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The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

by John Muir · English · Gutenberg #18359 · 320,193 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Author: John Muir


        
Release date: May 9, 2006 [eBook #18359]
                Most recently updated: July 15, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH ***




Transcriber’s Note:

A number of words have been inconsistently hyphenated in this text.
For a complete list, please see the end of this document.

cover




THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

BY

_John Muir_

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SKETCHES

BY THE AUTHOR

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1912 AND 1913, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY JOHN MUIR

_Published March 1913_

FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

John Muir

John MuirToList


Contents

I. A BOYHOOD IN SCOTLAND
  Earliest Recollections—The “Dandy Doctor” Terror—Deeds
   of Daring—The Savagery of Boys—School and
   Fighting—Birds’-nesting.  
II. A NEW WORLD
  Stories of America—Glorious News—Crossing the
   Atlantic—The New Home—A Baptism in Nature—New
   Birds—The Adventures of Watch—Scotch
   Correction—Marauding Indians.  
III. LIFE ON A WISCONSIN FARM 90
  Humanity in Oxen—Jack, the Pony—Learning to Ride—Nob
   and Nell—Snakes—Mosquitoes and their Kin—Fish and
   Fishing—Considering the Lilies—Learning to Swim—A
   Narrow Escape from Drowning and a Victory—Accidents to
   Animals.  
IV. A PARADISE OF BIRDS
  Bird Favorites—The Prairie Chickens—Water-Fowl—A Loon
   on the Defensive—Passenger Pigeons.  
V. YOUNG HUNTERS
  American Head-Hunters—Deer—A Resurrected
   Woodpecker—Muskrats—Foxes and Badgers—A Pet
   Coon—Bathing—Squirrels—Gophers—A Burglarious Shrike.  
VI. THE PLOUGHBOY
  The Crops—Doing Chores—The Sights and Sounds of
   Winter—Road-making—The Spirit-rapping
   Craze—Tuberculosis among the Settlers—A Cruel
   Brother—The Rights of the Indians—Put to the Plough at
   the Age of Twelve—In the Harvest-Field—Over-Industry
   among the Settlers—Running the Breaking-Plough—Digging
   a Well—Choke-Damp—Lining Bees.  
VII. KNOWLEDGE AND INVENTIONS
  Hungry for Knowledge—Borrowing Books—Paternal
   Opposition—Snatched Moments—Early Rising proves a Way
   out of Difficulties—The Cellar Workshop—Inventions—An
   Early-Rising Machine—Novel Clocks—Hygrometers, etc.—A
   Neighbor’s Advice.  
VIII. THE WORLD AND THE UNIVERSITY
  Leaving Home—Creating a Sensation in Pardeeville—A Ride
   on a Locomotive—At the State Fair in Madison—Employment
   in a Machine-Shop at Prairie du Chien—Back to
   Madison—Entering the University—Teaching School—First
   Lesson in Botany—More Inventions—The University of the
   Wilderness.  
INDEX

_Illustrations_

John Muir _Frontispiece_
Muir’s Lake (Fountain Lake) and the Garden Meadow 62
Our First Wisconsin Home 100
Clock with Hand rising and setting with the Sun, invented
by the Author in his Boyhood 132
Barometer invented by the Author in his Boyhood 164
Combined Thermometer, Hygrometer, Barometer, and
Pyrometer, invented by the Author in his Boyhood 196
The Hickory Hill House, built in 1857 230
Thermometer invented by the Author in his Boyhood 258
Self-Setting Sawmill. Model built in Cellar. Invented by
the Author in his Boyhood 258
My Desk, made and used at the Wisconsin State University 284




_The Story of My Boyhood and Youth_

IToC

A BOYHOOD IN SCOTLAND

Earliest Recollections—The “Dandy Doctor” Terror—Deeds of Daring—The
Savagery of Boys—School and Fighting—Birds’-nesting.


When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild,
and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and
wild creatures. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the
stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the
land lay in smooth cultivation. With red-blooded playmates, wild as
myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and
along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels
and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best
of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black
headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and
the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We
never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old
I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and
every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly
warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I
should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In
spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the
natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course
as invincible and unstoppable as stars.

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks
with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one
of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where
I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and
got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a
hay-field, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a
sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called
grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I
insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we
discovered the source of the strange exciting sound,—a mother field
mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me
was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on
discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den.

I was sent to school before I had completed my third year. The first
schoolday was doubtless full of wonders, but I am not able to recall
any of them. I remember the servant washing my face and getting soap in
my eyes, and mother hanging a little green bag with my first book in it
around my neck so I would not lose it, and its blowing back in the
sea-wind like a flag. But before I was sent to school my grandfather,
as I was told, had taught me my letters from shop signs across the
street. I can remember distinctly how proud I was when I had spelled my
way through the little first book into the second, which seemed large
and important, and so on to the third. Going from one book to another
formed a grand triumphal advancement, the memories of which still stand
out in clear relief.

The third book contained interesting stories as well as plain
reading-and spelling-lessons. To me the best story of all was
“Llewellyn’s Dog,” the first animal that comes to mind after the
needle-voiced field mouse. It so deeply interested and touched me and
some of my classmates that we read it over and over with aching hearts,
both in and out of school and shed bitter tears over the brave faithful
dog, Gelert, slain by his own master, who imagined that he had devoured
his son because he came to him all bloody when the boy was lost, though
he had saved the child’s life by killing a big wolf. We have to look
far back to learn how great may be the capacity of a child’s heart for
sorrow and sympathy with animals as well as with human friends and
neighbors. This auld-lang-syne story stands out in the throng of old
schoolday memories as clearly as if I had myself been one of that Welsh
hunting-party—heard the bugles blowing, seen Gelert slain, joined in
the search for the lost child, discovered it at last happy and smiling
among the grass and bushes beside the dead, mangled wolf, and wept with
Llewellyn over the sad fate of his noble, faithful dog friend.

Another favorite in this book was Southey’s poem “The Inchcape Bell,” a
story of a priest and a pirate. A good priest in order to warn seamen
in dark stormy weather hung a big bell on the dangerous Inchcape Rock.
The greater the storm and higher the waves, the louder rang the warning
bell, until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the Rover. One fine
day, as the story goes, when the bell was ringing gently, the pirate
put out to the rock, saying, “I’ll sink that bell and plague the Abbot
of Aberbrothok.” So he cut the rope, and down went the bell “with a
gurgling sound; the bubbles rose and burst around,” etc. Then “Ralph
the Rover sailed away; he scoured the seas for many a day; and now,
grown rich with plundered store, he steers his course for Scotland’s
shore.” Then came a terrible storm with cloud darkness and night
darkness and high roaring waves, “Now where we are,” cried the pirate,
“I cannot tell, but I wish I could hear the Inchcape bell.” And the
story goes on to tell how the wretched rover “tore his hair,” and
“curst himself in his despair,” when “with a shivering shock” the stout
ship struck on the Inchcape Rock, and went down with Ralph and his
plunder beside the good priest’s bell. The story appealed to our love
of kind deeds and of wildness and fair play.

A lot of terrifying experiences connected with these first schooldays
grew out of crimes committed by the keeper of a low lodging-house in
Edinburgh, who allowed poor homeless wretches to sleep on benches or
the floor for a penny or so a night, and, when kind Death came to their
relief, sold the bodies for dissection to Dr. Hare of the medical
school. None of us children ever heard anything like the original
story. The servant girls told us that “Dandy Doctors,” clad in long
black cloaks and supplied with a store of sticking-plaster of wondrous
adhesiveness, prowled at night about the country lanes and even the
town streets, watching for children to choke and sell. The Dandy
Doctor’s business method, as the servants explained it, was with
lightning quickness to clap a sticking-plaster on the face of a
scholar, covering mouth and nose, preventing breathing or crying for
help, then pop us under his long black cloak and carry us to Edinburgh
to be sold and sliced into small pieces for folk to learn how we were
made. We always mentioned the name “Dandy Doctor” in a fearful whisper,
and never dared venture out of doors after dark. In the short winter
days it got dark before school closed, and in cloudy weather we
sometimes had difficulty in finding our way home unless a servant with
a lantern was sent for us; but during the Dandy Doctor period the
school was closed earlier, for if detained until the usual hour the
teacher could not get us to leave the schoolroom. We would rather stay
all night supperless than dare the mysterious doctors supposed to be
lying in wait for us. We had to go up a hill called the Davel Brae that
lay between the schoolhouse and the main street. One evening just
before dark, as we were running up the hill, one of the boys shouted,
“A Dandy Doctor! A Dandy Doctor!” and we all fled pellmell back into
the schoolhouse to the astonishment of Mungo Siddons, the teacher. I
can remember to this day the amused look on the good dominie’s face as
he stared and tried to guess what had got into us, until one of the
older boys breathlessly explained that there was an awful big Dandy
Doctor on the Brae and we couldna gang hame. Others corroborated the
dreadful news. “Yes! We saw him, plain as onything, with his lang black
cloak to hide us in, and some of us thought we saw a sticken-plaister
ready in his hand.” We were in such a state of fear and trembling that
the teacher saw he wasn’t going to get rid of us without going himself
as leader. He went only a short distance, however, and turned us over
to the care of the two biggest scholars, who led us to the top of the
Brae and then left us to scurry home and dash into the door like
pursued squirrels diving into their holes.

Just before school skaled (closed), we all arose and sang the fine hymn
“Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing.” In the spring when the swallows
were coming back from their winter homes we sang—

“Welcome, welcome, little stranger,
Welcome from a foreign shore;
Safe escaped from many a danger ...”

and while singing we all swayed in rhythm with the music. “The Cuckoo,”
that always told his name in the spring of the year, was another
favorite song, and when there was nothing in particular to call to mind
any special bird or animal, the songs we sang were widely varied, such
as

“The whale, the whale is the beast for me,
Plunging along through the deep, deep sea.”

But the best of all was “Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing,” though at
that time the most significant part I fear was the first three words.

With my school lessons father made me learn hymns and Bible verses. For
learning “Rock of Ages” he gave me a penny, and I thus became suddenly
rich. Scotch boys are seldom spoiled with money. We thought more of a
penny those economical days than the poorest American schoolboy thinks
of a dollar. To decide what to do with that first penny was an
extravagantly serious affair. I ran in great excitement up and down the
street, examining the tempting goodies in the shop windows before
venturing on so important an investment. My playmates also became
excited when the wonderful news got abroad that Johnnie Muir had a
penny, hoping to obtain a taste of the orange, apple, or candy it was
likely to bring forth.

At this time infants were baptized and vaccinated a few days after
birth. I remember very well a fight with the doctor when my brother
David was vaccinated. This happened, I think, before I was sent to
school. I couldn’t imagine what the doctor, a tall, severe-looking man
in black, was doing to my brother, but as mother, who was holding him
in her arms, offered no objection, I looked on quietly while he
scratched the arm until I saw blood. Then, unable to trust even my
mother, I managed to spring up high enough to grab and bite the
doctor’s arm, yelling that I wasna gan to let him hurt my bonnie
brither, while to my utter astonishment mother and the doctor only
laughed at me. So far from complete at times is sympathy between
parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys,
little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

Father was proud of his garden and seemed always to be trying to make
it as much like Eden as possible, and in a corner of it he gave each of
us a little bit of ground for our very own in which we planted what we
best liked, wondering how the hard dry seeds could change into soft
leaves and flowers and find their way out to the light; and, to see how
they were coming on, we used to dig up the larger ones, such as peas
and beans, every day. My aunt had a corner assigned to her in our
garden which she filled with lilies, and we all looked with the utmost
respect and admiration at that precious lily-bed and wondered whether
when we grew up we should ever be rich enough to own one anything like
so grand. We imagined that each lily was worth an enormous sum of money
and never dared to touch a single leaf or petal of them. We really
stood in awe of them. Far, far was I then from the wild lily gardens of
California that I was destined to see in their glory.

When I was a little boy at Mungo Siddons’s school a flower-show was
held in Dunbar, and I saw a number of the exhibitors carrying large
handfuls of dahlias, the first I had ever seen. I thought them
marvelous in size and beauty and, as in the case of my aunt’s lilies,
wondered if I should ever be rich enough to own some of them.

Although I never dared to touch my aunt’s sacred lilies, I have good
cause to remember stealing some common flowers from an apothecary,
Peter Lawson, who also answered the purpose of a regular physician to
most of the poor people of the town and adjacent country. He had a pony
which was considered very wild and dangerous, and when he was called
out of town he mounted this wonderful beast, which, after standing long
in the stable, was frisky and boisterous, and often to our delight
reared and jumped and danced about from side to side of the street
before he could be persuaded to go ahead. We boys gazed in awful
admiration and wondered how the druggist could be so brave and able as
to get on and stay on that wild beast’s back. This famous Peter loved
flowers and had a fine garden surrounded by an iron fence, through the
bars of which, when I thought no one saw me, I oftentimes snatched a
flower and took to my heels. One day Peter discovered me in this
mischief, dashed out into the street and caught me. I screamed that I
wouldna steal any more if he would let me go. He didn’t say anything
but just dragged me along to the stable where he kept the wild pony,
pushed me in right back of its heels, and shut the door. I was
screaming, of course, but as soon as I was imprisoned the fear of being
kicked quenched all noise. I hardly dared breathe. My only hope was in
motionless silence. Imagine the agony I endured! I did not steal any
more of his flowers. He was a good hard judge of boy nature.

I was in Peter’s hands some time before this, when I was about two and
a half years old. The servant girl bathed us small folk before putting
us to bed. The smarting soapy scrubbings of the Saturday nights in
preparation for the Sabbath were particularly severe, and we all
dreaded them. My sister Sarah, the next older than me, wanted the
long-legged stool I was sitting on awaiting my turn, so she just tipped
me off. My chin struck on the edge of the bath-tub, and, as I was
talking at the time, my tongue happened to be in the way of my teeth
when they were closed by the blow, and a deep gash was cut on the side
of it, which bled profusely. Mother came running at the noise I made,
wrapped me up, put me in the servant girl’s arms and told her to run
with me through the garden and out by a back way to Peter Lawson to
have something done to stop the bleeding. He simply pushed a wad of
cotton into my mouth after soaking it in some brown astringent stuff,
and told me to be sure to keep my mouth shut and all would soon be
well. Mother put me to bed, calmed my fears, and told me to lie still
and sleep like a gude bairn. But just as I was dropping off to sleep I
swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton and with it, as I imagined,
my tongue also. My screams over so great a loss brought mother, and
when she anxiously took me in her arms and inquired what was the
matter, I told her that I had swallowed my tongue. She only laughed at
me, much to my astonishment, when I expected that she would bewail the
awful loss her boy had sustained. My sisters, who were older than I,
oftentimes said when I happened to be talking too much, “It’s a pity
you hadn’t swallowed at least half of that long tongue of yours when
you were little.”

It appears natural for children to be fond of water, although the
Scotch method of making every duty dismal contrived to make necessary
bathing for health terrible to us. I well remember among the awful
experiences of childhood being taken by the servant to the seashore
when I was between two and three years old, stripped at the side of a
deep pool in the rocks, plunged into it among crawling crawfish and
slippery wriggling snake-like eels, and drawn up gasping and shrieking
only to be plunged down again and again. As the time approached for
this terrible bathing, I used to hide in the darkest corners of the
house, and oftentimes a long search was required to find me. But after
we were a few years older, we enjoyed bathing with other boys as we
wandered along the shore, careful, however, not to get into a pool that
had an invisible boy-devouring monster at the bottom of it. Such pools,
miniature maelstroms, were called “sookin-in-goats” and were well known
to most of us. Nevertheless we never ventured into any pool on strange
parts of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it. If the stick
were not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered and enjoyed
plashing and ducking long ere we had learned to swim.

One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which
King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn. It was built more
than a thousand years ago, and though we knew little of its history, we
had heard many mysterious stories of the battles fought about its
walls, and firmly believed that every bone we found in the ruins
belonged to an ancient warrior. We tried to see who could climb highest
on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances that no cautious
mountaineer would try. That I did not fall and finish my
rock-scrambling in those adventurous boyhood days seems now a
reasonable wonder.

Among our best games were running, jumping, wrestling, and scrambling.
I was so proud of my skill as a climber that when I first heard of hell
from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us that if
we did anything wrong we would be cast into it, I always insisted that
I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone
walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chinks
and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes. Anyhow the terrors of
the horrible place seldom lasted long beyond the telling; for natural
faith casts out fear.

Most of the Scotch children believe in ghosts, and some under peculiar
conditions continue to believe in them all through life. Grave ghosts
are deemed particularly dangerous, and many of the most credulous will
go far out of their way to avoid passing through or near a graveyard in
the dark. After being instructed by the servants in the nature, looks,
and habits of the various black and white ghosts, boowuzzies, and
witches we often speculated as to whether they could run fast, and
tried to believe that we had a good chance to get away from most of
them. To improve our speed and wind, we often took long runs into the
country. Tam o’ Shanter’s mare outran a lot of witches,—at least until
she reached a place of safety beyond the keystone of the bridge,—and we
thought perhaps we also might be able to outrun them.

Our house formerly belonged to a physician, and a servant girl told us
that the ghost of the dead doctor haunted one of the unoccupied rooms
in the second story that was kept dark on account of a heavy
window-tax. Our bedroom was adjacent to the ghost room, which had in it
a lot of chemical apparatus,—glass tubing, glass and brass retorts,
test-tubes, flasks, etc.,—and we thought that those strange articles
were still used by the old dead doctor in compounding physic. In the
long summer days David and I were put to bed several hours before
sunset. Mother tucked us in carefully, drew the curtains of the big
old-fashioned bed, and told us to lie still and sleep like gude bairns;
but we were usually out of bed, playing games of daring called
“scootchers,” about as soon as our loving mother reached the foot of
the stairs, for we couldn’t lie still, however hard we might try. Going
into the ghost room was regarded as a very great scootcher. After
venturing in a few steps and rushing back in terror, I used to dare
David to go as far without getting caught.

The roof of our house, as well as the crags and walls of the old
castle, offered fine mountaineering exercise. Our bedroom was lighted
by a dormer window. One night I opened it in search of good scootchers
and hung myself out over the slates, holding on to the sill, while the
wind was making a balloon of my nightgown. I then dared David to try
the adventure, and he did. Then I went out again and hung by one hand,
and David did the same. Then I hung by one finger, being careful not to
slip, and he did that too. Then I stood on the sill and examined the
edge of the left wall of the window, crept up the slates along its side
by slight finger-holds, got astride of the roof, sat there a few
minutes looking at the scenery over the garden wall while the wind was
howling and threatening to blow me off, then managed to slip down,
catch hold of the sill, and get safely back into the room. But before
attempting this scootcher, recognizing its dangerous character, with
commendable caution I warned David that in case I should happen to slip
I would grip the rain-trough when I was going over the eaves and hang
on, and that he must then run fast downstairs and tell father to get a
ladder for me, and tell him to be quick because I would soon be tired
hanging dangling in the wind by my hands. After my return from this
capital scootcher, David, not to be outdone, crawled up to the top of
the window-roof, and got bravely astride of it; but in trying to return
he lost courage and began to greet (to cry), “I canna get doon. Oh, I
canna get doon.” I leaned out of the window and shouted encouragingly,
“Dinna greet, Davie, dinna greet, I’ll help ye doon. If you greet,
fayther will hear, and gee us baith an awfu’ skelping.” Then, standing
on the sill and holding on by one hand to the window-casing, I directed
him to slip his feet down within reach, and, after securing a good
hold, I jumped inside and dragged him in by his heels. This finished
scootcher-scrambling for the night and frightened us into bed.

