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Locusts and Wild Honey

by John Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #6355 · 358,514 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Locusts and Wild Honey

Author: John Burroughs


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6355]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6355

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        HTML markup by Andrew Sly


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY ***




This etext was produced by Jack Eden
HTML markup by Andrew Sly

[Illustration]




Locusts and Wild Honey

by John Burroughs

Contents

 PREFACE
 I. THE PASTORAL BEES
 II. SHARP EYES
 III. STRAWBERRIES
 IV. IS IT GOING TO RAIN?
 V. SPECKLED TROUT
 VI. BIRDS AND BIRDS
 VII. A BED OF BOUGHS
 VIII. BIRDS’-NESTING
 IX. THE HALCYON IN CANADA
 INDEX




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 JOHN BURROUGHS
From a photograph

 WHIP-POOR WILL
From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes

 TROUT STREAM
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason

 YELLOW BIRCHES
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason

 LEDGES
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason

 KINGFISHER (colored)
From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes

[Illustration: Burroughs and dog]




PREFACE


I am aware that for the most part the title of my book is an allegory
rather than an actual description; but readers who have followed me
heretofore, I trust, will not be puzzled or misled in the present case
by any want of literalness in the matter of the title. If the name
carries with it a suggestion of the wild and delectable in nature, of
the free and ungarnered harvests which the wilderness everywhere
affords to the observing eye and ear, it will prove sufficiently
explicit for my purpose.

ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.




I
THE PASTORAL BEES


The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from
Noah’s ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the
olive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each
hip, usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow. In a country
where maple sugar is made the bees get their first taste of sweet from
the sap as it flows from the spiles, or as it dries and is condensed
upon the sides of the buckets. They will sometimes, in their eagerness,
come about the boiling-place and be overwhelmed by the steam and the
smoke. But bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than
for honey: their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as well
as their stores of the latter; hence fresh bread, in the shape of new
pollen, is diligently sought for. My bees get their first supplies from
the catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them out! If but one
catkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour to
rifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hive
some mild April day and see them come pouring in with their little
baskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring. They will have
new bread now; they have been to mill in good earnest; see their dusty
coats, and the golden grist they bring home with them.

When a bee brings pollen into the hive he advances to the cell in which
it is to be deposited and kicks it off, as one might his overalls or
rubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off without
ever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comes
along and rams it down with his head and packs it into the cell, as the
dairymaid packs butter into a firkin with a ladle.

The first spring wild-flowers, whose sly faces among the dry leaves and
rocks are so welcome, are rarely frequented by the bee. The anemone,
the hepatica, the bloodroot, the arbutus, the numerous violets, the
spring beauty, the corydalis, etc., woo all lovers of nature, but
seldom woo the honey-loving bee. The arbutus, lying low and keeping
green all winter, attains to perfume and honey, but only once have I
seen it frequented by bees.

The first honey is perhaps obtained from the flowers of the red maple
and the golden willow. The latter sends forth a wild, delicious
perfume. The sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken
tassels a rich nectar is gathered. My bees will not label these
different varieties for me, as I really wish they would. Honey from the
maple, a tree so clean and wholesome, and full of such virtues every
way, would be something to put one’s tongue to. Or that from the
blossoms of the apple, the peach, the cherry, the quince, the
currant,—one would like a card of each of these varieties to note their
peculiar qualities. The apple-blossom is very important to the bees. A
single swarm has been known to gain twenty pounds in weight during its
continuance. Bees love the ripened fruit, too, and in August and
September will such themselves tipsy upon varieties such as the
sops-of-wine.

The interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees and that of the
clover and the raspberry is bridged over in many localities by the
honey locust. What a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth at
this season! I know nothing about the quality of the honey, but it
ought to keep well. But when the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of
plenty are unsealed indeed; what a commotion about the hives then,
especially in localities where it is extensively cultivated, as in
places along the Hudson! The delicate white clover, which begins to
bloom about the same time, is neglected; even honey itself is passed by
for this modest, colorless, all but odorless flower. A field of these
berries in June sends forth a continuous murmur like that of an
enormous hive. The honey is not so white as that obtained from clover,
but it is easier gathered; it is in shallow cups, while that of the
clover is in deep tubes. The bees are up and at it before sunrise, and
it takes a brisk shower to drive them in. But the clover blooms later
and blooms everywhere, and is the staple source of supply of the finest
quality of honey. The red clover yields up its stores only to the
longer proboscis of the bumblebee, else the bee pasturage of our
agricultural districts would be unequaled. I do not know from what the
famous honey of Chamouni in the Alps is made, but it can hardly surpass
our best products. The snow-white honey of Anatolia in Asiatic Turkey,
which is regularly sent to Constantinople for the use of the grand
seignior and the ladies of his seraglio, is obtained from the cotton
plant, which makes me think that the white clover does not flourish
there. The white clover is indigenous with us; its seeds seem latent in
the ground, and the application of certain stimulants to the soil, such
as wood ashes, causes them to germinate and spring up.

The rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields no honey to the bee,
unless the wild species be sought by the bumblebee.

Among the humbler plants let me not forget the dandelion that so early
dots the sunny slopes, and upon which the bee languidly grazes,
wallowing to his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pasturage.
From the blooming rye and wheat the bee gathers pollen, also from the
obscure blossoms of Indian corn. Among weeds, catnip is the great
favorite. It lasts nearly the whole season and yields richly. It could
no doubt be profitably cultivated in some localities, and catnip honey
would be a novelty in the market. It would probably partake of the
aromatic properties of the plant from which it was derived.

Among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer you may chance
upon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which the
liquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a
slight flavor of mint. This is the product of the linden or basswood,
of all the trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees.
Melissa, the goddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. The
wild swarms in the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it. I
have seen a mountain-side thickly studded with it, its straight, tall,
smooth, light gray shaft carrying its deep green crown far aloft, like
the tulip-tree or the maple.

In some of the Northwestern States there are large forests of it, and
the amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this section
during the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade
and ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and, if it
were as extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey
would be greatly increased. The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is
the product of the linden.

It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that

      “A swarm of bees in May
       Is worth a load of hay;
       A swarm of bees in June
       Is worth a silver spoon;
       But a swarm in July
       Is not worth a fly.”


A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sure to
thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or two
later: but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no
clover or linden honey for the “grand seignior and the ladies of his
seraglio,” but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man’s nectar, the
sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the
black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in
it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when
at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake.
Bread with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good
fortune. It is not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the
same class of goods as Herrick’s

“Nut-brown mirth and russet wit.”


How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.

Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts the
bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
asters and the goldenrod are about all that remain to them.

Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
custom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from New
Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of
perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the
river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the bees
were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must
have been very great. In September they should have begun the return
trip, following the retreating summer south.

