ man pos-
sum now! Down by de bend! Dat ’s possum-
talk, big talk, fat talk!” And we hurried after
the dog.

We had gone half a mile, and Uncle Jethro
had picked himself up at least three times, when
I protested.

“Unele Jeth!” I cried, “that ’s an awfully
long-legged possum. He ’ll run all his fat off
before we catch him.”

“Dat ’s so, boy, shw’ ’nough! W’at dat ol’
fool dog tree a long-legged possum fo’, nohow?
Yer, Clamity, ’lamity, yer, yer!” he yelled, as
the hound doubled and began to track the rabbit
back toward us.

We were thoroughly cooled before Calamity
appeared. She was boxed on the ear and sent

[14]

©

off again with the command to talk possum next
time or be shot.

She was soon talking again. This time it
must be possum-talk. There could be no mis-
take about that long, steady, placid howl. The
dog must be under a tree or beside a stump wait-
ing for us. As Uncle Jethro heard the cry he
chuckled, and a new moon broke through his
dusky countenance.

“Yhear dat? Dat ’s possum-talk. C’lamity
done meet up wid de ol’ man dis time, shu’.”

And so she had, as far as we could see. She
was lying restfully on the bank of a little stream,
her head in the air, singing that long, lonesome
strain which Uncle Jethro called her possum-
talk. It was a wonderfully faithful reproduction
of her master’s camp-meeting singing. One of
his weird, wordless melodies seemed to have
passed into the old dog’s soul.

But what was she calling us for? As we came
up we looked around for the tree, the stump, the
fallen log; but there was not a splinter in sight.
Uncle Jethro was getting nervous. Calamity
rose, as we approached, and pushed her muzzle
into a muskrat’s smooth, black hole. This was

[15]

“Here on the
fence we waited.”

a

too much. She saw it, and hung her head, for
she knew what was coming.

“Took yhere, yo’ obtuscious ol’ fool. W’at
yo’ ’sociatin’ wid a low-down possum as takes UV
mus’rats’ holes? W’at I done tol’ yo’ ’bout
dis? Go ’long home! Go ’long en talk de
moon up a tree.” And as Uncle Jethro dropped
upon his knees by the hole, Calamity slunk
away through the brush.

I held up a bunch of freshly washed grass-
roots.

“Unele Jeth, this must be a new species of
possum; he eats roots like any muskrat,” I
said innocently.

It was good for Calamity not to be there just
then. Uncle Jethro loved her as he would have
loved a child ; but he vowed, as he picked up his
gun: “De nex’ time dat no-’count dog don’t talk
possum, yo’ ll see de buzzard ’bout, yo’ will.”

We tramped up the hill and on through the
woods to some open fields. Here on the fence
we waited for Calamity’s signal.

“Did you say you would n’t put any price on
Calamity, Uncle Jethro?” I asked as we waited.

There was no reply.

[16]

“Going to roast this possum, are n’t you?”

Silence.

“Am I going to have an invite, Uncle Jeth?”

“Hush up, boy! How we gwine yhear w’at
dat dog say?”

“Calamity? Why, did n’t you tell her to go
home?”

The woods were still. A little screech-owl
off in the trees was the only creature that dis-
turbed the brittle silence. The owl was flitting
from perch to perch, coming nearer us.

“W’at dat owl say?” whispered Uncle Jethro,
starting. ‘‘ ‘No possum’? ‘no possum’? ‘no pos-
sum’? Come ’long home, boy,” he commanded
aloud. “W’en ol’ Miss Owl say ‘No possum,’
C’lamity herself ain’t gwine git none.” And
sliding to the ground, he trudged off for home.

We were back again in the corn-field with
an empty sack. The moon was riding high near
eleven o’clock. From behind a shock Calamity
joined us, falling in at the rear like one of our
shadows. Of course Uncle Jethro did not see
her. He was proud of the rheumatic old hound,
and‘a night like this nipped his pride as the
first frosts nip the lima-beans.

2 [17]

It was the owl’s evil doing, he argued all the
way home. ‘W’en ol’ Miss Owl say ‘Stay in’—

no use:
?Simmons sweet, ’simmons red,
Ain’t no possum leave his bed.

All de dogs in Mount Zion won't fin’ no pos-
sum ‘out dis night.”

No; it was not Calamity’s fault: it was Miss
Owl’s.

We were turning in back of the barn when
there came a sudden yelp, sharp as a pistol-shot,
and Calamity darted through Uncle Jethro’s
legs, almost upsetting him, making straight for
the yard. At the same moment I caught sight
of a large creature hurrying with a wabbly,
uncertain gait along the ridge-pole of the hen-
house.

It was a possum—as big as a coon. He was
already half-way down the side of the coop ; but
Calamity was below him, howling like mad.

Unele Jethro nearly unjointed himself. Be-
fore the frightened animal had time to faint, the
triumphant hunter was jouncing him up and
down inside the sack, and promising the bones
and baking-pan to Calamity.

[18]

“Wat dat yo’ mumblin’, boy? Gwine ax
yo’self a’ invite? @ ’way; g’ way; yo’ don’
lak possum. W’at dat yo’ sayin’ ’g’in’ C’lamity?
Yo’ ’s needin’ sleep, chil’, yo’ is. Ain’t I done
to? yo’ dat dog gwine talk possum by-um-bit?
Wat dem ‘flections ’g’in’ ol’ Miss Owl?
Boosh, boy! Dat all fool-talk, w’at ol? Miss
Owl say. We done been layin’ low jis s’prise
yo’>, me an’ C’lamity an’ ol’ Miss Owl has.”
And as he placed the chopping-block upon the
barrel to keep the possum safe till morning, he
began again :

“Coon he up a gum-tree,
Possum in de holla;
Coon he roll hi’self in ha’r,
Possum roll in talla.

“Lawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry,
In de la-ane, in de lane.”

The next morning Uncle Jethro went to get
his possum. But the possum was gone. The
chopping-block lay on the woodshed floor, the
cover of the barrel was pushed aside, and the
only trace of the animal was a bundle of seed-
corn that he had: pulled from a nail overhead
and left half eaten on the floor. He had stopped
for a meal on his way out.

[19]

Uncle Jethro, with Uncle Remus, gives Br’er
Rabbit the wreath for craft; but in truth the
laurel belongs to Br’er Possum. He is an eter-
nal surprise. Either he is the most stupidly

wise animal of the woods, or the most wisely

“ He had stopped for a
meal on his way out.”

stupid. He is a puzzle. Apparently his one
unburied talent is heaviness. Joe, the fat boy,
was not a sounder nor more constant sleeper,
nor was his mental machinery any slower than
the possum’s. The little beast is utterly want-
ing in swiftness and weapons, his sole hope and
defense being luck and indifference. To luck
and indifference he trusts life and happiness.
And who ean say he does not prosper—that he
does not roll in fat?

I suppose there once were deer and otter in

[20]

the stretches of wild woodland along the Cohan-
sey ; but a fox is rare here now, and the coon
by no means abundant. Indeed, the rabbit,
even with the help of the game laws, has a hard
time. Yet the possum, unprotected by law,
slow of foot, slower of thought, and worth fifty
cents in any market, still flourishes along the
creek.

A greyhound must push to overtake a rabbit,
but I have run down a possum with my winter
boots on in less than half-way across a clean
ten-acre field. He ambles along like a bear,
swinging his head from side to side to see how
fast you are gaining upon him. When you
come up and touch him with your foot, over he
goes, grunting and grinning with his mouth
wide open. If you nudge him further, or bark,
he will die—but he will come to life again when
-you turn your back.

Some scientifically minded people believe
that this “playing possum” follows as a physio-
logical effect of fear ; that is, they say the pulse
slackens, the temperature falls, and, as a result,
instead of a pretense of being dead, the poor
possum actually swoons.

[21]

A physiologist in his laboratory, with stetho-
scope, sphygmoscope, thermometer, and pneu-
monometer, may be able to scare a possum into
a fit—I should say he might; but I doubt if a
plain naturalist in the woods, with only his two
eyes, a jack-knife, and a bit of string, was ever
able to make the possum do more than “play
possum.”

We will try to believe with the laboratory
investigator that the possum does genuinely
faint. However, it will not be rank heresy to
run over this leaf from my diary. It records a
faithful diagnosis of the case as I observed it.
The statement does not claim to be scientific ;
I mean that there were no ’meters or ’scopes
of any kind used. It is simply what I saw and
have seen a hundred times. Here is the entry:

POSSUM-FAINT

Cause. My sudden appearance before the patient.

Symptoms. A backing away with open mouth and
unpleasant hisses until forcibly stopped, when the
patient falls on one side, limp and helpless, a long,
unearthly smile overspreading the face; the off eye
closed, the near eye just ajar ; no muscular twitching,
but most decided attempts to get up and run as soon
as my back is turned.

Playing possum.

Treatment. My non-interference.

Note. Recovery instantaneous with my removal
ten feet. This whole performance repeated twelve
times in as many minutes,

December 26, 1893.

I have known the possum too long for a ready
faith in his extreme nervousness, too long to
believe him so hysterical that the least surprise
can frighten him into fits. He has a reasonable
fear of dogs; no fear at all of cats; and will
take his chances any night with a coon for the
possession of a hollow log. He will live in the
same burrow with other possums, with owls,—
with anything in fact,—and overlook any bear-
able imposition; he will run away from every-
thing, venture anywhere, and manage to escape
from the most impossible situations. Is this an
epileptic, an unstrung, flighty creature? Pos-
sibly ; but look at him. He rolls in fat; and
how long has obesity been the peculiar accom-
paniment of nervousness?

It is the amazing coolness of the possum,
however, that most completely disposes of the
scientist’s pathetic tale of unsteady nerves. A
creature that will deliberately walk into a trap,

[23 ]

spring it, eat the bait, then calmly lie down and
sleep until the trapper comes, has no nerves.
I used to catch a possum, now and then, in the
box-traps set for rabbits. It is a delicate task
to take a rabbit from such a trap ; for, give him
a crack of chance and away he bolts to freedom.
Open the lid carefully when there is a possum
inside, and you will find the old fellow curled
up with a sweet smile of peace on his face, fast
asleep. Shake the trap, and he rouses yawn-
ingly, with a mildly injured air, offended at your
rudeness, and wanting to know why you should
wake an innocent possum from so safe and com-
fortable a bed. He blinks at you inquiringly
and says: “Please, sir, if you will be so kind as
to shut the door and go away, I will finish my
nap.” And while he is saying it, before your
very eyes, off to sleep he goes.

Is this nervousness? What, then, is it—stu-
pidity or insolence?

Physically as well as psychologically the pos-
sums are out of the ordinary. As every one
knows, they are marsupials; that is, they have
a pouch or pocket on the abdomen in which they
carry the young. Into this pocket the young

[24]

are transferred as soon as they are born, and were
it not for this strange half-way house along the
journey of their development they would perish.

At birth a possum is little more than formed—
the least mature babe among all of our mam-
mals. It is only half an inch long, blind, deaf,
naked, and so weak and helpless as to be unable
to open its mouth or even cry. Such babies are
rare. The smallest young mice you. ever saw
are as large as possums at their birth. They
weigh only about four grains, the largest of
them, and are so very tiny that the mother
has to fasten each to a teat and force the milk
down each wee throat—for they cannot even
swallow.

They live in this cradle for about five weeks,
by which time they can creep out and climb over
their mother. They are then about the size of
full-grown mice, and the dearest of wood babies.
They have sharp pink noses, snapping black eyes,
gray fur, and the longest, barest tails. I think
that the most interesting picture I ever saw in
the woods was an old mother possum with eleven
little ones clinging to her. She was standing off
a dog as I came up, and every one of the eleven

[25]

was peeking out, immensely enjoying this first
adventure. The quizzing snouts of six were
poked out in a bunch from the cradle-pouch,
while the other five mites were upon their
mother’s back, where they had been playing
Jack-and-the-beanstalk up and down her tail.
Historically, also, the possum is a conundrum.
He has not a single relative on this continent,

Davee loner

“She was standing off a dog.”

except those on exhibition in zoédlogical gardens.
He left kith and kin behind in Australia when
he came over to our country. How he got here,
and when, we do not know. Clouds hang heavy

over the voyages of all the discoverers of Amer-

[26]

ica. The possum was one of the first to
find us, and when did he land, I wonder? ~ «2%
How long before Columbus, and Leif, son hy %
of Eric? Bee a

In his appetite the possum is ‘a

no way peculiar, except, per-
haps, that he takes the seasons’
menus entire. Between persimmon-
times he eats all sorts of animal food,
and is a much better hunter than we usually
give him eredit for. Considering his slowness,
too, he manages to plod over an amazing
amount of territory in the course of his evening
rambles. He starts out at dusk, and wanders

around all night, planning his hunt so as to

get back to his lair by dawn. Sometimes at -,| (a
daybreak he is a long way from home. Not f har]
being able to see well in the light, and rather |
than run into needless danger, he then crawls |),
into the nearest hole or under the first rail-pile WY f r
he comes to; or else he climbs a tree, and, V4, y
wrapping his tail about a limb, settles 4 KF
himself comfortably in a forked branch
quite out of sight, and sleeps till dark-

ness comes again. Aa

On these expeditions he picks up frogs, fish,
eggs, birds, mice, corn, and in winter a chicken
here and there.

In the edge of a piece of woods along the
Cohansey there used to stand a large hen-coop
surrounded by a ten-foot fence of wire netting.
One winter several chickens were missing here,
and though rats and other prowlers about the
pen were caught, still the chickens continued to
disappear.

One morning a possum was seen to descend
the wire fence and enter the coop through the
small square door used by the fowls. We ran
in; but there was no possum to be found. We
thought we had searched everywhere until,
finally, one of us lifted the lids off a rusty old
stove that had been used to heat the coop the
winter before, and there was the possum, with
two companions, snug and warm, in a nest of
feathers on the grate.

Here were the remains of the lost chickens.
These sly thieves had camped in this stove ever
since autumn, crawling in and out through the
stovepipe hole. During the day they slept
quietly ; and at night, when the chickens were

[28 ]

at roost, the old rascals would slip out, grab the
nearest one, pull it into the stove, and feast.

Is there anything on record in the way of
audacity better than that?

[29]

BIRDS’ WINTER BEDS

BIRDS’ WINTER BEDS

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.

STORM had been raging from the north-

east all day. Toward evening the wind
strengthened to a gale, and the fine, icy snow
swirled and drifted over the frozen fields.

I lay a long time listening to the wild sym-
phony of the winds, thankful for the roof over
my head, and wondering how the hungry, home-
less creatures out of doors would pass the night.
Where do the birds sleep such nights as this?
Where in this bitter cold, this darkness and
storm, will they make their beds? The lark
that broke from the snow at my feet as I crossed
the pasture this afternoon—

3 [33]

What comes o’ thee?
Whar wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing,
Av’ close thy e’e?

The storm grew fiercer; the wind roared
through the big pines by the side of the house
and swept hoarsely on across the fields; the
pines shivered and groaned, and their long
limbs scraped over the shingles above me as if
feeling with frozen fingers for a way in; the
windows rattled, the cracks and corners of the
old farm-house shrieked, and a long, thin line of
snow sifted in from beneath the window across
the garret floor. I fancied these sounds of the
storm were the voices of freezing birds, crying
to:be taken in from the cold. Once I thought
I heard a thud against the window, a sound
heavier than the rattle of the snow. Something
seemed to be beating at the glass. It might be
a bird. I got out of bed to look; but there
was only the ghostly face of the snow pressed
against the panes, half-way to the window’s top.
I imagined that I heard the thud again; but,
while listening, fell asleep and dreamed that
my window was frozen fast, and that all the
birds in the world were knocking at it, trying
to get in out of the night and storm.

[34]

The fields lay pure and white and flooded with
sunshine when I awoke. Jumping out of bed,
I ran to the window, and saw a dark object on
the sill outside. I raised the sash, and there,
close against the glass, were two quails—frozen
stiff in the snow. It was they I heard the
night before fluttering at the window. The
ground had been covered deep with snow for
several days, and at last, driven by hunger and
cold from the fields, they saw my light, and
sought shelter from the storm and a bed for
the night with me.

Four others, evidently of the same covey,
spent the night in the wagon-house, and in the
morning helped themselves fearlessly to the
chickens’ breakfast. They roosted with the
chickens several nights, but took to the fields
again as soon as the snow began to melt.

It is easy to account for our winter birds dur-
ing the day. Along near noon, when it is warm
and bright, you will find the sparrows, chicka-
dees, and goldfinches searching busily among
the bushes and weeds for food, and the crows
and jays scouring the fields. But what about
them during the dark? Where do they pass
the long winter nights?

[35 ]

Why, they have nests, yousay. Yes, they had
nests in the summer, and then, perhaps, one of
the parent birds may be said to have slept in the
nest during the weeks of incubation and rearing
of the young. But nests are cradles, not beds,
and are never used by even the young birds from
the day they leave them. Muskrats build houses,
foxes have holes, and squirrels sleep in true nests ;
but of the birds it can be said, ‘‘they have not
where to lay their heads.” They sleep upon
their feet in the grass, in hollow trees, and among
the branches ; but, at best, such a bed is no more
than aroost. <A large part of the year this roost
is new every night, so that the question of a
sleeping-place during the winter is most serious.

The cheerful little goldfinches, that bend the
dried ragweeds and grass-stalks down and scatter
their chaff over the snow, sleep in the thick
cedars and pines. These warm, close-limbed
evergreens I have found to be the lodging-houses
of many of: the smaller winter birds—the fox-
colored sparrow, snowbird, crossbill, and some-
times of the chickadee, though he usually tucks
his little black cap under his wing in a wood-
pecker’s hole.

[36]

“The cheerful little gold- |
finches, that bend the dried
ragweeds.”

The meadow-larks always
roost upon the ground. They
greep well under the grass, or, if
the wind is high and it snows, they
squat close to the ground behind a
tuft of grass or thick bush and sleep {
while the cold white flakes fall about = |
them. They are often covered before the morn-
ing; and when housed thus from the wind and
hidden from prowling enemies, no bird could
wish for a cozier, warmer, safer bed.

But what a lonely bed it is! Nothing seems

[37]

so utterly homeless and solitary as a meadow-
lark after the winter nightfall. In the middle
of a wide, snow-covered pasture one will occa-
sionally spring from under your feet, scattering
the snow that covered him, and go whirring
away through the dusk, lost instantly in the
darkness—a single little life in the wild, bleak
wilderness of winter fields !

Again, the grass is often a dangerous bed. On
the day before the great March blizzard of 1888,
the larks were whistling merrily from the fences,
with just a touch of spring in their call. At
noon I noted no signs of storm, but by four
o’clock—an hour earlier than usual—the larks
had disappeared. They rose here and there
from the grass as I crossed the fields, not as they.
do when feeding, far ahead of me, but close to.
my feet. They had gone to bed. By early even-
ing the snow began to fall, and for two days
continued furiously.

A week later, when the deep drifts melted, I
found several larks that had perished from cold
or starvation or had smothered under the
weight of snow.

There is something of awe in the thought of a

[38 ]

bird nestling close beneath a snow-laden bush in
a broad meadow, or clinging fast to a limb in
the swaying top of some tall tree, rocked in its
great arms through the night by a winter gale.
All trees, even the pines and cedars, are fearfully
exposed sleeping-places, and death from cold is
not infrequent among the birds that take beds
in them. .

The pine barrens, and especially certain pine
clumps along Cohansey Creek and at the head
of Cubby Hollow, used to be famous crow-roosts.
Thousands of the birds, a few years ago, fre-
quented these pieces of wood in the winter.
About the middle of the afternoon, during the
severest weather, they begin to fly over to the
roost at the head of the Hollow, coming in from
the surrounding fields, some of them from miles
away, where they have been foraging all day
for food. You can tell the character of the
weather by the manner of their flight. In the
fall and spring they went over cawing, chasing
each other and performing in the air; they were
happy, and life was as abundant as the spring
promise or the autumn fullness everywhere. But
in January the land is bare and hard, and life

[39 ]

correspondingly lean and cheerless. You see it
in their heavy, dispirited flight ; all their spring
joyousness is gone; they pass over silent and
somber, reluctant to leave the fields, and fearful
of the night. There is not a croak as they settle
among the pines—scores, sometimes hundreds of
them, in a single tree.

Here, in the swaying tops, amid the heavy
roar of the winds, they sleep. You need have
no fear of waking them as you steal through the
shadows beneath the trees. The thick mat of
needles or the sifted snow muffles your footfalls ;
and the winds still the breaking branches and
snapping twigs. Whata bed ina winter storm !
The sky is just light enough for you to distinguish
the dim outlines of the sleepers as they rock in
the waves of the dark green that rise and fall
above you; the trees moan, the branches shiver
and creak, and high above all, around and be-
neath you, filling the recesses of the dark wood
rolls the volume of the storm.

But the crows sleep on, however high the
winds. They sit close to the branches, that the
feathers may cover their clinging feet; they
tuck their heads beneath their wing-coverts,

[40]

thus protecting the whole body, except one
side of the head, which the feathers of the wing
cannot quite shelter. This leaves an eye ex-
posed, and this eye, like the heel of Achilles,
proves to be the one vulnerable spot. It freezes
in very severe weather, causing a slow, painful
death. In the morning, after an unusually cold
night, you can find dozens of crows flapping
piteously about in the trees of the roost and
upon the ground, with frozen eyes. In Janu-
ary, 1895, 1 saw very many of them along the
Hollow, blind in one eye or in both eyes, dying
of pain and starvation. It was pitiful to see
their sufferings. The snow in places was
sprinkled with their broken feathers, and with
pine-needles which they had plucked off and
tried to eat. Nothing could be done for the
poor things. I have tried time and again to
doctor them; but they were sure to die in the
end.

Who has not wondered, as he has seen the
red rim of the sun sink down in the sea, where
the little brood of Mother Carey’s chickens
skimming round the vessel would sleep that
night? Or who, as he hears the honking of geese

[41]

overhead in the darkness, has not questioned by

what
... plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean-side,

they will find rest?

In winter, when a heavy southeast wind is
blowing, the tides of Delaware Bay are high and
the waters very rough. Then the ducks that
feed along the reedy flats of the bay are driven
into the quieter water of the creeks, and at
night fly into the marshes, where they find safe
beds in the ‘salt-holes.”

The salt-holes are sheets of water having no
outlet, with clean perpendicular sides as if cut
out of the grassy marsh, varying in size from a
few feet wide to an acre in extent. The sedges
grow luxuriantly around their margins, making
a thick, low wall in winter, against which the
winds blow in vain. Ifa bird must sleep in the
water, such a hole comes as near to being a per-
fect cradle as anything could be, short of the
bottom of a well.

The ducks come in soon after dark. You
can hear the whistle of their wings as they pass

[42]

just above your head, skimming along the
marsh. They settle ina hole, swim close up to the
windward shore, beneath the sedges, and, with
their heads under their wings, go fast asleep.
And as they sleep the ice begins to form— first,
along their side of the hole, where the water is
calmest ; then, extending out around them, it
becomes a hard sheet across the surface.

A night that will freeze a salt-hole is not one
in which there is likely to be much hunting
done by man or beast. But EF have been on the
marshes such nights, and so have smaller and
more justified hunters. It is not a difficult feat
to surprise the sleeping ducks. The ice is half
an inch thick when you come up, and seals the
hole completely, save immediately about the
bodies of the birds. Their first impulse, when
taken thus at close range, is to dive; and down
they go, turning in their tracks.

Will they get out? One may chance to
strike the hole which his warm body kept
open, as he rises to breathe; but it is more
likely that he will come up under the ice, and
drown. I have occasionally found a dead duck
beneath the ice or floating in the water of a

[43 ]

salt-hole. It had been surprised, no doubt,
while sleeping, and, diving in fright, was
drowned under the ice, which had silently
spread like a strange, dreadful covering over
its bed.

Probably the life of no other of our winter
birds is so full of hardship as is that of the
quail, Bob White.

In the early summer the quails are hatched
in broods of from ten to twenty, and live as
families until the pairing season the next spring.
‘The chicks keep close to the neighborhood of
the home nest, feeding and roosting together,
under the guidance of the parent birds. But
this happy union is soon broken by the advent
of the gunning season. It is seldom that a bevy
escapes this period whole and uninjured. In-
deed, if one of the brood is left to welcome the
spring it is little less than a miracle.

I have often heard the scattered, frightened
families called together after a day of hard
shooting ; and once, in the old pasture to the
north of Cubby Hollow, I saw the bevy assemble.

It was long after sunset, but the snow so dif-
fused the light that I could see pretty well. In

[44]

j

; . Figg oon i

There she stood in the HP Pes ey, '
snow with head high, }
listening anxiously.” ey

climbing the fence into the pasture,
I had started a rabbit, and! was creep-
ing up behind a low cedar, when a quail,

very near me, whistled softly, Whirl-ee! The
cedar was between us. Whirl-ee, whirl-ee-gig !
she whistled again.

It was the sweetest bird-note I ever heard,
being so low, so liquid, so mellow that I almost
doubted if Bob White could make it. But there
she stood in the snow with head high, listening
anxiously. Again she whistled, louder this time ;
and from the woods below came a faint answer-
ing call: White! The answer seemed to break
a spell; and on three sides of me sounded
other calls. At this the little signaler repeated
her efforts, and each time the answers came
louder and nearer. Presently something dark
hurried by me over the snow and joined the

[45]

quail I was watching. It was one of the covey
that I had heard call from the woods.

Again and again the signal was sent forth
until a third, fourth, and finally a fifth were
grouped about the leader. There was just an
audible twitter of welcome and gratitude ex-
changed as each new-comer made his appearance.
Once more the whistle sounded; but this time
there was no response across the silent field.

The quails made their way to a thick cedar
that spread out over the ground, and, huddling
together in a close bunch under this, they mur-
mured something soft and low among themselves
and—dreamed.