In the short winter days, when it was dark even at our early bedtime,
we usually spent the hours before going to sleep playing voyages around
the world under the bed-clothing. After mother had carefully covered
us, bade us good-night and gone downstairs, we set out on our travels.
Burrowing like moles, we visited France, India, America, Australia, New
Zealand, and all the places we had ever heard of; our travels never
ending until we fell asleep. When mother came to take a last look at
us, before she went to bed, to see that we were covered, we were
oftentimes covered so well that she had difficulty in finding us, for
we were hidden in all sorts of positions where sleep happened to
overtake us, but in the morning we always found ourselves in good
order, lying straight like gude bairns, as she said.

Some fifty years later, when I visited Scotland, I got one of my Dunbar
schoolmates to introduce me to the owners of our old home, from whom I
obtained permission to go upstairs to examine our bedroom window and
judge what sort of adventure getting on its roof must have been, and
with all my after experience in mountaineering, I found that what I had
done in daring boyhood was now beyond my skill.

Boys are often at once cruel and merciful, thoughtlessly hard-hearted
and tender-hearted, sympathetic, pitiful, and kind in ever changing
contrasts. Love of neighbors, human or animal, grows up amid savage
traits, coarse and fine. When father made out to get us securely locked
up in the back yard to prevent our shore and field wanderings, we had
to play away the comparatively dull time as best we could. One of our
amusements was hunting cats without seriously hurting them. These
sagacious animals knew, however, that, though not very dangerous, boys
were not to be trusted. One time in particular I remember, when we
began throwing stones at an experienced old Tom, not wishing to hurt
him much, though he was a tempting mark. He soon saw what we were up
to, fled to the stable, and climbed to the top of the hay manger. He
was still within range, however, and we kept the stones flying faster
and faster, but he just blinked and played possum without wincing
either at our best shots or at the noise we made. I happened to strike
him pretty hard with a good-sized pebble, but he still blinked and sat
still as if without feeling. “He must be mortally wounded,” I said,
“and now we must kill him to put him out of pain,” the savage in us
rapidly growing with indulgence. All took heartily to this sort of cat
mercy and began throwing the heaviest stones we could manage, but that
old fellow knew what characters we were, and just as we imagined him
mercifully dead he evidently thought the play was becoming too serious
and that it was time to retreat; for suddenly with a wild whirr and
gurr of energy he launched himself over our heads, rushed across the
yard in a blur of speed, climbed to the roof of another building and
over the garden wall, out of pain and bad company, with all his lives
wideawake and in good working order.

After we had thus learned that Tom had at least nine lives, we tried to
verify the common saying that no matter how far cats fell they always
landed on their feet unhurt. We caught one in our back yard, not Tom
but a smaller one of manageable size, and somehow got him smuggled up
to the top story of the house. I don’t know how in the world we managed
to let go of him, for as soon as we opened the window and held him over
the sill he knew his danger and made violent efforts to scratch and
bite his way back into the room; but we determined to carry the thing
through, and at last managed to drop him. I can remember to this day
how the poor creature in danger of his life strained and balanced as he
was falling and managed to alight on his feet. This was a cruel thing
for even wild boys to do, and we never tried the experiment again, for
we sincerely pitied the poor fellow when we saw him creeping slowly
away, stunned and frightened, with a swollen black and blue chin.

Again—showing the natural savagery of boys—we delighted in dog-fights,
and even in the horrid red work of slaughter-houses, often running long
distances and climbing over walls and roofs to see a pig killed, as
soon as we heard the desperately earnest squealing. And if the butcher
was good-natured, we begged him to let us get a near view of the
mysterious insides and to give us a bladder to blow up for a foot-ball.

But here is an illustration of the better side of boy nature. In our
back yard there were three elm trees and in the one nearest the house a
pair of robin-redbreasts had their nest. When the young were almost
able to fly, a troop of the celebrated “Scottish Grays,” visited
Dunbar, and three or four of the fine horses were lodged in our stable.
When the soldiers were polishing their swords and helmets, they
happened to notice the nest, and just as they were leaving, one of them
climbed the tree and robbed it. With sore sympathy we watched the young
birds as the hard-hearted robber pushed them one by one beneath his
jacket,—all but two that jumped out of the nest and tried to fly, but
they were easily caught as they fluttered on the ground, and were
hidden away with the rest. The distress of the bereaved parents, as
they hovered and screamed over the frightened crying children they so
long had loved and sheltered and fed, was pitiful to see; but the
shining soldier rode grandly away on his big gray horse, caring only
for the few pennies the young songbirds would bring and the beer they
would buy, while we all, sisters and brothers, were crying and sobbing.
I remember, as if it happened this day, how my heart fairly ached and
choked me. Mother put us to bed and tried to comfort us, telling us
that the little birds would be well fed and grow big, and soon learn to
sing in pretty cages; but again and again we rehearsed the sad story of
the poor bereaved birds and their frightened children, and could not be
comforted. Father came into the room when we were half asleep and still
sobbing, and I heard mother telling him that, “a’ the bairns’ hearts
were broken over the robbing of the nest in the elm.”

After attaining the manly, belligerent age of five or six years, very
few of my schooldays passed without a fist fight, and half a dozen was
no uncommon number. When any classmate of our own age questioned our
rank and standing as fighters, we always made haste to settle the
matter at a quiet place on the Davel Brae. To be a “gude fechter” was
our highest ambition, our dearest aim in life in or out of school. To
be a good scholar was a secondary consideration, though we tried hard
to hold high places in our classes and gloried in being Dux. We fairly
reveled in the battle stories of glorious William Wallace and Robert
the Bruce, with which every breath of Scotch air is saturated, and of
course we were all going to be soldiers. On the Davel Brae battleground
we often managed to bring on something like real war, greatly more
exciting than personal combat. Choosing leaders, we divided into two
armies. In winter damp snow furnished plenty of ammunition to make the
thing serious, and in summer sand and grass sods. Cheering and shouting
some battle-cry such as “Bannockburn! Bannockburn! Scotland forever!
The Last War in India!” we were led bravely on. For heavy battery work
we stuffed our Scotch blue bonnets with snow and sand, sometimes mixed
with gravel, and fired them at each other as cannon-balls.

Of course we always looked eagerly forward to vacation days and thought
them slow in coming. Old Mungo Siddons gave us a lot of gooseberries or
currants and wished us a happy time. Some sort of special
closing-exercises—singing, recitations, etc.—celebrated the great day,
but I remember only the berries, freedom from school work, and
opportunities for run-away rambles in the fields and along the
wave-beaten seashore.

An exciting time came when at the age of seven or eight years I left
the auld Davel Brae school for the grammar school. Of course I had a
terrible lot of fighting to do, because a new scholar had to meet every
one of his age who dared to challenge him, this being the common
introduction to a new school. It was very strenuous for the first month
or so, establishing my fighting rank, taking up new studies, especially
Latin and French, getting acquainted with new classmates and the master
and his rules. In the first few Latin and French lessons the new
teacher, Mr. Lyon, blandly smiled at our comical blunders, but
pedagogical weather of the severest kind quickly set in, when for every
mistake, everything short of perfection, the taws was promptly applied.
We had to get three lessons every day in Latin, three in French, and as
many in English, besides spelling, history, arithmetic, and geography.
Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved
kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed
the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory, and in
connection with reading-lessons we were called on to recite parts of
them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and
irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all
this, father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the
time I was eleven years of age I had about three fourths of the Old
Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh. I could recite
the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of
Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making
scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were
never heard of in those days. We carried our school-books home in a
strap every night and committed to memory our next day’s lessons before
we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely
on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases. I can’t conceive
of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more
fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by
whipping,—thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no
time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the
new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays. There was
nothing said about making the seats easy or the lessons easy. We were
simply driven pointblank against our books like soldiers against the
enemy, and sternly ordered, “Up and at ’em. Commit your lessons to
memory!” If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for
the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that
there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that
irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.

Fighting was carried on still more vigorously in the high school than
in the common school. Whenever any one was challenged, either the
challenge was allowed or it was decided by a battle on the seashore,
where with stubborn enthusiasm we battered each other as if we had not
been sufficiently battered by the teacher. When we were so fortunate as
to finish a fight without getting a black eye, we usually escaped a
thrashing at home and another next morning at school, for other traces
of the fray could be easily washed off at a well on the church brae, or
concealed, or passed as results of playground accidents; but a black
eye could never be explained away from downright fighting. A good
double thrashing was the inevitable penalty, but all without avail;
fighting went on without the slightest abatement, like natural storms;
for no punishment less than death could quench the ancient inherited
belligerence burning in our pagan blood. Nor could we be made to
believe it was fair that father and teacher should thrash us so
industriously for our good, while begrudging us the pleasure of
thrashing each other for our good. All these various thrashings,
however, were admirably influential in developing not only memory but
fortitude as well. For if we did not endure our school punishments and
fighting pains without flinching and making faces, we were mocked on
the playground, and public opinion on a Scotch playground was a
powerful agent in controlling behavior; therefore we at length managed
to keep our features in smooth repose while enduring pain that would
try anybody but an American Indian. Far from feeling that we were
called on to endure too much pain, one of our playground games was
thrashing each other with whips about two feet long made from the
tough, wiry stems of a species of polygonum fastened together in a
stiff, firm braid. One of us handing two of these whips to a companion
to take his choice, we stood up close together and thrashed each other
on the legs until one succumbed to the intolerable pain and thus lost
the game. Nearly all of our playground games were
strenuous,—shin-battering shinny, wrestling, prisoners’ base, and dogs
and hares,—all augmenting in no slight degree our lessons in fortitude.
Moreover, we regarded our punishments and pains of every sort as
training for war, since we were all going to be soldiers. Besides
single combats we sometimes assembled on Saturdays to meet the scholars
of another school, and very little was required for the growth of
strained relations, and war. The immediate cause might be nothing more
than a saucy stare. Perhaps the scholar stared at would insolently
inquire, “What are ye glowerin’ at, Bob?” Bob would reply, “I’ll look
where I hae a mind and hinder me if ye daur.” “Weel, Bob,” the outraged
stared-at scholar would reply, “I’ll soon let ye see whether I daur or
no!” and give Bob a blow on the face. This opened the battle, and every
good scholar belonging to either school was drawn into it. After both
sides were sore and weary, a strong-lunged warrior would be heard above
the din of battle shouting, “I’ll tell ye what we’ll dae wi’ ye. If
ye’ll let us alane we’ll let ye alane!” and the school war ended as
most wars between nations do; and some of them begin in much the same
way.

Notwithstanding the great number of harshly enforced rules, not very
good order was kept in school in my time. There were two schools within
a few rods of each other, one for mathematics, navigation, etc., the
other, called the grammar school, that I attended. The masters lived in
a big freestone house within eight or ten yards of the schools, so that
they could easily step out for anything they wanted or send one of the
scholars. The moment our master disappeared, perhaps for a book or a
drink, every scholar left his seat and his lessons, jumped on top of
the benches and desks or crawled beneath them, tugging, rolling,
wrestling, accomplishing in a minute a depth of disorder and din
unbelievable save by a Scottish scholar. We even carried on war, class
against class, in those wild, precious minutes. A watcher gave the
alarm when the master opened his house-door to return, and it was a
great feat to get into our places before he entered, adorned in awful
majestic authority, shouting “Silence!” and striking resounding blows
with his cane on a desk or on some unfortunate scholar’s back.

Forty-seven years after leaving this fighting school, I returned on a
visit to Scotland, and a cousin in Dunbar introduced me to a minister
who was acquainted with the history of the school, and obtained for me
an invitation to dine with the new master. Of course I gladly accepted,
for I wanted to see the old place of fun and pain, and the battleground
on the sands. Mr. Lyon, our able teacher and thrasher, I learned, had
held his place as master of the school for twenty or thirty years after
I left it, and had recently died in London, after preparing many young
men for the English Universities. At the dinner-table, while I was
recalling the amusements and fights of my old schooldays, the minister
remarked to the new master, “Now, don’t you wish that you had been
teacher in those days, and gained the honor of walloping John Muir?”
This pleasure so merrily suggested showed that the minister also had
been a fighter in his youth. The old freestone school building was
still perfectly sound, but the carved, ink-stained desks were almost
whittled away.

The highest part of our playground back of the school commanded a view
of the sea, and we loved to watch the passing ships and, judging by
their rigging, make guesses as to the ports they had sailed from, those
to which they were bound, what they were loaded with, their tonnage,
etc. In stormy weather they were all smothered in clouds and spray, and
showers of salt scud torn from the tops of the waves came flying over
the playground wall. In those tremendous storms many a brave ship
foundered or was tossed and smashed on the rocky shore. When a wreck
occurred within a mile or two of the town, we often managed by running
fast to reach it and pick up some of the spoils. In particular I
remember visiting the battered fragments of an unfortunate brig or
schooner that had been loaded with apples, and finding fine unpitiful
sport in rushing into the spent waves and picking up the red-cheeked
fruit from the frothy, seething foam.

All our school-books were extravagantly illustrated with drawings of
every kind of sailing-vessel, and every boy owned some sort of craft
whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite pains,—sloops,
schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships, with their sails and string
ropes properly adjusted and named for us by some old sailor. These
precious toy craft with lead keels we learned to sail on a pond near
the town. With the sails set at the proper angle to the wind, they made
fast straight voyages across the pond to boys on the other side, who
readjusted the sails and started them back on the return voyages.
Oftentimes fleets of half a dozen or more were started together in
exciting races.

Our most exciting sport, however, was playing with gunpowder. We made
guns out of gas-pipe, mounted them on sticks of any shape, clubbed our
pennies together for powder, gleaned pieces of lead here and there and
cut them into slugs, and, while one aimed, another applied a match to
the touch-hole. With these awful weapons we wandered along the beach
and fired at the gulls and solan-geese as they passed us. Fortunately
we never hurt any of them that we knew of. We also dug holes in the
ground, put in a handful or two of powder, tamped it well around a fuse
made of a wheat-stalk, and, reaching cautiously forward, touched a
match to the straw. This we called making earthquakes. Oftentimes we
went home with singed hair and faces well peppered with powder-grains
that could not be washed out. Then, of course, came a correspondingly
severe punishment from both father and teacher.

Another favorite sport was climbing trees and scaling garden-walls.
Boys eight or ten years of age could get over almost any wall by
standing on each other’s shoulders, thus making living ladders. To make
walls secure against marauders, many of them were finished on top with
broken bottles imbedded in lime, leaving the cutting edges sticking up;
but with bunches of grass and weeds we could sit or stand in comfort on
top of the jaggedest of them.

Like squirrels that begin to eat nuts before they are ripe, we began to
eat apples about as soon as they were formed, causing, of course,
desperate gastric disturbances to be cured by castor oil. Serious were
the risks we ran in climbing and squeezing through hedges, and, of
course, among the country folk we were far from welcome. Farmers
passing us on the roads often shouted by way of greeting: “Oh, you
vagabonds! Back to the toon wi’ ye. Gang back where ye belang. You’re
up to mischief, Ise warrant. I can see it. The gamekeeper’ll catch ye,
and maist like ye’ll a’ be hanged some day.”

Breakfast in those auld-lang-syne days was simple oatmeal porridge,
usually with a little milk or treacle, served in wooden dishes called
“luggies,” formed of staves hooped together like miniature tubs about
four or five inches in diameter. One of the staves, the lug or ear, a
few inches longer than the others, served as a handle, while the number
of luggies ranged in a row on a dresser indicated the size of the
family. We never dreamed of anything to come after the porridge, or of
asking for more. Our portions were consumed in about a couple of
minutes; then off to school. At noon we came racing home ravenously
hungry. The midday meal, called dinner, was usually vegetable broth, a
small piece of boiled mutton, and barley-meal scone. None of us liked
the barley scone bread, therefore we got all we wanted of it, and in
desperation had to eat it, for we were always hungry, about as hungry
after as before meals. The evening meal was called “tea” and was served
on our return from school. It consisted, as far as we children were
concerned, of half a slice of white bread without butter, barley scone,
and warm water with a little milk and sugar in it, a beverage called
“content,” which warmed but neither cheered nor inebriated. Immediately
after tea we ran across the street with our books to Grandfather
Gilrye, who took pleasure in seeing us and hearing us recite our next
day’s lessons. Then back home to supper, usually a boiled potato and
piece of barley scone. Then family worship, and to bed.

Our amusements on Saturday afternoons and vacations depended mostly on
getting away from home into the country, especially in the spring when
the birds were calling loudest. Father sternly forbade David and me
from playing truant in the fields with plundering wanderers like
ourselves, fearing we might go on from bad to worse, get hurt in
climbing over walls, caught by gamekeepers, or lost by falling over a
cliff into the sea. “Play as much as you like in the back yard and
garden,” he said, “and mind what you’ll get when you forget and
disobey.” Thus he warned us with an awfully stern countenance, looking
very hard-hearted, while naturally his heart was far from hard, though
he devoutly believed in eternal punishment for bad boys both here and
hereafter. Nevertheless, like devout martyrs of wildness, we stole away
to the seashore or the green, sunny fields with almost religious
regularity, taking advantage of opportunities when father was very
busy, to join our companions, oftenest to hear the birds sing and hunt
their nests, glorying in the number we had discovered and called our
own. A sample of our nest chatter was something like this: Willie
Chisholm would proudly exclaim—“I ken (know) seventeen nests, and you,
Johnnie, ken only fifteen.”

“But I wouldna gie my fifteen for your seventeen, for five of mine are
larks and mavises. You ken only three o’ the best singers.”

“Yes, Johnnie, but I ken six goldies and you ken only one. Maist of
yours are only sparrows and linties and robin-redbreasts.”

Then perhaps Bob Richardson would loudly declare that he “kenned mair
nests than onybody, for he kenned twenty-three, with about fifty eggs
in them and mair than fifty young birds—maybe a hundred. Some of them
naething but raw gorblings but lots of them as big as their mithers and
ready to flee. And aboot fifty craw’s nests and three fox dens.”

“Oh, yes, Bob, but that’s no fair, for naebody counts craw’s nests and
fox holes, and then you live in the country at Belle-haven where ye
have the best chance.”

“Yes, but I ken a lot of bumbee’s nests, baith the red-legged and the
yellow-legged kind.”

“Oh, wha cares for bumbee’s nests!”

“Weel, but here’s something! Ma father let me gang to a fox hunt, and
man, it was grand to see the hounds and the lang-legged horses lowpin
the dykes and burns and hedges!”

The nests, I fear, with the beautiful eggs and young birds, were prized
quite as highly as the songs of the glad parents, but no Scotch boy
that I know of ever failed to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of
the skylarks. Oftentimes on a broad meadow near Dunbar we stood for
hours enjoying their marvelous singing and soaring. From the grass
where the nest was hidden the male would suddenly rise, as straight as
if shot up, to a height of perhaps thirty or forty feet, and,
sustaining himself with rapid wing-beats, pour down the most delicious
melody, sweet and clear and strong, overflowing all bounds, then
suddenly he would soar higher again and again, ever higher and higher,
soaring and singing until lost to sight even on perfectly clear days,
and oftentimes in cloudy weather “far in the downy cloud,” as the poet
says.

To test our eyes we often watched a lark until he seemed a faint speck
in the sky and finally passed beyond the keenest-sighted of us all. “I
see him yet!” we would cry, “I see him yet!” “I see him yet!” “I see
him yet!” as he soared. And finally only one of us would be left to
claim that he still saw him. At last he, too, would have to admit that
the singer had soared beyond his sight, and still the music came
pouring down to us in glorious profusion, from a height far above our
vision, requiring marvelous power of wing and marvelous power of voice,
for that rich, delicious, soft, and yet clear music was distinctly
heard long after the bird was out of sight. Then, suddenly ceasing, the
glorious singer would appear, falling like a bolt straight down to his
nest, where his mate was sitting on the eggs.