It is the making of wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet, the
form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that fills
it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in both
cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must
make himself,—must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax is
to be made, the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into
their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious
rite: they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long
lines that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the
miracle to transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is
rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are
secreted from between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is
taken off and from it the comb is built up. It is calculated that about
twenty-five pounds of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb,
to say nothing of the time that is lost. Hence the importance, in an
economical point of view, of a recent device by which the honey is
extracted and the comb returned intact to the bees. But honey without
the comb is the perfume without the rose,—it is sweet merely, and soon
degenerates into candy. Half the delectableness is in breaking down
these frail and exquisite walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before
it has lost its freshness by contact with the air. Then the comb is a
sort of shield or foil that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed
by the first shock of the sweet.

The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the
hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the
swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has
no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the
more conspicuous marks for the birds. They are all candidates for the
favors of the queen, a fatal felicity that is vouchsafed to but one.
Fatal, I say, for it is a singular fact in the history of bees that the
fecundation of the queen costs the male his life. Yet day after day the
drones go forth, threading the mazes of the air in hopes of meeting her
whom to meet is death. The queen only leaves the hive once, except when
she leads away the swarm, and as she makes no appointment with the
male, but wanders here and there, drones enough are provided to meet
all the contingencies of the case.

One advantage, at least, results from this system of things: there is
no incontinence among the males in this republic!

Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goes
forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. Then
the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying to
hide in corners and byways! There is no loud, defiant humming now, but
abject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have seen
a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between the
glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them, or where
they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also
crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later
they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance,
except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his
place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and
another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your
waistbands with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.

It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen
is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the
swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning
queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the
hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at
large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note
that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowed
to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two, by the
abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her
successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates in
favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no more
swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto
upon her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens
issued at the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the
workers, who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and
recognized the victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many other
curious facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.

It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always
vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty
stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.

The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the
bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing
subjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over the
imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the country
of the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetly
submissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of bees
is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant in
their example. The power and authority are entirely vested in the great
mass, the workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of the
colony, and administer its affairs. Their word is law, and both king
and queen must obey. They regulate the swarming, and give the signal
for the swarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the
tree in the woods and conduct the queen to it.

The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact
that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her
as a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the
hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived
of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm
loses all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in
the hive.

The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to
be disposed of, they starve her to death; and the queen herself will
sting nothing but royalty,—nothing but a rival queen.

The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting
her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is
a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it
awakens a thrill Before you have seen a queen, you wonder if this or
that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but
when you once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment.
You know _that_ is the queen. That long, elegant, shining,
feminine-looking creature can be none less than royalty. How
beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how
deliberate her movements! The bees do not fall down before her, but
caress her and touch her person. The drones, or males, are large bees,
too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is
but one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks imperial
and authoritative: Huber relates that when the old queen is restrained
in her movements by the workers, and prevented from destroying the
young queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters
a note that strikes every bee motionless and makes every head bow;
while this sound lasts, not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and
humbled: yet whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or of
sympathy with the distress of the queen mother, is hard to determine.
The moment it ceases and she advances again toward the royal cells, the
bees bite and pull and insult her as before.

I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is! how they
come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees, each
striving to get out first! It is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye, and a soft
chorus of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they
drift, now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick
about some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other
point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few
moments the whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch
perhaps as large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one
to three or four hours or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked
up, when, if they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they
are up and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen
the enterprise miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small
pear-tree into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath
the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up
into it, and all seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I
observed that something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and
to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and
all returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found
beneath it the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one of
the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it
upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the
accident terminated fatally with her, or else the young queen had been
liberated in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it
was ten days before the swarm issued a second time.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
Years upon years of life in the apiary seem to have no appreciable
effect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new
swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud, or a sudden wind, after the bees
are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Or
an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will
quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say but
that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now
entirely discredited by regular bee keepers but still resorted to by
unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and
creating an uproar generally, might not be without good results.
Certainly not by drowning the “orders” of the queen, but by impressing
the bees, as with some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily
alarmed and disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought
down by a farmer plowing in the field who showered them with handfuls
of loose soil.

I love to see a swarm go off—if it is not mine, and, if mine must go, I
want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles
again by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
escapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting,
had returned to the parent hive,—some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or
may be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came
out again and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree
in the woods—perhaps some royal old maple or birch, holding its head
high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and
galleries—had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered
filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around.
Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they
had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a
more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of
bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a
pivot,—over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart
of the mountain, about a mile distant,—slow at first, so that the youth
who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only
a foxhound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring
up the side of the mountain; saw his white shirtsleeves gleam as he
entered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any
clue as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of
the ten thousand that covered the side of the mountain.

The other swarm came out about one o’clock of a hot July day, and at
once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind at
least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this
direction. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, I
threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
organized and under way. The route soon led me into a field of standing
rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. Plunging
recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by
the agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature forest
just in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill,
some fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I could, I
soon reached the hilltop, my breath utterly gone and the perspiration
streaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side the country
opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the north, heavily
wooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident at once that the
bees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped on
one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the opposite
mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely
problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-laden
tree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of the
leaf.

I heard of a youth in the neighborhood more lucky than myself on a like
occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose
route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hat
in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. Presently he
noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm;
and in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarm
had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, he coolly
deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from the
accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation of this
singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long
and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It is
not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields,
collected upon a bush or branch of a tree.

When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees,
as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen
feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles,
except in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high.
The swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen
(at least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a
direct course, there is always some chance of following them to the
tree, unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood
or a swamp or a high hill, intervenes,—enough chance, at any rate, to
stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind
holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two
plans are feasible,—either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive
them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains
the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors
and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former
course is more business-like; but the latter is the one usually
recommended by one’s friends and neighbors.

Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one is
about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
distant laborers in the field, or by some youth plowing on the side of
the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm
dimly whirling by overhead, and, maybe, gives chase; or he may simply
catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm
of bees go over; and perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the
garden a black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.

They are not partial as to the kind of tree,—pine, hemlock, elm, birch,
maple, hickory,—any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. A
swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and took
up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an
adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground. Another
swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper, and went into the
cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of a
large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.

In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence
forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem
to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild
honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed, not long since,
that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a
tree that had several pailfuls in it.

One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near
the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down,
for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another
time, while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods, I
discovered a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season
before remarked the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of
leaves concealed them from me. This time my former presentiment
occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees,
going out and in a large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest
of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the
creek into which it fell. I happened along that way two or three days
after the tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless,
that escaped the flood and those that were away when the disaster came,
hanging in a small black mass to a branch high up near where their home
used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved, the
remnant probably sought another tree; otherwise the bees soon died.

I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested
with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm
seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the
end uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would be
curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties,
and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights and
franchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the bees to have
some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides.

Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive
seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree,—“gums,” as
they are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In
some European countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a
tree, a suitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned straw
hive is picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.

