Everyday Adventures
by Samuel Scoville · English · Gutenberg #40919 · 379,959 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Everyday Adventures
Author: Samuel Scoville
Release date: October 2, 2012 [eBook #40919]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERYDAY ADVENTURES ***
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
[Illustration: TWO ADVENTURERS--GRAY FOX AND SCREECH OWL]
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
By SAMUEL SCOVILLE, JR.
_With Illustrations from Photographs_
_The_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON
_Copyright 1920, by_
_Samuel Scoville, Jr._
Of the chapters of this book, three have appeared as separate
articles in _The Atlantic Monthly_, three in _The Yale Review_,
two in _The Youth's Companion_, and the others, in whole or in
part, in _St. Nicholas_, _Good Housekeeping_, and _The Christian
Endeavor World_.
_This book is dedicated to that brave and loyal adventurer, who
has shared so many everyday adventures with me--my wife._
The illustrations for this book have been made from photographs
taken by Mr. Howard T. Middleton, Mr. J. Fletcher Street, Mr.
William L. Baily, and Mr. A. D. McGrew. The author wishes to
express his appreciation here of the skill, knowledge, and
patience which have made such photographs possible. In some of
those taken by Mr. Middleton, tamed, caged, or mounted specimens
have been used as models. In others he has persuaded wild
animals to photograph themselves by various ingenious devices.
CONTENTS
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 1
ZERO BIRDS 18
SNOW STORIES 38
A RUNAWAY DAY 59
THE RAVEN'S NEST 73
HIDDEN TREASURE 86
BIRD'S-NESTING 100
THE TREASURE HUNT 120
ORCHID HUNTING 139
THE MARSH DWELLERS 161
THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 176
DRAGON'S BLOOD 216
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Two Adventurers--Gray Fox and Screech Owl_ Frontispiece
_Br'er Fox and Br'er Possum_ 4
_The Singer of the Night--The Screech Owl_ 16
_A Crow Chorus_ 25
_Just Out of the Nest--Young Red Squirrels_ 28
_The Dear Deer Mice_ 35
_Death-in-the-Dark--The Great Horned Owl_ 44
_Flyer, the Squirrel_ 52
_The Long-tailed Weasel_ 64
"_The Young Ravens shall neither lack nor suffer Hunger_" 82
_The Jewel-Box of the Wood Pewee_ 96
_The Red-Shouldered Hawk_ 104
_Mrs. Killdeer at Her Nest_ 108
_Mr. Flicker at Home_ 126
_The Mourning Dove in Her Nest_ 128
_Pink and White Lady Slippers_ 146
_The King of the Forest--The Banded Rattlesnake_ 154
_The Great Blue Heron at Breakfast_ 160
_The Marsh Hawk's Nest_ 164
_Lotor, the Coon_ 184
_The Seventh Sleeper--The Skunk_ 192
_The Whistlepig_ 196
_The Junco on His Watch Tower_ 219
_No Admittance--per order, Mr. Screech Owl_ 222
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
_For the sick and the sorry and the weary at heart stands a
refuge at their very doors. There needs but sight to the
unseeing eyes and the unstopping of deafened ears, and the way
to the World where the sweet Wild-Folk dwell lies open. Therein
is happiness that time cannot tarnish, the stilling of sorrow
and rest from toil. Let him who hears the call heed it as he
values his soul's welfare._
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
I
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
All that May day long I had been trying to break my record of birds
seen and heard between dawn and dark. Toward the end of the gray
afternoon an accommodating Canadian warbler, wearing a black necklace
across his yellow breast, carried me past my last year's mark, and I
started for home in great contentment. My path wound in and out among
the bare white boles of a beech wood all feathery with new
green-sanguine-colored leaves. Always as I enter that wood I have a
sense of a sudden silence, and I walk softly, that I may catch perhaps
a last word or so of what They are saying.
That day, as I moved without a sound among the trees, suddenly, not
fifty feet away, loping wearily down the opposite slope, came a gaunt
red fox and a cub. With her head down, she looked like the picture of
the wolf in Red Riding-Hood. The little cub was all woolly, like a
lamb. His back was reddish-brown, and he had long stripes of gray
across his breast and around his small belly, and his little sly face
was so comical that I laughed at the very first sight of it. What wind
there was blew from them to me, and my khaki clothes blended with the
coloring around me.
As I watched them, another larger cub trotted down the hill. The first
cub suddenly yapped at him, with a snarling little bark quite
different from that of a dog; but the other paid no attention, but
stalked sullenly into a burrow which for the first time I noticed
among the roots of a white-oak tree. Back of the burrow lay a large
chestnut log which evidently served as a watch-tower for the fox
family. To this the mother fox went, and climbing up on top of it, lay
down, with her head on her paws and her magnificent brush dangling
down beside the log, and went to sleep.
The little cub that was left trotted to the entrance of the burrow and
for a while played by himself, like a puppy or a kitten. First he
snapped at some blades of grass and chewed them up fiercely. Then,
seeing a leaf that had stuck in the wool on his back, he whirled
around and around, snapping at it with his little jaws. Failing to
catch it, he rolled over and over in the dirt until he had brushed it
off. Then he proceeded to stalk the battered carcass of an old black
crow that lay in front of the burrow. Crouching and creeping up on it
inch by inch, he suddenly sprang and caught that unsuspecting corpse
and worried it ferociously, with fierce little snarls. All the time
his wrinkled-up, funny little face was so comical that I nearly
laughed aloud every time he moved. At last he curled up in a round
ball, with his chin on his forepaws like his mother.
There before me, at the end of the quiet spring afternoon, two of the
wildest and shyest of all of our native animals lay asleep. Never
before had I seen a fox in all that country, nor even suspected that
one had a home within a scant mile of mine. As I watched them
sleeping, I felt somehow that the wildwood had taken me into her
confidence and was trusting her children to my care; and I would no
more have harmed them, than I would my own.
As I watched the cub curled up in a woolly ball, I wanted to creep up
and stroke his soft fur. Leaving the hard path, I started to cover as
silently as possible the fifty feet that lay between us. Before I had
gone far, a leaf rustled underfoot, and in a second the cub was on his
feet, wide awake, and staring down at me. With one foot in the air, I
waited and waited until he settled down to sleep again. A minute later
the same thing happened once more, only to be repeated at every step
or so. It took me something like half an hour to reach a point within
twenty feet of where he lay, and I looked straight into his eyes each
time that he stood up.
No wild animal can tell a man from a tree by sight alone if only he
stands still. Suddenly, as the cub sprang up, perhaps for the tenth
time, there about six feet to one side of him stood the old mother
fox. I had not heard a sound or seen a movement, but there she was. I
was so close that I dared not move my head to look at the cub, but
turned only my eyes. When I looked back the mother fox was gone. With
no sudden movement that I could detect, there almost before my eyes
she had melted into the landscape.
I stood like a stone until the cub had lain down once more. This time
evidently he was watching me out of his wrinkled-up little eyes, for
at my very first forward movement he got up, and with no appearance of
haste turned around and disappeared down in the burrow. The
watch-tower log was vacant, although I have no doubt that the mother
fox was watching me from some unseen spot.
When I came to examine the den, I found that there were three burrows
in a line, perhaps fifteen feet in length, with a hard-worn path
leading from one to the other. The watch-log behind them was rubbed
smooth and shiny, with reddish fox-hairs caught in every crevice. Near
the three burrows was a tiny one, which I think was probably dug as an
air-hole; while in front I found the feathers of a flicker, a purple
grackle, and a chicken, besides the remains of the crow aforesaid. How
any fox outside of the fable could beguile a crow is a puzzle to me.
All of these burrows were in plain sight, and I hunted a long time to
find the concealed one which is a part of the home of every
well-regulated fox family. For a while I could find no trace of it.
Finally I saw on the side of a stump one reddish hair that gave me a
clue. Examining the stump carefully, I found that it was hollow and
formed the entrance to the secret exit from the three main burrows.
A week later I went again to look at the home of that fox family; but
it was deserted by them and was now tenanted by a fat woodchuck,
who would never have ventured near the den if the owners had not left
it. Mrs. Fox had evidently feared the worst from my visit, and in the
night had moved her whole family to some better-hidden home. This was
three years ago, and, although I visit the place every winter, no
tell-tale tracks ever show that she has moved back.
[Illustration: BR'ER FOX AND BR'ER POSSUM]
It is not necessary to go to the forest for adventures: they lie in
wait for us at our very doors. My home is in a built-up suburb of a
large city, apparently hopelessly civilized. The other morning I was
out early for some before-breakfast chopping, the best of all
setting-up exercises. As I turned the corner of the garage, I suddenly
came face to face with a black-and-white animal with a pointed nose, a
bushy tail, and an air of justified confidence. I realized that I was
on the brink of a meeting which demanded courage but not rashness. "Be
brave, be brave, but not _too_ brave," should always be the motto of
the man who meets the skunk. From my past experience, however, I knew
that the skunk is a good sportsman. Unless rushed, he always gives
three warnings before he proceeds to extremities.
As I came near, he stopped and shook his head sadly, as if saying to
himself, "I'm afraid there's going to be trouble, but it isn't my
fault." As I still came on, he gave me danger signal number one by
suddenly stamping his forepaws rapidly on the hard ground. Upon my
further approach followed signal number two, to wit, the hoisting
aloft of his aforesaid long, bushy tail. As I came on more and more
slowly, I received the third and last warning--the end of the erect
tail moved quietly back and forth a few times.
It was enough. I stood stony still, for I knew that if, after that, I
moved forward but by the fraction of an inch, I would meet an unerring
barrage which would send a suit of clothes to an untimely grave. For
perhaps half a minute we eyed each other. Like the man in the story, I
made up my mind that one of us would have to run--and that I was that
one. Without any false pride I backed slowly and cautiously out of
range. Thereupon the threatening tail descended, and Mr. Skunk trotted
away through a gap in the fence into the long grass of an unoccupied
lot--probably seeking a breakfast of field-mice.
I felt a definite sense of relief, for it is usually more dangerous to
meet a skunk than a bear. In fact, all the bears that I have ever come
upon were disappearing with great rapidity across the landscape.
But there are times when a meeting with either Mr. or Mrs. Bruin is
apt to be an unhappy one. Several years ago I was camping out in Maine
one March, in a lumberman's shack. A few days before I came, two boys
in a village near by decided to go into the woods hunting, with a
muzzle-loading shot-gun and a long stick between them. One boy was ten
years old, while the other was a patriarch of twelve. On a hillside
under a great bush they noticed a small hole which seemed to have
melted through the snow, and which had a gamy savor that made them
suspect a coon. The boy with the stick poked it in as far as possible
until he felt something soft.
"I think there's something here," he remarked, poking with all his
might.
He was quite right. The next moment the whole bank of frozen snow
suddenly caved out, and there stood a cross and hungry bear, prodded
out of his winter sleep by that stick. The boys were up against a bad
proposition. The snow was too deep for running, and when it came to
climbing--that was Mr. Bear's pet specialty. So they did the only
thing left for them to do: they waited. The little one with the stick
got behind the big one with the gun, which weapon wavered unsteadily.
"Now, don't you miss," he said, "'cause this stick ain't very sharp."
Sometimes an attacking bear will run at a man like a biting dog. More
often it rises on its haunches and depends on the smashing blows of
its mighty arms and steel-shod paws. So it happened in this case. Just
before the bear reached the boys, he lifted his head and started to
rise. The first boy, not six feet away, aimed at the white spot which
most black bears have under their chin, and pulled the trigger. At
that close range the heavy charge of number six shot crashed through
the animal's throat, making a single round hole like a big bullet,
cutting the jugular vein, and piercing the neck vertebræ beyond. The
great beast fell forward with hardly a struggle, so close to the boys
that its blood splashed on their rubber boots. They got ten dollars
for the skin and ten dollars for the bounty, and about one million
dollars' worth of glory.
* * * * *
Hasting homeward for more peaceful adventures, I find, near the road
which leads to the railway station over which scores and hundreds of
my friends and neighbors, including myself, pass every day, a little
patch of marshland. In the fall it is covered with a thick growth of
goldenrod, purple asters, joe-pye-weed, wild sunflowers, white
boneset, tear-thumb, black bindweed, dodder, and a score or more of
other common fall flowers.
One night, at nine o'clock, I noticed that an ice-blue star shone from
almost the very zenith of the heavens. Below her were two faint stars
making a tiny triangle, the left-hand one showing as a beautiful
double under an opera-glass. Below was a row of other dim points of
light in the black sky. It was Vega of the Lyre, the great Harp Star.
Then I knew that the time had come. We humans think, arrogantly, that
we are the only ones for whom the stars shine, and forget that flowers
and birds, and all the wild folk are born each under its own special
star.
The next morning I was up with the sun and visited that bit of
unpromising marshland past which all of us had plodded year in and
year out. In one corner, through the dim grass, I found flaming like
deep-blue coals one of the most beautiful flowers in the world, the
fringed gentian. The stalk and flower-stems looked like green
candelabra, while the unopened blossoms showed sharp edges like
beech-nuts. Above them glowed square fringed flowers of the richest,
deepest blue that nature holds. It is bluer than the bluebird's back,
and fades the violet, the aster, the great lobelia, and all the other
blue flowers that grow. The four petals were fringed, and the flower
seemed like a blue eye looking out of long lashes to the paler sky
above. The calyx inside was of a veined purple or a silver-white,
while four gold-tipped, light purple stamens clustered around a
canary-yellow pistil. That morning I wore on the train one of the two
flowers which I allowed myself to pick. Every friend I met spoke of it
admiringly. Some had heard of it, others had seen it for themselves in
places far distant. None of them knew that every day until frost they
would pass unheedingly within ten feet of nearly thirty of these
flowers.
Sometimes the adventure, unlike good children, is to be heard, not
seen. It was the end of a hot August day. I had been down for a late
dip in the lake, and was coming back through the woods to the old
farmhouse where I have spent so many of my summers. The path wound
through a grove of slim birches, and the lights in the afterglow were
all green and gold and white. From the nearby road a field sparrow,
with a pink beak, sang his silver flute song; and I stopped to listen,
and thought to myself, if he were only as rare as the nightingale, how
people would crowd to hear him.
Suddenly from the depths of the twilight woods a thrush song began. At
first I thought the singer was the wood thrush, which, besides the
veery or Wilson thrush, was the only one that I had supposed could be
found in that Connecticut township. The song, however, had a more
ethereal quality, and I listened in vain for the drop to the harsh
bass notes which always blemish the strain of the wood thrush.
Instead, after three arpeggio notes, the singer's voice went up and
up, with a sweep that no human voice or instrument could compass, and
I suddenly realized that I was in the presence of one of the great
singers of the world. For years I had read of the song of the hermit
thrush, but in all my wanderings I had never chanced to hear it
before.
Lafcadio Hearn writes of a Japanese bird whose song has the power to
change a man's whole life. So it was with me that midsummer evening.
Some thing had been added to the joy of living that could never be
taken from me. Since that twilight I have heard the hermit thrush sing
many times. Through the rain in the dawn-dusk on the top of Mount
Pocono, he sang for me once, while all around a choir of veerys
accompanied him with their strange minor harp-chords. One Sunday
morning, at the edge of a little Canadian river, I heard five singing
together on the farther side. "Ah-h-h, holy, holy, holy," their voices
chimed across the still water. In the woods, in migration, I have
heard their whisper-song, which the hermit sings only when traveling;
and once on a May morning, in my back yard, near Philadelphia, one
sang for me from the low limb of a bush as loudly as if he were in his
mountain home.
No thrush song, however, will ever equal that first one which I heard
among the birch trees. Creeping softly along the path that evening, I
finally saw the little singer on a branch against the darkening sky.
Again and again he sang, until at last I noticed that, when the
highest notes were reached and the song ceased to my ears, the singer
sang on still. Quivering in an ecstasy, with open beak and
half-fluttering wings, the thrush sang a strain that went beyond my
range. Like the love-song of the bat, perhaps the best part of the
song of the hermit thrush can never be heard by any human ear.
* * * * *
It was the morning of June twentieth. I stood at the gate of the
farm-house where three roads met, and the air was full of bird-songs.
For a long time I stood there, and tried to note how many different
songs I could hear. Nearby were the alto joy-notes of the Baltimore
oriole. Up from the meadow where the trout brook flowed, came the
bubbling, gurgling notes of the bobolink. Robins, wood thrushes, song
sparrows, chipping sparrows, blue-birds, vireos, goldfinches, chebecs,
indigo birds, flickers, phoebes, scarlet tanagers, red-winged
blackbirds, catbirds, house wrens--altogether, without moving from my
place, I counted twenty-three different bird-songs and bird-notes.
Nearby I saw a robin's nest, curiously enough built directly on the
ground on the side of the bank of one of the roads, and lined with
white wool, evidently picked up in the neighboring sheep-pasture.
This started me on another of the games of solitaire which I like to
play out-of-doors, and I tried to see how many nests I could discover
from the same vantage-point without moving. This is really a good way
to find birds' nests, and the one who stands still and watches the
birds will often find more than he who beats about. For a long time
the robin's nest was the only one on my list. At last the flashing
orange and black of a Baltimore oriole betrayed its gray swinging
pouch of a nest in a nearby spruce tree--the only time that I have
ever seen an oriole's nest in an evergreen tree. In a lilac bush I saw
the deep nest of the catbird, with its four vivid blue eggs and the
inevitable grapevine-bark lining around its edge.
In a high fork in a great maple tree at the corner of the road, the
chebec, or least flycatcher, showed me her home. Sooner or later, if
you watch any of the flycatchers long enough, they will generally show
you their nests. This one was high up in a fork, and made of string
and wool and down. Over in the adjoining orchard I saw a kingbird
light on her nest in the very top of an apple tree; and I have no
doubt that, if I had climbed up to it, I would have seen three
beautiful cream-white eggs blotched with chocolate-brown.
The last nest of all was my treasure nest of the summer. I was about
to give up the game and start off for a walk, when suddenly, right
ahead of me, hanging on the limb of a sugar-maple, not five feet above
the stone wall, I saw the swinging basket-nest of a vireo, with the
woven white strips of birch-bark on the outside which all vireos use
in that part of the country. It was as if a veil had suddenly dropped
from my eyes, for I had been looking in that direction constantly,
without seeing the nest directly in front of me. Probably, at last, I
must have slightly turned my head and finally caught the light in a
different direction. I supposed that the nest was that of the red-eyed
vireo, the only one of the five vireos which would be likely to build
in such a location. Climbing upon the wall to look at it, I saw that
the mother bird was on the nest. Even when I took hold of the limb,
she did not fly. Then I slowly pulled the limb down, and still the
brave little bird stayed on her nest, although several times she
started to her feet and, ruffling her feathers, made as if to fly. As
the nest came nearer and nearer, I could see that she was quivering
all over with fear, and that her heart was beating so rapidly as to
shake her tiny body. Finally, as she came almost within reach of my
outstretched hand, she gave me one long look and then suddenly cuddled
down over her dearly loved eggs and hid her head inside of the nest.
Reaching my hand out very carefully, I stroked her quivering little
back. She raised her head and gave me another long look, as if to make
sure whether I meant her any harm. Evidently I seemed friendly, for as
I stroked her head she turned and gave my finger a little peck, then
snuggled her head up against it in the most confiding, engaging way.
As she did so, I noticed that a white line ran from the beak to the
eye, and that she had a white eye-ring and a bluish-gray head. As I
looked at her, suddenly from a nearby branch the father bird sang,
and I recognized the song of the solitary or blue-headed vireo, who
belongs in the deep woods and whose rare nest is usually found in
their depths. As the male came nearer, I could see his pure white
throat which, with the white line from eye to bill and the
greenish-yellow markings on either flank, make good field-marks. The
four eggs, which I saw afterwards when the mother bird was off the
nest, were white with reddish markings all over instead of being
blotched at one end as are those of the red-eyed vireo. Every day for
the rest of that week I visited my little friend; and before I left
she grew to know me so well that she would not even ruffle up her
feathers when I pulled the limb down.
* * * * *
Children are of great help in the life adventurous. They have an
inexhaustible fund of admiration for even the feeblest efforts of
their parents in adventuring. Many a dull dog, who once heard nothing
in all the world but the clank of business, has been changed into a
confirmed adventurer by sheer appreciation. Moreover, children possess
an energy and imagination which we grown-ups often lack. Only the
other afternoon I started off for a walk with my four, to find myself
suddenly dining in the New Forest with Robin Hood, Little John, Will
Scarlet, and Allan a' Dale. Owing probably to a certain comfortable
habit of person, I was elected to be Friar Tuck.