It was far too common a practice among us to carry off a young lark
just before it could fly, place it in a cage, and fondly, laboriously
feed it. Sometimes we succeeded in keeping one alive for a year or two,
and when awakened by the spring weather it was pitiful to see the
quivering imprisoned soarer of the heavens rapidly beating its wings
and singing as though it were flying and hovering in the air like its
parents. To keep it in health we were taught that we must supply it
with a sod of grass the size of the bottom of the cage, to make the
poor bird feel as though it were at home on its native meadow,—a meadow
perhaps a foot or at most two feet square. Again and again it would try
to hover over that miniature meadow from its miniature sky just
underneath the top of the cage. At last, conscience-stricken, we
carried the beloved prisoner to the meadow west of Dunbar where it was
born, and, blessing its sweet heart, bravely set it free, and our
exceeding great reward was to see it fly and sing in the sky.

In the winter, when there was but little doing in the fields, we
organized running-matches. A dozen or so of us would start out on races
that were simply tests of endurance, running on and on along a public
road over the breezy hills like hounds, without stopping or getting
tired. The only serious trouble we ever felt in these long races was an
occasional stitch in our sides. One of the boys started the story that
sucking raw eggs was a sure cure for the stitches. We had hens in our
back yard, and on the next Saturday we managed to swallow a couple of
eggs apiece, a disgusting job, but we would do almost anything to mend
our speed, and as soon as we could get away after taking the cure we
set out on a ten or twenty mile run to prove its worth. We thought
nothing of running right ahead ten or a dozen miles before turning
back; for we knew nothing about taking time by the sun, and none of us
had a watch in those days. Indeed, we never cared about time until it
began to get dark. Then we thought of home and the thrashing that
awaited us. Late or early, the thrashing was sure, unless father
happened to be away. If he was expected to return soon, mother made
haste to get us to bed before his arrival. We escaped the thrashing
next morning, for father never felt like thrashing us in cold blood on
the calm holy Sabbath. But no punishment, however sure and severe, was
of any avail against the attraction of the fields and woods. It had
other uses, developing memory, etc., but in keeping us at home it was
of no use at all. Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature
saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons some of her
own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we
should be called to wander in wildness to our heart’s content. Oh, the
blessed enchantment of those Saturday runaways in the prime of the
spring! How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory
of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling
with the bees and glad birds and glad streams! Kings may be blessed; we
were glorious, we were free,—school cares and scoldings, heart
thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness
of Nature’s glad wildness. These were my first excursions,—the
beginnings of lifelong wanderings.




IIToC

A NEW WORLD

Stories of America—Glorious News—Crossing the Atlantic—The New Home—A
Baptism in Nature—New Birds—The Adventures of Watch—Scotch
Correction—Marauding Indians.


Our grammar-school reader, called, I think, “Maccoulough’s Course of
Reading,” contained a few natural-history sketches that excited me very
much and left a deep impression, especially a fine description of the
fish hawk and the bald eagle by the Scotch ornithologist Wilson, who
had the good fortune to wander for years in the American woods while
the country was yet mostly wild. I read his description over and over
again, till I got the vivid picture he drew by heart,—the long-winged
hawk circling over the heaving waves, every motion watched by the eagle
perched on the top of a crag or dead tree; the fish hawk poising for a
moment to take aim at a fish and plunging under the water; the eagle
with kindling eye spreading his wings ready for instant flight in case
the attack should prove successful; the hawk emerging with a struggling
fish in his talons, and proud flight; the eagle launching himself in
pursuit; the wonderful wing-work in the sky, the fish hawk, though
encumbered with his prey, circling higher, higher, striving hard to
keep above the robber eagle; the eagle at length soaring above him,
compelling him with a cry of despair to drop his hard-won prey; then
the eagle steadying himself for a moment to take aim, descending swift
as a lightning-bolt, and seizing the falling fish before it reached the
sea.

Not less exciting and memorable was Audubon’s wonderful story of the
passenger pigeon, a beautiful bird flying in vast flocks that darkened
the sky like clouds, countless millions assembling to rest and sleep
and rear their young in certain forests, miles in length and breadth,
fifty or a hundred nests on a single tree; the overloaded branches
bending low and often breaking; the farmers gathering from far and
near, beating down countless thousands of the young and old birds from
their nests and roosts with long poles at night, and in the morning
driving their bands of hogs, some of them brought from farms a hundred
miles distant, to fatten on the dead and wounded covering the ground.

In another of our reading-lessons some of the American forests were
described. The most interesting of the trees to us boys was the sugar
maple, and soon after we had learned this sweet story we heard
everybody talking about the discovery of gold in the same wonder-filled
country.

One night, when David and I were at grandfather’s fireside solemnly
learning our lessons as usual, my father came in with news, the most
wonderful, most glorious, that wild boys ever heard. “Bairns,” he said,
“you needna learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re gan to America the
morn!” No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good
things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold; hawks,
eagles, pigeons, filling the sky; millions of birds’ nests, and no
gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land. We were utterly,
blindly glorious. After father left the room, grandfather gave David
and me a gold coin apiece for a keepsake, and looked very serious, for
he was about to be deserted in his lonely old age. And when we in
fullness of young joy spoke of what we were going to do, of the
wonderful birds and their nests that we should find, the sugar and
gold, etc., and promised to send him a big box full of that tree sugar
packed in gold from the glorious paradise over the sea, poor lonely
grandfather, about to be forsaken, looked with downcast eyes on the
floor and said in a low, trembling, troubled voice, “Ah, poor laddies,
poor laddies, you’ll find something else ower the sea forbye gold and
sugar, birds’ nests and freedom fra lessons and schools. You’ll find
plenty hard, hard work.” And so we did. But nothing he could say could
cloud our joy or abate the fire of youthful, hopeful, fearless
adventure. Nor could we in the midst of such measureless excitement see
or feel the shadows and sorrows of his darkening old age. To my
schoolmates, met that night on the street, I shouted the glorious news,
“I’m gan to Amaraka the morn!” None could believe it. I said, “Weel,
just you see if I am at the skule the morn!”

Next morning we went by rail to Glasgow and thence joyfully sailed away
from beloved Scotland, flying to our fortunes on the wings of the
winds, care-free as thistle seeds. We could not then know what we were
leaving, what we were to encounter in the New World, nor what our gains
were likely to be. We were too young and full of hope for fear or
regret, but not too young to look forward with eager enthusiasm to the
wonderful schoolless bookless American wilderness. Even the natural
heart-pain of parting from grandfather and grandmother Gilrye, who
loved us so well, and from mother and sisters and brother was quickly
quenched in young joy. Father took with him only my sister Sarah
(thirteen years of age), myself (eleven), and brother David (nine),
leaving my eldest sister, Margaret, and the three youngest of the
family, Daniel, Mary, and Anna, with mother, to join us after a farm
had been found in the wilderness and a comfortable house made to
receive them.

In crossing the Atlantic before the days of steamships, or even the
American clippers, the voyages made in old-fashioned sailing-vessels
were very long. Ours was six weeks and three days. But because we had
no lessons to get, that long voyage had not a dull moment for us boys.
Father and sister Sarah, with most of the old folk, stayed below in
rough weather, groaning in the miseries of seasickness, many of the
passengers wishing they had never ventured in “the auld rockin’ creel,”
as they called our bluff-bowed, wave-beating ship, and, when the
weather was moderately calm, singing songs in the evenings,—“The
Youthful Sailor Frank and Bold,” “Oh, why left I my hame, why did I
cross the deep,” etc. But no matter how much the old tub tossed about
and battered the waves, we were on deck every day, not in the least
seasick, watching the sailors at their rope-hauling and climbing work;
joining in their songs, learning the names of the ropes and sails, and
helping them as far as they would let us; playing games with other boys
in calm weather when the deck was dry, and in stormy weather rejoicing
in sympathy with the big curly-topped waves.

The captain occasionally called David and me into his cabin and asked
us about our schools, handed us books to read, and seemed surprised to
find that Scotch boys could read and pronounce English with perfect
accent and knew so much Latin and French. In Scotch schools only pure
English was taught, although not a word of English was spoken out of
school. All through life, however well educated, the Scotch spoke
Scotch among their own folk, except at times when unduly excited on the
only two subjects on which Scotchmen get much excited, namely religion
and politics. So long as the controversy went on with fairly level
temper, only gude braid Scots was used, but if one became angry, as was
likely to happen, then he immediately began speaking severely correct
English, while his antagonist, drawing himself up, would say: “Weel,
there’s na use pursuing this subject ony further, for I see ye hae
gotten to your English.”

As we neared the shore of the great new land, with what eager wonder we
watched the whales and dolphins and porpoises and seabirds, and made
the good-natured sailors teach us their names and tell us stories about
them!

There were quite a large number of emigrants aboard, many of them newly
married couples, and the advantages of the different parts of the New
World they expected to settle in were often discussed. My father
started with the intention of going to the backwoods of Upper Canada.
Before the end of the voyage, however, he was persuaded that the States
offered superior advantages, especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where
the land was said to be as good as in Canada and far more easily
brought under cultivation; for in Canada the woods were so close and
heavy that a man might wear out his life in getting a few acres cleared
of trees and stumps. So he changed his mind and concluded to go to one
of the Western States.

On our wavering westward way a grain-dealer in Buffalo told father that
most of the wheat he handled came from Wisconsin; and this influential
information finally determined my father’s choice. At Milwaukee a
farmer who had come in from the country near Fort Winnebago with a load
of wheat agreed to haul us and our formidable load of stuff to a little
town called Kingston for thirty dollars. On that hundred-mile journey,
just after the spring thaw, the roads over the prairies were heavy and
miry, causing no end of lamentation, for we often got stuck in the mud,
and the poor farmer sadly declared that never, never again would he be
tempted to try to haul such a cruel, heart-breaking, wagon-breaking,
horse-killing load, no, not for a hundred dollars. In leaving Scotland,
father, like many other homeseekers, burdened himself with far too much
luggage, as if all America were still a wilderness in which little or
nothing could be bought. One of his big iron-bound boxes must have
weighed about four hundred pounds, for it contained an old-fashioned
beam-scales with a complete set of cast-iron counterweights, two of
them fifty-six pounds each, a twenty-eight, and so on down to a single
pound. Also a lot of iron wedges, carpenter’s tools, and so forth, and
at Buffalo, as if on the very edge of the wilderness, he gladly added
to his burden a big cast-iron stove with pots and pans, provisions
enough for a long siege, and a scythe and cumbersome cradle for cutting
wheat, all of which he succeeded in landing in the primeval Wisconsin
woods.

A land-agent at Kingston gave father a note to a farmer by the name of
Alexander Gray, who lived on the border of the settled part of the
country, knew the section-lines, and would probably help him to find a
good place for a farm. So father went away to spy out the land, and in
the mean time left us children in Kingston in a rented room. It took us
less than an hour to get acquainted with some of the boys in the
village; we challenged them to wrestle, run races, climb trees, etc.,
and in a day or two we felt at home, carefree and happy,
notwithstanding our family was so widely divided. When father returned
he told us that he had found fine land for a farm in sunny open woods
on the side of a lake, and that a team of three yoke of oxen with a big
wagon was coming to haul us to Mr. Gray’s place.

We enjoyed the strange ten-mile ride through the woods very much,
wondering how the great oxen could be so strong and wise and tame as to
pull so heavy a load with no other harness than a chain and a crooked
piece of wood on their necks, and how they could sway so obediently to
right and left past roadside trees and stumps when the driver said
_haw_ and _gee_. At Mr. Gray’s house, father again left us for a few
days to build a shanty on the quarter-section he had selected four or
five miles to the westward. In the mean while we enjoyed our freedom as
usual, wandering in the fields and meadows, looking at the trees and
flowers, snakes and birds and squirrels. With the help of the nearest
neighbors the little shanty was built in less than a day after the
rough bur-oak logs for the walls and the white-oak boards for the floor
and roof were got together.

To this charming hut, in the sunny woods, overlooking a flowery glacier
meadow and a lake rimmed with white water-lilies, we were hauled by an
ox-team across trackless carex swamps and low rolling hills sparsely
dotted with round-headed oaks. Just as we arrived at the shanty, before
we had time to look at it or the scenery about it, David and I jumped
down in a hurry off the load of household goods, for we had discovered
a blue jay’s nest, and in a minute or so we were up the tree beside it,
feasting our eyes on the beautiful green eggs and beautiful birds,—our
first memorable discovery. The handsome birds had not seen Scotch boys
before and made a desperate screaming as if we were robbers like
themselves; though we left the eggs untouched, feeling that we were
already beginning to get rich, and wondering how many more nests we
should find in the grand sunny woods. Then we ran along the brow of the
hill that the shanty stood on, and down to the meadow, searching the
trees and grass tufts and bushes, and soon discovered a bluebird’s and
a woodpecker’s nest, and began an acquaintance with the frogs and
snakes and turtles in the creeks and springs.


MUIR'S LAKE (FOUNTAIN LAKE) AND THE GARDEN MEADOW
MUIR’S LAKE (FOUNTAIN LAKE) AND THE GARDEN MEADOW
Sketched from the roof of the Bur-Oak ShantyToList

This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how
utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching
her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and
cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were
at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed
into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and
pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature’s pulses were beating
highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young
leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling
lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!

Next morning, when we climbed to the precious jay nest to take another
admiring look at the eggs, we found it empty. Not a shell-fragment was
left, and we wondered how in the world the birds were able to carry off
their thin-shelled eggs either in their bills or in their feet without
breaking them, and how they could be kept warm while a new nest was
being built. Well, I am still asking these questions. When I was on the
Harriman Expedition I asked Robert Ridgway, the eminent ornithologist,
how these sudden flittings were accomplished, and he frankly confessed
that he didn’t know, but guessed that jays and many other birds carried
their eggs in their mouths; and when I objected that a jay’s mouth
seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that birds’ mouths were
larger than the narrowness of their bills indicated. Then I asked him
what he thought they did with the eggs while a new nest was being
prepared. He didn’t know; neither do I to this day. A specimen of the
many puzzling problems presented to the naturalist.

We soon found many more nests belonging to birds that were not half so
suspicious. The handsome and notorious blue jay plunders the nests of
other birds and of course he could not trust us. Almost all the
others—brown thrushes, bluebirds, song sparrows, kingbirds, hen-hawks,
nighthawks, whip-poor-wills, woodpeckers, etc.—simply tried to avoid
being seen, to draw or drive us away, or paid no attention to us.

We used to wonder how the woodpeckers could bore holes so perfectly
round, true mathematical circles. We ourselves could not have done it
even with gouges and chisels. We loved to watch them feeding their
young, and wondered how they could glean food enough for so many
clamorous, hungry, unsatisfiable babies, and how they managed to give
each one its share; for after the young grew strong, one would get his
head out of the door-hole and try to hold possession of it to meet the
food-laden parents. How hard they worked to support their families,
especially the red-headed and speckledy woodpeckers and flickers;
digging, hammering on scaly bark and decaying trunks and branches from
dawn to dark, coming and going at intervals of a few minutes all the
livelong day!

We discovered a hen-hawk’s nest on the top of a tall oak thirty or
forty rods from the shanty and approached it cautiously. One of the
pair always kept watch, soaring in wide circles high above the tree,
and when we attempted to climb it, the big dangerous-looking bird came
swooping down at us and drove us away.

We greatly admired the plucky kingbird. In Scotland our great ambition
was to be good fighters, and we admired this quality in the handsome
little chattering flycatcher that whips all the other birds. He was
particularly angry when plundering jays and hawks came near his home,
and took pains to thrash them not only away from the nest-tree but out
of the neighborhood. The nest was usually built on a bur oak near a
meadow where insects were abundant, and where no undesirable visitor
could approach without being discovered. When a hen-hawk hove in sight,
the male immediately set off after him, and it was ridiculous to see
that great, strong bird hurrying away as fast as his clumsy wings would
carry him, as soon as he saw the little, waspish kingbird coming. But
the kingbird easily overtook him, flew just a few feet above him, and
with a lot of chattering, scolding notes kept diving and striking him
on the back of the head until tired; then he alighted to rest on the
hawk’s broad shoulders, still scolding and chattering as he rode along,
like an angry boy pouring out vials of wrath. Then, up and at him again
with his sharp bill; and after he had thus driven and ridden his big
enemy a mile or so from the nest, he went home to his mate, chuckling
and bragging as if trying to tell her what a wonderful fellow he was.

This first spring, while some of the birds were still building their
nests and very few young ones had yet tried to fly, father hired a
Yankee to assist in clearing eight or ten acres of the best ground for
a field. We found new wonders every day and often had to call on this
Yankee to solve puzzling questions. We asked him one day if there was
any bird in America that the kingbird couldn’t whip. What about the
sandhill crane? Could he whip that long-legged, long-billed fellow?

“A crane never goes near kingbirds’ nests or notices so small a bird,”
he said, “and therefore there could be no fighting between them.” So we
hastily concluded that our hero could whip every bird in the country
except perhaps the sandhill crane.

We never tired listening to the wonderful whip-poor-will. One came
every night about dusk and sat on a log about twenty or thirty feet
from our cabin door and began shouting “Whip poor Will! Whip poor
Will!” with loud emphatic earnestness. “What’s that? What’s that?” we
cried when this startling visitor first announced himself. “What do you
call it?”

“Why, it’s telling you its name,” said the Yankee. “Don’t you hear it
and what he wants you to do? He says his name is ‘Poor Will’ and he
wants you to whip him, and you may if you are able to catch him.” Poor
Will seemed the most wonderful of all the strange creatures we had
seen. What a wild, strong, bold voice he had, unlike any other we had
ever heard on sea or land!

A near relative, the bull-bat, or nighthawk, seemed hardly less
wonderful. Towards evening scattered flocks kept the sky lively as they
circled around on their long wings a hundred feet or more above the
ground, hunting moths and beetles, interrupting their rather slow but
strong, regular wing-beats at short intervals with quick quivering
strokes while uttering keen, squeaky cries something like _pfee_,
_pfee_, and every now and then diving nearly to the ground with a loud
ripping, bellowing sound, like bull-roaring, suggesting its name; then
turning and gliding swiftly up again. These fine wild gray birds, about
the size of a pigeon, lay their two eggs on bare ground without
anything like a nest or even a concealing bush or grass-tuft.
Nevertheless they are not easily seen, for they are colored like the
ground. While sitting on their eggs, they depend so much upon not being
noticed that if you are walking rapidly ahead they allow you to step
within an inch or two of them without flinching. But if they see by
your looks that you have discovered them, they leave their eggs or
young, and, like a good many other birds, pretend that they are sorely
wounded, fluttering and rolling over on the ground and gasping as if
dying, to draw you away. When pursued we were surprised to find that
just when we were on the point of overtaking them they were always able
to flutter a few yards farther, until they had led us about a quarter
of a mile from the nest; then, suddenly getting well, they quietly flew
home by a roundabout way to their precious babies or eggs, o’er a’ the
ills of life victorious, bad boys among the worst. The Yankee took
particular pleasure in encouraging us to pursue them.

Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly
believe our senses except when hungry or while father was thrashing us.
When we first saw Fountain Lake Meadow, on a sultry evening, sprinkled
with millions of lightning-bugs throbbing with light, the effect was so
strange and beautiful that it seemed far too marvelous to be real.
Looking from our shanty on the hill, I thought that the whole wonderful
fairy show must be in my eyes; for only in fighting, when my eyes were
struck, had I ever seen anything in the least like it. But when I asked
my brother if he saw anything strange in the meadow he said, “Yes, it’s
all covered with shaky fire-sparks.” Then I guessed that it might be
something outside of us, and applied to our all-knowing Yankee to
explain it. “Oh, it’s nothing but lightnin’-bugs,” he said, and kindly
led us down the hill to the edge of the fiery meadow, caught a few of
the wonderful bugs, dropped them into a cup, and carried them to the
shanty, where we watched them throbbing and flashing out their
mysterious light at regular intervals, as if each little passionate
glow were caused by the beating of a heart. Once I saw a splendid
display of glow-worm light in the foothills of the Himalayas, north of
Calcutta, but glorious as it appeared in pure starry radiance, it was
far less impressive than the extravagant abounding, quivering, dancing
fire on our Wisconsin meadow.