Some of the family were evidently missing,
and I crept away, sorry that even one had been
taken from the little brood.

* And — dreamed.”

SOME SNUG WINTER BEDS

SOME SNUG WINTER BEDS

lie was a cold, desolate January day. Scarcely
a sprig of green showed in the wide land-
scape, except where the pines stood in a long
blur against the gray sky. There was not a sign
that anything living remained in the snow-buried
fields, nor in the empty woods, shivering and
looking all the more uncovered and cold under
their mantle of snow, until a solitary crow
flapped heavily over toward the pines in search
of an early bed for the night.

The bird reminded me that I, too, should be
turning toward the pines; for the dull gray
afternoon was thickening into night, and my

4 [49]

bed lay beyond the woods, a long tramp through
the snow. |

As the black creature grew small in the dis-
tance and vanished among the trees, I felt a
pang of pity for him. I knew by his flight that
he was hungry and weary and cold. Every
labored stroke of his unsteady wings told of a
long struggle with the winter death. He was
silent ; and his muteness spoke the foreboding
and dread with which he faced another bitter
night in the pines.

The snow was half-way to my knees ; and still
another storm was brewing. All day the leaden
sky had been closing in, weighed down by the
snow-filled air. That hush which so often pre-
cedes the severest winter storms brooded every-
where. The winds were in leash—no, not in
leash ; for had my ears been as keen as those of
the creatures about me, I might even now have
heard them baying far away to the north. It
was not the winds that were still; it was the
fields and forests that quailed before the onset
of the storm.

I skirted Lupton’s Pond and saw the muskrat
village, a collection of white mounds out in the

[50]

ice, and coming on to Cubby Hollow, I crossed on
the ice, ascended the hill, and keeping in the
edge of the swamp, left the pines a distance to
the left. A chickadee, as if oppressed by the
silence and loneliness among the trees, and un-
easy in his stout little heart at the threatening
storm, flew into the bushes as near to me as he
could get, and, apparently for the sake of com-
panionship, followed me along the path, cheep-
ing plaintively.

As I emerged from the woods into a corn-
field and turned to look over at the gloomy
pines, a snowflake fell softly upon my arm. The
storm had begun. Now the half-starved crows
came flocking in by hundreds, hurrying to roost
before the darkness should overtake them. A
biting wind was rising ; already I could hear it
soughing through the pines. There was some-
thing fascinating in the oncoming monster, and
backing up behind a corn-shock, I stopped a
little to watch the sweep of its white winds be- .
tween me and the dark, sounding pines.

I shivered as the icy flakes fell thicker and
faster. How the wild, unhoused things must
suffer to-night! I thought, as the weary pro-

[51]

cession of crows beat on toward the trees.
Presently there was a small stir within the
corn-shock. I laid my ear to the stalks and
listened. Mice! I could hear them moving
around in there. It was with relief that I felt
that here, at least, was a little people whom
the cold and night could not hurt.

These mice were as warmly sheltered inside
this great shock as I should be in my furnace-
warmed home. Their tiny nests of corn-silk,
hidden away, perhaps, within the stiff, empty
husks at the shock’s very center, could never
be wet by a drop of the most driving rain nor
reached by the most searching frosts. And not
a mouse of them feared starvation. A plenty
of nubbins had been left from the husking, and
they would have corn for the shelling far into the
spring—if the fodder and their homes should be
left to them so long.

I floundered on toward home. In the gather-
ing night, amid the swirl of the snow, the
shocks seemed like spectral tents pitched up
and down some ghostly camp. But the specters
and ghosts were all with me, all out in the
whirling storm. The mice knew nothing of

[53]

wandering, shivering spirits ; they nibbled their
corn and squeaked in snug contentment; for
only dreams of the winter come to them in
there.

These shock-dwellers were the common house-
mice, Mus musculus. But they are not the only
mice that have warm beds in winter. In fact,
bed-making is a specialty among the mice.

Zapus, the jumping-mouse, the exquisite little
fellow with the long tail and kangaroo legs, has
made his nest of leaves and grass down in the
ground, where he lies in a tiny ball just out of
the frost’s reach, fast asleep. He will be plowed
out of bed next spring, if his nest is in a field
destined for corn or melons; for Zapus is sure
to oversleep. He is a very sound sleeper. The
bluebirds, robins, and song-sparrows will have
been back for weeks, the fields will be turning
green, and as for the flowers, there will be a
long procession of them started, before this
pretty sleepy-head rubs his eyes, uncurls him-
self, and digs his way out to see the new spring
morning.

Does this winter-long sleep seem to him only
as a nap overnight?

[54]

Arvicola, the meadow-mouse, that duck-legged,
stump-tailed, pot-bellied mouse whose paths
you see everywhere in the meadows and fields,
stays wide awake all winter. He is not so ten-

The meadow-mouse.

der as Zapus. The cold does not bother him ;
he likes it. Up he comes from his underground
nest,—or home, rather, for it is more than a
mere sleeping-place,—and runs out into the
snow like a boy. He dives and plunges about
in the soft white drifts, plowing out roads that

[55]

crisscross and loop and lady’s-chain and lead
nowhere—simply for the fun of it.

Fairies do wonderful things and live in im-
possible castles ; but no fairy ever had a palace
in fairy-land more impossible than this unfairy-
like meadow-mouse had in my back yard.

One February day I broke through the frozen
crust of earth in the garden and opehed a large
pit in which forty bushels of beets were buried.
I took out the beets, and, when near the bottom,
I came upon a narrow tunnel running around
the wall of the pit like the Whispering Gallery
around the dome of St. Paul’s. It completely
circled the pit, was well traveled, and, without
doubt, was the corridor of some small animal
that had the great beet-pit for a winter home.

There were numerous dark galleries branch-
ing off from this main hallway, piercing out
into the ground. Into one of these I put my
’ finger, by way of discovery, thinking I might
find the nest. I did find the nest—and more.
The instant my finger entered the hole a sharp
twinge shot up my arm, and I snatched away
my hand with a large meadow-mouse fastened
to the end of my finger, and clinging desperately

[56]

to her, lo! two baby mice, little bigger than
thimbles.

In this mild and even temperature, four feet
below the frozen surface of the garden, with
never a care as to weather and provisions, dwelt
this single family of meadow-mice. What a
home it was! A mansion, indeed, with rooms
innumerable, and a main hall girdling a very
mountain of juicy, sugary beets. This family
could not complain of hard times. Besides the
beets, the mice had harvested for themselves a
number of cribs of clover-roots. These cribs, or
bins, were in the shape of little pockets in the
walls of the great gallery. Each contained a
cupful of the thick, meaty tap-roots of clover,
cut into lengths of about half an inch. If the
beets should fail (!), or cloy upon them, they
had the roots to fall back on.

It was absolutely dark here, and worse ; there
was no way to get fresh air that I couldsee. Yet
here two baby mice were born in the very dead
of winter, and here they grew as strong and warm
and happy as they would have grown had the
season showered rose-petals instead of snow-
flakes over the garden above.

[57]

Hesperomys is the rather woodsy name of the
white-footed or deer-mouse, a shy, timid little
creature dwelling in every wood, who, notwith-
standing his abundance, is an utter stranger to
most of us. We are more familiar with his tracks,
however, than with even those of the squirrel
and rabbit. His is that tiny double trail gal-
loped across the snowy paths in the woods. We
see them sprinkled over the snow everywhere ;
but when have we seen the feet that left them?
Here goes a line of the wee prints from a hole
in the snow near a stump over to the butt of
a large pine. Whitefoot has gone‘for provender
to one of his storehouses among the roots of the
pine; or maybe a neighbor lives here, and he
has left his nest of bird-feathers in the stump
to make a friendly call after the storm.

A bed of downy feathers at the heart of a
punky old stump beneath the snow would seem
as much of a snuggery as ever a mouse could
build ; but it is not. Instead of a dark, warm
chamber within a hollow stump, Whitefoot some-
times goes to the opposite extreme, and climbs
a leafless tree to an abandoned bird’s nest, and
fits this up for his winter home. Down by Cubby

[58]

Hollow I found a wood-thrush’s nest in a slender
swamp-maple, about fifteen feet from the ground.
The young birds left it late in June, and when
Whitefoot moved in I do not know. But along
in the winter I noticed that the nest looked sus-
piciously round and full, as if it were roofed
over. Perhaps the falling leaves had lodged in
it, though this was hardly likely. So I went up
to the sapling and tapped. My suspicions were
correct. After some thumps, a sleepy, fright-
ened face appeared through the side of the nest,
and looked cautiously down at me. No one
could mistake that pointed nose, those big ears,
and the round pop-eyesso nearly dropping out
with blinking. It was Whitefoot. I had dis-
turbed his dreams, and he had hardly got his
wits together yet, for he had never been awak-
ened thus before. And what could wake him?
The black-snakes are asleep, and there is not a
coon or cat living that could climb this spindling
maple. Free from these foes, Whitefoot has
only the owls to fear, and I doubt if even the
little screech-owl could flip through these inter-
laced branches and catch the nimble-footed ten-
ant of the nest.

[59]

”

“It was Whitefoot.

In spite of the exposure this must be a warm
bed. The walls are thick and well plastered with
mud, and are packed inside with fine, shredded
bark which the mouse himself has pulled from
the dead chestnut limbs, or, more likely, has
taken from a deserted crow’s nest. The whole
is thatched with a roof of shredded bark, so
neatly laid that it sheds water perfectly. The
entrance is on the side, just over the edge of
the original structure, but so shielded by the
extending roof that the rain and snow never beat
in. The thrushes did their work well; the nest
is securely mortised into the forking branches ;
and Whitefoot can sleep without a tremor
through the wildest winter gale. Whenever
the snow falls lightly a high white tower rises
over the nest; and then the little haycock,
lodged in the slender limbs so far above our
heads, is a very castle indeed.

High over the nest of the white-footed mouse,
in the stiffened top of a tall red oak that stands
on the brow of the hill, swings another winter
bed. It is the bulky oak-leaf hammock of the
gray squirrel.

A hammock for a winter bed? Is there any-

[61]

thing snug and warm about a hammock? Not
much, true enough. From the outside the gray
squirrel’s leaf bed looks like the coldest, dead-
liest place one could find in which to pass the
winter. The leaves are loose and rattle in the
wind like the clapboards of a tumble-down
house. The limb threatens every moment to
toss the clumsy nest out upon the storm. But
‘the moorings hold, and if we could curl up with
the sleeper in that swaying bed, we should rock
and dream, and never feel a shiver through the
homespun blankets of chestnut bark that wrap
us round inside the flapping leaves.

Be it never so cozy, a nest like this is far
from a burrow—the bed of a fat, thick-headed
dolt who sleeps away the winter. A glance into
the stark, frozen top of the oak sends over us a
chill of fright and admiration for the dweller
up there. He cannot be an ease-lover ; neither
can he know the meaning of fear. We should
as soon think of a sailor’s being afraid of the
shrieking in the rigging overhead, as of this
bold squirrel in the tree-tops dreading any
danger that the winter winds might bring.

There are winters when the gray squirrel

[ 62]

“ From his leafless height he looks down into the Hollow.”

stays in the hollow of some old tree. A secure
and sensible harbor, this, in which to weather
the heavy storms, and I wonder that a nest is
ever anchored outside in the tree-tops. The
woodsmen and other wiseacres say that the
squirrels never build the tree-top nests except
in anticipation of a mild winter. But weather
wisdom, when the gray squirrel is the source, is
as little wise as that which comes from Wash-
ington or the almanac. I have found the nests
in the tree-tops in the coldest, fiercest winters.
It is not in anticipation of fine weather, but

[63 ]

a wild delight in the free, wild winter, that
leads the gray squirrel to swing his hammock
from the highest limb of the tallest oak that
will hold it. He dares and defies the winds, and
claims their freedom for his own. From his
leafless height yonder he looks down into the
Hollow upon the tops of the swamp trees where
his dizzy roads run along the angled branches,
and over the swamp to the dark pines, and over
the pines, on, on across the miles of white fields
which sweep away and away till they freeze
with the frozen sky behind the snow-clouds that
drift and pile. In his aery he knows the snarl]
and bite of the blizzard; he feels the swell of
the heaving waves that drive thick with snow
out of the cold white north. Anchored far out
in the tossing arms of the strong oak, his leaf nest
rocks in the storm like a yawl in a heaving sea.
But he loves the tumult and the terror. A
night never fell upon the woods that awed him ;
cold never crept into the trees that could chill
his blood ; and the hoarse, mad winds that swirl
and hiss about his pitching bed never shook a
nerve in his round, beautiful body. How he
must sleep! And what a constitution he has!

[ 64 ]

A BIRD OF THE DARK

A BIRD OF THE DARK

HE world is never more than half asleep.

Night dawns and there is almost as wide a
waking as with the dawn of day. We live in
the glare till it leaves us blind to the forms that
move through the dark; we listen to the roar
of the day till we can no longer hear the stir
that begins with the night. But here in the
darkness is life and movement, — wing-beats, foot-
falls, cries, and calls,—all the wakefulness, strug-
gle, and tragedy of the day.

Whatever the dusk touches it quickens.
Things of bare existence by day have life at
night. The very rocks that are dead and inani-
mate in the light get breath and being in the
dark. What was mere substance now becomes

[67]

shadow, and shadow spirit, till all the day’s dead
live and move. The roads, fences, trees, and
buildings become new creatures ; landmarks,
distances, and places change ; new odors are on
the winds ; strange lights appear ; soft footsteps
pass and repass us; and hidden voices whisper
everywhere. The brightest day is not more
awake ; at high noon we are not more alert.

One of the commonest of these night sounds
is the cry of the whippoorwill. From the middle
of April to the end of September it rings along
the edge of the clearing; but how seldom we ©
have seen the singer! To most of us it is only
a disembodied voice. Night has put her spell
upon the whippoorwills and changed them from
birds into wandering shadows and voices. There
is something haunting in their call, a suggestion
of fear, as though the birds were in flight, pur-
sued by a shape in the gloom. It is the voice of
the lost—the voice of the night trying to find
its way back to the day. There is snap enough
in the call if you happen to be near the bird.
Usually the sound comes to us out of the dark-
ness and distance—the loneliest, ghostliest cry of
all the night.

[68]

It is little wonder that so many legends and
omens follow the whippoorwill. How could our
imaginations, with a bent for superstition, fail
to work upon a creature so often heard, so rarely
seen, of habits so dark and uncanny?

One cannot grow accustomed to the night. The
eager, jostling, open-faced day has always been
familiar ; but with the night, though she comes
as often as the day, no number of returns can
make us acquainted. Whatever is peculiarly
her own shares her mystery. Who can get used
to the bats flitting and squeaking about him in
the dusk? Or who can keep his flesh from creep-
ing when an owl bobs over him in the silence
against a full moon? Or who, in the depths ofa
pine barren, can listen to a circle of whippoor-
wills around him, and not stay his steps as one
lost in the land of homeless, wailing spirits?
The continual shifting of the voices, the mock-
ing echoes, and the hiding darkness combine in
an effect altogether gruesome and unearthly.

One may hear the whippoorwill every sum-
mer of his life, but never see the bird. It is shy
and wary, and, with the help of the darkness,
manages to keep strangely out of sight. Though

[69]

it is not unusual to stumble upon one asleep by
day, it is a rare experience to surprise one feed-
ing or singing at night.

One evening I was standing by a pump in an
open yard, listening to the whippoorwills as
they came out to the edge of the woods and.
called along the fields. The swamp ran up so
close on this side of the house that faint puffs
of magnolia and wild grape could be strained
pure from the mingling odors in the sweet night
air. The whippoorwills were so near that the
introductory chuck and many of the finer, flute-
like trills of their song, which are never heard at
a distance, were clear and distinct. Presently
one call sounded out above the others, and in-
stantly rang again, just behind a row of currant-
bushes not ten feet away.

I strained my eyes for a glimpse of the creature,
when swift wings fanned my face, and a dark,
fluffy thing, as soft and noiseless as a shadow,
dropped at my feet, and exploded with a triple
ery of Whip-poor-will ! that startled me. It was
a rapid, crackling, vigorous call that split through
the night as a streak of lightning through a
thunder-cloud. The farmers about here interpret

[70]

the notes to say, Crack-the-whip ! and certainly,

near by, this fits better than Whip-poor-will !
The bird was flitting about the small plat-

form upon which I stood. I remained as stiff

“Tt caught at the
insects in the air."

as the pump, for which, evidently, it had mis-
taken me. It was not still a moment, but
tossed back and forth on wings that were abso-
lutely silent, and caught at the insects in the air
and uttered its piercing cry. It leaped rather
than flew, sometimes calling on the wing, and
always upon touching the ground.

This is as good a view of the bird as I ever
got at night. The darkness was too thick to

[71]

see what the food was it caught, or how it
caught it. I could not make out a pose or a
motion more than the general movements about
the pump. The one other time that I have
had a good look at the bird, when not asleep,
showed him at play.

It was an early August morning, between two
and three o’clock. The only doctor in the vil-
lage had been out all night at a little town
about five miles away. He was wanted at once,
and I volunteered to get him.

Five miles is pure fun to a boy who has run
barefoot every one of his fifteen summers; so I
rolled up my trousers, tightened my belt, and
bent away for Shiloh at an easy dog-trot that,
even yet, I believe I could keep up for half a
day.

There was not a glimmer in the east when I
started. JI had covered three miles, and was
entering a long stretch of sprout-land when the
dawn began. The road was dusty, and the
dew-laid powder puffed beneath the soft, swift
pats of my feet. Things began to stand out
with some distinctness now as the pale light
brightened. No wagons had been along, and

[72]

every mark of the night was plain. Here and
there were broad, ragged-edged bands across the
road—the trails of the wandering box-turtles.
I saw the smooth, waving channel left by a snake
that had just gone across. Here and there were
bunches of rabbit tracks, and every little while
appeared large spots in the road, where some
bird had been dusting itself.

Suddenly I made a sharp turn, and almost ran
over a whippoorwill concealed in a very cloud
of dust which she was flirting up with her wings.
This explained the spots back along the road.
The bird flew up and settled a few yards ahead
of me, and took another hasty dip. This she
kept up for nearly a quarter of a mile.

The road was alive with whippoorwills. It
was their bathing-hour, and playtime, too. The
serious business of the night was done ; they had
hunted through the first hours, and now it was
time to be social. The light was coming rap-
idly, and so was bedtime; but they called and
capered about me, playing away the narrowing
night to the very edge of day.

On my return, an hour later, the sun was
looking over the tops of the “cut-offs,” but he

[73]

did not see a whippoorwill.
They were all roosting length-
wise upon the logs and stumps
back among the bushes.

These unnatural, unbirdlike
habits of the whippoorwill are
matched by the appearance of
the bird. The first time one
sees a whippoorwill he ques-
tions whether its shape and
color are the result of its noc-
turnal life or whether it took
to the night to hide its un-
beautiful self from the gaze of
the day.

It has ridiculously short
legs, a mere point of a bill,
and a bristled, head-dividing
gap that would shame a frog.
Looked at in the daylight, its

color, too, is a meaningless

mixture, as unreal and half done as the rest of
the creature. But we should not be so hasty in
our judgment. There is design in all things in
nature ; utility is the first law of creation: and
the discovery of plan and purpose is the highest
appreciation of beauty.

The whippoorwill’s dress must be criticized
from the view-point of its usefulness to the bird ;
then it becomes one of the most exquisitely
artistic garments worn. Compare it with that
of any other bird, and your wonder at it grows.
Another such blending of light and shadow can-
not be found. The night herself seems to have
woven this robe out of warp from the strands of
early dawn and of woof spun from the twilight.

The whippoorwill cannot change the color of
its dress with the passing clouds, nor match it
with the light green of unfolding leaves and the
deep bronze of old tree-trunks, as the chameleon
can. But the bird has no need of such control.
It is always in harmony with its surroundings.
In the falling twilight it seems a shadow among
the shadows ; in the breaking dawn it melts into
the gray half-light, a phantom ; at midnight it is
only an echo in the dark ; and at noontime you

[75]

would pass the creature for a mossy knot, as it
squats close to a limb or rail, sitting lengthwise,
unlike any bird of the light.

We need not expect a bird of such irregular
habits as the whippoorwill to have the normal
instincts of birds, even with regard to its off-
spring. A bird given to roaming about at night,
the companion of toads and bats and spooks, is
not one that can be trusted to bring up young.
You cannot count much on the domesticity of a
bird that flits around with the shadows and fills
the night with doleful, spellbinding cries.

The nest of the whippoorwill is the bare
ground, together with whatever leaves, pebbles,
or bits of wood happen to be under the eggs when
they are laid. I found a nest once by the side
of a log in the woods, and by rarest good fortune
missed putting my foot upon the eggs. Here
there was no attempt at nest-building, not even
a depression in the earth. There were two of
the eggs,—the usual number,—long and creamy
white, with mingled markings of lavender and
reddish brown. Here, upon the log, one of the
birds dozed away the day, while the mate on
the nest brooded and slept till the gloaming.

[76]

The effect of this erratic life in the forest
glooms and under the cover of night has been
to make the whippoorwill careless of her home
and negligent of her young. She has become a
creature of omen, weird and wakeful, lingering
behind the time of superstition to keep myths
moving in our scanty groves and mystery still
stirring through the dark rooms of the night.

“Unlike any bird
of the light.”

[77]

THE PINE-TREE SWIFT

THE PINE-TREE SWIFT

N any large museum you may see the fossil
skeletons, or the casts of the skeletons, of
those mammoth saurians of the Mesozoic Age.
But you can go into the pine barrens any bright
summer day and capture for yourself a real live
saurian. The gloom of the pines is the lingering
twilight of that far-off time, and the pine-tree
lizard, or swift, is the lineal descendant of those
reptile monsters who ruled the seas and the dry
land before man was.

Throughout southern New Jersey the pine-
tree swifts abound. The worm-fences, rail-piles,
bridges, stone-heaps, and, above all, the pine-
trees are alive with them. They are the true

6 [81]

children of the pines, looking so like a very
part of the trees that it seems they must have
been made by snipping off the pitch-pines’ scaly
twigs and giving legs to them. They are the
aborigines, the primitive people of the barrens ;
and it is to the lean, sandy barrens you must
go if you would see the swifts at home.

In these wide, silent wastes, where there are
miles of scrub-pine without a clearing, where
the blue, hazy air is laden with the odor of resin,
where the soft glooms are mingled with softer,
shyer lights, the swifts seem what they actually
are—creatures of another, earlier world. When
one darts over your foot and scurries up a tree
to watch you, it is easy to imagine other ante-
diluvian shapes moving in the deeper shadows
beyond. How they rustle the leaves and scratch
the rough pine bark! They hurry from under
your feet and peek around the tree-trunks into
your face, their nails and scales scraping, while
they themselves remain almost invisible on the
deep browns of the pines; and if you are in-
clined to be at all nervous, you will start and
shiver.

The uncanny name “lizard” is partly account-

[82]

able for our unpleasant feelings toward
this really intelligent and interesting little
beast. If he were more widely known as “swift,”
Sceloporus would be less detested. The z in “‘liz-
ard” adds a creepy, crawly, sinister something
to the name which even the wretched word
“snake” does not suggest. “Swift,” the com-
mon name in some localities, is certainly more
pleasing, and, at the same time, quite accurately
descriptive.

There is nothing deadly nor vicious, nor yet
unlovely, about the swift, unless some may hate
his reptile form and his scales. But he is
strangely dreaded. The mere mention of him
is enough to stampede a Sunday-school picnic.
I know good people who kill every swift they
meet, under the queer religious delusion that
they are lopping off a limb of Satan. “All rep-
tiles are cursed,” one such zealot declared to

[83 ]

“They peek
around the
tree-trunks.”

me, “and man is to bruise their heads.” The
good book of nature was not much read, evi-
dently, by this student of the other Good
Book. |

The swift is absolutely harmless. He is with-
out fang, sting, or evil charm. He is not ex-
actly orthodox, for he has a third eye in the top
of his head, the scientists tell us ; but that eye is
entirely hidden. It cannot bind nor leer, like
Medusa. Otherwise the swift is a perfectly
normal little creature, about six inches long
from tip to tip, quick of foot, scaly, friendly,
wonderfully colored in undulating browns and
blues, and looking, on the whole, like a pretty
little Noah’s-ark alligator.

On the south side of the clump of pines beyond
Cubby Hollow is a pile of decaying rails where
I have watched the swifts, and they me, for so
many seasons that I fancy they know me.
Dewberry-vines and Virginia creeper clamber
over the pile, and at one end, flaming all
through July, burns a splendid bush of butter-
fly-weed. The orange-red blossoms shine like
a beacon against the dark of the pines, and lure
a constant stream of insect visitors, who make

[84]

living for the swifts of this particular place rich
and easy while the attraction lasts.

Any hot day I can find several swifts here,
and they are so tame that I can tickle them all
off to sleep without the slightest trouble. They
will look up quickly as I approach, fearless but
alert, with head tilted and eyes snapping ; but
not one stirs. With a long spear of Indian
grass I reach out gently and stroke the nearest
one. Shut go his eyes; down drops his head;
he sleeps—at least, he pretends to. This is my
peace greeting. Now I may sit down, and life
upon the rail-pile will go normally on.

Upon the end of a rail, so close to a cluster of
the butterfly-weed blossoms that he can pick the
honey-gatherers from it,—as you would pick
olives from a dish on the table,—lies a big male
swift without a tail. He lost that member in
an encounter with me several weeks ago. A
new one has started, but it is a mere bud yet.
I know his sex by the brilliant blue stripe down
each side, which is a favor not granted the fe-
males. The sun is high and hot. ‘“Fearfully
hot,” I say under my wide straw hat. “Delight-
fully warm,” says the lizard, sprawling over

[85]

the rail, his legs hanging, eyes half shut, every
possible scale exposed to the blistering rays, and
his bud of a tail twitching with the small spasms
of exquisite comfort that shoot to the very ends
of his being.