The forest itself is a wonderful wood of great trees hidden in a
little valley between two round green hills. In its centre is a
bubbling spring of clear water that never freezes in winter or dries
up in summer. That afternoon we had explored the Haunted House at the
edge of the wood, with its date-stone of 1809, ten-foot fireplace, and
vast stone chimney, and had fearfully approached that door under which
a dark stream of blood flowed a half-century ago, on the day when all
humans stopped dwelling in that house forever.
Little John climbed puffingly up through two sets of floor-beams, to
where a few warped hemlock boards still make a patch of flooring in
the attic. Under a rafter he found a cunningly concealed hidey-hole,
drilled like a flicker's nest into one of the soft mica-schist stones
of the chimney. Inside were a battered home-made top, whittled out of
a solid block, and two flint Indian arrow-heads, ghosts of some
long-dead boyhood which still lingered in the little attic chamber.
In the spring twilight we stole out by a side door, so that we might
not cross that stained threshold. A lilac bush, which in a century of
growth had become a thicket of purple, scented bloom, surrounded the
whole side of the house; while beside a squat buttonwood tree of
monstrous girth was the dome of a Dutch oven. We followed a dim path
fringed with white-thorn and sprays of sweet viburnum blossoms.
From the distance, beyond the farther hill, came the crooning of the
toads on their annual pilgrimage back to the marsh where they were
born. In time we reached a bank all blue and white with enameled
innocents. In front of this the camp-fire was always kindled. The Band
scattered for fire-wood--but not far, for there were too many lurking
shadows among those tree-trunks. At last the fire was laid and
lighted. Five minutes later all the powers of darkness fled for their
lives before the steady roaring column of smokeless flame that surged
up in front of the Band. Followed wassail and feasting galore.
Haunches of venison, tasting much like mutton-chops, broiled hissingly
at the end of green beechwood spits. Flagons of Adam's ale were
quaffed, and the loving-cup--it was of the folding variety--passed
from hand to hand.
All at once the substantial Tuck heaved himself up to his feet beside
the dying fire. There was not a sound in the sleeping forest.
Night-folk, wood-folk, water-folk, all were still. Then from the
pursed lips of the Friar sounded a long, wavering, mournful call.
Again and again it shuddered away across the hills. Suddenly, so far
away that at first it seemed an echo, it was answered. Once and twice
more the call sounded, and each time the answer was nearer and louder.
Something was coming. As the Band listened aghast, around the circle
made by the firelight glided a dark shape with fiery eyes. It realized
their worst fears, and with one accord they threw themselves on the
Friar, who rocked under the impact.
"Send it back, Fathie, send it back!" they shouted in chorus.
[Illustration: THE SINGER OF THE NIGHT--THE SCREECH OWL]
The good Friar unpuckered his lips.
"I am surprised, comrades," he said severely. "You aren't afraid of an
old screech-owl, are you?"
"N-n-n-ooo," quavered little Will Scarlet, "if you're _sure_ it's a
nowl."
"Certain sure," asserted the Friar reassuringly, and gave the call
again.
On muffled, silent wings the dark form drifted around and around the
light, but never across it, and then alighted on a nearby tree and
gave an indescribable little crooning note which the Friar could only
approximate. At last, disgusted with the clumsy attempts to continue a
conversation so well begun, the owl melted away into the darkness and
was gone.
After that, the Band decided that home was the one place for them.
Water was poured on the blaze, and earth heaped over the hissing
embers. Under the sullen flare of Arcturus and the glow of Algieba,
Spica, and all the stars of spring, they started back by dim wood
roads and flower-scented lanes. Will Scarlet, Little John, and Allan
a' Dale frankly shared the hands of the Friar, and in the darkest
places even the redoubtable Robin himself casually took possession of
an unoccupied thumb.
II
ZERO BIRDS
It had been a strenuous night. All day the mercury had been flirting
with the zero mark, and soon after sunset burrowed down into the bulb
below all readings. My bed that night felt like a well-iced tomb.
Probably daylight would have found me frozen to death if it had not
been for a saving idea. Hurrying into the children's room, I selected
two of the warmest and chubbiest. Banking them on either side of me in
my bed, I just survived the night. Of course it was hard on them; but
then, any round, warm child of proper sentiments should welcome an
opportunity to save the life of an aged parent.
In spite of my patent heating-plant I woke up toward morning
shivering, and remembered with a terrible depression that I had
boasted to Mrs. Naturalist and to various and sundry scoffing friends
that I would cut down and cut up and haul in one forty-foot hickory
tree before the glad New Year. For a while I decided that there was
nothing on earth worth exchanging for that warm bed. Finally, however,
my better nature conquered, and the dusk before the dawn found me in
the woods in front of a dead hickory tree some forty feet high and a
couple of rods through--at least that was how its flinty girth
impressed me after I had chopped a while. The air was like iced wine.
Every axe-stroke drove it tingling through my blood.
Before attacking the hickory, however, I began to cut down the brush
surrounding the doomed tree, so as to gain clear space for the
axe-swing. Almost immediately a vindictive spice-bush in falling
knocked off my glasses, and they fell into the snow somewhere ahead of
me. Without them I am in the same condition as a mole or a shrew, my
sense of sight being only rudimentary. Down I plumped on my knees in
the snow and fumbled in the half light with numbed fingers through the
cold whiteness ahead.
As I groped and grumbled in this lowly position, suddenly I heard the
prelude to one of the most beautiful of winter dawn-songs. It was a
liquid loud note full of rolling _r's_. Perhaps it can be best
represented in print somewhat as follows: "Chip'r'r'r'r." I forgot my
lost glasses and my cold hands and my wet knees waiting for the song
that I knew was coming. Another preliminary, rolling note or so, and
there sounded from a low stump a wild, ringing song that could be
heard for half a mile. "Wheedle-wheedle-wheedle," it began full of
liquid bell-like overtones. Then the singer added another syllable to
his strain and sang, "Whee-udel, whee-udel, whee-udel." Three times,
with a short rest between, he sang the full double strain through,
although it was so dark that only the ghostly, black tree-trunks could
be seen against the white snow. I needed no sight of him, however, to
recognize the singer. The song took me back to a bitter winter day in
Philadelphia some seventeen years ago, when I was laboriously
learning the birds. I was walking through a bit of waste-land
encircled by trolley-tracks when I heard this same song. It was like
nothing which I had ever heard in New England, where I had learned
what little I knew about birds, and I searched everywhere for the
singer, expecting to see a bird about the size of a robin.
Finally, in the underbrush just ahead of me, I saw an unmistakable
wren singing so ecstatically that he shook and trembled all over with
the outpouring of his song. It was my first sight and hearing of this
southern bird, the Carolina wren, the largest of our five wrens, whose
field-mark is a long white line over the eye. He is reddish-brown,
while the house wren, which is half an inch shorter, is
cinnamon-brown. The long-billed marsh wren also has a white line over
the eye and is about the same size, but is never found away from the
tall grass bordering on water, and has no such song as the Carolina.
The winter wren and the short-billed marsh wren could neither of them
be mistaken for the Carolina, as both are about an inch and a half
shorter and lack the white line. The house wren and the long-billed
marsh wren bubble when they sing, the Carolina wren and the winter
wren ring, and the short-billed marsh wren, the rarest of all, clicks.
Of them all only the Carolina wren sings in the winter.
That day the wren-song brought me good luck. It was no more than
finished when I heard someone passing along a nearby wood-road, who
turned out to be an early-rising workman from whom I borrowed some
matches with which I finally discovered my missing eyes half buried in
the snow. I attacked the pignut hickory with great energy to make up
for lost time. Little by little the axe bit through the tough wood,
until the kerf was well past the heart of the tree. As I chopped I
could hear the quick strokes of a far better wood-cutter than I shall
ever be. Suddenly he gave a loud, rattling call, and I recognized the
hairy woodpecker. He is much larger than the downy, being nearly the
size of a robin, while his call is wilder and louder and lacks the
downward run of the downy's note. We chopped on together, he at his
tree and I at mine. Suddenly from my tree sounded a warning crack, and
the trunk wavered for a moment. I stepped well off to one side, for it
is dangerous to stand behind a falling tree. If it strikes anything as
it falls the trunk may shoot backward. A venerable ancestor of mine,
so the story runs, tried to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by
chopping down a tree, and standing behind it, was killed by the
back-lash of the falling trunk.
The tree swayed forward toward the crimson rim of the rising sun. One
more stroke at its heart, and there was a loud series of cracks,
followed by a roar like thunder as it crashed down. Almost
immediately, as if awakened by the noise, I began to hear bird-notes.
From over to my left sounded a series of sharp, irritating
alarm-notes, and in the waxing light I caught a glimpse of a crested
blood-red bird at the edge of a green-brier thicket. In that same
place I had found his nest the spring before, made of twigs and strips
of bark and lined with grass and roots and holding three speckled
eggs. It was the cardinal grosbeak, another bird unknown to me in New
England. No matter how often I meet this crimson-crested grosbeak, he
will never become a common bird to me. Each time I see him I feel
again something of the thrill which came over me when I first met this
singer from the southland in a thicket on the edge of Philadelphia.
With the Carolina wren and the tufted titmouse, the cardinal grosbeak
completes a trio of birds that can never be commonplace to one born
north of Central Park, New York, which is about the limit of their
northern range.
To-day, as I watched my flaming cardinal, he suddenly dived stiffly
into the heart of the thicket. A moment later from its midst sounded a
clear, loud whistle, "Whit, whit, whit." I answered him, for this is
one of the few bird-calls I can imitate. Before long his dove-colored
mate also appeared. Her wings and tail were of a duller red, while the
upper-parts of her sleek body were of a brownish-ash tint. The throat
and a patch by the base of the bill were black in both. As I watched,
the singer in the thicket added to his whistle the word "Teu, teu,
teu, teu" and then finally ran them together--"Whee-teu, whee-teu,
whee-teu," so rapidly whistled that it sounded almost like a single
note.
On the way back to breakfast, as the sun came up and warmed a slope of
the woods, a flock of slate-colored juncos burst out altogether in a
chorus of soft little trills, with now and then sharp alarm-notes
like the clicking of pebbles together, interspersed with tiny
half-whispered notes best expressed by the same letters as those used
in writing the grosbeak music--"Teu, teu, teu, teu." Suddenly, from a
farther corner of the sun-warmed slope, I heard a few tinkling notes
followed by a tantalizing snatch of rich, sweet song shot through with
canary-like trills and runs. I hurried over the snow and caught a
glimpse of a little flock of birds with crowns of reddish-brown, and
each wearing small black spots in the exact centre of their
drab-colored waistcoats. They were tree-sparrows down from the far
North, and I was fortunate to have heard the peculiarly gentle cadence
of one of their rare winter songs.
Farther on, the caw of a passing crow drifted down from the cold sky,
and before I left the woods I heard the pip of a downy woodpecker and
the grunt of the white-breasted nuthatch, that tree-climber with the
white cheeks which, unlike woodpeckers, can go both up and down trees
head-foremost. In the early spring and sometimes on warm winter days,
one may hear his spring song, which is "Quee-quee-quee." It is not
much of a song, but Mr. Nuthatch is very proud of it and usually
pauses admiringly between each two strains. In my early bird-days I
used to mistake this spring song for the note of an early flicker, and
would scandalize better-educated ornithologists by reporting flickers
several weeks before their time. The last bird I heard before I left
the woods remarked solemnly, "Too-wheedle, too-wheedle, too-wheedle,
too-wheedle," like a creaking wheelbarrow, and then suddenly broke out
into the flat, harsh "Djay, djay, djay" which has given the
silver-and-blue jay its name.
By the time I had reached home, I decided that it was too cold a day
to practise law safely. The state legislature in their wisdom had
already made the day a half-holiday. Not to be outdone in generosity,
I decided to donate my half and make the holiday a whole one. Anent
this matter of holidays, the trouble with most of us is that we are
obsessed with the importance of our daily work. There are many
pleasant byways which we plan to come back and explore when we have
reached the end of the straight, steep, and intensely narrow road that
leads to achievement. The trouble is that there is no returning. Men
die rich, famous, or successful, who have never taken the time to
companion their children or to find their way into the world of the
wild-folk which lies at their very doors. It was not always so. Read
in Evelyn's Diary how for sixty years a great man played a great part
under three kings and the grim Protector, and yet never lost an
opportunity to refresh his life with bird-songs, hilltops,
flower-fields, and sky-air. We reach our goal to-day in a few
desperate years, stripped to the buff like a Marathon runner. One can
arrive later and not miss a thousand little happinesses along the way.
With similar arguments I convinced myself on that day, that it was my
duty as an amateur naturalist to discover how many birds I could meet
between dawn and dark with the thermometer below zero. Certain
gentlemen-adventurers of my acquaintance aided and abetted me in this
plan. They all held high office in a military organization known for
short as the Band. There was First Lieutenant Trottie, Second
Lieutenant Honey, Sergeant Henny-Penny, and Corporal Alice-Palace,
while I had been honored with a captain's commission in this regiment.
To be sure, there was something of a dearth of privates; but with such
a gallant array of officers their absence was not felt. At any hour of
day or night, to the last man, every member of the Band was ready for
the most desperate adventures by field and flood.
[Illustration: A CROW CHORUS]
As we left the house the thermometer stood at four below, while the
sky was of a frozen blue, without a cloud, and had a hard glitter as
if streaked with frost. In a low tree by the roadside, we heard the
metallic note of a downy woodpecker scurrying up the trunk and backing
stiffly down. Farther on sounded a loud cawing, and we saw four
ruffianly crows assaulting a respectable female broad-winged hawk. One
after the other they would flap over her as closely as possible,
aiming vicious pecks as they passed. The broad-winged beat the air
frantically with her short, wide, fringed wings, and seemed to make no
effort to defend herself against her black, jeering pursuers. Once she
alighted on an exposed limb. Instantly the crows settled near her and
used language which no respectable female hawk could listen to for a
moment. She spread her wings and soared away, and as she passed out
of sight they were still cawing on her trail.
If the hawk had been one of the swift Accipiters, such as the gray
goshawk or the Cooper's hawk, or any of the falcons, no crow would
have ventured to take any liberties. One of my friends, who collects
bird's eggs instead of bird-notes, was once attempting feloniously to
break and enter the home of a duck-hawk which was highly regarded in
the community--about two hundred feet highly in fact. As my friend was
swinging back and forth on a rope in front of the perpendicular cliff,
said duck-hawk dashed at him at the rate of some ninety miles per
hour. Being scared off by a blank cartridge, the enraged falcon
towered. A passing crow flapping through the air made a peck at the
hawk as it shot past. That was one of the last and most unfortunate
acts in that crow's whole life. The duck-hawk was fairly aching with
the desire to attack someone or something which was not protected by
thunder and lightning. With one flash of its wings it shot under that
misguided crow, and, turning on its back in mid-air, slashed it with
six talons like sharpened steel. The crow dropped, a dead mass of
black and blood, to the brow of the cliff below.
Finally we reached the tall, stone chimney--all that is left of some
long-forgotten house, which marks the entrance to old Darby Road,
which was opened in 1701. At that point Wild-Folk Land begins. The
hurrying feet of more than two centuries have sunk the road some ten
feet below its banks, and the wild-folk use its hidden bed like one
of their own trails. Foxes pad along its rain-washed course, and
rabbits and squirrels hop and scurry across its narrow width, while in
spring and summer wild ginger, ebony spleenwort, the blue-and-white
porcelain petals of the hepatica, and a host of other flowers bloom on
its banks. The birds too nest there, from the belted gray-blue and
white kingfisher, which has bored a deep hole into the clay under an
overhanging wild-cherry tree, down to the field sparrow, with its pink
beak and flute-song, which watches four speckled eggs close-hidden in
a tiny cup of woven grass.
To-day we followed the windings of the road, until we came to the vast
black oak tree which marks the place where Darby Road, after running
for nearly ten miles, stops to rest. Beyond stretched the unbroken
expanse of Blacksnake Swamp, bounded by the windings of Darby Creek.
The Band seated themselves on one of their favorite resting-places, a
great log which lay under the trees. Above us a white-breasted
nuthatch, with its white cheeks and black head, was rat-tat-tatting up
and around a half-dead limb, picking out every insect egg in sight
from the bark. As the bird came near the broken top of the bough, out
of a hole popped a very angry red squirrel exactly like a
jack-in-the-box. The red squirrel is the fastest of all the tree-folk
among the animals, but a nuthatch on a limb is not afraid of anything
that flies or crawls or climbs. He can run up and down around a
branch, forward and backward, unlike the woodpeckers, which must
always back down, or the brown creepers, which can go up a tree in
long spirals but have to fly down.
A red streak flashed down the limb on which the nuthatch was working.
That was the squirrel. A fraction of a second ahead of the squirrel
there was a wink of gray and white. That was the nuthatch. Before the
squirrel could even recover his balance, there was a cheerful
rat-tat-tat just behind him on the other side of the limb. As the
squirrel turned, the rapping sounded on the other side of the branch.
His bushy tail quivered, and using some strong squirrel-language, he
dived back into his hole. He was hardly out of sight when the nuthatch
was tapping again at his door. Once more the squirrel rushed out
chattering and sputtering. Once more the nuthatch was not there. Then
he tried chasing the bird around the limb, but there was nothing in
that. The nuthatch could turn in half the time and space, and moreover
did not have to be afraid of falling, for a drop of fifty feet to
frozen ground is no joke even for a red squirrel. The aggravating
thing about the nuthatch was that, no matter how hard the squirrel
chased him, he never stopped for a second, tapping away at the branch,
feeding even as he ran. Finally Mr. Squirrel went back to his house
and stayed there, while the nuthatch tapped in triumph all around his
hole, although muffled chatterings from within expressed the
squirrel's unvarnished opinion of that nuthatch.
When the nuthatch finally flew to another tree, we got up and followed
a path that twisted through a barren field full of grassy tussocks
and clumps of mockernut hickories and black-walnut trees, until it at
last lost itself in the depths of Blacksnake Swamp. This swamp had
taken its name from the day that we caught a black snake skimming
along over the tops of the bushes like a bird. In summer it is full of
impassable quagmires, and to-day we hoped to explore the hidden places
which we had never yet seen. We had scarcely passed through the outer
fringe of tall grasses and cat-tails, when we heard everywhere through
the cold air little tinkling notes, and caught glimpses of dark
sparrow-like birds with forked tails, striped breasts, and streaked
rich brown backs, each one showing a fine zigzag whitish line at the
bend of the wing. Another field-mark was a light patch over each eye,
and we identified the first and largest flock of pine siskin of the
year. These siskin are strange birds. One never knows when and where
they will appear. The last flock that I had seen was in my back-yard
in May. Usually too they are in trees, and this was the first time
that I had ever met with them on the ground. The birds gave little
canary-like notes, like goldfinches, which are often found with them,
but can always be recognized by their unstreaked breasts and double
wing-bars.
[Illustration: JUST OUT OF THE NEST--YOUNG RED SQUIRRELS]
For a long time we studied the flock through our field-glasses, until
every last one of the Band had learned this new bird. As we watched
them, a white-throated sparrow lisped from a nearby bush, and a little
later we met a flock of tree sparrows, a bird which is never by any
chance found in a tree. In the distance a woodpecker flew through the
air in a labored up-and-down flight, and, as he disappeared, he gave
the wild cry of the hairy woodpecker, a bird nearly twice the size of
his smaller brother, the downy. Close by the side of the creek, we
heard a tiny note like "pheep, pheep, pheep," and, even as we looked
for the bird, it flew past and lit on a tree on the other side of the
path, not two feet away. We all stood stony still, and in a minute a
brown creeper circled the tree, climbing it in tiny hops in a wide
spiral. He was so close that we could see his stiff, spiny tail with a
little row of spots at its base, and the brown and gray speckles on
his back, and his long curiously curved bill.
We pressed on into the very heart of the great, treacherous marsh,
to-day frozen hard and safe, and explored all of its secret places. In
a tangle of wild-grape vine, we found the round nest, rimmed with
grape-vine bark, of the cardinal grosbeak; while over in a thicket of
elderberry bushes, all rusty-gold with the clinging stems of that
parasite, the dodder, showed the close sheath of the fine branches of
a swamp maple. In a fork at the end of one of the branches, all
silver-gray, was the empty nest of a goldfinch, the last of all the
birds to nest. It was made of twisted strands of the silk of the
milkweed pods hackled by the bird's beak. In the snow, we came across
a strange track almost like the trail of a snake. It was a wide
trough, with little close-set, zigzag paw-marks running all through
it. The Captain told the Band that this was the trail of the fierce
blarina shrew, one of the killers. Without eyes or ears, this strange
little blind death eats its weight in flesh every twenty-four hours,
and slays under ground, above ground, and even under the water. The
Band regarded the strange tracks with enormous interest.
"How big do they grow?" anxiously inquired Henny-Penny, the littlest
but one of the Band.
"Just a little longer than my middle finger," the Captain reassured
him.