Partridge drumming was another great marvel. When I first heard the
low, soft, solemn sound I thought it must be made by some strange
disturbance in my head or stomach, but as all seemed serene within, I
asked David whether he heard anything queer. “Yes,” he said, “I hear
something saying _boomp_, _boomp_, _boomp_, and I’m wondering at it.”
Then I was half satisfied that the source of the mysterious sound must
be in something outside of us, coming perhaps from the ground or from
some ghost or bogie or woodland fairy. Only after long watching and
listening did we at last discover it in the wings of the plump brown
bird.

The love-song of the common jack snipe seemed not a whit less
mysterious than partridge drumming. It was usually heard on cloudy
evenings, a strange, unearthly, winnowing, spiritlike sound, yet easily
heard at a distance of a third of a mile. Our sharp eyes soon detected
the bird while making it, as it circled high in the air over the meadow
with wonderfully strong and rapid wing-beats, suddenly descending and
rising, again and again, in deep, wide loops; the tones being very low
and smooth at the beginning of the descent, rapidly increasing to a
curious little whirling storm-roar at the bottom, and gradually fading
lower and lower until the top was reached. It was long, however, before
we identified this mysterious wing-singer as the little brown jack
snipe that we knew so well and had so often watched as he silently
probed the mud around the edges of our meadow stream and spring-holes,
and made short zigzag flights over the grass uttering only little
short, crisp quacks and chucks.

The love-songs of the frogs seemed hardly less wonderful than those of
the birds, their musical notes varying from the sweet, tranquil,
soothing peeping and purring of the hylas to the awfully deep low-bass
blunt bellowing of the bullfrogs. Some of the smaller species have
wonderfully clear, sharp voices and told us their good Bible names in
musical tones about as plainly as the whip-poor-will. _Isaac, Isaac;
Yacob, Yacob; Israel, Israel_; shouted in sharp, ringing, far-reaching
tones, as if they had all been to school and severely drilled in
elocution. In the still, warm evenings, big bunchy bullfrogs bellowed,
_Drunk! Drunk! Drunk! Jug o’ rum! Jug o’ rum_! and early in the spring,
countless thousands of the commonest species, up to the throat in cold
water, sang in concert, making a mass of music, such as it was, loud
enough to be heard at a distance of more than half a mile.

Far, far apart from this loud marsh music is that of the many species
of hyla, a sort of soothing immortal melody filling the air like light.

We reveled in the glory of the sky scenery as well as that of the woods
and meadows and rushy, lily-bordered lakes. The great thunderstorms in
particular interested us, so unlike any seen in Scotland, exciting
awful, wondering admiration. Gazing awe-stricken, we watched the
upbuilding of the sublime cloud-mountains,—glowing, sun-beaten pearl
and alabaster cumuli, glorious in beauty and majesty and looking so
firm and lasting that birds, we thought, might build their nests amid
their downy bosses; the black-browed storm-clouds marching in awful
grandeur across the landscape, trailing broad gray sheets of hail and
rain like vast cataracts, and ever and anon flashing down vivid zigzag
lightning followed by terrible crashing thunder. We saw several trees
shattered, and one of them, a punky old oak, was set on fire, while we
wondered why all the trees and everybody and everything did not share
the same fate, for oftentimes the whole sky blazed. After sultry storm
days, many of the nights were darkened by smooth black apparently
structureless cloud-mantles which at short intervals were illumined
with startling suddenness to a fiery glow by quick, quivering
lightning-flashes, revealing the landscape in almost noonday
brightness, to be instantly quenched in solid blackness.

But those first days and weeks of unmixed enjoyment and freedom,
reveling in the wonderful wildness about us, were soon to be mingled
with the hard work of making a farm. I was first put to burning brush
in clearing land for the plough. Those magnificent brush fires with
great white hearts and red flames, the first big, wild outdoor fires I
had ever seen, were wonderful sights for young eyes. Again and again,
when they were burning fiercest so that we could hardly approach near
enough to throw on another branch, father put them to awfully practical
use as warning lessons, comparing their heat with that of hell, and the
branches with bad boys. “Now, John,” he would say,—“now, John, just
think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into that fire:—and
then think of hellfire, that is so many times hotter. Into that fire
all bad boys, with sinners of every sort who disobey God, will be cast
as we are casting branches into this brush fire, and although suffering
so much, their sufferings will never never end, because neither the
fire nor the sinners can die.” But those terrible fire lessons quickly
faded away in the blithe wilderness air; for no fire can be hotter than
the heavenly fire of faith and hope that burns in every healthy boy’s
heart.

Soon after our arrival in the woods some one added a cat and puppy to
the animals father had bought. The cat soon had kittens, and it was
interesting to watch her feeding, protecting, and training them. After
they were able to leave their nest and play, she went out hunting and
brought in many kinds of birds and squirrels for them, mostly ground
squirrels (spermophiles), called “gophers” in Wisconsin. When she got
within a dozen yards or so of the shanty, she announced her approach by
a peculiar call, and the sleeping kittens immediately bounced up and
ran to meet her, all racing for the first bite of they knew not what,
and we too ran to see what she brought. She then lay down a few minutes
to rest and enjoy the enjoyment of her feasting family, and again
vanished in the grass and flowers, coming and going every half-hour or
so. Sometimes she brought in birds that we had never seen before, and
occasionally a flying squirrel, chipmunk, or big fox squirrel. We were
just old enough, David and I, to regard all these creatures as wonders,
the strange inhabitants of our new world.

The pup was a common cur, though very uncommon to us, a black and white
short-haired mongrel that we named “Watch.” We always gave him a pan of
milk in the evening just before we knelt in family worship, while
daylight still lingered in the shanty. And, instead of attending to the
prayers, I too often studied the small wild creatures playing around
us. Field mice scampered about the cabin as though it had been built
for them alone, and their performances were very amusing. About dusk,
on one of the calm, sultry nights so grateful to moths and beetles,
when the puppy was lapping his milk, and we were on our knees, in
through the door came a heavy broad-shouldered beetle about as big as a
mouse, and after it had droned and boomed round the cabin two or three
times, the pan of milk, showing white in the gloaming, caught its eyes,
and, taking good aim, it alighted with a slanting, glinting plash in
the middle of the pan like a duck alighting in a lake. Baby Watch,
having never before seen anything like that beetle, started back,
gazing in dumb astonishment and fear at the black sprawling monster
trying to swim. Recovering somewhat from his fright, he began to bark
at the creature, and ran round and round his milk-pan, wouf-woufing,
gurring, growling, like an old dog barking at a wild-cat or a bear. The
natural astonishment and curiosity of that boy dog getting his first
entomological lesson in this wonderful world was so immoderately funny
that I had great difficulty in keeping from laughing out loud.

Snapping turtles were common throughout the woods, and we were
delighted to find that they would snap at a stick and hang on like
bull-dogs; and we amused ourselves by introducing Watch to them,
enjoying his curious behavior and theirs in getting acquainted with
each other. One day we assisted one of the smallest of the turtles to
get a good grip of poor Watch’s ear. Then away he rushed, holding his
head sidewise, yelping and terror-stricken, with the strange buglike
reptile biting hard and clinging fast,—a shameful amusement even for
wild boys.

As a playmate Watch was too serious, though he learned more than any
stranger would judge him capable of, was a bold, faithful watch-dog,
and in his prime a grand fighter, able to whip all the other dogs in
the neighborhood. Comparing him with ourselves, we soon learned that
although he could not read books he could read faces, was a good judge
of character, always knew what was going on and what we were about to
do, and liked to help us. We could run nearly as fast as he could, see
about as far, and perhaps hear as well, but in sense of smell his nose
was incomparably better than ours. One sharp winter morning when the
ground was covered with snow, I noticed that when he was yawning and
stretching himself after leaving his bed he suddenly caught the scent
of something that excited him, went round the corner of the house, and
looked intently to the westward across a tongue of land that we called
West Bank, eagerly questioning the air with quivering nostrils, and
bristling up as though he felt sure that there was something dangerous
in that direction and had actually caught sight of it. Then he ran
toward the Bank, and I followed him, curious to see what his nose had
discovered. The top of the Bank commanded a view of the north end of
our lake and meadow, and when we got there we saw an Indian hunter with
a long spear, going from one muskrat cabin to another, approaching
cautiously, careful to make no noise, and then suddenly thrusting his
spear down through the house. If well aimed, the spear went through the
poor beaver rat as it lay cuddled up in the snug nest it had made for
itself in the fall with so much far-seeing care, and when the hunter
felt the spear quivering, he dug down the mossy hut with his tomahawk
and secured his prey,—the flesh for food, and the skin to sell for a
dime or so. This was a clear object lesson on dogs’ keenness of scent.
That Indian was more than half a mile away across a wooded ridge. Had
the hunter been a white man, I suppose Watch would not have noticed
him.

When he was about six or seven years old, he not only became cross, so
that he would do only what he liked, but he fell on evil ways, and was
accused by the neighbors who had settled around us of catching and
devouring whole broods of chickens, some of them only a day or two out
of the shell. We never imagined he would do anything so grossly
undoglike. He never did at home. But several of the neighbors declared
over and over again that they had caught him in the act, and insisted
that he must be shot. At last, in spite of tearful protests, he was
condemned and executed. Father examined the poor fellow’s stomach in
search of sure evidence, and discovered the heads of eight chickens
that he had devoured at his last meal. So poor Watch was killed simply
because his taste for chickens was too much like our own. Think of the
millions of squabs that preaching, praying men and women kill and eat,
with all sorts of other animals great and small, young and old, while
eloquently discoursing on the coming of the blessed peaceful, bloodless
millennium! Think of the passenger pigeons that fifty or sixty years
ago filled the woods and sky over half the continent, now exterminated
by beating down the young from the nests together with the brooding
parents, before they could try their wonderful wings; by trapping them
in nets, feeding them to hogs, etc. None of our fellow mortals is safe
who eats what we eat, who in any way interferes with our pleasures, or
who may be used for work or food, clothing or ornament, or mere cruel,
sportish amusement. Fortunately many are too small to be seen, and
therefore enjoy life beyond our reach. And in looking through God’s
great stone books made up of records reaching back millions and
millions of years, it is a great comfort to learn that vast multitudes
of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a
good time in God’s love before man was created.

The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of
simple, playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and
of course many of those whippings fell upon me. Most of them were
outrageously severe, and utterly barren of fun. But here is one that
was nearly all fun.

Father was busy hauling lumber for the frame house that was to be got
ready for the arrival of my mother, sisters, and brother, left behind
in Scotland. One morning, when he was ready to start for another load,
his ox-whip was not to be found. He asked me if I knew anything about
it. I told him I didn’t know where it was, but Scotch conscience
compelled me to confess that when I was playing with it I had tied it
to Watch’s tail, and that he ran away, dragging it through the grass,
and came back without it. “It must have slipped off his tail,” I said,
and so I didn’t know where it was. This honest, straightforward little
story made father so angry that he exclaimed with heavy, foreboding
emphasis: “The very deevil’s in that boy!” David, who had been playing
with me and was perhaps about as responsible for the loss of the whip
as I was, said never a word, for he was always prudent enough to hold
his tongue when the parental weather was stormy, and so escaped nearly
all punishment. And, strange to say, this time I also escaped, all
except a terrible scolding, though the thrashing weather seemed darker
than ever. As if unwilling to let the sun see the shameful job, father
took me into the cabin where the storm was to fall, and sent David to
the woods for a switch. While he was out selecting the switch, father
put in the spare time sketching my play-wickedness in awful colors, and
of course referred again and again to the place prepared for bad boys.
In the midst of this terrible word-storm, dreading most the impending
thrashing, I whimpered that I was only playing because I couldn’t help
it; didn’t know I was doing wrong; wouldn’t do it again, and so forth.
After this miserable dialogue was about exhausted, father became
impatient at my brother for taking so long to find the switch; and so
was I, for I wanted to have the thing over and done with. At last, in
came David, a picture of open-hearted innocence, solemnly dragging a
young bur-oak sapling, and handed the end of it to father, saying it
was the best switch he could find. It was an awfully heavy one, about
two and a half inches thick at the butt and ten feet long, almost big
enough for a fence-pole. There wasn’t room enough in the cabin to swing
it, and the moment I saw it I burst out laughing in the midst of my
fears. But father failed to see the fun and was very angry at David,
heaved the bur-oak outside and passionately demanded his reason for
fetching “sic a muckle rail like that instead o’ a switch? Do ye ca’
that a switch? I have a gude mind to thrash you insteed o’ John.”
David, with demure, downcast eyes, looked preternaturally righteous,
but as usual prudently answered never a word.

It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way they
should go; and poor overworked father was determined to do it if enough
of the right kind of switches could be found. But this time, as the sun
was getting high, he hitched up old Tom and Jerry and made haste to the
Kingston lumber-yard, leaving me unscathed and as innocently wicked as
ever; for hardly had father got fairly out of sight among the oaks and
hickories, ere all our troubles, hell-threatenings, and exhortations
were forgotten in the fun we had lassoing a stubborn old sow and
laboriously trying to teach her to go reasonably steady in rope
harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm,
and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she
had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had
yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in
their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms
they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging
her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down and give them a
drink.

After her darling short-snouted babies were about a month old, she took
them out to the woods and gradually roamed farther and farther from the
shanty in search of acorns and roots. One afternoon we heard a
rifle-shot, a very noticeable thing, as we had no near neighbors, as
yet. We thought it must have been fired by an Indian on the trail that
followed the right bank of the Fox River between Portage and Packwaukee
Lake and passed our shanty at a distance of about three quarters of a
mile. Just a few minutes after that shot was heard, along came the poor
mother rushing up to the shanty for protection, with her pigs, all out
of breath and terror-stricken. One of them was missing, and we supposed
of course that an Indian had shot it for food. Next day, I discovered a
blood-puddle where the Indian trail crossed the outlet of our lake. One
of father’s hired men told us that the Indians thought nothing of
levying this sort of blackmail whenever they were hungry. The solemn
awe and fear in the eyes of that old mother and those little pigs I
never can forget; it was as unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever
saw expressed by any human eye, and corroborates in no uncertain way
the oneness of all of us.




IIIToC

LIFE ON A WISCONSIN FARM

Humanity in Oxen—Jack, the Pony—Learning to Ride—Nob and
Nell—Snakes—Mosquitoes and their Kin—Fish and Fishing—Considering the
Lilies—Learning to Swim—A Narrow Escape from Drowning and a
Victory—Accidents to Animals.


Coming direct from school in Scotland while we were still hopefully
ignorant and far from tame,—notwithstanding the unnatural profusion of
teaching and thrashing lavished upon us,—getting acquainted with the
animals about us was a never-failing source of wonder and delight. At
first my father, like nearly all the backwoods settlers, bought a yoke
of oxen to do the farm work, and as field after field was cleared, the
number was gradually increased until we had five yoke. These wise,
patient, plodding animals did all the ploughing, logging, hauling, and
hard work of every sort for the first four or five years, and, never
having seen oxen before, we looked at them with the same eager
freshness of conception as we did at the wild animals. We worked with
them, sympathized with them in their rest and toil and play, and thus
learned to know them far better than we should had we been only trained
scientific naturalists. We soon learned that each ox and cow and calf
had individual character. Old white-faced Buck, one of the second yoke
of oxen we owned, was a notably sagacious fellow. He seemed to reason
sometimes almost like ourselves. In the fall we fed the cattle lots of
pumpkins and had to split them open so that mouthfuls could be readily
broken off. But Buck never waited for us to come to his help. The
others, when they were hungry and impatient, tried to break through the
hard rind with their teeth, but seldom with success if the pumpkin was
full grown. Buck never wasted time in this mumbling, slavering way, but
crushed them with his head. He went to the pile, picked out a good one,
like a boy choosing an orange or apple, rolled it down on to the open
ground, deliberately kneeled in front of it, placed his broad, flat
brow on top of it, brought his weight hard down and crushed it, then
quietly arose and went on with his meal in comfort. Some would call
this “instinct,” as if so-called “blind instinct” must necessarily make
an ox stand on its head to break pumpkins when its teeth got sore, or
when nobody came with an axe to split them. Another fine ox showed his
skill when hungry by opening all the fences that stood in his way to
the corn-fields.

The humanity we found in them came partly through the expression of
their eyes when tired, their tones of voice when hungry and calling for
food, their patient plodding and pulling in hot weather, their
long-drawn-out sighing breath when exhausted and suffering like
ourselves, and their enjoyment of rest with the same grateful looks as
ours. We recognized their kinship also by their yawning like ourselves
when sleepy and evidently enjoying the same peculiar pleasure at the
roots of their jaws; by the way they stretched themselves in the
morning after a good rest; by learning languages,—Scotch, English,
Irish, French, Dutch,—a smattering of each as required in the faithful
service they so willingly, wisely rendered; by their intelligent, alert
curiosity, manifested in listening to strange sounds; their love of
play; the attachments they made; and their mourning, long continued,
when a companion was killed.

When we went to Portage, our nearest town, about ten or twelve miles
from the farm, it would oftentimes be late before we got back, and in
the summer-time, in sultry, rainy weather, the clouds were full of
sheet lightning which every minute or two would suddenly illumine the
landscape, revealing all its features, the hills and valleys, meadows
and trees, about as fully and clearly as the noonday sunshine; then as
suddenly the glorious light would be quenched, making the darkness seem
denser than before. On such nights the cattle had to find the way home
without any help from us, but they never got off the track, for they
followed it by scent like dogs. Once, father, returning late from
Portage or Kingston, compelled Tom and Jerry, our first oxen, to leave
the dim track, imagining they must be going wrong. At last they stopped
and refused to go farther. Then father unhitched them from the wagon,
took hold of Tom’s tail, and was thus led straight to the shanty. Next
morning he set out to seek his wagon and found it on the brow of a
steep hill above an impassable swamp. We learned less from the cows,
because we did not enter so far into their lives, working with them,
suffering heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and almost deadly weariness
with them; but none with natural charity could fail to sympathize with
them in their love for their calves, and to feel that it in no way
differed from the divine mother-love of a woman in thoughtful,
self-sacrificing care; for they would brave every danger, giving their
lives for their offspring. Nor could we fail to sympathize with their
awkward, blunt-nosed baby calves, with such beautiful, wondering eyes
looking out on the world and slowly getting acquainted with things, all
so strange to them, and awkwardly learning to use their legs, and play
and fight.

Before leaving Scotland, father promised us a pony to ride when we got
to America, and we saw to it that this promise was not forgotten. Only
a week or two after our arrival in the woods he bought us a little
Indian pony for thirteen dollars from a store-keeper in Kingston who
had obtained him from a Winnebago or Menominee Indian in trade for
goods. He was a stout handsome bay with long black mane and tail, and,
though he was only two years old, the Indians had already taught him to
carry all sorts of burdens, to stand without being tied, to go anywhere
over all sorts of ground fast or slow, and to jump and swim and fear
nothing,—a truly wonderful creature, strangely different from shy,
skittish, nervous, superstitious civilized beasts. We turned him loose,
and, strange to say, he never ran away from us or refused to be caught,
but behaved as if he had known Scotch boys all his life; probably
because we were about as wild as young Indians.

One day when father happened to have a little leisure, he said, “Noo,
bairns, rin doon the meadow and get your powny and learn to ride him.”
So we led him out to a smooth place near an Indian mound back of the
shanty, where father directed us to begin. I mounted for the first
memorable lesson, crossed the mound, and set out at a slow walk along
the wagon-track made in hauling lumber; then father shouted: “Whup him
up, John, whup him up! Make him gallop; gallopin’ is easier and better
than walkin’ or trottin’.” Jack was willing, and away he sped at a good
fast gallop. I managed to keep my balance fairly well by holding fast
to the mane, but could not keep from bumping up and down, for I was
plump and elastic and so was Jack; therefore about half of the time I
was in the air.

