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SUMMER

DALLAS LORE SHARP

A SUMMER EVENING — NIGHT HERONS (page 54)

SUMMER

DALLAS LORE SHARP

AUTHOR OF " THE LAY OF THE LAND," " THE FACE OF THE FIELDS,"

" WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON," " THE FALL OF THE YEAB,"

" WINTER,7' " THE SPRING OF THE YEAR," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY

ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
flitertfbe p«^ Cambridge

S.S

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

TO
ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL

THE FRIEND AND ARTIST
OF THESE FOUR BOOKS

416188

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ix

I. THE SUMMER AFIELD 1 -

II. THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY 9

III. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER . . 18

IV. THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT . . . . . . 27 — 1*

V. FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD .... 39

VI. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER . . 46

VII. THE SEA-BIRDS' HOME • . 57 - <J

VIII. THE MOTHER MURRE 65

IX. MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS ....... 79

I
X. RIDING THE RIM ROCK 88

XI. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO Do THIS SUMMER . . 100

XII. THE" CONY" 112

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS . . 123

ILLUSTRATIONS

A SUMMER EVENING — BLACK-CROWNED NIGHT HERONS

Frontispiece

RED CLOVER AND BUMBLEBEE ........ 4

RED SALAMANDER, OLD AND YOUNG 7

NEWTS . . 7

HIPPOPOTAMUS — "!T WAS HIS GAME OF SOLITAIRE" . . 9

THE OTTER AND HIS SLIDE , . - .... 12

" FOLLOW MY LEADER " . . . ... . . . .14

BUTTERFLIES AT PLAY — " WHIRLING OVER MT. HOOD'S

POINTED PEAK " - . . . i . . . . . - . 16

RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD AND NEST 20

ORCHIDS ,22

YOUNG COWBIRD IN VIREO'S NEST 25

COYOTE — " WHAT A SHOT !" 28

ARGIOPE, THE MEADOW SPIDER . ." > v 44

CICADA — " DOG-DAYS-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z " 48

"THE BATS FLITTING AND WAVERING ABOUT" .... 49

RED-EYED VIREO — " Do YOU BELIEVE IT ? " 52

TUFTED PUFFINS 59

viii ILLUSTRATIONS

BRANDT'S CORMORANT 63

A MOTHER SPIDER WITH HER SACK OF EGGS .... 67

THE FATHER STICKLEBACK ON GUARD 68

CALIFORNIA MURRE — " WITH THREATENING BEAK WATCHED

THE TWO MEN COME ON " . . . . . . ' . .75

PETRELS — "SKIMMING THE HEAVING SEA LIKE SWALLOWS" 80
RIDING THE RIM ROCK — " NECK AND NECK WITH A BIG

WHITE STEER" ,97

SASSAFRAS . . 105

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE 106

POISON SUMACH 107

POISON IVY 108

VIRGINIA CREEPER . . 109

THE DEADLY MUSHROOMS ... 110

POKE BERRIES . . , Ill

THE CONY, OR PIKA . . 116

INTRODUCTION

IN this fourth and last volume of these outdoor
books I have taken you into the summer fields and,
shall I hope ? left you there. After all, what better
thing could I do ? And as I leave you there, let me
say one last serious word concerning the purpose
of such books as these and the large subject of
nature-study in general.

I believe that a child's interest in outdoor life is a
kind of hunger, as natural as his interest in bread
and butter. He cannot live on bread and butter
alone, but he ought not to try to live without them.
He cannot be educated on nature-study alone, but
he ought not to be educated without it. To learn to
obey and reason and feel — these are the triple ends
of education, and the greatest of these is to learn to
feel. The teacher's word for obedience ; the arithme-
tic for reasoning ; and for feeling, for the cultivation
of the imagination, for the power to respond quickly
and deeply, give the child the out-of-doors.

" If I could teach my Rugby boys but one thing,"
said Dr. Arnold, " that one thing should be poetry."
Why? Because poetry draws out the imagination,
quickens and refines and deepens the emotions. The
first great source of poetry is Nature. Give the child
poetry; and give him the inspiration of the poem,

x INTRODUCTION

the teacher of the poet — give him Nature. Make a
poet of the child, who is already a poet born.

How can so essential, so fundamental a need be-
come a mere fad of education ? A child wants first to
eat, then to play, then he wants to know — particu-
larly he wants to know the animals. And he does
know an elephant from a kangaroo long before he
knows a Lincoln from a Napoleon; just so he wants
to go to the woods long before he asks to visit a
library.

The study of the ant in the school-yard walk, the
leaves on the school-yard trees, the clouds over the
school-house roof, the sights, sounds, odors coming
in at the school-room windows, these are essential
studies for art and letters, to say nothing of life.

And this is the way serious men and women
think about it. Captain Scott, dying in the Antarc-
tic snows, wrote in his last letter to his wife : " Make
our boy interested in natural history if you can. It
is better than games. Keep him in the open air."

I hope that these four volumes may help to inter-
est you in natural history, that they may be the
means of taking you into the open air of the fields
many times the seasons through.

DALLAS LORE SHARP.

MULLEIN HILL, February, 1914.

SUMMER

CHAPTER I

THE SUMMER AFIELD

THE word summer, being interpreted, means
vacation ; and vacation, being interpreted,
means — so many things that I have not space
in this book to name them. Yet how can there be a
vacation without mountains, or seashore, or the fields,
or the forests — days out of doors ? My ideal vaca-
tion would have to be spent in the open ; and this
book, the larger part of it, is the record of one of
my summer vacations — the vacation of the summer
of 1912. That was an ideal vacation, and along with
my account of it I wish to give you some hints on
how to make the most of your summer chance- to
tramp the fields and woods.

For the real lover of nature is a tramp ; not the
kind of tramp that walks the railroad-ties and carries
his possessions in a tomato-can, but one who follows
the cow-paths to the fields, who treads the rabbit-
roads in the woods, watching the ways of the wild
things that dwell in the tree-tops, and in the deepest
burrows under ground.

Do not tell anybody, least of all yourself, that you
love the out-of-doors, unless you have your own path
to the woods, your own cross-cut to the pond, your
own particular huckleberry-patch and fishing-holes
and friendships in the fields. The winds, the rain, the
stars, the green grass, even the birds and a multi-
tude of other wild folk try to meet you more than half-
way, try to seek you out even in the heart of the great
city ; but the great out-of-doors you must seek, for it
is not in books, nor in houses, nor in cities. It is
out at the end of the car-line or just beyond the
back-yard fence, maybe — far enough away, any-
how, to make it necessary for you to put on your
tramping shoes and with your good stout stick go
forth.

You must learn to be a good tramper. You thought
you learned how to walk soon after you got out of
the cradle, and perhaps you did, but most persons
only know how to hobble when they get into the un-
paved paths of the woods.

With stout, well-fitting shoes, broad in the toe and
heel; light, stout clothes that will not catch the
briers, good bird-glasses, and a bite of lunch against
the noon, swing out on your legs ; breathe to the
bottom of your lungs ; balance your body on your
hips, not on your collar-bones, and, going leisurely,
but not slowly (for crawling is deadly dull), do ten
miles up a mountain-side or through the brush ; and
if at the end you feel like eating up ten miles more,

THE SUMMER AFIELD 3

then you may know that you can walk, can tramp,
and are in good shape for the summer.

In your tramping-kit you need : a pocket-knife ;
some string ; a pair of field-glasses ; a botany-can or
fish-basket on your back; and perhaps a notebook.
This is all and more than you need for every tramp.
To these things might be added a light camera. It
depends upon what you go for. I have been afield
all my life and have never owned or used a cam-
era. But there are a good many things that I have
never done. A camera may add a world of interest
to your summer, so if you find use for a camera,
don't fail to make one a part of your tramping outfit.

After all, what you carry on your back or on your
feet or in your hands does not matter half so much
as what you carry in your head and heart — your
eye, and spirit, and purpose. For instance, when
you go into the fields have some purpose in your
going besides the indefinite desire to get out of
doors.

If you long for the wide sky and the wide winds
and the wide slopes of green, then that is a real and a
definite desire. You want to get out, OUT, OUT, be-
cause you have been shut in. Very good ; for you
will get what you wish, what you go out to get.
The point is this: always go out for something.
Never yawn and slouch out to the woods as you
might to the corner grocery store, because you don't
know how else to kill time.

4 SUMMER

Go with some purpose ; because you wish to visit
some particular spot, see some bird, find some flower,
catch some — fish ! Anything that takes you into the
open is good — ploughing, hoeing, chopping, fish-
ing, berrying, botanizing, tramping. The aimless

person any-
where is a
failure, and
he is sure to
get lost in the woods!

It is a good plan to go
frequently over the same fields,
taking the beaten path, watch-
ing for the familiar things,
until you come to know your
haunt as thoroughly as the
fox or the rabbit knows his.
Don't be afraid of using up
a particular spot. The more
often you visit a place the
richer you will find it to be in
interest for you.

Now, do not limit your in-
terest and curiosity to any
one kind of life or to any set of things out of doors.
Do not let your likes or your prejudices interfere
with your seeing the whole out-of-doors with all its
manifold life, for it is all interrelated, all related to
you, all of interest and meaning. The clover blossom

THE SUMMER AFIELD 5

and the bumblebee that carries the fertilizing pollen
are related : the bumblebee and the mouse that eats
up its grubs are related; and every one knows that
mice and cats are related ; thus the clover, the bumble-
bee, the mouse, the cat, and, finally, the farmer, are
all so interrelated that if the farmer keeps a cat,
the cat will catch the mice, the mice cannot eat the
young bumblebees, the bumblebees can fertilize the
clover, and the clover can make seed. So if the farmer
wants clover seed to sow down a new field with, he
must keep a cat.

I think it is well for you to have some one thing
in which you are particularly interested. It may be
flowers or birds or shells or minerals. But as the
whole is greater than any of its parts, so a love and
knowledge of nature, of the earth and the sky over
your head and under your feet, with all that lives
with you there, is more than a knowledge of its
birds or trees or reptiles.

But be on your guard against the purpose to spread
yourselves over too much. Don't be thin and super-
ficial. Don't be satisfied with learning the long Latin
names of things while never watching the ways of
the things that have the names. As they sat on the
porch, so the story goes, the school trustee called
attention to a familiar little orange-colored bug,
with black spots on his back, that was crawling on
the floor.

"I s'pose you know what that is?" he said.

6 SUMMER

"Yes/' replied the applicant, with conviction;
"that is a Coccinella septempunctata"

"Young man/' was the rejoinder, "a feller as
don't know a ladybug when he sees it can't get my
vote for teacher in this deestrict."

The "trustee "'was right; for what is the use of
knowing that the little ladybug is Coc-ci-nel'-la sep-
tem-punc-ta'-ta when you do not know that she is a
ladybug, and that you ought to say to her: —

" Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home ;
Your house is on fire, your children alone " ?

Let us say, now, that you are spending your va-
cation in the edge of the country within twenty miles
of a great city such as Boston. That might bring
you out at Hingham, where I am spending mine. In
such an ordinary place (if any place is ordinary,)
what might you expect to see and watch during the
summer?

Sixty species of birds, to begin with ! They will keep
you busy all summer. The wild animals, beasts, that
you will find depend so very much upon your locality
— woods, waters, rocks, etc. — that it is hard to say
how many they will be. Here in my woods you might
come upon three or four species of mice, three species
of squirrels, the mink, the muskrat, the weasel, the
mole, the shrew, the fox, the skunk, the rabbit, and
even a wild deer. Of reptiles and amphibians you
would see several more species than of fur-bearing
animals, — six snakes, four common turtles, two sala-

THE SUMMER AFIELD 7

manders, frogs, toads, newts, — a wonderfully inter-
esting group, with a real live rattler among them if
you should go over to the Blue
Hills, fifteen miles away.

You will go many times into
the fields before you can make
of the reptiles your friends and
neighbors. But by and
by you will watch them
and note their ways with
as much interest as you
watch the other wild
folk about you. It is a <
pretty shallow lover of RED SALAMANDERS, OLD AND YOUNG
nature who jumps upon

a little snake with both feet, or who shivers when a lit-
tle salamander drops out of the leaf-mould at his feet.

And what shall I say of the
fishes ? There are a dozen of
them in the stream and ponds
within the compass of rny
haunt. They are a fascina-
ting family, and one very lit-
tle watched by the ordinary
tramper. But you are not or-
dinary. Quiet and patience and
much putting together of scraps of observations will
be necessary if you are to get at the whole story of
any fish's life. The story will be worth it, however.

NEWTS

8 SUMMER

No, I shall not even try to number the insects —
the butterflies, beetles, moths, wasps, bees, bugs,
ticks, mites, and such small "deer" as you will find
in the round of your summer's tramp. Nor shall
I try to name the flowers and trees, the ferns and
mosses. It is with the common things that you ought
now to become familiar, and one summer is all too
short for the things you ought to see and hear and
do in your vacation out of doors.

CHAPTER II

THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY

THE watcher of wild animals never gets used to
the sight of their mirthless sport. In all other
respects animal play is entirely human.
A great deal of human play is serious — desperately
serious on the football-field, and at the card-table,
as when a lonely player is trying to kill time with
solitaire.

I have watched a great ungainly hippopotamus
for hours trying to do the same solemn thing by cuff-
ing a croquet-ball back and forth from one end of

his cage to the other. His keepers told me that with-
out the plaything the poor caged giant would fret and
worry himself to death. It was his game of solitaire.

10 SUMMER

In all their games of rivalry the animals are seri-
ous as humans, and, forgetting the fun, often fall to
fighting — a sad case, indeed. But brutes are brutes.
We cannot expect anything better of the animals.
Only this morning the whole flock of chickens in
the hen-yard started suddenly on the wild flap to see
which would beat to the back fence and wound up on
the " line " in a free fight, two of the cockerels tearing
the feathers from each other in a desperate set-to.

You have seen puppies fall out in the same human
fashion, and kittens also, and older folk as well. I
have seen a game of wood-tag among friendly gray
squirrels come to a finish in a fight. As the crows
pass over during the winter afternoon, you will notice
their play — racing each other through the air, diving,
swooping, cawing in their fun, when suddenly some
one's temper snaps, and there is a mix-up in the air.

They can get angry, but they cannot laugh. I
once saw what I thought was a twinkle of merri-
ment, however, in an elephant's eye. It was at the
circus several years ago. The keeper had just set down
for one of the elephants a bucket of water which a per-
spiring youth had brought in. The big beast sucked
it quietly up, — the whole of it, — swung gently around
as if to thank the perspiring boy, then soused him,
the whole bucketful! Everybody roared, and one of
the other elephants joined in with trumpetings, so
huge and jolly was the joke.

The elephant who played the trick looked solemn

THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY 11

enough, except for a twitch at the lips and a glint in
the eye. There is something of a smile about every
elephant's lips, to be sure, and fun is so contagious
that one should hesitate to say that he saw an ele-
phant laugh. But if that elephant did n't laugh, it
was not his fault.

From the elephant to the inf usorian, the microscopic
animal of a single cell known as the paramcecium, is
a far cry — to the extreme opposite end of the ani-
mal kingdom, worlds apart. Yet I have seen Para-
mcecium caudatum at play in a drop of water
under a compound microscope, as I have seen ele-
phants at play in their big bath-tub at the zoological
gardens.

Place a drop of stagnant water under your micro-
scope and watch these atoms of life for yourself. In-
visible to the naked eye, they are easily followed on
the slide as they skate and whirl and chase one another
to the boundaries of their playground and back again,
first one of them "it," then another. They stop to
eat, they slow up to divide their single-celled bodies
into two cells, the two cells now two living creatures
where a moment before they were but one, both of
them swimming off immediately to feed and multiply
and play.

Play seems to be as natural and as necessary to
the wild animals as it is to human beings. Like us
the animals play hardest while young, but as some
human children never outgrow their youth and love

SUMMER

of play, so there are old animals that never grow
too fat nor too stiff nor too stupid to play.

The condition of
the body has a great
deal to do with the
state of the spirit. J:-
The sleek, lithe otter
could not possibly
grow fat. He keeps in
trim because he cannot
help it, perhaps, but however
that may be, he is a very boy
for play, and even goes so
himself a slide or chute
diving down it into the
in one of the maga-
otter in the New York
that swam and
stone balanced on

Building a
children used to
made for us
slanting cellar-

far as to build
for the fun of
water. A writer
zines tells of an
Zoological Park
dived with a round
his head.

slide is more than we
do, for we had ready-
grandfather's two big
doors, down which we slid
and slid and slid till the
wood was scoured
white and slippery
with the sliding. The
otter loves to slide.
Up he climbs on the

THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY 13

bank, then down he goes — splash — into the stream.
Up he climbs and down he goes — time after time,
day after day. There is nothing like a slide, unless
it is a cellar-door.

How much of a necessity to the otter is his play,
one would like to know — what he would give up
for it, and how he would do deprived of it. In the
case of Pups, my neighbor's beautiful young col-
lie, play seems more needful than food. There are
no children, no one, to play with him there, so
that the sight of my small boys sets him almost
frantic.