The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of
an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually
recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what
hairbreadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on
an average, about four or five thousand a month, or one hundred and
fifty a day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders,
benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and
in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principal
mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled before
they can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive, unable to get in
with their burden. One may see them come utterly spent and drop
hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. Before they can
rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick
them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm
them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand,
until they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an
apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also
picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore.
It is amusing to see them come hurrying home when there is a
thunder-storm approaching. They come piling in till the rain is upon
them. Those that are overtaken by the storm doubtless weather it as
best they can in the sheltering trees or grass. It is not probable that
a bee ever gets lost by wandering into strange and unknown parts. With
their myriad eyes they see everything; and then their sense of locality
is very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks
the place of his hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or
swamps, or of the bee-hunter’s box of honey on the hills or in the
woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.

Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the
open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Besides grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions,
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.

Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
“bread and honey” while the “king was in the parlor counting out his
money,” was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
long; to which the veteran replied that it was by “oil without and
honey within.” Cicero, in his “Old Age,” classes honey with meat and
milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept
farmhouse will be supplied.

Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity,
an article doubtless in no wise superior to our best products. Leigh
Hunt’s “Jar of Honey” is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and
literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always
been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says
the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people
also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are
native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—“flat-nosed
bees,” as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which
comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world’s
goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth
be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis
and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which
Arsinoë cherishes Adonis are “honey-cakes,” and other tidbits made of
“sweet honey.” In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still
to prevail: when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in
their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love
may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.

It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once, when Pindar lay asleep, the bees
dropped honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the
promised Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about
the butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan’s eyes were enlightened by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: “See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I
tasted a little of this honey.” So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity-school days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not
to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be
said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the
children of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten
raw, but roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground
made hot by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been
served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat
with honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in
Palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general
weal, and in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the
more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers, and flowering shrubs,
Palestine has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their
honey in hollow trees, as our bees do when they escape from the hive,
and in holes in the rocks, as ours do not. In a tropical or
semi-tropical climate, bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks;
but where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up
in the trunk of a forest tree.

The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate
zone. There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics.
Honey from certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting,
and that from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount
Hymettus owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia
and in Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated
honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of
rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.

California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and
the bee is the bee still. “Men may degenerate,” says an old traveler,
“may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactures may
fail, and commodities be debased; but the sweets of the wild-flowers of
the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will
continue without change or derogation.”




II
SHARP EYES


Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often
amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on
opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would
he see? Perhaps not the invisible,—not the odors of flowers or the
fever germs in the air,—not the infinitely small of the microscope or
the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more
eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but
would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of
vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than
others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision
penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a
spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how
many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter,
matching his sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a
moose, or fox or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another
eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of
things,—whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic
markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or
the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes
were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like
written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the
writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was
one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse
from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn
fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable,
dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she
wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently
captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What but a
horsehair for her nest which was in an apple-tree near by? and she was
so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one
out of the horse’s tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season
I examined her nest, and found it sewed through and through with
several long horsehairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till
the hair was found.

Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes,
are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are
sharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy
played among some English sparrows, and wrote an account of it in his
newspaper; it is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to his
box a large, fine goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrow
and much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered his
gratulations over it, he went away in quest of his mate. His next-door
neighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and
seized the feather; and here the wit of the bird came out, for instead
of carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree and hid
it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighbor
returned with his mate was innocently employed about her own affairs.
The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a high
state of excitement, and, with wrath in his manner and accusation on
his tongue, rushed into the cote of the female. Not finding his goods
and chattels there as he had expected, he stormed around awhile,
abusing everybody in general and his neighbor in particular, then went
away as if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight, the
shrewd thief went and brought the feather home and lined her own
domicile with it.

I was much amused one summer day in seeing a bluebird feeding her young
one in the shaded street of a large town. She had captured a cicada or
harvest-fly, and, after bruising it awhile on the ground, flew with it
to a tree and placed it in the beak of the young bird. It was a large
morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick’s ability to
dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great
solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but
made no headway in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and
flew to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more
thoroughly. Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say,
“There, try it now,” and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts
that she repeated many of his motions and contortions. But the great
fly was unyielding, and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to
the beak that held it. The young bird fluttered and fluttered, and
screamed, “I’m stuck, I’m stuck!” till the anxious parent again seized
the morsel and carried it to an iron railing, where she came down upon
it for the space of a minute with all the force and momentum her beak
could command. Then she offered it to her young a third time, but with
the same result as before, except that this time the bird dropped it;
but she reached the ground as soon as the cicada did, and taking it in
her beak flew some distance to a high board fence, where she sat
motionless for some moments. While pondering the problem how that fly
should be broken, the male bluebird approached her, and said very
plainly, and I thought rather curtly, “Give me that bug,” but she
quickly resented his interference and flew farther away, where she sat
apparently quite discouraged when I last saw her.

The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him.
His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in the
progress of the season; things are never quite the same after one has
heard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in advance
of the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and orchard all
that time, apparently waiting the arrival of his mate. He called and
warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within ear-shot and could
be hurried up. Now he warbled half-angrily or upbraidingly, then
coaxingly, then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in a
plaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his wings, and twinkle
them caressingly, as if beckoning his mate to his heart. One morning
she had come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a
knothole in an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his side. I heard a
fine confidential warble,—the old, old story. But the female flew to a
near tree, and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and
got some dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew again to the hole in
the old tree, and promised unremitting devotion, but the other said,
“Nay,” and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather
heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff, and cried out in a tone
that said plainly enough, “Wait a minute. One word, please,” and flew
swiftly in pursuit. He won her before long, however, and early in April
the pair were established in one of the four or five boxes I had put up
for them, but not until they had changed their minds several times. As
soon as the first brood had flown, and while they were yet under their
parents’ care, they began another nest in one of the other boxes, the
female, as usual, doing all the work, and the male all the
complimenting. A source of occasional great distress to the mother bird
was a white cat that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never
been known to catch a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was
very embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother
bluebird would set up that pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the
cat was standing by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with
building material, and alighted above me to survey the place before
going into the box. When she saw the cat she was greatly disturbed, and
in her agitation could not keep her hold upon all her material. Straw
after straw came eddying down, till not half her original burden
remained. After the cat had gone away the bird’s alarm subsided, till
presently, seeing the coast clear, she flew quickly to the box and
pitched in her remaining straws with the greatest precipitation, and,
without going in to arrange them, as was her wont, flew away in evident
relief.

In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the
house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted
woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knothole which led to the decayed
interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a
squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not
witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird
hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and
enlarging the cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used
rather to floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders,
but rather nest-carvers.