After a quarter of a mile or so of this curious transportation, I
cried, “Whoa, Jack!” The wonderful creature seemed to understand
Scotch, for he stopped so suddenly I flew over his head, but he stood
perfectly still as if that flying method of dismounting were the
regular way. Jumping on again, I bumped and bobbed back along the
grassy, flowery track, over the Indian mound, cried, “Whoa, Jack!” flew
over his head, and alighted in father’s arms as gracefully as if it
were all intended for circus work.

After going over the course five or six times in the same free,
picturesque style, I gave place to brother David, whose performances
were much like my own. In a few weeks, however, or a month, we were
taking adventurous rides more than a mile long out to a big meadow
frequented by sandhill cranes, and returning safely with wonderful
stories of the great long-legged birds we had seen, and how on the
whole journey away and back we had fallen off only five or six times.
Gradually we learned to gallop through the woods without roads of any
sort, bareback and without rope or bridle, guiding only by leaning from
side to side or by slight knee pressure. In this free way we used to
amuse ourselves, riding at full speed across a big “kettle” that was on
our farm, without holding on by either mane or tail.

These so-called “kettles” were formed by the melting of large detached
blocks of ice that had been buried in moraine material thousands of
years ago when the ice-sheet that covered all this region was receding.
As the buried ice melted, of course the moraine material above and
about it fell in, forming hopper-shaped hollows, while the grass
growing on their sides and around them prevented the rain and wind from
filling them up. The one we performed in was perhaps seventy or eighty
feet wide and twenty or thirty feet deep; and without a saddle or hold
of any kind it was not easy to keep from slipping over Jack’s head in
diving into it, or over his tail climbing out. This was fine sport on
the long summer Sundays when we were able to steal away before
meeting-time without being seen. We got very warm and red at it, and
oftentimes poor Jack, dripping with sweat like his riders, seemed to
have been boiled in that kettle.

In Scotland we had often been admonished to be bold, and this advice we
passed on to Jack, who had already got many a wild lesson from Indian
boys. Once, when teaching him to jump muddy streams, I made him try the
creek in our meadow at a place where it is about twelve feet wide. He
jumped bravely enough, but came down with a grand splash hardly more
than halfway over. The water was only about a foot in depth, but the
black vegetable mud half afloat was unfathomable. I managed to wallow
ashore, but poor Jack sank deeper and deeper until only his head was
visible in the black abyss, and his Indian fortitude was desperately
tried. His foundering so suddenly in the treacherous gulf recalled the
story of the Abbot of Aberbrothok’s bell, which went down with a
gurgling sound while bubbles rose and burst around. I had to go to
father for help. He tied a long hemp rope brought from Scotland around
Jack’s neck, and Tom and Jerry seemed to have all they could do to pull
him out. After which I got a solemn scolding for asking the “puir beast
to jump intil sic a saft bottomless place.”

We moved into our frame house in the fall, when mother with the rest of
the family arrived from Scotland, and, when the winter snow began to
fly, the bur-oak shanty was made into a stable for Jack. Father told us
that good meadow hay was all he required, but we fed him corn, lots of
it, and he grew very frisky and fat. About the middle of winter his
long hair was full of dust and, as we thought, required washing. So,
without taking the frosty weather into account, we gave him a thorough
soap and water scouring, and as we failed to get him rubbed dry, a row
of icicles formed under his belly. Father happened to see him in this
condition and angrily asked what we had been about. We said Jack was
dirty and we had washed him to make him healthy. He told us we ought to
be ashamed of ourselves, “soaking the puir beast in cauld water at this
time o’ year”; that when we wanted to clean him we should have sense
enough to use the brush and curry-comb.


OUR FIRST WISCONSIN HOME
OUR FIRST WISCONSIN HOME
On the hill near the shanty built in the summer of 1849ToList

In summer Dave or I had to ride after the cows every evening about
sundown, and Jack got so accustomed to bringing in the drove that when
we happened to be a few minutes late he used to go off alone at the
regular time and bring them home at a gallop. It used to make father
very angry to see Jack chasing the cows like a shepherd dog, running
from one to the other and giving each a bite on the rump to keep them
on the run, flying before him as if pursued by wolves. Father would
declare at times that the wicked beast had the deevil in him and would
be the death of the cattle. The corral and barn were just at the foot
of a hill, and he made a great display of the drove on the home stretch
as they walloped down that hill with their tails on end.

One evening when the pell-mell Wild West show was at its wildest, it
made father so extravagantly mad that he ordered me to “Shoot Jack!” I
went to the house and brought the gun, suffering most horrible mental
anguish, such as I suppose unhappy Abraham felt when commanded to slay
Isaac. Jack’s life was spared, however, though I can’t tell what
finally became of him. I wish I could. After father bought a span of
work horses he was sold to a man who said he was going to ride him
across the plains to California. We had him, I think, some five or six
years. He was the stoutest, gentlest, bravest little horse I ever saw.
He never seemed tired, could canter all day with a man about as heavy
as himself on his back, and feared nothing. Once fifty or sixty pounds
of beef that was tied on his back slid over his shoulders along his
neck and weighed down his head to the ground, fairly anchoring him; but
he stood patient and still for half an hour or so without making the
slightest struggle to free himself, while I was away getting help to
untie the pack-rope and set the load back in its place.

As I was the eldest boy I had the care of our first span of work
horses. Their names were Nob and Nell. Nob was very intelligent, and
even affectionate, and could learn almost anything. Nell was entirely
different; balky and stubborn, though we managed to teach her a good
many circus tricks; but she never seemed to like to play with us in
anything like an affectionate way as Nob did. We turned them out one
day into the pasture, and an Indian, hiding in the brush that had
sprung up after the grass fires had been kept out, managed to catch
Nob, tied a rope to her jaw for a bridle, rode her to Green Lake, about
thirty or forty miles away, and tried to sell her for fifteen dollars.
All our hearts were sore, as if one of the family had been lost. We
hunted everywhere and could not at first imagine what had become of
her. We discovered her track where the fence was broken down, and,
following it for a few miles, made sure the track was Nob’s; and a
neighbor told us he had seen an Indian riding fast through the woods on
a horse that looked like Nob. But we could find no farther trace of her
until a month or two after she was lost, and we had given up hope of
ever seeing her again. Then we learned that she had been taken from an
Indian by a farmer at Green Lake because he saw that she had been shod
and had worked in harness. So when the Indian tried to sell her the
farmer said: “You are a thief. That is a white man’s horse. You stole
her.”

“No,” said the Indian, “I brought her from Prairie du Chien and she has
always been mine.”

The man, pointing to her feet and the marks of the harness, said: “You
are lying. I will take that horse away from you and put her in my
pasture, and if you come near it I will set the dogs on you.” Then he
advertised her. One of our neighbors happened to see the advertisement
and brought us the glad news, and great was our rejoicing when father
brought her home. That Indian must have treated her with terrible
cruelty, for when I was riding her through the pasture several years
afterward, looking for another horse that we wanted to catch, as we
approached the place where she had been captured she stood stock still
gazing through the bushes, fearing the Indian might still be hiding
there ready to spring; and she was so excited that she trembled, and
her heartbeats were so loud that I could hear them distinctly as I sat
on her back, _boomp_, _boomp_, _boomp_, like the drumming of a
partridge. So vividly had she remembered her terrible experiences.

She was a great pet and favorite with the whole family, quickly learned
playful tricks, came running when we called, seemed to know everything
we said to her, and had the utmost confidence in our friendly kindness.

We used to cut and shock and husk the Indian corn in the fall, until a
keen Yankee stopped overnight at our house and among other labor-saving
notions convinced father that it was better to let it stand, and husk
it at his leisure during the winter, then turn in the cattle to eat the
leaves and trample down the stalks, so that they could be ploughed
under in the spring. In this winter method each of us took two rows and
husked into baskets, and emptied the corn on the ground in piles of
fifteen to twenty basketfuls, then loaded it into the wagon to be
hauled to the crib. This was cold, painful work, the temperature being
oftentimes far below zero and the ground covered with dry, frosty snow,
giving rise to miserable crops of chilblains and frosted fingers,—a sad
change from the merry Indian-summer husking, when the big yellow
pumpkins covered the cleared fields;—golden corn, golden pumpkins,
gathered in the hazy golden weather. Sad change, indeed, but we
occasionally got some fun out of the nipping, shivery work from hungry
prairie chickens, and squirrels and mice that came about us.

The piles of corn were often left in the field several days, and while
loading them into the wagon we usually found field mice in them,—big,
blunt-nosed, strong-scented fellows that we were taught to kill just
because they nibbled a few grains of corn. I used to hold one while it
was still warm, up to Nob’s nose for the fun of seeing her make faces
and snort at the smell of it; and I would say: “Here, Nob,” as if
offering her a lump of sugar. One day I offered her an extra fine, fat,
plump specimen, something like a little woodchuck, or muskrat, and to
my astonishment, after smelling it curiously and doubtfully, as if
wondering what the gift might be, and rubbing it back and forth in the
palm of my hand with her upper lip, she deliberately took it into her
mouth, crunched and munched and chewed it fine and swallowed it, bones,
teeth, head, tail, everything. Not a single hair of that mouse was
wasted. When she was chewing it she nodded and grunted, as though
critically tasting and relishing it.

My father was a steadfast enthusiast on religious matters, and, of
course, attended almost every sort of church-meeting, especially
revival meetings. They were occasionally held in summer, but mostly in
winter when the sleighing was good and plenty of time available. One
hot summer day father drove Nob to Portage and back, twenty-four miles
over a sandy road. It was a hot, hard, sultry day’s work, and she had
evidently been over-driven in order to get home in time for one of
these meetings. I shall never forget how tired and wilted she looked
that evening when I unhitched her; how she drooped in her stall, too
tired to eat or even to lie down. Next morning it was plain that her
lungs were inflamed; all the dreadful symptoms were just the same as my
own when I had pneumonia. Father sent for a Methodist minister, a very
energetic, resourceful man, who was a blacksmith, farmer, butcher, and
horse-doctor as well as minister; but all his gifts and skill were of
no avail. Nob was doomed. We bathed her head and tried to get her to
eat something, but she couldn’t eat, and in about a couple of weeks we
turned her loose to let her come around the house and see us in the
weary suffering and loneliness of the shadow of death. She tried to
follow us children, so long her friends and workmates and playmates. It
was awfully touching. She had several hemorrhages, and in the forenoon
of her last day, after she had had one of her dreadful spells of
bleeding and gasping for breath, she came to me trembling, with
beseeching, heartbreaking looks, and after I had bathed her head and
tried to soothe and pet her, she lay down and gasped and died. All the
family gathered about her, weeping, with aching hearts. Then dust to
dust.

She was the most faithful, intelligent, playful, affectionate,
human-like horse I ever knew, and she won all our hearts. Of the many
advantages of farm life for boys one of the greatest is the gaining a
real knowledge of animals as fellow-mortals, learning to respect them
and love them, and even to win some of their love. Thus godlike
sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of
churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless
doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no
rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to be
petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved.

At first we were afraid of snakes, but soon learned that most of them
were harmless. The only venomous species seen on our farm were the
rattlesnake and the copperhead, one of each. David saw the rattler, and
we both saw the copperhead. One day, when my brother came in from his
work, he reported that he had seen a snake that made a queer buzzy
noise with its tail. This was the only rattlesnake seen on our farm,
though we heard of them being common on limestone hills eight or ten
miles distant. We discovered the copperhead when we were ploughing, and
we saw and felt at the first long, fixed, half-charmed, admiring stare
at him that he was an awfully dangerous fellow. Every fibre of his
strong, lithe, quivering body, his burnished copper-colored head, and
above all his fierce, able eyes, seemed to be overflowing full of
deadly power, and bade us beware. And yet it is only fair to say that
this terrible, beautiful reptile showed no disposition to hurt us until
we threw clods at him and tried to head him off from a log fence into
which he was trying to escape. We were barefooted and of course afraid
to let him get very near, while we vainly battered him with the loose
sandy clods of the freshly ploughed field to hold him back until we
could get a stick. Looking us in the eyes after a moment’s pause, he
probably saw we were afraid, and he came right straight at us, snapping
and looking terrible, drove us out of his way, and won his fight.

Out on the open sandy hills there were a good many thick burly blow
snakes, the kind that puff themselves up and hiss. Our Yankee declared
that their breath was very poisonous and that we must not go near them.
A handsome ringed species common in damp, shady places was, he told us,
the most wonderful of all the snakes, for if chopped into pieces,
however small, the fragments would wriggle themselves together again,
and the restored snake would go on about its business as if nothing had
happened. The commonest kinds were the striped slender species of the
meadows and streams, good swimmers, that lived mostly on frogs.

Once I observed one of the larger ones, about two feet long, pursuing a
frog in our meadow, and it was wonderful to see how fast the legless,
footless, wingless, finless hunter could run. The frog, of course, knew
its enemy and was making desperate efforts to escape to the water and
hide in the marsh mud. He was a fine, sleek yellow muscular fellow and
was springing over the tall grass in wide-arching jumps. The
green-striped snake, gliding swiftly and steadily, was keeping the frog
in sight and, had I not interfered, would probably have tired out the
poor jumper. Then, perhaps, while digesting and enjoying his meal, the
happy snake would himself be swallowed frog and all by a hawk. Again,
to our astonishment, the small specimens were attacked by our hens.
They pursued and pecked away at them until they killed and devoured
them, oftentimes quarreling over the division of the spoil, though it
was not easily divided.

We watched the habits of the swift-darting dragonflies, wild bees,
butterflies, wasps, beetles, etc., and soon learned to discriminate
between those that might be safely handled and the pinching or stinging
species. But of all our wild neighbors the mosquitoes were the first
with which we became very intimately acquainted.

The beautiful meadow lying warm in the spring sunshine, outspread
between our lily-rimmed lake and the hill-slope that our shanty stood
on, sent forth thirsty swarms of the little gray, speckledy, singing,
stinging pests; and how tellingly they introduced themselves! Of little
avail were the smudges that we made on muggy evenings to drive them
away; and amid the many lessons which they insisted upon teaching us we
wondered more and more at the extent of their knowledge, especially
that in their tiny, flimsy bodies room could be found for such cunning
palates. They would drink their fill from brown, smoky Indians, or from
old white folk flavored with tobacco and whiskey, when no better could
be had. But the surpassing fineness of their taste was best manifested
by their enthusiastic appreciation of boys full of lively red blood,
and of girls in full bloom fresh from cool Scotland or England. On
these it was pleasant to witness their enjoyment as they feasted.
Indians, we were told, believed that if they were brave fighters they
would go after death to a happy country abounding in game, where there
were no mosquitoes and no cowards. For cowards were driven away by
themselves to a miserable country where there was no game fit to eat,
and where the sky was always dark with huge gnats and mosquitoes as big
as pigeons.

We were great admirers of the little black water-bugs. Their whole
lives seemed to be play, skimming, swimming, swirling, and waltzing
together in little groups on the edge of the lake and in the meadow
springs, dancing to music we never could hear. The long-legged skaters,
too, seemed wonderful fellows, shuffling about on top of the water,
with air-bubbles like little bladders tangled under their hairy feet;
and we often wished that we also might be shod in the same way to
enable us to skate on the lake in summer as well as in icy winter. Not
less wonderful were the boatmen, swimming on their backs, pulling
themselves along with a pair of oar-like legs.

Great was the delight of brothers David and Daniel and myself when
father gave us a few pine boards for a boat, and it was a memorable day
when we got that boat built and launched into the lake. Never shall I
forget our first sail over the gradually deepening water, the sunbeams
pouring through it revealing the strange plants covering the bottom,
and the fishes coming about us, staring and wondering as if the boat
were a monstrous strange fish.

The water was so clear that it was almost invisible, and when we
floated slowly out over the plants and fishes, we seemed to be
miraculously sustained in the air while silently exploring a veritable
fairyland.

We always had to work hard, but if we worked still harder we were
occasionally allowed a little spell in the long summer evenings about
sundown to fish, and on Sundays an hour or two to sail quietly without
fishing-rod or gun when the lake was calm. Therefore we gradually
learned something about its inhabitants,—pickerel, sunfish, black bass,
perch, shiners, pumpkin-seeds, ducks, loons, turtles, muskrats, etc. We
saw the sunfishes making their nests in little openings in the rushes
where the water was only a few feet deep, ploughing up and shoving away
the soft gray mud with their noses, like pigs, forming round bowls five
or six inches in depth and about two feet in diameter, in which their
eggs were deposited. And with what beautiful, unweariable devotion they
watched and hovered over them and chased away prowling spawn-eating
enemies that ventured within a rod or two of the precious nest!

The pickerel is a savage fish endowed with marvelous strength and
speed. It lies in wait for its prey on the bottom, perfectly motionless
like a waterlogged stick, watching everything that moves, with fierce,
hungry eyes. Oftentimes when we were fishing for some other kinds over
the edge of the boat, a pickerel that we had not noticed would come
like a bolt of lightning and seize the fish we had caught before we
could get it into the boat. The very first pickerel that I ever caught
jumped into the air to seize a small fish dangling on my line, and,
missing its aim, fell plump into the boat as if it had dropped from the
sky.

Some of our neighbors fished for pickerel through the ice in midwinter.
They usually drove a wagon out on the lake, set a large number of lines
baited with live minnows, hung a loop of the lines over a small bush
planted at the side of each hole, and watched to see the loops pulled
off when a fish had taken the bait. Large quantities of pickerel were
often caught in this cruel way.

Our beautiful lake, named Fountain Lake by father, but Muir’s Lake by
the neighbors, is one of the many small glacier lakes that adorn the
Wisconsin landscapes. It is fed by twenty or thirty meadow springs, is
about half a mile long, half as wide, and surrounded by low
finely-modeled hills dotted with oak and hickory, and meadows full of
grasses and sedges and many beautiful orchids and ferns. First there is
a zone of green, shining rushes, and just beyond the rushes a zone of
white and orange water-lilies fifty or sixty feet wide forming a
magnificent border. On bright days, when the lake was rippled by a
breeze, the lilies and sun-spangles danced together in radiant beauty,
and it became difficult to discriminate between them.

On Sundays, after or before chores and sermons and Bible-lessons, we
drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily time, getting
finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes,
and muskrats. In particular we took Christ’s advice and devoutly
“considered the lilies”—how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime
mud, and ride gloriously among the breezy sun-spangles. On our way home
we gathered grand bouquets of them to be kept fresh all the week. No
flower was hailed with greater wonder and admiration by the European
settlers in general—Scotch, English, and Irish—than this white
water-lily (_Nymphæa odorata_). It is a magnificent plant, queen of the
inland waters, pure white, three or four inches in diameter, the most
beautiful, sumptuous, and deliciously fragrant of all our Wisconsin
flowers. No lily garden in civilization we had ever seen could compare
with our lake garden.

The next most admirable flower in the estimation of settlers in this
part of the new world was the pasque-flower or wind-flower (_Anemone
patens_ var. _Nuttalliana_). It is the very first to appear in the
spring, covering the cold gray-black ground with cheery blossoms.
Before the axe or plough had touched the “oak openings” of Wisconsin,
they were swept by running fires almost every autumn after the grass
became dry. If from any cause, such as early snowstorms or late rains,
they happened to escape the autumn fire besom, they were likely to be
burned in the spring after the snow melted. But whether burned in the
spring or fall, ashes and bits of charred twigs and grass stems made
the whole country look dismal. Then, before a single grass-blade had
sprouted, a hopeful multitude of large hairy, silky buds about as thick
as one’s thumb came to light, pushing up through the black and gray
ashes and cinders, and before these buds were fairly free from the
ground they opened wide and displayed purple blossoms about two inches
in diameter, giving beauty for ashes in glorious abundance. Instead of
remaining in the ground waiting for warm weather and companions, this
admirable plant seemed to be in haste to rise and cheer the desolate
landscape. Then at its leisure, after other plants had come to its
help, it spread its leaves and grew up to a height of about two or
three feet. The spreading leaves formed a whorl on the ground, and
another about the middle of the stem as an involucre, and on the top of
the stem the silky, hairy long-tailed seeds formed a head like a second
flower. A little church was established among the earlier settlers and
the meetings at first were held in our house. After working hard all
the week it was difficult for boys to sit still through long sermons
without falling asleep, especially in warm weather. In this drowsy
trouble the charming anemone came to our help. A pocketful of the
pungent seeds industriously nibbled while the discourses were at their
dullest kept us awake and filled our minds with flowers.