Suddenly, in the very midst of this zoölogical bric-a-brac, a great
thought came to each and every of the Band simultaneously.
"Lunch-time!" they shouted with one accord.
Then occurred the tragedy of the trip. In a pocket of his
shooting-jacket the Captain had a package of sandwiches containing
just one apiece, no more, no less. The rest of the lunch, thick
scones, raisins, chocolate, saveloy sausage, bacon, and other
necessaries and luxuries, had been wrapped up in another package and
intrusted to Honey as head of the commissary department for the
day--and Honey had left the package on the hall table! It was a grief
almost too great to be borne. The Band regarded their guilty comrade
reproachfully. Two large tears ran down Honey's cheeks. Alice-Palace,
the littlest of them all, gave way to unrestrained emotions which bade
fair to frighten away the most blood-thirsty of blarinas within the
radius of a mile.
Then it was that the Captain rose to the emergency. "Comrades," said
he, placing one hand over Alice-Palace's widely-opened mouth, "all is
not lost. Old woodsmen like ourselves can find food anywhere. Follow
me. Hist!"
Like Hawk-Eye and Chingachgook and other well-known scouts, the
Captain was apt to employ that mysterious word when beginning a
desperate adventure. The Band followed him with entire confidence,
albeit with certain snifflings on the part of Corporal Alice-Palace.
They crossed a tiny brook, and found themselves in a little grove of
swamp maples which had grown up around the fallen trunk of the parent
tree. The Captain scanned the trees carefully. Everywhere were trails
in the snow which he told them were the tracks of gray squirrels.
Suddenly he reached up and picked out from between a little twig
and the smooth trunk of a swamp-maple sapling, a big, dry,
beautifully-seasoned black walnut. That started the Band to looking,
and they found that the little trees were filled with walnuts, each
one wedged in between twigs or branches so that it would not blow
down. Up and down and about the low trees climbed and scrambled the
Band. Some of the nuts were hidden and some were in plain sight, but
altogether there was nearly half a peck of them, each one containing a
dry, crisp, golden kernel which tasted as rich and delicious as it
looked. They had come upon the winter storehouse of a gray-squirrel
family.
Piling the nuts in the lee of a big oak tree where the camp-fire was
to be made, they followed the Captain to a broken-down rail fence,
where grew a thicket of tiny trees with smooth trunks, whose gray
twigs were laden down with bunches of what looked like tiny purple
plums. Each one had a layer of pulp over a flat stone, and this pulp,
what there was of it, had a curious attractive spicy sugary taste. The
Captain told the Band that these were nanny-plums, sometimes known as
sweet viburnum. Further on, they found clusters of little purple
fox-grapes, fiercely sour in the fall, but now sweetened enough, under
the bite of the frost, to be swallowed.
Still the Captain was not ready to stop. Up the hillside he led them,
by a winding path through tangled thickets, until in a level place he
brought them to a group of curious trees. The bark of these was deeply
grooved and in places nearly three inches thick, while the branches
were covered with scores and scores of golden-red globes. Some were
wrinkled and frost-bitten until they had turned brown, but others
still hung plump and bright in the winter air. It was a grove of
persimmon trees. Before he could be stopped, Henny-Penny had picked
one of the best-looking of the lot and took a deep bite out of the
soft pulp. Immediately thereafter he spat out his first taste of
persimmon with great emphasis, his mouth so puckered that it was with
difficulty that he could express his unfavorable opinion of the new
fruit.
"Handsome is as handsome does," warned the Captain. "Try some of the
frost-bitten ones."
The Band accordingly did so, and found that the worst-looking and most
wrinkled specimens were sweet as honey and without a trace of pucker.
On their way back, they passed through a thicket of tangled bushes,
whose branches were all matted together in bunches which looked like
birds' nests. The twigs were laden down with round, purple berries
about the size of a wild cherry, and the Captain told the Band that
these were hackberries, otherwise known as sugar-berries. They picked
handfuls of them, and found that the berry had a sweet spicy pulp over
a fragile stone that could be crushed like the stones of a raisin,
while the fruit when eaten resembled a raisin in taste.
Hurrying back to the camp-fire tree, the Captain dug a round circle a
couple of feet in diameter in the snow, and spread down a layer of dry
leaves. Over these he built a little tepee of tiny, dry, black-oak
twigs. Underneath this he placed a fragment of birch-bark which he had
peeled off one of the aspen birches which grew on the fringe of the
swamp. This burned like paper, and in a minute the little ball of dry
twigs was crackling away with a steady flame. Over this he piled dry
sassafras and hickory boughs, and in a few moments the Band was seated
around a column of flame which roared up fully four feet high. With
their backs against the great oak tree, they cracked and cracked and
cracked black walnuts and crunched sugar-berries and nibbled
nanny-plums and tasted frost-grapes--saving the single sandwich until
next to the last; while for desert they had handfuls and handfuls of
honey-sweet, wrinkled persimmons.
[Illustration: THE DEAR DEER MICE]
Near the fire Lieutenant Trottie found an old box-cover bedded in the
snow. As he lifted it up, there was a rush and a scurry, and from a
round, warm nest underneath the cover, made of thistle-down, fur,
feathers, and tiny bits of woodfibre all matted together into a sort
of felt, dashed six reddish-brown, pink-pawed mice. They burrowed in
the snow, crept under the leaves, and in a minute were out of sight,
all except one, which tried to climb the box-cover and which Trottie
caught before he could scurry over the top of it. His fur was like
plush, with the hair a warm reddish-brown at the ends and gray at the
roots. Underneath he was snowy-white, although there, too, the fur
showed mouse-gray under the surface. He had little brown claws and six
tiny pink disks on each paw, which enabled him to run up and down
perpendicular surfaces. His eyes were big and brown and lustrous, and
he had flappy, pinky-gray, velvet ears, each one of which was half the
size of his funny little face and thin as gossamer. His paws were pink
and his long tail was covered with the finest of hairs. When he found
he was fairly caught, he snuggled down into Trottie's hand, making a
queer little whimpering noise, while his nose wrinkled and quivered.
When Trottie brought him to the fire, Henny-Penny offered him a
half-kernel of one of his walnuts. Instantly the little nose stopped
quivering, and Mousy sat up like a squirrel on the back of Trottie's
hand and nibbled away until the piece was all gone. Each one of the
Band took turns in feeding him until he could eat no more. Then
Trottie put him back in the deserted nest and replaced the box-cover.
The last adventure of all was on the way home. We were walking along
an abandoned railroad track, when suddenly a flock of light grayish
birds flew up all together out of the dry grass and lighted in a small
elm tree nearby. As we watched them, they turned and all flew down
together. Instantly it was as if a mass of peach-blossoms had been
spilled on the withered grass and white snow. Fully a third of the
flock had crimson crowns and rose-colored breasts, while at the base
of the streaked gray-and-brown backs showed a tinge of pink. It was
our first flock of the lesser redpolls all the way down from the
Arctic Circle. They were restless but not shy, and sometimes we were
able to get within six feet of them. They would continually fly back
and forth from the tree to the ground, keeping up a soft chattering
interspersed with little tinkling notes, somewhat resembling the
goldfinch or the siskin which we had left behind us in the swamp.
Always, when they flew, they gave a little piping call, and their
field-mark was a black patch under the throat which could be seen even
farther than their red polls or their rosy breasts. Their beaks were
light and very pointed, and they had forked tails like the siskin.
It was nearly twilight when we left them and at last started home. As
we followed a fox-trail in and out through the thickets of Fern
Valley, we caught a glimpse of a large brown bird on the ground. At
first I thought that it was some belated fox sparrow; but when it
hopped to a low twig and then raised its tail stiffly as I watched, I
recognized the hermit thrush, which always betrays itself by this
curious mannerism. The last one I had seen was singing like Israfel,
in the twilight of a Canadian forest. To-day the little singer was
silent, and I wondered what had kept him back from the southland, and
hoped that he would be able to win through the bitter days still ahead
of him. I have no doubt that he did, for the hermit thrush is a
brave-hearted, hardy, self-reliant bird.
The sun had gone down before we finally reached the road. Above the
after-glow showed a patch of apple-green sky against which was etched
the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It almost seemed
as if a puff of wind would blow her like a cobweb out of the sky.
Above gleamed Venus, the evening star, all silver-gold; while over
toward the other side of the sky, great golden Jupiter echoed back her
rays. Below the green, the sky was a mass of dusky gold which deepened
into amber and then slowly faded. As we walked home through the
twilight, we heard the last, sweetest, and saddest singer of that
winter day. Through the air shuddered a soft tremolo call, like the
whistling of swift, unseen wings or the wail of a little lost child.
It was the eerie call of the little screech-owl--and never was a bird
worse named. Answering, I brought him so close to us that we could see
his ear-tufts showing in the half-light. All the way home he followed
us, calling and calling for some one who will never come.
III
SNOW STORIES
The sun went down in a spindrift of pale gold and gray, which faded
into a bank of lead-colored cloud. The next morning the woods and
fields were dumb with snow. No blue jays squalled, nor white-skirted
juncos clicked; neither were there any nuthatches running gruntingly
up and down the tree-trunks. There was not even the caw of a passing
crow from the cold sky. As I followed an unbroken wood-road, it seemed
as if all the wild-folk were gone.
The snow told another story. On its smooth surface were records of the
lives that had throbbed and passed and ebbed beneath the silent trees.
Just ahead of me the road crossed a circle where, a half-century ago,
the charcoal-burners had set the round stamp of one of their pits. On
the level snow there was a curious trail of zigzag tracks. They were
deep and close-set, and made by some animal that walked flat-footed. I
recognized the trail of the unhasting skunk. Other animals may jump
and run and skurry through life, but the motto of the skunk is, "Don't
hurry, others will." The tracks of the fore-paw, when examined
closely, showed long claw-marks which were absent from the print of
the hind feet. Occasionally the trail changed into a series of groups
of four tracks arranged in a diagonal straight line, which marked
where the skunk had broken into the clumsy gallop which is its fastest
gait. Most of the time this particular skunk had walked in a slow and
dignified manner. By the edge of the woods he had stopped and dug
deeply into a rotten log, evidently looking for winter-bound crickets
and grubs.
At this point another character was added to the plot of this snow
story. Approaching at right angles to the trail of the skunk were the
tracks of a red fox. I knew he was red, because that is the only kind
of fox found in that part of New England. I knew them to be the tracks
of a fox, because they ran straight instead of spraddling like a dog,
and never showed any mark of a dragging foot. The trail told what had
happened. The first tracks were the far-apart ones of a hunting fox.
When he reached the skunk's trail, the foot-prints became close
together and ran parallel to the trail and some distance away from it.
The fox was evidently following the tracks in a thoughtful mood. He
was a young fox, or he would not have followed them at all. At the
edge of the clearing he had sighted the skunk and stopped, for the
prints were melted deep into the snow. Sometimes an old and hungry fox
will kill a skunk. In order to do this safely, the spine of the skunk
must be broken instantly by a single pounce, thus paralyzing the
muscles on which the skunk depends for his defense; for the skunk
invented the gas-attack a million years before the Boche. No living
animal can stay within range of the choking fumes of the liquid musk
which the skunk can throw for a distance of several feet. The snow
told me what happened next. It was a sad story. The fox had sprung and
landed beside the skunk, intending to snap it up like a rabbit. The
skunk snapped first. Around the log was a tangle of fox-tracks, with
flurries and ridges and holes in the snow where the fox had rolled and
burrowed. Out of the farther side a series of tremendous bounds showed
where a wiser and a smellier fox had departed from that skunk with an
initial velocity of close to one mile per minute. Finally, out of the
confused circle came the neat, methodical trail of the unruffled skunk
as he moved sedately away. Probably to the end of his life the device
of a black-and-white tail rampant will always be associated in that
fox's mind with the useful maxim, "Mind your own business."
Beyond the instructive fable of the fox and the skunk showed lace-work
patterns and traceries in the snow where scores and hundreds of the
mice-folk had come up from their tunnels beneath the whiteness, and
had frolicked and feasted the long night through. Some of these tracks
were in little clumps of fours. Each group had a five-fingered pair of
large prints in front and a pair of four-fingered tracks just behind.
Down the middle ran a tail-mark. They were the tracks of the
white-footed or deer-mice. These were the same little robbers which
swarmed into my winter camp and gnawed everything in sight. Even a
flitch of bacon hung on a cord was riddled with their tiny
teeth-marks. Only things hung on wires were safe, for their clinging
little feet cannot find a footing on the naked iron. One night they
gnawed a ring of round holes through the crown of a cherished felt hat
belonging to a friend of mine. The language he used when he looked at
that hat the next morning was unfit for the ears of any young
deer-mouse. Another time the deer-mice carried off about a peck of
expensive stuffing from a white horse-hair mattress, which I had
imported for the personal repose of my aged frame. Although I
ransacked that cabin from turret to foundation-stone I could never
find a trace of that horse-hair. In spite of their evil ways one
cannot help liking the little rascals. They have such bright, black
eyes, and wear such snowy, silky waistcoats and stockings.
The other evening I sat reading alone in my cabin in the heart of the
pine-barrens before a roaring fire. Suddenly I felt something tickle
my knee. When I moved there was a sudden jump and a deer-mouse sprang
out from my trouser-leg to the floor. Then I put a piece of bread on
the edge of the wood-box. Although I saw the bread disappear, I could
catch no glimpse of what took it. Finally I put a piece on my shoe,
and after running back and forth from the wood-box several times, Mr.
Mouse at last became brave enough to take it. When he found that I did
not move, he sat up on my shoe like a little squirrel and nibbled away
at his crumb, watching me all the time out of a corner of his black
eyes. I forgave him my friend's hat, and was almost ready to overlook
the horse-hair episode. When I moved, like a flash he dashed up the
wall by the fireplace, and hid behind a row of books that stood on
the red-oak plank which I had put in as a mantel-piece. Unfortunately
he had forgotten to hide his long silky tail. It hung down through the
crack between the plank and the rough stone of the chimney. I tiptoed
over and gave it a pinch to remind him to meddle no more with other
people's mattresses.
Returning to the wood-road--on that morning, among the trails of the
deer-mice were the more numerous tracks of the meadow- or field-mouse.
They show no tail-mark, and the smaller footprints were not side by
side as with the deer-mice, but almost always one behind the other.
These smaller paw-marks among all jumping-animals, such as rabbits,
squirrels, and mice, are always the marks of the fore-paws. The larger
far-apart tracks mark where the hind feet of the jumper come down in
front and outside of the fore-paws as he jumps.
On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow there showed another
faint trail, which looked like a string of tiny exclamation marks with
a tail-mark between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, the
smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This tiny fierce fragment of
flesh and blood is only about the length of a man's little finger. So
swift are the functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for six
hours, the shrew starves and dies. Many of them are found starved to
death on the melting snow, having crept up from their underground
burrows through the shafts made by grass and weed-stems. Wandering
over the white waste, they lose their way and, failing to find food,
starve before the sun is half way down the sky. As the shrew does not
hibernate, his whole life is a swift hunt for food; for every day this
apparently eyeless, earless animal must eat its own weight in flesh.
The weasels kill from blood-lust, but the shrews kill for their very
life's sake. It is a fearsome sight to see a shrew attack a mouse. The
mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the shrew secures a grip with
its long, crooked, crocodile jaws filled with fierce teeth, and
devours its way like fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying
out and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until the mouse falls
over dead. This tiny beastling, the masked shrew, must be weighed by
troy weight, and tips a jeweler's scale at less than forty-five
grains.
To-day the snow said the shrew had been an unbidden and unwelcome
guest at the mice-dinner. At first the mice-trails were massed
together in a maze of tracks. Where the trail of the shrew touched the
circle, there shot out separate lines of mice-tracks, like the spokes
of a wheel, with the paw-marks far apart, showing that the guests had
all sprung up from the laden table of the snow and dashed off in
different directions. The shrew-track circled faintly here and there,
ran for some distance in a long straight trail, and--stopped. The
Sword of Damocles, which hangs forever over the head of all the little
wild-folk, had fallen. The shrew was gone. A tiny fleck of blood and a
single track like a great X on the snow told the tale of his passing.
All his fierceness and courage availed nothing when the great talons
of the flying death clamped through his soft fur. X is the signature
of the owl-folk just as K is of the hawk-kind. The size of the mark in
this case showed that the killer was one of the larger owls. Later in
the winter it might have been the grim white Arctic owl, which
sometimes comes down from the frozen North in very cold weather. So
early in the season, however, it would be either the barred or the
great horned owl.
I had hunted and camped and fished and tramped all through this
hill-country, and although I had often heard at night the "Whoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo" of the great horned owl, which keeps always the
same pitch, I had never heard the call of the barred owl, which ends
in a falling cadence with a peculiar deep, hollow note. So I decided
that the maker of the track was that fierce king of the deep woods,
whose head, with its ear-tufts or horns, may be seen peering from his
nest of sticks on the mountainside in a high tree-top as early as
February. On wings so muffled by soft downy feathers as to be
absolutely noiseless, he had swooped down in the darkness, and the
tiny bubble of the shrew's life had broken into the void.
Beyond this point the road wound upward toward the slope of the
Cobble, a steep, sharp-pointed little hill which suddenly thrust
itself up from a circle of broad meadows and flat woodlands. Time was
when all the Cobble was owned and ploughed clear to its peak by
Great-great-uncle Samuel, who had a hasty disposition and a tremendous
voice, and ploughed with two yoke of oxen which required a
considerable amount of conversation. Tradition has it that, when
discoursing to them, he could be heard in four different towns. That
was more than one hundred years ago, and the Cobble has been untouched
by plough or harrow since, and to-day is wooded to the very top.
[Illustration: DEATH-IN-THE-DARK--THE GREAT HORNED OWL]
Just ahead of me on the wood-road showed a deep track which only in
recent years has been seen in Connecticut. In my boyhood a deer-track
was as unknown as that of a wolf, and the wolves have been gone for at
least a century. Within the last ten years the deer have come back.
Last summer I met two on the roads with the cows, and later saw seven
make an unappreciated visit to my neighbor's garden, where they seemed
to approve highly of her lettuce. Straight up the hillside ran the
line of deeply stamped little hoof-marks. The trail looks like a
sheep's; but the front of each track ends in two beautifully curved
sharp points, while the track of a sheep is straighter and blunter.
Nor could any sheep negotiate that magnificent bound over the
five-foot rail fence. From take-off to where the four small hoofs
landed together on the other side was a good twenty feet.
On the other side of the fence the snow had drifted over a patch of
sweet fern by the edge of the wood-road in a low hummock. As I plodded
along, I happened to strike this with my foot. There was a tremendous
whirring noise, the snow exploded all over me, and out burst a
magnificent cock partridge, as we call the ruffed grouse in New
England, and whizzed away among the laurels like a lyddite shell.
When the snowstorm began, he had selected a cozy spot in the lee of
the sweet-fern patch, and had let himself be snowed over. The warmth
of his body had made a round, warm room, and with plenty of rich
fern-seeds within easy reach, he was prepared to stay in winter
quarters a week, if necessary.
The stories of the snow, although often difficult to read, are always
interesting. After the winter fairly sets in, we read nothing about
the Seven Sleepers who have put themselves in cold storage until
spring. The bear, the raccoon, the woodchuck, the skunk, the chipmunk,
and the jumping-mouse are all fast asleep underground. The last
sleeper never touches the ground when awake, and sleeps swinging
up-side-down by the long, recurved nails on his hind feet. He is the
bat, who lives and hunts in the air, and can out-fly any bird of his
own size.
Perhaps the most unexpected of the snow stories was one which I read
one winter day when out for a walk with the Botanist. Although the
snow was on the ground, the sky was as blue as in June, as the
Botanist and I swung into an old road that the forgotten feet of more
than two centuries had worn deep below its banks. It was opened in
1691, when William and Mary were king and queen, and Boston Tea
Parties and Liberty Bells and Declarations of Independence were not
yet even dreamed of in the land.
We always keep a bird-record of every walk, and note down the names of
the sky-folk whom we meet and any interesting bit of news that they
may have for us. In the migration season there is great rivalry as to
who shall meet the greatest number from the crowd of travelers going
north. Last year my best day's record was eighty-four different kinds
of birds, which beat the Botanist by two. A black duck and a late
bay-breasted warbler were the cause of his undoing. To a birdist every
walk is full of possibilities. Any day, anywhere, some bird may flash
into sight for the first time.
The Botanist has pointed out to me not fewer than twenty times the
sacred field where, one bitter winter day, he saw his first (and last)
flock of horned larks. For my part, I never fail to show him the
pignut hickory where my first golden-winged warbler spoke to me one
May morning.