The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard in
the heart of the old tree,—at first feebly, but waxing stronger day by
day until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand
upon the trunk of the tree, they would set up an eager, expectant
chattering; but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon
detected the unusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then
uttering a warning note. Long before they were fully fledged they
clambered up to the orifice to receive their food. As but one could
stand in the opening at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and
struggling for this position. It was a very desirable one aside from
the advantages it had when food was served; it looked out upon the
great, shining world, into which the young birds seemed never tired of
gazing. The fresh air must have been a consideration also, for the
interior of a high-hole’s dwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds
came with food, the young one in the opening did not get it all, but
after he had received a portion, either on his own motion or on a hint
from the old one, he would give place to the one behind him. Still, one
bird evidently outstripped his fellows, and in the race of life was two
or three days in advance of them. His voice was loudest and his head
oftenest at the window. But I noticed that, when he had kept the
position too long, the others evidently made it uncomfortable in his
rear, and, after “fidgeting” about awhile, he would be compelled to
“back down.” But retaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates spent
few easy moments at that lookout. They would close their eyes and slide
back into the cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its charms
for them.

This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest. For two days
before that event he kept his position in the opening most of the time
and sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained
from feeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As I
stood looking at him one afternoon and noting his progress, he suddenly
reached a resolution,—seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear,—and
launched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well, and
carried him about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day
after, the next in size and spirit left in the same manner; then
another, till only one remained. The parent birds ceased their visits
to him, and for one day he called and called till our ears were tired
of the sound. His was the faintest heart of all. Then he had none to
encourage him from behind. He left the nest and clung to the outer bole
of the tree, and yelped and piped for an hour longer; then he committed
himself to his wings and went his way like the rest.

A young farmer in the western part of New York, who has a sharp,
discriminating eye, sends me some interesting notes about a tame
high-hole he once had.

“Did you ever notice,” says he, “that the high-hole never eats anything
that he cannot pick up with his tongue? At least this was the case with
a young one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust out his
tongue two or three inches, and it was amusing to see his efforts to
eat currants from the hand. He would run out his tongue and try to
stick it to the currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue
around it like a hook and try to raise it by a sudden jerk. But he
never succeeded, the round fruit would roll and slip away every time.
He never seemed to think of taking it in his beak. His tongue was in
constant use to find out the nature of everything he saw; a nail-hole
in a board or any similar hole was carefully explored. If he was held
near the face he would soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his
tongue into it. In this way he gained the respect of a number of
half-grown cats that were around the house. I wished to make them
familiar to each other, so there would be less danger of their killing
him. So I would take them both on my knee, when the bird would soon
notice the kitten’s eyes, and, leveling his bill as carefully as a
marksman levels his rifle, he would remain so a minute, when he would
dart his tongue into the cat’s eye. This was held by the cats to be
very mysterious: being struck in the eye by something invisible to
them. They soon acquired such a terror of him that they would avoid him
and run away whenever they saw his bill turned in their direction. He
never would swallow a grasshopper even when it was placed in his
throat; he would shake himself until he had thrown it out of his mouth.
His ‘best hold’ was ants. He never was surprised at anything, and never
was afraid of anything. He would drive the turkey gobbler and the
rooster. He would advance upon them holding one wing up as high as
possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward
them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that
they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of
himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and
he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going
into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he
disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw him again.” My
correspondent also sends me some interesting observations about the
cuckoo. He says a large gooseberry-bush standing in the border of an
old hedge-row, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his house,
was occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession, and,
after an interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a good
chance to observe them. He says the mother bird lays a single egg, and
sits upon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has
seen one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole
egg, all in the nest at once. “So far as I have seen, this is the
settled practice,—the young leaving the nest one at a time to the
number of six or eight. The young have quite the look of the young of
the dove in many respects. When nearly grown they are covered with long
blue pin-feathers as long as darning-needles, without a bit of plumage
on them. They part on the back and hang down on each side by their own
weight. With its curious feathers and misshapen body, the young bird is
anything but handsome. They never open their mouths when approached, as
many young birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when
touched.” He also notes the unnatural indifference of the mother bird
when her nest and young are approached. She makes no sound, but sits
quietly on a near branch in apparent perfect unconcern.

These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo
is occasionally found in the nests of other birds, raise the inquiry
whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European
species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, on
the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It has
but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress
to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest—a mere platform
of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds—from the deep, compact, finely
woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or the kingbird, and
what a gulf between its indifference toward its young and their
solicitude! Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to
a parasite like our cowbird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular
nest-builder.

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which
is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly against
the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat
of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter
escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early
spring he saw two hen-hawks, that were circling and screaming high in
air, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them together,
fall toward the earth, flapping and struggling as if they were tied
together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again.
He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the
hawks were toying fondly with each other.

He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a hummingbird in
the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of
the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as
a chip. The bird seems to have died, as it had lived, on the wing, and
its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy
this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed
depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry
timber in a hay-loft, and, with spread wings, ending its existence!

When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects
about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how
they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a
mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were
very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his
machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood
of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings
over the “cut-bar,” and just where it was causing the grass to tremble
and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would doubtless have gone
hungry yet another day.

Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male and female take part in
incubation. “I was rather surprised,” he says, “on one occasion, to see
how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tall
beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head and
neck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk
coming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alight
near by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mate
getting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemed
almost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they can
make such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs.”

The kingbird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear. It
is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable of
dealing his great antagonist. The kingbird seldom more than dogs the
hawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado; but
my correspondent says he once “saw a kingbird riding on a hawk’s back.
The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the kingbird sat upon his
shoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight,”—tweaking his
feathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.

That near relative of the kingbird, the great crested flycatcher, has
one well-known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest
finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert
correspondent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make
off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good
substitute for the coveted material.

One day in May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of a
whip-poor-will, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest,—two
elliptical whitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was
within a yard of the mother bird before she flew. I wondered what a
sharp eye would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the
bird, so I came to the place many times and had a look. It was always a
task to separate the bird from her surroundings, though I stood within
a few feet of her, and knew exactly where to look. One had to bear on
with his eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and
leaves, and bits of black or dark brown bark, were all exactly copied
in the bird’s plumage. And then she did sit so close, and simulate so
well a shapeless, decaying piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a
companion, and, guiding his eye to the spot, noted how difficult it was
for him to make out there, in full view upon the dry leaves, any
semblance to a bird. When the bird returned after being disturbed, she
would alight within a few inches of her eggs, and then, after a
moment’s pause, hobble awkwardly upon them.