His efforts to induce a hen or a rooster to play
with him are pathetic. The hen cannot understand.
She has n't a particle of play in her anyhow, but
Pups cannot get that through his head. He runs
rapidly around her, drops on all fours flat, swings
his tail, cocks his ears, looks appealingly and barks
a few little cackle-barks, as nearly hen-like as he can
bark them, then dashes off and whirls back — while
the hen picks up another bug. She never sees Pups.
The old white coon cat is better; but she is usually
up the miff-tree. Pups steps on her, knocks her over,
or otherwise offends, especially when he tags her out
into the fields and spoils her hunting. The Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ought to send
some child or puppy out to play with Pups of a
Saturday.

I doubt if among the lower forms of animals play

SUMMER

holds any such prominent place as with the dog and
the keen-witted, intelligent otter. To catch these
lower animals at play is a rare experience. One of
our naturalists describes the game of "follow my
leader, " as he watched it played by a school of min-
nows— a most unusual record, but not at all hard to
believe, for I saw recently, from the bridge in the
Boston Public Garden, a school of goldfish playing
at something very much like it.

This naturalist was lying stretched out upon an old
bridge, watching the minnows through a large crack
between the planks, when he saw one leap out of the
water over a small twig floating at the surface. In-
stantly another minnow broke the water and flipped

over the twig, followed by another and another, the
whole school, as so many sheep, or so many children,
following the leader over the twig.

The love of play seems to be one of the elemental
needs of all life above the plants, and the games of

THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY 15

us human children seem to have been played before
the dry land was, when there were only water babies
in the world, for certainly the fish never learned " fol-
low my leader" from us. Nor did my young bees
learn from us their game of "prisoners' base" which
they play almost every summer noontime in front of
the hives. And what is the game the flies play about
the cord of the drop-light in the centre of the kitchen
ceiling?

One of the most interesting animal games that I
ever saw was played by a flock of butterflies on the
very top of Mount Hood, whose pointed snow-piled
peak looks down from the clouds over the whole vast
State of Oregon.

Mount Hood is an ancient volcano, eleven thou-
sand two hundred twenty-five feet high. Some seven
thousand feet or more up, we came to " Tie-up
Rock " — the place on the climb where the glacier
snows lay before us and we were tied up to one an-
other and all of us fastened by rope to the guide.

From this point to the peak, it was sheer deep
snow. For the last eighteen hundred feet we clung to
a rope that was anchored on the edge of the crater
at the summit, and cut oar steps as we climbed.

Once we had gained the peak, we lay down behind
a pile of sulphurous rock, out of the way of the cut-
ting wind, and watched the steam float up from the
crater, with the widest world in view that I ever
turned my eyes upon.

SUMMER

The draft pulled hard about the openings among
the rock-piles, but hardest up a flue, or chimney, that

was left in the edge of the
crater-rim where parts of
the rock had
fallen away.

As we lay at
the side of this
flue, we soon dis-
covered that but-
terflies were hov-
ering about us;
no, not hovering,
but flying swiftly
up between the
rocks from some-
where down the
flue. I could
scarcely believe my
eyes. What could
any living thing be
doing here? — and
of all things, butter-
flies ? This was three or four
thousand feet above the last ves-
tige of vegetation, a mere point
of volcanic rock (the jagged edge-piece of an old
crater) wrapped in eternal ice and snow, with sul-
phurous gases pouring over it, and across it blowing

THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY 17

a wind that would freeze as soon as the sun was out
of the sky.

But here were real butterflies. I caught two or
three of them and found them to be vanessas ( Van-
essa calif ornica], a close relative of our mourning-
cloak butterfly. They were all of one species, appar-
ently, but what were they doing here ?

Scrambling to the top of the piece of rock behind
which I had been resting, I saw that the peak was
alive with butterflies, and that they were flying —
over my head, out down over the crater, and out of
sight behind the peak, whence they reappeared, whirl-
ing up the flue past me on the wings of the draft that
pulled hard through it, to sail down over the crater
again, and again to be caught by the draft and pulled
up the flue, to their evident delight, up and out over
the peak, where they could again take wings, as boys
take their sleds, and so down again for the fierce up-
ward draft that bore them whirling over Mount
Hood's pointed peak.

Here they were, thousands of feet above the snow-
line, where there was no sign of vegetation, where
the heavy vapors made the air to smell, where the
very next day a wild snowstorm wrapped its frozen
folds about the peak — here they were, butterflies,
playing, a host of them, like so many schoolboys on
the first coasting snow !

CHAPTER III

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER

THE dawn, the breaking dawn ! I know noth-
ing lovelier, nothing fresher, nothing newer,
purer, sweeter than a summer dawn. I am
just back from one — from the woods and cornfields
wet with dew, the meadows and streams white with
mist, and all the world of paths and fences running
off into luring spaces of wavering, lifting, beckon-
ing horizons where shrouded forms were moving and
hidden voices calling. By noontime the buzz-saw of
the cicada will be ripping the dried old stick of this
August day into splinters and sawdust. No one could
imagine that this midsummer noon at 90° in the
shade could have had so May like a beginning.

I said in "The Spring of the Year" that you
should see a farmer ploughing, then a few weeks later
the field of sprouting corn. Now in July or August
you must see that field in silk and tassel, blade and
stalk standing high over your head.

You might catch the same sight of wealth in a cot-
ton-field, if cotton is " king" in your section; or in a

THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER 19

vast wheat-field, if wheat is your king ; or in a potato-
field if you live in Maine — but no, not in a potato-
field. It is all underground in a potato-field. Nor
can cotton in the South, or wheat in the Northwest,
give you quite the depth and the ranked and ordered
wealth of long, straight lines of tall corn.

Then to hear a summer rain sweep down upon it
and the summer wind run swiftly through it ! You
must see a great field of standing corn.

Ill

Keep out from under all trees, stand away from
all tall poles, but get somewhere in the open and
watch a blue-black thunderstorm come up. It is one
of the wonders of summer, one of the shows of the
sky, a thing of terrible beauty that I must confess
I cannot look at without dread and a feeling of awe
that rests like a load upon me.

" All heaven and earth are still — though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep : —

The sky is changed ! — and such a change ! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,

Yet lovely in your strength

Far along,

From peak to peak the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder ! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps who call to her aloud."

SUMMER

But there are many smaller, individual things to
be seen this summer, and among them, notable for
many reasons, is a hummingbird's nest. " When
completed it is scarcely larger than an English wal-
nut and is usually sad-
dled on a small hori-
zontal limb of a tree or
shrub frequently many
iwnspTesEsaa^ ^eefc fr°m tne ground,
it It is composed almost

n^^>:'-r-; — ''^P^^I^P? i^<&*^ . - i t>

entirely or
*-^ soft plant
fibers, frag-
ments of spi-
ders' webs
sometimes
being used

to hold them in shape. The sides are thickly studded
with bits of lichen, and practiced, indeed, is the eye
of the man who can distinguish it from a knot on
the limb."

This is the smallest of birds' nests and quite as
rare and difficult to find as any single thing that
you can go out to look for. You will stumble upon
one now and then ; but not many in a whole life-
time. Let it be a test of your keen eye — this find-
ing of a little hummer's nest with its two white eggs

THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER 21

the size of small pea-beans or its two tiny young
that are up and off on their marvelous wings within
three weeks from the time the eggs are laid !

Have you read Mr. William L. Finley's story of
the California condor's nest ? The hummingbird
young is oat and gone within three weeks ; but the
condor young is still in the care of its watchful par-
ents three months after it is hatched. You ought to
watch the slow, guarded youth of one of the larger
hawks or owls during the summer. Such birds
build very early, — before the snow is gone some-
times, — but they are to be seen feeding their young
far into the summer. The wide variety in bird-life,
both in size and habits, will be made very plain to
you if you will watch the nests of two such birds as
the hummer and the vulture or the eagle.

This is the season of flowers. But what among
them should you especially see? Some time ago one
of the school-teachers near me brought in a list
of a dozen species of wild orchids, gathered out of
the meadows, bogs, and woods about the neighbor-
hood. Can you do as well?

Suppose, then, that you try to find as many. They
were the pink lady's-slipper ; the yellow lady's-slip
per; the yellow f ringed-orchis (Habenaria ciliaris) ;

SUMMER

the ladies'-tresses, two species ; the rattlesnake-plan-
tain ; arethusa, or Indian pink ; calopogon, or grass

pink ; pogonia, or
snake-mouth (ophi-
oglossoides and ver-
ticillata) ; the ragged
f ringed-orchis; and
the showy or spring
orchis. Arethusa and
the showy orchis
really belong to the
spring but the others
will be task enough
for you, and one that
will give point and
purpose to your wan-
afield this

derings
summer.

VII

There are a certain
number of moths and
butterflies that you
should see and know
also. If one could
come to know, say,
one h undred and fifty
flowers and the moths
and butterflies that visit them (for the flower and its

ORCHIDS

1. Arelhusa bulbosa

2. Pogonia ophioglossoides

3. Pink Lady's-Slipper

4. Yellow Lady's-Slipper

5. Showy Orchis

THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER 23

insect pollen-carrier are to be thought of and studied
together), one would have an excellent speaking
acquaintance with the blossoming out-of-doors.

Now, among the butterflies you ought to know
the mourning-cloak, or vanessa; the big red-brown
milkweed butterfly ; the big yellow tiger swallow-
tail ; the small yellow cabbage butterfly; the painted
beauty ; the red admiral ; the common f ritillary ; the
common wood-nymph — but I have named enough
for this summer, in spite of the fact that 1 have not
named the green-clouded or Troilus butterfly, and
Asterias, the black swallowtail, and the red-spotted
purple, and the viceroy.

Among the moths to see are the splendid Pro-
methea, Cecropia, bullseye, Polyphemus, and Luna,
to say nothing of the hummingbird moth, and the
sphinx, or hawk, moths, especially the large one that
feeds as a caterpillar upon the tomato-vines, Ma-cros-
i-la quin-que-mac-u-la'-ta.

VIII

There is a like list of interesting beetles and other
insects, that play a large part in even your affairs,
which you ought to watch during the summer : the
honeybee, the big droning golden bumblebee, the
large white-faced hornet that builds the paper nests
in the bushes and trees, the gall-flies, the ichneumon-
flies, the burying beetle, the tumble-bug beetle, the
dragon-fly, the caddis-fly — these are only a few of

24 SUMMER

a whole world of insect folk about you, whose habits
and life-histories are of utmost importance and of
tremendous interest. You will certainly believe it if
you will read the Peckhams' book called " Wasps,
Social and Solitary," or the beautiful and fascinating
insect stories by the great French entomologist
Fabre. Get also " Every-day Butterflies," by Scud-
der ; and " Moths and Butterflies," by Miss Dicker-
son, and " Insect Life," by Kellogg.

You see I cannot stop with this list of the things.
That is the trouble with summer — there is too much
of it while it lasts, too much variety and abundance
of life. One is simply compelled to limit one's self
to some particular study, and to pick up mere scraps
from other fields.

But, to come back to the larger things of the out-
of-doors, you should see the mist some summer morn-
ing very early or some summer evening, sheeted
and still over a winding stream or pond, especially
in the evening when the sun has gone down behind
the hill, the flame has faded from the sky, and over
the rim of the circling slopes pours the soft, cool
twilight, with a breeze as soft and cool, and a spirit
that is prayer. For then from out the deep shadows
of the wooded shore, out over the pond, a thin wrhite
veil will come creeping — the mist, the breath of the
sleeping water, the soul of the pond !

THINGS TO SEE THIS SUMMER

You should see it rain down little toads this sum-
mer— if you can! There are persons who claim to
have seen it. But I never have. I have stood on
Maurice River Bridge, however, and apparently had
them pelting down upon my feet as the big drops of
the July shower struck the planks — myriads of tiny
toads covering the bridge across the river ! Did they
rain down? No, they had been hiding in the dirt
between the planks and hopped out to meet the sweet
rain and to soak their little thirsty skins full.

You should see a cowbird's young in a vireo's nest
and the efforts of the poor deceived parents to sat-
isfy its insatiable ap-
petite at the expense
of their own young
ones' lives ! Such a
sight will set you to
thinking.

XII

I shall not tell you
what else you should see, for the whole book could
be filled with this one chapter, and then you might
lose your forest in your trees. The individual tree
is good to look at — the mighty wide-limbed hem-

26 SUMMER

lock or pine; but so is a whole dark, solemn forest
of hemlocks and pines good to look at. Let us come
to the out-of-doors with our study of the separate,
individual plant or thing ; but let us go on to Nature,
and not stop with the individual thing.

CHAPTER IV

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT

"E have stopped the plumers," said the
game- warden, "and we are holding the
market-hunters to something like de-
cency ; but there 's a pot-hunter yonder on Pelican
Point that I've got to do up or lose my job."

Pelican Point was the end of a long, narrow pe-
ninsula that ran out into the lake, from the oppo-
site shore, twelve miles across from us. We were
in the Klamath Lake Reservation in southern Ore-
gon, one of the greatest wild-bird preserves in the
world.

Over the point, as we drew near, the big white
pelicans were winging, and among them, as our boat
came up to the rocks, rose a colony of black cormo-
rants. The peninsula is chiefly of- volcanic origin,
composed of crumbling rock and lava, and ends in
well-stratified cliffs at the point. Patches of scraggly
sagebrush grew here and there, and out near the
cliffs on the sloping lava sides was a field of golden
California poppies.

The gray, dusty ridge in the hot sun, with cliff
swallows and cormorants and the great pouched pel-

28 SUMMER

leans as inhabitants, seemed the last place that a
pot-hunter would frequent. What could a pot-hunter
find here? I wondered.

We were pulling the boat up on the sand at a
narrow neck in the peninsula, when the warden

touched my arm. " Up there near the sky-line among
the sage! What a shot!"

I was some seconds in making out the head and
shoulders of a coyote that was watching us from
the top of the ridge.

"The rascal knows/' went on the warden, "I
have no gun; he can smell a gun clear across the,
lake. I have tried for three years to get that fellow.
He's the terror of the whole region, and especially
of the Point; if I don't get him soon, he'll clean
out the pelican colony.

"Why don't I shoot him? Poison him? Trap
him? I have offered fifty dollars for his hide. Why
don't I? I'll show you. Now you watch the critter
as I lead you up the slope toward him."

We had not taken a dozen steps when I found
myself staring hard at the place where the coyote
had been, but not at the coyote, for he was gone.

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT 29

He had vanished before my eyes. I had not seen him
move, although I had been watching him steadily.

"Queer, isn't it?" said the warden. "It's not
his particular dodge, for every old coyote that has
been hunted learns to work it; but I never knew
one that had it down so fine as this sinner. There's
next to nothing here for him to skulk behind. Why,
he has given my dog the slip right here on the bare
rock! But I'll fix him yet,"

I did not have to be persuaded to stay overnight
with the warden for the coyote-hunt the next day.
The warden, I found, had fallen in with a Mr.
Harris, a homesteader, who had been something of
a professional coyote-hunter. Harris had just arrived
in southern Oregon, and had brought with him his

O 7 O

dogs, a long, graceful greyhound, and his fighting
mate, a powerful Russian wolfhound; both were
crack coyote dogs from down Saskatchewan. He
had accepted the warden's ofiPer of fifty dollars for
the hide of the coyote of Pelican Point, and was now
on his way round the lake.

The outfit appeared late the next day, and con-
sisted of the two dogs, a horse and buckboard, and
a big, empty dry-goods box.

I had hunted possums in the gum swamps of the
South with a stick and a gunny-sack, but this rig,
on the rocky, roadless shores of the lake — a dry-
goods box for coyotes! — beat any hunting combina-
tion I had ever seen.

30 SUMMER

We had pitched the tent on the south shore of
the point where the peninsula joined the mainland,
and were finishing our supper, when not far from
us, back on shore, we heard the doleful yowl of the
coyote.

We were on our feet in an instant.

"There he is," said the warden, "lonesome for a
little play with your dogs, Mr. Harris."

There was still an hour and a half of good light,
and Harris untied his dogs. I had never seen the
coyote hunted, and was greatly interested. Harris,
with his dogs close in hand, led us directly away
from where we had heard the coyote bark. Then we
stopped and sat down. At my look of inquiry, Har-
ris smiled.

"Oh, no, we're not after coyotes to-night, % not
that coyote, anyhow," he said. "You know a coyote
is made up of equal parts of curiosity, cowardice,
and craft ; and it 's a long hunt unless you can get
a lead on his curiosity. We are not out for him.
He sees that. In fact, we'll amble back now — but
we '11 manage to get up along the crest of that little
ridge where he is sitting, so that the dogs can fol-
low him whichever way he runs. You hunt coyotes
wholly by sight, you know."