The next great flower wonders on which we lavished admiration, not only
for beauty of color and size, but for their curious shapes, were the
cypripediums, called “lady’s-slippers” or “Indian moccasins.” They were
so different from the familiar flowers of old Scotland. Several species
grew in our meadow and on shady hillsides,—yellow, rose-colored, and
some nearly white, an inch or more in diameter, and shaped exactly like
Indian moccasins. They caught the eye of all the European settlers and
made them gaze and wonder like children. And so did calopogon, pogonia,
spiranthes, and many other fine plant people that lived in our meadow.
The beautiful Turk’s-turban (_Lilium superbum_) growing on stream-banks
was rare in our neighborhood, but the orange lily grew in abundance on
dry ground beneath the bur-oaks and often brought Aunt Ray’s lily-bed
in Scotland to mind. The butterfly-weed, with its brilliant scarlet
flowers, attracted flocks of butterflies and made fine masses of color.
With autumn came a glorious abundance and variety of asters, those
beautiful plant stars, together with goldenrods, sunflowers, daisies,
and liatris of different species, while around the shady margin of the
meadow many ferns in beds and vaselike groups spread their beautiful
fronds, especially the osmundas (_O. claytoniana, regalis_, and
_cinnamomea_) and the sensitive and ostrich ferns.

Early in summer we feasted on strawberries, that grew in rich beds
beneath the meadow grasses and sedges as well as in the dry sunny
woods. And in different bogs and marshes, and around their borders on
our own farm and along the Fox River, we found dewberries and
cranberries, and a glorious profusion of huckleberries, the
fountain-heads of pies of wondrous taste and size, colored in the heart
like sunsets. Nor were we slow to discover the value of the hickory
trees yielding both sugar and nuts. We carefully counted the different
kinds on our farm, and every morning when we could steal a few minutes
before breakfast after doing the chores, we visited the trees that had
been wounded by the axe, to scrape off and enjoy the thick white
delicious syrup that exuded from them, and gathered the nuts as they
fell in the mellow Indian summer, making haste to get a fair share with
the sapsuckers and squirrels. The hickory makes fine masses of color in
the fall, every leaf a flower, but it was the sweet sap and sweet nuts
that first interested us. No harvest in the Wisconsin woods was ever
gathered with more pleasure and care. Also, to our delight, we found
plenty of hazelnuts, and in a few places abundance of wild apples. They
were desperately sour, and we used to fill our pockets with them and
dare each other to eat one without making a face,—no easy feat.

One hot summer day father told us that we ought to learn to swim. This
was one of the most interesting suggestions he had ever offered, but
precious little time was allowed for trips to the lake, and he seldom
tried to show us how. “Go to the frogs,” he said, “and they will give
you all the lessons you need. Watch their arms and legs and see how
smoothly they kick themselves along and dive and come up. When you want
to dive, keep your arms by your side or over your head, and kick, and
when you want to come up, let your legs drag and paddle with your
hands.”

We found a little basin among the rushes at the south end of the lake,
about waist-deep and a rod or two wide, shaped like a sunfish’s nest.
Here we kicked and plashed for many a lesson, faithfully trying to
imitate frogs; but the smooth, comfortable sliding gait of our
amphibious teachers seemed hopelessly hard to learn. When we tried to
kick frog-fashion, down went our heads as if weighted with lead the
moment our feet left the ground. One day it occurred to me to hold my
breath as long as I could and let my head sink as far as it liked
without paying any attention to it, and try to swim under the water
instead of on the surface. This method was a great success, for at the
very first trial I managed to cross the basin without touching bottom,
and soon learned the use of my limbs. Then, of course, swimming with my
head above water soon became so easy that it seemed perfectly natural.
David tried the plan with the same success. Then we began to count the
number of times that we could swim around the basin without stopping to
rest, and after twenty or thirty rounds failed to tire us, we proudly
thought that a little more practice would make us about as amphibious
as frogs.

On the fourth of July of this swimming year one of the Lawson boys came
to visit us, and we went down to the lake to spend the great warm day
with the fishes and ducks and turtles. After gliding about on the
smooth mirror water, telling stories and enjoying the company of the
happy creatures about us, we rowed to our bathing-pool, and David and I
went in for a swim, while our companion fished from the boat a little
way out beyond the rushes. After a few turns in the pool, it occurred
to me that it was now about time to try deep water. Swimming through
the thick growth of rushes and lilies was somewhat dangerous,
especially for a beginner, because one’s arms and legs might be
entangled among the long, limber stems; nevertheless I ventured and
struck out boldly enough for the boat, where the water was twenty or
thirty feet deep. When I reached the end of the little skiff I raised
my right hand to take hold of it to surprise Lawson, whose back was
toward me and who was not aware of my approach; but I failed to reach
high enough, and, of course, the weight of my arm and the stroke
against the overleaning stern of the boat shoved me down and I sank,
struggling, frightened and confused. As soon as my feet touched the
bottom, I slowly rose to the surface, but before I could get breath
enough to call for help, sank back again and lost all control of
myself. After sinking and rising I don’t know how many times, some
water got into my lungs and I began to drown. Then suddenly my mind
seemed to clear. I remembered that I could swim under water, and,
making a desperate struggle toward the shore, I reached a point where
with my toes on the bottom I got my mouth above the surface, gasped for
help, and was pulled into the boat.

This humiliating accident spoiled the day, and we all agreed to keep it
a profound secret. My sister Sarah had heard my cry for help, and on
our arrival at the house inquired what had happened. “Were you
drowning, John? I heard you cry you couldna get oot.” Lawson made haste
to reply, “Oh, no! He was juist haverin (making fun).”

I was very much ashamed of myself, and at night, after calmly reviewing
the affair, concluded that there had been no reasonable cause for the
accident, and that I ought to punish myself for so nearly losing my
life from unmanly fear. Accordingly at the very first opportunity, I
stole away to the lake by myself, got into my boat, and instead of
going back to the old swimming-bowl for further practice, or to try to
do sanely and well what I had so ignominiously failed to do in my first
adventure, that is, to swim out through the rushes and lilies, I rowed
directly out to the middle of the lake, stripped, stood up on the seat
in the stern, and with grim deliberation took a header and dove
straight down thirty or forty feet, turned easily, and, letting my feet
drag, paddled straight to the surface with my hands as father had at
first directed me to do. I then swam round the boat, glorying in my
suddenly acquired confidence and victory over myself, climbed into it,
and dived again, with the same triumphant success. I think I went down
four or five times, and each time as I made the dive-spring shouted
aloud, “Take that!” feeling that I was getting most gloriously even
with myself.

Never again from that day to this have I lost control of myself in
water. If suddenly thrown overboard at sea in the dark, or even while
asleep, I think I would immediately right myself in a way some would
call “instinct,” rise among the waves, catch my breath, and try to plan
what would better be done. Never was victory over self more complete. I
have been a good swimmer ever since. At a slow gait I think I could
swim all day in smooth water moderate in temperature. When I was a
student at Madison, I used to go on long swimming-journeys, called
exploring expeditions, along the south shore of Lake Mendota, on
Saturdays, sometimes alone, sometimes with another amphibious explorer
by the name of Fuller.

My adventures in Fountain Lake call to mind the story of a boy who in
climbing a tree to rob a crow’s nest fell and broke his leg, but as
soon as it healed compelled himself to climb to the top of the tree he
had fallen from.

Like Scotch children in general we were taught grim self-denial, in
season and out of season, to mortify the flesh, keep our bodies in
subjection to Bible laws, and mercilessly punish ourselves for every
fault imagined or committed. A little boy, while helping his sister to
drive home the cows, happened to use a forbidden word. “I’ll have to
tell fayther on ye,” said the horrified sister. “I’ll tell him that ye
said a bad word.” “Weel,” said the boy, by way of excuse, “I couldna
help the word comin’ into me, and it’s na waur to speak it oot than to
let it rin through ye.”

A Scotch fiddler playing at a wedding drank so much whiskey that on the
way home he fell by the roadside. In the morning he was ashamed and
angry and determined to punish himself. Making haste to the house of a
friend, a gamekeeper, he called him out, and requested the loan of a
gun. The alarmed gamekeeper, not liking the fiddler’s looks and voice,
anxiously inquired what he was going to do with it. “Surely,” said he,
“you’re no gan to shoot yoursel.” “No-o,” with characteristic candor
replied the penitent fiddler, “I dinna think that I’ll juist exactly
kill mysel, but I’m gaun to tak a dander doon the burn (brook) wi’ the
gun and gie mysel a deevil o’ a fleg (fright).”

One calm summer evening a red-headed woodpecker was drowned in our
lake. The accident happened at the south end, opposite our memorable
swimming-hole, a few rods from the place where I came so near being
drowned years before. I had returned to the old home during a summer
vacation of the State University, and, having made a beginning in
botany, I was, of course, full of enthusiasm and ran eagerly to my
beloved pogonia, calopogon, and cypripedium gardens, osmunda ferneries,
and the lake lilies and pitcher-plants. A little before sundown the
day-breeze died away, and the lake, reflecting the wooded hills like a
mirror, was dimpled and dotted and streaked here and there where fishes
and turtles were poking out their heads and muskrats were sculling
themselves along with their flat tails making glittering tracks. After
lingering a while, dreamily recalling the old, hard, half-happy days,
and watching my favorite red-headed woodpeckers pursuing moths like
regular flycatchers, I swam out through the rushes and up the middle of
the lake to the north end and back, gliding slowly, looking about me,
enjoying the scenery as I would in a saunter along the shore, and
studying the habits of the animals as they were explained and recorded
on the smooth glassy water.


CLOCK. THE STAR HAND RISING AND SETTING WITH THE SUN ALL THE YEAR
CLOCK. THE STAR HAND RISING AND SETTING WITH THE SUN ALL THE YEAR
Invented by the author in his boyhoodToList

On the way back, when I was within a hundred rods or so of the end of
my voyage, I noticed a peculiar plashing disturbance that could not, I
thought, be made by a jumping fish or any other inhabitant of the lake;
for instead of low regular out-circling ripples such as are made by the
popping up of a head, or like those raised by the quick splash of a
leaping fish, or diving loon or muskrat, a continuous struggle was kept
up for several minutes ere the outspreading, interfering ring-waves
began to die away. Swimming hastily to the spot to try to discover what
had happened, I found one of my woodpeckers floating motionless with
outspread wings. All was over. Had I been a minute or two earlier, I
might have saved him. He had glanced on the water I suppose in pursuit
of a moth, was unable to rise from it, and died struggling, as I nearly
did at this same spot. Like me he seemed to have lost his mind in blind
confusion and fear. The water was warm, and had he kept still with his
head a little above the surface, he would sooner or later have been
wafted ashore. The best aimed flights of birds and man “gang aft
agley,” but this was the first case I had witnessed of a bird losing
its life by drowning.

Doubtless accidents to animals are far more common than is generally
known. I have seen quails killed by flying against our house when
suddenly startled. Some birds get entangled in hairs of their own nests
and die. Once I found a poor snipe in our meadow that was unable to fly
on account of difficult egg-birth. Pitying the poor mother, I picked
her up out of the grass and helped her as gently as I could, and as
soon as the egg was born she flew gladly away. Oftentimes I have
thought it strange that one could walk through the woods and mountains
and plains for years without seeing a single blood-spot. Most wild
animals get into the world and out of it without being noticed.
Nevertheless we at last sadly learn that they are all subject to the
vicissitudes of fortune like ourselves. Many birds lose their lives in
storms. I remember a particularly severe Wisconsin winter, when the
temperature was many degrees below zero and the snow was deep,
preventing the quail, which feed on the ground, from getting anything
like enough of food, as was pitifully shown by a flock I found on our
farm frozen solid in a thicket of oak sprouts. They were in a circle
about a foot wide, with their heads outward, packed close together for
warmth. Yet all had died without a struggle, perhaps more from
starvation than frost. Many small birds lose their lives in the storms
of early spring, or even summer. One mild spring morning I picked up
more than a score out of the grass and flowers, most of them darling
singers that had perished in a sudden storm of sleety rain and hail.

In a hollow at the foot of an oak tree that I had chopped down one cold
winter day, I found a poor ground squirrel frozen solid in its snug
grassy nest, in the middle of a store of nearly a peck of wheat it had
carefully gathered. I carried it home and gradually thawed and warmed
it in the kitchen, hoping it would come to life like a pickerel I
caught in our lake through a hole in the ice, which, after being frozen
as hard as a bone and thawed at the fireside, squirmed itself out of
the grasp of the cook when she began to scrape it, bounced off the
table, and danced about on the floor, making wonderful springy jumps as
if trying to find its way back home to the lake. But for the poor
spermophile nothing I could do in the way of revival was of any avail.
Its life had passed away without the slightest struggle, as it lay
asleep curled up like a ball, with its tail wrapped about it.




IVToC

A PARADISE OF BIRDS

Bird Favorites—The Prairie Chickens—Water-Fowl—A Loon on the
Defensive—Passenger Pigeons.


The Wisconsin oak openings were a summer paradise for song birds, and a
fine place to get acquainted with them; for the trees stood wide apart,
allowing one to see the happy homeseekers as they arrived in the
spring, their mating, nest-building, the brooding and feeding of the
young, and, after they were full-fledged and strong, to see all the
families of the neighborhood gathering and getting ready to leave in
the fall. Excepting the geese and ducks and pigeons nearly all our
summer birds arrived singly or in small draggled flocks, but when frost
and falling leaves brought their winter homes to mind they assembled in
large flocks on dead or leafless trees by the side of a meadow or
field, perhaps to get acquainted and talk the thing over. Some species
held regular daily meetings for several weeks before finally setting
forth on their long southern journeys. Strange to say, we never saw
them start. Some morning we would find them gone. Doubtless they
migrated in the night time. Comparatively few species remained all
winter, the nuthatch, chickadee, owl, prairie chicken, quail, and a few
stragglers from the main flocks of ducks, jays, hawks, and bluebirds.
Only after the country was settled did either jays or bluebirds winter
with us.

The brave, frost-defying chickadees and nuthatches stayed all the year
wholly independent of farms and man’s food and affairs.

With the first hints of spring came the brave little bluebirds, darling
singers as blue as the best sky, and of course we all loved them. Their
rich, crispy warbling is perfectly delightful, soothing and cheering,
sweet and whisperingly low, Nature’s fine love touches, every note
going straight home into one’s heart. And withal they are hardy and
brave, fearless fighters in defense of home. When we boys approached
their knot-hole nests, the bold little fellows kept scolding and diving
at us and tried to strike us in the face, and oftentimes we were afraid
they would prick our eyes. But the boldness of the little housekeepers
only made us love them the more.

None of the bird people of Wisconsin welcomed us more heartily than the
common robin. Far from showing alarm at the coming of settlers into
their native woods, they reared their young around our gardens as if
they liked us, and how heartily we admired the beauty and fine manners
of these graceful birds and their loud cheery song of _Fear not, fear
not, cheer up, cheer up_. It was easy to love them for they reminded us
of the robin redbreast of Scotland. Like the bluebirds they dared every
danger in defense of home, and we often wondered that birds so gentle
could be so bold and that sweet-voiced singers could so fiercely fight
and scold.

Of all the great singers that sweeten Wisconsin one of the best known
and best loved is the brown thrush or thrasher, strong and able without
being familiar, and easily seen and heard. Rosy purple evenings after
thundershowers are the favorite song-times, when the winds have died
away and the steaming ground and the leaves and flowers fill the air
with fragrance. Then the male makes haste to the topmost spray of an
oak tree and sings loud and clear with delightful enthusiasm until
sundown, mostly I suppose for his mate sitting on the precious eggs in
a brush heap. And how faithful and watchful and daring he is! Woe to
the snake or squirrel that ventured to go nigh the nest! We often saw
him diving on them, pecking them about the head and driving them away
as bravely as the kingbird drives away hawks. Their rich and varied
strains make the air fairly quiver. We boys often tried to interpret
the wild ringing melody and put it into words.

After the arrival of the thrushes came the bobolinks, gushing,
gurgling, inexhaustible fountains of song, pouring forth floods of
sweet notes over the broad Fox River meadows in wonderful variety and
volume, crowded and mixed beyond description, as they hovered on
quivering wings above their hidden nests in the grass. It seemed
marvelous to us that birds so moderate in size could hold so much of
this wonderful song stuff. Each one of them poured forth music enough
for a whole flock, singing as if its whole body, feathers and all, were
made up of music, flowing, glowing, bubbling melody interpenetrated
here and there with small scintillating prickles and spicules. We never
became so intimately acquainted with the bobolinks as with the
thrushes, for they lived far out on the broad Fox River meadows, while
the thrushes sang on the tree-tops around every home. The bobolinks
were among the first of our great singers to leave us in the fall,
going apparently direct to the rice-fields of the Southern States,
where they grew fat and were slaughtered in countless numbers for food.
Sad fate for singers so purely divine.

One of the gayest of the singers is the redwing blackbird. In the
spring, when his scarlet epaulets shine brightest, and his little
modest gray wife is sitting on the nest, built on rushes in a swamp, he
sits on a nearby oak and devotedly sings almost all day. His rich
simple strain is _baumpalee_, _baumpalee_, or _bobalee_ as interpreted
by some. In summer, after nesting cares are over, they assemble in
flocks of hundreds and thousands to feast on Indian corn when it is in
the milk. Scattering over a field, each selects an ear, strips the husk
down far enough to lay bare an inch or two of the end of it, enjoys an
exhilarating feast, and after all are full they rise simultaneously
with a quick birr of wings like an old-fashioned church congregation
fluttering to their feet when the minister after giving out the hymn
says, “Let the congregation arise and sing.” Alighting on nearby trees,
they sing with a hearty vengeance, bursting out without any puttering
prelude in gloriously glad concert, hundreds or thousands of exulting
voices with sweet gurgling _baumpalees_ mingled with chippy vibrant and
exploding globules of musical notes, making a most enthusiastic,
indescribable joy-song, a combination unlike anything to be heard
elsewhere in the bird kingdom; something like bagpipes, flutes,
violins, pianos, and human-like voices all bursting and bubbling at
once. Then suddenly some one of the joyful congregation shouts Chirr!
Chirr! and all stop as if shot.

The sweet-voiced meadowlark with its placid, simple song of
_peery-eery-ódical_ was another favorite, and we soon learned to admire
the Baltimore oriole and its wonderful hanging nests, and the scarlet
tanager glowing like fire amid the green leaves.

But no singer of them all got farther into our hearts than the little
speckle-breasted song sparrow, one of the first to arrive and begin
nest-building and singing. The richness, sweetness, and pathos of this
small darling’s song as he sat on a low bush often brought tears to our
eyes.

The little cheery, modest chickadee midget, loved by every innocent boy
and girl, man and woman, and by many not altogether innocent, was one
of the first of the birds to attract our attention, drawing nearer and
nearer to us as the winter advanced, bravely singing his faint silvery,
lisping, tinkling notes ending with a bright _dee, dee, dee_! however
frosty the weather.

The nuthatches, who also stayed all winter with us, were favorites with
us boys. We loved to watch them as they traced the bark-furrows of the
oaks and hickories head downward, deftly flicking off loose scales and
splinters in search of insects, and braving the coldest weather as if
their little sparks of life were as safely warm in winter as in summer,
unquenchable by the severest frost. With the help of the chickadees
they made a delightful stir in the solemn winter days, and when we were
out chopping we never ceased to wonder how their slender naked toes
could be kept warm when our own were so painfully frosted though clad
in thick socks and boots. And we wondered and admired the more when we
thought of the little midgets sleeping in knot-holes when the
temperature was far below zero, sometimes thirty-five degrees below,
and in the morning, after a minute breakfast of a few frozen insects
and hoarfrost crystals, playing and chatting in cheery tones as if
food, weather, and everything was according to their own warm hearts.
Our Yankee told us that the name of this darling was Devil-downhead.