After the young had appeared, all the wit of the bird came into play. I
was on hand the next day, I think. The mother bird sprang up when I was
within a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the leaves with her wings
till they sprang up, too; as the leaves started the young started, and,
being of the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which the bird
was a trying task to any eye. I came the next day, when the same
tactics were repeated. Once a leaf fell upon one of the young birds and
nearly hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down, like a young
partridge, and soon follow their mother about. When disturbed, they
gave but one leap, then settled down, perfectly motionless and stupid,
with eyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions, made frantic
efforts to decoy me away from her young. She would fly a few paces and
fall upon her breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would run
through her tremulous outstretched wings and prostrate body. She kept a
sharp eye out the meanwhile to see if the ruse took, and, if it did
not, she was quickly cured, and, moving about to some other point,
tried to draw my attention as before. When followed she always alighted
upon the ground, dropping down in a sudden peculiar way. The second or
third day both old and young had disappeared.

[Illustration: Whip-poor-will]

The whip-poor-will walks as awkwardly as a swallow, which is as awkward
as a man in a bag, and yet she manages to lead her young about the
woods. The latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their
protective coloring shielding them most effectively. Wilson once came
upon the mother bird and her brood in the woods, and, though they were
at his very feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young that
he was about to give up the search, much disappointed, when he
perceived something “like a slight mouldiness among the withered
leaves, and, on stooping down, discovered it to be a young
whip-poor-will, seemingly asleep.” Wilson’s description of the young is
very accurate, as its downy covering does look precisely like a “slight
mouldiness.” Returning a few moments afterward to the spot to get a
pencil he had forgotten, he could find neither old nor young.

It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods, motionless upon the
leaves; this sense needs to be as sharp as that of smell in hounds and
pointers, and yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to see the
bird and to shoot it before it takes wing. I think he sees it as soon
as it sees him, and before it suspects itself seen. What a training to
the eye is hunting! to pick out the game from its surroundings, the
grouse from the leaves, the gray squirrel from the mossy oak limb it
hugs so closely, the red fox from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the
rabbit from the stubble, or the white hare from the snow, requires the
best powers of this sense. A woodchuck motionless in the fields or upon
a rock looks very much like a large stone or boulder, yet a keen eye
knows the difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away.

A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wild
creatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he finds
his match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speck
against the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen
to be secreted in the bushes, or behind the fence near which he
alights! One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the
form, structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field of
vision,—indeed, can probably see in nearly every direction at the same
instant, behind as well as before. Man’s field of vision embraces less
than half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically; his brow
and brain prevent him from seeing within many degrees of the zenith
without a movement of the head; the bird, on the other hand, takes in
nearly the whole sphere at a glance.

I find I see, almost without effort, nearly every bird within sight in
the field or wood I pass through (a flit of the wing, a flirt of the
tail are enough, though the flickering leaves do all conspire to hide
them), and that with like ease the birds see me, though unquestionably
the chances are immensely in their favor. The eye sees what it has the
means of seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your heart before you
can find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and aim. No one ever
yet found the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his
mind. A person whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in
every field he walks through.

One season I was interested in the tree-frogs, especially the tiny
piper that one hears about the woods and brushy fields,—the hyla of the
swamps become a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new
role. But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for
them, I several times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some
bushes, I captured two. They leaped before me, as doubtless they had
done many times before; but though not looking for or thinking of them,
yet they were quickly recognized, because the eye had been commissioned
to find them. On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedly
loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray
squirrel that was fast escaping through the treetops, when one of these
lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me.
I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because
I had already made him my own.

Nevertheless the habit of observation is the habit of clear and
decisive gazing: not by a first casual glance, but by a steady,
deliberate aim of the eye, are the rare and characteristic things
discovered. You must look intently, and hold your eye firmly to the
spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The
sharpshooter picks out his man, and knows him with fatal certainty from
a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to
locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but
also a faculty which they call individuality,—that which separates,
discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This
is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet.
The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,—it seizes upon and
preserves the individuality of the thing.

Persons frequently describe to me some bird they have seen or heard,
and ask me to name it, but in most cases the bird might be any one of a
dozen, or else it is totally unlike any bird found on this continent.
They have either seen falsely or else vaguely. Not so the farm youth
who wrote me one winter day that he had seen a single pair of strange
birds, which he describes as follows: “They were about the size of the
‘chippie;’ the tops of their heads were red, and the breast of the male
was of the same color, while that of the female was much lighter; their
rumps were also faintly tinged with red. If I have described them so
that you would know them, please write me their names.” There can be
little doubt but the young observer had, seen a pair of redpolls,—a
bird related to the goldfinch, and that occasionally comes down to us
in the winter from the far north. Another time, the same youth wrote
that he had seen a strange bird, the color of a sparrow, that alighted
on fences and buildings as well as upon the ground, and that walked.
This last fact showed the youth’s discriminating eye and settled the
case. From this and the season, and the size and color of the bird, I
knew he had seen the pipit or titlark. But how many persons would have
observed that the bird walked instead of hopped?

Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried to describe to me a
bird that built a nest in a tree within a few feet of the house. As it
was a brown bird, I should have taken it for a wood thrush, had not the
nest been described as so thin and loose that from beneath the eggs
could be distinctly seen. The most pronounced feature in the
description was the barred appearance of the under side of the bird’s
tail. I was quite at sea, until one day, when we were driving out, a
cuckoo flew across the road in front of us, when my friends exclaimed,
“There is our bird!” I had never known a cuckoo to build near a house,
and I had never noted the appearance the tail presents when viewed from
beneath; but if the bird had been described in its most obvious
features, as slender, with a long tail, cinnamon brown above and white
beneath, with a curved bill, any one who knew the bird would have
recognized the portrait.

We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its
specific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of the
tulip-tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outlines of one.
A good observer is quick to take a hint and to follow it up. Most of
the facts of nature, especially in the life of the birds and animals,
are well screened. We do not see the play because we do not look
intently enough. The other day I was sitting with a friend upon a high
rock in the woods, near a small stream, when we saw a water-snake
swimming across a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would have
noted it, perhaps nothing more. A little closer and sharper gaze
revealed the fact that the snake bore something in its mouth, which, as
we went down to investigate, proved to be a small catfish, three or
four inches long. The snake had captured it in the pool, and, like any
other fisherman, wanted to get its prey to dry land, although it itself
lived mostly in the water. Here, we said, is being enacted a little
tragedy that would have escaped any but sharp eyes. The snake, which
was itself small, had the fish by the throat, the hold of vantage among
all creatures, and clung to it with great tenacity. The snake knew that
its best tactics was to get upon dry land as soon as possible. It could
not swallow its victim alive, and it could not strangle it in the
water. For a while it tried to kill its game by holding it up out of
the water, but the fish grew heavy, and every few moments its struggles
brought down the snake’s head. This would not do. Compressing the
fish’s throat would not shut off its breath under such circumstances,
so the wily serpent tried to get ashore with it, and after several
attempts succeeded in effecting a landing on a flat rock. But the fish
died hard. Catfish do not give up the ghost in a hurry. Its throat was
becoming congested, but the snake’s distended jaws must have ached. It
was like a petrified gape. Then the spectators became very curious and
close in their scrutiny, and the snake determined to withdraw from the
public gaze and finish the business in hand to its own notions. But,
when gently but firmly remonstrated with by my friend with his
walking-stick, it dropped the fish and retreated in high dudgeon
beneath a stone in the bed of the creek. The fish, with a swollen and
angry throat, went its way also.

Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw a fresh bone or a piece
of meat upon the snow in winter, and see how soon the crows will
discover it and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the crow
that first discovers it will alight near it, to make sure he is not
deceived; then he will go away, and soon return with a companion. The
two alight a few yards from the bone, and after some delay, during
which the vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the crows advances
boldly to within a few feet of the coveted prize. Here he pauses, and
if no trick is discovered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it
and makes off.

One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the
house and scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue jay for
weeks, yet that very day one found my corn, and after that several came
daily and partook of it, holding the kernels under their feet upon the
limbs of the trees and pecking them vigorously.

Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp eyes, still I was
surprised to see how quickly Downy found out some bones that were
placed in a convenient place under the shed to be pounded up for the
hens. In going out to the barn I often disturbed him making a meal off
the bits of meat that still adhered to them.

“Look intently enough at anything,” said a poet to me one day, “and you
will see something that would otherwise escape you.” I thought of the
remark as I sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring day. I
saw a small hawk approaching; he flew to a tall tulip-tree, and
alighted on a large limb near the top. He eyed me and I eyed him. Then
the bird disclosed a trait that was new to me: he hopped along the limb
to a small cavity near the trunk, when he thrust in his head and pulled
out some small object and fell to eating it. After he had partaken of
it for some minutes he put the remainder back in his larder and flew
away. I had seen something like feathers eddying slowly down as the
hawk ate, and on approaching the spot found the feathers of a sparrow
here and there clinging to the bushes beneath the tree. The hawk,
then,—commonly called the chicken hawk,—is as provident as a mouse or a
squirrel, and lays by a store against a time of need, but I should not
have discovered the fact had I not held my eye on him.

An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual sound or commotion
among them. In May or June, when other birds are most vocal, the jay is
a silent bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the groves as
silent as a pickpocket; he is robbing birds’-nests, and he is very
anxious that nothing should be said about it, but in the fall none so
quick and loud to cry “Thief, thief!” as he. One December morning a
troop of jays discovered a little screech owl secreted in the hollow
trunk of an old apple-tree near my house. How they found the owl out is
a mystery, since it never ventures forth in the light of day; but they
did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I suspect the
bluebirds first told them, for these birds are constantly peeping into
holes and crannies both spring and fall. Some unsuspecting bird had
probably entered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year’s
nest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a cold night, and then
had rushed out with important news. A boy who should unwittingly
venture into a bear’s den when Bruin was at home could not be more
astonished and alarmed than a bluebird would be on finding itself in a
cavity of a decayed tree with an owl. At any rate, the bluebirds joined
the jays in calling the attention of all whom it might concern to the
fact that a culprit of some sort was hiding from the light of day in
the old apple-tree. I heard the notes of warning and alarm and
approached to within eyeshot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered
about uttering their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were
bolder and took turns looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor,
shrinking owl. A jay would alight in the entrance of the hole, and
flirt and peer and attitudinize, and then fly away crying “Thief,
thief, thief!” at the top of his voice.

I climbed up and peered into the opening, and could just descry the owl
clinging to the inside of the tree. I reached in and took him out,
giving little heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He was as
red as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He made no effort to escape,
but planted his claws in my forefinger and clung there with a grip that
soon grew uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an outhouse, in
hopes of getting better acquainted with him. By day he was a very
willing prisoner, scarcely moving at all, even when approached and
touched with the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-closed,
sleepy eyes. But at night what a change! how alert, how wild, how
active! He was like another bird; he darted about with wide, fearful
eyes, and regarded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window, and
swiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out into the congenial
darkness, and perhaps, ere this, has revenged himself upon the sleeping
jay or bluebird that first betrayed his hiding-place.




III
STRAWBERRIES


Was it old Dr. Parr who said or sighed in his last illness, “Oh, if I
can only live till strawberries come!” The old scholar imagined that,
if he could weather it till then, the berries would carry him through.
No doubt he had turned from the drugs and the nostrums, or from the
hateful food, to the memory of the pungent, penetrating, and
unspeakably fresh quality of the strawberry with the deepest longing.
The very thought of these crimson lobes, embodying as it were the first
glow and ardor of the young summer, and with their power to unsheathe
the taste and spur the nagging appetite, made life seem possible and
desirable to him.

The strawberry is always the hope of the invalid, and sometimes, no
doubt, his salvation. It is the first and finest relish among fruits,
and well merits Dr. Boteler’s memorable saying, that “doubtless God
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”

On the threshold of summer, Nature proffers us this her virgin fruit;
more rich and sumptuous are to follow, but the wild delicacy and fillip
of the strawberry are never repeated,—that keen feathered edge greets
the tongue in nothing else.

Let me not be afraid of overpraising it, but probe and probe for words
to hint its surprising virtues. We may well celebrate it with festivals
and music. It has that indescribable quality of all first things,—that
shy, uncloying, provoking barbed sweetness. It is eager and sanguine as
youth. It is born of the copious dews, the fragrant nights, the tender
skies, the plentiful rains of the early season. The singing of birds is
in it, and the health and frolic of lusty Nature. It is the product of
liquid May touched by the June sun. It has the tartness, the briskness,
the unruliness of spring, and the aroma and intensity of summer.

Oh, the strawberry days! how vividly they come back to one! The smell
of clover in the fields, of blooming rye on the hills, of the wild
grape beside the woods, and of the sweet honeysuckle and the spiræa
about the house. The first hot, moist days. The daisies and the
buttercups; the songs of the birds, their first reckless jollity and
love-making over; the full tender foliage of the trees; the bees
swarming, and the air strung with resonant musical chords. The time of
the sweetest and most, succulent grass, when the cows come home with
aching udders. Indeed, the strawberry belongs to the juiciest time of
the year.

What a challenge it is to the taste! how it bites back again! and is
there any other sound like the snap and crackle with which it salutes
the ear on being plucked from the stems? It is a threat to one sense
that the other is soon to verify. It snaps to the ear as it smacks to
the tongue. All other berries are tame beside it.

The plant is almost an evergreen; it loves the coverlid of the snow,
and will keep fresh through the severest winters with a slight
protection. The frost leaves its virtues in it. The berry is a kind of
vegetable snow. How cool, how tonic, how melting, and how perishable!
It is almost as easy to keep frost. Heat kills it, and sugar quickly
breaks up its cells.