The little trick worked perfectly. The coyote,
curious to see what we were doing, had risen to his
feet, and stood, plainly outlined against the sky. He
was entirely unsuspecting, and as we approached,

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT 31

only edged and backed, more apparently to get a
sight of the dogs behind us than through any fear.

Suddenly Harris stepped from before the dogs,
pointed them toward the coyote, and slipped their
leashes. The hounds were trained to the work. There
was just an instant's pause, a quick yelp, then two
doubling, reaching forms ahead of us, with a little
line of dust between.

The coyote saw them coming, and started to run,
not hurriedly, however, for he had had many a run
before. He was not afraid, and kept looking behind
to see what manner of dog was after him this time.

But he was not long in making up his mind that
this was an entirely new kind, for in less than three
minutes the hounds had halved the distance that
separated him from them. At first, the big wolf-
hound was in the lead. Then, as if it had taken him
till this time to find all four of his long legs, the grey-
hound pulled himself together, and in a burst of speed
that was astonishing, passed his heavier companion.

We raced along the ridge to see the finish. But
the coyote ahead of the dogs was no novice. He
knew the game perfectly. He saw the gap closing
behind him. Had he been young, he would have
been seized by fear; would have darted right and
left, mouthing and snapping in abject terror. In-
stead of that, he dug his nails into the shore, and
with all his wits about him, sped for the desert. The
greyhound was close behind him.

32 SUMMER

I held my breath. Harris, I think, would have
taken his fifty dollars then and there ! And the warden
would have handed it to him, despite his past experi-
ence with the beast ; but suddenly the coyote headed
straight off for a low manzanita bush that stood up
amid the scraggly sagebrush back from the shore.

The hunt was now going directly from us, with the
dust and the wolfhound behind, following the line in
front. The gap between the greyhound and the coy-
ote seemed to have closed, and when the hound took
the low manzanita with a bound that was half-somer-
sault, Harris exclaimed, " He's nailed him ! " and we
ran ahead to see the wolfhound complete the job.

The wolfhound, however, kept right on across the
desert; the greyhound lagged uncertainly far behind;
in the lead, ahead of the big grizzled wolfhound,
bobbed the form of a fleeing jack-rabbit !

The look of astonishment and then of disgust on
Harris's face was amusing to see. The warden may
have been disappointed, but he did not take any
pains to repress a chuckle.

Harris said nothing. He was searching the stunted
sagebrush off to the left of us. We followed his eyes,
and he and the warden, both experienced plainsmen,
picked out the skulking, shadowy shape of the coy-
ote, as the creature, with belly to the ground, slunk
off out of sight.

It was too late for any further attempt that night.

"An old stager, sure," Harris commented, as we

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT 33

returned to camp. "Knows a trick or two for every
one of mine. But I '11 fix him."

Nothing was seen of the coyote all the early part
of the next day, and no effort was made to find him ;
but toward the middle of the afternoon, Harris
hitched up the bronco, and, unpacking a flat package
in the bottom of the buckboard, showed us a large
glass window, which he fitted as a door into one end
of the big dry-goods box. Then into the glass-ended
box he put the two hounds.

"Now, gentlemen," he said, "I'm going to invite
you to take a sight-seeing trip on this auto out into
the sagebrush. Incidentally, if you chance to see a
coyote, don't mention it."

If all the coyotes, jack-rabbits, gophers, and peli-
cans of the territory had come out to see us thump
and bump over the dry, uneven desert, I should not
have been surprised; and so, on coming back to camp,
it was with no wonder at all that I discovered the
coyote, out on the point, staring at us from across
the neck of the peninsula. Nothing like this had
happened on his side of the lake before.

Harris saw him instantly, and was quick to recog-
nize our advantage. We had the coyote cornered —
out on the long, narrow peninsula, where the dogs
must run him down. The wily creature had so far
forgotten himself as to get caught between us and
the ridge alongshore, and, partly in curiosity, had
kept running ahead and stopping to look at us, until

34 SUMMER

now he was past the place where he could skulk
back without our seeing him, into the open plain.

Even yet all depended upon our getting so close
to him that the dogs could keep him constantly in
sight. The crumbling ledges at the end of the point
were full of holes and crevices into which the beast
could dodge.

We were not close enough, however. With one
of us watching the coyote, should he happen to run,
Harris turned the bronco slowly round until the
glass end of the box in the back of the buckboard
was pointing directly at the creature. There was a
scramble of feet inside the box. The dogs had sighted
the beast. Then Harris started as if to drive away,
the coyote watching us all the time.

Instead of driving off, he made a circle, and com-
ing back slowly toward the coyote, gained the top
of a little knoll. Had the coyote seen the dogs in
the box, he would have vanished instantly; but the
box interested and puzzled him.

He stood looking with all his eyes as the proces-
sion turned, and once more the glass end of the box
was pointed directly toward him. The dogs evidently
knew what was expected of them. They were silent,
but ready. Suddenly, without stopping the pony,
Harris pulled open the glass door, and yelled, " Go ! "

And go they did. I never saw hundred-yard run-
ners leap from the mark as those two hounds leaped
from that box. The coyote, in his astonishment, act-

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT 35

ually turned a back handspring and started for the
point.

The dogs were hardly two hundred yards behind
him, and were making short work of the space be-
tween. It seemed hardly fair, and I must say that I
felt something like sympathy for the under dog, wild
dog though he was; the odds against him were so
great.

But the coyote knew his track thoroughly, and
was taking advantage of the rough, loose, shelving
ground. For the farther out toward the end of the

point they ran, the narrower, rockier, and steeper
grew the peninsula, the more difficult and danger-
ous the footing.

The coyote slanted along the side of the ridge,
and took a sloping slab of rock ahead of him with a
slow side-step and a climb that brought the dogs close
up behind him. They took the rock at a leap, slid
halfway across, and scrambling, rolled several yards
down the slope — and lost all the gain they had
made.

Things began to even up. The chase began to be
interesting. Here judgment was called for, as well as
speed. The cliff swallows swarmed out of their nests
under the overhanging rocks; the black cormorants
and great-winged pelicans saw their old enemy com-
ing, and rose, flapping, over the water; the circling
gulls dropped low between the runners; their strange
clangor and the stranger tropical shapes thick in

36 SUMMER

the air gave the scene a wildness altogether new
to me.

On fled the coyote; on bounded the dogs. He
would never escape ! Nothing without wings could
ever do it! Mere feet could never stand such a test!
The chances that pursued and pursuers took — the
leaps — the landings ! The whole slope seemed roll-
ing with stones, started by the feet of the runners.

They were nearing the high, rough rocks of the
tip of the point. Between them and the ledges of the
point, and reaching from the edge of the water nearly
to the top of the ridge, lay the steep golden garden
of California poppies, blooming in the dry lava soil
that had crumbled and drifted down on the rocky
side.

The coyote veered, and dashed down toward the
middle of the poppies ; the hounds hit the bed two
jumps behind. There was a cloud of dust, and
in it we saw an avalanche of dogs ploughing a wide
furrow through the flowers nearly down to the
water. Climbing slowly out near the upper edge of
the bed was the coyote, again with a good margin of
lead.

But the beast was at the end of the point, and
nearing the end of his race. Had we been out of the
way, he might have turned and yet given the dogs
the slip — for behind us lay the open desert^

Straight toward the rocks he headed, with the
hounds laboring up the slope after him. He was

THE COYOTE OF PELICAN POINT 37

running to the very edge of the point, as if he were
intending to leap off the cliff to death in the lake
below, and I saw Harris's face tighten as his hounds
topped the ridge, and senselessly tore on toward the
same fearful edge. But the race was not done yet.
The coyote hesitated, turned down the ledges on the
south slope, and leaping in among the cormorant nests,
started back toward us.

He was surer on his feet than were the hounds,
but this hesitation on the point had cost him several
yards. The hounds would pick him up in the little
cove of smooth, hard sand that lay, encircled by
rough rocks, just ahead, unless — no, he must cross
the cove, he must take the stretch. He was taking it
— knowingly, too, and with a burst of power that he
had not shown upon the slopes. He was flinging away
his last reserve.

The hounds were nearly across ; the coyote was
within fifty feet of the boulders, when the grey-
hound, lowering his long, flat head, lunged for the
spine of his quarry.

The coyote heard him coming, spun on his fore
feet, offering his fangs to those of his foe, and threw
himself backward just as the jaws of the wolfhound
clashed at him and flecked his throat with foam.

The two great dogs collided and bounded wide
apart, startling a jack rabbit that dived between them
into a hole among the rocks. The coyote, on his feet
in an instant, caught the motion of the rabbit, and

38 SUMMER

like his shadow, leaped into the air after him for the
hole.

He was as quick as thought, quicker than either of
the hounds. He sprang high over them, — safely over
them, we thought, — when, in mid-air, at the turn of
the dive, he twisted, heeled half-over, and landed hard
against the side of the hole ; and the wolfhound
pulled him down.

It was over ; but there was something strange, al-
most unfair, it seemed, about the finish.

Before we got down to the cove both of the dogs
had slunk back, cowering from the dead coyote.
Then there came to us the buzz of a rattlesnake —
a huge, angry reptile that lay coiled in the mouth of
the hole. The rabbit had struck and roused the
snake. The coyote in his leap had caught the warn-
ing whir, but caught it too late to clear both snake
and hounds. His twist in the air to clear the snake
had cost him his life. So close is the race in the des-
ert world.

CHAPTER V

FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD

OVER and over I read the list of saints and
martyrs on the wall across the street, think-
ing dully how men used to suffer for their
religion, and how, nowadays, they suffer for their
teeth For I was reclining in a dentist's chair, blink-
ing through the window at the Boston Public Li-
brary, seeing nothing, however, nothing but the
tiles on the roof, and the names of Luther, Wesley,
Wycliffe, graven on the granite wall, while the den-
tist burred inside of my cranium and bored down to
my toes for nerves. So, at least, it seemed.

By and by my gaze wandered blankly off to the
square patch of sky in sight above the roof. A black
cloud was driving past in the wind away up there.
Suddenly a white fleck swept into the cloud, ca-
reened, spread two wide wings against it, and
rounded a circle. Then another and another, until
eight herring gulls were soaring white against the
sullen cloud in that little square of sky high over
the roofs of Boston.

Was this the heart of a vast city ? Could I be in
a dentist's chair? There was no doubt about the
chair; but how quickly the red-green roof of the Li-

40 SUMMER

brary became the top of some great cliff ; the dron-
ing noise of traffic in the streets, the wash of waves
against the rocks; and yonder on the storm-stained
sky those wheeling wings, how like the winds of the
ocean, and the raucous voices, how they seemed to
fill all the city with the sweep and the sound of the
sea!

Boston, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chi-
cago, San Francisco — do you live in any one of
them or in any other city? If you do, then you have
a surprisingly good chance to watch the ways of
wild things and even to come near to the heart of
Nature. Not so good a chance, to be sure, as in the
country; but the city is by no means so lacking in
wild life or so shunned by the face of Nature as we
commonly believe.

All great cities are alike, all of them very differ-
ent, too, in details ; Boston's streets, for instance,
being crookeder than most, but like them all, reach-
ing out for many a mile before they turn into coun-
try roads and lanes with borders of quiet and wide
green fields.

But Boston has the wide waters of the Harbor
and the Charles River Basin. And it also has
T Wharf ! They did not throw the tea overboard
there, back in Revolutionary days, as you may be
told, but T Wharf is famous, nevertheless, famous
for fish !

Fish? Swordfish and red snappers, scup, shad,

FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD 41

squid, squeteague, sharks, skates, smelts, sculpins,
sturgeon, scallops ; halibut, haddock, hake — to say
nothing of mackerel, cod, and countless freak things
caught by trawl and seine all the way from Boston
Harbor to the Grand Banks ! I have many a time sat
on T Wharf and caught short, flat flounders with my
line. It is almost as good as a trip to the Georges
in the " We 're Here " to visit T Wharf; and then
to walk slowly up through Quincy Market. Surely
no single walk in the woods will yield a tithe of the
life to be found here, and found only here for us,
brought as the fish and game and fruits have been
from the ends of the earth and the depths of the sea.
There is no reason why city children should not
know a great deal about animal life, nor why the
teachers in city schools should feel that nature study
is impossible for them. For, leaving the wharf with
its fish and gulls and fleet of schooners, you come up
four or five blocks to old King's Chapel Burying-
Ground where the Boston sparrows roost. Boston is
full of interesting sights, but none more interesting
to the bird-lover than this sparrow-roost. The great
bird rocks in the Pacific, described in another chap-
ter of this book, are larger, to be sure, yet hardly
more clamorous when, in the dusk, the sparrow clans
begin to gather ; nor hardly wilder than this city
roost when the night lengthens, and the quiet creeps
down the alleys and along the empty streets, and
the sea winds stop on the corners, and the lamps,

42 SUMMER

like low-hung stars, light up the sleeping birds till
their shadows waver large upon the stark walls about
the old graveyard that break far overhead as rim
rock breaks on the desert sky.

Now shift the scene to an early summer morning
on Boston Common, two blocks farther up, and on
to the Public Garden across Charles Street. There
are more wild birds to be seen in the Garden on a
May morning than there are here in the woods of
Hingham, and the summer still finds some of them
about the shrubs and pond. And it is an easy place
in which to watch them. One of our bird-students
has found over a hundred species in the Garden.
Can any one say that the city offers a poor chance
for nature-study ?

This is the story of every great city park. My
friend Professor Herbert E. Walter found nearly
one hundred and fifty species of birds in Lincoln
Park, Chicago. And have you ever read Mr. Brad-
ford Torrey's delightful essay called " Birds on Bos-
ton Common " ?

Then there are the squirrels and the trees on the
Common ; the flowers, bees, butterflies, and even the
schools of goldfish, in the pond of the Garden —
enough of life, insect-life, plant-life, bird-life, fish-
life, for more than a summer of lessons.

Nor is this all. One block beyond the Garden
stands the Natural History Museum, crowded with
mounted specimens of birds and beasts, reptiles,

FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD 43

fishes, and shells beyond number, — more than you can
study, perhaps. You city folk, instead of having too
little, have altogether too much of too many things.
But such a museum is always a suggestive place for
one who loves the out-of-doors. And the more one
knows of nature, the more one gets out of the mu-
seum. You can carry there, and often answer, the
questions that come to you in your tramps afield, in
your visits to the Garden, and in your reading of
books. Then add to this the great Agassiz Museum
at Harvard University, and the Aquarium at South
Boston, and the Zoological Gardens at Franklin
Park, and the Arnold Arboretum — all of these with
their multitude of mounted specimens and their liv-
ing forms for you ! For me also ; and in from the
country I come, very often, to study natural history
in the city.

What is true of Boston is true of every city in
some degree. The sun and the moon and stars shine
upon the city as upon the country, and during my
years of city life (I lived in the very heart of Boston)
it was my habit to climb to my roof, above the din
and glare of the crowded street, and here among the
chimney-pots to lie down upon my back, the city far
below me, and overhead the blue sky, the Milky Way,
the constellations, or the moon, swinging —

"Through the heaven's wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bowed
Stooping through a fleecy cloud."

SUMMER

Here, too, I have watched the gulls that sail over the
Harbor, especially in the winter. From this outlook
I have seen the winging geese pass over, and heard
the faint calls of other migrating flocks, voices that

were all the more
mysterious for their
falling through the
muffling hum that
%| rises from the streets
and spreads over
the wide roof of
the city as a soft
night wind over the
peaked roofs of a for-
est of firs.

Strangely enough
here on the roof I have
watched the only nighthawks
that I have ever found in Mas-
sachusetts. This is surely the
last place you would expect to
find such wild, spooky, dusk-
loving creatures as nighthawks.
Yet here, on the tarred and
pebbled roofs, here among the
whirling, squeaking, smoking

chimney-pots, here above the crowded, noisy streets,
these birds built their nests, — laid their eggs, rather,
for they build no nests, — reared their young, and in

ARGIOPE, THE MEADOW
SPIDER

FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD 45

the long summer twilight rose and fell through the
smoky air, uttering their peevish cries and making
their ghostly booming sounds with their high-diving,
just as if they were out over the darkening swales
along some gloomy swamp-edge.

For many weeks I had a big tame spider in the
corner of my study there in that city flat, and I have
yet to read an account of all the species of spiders
to be found dwelling within the walls of any great
city. Even Argiope of the meadows is doubtless
found in the Fens. Not far away from my flat, down
near the North Station, one of my friends on the
roof of his flat kept several hives of bees. They fed
on the flowers of the Garden, on those in dooryards,
and on the honey-yielding lindens which stand here
and there throughout the city. Pigeons and sparrows
built their nests within sight of my windows ; and by
going early to the roof I could see the sun rise, and
in the evening I could watch it go down behind the
hills of Belmont as now I watch it from my lookout
here on Mullein Hill.

One is never far from the sky, nor from the earth,
nor from the free, wild winds, nor from the wilder
night that covers city and sea and forest with its
quiet, and fills them all with lurking shadows that
never shall be tamed.