The little Caliban! How he loves the sun!
It cannot shine too hot nor too long upon him.
He stiffens and has aches when it is cold, so he
is a late riser, and appears not at all on dark,
drizzly days.

His nose is resting upon the rail like a drowsy
scholar’s upon the desk ; but he is not asleep:
he sees every wasp and yellow-jacket that lights
upon the luring flowers. He has learned some
things about the wasp tribe ; and if any of them
want honey from his butterfly-weed, they may
have it. These come and go with the butterflies
and hard-backed bugs, no notice being taken.
But I hear the booming of a bluebottle-fly.
Sceloporus hears him, too, and gathers his legs
under him, alert. The fly has settled upon one
of the flower-clusters. He fumbles among the
blossoms, and pretty soon blunders upon those
watched by the swift. Fatal blunder! There
is a quick scratching on the rail, a flash of brown

[86 ]

across the orange flowers, and the next thing I
see is the swift, back in his place, throwing his
head about in the air, licking down the stupid
bluebottle-fly.

A spider crawls over the rail behind him.
He turns and snaps it up. A fly buzzes about
his head, but he will not jump with all four feet,
and so loses it. A humming-bird is fanning the
butterfly-weed, and he looks on with interest not
unmixed with fear. Now the bugs, butterflies,
hornets, and wasps make up the motley crowd
of visitants to his garden, and Sceloporus stretches
out in the warmth again. He is hardly asleep
when a bird’s shadow passes across the rails.
The sharp scratch of scales and claws is heard at
half a dozen places on the pile at once, and every
swift has ducked around his rail out of sight.

An enemy! The shadow sweeps on across
the melon-field, and above in the sky I see a
turkey-buzzard wheeling. This is no enemy.
Evidently the swifts mistook the buzzard’s
shadow for that of the sharp-shinned hawk.
Had it been the hawk, my little bobtailed
friend might have been taking a dizzy ride
through the air to some dead tree-top at that

[87]

moment, instead of peeking over his rail to see
if the coast were clear.

All the lesser hawks feed upon the swifts. I
have often seen the sparrow-hawk perched upon

a tall stake search- ing the fences for

them. Cats eat themalso. But they

do not agree with puss. They

make a cat thin and morbid and un-

“The sparrow-
hawk searching the
fences for them.”
happy. We can tell when the lizard-catching
disease is upon Tom by his loss of appetite, his
lankness, and his melancholy expression.

[88]

All fear of the hawk is passed, and the lizards
come out into the light again. Presently one
leaves the rails, runs over my foot, and dashes by
short stages into the field. He is after a nest of
ants, or is chasing a long-legged spider. It is
worth while to follow them when they take to
the fields, for they may let you into a secret, as
they once did me.

About a hundred feet into the melon-patch
stands an old and very terrible scarecrow. It
is quite without terrors for the swifts, however.
Around this monster’s feet the soil is bare and
open to the sun. One day I discovered a lizard
making her way thither, and I followed. She
did not stop for ants or spiders, but whisked
under the vines and hastened on as if bound on
some urgent business. And so she was.

When she reached the warm, open sand at
the scarecrow’s feet, she dug out a little hollow,
and, to my utter amazement, deposited therein
seven tough, yellowish, pea-like eggs, covered
them with sand, and raced back to the rail-pile.
That was all. Her maternal duties were done,
her cares over. She had been a faithful mother
to the last degree,—even to the covering up of

[89]

her eggs,—and now she left them to the kindly
skies. About the middle of July they hatched,
and, in finding their way to the rail-pile, they
stopped at the first mound on the road, and
began life in earnest upon a fiery dinner of red
ants.

It looks as if nature were partial in the care
she takes of her children. How long she both-
ers and fusses over us, for instance, and how,
without one touch of parental care or interest,
she tosses the lizard out, even before he is
hatched, to shift for himself. If, however, we
could eat red ants the day we are born and
thrive on them, I suppose that our mothers, too,
without much concern, might let us run.

The day-old babies join their elders upon the
rails, and are received with great good humor—
with pleasure, indeed ; for the old ones seem to
enjoy the play of the youngsters, and allow them
to:climb over their backs and claw and scratch
them without remonstrance. The swifts are
gentle, peaceable, and sweet-tempered. They
rarely fight among themselves. The only time
that I ever found one out of humor was when
she was anxiously hunting for a place in which

[90]

to leave her eggs. The trouble of it all made
her cross, and as I picked her up she tried to
bite me. And I ought to have been bitten.

Ordinarily, however, the swifts are remark-
ably docile and friendly. If treated kindly,
they will allow you to stroke them and handle
them freely within a few minutes after capture.
I have sometimes had them cling to my coat of
their own will as I tramped about the woods.
They hiss and open their mouths when first
taken; but their teeth could not prick one’s
skin if they did strike. °

They are clean, pretty, interesting pets to
have about the house and yard. They are easily
tamed, and, in spite of their agility, they are no
trouble at all to capture. I have often caught
them with my unaided hand; but an almost
sure way is to take a long culm of green grass,
strip off the plume, and make a snood of the
wire-like end.

A swift is sunning himself upon a rail. He
rises upon his front legs, as you approach, to
watch you. Carefully now! Don’t try to get
too near. You can just reach him. Now your
snood is slipping over his nose; it tickles him ;

[91]

he enjoys it, and shuts his eyes. The grass loop
is about his neck; he discovers it, and—pull!
for he leaps. If the snood does not break you
have him dangling in the air. Bring him to
your coat now, and touch him lightly till his
fear is dispelled, then loose him, and he will stay
with you for hours.

When upon a tree you may seize him with
your bare hand by coming up from behind.
But never try to catch him by the tail ; for liz-
ards’ tails were not made for that purpose,
though, from their length and convenience to
grasp, and from the careless way their owners
have of leaving them sticking out, it seems as if
nature intended them merely for handles.

In my haste to catch the bobtailed lizard of
the rail-pile, I carelessly clapped my hand upon
his long, scaly tail, when, by a quick turn, he
mysteriously unjointed himself from it, leaving
the appendage with me, while he scampered off
along the rails. He is now growing another
tail for some future emergency.

Between eating, sleeping, and dodging shad-
ows, the lizards spend their day, and about the
middle of the afternoon disappear. Where do

[92]

they spend their night? They go somewhere
from the dew and cold; but where?

There is a space about two inches deep be-
tween the window-sash and the net-frames in my
room. Some time ago I put a number of swifts
upon the netting, covered the window-sill with
sand, and thus improvised an ideal lizard-cage.
All I had to do to feed them was to raise the
window, drive the flies from the room on to the
netting, and close the sash. The lizards then
caught them at their leisure.

Two days after they were transferred here, and
had begun to feel at home and fearless of me,
I noticed, as night came on, that they de-
scended from the netting and disappeared in the
sand. I put my finger in and took one out, and
found that the sand was much warmer than the
dewy night air.

This was their bed, and this explained the
sleeping habits of the free, wild ones. The sand
remains warm long after the sun sets and makes
them a comfortable bed. Into the sand they go
also to escape the winter. They must get down
a foot or more to be rid of the frost ; and being
poor diggers, they hunt up the hole of some

[93 ]

other creature, or work their way among the
decayed roots of some old stump until below the
danger-line. By the middle of September they
have made their beds, and when they wake up,
the melons will be started and the May sunshine
warm upon the rails.

[94]

IN THE OCTOBER MOON

IN THE OCTOBER MOON

N October night, calm, crisp, and moonlit !
There is a delicate aroma from the falling
leaves in the air, as sweet as the scent of fresh-
filed haymows. The woods are silent, shadowy,
and sleepful, lighted dimly by the moon, as a
vague, happy dream lights the dark valley of our
sleep. Dreamful is this night world, but yet not
dreaming. When, in the highest noon, did every
leaf, every breeze, seem so much a self, so full of
ready life? The very twigs that lie brittle and
dead beneath our feet seem wakeful now and on
the alert. In this silence we feel myriad mov-
ings everywhere; and we know that this sleep

7 [97]

is but the sleep of the bivouac fires, that an army
is breaking camp to move under cover of the
night. Every wild thing that knows the dark
will be stirring to-night. And what softest foot
can fall without waking the woods?

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn

leaves lie dead;

They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s

tread.
Not a mouse can scurry, not a chestnut drop,
not a wind whisper among these ‘new-fallen
leaves without discovery ; even a weasel cannot
dart across the moon-washed path and not leave
a streak of brown upon the silver, plain enough
to follow.

A morning in May is best of all the year to be
afield with the birds; but to watch for the wild
four-footed things, a moonlight night in October
is the choice of the seasons. May-time is bird-
time. That is theirspring of mate-winning and
nest-building, and it bubbles over with life and
song. The birds are ardent lovers; they some-
times fight in their wooing : but fighting or sing-
ing, they are frank, happy creatures, and always
willing to see you. The mammals are just as

[98 }

ardent lovers as the birds, and infinitely more
serious, But they are not poets; they are not
in the show business; and they want no out-
sider to come and listen to their pretty story of
woe. Their spring, their courting-time, is not a
time of song and play. The love-affairs of a
timid, soulful-eyed rabbit are so charged and in-
tense as not always to be free from tragedy.
Don’t expect any attention in the spring, even
from that bunch of consuming curiosity, the red
squirrel; he has something in hand, for once,
more to his mind than quizzing you. Life with
the animals then, and through the summer, has
too much of love and fight and fury, is too
terribly earnest, to admit of any frolic.

But autumn brings release from most of these
struggles. There is surcease of love; there is
abundance of food; and now the only passions
of the furry breasts are such gentle desires as
abide with the curious and the lovers of peace
and plenty. The animals are now engrossed
with the task of growing fat and furry.
Troubled with no higher ambitions, curiosity,
sociability, and a thirst for adventure begin to
work within them these long autumn nights,

[99]

and not one of them, however wild and fearful,
can resist his bent to prowl in the light of the
October moon.

To know much of the wild animals at home
one must live near their haunts, with eyes and
ears open, foréver on the watch. For you must
wait their pleasure. You cannot entreat them
for the sake of science, nor force them in the
name of the law. You cannot set up your easel
in the meadow, and hire a mink or muskrat to
pose for you any time you wish; neither can
you call, when you like, at the hollow gum in
the swamp and interview a coon. The animals
flatly refuse to sit for their pictures, and to see
reporters and assessors. But carry your sketch-
book and pad with you, and, after a while, in
the most unlikely times and places, the wariest
will give you sittings for a finished picture, and
the most reticent will tell you nearly all that
he knows.

At no time of the year are the animals so
loquacious, so easy of approach, as along in the
October nights. There is little to be seen of
them by day. They are cautious folk. By na-
ture most of them are nocturnal ; and when this

[100]

habit is not inherited, fear has led to its acqui-
sition. But protected by the dark, the shy and
suspicious creep out of their hiding-places ; they
travel along the foot-paths, they play in the
wagon-roads, they feed in our gardens, and I
have known them to help themselves from our
chicken-coops. If one has never haunted the
fields and woods at night he little knows their
multitude of wild life. Many a hollow stump
and uninteresting hole in the ground—tombs
by day—give up their dead at night, and some-
thing more than ghostly shades come forth.

If one’s pulse quickens at the sight and sound
of wild things stirring, and he has never seen,
in the deepening dusk, a long, sniffling snout
poked slowly out of a hollow chestnut, the glint
of black, beady eyes, the twitch of papery ears,
then a heavy-bodied possum issue from the hole,
clasping the edge with its tail, to gaze calmly
about before lumbering off among the shadows
—then he still has something to go into the
woods for.

Our forests by daylight are rapidly being
thinned into picnic groves; the bears and pan-
thers have disappeared, and by day there is

[101 ]

nothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations
exercise. But the night remains, and if we
hunger for adventure, why, besides the night,
here is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty
sure chance for excitement. Never to have
stood face to face in a narrow path at night
with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have
missed excitement and suspense second only to
the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed
wildeat. It is surely worth while, in these days
of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and ad-
venture has fled the woods, to sally out at night
for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the
shock of standing before a beast that will not
give you the path. As you back away from
him you feel as if you were really escaping. If
there is any genuine adventure left for us in
this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by
the dark.

Who ever had a good look at a muskrat in
the glare of day? I was drifting noiselessly
down the river, recently, when one started to
cross just ahead of my boat. He got near
midstream, recognized me, and went under like
a flash. Even a glimpse like this cannot be had

[102 ]

every summer; but in the autumn nights you
cannot hide about their houses and fail to see
them. In October they are building their win-
ter lodges, and the clumsiest watcher may spy

“In October they are building their winter lodges.”

them glistening in the moonlight as they climb
with loads of sedge and mud to the roofs of their
sugar-loaf houses. They are readily seen, too,
making short excursions into the meadows ; and
occasionally the desire to rove and see the world
will take such hold upon one as to drive him a
mile from water, and he will slink along in the
shadow of the fences and explore your dooryard

[103]

and premises. Frequently, in the late winter, I
have followed their tracks on these night jour-
neys through the snow between ponds more
than a mile apart.

But there is larger game abroad than musk-
rats and possums. These October nights the
quail are in covey, the mice are alive in the dry
grass, and the foxes are abroad. Lying along
the favorite run of Reynard, you may see him.
There are many sections of the country where
the rocks and mountains and wide areas of
sterile pine-land still afford the foxes safe
homes ; but in most localities Reynard is rapidly
becoming a name, a creature of fables and folk-
lore only. The rare sight of his clean, sharp
track in the dust, or in the mud along the
margin of the pond, adds flavor to a whole
day’s tramping ; and the glimpse of one in the
moonlight, trotting along a cow-path or lying
low for Br’er Rabbit, is worth many nights of
watching.

I wish the game-laws could be amended to
cover every wild animal left to us. In spite of
laws they are destined to disappear ; but if the
fox, weasel, mink, and skunk, the hawks and

[104]

owls, were protected as the quail and deer are,
they might be preserved a long time to our
meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss
to our landscape is the extinction of the great
golden eagle! How much less of spirit, daring,
courage, and life come to us since we no longer
mark the majestic creature soaring among the
clouds, the monarch of the skies! A dreary
world it will be out of doors when we can hear
no more the scream of the hawks, can no
longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow
a fox to den. We can well afford to part with
a turnip, a chicken, and even with a suit of
clothes, now and then, for the sake of this wild
flavor to our fenced pastures and close-cut
meadows.

I ought to have named the crow in the list
deserving protection. He steals. So did Fal-
staff. But I should miss Falstaff had Shakspere
left him out; yet no more than I should miss
the crow were he driven from the pines. They
are both very human. Jim Crow is the humanest
bird in feathers. The skunk I did include in
the list. It was not by mistake. The skunk
has a good and safe side to him, when we know

[105 ]

“The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight.”

how to approach him. The skunk wants a
champion. Some one ought to spend an entire
October moon with him and give us the better
side of his character. If some one would take
the trouble to get well acquainted with him at
home, it might transpire that we have grievously
abused and avoided him.

There is promise of a future for the birds in
their friendship for us and in our interest and
sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in
birds ; everybody loves them. There are bird-
books and bird-books and bird-books—new vol-
umes in every publisher’s spring announcements.
Every one with wood ways knows the songs and
nests of the more common species. But this is
not so with the four-footed animals. They are
fewer, shyer, more difficult of study. Only a
few of us are enthusiastic enough to back into a
hole in a sand-bank and watch all night for the
“beasts” with dear old Tam Edwards.

But such nights of watching, when every fallen
leaf is a sentinel and every moonbeam a spy, will
let us into some secrets about the ponds and fields
that the sun, old and all-seeing as he is, will
never know. Our eyes were made for daylight ;

[107]

but I think if the anatomists tried they might
find the rudiments of a third, a night eye, behind
the other two. From my boyhood I certainly
have seen more things at night than the bright-
est day ever knew of. If our eyes were intended
for day use, our other senses seem to work best
by night. Do we not take the deepest impres-
sions when the plates of these sharpened senses
are exposed in the dark? Even in moonlight
our eyes are blundering things ; but our hearing,
smell, and touch are so quickened by the alert-
ness of night that, with a little training, the
imagination quite takes the place of sight—a
new sense, swift and vivid, that adds an excite-
ment and freshness to the pleasure of out-of-
door study, impossible to get through our two
straightforward, honest day eyes.

Albeit, let us stay at home and sleep when
there is no moon; and even when she climbs up
big and round and bright, there is no surety of
a fruitful excursion before the frosts fall. In
the summer the animals are worn with home
cares and doubly wary for their young ; the grass
is high, the trees dark, and the yielding green is
silent under even so clumsy a crawler as the box-

[108 ]

turtle. But by October the hum of insects is
stilled, the meadows are mown, the trees and
bushes are getting bare, the moon pours in un-
hindered, and the crisp leaves crackle and rustle
under the softest-padded foot.

[109 J

FEATHERED NEIGHBORS

i
}
4

FEATHERED NEIGHBORS

I

HE electric cars run past my door, with a

switch almost in front of the house. I can
hear a car rumbling in the woods on the west,
and another pounding through the valley on
the east, till, shrieking, groaning, crunching,
crashing, they dash into view, pause a moment
on the switch, and thunder on to east and west
till out of hearing. Then, for thirty minutes, a
silence settles as deep as it lay here a century

8 [113]

ago. Dogs bark ; an anvil rings; wagons rattle
by ; and children shout about the cross-roads.
But these sounds have become the natural
voices of the neighborhood—mother-tongues
like the chat of the brook, the talk of the
leaves, and the caw of the crows. And these
voices, instead of disturbing, seem rather to lull
the stillness.

But the noise of the cars has hardly died
away, and the quiet come, when a long, wild cry
breaks in upon it. Yarup! yarup ! yarup-up-up-
up-up / in quick succession sounds the call, fol-
lowed instantly by a rapid, rolling beat that
rings through the morning hush like a reveille
with bugle and drum.

It is the ery of the “flicker,” the “ high-hole.”
He is propped against a pole along the street
railroad, nearly a quarter of a mile away. He
has a hole in this pole, almost under the iron
arm that holds the polished, pulsing wire for the
trolley. It is a new house, which the bird has
been working at for more than a week, and it
must be finished now, for this lusty call is an
invitation to the warming. I shall go, and,
between the passing of the cars, witness the

[114]

bowing, the squeaking, the palaver. A high-
hole warming is the most utterly polite func-
tion in birddom.

Some of my friends were talking of birds,
not long ago, when one of them turned to me
and said hopelessly :

“T is no use. We can’t save them even if
we do stop wearing them upon our hats. Civi-
lization is bound to sweep them away. We
shall be in a birdless world pretty soon, in spite
of laws and Audubon societies.”

I made no reply, but, for an answer, led the
way to the street and down the track to this
pole which High-hole had appropriated. I
pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch.
Then I knocked. Instantly a red head ap-
peared at the opening. High-hole was mad
enough to eat us; but he changed his mind,
and, with a bored, testy flip, dived into the
woods. He had served my purpose, however,
for his red head sticking out of a hole in a
street-railway pole was as a rising sun in the
east of my friends’ ornithological world. New
light broke over this question of birds and
men. The cars drive High-hole away? Not so

[115]

long as cars run by overhead wires on wooden
poles.

High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps “‘do-
mesticated ” would better describe him ; though
domesticated implies the purposeful effort of
man to change character and habits, while the
changes which have come over High-hole—and
over most of the wild birds—are the result of
High-hole’s own free choosing.

If we should let the birds have their way
they would voluntarily fall into civilized, if
not into domesticated, habits. They have no
deep-seated hostility toward us; they have not
been the aggressors in the long, bitter war of
extermination ; they have ever sued for peace.
Instead of feeling an instinctive enmity, the
birds are drawn toward us by the strongest of
interests. If nature anywhere shows us her
friendship, and her determination, against all
odds, to make that friendship strong, she shows
it through the birds. The way they forgive
and forget, their endless efforts at reconcilia-
tion, and their sense of obligation, ought to
shame us. They sing over every acre that we
reclaim, as if we had saved it for them only;

[116]

and in return they probe the lawns most dili-
gently for worms, they girdle the apple-trees
for grubs, and gallop over the whole wide sky

“They probe the lawns most diligently for worms.”

for gnats and flies—squaring their account, if
may be, for cherries, orchards, and chimneys.
The very crows, in spite of certain well-
founded fears, look upon a new farm—not upon
the farmer, perhaps—as a godsend. In the cold
and poverty of winter, not only the crows, but
the jays, quails, buntings, and sparrows, help
themselves, as by right, from our shocks and
cribs. Summer and winter the birds find food
so much more plentiful about the farm and vil-
lage, find living in all respects so much easier
and happier here than in remote, wild regions,

[117 ]

“ Even he loves a listener.”

that, as a whole, they have become a suburban
people.

But life is more than meat for the birds.
There is a subtle yet real attraction for them
in human society. They like its stir and
change, its attention and admiration. The
shyest and most modest of the birds pines for
appreciation. The cardinal grosbeak, retiring
as he is, cannot believe that he was born to
blush unseen—to the tip of his beautiful crest.
And the hermit-thrush, meditative, spiritual,
and free as the heart of the swamp from world-
liness—even he loves a listener, and would not
waste his sweetness any longer on desert forest
air. Ido not know a single bird who does not
prefer a wood with a wagon-road through it.

My friends had smiled at such assertions be-
fore their introduction to the bird in the pole.
They knew just enough of woodpeckers to ex-
pect High-hole to build in the woods, and, when
driven from there, to disappear, to extinguish
himself, rather than stoop to an existence with-
in walls of hardly the dignity and privacy of
a hitching-post.

He is a proud bird and a wild bird, but a

[119]

practical, sensible bird withal. Strong of wing
and mighty of voice, he was intended for a vig-
orous, untamed life, and even yet there is the
naked savage in his bound and his whoop. But
electric cars have come, with smooth-barked
poles, and these are better than rotten trees,
despite the jangle and hum of wires and the
racket of grinding wheels. Like the rest of us,
he has not put off his savagery: he has simply
put on civilization. Street cars are a conve-
nience and a diversion. He has wings and
wildest freedom any moment, and so, even
though heavy timber skirts the track and
shadows his pole, and though across the road
opposite stands a house where there are chil-
dren, dogs, and cats, nevertheless, High-hole
follows his fancy, and instead of building back
in the seclusion and safety of the woods, comes
out to the street, the railroad, the children, and
the cats, and digs him a modern house in this
sounding cedar pole.

Perhaps it is imagination, but I think that I
can actually see High-hole changing his wood
ways for the ways of the village. He grows
tamer and more trustful every summer.

[120]

A pair have their nest in a telegraph-pole
near the school-house, where they are constantly
mauled by the boys. I was passing one day
when two youngsters rushed to the pole and
dragged out the poor harassed hen for my edi-
fication. She was seized by one wing, and came
out flapping, her feathers pulled and splintered.
She had already lost all but two quills from her
tail through previous exhibitions. I opened
my hands, and she flew across the pasture to the
top of a tree, and waited patiently till we went

“She flew across the pasture.”

away. She then returned, knowing, appa-
rently, that we were boys and a necessary evil
of village life.

[ 121]

But this pole-lfe marks only half the dis-
tance that these birds have come from the
woods.

One warm Sunday of a recent March, in the
middle of my morning sermon, a ghostly rap-
ping was heard through the meeting-house. I
paused. Tap, tap, tap! hollow and ominous it
echoed. Every soul was awake in an instant.
Was it a summons from—? But two of the
small boys grinned; some one whispered
“flicker”; and I gathered my ornithological
wits together in time to save the pause and
proceed with the service.

After the people went home I found three
flicker-holes in the latticework over the north
windows. One of last year’s tenants had got
back that morning from the South, and had
gone to work cleaning up and putting things
to rights in his house, regardless of Sabbath
and sermon.

This approach of the flicker to domestic life
and human fellowship is an almost universal
movement among the birds. And no tendency
anywhere in wild life is more striking. The
four-footed animals are rapidly disappearing

[122]

© Putting things to
rights in his house.”

before the banging car and spreading town, yet
the birds welcome these encroachments and
thrive on them. One never gets used to the
contrast in the bird life of uninhabited places
with that about human dwellings. Thoreau
tells his wonder and disappointment at the
dearth of birds in the Maine woods; Burroughs
reads about it, and goes off to the mountains,
but has himself such an aggravated shock of
the same surprise that he also writes about it.
The few hawks and rarer wood species found in
these wild places are shy and elusive. More
and more, in spite of all they know of us, the
birds choose our proximity over the wilderness.
Indeed, the longer we live together, the less
they fear and suspect us.

II

Usine my home for a center, you may describe
a circle of a quarter-mile radius and all the way
round find that radius intersecting either a
house, a dooryard, or an orchard. Yet within
this small and settled area I found one summer
thirty-six species of birds nesting. Can any

[123]

“A very ordinary New
England ‘ eorner.’”

cabin in the Adirondacks open its window to
more voices—any square mile of solid, unhacked
forest on the globe show richer, gayer variety of
bird life?

The nightingale, the dodo, and the ivorybill
were not among these thirty-six. What then?
If one can live on an electric-car line, inside the
borders of a fine city, have his church across the
road, his blacksmith on the: corner, his neigh-
bors within easy call, and, with all this, have
any thirty-six species of birds nesting within
ear-shot, ought he to ache for the Archeopteryx,
or rail at civilization as a destroyer?

There is nothing remarkable about this bit of
country. I could plant myself at the center of
such a circle anywhere for miles around and
find just as many birds. Perhaps the land is
more rocky and hilly, the woods thicker, the
gardens smaller here than is common elsewhere
in eastern Massachusetts ; otherwise, aside from
a gem of a pond, this is a very ordinary New
England ‘“corner.”