Is there anything like the odor of strawberries? The next best thing to
tasting them is to smell them; one may put his nose to the dish while
the fruit is yet too rare and choice for his fingers. Touch not and
taste not, but take a good smell and go mad! Last fall I potted some of
the Downer, and in the winter grew them in the house. In March the
berries were ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all told,
to make one consider whether it were not worth while to kill off the
rest of the household, so that the berries need not be divided. But if
every tongue could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily upon
them. They filled the house with perfume. The Downer is remarkable in
this respect. Grown in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any
strawberry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less agreeable to the
taste. It is a very beautiful berry to look upon, round, light pink,
with a delicate, fine-grained expression. Some berries shine, the
Downer glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core is firm and
white, its skin thick and easily bruised, which makes it a poor market
berry, but, with its high flavor and productiveness, an admirable one
for home use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson, while it is
much more palatable. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody
knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat
it without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimonious. Like some
persons, the Wilson will not ripen and sweeten till its old age. Its
largest and finest crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften
and fail unregenerated, or with all its sins upon it. But wait till
toward the end of the season, after the plant gets over its hurry and
takes time to ripen its fruit. The berry will then face the sun for
days, and, if the weather is not too wet, instead of softening will
turn dark and grow rich. Out of its crabbedness and spitefulness come
the finest, choicest flavors. It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold
of the taste in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jocunda
or the Triumph, cannot approximate to. Its quality is as penetrating as
that of ants and wasps, but sweet. It is, indeed, a wild bee turned
into a berry, with the sting mollified and the honey disguised. A quart
of these rare-ripes I venture to say contains more of the peculiar
virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind than can be had in twice
the same quantity of any other cultivated variety. Take these berries
in a bowl of rich milk with some bread,—ah, what a dish!—too good to
set before a king! I suspect this was the food of Adam in Paradise,
only Adam did not have the Wilson strawberry; he had the wild
strawberry that Eve plucked in their hill-meadow and “hulled” with her
own hands, and that, take it all in all, even surpasses the
late-ripened Wilson.

Adam is still extant in the taste and the appetite of most country
boys; lives there a country boy who does not like wild strawberries and
milk,—yea, prefer it to any other known dish? I am not thinking of a
dessert of strawberries and cream; this the city boy may have, too,
after a sort; but bread-and-milk, with the addition of wild
strawberries, is peculiarly a country dish, and is to the taste what a
wild bird’s song is to the ear. When I was a lad, and went afield with
my hoe or with the cows, during the strawberry season, I was sure to
return at meal-time with a lining of berries in the top of my straw
hat. They were my daily food, and I could taste the liquid and gurgling
notes of the bobolink in every spoonful of them; and to this day, to
make a dinner or supper off a bowl of milk with bread and
strawberries,—plenty of strawberries,—well, is as near to being a boy
again as I ever expect to come. The golden age draws sensibly near.
Appetite becomes a kind of delicious thirst,—a gentle and subtle
craving of all parts of the mouth and throat,—and those nerves of taste
that occupy, as it were, a back seat, and take little cognizance of
grosser foods, come forth, and are played upon and set vibrating.
Indeed, I think, if there is ever rejoicing throughout one’s alimentary
household,—if ever that much-abused servant, the stomach, says Amen, or
those faithful handmaidens, the liver and spleen, nudge each other
delightedly, it must be when one on a torrid summer day passes by the
solid and carnal dinner for this simple Arcadian dish.

The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy and high-flavored,
but, unlike the apple, it is also mild and delicious. It has the true
rustic sweetness and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared
with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity. It is never dropsical
or overgrown, but firm-fleshed and hardy. Its great enemies are the
plow, gypsum, and the horse-rake. It dislikes a limestone soil, but
seems to prefer the detritus of the stratified rock. Where the sugar
maple abounds, I have always found plenty of wild strawberries. We have
two kinds,—the wood berry and the field berry. The former is as wild as
a partridge. It is found in open places in the woods and along the
borders, growing beside stumps and rocks, never in abundance, but very
sparsely. It is small, cone-shaped, dark red, shiny, and pimply. It
looks woody, and tastes so. It has never reached the table, nor made
the acquaintance of cream. A quart of them, at a fair price for human
labor, would be worth their weight in silver at least. (Yet a careful
observer writes me that in certain sections in the western part of New
York they are very plentiful.)

Ovid mentions the wood strawberry, which would lead one to infer that
they were more abundant in his time and country than in ours.

This is, perhaps, the same as the alpine strawberry, which is said to
grow in the mountains of Greece, and thence northward. This was
probably the first variety cultivated, though our native species would
seem as unpromising a subject for the garden as club-moss or
wintergreens.

Of the field strawberry there are a great many varieties,—some growing
in meadows, some in pastures, and some upon mountain-tops. Some are
round, and stick close to the calyx or hull; some are long and pointed,
with long, tapering necks. These usually grow upon tall stems. They
are, indeed, of the slim, linear kind. Your corpulent berry keeps close
to the ground; its stem and foot-stalk are short, and neck it has none.
Its color is deeper than that of its tall brother, and of course it has
more juice. You are more apt to find the tall varieties upon knolls in
low, wet meadows, and again upon mountain-tops, growing in tussocks of
wild grass about the open summits. These latter ripen in July, and give
one his last taste of strawberries for the season.

But the favorite haunt of the wild strawberry is an uplying meadow that
has been exempt from the plow for five or six years, and that has
little timothy and much daisy. When you go a-berrying, turn your steps
toward the milk-white meadows. The slightly bitter odor of the daisies
is very agreeable to the smell, and affords a good background for the
perfume of the fruit. The strawberry cannot cope with the rank and
deep-rooted clover, and seldom appears in a field till the clover has
had its day. But the daisy with its slender stalk does not crowd or
obstruct the plant, while its broad white flower is like a light
parasol that tempers and softens the too strong sunlight. Indeed,
daisies and strawberries are generally associated. Nature fills her
dish with the berries, then covers them with the white and yellow of
milk and cream, thus suggesting a combination we are quick to follow.
Milk alone, after it loses its animal heat, is a clod, and begets
torpidity of the brain; the berries lighten it, give wings to it, and
one is fed as by the air he breathes or the water he drinks.

Then the delight of “picking” the wild berries! It is one of the
fragrant memories of boyhood. Indeed, for boy or man to go a-berrying
in a certain pastoral country I know of, where a passer-by along the
highway is often regaled by a breeze loaded with a perfume of the
o’er-ripe fruit, is to get nearer to June than by almost any course I
know of. Your errand is so private and confidential! You stoop low. You
part away the grass and the daisies, and would lay bare the inmost
secrets of the meadow. Everything is yet tender and succulent; the very
air is bright and new; the warm breath of the meadow comes up in your
face; to your knees you are in a sea of daisies and clover; from your
knees up, you are in a sea of solar light and warmth. Now you are
prostrate like a swimmer, or like a surf-bather reaching for pebbles or
shells, the white and green spray breaks above you; then, like a
devotee before a shrine or naming his beads, your rosary strung with
luscious berries; anon you are a grazing Nebuchadnezzar, or an artist
taking an inverted view of the landscape.