CHAPTER VI

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER

THE fullness, the flood, of life has come, and,
contrary to one's expectations, a marked si-
lence has settled down over the waving fields
and the cool deep woods. I am writing these lines in
the lamplight, with all the windows and doors open
to the dark July night. The summer winds are mov-
ing in the trees. A cricket and a few small green
grasshoppers are chirping in the grass ; but nothing
louder is near at hand. Arid nothing louder is far off,
except the cry of the whip-poor-will in the wood road.
But him you hear in the spring and autumn as well
as in the summer. Ah, listen ! My tree-toad in the
grapevine over the bulkhead door!

This is a voice you must hear — on cloudy sum-
mer days, toward twilight, and well into the evening.
Do you know what it is to feel lonely? If you do, I
think, then, that you know how the soft, far-off, eerie
cry of the tree-toad sounds. He is prophesying rain,
the almanac people think, but I think it is only the
sound of rain in his voice, summer rain after a long
drouth, cooling, reviving, soothing rain, with just a

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER 47

patter of something in it that I cannot describe,
something that I used to hear on the shingles of the
garret over the rafters where the bunches of hore-
hound and catnip and pennyroyal hung.

You ought to hear the lively clatter of a mowing-
machine. It is hot out of doors ; the roads are begin-
ning to look dusty; the insects are tuning up in
the grass, and, like their chorus all together, and
marching round and round the meadow, moves the
mower's whirring blade. I love the sound. Hay-
ing is hard, sweet work. The farmer who does not
love his haying ought to be made to keep a country
store and sell kerosene oil and lumps of dead salt
pork out of a barrel. He could not appreciate a live,
friendly pig.

Down the long swath sing the knives, the cogs
click above the square corners, and the big, loud
thing sings on again, — the song of " first-fruits,"
the first great ingathering of the season, — a song
to touch the heart with joy and sweet solemnity.

Ill

You ought to hear the Katydids — two of them
on the trees outside your window. They are not
saying " Katy did," nor singing " Katy did "; they
are fiddling " Katy did," " Katy did n't " — by rasp-
ing the fore wings.

SUMMER

Is the sound "Katy " or « Katy did"? or what
is said ? Count the notes. Are they at the rate of
two hundred per minute? Watch the instrumen-
talist— till you make sure it is the male who is
wooing Katy with his persistent guitar. The male

has no long ovipositors.

Another instrument-
alist to hear is the big
cicada or "harvest-fly."
There is no more
characteristic
sound of all the
summer than his
big, quick, start-
ling whirr — a
minute mowing-
machine up on the
limb overhead !
Not so minute
either, for the crea-
ture is fully two
inches long, with
bulging eyes and a
click to his wings

he flies that can be heard a hundred feet
" Dog-days-z-z-z-z-z-z-z " is the song he sings

when
away

to me.

'FLITTING AND WAVEKING ABOUT'

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER 51

This is the season of small sounds. As a test of
the keenness of your ears go out at night into
some open glade in the woods or by the side of some
pond and listen for the squeaking of the bats flit-
ting and wavering above in the uncertain light over
your head. You will need a stirless midsummer
dusk ; and if you can hear the thin, fine squeak as the
creature dives near your head, you may be sure your
ears are almost as keen as those of the fox. The sound
is not audible to most human ears,

Another set of small sounds characteristic of mid-
summer is the twittering of the flocking swallows in
the cornfields and upon the telegraph-wires. This
summer I have had long lines of the young birds
and their parents from the old barn below the hill
strung on the wires from the house across the lawn.
Here they preen while some of the old birds hawk for
flies, the whole line of them breaking into a soft little
twitter each time a newcomer alights among them.
One swallow does not make a summer, but your
electric light wires sagging with them is the very
soul of the summer.

VII

In the deep, still woods you will hear the soft call
of the robin — a low, pensive, plaintive note unlike

SUMMER

its spring cry or the after-shower song. It is as if
the voice of the slumberous woods were speaking, —

without alarm, reproach,
or welcome either. It is
an invitation to stretch
yourself on the deep moss
and let the warm shadows
of the summer
woods steal
over you
with sleep.

And this,
too, is a thing
to learn. Do-
ing som e-
thing, hear-
ing something, seeing
something by no means
exhausts our whole
business with the out-of-
doors. To lie down and do
nothing, to be able to keep
silence and to rest on the
great whirling globe is as needful as to know every-
thing going on about us.

THE RED-EYED VIREO

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER 53

VIII

There is one bird-song so characteristic of mid-
summer that I think every lover of the woods must
know it : the oft-repeated, the constant notes of
the red-eyed vireo or "preacher." Wilson Flagg
says of him : " He takes the part of a deliberative
orator who explains his subject in a few words and
then makes a pause for his hearers to reflect upon
it. We might suppose him to be repeating moder-
ately with a pause between each sentence, ( You
see it — you know it — do you hear me ? — do you
believe it ? ' All these strains are delivered with a
rising inflection at the close, and with a pause, as if
waiting for an answer."

A few other bird-notes that are associated with
hot days and stirless woods, and that will be worth
your hearing are the tree-top song of the scarlet
tanager. He is one of the summer sights, a dash of
the burning tropics is his brilliant scarlet and jet
black, and his song is a loud, hoarse, rhythmical
carol that has the flame of his feathers in it and the
blaze of the sun. You will know it from the cool,
liquid song of the robin both by its peculiar quality
and because it is a short song, and soon ended, not
of indefinite length like the robin's.

Then the peculiar, coppery, reverberating, or

54 SUMMER

confined song of the indigo bunting — as if the bird
were singing inside some great kettle.

One more — among a few others — the softly fall-
ing, round, small, upward-swinging call of the wood
pewee. Is it sad ? Yes, sad. But sweeter than sad, —
restful, cooling, and inexpressibly gentle. All day
long from high above your head and usually quite
out of view, the voice — it seems hardly a voice
— breaks the long silence of the summer woods.

When night comes down with the long twilight
there sounds a strange, almost awesome quawk in the
dusk over the fields. It sends a thrill through me,
notwithstanding its nightly occurrence all through
July and August. It is the passing of a pair of
night herons — the black-crowned, I am sure, al-
though this single pair only fly over. Where the
birds are numerous they nest in great colonies.

It is the wild, eerie quawk that you should hear,
a far-off, mysterious, almost uncanny sound that fills
the twilight with a vague, untamed something, no
matter how bright and civilized the day may have
been.

From the harvest fields comes the sweet whistle of
Bob White, the clear, round notes rolling far through
the hushed summer noon; in the wood-lot the

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SUMMER 55

crows and jays have already begun their cawings
and screamings that later on become the dominant
notes of the golden autumn. They are not so loud
and characteristic now because of the insect orchestra
throbbing with a rhythmic beat through the air. So
wide, constant, and long-continued is this throbbing
note of the insects that by midsummer you almost
cease to notice it. But stop and listen — field crick-
ets, katydids, long-horned grasshoppers, snowy tree-
crickets : chwl-chici-chwi-chwi — thrr-r-r-r-r-r-r —
crrri-crrri-crrri'Crrri — gru-gru-gru-gru — retreat-
retreat -retreat -treat -treat — like the throbbing of
the pulse.

XII

One can do no more than suggest in a short chap-
ter like this ; and all that I am doing here is catch-
ing for you some of the still, small voices of my
summer. How unlike those of your summer they
may be I can easily imagine, for you are in the
Pacific Coast, or off on the vast prairies of Canada,
or down in the sunny fields and hill-country of the
South.

I have done enough if I have suggested that you
stop and listen ; for after all it is having ears which
hear not that causes the trouble. Hear the voices
that make your summer vocal — the loud and still
voices which alike pass unheeded unless we pause to
hear.

56 SUMMER

As a lesson in listening, go out some quiet evening,
and as the shadows slip softly over the surface of
the wood-walled pond, listen to the breathing of
the fish as they come to the top, and the splash
of the muskrats, or the swirl of the pickerel as he
ploughs a furrow through the silence.

CHAPTEK VH
THE SEA-BIRDS' HOME

AFTER my wandering for years among the
quiet lanes and along the winding cow-paths
of the home fields, my trip to the wild-bird
rocks in the Pacific Ocean, as you can imagine, was
a thrilling experience. We chartered a little launch
at Tillamook, and, after a fight of hours and hours
to cross Tillamook Bar at the mouth of the bay, we
got out upon the wide Pacific, and steamed down
the coast for Three- Arch Rocks, which soon began to
show far ahead of us just off the rocky shore.

I had never been on the Pacific before, nor had
I ever before seen the birds that were even now be-
ginning to dot the sea and to sail over and about us
as we steamed along. It was all new, so new that the
very water of the Pacific looked unlike the familiar
water of the Atlantic. And surely the waves were
different, — longer, grayer, smoother, with an im-
mensely mightier heave. At least they seemed so,
for every time we rose on the swell, it was as if our
boat were in the hand of Old Ocean, and his mighty
arm were "putting" us, as the athlete "puts" the
shot. It was all new and strange and very wild to
me, with the wild cries of the sea-birds already

58 SUMMER

beginning to reach us as flocks of the birds passed
around and over our heads.

The fog was lifting. The thick, wet drift that had
threatened our little launch on Tillamook Bar stood
clear of the shouldering sea to the westward, and in
over the shore, like an upper sea, hung at the fir-girt
middles of the mountains, as level and as gray as
theseabelow. There was no breeze. The long, smooth
swell of the Pacific swung under us and in, until it
whitened at the base of the three rocks that rose out
of the sea in our course, and that now began to
take on form in the foggy distance. Gulls were fly-
ing over us, lines of black cormorants and crowds
of murres were winging past, but we were still too
far away from the looming rocks to see that the gray
of their walls was the gray of uncounted colonies of
nesting birds, colonies that covered their craggy steeps
as, on shore, the green firs clothed the slopes of the
Coast Range Mountains up to the hanging fog.

As we ran on nearer, the sound of the surf about
the rocks became audible, the birds in the air grew
more numerous, their cries now faintly mingling with
the sound of the sea. A hole in the side of the middle
Rock, a mere fleck of foam it seemed at first, widened
rapidly into an -arching tunnel through which our
boat might run ; the swell of the sea began to break
over half -sunken ledges; and soon upon us fell the
damp shadows of the three great rocks, for now
we were looking far up at their sides, where we could

THE SEA-BIRDS' HOME

see the birds in their guano-gray rookeries, rookery

over rookery, — gulls, cormorants, guillemots, puffins,

murres, — encrusting the sides

from tide-line to pinnacles, as the

crowding barnacles encrusted ? HH»\

the bases from the tide-line ^S-^

down.

We had not approached with-
out protest, for the birds were
coming off to meet us, wheel-
ing and clacking overhead, the
nearer we drew, in a constantly
thickening cloud of lowering
wings and tongues. The clamor
was indescribable, the tossing
flight enough to make one mad
with the motion of wings. The air was filled, thick,
with the whirling and the screaming, the clacking,
the honking, close to our ears, and high up in the
peaks, and far out over the waves. Never had I been
in this world before. Was I on my earth? or had I
suddenly wakened up in some old sea world where
there was no dry land, no life but this?

We rounded the outer or Shag Rock and headed
slowly in opposite the yawning hole of the middle
Rock as into some mighty cave, so sheer and shadowy
rose the walls above us, — so like to cavern thunder
was the throbbing of the surf through the hollow
arches, was the flapping and screaming of the birds

TUFTED PUFFINS

60 SUMMER

against the high circling walls, was the deep, men-
acing grumble of the bellowing sea-lions, as, through
the muffle of surf and sea-fowl, herd after herd lum-
bered headlong into the foam.

It was a strange, wild scene. Hardly a mile from
the Oregon coast, but cut off by breaker and bar
from the abrupt, uninhabited shore, the three rocks
of the Reservation, each pierced with its resounding
arch, heaved their huge shoulders from the waves
straight up, high, towering, till our little steamer
coasted their dripping sides like some puffing pygmy.

Each rock was perhaps as large as a solid city
square and as high as the tallest of sky-scrapers ;
immense, monstrous piles, each of them, and run
through by these great caverns or arches, dim, drip-
ping, filled with the noise of the waves and the beat
of thousands of wings.

They were of no part or lot with the dry land. Their
wave-scooped basins were set with purple starfish and
filled with green and pink anemones, and beaded
many deep with mussels of amethyst and jet that
glittered in the clear beryl waters ; and, above the
jeweled basins, like fabled beasts of old, lay the sea-
lions, uncouth forms, flippered, reversed in shape,
with throats like the caves of ^Eolus, hollow, hoarse,
discordant; and higher up, on every jutting bench
and shelf, in every weathered rift, over every jog of
the ragged cliffs, to their bladed backs and pointed
peaks, swarmed the sea-birds, webf ooted, amphibious.

THE SEA-BIRDS' HOME 61

shaped of the waves, with stormy voices given them
by the winds that sweep in from the sea.

As I looked up at the amazing scene, at the mighty
rocks and the multitude of winging forms, I seemed
to see three swirling piles of life, three cones that
rose like volcanoes from the ocean, their sides cov-
ered with living lava, their craters clouded with the
smoke of wings, while their bases seemed belted by
the rumble of a multi-throated thunder. The very air
was dank with the smell of strange, strong volcanic
gases, — no breath of the land, no odor of herb, no scent
of fresh soil ; but the raw, rank smells of rookery and
den, saline, kelpy, fetid; the stench of fish and
bedded guano, and of the reeking pools where the
sea-lion herds lay sleeping on the lower rocks in
the sun.

A boat's keel was beneath me, but as I stood out
on the pointed prow, barely above the water, and
found myself thrust forward without will or effort
among the crags and caverns, among the shadowy
walls, the damps, the smells, the sounds, among the
bellowing beasts in the churning waters about me,
and into the storm of wings and tongues in the whirl-
ing air above me, I passed from the things I had
known, and the time and the earth of man, into a
monstrous period of the past.

This was the home of the sea-birds. Amid all the
din we landed from a yawl and began our climb
toward the top of Shag Rock, the outermost of the

62 SUMMER

three. And here we had another and a different sight
of the wild life. It covered every crag. I clutched it
in my hands ; I crushed it under my feet ; it was thick
in the air about me. My narrow path up the face of
the rock was a succession of sea-bird rookeries, of
crowded eggs, and huddled young, hairy or naked or
wet from the shell. Every time my fingers felt for a
crack overhead they touched something warm that
rolled or squirmed; every time my feet moved under
me, for a hold, they pushed in among top-shaped eggs
that turned on the shelf or went over far below ; and
whenever I hugged the pushing wall I must bear off
from a mass of squealing, struggling, shapeless
things, just hatched. And down upon me, as rook-
ery after rookery of old birds whirred in fright from
their ledges, fell crashing eggs and unfledged young,
that the greedy gulls devoured ere they touched the
sea.

I was midway in the climb, at a bad turn round a
point, edging inch by inch along, my face pressed
against the hard face of the rock, my feet and fingers
gripping any crack or seam they could feel, when
out of the deep space behind me I caught the swash
of waves. Instantly a cold hand seemed to clasp me
from behind.

I flattened against the rock, my whole body, my
very mind clinging desperately for a hold, — a fall-
ing fragment of shale, a gust of wind, the wing-stroke
of a frightened bird, enough to break the hold and

THE SEA-BIRDS' HOME 63

swing me out over the water, washing faint and far
below. A long breath, and I was climbing again.

We were on the outer
Rock, our only possible as-
cent taking us up the sheer south
face. With the exception of an
occasional Western gull's and
pigeon guillemot's nest, these
steep sides were occupied en-
tirely by the California
murres, — penguin - shaped
birds about the
size of a small
wild duck, choc-
olate-brown
above, with
white breasts,

BRANDT'S CORMORANT

— which liter-
ally covered the sides of the three great rocks wher-
ever they could find a hold. If a million meant any-
thing, I should say there were a million murres nest-
ing on this outer Rock ; not nesting either, for the egg
is laid upon the bare ledge, as you might place it upon
a mantel, — a single sharp-pointed egg, as large as a
turkey's, and just as many of them on the ledge as
there is standing-room for the birds. The murre broods
her very large egg by standing straight up over it, her
short legs, by dint of stretching, allowing her to strad-
dle it, her short tail propping her securely from behind.

64 SUMMER

On, up along the narrow back, or blade, of the
rock, and over the peak, were the well-spaced nests
of the Brandt's cormorants, nests the size of an ordi-
nary straw hat, made of sea-grass and the yellow-
flowered sulphur-weed that grew in a dense mat over
the north slope of the top, each nest holding four
long, dirty blue eggs or as many black, shivering
young ; and in the low sulphur-weed, all along the
roof-like slope of the top, built the gulls and the
tufted puffins ; and, with the burrowing puffins, often
in the same holes, were found the Kaeding's petrels;
while down below them, as up above them, — all
around the rock-rim that dropped sheer to the sea,
— stood the cormorants, black, silent, statuesque ;
and everywhere were nests and eggs and young, and
everywhere were flying, crying birds — above, about,
and far below me, a whirling, whirring vortex of
wings that had caught me in its funnel.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOTHER MURRE

I HEAR the bawling of my neighbor's cow. Her
calf was carried off yesterday, and since then,
during the long night, and all day long, her in-
sistent woe has made our hillside melancholy. But I
shall not hear her to-night, not from this distance.
She will lie down to-night with the others of the
herd, and munch her cud. Yet, when the rattling
stanchions grow quiet and sleep steals along the
stalls, she will turn her ears at every small stirring;
she will raise her head to listen and utter a low, ten-
der moo. Her full udder hurts ; but her cud is sweet.
She is only a cow.