On the west side of my yard lies a cultivated
field, beyond which stands an ancient apple
orchard; on the east the yard is hedged by a

[125]

tract of sprout-land which is watched over by a
few large pines; at the north, behind the house
and garden, runs a wall of chestnut and oak,
which ten years ago would have been cut but
for some fortunate legal complication. Such
is the character of the whole neighborhood.
Patches of wood and swamp, pastures, orchards,
and gardens, cut in every direction by roads and
paths, and crossed by one tiny stream—this is
the circle of the thirty-six.

Not one of these nests is beyond a stone’s
throw from ahouse. Seven of them, indeed, are
in houses or barns, or in boxes placed about
the dooryards; sixteen of them are in orchard
trees ; and the others are distributed along the
roads, over the fields, and in the woods.

Among the nearest of these feathered neigh-
bors is a pair of bluebirds with a nest in one of
the bird-boxes in the yard. The bluebirds are
still untamed, building, as I have often found, in
the wildest spots of the woods; but seen about
the house, there is something so reserved, so
gentle and refined in their voice and manner as
to shed an atmosphere of good breeding about
the whole yard. What a contrast they are to

[126]

‘“They are the first to
return in the spring,”

the English sparrows! What a rebuke to city
manners !

They are the first to return in the spring ; the
spring, rather, comes back with them. They
are its wings. It could not come on any others.
If it tried, say, the tanager’s, would we believe
and accept it? The bluebird is the only possi-
ble interpreter of those first dark signs of
March; through him we have faith in the
glint of the pussy-willows, in the half-thawed
peep of the hylas, and in the northward flying
of the geese. Except for his return, March
would be the one month of all the twelve never
looked at from the woods and waysides. He
comes, else we should not know that the waters
were falling, that a leaf could be plucked in all
the bare, muddy world.

Our feelings for the bluebird are much mixed.
His feathers are not the attraction. He is
bright, but on the whole rather plainly dressed.
Nor is it altogether his voice that draws us;
the snowflakes could hardly melt into tones
more mellow, nor flecks of the sky’s April blue
run into notes more limpid, yet the bluebird
is no singer. The spell is in the spirit of the

[128]

bird. He is the soul of this somber season,
voicing its sadness and hope. What other bird
can take his place and fill his mission in the
heavy, hopeful days of March? We are in no
mood for gaiety and show. Not until the
morning stars quarrel together will the cat-bird
or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The ir-
reverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom
of March would turn the spring back and draw
the winter out of his uncovered grave. The
bluebird comes and broods over this death and
birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep,
and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life.

Within my house is another very human little
bird—the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very
firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a
warm place in our hearts; but where have I
ever read one word expressing the affection for
him that is universally shown the bluebird?

I am thinking of our American swallow. We
all know how Gilbert White loved his chimney-
swallows—how he loved every creature that
flew or crawled about the rectory. Was it an
ancient tortoise in the garden? the sheep upon
the downs? a brood of birds in the chimney?

8 [129]

“Where the dams are hawking for flies.”

No matter. Let the creatures manifest never
so slight a friendliness for him, let them claim
never so little of his protection, and the good
rector’s heart went out toward them as it might
toward children of his own.

But the swallows were White’s fondest care.
He and his hirundines were inseparable. He
thought of them, especially those of the chim-
ney, as members of his household. One can de-
tect almost a father’s interest and joy in his
notes upon these little birds. Listen to the
parent in this bit about the young in Letter
XVIII. They are just out of the chimney.

“They play about near the place where the
dams are hawking for flies ; and when a mouthful
is collected, at a certain signal given, the dam and
the nestling advance, rising toward each other,
and meeting at an angle; the young one all the
while uttering such a little quick note of grati-
tude and complacency that a person must have
paid very little regard to the wonders of nature
that has not often remarked this feat.”

Has anything been written about our swift
showing as faithful and sympathetic observation
as that? No. He comes and goes without any

[131]

one, like Gilbert White, being cheered by his
twitter or interested in his doings. Perhaps it
is because we have so many brighter, sweeter
birds about us here; or perhaps our chimneys
are higher than those of Selborne Rectory ; or
maybe we have no Gilbert White over here.

Of course we have no Gilbert White. We
have not had time to produce one. The union
of man and nature which yields the naturalist
of Selborne is a process of time. Our soil and
our sympathy are centuries savager than Eng-
land’s. We still look at our lands with the
spirit of the ax; we are yet largely concerned
with the contents of the gizzards of our birds.
Shall the crows and cherry-birds be extermi-
nated? the sparrows transported? the owls and
hawks put behind bars? Not until the col-
lectors at Washington pronounce upon these
first questions can we hope for a naturalist who
will find White’s wonders in the chimney-
swallow.

These little swifts are not as attractive as
song-sparrows. They are sooty—worse than
sooty sometimes ; their clothes are too tight for
them ; and they are less musical than a small

[132]

boy with “clappers.” Nevertheless I could ill
spare them from my family. They were the
first birds I knew, my earliest home being so
generous in its chimneys as to afford lodgings to
several pairs of them. This summer they again
share my fireside, squeaking, scratching, and
thundering in the flue as they used to when, real
goblins, they came scrambling down to peek and
spy at me. I should miss them from the chim-
ney as I should the song-sparrows from the
meadow. They are above the grate, to be sure,
while I am in front of it; but we live in
the same house, and there is only a wall be-
tween us.

If the chimney would be a dark, dead hole
without the swifts, how empty the summer sky
would be were they not skimming, darting, wig-
gling across every bright hour of it! They
are tireless fliers, feeding, bathing, love-making,
and even gathering the twigs for their nests on
the wing, never alighting, in fact, after leaving
the chimney until they return to it. They rest
while flying. Every now and then you will see
them throw their wings up over their heads till
the tips almost touch, and, in twos or threes,

[133]

scale along to the time of their jolly, tuneless
rattle.

From May to September, is there a happier
sight than a flock of chimney-swallows, just be-
fore or just after a shower, whizzing about the
tops of the corn or coursing over the river, like
so many streaks of black lightning, ridding the
atmosphere of its overcharge of gnats! They
eut across the rainbow and shoot into the rose-
and pearl-washed sky, and drop—into the depths
of a soot-clogged chimney !

These swallows used to build in caves and in
clean, hollow trees; now they nest only in
chimneys. So far have they advanced in civili-
zation since the landing of the Pilgrims!

Upon the beams in the top of the barn the
brown-breasted, fork-tailed barn-swallows have
made their mud nests for years. These birds
are wholly domesticated. We cannot think of
them as wild. And what a place in our affec-
tions they have won! If it is the bluebirds
that bring the spring, the barn-swallows fetch

‘the summer. They take us back to the farm.
We smell the hay, we see the cracks and knot-
holes of light cutting through the fragrant

[134]

SASS
We
SS

“They cut across

the rainbow.”

gloom of the mows, we hear the munching
horses and the summer rain upon the shingles,
every time a barn-swallow slips past us.

For grace of form and poetry of motion there
is no rival for the barn-swallow. When on
wing, where else, between the point of a beak
and the tips of a tail, are there so many marvel-
ous curves, such beautiful balance of parts? On
the wing, I say. Upon his feet he is as awk-
ward as the latest Herreshoff yacht upon the
stays. But he is the yacht of the air. Every
line of him is drawn for racing. The narrow,
wide-reaching wings and the long, forked tail
are the perfection of lightness, swiftness, and
power. A master designed him—saved every
possible feather’s weight, bent from stem to
stern, and rigged him to outsail the very winds.

From the barn to the orchard is no great.
journey; but it is the distance between two
bird-lands. One must cross the Mississippi basin,
the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Ocean to
find a greater change in bird life than he finds
in leaping the bars between the yard and the
orchard.

A bent, rheumatic, hoary old orchard is na-

[136 ]

“ The barn-swallows fetch the summer.”

ture’s smile in the agony of her civilization.
Men may level the forests, clear the land and
fence it; but as long as they plant orchards,
bird life, at least, will survive and prosper.

‘From the barn to the orchard.”

Except for the warblers, one acre of apple-
trees is richer in the variety of its birds than
ten acres of woods. In the three unkempt, de-
crepit orchards hereabout, I found the robin,
chippy, orchard-oriole, cherry-bird, king-bird,
crow-blackbird, bluebird, chebec, tree-swallow,
flicker, downy woodpecker, screech-owl, yellow
warbler, redstart, and great-crested flycatcher
—all nesting as rightful heirs and proprietors.

[138]

This is no small share of the glory of the whole
bird world.

I ought not to name redstart as a regular occu-
pant of the orchard. He belongs to the woods,
and must be reckoned a visitor to the apple-
trees, only an occasional builder, at best. The
orchard is too open for him. He is an actor,
and needs a leafy setting for his stage. In the
woods, against a dense background of green, he
can play butterfly with charming effect, can
spread himself and flit about like an autumn
leaf or some wandering bit of paradise life,
with wings of the grove’s richest orange light
and its deepest shadow.

When, however, he has a fancy for the or-
chard, this dainty little warbler shows us what
the wood-birds can do in the way of friendship
and sociability.

Across the road, in an apple-tree whose
branches overhang a kitchen roof, built a pair
of redstarts. No one discovered the birds till
the young came; then both parents were seen
about the yard the whole day long. They were
as much at home as the chickens, even more
familiar. Having a leisure moment one day,

[139]

Hl “ Across the road, in an
apple-tree, built a pair
of redstarts.”

when a bicycle was being cleaned beneath the
tree, the inquisitive pair dropped down, the
female actually lighting upon the handle-bar to
see how the dusting was done. On another oc-
casion she attempted to settle upon the baby
swinging under the tree in a hammock; and

again, when I caught one of her own babies in
[140]

my hands, she came, bringing a worm, and,
without the slightest fear of me, tried to feed
it. Yet she was somewhat daunted by the trap
in which her infant was struggling; she would
fan my hands with her wings, then withdraw,
not able to muster quite enough courage to
settle upon them.

Neither of these birds ever showed alarm at
the people of the house. In fact, I never saw
a redstart who seemed to know that we humans
ought to be dreaded. These birds are now as
innocent of suspicion as when they came up to
Adain to be named. On two occasions, during
severe summer storms, they have fluttered at
my windows for shelter, and dried their feathers,
as any way-worn traveler might, in safety be-
neath my roof.

From the window one morning I saw Che-
bec, the least flycatcher, light upon the clothes-
line. She teetered a moment, balancing her
big head by her loosely jointed tail, then leaped
lightly into the air, turned,—as only a flycatcher
can,— and, diving close to the ground, gathered
half the gray hairs of a dandelion into her
beak, and darted off. I followed instantly, and

[141]

soon found her nest in one of the orchard trees.
It was not quite finished; and while the bird
was gone for more of the dandelion down, I
climbed up and seated myself within three feet
of the nest.

Back came Mrs. Chebec with a swoop, but,
on seeing me, halted short of the nest. I was
motionless. Hopping cautiously toward the
nest, she took an anxious look inside; finding
nothing disturbed, she concluded that there was
no evil in me, and so went on with her interest-
ing work. It was a pretty sight. In a quiet,
capable, womanly way she laid the lining in,
making the nest, in her infinite mother-love, fit
for eggs with shells of foam.

The chebec is a finished architect. Better
builders are few indeed. The humming-bird is
slower, more painstaking, and excels Chebec in
outside finish. But Chebec’s nest is so deep, so
soft, so round and hollow! There is the loveli-
ness of pure curve in its walls. And small won-
der! She bends them about the beautiful mold
of her own breast. Whenever she entered with
the dandelion cotton, she went round and round
these walls, before leaving, pressing them fondly

[142]

with her chin close against her breast. She
could not make them sufficiently safe nor half
lovely enough for the white, fragile treasures to
be cradled there.

Artists though they be, the chebees, never-
theless, are very tiresome birds. They think
that they can sing—a sad, sorry, maddening
mistake. Mr. Chapman says the day that song
was distributed among the birds the chebees sat
on a back seat. Would they had been out

“Gathered half the gray hairs of a dandelion into her beak.”

catching flies! In the chatter of the English
sparrow, no matter how much I may resent his

[143]

impudence and swagger, there is something so
bright and lively that I never find him really
tiresome. But the chebecs come back very
early in spring, and sit around for days and
days, catching flies, and jerking their heads and
calling, Chebec! chebec! chebec! till you wish their
heads would snap off.

In the tree next to the chebec’s was a brood
of robins. The crude nest was wedged care-
lessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that
the cats and roving boys could help themselves
without trouble. The mother sputtered and
worried and scolded without let-up, trying to
make good her foolishness in fixing upon such a
site by abundance of anxiety and noise.

The fussiest, least sensible mother among
the birds is the robin. Any place for her nest
but a safe one! The number of young robins
annually sacrificed to pure parental careless-
ness is appalling. The female chooses the
site for the home, and her ability for blunder-
ing upon unattractive and exposed locations
amounts to genius. She insists upon building
on the sand. Usually the rain descends, the
floods come, the winds blow, and there is a fall.

fide]

“Tn the tree next to the chebec’s was a brood of robins. The erude
nest was wedged carelessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that
the cats and roving boys could help themselves without trouble.”

10

Here is a pair building upon a pile of boards
under a cherry-tree ; another pair plaster their
nest to the rider of an old worm-fence ; while a
third couple, abandoning the woods near by,
plant theirs, against all remonstrance, upon
the top of a step-ladder that the brickmakers
use daily in their drying-sheds.

It was the superlative stupidity of this robin
that saved her family. The workmen at first
knocked her nest off to the ground. She had
plenty of clay at hand, however, and began her
nest again, following the ladder as it moved
about the shed. Such amazing persistence won,
of course. Out of wonder, finally, the men gave
the ladder over to her and stood aside till her
family affairs were attended to. Everything
was right in time. After infinite scolding, she
at last came off in triumph, with her brood of
four.

A striking illustration of this growing alliance
between us and the birds is the nest of the great-
crested flycatcher in the orchard. Great-crest
has almost become an orchard-bird. At heart
he is, and ever will be, a bird of the wilds. He
is not tame—does not want to be tame; he is

[146]

bold, and the dangers and advantages of orchard.
life attract him. His moving into an apple
orchard is no less a wonder than would be an
Apache chief’s settling in New York or Boston.

Most observers still count Great-crest among
the wild and unreclaimed. Florence A. Mer-
riam, speaking of his return in spring, says:
“Not many days pass, however, before he is so
taken up with domestic matters that his voice
is rarely heard outside the woods”; and in
Stearns’s “Birds” I find: “It does not court the
society of man, but prefers to keep aloof in the
depths of the forest, where it leads a wild, shy,
and solitary life.” This is not Great-crest as I
know him. I have found many of his nests,
and never one in any but orchard trees. Riding
along a country road lately, I heard Great-
crest’s call far ahead of me. I soon spied
him on the wires of a telegraph-pole. Under
him was a pear-tree, and a hundred yards away
a farm-house. In the pear-tree I found his
nest—snake-skins and all.

I disagree, too, with most descriptions of this
bird’s cry. The authors I have read seem never
to have heard him on a quiet May morning

[147]

* T soon spied him on the
wires of a telegraph-pole.”

across a fifty-acre field. His voice is “ harsh
and discordant” when sounded into one’s very
ears. The sweetest-toned organ would be dis-
cordant to one inside the instrument. Give the
bird the room he demands,— wide, early-morn-
ing fields,—and listen. A single shout, almost
human it seems, wild, weird, and penetrating,
yet clear and smooth as the blast of a bugle.
One can never forget it, nor resist it; for it
thrills like a resurrection call—the last, long
summons to the spring waking. This solitary
note is often repeated, but is never so rapid

nor so long drawn out as the call of the flicker.
[ 148 ]

Great-crest is a character, one of the most
individual of all our birds. What other bird
lines his nest with snake-skins? or hangs such
gruesome things out for latch-strings? He has
taken up his residence among us, but he has
given us pretty plainly to understand that we
need not call, else I mistake the hint in the
scaly skin that dangles from his door. The
strong personality of the bird is stamped even
upon its eggs. Where are any to match them
for curious, crazy coloring? The artist had
purple inks, shading all the way from the deep-
est chestnut-purple to the faintest lilac. With
a sharp pen he scratched the shell from end to
end with all his colors till it was covered, then
finished it off with a few wild flourishes and
crosswise scrawls.

Like the birds of the orchards and buildings,
the field-birds also are yielding to human influ-
ences. We can almost say that we have an
order of farm-birds, so many species seem to
have become entirely dependent upon the pas-
ture and grain-field.

“Where did Bobolink disport himself before
there were meadows in the North and rice-

[149]

fields in the South? Was he the same lithe,
merry-hearted beau then as now?” I do not
know. But I do know that, in the thirty and
three years since Mr. Burroughs asked the ques-
tion, Bobolink has lost none of his nimbleness,
nor forgotten one bubbling, tinkling note of his
song. Yet in his autumn journey South, from
the day he reaches the ripe reeds of the Jersey
marshes till he is lost in the wide rice-lands of
Georgia, his passage is through a ceaseless, piti-
less storm of lead. Dare he return to us in
spring? and can he ever sing again? He will
come if May comes—forgetting and forgiving,
dressed in as gay a suit as ever, and just as full
of song.

There is no marvel of nature’s making equal
to the miracle of her temper toward man. How
gladly she yields to his masterful dominion !
How sufferingly she waits for him to grow out
of his spoiled, vicious childhood. The spirit of
the bobolink ought to exorcise the savage out
of us. It ought, and it does—slowly.

We are trying, for instance, to cow the savage
in us by law, to restrain it while the birds are
breeding; but we hardly succeed yet. The

[150]

mating season is scarcely over, the young not
yet grown, when the gunners about me go into
the fields with their dogs and locate every covey

of quail, even counting the number of birds in

“ He will come if May comes.”

each. With the dawn of the first day of open
season they are out, going from flock to flock,
killing, till the last possible bird is in their
bloody bags.

One of the most pathetie of all the wordless
eries of the out-of-doors is the covey-call of
the female quail at night, trying to gather the
scattered flock together after the dogs are called
off and the hunters have gone home.

[151]

It was nearly dark one December afternoon,
the snow ankle-deep and falling swiftly, when,
crossing a wide field, I heard this call from a
piece of sprout-land ahead of me. Kneeling
in the snow, I answered the whistle. Instantly
came a reply. Back and forth we signaled till
there was a whir of wings, and down in the soft
snow within a few feet of me dropped the lonely,
frightened quail. She was the only one left of a
covey that the night before had roosted un-

‘Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely frightened quail.”

[152]

broken, snugly wedged, with their tails together,
under a pile of brush.

Sharing the fields with the quails are the
meadow-larks. They scale along the grass,
rarely rising higher than the cedars, flapping
rapidly for a short distance, then sailing a little
in a cautious, breath-held manner, as though
wings were a new invention and just a trifle
dangerous yet. On they go to a fence-stake, and
land with many congratulatory flirts of wings
and tail. Has anybody observed the feat?
They look around. Yes; here I sit,—amanona
fence across the field, —and the lark turns toward
me and calls out: “Did you see me?”

He would be the best-bred, most elegant of
our birds, were it not for his self-consciousness.
He is consumed with it. There is too much
gold and jet on his breast. But, in spite of all
this, the plain, rich back and wings, the slender
legs, the long, delicate beak, the erect carriage,
the important air, the sleek, refined appearance,
compel us to put him down an aristocrat.

In a closely cropped pasture near the house,
in early June, I found the eggs of the night-
hawk. There was no nest, of course: the eggs

[153]

“On they go to a fence-stake.”

lay upon the grass, and, for safety, had been left
directly under the fence. The cows might not
step on them here, but nothing prevented their
crushing the fragile things with their noses.
Lengthwise, upon one of the rails, slept the
mother. She zigzagged off at my approach, daz-
zled and uncertain in the white light of the
noon, making no outery nor stopping an instant
to watch the fate of her eggs. She acted like a
huge bat, slinking and dodging, out of her ele-
ment in the light, and anxious to be hid. She

did not seem like a creature that had a voice ;
[ 154 ]

and the way she flew would make one think
that she did not know the use of her wings.
But what a cireus flier she is at night ! and with
what an uncanny noise she haunts the twilight !
She has made more hair stand on end, with
her earthward plunge and its unearthly boom
through the dusk, than all the owls together. It
is a ghostly joke. And who would believe in
the daylight that this limp, ragged lump, dozing
upon the fence or the kitchen roof, could play
the spook so cleverly in the dark ?

IIt

On the 25th of April, before the trees were in
leaf, I heard the first true wood-note of the
spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the
garden. ‘Clear, clear, clear up!” it rang, pure,
untamed, and quickening. The solitary vireo!
It was his whistle, inimitable, unmistakable ; and
though I had not seen him since last July, I hur-
ried out to the woods, sure he would greet me.
Solitary is the largest, rarest, tamest, and
sweetest-voiced of the vireos. I soon found him
high in the tops of the trees ; but I wanted him

[155 ]

nearer. He would not descend. So I chased
him, stoning and mocking him even, till, at last,
he came down to the bushes and showed me his
big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and
yellow-washed sides.

He did more than show himself: he sang for
me. Within ten feet of me, he began a quiet
little warble of a tenderness and contentment I

“Tt was a love-song.”

never heard before. Such variety of notes, such
sweetness of melody, such easy, unconscious ren-
dering! It was a love-song, but sung all to
himself, for he knew that there was no gentle
heart to listen this side of Virginia. He sang to

[156]

his own happy heart as pure and sweet a song
as the very angels know.

Solitary disappeared from that day. I con-
eluded he had gone to heavier, wilder woods to
nest. It was late in June that, passing through
this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sap-
ling, just above my head, a soft, yellowish basket.
It was a vireo’s nest; but it was too large, too
downy, too yellow for Red-eye. There were no
bunches of white spider-webs upon it, such as
Red-eye hangs all over his nest. I stepped aside
for a better view, and had just caught the glint
of a large, white-ringed eye peering over the
nest’s edge at me, when, off in the woods behind
me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary’s
whistle—a round, pure, pearly note that broke
the quiet as pearly teeth break through the smile
of a beautiful face.. He soon appeared, coming
on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no
hurry and in no alarm. When he reached the
pine overhead, his mate left the nest to confer
with him. They scolded me mildly while I
climbed for a look at the four delicately spotted
eggs ; but as soon as I lay down upon the ground,
the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into the

[157]

nest and cuddled down over the eggs till her
head hardly showed above the rim. Had a few
bushes been removed I could have seen the nest
from my front door.

Why do the wood-birds so persistently build
their nests along the paths and roads? I said
that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood with
a road through it. If he possibly can he will
build along that road. And what one of the
birds will not? Is it mere stupidity? Is it euri-
osity to see what goes on? Is there some safety
here from enemies worse than boys and cats and
dogs? Or is it that these birds take this chance
for human fellowship? If this last is the reason
for their rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that
overhang roads and tufts of grass in constantly
traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned ;
otherwise they are foolish—fatally foolish.

The first black-and-white warbler’s nest I ever
found was at the base of a clump of bushes in a
narrow wood-path not ten feet from a highway.
There were acres of bushes beyond, thick and
pathless, all theirs to choose from.

In the same piece of. scrub-oak the summer
after I found another black-and-white warbler’s

[158 ]

nest. The loud talk of three of the birds at-
tracted me. Two of them were together, and
just mated, evidently ; the third was a male, and
just as plainly the luckless suitor. He was
trying to start a quarrel between the young
couple, doing his best to make the new bride
break her vows. He flew just ahead of them,
darting to the ground, scuttling under the brush,
and calling out, “See here! Come here! Don’t
fool with him any longer! I have the place
for a nest!”

But the pair kept on together, chatting
brightly as they ran up and down the trees and
hunted under the fallen limbs and leaves for a
home-site. The male led the way and found the
places; the female passed judgment. I followed
them.

Every spot the cock peeped into was the finest
in the woods; his enthusiasm was constant and
unbounded. “Any place is heaven,” he kept
repeating, ‘‘any place, so long as I have you.”
But she was to do the housekeeping, and the
ecstasies of the honeymoon were not to turn her
head. She was house-hunting ; and, like every
woman, at her best. She said “no,” and ‘no,”

[ 159 ]

and “no.” I began to think they never would
find the place, when the male darted far ahead
and went out of sight beneath some low huckle-
berry-bushes near a stone wall. This wall ran
between the woods and a pasture ; and parallel
with it, on the woods side, was a foot-path.

Up came the little hen, and together they
scratched about under the leaves. Suddenly the
cock flew away and fetched a strip of chestnut
bark. This he turned over to his wife. Then
both birds flew out to the chestnut limbs for
bark, and brought their strips back. The home
was founded.

It was the merest cavity, pushed into the dead
leaves, with three shreds of bark for first timbers.
In less than a week the structure was finished
and furnished—with a tiny white egg thickly
sprinkled with brown. I watched the spot daily,
and finally saw the four young warblers safely
out into their new woods-world. But from the
day the first egg was laid until the nestlings left
I constantly expected to find everything crushed
under the foot of some passer-by.

When free from household cares the chickadee
is the most sociable of the birds of the woods.

[160]

11

“But the pair kept on to-
gether, chatting brightly.”

But he takes family matters seriously, and with-
draws so quietly to the unfrequented parts of the
woods during nesting-time as to seem to have
migrated. Yet of the four chickadees’ nests
found about the house, one was in a dead yellow
birch in a bit of deep swamp, two others were in
yellow birches along wood-roads, and the fourth
was in a rotten fence-post by the main road, a
long way from any trees.

A workman while mending the fence discov-
ered this last nest. The post crumbled in his
hands as he tried to pull it down, revealing the
nest of moss and rabbit hair, with its five brown-
and-white eggs. He left the old post, propped
it up with a sound one, and, mending the broken
walls of the cavity the best he could, hurried
along with his task, that the birds might return.
They came back, found the wreckage of dust and
chips covering the eggs, tried the flimsy walls—
and went away. It was a desecrated home, nei-
ther safe nor beautiful now ; so they forsook it.