To-day, however, our walk was almost a birdless one. We heard the caw
of the crow, the only bird-note that can be certainly counted on for
every day of the year. We saw the flutter of the white skirts of the
juncos. From a blighted chestnut tree we saw a bird flash down into
the dry grass from his perch on a dead limb. As we came nearer, he
glided off like a little aeroplane, and we recognized the flight and
the spotted buff waistcoat of the sparrow-hawk hunting meadow-mice.
Later in the morning we heard the "Pip, pip," of the song sparrow, and
marked the black spot on his breast. Far ahead, across a snow-covered
meadow, a bird flew dippingly up and down. He had laid aside his
canary-yellow and black suit, but his flight bewrayed the goldfinch.
Passing through a beechwood, we heard a sharp call, and saw a
black-and-white bird back down a tree. This cautious procedure stamped
him as the downy woodpecker. Of all the tree-climbers only the
woodpeckers back down.
Strangely enough, a short distance farther on we heard another cry
like that of the downy woodpecker, only harsher and wilder, and caught
a glimpse of the hairy woodpecker, the big brother of the downy, a
rarer, larger bird of the deep woods. That ended our bird list--a
paltry seven when we should have had a score.
We passed the swamp meadow close to the road, where the blue, blind
gentian grows not twenty-five yards from the unseeing eyes of the
travelers, who pass there every October day and never suspect what a
miracle of color lies hidden in the tangle of marsh-grass beside their
path. The Botanist with many misgivings had shown me the secret. For
three years we had tramped together before he held me to be worthy to
share it.
Farther on we crossed a plateau where a series of stumps showed where
a grove of chestnut trees had grown in the days before the Blight.
Suddenly from under our very feet dashed a brown rabbit, his white
powder-puff gleaming at every jump. The lithe, lean, springing body
seemed the very embodiment of speed. There are few animals that can
pass a rabbit in a hundred yards, even our cottontail, the slowest of
his family. He is, however, only a sprinter. In a long-distance event
the fox, the dog, and even the dogged, devilish little weasel can run
him down.
We looked at the form where he had been lying. It was a wet little
hollow made in the dank grass, with only a few dripping leaves for a
mattress--a forlorn bed. Yet Runny-Bunny, as some children I know have
named him, seems to rest well in his open-air sleeping porch, and even
lies abed there.
One far-away snowy day in February two of us stole a few moments from
the bedside of a sick child--how long, long ago it all seems now!--and
walked out among the wild-folk to forget. In a bleak meadow, right at
our feet, we saw a rabbit crouched, nearly covered by the snow. He had
been snowed under days before, but had slept out the storm until half
of his fleecy coverlet had melted away.
He lay so still that at first we thought he was dead; but on looking
closely, we could see the quick throbbing of his frightened little
heart. There was not a quiver from his taut body, or a blink from his
wide-open eyes. He lay motionless until my hand stroked gently his wet
fur. Then, indeed, he exploded like a brown bomb-shell from the snow,
and we laughed and laughed, the first and last time for many a weary
week.
Years later, I was coasting down the meadow-hill with one of my boys;
and, as the sled came to a stop, a rabbit burst out of the snow,
almost between the runners. The astonished boy rolled into a drift as
if blown clear off his sled by the force of the explosion.
To-day, as the Brownie sped over the soft snow, we could see how its
tracks in series of fours were made. At every jump the long hind-legs
thrust themselves far in front. They made the two far-apart tracks in
the snow, while the close-set fore-paws made the nearby tracks.
Accordingly a rabbit is always traveling in the direction of the
far-apart tracks, quite contrary to what most of us would suppose.
It is the same way with celestial rabbits. Look any clear winter night
down below the belt of Orion, and you will see a great rabbit-track in
the sky--the constellation of Lepus, the Hare, whose track leads away
from the Great Dog with baleful Sirius gleaming green in his fell jaw.
From the rabbit-meadow we followed devious paths down through Fern
Valley, which in summertime is a green mass of cinnamon fern,
interrupted fern, Christmas fern, brake, regal fern, and half a score
of others. In the midst of the marsh were rows of the fruit-stems of
the sensitive fern, which is the first to blacken before the frost.
These were heavy with rich wine-brown seed-pods, filled with seeds
like fine dust. They had an oily, nutty taste; and it would seem as if
some hungry mouse or bird would find them good eating during famine
times. Yet so far as I have observed they are never fed upon.
Along the side of the path were thickets of spice-bush, whose crushed
leaves in summer have an incense sweeter than burns in any censer of
man's making. To-day I broke one of the brittle branches, to nibble
the perfumed bark, and found at the end of a twig, pretending to be a
withered leaf, a cocoon of the prometheus moth. The leaf had been
folded together, lined with spun silk, and lashed so strongly that the
twig would break before the silken cable.
We passed through a clump of staghorn sumac with branches like
antlers, bearing at their ends heavy masses of fruit-clusters made up
of hundreds of dark, velvety crimson berries, each containing a brown
seed. The pulp of these berries is intensely sour, its flavor giving
the sumac its other name of "vinegar plant." These red clusters
crushed in sweetened water make a very good imitation of the red
circus-lemonade of our childhood. The staghorn is not to be confounded
with its treacherous sister, the poison sumac, with her corpse-colored
berries. She is a vitriol-thrower, and with her death-pale bark and
arsenic-green leaves, always makes me think of one of those haggard,
horrible women of the Terror.
It was in Fern Valley that the Botanist made his discovery for the
day. It was only a tree, and moreover a tree that he must have passed
many times before. Only to-day, however, did it catch his eye. The
bark was that of an oak, but the leaves, which clung thick and brown
to the limb, were long, with a straight edge something like the leaves
of the willow-oak, only broader and larger. It was no other than the
laurel-oak, a tree which by all rights belonged hundreds of miles to
the south of us.
He walked gloatingly around his discovery, and it was some time before
I could drag him on. Thereafter he gave me a masterly discourse, some
forty minutes in duration, on the life-history of the oaks, and
propounded several ingenious theories to account for the presence of
this strange species. This discourse continued until we reached the
historic white oak near the end of the valley, where the Botanist once
found a flock of bay-breasted warblers in the middle of a rainstorm;
and again I heard the story of that day.
Through the valley flowed a little stream, and the snow along its
banks told of the goings and comings of the wild-folk. Gray squirrels,
red squirrels, muskrats, rabbits, mice, foxes, weasels, all had passed
and repassed along these banks.
To me the most interesting trail was that of a blarina shrew. His
track in the snow is a strange one. It is a round, tunnel-like trail,
like that of some large caterpillar, with the trough made by the
wallowing little body filled with tiny alternate tracks--one of the
strangest of all the winter trails.
I could obtain very little enthusiasm from the Botanist over blarinas.
He still babbled of laurel-leafed oaks and similar frivolities. Even
the crowning event of the walk left him cold. It came on the
home-stretch. We were passing through the last pasture before reaching
the humdrum turnpike which led to the tame-folk. Suddenly in the snow
I saw a strange trail. It was evidently made by a jumper, but not one
whose track I knew. I followed it, until among the leaves in a bank
something moved. Before my astonished eyes hopped falteringly, but
bravely, a speckled toad.
The winter sun shone palely on his brown back still crusted with
the earth of his chill home. Down under the leaves and the frozen
ground he had heard the call, and struggled to the surface, expecting
to find spring awaiting him. Two jumps, however, had landed him in a
snowbank. It was a disillusion, and Mr. Toad winked his mild brown
eyes piteously. He struggled bravely to get out, but every jump
plunged him deeper into the snow. His movements became feebler as the
little warmth his cold blood contained oozed out.
[Illustration: FLYER, THE SQUIRREL]
Just as he was settling despairingly back into the crystallized cold,
I rescued him. He was too far gone even to move, for cold spells quick
death to the reptile folk. Only his blinking beautiful eyes, like
lignite flecked with gold, and the slow throbbing of his mottled
breast, showed that life was still in him. He nestled close in my
hand, willing to occupy it until warm weather.
I back-tracked him from his faltering efforts, and where his first
lusty jump showed on the thawing ground I found his hibernaculum. It
was only a little hollow, scarcely three inches deep, under sodden
leaves and wet earth, and cheerless enough, according to mammalian
ideas. It was evidently home for Mr. Toad, and when I set him therein,
he scrambled relievedly under some of the loose wet leaves which had
fallen back into his nest. I piled a generous measure of dripping
leaves and moist earth over his warted back. It may have been
imagination, but I fancied that the last look I had from his bright
eyes was one of gratitude. The Botanist scoffed at the idea, for
toads, like pine-snakes, convey absolutely no appeal to his narrow,
flower-bound nature.
I have erected a monument in the shape of a chestnut stake beside Mr.
Toad's winter residence, and I strongly suspect that he will be the
last of his family to get up when the spring rising-bell finally
rings.
"There's positively nothing to this early-rising business," I can hear
him telling his friends at the Puddle Club in April. "Look at what
happened to me. If it hadn't been for a well-meaning giant, I would
have caught my death of cold from getting out of bed too soon. Never
again!"
Our calendar-makers use red letters to mark special days. Personally,
I prefer orchids and birds and sunrises and nests and snakes and
similar markers. I have in my diary "The Day of the Prothonotary
Warbler," "The Day of the Henslow's Sparrow's Nest" (that was a day!),
"The Day of the Fringed Gentian," and many, many others. But always
and forever that snowy 21st of December is marked in my memory as "The
Day of the Early Toad."
Once more I was climbing the Cobble. The wood-road on which I started
had narrowed to a path. Overhead masses of rock showed through the
snow, and above them were the dark depths of the Bear-Hole where
Great-great-uncle Jake had once shot with his flintlock musket the
largest bear ever killed in that part of the state. It was here at the
cliff side that Shahrazad snow told me another story.
Along the edge of the slope ran a track made up of four holes in the
snow. The front ones were far apart and the back ones near apart.
Occasionally, instead of four holes, five would show in the snow, and
the position of the marks was reversed. A little farther on, and the
trail changed. The two near-apart tracks were now in a perpendicular
line instead of side by side. To Chingachgook, or Deerslayer, or
Daniel Boone, or any other well-known tracker, the trail would have,
of course, been an open book. But it had taken an amateur trailer like
myself some years to be able to read that snow record aright. The
trail was that of a cottontail rabbit. At first he had been hopping
contentedly along, with an eye open for anything eatable in the line
of winter vegetables. The far-apart tracks were the paw-marks of the
big hind-legs, which came in front of the marks made by the fore-paws
as they touched the ground at every hop. The five marks were where he
had sat down to look around. The fifth mark was the mark of his stubby
tail, and when he stopped, the little fore-paws made the near-apart
marks in front of the far-apart marks of his hind-feet, instead of
behind them as when he hopped.
Suddenly the rabbit detected something alarming coming from behind,
for the sedate hops changed into startled bounds. A little farther on
the trail said that the rabbit had caught sight of its pursuer as it
ran; for a rabbit by the position of its eyes sees backward and
forward equally well. The tracks showed a frantic burst of speed. In
an effort to get every possible bit of leverage, the fore-legs were
twisted so that they struck the ground one behind the other, which
accounted for the last set of marks perpendicular to those in front. A
line of tracks which came from a pile of stones, and paralleled the
rabbit's trail, told the whole story. The paw-marks were small and
dainty, but beyond each pad-print were the marks of fierce claws. No
wonder the rabbit ran wild when it first scented its enemy, and then
saw its long slim body bounding along behind, white as snow except for
the black tip of its tail.
It was the weasel, whose long body moves like the uncoiling of a steel
spring. A weasel running looks like a gigantic inch-worm that bounds
instead of crawls. Speed, however, is not what the little white killer
depends on for its prey. It can follow a trail by scent better than
any hound, climb trees nearly as well as a squirrel; and if the animal
it is chasing goes into a burrow, it has gone to certain death. The
rabbit's only chance would have been a straight-away run at full speed
for miles and hours. In this way it could probably have tired out the
weasel, which is a killer, not a runner, by profession. A rabbit,
however, like the fox, never runs straight. Round and round in great
circles it runs about its feeding-ground, of which it knows all the
paths and runways and burrows. Against a dog or fox these are safer
tactics than exploring new territory. Against a weasel they are
usually fatal.
It was easy to see on the snow what had happened. At first, when the
rabbit saw the weasel looping along its trail like a hunting snake, it
had started off with a sprint that in a minute carried it out of
sight. Then a strange thing happened. Although a rabbit can run for
an hour at nearly top speed, and in this case had every reason to run,
after a half-mile of rapid circling and doubling, the trail changed
and showed that the rabbit was plodding along as if paralyzed.
One of the weird and unexplained facts in nature is the strange power
that a weasel appears to have over all the smaller animals. Many of
them simply give up and wait for death when they find that a weasel is
on their trail. A red squirrel, which could easily escape through the
tree-tops, sometimes becomes almost hysterical with fright, and has
been known to fall out of a tree-top in a perfect ecstasy of terror.
Even the rat, which is a cynical, practical animal, with no nerves,
and a bitter, brave fighter when fight it must, loses its head when up
against a weasel. A friend of mine once saw a grim, gray old fellow
run squealing aloud across a road from a woodpile and plunge into a
stone wall. A moment later a weasel in its reddish summer coat came
sniffing along the rat's trail and passed within a yard of him.
This night the rabbit, with every chance for escape, began to run
slowly and heavily, as if in a nightmare, watching the while its back
trail. And when the weasel came in sight again, the trail stopped as
the rabbit crouched in the snow waiting for the end. It came
mercifully quick. When the weasel saw the rabbit had stopped, its red
eyes flamed, and with a flashing spring its teeth and claws were at
poor bunny's throat. There was a plaintive whinnying cry, and the
reddened snow told the rest.
So the last story of the snow ended in tragedy, as do nearly all true
stories of the wild-folk. Yet they need not our pity. Better a
thousand times the quick passing at the end of a swift run or of a
brave fight, than the long, long weariness of pain and sickness by
which we humans so often claim our immortality.
IV
A RUNAWAY DAY
It is a wise man who knows when to run away. To quote rightly the
words of a great poet, whose name has escaped me:--
He who works and runs away
May live to work another day.
So it was that, like Christian of old, I suddenly decided to escape
for my life from my city.
There were many reasons. It was a holiday. Then the sun rose on one of
the most perfect days that ever dawned since the calendar was
invented. Furthermore, there was the thought of a little cabin hidden
in the heart of the pine barrens. So I ran away through snow-covered
meadows and silent woods and past farmhouses that were old when this
republic was first born, until my law offices and the city and the
noise and the dust and the smoke were all behind the horizon.
An hour later I was following a little path that zigzagged back and
forth through thickets of scrub oak and stiff rows of pitch pines.
Above the trees was the rush of wings. The upper air was filled with
the victorious sound of going that heartened David from the tops of
the mulberry trees in that dread valley of Rephaim. Perhaps it was the
wind; but why did not the tree-tops sway instead of standing in
frozen rows? The sky above was the color of the eggs of the wood
thrush, a tender blue faintly washed with white. As the sun rose
higher and higher, the color deepened to that bluest of blues which
burns in May under the breast of the brooding catbird. Filtered
through frost, the sunlight shone, intensely bright but without heat.
The air was full of the spicery of a million pine trees. With every
breath it went tingling through my blood, carrying with it the joy of
the open and the freedom of the barrens.
At last I came to the cabin. It is set on the very edge of the
brownest, crookedest, sweetest stream in the world--the cedar-stained
Rancocas. The wide porch overhangs the water, and over the doorway is
a tiny horseshoe, which was dug out of the bog at Upper Mill,
undoubtedly cast by some fairy steed. One whole side of the cabin is
taken up by an arched fireplace built of brown and yellow and red
sandstone, the only stone that can be found in the Barrens. Squat and
curly, two massive andirons, hammered out of bog iron, stand among the
ashes. They have a story all their own.
Five miles through the woods is Upper Mill, which is not a mill at
all, but marks the place where, a century ago, one stood. The only
occupied house there is a log cabin built of imperishable white-cedar
logs in 1720, the date still showing on one of the logs. Charlie
Rogers lives there alone. It used to be an old tavern on the
cattle-road from Perth Amboy. Every now and then Charlie finds old
coins, King George III pennies and farthings, and the rare New Jersey
pennies which were coined only during two years, and which bear a
plough and the old name of New Jersey--Nova Cæsarea. One day, when I
was gossiping with Charlie, I told him that, if he took up the old
dirt floor and sifted it through an ash-sifter during the long winter
evenings, he might find a further store of rare coins. He took my
advice, and the first treasure he uncovered was these andirons buried
where once had been a hearth. Charlie gave them to me, and they hold
up logs now as well as they did two hundred years ago.
As I slipped into a well-worn suit of khaki, all the worry of the
month fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was drowned
in the golden water. Tucking a pair of field-glasses into one pocket
and a package of lunch into the other, I started off on an exploring
trip. In the barrens everywhere are paths that wind for miles in and
out among the trees and along the edges of brooks and bogs. Who made
them? Who keeps them open? No one knows. I have been able to follow a
few of them out to the end. One leads to Ong's Hat, a little clearing
in the heart of the woods, where grows an enormous white-oak tree. A
century and a half ago Ong, the Indian, lived there. One day he
disappeared. Nothing was ever found except his blood-stained hat. Then
there is the path that leads to Sheep-Pen Hill, where seven empty
houses and a well stand deserted and alone. Others lead to Gum Sprung,
which, being translated, means Gum-Tree Cove, and to Double Trouble
and Mount Misery, where the rattlesnake den is, and Apple-Pie Hill,
and Friendship, and a host of other places that I have not explored.
To-day I walked for miles and miles through stretches of low, gleaming
pines and past pools set in golden sphagnum moss. The wind had died
down, and the silence seeped in and carried with it the comfort of the
wilderness. The first friend I met was a little bird that dived like a
mouse into a pile of brush. I saw a brook, and hurried to it, knowing
that if the bird were a winter wren it could not possibly keep from
running along the edges of that brook. Sure enough, in a minute I saw
it darting in and out of holes and with cocked tail curtsying on the
stones. It is the next to the smallest of our five wrens--only the
rare short-billed marsh wren is tinier.
To-day all through the tree-tops I heard the high-pitched tiny notes
of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Its forked tail,
striped head, and wing-bars are the field-marks by which it can be
told in spite of its quick movements. It is the third smallest of all
our birds: only the hummingbird and the short-billed marsh wren are
smaller. Beyond the kinglet I heard the clicking alarm-notes and saw a
flutter of the white skirts of a junco as it flew up ahead of me,
showing its white tail-feathers, while in the woods a silver-and-blue
bird sprang out of the bushes, for a wonder without a sound. It was
the blue jay, which scolds and squalls all day long. Overhead, in
spite of the bitter cold, the grim black buzzards, with their fringed
wings and black-and-gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the
smaller crow flapped laboriously beneath them.
Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare climbing fern, an
evergreen fern which climbs like a vine and has flat, veined leaves
that look like little green hands with four and five fingers. The stem
is like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met the pale-gray poison
sumac, with its corpse-colored berries growing out from the sides of
the twigs instead of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless
varieties.
I followed Pond-Lily Path through the white sand that in the
springtime is all golden with barrens-heather. It winds in and out
through the scattered clumps of low pitch pine and thickets of scrub
oak, and finally leads to a still brook all afloat in midsummer with
pond lilies. When the path reached the bogs, which to-day were frozen
solid, I turned in, crossing them on the snow-covered ice. Everywhere
were lines of four-toed crow tracks, and here and there were rabbit
trails, a series of four round holes in the snow.
The next morning, when I followed my own tracks, I found that for more
than a mile I had been trailed by some animal making a series of
little paw-prints like those of a small cat, except that they were
close together and sometimes doubled, showing where the animal had
given sudden bounds. It was none other than the trail of a weasel,
probably the long-tailed variety, although that is rare in the
barrens. Like others of his family, this animal oftens follows a
man's tracks for a long distance, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps in
the hope of finding food. As I looked at the trail of this little
killer, I was glad that he was not larger. If weasels, or those other
killers, the shrews, were as large as a dog, no man's life would be
safe out of doors.
I explored so far that the sun had set before I turned back for the
cabin. Suddenly, from far over where the tree-trunks were inked black
against the golden afterglow, I heard a hoot, deep rather than loud.
"_Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo!_" it went, and sometimes, "_Hoo-hoo-hoo!_"
Usually, though, the second note was doubled. It meant that the great
horned owl with its speckled gray back and white collar was hunting
rabbits through the silent woods. If it had been the barred owl, the
third note would have been doubled and the last note would have had a
drop in its cadence.
In the frosty twilight I hurried along the winding path, back to the
cabin and a long, dreamy evening before the roaring fire. First came a
wonderful exhibition of free-hand cooking. Then I piled the great
fireplace well up the chimney with masses of pitch-pine knots and
stumps that I had dug up in the dry bogs. All of the sapwood had
decayed, leaving nothing except the resinous bones of the fallen
trees. They burned at the touch of a match, with a red smoky flame.