Had she been a wild cow, or had she been out with
her calf in a wild pasture, the mother-love in her
would have lived for six months. Here in the barn
she will be forced to forget her calf in a few hours,
and by morning her mother-love shall utterly have
died.

There is a mother-principle alive in all nature that
never dies. This is different from mother-love. The
oak tree responds to the mother-principle, and bears
acorns. It is a law of life. The mother-love or pas-
sion, on the other hand, occurs only among the higher

66 SUMMER

animals. It is very common ; and yet, while it is one
of the strongest, most interesting, most beautiful of
animal traits, it is at the same time the most individ-
ual and variable of all animal traits.

This particular cow of my neighbor's that I hear
lowing, is an entirely gentle creature ordinarily, but
with a calf at her side she will pitch at any one who
approaches her. And there is no other cow in the
herd that mourns so long after her calf. The mother
in her is stronger, more enduring, than in any of the
other nineteen cows in the barn. My own cow hardly
mourns at all when her calf is taken away. She might
be an oak tree losing its acorns, or a crab losing her
hatching eggs, so far as any show of love is con-
cerned.

The female crab attaches her eggs to her swim-
merets and carries them about with her for their pro-
tection as the most devoted of mothers ; yet she is no
more conscious of them, and feels no more for them,
than the frond of a cinnamon fern feels for its spores.
She is a mother, without the love of the mother.

In the spider, however, just one step up the ani-
mal scale from the crab, you find the mother-love or
passion. Crossing a field the other day, I came upon
a large female spider of the hunter family, carrying
a round white sack of eggs, half the size of a cherry,
attached to her spinnerets. Plucking a long stem of
grass, I detached the sack of eggs without bursting
it. Instantly the mother turned and sprang at the

THE MOTHER MURRE 67

grass-stem, fighting and biting until she got to the
sack, which she seized in her strong jaws and made off
with as fast as her long, rapid legs would carry her.

I laid the stem across her back and again took
the sack away. She came on for it, fighting more
fiercely than before. Once more she seized it ; once
more I forced it from her jaws, while she sprang at
the grass-stem and tried to tear it to pieces. She
must have been fighting for two minutes when, by
a regrettable move on my part, one of her legs was
injured. She did not falter in her fight. On she
rushed for the sack as fast as I pulled it away. She
would have fought for that sack, I believe, until she
had not one of her eight legs to stand on, had I
been cruel enough to compel her. It did not come
to this, for suddenly the sack burst, and out poured,
to my amazement, a myriad of tiny brown spider-
lings. Before I could think what to do that mother
spider had rushed among them and caused them to
swarm upon her, covering her, many deep, even to

SUMMER

the outer joints of her long legs. I did not disturb
her again, but stood by and watched her slowly
move off with her encrusting family to a place of
safety.

I had seen these spiders try hard to escape with
their egg-sacks before, but had never tested the
strength of their purpose. For a time after this ex-
perience I made a point of taking the sacks away
from every spider I found. Most of them scurried
off to seek their own safety ; one of them dropped
her sack of her own accord; some of them showed
reluctance to leave it ; some of them a disposition to
fight; but none of them the fierce, consuming

mother-fire of the
one with the hurt
leg.

A m o ng the
fishes, much high-
er animal forms
than the spiders,
we find the mother-
love only in the males.
It is the male stickleback that
builds the nest, then goes out and
drives the female in to lay her eggs,
then straightway drives her out to
prevent her eating them, then puts
himself on guard outside the nest to pro-
tect them from other sticklebacks and

THE MOTHER MURRE 69

other enemies, until the young shall hatch and be
able to swim away by themselves. Here he stays for
a month, without eating or sleeping, so far as we
know.

It is the male toadfish that crawls into the nest-
hole and takes charge of the numerous family. He
may dig the hole, too, as the male stickleback builds
the nest. I do not know as to that. But I have raised
many a stone in the edge of the tide along the shore
of Naushon Island in Buzzard's Bay, to find the
under surface covered with round, drop-like, amber
eggs, and in the shallow cavity beneath, an old male
toadfish, slimy and croaking, and with a countenance
ugly enough to turn a prowling eel to stone. The
female deposits the eggs, glues them fast with much
nicety to the under surface of the rock, as a female
might, and finishes her work. Departing at once, she
leaves the coming brood to the care of the male, who
from this time, without relief or even food in all
probability, assumes the role and all the responsibili-
ties of mother, and must consequently feel all the
mother-love.

Something like this is true of the common horn-
pout, or catfish, I believe, though I have never seen
it recorded, and lack the chance at present of prov-
ing my earlier observations. I think it is father
catfish that takes charge of the brood, of the
swarm of kitten catfish, from the time the spawn
is laid.

70 SUMMER

A curious sharing of mother qualities by male
and female is shown in the Surinam toads of South
America, where the male, taking the newly depos-
ited eggs, places them upon the back of the female.
Here, glued fast by their own adhesive jelly, they
are soon surrounded by cells grown of the skin of
the back, each cell capped by a lid. In these cells the
eggs hatch, and the young go through their meta-
morphoses, apparently absorbing some nourishment
through the skin of their mother. Finally they break
through the lids of their cells and hop away. They
might as well be toadstools upon a dead stump, so
far as motherly care or concern goes, for, aside from
allowing the male to spread the eggs upon her back,
she is no more a mother to them than the dead stump
is to the toadstools. She is host only to the little
parasites.

I do not know of any mother-love among the rep-
tiles. The mother-passion, so far as my observation
goes, plays no part whatever in the life of reptiles.
Whereas, passing on to the birds, the mother-passion
becomes by all odds the most interesting thing in
bird-life.

And is not the mother-passion among the mam-
mals even more interesting? It is as if the watcher
in the woods went out to see the mother animal only.
It is her going and coming that we follow; her
faring, foraging, and watch-care that let us deepest
into the secrets of wild animal life.

THE MOTHER MURRE 71

On one of the large estates here in Hingham, a
few weeks ago, a fox was found to be destroying
poultry. The time of the raids, and their boldness,
were proof enough that the fox must be a female
with young. Poisoned meat was prepared for her,
and at once the raids ceased. A few days later one
of the workmen of the estate came upon the den of
a fox, at the mouth of which lay dead a whole litter
of young ones. They had been poisoned. The
mother had not eaten the prepared food herself, but
had carried it home to her family. They must have
died in the burrow, for it was evident from the signs
that she had dragged them into the fresh air to re-
vive them, and deposited them gently on the sand
by the hole. Then in her perplexity she had brought
various tidbits of mouse and bird and rabbit, which
she placed at their noses to tempt them to wake up
out of their strange sleep and eat. No one knows how
long she watched beside the lifeless forms, nor what
her emotions were. She must have left the neighbor-
hood soon after, however, for no one has seen her
since about the estate.

The bird mother is the bravest, tenderest, most
appealing thing one ever comes upon in the fields.
It is the rare exception, but we sometimes find the
real mother wholly lacking among the birds, as in
the case of our notorious cowbird, who sneaks about,
watching her chance, when some smaller bird is
gone, to drop her egg into its nest. The egg must

72 SUMMER

be laid, the burden of the race has been put upon
the bird, but not the precious burden of the child.
She lays eggs; but is not a mother.

The same is true of the European cuckoos, but
not quite true, in spite of popular belief, of our
American cuckoos. For our birds (both species)
build rude, elementary nests as a rule, and brood
their eggs. Occasionally they may use a robin's or
a catbird's nest, in order to save labor. So unde-
veloped is the mother in the cuckoo that if you
touch her eggs she will leave them — abandon her
rude nest and eggs as if any excuse were excuse
enough for an escape from the cares of motherhood.
How should a bird with so little mother-love ever
learn to build a firm- walled, safe, and love-lined
nest?

The great California condor is a most faithful
and anxious mother ; the dumb affection of both
parent birds, indeed, for their single offspring is pa-
thetically human. On the other hand, the mother in
the turkey buzzard is so evenly balanced against the
vulture in her that I have known a brooding bird to
be so upset by the sudden approach of a man as to
rise from off her eggs and devour them instantly,
greedily, and make off on her serenely soaring wings
into the clouds.

Such mothers, however, are not the rule. The
buzzard, the cuckoo, and the cowbird are the strik-
ing exceptions. The flicker will keep on laying eggs

THE MOTHER MURRE 73

as fast as one takes them from the nest-hole, until
she has no more eggs to lay. The quail will some-
times desert her nest if even a single egg is so much
as touched, but only because she knows that she has
been discovered and must start a new nest, hidden
in some new place, for safety. She is a wise and de-
voted mother, keeping her brood with her as a
" covey" all winter long.

One of the most striking cases of mother-love
which has ever come under my observation, I saw
in the summer of 1912 on the bird rookeries of the
Three- Arch Rocks Reservation off the coast of Ore-
gon.

We were making our slow way toward the top of
the outer rock. Through rookery after rookery of
birds we climbed until we reached the edge of the
summit. Scrambling over this edge, we found our-
selves in the midst of a great colony of nesting
murres — hundreds of them — covering this steep
rocky part of the top.

As our heads appeared above the rim, many of
the colony took wing and whirred over us out to
sea, but most of them sat close, each bird upon its
egg or over its chick, loath to leave, and so expose
to us the hidden treasure.

The top of the rock was somewhat cone-shaped,
and in order to reach the peak and the colonies on
the west side we had to make our way through this
rookery of the murres. The first step among them,

74 SUMMER

and the whole colony was gone, with a rush of wings
and feet that sent several of the top-shaped eggs
rolling, and several of the young birds toppling over
the cliff to the pounding waves and ledges far below.

We stopped, but the colony, almost to a bird, had
bolted, leaving scores of eggs and scores of downy
young squealing and running together for shelter,
like so many beetles under a lifted board.

But the birds had not every one bolted, for here
sat two of the colony among the broken rocks.
These two had not been frightened off. That both
of them were greatly alarmed, any one could see
from their open beaks, their rolling eyes, their tense
bodies on tiptoe for flight. Yet here they sat, their
wings out like props, or more like gripping hands,
as if they were trying to hold themselves down to
the rocks against their wild desire to fly.

And so they were, in truth, for under their ex-
tended wings I saw little black feet moving. Those
two mother murres were not going to forsake their
babies ! No, not even for these approaching mon-
sters, such as they had never before seen, clamber-
ing over their rocks.

What was different about these two? They had
their young ones to protect. Yes, but so had every
bird in the great colony its young one, or its egg,
to protect, yet all the others had gone. Did these
two have more mother-love than the others? And
hence, more courage, more intelligence?

THE MOTHER MURRE 75

We took another step toward them, and one of
the two birds sprang into the air, knocking her baby
over and over with the stroke of her wing, and com-
ing within an inch of hurling it across the rim to be
battered on the ledges below. The other bird raised
her wings to follow, then clapped them back over
her baby. Fear is the most contagious thing in the
world ; and that flap of fear by the other bird thrilled
her, too, but as she had withstood the stampede of
the colony, so she caught herself again and held on.

She was now alone on the bare top of the rock,
with ten thousand circling birds screaming to her

in the air above, and with two men creeping up to
her with a big black camera that clicked ominously.
She let the multitude scream, and with threatening
beak watched the two men come on. A motherless
baby, spying her, ran down the rock squealing for

76 SUMMER

his life. She spread a wing, put her bill behind him
and shoved him quickly in out of sight with her
own baby. The man with the camera saw the act,
for I heard his machine click, and I heard him say
something under his breath that you would hardly
expect a mere man and a game- warden to say. But
most men have a good deal of the mother in them ;
and the old bird had acted with such decision, such
courage, such swift, compelling instinct, that any
man, short of the wildest savage, would have felt his
heart quicken at the sight.

"Just how compelling might that mother-instinct
be?" I wondered. "Just how much would that
mother-love stand?" I had dropped to my knees,
and on all fours had crept up within about three
feet of the bird. She still had chance for flight.
Would she allow me to crawl any nearer? Slowly,
very slowly, I stretched forward on my hands, like
a measuring-worm, until my body lay flat on the
rocks, and my fingers were within three inches of
her. But her wings were twitching, a wild light
danced in her eyes, and her head turned toward
the sea.

For a whole minute I did not stir. I was watch-
ing— and the wings again began to tighten about
the babies, the wild light in the eyes died down, the
long, sharp beak turned once more toward me.

Then slowly, very slowly, I raised my hand,
touched her feathers with the tip of one finger —

THE MOTHER MURRE 77

with two fingers — with my whole hand, while the
loud camera click-clacked, click-clacked hardly four
feet away !

It was a thrilling moment. I was not killing any-
thing. I had no long-range rifle in my hands, com-
ing up against the wind toward an unsuspecting
creature hundreds of yards away. This was no
wounded leopard charging me ; no mother-bear de-
fending with her giant might a captured cub. It
was only a mother-bird, the size of a wild duck, with
swift wings at her command, hiding under those
wings her own and another's young, and her own
boundless fear !

For the second time in my life I had taken cap-
tive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No, I had
not taken her captive. She had made herself a cap-
tive ; she had taken herself in the strong net of her
mother-love.

And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the
first touch of my hand I think she felt the love re-
straining it, and without fear or fret she let me reach
under her and pull out the babies. But she reached
after them with her bill to tuck them back out of
sight, and when I did not let them go, she sidled
toward me, quacking softly, a language that I per-
fectly understood, and was quick to respond to. I
gave them back, fuzzy and black and white. She
got them under her, stood up over them, pushed her
wings down hard around them, her stout tail down

78 SUMMER

hard behind them, and together with them pushed
in an abandoned egg that was close at hand. Her
own baby, some one else's baby, and some one else's
forsaken egg ! She could cover no more ; she had
not feathers enough. But she had heart enough ;
and into her mother's heart she had already tucked
every motherless egg and nestling of the thousands
of frightened birds, screaming and wheeling in the
air high over her head.

CHAPTER IX
MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS

WHO has not wondered/' I asked, many
years ago, " as he has seen the red rim
of the sun sink down in the sea, where
the little brood of Mother Carey's chickens skim-
ming round the vessel would sleep that night?"
Here on the waves, no doubt, but what a bed !
You have seen them, or you will see them the first
time you cross the ocean, far out of sight of land
— a little band of small dark birds, veering, glan-
cing, skimming the heaving sea like swallows, or rid-
ing the great waves up and down, from crest to
trough, as easily as Bobolink rides the swaying clo-
ver billows in the meadow behind the barn.

I have stood at the prow and watched them as
the huge steamer ploughed her way into the dark-
ening ocean. Down in the depths beneath me the
porpoises were playing, — as if the speeding ship,
with its mighty engines, were only another porpoise
playing tag with them, — and off on the gray sea
ahead, where the circle of night seemed to be closing
in, this little flock of stormy petrels, Mother Carey's
chickens, rising, falling with the heave and sag of
the sea, so far, for such little wings, from the shore !

SUMMER

You will see them, and you will ask yourself, as
I asked myself, "Where is their home? Where do
they nest?" I hope you will also have a chance to

answer
the question
some time
for yourself, as
I had a chance to
answer it for myself
recently, out on the
Three-Arch Rocks, in the
Pacific, just off the coast of Oregon.

I visited the rocks to see all their multitudinous
wild life, — their gulls, cormorants, murres, guille-
mots, puffins, oyster-catchers, and herds of sea-lions,
— but more than any other one thing I wanted to
see the petrels, Kaeding's petrels, that nest on the
top of Shag Rock, the outermost of the three rocks
of the Reservation.

No, not merely to see the petrels : what I really
wished to do was to stay all night on the storm-
swept peak in order to hear the petrels come back
to their nests on the rock in the dusk and dark.
My friend Finley had done it, years before, on this
very rock. On the steep north slope of the top he
had found a safe spot between two jutting crags,

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 81

and, wrapping himself in his blanket as the sun
went down behind the hill of the sea, had waived
for the winnowing of the small mysterious wings.

Just to sleep in such a bed would be enough. To
lie down far up on the ragged peak of this wild sea
rock, with the break and swash of the waves coming
up from far beneath you, with the wide sea-wind
coming in, and the dusk spreading down^ and the
wild sea-birds murmuring in their strange tongues all
about you — it would be enough just to turn one's
face to the lonely sky in such a spot and listen. But
how much more to hear suddenly, among all these
strange sounds, the swift fanning of wings — to feel
them close above your face — and to see in the dim
dusk wavering shadowy forms, like a troop of long-
winged bats, hovering over the slope and chittering
in a rapid, unbirdlike talk, as if afraid the very dark
might hear them !