There is no eagle’s nest in this collection of
thirty-six. But if Mr. Burroughs is correct,
there is the next thing to it—a humming-bird’s
nest; three of them, indeed, one of which is

[162 ]

withinastone’s throw
of my door! This one
is in the oaks behind
my garden, but the
other two are even
nearer to houses. One
of these is upon the
limb of a pear-tree.
The tip of this limb
rubs against a wood-
shed connected with
adwelling. The third
nest is in a large ap-
ple orchard, in the
tree nearest the house,
and saddled upon that
branch of the tree
which reaches farthest
toward the dwelling.
So close is this nest
that I can look out of
the garret window
directly into it.

I believe that Ru-
by-throat is so far do- “Tn a dead yellow birch.”

[ 163 ]

“So close I can look directly into it.”

mesticated that he rejoices over every new flower-
garden. There was nearly half an acre of gladi-
oli in the neighborhood one summer, where all
the humming-birds gathered from far and near.
Here, for the only time in my life, I saw a flock
of humming-birds. I counted eight one day ;
and the gardener told me that he had often seen
a dozen of them among the spikes. They
squeaked like bats, and played—about as bullets
might play. In fact, I think I dodged when they
whizzed past me, as a soldier does the first time
he is under fire.

One of my friends had a cellar window abloom
[164]

with geraniums. <A ruby-throat came often to
this window. One day the mistress of the flowers
caught the wee chap in her hands. He knew at
once that she meant no harm and quietly sub-
mitted. A few days later he returned and was
captured again. He liked the honey, and evi-
dently the fondling, too, for he came very regu-
larly after that for the nectar and the lady’s
soft hands.

The nest behind my garden is in the top of a
tall, slender maple, with oaks and chestnuts sur-
rounding and overshadowing it. Finding a nest
like this is inspiration for the rest of life. The
only feat comparable to it is the discovery of a
bee-tree. Finding wild bees, I think, would be
good training for oneintending to hunt humming-
birds’ nests in the woods. But no one ever had
such an intention. No one ever deliberately
started into the woods a-saying, “Go to, now ; Ill
find a humming-bird’s nest in here!”

Humming-birds’ nests are the gifts of the gods
—rewards for patience and for gratitude because
of commoner grants. My nests have invariably
come this way, or, if you choose, by accident.
The nearest I ever came to earning one was in

[165 ]

the case of this one in the maple. I caught a
glimpse of a humming-bird flashing around the
high limbs of a chestnut, so far up that she looked
no bigger than a hornet. I suspected instantly
that she was gathering lichens for a nest, and, as
she darted off, I threw my eyes ahead of her
across her path. It was just one chance in ten
thousand if I even saw her speeding through the
limbs and leaves, if I got the line of her flight,
to say nothing of a clue to her nesting-place. It
was little short of a miracle. I had tried many
times before to do it, but this is the only time I
ever succeeded: my line of vision fell directly
upon the tiny builder as she dropped to her nest
in the sapling.

The structure was barely started. I might
have stared at it with the strongest glass and
never made it out a nest; the sapling, too, was
no thicker at the butt than my wrist, and I
should not have dreamed of looking into its tall,
spindling top for any kind of a nest. Further-
more, as if to rob one of the last possibility of
discovering it, a stray bud, two years before, had
pushed through the bark of the limb about three
inches behind where the nest was to be fixed, and

[166 ]

had grown, till now its leaves hung over the
dainty house in an almost perfect canopy and
screen.

For three weeks the walls of this house were
going up. Is it astonishing that, when finished,
they looked like a growth of the limb, like part
and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily
visit to the sapling until the young birds flew
away; then I bent the tree to the ground and
brought the nest home. It now hangs above my
desk, its thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy
canopy telling still of the little mother’s un-
wearied industry, of her infinite love and fore-
sight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to
the limb, so exquisitely lichened into harmony
with the green around, this tiniest nest speaks
for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry,
would be the loss of these beautiful neighbors of
our copses and fields !

[167]

“MUS’RATTIN’”

“Uncle Jethro limhered his stiffened knees and
went chuckling down the bank.”

“MUS’RATTIN’”

NE November afternoon I found Uncle

Jethro back of the woodshed, drawing a

chalk-mark along the barrel of his old musket,
from the hammer to the sight.

“What are you doing that for, Uncle Jeth?”
I asked.

“ What fo’? Fo’ mus’rats, boy.”

“Muskrats! Do you think they ’ll walk up
and toe that mark, while you knock ’em over
with a stick?”

“@way fum yhere! What I take yo’ pos-
sumin’ des dozen winters fo’, en yo’ dunno
how to sight a gun in de moon yit? I’s gwine
mus’rattin’ by de moon to-night, en I won’t
take yo’ nohow.”

Of course he took me. We went out about
nine o’clock, and entering the zigzag lane be-
hind the barn, followed the cow-paths down to
the pasture, then cut across the fields to Lup-

(272)

ton’s Pond, the little wood-walled lake which
falls over a dam into the wide meadows along
Cohansey Creek.

It is a wild, secluded spot, so removed that a
pair of black ducks built their nest for several
springs in the deep moss about the upper shore.

It is shallow and deeply crusted over with
lily-pads and pickerel-weed, except for a small
area about the dam, where the water is deep
and clear. There are many stumps in the
upper end; and here, in the shallows, built
upon the hummocks or anchored to the sub-
merged roots, are the muskrats’ houses.

The big moon was rising over the meadows
as we tucked ourselves snugly out of sight in a
clump of small cedars on the bank, within easy
range of the dam and commanding a view of
the whole pond. The domed houses of the
muskrats—the village numbered six homes—
showed plainly as the moon came up; and
when the full flood of light fell on the still sur-
face of the pond, we could see the “roads” of
the muskrats, like narrow channels, leading
down through the pads to the open space about
the dam.

[172]

“The big moon was rising over the meadows.”

A muskrat’s domestic life is erratic. Some-
times there will be a large village in the pond,
and, again, an autumn will pass without a
single new house being built. It may be
that some of the old houses will be fitted up
anew and occupied; but I have known years
when there was not a house in the pond. At
no time do all of the muskrats build winter
houses. The walls of the meadow ditches just

[173]

under the dam are honeycombed with subter-
ranean passages, in which many of the musk-
rats live the year round. Neither food nor
weather, so far as I have found, influence them
at all in the choice of their winter quarters.
In low, wet meadows where there are no

Section of muskrat’s house.

ditches, the muskrats, of course, live altogether
in mud and reed houses above ground, for the
water would flood the ordinary burrow. These
structures are placed on the tussocks along a
water-hole, so that the dwellers can dive out
and escape under water when danger ap-
proaches. But here in the tide-meadows,
where the ditches are deep, the muskrats rear
their families almost wholly in underground

[174]

rooms. It is only when winter comes, and
family ties dissolve, that a few of the more
sociable or more adventurous club together,
come up to the pond, and while away the cold
weather in these haystack lodges.

These houses are very simple, but entirely
adequate. If you will lift the top off an ordi-
nary meadow lodge you will find a single room,
with a bed in the middle, and at least one en-
trance and one exit which are always closed to
outsiders by water.

The meadow lodge is built thus: The musk-
rat first chooses a large tussock of sedge that
stands well out of the water for his bedstead.
Now, from a foundation below the water, thick
walls of mud and grass are erected inclosing
the tussock ; a thatch of excessive thickness is
piled on; the channels leading away from the
doors are dug out if necessary; a bunch of
soaking grass is brought in and made into a
bed on the tussock—and the muskrat takes
possession.

The pond lodges at the head of Lupton’s are
made after this fashion, only they are much
larger, and instead of being raised about a tus-

[175]

sock of sedge, they are built upon, and inclose,
a part of a log or stump.

This lodge life is surely a cozy, jolly way of
passing the winter. The possums are inclined
to club together whenever they can find stumps
that are roomy enough; but the muskrats
habitually live together through the winter.
Here, in the single room of their house, one
after another will come, until the walls can hold
no more; and, curling up after their night of
foraging, they will spend the frigid days bliss-
fully rolled into one warm ball of dreamful |
sleep. Let it blow and snow and freeze out-
side ; there are six inches of mud-and-reed wall
around them, and, wrapped deep in rich, warm
fur, they hear nothing of the blizzard and care
nothing for the cold.

Nor are they prisoners of the cold here. The
snow has drifted over their house till only a
tiny mound appears; the ice has sealed the
pond and locked their home against the storm
and desolation without: but the main roadway
from the house is below the drifting snow, and
they know where, among the stumps and but-
ton-bushes, the warm-nosed watchers have kept

[176]

breathing-holes open. The ice-maker never
finds their inner stair; its secret door opens
into deep, under-water paths, which run all
over the bottom of the unfrozen pond-world.

“The snow has drifted over their house till only
a tiny mound appears.”

Unless roused by the sharp thrust of a spear,
the muskrats will sleep till nightfall. You
may skate around the lodge and even sit down
upon it without waking the sleepers ; but plunge

your polo-stick through the top, and you will

2 fare |

hear a smothered plunk, plunk, plunk, as one
after another dives out of bed into the water
below.

The moon climbed higher up the sky and the
minutes ran on to ten o’clock. We waited.
The night was calm and still, and the keen,
alert air brought every movement of the wild
life about us to our ears. The soft, cottony
footfalls of a rabbit, hopping leisurely down the
moonlit path, seemed not unlike the echoing
steps on silent, sleeping streets, as some traveler
passes beneath your window; a wedge of wild
geese honked far over our heads, holding their
mysterious way to the South ; white-footed mice
scurried among the dried leaves; and our ears
were so sharpened by the frosty air that we
caught their thin, wiry squeaks.

Presently there was a faint plash among the
muskrat houses. The village was waking up.
Uncle Jethro poked the long nose of his gun
cautiously through the bushes, and watched.
Soon there was a wake in one of the silvery
roads, then a parting of waves, and stemming
silently and evenly toward us, we saw the
round, black head of a muskrat.

[178]

It was a pretty sight and a pretty shot; but
I would not have had the stillness and the
moonlit picture spoiled by the blare of that
murderous musket for the pelts of fifty musk-
rats, and as the gun was coming to Uncle
Jethro’s shoulder, I slipped my hand under the
lifted hammer.

With just an audible grunt of impatience the
old negro understood,—it was not the first good
shot that my love of wild things had spoiled for
him,—and the unsuspecting muskrat swam on to
the dam.

A plank had drifted against the bank, and
upon this the little creature scrambled out, as
dry as the cat at home under the roaring

kitchen stove. Down another

road came a second muskrat,
and, swimming across the
open water at the dam,
joined the first-comer
on the plank. They
rubbed noses softly —the
sweetest of all wild-animal greetings—and a nese
moment afterward began to play together.

They were out for a frolic, and the night was

[179]

“Two little brown creatures washing calamus,”

splendid. Keeping one eye open for owls, they
threw off all other caution, and swam and dived
and chased each other through the water, with
all the fun of boys in swimming.

On the bottom of the pond about the dam, in
ten or twelve feet of water, was a bed of unios.
I knew that they were there, for I had cut my
feet upon them; and the muskrats knew they
were there, for they had had many a moonlight
lunch of them. These mussels the muskrats
reckon sweetmeats. They are hard to get,
hard to crack, but worth all the cost. I was
not surprised, then, when one of the muskrats
sleekly disappeared beneath the surface, and
came up directly with a mussel.

There was a squabble on the plank, which
ended in the other muskrat’s diving for a mus-
sel for himself. How they opened them I could
not clearly make out, for the shells were almost
concealed in their paws; but judging from
their actions and the appearance of other shells
which they had opened, I should say that they
first gnawed through the big hinge at the back,
then pried open the valves, and ate out the
contents.

[181 ]

Having finished this first course of big-neck
clams, they were joined by a third muskrat,
and, together, they filed over the bank and
down into the meadow. Shortly two of them
returned with great mouthfuls of the mud-
bleached ends of calamus-blades. Then fol-
lowed the washing.

They dropped their loads upon the plank,
took up the stalks, pulled the blades apart, and
soused them up and down in the water, rubbing
them with their paws until they were as clean
and white as the whitest celery one ever ate.
What a dainty picture! Two little brown
creatures, humped on the edge of a plank,
washing calamus in moonlit water !

One might have taken them for half-grown
coons as they sat there scrubbing and munching.
Had the big barred owl, from the gum-swamp
down the creek, come along then, he could
easily have bobbed down upon them, and might
almost have carried one away without the other
knowing it, so all-absorbing was the calamus-
washing.

Muskrats, like coons, will wash what they
eat, whether washing is needed or not. It is a

[ 182]

necessary preliminary to dinner—their right-
eousness, the little Pharisees! Judging from
the washing disease which ailed two tame musk-
rats that I knew, it is perfectly safe to say that
had these found clean bread and butter upon
the plank, instead of muddy calamus, they
would have scoured it just the same. ;

Before the two on the plank had finished
their meal, the third muskrat returned, drag-
ging his load of mud and roots to the scrubbing.
He was just dipping into the water when there
was a terrific explosion in my ears, a roar that
echoed round and round the pond. As the
smoke lifted, there were no washers upon the
plank; but over in the quiet water floated
three long, slender tails.

“No man gwine stan’ dat shot, boy, jis ’ see
a mus’rat wash hi’ supper”; and Uncle Jethro
limbered his stiffened knees and went chuckling
down the bank.

[183]

A STUDY IN BIRD MORALS

“She melted away among the dark pines like a shadow.’

A STUDY IN BIRD MORALS

HE eternal distinctions of right and wrong
upon which the moral law is based inhere
even in the jelly of the amceba. The Decalogue
binds all the way down. In the course of a lit.
tle observation one must find how faithfully the
animals, as a whole, keep the law, and how sadly,
at times, certain of them are wont to break it.
To pass over such notorious cases as the cow-
bird, cuckoo, turkey-buzzard, and crow, there is
still cause for positive alarm, if the birds have
souls, in the depraved habit of duplicity common
among them. Ina single short tramp, one June
afternoon, no less than five different birds at-
tempted to deceive me. The casuist may be able
to justify all five of them ; for, no doubt, there are
extremities when this breach of the law should
not merit condemnation ; but even so, if in the

[187]

limits of one short walk five little innocents de-
liberately act out the coolest of falsehoods, one
cannot help wondering if it is not true that the
whole creation needs redeeming.

The first of these five was a yellow warbler.
I was trying to look into her nest, which was
placed in the top of a clump of alders in a
muddy pasture, when she slipped out and flut-
tered like an autumn leaf to the ground. She
made no outery, but wavered down to my feet
with quivering wings, and dragged herself over
the water and mud as if wounded. I paused to
look at her, and, as long as I watched, she played
her best to lure me. A black-snake would have
struck at her instantly ; but I knew her woman’s
ways and turned again to the nest. As soon as
she saw that her tears and prayers would not
avail, she darted into the bushes near me and
called me every wicked thing that she could
think of. I deserved it all, of course, though I
was only curious to see her cradle and its hold-
ings, which, had she been a human mother, she
would have insisted on my stopping to see.

On the way to Lupton’s I climbed a sharp,
pine-covered hill, where the needles were so

[188 ]

slippery that I had to

“She called me
every wicked
thing that she
could think of.”

halt for a minute’s rest

at the top. The trees rose
straight and close and
slender, with scarcely a live
branch reaching out nearer
the ground than twenty feet.
The roof of green shut out
the light, and the matting of brown
spread the ground so deep that only
afew stunted blueberry-bushes, small]
ferns, and straying runners of ground-

[189 ]

pine abode there. It was one of those cathe-
dral-like clumps, a holy of holies of the woods,
into whose dim silence the straggling bushes,
briers, and other lowly forest folk dare not come,
but fall upon their knees outside and worship.

The birds, however, are not so reverent. I
was scarcely stretched upon the needles when a
slight movement overhead arrested my atten-
tion. As I looked, a soft fluttering of wings
brought a blue jay into the branches directly
above me. There is nothing. peculiar in finding
a blue jay among the pines—they usually nest
there. But there was something peculiar about
this jay; he'moved so quiétly, he appeared so
entirely unconscious of me, though I knew that
he saw me as plainly as I him. Then at his side
alighted his mate, meeker and more modest
than a chippy.

What did it signify—these squawking, scold-
ing, garrulous birds suddenly gone silent and
trustful? In the pines at this season one never
gets nearer a jay than field-glass range—near
enough to hear him dash away, screeching de-
fiance. But here were these two gliding among
the branches above my head as cautiously and

[190 ]

“Tt was one of
those cathedral- :
like clumps.” bs) 2 7
1 T&
£

es
6 * “They were
4 watching me.”

softly as cuckoos, searching apparently for grubs,
yet. keeping all the time to the one spot, not
leaving for a moment to hunt among other
trees. Round and round the same limbs they
went, without once screaming or uttering so
much as a word of that sweet, confiding talk
which one hears when he spies on a pair of
lovers or a newly wedded couple of these birds.

[192]

I became suspicious. All this meant something.
They kept close together, and fiuttered about,
hanging from the twigs head down like chicka-
dees, deliberately biting.off bunches of needles,
prying into the cones,.and scaling: off bits of
bark, but ‘finding nothing, nor even trying to
find anything.

At this juncture I chanced to move my feet.
The birds stopped instantly; but on my be-
coming quiet they went on scattering the nee-
dles and bark-chips again. Then I raised my
glass. They paused just for a second, and con-
tinued, though now I saw that their picking was
all at random, hitting the limb or not as might
be. They were not hunting grubs: they were
watching me ; and more—they were keeping me
watching them.

It was a clever little ruse. But it was too
good, too new, too unjaylike for my faith.
There was a nest against one of these pines, as
sure as it was June. And this fearless uncon-
cern? this new and absorbing interest in grubs?
All assumed !—very genuinely assumed, indeed,
and might have led me to do a dozen things
other than looking for the nest, had I known a

%
1B [193]

little less of jays. It was heroic, too. They
were calm and had all their wits about them.
Outwardly they were indifferent to my presence
and gave me not the slightest heed. But this
was allshow. Every instant they saw me; and,
while pretending not to know that I was near,
they had come to intercept me, to attract my
attention to themselves, and save their nest.
And at how much cost! To have looked within
those calm little bosoms were to have seen two
hearts as anxious and fearful as ever thumped
parental breasts.

If I had been deceived and led to waste my
afternoon or to record something untrue of the
blue jay, still, I think, these two birds could
hardly have been condemned before the law.
For did not their motive justify the deed?

The blue jays are braggarts, full of noise, and
almost without morals ; yet they have not seemed
to me quite as bad as they used to, not quite
the same blustering, quarrelsome, unmoral rene-
gades, since these two showed me how they
could conquer their instinctive fears and rise
superior to everything common and cowardly
by the power of their parental love.

[194]

I could not find the nest; so returning the
next day, I crept under cover to the foot of the
hill, and, ascending stealthily, saw the hen as she
slipped from the home tree. She melted away
among the dark pines like a shadow, but reap-
peared immediately with her mate to head me
off again. Not this time, however, for I had
their secret. My eye was upon the nest. It
was a loose, rough affair of coarse sticks, fixed
upon two dead branches well up against a slen-
der pine’s trunk. I could see patches of light
sky through it, it was such a botch. But where
art failed nature perfected. I saw the sky
through the bungled structure, but not the eggs.
I had to climb to see them, for they were so
washed with shadowy green that they blended
perfectly with the color of the nest and the sub-
dued light of the pines.

After my adventure with the jays I had‘ an
interesting experience with a pair of tiny birds
in the sand-bank on the north side of Lupton’s
Pond.

The country immediately surrounding the
pond is exceedingly varied and full of life,
The high, level farm-lands break off into sand-

[195]

banks, which, in turn, spread into sweeping
meadows that run out to the creek. The little
pond lies between steep hills of chestnut-oak
and pine, its upper waters being lost in a dense
swamp of magnolia and alder, while over the
dam at its foot there rushes a fall that echoes
around the wooded hills and then goes purling
among the elder and dog roses into the sullen
tide-ditches of the meadow. Except the
meadows and cultivated fields, everything is on
a small seale, as if the place were made of the
odds and ends, the left-over pieces in the making
of the region round about. Such diversity of
soils, such a medley of features, such profusion
of life, in a territory of the same size I never saw
elsewhere. At the boarding-school, near by,
Lupton’s Pond is known as “Paradise.”

On reaching the pond I went over to the
sand-bank to look for a pair of kingfishers who
had nested there many years; but instead of
them, I saw a pair of winter wrens fly sharply
among the washed-out roots of a persimmon-
tree which stood on the edge of the hill above.
I instantly lost sight of one of the birds. The
actions of the other were so self-conscious that I

[196]

stopped and watched—I had never found a
winter wren’s nest. Ina moment the missing bird
appeared and revealed the nest. It was large for
the size of the builders, made of sticks, grass, and
feathers, and was fixed among the black roots just
below the green hilltop, and set into the sand far
enough to leave a little of one side exposed.

The wrens hurried away on my approach ;
but when I retreated to the foot of the bank,
they darted back to the nest, the hen entering
without a pause, while the cock perched upon a
root at the door and began a most extraordinary
performance.

He managed to put himself directly between
me and the tiny portal, completely cutting off
my view of the little brown wife inside the nest ;
then, spreading his wings, with tail up and head
-on one side, he fluttered and bobbed and wagged
and poured out a volume of song that was pro-
digious. It lifted him fairly off his feet. Had
he suddenly gone up with a whizz, like a sky-
rocket, and burst into a shower of bubbles, trills,
runs, and wild, ecstatic warbles, I should have
looked on with no more wonder. Such a song!
It was singing gone mad.

[197 ]

My head was on a level with him. I leaned
forward nearer the bank. At this he went
crazy with his efforts—into a fit, almost. I
cannot have been mistaken: it was the first
time that I had ever heard a bird sing when in
terror; but I had whistled my way past too
many dogs and through too many graveyards
at night to be deceived in the note of fear, and
in the purpose of this song. That bit of a
husband was scared almost out of his senses;
but there he stood, squarely between me and
that precious nest and the more precious wife,
guarding them from my evil eyes with every
atom of his midget self.

It was as fine an illustration of courage as I
ever saw, a triumph of love and duty over fear
—fear that perhaps we have no way to measure.
And it was a triumph of wedded love at that;
for there were no young, not even an egg in the
unfinished nest. It all happened in less than a
minute. The female reappeared in an instant,
satisfied that all was well with the nest, and both
birds sped off and dropped among the briers.

How would the casuist decide for so sweet, so
big, so heroic a deception—or the attempt?

[198 ]

A little farther down the creek, where the
meadows meet the marsh, dwell the cousins of

‘A triumph of love and duty over fear.”

the winter wrens, the long-billed marsh-wrens.
Here in the wide reaches of calamus and reeds,
where the brackish tide comes in, the marsh-
wrens build by hundreds. Their big, bulky
nests are woven about a handful of young cala-
mus-blades, or tied to afew long, stout sedge-

stalks, and grow as the season grows.

[199]

The nests are made of coarse marsh-grass,— of
the floatage often,—and are so long in the pro-
cess of construction that, when completed, they
are all speared through with the grass-blades, as
with so many green bayonets. They are about
the size of a large calabash, nearly round, thick-
walled and heavy, with a small entrance, just
under the roof, leading upward like a short
stair to a deep, pocket-like cavity, at whose
bottom lie the eggs, barely out of finger reach.

I could hear the smothered racket of the
singing wrens all about me in the dense growth,
scoldings to my right, defiance to my left, dis-
cussions of wives, grumblings of husbands, and
singing of lovers everywhere, until the whole
marsh seemed a-sputter and a-bubble with a
gurgling tide of song like a river running in.
Now and then, a wave, rising higher than its
fellows, splashed up above the reeds and broke
into song-spray, as an ecstasy lifted the wee
brown performer out of the green.

But these short dashes of the wrens into
upper air, I have come to believe, are not en-
tirely the flights of enraptured souls. Some-
thing more than Mr. Chapman’s “mine of

[200]

music bursts within them.” Before they knew
that I was near I rarely saw one make this sing-
ing dive into the air; but as soon as they were
acquainted with my presence they appeared on
every hand. I had not gone fifty feet into
their reedy domain when I began to catch a
furious berating. The knives of the mowing-
machine up in the meadow went no faster nor
sharper than these unseen tongues in the reeds.
Suddenly a bit of brown fury dashed into view
near me, spattered the air thick with song-
notes, and, as if veiled by this cloud of melody,
it turned on its head and dived back, chatter-
ing of all that was seen to the other furies in
the reeds.

Does any one believe that exhibition to be
an explosion of pure song—the exaltation of
unmixed joy? If ever the Ninth Command-
ment was broken, it was broken here.

This uncontrollable emotion, this shower of
song, is but a cloak to the singer’s fear and
curiosity. He wants to know where I am and
what I am about. I once knew a little dog
who was so afraid of the dark that he would
run barking all the way to the barn when put

[ 201 ]

out at night. So these little spies start up
singing their biggest as a blind to their real
feelings and purposes.

The quail’s broken wings and rushes of blood
to the head during nesting-time have lost
their lure even for the small boy; yet they
somehow still work on me. I involuntarily
give my attention to this distress until too late
to catch sight of the scurrying brood. I ima-
gine, too, that the oldest and wisest of the foxes
is still fooled by this make-believe, and will
continue to be fooled to the end of time.

A barren, stony hillside slopes gradually to
the marsh where the wrens live. Here I was
met by the fifth deceiver, a killdeer plover.
The killdeer’s crocodile tears are bigger and
more touchingly genuine than even the quail’s.
And, besides all her tricks, she has a voice that
fairly drips woe.

The killdeer always builds in a worn-out,
pebbly pasture or in a bare, unused field. Here
among the stones she makes her nest by scrap-
ing out ashallow cavity, into which she scratches
a few bits of rotten wood and weed-stalks in
sizes that would make good timber for a caddis-

[202]

“ He wants to know where I am and what I am about.”

worm’s house. Instead of digging the cavity,
she often hunts up two or three stones and a
corn-butt, which happen to lie so that she can
crowd in between them, and makes this shift
serve her for a nest.