Above them I banked dry lengths of swamp maple and post oak. Then,
drawing up a vast rocker well within the circle of the heat, I settled
down to read and dream in front of the red coals.
[Illustration: THE LONG-TAILED WEASEL]
There is nothing in life sweeter than a little loneliness. Nowadays we
live and die in crowds, like ants and bees, so that solitude is likely
to become one of the lost arts. No book ever tastes so well as before
a great fire in the heart of a wilderness, even if the wilderness be
only a few miles away. In my cabin I keep a special shelf of the books
which I have always wanted to read, and for which in some way I never
find time in the hurry of everyday life. That evening I sat for long
over the Saga of Burnt Njal, and read again of the bill of Gunnar and
the grim axe, the "ogress of war," of Skarphedinn and the sword of the
dauntless Kari. In the flickering firelight I pictured the death-fight
of Gunnar of Lithend, one of the four great fights of one man against
a multitude in history, and heard again Hallgarda, the fair and the
false, forsake him to his death.
"Give me two locks of thy hair," said Gunnar to Hallgarda, when that
his bow-string was cut in twain; "and ye two, my mother and thou,
twist them together into a bow-string for me."
"Does aught lie on it?" she says.
"My life lies on it," he said.
"I will not do it," said Hallgarda; "for know ye now that I never
cared a whit for thee."
At last it was time to go to bed. I went out to get a drink of the
most wonderful water in the world. Near the cabin a little bog was
frozen over a foot deep with white bubbled ice. In one place a round,
black hole had betrayed the secret spring that flooded the whole
swale. In the coldest weather this spring-hole remains unfrozen. I
dipped up a pitcherful of the soft, spicy cedar-water pulsing from the
very heart of the marsh. The Pinies have a saying that he who drinks
cedar-water will always come back to the barrens, no matter how far
afield he may wander.
As I came to the porch-steps, in the dark stream just below me I saw a
strange thing. Underneath the water a ball of fire flashed down the
stream and disappeared around the bend. For a long time I tried to
puzzle out what it could be. There was no form of aquatic
phosphorescent life that would swim through a northern stream in the
depths of winter. It was only when I started to tell the time by the
sky clock that the mystery was solved. I was looking at the star Caph
in Cassiopeia, which is the hour-hand of the clock, when suddenly a
meteor flashed down the sky, and I realized that my submarine of a few
moments before had been only the reflection of another shooting star.
As I stopped on the porch with my pitcher, the open door made a long
lane of light. Just across the creek, not fifty feet away, sounded a
crash in the brush, and there in the spotlight, held by the glare,
stood a big buck. For a moment I looked right into his beautiful,
liquid, gleaming eyes. Then, with a snort, he plunged into the woods
and was gone. For years I had tramped through the barrens and had
found the tracks of the deer that still live not thirty miles from the
third largest city in America, but until that night I had never seen
one.
It grew colder and colder, and the little cabin snapped and cracked
with the frost. Banking up the fireplace with logs, I pulled my bed up
into the circle of heat, and fell asleep to the flickering of the fire
and the croon of the wind among the pine trees outside. Through the
window I could see the winter sky ablaze with stars, while the late
moon shone like a bowl of frozen gold through the black tree-trunks.
The next morning I had to leave on the nine-o'clock train; and so I
rose early and after breakfast took a last walk down to Lower Mill and
back, to see if I could add any more winter birds to my list. It was a
cold, clear, snapping winter morning, and as the sun came up through
the pine trees I met first one and then another of the bird-folk
abroad after their breakfasts. First I heard the "Pip, pip!" of the
downy woodpecker, all black and white, with a bloodstain at the back
of his head. He is a tree-climber who can go up a tree head-foremost,
but must always back down. The nuthatches, with their white cheeks and
grunting notes, can go up and down a tree either head-first or
tail-first and the last of the tree-climbers, the brown creeper,
climbs up in a spiral, but has to fly down.
Farther on, I heard the call of the big hairy woodpecker, which looks
almost like the downy except that he is nearly twice as large. He was
drilling a hole in the under side of a branch and sucking out
hibernating ants with his long, sticky trident tongue. Next came a
tree sparrow, with his white wing-bar and brown-red patch on the crown
of his head. He was busily scratching on the ground; he is called a
tree sparrow because never by any chance is he found in a tree. On the
side of a white-oak tree a bit of bark seemed to move upward in a
spiral, and I recognized the brown creeper, the last of the climbers.
He went up the tree in a series of tiny hops and then, true to his
training, flew down and started up again.
As I turned the curve by Lower Mill, I saw in a thicket near the dam a
number of white-throated sparrows, with their striped white heads and
white throat-patches. Near them suddenly hopped a bird that ought to
have been far south. It was reddish brown with a long tail, and I
recognized the female chewink. She hopped around and scratched among
the leaves like a little hen, in true chewink style, as if the month
were April instead of January.
I hurried around a bend in the road and heard over my head a series of
loud _pips_, much like the note of an English sparrow. I looked
up--and there was my great adventure. A little locust tree was filled
with a flock of plump, large birds. At first I thought that they were
cedar birds, but in a moment I caught sight of their coloring. Six of
the males out of the flock of seventy-four were in full plumage. Their
forked tails were velvet black. Their wings were the golden white of
old ivory, with a broad black edge, their heads grayish black, and
their breasts and backs a deep, rich gold; and, strangest of all,
their thick beaks were of a greenish-white color.
It was a great moment. For the first time in my life I had met the
evening grosbeaks, and had found what afterwards proved to be the
largest flock ever reported of this rare bird of the far north so far
south. For a delightful hour I followed them. They were restless, but
not shy. Sometimes they alighted on the ground and then flew up all
together, like a flock of starlings. They looked like overgrown
goldfinches, just as the pine grosbeak looks like an overgrown purple
finch, and the blue grosbeak of the south for all the world like a
monstrous indigo bunting. As I followed them, suddenly I heard a sharp
_chip_, and to my delight there flashed into sight the crested
cardinal grosbeak, blood-red against the snow. For a moment the lithe,
nervous, flaming bird of the south met its squat, strong, stolid
cousin of the far north.
I could come quite near without alarming them, and then suddenly they
would all fly away together to some other tree without any apparent
reason. Besides the sparrow-like note that I first heard, they had a
sort of trilling chirp. Once they all started like a flock of
goldfinches or grackles in a chirping chorus. When they flew, they
sometimes gave a single, clear flight-note, but never made a sound
when feeding on the ground. The birds had short, slightly forked
tails, and the yellow ring around the eye gave them, when seen in
profile, a curious spectacled appearance; while the huge beak and
short tail made them seem clumsy as compared with the other grosbeaks.
The plumage of the females showed mottled black-and-white wings and
greenish-yellow backs and breasts. The iris of the eye in both sexes
was red, the legs of a bluish-gray pink, and the feet of a
grayish-pink color.
Later I found that the birds fed on the berries of the poison ivy, red
cedar, climbing bittersweet, and the buds and embryo needles of the
pitch pine, together with the seeds of the box elder. The favorite
food of the flock that I watched seemed always to be the pits of the
wild black cherry (_Prunus serotina_). They would take the pits well
out of sight back into their beaks, keeping their bills half open in a
comical manner, as if they had a bone in the throat. A second later
there would be a cracking noise and out would drop two nicely split
segments of the cherry pits, the meat having been swallowed. Sometimes
in the trees they would sidle along the limbs exactly as a parrot does
along its perch.
The authorities state that the evening grosbeak has no immature
plumage, but passes after its first moulting immediately into full
plumage. I saw one, however, that I am sure was in immature plumage.
The back was yellowish instead of being gray, like the females', and
the wings were of a dirty white color instead of being mottled black
and white, like the plumage of the females, or half black and half
white, like the plumage of the males. Both sexes seemed to have the
same call and gave it equally often.
The history of the evening grosbeak illustrates the far-reaching and
never-ending consequences of a falsehood. This bit of moralizing is
called forth because of the name of this sorely misdescribed bird. In
three languages, English, Greek and Latin, the myth is perpetuated
that the evening grosbeak, or _Hesperiphona vespertina_,
sings only at twilight. It all began in 1823, when one Major
Delafield, a boundary agent of the United States government, was
camping northwest of Lake Superior. There he met a flock of evening
grosbeaks in the twilight, and instantly jumped to the conclusion that
the birds were accustomed to spend the day in the dark recesses of
impassable swamps and come out and sing only at evening.
As a matter of fact, the evening grosbeak goes to bed at dark, like
all other respectable, reputable birds. Its song is a wandering, jerky
warble that the singer himself recognizes as a miserable failure, for
he often stops and looks discontented and then remains silent for a
minute before trying again. It sounds like the early part of a
robin's song, but is always suddenly checked as if the performer
were out of breath. The guess of the imaginative major was later
elaborated by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Nuttall, and even by later
ornithologists,--Coues among them,--not one of whom had ever seen or
heard the bird. Coues's description in his "Key to North American
Birds" is worth quoting as a specimen of the rhetoric in which a past
generation of ornithologists dared to indulge.
"A bird of distinguished appearance, whose very name suggests the
far-away land of the dipping sun and the tuneful romance which the
wild bird throws around the close of day. Clothed in striking color
contrast of black, white and gold, he seems to represent the allegory
of diurnal transmutation, for his sable pinions close around the
brightness of his vesture, as night encompasses golden hues of sunset,
while the clear white space enfolded in these tints foretells the dawn
of the morrow."
That morning I knew nothing of the history or the habits of this
unknown and misrepresented bird. All I knew was that for me the
twenty-ninth day of January, 1917, would be marked in my calendar
forever by a bird from the north, all dusky gold and velvet black and
ivory white--the Day of the Evening Grosbeak.
At last the time came to leave them. As I started back for home, the
sun showed through the trees like a vast red coal, with a smoke of
clouds drifting across its face, and I traveled back to town in the
full glory of a clear winter morning, filled with the measureless
content of a great discovery. It was good to be alive and to look
forward to more work and to more glorious, adventure-filled runaway
days.
V
THE RAVEN'S NEST
After all, the Rosicrucians were an ignorant lot. They spent their
days over alembics, cucurbits, and crucibles--yet they grew old. In
our days many men--and a few women--have discovered the Elixir of
Youth--but never indoors. The prescription is a simple one. Mix a
hobby with plenty of sky-air, shake well, and take twice a week. I
know a railroad official who retired when he was seventy. "He'll die
soon," observed his friends kindly. Instead, he began to collect
native orchids from all points of the compass. Now he is too busy
tramping over mountains and through woods and marshes even to think of
dying. Anyway, he would not have time until he has found the
ram's-head and the crane's-bill orchids and finished his monograph on
the _Habenaria_. He will never grow old.
Neither will that other friend of mine who collects fresh-water
pearls, nor the one who makes me visit black-snake and rattlesnake
dens with him every spring, nor those others who spend their time in
collecting butterflies, beetles, wasps, and similar bric-a-brac. As
for those four abandoned oölogists who have hunted with me for years,
they will be young at a hundred. They rank high in their respective
callings. Yet from February, when the great horned owl begins its
nest, until the goldfinch lays her white eggs in July, the four spend
every holiday and vacation hunting birds' nests.
Personally I collect only notes, out-of-door secrets, and little
everyday adventures. Bird-songs, flower-fields, and friendships with
the wild-folk mean far more to me than cabinets of pierced eggs, dried
flowers, stuffed birds, and tanned skins. Nor am I much of a hunter.
When it comes to slaughtering defenseless animals with high-powered
guns, I prefer a position in an abattoir. One can kill more animals in
a day, and with less exertion. Yet my collecting and sporting friends
make allowances for my vagaries and take me with them on their
journeyings. Wherefore it happened that in early March I received a
telegram. "Raven's nest located. Come if you are man enough."
Now a middle-aged lawyer and the father of a family has no business
ravening along the icy and inaccessible cliffs which that gifted fowl
prefers for nursery purposes. I have, however, a maxim of Thoreau
which I furbish up for just such occasions. "A man sits as many risks
as he runs," wrote that wanderer in the woods. Accordingly the next
morning found me two hundred miles to the north, plodding through a
driving snow-storm toward Seven Mountains, with the first man in
recent years to find the nest of a northern raven in Pennsylvania.
For fifteen freezing miles we clambered over and around three of the
seven. By the middle of the afternoon we reached a cliff hidden behind
thickets of rhododendron. In the meantime the snow had changed to a
lashing rain, probably the coldest that has ever fallen on the North
American continent. Ploughing through slush, the black rhododendron
stems twisted around us like wet rubber, and the hollow green leaves
funneled ice-water down our backs and into our ears. Breaking through
the last of the thickets, we at length reached a little brook which
ran along the foot of the cliff. A hundred feet above, out from the
middle of the cliff stretched a long tongue of rock. Over this the
cliff arched like a roof, with a space between which widened toward
the tip of the tongue. In a niche above this cleft a dark mass showed
dimly through the rain.
"The nest!" muttered the Collector hoarsely, pouring a pint or so of
rain-water down my neck from his hat-brim as he bent toward me. I
stared with all my eyes, at last one of the chosen few to see the nest
of a Pennsylvania raven. It was made of large sticks. The fresh broken
ends and the droppings on the cliff-side showed that it was a recent
one. There were no signs of either of the birds. We solemnly removed
our coats and sweaters and prepared for the worst. To me the cliff
looked much like the Matterhorn, only slipperier. The Collector,
however, was most reassuring. He told me that the going looked worse
than it really was, and that, anyway, if I did fall, death would be so
nearly instantaneous as to involve little if any suffering.
Thus encouraged, I followed him gruntingly up a path which had
evidently been made by a chamois or an ibex. At last I found myself
perched on a shelf of stone about the width of my hand. The Collector,
who was above me on an even smaller foothold, took this opportunity to
tell me that the rare Allegheny cave-rat was found on this cliff, and
nearly fell off his perch trying to point out to me a crevice where he
had once seen the mass of sticks, stones, leaves, feathers, and bones
with which these versatile animals barricade their passage-ways. I
refused to turn my head. That day I was risking my life for ravens,
not rats. Above us was the long, rough tongue of rock. Below us, a far
hundred feet, the brook wound its way through snow-covered boulders.
Again the Collector led the way. Hooking both arms over the tongue of
rock above him, he drew himself up until his chest rested on the edge,
and then, sliding toward the precipice, managed to wriggle up in some
miraculous way without slipping off. From the top of the tongue he
clambered up to the niche where the nest was, calling down to me to
follow. Accordingly I left my shelf and hung sprawlingly on the
tongue; but there was no room to push my way up between it and the
rock-roof above.
"Throw your legs straight out," counseled the Collector from above,
"and let yourself slide."
I tried conscientiously, but it was impossible. My sedentary,
unadventurous legs simply would not whirl out into space. At last,
under the jeers of my friend, I shut my eyes and, kicking out
mightily, found myself sliding toward eternity. Just before I reached
it, under the Collector's bellowed instructions, I thrust my left arm
up as far as I could, and found a hand-hold on the slippery rock.
After getting my breath, I managed to wriggle up through the crevice
and lay safe on the top of the tongue. The niche above was not large
enough for us both, so the Collector came down while I took his place.
I was lashed by a freezing rain, my numb hands were cut and bleeding,
and there were ten weary miles still ahead. Yet that moment was worth
all that it cost. There is an indescribable fascination and triumph in
sharing a secret with the wild-folk, which can be understood only by
the initiate. The living naturalists who had looked into the home of
the Northern raven in Pennsylvania could be counted on the thumb and
first three fingers of one hand. At last the little finger belonged to
me.
The deep cup of the nest was about one foot in diameter and over a
yard across on the outside. It was firmly anchored on the shelf of
rock, the structure being built into the crevices and made entirely of
dead oak branches, some of them fully three quarters of an inch in
diameter. It looked from a distance like an enormous crow's nest. The
cup itself was some six inches deep, and lined with red and white
deer-hair and some long black hairs which were probably those of a
skunk. Inside, it had a little damp green moss; while the rim was made
of green birch twigs bruised and hackled by the beaks of the builders.
On this day, March 9, 1918, there were no eggs, although in a previous
year the Collector had found two as early as February 25, when the
cliffs were covered with snow; and on March 5, of another year he
collected a full set of five fresh eggs, which I afterwards examined
in his collection. The birds had built a nest the year before, without
laying. This fact, with the absence of eggs this year, convinced the
Collector that the birds were sterile from age. During the last years
of their long life, which is supposed to approach a century, a pair of
ravens will sometimes build, with pathetic pains, nest after nest
which are never occupied by eggs. The Collector promised to show me a
set, however, the next day in another nest.
At last it was time to start down. The Collector, who was waiting on
his shelf, warned me that the descent was more difficult than the
climb which I had just lived through, as it was necessary to slide
some six feet backwards to the shelf from which we started. As I
looked down the cliff-side I decided to remain with the ravens. It was
not until the Collector promised most solemnly to catch me, that I at
last let go and found myself back on the shelf with him. Then came
another wonderful moment. "Crrruck, crrruck, crrruck," sounded
hoarsely from the valley below--a note like that of a deep-voiced crow
with a bad cold.
"Hurry!" urged the Collector; "it's one of the old birds coming back."
I claim to have hurried as much as any man of my age could be expected
to do, but by the time I had reached the path the wary raven had
disappeared. I clambered down the cliff while the Collector
reproached me for my senile slowness. We stopped to rest at the foot,
and I was just telling him that the Cornishmen hate the raven because
to their ears he always cries "Corpse, corpse!" when suddenly the bird
itself came back again. It flew across the valley and alighted on a
tree-top by the opposite cliff, looking like a monster crow, being
about one-third longer. One might mistake a crow for a raven, but
never a raven for a crow. If there be any doubt about the bird, it is
always safe to set it down as a crow.
The flight of the raven, which consisted of two flaps and a soar, and
its long tail resembling that of an enormous grackle, were its most
evident field-marks.
For long we sat and watched the wary birds, until, chilled through by
the driving rain, we started to cover the ten miles that lay between
us and the house of Squire McMahon, a mountain friend of the
Collector, where we planned to pass the night. On the way the
Collector told me that he saw his first raven while wandering through
the mountains in the spring of 1909, and how he trailed and hunted and
watched until, in 1910, he found the first nest. Since then he had
found twelve. His system was a simple one. Selecting from a gazetteer
a list of mountain villages with wild names, such as Bear Creek,
Paddy's Mountain, and Panther Run, he would write to the postmasters
for the names of noted hunters and woodsmen. From them he would secure
more or less accurate information about the haunts of ravens, which
usually frequent only the loneliest and most inaccessible parts of the
mountains.
The trail led through deep forests and up and across mountains, and
was so covered with ice and snow as to be difficult going. At one
point the Collector showed me a place where he had been walking years
ago, when he suddenly became conscious that he was being followed by
something or somebody. At a point where the trail doubled on itself,
he ran back swiftly and silently, just in time to see a
bay-lynx--which had been trailing him, as those big cats sometimes
will--dive into a nearby thicket. Anon he cheered the way with snake
stories, for Seven Mountains in summer swarm with rattlesnakes and
copperheads.
By the time he had finished it was dark, and I thought with a great
longing of food and fire--especially fire. It did not seem possible to
be so cold and still live. In the very nick of time, for me at least,
we caught sight of the lamplight streaming from the windows of the
Squire's house. Dripping, chilled, tired, and starving, we burst into
Mrs. McMahon's immaculate kitchen and were treated by the old couple
like a pair of long-lost sons. In less than two minutes our
waterlogged shoes were off, our wet coats and sogged sweaters spread
out to dry, and we sat huddled over a glowing stove while Mrs. McMahon
fried fish, made griddle-cakes, and brewed hot tea simultaneously and
with a swiftness that just saved two lives. We ate and ate and ate and
ate, and then, in a huge feather-bed, we slept and slept and slept
and slept. Long after I have forgotten the difference between a tort
and a contract, and whether A. Edward Newton or Marie Corelli wrote
the "Amenities," that dinner and that sleep will stand out in my
memory.
The next morning we started off again in a driving snowstorm, to look
at another nest some ten miles farther on. The first bird we met was a
prairie horned lark flying over the valley, with its curious tossing,
mounting flight, like a bunch of thistle-down. It differs from the
more common horned, or shore, lark by having a white instead of a
yellow throat and eye-line; and it nests in the mountain meadows in
upper Pennsylvania, while its larger brother breeds in the far north.