That was what I wanted so much to hear and to
see. For down in a little burrow, in the accumulated
earth and guano of the top, under each of these
hovering shadows, would be another shadow, wait-
ing to hear the beating of the wings and the chitter
above ; and I wanted to see the mate in the burrow
come out and greet the mate that had been all day
upon the sea.

This petrel digs itself a little burrow and lays one
egg. The burrow might hold both birds at once,
but one seldom finds two birds in the burrow to-

82 SUMMER

gether. While one is brooding, the other is off on
its wonderful wings — away off in the wake of your
ocean steamer, perhaps, miles and miles from shore.
But when darkness falls it remembers its nest and
speeds home to the rock, taking its place down in
the little black burrow, while the mate comes forth
and spreads its wings out over the heaving water,
not to return, it may be, until the night and the day
have passed and twilight falls again.

We landed on a ledge of Shag Rock, driving off
a big bull sea-lion who claimed this particular slab of
rock as his own. We backed up close to the shelf in
a yawl boat, and as the waves rose and fell, watched
our chance to leap from the stern of the little boat
to the rock. Thus we landed our cameras, food and
water, and other things, then we dragged the boat
up, so that, a storm arising or anything happening
to the small steamer that had brought us, we might
still get away to the shore.

It was about the middle of the forenoon. All the
morning, as we had steamed along, a thick fog had
threatened us ; but now the sun broke out, making
it possible to use our cameras, and after a hasty
lunch we started for the top of the rock — a climb
that looked impossible, and that was pretty nearly
as impossible as it looked.

It had been a slow, perilous climb ; but, once on
the summit, where we could move somewhat freely
and use the cameras, we hurried from colony to

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 83

colony to take advantage of the uncertain sunlight,
which, indeed, utterly failed us after only an hour's
work. But, as I had no camera, I made the best of it,
giving all my time to studying the ways of the birds.
Besides, I had come to stay on the peak all night;
I could do my work well enough in the dark. But
I could not do it in the wind and rain.

The sun went into the clouds about four o'clock,
but so absorbed was I in watching, and so thick was
the air with wings, so clangorous with harsh tongues,
that I had not seen the fog moving in, or noticed
that the gray wind of the morning had begun to
growl about the crags. Looking off to seaward, I
now saw that a heavy bank of mist had blurred the
sky-line and settled down upon the sea. The wind
had freshened; a fine, cold drizzle was beginning to
fall, and soon came slanting across the peak. The
prospect was grim and forbidding. Then the rain
began. The night was going to be dark and stormy,
too wet and wild for watching, here where I must
hang on with my hands or else slip and go over —
down — down to the waves below.

We started to descend at once, while there was
still light enough to see by, and before the rocks
were made any slipperier by the rain. We did not
fear the wind much, for that was from the north,
and we must descend by the south face, up which we
had come.

I was deeply disappointed. My night with the

84 SUMMER

petrels on the top was out of the question. Yet as
I backed over the rim of that peak, and began to
pick my way down, it was not disappointment, but
fear that I felt. It had been bad enough coming
up; but this going down! — with the cold, wet
shadow of night encircling you and lying dark on
the cold, sullen sea below — this was altogether
worse.

The rocks were already wet, and the footing was
treacherous. As we worked slowly along, the birds
in the gathering gloom seemed to fear us less, flying
close about our heads, their harsh cries and winging
tumult adding not a little to the peril of the descent.
And then the looking down ! and then the impossi-
bility at places of even looking down — when one
could only hang on with one's hands and feel around
in the empty air with one's feet for something to
stand on !

I got a third of the way down, perhaps, and then
stopped. The men did not laugh at me. They simply
looped a rope about me, under my arms, and lowered
me over the narrow shelves into the midst of a large
murre colony, from which point I got on alone.
Then they tied the rope about Dallas, my eleven-
year-old son, who was with me on the expedition,
and lowered him.

He came bumping serenely down, smoothing all
the little murres and feeling of all the warm eggs on
the way, as if they might have been so many little

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 85

kittens, and as if he might have been at home on the
kitchen floor, instead of dangling down the face of
a cliff two hundred or more feet above the sea.

Some forty feet from the waves was a weathered
niche, or shelf, eight or ten feet wide. Here we
stopped for the night. The wind was from the other
side of the rock ; the overhanging ledge protected us
somewhat from above, though the mist swept about
the steep walls to us, and the drizzle dripped from
overhead. But as I pulled my blanket about me and
lay down beside the other men the thought of what
the night must be on the summit made the hard,
damp rock under me seem the softest and warmest
of beds.

But what a place was this to sleep in ! — this nar-
row ledge with a rookery of wild sea-birds just above
it, with the den of a wild sea-beast just below it,
with the storm-swept sky shut down upon it, and the
sea, the crawling, sinister sea, coiling and uncoiling
its laving folds about it, as with endless undulations
it slipped over the sunken ledges and swam round
and round the rock.

What a place was this to sleep ! I could not sleep.
I was as wakeful as the wild beasts that come forth
at night to seek their prey. I must catch a glimpse
of Night through her veil of mist, the gray, ghostly
Night, as she came down the long, rolling slope
of the sea, and I must listen, for my very fingers
seemed to have ears, so many were the sounds, and

86 SUMMER

so strange — the talk of the wind on the rock, the
sweep of the storm, the lap of the waves, the rum-
bling mutter of the wakeful caverns, the cry of birds,
the hoarse grumbling growl of the sea-lions swim-
ming close below.

The clamor of the birds was at first disturbing.
But soon the confusion caused by our descent among
them subsided ; the large colony of murres close by
our heads returned to their rookery ; and with the
rain and thickening dark there spread everywhere the
quiet of a low murmurous quacking. Sleep was set-
tling over the rookeries.

Down in the sea below us rose the head of an old
sea-lion, the old lone bull whose den we had invaded.
He was coming back to sleep. He rose and sank,
blinking dully at the cask we had left on his ledge ;
then clambered out and hitched slowly up toward
his sleeping-place. I counted the scars on his head,
and noted the fresh deep gash on his right side. I
could hear him blow and breathe.

I drew back from the edge, and, pulling the piece
of sail-cloth over me and the small boy at my side,
turned my face up to the slanting rain. Two young
gulls came out of their hiding in a cranny and nestled
against my head, their parents calling gently to them
from time to time all night long. In the murre col-
ony overhead there was a constant stir and a soft, low
talk, and over all the rock, through all the darkened
air there was a silent coming and going of wings —

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 87

wings — of the stormy petrels, some of them, I felt
sure, the swift shadow wings of Mother Carey's
chickens that I had so longed to hear come winnow-
ing in from afar on the sea.

The drizzle thickened. And now I heard the
breathing of the sleeping men beside me ; and under
me I felt the narrow shelf of rock dividing the waters
from the waters, and then — I, too, must have slept;
for utter darkness was upon the face of the deep.

CHAPTER X

RIDING THE RIM ROCK

FROM P Ranch to Winnemucca is a seven-
teen-day drive through a desert of rim rock
and greasewood and sage, which, under the
most favorable of conditions, is beset with difficulty;
but which, in the dry season, and with a herd of
anything like four thousand, becomes an unbroken
hazard. More than anything else on such a drive is
feared the wild herd-spirit, the quick black temper of
the cattle, that by one sign or another ever threatens
to break the spell of the rider's power and sweep the
maddened or terrorized herd to destruction. The
handling of the herd to keep this spirit sleeping is
ofttimes a thrilling experience.

Some time before my visit to P Ranch, in Harney
County, southeastern Oregon, in the summer of
1912, the riders had taken out a herd of four thou-
sand steers on what proved to be one of the most
difficult drives ever made to Winnemucca, the ship-
ping station in northern Nevada.

For the first two days on the trail the cattle were
strange to each other, having been gathered from
widely distant grazing-grounds, — from the Double O
and the Home ranches, — and were somewhat clan-

RIDING THE RIM ROCK 89

nish and restive under the driving. At the beginning
of the third day signs of real ugliness appeared.
The hot weather and a shortage of water began to
tell on the temper of the herd.

The third day was long and exceedingly hot. The
line started forward at dawn and all day long kept
moving, with the sun cooking the bitter smell of sage
into the air, and with the sixteen thousand hoofs
kicking up a still bitterer smother of alkali dust that
inflamed eyes and nostrils and coated the very lungs
of the cattle. The fierce desert thirst was upon the
herd long before it reached the creek where it was to
bed for the night. The heat and the dust had made
slow work of the driving, and it was already late
when they reached the creek — only to find it dry.

This was bad. The men were tired. But, worse,
the cattle were thirsty, and Wade, the " boss of the
buckaroos," pushed the herd on toward the next rim
rock, hoping to get down to the plain below to water
before the end of the slow desert twilight. Anything
for the night but a dry camp.

They had hardly started on when a whole flank of
the herd, as if by prearrangement, suddenly break-
ing away and dividing about two of the riders, tore
off through the brush. The horses were as tired as the
men, and before the chase was over the twilight was
gray in the sage and it became necessary to halt at
once and make camp where they were. They would
have to go without water.

90 SUMMER

The runaways were brought up and the herd closed
in till it formed a circle nearly a mile around. This
was as close as it could be drawn, for the cattle would
not bed — lie down. They wanted water more than
they wanted rest. Their eyes were red, their tongues
raspy with thirst. The situation was a serious one.

But camp was made. Two of the riders were sent
back along the trail to bring up the " drags," while
Wade with his other men circled the uneasy cattle,
closing them in, quieting them, and doing everything
possible to make them bed.

But they were thirsty, and, instead of bedding, the
herd began to " growl " — a distant mutter of throats,
low, rumbling, ominous, as when faint thunder rolls
behind the hills. Every plainsman fears the growl,
for it usually is a prelude to the " milling," as it
proved to be now, when the whole vast herd began
to stir, slowly, singly, and without direction, till at
length it moved together, round and round, a great
compact circle, the multitude of clicking hoofs, of
clashing horns, and chafing sides like the sound
of rushing rain across a field of corn.

Nothing could be worse for the cattle. The cooler
twilight was falling, but, mingling with it, rose and
thickened and spread the choking dust from their feet
that soon covered them and shut out all but the dark
wall of the herd from sight.

Slowly, evenly swung the wall, round and round
without a break. Only one who has watched a mill-

RIDING THE RIM ROCK 91

ing herd can know its suppressed excitement. To
keep that excitement in check was the problem of
Wade and his men. And the night had not yet be-
gun.

When the riders had brought in the drags and
the chuck-wagon had lumbered up with supper, Wade
set the first watch.

Along with the wagon had come the fresh horses
— and Peroxide Jim, a supple, powerful, clean-limbed
buckskin, that had, I think, as fine and intelligent
an animal-face as any I ever saw. And why should
he not have been saved fresh for just such a need as
this? Are there not superior horses to match supe-
rior men — a Peroxide Jim to complement a Wade
and so combine a real centaur, noble physical power
controlled by noble intelligence? At any rate, the
horse understood the situation, and though there was
nothing like sentiment about the boss of the P
Ranch riders, his faith in Peroxide Jim was complete.

The other night horses were saddled and tied to
the wheels of the wagon. It was Wade's custom to
take his turn with the second watch ; but, shifting
his saddle to Peroxide Jim, he rode out with the four
of the first watch, who, evenly spaced, were quietly
circling the herd.

The night, for this part of the desert, was unusu-
ally warm; it was close, silent, and without a sky.
The near thick darkness blotted out the stars. There
is usually a breeze at night over these highest rim-

92 SUMMER

rock plains that, no matter how hot the day,
crowds the cattle together for warmth. To-night not
a breath stirred the sage as Wade wound in and out
among the bushes, the hot dust stinging his eyes and
caking rough on his skin.

Kound and round moved the weaving, shifting
forms, out of the dark and into the dark, a gray
spectral line like a procession of ghosts, or some slow
morris of the desert's sheeted dead. But it was not
a line, it was a sea of forms ; not a procession, but
the even surging of a maelstrom of hoofs a mile
around.

Wade galloped out on the plain for a breath of
air and a look at the sky. A quick cold rain would
quiet them ; but there was no feel of rain in the dark-
ness, no smell of it in the air. Only the powdery
taste of bitter sage.

The desert, where the herd had camped, was one
of the highest of a series of tablelands, or benches,
that lay as level as a floor, and rimmed by a sheer
wall of rock over which it dropped to the bench of
sage below. The herd had been headed for a pass,
and was now halted within a mile of the rim rock on
the east, where there was about three hundred feet
of perpendicular fall.

It was the last place an experienced plainsman
would have chosen for a camp ; and every time Wade
circled the herd and came in between the cattle and
the rim, he felt its nearness. The darkness helped to

RIDING THE RIM ROCK 93

bring it near. The height of his horse brought it
near — he seemed to look down from his saddle over
it, into its dark depths. The herd in its milling
was surely warping slowly in the direction of the
precipice. But this was all fancy — the trick of ,the»
dark and of nerves, if a plainsman has nerves.

At twelve o'clock the first guard came in and
woke the second watch. Wade had been in his sad-
dle since dawn, but this was his regular watch.
More than that, his trained ear had timed the mill-
ing hoofs. The movement of the herd had quick-
ened.

If now he could keep them going and could pre-
vent their taking any sudden fright ! They must
not stop until they stopped from utter weariness*
Safety lay in their continued motion. So Wade, with
the fresh riders, flanked them closely, paced them,
and urged them quietly on. They must be kept mill-
ing, and they must be kept from fright.

In the taut silence of the starless desert night,
with the tension of the cattle at the snapping-point,
any quick, unwonted sight or sound would stam-
pede the herd — the sneezing of a horse, the flare
of a match, enough to send the whole four thousand
headlong — blind, frenzied, tramping — till spent
and scattered over the plain.

And so, as he rode, Wade began to sing. The
rider ahead of him took up the air and passed it on,
until, above the stepping stir of the hoofs, rose the

94 SUMMER

faint voices of the men, and all the herd was bound
about by the slow, plaintive measure of some old
song. It was not to soothe their savage breasts that
the riders sang to the cattle, but to prevent the
•shock of any loud or sudden noise.

So they sang and rode, and the night wore on to
one o'clock, when Wade, coming up on the rim-rock
side, felt a cool breeze fan his face, and caught a
breath of fresh, moist wind with the taste of water
in it.

He checked his horse instantly, listening as the
wind swept past him over the cattle. But they must
already have smelled it, for they had ceased their
milling. The whole herd stood motionless, the indis-
tinct forms nearest him showing, in the dark, their
bald faces lifted to drink the sweet wet breath that
came over the rim. Then they started again, but
faster, and with a rumbling from their hoarse throats
that tightened Wade's grip on his reins.

The sound seemed to come out of the earth, a low,
rumbling mumble, as deep as the night and as wide
as the plain, a thick, inarticulate bellow that stood
every rider stiff in his stirrups.

The breeze caught the dust and carried it back
from the gray-coated, ghostly shapes, and Wade saw
that they were still moving in a circle. If only he
could keep them going ! He touched his horse to
ride on with them, when across the black sky flashed
a vivid streak of lightning.

RIDING THE RIM ROCK 95

There was a snort from the steers, a quick clap of
horns and hoofs from within the herd, a tremor of
the plain, a roar, a surging mass — and Wade was
riding the flank of a wild stampede. Before him,
behind him, beside him, pressing hard upon his
horse, galloped the frenzied steers, and beyond them
a multitude, borne on, and bearing him on, by the
heave of the galloping herd.

Wade was riding for his life. He knew it. His
horse knew it. He was riding to turn the herd, too,
— back from the rim, — as the horse also knew.
The cattle were after water — water-mad — and
would go over the precipice to get it, carrying horse
and rider with them.

Wade was the only rider between the herd and the
rim. It was black as death. He could see nothing in
the sage, could scarcely discern the pounding, pant-
ing shadows at his side ; but he knew by the swish
of the brush and the plunging of the horse that the
ground was growing stonier, that they were nearing
the rocks.

To outrun the cattle seemed his only chance. If
he could come up with the leaders he might yet head
them off upon the plain and save the herd. There
were cattle still ahead of him, — how many, what
part of the herd, he could not tell. But the horse
knew. The reins hung on his straight neck, while
Wade, yelling and firing into the air, gave him the
race to win, to lose.

96 SUMMER

Suddenly they veered and went high in the air,
as a steer plunged headlong into a draw almost be-
neath his feet. They cleared the narrow ravine,
landed on bare rock, and reeled on.

They were riding the rim. Close on their left
bore down the flank of the herd, and on their right,
under their very feet, was the precipice, so close that
theyfeltits blackness — its three hundred feet of fall.

A piercing, half-human bawl of terror told where
a steer had been crowded over. Would the next leap
crowd them over too? Then Wade found himself
racing neck and neck with a big white steer, which
the horse, with marvelous instinct, seemed to pick
from a bunch, and to cling to, forcing him gradually
ahead, till, cutting him free from the bunch entirely,
he bore him off into the sage.