Her eggs are one of the world’s small wonders.
They lie out in the open like so many of the
pebbles about them—resembling the stones so
perfectly that they are more often overlooked
or crushed than discovered. The ground color

[203 ]

of the egg is that of the earth, and the mark-
ings correspond marvelously to the size, shade,
and distribution of the bits of wood beneath
them in the nest. I know of no other instance
of protective coloring among the birds so
nearly perfect, unless it be the killdeer herself
when playing her favorite trick of “invisible.”

She had seen me before I entered the reeds
of the marsh-wrens. Squatting close over her
eggs, she watched me silently, and seeing that I
was approaching her nest on my way up the
hill, she glided off and suddenly appeared at
my feet. Where she came from I did not
know. It was as if the earth had opened and
let her out. I stopped. That was what she
wanted. ‘You numskull, look at me and make
a fool of yourself,” she said by the light in her
eye. I did exactly so.

With her head outstretched and body close
to the ground, she slid like a ghost before me as
I followed. Now she took form like a stone,
now seemed to sink out of sight into the earth,
reappearing only to vanish again into thin air.
Thus she led me on, contriving to keep from
beneath my feet, and always just out of reach,

[204]

till, seeing that my credulity and patience were
failing, she broke silence for a desperate last
act, and fell in a fit, screaming, Will-dee, kill-dee,
kill-dee!

There she lay in the agony ofdeath. Istooped
to pick her up; but she happened to flutter a
little—the death-spasm. I stepped forward to
take her. Putting my hand down, I—ah! not
dead yet! Poor thing! She jerked just out
of my hand—reflex action, no doubt. But now
it is all over; she is dead, and I bend to pick
her up, when, springing like an arrow from my
grasp, killdeer, ringing out her wail, goes swiftly
flying across the hill.

Fooled! Yes; but not altogether fooled, for
I knew that it would turn out so. The im-
postor! But was n’t it beautifully done? I
shall never grow too wise to be duped.

She has played me a trick, and now I will
revenge myself and find her nest. I shall—
perhaps.

‘In the agony of death.”

[205 J

RABBIT ROADS

RABBIT ROADS

ie your woods walks did you ever notice a
little furrow or tunnel through the under-
brush, a tiny roadway in the briers and huckle-
berry-bushes? Did you ever try to follow this
path to its beginning or end, wondering who
traveled it? You have, doubtless. But the
woods must be wild and the undergrowth thick
and you must be as much at home among the
trees as you are in your own dooryard, else this
slight mark will make no impression upon you.
4 [ 209 ]

But enter any wild tract of wood or high
swamp along the creek, and look sharp as you cut
across the undergrowth. You will not go far
before finding a narrow runway under your feet.
It is about five inches wide, leading in no partic-
ular direction, and is evidently made by cutting
off the small stems of vines and bushes at an inch
or more from the ground. The work looks as if
it had been laid out by rule and done with a
sharp knife, it is so regular and clean.

This is a rabbit road. Follow it a few rods
and you will find it crossed by another road, ex-
actly similar. Take this new path now, and
soon you are branching off, turning, and joining
other roads. You are in rabbit-land, traveling
its highways—the most complicated and entan-
gling system of thoroughfares that was ever con-
structed. The individual roads are straight
and plain enough, but at a glance one can
see that the plan of the system is intended to
bewilder and lead astray all who trespass here.
Without a map and directions no one could
hope to arrive at any definite point through
such a snarl.

There often comes along with the circus a

[210]

building called the “Moorish Maze,” over whose
entrance is this invitation :

COME IN AND GET LOST!

This is what one reads at the cross-roads in
rabbit-land. There are finger-boards and muile-
stones along the way; but they point nowhere
and mark no distances except to the rabbits.
An animal’s strong points usually supplement
each other ; its well-developed powers are in line
with its needs and mode of life. So, by the very
demands of his peculiar life, the beaver has be-
come chief among all the animal engineers, his
specialty being dams. He can make a good slide
for logging, but of the construction of speedways
he knows absolutely nothing. The rabbit, on
the other hand, isa runner. He can swim if he
is obliged to. His interests, however, lie mostly
in his heels, and hence in his highways. So
Bunny has become an expert road-maker. He
cannot build a house, nor dig even a respectable
den; he is unable to climb, and his face is too
flat for hole-gnawing: but turn him loose in a
brambly, briery wilderness, and he will soon
thread the trackless waste with a network of

[211]

roads, and lay it open to his nimble feet as the
sky lies open to the swallow’s wings.

But how maddening these roads are to the
dogs and foxes! In the first place, they have a
peculiar way of beginning nowhere in particular,
and of vanishing all at once, in the same blind

“ Calamity is hot on his track.”

fashion. I am not sure that I ever found a satis-
factory end to a rabbit’s road—that is, a nest, a
playground, or even a feeding-place. Old Ca-
lamity, the hound, is always tormented and
undone whenever she runs foul of a rabbit
road.

She will start Bunny in the open field, and trail
away after him in full tongue as fast as her fat

(202 ]

bow-legs will carry her. The rabbit makes for
the woods. Calamity is hot on his track, going
down toward the creek. Suddenly she finds
herself plunging along a rabbit road, breaking
her way through by sheer force where the rabbit
slipped along with perfect ease. She is following
the path now rather than the scent, and, all at
once, discovers that she is off the trail. She
turns and goes back. Yes, here the rabbit made
a sharp break to the right by a side-path ; the
track is fresh and warm, and the old hound sings
in her eager delight. On she goes with more
haste, running the path again instead of the
trail, and—there is no path ! It is gone. This
bothers the old dog; but her nose is keen and
she has picked up the course again. Here it goes
into another road. She gives tongue again, and
rushes on, when— Wow ! she has plunged into a
thick and thorny tangle of greenbrier.

That is where the torment comes in. These
roads have a habit of taking in the brier-patches.
Calamity will go round a patch if she can; she
will work her way through if she must—but it is
at the cost of bloody ears and a thousand smart-
ing pricks. Bunny, meantime, is watching just

[213]

inside the next brier-patch, counting the digs of
his clumsy pursuer.

I suppose that this “blind alley” kind of road
is due to the fact that the rabbits have no regu-
lar homes. They make a nest for the young;
but they never have dens, like minks and coons.
In New England they often live in holes and
among the crannies of the stone walls ; and there,
as far as I have seen, they rarely or never make
roads. Farther south, where the winters are
less severe, they dig no holes, for they prefer an
open, even an exposed, bed to any sort of shelter.

Shelters are dangerous. Bunny cannot back
into a burrow and bare his teeth to his enemy ;
he is not a fighter. He can run, and he knows
it; legs are his salvation, and he must have room
to limber them. If he has to fight, then give
him the open, not a hole; for it is to be a kanga-
roo kicking match, and a large ring is needed.
He had as well surrender himself at once as to
run into a hole that has only one opening.

During the cold, snowy weather the rabbits
usually leave the bare fields for the woods,
though the older and wiser ones more frequently
suffer the storms than risk the greater danger

[214]

“Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next brier-pateh.”

of such a move. When pressed by hunger or
hounded hard, they often take to a rail-pile, and
sometimes they grow so bold as to seek hiding
under a barn or house. One young buck lived
all winter in the wood-pile of one of my neigh-
bors, becoming so tame that he fed with the
chickens.

The nearest approach that a rabbit makes to
a house is his “squat,” or form. This is simply a
sitting-place in the fields or along the weods, that
he will change every time he is thoroughly fright-
ened out of it. Undisturbed he will stay in this

[215]

squat for months at a time. Occasionally a rab-
bit will have two or three squats located over his
range, each one so placed that a wide view on
every side may be had. If it is along the woods,
then he sits facing the open fields, with his
ears laid back toward the trees. He can hear as
far as he can see, and his nose tells him who is
coming up the wind sooner than either eyes or
ears.

It is cold, lonely living here in the winter.
But everybody, except the mice and little birds,
are enemies, his only friends being his wits
and legs. In the long run, wits and legs are
pretty safe insurance. “He who fights and runs
away will live to fight another day,” is Bunny’s
precept—and it works well; he still thrives.

The squat is a cold place. The sky is its roof,
and its only protection is the tuft of grass, the
stone, or the stump beside which it is placed.
Bunny may change to the lee or windward side,
as suits him, during a storm; but usually he
keeps his place and lies close to the ground, no
matter how the wind blows, or how fiercely falls
the rain and snow. I have frequently started
them from their squats in bleak, wind-swept

[216]

fields, when the little brown things were com-
pletely snowed under.

There is great individuality among all animals,
and though the rabbits look as much alike as
peas, they are no exception to the rule. This
personality is especially shown in their whimsical
fancies for certain squats. Here, within sight of
the house and the dog, an old rabbit took up her
abode on a big, flat rail in the corner of the
fence. Of course no hawk or owl could touch
her here, for they dared not swoop between
the rails ; the dog and cat could scent her,
but she had already whipped the cat, and
she had given Calamity so many long runs
that the hound was weary of her. The strate-
gic value of such a situation is plain: she was
thus raised just above the level of the field and
commanded every approach. Perhaps it was not
whim, but wisdom, that led to this selection.

I knew another, a dwarf rabbit, that always
got into a bare or plowed field and squatted be-
side a brown stone or clod of earth. Experience
had taught him that he looked like a clod, and

that no enemy ever plagued him when he lay
low in the brown soil.

[ O17 ] “The squat is a cold place.”

One summer I stumbled upon a squat close
along the public road. Cart-loads of trash had
been dumped there, and among the debris was a
bottomless coal-scuttle. In the coal-seuttle a
rabbit made his squat. Being open at both ends,
it sheltered him beautifully from sun and rain.
Here he sat, napping through the day, watching
the interesting stream of passers-by, himself
hidden by the rank weeds and grass. When dis-
covered by a dog or boy, he tripped out of one
of his open doors and led the intruder a useless
run into the swamp.

At one time my home was separated from the
woods by only a clover-field. This clover-field
was a favorite feeding-ground for the rabbits of
the vicinity. Here, in the early evening, they
would gather to feed and frolic ; and, not content
with clover, they sometimes went into the garden
for a dessert of growing corn and young cabbage.

Take a moonlight night in autumn and hide
in the edge of these woods. There is to be a rab-
bit party in the clover-field. The grass has long
been cut and the field is clean and shining ; but
still there is plenty to eat. The rabbits from
both sides of the woods are coming. The fuli

[218]

moon rises above the trees, and the cottontails
start over. Now, of course, they use the paths
which they cut so carefully the longest possible
way round. They hop leisurely along, stopping
now and then to nibble the sassafras bark or to
get a bite of wintergreen, even quitting the path,
here and there, for a berry or a bunch of sweet
wood-grass.

“Stop a moment; this won’tdo! Here isaside-
path where the briers have grown three inches
since they were last cut off. This path must be
cleared out at once,” and the old buck falls to cut-
ting. By the time he has finished the path a dozen
rabbits have assembled in the clover-field. When
he appears there is a thump, and all look up ; some
one runs to greet the new-comer; they touch
whiskers and smell, then turn to their eating.

The feast is finished, and the games are on.
Four or five of the rabbits have come together
for a turn at hop-skip-and-jump. And such hop-
skip-and-jump! They are professionals at this
sport, every one of them. There is not a rabbit
in the game that cannot leap five times higher
than he can reach on his tiptoes, and hop a clean
ten feet.

[219]

“The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox.”

Over and over they go, bounding and bounc-
ing, snapping from their marvelous hind legs as
if shot from a spring-trap. It is the greatest
jumping exhibition that you will ever see. To
have such legs as these is the next best thing to
having wings.

Right in the thick of the fun sounds a sharp
thump! thump! Every rabbit “freezes.’”’ It is
the stamp of an old buck, the call, Danger!
danger! He has heard a twig break in the woods,
or has seen a soft, shadowy thing cross the moon.

As motionless as stumps squat the rabbits, stiff
with the tenseness of every ready muscle. They
listen. But it was only a dropping nut or a rest-
less bird; and the play continues.

They are chasing each other over the grass in
a game of tag. There go two, round and round,
tagging and re-tagging, first one being “it” and
then the other. Their circle widens all the time
and draws nearer to the woods. This time round
they will touch the bush behind which we are
watching. Here they come—there they go;
they will leap the log yonder. Flash! squeak!
scurry! Not a rabbit in the field! Yes; one
rabbit—the limp, lifeless one hanging over the

[221]

neck of that fox trotting off yonder in the
shadows, along the border of the woods!

The picnic is over for this night, and it will be
some time before the cottontails so far forget
themselves as to play in this place again.

It is small wonder that animals do not laugh.
They have so little play. The savage seldom
laughs, for he hunts and is hunted like a wild
animal, and is allowed so scant opportunity to be
off guard that he cannot develop the power to
laugh. Much more is this true of the animals.
From the day an animal is born, instinct and
training are bent toward the circumvention of
enemies. There is no time to play, no chance,
no cause for laughter.

The little brown rabbit has least reason of all
to be glad. He is utterly inoffensive, the enemy
of none, but the victim of many. Before he
knows his mother he understands the meaning of
Be ready! Watch! We drinks these words in
with his milk. The winds whisper them; the
birds call them; every leaf, every twig, every
shadow and sound, says: Be ready! Watch!
Life is but a series of escapes, little else than
vigilance and flight. He must sleep with eyes

[222]

open, feed with ears up, move with muffled feet,
and, at short stages, he must stop, rise on his
long hind legs, and listen and look. If he ever
forgets, if he pauses one moment for a wordless,
noiseless game with his fellows, he dies. For
safety’s sake he lives alone; but even a rabbit
has fits of sociability, and gives way at times to
his feelings. The owl and the fox know this,
and they watch the open glades and field-edges.
They must surprise him.

The barred ow] is quick at dodging, but Bunny
is quicker. It is the owl’s soft, shadow-silent
wings that are dreaded. They spirit’ him
through the dusk like a huge moth, wavering
and aimless, with dangling dragon-claws. But
his drop is swift and certain, and the grip of
those loosely hanging legs is the very grip of
death. There is no terror like the ghost-terror
of the owl.

The fox is feared ; but then, he is on legs, not
wings, and there are telltale winds that fly be-
fore 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.

[223]

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 be-
fore 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 up

[224]

‘His drop is swift and certain.”

with. 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 fright-
ened, 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 resourceful-
ness, also. But this is to be expected. Ifnumber
of children count for experience, then, surely,
Molly ought to be resourceful. There are sea-
sons when she will raise as many as three fam-
ilies—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 toge-

[226]

ther! But animal children, as a rule, behave
better than human children, so we may not mea-
sure 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 tocome. 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 the

[227]

end 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 exceed-
ingly 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 did n’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 the

[228]

caution 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 straw-
berries on a hill, I heard a curious grunting down
the side below me, then the quick thud ! 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’s

[229]

ears, 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 an-
tagonist.

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 greenlightin
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 un-
harmed. Molly grunted and stamped at me for
looking at them ; but I was too big to kick as she

[230]

“Seven young ones in the nest.”

had 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.

[231]

Perhaps the other six survived until Novem-
ber, the beginning of the gunning season. But
when the slaughter was past, if one lived, he re-
membered 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.

[232]

BRICK-TOP

BRICK-TOP

HAT man was not only an item in the reck-
oning when the world was made, but that
his attributes were anticipated too, is every-
where 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 that

[235 ]

the 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 mush-
room,” the deadly Agaricus (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 mush-
room 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 infre-
quently 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
poisonous Amanita tribe, whose toxic breath

[236]

throws 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 socie-
ties 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, we know
these 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 utterly im-

[237]

possible 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.

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 approach

[238 ]

‘The land of the mushroom.”

the shape of the deadly Amanita. 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, turn-
ing black later with the black spores. It comes
in September, and lasts until the heavy snows
fall, growing rarely anywhere but in the woods
upon oak stumps. 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 isseen. 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, and per-

[240]

fectly harmless species should be so seldom pic-
tured among the edible fungi in works upon this
subject. I have seen it figured only two or three
times, under the names Hypholoma perplexum
and H. 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 dis-
tributed ,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 ; butitis mostly
talk. It gives a practical, businesslike com-
plexion 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 about

16 [241]

as 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 mush-
rooms is to catch the most exhilarating breath of
the year, is to walk of a sudden into a wonder-
world. Withaneyesingle for fungi, we see them
of every shape and color and in every imaginable

[242]

place—under leaves, up trees, in cellars, every-
where 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 au-
tumn, have so many flocks of goldfinches glit-
tered 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 un-
natural 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 ;

[243]

Witch-hazel.

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.

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-fall-
ing 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.

[245]

SECOND CROPS

oy,

SECOND CROPS

I

A ibe 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 his-
toric trees ; boys with deep pockets take to fruit-
trees : but dead trees, since I developed a curios-
ity 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 nothing unrea-

[249]

sonable in it, as in—bibliomania, for instance.
I discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of
holes, and standing among acres of green, char-
acterless 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; Inever
paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was
full of years and mildew and rare errata (I some-
times buy books at a reduction for these acci-
dents) ; 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. Sooner

[250]

or 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 piay, and re-
membering more than one winter day made alive
and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not inter-
fere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose
the pretty pair of swallows as summer neighbors.

The swallows disappeared. All was quiet for

[251]

“T knew it suited
exactly.”

a 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 by the glad, excited
way he came out and darted off. He soon re-
turned 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 spar-
row? Anyhow, I feel just a mite of satisfaction
when I recall how that sparrow, with the colo-
nizing instinct of his race, dropping down upon
the pump with the notion that he “ had a duty
to the world,” dropped off that pump straight-
way, concluding that his “duty” did not relate
to that particular pump any longer. The spar-
rows 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, and

[253]

commenting vo- ciferously. He
looked into thea

possible point,

@r- hole from every
im, and was, about
) there came a
a flash of blue,

sent him spin-

to enter, when
whizz of wings,
and a slap that
ning. When the
low swooped

indignant swal-
back, like a
boomerang, the sparrow had
scuttled off to

That was a

an apple-tree.

coup de grace.
| after that; and

the five white
' wings and were
the fly-filled air
preening them-

Peace reigned
along in July
eges had found
skimming about

or counting and

RO gan i ea

selves demurely in a solemn row

upon the wire fence.
Between two pastures, easily
seen from the same study win-

“With tail up, head
dow, stands a_ cocked, very much wild apple-tree,

amazed, and com-
pathetically dis- Dee vocifer- eased and rheu-
matic, which, like one of Mr. Burroughs’s trees,
never bore very good crops of apples, but
four seasons a year is marvelously full of

[254]

animals. 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 maneuvering I
seized him by the collar, and out he came grin-
ning, 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. He

[255]

will sleep 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 IJ should find the three still sleeping on
my return. And it wasso. 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 be-
tween the uplands and meadows, has been home,
hotel, post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for
many of the wild folk about the fields.

A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very
city of hollows-loving animals. Not far away is
one such orehard with a side bordering an

[ 256]

extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse
meet is an apple-tree that has been the ancestral

“In a solemn row upon the wire fence.”

home of unnumbered generations of flying-squir-
rels. The cavity was first hollowed out by
flickers. The squirrels were interlopers. When

M7 [257 ]

the young come in
April the large opening
is stuffed withshredded
chestnut bark, leaving
barely room enough
for the parents to
squeeze through. The
sharpest-eyed hawk
awing would never
dream of waiting out-
side that insignificant
door for a meal of
squirrel.

But such _precau-
tions are not always
proof against boys. I
robbed that home one
spring of its entire
batch of babies (no
one with any love of

“Young fiying- wild things could resist
squirrels.”

the temptation to kid-
nap young flying-squirrels), and tried
to bring them up in domestic ways.

But somehow I never succeeded with
[ 258 ]

pets. 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 pil-
low. 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 look-
out 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 light

[259]

for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company
or telegraph across the fields on one of the res-
onant 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 van-
tage-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.”

[260]

IT

NATURE'S prodigality and parsimony are ex-
tremes 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 tene-
ment?

Part of the answer, at least, is found in na-
ture’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.

[261]

Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very
comforting—and marvelous too. Let any in-
different 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 wni-
flora) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value
trees according to their capacity for cavities, —
the naturalist has a right to such ascale of valua-
tion, —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, and

[ 262 ]

the 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 aswamp. 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

[263]

owls’ cave. There was design in the bulge, or
foresight in the owls’ choice; for that excres-
cence 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 some-
thing 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-o0-a! And faint
and far away came back a timid Woo-hoo, woo-a!

[264]

from her mate, safely hid across
the creek.

The weird, uncanny cry
rolled round under the
roof of limbs, and
seemed to wake a ]
ghost-owl in every Oe
hollow bole, echoing
and reéchoing 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

” “ She turned and
the great trees, needed the dived ee f etblask
help of but little imagina- Cv ce ar Oe.

tion 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 was

[ 265 ]

a raw spring day ; snow still lingered in shady
spots. But here, backed against the farther
rall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely

“Wrapped up like little Eskimos.”

a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos—
tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed
frost could never bite through.

Very green babies of all kinds are queer, un-

[ 266 ]

certain, indescribable creations—faith genera-
tors. 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—the crumbs of one night’s dinner, the
leavings of one night’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 to-
gether,” 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 miceanhour! Suppose
they hunted only two evening hours a day?

[267 ]

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 depen-
dent for food—a riddance in this short time of
not less than one hundred and twenty-five musk-
rats, 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 old

[268]

“Tt is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps.”

bridge, 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 excava-
tions made by erratic woodpeckers. This whole
clump of water-logged piles has been colonized

[269 ]

by 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 swal-
lows 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, watch-
ing the swallows in the sunset skim and flash
among the rotting timbers over the golden-flow-
ing tide.

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 liv-
ing pillar ofivy. Allislife. There are no dead,
no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made ceme-
tery 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 our burial-

[270]

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;
thenall wasstill. Again, after a moment’s pause,
I heard pick—pick—pick on the inside. At my
feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Back-
ing 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. Istole back and thumped. Instantly
a dangerous bill and a flashing eye appeared, and
High-hole, with his miner’s lamp burning red

{271 ]

“ Even the finger-
, board is a living

pillar of ivy.”
in the top of his cap
ao lunged off across the
fields in some ill humor, no doubt.

Throughout the summer there was telegraph-
ing with and without wires on that dry, resonant
pole. And meantime, if there was anything un-
intelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washing-
ton, 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.

[272]

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 erop 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 I

18 [273]

wished 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 at-
tempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee-
deep snow, and while floundering about happened
upon a large dead pine that was new tome. It
was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, ap-
parently, 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 documen-
tary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation
that there were mice in the old corpse. “The

[274]

Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he
stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly?
But I was dropping off my overcoat and order-
ing 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 cen-
ters of trees. And, priest though he was (shame
on the buman 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; the

[275]

preacher 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 de-
clared 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 de-
cayed 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.

[276]

WOOD-PUSSIES

WOOD-PUSSIES

NE real source of the joy in out-of-door
study lies in its off-time character. A
serious, bread-winning study of birds must be a
lamentable vocation ; it comes to measuring egg-
shells merely, and stuffing skins. To get its real
tonic, nature study must not be carried on with
Walden Pond laboriousness, nor with the unre-
lieved persistence of a five years aboard a Beagle.
Darwin staggered under the burden of his obser-
vations ; and Thoreau says: ‘I would not have
any one adopt my mode of living ; for before he
has fairly learned it I may have found out an-
other for myself’ —and so he did.

No; the joy in wild things is the joy of being
wild with them—vacation joy. Think of being
forced to gather ants and watch spiders for a
living! It would be quite as bad as making
poetry or prophecy one’s profession. From the
day Mohammed formally adopts Koran-making

[279]

as a business, he begins to lose his spontaneity and
originality, and grows prosy and artificial, even
plagiaristic. Nature shuns the professional.
She makes her happiest visits as short sur-
prises, delightful interruptions and diversions
in the thick of our earnest business.

You can take no vacation in the mountains?
Then snatch a few minutes before the seven-
o’clock whistle blows, or while you hoe, or be-
tween office-hours, to look and listen. The
glimpses of wild life caught at such times will be
flashes of revelation. It may be the instant pic-
ture of a gray fox leaping at a buzzard from
behind a bush as the train drives across the wide,
blank prairies of southern Kansas; or a warm
time with wasps while mowing in New Jersey ;
or the chirp of sparrows in passing King’s Chapel
Burial-ground when a cold winter twilight is
settling over Boston; or the chance meeting of
a wood-pussy on your way home from singing-
school in Maine. Whatever the picture, and
wherever obtained, coming in this unexpected
way, it is sure to be more lasting, meaningful, and
happy than volumes of the kind gathered after
long days of tramping with gun and glass.

[ 280 }

Any one can acquaint himself with the out-of-
doors, if he keeps his eyes and ears open and
lives a little while, should his lines happen to
fall even in a city. Most cities have parks, or a
river, or a zodlogical garden. A zodlogical gar-
den is not to be despised by the naturalist.
About ninety-nine hundredths of every wild
animal remains wild in spite of iron bars and
peanuts and visitors.

There is one little creature, however, that you
must live at least on the edge of the country to
know, for I never saw a zoélogical garden that
had a pit or cage for him. Yet he is nota blood-
thirsty nor a venomous beast; in fact, he is as
harmless as a rabbit and every whit as interest-
ing as a prairie-dog. Nevertheless it is of no
use to look for him in the city. You must go
out to the outskirts, to the farms and pastures, if
you would meet the wood-pussy. And even
here you must not look for him, but go to church
or visit the neighbors after dark and let the
wood-pussy look for you. It will be alto-
gether a rare and interesting experience, an
encounter to remember.