Their big neighbors the owls also made good winter music, singing out
loud in wild, gallant strains bespeaking brave comfort, let the frost
bite as it might. The solemn hooting of the species with the widest
throat seemed to us the very wildest of all the winter sounds.

Prairie chickens came strolling in family flocks about the shanty,
picking seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls, and they became
still more abundant as wheat-and corn-fields were multiplied, but also
wilder, of course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at them.
The booming of the males during the mating-season was one of the
loudest and strangest of the early spring sounds, being easily heard on
calm mornings at a distance of a half or three fourths of a mile. As
soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled in flocks of a
dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a ploughed field,
ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on the
sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures something
like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming
calls,—_boom! boom! boom!_ interrupted by choking sounds. My brother
Daniel caught one while she was sitting on her nest in our corn-field.
The young are just like domestic chicks, run with the mother as soon as
hatched, and stay with her until autumn, feeding on the ground, never
taking wing unless disturbed. In winter, when full-grown, they assemble
in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall
trees, and to feeding-places in the morning,—unhusked corn-fields, if
any are to be found in the neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and
willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food
when snow covers the ground.

The wild rice-marshes along the Fox River and around Pucaway Lake were
the summer homes of millions of ducks, and in the Indian summer, when
the rice was ripe, they grew very fat. The magnificent mallards in
particular afforded our Yankee neighbors royal feasts almost without
price, for often as many as a half-dozen were killed at a shot, but we
seldom were allowed a single hour for hunting and so got very few. The
autumn duck season was a glad time for the Indians also, for they
feasted and grew fat not only on the ducks but on the wild rice, large
quantities of which they gathered as they glided through the midst of
the generous crop in canoes, bending down handfuls over the sides, and
beating out the grain with small paddles.

The warmth of the deep spring fountains of the creek in our meadow kept
it open all the year, and a few pairs of wood ducks, the most
beautiful, we thought, of all the ducks, wintered in it. I well
remember the first specimen I ever saw. Father shot it in the creek
during a snowstorm, brought it into the house, and called us around
him, saying: “Come, bairns, and admire the work of God displayed in
this bonnie bird. Naebody but God could paint feathers like these.
Juist look at the colors, hoo they shine, and hoo fine they overlap and
blend thegether like the colors o’ the rainbow.” And we all agreed that
never, never before had we seen so awfu’ bonnie a bird. A pair nested
every year in the hollow top of an oak stump about fifteen feet high
that stood on the side of the meadow, and we used to wonder how they
got the fluffy young ones down from the nest and across the meadow to
the lake when they were only helpless, featherless midgets; whether the
mother carried them to the water on her back or in her mouth. I never
saw the thing done or found anybody who had until this summer, when Mr.
Holabird, a keen observer, told me that he once saw the mother carry
them from the nest tree in her mouth, quickly coming and going to a
nearby stream, and in a few minutes get them all together and proudly
sail away.

Sometimes a flock of swans were seen passing over at a great height on
their long journeys, and we admired their clear bugle notes, but they
seldom visited any of the lakes in our neighborhood, so seldom that
when they did it was talked of for years. One was shot by a blacksmith
on a millpond with a long-range Sharp’s rifle, and many of the
neighbors went far to see it.

The common gray goose, Canada honker, flying in regular harrow-shaped
flocks, was one of the wildest and wariest of all the large birds that
enlivened the spring and autumn. They seldom ventured to alight in our
small lake, fearing, I suppose, that hunters might be concealed in the
rushes, but on account of their fondness for the young leaves of winter
wheat when they were a few inches high, they often alighted on our
fields when passing on their way south, and occasionally even in our
corn-fields when a snowstorm was blowing and they were hungry and
wing-weary, with nearly an inch of snow on their backs. In such times
of distress we used to pity them, even while trying to get a shot at
them. They were exceedingly cautious and circumspect; usually flew
several times round the adjacent thickets and fences to make sure that
no enemy was near before settling down, and one always stood on guard,
relieved from time to time, while the flock was feeding. Therefore
there was no chance to creep up on them unobserved; you had to be well
hidden before the flock arrived. It was the ambition of boys to be able
to shoot these wary birds. I never got but two, both of them at one
so-called lucky shot. When I ran to pick them up, one of them flew
away, but as the poor fellow was sorely wounded he didn’t fly far. When
I caught him after a short chase, he uttered a piercing cry of terror
and despair, which the leader of the flock heard at a distance of about
a hundred rods. They had flown off in frightened disorder, of course,
but had got into the regular harrow-shape order when the leader heard
the cry, and I shall never forget how bravely he left his place at the
head of the flock and hurried back screaming and struck at me in trying
to save his companion. I dodged down and held my hands over my head,
and thus escaped a blow of his elbows. Fortunately I had left my gun at
the fence, and the life of this noble bird was spared after he had
risked it in trying to save his wounded friend or neighbor or family
relation. For so shy a bird boldly to attack a hunter showed wonderful
sympathy and courage. This is one of my strangest hunting experiences.
Never before had I regarded wild geese as dangerous, or capable of such
noble self-sacrificing devotion.

The loud clear call of the handsome bob-whites was one of the
pleasantest and most characteristic of our spring sounds, and we soon
learned to imitate it so well that a bold cock often accepted our
challenge and came flying to fight. The young run as soon as they are
hatched and follow their parents until spring, roosting on the ground
in a close bunch, heads out ready to scatter and fly. These fine birds
were seldom seen when we first arrived in the wilderness, but when
wheat-fields supplied abundance of food they multiplied very fast,
although oftentimes sore pressed during hard winters when the snow
reached a depth of two or three feet, covering their food, while the
mercury fell to twenty or thirty degrees below zero. Occasionally,
although shy on account of being persistently hunted, under pressure of
extreme hunger in the very coldest weather when the snow was deepest
they ventured into barnyards and even approached the doorsteps of
houses, searching for any sort of scraps and crumbs, as if piteously
begging for food. One of our neighbors saw a flock come creeping up
through the snow, unable to fly, hardly able to walk, and while
approaching the door several of them actually fell down and died;
showing that birds, usually so vigorous and apparently independent of
fortune, suffer and lose their lives in extreme weather like the rest
of us, frozen to death like settlers caught in blizzards. None of our
neighbors perished in storms, though many had feet, ears, and fingers
frost-nipped or solidly frozen.

As soon as the lake ice melted, we heard the lonely cry of the loon,
one of the wildest and most striking of all the wilderness sounds, a
strange, sad, mournful, unearthly cry, half laughing, half wailing.
Nevertheless the great northern diver, as our species is called, is a
brave, hardy, beautiful bird, able to fly under water about as well as
above it, and to spear and capture the swiftest fishes for food. Those
that haunted our lake were so wary none was shot for years, though
every boy hunter in the neighborhood was ambitious to get one to prove
his skill. On one of our bitter cold New Year holidays I was surprised
to see a loon in the small open part of the lake at the mouth of the
inlet that was kept from freezing by the warm spring water. I knew that
it could not fly out of so small a place, for these heavy birds have to
beat the water for half a mile or so before they can get fairly on the
wing. Their narrow, finlike wings are very small as compared with the
weight of the body and are evidently made for flying through water as
well as through the air, and it is by means of their swift flight
through the water and the swiftness of the blow they strike with their
long, spear-like bills that they are able to capture the fishes on
which they feed. I ran down the meadow with the gun, got into my boat,
and pursued that poor winter-bound straggler. Of course he dived again
and again, but had to come up to breathe, and I at length got a quick
shot at his head and slightly wounded or stunned him, caught him, and
ran proudly back to the house with my prize. I carried him in my arms;
he didn’t struggle to get away or offer to strike me, and when I put
him on the floor in front of the kitchen stove, he just rested quietly
on his belly as noiseless and motionless as if he were a stuffed
specimen on a shelf, held his neck erect, gave no sign of suffering
from any wound, and though he was motionless, his small black eyes
seemed to be ever keenly watchful. His formidable bill, very sharp,
three or three and a half inches long, and shaped like a pickaxe, was
held perfectly level. But the wonder was that he did not struggle or
make the slightest movement. We had a tortoise-shell cat, an old Tom of
great experience, who was so fond of lying under the stove in frosty
weather that it was difficult even to poke him out with a broom; but
when he saw and smelled that strange big fishy, black and white,
speckledy bird, the like of which he had never before seen, he rushed
wildly to the farther corner of the kitchen, looked back cautiously and
suspiciously, and began to make a careful study of the handsome but
dangerous-looking stranger. Becoming more and more curious and
interested, he at length advanced a step or two for a nearer view and
nearer smell; and as the wonderful bird kept absolutely motionless, he
was encouraged to venture gradually nearer and nearer until within
perhaps five or six feet of its breast. Then the wary loon, not liking
Tom’s looks in so near a view, which perhaps recalled to his mind the
plundering minks and muskrats he had to fight when they approached his
nest, prepared to defend himself by slowly, almost imperceptibly
drawing back his long pickaxe bill, and without the slightest fuss or
stir held it level and ready just over his tail. With that dangerous
bill drawn so far back out of the way, Tom’s confidence in the
stranger’s peaceful intentions seemed almost complete, and, thus
encouraged, he at last ventured forward with wondering, questioning
eyes and quivering nostrils until he was only eighteen or twenty inches
from the loon’s smooth white breast. When the beautiful bird,
apparently as peaceful and inoffensive as a flower, saw that his hairy
yellow enemy had arrived at the right distance, the loon, who evidently
was a fine judge of the reach of his spear, shot it forward quick as a
lightning-flash, in marvelous contrast to the wonderful slowness of the
preparatory poising, backward motion. The aim was true to a
hair-breadth. Tom was struck right in the centre of his forehead,
between the eyes. I thought his skull was cracked. Perhaps it was. The
sudden astonishment of that outraged cat, the virtuous indignation and
wrath, terror, and pain, are far beyond description. His eyes and
screams and desperate retreat told all that. When the blow was
received, he made a noise that I never heard a cat make before or
since; an awfully deep, condensed, screechy, explosive _Wuck!_ as he
bounced straight up in the air like a bucking bronco; and when he
alighted after his spring, he rushed madly across the room and made
frantic efforts to climb up the hard-finished plaster wall. Not
satisfied to get the width of the kitchen away from his mysterious
enemy, for the first time that cold winter he tried to get out of the
house, anyhow, anywhere out of that loon-infested room. When he finally
ventured to look back and saw that the barbarous bird was still there,
tranquil and motionless in front of the stove, he regained command of
some of his shattered senses and carefully commenced to examine his
wound. Backed against the wall in the farthest corner, and keeping his
eye on the outrageous bird, he tenderly touched and washed the sore
spot, wetting his paw with his tongue, pausing now and then as his
courage increased to glare and stare and growl at his enemy with looks
and tones wonderfully human, as if saying: “You confounded fishy,
unfair rascal! What did you do that for? What had I done to you?
Faithless, legless, long-nosed wretch!” Intense experiences like the
above bring out the humanity that is in all animals. One touch of
nature, even a cat-and-loon touch, makes all the world kin.

It was a great memorable day when the first flock of passenger pigeons
came to our farm, calling to mind the story we had read about them when
we were at school in Scotland. Of all God’s feathered people that
sailed the Wisconsin sky, no other bird seemed to us so wonderful. The
beautiful wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from
climate to climate in accord with the weather, finding their
food—acorns, beechnuts, pine-nuts, cranberries, strawberries,
huckleberries, juniper berries, hackberries, buckwheat, rice, wheat,
oats, corn—in fields and forests thousands of miles apart. I have seen
flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over
from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at
the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like a mighty river in the
sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts, and
rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses like high-plashing
spray. How wonderful the distances they flew in a day—in a year—in a
lifetime! They arrived in Wisconsin in the spring just after the sun
had cleared away the snow, and alighted in the woods to feed on the
fallen acorns that they had missed the previous autumn. A comparatively
small flock swept thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few
minutes, by moving straight ahead with a broad front. All got their
share, for the rear constantly became the van by flying over the flock
and alighting in front, the entire flock constantly changing from rear
to front, revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing roar
that could be heard a long way off. In summer they feasted on wheat and
oats and were easily approached as they rested on the trees along the
sides of the field after a good full meal, displaying beautiful
iridescent colors as they moved their necks backward and forward when
we went very near them. Every shotgun was aimed at them and everybody
feasted on pigeon pies, and not a few of the settlers feasted also on
the beauty of the wonderful birds. The breast of the male is a fine
rosy red, the lower part of the neck behind and along the sides
changing from the red of the breast to gold, emerald green and rich
crimson. The general color of the upper parts is grayish blue, the
under parts white. The extreme length of the bird is about seventeen
inches; the finely modeled slender tail about eight inches, and extent
of wings twenty-four inches. The females are scarcely less beautiful.
“Oh, what bonnie, bonnie birds!” we exclaimed over the first that fell
into our hands. “Oh, what colors! Look at their breasts, bonnie as
roses, and at their necks aglow wi’ every color juist like the
wonderfu’ wood ducks. Oh, the bonnie, bonnie creatures, they beat a’!
Where did they a’ come fra, and where are they a’ gan? It’s awfu’ like
a sin to kill them!” To this some smug, practical old sinner would
remark: “Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill the bonnie things, but
they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were
sent to God’s chosen people, the Israelites, when they were starving in
the desert ayont the Red Sea. And I must confess that meat was never
put up in neater, handsomer-painted packages.”

In the New England and Canada woods beechnuts were their best and most
abundant food, farther north, cranberries and huckleberries. After
everything was cleaned up in the north and winter was coming on, they
went south for rice, corn, acorns, haws, wild grapes, crab-apples,
sparkle-berries, etc. They seemed to require more than half of the
continent for feeding-grounds, moving from one table to another, field
to field, forest to forest, finding something ripe and wholesome all
the year round. In going south in the fine Indian-summer weather they
flew high and followed one another, though the head of the flock might
be hundreds of miles in advance. But against head winds they took
advantage of the inequalities of the ground, flying comparatively low.
All followed the leader’s ups and downs over hill and dale though far
out of sight, never hesitating at any turn of the way, vertical or
horizontal that the leaders had taken, though the largest flocks
stretched across several States, and belts of different kinds of
weather.

There were no roosting-or breeding-places near our farm, and I never
saw any of them until long after the great flocks were exterminated. I
therefore quote, from Audubon’s and Pokagon’s vivid descriptions.

“Toward evening,” Audubon says, “they depart for the roosting-place,
which may be hundreds of miles distant. One on the banks of Green
River, Kentucky, was over three miles wide and forty long.”

“My first view of it,” says the great naturalist, “was about a
fortnight after it had been chosen by the birds, and I arrived there
nearly two hours before sunset. Few pigeons were then to be seen, but a
great many persons with horses and wagons and armed with guns, long
poles, sulphur pots, pine pitch torches, etc., had already established
encampments on the borders. Two farmers had driven upwards of three
hundred hogs a distance of more than a hundred miles to be fattened on
slaughtered pigeons. Here and there the people employed in plucking and
salting what had already been secured were sitting in the midst of
piles of birds. Dung several inches thick covered the ground. Many
trees two feet in diameter were broken off at no great distance from
the ground, and the branches of many of the tallest and largest had
given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado.

“Not a pigeon had arrived at sundown. Suddenly a general cry
arose—‘Here they come!’ The noise they made, though still distant,
reminded me of a hard gale at sea passing through the rigging of a
close-reefed ship. Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men.
The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted and a
magnificent as well as terrifying sight presented itself. The pigeons
pouring in alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses
were formed on the branches all around. Here and there the perches gave
way with a crash, and falling destroyed hundreds beneath, forcing down
the dense groups with which every stick was loaded; a scene of uproar
and conflict. I found it useless to speak or even to shout to those
persons nearest me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and
I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.
None dared venture within the line of devastation. The hogs had been
penned up in due time, the picking up of the dead and wounded being
left for the next morning’s employment. The pigeons were constantly
coming in and it was after midnight before I perceived a decrease in
the number of those that arrived. The uproar continued all night, and
anxious to know how far the sound reached I sent off a man who,
returning two hours after, informed me that he had heard it distinctly
three miles distant.


BAROMETER
BAROMETER
Invented by the author in his boyhoodToList

“Toward daylight the noise in some measure subsided; long before
objects were distinguishable the pigeons began to move off in a
direction quite different from that in which they had arrived the
evening before, and at sunrise all that were able to fly had
disappeared. The howling of the wolves now reached our ears, and the
foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, coons, opossums, and polecats were seen
sneaking off, while eagles and hawks of different species, accompanied
by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them and enjoy a share of the
spoil.

“Then the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the
dead, the dying and mangled. The pigeons were picked up and piled in
heaps until each had as many as they could possible dispose of, when
the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder.

“The breeding-places are selected with reference to abundance of food,
and countless myriads resort to them. At this period the note of the
pigeon is coo coo coo, like that of the domestic species but much
shorter. They caress by billing, and during incubation the male
supplies the female with food. As the young grow, the tyrant of
creation appears to disturb the peaceful scene, armed with axes to chop
down the squab-laden trees, and the abomination of desolation and
destruction produced far surpasses even that of the roosting places.”

Pokagon, an educated Indian writer, says: “I saw one nesting-place in
Wisconsin one hundred miles long and from three to ten miles wide.
Every tree, some of them quite low and scrubby, had from one to fifty
nests on each. Some of the nests overflow from the oaks to the hemlock
and pine woods. When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding-places they
sometimes cut the timber from thousands of acres. Millions are caught
in nets with salt or grain for bait, and schooners, sometimes loaded
down with the birds, are taken to New York where they are sold for a
cent apiece.”




VToC

YOUNG HUNTERS

American Head-hunters—Deer—A Resurrected Woodpecker—Muskrats—Foxes and
Badgers—A Pet Coon—Bathing—Squirrels—Gophers—A Burglarious Shrike.


In the older eastern States it used to be considered great sport for an
army of boys to assemble to hunt birds, squirrels, and every other
unclaimed, unprotected live thing of shootable size. They divided into
two squads, and, choosing leaders, scattered through the woods in
different directions, and the party that killed the greatest number
enjoyed a supper at the expense of the other. The whole neighborhood
seemed to enjoy the shameful sport especially the farmers afraid of
their crops. With a great air of importance, laws were enacted to
govern the gory business. For example, a gray squirrel must count four
heads, a woodchuck six heads, common red squirrel two heads, black
squirrel ten heads, a partridge five heads, the larger birds, such as
whip-poor-wills and nighthawks two heads each, the wary crows three,
and bob-whites three. But all the blessed company of mere songbirds,
warblers, robins, thrushes, orioles, with nuthatches, chickadees, blue
jays, woodpeckers, etc., counted only one head each. The heads of the
birds were hastily wrung off and thrust into the game-bags to be
counted, saving the bodies only of what were called game, the larger
squirrels, bob-whites, partridges, etc. The blood-stained bags of the
best slayers were soon bulging full. Then at a given hour all had to
stop and repair to the town, empty their dripping sacks, count the
heads, and go rejoicing to their dinner. Although, like other wild
boys, I was fond of shooting, I never had anything to do with these
abominable head-hunts. And now the farmers having learned that birds
are their friends wholesale slaughter has been abolished.

We seldom saw deer, though their tracks were common. The Yankee
explained that they traveled and fed mostly at night, and hid in
tamarack swamps and brushy places in the daytime, and how the Indians
knew all about them and could find them whenever they were hungry.