The group coming on behind followed the leader,
and after them swung others. The tide was turning.
Within a short time the whole herd had veered, and,
bearing off from the cliffs, was pounding over the
open plains.

Whose race was it? It was Peroxide Jim's, ac-
cording to Wade, for not by word or by touch of
hand or knee had he been directed in the run. From
the flash of the lightning the horse had taken the
bit, had covered an indescribably perilous path at
top speed, had outrun the herd and turned it from
the edge of the rim rock, without a false step or a
shaken nerve.

(Page 7}

NECK AND NECK WITH A BIG WHITE STEER "

RIDING THE RIM ROCK 99

Bred on the desert, broken in at the round-up,
trained to think steer as the' rider thinks it, the horse
knew, as swiftly, as clearly as his rider, the work be-
fore him. But that he kept himself from fright, that
none of the wild herd-madness passed into him, is a
thing for great wonder. He was as thirsty as any of
the herd ; he knew his own peril, I believe, as none
of the herd had ever known anything, and yet such
coolness, courage, wisdom, and power !

Was it training ? Superior intelligence ? More in-
timate association with the man on his back, and so
a farther remove from jthe wild thing that domesti-
cation does not seem to touch ? Or was it all by sug-
gestion, the superior intelligence above him riding,
not only the flesh, but the spirit?

Not all suggestion, I believe. Perhaps a herd of
horses could not be stampeded so easily as these P
Ranch cattle. In this race, however, nothing of the
wild herd-spirit touched the horse. Had the cattle
been horses, would Peroxide Jim have been able to
keep himself outside the stampede and above the
spirit of the herd?

CHAPTER XI

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER

FIRST, select some bird or beast or insect that
lives with you in your dooryard or house or
near neighborhood, and keep track of his
doings all summer long, jotting down in a diary
your observations. You might take the white-faced
hornet that builds the big paper nests in the trees ;
or the mud wasp, or the toad under the steps, or the
swifts in the chimney, or the swallows in the barn. It
hardly matters what you take, for every life is inter-
esting. The object is to learn how to follow up your
study, how to watch one life long enough, and under
circumstances different enough, to discover its many-
sidedness, its fascination and romance. Such careful
and prolonged study will surely reveal to you some-
thing no one else has seen, too. It will be good train-
ing in patience and independence.

Along with this study of one life, keep a list of
all the beasts, birds, insects., flowers, etc., that live —
I mean, that build nests or dig holes and rear fami-
lies — in your dooryard or in this " haunt " that I

THINGS TO DO THJS

told you in " The Spring of the Year " (see page 42,
Sections in and iv) you ought to pick out as your own
field of study. This list will grow all through the sum-
mer and from year to year. I have a list of seventy-
six wild neighbors (not counting the butterflies and
insects) that are sharing my four teen-acre farm with
me. How many and what wild things are sharing
your dooryard, your park, your favorite haunt or
farm with you ? Such a list of names, with a blank
place left for each where observations can be en-
tered from time to time, would be one of the most
useful and interesting journals you could keep.

Ill

All through June and into July you should have
a round of birds' nests that you visit daily, and to
which you can take your friends and visitors — that
is, if you live in or near the country. One will be
in the big unused chimney of the house, perhaps,
and that will be the first ; then one in the barn, or
in a bird-house in the yard ; or in the pear- or apple-
tree hole ; one in the lilac or honeysuckle bushes, and
then down into the orchard, out into the meadow,
on into the woods and back — taking in twenty to
thirty birds' nests with eggs and young ! Did you
ever do it ? Can you do it this summer ? Don't you
think it would be quite as exciting and interesting
as going to the circus? I can do it; and if you
come out to Mullein Hill in June or July, any one

\m; K-' .SUMMER

of my small boys will take you on his " birds' nest
round."

You should camp out — even if you have to pitch
your tent in the back yard or up on the roof ! You
should go to sleep on a bed of boughs, — pine, or
spruce, or hickory, if possible, — or swing your ham-
mock between the trunks of sweet-smelling forest
trees, and turn your face up to the stars ! You will
never want to sleep in a room with closed windows
after that. To see the stars looking down upon you;
to see the tree-tops swaying over you ; to feel the fresh
night wind stealing across your face and breathing
into your very soul — yes, you must sleep at least
one night this summer right out on a bed of boughs ;
but with a blanket of wool and a piece of sail-cloth
or rubber coat over you and under you, and perhaps
some mosquito-netting.

But you must not build a fire in the woods, unless
you have a guide or older people with a permit
along. Fires are terrible masters, and it is almost as
dangerous to build a fire in the woods as to build
one in the waste-paper basket in the basement of
some large store. Along the seashore or by the mar-
gin of a river or lake, if you take every precaution,
it might be safe enough ; but in the woods, if camp-
ing out, make all preparations by clearing a wide

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER 103

space down to the bare ground, then see that it is
bare ground and not a boggy, rooty peat-bed be-
neath, that will take fire and smoulder and burn
away down under the surface out of sight, to break
through, perhaps, a week after you have gone, and
set the whole mountain-side afire. Build your fire
on bare, sandy earth; have a shovel and can of
water at hand, and put the fire out when you are
done with it. It is against the law in most States to
set a fire out of doors after the 1st of April, without
a permit from the fire-warden.

Now, after this caution, you ought to go out some
evening by the shore with a small party and roast
some green corn in the husk; then, wrapping some
potatoes in clay, bake them ; if you have fish, wrap
them in clay with their scales on, and bake them.
The scales will come off beautifully when the clay
is cracked off, and leave you the tastiest meal of
fish and potatoes and corn you ever ate. Every boy
and girl ought to have a little camp-life and ought
to have each his share of camp-work to perform this
summer.

At the close of some stifling July day you ought
to go out into the orchard or woods and watch the
evening come on — to notice how the wild life re-
vives, flowers open, birds sing, animals stir, breezes
start, leaves whisper, and all the world awakes.

104 SUMMER

Then follow that up by getting out the next
morning before sunrise, say at half-past three o'clock,
an hour before the sun bursts over the eastern hills.
If you are not a stump or a stone, the sight and the
smell — the whole indescribable freshness and won-
der of it all — will thrill you. Would you go to the
Pyramids or Niagara or the Yellowstone Park? Yes,
you would, and you would take a great deal of
trouble to see any one of these wonders! Just as
great a wonder, just as thrilling an experience, is
right outside of your bedroom early any June, July,
or August morning! I know boys and girls who
never saw the sun get up!

VII

You ought to spend some time this summer on a
real farm. Boy or girl, you need to feel ploughed
ground under your feet; you need the contact with
growing things in the ground; you need to handle
a hoe, gather the garden vegetables, feed the chick-
ens, feed the pigs, drive the cows to pasture, help
stow away the hay — and all the other interesting
experiences that make up the simple, elemental, and
wonderfully varied day of farm life. A mere visit is
not enough. You need to take part in the digging
and weeding and planting. The other day I let out
my cow after keeping her all winter in the barn.
The first thing she did was to kick up her heels and
run to a pile of fresh earth about a newly planted

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER

105

tree and fall to eating it — not the tree, but the
earth, the raw, rich soil — until her muzzle was
muddy halfway to her eyes. You do not need to eat
it; but the need to smell it, to see it, to feel it, to
work in it, is just as real as the cow's need to eat it.

VIII

You ought to learn how to browse and nibble in
the woods. What do I mean? Why, just this: that
you ought to
learn how to
taste the woods
as well as to see
them. Maurice
Thompson, in
" Byways and

Bird Notes," SASSAFRAS

a book you
ought to read (and that is another "ought to do"
for this summer), has a chapter called " Browsing
and Nibbling" in which his mountain guide says:
"What makes me allus a-nibblin' an' a-browsin' of
the bushes an' things as I goes along? I kinder
b'lieve hit keeps a feller's heart stiddy an' his blood
pure for to nibble an' browse kinder like a deer
does. You know a deer is allus strong an' active,
an' hit is everlastin'ly a-nibblin' an' a-browsin'. Ef
hit is good for the annymel, hit otter be good for
the feller."

106

SUMMER

The guide may not be right about the strength to
be had from tasting the roots and barks and buds of
things, but I know that I am right when I tell you
that the very sap of the summer woods will seem to
mingle with your blood at the taste of the aromatic
sassafras root, the spicy bark of the sweet birch and

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE

the biting bulb of the Indian turnip. Many of the per-
fumes, odors, resins, gums, saps, and nectars of the
woods can be known to you only by sense of taste.

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER 107

" But I shall bite into something poisonous," you
say. Yes, you must look out for that, and you must

POISON SUMACH

take the pains this summer to learn the poisonous
things of our woods and fields. So before you begin
to browse and nibble, make a business of learning the

108

SUMMER

deadly nightshade with its green or its red berries;
the poison sumach with its loose panicles or clusters

POISON IVY

of grayish-white berries; the three-leaved poison ivy
or " ground oak " (which you can easily tell from
the five-leaved Virginia creeper) ; and the deadly
mushrooms with their bulbous roots. These are the
poisonous plants that you will meet with most fre-
quently, but there are a few others, and it will be

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER

109

safest not to nibble any plant that is strange to you.
Nor am I suggesting that you make a meal on the

pitch of the pine trees
or anything else.
Do not eat any of
these things ;
taste them
only. I was
once made
desperately ill

VIRGINIA CREEPER

by eating poke root (I was

a very little child) which

I took for sweet potato.

Poke berries are not good to

eat. Take along a few good

sandwiches from home to eat.

But learn to know the mints, the

medicinal roots and barks, and

that long list of old-fashioned

" herbs" that our grandmothers hung from the garret

rafters and made us take occasionally as " tea."

110

SUMMER

A. phalloides

Finally, as a lover of the woods and wild life, you
ought to take a personal responsibility for the pres-
ervation of the
trees and woods
in your neigh-
borhood, and of
the birds and
beasts and other
lowlier forms of
wild life. Year
by year the wild
things are van-
ishing never to
return to your
woods, and never
to be seen again
by man. Do
what you can to
stop the hunting
and ignorant
killing of every
sort. You ought
to get and read
"Our Vanish-
ing Wild Life/'
by William T.
Hornaday, and then join the growing host of us

ntappa

THE DEADLY AMANITA

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER

111

who, alarmed at the fearful increase of insect pests,
and the loss to the beauty and interest of the out-

POKE

of-doors through the extermination of wild life, are
doing our best to save the wild things we still have
and to increase their numbers.

CHAPTER XII

THE " CONY "

WE were threading our slow way along the
narrow divide of the Wallowa Mountains
that runs between the branches of the
Snake River. Our guide was a former " camp-ten-
der/' one who carries provisions to the sheep-herders
in the mountains. As we were stopping a moment to
breathe our horses and to look down upon the head
springs of Big Sheep and Salt Lick Creeks on one
side, and the narrow ribbon of the Imnaha on the
other, this guide and our mammal-collector rode on
ahead. An hour later I saw them round the breast
of a peak far along on the trail and disappear. That
night they brought into camp a "cony," or pika, or
little chief hare.

The year before, this camp-tender, in passing a
certain rock-slide among the high peaks of the pass,
had heard and seen a peculiar little animal about the
size and shape of a small guinea-pig, whistling among
the broken rock. He had never seen the little creature
before, — had never heard of it. It was to this slide
that he now took our naturalist, in the hope of show-
ing him the mountain guinea-pig, and, sure enough,
they brought one back with them, and showed me

THE "CONY" 113

my first "cony," one of the rarest of American
mammals.

But I was broken-hearted. That I should have been
so near and missed it ! For we had descended to
Aneroid Lake to camp that night, and there were no
cony slides below us on the trail.

While the men were busy about camp the next
morning, I slipped off alone on foot, and, following
the trail, got back about ten o'clock to the rock-slide
where they had killed the cony.

A wilder, barrener, more desolate land of crags
and peaks I never beheld. Eternal silence seemed to
wrap it round. The slide was of broken pieces of
rock, just as if the bricks from an immense chimney
had cracked off and rolled down into the valley of
the roof. Stunted vegetation grew around, with
scraggly wild grass and a few snow-line flowers, for
this was on the snow-line, several melting banks
glistening in the morning sun about me.

I crept round the sharp slope of the peak and down
to the edge of the rock-slide. "Any living thing
in that long heap of broken rock ! " I said to myself
incredulously. That barren, blasted pile of splintered
peaks the home of an animal? Why, I was on the
top of the world! A great dark hawk was wheeling
over toward Eagle Cap Mountain in the distance ;
far below me flapped a band of ravens ; and down,
down, immeasurably far down, glistened the small
winding waters of the Iinnaha; while all about me

114 SUMMER

were the peaks, lonely, solitary, mighty, terrible !
Such bleakness and desolation !

But here, they told me, they had shot the cony.
I could not believe it. Why should any animal live
away up here on the roof of the world? For several
feet each side of the steep, piled-up rock grew spears
of thin, wiry grass about six inches high, and a few
stunted flowers, — pussy's-paws, alpine phlox, and
beardtongue, all of them flat to the sand, — and
farther down the sides of the ravine were low, twisted
pines, — mere prostrate mats of trees that had crept
in narrow ascending tongues, up and up, until they
could hang on no longer to the bare alpine "slopes.
But here above the stunted pines, here in the slide
rock, where only mosses and a few flat plants could
live, — plants that blossom in the snow, — dwell the
conies.

I sat down on the edge of the slide, feeling that I
had had my labor for my pains. We had been climb-
ing these peaks in the hope of seeing one of the last
small bands of mountain sheep that made these fast-
nesses their home. But, much as I wished to see a wild
mountain sheep among the crags, I wished more to
see the little cony among the rocks. " As for the
stork/' says the Bible, " the fir trees are her house.
The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats ; and
the rocks for the conies." I had always wondered
about those conies — what they looked like and how
they lived among the rocks.

THE "CONY" 115

I knew that these little conies here in the slide (if
indeed they could be here) were not those of the
mountain-peaks of Palestine. What of that ! The
very rocks might be different in kind from the rocks
of Nebo or Lebanon ; but peaks are peaks, and rocks
are rocks, and the strange little "rabbits" that
dwell in their broken slides are all conies to me. The
cony of the Bible is the little hyrax, a relative of the
elephant.

I sat for a while watching. Was this the place ?
I must make sure before I settled down to waiting,
for when in all my life again might I have this
chance ?

Out in the middle of the slide was a pile of rocks
with an uneven look about them, as if they had been
heaped up there by other hands than those that
hurled them from the peak. Going quietly out, I ex-
amined them closely, and found the perfect print of
a little bloody paw on one of them.

This was the right place. Here was where they
had shot the specimen brought into camp. I got
back to my seat, ready now to wait, even while I
knew that I was holding back the camp from its
day's march.

Perhaps I had been watching for half an hour,
when from somewhere, in the rock-slide surely,
though I could not tell, there sounded a shrill
bleating whistle, not unlike the whistles of the
ground squirrels and marmots that I had heard all

116

SUMMER

through the mountains, yet more tremulous and not
so piercing.

I waited. Presently a little gray form crept over
a stone, stopped and whistled, then disappeared. It
was my cony !

If you can think of Molly Cottontail turned into
the shape of a guinea-pig about eight inches long,

with positively no tail at all, and with big round
broad ears, and with all four legs of equal length so
that the creature walks instead of hopping, — if you
can imagine such a rabbit, — you will get a pretty
clear picture of the cony, or pika, or " little chief
hare."

I kept as still as the stones. Presently the plain-
tive, bleating whistle sounded from nowhere again
— behind me, beyond me, up the slide or down, I

THE "CONY" 117

could not tell. The rocks were rough, rusty chunks
two or three feet long, piled helter-skelter without
form or order, so that any one spot in the slide looked
precisely like every other spot. I could not tell just
the piece the cony had crossed, once my eyes were
off of it, nor into which of the cracks he had disap-
peared. I could only sit still and wait till I caught
him moving, so completely did his color blend with
the rusty brown tone of the slide.

All the while the shrill, piteous call kept coming
from anywhere in the slide. But it was not the call
of several voices, not a colony whistling at once. The
conies live in colonies, but, judging from the single
small haycock which they had curing in the sun, I
think there could not have been more than two or
three pairs of them in this particular slide. Possibly
there was only the single pair, one of which had been
shot, for presently, when my eyes grew sharp enough
to pick the little creature out against the rocks, I
found that one was doing all the calling, and that for
some reason he was greatly disturbed.

Now he would stop on a slab and whistle, then
dive into some long passage under the stones, to re-
appear several feet or yards away. Here he would
pause to listen, and, hearing nothing, would call
again, waiting for an answer to his tremulous cry
which did not come.

Under and over the stones, up and down the slide,
now close to me, now on the extreme opposite edge

118 SUMMER

of the pile he traveled, nervously, anxiously looking
for something — for some one, I truly think ; and
my heart smote me when I thought it might be for
the dead mate whose little bare foot-pads had left
the bloody print upon the rock.