But what is a wood-pussy? That is the

[ 281 ]

question I asked myself the first night I spent in
Maine. I had occasion to go down the road
that night, and as my hostess handed me the
lantern she said warningly, “Look out for the
wood: pussies on the way.” From what I was
able to put together that night I was sure that
“wood-pussy ” was a very pretty down-east name
for what, in New Jersey, I had always called a
skunk.

I have had about a dozen unsought meetings
with this greatly dreaded, seldom-named,, but
much-talked-of creature. Most of them are
moonlight scenes—pictures of dimly lighted,
shadow-flecked paths, with a something larger
than a cat in them, standing stock-still or moving
leisurely toward me, silvered now with pale light,
now uncertain and monstrous where the shadows
lie deepest. With these memories always come
certain strange sensations of scalp-risings, chill
feelings of danger, of wild adventure, and of hair-
breadth escape.

I have never met a skunk at night that did
not demand (and receive) the whole path, even
when that path was the State highway. Dispute
the authority of a skunk? No more than I

[282]

should the best-known ranger’s in Texas when
requested to hold up my hands. The skunk is
the only animal left in the East that you will not
parley with. Try to.stare the Great Stone Face
out of countenance if you wish, but when a
skunk begins to sidle toward you, do not try to
stare him out of the path ; just sidle in the direc-
tion he sidles, and sidle as fast as you can.

Late one afternoon I was reading by the side
of a little ravine on one of the islands in Casco
Bay. The sharp, rocky walls of the cut were
shaded by scrub-pines and draped with dewberry-
vines. Presently the monotonous slop of the
surf along the shore, growing fainter as the tide
ebbed, was broken by a stir in the dry leaves at
the bottom of theravine. Ilistened. Something
was moving below me. Creeping cautiously to
the edge, I looked down, and there, in a narrow
yard between two boulders, not ten feet beneath
me, was a family of seven young skunks.

They were about three weeks old,—“‘kittens,”
the natives called them,—and seemed to be play-
ing some kind of a rough-and-tumble game to-
gether. Funny little bunches of black and white
they were, with pointed noses, beady black eyes,

[283 ]

“A family of seven young skunks.”

and very grand tails. They were jet-black, ex-
cept for white tips to their tails and a pure
white mark beginning on the top of their heads
and dividing down their sides like the letter V.

My presence was unsuspected and their play
went on. It was a sight worth the rest of the
vacation. When you find wild animals so far off
their guard as to play, do as Captain Cuttle sug-
gests—“‘make a note of it.” It is a red-letter
experience.

I doubt if there is another set of children
in all the out-of-doors so apparently incapable
of playing as a set of young skunks. You
have watched lambs stub and wabble about in
their gambols, clumsy and unsafe upon their legs
because there was so little body to hold down so
much legs. These young skunks were clumsier
than the wabbliest-legged lambkin that you ever
saw, and for just the opposite reason—there was
so little legs to hold up so much body. Such
humpty-dumpty babies! They fell over each
other, over the stones, and over their paws as if
paws were made only to be tumbled over. Their
surest, quickest way of getting anywhere was to
upset and roll to it.

[ 285 ]

It was a silent playground, as all animal play-
grounds are. The stir of the dead leaves and
now and then a faint hiss was all I could hear.
Who has ever heard any noise from untamed
animals at play? One day I came softly upon
two white-footed mice playing in the leaves
along a wood-road and squeaking joyously ; but
as a rule the children of the wilds, no matter how
exciting their games, rarely utter a word. Si-
lence is the first lesson they are taught. Or is it
now instinctive? Have not generations of bitter
life-struggle made the animals so timid and
wary that the young are born with a dread
of discovery so strong that they never shout
in their play? This softness and silence was
the only striking difference to be seen in the
play of these young skunks here in the falling
twilight, safely hidden among the rocks of the
wild ravine, and that of school-children upon a
village green.

The child is much the same, whether the par-
ticular species is four-footed or whether it goes
on two feet. Here below me one of the little
toddlers got a bump that hurt him, and it made
him just as mad asa bump ever did me. There

[ 286]

was a fuss in a twinkling. He stamped with
both fore feet, showed his teeth, humped his
back, and turned both ends of his tiny body, like
a pinched wasp, toward every one that came
near him. The others knew what that particu-
lar twist meant and kept their distance. I knew
the import of that movement, too. ‘These young
things had already learned their lesson of self-
defense. I believe that a three-weeks-old skunk
could hold his own against the world.

The dusk was deepening rapidly in the ravine ;
and I was just about to shout to see how they
would take it, when a long black snout was
thrust slowly out from beneath a piece of the
ledge, and the mother of the young skunks
appeared. Without giving them a look, she
crawled off around arock. The family followed;
and here they all fell to eating something— what,
I could not see. I tried to scare them away, but
at my commands they only switched their tails
and doubled into defensive attitudes. Finally
with some stones I drove them, like so many huge
erabs, into the den, and—horrors ! they were eat-
ing one of their own kin, a full-grown skunk, the
father of their family, for all they knew or cared,

[287 ]

that had been killed the night before in one of
the islander’s chicken-coops.

The skunk is no epicure. The matter of eat-
ing one’s husband or wife, one’s father or mother,
has never struck the skunk as out of the ordinary.
As far as my observation goes, the supreme ques-
tion with him is, Can this thing be swallowed?
Such thoughts as, What is it? How does it taste?
Will it digest? Is it good form?—no skunk since
the line began ever allowed to interfere with his
dinner. Anenviable disregard, this of dietetics !
To eat everything with a relish! If the testi-
mony of Maine farmers can be credited, this ani-
mal is absolutely omnivorous. During the winter
the skunks burrow and sleep, several of them
in the same hole. When they go in they are as
fat as September. woodchucks ; but long before
spring, the farmers tell me, the skunks grow
so lean and hungry that, turning cannibal, they
fall upon their weaker comrades and devour
them, only the strongest surviving until the
spring.

In August, along the Kennebec, I found the
skunks attacking the sugar corn. They strip the
ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw the

[288]

19

“The family followed.”

milky grain. But they do most damage among
the chickens. For downright destructiveness, a
knowing old skunk, with a nice taste for pullets
and a thorough acquaintance with the barn-yard,
discounts even Reynard. Reynard is the reputed
arch-enemy of poultry, yet there is a good deal
of the sportsman about him ; he has some sort of
honor, a sense of the decency of the game. The
skunk, on the contrary, is a poacher, a slaugh-
terer for the mere sake of it. My host, in a single
night, had fourteen hens killed by a skunk that
dug under the coop and deliberately bit them
through the neck. He is not so cunning nor so
swift as the fox, but the skunk is no stupid. He
is cool and calm and bold. He will advance
upon and capture a hen-house, and be off to his
den, while a fox is still studying his map of the
farm.

Yet, like every other predatory creature, the
skunk more than balances his debt for corn and
chickens by his credit for the destruction of
obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and
mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by
digging out the nests and eating the young. But
we forget our debt when the chickens disap-

[290]

pear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever
learn to say, when the redtail swoops among the
pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage,
when the robins rifle the cherry-trees, and when a
skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving
dinner—shall we ever learn to love and under-
stand the fitness of things out of doors enough
to say,

But then, poor beastie, thou maun live?

The skunk is a famous digger. There are gi-
gantic stories in Maine, telling how he has been
seen to escape the hound by digging himself
out of sight in the middle of an open field. I
have never tried to run down a skunk, and so
never gave one the opportunity of showing me
all he is capable of as a lightning excavator ;
but, unless all my experience is wrong, a skunk
would rather fight or run or even die than exert
himself to the extent of digging a home. . In the
majority of cases their lairs are made by other
paws than their own.

One of the skunk’s common tricks is to take
up his abode with a woodchuck. As wood-
chucks, without exception, are decent sort of

[291]

folk, they naturally object ; but the unwelcome
visitor, like Tar Baby, says nothing; simply
gives his host the privilege of remaining in
his own house if he chooses. He chooses to
go, of course, and the easy-minded interloper
settles down comfortably at home. Butit is not
long before a second wanderer chances upon this
hole, and, without thanks or leave, shares the
burrow with the first. This often goes on until
the den is crowded—until some farmer’s boy digs
out a round half-dozen.

From such a lair as headquarters the skunks
forage at night, each making off alone to a fa-
vorite haunt, and returning before daybreak for
safety and sleep. But a peculiar thing about
these lodges, as about the family den in the ra-
vine, is their freedom from the hateful musk.
One rarely detects any odor about a skunk’s
burrow. I had been within twenty feet of this
one on the island most of the afternoon and had
not known it. How are a number of skunks
living in a single burrow for weeks able to keep
it sweet, when one of them, by simply passing
through aten-acre field of blossoming clover, will
make it unendurable? It certainly speaks well

[292]

for the creature’s personal cleanliness, or else is
proof of his extreme caution against discovery.

The odor will easily carry with the wind three
miles. On the spot where the animal has been
shot, you will remember it a twelvemonth after
whenever it rains. ‘Do you want to know how
to shoot askunk on your kitchen steps and never
know it twenty-four hours after?” queried my
Kennebec authority on these beasts. I did, of
course, though I never expected a skunk to take
up his stand on my kitchen steps and compel me
to despatch him.

“Well, shoot him dead, of course ; then let him
lie there three days. All that smell will come
back to him, no matter how far off it’s gone.
It 11 all come up out of the boards, too, and go
into him, and you can carry him away by the
tail and never know a skunk ’s been on the
farm. It’s curious how a skunk can make a
smell, but never have any ; and it’s curious how
it all returns to him when he dies. Most things
are curious, ain’t they?” I agreed that they
were.

But to return to my family in the ravine.
The next morning I went back to the glen and

[293]

caught three of these young ones. They made
no resistance,—merely warned me to be careful,
—and I took them to the house. For several
days I fed them fish and fruit until they became
so tame that I could handle them without cau-
tion. But they were hopelessly dulland uninter-
esting pets, never showing the least intelligence,
curiosity, or affection. I finally turned them
loose among their native rocks, and they strayed
off as unconcerned as if they had not spent two
weeks away from home, shut up in a soap-box.
There seems to be little excuse, in this broad
land of opportunity, for any one’s going into
skunk-farming for a business ; but these animals
have a good market value, and so, in spite of a
big country and rich resources, our hands are so
eager for gold that every summer we hear of new
skunk farms. Still, why not raise skunks?
They are more easily kept than pigs or pigeons ;
they multiply rapidly ; their pelts make good (?)
marten-skins; and I see no reason why any
one having a piece of woodland with a stream
in it, and a prairie or an ocean on each side of
it, could not fence it in, stock it with skunks, and
do a profitable and withal an interesting business.

[294]

FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP

FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP

HLERE are many lovers of the out-of-doors
who court her in her robes of roses and in
her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only.
Now a lover that never sees her barefoot in the
meadow, that never hears her commonplace
chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in
her lowly, humdrum life among the toads and
snakes, has little genuine love for his mistress.
To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the
long Latin name of the ragweed, to exclaim over
the bobolink’s song, to go into ecstasies at a glori-
ous sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at
all. One who does all this sincerely, but who
stuffs his ears to the din of the spring frogs, is
in love with nature’s pretty clothes, her dainty
airs and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies
deeper down. When one has gone down to that,
then a March without peepers will be as lone-

[297]

some as a crowd without friends ; then an orchard
without the weather-wise hyla can never make
good his place with mere apples ; and the front
door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath
its step will lack something quite as needful to
its evening peace and homeness as it lacks when
the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are
gone.

We are not humble nor thoughtful out of
doors. There is too much sentiment in our pas-
sion for nature. We make colored plates and
poems to her. All honor to the poets ! especially
to those who look carefully and see deeply, like
Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But
what the common run of us needs, when we go
a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scien-
tific course in biology. How a little study in
comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal
to us the fearful and wonderful in the make-up
of all animal forms! And the fearful and won-
derful have a meaning and a beauty which we
ought to realize.

We all respond to the flowers and birds, for
they demand no mental effort. What about the
snakes and frogs? Do we shiver at them? Do

[298]

we more than barely endure them? No one can
help feeling the comfort and sympathy of the
bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears.
He comes some March morning in a flurry of
snow, or drops down out of a cheerless, soaking
sky, and assures us that he has just left the South
and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to
tell us that spring is on the way. Yet, here is
another voice, earlier than the bluebird’s often,
with the bluebird’s message, and with even more
than the bluebird’s authority; but who will
listen to a frog? A prophet is not without
honor save in hisown country. One must needs
have wings and come from a foreign land to be
received among us as a prophet of the spring.
Suppose a little frog noses his way up through
the stiff, cold mud, bumps against the ice, and
pipes, Spring! spring! spring! Has he not
as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops
down from no one knows where, with the same
message? The bluebird comes because he has
seen the spring ; Hyla comes because he has the
spring in his heart. He that receives Hyla in
the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s
reward.

[299]

“Spring! spring! spring!?”

For me there is no clearer call in all the year
than that of the hylas’ in the break-up days of
March. The sap begins to start in my roots at
the first peep. There is something in their brave
little summons, as there is in the silvery light on
the pussy-willows, that takes hold on my hope
and courage, and makes the March mud good to
tramp through. And this despite the fact that
these early hylas so aggravated my first attack
of homesickness that I thought it was to be fatal.
The second night I ever spent away from home
and my mother was passed with old Mrs. Tribbet,
who had a large orchard, behind which was a
frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins
and comfort me with apples. I was sick for
home. And those frogs! When the guineas got
quiet, how dreadful they made the long May
twilight with their shrieking, strangling, home-
sick cries! After all these years I cannot listen
to them in the evenings of early spring without
catching an echo from the back of that orchard,
without just a throb of that pain so near to
breaking my heart.

Close by, in a corner lot between the two
cross-roads of the village, lies a wretched little

[301 ]

puddle, the home of countless hylas until the
June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or
more people who live in the vicinity and who
pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am
the only one who, until recently, was sure he
had ever seen a peeper, and knew that they were
neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As
I was standing by the puddle, one May day, a
good neighbor came along and stopped with me.
The chorus was in full blast—cricket-frogs, Pick-
ering’s frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all,
the melancholy quaver of Bufo, the “hop-toad.”

“What is it that makes the dreadful noise?”
my neighbor asked, meaning, I knew, by “dread-
ful noise,” the song of the toad. I handed her
my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the
doleful bagpipe sprawling at the surface of the
water, and, after sixty years of wondering, she
saw with immense satisfaction that one part in
this familiar spring medley was taken by the
common toad.

Sixty springs are a good many springs to be
finding out the author of so well-known a sound
as this woeful strain of the serenading toad ; but
more than half a century might be spent in

[302]

catching a cricket-frog at his song. I tried to
make my neighbor see one that was clinging to
a stick in the middle of the puddle ; but her eyes

“A wretched little puddle.”

were dim. Deft hands have dressed these peep-
ers. We have heard them by the meadowful
every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of
one hand number more than the peepers we have
seen. One day I bent over three lily-pads till

[303 ]

nearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog
that was piping all the while somewhere near or
upon them. At last, in despair, I made a dash
at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper
sank to the bottom an instant before my net
struck the surface.

The entire frog family is as protectively col-
ored as this least member, the cricket-frog. They
all carry fern-seed in their pockets and go invis-
ible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and
black cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops
about over the brown leaves. I have had him
jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while
I stared hard at him. He lands with legs ex-
tended, purposely simulating the shape of the
ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only
clue for one’s baffled eyes, the moist glisten as
his body dissolves against the dead brown of the
leaf-carpet. The tree-toad, Hyla versicolor, still
more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for,
to a certain extent, he can change color to match
the bark upon which he sits. More than once, in
climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon
a tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches
of gray-green lichen upon the limbs. But there

[304]

is less of wonder in the tree-toad’s ability to
change his colors than in the way he has of
changing his clothes. He is never troubled
with the getting of a new suit; his labor comes
in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he
disposes of his cast-off clothes.

One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-
toad that was stiff and nearly dead with cold. I
put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and
found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting
with his toes turned in, looking much surprised
at his new quarters. He made himself at home,
however, and settled down comfortably, ready
for what might happen next.

The following day he climbed up the side of
the bottle and slept several hours, his tiny disked
toes holding him as easily and restfully as if he
were stretched upona feather-bed. Iturned him

upside down; but he knew nothing of it until .\

later when he awoke ; then he deliberately turned
round with his head up and went to sleep again.
At night he was wide awake, winking and blink-
ing at the lamp, and watching me through his
window of green glass.
A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the
20 [ 305 ]

bottom of his bottle in a very queer attitude.
His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent down,
his feet rolled up—his whole body huddled into
a ball less than half its normalsize. After atime
he began to kick and gasp as if in pain, rolling
and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he
was dying. He would double up into a bunch,
then kick out suddenly and stand up on his hind
legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to
swallow something. He was trying to swallow
something, and the thing had stuck on the way.
It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each corner
of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thin-
ning and disappearing most strangely along his
sides.

With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down
a little, and, as it did so, the skin along his sides
rolled up. It was his old suit! He was taking
it off for a new one ; and, instead of giving it to
the poor, he was trying to economize by eating
it. What a meal! What a way to undress!
What curious economy !

Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads
ate their skins—after shedding them ; but it was
never made plain to me that they ate them while

[306 ]

changing them—indeed, swallowed them off!
Three great gulps more and the suit—shirt,
shoes, stockings, and all—disappeared. Then
Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his
mouth, and settled back with the very air of one
who has magnificently sent away the waiter with
the change.

Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I
saw the entire operation this time. It was al-
most a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over
his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were
a shirt, then crammed it into his mouth ; kicked
it over his back next; worked out his feet and
legs; then ate it off as before. The act was ac-
complished with difficulty, and would have been
quite impossible had not Hyla found the most
extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to
the ability to speak Russian with the tongue
comes the power to skin one’s self with it. The
tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can
skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his
tongue is hung at the front end, with the free
end forked and pointing toward his stomach.
When my little captive had crammed his mouth
full of skin, he stuck this fork of a tongue into it

[ 307 ]

eae al
‘“‘He was trying to
swallow something.”

and forced it down his throat and held it down
while he kicked and squirmed out of it.

Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our
common toad, Bufo, is just as carefully clothed.
Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean,
narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of
the lawn. On one side of the house the shade
lies all day long and the grass is cool and damp.
Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two
summers. I rarely pass that way without seeing
him, well hidden in the grass. For several days
lately he had been missing, when, searching more
closely one morning, I found him sunk to the
level of his back in the line of pebbles, his spots
and the glands upon his neck so mingling with
the varied collection of gravel about him that
only a practised eye, and that sharp with expec-
tation, could have made him out.

In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh
soil sticking to him, what thing could look more
like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump of a
toad? But there is a beauty even in this un-
lovely form ; for here is perfect adaptability.

Our canons of the beautiful are false if they
do not in some way include the toad. Shall we

[308 ]

measure all the out-of-doors by the linnet’s song,
the cardinal-flower’s flame, and the hay-field’s
odor? Deeper, wider, more fundamental and
abiding than these standards, lie the intellectual
principles of plan and purpose and the intellec-
tual quality of perfect execution. We shall love
not alone with all our heart, but with all our
mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful
by the superficial standard of what happens to
please our eye, we shall see no more of the world
than we do of the new moon. Whole classes of
animals and wide regions of the earth’s surface
must, by this test, be excluded. The only way
the batrachians could possibly come in would
be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and fry-
ing them. Treated thus, they look good and
taste good, but this is all that can be said for the
entire family. Studied, however, from the single
view-point of protective coloring, or again, as
illustrating the ease with which the clumsiest
forms can be fitted to the widest variety of con-
ditions, the toads do not suffer by any compari-
son. In the light of such study, Bufo loses his
repulsiveness and comes to have a place quite as
unique as the duckbill’s, and a personality not

[309]

less fascinating than the swallow’s or the gray
squirrel’s.

However, the toad to the most of us is anything
buta poem. What, indeed, looks less lovely, less
nimble and buoyant, more chained to the earth,
than a toad? But stretch the least web between
his toes, lengthen his hind legs, and—over he
goes, the leopard-frog, champion high diver of
the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes
with the tiniest disks, and—there he swings,
Pickering’s little hyla, clinging as easily to the
under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as
a fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.

When a boy I climbed to the top of the flag-
pole on one of the State geological survey sta-
tions. The pole rose far above the surrounding
pines—the highest point for miles around. As
I clinched the top of the staff, gripping my fin-
gers into the socket for the flag-stick, I felt
something cold, and drawing myself up, found a
tree-toad asleep in the hole. Under him was a
second toad, and under the second a third—all
dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all
the region.

From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature

[ 310 ]

carries this toad-form simply by a thin web be-
tween the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips.
And mixing her greens and browns with just a
dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully
that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or
against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree,
each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed
helmet that made him invisible.

The frogs have innumerable enemies among
the water-birds, the fish, the snakes, and such
animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink.
The toads fortunately are supplied with glands
behind their heads whose secretion is hateful to
most of their foes, though it seems to be no
offense whatever to the snakes. A toad’s only
chance, when a snake is after him, lies in hiding.
I once saw a race between a toad and an adder
snake, however, in which the hopper won.

One bright May morning I was listening to the
music of the church bells, as it floated out from
the city and called softly over the fields, when
my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak
and a thud beside the log on which I sat ; some-
thing dashed over my foot; and I turned to
catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, mak-

[311]

ing hard for the brush along the fence. He
scarcely seemed to touch the ground, but
skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a
midget jack-rabbit. His case was urgent ; and
little wonder! At the opposite end of the log,
raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes
hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and
astonishment all over her face, swayed the flat,
ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently she,
too, had never seen a toad get away in any such
time before; and after staring a moment, she
turned under the log and withdrew from the
race, beaten.

Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death
to the toads. Bufo would almost as soon find
himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty
road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night.
He is not particular about the moon. All he
asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay
the dust and dampen the grass, and that the in-
sects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are
asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking
beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing
along their paths. There is no foe abroad at
night, and life, during these dark, quiet hours,

[312]

has even for a toad something like a dash of
gaiety.

In one of the large pastures not far away
stands a pump. It is shaded by an ancient
apple-tree, under which, when the days are
hottest, the cattle gather to doze and dream.
They have worn away the grass about the mossy
trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the
spot cool and muddy the summer through. Here
the toads congregate from every quarter of the
great field. I stretched myself out flat on the
grass one night and watched them in the moon-
light. There must have been fifty here that
night, hopping about over the wet place—as
grotesque a band as ever met by woods or waters.

We need no “second sight,” no pipe of Pan,
no hills of Latmos with a flock to feed, to find
ourselves back in that enchanted world of the
kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use
the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills
by morning and by moonlight. Here in the
moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins,
if ever goblins were seen in the light of our
moon.

» There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the

[313]

slightest sound, save the small pit-pat, pit-pat,
made by their hopping. There may have been
some kind of toad talk among them, but listen
never so closely, I could not catch a syllable
of it.

Where did they all come from? How did
they find their way to this wet spot over the
hills and across the acres of this wide pasture?
You could walk over the field in the daytime
and have difficulty in finding a single toad ; but
here at night, as I lay watching, every few min-
utes one would hop past me in the grass; or
coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint
light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing
leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving
slowly toward the pump to join the band of his
silent friends under the trough.

Not because there was more food at the pump,
nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here.
The one thing necessary to their existence is
water, and doubtless many of these toads had
crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get
a drink. I have known a toad to live a year
without food, and another to die in three days
for lack of water. And yet this thirsty little

[314]

beast never knows the pleasure of a real drink,
because he does not know how to drink.

I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks
at a time, never allowing them water when I
could not watch them closely, and I never saw
one drink. Instead, they would sprawl] out in
the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, and
soak themselves full, as they did here on the
damp sand about the pump.

Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and
the crickets and katydids begin to chirp, the toad
that sleeps under my front step hops out of bed,
kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look
at the weather. He seems to think as he sits
here on the gravel walk, sober and still, with
his face turned skyward. What does he think
about? Is he listening to the chorus of the
crickets, to the whippoorwills, or is it for supper
he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of
toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary
things, that he meditates. Who knows? Some
day perhaps we shall have a batrachian psychol-
ogy, and I shall understand what it is that my
door-step lodger turns over and over in his mind
as he watches the coming of the stars. All I can

[315]

do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remem-
ber one evening when he sat thinking and wink-
ing a full hour without making a single hop.

As the darkness comes down he makes off for
a night of bug-hunting. At the first peep of
dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back
for home. Home to a toad usually means any
place that offers sleep and safety for the day ;
but if undisturbed, like the one under the step,
he will return to the same spot throughout the
summer. This chosen spot may be the door-step,
the cracks between the bricks of a well, or the
dense leaves of a strawberry-bed.

In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell
between March and June that I had to water
my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morn-
ing during this dry spell that I did not find sev-
eral toads tucked away for the day in these moist
hills. These individuals had no regular home,
like the one under the step, but hunted up the
coolest, shadiest places in the soft soil and made
new beds for themselves every morning.

Their bed-making is very funny, but not
likely to meet the approval of the housewife.
Wearied with the night’s hunting, a toad comes

[316]

to the cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once
to kick himself into bed. He backs and kicks
and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can,
then screws and twists till he is worked out of
sight beneath the soil, hind end foremost. Here
he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking out,
half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder
crawls along, he simply pulls in his eyes, the
loose sand falls over them, and the snake
passes on.

When the nights begin to grow chilly and
there are threatenings of frost, the toads hunt up
winter quarters, and hide deep down in some
warm burrow—till to-morrow if the sun comes
out hot, or, it may be, not to wake until next
April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches
them, when any shelter must do, when even their
snake-fear is put aside or forgotten. ‘Misery
acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” said
Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the
storm. So might the toad say in an early frost.

The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by
dug out a bunch of toads one winter, all mixed
up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled
and squirmed together in a perfect jumble of

[317]

F) legs, heads, and tails—all in their dead winter

c sleep.. Their common enemy, the frost, had

taken them unawares, and driven them like

f friends into the crevice of the rocks, where they

would have slept together until the spring had
29 not the quarrymen unearthed them.