Indians belonging to the Menominee and Winnebago tribes occasionally
visited us at our cabin to get a piece of bread or some matches, or to
sharpen their knives on our grindstone, and we boys watched them
closely to see that they didn’t steal Jack. We wondered at their
knowledge of animals when we saw them go direct to trees on our farm,
chop holes in them with their tomahawks and take out coons, of the
existence of which we had never noticed the slightest trace. In winter,
after the first snow, we frequently saw three or four Indians hunting
deer in company, running like hounds on the fresh, exciting tracks. The
escape of the deer from these noiseless, tireless hunters was said to
be well-nigh impossible; they were followed to the death.

Most of our neighbors brought some sort of gun from the old country,
but seldom took time to hunt, even after the first hard work of fencing
and clearing was over, except to shoot a duck or prairie chicken now
and then that happened to come in their way. It was only the less
industrious American settlers who left their work to go far a-hunting.
Two or three of our most enterprising American neighbors went off every
fall with their teams to the pine regions and cranberry marshes in the
northern part of the State to hunt and gather berries. I well remember
seeing their wagons loaded with game when they returned from a
successful hunt. Their loads consisted usually of half a dozen deer or
more, one or two black bears, and fifteen or twenty bushels of
cranberries; all solidly frozen. Part of both the berries and meat was
usually sold in Portage; the balance furnished their families with
abundance of venison, bear grease, and pies.

Winter wheat is sown in the fall, and when it is a month or so old the
deer, like the wild geese, are very fond of it, especially since other
kinds of food are then becoming scarce. One of our neighbors across the
Fox River killed a large number, some thirty or forty, on a small patch
of wheat, simply by lying in wait for them every night. Our wheat-field
was the first that was sown in the neighborhood. The deer soon found it
and came in every night to feast, but it was eight or nine years before
we ever disturbed them. David then killed one deer, the only one killed
by any of our family. He went out shortly after sundown at the time of
full moon to one of our wheat-fields, carrying a double-barreled
shotgun loaded with buckshot. After lying in wait an hour or so, he saw
a doe and her fawn jump the fence and come cautiously into the wheat.
After they were within sixty or seventy yards of him, he was surprised
when he tried to take aim that about half of the moon’s disc was
mysteriously darkened as if covered by the edge of a dense cloud. This
proved to be an eclipse. Nevertheless, he fired at the mother, and she
immediately ran off, jumped the fence, and took to the woods by the way
she came. The fawn danced about bewildered, wondering what had become
of its mother, but finally fled to the woods. David fired at the poor
deserted thing as it ran past him but happily missed it. Hearing the
shots, I joined David to learn his luck. He said he thought he must
have wounded the mother, and when we were strolling about in the woods
in search of her we saw three or four deer on their way to the
wheat-field, led by a fine buck. They were walking rapidly, but
cautiously halted at intervals of a few rods to listen and look ahead
and scent the air. They failed to notice us, though by this time the
moon was out of the eclipse shadow and we were standing only about
fifty yards from them. I was carrying the gun. David had fired both
barrels but when he was reloading one of them he happened to put the
wad intended to cover the shot into the empty barrel, and so when we
were climbing over the fence the buckshot had rolled out, and when I
fired at the big buck I knew by the report that there was nothing but
powder in the charge. The startled deer danced about in confusion for a
few seconds, uncertain which way to run until they caught sight of us,
when they bounded off through the woods. Next morning we found the poor
mother lying about three hundred yards from the place where she was
shot. She had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of
the buckshot had passed through her heart.

Excepting Sundays we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves,
the 4th of July and the 1st of January. Sundays were less than half our
own, on account of Bible lessons, Sunday-school lessons and church
services; all the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold or warm.
No wonder, then, that our two holidays were precious and that it was
not easy to decide what to do with them. They were usually spent on the
highest rocky hill in the neighborhood, called the Observatory; in
visiting our boy friends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and
play games; in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow
or buy; or in making models of machines I had invented.

One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age
hunting redwing blackbirds then busy in the corn-fields. Our party had
only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps
because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of carrying.
We marched through the corn without getting sight of a single redwing,
but just as we reached the far side of the field, a red-headed
woodpecker flew up, and the Lawson boys cried: “Shoot him! Shoot him!
he is just as bad as a blackbird. He eats corn!” This memorable
woodpecker alighted in the top of a white oak tree about fifty feet
high. I fired from a position almost immediately beneath him, and he
fell straight down at my feet. When I picked him up and was admiring
his plumage, he moved his legs slightly, and I said, “Poor bird, he’s
no deed yet and we’ll hae to kill him to put him oot o’
pain,”—sincerely pitying him, after we had taken pleasure in shooting
him. I had seen servant girls wringing chicken necks, so with desperate
humanity I took the limp unfortunate by the head, swung him around
three or four times thinking I was wringing his neck, and then threw
him hard on the ground to quench the last possible spark of life and
make quick death doubly sure. But to our astonishment the moment he
struck the ground he gave a cry of alarm and flew right straight up
like a rejoicing lark into the top of the same tree, and perhaps to the
same branch he had fallen from, and began to adjust his ruffled
feathers, nodding and chirping and looking down at us as if wondering
what in the bird world we had been doing to him. This of course
banished all thought of killing, as far as that revived woodpecker was
concerned, no matter how many ears of corn he might spoil, and we all
heartily congratulated him on his wonderful, triumphant resurrection
from three kinds of death,—shooting, neck-wringing, and destructive
concussion. I suppose only one pellet had touched him, glancing on his
head.

Another extraordinary shooting-affair happened one summer morning
shortly after daybreak. When I went to the stable to feed the horses I
noticed a big white-breasted hawk on a tall oak in front of the
chicken-house, evidently waiting for a chicken breakfast. I ran to the
house for the gun, and when I fired he fell about halfway down the
tree, caught a branch with his claws, hung back downward and fluttered
a few seconds, then managed to stand erect. I fired again to put him
out of pain, and to my surprise the second shot seemed to restore his
strength instead of killing him, for he flew out of the tree and over
the meadow with strong and regular wing-beats for thirty or forty rods
apparently as well as ever, but died suddenly in the air and dropped
like a stone.

We hunted muskrats whenever we had time to run down to the lake. They
are brown bunchy animals about twenty-three inches long, the tail being
about nine inches in length, black in color and flattened vertically
for sculling, and the hind feet are half-webbed. They look like little
beavers, usually have from ten to a dozen young, are easily tamed and
make interesting pets. We liked to watch them at their work and at
their meals. In the spring when the snow vanishes and the lake ice
begins to melt, the first open spot is always used as a feeding-place,
where they dive from the edge of the ice and in a minute or less
reappear with a mussel or a mouthful of pontederia or water-lily
leaves, climb back on to the ice and sit up to nibble their food,
handling it very much like squirrels or marmots. It is then that they
are most easily shot, a solitary hunter oftentimes shooting thirty or
forty in a single day. Their nests on the rushy margins of lakes and
streams, far from being hidden like those of most birds, are
conspicuously large, and conical in shape like Indian wigwams. They are
built of plants—rushes, sedges, mosses, etc.—and ornamented around the
base with mussel-shells. It was always pleasant and interesting to see
them in the fall as soon as the nights began to be frosty, hard at work
cutting sedges on the edge of the meadow or swimming out through the
rushes, making long glittering ripples as they sculled themselves
along, diving where the water is perhaps six or eight feet deep and
reappearing in a minute or so with large mouthfuls of the weedy tangled
plants gathered from the bottom, returning to their big wigwams,
climbing up and depositing their loads where most needed to make them
yet larger and firmer and warmer, foreseeing the freezing weather just
like ourselves when we banked up our house to keep out the frost.

They lie snug and invisible all winter but do not hibernate. Through a
channel carefully kept open they swim out under the ice for mussels,
and the roots and stems of water-lilies, etc., on which they feed just
as they do in summer. Sometimes the oldest and most enterprising of
them venture to orchards near the water in search of fallen apples;
very seldom, however, do they interfere with anything belonging to
their mortal enemy man. Notwithstanding they are so well hidden and
protected during the winter, many of them are killed by Indian hunters,
who creep up softly and spear them through the thick walls of their
cabins. Indians are fond of their flesh, and so are some of the wildest
of the white trappers. They are easily caught in steel traps, and after
vainly trying to drag their feet from the cruel crushing jaws, they
sometimes in their agony gnaw them off. Even after having gnawed off a
leg they are so guileless that they never seem to learn to know and
fear traps, for some are occasionally found that have been caught twice
and have gnawed off a second foot. Many other animals suffering
excruciating pain in these cruel traps gnaw off their legs. Crabs and
lobsters are so fortunate as to be able to shed their limbs when caught
or merely frightened, apparently without suffering any pain, simply by
giving themselves a little shivery shake.

The muskrat is one of the most notable and widely distributed of
American animals, and millions of the gentle, industrious, beaver-like
creatures are shot and trapped and speared every season for their
skins, worth a dime or so,—like shooting boys and girls for their
garments.

Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings
will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals
in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the
mean time we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent
lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hale, red-blooded boys are
savage, the best and boldest the savagest, fond of hunting and fishing.
But when thoughtless childhood is past, the best rise the highest above
all this bloody flesh and sport business, the wild foundational animal
dying out day by day, as divine uplifting, transfiguring charity grows
in.

Hares and rabbits were seldom seen when we first settled in the
Wisconsin woods, but they multiplied rapidly after the animals that
preyed upon them had been thinned out or exterminated, and food and
shelter supplied in grain-fields and log fences and the thickets of
young oaks that grew up in pastures after the annual grass fires were
kept out. Catching hares in the winter-time, when they were hidden in
hollow fence-logs, was a favorite pastime with many of the boys whose
fathers allowed them time to enjoy the sport. Occasionally a stout,
lithe hare was carried out into an open snow-covered field, set free,
and given a chance for its life in a race with a dog. When the snow was
not too soft and deep, it usually made good its escape, for our dogs
were only fat, short-legged mongrels. We sometimes discovered hares in
standing hollow trees, crouching on decayed punky wood at the bottom,
as far back as possible from the opening, but when alarmed they managed
to climb to a considerable height if the hollow was not too wide, by
bracing themselves against the sides.

Foxes, though not uncommon, we boys held steadily to work seldom saw,
and as they found plenty of prairie chickens for themselves and
families, they did not often come near the farmer’s hen-roosts.
Nevertheless the discovery of their dens was considered important. No
matter how deep the den might be, it was thoroughly explored with pick
and shovel by sport-loving settlers at a time when they judged the fox
was likely to be at home, but I cannot remember any case in our
neighborhood where the fox was actually captured. In one of the dens a
mile or two from our farm a lot of prairie chickens were found and some
smaller birds.

Badger dens were far more common than fox dens. One of our fields was
named Badger Hill from the number of badger holes in a hill at the end
of it, but I cannot remember seeing a single one of the inhabitants.

On a stormy day in the middle of an unusually severe winter, a black
bear, hungry, no doubt, and seeking something to eat, came strolling
down through our neighborhood from the northern pine woods. None had
been seen here before, and it caused no little excitement and alarm,
for the European settlers imagined that these poor, timid, bashful
bears were as dangerous as man-eating lions and tigers, and that they
would pursue any human being that came in their way. This species is
common in the north part of the State, and few of our enterprising
Yankee hunters who went to the pineries in the fall failed to shoot at
least one of them.

We saw very little of the owlish, serious-looking coons, and no wonder,
since they lie hidden nearly all day in hollow trees and we never had
time to hunt them. We often heard their curious, quavering, whinnying
cries on still evenings, but only once succeeded in tracing an
unfortunate family through our corn-field to their den in a big oak and
catching them all. One of our neighbors, Mr. McRath, a Highland
Scotchman, caught one and made a pet of it. It became very tame and had
perfect confidence in the good intentions of its kind friend and
master. He always addressed it in speaking to it as a “little man.”
When it came running to him and jumped on his lap or climbed up his
trousers, he would say, while patting its head as if it were a dog or a
child, “Coonie, ma mannie, Coonie, ma mannie, hoo are ye the day? I
think you’re hungry,”—as the comical pet began to examine his pockets
for nuts and bits of bread,—“Na, na, there’s nathing in my pooch for ye
the day, my wee mannie, but I’ll get ye something.” He would then fetch
something it liked,—bread, nuts, a carrot, or perhaps a piece of fresh
meat. Anything scattered for it on the floor it felt with its paw
instead of looking at it, judging of its worth more by touch than
sight.

The outlet of our Fountain Lake flowed past Mr. McRath’s door, and the
coon was very fond of swimming in it and searching for frogs and
mussels. It seemed perfectly satisfied to stay about the house without
being confined, occupied a comfortable bed in a section of a hollow
tree, and never wandered far. How long it lived after the death of its
kind master I don’t know.

I suppose that almost any wild animal may be made a pet, simply by
sympathizing with it and entering as much as possible into its life. In
Alaska I saw one of the common gray mountain marmots kept as a pet in
an Indian family. When its master entered the house it always seemed
glad, almost like a dog, and when cold or tired it snuggled up in a
fold of his blanket with the utmost confidence.

We have all heard of ferocious animals, lions and tigers, etc., that
were fed and spoken to only by their masters, becoming perfectly tame;
and, as is well known, the faithful dog that follows man and serves
him, and looks up to him and loves him as if he were a god, is a
descendant of the blood-thirsty wolf or jackal. Even frogs and toads
and fishes may be tamed, provided they have the uniform sympathy of one
person, with whom they become intimately acquainted without the
distracting and varying attentions of strangers. And surely all God’s
people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play.
Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small
mischievous microbes,—all are warm with divine radium and must have
lots of fun in them.

As far as I know, all wild creatures keep themselves clean. Birds, it
seems to me, take more pains to bathe and dress themselves than any
other animals. Even ducks, though living so much in water, dip and
scatter cleansing showers over their backs, and shake and preen their
feathers as carefully as land-birds. Watching small singers taking
their morning baths is very interesting, particularly when the weather
is cold. Alighting in a shallow pool, they oftentimes show a sort of
dread of dipping into it, like children hesitating about taking a
plunge, as if they felt the same kind of shock, and this makes it easy
for us to sympathize with the little feathered people.

Occasionally I have seen from my study-window red-headed linnets
bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce. A large Monterey
cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew
lodges in still nights made favorite bathing-places. Alighting gently,
as if afraid to waste the dew, they would pause and fidget as they do
before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the drops in
showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool. I have also
seen the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of silver firs
on the edge of a glacier meadow, but nowhere have I seen the dewdrops
so abundant as on the Monterey cypress; and the picture made by the
quivering wings and irised dew was memorably beautiful. Children, too,
make fine pictures plashing and crowing in their little tubs. How
widely different from wallowing pigs, bathing with great show of
comfort and rubbing themselves dry against rough-barked trees!

Some of our own species seem fairly to dread the touch of water. When
the necessity of absolute cleanliness by means of frequent baths was
being preached by a friend who had been reading Combe’s Physiology, in
which he had learned something of the wonders of the skin with its
millions of pores that had to be kept open for health, one of our
neighbors remarked: “Oh! that’s unnatural. It’s well enough to wash in
a tub maybe once or twice a year, but not to be paddling in the water
all the time like a frog in a spring-hole.” Another neighbor, who
prided himself on his knowledge of big words, said with great
solemnity: “I never can believe that man is amphibious!”

Natives of tropic islands pass a large part of their lives in water,
and seem as much at home in the sea as on the land; swim and dive,
pursue fishes, play in the waves like surf-ducks and seals, and explore
the coral gardens and groves and seaweed meadows as if truly
amphibious. Even the natives of the far north bathe at times. I once
saw a lot of Eskimo boys ducking and plashing right merrily in the
Arctic Ocean.

It seemed very wonderful to us that the wild animals could keep
themselves warm and strong in winter when the temperature was far below
zero. Feeble-looking rabbits scud away over the snow, lithe and
elastic, as if glorying in the frosty, sparkling weather and sure of
their dinners. I have seen gray squirrels dragging ears of corn about
as heavy as themselves out of our field through loose snow and up a
tree, balancing them on limbs and eating in comfort with their dry,
electric tails spread airily over their backs. Once I saw a fine hardy
fellow go into a knot-hole. Thrusting in my hand I caught him and
pulled him out. As soon as he guessed what I was up to, he took the end
of my thumb in his mouth and sunk his teeth right through it, but I
gripped him hard by the neck, carried him home, and shut him up in a
box that contained about half a bushel of hazel-and hickory-nuts,
hoping that he would not be too much frightened and discouraged to eat
while thus imprisoned after the rough handling he had suffered. I soon
learned, however, that sympathy in this direction was wasted, for no
sooner did I pop him in than he fell to with right hearty appetite,
gnawing and munching the nuts as if he had gathered them himself and
was very hungry that day. Therefore, after allowing time enough for a
good square meal, I made haste to get him out of the nut-box and shut
him up in a spare bedroom, in which father had hung a lot of selected
ears of Indian corn for seed. They were hung up by the husks on cords
stretched across from side to side of the room. The squirrel managed to
jump from the top of one of the bed-posts to the cord, cut off an ear,
and let it drop to the floor. He then jumped down, got a good grip of
the heavy ear, carried it to the top of one of the slippery, polished
bed-posts, seated himself comfortably, and, holding it well balanced,
deliberately pried out one kernel at a time with his long chisel teeth,
ate the soft, sweet germ, and dropped the hard part of the kernel. In
this masterly way, working at high speed, he demolished several ears a
day, and with a good warm bed in a box made himself at home and grew
fat. Then naturally, I suppose, free romping in the snow and tree-tops
with companions came to mind. Anyhow he began to look for a way of
escape. Of course he first tried the window, but found that his teeth
made no impression on the glass. Next he tried the sash and gnawed the
wood off level with the glass; then father happened to come upstairs
and discovered the mischief that was being done to his seed corn and
window and immediately ordered him out of the house.

The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little
animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature, with fine
eyes and smooth, soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is
about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide-spread tail and
the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look
broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often
brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly
during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided
off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds, as soon as they
heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibres at the stump,
when the trees they were in began to totter and groan. They can fly, or
rather glide, twenty or thirty yards from the top of a tree twenty or
thirty feet high to the foot of another, gliding upward as they reach
the trunk, or if the distance is too great they alight comfortably on
the ground and make haste to the nearest tree, and climb just like the
wingless squirrels.

Every boy and girl loves the little fairy, airy striped chipmunk, half
squirrel, half spermophile. He is about the size of a field mouse, and
often made us think of linnets and song sparrows as he frisked about
gathering nuts and berries. He likes almost all kinds of grain,
berries, and nuts,—hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, strawberries,
huckleberries, wheat, oats, corn,—he is fond of them all and thrives on
them. Most of the hazel bushes on our farm grew along the fences as if
they had been planted for the chipmunks alone, for the rail fences were
their favorite highways. We never wearied watching them, especially
when the hazel-nuts were ripe and the little fellows were sitting on
the rails nibbling and handling them like tree-squirrels. We used to
notice too that, although they are very neat animals, their lips and
fingers were dyed red like our own, when the strawberries and
huckleberries were ripe. We could always tell when the wheat and oats
were in the milk by seeing the chipmunks feeding on the ears. They kept
nibbling at the wheat until it was harvested and then gleaned in the
stubble, keeping up a careful watch for their enemies,—dogs, hawks, and
shrikes. They are as widely distributed over the continent as the
squirrels, various species inhabiting different regions on the
mountains and lowlands, but all the different kinds have the same
general characteristics of light, airy cheerfulness and good nature.

Before the arrival of farmers in the Wisconsin woods the small ground
squirrels, called “gophers,” lived chiefly on the seeds of wild grasses
and weeds, but after the country was cleared and ploughed no feasting
animal fell to more heartily on the farmer’s wheat and corn. Increasing
rapidly in numbers and knowledge, they became very destructive,
especially in the spring when the corn was planted, for they learned to
trace the rows and dig up and eat the three or four seeds in each hill
about as fast as the poor farmers could cover them. And unless great
pains were taken to diminish the numbers of the cunning little robbers,
the fields had to be planted two or three times over, and even then
large gaps in the rows would be found. The loss of the grain the

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