Up and down, in and out, he ran, calling, calling,
calling, but getting no answer back. He was the
only one that showed himself, the only live one I have
ever seen, but this one I followed, as he went search-
ing and crying over the steep rock-slide, with my eye
and with the field-glasses, until long past noon — with
a whole camp down the canon looking for me !

But they must know where to look. Let them
climb out of the canon, back to the top of the world
to the cony slide, if they could not wait for me.

Higher up than the mountain sheep or the goat
can live, where only the burrowing pocket gopher
and rare field mice are ever found, dwells the cony.
This particular slide was on one of the minor peaks,
— loftier ones towered all about, — nor do I know
just how high it was, but the cony dwells above the
tree-line, up in the Arctic-Alpine Zone, in a world of
perpetual snow, from ten to fourteen thousand feet
above the sea.

By perpetual snow I mean that the snow-banks
never melt in the shadowed ravines and on the bare
north slopes. Here, where I was watching, the rock-
slide lay open to the sun, the scanty grass was green
beyond the gully, and the squat alpine flowers were

THE "CONY" 119

in bloom, the saxifrage and a solitary aster (April
and September together !) blossoming in the edges of
the snow just as fast as the melting banks allowed
them to lift their heads. But any day the wind might
come down from the north, keen and thick and white
about the summits, and leave the flowers and the cony
slide covered deep beneath a drift.

Spring, summer, and autumn are all one season,
all crowded together — a kind of peak piercing for
a few short weeks the long, bleak, unbroken land of
winter here on the roof of the world.

But during this brief period the thin grass springs
up, and the conies cut and cure it, enough of it to last
them from the falling of the September snows until
the drifts are once more melted and their rock-slide
warms in another summer's sun.

For the cony does not hibernate. He stays awake
down in his catacombs. Think of being buried alive
in pitch-black night with snow twenty-five feet thick
above you for nine out of twelve months of the
year ! Yet here they are away up on the sides of the
wildest summits, living their lives, keeping their
houses, rearing their children, visiting back and forth
through their subways for all this long winter, pro-
tected by the drifts which lie so deep that they keep
out the cold.

As I looked about me I could not see grass enough
to feed a pair of conies for a winter. Right near me
was one of their little haycocks, nearly cured and

120 SUMMER

ready for storing in their barns beneath the rocks;
but this would not last long. It was already early
August and what haying they had to do must be
done quickly or winter would catch them hungry.

They cut the grass that grows in the vicinity of
the slide, and cock it until it is cured, then they carry
it all below against the coming of the cold; and
naturalists who have observed them describe with
what hurry and excitement the colony falls to taking
in the hay when bad weather threatens to spoil it.

Hardy little farmers ! Bold small folk ! Why climb
for a home with your tiny, bare-soled feet above the
aerie of the eagle and the cave of the soaring con-
dor of the Sierras? Why not descend to the warm
valleys, where winter, indeed, comes, but cannot lin-
ger?— or farther down where the grass is always
green, with never a need to cut and cure a winter's
hay?

I do not know why — nor why upon the tossing
waves the little petrel makes her bed ; nor why, be-
neath the waves, "down to the dark, to the utter
dark" on

" The great gray level plains of ooze,"

the "blind white sea-snakes" make their home;
nor why at the north, in the fearful, far-off, frozen
north, the little lemmings dwell; nor why, nor why.
But as I sat there above the clouds, listening to the
plaintive, trembling whistle of the little cony, and

THE "CONY" 121

hoping his mate was not dead, and wondering why he
stayed here in the barren peak, and how he must fare
in the black, bitter winter, I said over to myself the
lines of Kipling for an answer, —

" And God who clears the grounding berg
And steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow."

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER I

TO THE TEACHER

Let me say again that the best thing any nature book can do for
its readers is to take them out of doors ; and that the best thing any na-
ture-study teacher can do for them is to take them out of doors. Think
of going to school to a teacher so simple, wholesome, vigorous, origi-
nal, and rich in the qualities of the soul that she (how naturally we
say " she " !) — that she comes to her classroom by way of the Public
Garden, carrying a bird-glass in her hand ! or across the fields with a
rare orchid in her hand, and the freshness and sweetness of the June
morning in her face and spirit ! Why, I should like to be a boy again
just to have such a teacher. Instead of bird-songs it is too often
school gossip, instead of orchids it is clothes, instead of the open
fields it is the round of the schoolroom that most teachers are ab-
sorbed in. Most teachers can add and spell much better than they
can read, because they do not know the literary values and sugges-
tions of words. Nothing would so help the run of teachers as the back-
ground, the observation and feeling, that would come from an intimate
knowledge of the out-of-doors in the vicinity of their schoolrooms.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1

Learn first of all the joy of walking. It is enough at first to say
" I am going to take a woods walk," with nothing smaller in mind
to do or hear or see. Such tramping itself is one of the very best
ways of meeting the wild folk, and getting acquainted with na-
ture. Go to a variety of places — the seashore, the water-front,
the upland pasture, the deep swamps, even if you take a car-ride
to reach them. Then select the place nearest at hand to frequent
and watch closely.

124 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

PAGE 3

There are many good books on the use of the camera for nature-
study. Among them read : " Nature and the Camera " by Dug-
more ; " Home Life of Wild Birds," by Herrick.

PAGE 4

The clover blossom and the bumblebee : Read the intensely inter-
esting book of Darwin's on the cross-fertilization of flowers.
You will also find readable accounts in " Nature's Garden," by
Mrs. Blanchan.

PAGE 5

In what nursery book do you find the original account of the
House that Jack Built f

PAGE 6

Coccinella septempunctata : The ladybirds, or ladybugs, are named
according to the number of their spots : septempunctata means
seven-spotted. Another is called novemnotata, nine-spotted.
Sixty species of birds : Make your own list. Study your woods, your
neighborhood, minutely day and night in order to find them all.

CHAPTER II

TO THE TEACHER

Set the students to watching and reporting this rare but very in-
teresting phase of wild animal life. Nothing will tax their patience
and ingenuity more ; nor will any of their reports need so careful
scrutiny and weighing, so easy is it to be mistaken.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 10

"line ": the end of the race ; the "tape " or mark set for runners
in a contest.

" set-to " : a combat or fight.

mix-up : is the same half -slangy word or newspaper expression for
a general fight.
PAGE 11

Paramcecium : this is one of the best known of the single-celled
animals. You can get them by making an " infusion " of raw po-
tato, a little hay, and stagnant water.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 125

PAGE 12

A writer in one of our magazines : The account is found in " St.
Nicholas "for May, 1913.

two big slanting cellar-doors : These were in the shed of my grand-
father's farmhouse, " Underwood," and covered the " bulkhead "
of the cellar.

PAGE 13

The [Massachusetts] Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ani-
mals : has its headquarters in Boston. It does a great work for
" dumb " animals, and publishes a paper called " Our Dumb Ani-
mals " that every home and school should have.

PAGE 14

follow my leader : a game that all boys know and love, especially
when a strong, daring leader takes the game in hand.

PAGE 15

Mount Hood : is the highest peak of the Cascade Range in Ore-
gon. The rope hanging down from the summit was brought up on
a pack-horse or mule (I forget which) as far as Tie-up Rock,
then carried to the summit by the professional guides and there
fastened for the safety of those whom they take to the top during
the summer.

PAGE 17

a wild snowstorm : for a fuller description of this storm and the
whole climb see the chapter in " Where Rolls the Oregon " en-
titled " The Butterflies of Mount Hood."

CHAPTER III

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 19

" All heaven and earth are still" etc. : this is from Byron's
" Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," a poem you ought to read.

PAGE 21

Mr. William L. Finley's story of the condor appeared in the
" Century Magazine." It is one of the most interesting bird stories
ever written.

This is the season ofjlowers : among the helpful and interesting
flower books for field use are " Gray's Manual," Mrs. Dana's

126 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

"How to Know the Wild Flowers," and Chester A. Reed's
little vest-pocket Guide with colored plates of the common flowers.
PAGE 25

rain down little toads : 1 saw it again in the deserts of Oregon,
the quick shower making millions of western spadefoot toads hop
up out of the sand. As the sun came out again, presto ! all were
gone — into the sand out of sight.

CHAPTER IV

TO THE TEACHER

In reading this story point out the very narrow margin of life
among the wild animals ; that is to say, show how little a thing it
often is that turns the scales, that makes for life or death. We need
all our powers, and all of them developed to their very highest de-
gree of efficiency for the race of life. Only the fittest survive, and
for these the race is often under too great handicaps.

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 27

plumers : those who used to kill birds for their beautiful plumage.
Klamath Lake Reservation: is partly in California. It was set aside
by President Roosevelt.

the coyote : is the prairie or desert wolf. He is larger than the
red fox, but smaller than the gray, or timber, wolf.

PAGE 29

homesteader : one who settles upon land under the Federal home-
steading laws.

CHAPTER V

TO THE TEACHER

With a map of Boston follow the course of this title — from the
crowded wharf and water-front to the wide, country-like fields of
Franklin Park. It is a five-cent car-ride, a good half-day's walk if
you watch the wild life on the way. Map out suck a course in your

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 127

own city and take your pupils over it on a tramp, Watching for
glimpses of animal and bird life and for the sight of Nature's face —
the sky, the wind, the sunshine, trees, grass, flowers, etc. Make the
most of your city chance for nature-study. It is an important matter.

FOR THE PUPIL

T wharf, long one of the busiest fish wharves in the world, per-
haps the busiest, is, as I write, on the point of being abandoned
by the fish-dealers of Boston, who are to occupy a huge new pier
at South Boston, built by the State at a cost of about a million
dollars. Franklin Field is a great athletic field adjoining Franklin
Park in the southern part of Boston.

PAGE 39

list of saints: these immortal names are carved in various places
on the outer walls of the Public Library.
cranium : the head, or rather the skull.

herring gull : Larus argentatus, one of the largest and common-
est of the harbor birds, and very much like the Western gull of
Three-Arch Rocks. It is a pearl-gray and pure white creature
with black on the wings. The immature birds are a brownish gray
and look like an entirely different species for the first year.

PAGE 40

Boston, Baltimore, etc. : Make a study of your city parks and the
spots of green and the open spaces where the wild things may be
found. Go to the Public Library and ask for the books that treat
of the wild life of your city : " Wild Birds in City Parks," by
Walter, will be such a book for Chicago ; « Birds in the Bush,"
by Torrey, and " Birds of the Boston Public Garden," by Wright,
for Boston.

Charles River Basin : the wide fresh-water part of Charles River
just above the dam and near Beacon and Charles Streets.
Scup : another name is porgie, porgy, scuppaug.
Squid: (Ommastrephes illecebrosus), a cephalopod, or cuttlefish,
used for bait along the Atlantic coast.

The " cuttle-bone " in canaries' cages is taken from the genus
Sepia.

Squeteague : pronounced skwe-teg' ; also called weak fish and sea-
trout.

128 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

Scallops: are shellfish the large muscle of which is much prized

for food.

These are only a few of the fish kinds brought in at T Wharf.

PAGE 41

Grand Banks: a submarine plateau in the Atlantic, eastward
from Newfoundland ; noted as a fishing-ground. Its depth is
thirty to sixty fathoms.

the Georges: a smaller bank lying off Cape Cod.
" We're Here"; the name of the schooner in Kipling's "Cap-
tains Courageous."

Quincy Market : an old well-known market in Boston.
King's Chapel: on Tremont Street. It was begun in 1749 and is
still used for worship. See " Roof and Meadow " for a fuller ac-
count of the sparrows.

PAGE 42

rim rock: the edging of rock around the flats and plains of the

sage deserts of Oregon.

Boston Common : known to every child who has read the history

of our country. The "Garden" is across Charles Street from the

Common.

PAGE 43

Agassiz Museum : the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard

University. It is popularly called the Agassiz Museum in honor

of the great naturalist Louis Agassiz, who founded it.

See Sarah K. Bolton's " Famous Men of Science."

Arnold Arboretum : is near the western edge of Boston ; one of the

most celebrated gardens of trees in the world.

Through the heaven's wide pathless way : from " II Penseroso," by

Milton.

PAGE 44

Swales : wet, grassy, or even bushy, meadows.

CHAPTER VI

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 46

The tree-toad: (Hyla versicolor) ; he is said by country people to
prophesy rain.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 129

pennyroyal: is one of the small aromatic mints.

Wilson Flagg : one of our earliest outdoor writers. Look up his

life in any American biographical dictionary.

CHAPTER VII

TO THE TEACHER

For a fuller account of this Wild Bird Reservation see the chapter
in " Where Rolls the Oregon," called " Three-Arch Rocks Reserva-
tion." Bring out in your reading the point I wished to make, namely
that these great reservations of State and Federal Government are
not only to preserve bird and animal life, but also to preserve nature
— a portion of the earth — wild and primitive and thrilling, against
the constant encroachments of civilization. Interest your pupils in
their own local parks, preserves, etc., and if they have farms or
wood-lots, have them post them and set them aside as their personal
sanctuaries for wild life.

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 57

Tillamook: the name of a town near the coast of Oregon.
at the mouth of the bay : Tillamook Bay, where the bar is only about
thirty feet wide, making the passage extremely difficult and dan-
gerous.

Three-Arch Rocks Reservation : was set aside by President Roose-
velt. Credit for this and the other Oregon Reservations is largely
due to Mr. William L. Finley and the Audubon Societies.

PAGE 59

Shag Rock : so named for the black cormorants that nest upon it,
for these birds are commonly known as " shags."

PAGE 60

the sea-lions : were of the species known as Steller's sea-lions.
reversed in shape : I mean the close hind flippers, the tapering
hind end of the body, gave them an unnatural shape — reversed.
JEolus : the god of the winds.

130 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER VIII

TO THE TEACHER

Set the pupils to watching for evidences of mother-love among the
lower creatures, where we do not think of finding it; stir them to
look for unreported acts, and the hidden, less easily observed ways.
Such a suggestion might be the turning of a new page for them in
the book of nature.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 65

Cud: the ball of grass or hay that the cow keeps bringing up

from her first stomach to be chewed and swallowed, going then

into the second stomach, where it is digested.

stanchions : the iron or wooden fastening about the cow's neck in

the stall.

mother-principle : the instinct or unconscious impulse of all living

things to reproduce their kind.

PAGE 66

spores : the name of the seed dust of the ferns.

the hunter family : these are the spiders that build no nets or webs

for snaring their prey, but hunt their prey over the ground.

PAGE 69

Toadjish : See the chapter in the " Fall of the Year " called " In
the Toadfish's Shoe."

PAGE 70

Surinam toads : pronounced soo-ri-nam'.

Mother-passion . . . in the life of reptiles : many readers, seeing this
statement in the " Atlantic Monthly," where the essay first ap-
peared, have written me of how when they were boys they sa'w
snakes swallow their young — or at least killed the old snakes
with young in them ! Is n't that mother-love among the reptiles ?
But every time the story has been about garter snakes or mocca-
sins or some other ovoviviparous snake; that is, a snake that does
not lay eggs, but keeps them within her body till they hatch, then
gives birth to the young. I have never seen a snake swallow its
young ; though big snakes do eat little ones whenever they can
get them.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 131

CHAPTEK IX

FOR THE PUPIL

Mother Carey's chickens are any of the small petrels. The little
stormy petrels of poetry and story belong to the Old World and
only wander occasionally over to our side of the Atlantic.
PAGE 79

petrel : pronounced pet'rel, so called in allusion, perhaps, to Saint
Peter's walking on the sea.

CHAPTER X

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 88

P Ranch : is one of the Hanley system of cattle ranches, which
cover a wide area almost seventy-five miles long. The buildings
and tree-fences, the stockades and sheds make it one of the most
picturesque I have ever seen. This story was told to me by Jack
Wade, the " boss of the buckaroos." " Buckaroo " is a corruption
of the Spanish vaquero, cowherd.
Winnemucca : find the place on the map.

PAGE 91

buckskin: a horse of a soft yellowish color. He got his name
Peroxide Jim from the resemblance of the color of his coat to
that of human hair bleached by peroxide of hydrogen.

CHAPTER XI

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 100

paper nests in trees: The common yellow-jacket hornet builds
similar large round nests in bushes, and other wasps build paper
nests behind walls, under the ground, in holes, etc.

132 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

PAGE 107

bite into something poisonous : Send to the Department of Agri-
culture at Washington for the little booklet on our poisonous
plants. It is free.

CHAPTER XII

TO THE TEACHER

Try to bring home to the class the profoundly interesting facts
of animal distribution — where they live, and how they came to live
where they do. Point out the strange shifts resorted to by various
creatures who live at the various extremes of height or depth or cold
or heat to enable them to get a living.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 121

"And God ivho clears ": these lines of Kipling I am quoting as I
first found them printed. I see in his collected verse that they
are somewhat changed.

14 DAY USE

RETURN TO DESK FROM WHIG BORROW!

i/flT* fl SSfflaliw
l^iii LiBMBnlll

below, or

Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.

LD 21-50m-6,'59
(A2845slO)476

General Library

University of California

Berkeley

416188

IVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

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