There is much mystery shrouding this humble

{ tion is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading
é down through literature, it is astonishing how
often the little monster has hopped into it.
There is chance for some one to make a big book
of the fable and folk-lore that has been gathering
through the ages about the toads. The stories
of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long en-

b batrachian. Somewhere in everybody’s imagina-

tombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells
they induce, of their eating fire and dropping

from the clouds, are legion.

And there seems to be some basis of fact for
all these tales. No one has yet written for us
the life-history of the toad. After having
watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly
prepared to see toads jump out of the fire, tumble
, from broken marble mantles, and fall from the
‘ 4 clouds. JI never caught them in my hat during

[318]

a shower; but I have stood on Mauricetown
Bridge, when the big drops came pelting down,
and seen those drops apparently turn into tiny
toads as they struck the planks, until the bridge
was alive with them! Perhaps they had been
hiding from the heat between the cracks of the
pianks—but there are people who believe that
they came down from the clouds.

How, again, shall I explain this bit of observa-
tion? More than six years I lived near a mud-
hole that dried up in July. I passed it almost
daily. One spring there was a strange toad-call
in the hole, a call that I had never heard any-
thing lke before—a deafening, agonizing roar,
hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that
the water was moving with spade-foot toads.
Two days later the hole was still; every toad
was gone. They disappeared; and though I
kept that little puddle under watch for several
seasons after that, I have not known a spade-foot
to appear there since.

The water was almost jellied with their spawn,
and a little later was swarming with spade-foot
tadpoles. Then it began to dry up, and some of
the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot-

[319 J

prints of the cows along the edge of the hole.
Just as fast as the water disappeared in these
foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were ab-
sorbed and legs formed, and they hopped away
—some of them a week before their brothers,
that were hatched at the same time, but who
had stayed in the middle of the pond, where the
deeper water allowed them a longer babyhood
for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pres-
sure, can nature work with this adaptable body
of the toad !

Long before the sun-baked mud began to
crack these young ones had gone—where? And
whence came their parents, and whither went
they? When will they return?

21

A BUZZARDS’ BANQUET

“Jn a state of soured silence.”

A BUZZARDS’ BANQUET

S there anything ugly out of doors? Can
the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever
find her unlovely? We know that she is su-
premely utilitarian, and we have only wonder
and worship for her prodigal and perfect econ-
omy. But does she always couple beauty with
her utility?

To her real lover nature is never tiresome nor
uninteresting ; but often she is most fascinating
when veiled. She has moods and tempers and
habits, even physical blemishes, that are fre-
quently discovered to the too pressing suitor ;
and though these may quicken his interest and
faith, they often dissipate that halo of perfection
with which first fancy clothed her. This inti-
macy, this “seeing the very pulse of the machine,”
is what spoils poets like Burroughs and Thoreau :
spoils them for poets to make them the truer
philosophers. .

[ 323 ]

Like the spots on the sun, all of nature’s other
blemishes disappear in the bright blaze of her
loveliness when viewed through a veil, whether
of shadows, or mists, or distance. This is half
the secret of the spell of the night, of the mystery
of the sea, and the enchantment of an ancient
forest. From the depths of a bed in the meadow-
grass there is perfection of motion, the very soul
of poetry, in the flight of a buzzard far up under
the blue dome of the sky ; but look at the same
bald-headed, snaky-necked creature upon afence-
stake, and you wonder how leagues into the
clouds ever hid his ugly visage from you. Mel-
rose must be seen by moonlight. The light to
see the buzzard in has never been on land or
sea, has come no hearer than the high white
clouds that drift far away in the summer sky.

From an economic point of view the buzzard
is an admirable creation. So are the robin, the
oriole, and most other birds; but these are ad-
mirable also from the esthetic point of view.
Not so the buzzard. He has the wings of
Gabriel—the wings only; for, truly, his neck
and head are Lucifer’s. If ugliness be an attri-
bute of nature, then this bird is its expression

[324]

“ Ugliness incarnate.”

incarnate. Not that he is wicked, but worse
than wicked—repulsive. Now the jackal is a
mean, sordid scamp, a miserable half-dog beast,
a degenerate that has not fallen far, since he was
never up very high. The buzzard, on the other
hand, wasabird. What he is now is unnamable.
He has fallen back below the reptiles, into a
harpy with snake’s head and bird’s body—a vul-
ture more horrid than any mythical monster.

Having once seen a turkey-buzzard feeding,
one has no difficulty in accounting for the origin
of those “angry creations of the gods” that de-
filed the banquets of King Phineus. If there is
any holiness of beauty, surely the turkey-buzzard
with clipped wing is the most unholy, the most
utterly lost soul in the world.

One bright, warm day in January—a frog-
waking day in southern New Jersey—I saw
the buzzards in unusual numbers sailing over
the pines beyond Cubby Hollow. Hoping for
a glimpse of something social in the silent, un-
emotional solitaries, I hurried over to the pines,
and passing through the wood, found a score of
the birds feasting just beyond the fence in an
open field.

[326]

Creeping up close to the scene, I quietly hid
in a big drift of leaves and corn-blades that the
winds had piled in a corner of the worm-fence,
and became an uninvited guest at the strangest,
gruesomest assemblage ever gathered—a buz-
zards’ banquet.

The silence of the nether world wrapped this
festive scene. Like ugly shades from across the
Styx came the birds, deepening the stillness with
their swishing wings. It was an unearthly pic-
ture : the bare, stub-stuck corn-field, the gloomy
pines, the silent, sullen buzzards in the yellow
winter sunlight !

The buzzards were stalking about when I ar-
rived, all deliberately fighting for a place and a
share of the spoil. They made no noise; and
this dumb semblance of battle heightened the
unearthliness of the scene. As they lunged
awkwardly about, the ends of their over-long
wings dragged the ground, and they tripped and
staggered like drunken sailors on shore. The
hobbling hitch of seals on land could not be less
graceful than the strut of these fighting buzzards.
They scuffled as long as there was a scrap to
fight for, wordless and bloodless, not even a fea-

[327]

ther being disturbed, except those that rose with
anger, as the hair rises on a dog’s back. But the
fight was terrible in its uneanniness.

‘Sailing over the pines.”

Upon the fence and in the top of a dead oak
near by others settled, and passed immediately
into a state of semi-consciousness that was almost
a stupor. Gloomy and indifferent: they sat,
hunched up with their heads between their shoul-
ders, perfectly oblivious of all mundane things.

There was no sign of recognition between the

[328 ]

birds until they dropped upon the ground and
began fighting. Leta crow join a feeding group
of its fellows, and there will be considerable caw-
ing; even a Sparrow, coming into a flock, will
create some chirping : but there was not so much
as the twist of a neck when a new buzzard joined
or left this assemblage. Each bird sat as if he
were at the center of the Sahara Desert, as
though he existed alone, with no other buzzard
on the earth.

There was no hurry, no excitement anywhere ;
even the struggle on the ground was measured
and entirely wooden. None of the creatures on
the fence showed any haste to fall to feeding.
After alighting they would go through the long
process of folding up their wings and packing
them against their sides; then they would sit
awhile as if trying to remember why they had
come here rather than gone to any other place.
Occasionally one would unfold his long wings by
sections, as you would open a jointed rule, pause
a moment with them outstretched, and, with a
few ponderous flaps, sail off into the sky without
having tasted the banquet. Then another upon
the ground, having feasted, would run a few

[329]

steps to get spring, and bounding heavily into
the air, would smite the earth with his too long
wings, and go swinging up above the trees. As
these grew small and disappeared in the distance,
others came into view, mere specks among the
clouds, descending in ever-diminishing circles
until they settled, without word or greeting, with
their fellows at the banquet.

The fence was black with them. Evidently
there is news that spreads even among these in-
communicative ghouls. Soon one settled upon
the fence-stake directly over me. To dive from
the clouds at the frightful rate of a mile a min-
ute, and, with those mighty wings, catch the
body in the invisible net of air about the top of
a fence-stake, is a feat that stops one’s breath to
see. No matter if, here within my reach, his
suit of black looked rusty ; no matter if his beak
was a sickly, milky white, his eyes big and wa-
tery, and wrinkled about his small head and
snaky neck was red, bald skin, making a visage
as ugly as could be made without human assis-
tance. In spite of all this, I looked upon him
with wonder ; for I had seen him mark this slen-
der pole from the clouds, and hurl himself toward

[ 330 ]

it as though to drive it through him, and then,
between these powerful wings, light as softly
upon the point as a sleeping babe is laid upon a
pillow from its mother’s arms.

Perhaps half a hundred now were gathered in
a writhing heap upon the ground. <A banquet
this sans toasts and cheer—the very soul of the
unconvivial. It was a strange dumb-show in
serious reality, rather than a banquet. In the
stir of their scuffling, the dry clashing of their
wings, and the noise of their tumbling and pull-
ing and pecking as they moved together, I could
hear low, serpent-like hisses. Except for a sort
of half-heard guttural croak at rare intervals,
these hisses were the only utterances that broke
the silence. So far as I know, this sibilant, ba-
trachio-reptilian language is the meager limit of
the buzzard’s faculty of vocal expression. With
croak and hiss he warns and woos. And what
tender emotion has a buzzard too subtle for ex-
pression by a croak or hiss? And if he hates,
what need has he of words—with such a coun-
tenance?

But he does not hate, for he does not love. To
be able to hate implies a soul; and the buzzard

[331]

has no soul. Laziness, gluttony, uncleanness,
have destroyed everything spiritual inhim. He
has almost lost his language, so that now, even
among his own kind, except when surprised, he
is silent. But he needs no language, for he is not
companionable ; there is no trace of companion-
ableness in his nature. He seems entirely de-
void of affection and fellow-feeling, showing no
interest whatever in any one or anything save his
stomach. The seven evil spirits of the dyspeptic
possess him, body and soul.

It must be added, however, that the buzzards
are to some extent gregarious. They often fly
together, roost together, and nest in communities.
In this latter fact some naturalists would find
evidence of sociability ; but this manner of nest-
ing is not their habit. They more generally
nest a single pair to aswamp. When they nest
in communities, it is rather because the locality
is suitable than from any desire to be together.
Yet they frequently choose the same dead tree,
or clump of trees, for a roost, which may mean
that even in a buzzard’s bosom there is something
that calls for companionship.

For a nesting-place the buzzard selects aswamp

[332]

“A banquet this sans toasts and cheer.”

or remote and heavy timber where there is slight
chance of molestation. Here, in a rough nest of
sticks and leaves, upon the ground, in a hollow
log, upon a stump, or sometimes upon the bare
earth, are laid the two long, brown-blotched eggs
that constitute the complement.

“T once found a nest,” a correspondent writes,
“in a low, thick mat of briers and grape-vines.
The female was brooding her eggs when I came
upon the nest, and the moment she caught sight
of me, instead of trying to defend her treasures
as any normal mother would have done, she
turned like a demon upon her nest, thrust her
beak into one of her eggs, and devoured it before
I could scare her off.”

This unnatural act is thus far without parallel
in my observation of bird life. But it is only
testimony of what one may read in the appear-
ance of the buzzard. The indolent habits, the
unnamable tastes, have demoralized and un-
mothered the creature.

I cannot think that the buzzard was so de-
praved back in the Beautiful Garden. The curse
of Adam is on him ; but instead of sweating like
the rest of us and so redeeming himself, he is

[334]

content to be cursed. The bird has degenerated.
You can see in his countenance that originally
he was not so vicious in taste and habit. If, when
this office of scavenger was created, the buzzard
was installed, it was because he was too lazy and
too indifferent to refuse. He may have protested
and sulked; he even continues to protest and
sulk: but he has been engaged so long in the
business now that he is utterly incapable of
earning a living in any other way.

I saw all this in the face and attitude of the
buzzard on the stake above me. He sat there as
if conscious that a scavenger’s life was beneath
a bird of his parts ; he looked mad with himself
for submitting to a trade so degrading, mad with
his position among the birds: but long ago he
recognized the difficulty of changing his place
and manner of life, and, rather than make the
effort, he sank into this state of soured silence.

That this is the way to read his personal rec-
ord and the history of his clan is clear to my
mind, because the bird is still armed with the
great talons and beak of the eagles. He was
once a hunter. Through generations of disuse
these weapons have become dulled, weakened,

[335]

and unfit for the hunt; and the buzzard, instead
of struggling for his quarry, is driven to eat a
dinner that every other predatory bird would
refuse.

Another proof of his fall is that at this late day
he has a decided preference for fresh food. This
was doubtless the unspoiled taste of his ancestors,
given with the beak and talons. He is a glutton
and a coward, else he would be an eagle still.

We associate the turkey-buzzard with carrion,
and naturally attribute his marvelous power of
finding food to his sense of smell. Let a dead
animal be dragged into the field, and in less than
an hour there will be scores of these somber crea-
tures gathered about it, when, in all the reach of
the horizon for perhaps a week past, not more
than one or two have been seen at any one time.
Did they detect an odor miles away and follow
the scent hither? Possibly. But yonder you
spy a buzzard sailing so far up that he appears
no larger than a swallow. He is descending.
Watch where he settles. Lo! he is eating the
garter-snake that you killed in the path a few
minutes ago. How did the bird from that alti-
tude discover so tiny a thing? He could not

[336]

‘Floating without effort among the clouds.”

have smelled it, for it had no odor. He saw it.
It is not by scent, but by his astonishing powers
of sight, that the buzzard finds his food.

One day I carried a freshly killed chicken into
the field, and tying a long string to it, hid my-
self near by in a corn-shock. Soon a buzzard
passing overhead began to circle about me ; and

22 [337 ]

I knew that he had discovered the chicken.
Down he came, leisurely at first, spirally wind-
ing, as though descending some aérial stairway
from the clouds, till, just above the tree-tops, he
began to swing like a great pendulum through
the air, turning his head from side to side as he
passed over the chicken, watching to see if it
were alive. He was about to settle when I pulled
thestring. Up he darted ingreatfright. Again
and again I repeated the experiment ; and each
time, at the least sign of life, the buzzard hurried
off—afraid of so inoffensive a thing as a chicken !

Quite a different story comes to me from Penn-
sylvania. My correspondent writes : ‘ Years ago,
while I was at school in De Kalb, Mississippi, all
the children had their attention called to a great
commotion in a chicken-yard next the school-
house. It appeared that a large hawk had settled
down and was doing battle witha hen. My bro-
ther left the school-house and ran to the yard,
cautiously opened the gate, slipped up behind,
and caught the ‘hawk’—which proved to be a
large and almost famished turkey-buzzard. He
kept it four or five days, when it died.” Ex-
treme hunger might drive a buzzard to at-

[ 338 J

tack a hen; but rare indeed is such boldness
nowadays.

There were by this time fully a hundred buz-
zards about me, some coming, some going, some
sitting moody and disgusted, while others picked
hungrily among the bones. They had no suspi-
cion of my presence, but I had grown tired of
them, and springing suddenly from the leaves,
I stood in their midst. There was consternation
and hissing for an instant, then a violent flapping
of wings, and away they flew in every direction.
Their heavy bodies were quickly swung above
the trees, and soon they were all sailing away
beyond the reach of straining eyes. Presently
one came over far up in the blue, floating with-
out effort among the clouds, now wheeling in
great circles, now swinging through immense
ares, sailing with stately grandeur on motionless
wings in flight that was sublime.

[339]

UP HERRING RUN

UP HERRING RUN

HE habit of migrating is not confined to
birds. To some extent it is common to all
animals that have to move about for food, whe-
ther they live in the water or upon the land.
The warm south wind that sweeps northward in
successive waves of bluebirds and violets, of
warblers and buttercups, moves with a like magic
power over the sea. It touches the ocean with
the same soft hand that wakes the flowers and
brings the birds, and as these return to upland
and meadow, the waters stir and the rivers and
streams become alive with fish. Waves of stur-
geon, shad, and herring come in from unknown
regions of the ocean, and pass up toward the
[ 343 ]

head waters of the rivers and through the
smaller streams inland to the fresh-water lakes.

Waves of herring, did I say? It is a torrent
of herring that rushes up Herring Run, a spring
freshet from the loosened sources of the life of
the sea.

This movement of the fish is mysterious; no
more so than the migration of the birds, per-
haps, but it seems more wonderful to me. Bobo-
link’s yearly round trip from Cuba to Canada
may be, and doubtless is, a longer and a more
perilous journey than that made by the herring
or by any other migrant of the sea; but Bobo-
link’s road and his reasons for traveling are not
altogether hidden. He has the cold winds and
failing food to drive him, and the older birds to
pilot him on his first journey South, and the love
of home to draw him back when the spring
comes North again. Food and weather were the
first and are still the principal causes of his un-
rest. The case of the herring seems to be differ-
ent. Neither food nor weather influences them.
They come from the deep sea to the shallow
water of the shore to find lodgment for their eggs
and protection for their young ; but what brings

[344]

* From unknown regions of the ocean.”

them from the salt into
fresh water, and what
drives these particular
herring up Herring Run
instead of up some other
stream? Will some one
please explain?

Herring Run is the nat-
ural outlet of Whitman’s
Pond. It runs down
through Weymouth about
three fourths of a mile to
Weymouth Back River,
thence to the bay and
on to the sea. It is a
crooked, fretful little
stream, not over twenty
feet wide at the most,
very stony and very shal-
low.

About a hundred years
ago, as near as the oldest
inhabitants can remem-
ber, a few men of Wey-
mouth went down to

Taunton with their ox-
“A erooked, Hetiul [ 346 J

little stream.’

teams, and caught several barrels of herring
as they came up the Taunton River to spawn.
These fish they brought alive to Weymouth
and liberated in Whitman’s Pond; and these
became the ancestors of the herring which have
been returning to Whitman’s Pond for the last
century of Aprils.

As soon as the weather warms in the spring
the herring make their appearance in the Run.
A south wind along in April is sure to fetch
them; and from the first day of their arrival,
for about a month, they continue to come, on
their way to the pond. But they may be delayed
for weeks by cold or storms. Their sensitiveness
to changes of temperature is quite as delicate as a
thermometer’s. On a favorable day—clear and
sunny with a soft south wind—they can be seen
stemming up-stream by hundreds. Suddenly
the wind shifts, blowing up cold from the east,
and long before the nicest instrument registers a
fraction of change in the temperature of the
Run, the herring have turned tail to and scur-
ried off down-stream to the salt water.

They seem to mind nothing so much as this
particular change of the wind and the cold that
follows. It may blow or cloud over, and even

[347]

rain, without affecting them, if only the storms
are from the right quarter and it stays warm.
A cold east wind always hurries them back to
deep water, where they remain until the weather
warms up again. Late in May, however, when
they must lay their eggs, they ascend the stream,
and nothing short of a four-foot dam will effec-
tually stop their progress to the pond.

They are great swimmers. It is a live fish in-
deed that makes Whitman’s Pond. There are
flying-fish and climbing-fish, fish that walk over
land and fish that burrow through the mud;
but in an obstacle race, with a swift stream to
stem, with rocks, logs, shallows, and dams to get
over, you may look for a winner in the herring.

He will get up somehow—right side up or
bottom side up, on his head or on his tail, swim-
ming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!
A herring can almost walk on his tail. I have
watched them swim up Herring Run with their
backs half out of water ; and when it became too
shallow to swim at all, they would keel over on
their sides and flop for yards across stones so
bare and dry that a mud-minnow might easily
have drowned upon them for lack of water.

[348 ]

“Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!”

They are strong, graceful, athletic fish, quite
the ideal fish type, well balanced and bewilder-
ingly bony. The herring’s bones are his Sam-
son hair—they make his strength and agility
possible ; and besides that, they are vast protec-
tion against the frying-pan.

When the herring are once possessed of the
notion that it is high time to get back to the
ancestral pond and there leave their eggs, they
are completely mastered by it. They are not to
be stopped nor turned aside. Like Mussulmans
toward Mecca they struggle on, until an impass-
able dam intervenes or the pond is reached.
They seem to feel neither hunger, fear, nor
fatigue, and, like the salmon of Columbia River,
often arrive at their spawning-grounds so bat-
tered and bruised that they die of their wounds.
They become frantic when opposed. In Herring
Run I have seen them rush at a dam four feet
high, over which tons of water were pouring, and,
by sheer force, rise over two feet in the perpen-
dicular fall before being carried back. They
would dart from the foam into the great sheet of
falling water, strike it like an arrow, rise straight
up through it, hang an instant in mid-fall, and

[350]

be hurled back, and killed often, on the rocks
beneath. Had there been volume enough of the
falling water to have allowed them a fair swim-
ming chance, J believe that they could have
climbed the dam through the perpendicular
column.

Under the dam, and a little to one side, a “rest,”
or pen, has been constructed into which the her-
ring swim and are caught. The water in this
pen is backed up by a gate a foot high. The
whole volume of the stream pours over this gate
and tears down a two-foot sluiceway with velo-
city enough to whirl along a ten-pound rock
that I dropped into the box. The herring run
this sluice and jump the gate with perfect ease.
Twelve thousand of them have leaped the gate
in a single hour; and sixty thousand of them
went over it in one day and were scooped from
the pen. The fish always keep their heads up-
stream, and will crowd into the pen until the
shallow water is packed with them. When no
more can squeeze in, a wire gate is put into the
sluice, the large gates of the dam are closed, and
the fish are ladled out with scoop-nets.

The town sold the right to a manufacturing

[351]

company to build this dam in the Run, together
with the sole right to catch the herring, on con-
dition that yearly a certain number of the fish be
carted alive to the pond in order to spawn; and
with this further condition, that every Wey-
mouth householder be allowed to buy four hun-
dred herring at twenty-five cents per hundred.

A century ago four hundred herring to a
household might not have been many herring ;
but things have changed in a hundred years.
To-day no householder, saving the keeper of the
town house, avails himself of this generous offer.
I believe that a man with four hundred pickled
herring about his premises to-day would be
mobbed. Pickled herring, scaly, shrunken,
wrinkled, discolored, and strung on a stick in
the woodshed, undoes every other rank and bil-
ious preserve that I happen to know. One can
easily credit the saying, still current in the town,
that if a native once eats a Weymouth herring
he will never after leave the place.

Usually the fish first to arrive in the spring
are males. These precede the females, or come
along with them in the early season, while the
fish to arrive last are nearly all females. The

[352]

few that are taken alive to the pond deposit
their eggs within a few days, and, after a little
stay, descend the Run, leap the dam, and again
pass out into the ocean. The eggs are placed
along the shallow edges of the pond, among the
reeds and sedges. At first they float around in
a thin, viscid slime, or jelly, which finally acts as
a glue to fasten them to the grass. Here, left
without parental care, the eggs hatch and the
fry wiggle off and begin at once to shift for
themselves.

How hard they fare! In her sacrifice of young
fish, nature seems little better than a bloody
Aztec. Ihappened to be at Bay Side, a sturgeon
fishery on the Delaware Bay, when a sturgeon
was landed whose roe weighed ninety pounds. I
took a quarter of an ounce of these eggs, counted
them, and reckoned that the entire roe numbered
3,168,000 eggs. Yet, had these eggs been laid,
not more than one to a million would have de-
veloped to maturity. So it is with the herring.
Millions of their eggs are devoured by turtles,
frogs, pickerel, and eels. Indeed, young herring
are so important a food-supply for fresh-water
fish that. the damming of streams and the indis-

28 [353]

criminate slaughter of the spawners now seri-
ously threatens certain inland fishing interests.
Many waters have been re-stocked with herring
as a source of food for more valuable fish.

August comes, and the youngsters, now about
the length of your finger, grown tired of the fresh
water and the close margins of the pond, find
their way to the Run, and follow their parents
down its rough bed to a larger life in the sea.
Here again hungry enemies await them. In
untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod,
and swordfish. Yet immense schools survive,
and thousands will escape even the fearful steam
nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring
Run again.

If only we could conjure one of them to talk!
What a deep-sea story he could tell! What
sights, what wanderings, what adventures! But
the sea keeps all her tales. We do not know
even if the herring from Whitman’s Pond live
together as an individual clan or school during
their ocean life. There are certain indications
that they do. There is not much about a Whit-
man’s Pond herring to distinguish it from a
Taunton River or a Mystic Pond herring,—the

[ 354]

“ Here again hungry enemies await them.”

Weymouth people declare they can tell the

difference with their eyes shut,—though I be-

lieve the fish themselves know one another, and

that those of each pond keep together. At least,

when the inland running begins, the schools are
[ 355 ]

united, for then no Whitman’s Pond herring is
found with a Taunton River band.

In late summer the fry go down-stream ; but
whether it is they that return the next spring,
or whether it is only the older fish, is not certain.
It is certain that no immature fish ever appear
in the spring. The naturalists are almost agreed
that the herring reach maturity in eighteen
months. In that case it will be two years before
the young appear in the Run. The Weymouth
fishermen declare, however, that they do not
seek the pond until the third spring; for they
say that when the pond was first stocked, it was
three years before any herring, of their own
accord, made their way back to spawn.

Meantime where and how do they live? All
the ocean is theirs to roam through, though even
the ocean has its belts and zones, its barriers
which the strongest swimmers cannot pass. The
herring are among the nomads of the sea; but
let them wander never so far through the deep,
you may go to the Run in April and expect to
see them. Here, over the stones and shallows
by which they found their way to the sea, they
will come struggling back. No mistake is ever

[356]

made, no variation, no question as to the path.
On their way up the river from the bay they
will pass other fresh-water streais, as large, even
larger, than Herring Run. But their instinct is
true. They never turn aside until they taste
the Run, and though myriads enter, a half-mile
farther up the river not a herring will be found.

It is easy to see how the ox might know his
owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but how a
herring, after a year of roving through the sea,
knows its way up Herring Run to the pond, is
past finding out.

bes ieraee
He Uae
ee