Noon found us at a deer camp. Through the uncurtained windows we could
see the mounted body of a golden eagle, which, after stalking and
destroying one by one a whole flock of wild turkeys, had come to an
ignoble end while gorged on the carcass of a dead deer. The man who
captured it by throwing his coat over its head thought at first that
it was a turkey buzzard, which southern bird, curiously enough, finds
its way through the valleys up into these northern mountains. In fact,
the Collector once found a buzzard's nest just across a ravine from
the nest of a raven. Beyond the camp, on the other side of a rushing
torrent, we found another raven's nest swaying in the gale, in the
very top of a slender forty-foot white pine, the only raven's nest the
Collector had ever found in a tree. It was deserted, and we reached
home late that night with frost-bitten faces and ears, and without a
sight of the eggs of the northern raven.
The next day we took a train, and traveled forty miles down the river
to where, on a cliff overhanging the water, a pair of ravens had
nested for the last fifty years. There we found numerous old nests,
but never a trace of any that were fresh. There too we found a
magnificent wild turkey hanging dead in a little apple tree; it had
come to a miserable end by catching the toes of one foot in between
two twigs in such a way that it could not release itself. The bright
red color of its legs distinguished it from a tame turkey. The
Collector confided to me that the ambition of his life was to find the
nest of a wild turkey, which is the rarest of all Pennsylvania nests.
Next to it from a collecting standpoint come the nests of the Northern
raven, pileated woodpecker, and Blackburnian warbler, in the order
named.
* * * * *
March 12, 1919, found me again on a raven hunt with the Collector.
Before sunrise I was dropped from a sleeper at a little mountain
station set in a hill country full of broad fields, swift streams, and
leafless trees, flanked by dark belts of pines and hemlocks. Beyond
the hills was raven-land, lonely, wind-swept, full of lavender and
misty-purple mountains, with now and then a gap showing in their
ramparts. It was in these gaps that the ravens nested, always on the
north side, farthest from the sun.
Nearby was Treaster's Valley, which old Dan Treaster won from a pack
of black wolves before the Revolution. When he lay a-dying, three
quarters of a century later, the wailing howl of a wolf-pack sounded
outside his cabin, although wolves had been gone from the Valley for
fifty years. Old Dan sat up with the death-sweat on his forehead and
grinned. "They've come to see me off," he whispered and fell back
dead.
[Illustration: "THE YOUNG RAVENS SHALL NEITHER LACK NOR SUFFER
HUNGER"]
They bred hunters in that Valley. Peter Penz, the Indian fighter, who
celebrated his ninetieth birthday by killing a red bear, came from
there. So did Jacob Quiggle, who killed a maned panther one winter
night, under the light of a wind-swept moon, with his famous gun,
Black Sam. Over on Panther's Run not ten miles away, lived Solomon
Miller, who shot the last wood-bison, and died at the age of
eighty-eight, clapping his hands and shouting the chorus of a
hunting-song.
As the light began to show in the eastern sky, came the first
bird-notes of the day. The caw of a crow, a snatch of song-sparrow
melody, the chirp of a robin, the fluted alto note of a blue-bird, and
the squeal of a red-tailed hawk sounded before the sun came up.
A change of trains, and I met the Collector, as enthusiastic as ever.
Already that year he had found six ravens' nests with eggs in them,
but the one he had promised to show me was the best of the lot. It was
located in Poe's Gap, where local tradition hath it that the poet
wooed, not unsuccessfully, a mountain girl, and wrote "The Raven" in
her cabin. On the way to the Gap we heard and saw nineteen different
kinds of birds, including siskin, fox sparrows, and killdeer, and saw
a buzzard sail on black-fringed wings over the peaks. On a farmer's
barn we saw a goshawk nailed, its blue-gray back and finely penciled
breast unmistakable, even after the winter storms.
As we entered the Gap, patches of snow showed here and there, and a
mad mountain brook of foaming gray water came frothing and raging to
meet us. When we were full two hundred and fifty yards away from the
nest, the female raven flapped and soared away. The nest itself was
only thirty feet from the ground, on a shelf protected by a protruding
ledge, some ten feet down from the top of the cliffs. Rigging a rope
to a tree, I managed to swarm up and look at last on the eggs of a
Northern raven. They were three in number, a full clutch. The number
ranges from three to five, very rarely six, with one instance of
seven. The eggs themselves were half as large again as those of a
crow, and all different in coloration. One was light-blue-flecked and
speckled with brown and lavender; another heavily marked with lavender
and greenish-brown; while the last was of a solid greenish-brown
color.
The nest itself faced the Gap, and from it one could look clear across
the forest to the settled country beyond, while behind the cliff
stretched a range of low, unexplored mountains. The nest itself was
made of smaller sticks than the one I had seen over at Seven
Mountains, and had a double lining of brown and white deer-hair, a
fresh lining having been laid over that of the year before. As we
climbed to the nest, the ravens soared near, giving only the hoarse
"Crrruck." They have also a soft love-note, which cannot be heard
fifty yards away and sounds something like the syllables
"Ga-gl-gl-gli." As they soared near us, their plumage shone like black
glass, and we could see the long tapered feathers of the neck swell
whenever either of them croaked. They had a peculiar trick of gliding
side by side and suddenly touching wings, overlapping each other for
an instant. While we watched them, a red-shouldered hawk unwarily
approached the Gap. In an instant, the male raven was upon him, and
there was a sharp fight. The Buteo was not to be driven away easily,
and made brave play with beak and talons; but he never had a chance.
The raven glided round and round him with wonderful speed and
smoothness, driving in blow after blow with his heavy, punishing beak,
until the hawk was glad to escape.
For long and long I watched the dark, wise mysterious birds circle
through the blue sky. As I sat in their eyrie, I could look far, far
across the forests and the ranges of hills, to where the ploughed
fields began. Perhaps that poet whose heart-strings were a lute had
looked from that same raven-cliff before he went back to die among the
tame folk, and wished that he could stay in wild-folk land where he
belonged.
VI
HIDDEN TREASURE
It cost me an appendix to become a treasure-hunter, but it was worth
the price. I really had very little use for that appendix anyway,
while my membership in the Order of Treasure-Hunters has brought me in
several million dollars' worth of health and happiness.
It all began when I was sent from a city hospital to an old farmhouse
in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, with instructions to avoid
all but the most ladylike kind of exercise. Accordingly one morning I
found myself tottering feebly along a wood-road that led over Pond
Hill, highly resolved to walk to Hen's Pine and back. This was the
lone tree which stood on the crest of the wooded hill which, half a
century ago, old Hen, a freed slave, had begged from the
charcoal-burners when they coaled that region. Hen's old horse, Bill,
is buried at its foot, and Hen had hoped to lie there himself with his
axe, his fiddle, and his whip. Instead, he sleeps in a little
graveyard on a bare hill beside his old master.
My path had just crossed a round green circle in the woods where an
old charcoal-pit had set its seal forever. Suddenly a brown bird flew
up from beside the road a few yards ahead of me. If she had kept
quiet, I never would have learned her secret. When, however, she came
back, flying from branch to branch with fluttering wings and jerking
tail, keeping up at the same time a rattle of alarm-notes like a tiny
machine-gun, even a novice like myself would suspect a nest.
Fortunately a broken hazel bush marked the exact spot from which she
had flown. On going there, and looking carefully near its base, I
found what has always seemed to me one of the most beautifully hidden
nests of all the hundreds which I have seen since--perhaps because it
was my first rare nest. It was roofed in by the split hazel-branch,
and made of woven dry grass and leaves, with a scanty lining of
horse-hair and a flooring of leaf-fragments. Inside were five eggs.
Four of them were bluish-white, with aureoles of reddish-brown
blotches around the blunt ends; but the fifth was larger, and was
specked and splashed with blotches of rufous and brown-purple. Long
afterwards I learned that this last egg was the fatal gift of that
vampire the cow-bird, and that by leaving it there I had doomed the
four legitimate future birds of that nest to certain death. Sooner or
later the deadly changeling would hatch from that egg and roll its
foster-brothers out of the nest to starve.
That day, however, I was ignorant even of the name of the bird whose
nest I had found. For long I stood and gloated like a miser over the
little jewel-casket which the mother-bird had shown me, and for the
first time realized that anywhere in the woods and fields I might
come upon other treasure-hordes of the same kind. Then and there I
became a treasure-hunter. Ever since then I leave my treasures where I
find them, so that my recollections of them may not be marred by any
memories of fluttering, mourning mother birds. Aside from any
sentimental reasons, it has always seemed to me that he who takes the
eggs which he has discovered is guilty of the economic error of
spending his principal. If left undisturbed, the nest will pay
dividends in the way of information and observations which are worth
more than the mere possession of the pierced and empty eggs.
All the time that I was studying this nest both the parent birds were
moving around me in anxious circles. At times the mother bird would
drop her wings and scurry along just in front of me, pretending that
she was wounded nigh unto death and that, if I would but follow her
away from the nest, she could easily be caught. Both the birds had
brown backs and buff breasts and sides spotted with black, and
constantly tilted their tails and walked instead of hopping. As soon
as I came back to the farmhouse, I rummaged through colored charts and
bird-books until I had decided that the nest was that of a fox
sparrow, which also has a brown back and a spotted breast. It was not
until another year that I learned that the fox sparrow nests in the
far North and that the bird whose home I had discovered was none other
than the oven-bird--or golden-crowned accentor, to give him his more
sonorous title. This is the bird which comes in late April or early
May and sings all through the woods the best example of a crescendo
song in all bird-music. His nest on the ground usually has a domed
overhanging roof which makes it resemble an old-fashioned Dutch oven.
In spite of my ignorance there followed the happiest week of my life.
I forgot that I was an invalid, as well as all the injunctions of my
doctor. From morning until night I hunted birds' nests. As usual
fortune favored the novice, and I found nests that first week which I
have found but few times since.
The very next morning, on the other side of Pond Hill I turned a
sudden corner of the path through the dim green silence, and stepped
right into a breakfast-party. Mrs. Ruffed Grouse, known in that part
of the country as partridge, was breakfasting in the open path with at
least a dozen little grouse--or is it greese. Although taken by
surprise, neither she nor her children hesitated for the fraction of a
second. Falling upon the ground, she rolled and flapped as if in the
last agonies of death, whining like a puppy and dragging herself
almost to my feet. I looked away from the covey for a minute, to watch
the bird struggling and whining at my very feet. As I stretched my
hand out toward her, she feebly flopped away, still apparently well
within reach. I took a step or so after her, to see if she would
really permit herself to be caught. Suddenly realizing that she was
only decoying me away from her brood, I turned back. Although I had
gone less than six feet, and the little birds had been huddled
together close to me on the bare path, they had absolutely
disappeared. It seemed impossible that in a few seconds they could
have gained the shelter of the woods or could have found cover in the
scanty grass and scattered leaves close at hand. Not one could I find
although I searched and searched. When I turned back the mother grouse
was gone also, although I could hear her whining through the bushes.
Years later, again at the edge of the woods, one day early in June, I
came upon another mother grouse leading a covey of little chicks,
evidently just hatched, in single file out from the woods into the
open, probably to catch grasshoppers. She went through the same
performance as the first one, but this time I selected the two nearest
chicks, which stood directly in front of me, and resolved that nothing
would make me take my eyes away from them. Even as I watched, they
melted away into the grass. One I found lying motionless on its side
under a big brown leaf, looking exactly like its covering. The other I
never did find. At first the leaf-hidden partridge refused to move
even when I touched it, until I picked it up. Then it gave a shrill
peep almost like a little chicken. Instantly the poor mother bird
rushed up to my very feet and dashed her wings frantically against my
legs, jumping up from the ground and whining so piteously that, after
I had stroked her fuzzy, soft little chick, I put it back on the
ground without any further examination. At once it disappeared, and
the mother bird, still whining, also sidled away into the woods.
I hid behind an apple tree and waited nearly half an hour. At last
from the woods sounded a low "Cluck, cluck, cluck," and instantly nine
little partridge chicks, one by one, started up from the most
impossible hiding-places. It was like watching a resurrection. Some
came from under leaves, others out of clumps of grass, and two or
three rose from the almost bare ground, where they had lain in perfect
concealment. Falling into single file, they hurried like little ghosts
into the thicket, and the last I heard of that little family was a few
soft and very satisfied clucks from the hidden mother bird.
During that golden week of treasure-hunting I found a number of common
nests which, although everyday affairs to an experienced
ornithologist, were then, as they are now, a source of never-ending
interest. There was the robin's nest partly made of wool, which I
found in a thorn-bush in the sheep-pasture, with its four long,
sky-blue eggs. Over in the woods, just back of the deserted house
where Nat Bunker, the Indian, used to weave wonderful baskets out of
maiden-hair stems, I found the nest of a wood thrush in a witch-hazel
about seven feet from the ground, by the simple process of running my
head against the bush while going through the thick undergrowth. This
accident bunted the mother thrush off the nest; and pulling the bush
down, I peered in and saw three light-blue eggs.
If I had taken these eggs, as some bird's-nesters do, I never should
have had the experience of actually seeing a little wood thrush come
into the world. It was the last morning of my stay, and I had been
making my round of nests, examining each one and beginning the
bird-notes which I have kept up ever since. As I pulled the nest down
and looked at the three eggs, I suddenly saw a tiny black speck appear
out of the side of one. Then the shell cracked and split, and I
realized that what I had seen was the beak of the little bird within.
In a moment the crack spread, and finally, with a tremendous effort,
one half of the blue shell slid off and there in front of me, snugly
resting in the other half of the shell, was the naked baby-thrush, its
long neck curled down beside its round stomach. Raising its blind
head, it pressed against the confining shell, while its whole bare
body shook with the heart-throbs of a new life. I realized that before
my eyes this bare, blind bird was passing from one world into another;
and when the birth was finally accomplished and, free from the
prisoning shell, the little thrush lay panting on the bottom of the
soft nest, I turned away with a certain sense of uplift that I had
watched a fellow creature win a battle for a higher life.
It was another wood thrush's nest that same week, in the deep of a
thicket, that gave me still another experience. The nest was in a tiny
bush much lower than I have ever found a wood thrush's nest since.
When the mother thrush left the nest, she wasted no time in idle
alarm-notes, but, circling around the bush, flew straight for my face.
I ducked, and she went over me, only to turn and come back; and if I
had not guarded myself by striking at her with my hands, I have no
manner of doubt that she would have struck me with her beak.
In only one other instance in many years of bird's-nesting have I ever
been actually attacked by a nesting bird. Once in the twilight I had
found my first and last nest of a Kentucky warbler on the edge of a
wood. Taking a short cut through the trees, I was instantly assailed
by a pair of screech-owls, which flew directly at my face, snapping
their beaks and making little wailing notes. The light was so dim and
their flight so swift, that I actually ran out into the open, fearing
lest they might land with beak or claw on my eyes.
It was on the third day that I found in a white-thorn bush the little
horse-hair nest of the chipping sparrow. This last summer, in the
depths of Northern Canada, while hunting for such rare nests as the
bay-breasted, the yellow-palm and the Tennessee warblers, I found the
same little horse-hair home of the chipping sparrow. I thought with
this my last, as I did with my first, that there are no eggs of
American birds more beautiful than those little blue, brown-flecked
eggs of the dear gentle little chippy.
That same day, on the edge of the thick woods near the schoolhouse, I
found swinging from maple saplings, four and five feet from the
ground, the beautiful little woven baskets, thatched on the outside
with white birch-bark and lined within with pine-needles, of the
red-eyed vireo, with the black line through and the white line above
her red eye. In the vast, bare hardhack pasture on the slope of Pond
Hill, I watched a field sparrow fly down under a hardhack bush with a
bug in its beak. Hurrying there, I found on the ground, concealed by
the bush, her little nest of woven grass, with four little field
sparrows inside, whose gaping beaks kept both father and mother field
sparrow busy all day to fill them. As the parent birds flitted around
me, I could see plainly the pink beak which distinguishes the field
sparrow from all others of its family. Beside the brook, among the
cat-tails on the ground, I found the rough nest of the red-winged
blackbird, with its four eggs scrawled with strange black
hieroglyphics.
The fourth day was another treasure-trove day. Just at dawn, in a
dew-drenched thicket of spirea, I found three nests not six feet
apart. In one, root-lined and thatched with strips of grape-vine bark,
glowed the four deep blue eggs of the cat bird. The next nest,
singularly deep and made of dried grass, was owned by a black-blue
indigo bunting who, in spite of his intense coloring, seemed content
with three washed-out white eggs and a light-brown wife. On the last
nest the bird was brooding, and showed the golden-crowned head and the
chestnut band along the side which has given its name to the
chestnut-sided warbler. The nest, a humble affair of grass and hair,
sheltered four wonderful eggs, pink-white, spotted at the largest end
with flecks of chocolate and lilac and umber. Back of the thickets
tottered an old, old house. For fifty years it had been leased to the
wild-folk. As I looked at it, one of them flitted out of the
cellar-way, a gray bird whose name-note was phoebe. Just within the
doorway, on an oak beam, I found her new-finished nest of fresh,
bright, green moss.
All that morning I followed orchid-haunted paths through dim aisles of
high pine trees without finding a nest. When I gave up hunting for
them, they appeared. Toward noon I had put together a pocket rod and
was wading down the bed of a little brook, to catch a few trout for
lunch. In a little pool at the foot of a laurel bush, I landed a plump
jeweled fish. I cast again, and my hook caught a low hanging branch. I
gave the bough a shake, and from the foot of the bush a pale brown
bird stole out. A moment later I was looking at my first veery's nest.
It seemed strange to meet face to face this dweller in the dark woods.
Usually I had heard his weird harp-notes from the cool green depths of
the thicket, but with never a glimpse of the singer. To-day he sat on
a low branch within six feet, and I could plainly see the faintly
marked breast and the white spot under the beak which are the
field-marks of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Both birds flittered
around me like ghosts, saying faintly, "Wheer! wheer! wheer!" The nest
was built just off the ground and lined with brown leaves, and held
four of the most vivid blue eggs owned by any of the bird-folk. The
eggs of the cat-bird are of a deeper blue, but the strange vivid
brightness of the veery's eggs makes all other blue eggs look faded by
contrast.
All too soon my glorious week of treasure-hunting drew to a close. For
the last day were reserved the best two of my bird-adventures. During
the morning I had followed a wood-road which led through dark woods
into a marsh, and then up a wooded slope. I sat down to rest, and
suddenly saw a gray bird fly up into a tree, alight on a limb, and
before my eyes suddenly disappear. Bringing my field-glasses to bear,
I discovered saddled on that limb a lichen-covered nest, which looked
so exactly like the limb itself that, if the bird had not shown me her
home, I would never by any chance have discovered it. It was a far
climb for an invalid, but I felt that life was not worth living unless
I could have a closer look at this strange nest which had flashed into
sight right before my eyes. Gruntingly I clambered up the trunk, and
for the first time looked into the beautiful nest of the wood pewee.
It was lined with down and held four perfect eggs, pearly-white and
flecked with heavy brown and black spots.
For a long time I sat perched aloft, rejoicing over every perfect
detail of that nest and the eggs, and studying the gentle, silent,
anxious parent birds, of a dark-brownish-gray with two white wing-bars
and whitish under-parts. I went back to lunch feeling that my last day
had been well spent. However, the best was yet to be. I realize from
later experiences in bird's nesting that all this has an impossible
sound, but I can only say that I am setting down the happenings of
this week of treasure-hunting exactly as they came, and as they appear
in the battered canvas-bound note-book in which I scrawled my
field-notes that summer. The Wild Folk had evidently decided to
celebrate my discovery of their world by granting me seven days of
nest-finding rarely vouchsafed even to veteran ornithologists.
[Illustration: THE JEWEL-BOX OF THE WOOD PEWEE]
It was at twilight, and I stood on the edge of an old orchard where
grew a white-oak tree. As I looked away across the valley, I heard a
humming noise, and through the dimming light saw a tiny bird buzzing
through the air just overhead. As I watched, she alighted on a long
limb about ten feet from the ground, and even an ignoramus like myself
could recognize the long curved beak of the hummingbird. This one had
a white instead of a crimson throat, which, I was to learn, marked the
female. For an instant the little bird perched on the limb just over
my head, and then suddenly sidled toward what seemed a tiny knot, but
was not. Lest I be betrayed into further puns unworthy the fair fame
of a bird-student, I hasten to add that I had found the nest of a
ruby-throated hummingbird.
It was too dark that evening to examine it more closely, but by
sunrise the next morning I was on the spot with a step-ladder, and
with more delight than I have ever had in a nest since, looked down
into the tiny lichen-covered, cobweb-stitched, thistle-down-lined nest
of this smallest of all our birds. Within were two tiny white eggs.
The opening of the nest was just about the size of a quarter of a
dollar, and it did not seem possible that two little birds could later
be brooded and fed and reared in such a tiny cradle. The nest itself
was saddled on the limb, which was perhaps four inches in diameter.
It was so placed that the bottom of the nest did not rest directly on
the limb, but hung a little to one side, so that the future little
birds would rest in the swing of a hammock rather than on the hard
foundation of the branch itself. The nest was lashed to the limb with
strand after strand of cobwebs carried and wound around and around,
until the whole structure was firmly anchored by myriads of almost
invisible but tough little ropes. Inside, it was lined with the soft
yellowish-white fluffy fleece found inside milkweed pods. Next came a
layer of reddish-brown seed-husks, all bound and lashed together with
a network of cobwebs. On the outside was a layer of dull ashy-green
lichen-scales. Each minute separate fragment was fitted into a mosaic
which covered the whole nest. Outside of everything was another almost
invisible network of cobwebs, like the net of a balloon which holds
the round globe within. There must have been hundreds of gossamer
strands making up this network, all so fine that only by the closest
examination could they be seen.
Every bird's nest is a miracle, but I don't know any that is such a
marvel of industry and ingenuity and beauty as that of the
ruby-throated bird. Later on, when Mrs. Hummingbird was through with
her home, I collected it, and had an opportunity of seeing just what
the building of that nest meant to her--for, sad to say, Mr. H. B.
never moves a claw to help in home-building. The labor of collecting
the spider-webs alone, to say nothing of the hundreds of lichen-flecks
and seed-husks, would seem to be almost impossible. On the outside of
the nest I counted over a hundred separate bits of lichen, and then
undoubtedly overlooked many; while in the next layer of seed-husks
there were probably at least three times as many. Bit by bit, flake by
flake, the little worker had gathered her material, and from it had
spun, and woven and built a nest which was not only soft and secure
for her little ones, but, when finished, was absolutely disguised. No
prowler on the ground or pirate of the air could tell that nest from a
lichen-covered knot, unless, as had been my fortune, the little mother
herself showed it to them.
So endeth the tale of my first treasure-hunting. If you are not one of
us, don't let another summer go by without joining our Order. You will
find a wealth of happiness which no thief can steal nor misfortune
lose, and which, as the years go by, pays ever-increasing dividends of
joyous memories.
VII
BIRD'S-NESTING
It is the best of all out-of-door sports bar none. The thrill of
hidden treasure, the lure of adventure, the joy of escape from in-door
days--all these are part of it. Try it of a May day, or before sunrise
some June morning. I have a friend who leads a double life. During
business hours he is the president of a bank. Outside of them he is
the most abandoned bird's-nester of my acquaintance. If his depositors
could see their president going up the side of a perpendicular
oak-tree with climbing-irons, to look at the dizzy home of a red-tail
hawk, or picking his way across bottomless bogs in search of the
bittern's nest, there would probably be a run on his bank.
I know a woman seventy-two years young, who took up bird's-nesting in
order to help forget a great sorrow. While her contemporaries are
dozing their lives away in caps and easy-chairs, she is afield in all
sorts of weather, and sees more birds and finds more nests in a year
than the average woman meets in a lifetime. Incidentally she gets more
health and happiness out of life than any woman of her age whom I have
ever met.
Another woman, in a little town in New Jersey, by the sudden death of
her husband was left alone with but little money and no friends.
Moreover, her doctor advised her that she had only a year at most to
live. One day she found the nest of a prairie warbler, that little
jewel-casket lined with fern-wool. It held four eggs like pink-flecked
pearls. The very next day she bought a bird-book, and forgot all about
herself, and spent the happiest months of her life hunting nests. At
the end of a year in the open, she notified her indignant physician
that she had become too much interested in her hobby to confirm his
diagnosis. To-day she supports herself happily by writing about what
she sees and hears among the wild-folk.
The moral of all this is, go bird's-nesting. This past summer,
practising what I preach, I spent all my spare holidays in May, June,
and July hunting rare nests. Let me say in preface that I collect only
with a note-book and a camera. Personally, I prefer to have memories
and notes and pictures of my bird's-nests rather than cabinets full of
pierced and empty eggs; for I believe that a human who visits his
brethren of the air as their friend will find out more about them than
he who follows them about like a weasel, only to rob their nests.
The first of my bird-holidays was on May 20th. Four of us were to meet
at Mount Pocono, the highest mountain in Pennsylvania, on a hunt for
the rare nest of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Late that
evening we reached the camp near the top of the mountain, where we
were to make our headquarters. Up there the weather had harked back
to March, and the water froze on the porch that night. We pooled our
blankets and curled up together for warmth.
At one A.M. a whip-poor-will began his loud night-song. He always
sings as if he were wound up, and in a great hurry to finish his song
before the mechanism runs down. Later, in the darkness, we heard the
drumming like distant thunder of the ruffed grouse. One of our party
claims that on this mountain the grouse always drum at four-thirty in
the morning; and his stock as an accurate ornithologist went above par
when we examined our watches and found that it was just half-past
four. As the darkness turned to the dusk of dawn, the first day-song
was the beautiful minor strain of the white-throated sparrow. "O
Canada, Canada, Canada," he fluted. Then came a snatch of the wheezing
strain of the song sparrow. Finally, sweetest of all, sounded two or
three tantalizing notes of the hermit thrush, pure, single, prolonged
notes of wonderful sweetness, followed by two arpeggio chords.
We were up and out before sunrise; for he who would find rare nests
must look for them while the birds are laying or brooding. Four hours
distant, back in Philadelphia, summer had come. Here the trees showed
the green tracery of early spring, and the apple trees were still in
blossom, while everywhere the woods were white with the long pure
snow-petals of the shadblow. Some day we four are going to follow
Spring north, bird's-nesting all the way, until within the Arctic
Circle we find her in mid-July.
To-day the first nest discovered was that of the junco, or
slate-colored snowbird, whose jingling little song and the flutter of
whose white skirts were everywhere throughout the woods. This one was
close to the camp, hollowed out of the side of a bank of pine-needles,
and held four white eggs sparsely spotted with reddish-brown. The
little mother-bird chipped frantically, with a clicking note which the
Architect said always made him think that she carried pebbles in her
throat.
There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist remarked
epigrammatically. Some were the common trilliums, of a dark
garnet-red. Besides these we found many of the rarer painted
trilliums--a pure white triangle with a stained crimson reversed
triangle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies in triangles.
The painted trillium has the crimson triangle in the centre, set on
the white triangle made up of three petals which, in their turn, are
fixed in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole blossom is
set in a still larger triangle made up of three green leaves.
Everywhere the woods were full of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of
the azaleas. Its blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored
spots.
The next nest found was to me the most eventful one of the day,
although not an especially rare one on that mountain. The Architect
was walking beside one of the strange hummocks which are thought to
have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path of some old-time
cyclone. Suddenly his eye was caught by the gleam of four sky-blue
eggs shining like turquoises from a nest directly on the ground,
lined neatly with red-brown pine-needles and with dry dark green moss
on the outside, the hall-mark of the nest of the hermit thrush. In
front of it was a cushion of partridge-berry vines, with their green
leaves and red berries, while blueberry fronds, covered with tender
green leaves, arched over the nest, and sprays of ground-pine
sheltered its sides. It was a fitting home for the beautiful twilight
singer. The eggs of a hermit thrush actually seem to gleam from the
ground, unlike the mottled and speckled and clouded eggs of most
ground-nesters.
As the sun came up, the whole mountain-side rang with bird-songs.
There was the abrupt strain of the magnolia warbler, who to my ears
says, "Wheedle, wheedle, whee-chee." The black-and-white warbler sang
like a tiny, creaking wheel, as he ran up and down tree-trunks. Down
in the meadows beyond the lake, the long-tailed brown thrasher said,
"Hello, hello! Come over here, come over here. There he goes, there he
goes. Whoa, whoa, ha-ha, ha-ha." If you do not believe my reading of
his song, listen the next time one sings to you, and see if these are
not his exact words. Overhead we often heard the squeal of the
red-shouldered hawk, sounding almost like the cry of the blue jay.
Then there was the loud yet gentle warble of the purple finch; and
once we saw a beautiful rose-red male and his gray-brown wife feeding
each other on a limb like a pair of lovebirds. Another song which was
interesting to me, because almost new, was that of the solitary or
blue-headed vireo, who sang, "See, see me-e. See me, you! you!" His
whole song is in couplets. The Artist said that my rendering was too
imaginative, and that what the bird really said was "Che-wee--che-woo,
che-wee--chu, chu," which perhaps is more accurate.
[Illustration: THE RED-SHOULDERED HAWK]
Through appalling swamps and tangled thickets of rhododendron we were
led by the Banker, who had highly resolved not to return without a
sight of the golden-crowned kinglet's nest. Once we came to a large
spruce in which had been cut, in the living wood, great square holes
like those in bar-posts. On one side we counted five, on another
three, while on the opposite side were no less than ten, with a new
one on the top cut right into the solid heart-wood. It was a
feeding-tree of the great pileated woodpecker of the North, a
magnificent black and white bird with a scarlet crest, nearly the size
of a crow. All that morning we searched in vain for the kinglet's
nest. Only as we came back to the cabin at noon for lunch, were our
hopes raised.
As we walked down the trail, not a hundred yards from the
cabin-entrance, in a spruce tree, the Banker spied a great hanging
nest made of wool and lined with feathers, from the top of which flew
the only golden-crowned kinglet which we saw that day, with the orange
patch on the top of his tiny head edged with black and yellow. The
nest was empty, but the Banker felt that he had made the great
discovery of his life and discoursed learnedly on the industry of this
tiny bird, which could find and carry such a mass of wool and build a
nest at least a hundred times larger than itself. It was not until a
month later that he was reluctantly convinced that what he had found
was the nest of a deer-mouse.
That afternoon we skirted the little lake and saw, not forty feet
above us, a bald eagle flying down toward us with its snowy neck and
pure white tail. He flew with four or five quick flaps, and then would
soar. In the distance we saw another eagle pursued by a scurrilous
cawing crow. The eagle flew over to the shore, and alighted and drank,
and then, standing on the edge of the water, seemed to be fishing. His
pursuer also alighted just behind him, and walked close up. Every time
the eagle would turn, the crow would scuttle off, like some little
blackguard boy following and reviling one of his elders. Several times
the crow flew over the head of the eagle and tried to gain courage
enough to make a dab at him. Through it all the king of birds paid
absolutely no attention to his tormentor. The comparison of the crow
with the eagle gave some idea of the size of the latter. He seemed
over three times as large as the crow.
It was the Banker again, on the other side of the lake, who made the
next discovery. We were hunting a little apart through the woods, when
he announced from where he stood that he had just caught a glimpse of
a Brewster's warbler. For the benefit of other bird-students who are
in my class, let me write what I learned that day in regard to said
bird. A Brewster's warbler is the rare hybrid between the
golden-winged warbler and the blue-winged warbler, more closely
resembling the golden-winged. When it takes after the blue-winged, it
is called the Lawrence warbler. This specimen we studied feather by
feather for over half an hour at short range, and the experts of the
party pronounced it beyond peradventure a Brewster's warbler,--a bird
not seen often in a lifetime. It was solid blue on the back, pearly
white underneath, and showed white tail-feathers, together with a
greenish-yellow patch on the very crown of its head. It had two broad
yellow wing-bars, one large and the other small, and its white throat,
innocent of any black mark, was the field-mark by which it could be
told from either of its parents or from its half-brother the Lawrence.
It was the Artist who made the last discovery of the day. Near the
crest of the mountain, he gave a piercing cry and announced that he
had discovered an Indian cobra. We all hastened to his rescue, and saw
a fearsome sight. Coiled in front of him, hissed and struck a bloated,
swollen snake, with flattened head and up-turned snout. It was none
other than the American puff-adder, which ought to be called the bluff
adder since, in spite of its threats, it is never known to bite, and
is really a harmless and gentle snake.
The last thing the writer can remember of that trip was hearing, as he
fell asleep, the Architect tell the Banker of the time he found two
loon's eggs, which a man had discovered on the top of a muskrat's
house and put under one of his hens to hatch.
The next day we were back in Philadelphia and summer again, with a
list of seventy-six different kinds of birds identified on the trip
and a total of ten nests found.
A few days later I went bird's-nesting with another friend in the very
heart of the city of Camden. Through the manufacturing district a
sluggish creek winds its way past factory after factory. There, under
a clump of golden-rod leaves, he showed me the nest of a spotted
sandpiper, made of reeds lined with grass, containing four
eggs--dark-brown eggs, spotted at the larger end with chocolate marks,
and coming to a sharp point at the other end. Later on, I found
another nest in the middle of a mass of horse-tail. Then, in the very
centre of a base-ball diamond, not far from second base, on the naked
ground, he showed me a killdeer's nest--a hollow scraped in the
gravel, with four eggs which so matched the stones that they had
escaped the notice of the players all around them. On the bank of the
creek we found song sparrows' nests, and out in a patch of marsh, on
the very last tussock, the dried-grass nest of a swamp sparrow, which
was much thicker than the song sparrow's, while the four eggs were of
a marbled warm brown and white.
Then we pushed on, still in the city limits, until we came to an old
quarry-bed half-filled with water, which had turned into a noisome bit
of marshland. Pushing a rickety raft out through the muck and
water-reeds of the stagnant water, my friend showed me, on a clump of
pickerel weed on a sunken stick, a nest of twigs on which was
sitting a strange bird. Its long sharp beak pointed straight skyward.
Its back was a combination of shades of soft reddish-browns, while its
breast was reddish-brown streaked with white. The most curious things
about it were its eyes. They were almost all pupil, with a bright
golden ring around the extreme edge, and stared at us unwinkingly like
a great snake. Although we came close up, the bird absolutely refused
to leave her nest, and stabbed viciously at a stick which I poked out
toward her. Finally, not daring to trust my hand within reach of that
stabbing yellow beak, I lifted her up bodily with the long stick,
enough to show five whitish-blue eggs rounded at each end. It was the
rare nest and eggs of the least bittern, a bird a little over a foot
long, which has a strange habit of clutching with its claws the stalks
of reeds and walking up them like a monkey. As we left, amid the
clicking notes of the cricket-frogs and the boom of the bull-frogs we
heard a very low "Cluck, cluck, cluck." It was the least bittern
singing the only song she knew, in celebration of the fact that she
still had her eggs safe.
[Illustration: MRS. KILDEER AT HER NEST]
The Architect and myself decided to travel once again, later in the
season, to the mountain, in the hope that we might make a better
nesting record. We reached the cabin on June 17th, and again found
ourselves back in spring. The peepers were still calling, and there
were wild lilies-of-the-valley in the woods, and pink rose-hearted
twin-flowers, with their scent of heliotrope. Everywhere grew the
dwarf cornel, or bunch-berry, with its four white petals--the smallest
of the dogwoods, which grows only a few inches high.
The first nest was found by me. It was built on a foundation of tiny
twigs in a bush, and had a two-story effect, the upper story being
made of fine grass. As I came near the bush, a magnificent
chestnut-sided warbler, with the bay patches on his sides and his
yellow crown, made such an outcry that I suspected the nest and
finally found it. There were three eggs in it and one tiny young bird,
smaller than a bumblebee. Everywhere grew the beautiful northern
azalea, of a clear pink with a perfume like sandal-wood. The Canadian
warbler, with its black necklace on its yellow breast, sang everywhere
a song which sounded like, "Ea-sy, ea-sy, you, you"; and we heard also
the orange-throated Blackburnian warbler's wiry, thin notes.
Near the top of the mountain are two sphagnum bogs, difficult to find,
but the home of many a rare bird. We finally located the larger of
these bogs, and there the Artist made the great discovery of the day.
Right out from underneath his foot, as he splashed through the wet
moss, flew a yellow-bellied flycatcher, which gives a note like the
wood-pewee and whose nest had been found only once before in the state
of Pennsylvania. Right in front of him, hidden in the deep moss, was
this long-sought nest. It was set deep in club-moss and lined with
white pine-needles, and contained four pinkish-white eggs with an
aureole around the larger end, with light rufous markings. It was so
overshadowed with wintergreen leaves and aronia and bunch-berries
that, even after the Artist had pointed out the place to me, it was
with very great difficulty that I found it.
As we crossed the marsh, I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush,
which sounds to me like a cross between the notes of the wood thrush
and the strange harp-chords of the veery or Wilson thrush. In another
part of the bog sang the rare Nashville warbler, whose nest we have
yet to find. Its song starts like the creak of the black-and-white
warbler and ends like a chipping sparrow. In a marsh beyond the
sphagnum bog, I found the nest of a Maryland yellowthroat, set in a
yellow viburnum shrub some six inches from the ground. This nest is
usually on the ground. It was set just as a gem is set in a ring, the
setting consisting of leaves which come up into five or six points.
Held by the points is a little cup of grass. The eggs were the most
beautiful we saw that day--of a pinkish-white with a wreath of
chestnut blotches around the larger end. On the farther side of the
marsh, a white-throated sparrow flew out from in front of me; and
after a long search I found its nest--a little moss-rimmed cup of
gray-green, yellow grass, containing four eggs of a faint blue clouded
with chestnut, which was massed in large blotches at the larger end.
With the four eggs was a dumpy young cow-bird, that fatal changeling
which is the death of so many little birds. In this case we saved four
prospective white-throated sparrows from being starved to death by
their ugly foster-brother. The white-throat is a dear, gentle, little
bird. Even its alarm-notes are soft, instead of being harsh and
disagreeable like those of most other sparrows.
The next day I found a song sparrow's nest and a catbird's nest, and
then in the midst of dark, cool woods, where an icy brown trout-brook
ran through a mass of rhododendron, a thrush suddenly slipped away
ahead of me out of a clump of rhododendron bushes. The light color of
the bird and the lighter spotted breast marked it as a veery or Wilson
thrush. On looking at the bush, I saw the nest, a rough one made of
hemlock twigs matted together, and lined with pine-needles with a
basis of leaves. Inside were four small eggs of a heavenly blue. They
are among the smallest of all of our pure-blue eggs.
That same day the Artist found a beautiful nest of a
black-throated-blue warbler, also set in a rhododendron bush. The nest
was made of the light inner bark of the rhododendron, which was of a
bright yellow. Inside, it was lined with black and tan rootlets so
fine that they look almost like horse-hair. These are the same
rootlets which the magnolia warbler uses to line its nest, and up to
the present time no ornithologist whom I have met has been able to
identify them.
* * * * *
"Can you go to Maryland to-day on a bird-trip?" telephoned the
Banker.
"No," said I, "lawyers have to work for a living."
"There'll be blue-gray gnatcatchers and mocking-birds and Acadian
flycatchers," he tried again.
"No," said I.
"I've found out where the prothonotary warbler lives," he said once
more.
"No," said I.
"We may find its nest," he continued. "No one up here has seen one for
years."
"No," said I firmly. "What time does the train start?"
Sunset found me Somewhere in Maryland. I was squeezed into a buggy
built for one, along with the Miller, at whose house we were intending
to stop, and the Banker, who is constructed on flowing, generous
lines. We drove creakingly through miles and miles of blossoming peach
orchards. At the Miller's house we ate the worst supper that money
could buy. The Miller's wife had evidently been born a bad cook, and
by careful practice had become worse. It was over at last, and the
Banker and I retired to a room under the rafters which contained one
window and a mountainous bed. The rest of the space was taken up by
mosquitoes. I undressed, jumped into the bed, and sank out of sight.
The Banker located me by my muffled cries for help, and pulled me to
the surface just in time to save my life. Thereafter we molded a
conical crater in that feather-bed and carefully fitted ourselves in,
leaving a large air-hole at the top.
It was a hot night. The mosquitoes bit steadily, and the feather-bed
was like a furnace seven times heated. All night long a whip-poor-will
called his name under our window over three million times. The Banker
said he counted the notes. Finally, after hours and hours of agony, I
fell into a troubled sleep and was instantly awakened by the Banker,
who said it was time to get up. We breakfasted on what remained of the
corpse of the supper of the night before, which we found on the table.
A few moments later I was morosely moving an alleged boat through the
mists of the morass.
Without further alliteration, let me chronicle what paid for all the
toil, hardships and privations of the trip. It was the sight of a bird
of burnished gold flashing through the curling mists. "Tweet, tweet,
tweet," he called ringingly as he flew. The note reminded me somewhat
of the loud song of the Kentucky warbler, and the Banker, of the note
of the solitary sandpiper. Every now and then we caught tantalizing
glimpses of this warbler, which never by any chance stands still, but
flits here and there among the trees over the water. From the trees I
constantly heard squeaking notes, apparently of young birds. They
sounded everywhere, and I decided that the whole marsh must be full of
nests. The Banker laughed at my ignorance and told me that this was
the note of the blue-gray gnatcatchers--"like a mouse with a
toothache," as Chapman describes it. With great difficulty I caught a
glimpse of the tiny bird here and there among the tree-tops, and saw
the two long feathers of its tail, and had a glimpse of the gray and
white of its plumage. Some weeks before, the Banker had found down
there one of its rare and beautiful nests, like a large hummingbird's
nest, lined with down and thatched on the outside with lichens, and
fastened to a high bough.
That day I found the first nest of the prothonotary warbler. This bird
uses deserted woodpeckers' nests in dead trees set in marshes, so it
was necessary to paddle around to every dead tree which showed a hole.
I finally saw a little red-birch stub sticking up in the corner of the
marsh, and rowing over to it, noticed a small hole in its side.
Picking away the bark, I made it larger and a piece of the fresh green
moss, from which the nest of the prothonotary warbler is always built,
showed itself. Imbedded in the moss was a vivid orange-yellow feather,
which could belong to no other bird. The nest was just built and
contained no eggs.
The Banker found the second nest, in a willow-stub ten feet from the
ground, in an old downy woodpecker's nest. He found it by seeing the
male bird fly into the hole. Climbing up to the nest, he found that in
it were four young birds. Perching on a limb, he sat about four feet
from the nest while I was in the boat perhaps ten feet away. The
cock-bird flew up with a May-fly, making a soft alarm-note something
like that made by a field sparrow, only gentler. He flew up close to
where my friend sat and hesitated for a long while. Finally, the
hungry little birds inside gave a prolonged squeak, which probably
meant, "May-flies immediately!" This was too much for Mr.
Prothonotary. With a farewell look at the Banker, he turned his back
and dived into the nest, placing himself entirely at the mercy of this
giant who was keeping guard over his home. Seven times he did this
while we watched, bringing in two beetles, a small wasp, a fly, and
three May-flies. The hen-bird would come up time and time again with a
fly in her beak, but never could quite muster up courage enough to go
into the nest, but absent-mindedly swallowing the fly herself, would
go off.
We had a wonderful chance to study the coloring of this rare bird. The
cock-bird had a bright black eye which showed vividly against his
yellow cheek, as did his long black bill. His colors were gray,
yellow, and olive. The underside of his tail was pure white, and he
had a white edge to his wings, while the top of the wings was
greenish-yellow. The whole head, throat, and breast were of an intense
golden, almost orange yellow, and the wings were bluish-gray. The bird
itself was just about the size of the common black-and-white warbler.
The female was of the same coloring, only much paler.
After that came the tragedy of the day for me. An overhanging bough
knocked off my glasses, and they sank in the black waters of the marsh
and continued sunk, in spite of my frantic groping and diving for
them. The rest of the day I realized how the blinded galley-slaves
felt who were chained to the oar in mediæval times. The Banker kindly
described to me all the sixty-five different kinds of birds he saw in
that marsh. As my vision was limited to a range of about two feet, I
did not see many more birds personally. In spite of my blinded
condition, I did discover, however, another prothonotary's nest. I had
taken hold of a rotten willow-stub while pushing the boat through a
thicket. It broke in my hand, and there, in an exposed downy
woodpecker's hole, was a newly made nest of green moss, with a few
twigs and bark-strips on top, but no eggs. The fourth and last nest
was found by the Banker, again in a downy's hole. He saw something
move and thought it was a mouse or chickadee. Finally a long bill came
out of the hole and then a head. It was a hen prothonotary building
her nest. She had the hole already filled with moss, and was bringing
in grass, and would whirl around and around inside, modeling the nest
carefully. Within, she had lined it with grass, just as a chipping
sparrow's nest is lined with hair.
This was the last nest of the day. The Banker suggested that we stay
over another night, but I felt that home was the best place for a
blind man. My last memory of the golden prothonotary was hearing him
call, "Tweet, tweet, tweet" from the willows, as we started back to
the mill.
The last of my nesting-trips was on July 7th. The Artist in some
mysterious way had learned the secret of Tern Island, one of the few
places on the New Jersey coast where the Wilson tern still nests. In a
rickety old power-boat--probably it was the first one ever built--we
traveled haltingly through the most intricate channels imaginable,
and finally reached an island hidden by shoals and salt-marshes, but
whose farther beach faced the ocean. There, in a space about four
hundred by one hundred feet, we found seventy nests of tern,
containing a hundred and sixty-five eggs. Most of the nests contained
two eggs, some three, and one, four. The nests were merely hollows in
the sand, lined with bits of pure-white shell. The usual color of the
eggs was a blue-green background, heavily blotched with chocolate
blotches, although I found one egg of a light green, speckled all over
with light-red specks. In only one nest was there a young bird. The
little chick lay flat in the burning sun, while overhead hung the
mother tern, pearl-white with black-tipped wings, making a grinding,
scolding note. The young tern was downy like a duckling, and had tiny
red feet and a pink beak tipped with black. We put up a stake to mark
the nest, and later in the day, when we came back to photograph it, we
found that the little tern had crawled out, followed the shadow which
the stick had made, and lay with its head in the scanty shade far away
from the nest.
We met other rare water-fowl that blazing day. We saw the rare piping
plover, whose nest I was afterwards to find in Upper Canada, black
skimmers, with their strange slant-cut beaks, black tern, least tern,
loons, black-bellied plover, and everywhere throughout the
salt-meadows enormous great-blue herons.
This was the last trip of our quartette for the summer, and we are
looking forward to many more springs and summers among the bird-folk.
Let me end as I began--go bird's-nesting. Escape into the open from
these narrow in-door days, and learn the way to where the wild-folk
dwell. Seek their paterans and share their secrets. In their land you
will find the help of the hills, and hope wide as the world, and
strength and youth and health and happiness in full measure. Try it.
VIII
THE TREASURE-HUNT
I have always been of a very treasurous disposition. Such terms as
ingots, doubloons, and pieces-of-eight all my life long have been to
me words of power. In spite of these tendencies, I cannot say that up
to date I have unearthed much treasure. To be sure, there was that day
when I found a shiny quarter in the mud on my way to school. Instead
of being the out-cropping of a lode of currency, it turned out,
however, to be only a sporadic, solitary, companionless coin. Even so,
it was no mean find. I remember that it brought into my young life a
full pound of peppermint lozenges tastefully decorated in red ink,
with mottos of simple diction and exquisite sentiment. "Remember me,"
and "I love but dare not tell," were two of them, while another was a
manly query unanswered across the years which read, "How about a
kiss?" Although this treasure-trove gained me a fleeting popularity,
yet, like all treasure, it was soon gone. A prosaic teacher
confiscated the bulk of the hoard, and all I gained from it was the
privilege of learning by heart a poem of the late Mr. Longfellow. To
this day those beautiful lines,--
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining,--
cause in me a slight sensation of nausea.
It is probably due to these lawless traits that in my meridian years I
now hold the position which I do. Five and a half days in the week I
practise law. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons and all holidays,
legal and illegal, I am the Captain of a Robber Band, with all the
perquisites and perils which go with that high office. Without
vaunting myself unduly, I may claim to have fairly deserved my
position. Starting as a mere friar in the band of one Robin Hood, my
abilities as an outlaw brought me rapidly to the front. Thereafter,
when that band was reorganized, I was unanimously offered the position
once held by that implacable character who knew the Sesame Secret and
pursued a Mr. Baba so unsuccessfully, yet so unflinchingly. Flattered
by this recognition of qualities of leadership unsuspected by an
unthinking world, I accepted the responsibilities of the captaincy.
They were shared by First-Lieutenant Trottie, Second-Lieutenant Honey,
Sergeant Henny-Penny, and Corporal Alice-Palace. There were no
privates.
It was on a spring evening soon after the aforesaid election that the
Band met. The Captain spoke with the stern brevity which characterizes
all great leaders.
"Comrades," he announced, shutting the door and looking carefully
under the sofa to make sure that there were no spies about, "I have
just heard that there is a treasure not many miles from here. All
those in favor of a treasure-hunt to-morrow will kindly make a loud
noise."
The vote was probably the finest collection of assorted sounds ever
heard outside of a ship-yard. Right in the middle of it, the door
burst open, and in rushed Minnie, the cook, with a dipper of water,
under the impression that her favorite fear of fire had at last come
to pass. Close behind her was the Quartermaster-General, sometimes
known as Mother, while almost at the same instant old John, the
gardener, ran up on the porch with an axe, shouting hopefully, "Hould
him! I'm comin'!" under the impression that there was a fight of sorts
well under way.
The voting stopped suddenly, and the Captain looked quite ashamed as
he explained. Mother pretended to be very indignant.
"Some day," she said, "you'll all be in terrible danger and you'll
shout and yell and scream and bellow for help but not one of us will
come, will we, John?"
"Divil a step," called back John, as he clumped disappointedly down
the steps, his unused axe over his shoulder.
The Quartermaster-General agreed to withdraw her threat only after the
Captain had pledged the honor of the Band that there should be no
further disgustful noises within the house. Thereafter there were
hurryings and skurryings and dashings to and fro, in preparation for
the great adventure. Honey put fresh rubbers on his trusty sling-shot,
with which he could frequently hit a barn-door at five paces. Trottie
oiled up the air-rifle, which he was only allowed to use in windowless
wildernesses. Henny-Penny kept up such a fusillade with his new
pop-gun, that the Captain threatened to send him forth unarmed on the
morrow if he heard but one more pop. Alice-Palace's practice, however,
was the most spectacular. She had a water-pistol which, when properly
charged, would propel a stream of water an unbelievable distance. From
the bathroom door she took a snap-shot at Henny-Penny, who was
approaching her confidingly. The charge took effect in the very centre
of a large pink ear, and it was a long time before Henny-Penny could
be convinced that he was not mortally wounded.
At last the Captain ordered bed and perfect silence within fifteen
minutes, under penalty of being shot at sunrise.
"Nobody couldn't shoot me at sunrise," boasted Corporal Alice-Palace,
as she started up the stairs, "cause I wouldn't get up."
The next morning at dawn, from the Captain's room sounded the clear
whistle of the cardinal grosbeak--the adventure-call of the Band.
Followed thumps, splashings, and the sounds of rapid dressing from the
third story where the Band bivouacked.
"If there be any here," announced the Captain after breakfast, "who
for the sake of their wives and families wish to draw back, now is the
time. Once on the way, it will be too late."
"I haven't got any wife," piped up Henny-Penny, "nor any family 'cept
this one, but I want to come."
Similar sentiments were expressed by the rest of the Band. The Captain
said that it made the blood run faster in his shriveled old veins to
have such gallant comrades.
Purple grackles creaked and clattered in the trees, and the bushes
were full of song-sparrow notes, as the Band hurried away from the
house-line toward the Land of the Wild-Folk, where Romance still
dwells and adventures lurk behind every bush. A tottering stone
chimney marked its boundaries. There old Roberts Road began. On and
beyond Roberts Road anything might happen.
Each one of the Band, in addition to the lethal weapons already set
forth, carried a note-book and a pencil with which to keep a list of
all birds seen and heard, with notes on the same. Even Corporal
Alice-Palace, who was only six, carried a blank-book about the size of
a geography. To date it contained this single entry: "Robbins eat
wormes. I saw him do it."
The Quartermaster-General, despite the difficulty of the evening
before, had seen to it that the Band carried with them the very finest
lunch that any treasure-hunters ever had since Pizarro dined with the
Inca of Peru.
As they moved deep and deeper into Wild-Folk Land the air was full of
bird-songs. The Captain made them stop and listen to the singing
sparrows. First there was the song sparrow, who begins with three
notes and wheezes a little as he sings. It took them longer to learn
the quieter song of the vesper sparrow, with the flash of white in his
tail-feathers. His song always starts with two dreamy, contralto
notes and dies away in a spray of soprano twitterings. Then there were
the silver flute-notes of the little pink-beaked field sparrow, which
they were to hear later across darkling meadows, and the strange minor
strains of the white-throated sparrow.
Before long, a sudden thirst came upon Sergeant Henny-Penny.
Fortunately they were near the bubbling spring that marked the
beginning of Fox Valley, and the whole Band halted and drank in the
most advanced military manner, to wit, by bending the rims of their
felt hats into a cup. This method the Captain assured them was far
superior to the more usual system of lying flat on their tummies, and
had the approval of all great military leaders from Gideon down.
Right in the very midst of their drinking, there sounded from the
thicket a hurried warble of a mellow timbre, the wood-wind of the
sparrow orchestra, and they caught a fleeting glimpse of the gray and
tawny which is worn only by the fox sparrow, the largest of the
sparrows and the sweetest and rarest singer of them all. A moment
later a song sparrow sang. When he stopped, the strain was taken up by
the fox sparrow in another key. Three times through he sang the
twelve-note melody of the song sparrow, and his golden voice made the
notes of the other sound pitifully thin and reedy. Then the fox
sparrow threw in for good measure a few extemporaneous whistled
strains of his own, and seemed to wait expectantly--but the song
sparrow sang no more.
Through the long narrow valley, hidden between two green hills,
marched the Band, following the hidden safe path that generations of
foxes had made through the very middle of a treacherous marsh. As the
road bent in toward Darby Creek, there sounded the watchman's rattle
of the first kingfisher they had heard that year; and as they came to
the creek itself, a vast blue-gray bird with a long neck and bill
flapped up ahead of them. It was so enormous that Alice-Palace was
positive that it was a roc; but it turned out to be the great blue
heron, the largest bird in Eastern America.
From the marshy fields swept great flocks of red-winged blackbirds,
each one showing a yellow-bordered, crimson epaulet, proof positive
that Mrs. Blackbird was still in the South. Mrs. Robin had come back
the week before, which accounted for the joy-songs which sounded from
every tree-top. Until she comes, the robin's song is faint and thin
and infrequent. Beyond the creek they heard the "Quick, quick, quick,"
of the flicker calling to spring, and before long they came to the
tree where he had hollowed his hole. A most intelligent flicker he
was, too, for his shaft was sunk directly under a sign which read "No
Shooting Here."
From behind them as they marched, tolled the low sweet bell-notes of
the mourning dove--"Ah--coo, coo, coo." The Captain tried to imitate
the sound, and the harassed bird stood it as long as he could, but
finally flew away with whistling wings. Then the Captain told the Band
of a brave mother-dove whose nest he once found on the last day of
March. It was only a flat platform of dry sticks in a spruce tree, and
held two pearly-white eggs. The day after he found it, there came a
sudden snowstorm, and when he saw the nest again, it was covered with
snow--but there was the mother-bird still brooding her dear-loved
eggs, with her head just showing above the drifted whiteness.
[Illustration: MR. FLICKER AT HOME]
Beside the ruins of a spring-house, a gray bird with a tilting tail
said, "Phoe, bee-bee, bee." It was the little phoebe, so glad to
be back that he stuttered when he called his name. Thereafter the
Captain was moved to relate another anecdote. It seemed a friend of
his had stopped a pair of robins from nesting over a hammock hung
under an apple tree, by nailing a stuffed cat right beside their
bough. Whereupon the two robins, when they came the next morning, fled
with loud chirps of dismay. When two phoebes started to build on his
porch, he tried the same plan. He was called out of town the next day,
and when he came back a week later he found that the phoebes had
deserted their old nest. They had however built a new one--on top of
the cat's head.
As the Band swung back into the far end of Roberts Road, the Captain's
eye caught the gleam of a half-healed notch which he had cut in a
pin-oak sapling the year before, at the top of a high bank, to mark
the winter-quarters of a colony of blacksnakes. He halted the Band,
and one by one they clambered up the slope, stopping puffingly at the
first ledge, and searching the withered grass and gray rocks above
for any black, sinister shapes. Suddenly Honey did a remarkable
performance in the standing-back-broad-jump, finishing by rolling
clear to the foot of the bank. Right where he had stood lay a hale and
hearty specimen of a blacksnake nearly five feet long. Evidently it
had only just awakened from its winter-sleep, for there were
clay-smears on the smooth, satiny scales, and even a patch of clay
between the golden, unwinking eyes. Only the flickering of a long,
black, forked tongue showed that his snakeship was alive. Then it was
that the Captain lived up to the requirements of his position by
picking up that blacksnake with what he fondly believed to be an air
of unconcern. He showed the awe-stricken Band that the pupil of the
snake's eye was a circle, instead of the oval which is the hallmark of
that fatal family of pit-vipers to which the rattlesnake, copperhead,
and moccasin belong.
"If you have any doubt about a snake," lectured the Captain, "pick it
up and look it firmly in the eye. If the pupil is oval--drop it.
Perhaps, however," he went on reflectively, "it would be better to get
someone else to do the picking-up part."
When the Band learned from the Captain that it was the creditable
custom of the Zoölogical Gardens to give free entry to such as bore
with them as a gift a snake of size, their views toward the captive
changed considerably. Said snake was now legal tender, to be cherished
accordingly. It was the resourceful First Lieutenant Trottie who
solved all difficulties in regard to transportation. He hurriedly
removed a stocking, and the snake was inserted therein, giving the
stocking that knobbed, lumpy appearance usually seen in such articles
only at Christmas time.
[Illustration: THE MOURNING DOVE ON HER NEST]
From the Den the Band marched to a bowl-shaped meadow not far from old
Tory Bridge, under which a Revolutionary soldier hid with his horse
while his pursuers thundered overhead, well-nigh a century and a half
ago. On three sides of the field the green turf sloped down to a long
level stretch, covered by a thin growth of different trees, centring
on a thicket through which trickled a little stream. Near the fence on
a white-oak tree some ill-tempered owner had fastened a fierce sign
which read: "Keep out. Trespassers will be shot without notice." The
cross owner had been gone many a long year, but the sign still stood,
and it always gave the Band a delightful thrill to read it.
At the edge of the grove the Captain halted them all.
"Comrades," he said in a whisper, "I have heard rumors that there is a
clue to the treasure hidden in the sign-tree."
It was enough. With one accord the Band sprang upon that defenceless
tree. Some searched among its gnarled roots. Others examined the lower
branches. It was Henny-Penny, however, who boosted by Alice-Palace,
fumbled back of the threatening old sign and drew out a crumpled slip
of grimy paper. On it had been laboriously inscribed in some red
fluid, presumably blood, a skull and cross-bones. Underneath, in a
very bad hand, was written: "By the roots of the nearest black-walnut
tree. Captain Kidd."
There was a moment's check. It was Honey who recognized the tree by
its crooked clutching twigs, and found at its roots a crumpled piece
of paper which said: "Go to the nearest tulip tree. Blackbeard the
Pirate." It was Trottie who remembered that a tulip tree has square
leaves, and it was he who found the message which read: "I am buried
under a stone which stands between a spice-bush and a white-ash tree."
They all knew the spice-bush, with its brittle twigs and pungent bark
which was made to be nibbled, and under the stone they found a note
which said: "Look in the crotch of a dogwood tree. If you will listen
you will hear its bark"; which made the Band laugh like anything.
The last message of all read: "I am swinging in a vireo's nest on the
branch of a sour-gum tree." That was a puzzle which held the Band
hunting like beagles in check for a long time. Corporal Alice-Palace
at last spied the bleached little basket-nest at the end of a low
limb. Inside was a bit of paper which, when unfolded, seemed to be
entirely blank. So were the face of the Band as they looked. It was
the Captain again who saved the day.
"I have heard," he whispered, "that sometimes pirates write in
lemon-juice, which makes an invisible ink that needs heat to bring it
out. Like the Gold-Bug, you know."
It was enough. In less than sixty seconds, sun time, the Band had
built a tiny fire after the most approved Indian method, and as soon
as it began to crackle, the paper was held as close to the blaze as
possible. The Captain had the right idea. As the paper bent under the
heat, on its white surface brown tracings appeared, which slowly
formed letters and then words, until they could all read: "I am in the
hidey-hole of the chimney of the Haunted House. The Treasure."
For a moment the Band stared at each other in silence. They had made a
special study of pirates, black, white, yellow, and mixed. Haunted
houses, however, were beyond their bailiwick. It spoke well for the
iron discipline and high hearts of the company that not one of them
faltered. Led by dauntless Sergeant Henny-Penny, they crossed the
creek in single file on a tippy tree-trunk. Half hidden in the bushes
above, a gaunt stone house stared down at them out of empty
window-sockets like a skull. Through the thicket and straight up the
slope the Band charged, with such speed that the Captain was hard put
to keep up with his gallant officers. They never halted until they
stood at the threshold of the House itself. Under the bowed lintel the
Band marched, and never halted until they reached the vast fireplace
which took in a whole side of the room. The floorings of the House had
gone, and nothing but the naked beams remained, save for a patch of
warped boards far up against the stone chimney where the attic used to
be. It was plainly there that they must look for the hidey-hole.
The Captain showed his followers how in one of the window-ledges the
broken ends of the joists made a rude ladder. Up this the Band
clambered to the first tier of joists, without any mishap save that
the Captain's hat fell off and landed in front of the fireplace.
As they all roosted like chickens on the beams, there sounded a
footstep just outside. The Band stood stony still and held their
breath. Through the dim doorway came the furtive figure of a man. In
one hand he carried a basket, while the other was clinched on a
butcher-knife well fitted fo
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