The birds are alarmed by your close scrutiny of their domain. They
hardly know whether to sing or to cry, and do a little of both. The
bobolink follows you and circles above and in advance of you, and is
ready to give you a triumphal exit from the field, if you will only
depart.

      “Ye boys that gather flowers and strawberries,
       Lo, hid within the grass, an adder lies,”


Warton makes Virgil sing; and Montaigne, in his “Journey to Italy,”
says: “The children very often are afraid, on account of the snakes, to
go and pick the strawberries that grow in quantities on the mountains
and among bushes.” But there is no serpent here,—at worst, only a
bumblebee’s or yellow-jacket’s nest. You soon find out the spring in
the corner of the field under the beechen tree. While you wipe your
brow and thank the Lord for spring water, you glance at the initials in
the bark, some of them so old that they seem runic and legendary. You
find out, also, how gregarious the strawberry is,—that the different
varieties exist in little colonies about the field. When you strike the
outskirts of one of these plantations, how quickly you work toward the
centre of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavigate it, and
follow up all its branchings and windings!

Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and
lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or
more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the
virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and
wooing influences of the young summer!

I was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was near enough to hunting
and fishing to enlist me. Mother would always send me in preference to
any of the rest of the boys. I got the biggest berries and the most of
them. There was something of the excitement of the chase in the
occupation, and something of the charm and preciousness of game about
the trophies. The pursuit had its surprises, its expectancies, its
sudden disclosures,—in fact, its uncertainties. I went forth
adventurously. I could wander free as the wind. Then there were moments
of inspiration, for it always seemed a felicitous stroke to light upon
a particularly fine spot, as it does when one takes an old and wary
trout. You discovered the game where it was hidden. Your genius
prompted you. Another had passed that way and had missed the prize.
Indeed, the successful berry-picker, like Walton’s angler, is born, not
made. It is only another kind of angling. In the same field one boy
gets big berries and plenty of them; another wanders up and down, and
finds only a few little ones. He cannot see them; he does not know how
to divine them where they lurk under the leaves and vines. The
berry-grower knows that in the cultivated patch his pickers are very
unequal, the baskets of one boy or girl having so inferior a look that
it does not seem possible they could have been filled from the same
vines with certain others. But neither blunt fingers nor blunt eyes are
hard to find; and as there are those who can see nothing clearly, so
there are those who can touch nothing deftly or gently.

The cultivation of the strawberry is thought to be comparatively
modern. The ancients appear to have been a carnivorous race: they
gorged themselves with meat; while the modern man makes larger and
larger use of fruits and vegetables, until this generation is doubtless
better fed than any that has preceded it. The strawberry and the apple,
and such vegetables as celery, ought to lengthen human life,—at least
to correct its biliousness and make it more sweet and sanguine.

The first impetus to strawberry culture seems to have been given by the
introduction of our field berry (_Fragaria Virginiana_) into England in
the seventeenth century, though not much progress was made till the
eighteenth. This variety is much more fragrant and aromatic than the
native berry of Europe, though less so in that climate than when grown
here. Many new seedlings sprang from it, and it was the prevailing
berry in English and French gardens, says Fuller, until the South
American species, _grandiflora,_ was introduced and supplanted it. This
berry is naturally much larger and sweeter, and better adapted to the
English climate, than our _Virginiana._ Hence the English strawberries
of to-day surpass ours in these respects, but are wanting in that
aromatic pungency that characterizes most of our berries.

The Jocunda, Triumph, Victoria, are foreign varieties of the
Grandiflora species; while the Hovey, the Boston Pine, the Downer, are
natives of this country.

The strawberry, in the main, repeats the form of the human heart, and
perhaps, of all the small fruits known to man, none other is so deeply
and fondly cherished, or hailed with such universal delight, as this
lowly but youth-renewing berry.




IV
IS IT GOING TO RAIN?


I suspect that, like most countrymen, I was born with a chronic anxiety
about the weather. Is it going to rain or snow, be hot or cold, wet or
dry?—are inquiries upon which I would fain get the views of every man I
meet, and I find that most men are fired with the same desire to get my
views upon the same set of subjects. To a countryman the weather means
something,—to a farmer especially. The farmer has sowed and planted and
reaped and vended nothing but weather all his life. The weather must
lift the mortgage on his farm, and pay his taxes, and feed and clothe
his family. Of what use is his labor unless seconded by the weather?
Hence there is speculation in his eye whenever he looks at the clouds,
or the moon, or the sunset, or the stars; for even the Milky Way, in
his view, may point the direction of the wind to-morrow, and hence is
closely related to the price of butter. He may not take the sage’s
advice to “hitch his wagon to a star,” but he pins his hopes to the
moon, and plants and sows by its phases.

Then the weather is that phase of Nature in which she appears not the
immutable fate we are so wont to regard her, but on the contrary
something quite human and changeable, not to say womanish,—a creature
of moods, of caprices, of cross purposes; gloomy and downcast to-day,
and all light and joy to-morrow; caressing and tender one moment, and
severe and frigid the next; one day iron, the next day vapor;
inconsistent, inconstant, incalculable; full of genius, full of folly,
full of extremes; to be read and understood, not by rule, but by subtle
signs and indirections,—by a look, a glance, a presence, as we read and
understand a man or a woman. Some days are like a rare poetic mood.
There is a felicity and an exhilaration about them from morning till
night. They are positive and fill one with celestial fire. Other days
are negative and drain one of his electricity.

Sometimes the elements show a marked genius for fair weather, as in the
fall and early winter of 1877, when October, grown only a little stern,
lasted till January. Every shuffle of the cards brought these mild,
brilliant days uppermost. There was not enough frost to stop the plow,
save once perhaps, till the new year set in. Occasionally a fruit-tree
put out a blossom and developed young fruit. The warring of the
elements was chiefly done on the other side of the globe, where it
formed an accompaniment to the human war raging there. In our usually
merciless skies was written only peace and good-will to men, for
months.

What a creature of habit, too, Nature is as she appears in the weather!
If she miscarry once she will twice and thrice, and a dozen times. In a
wet time it rains to-day because it rained yesterday, and will rain
to-morrow because it rained to-day. Are the crops in any part of the
country drowning? They shall continue to drown. Are they burning up?
They shall continue to burn. The elements get in a rut and can’t get
out without a shock. I know a farmer who, in a dry time, when the
clouds gather and look threatening, gets out his watering-pot at once,
because, he says, “it won’t rain, and ’tis an excellent time to apply
the water.” Of course, there comes a time when the farmer is wrong, but
he is right four times out of five.

But I am not going to abuse the weather; rather to praise it, and make
some amends for the many ill-natured things I have said, within hearing
of the clouds, when I have been caught in the rain or been parched and
withered by the drought.

When Mr. Fields’s “Village Dogmatist” was asked what caused the rain,
or the fog, he leaned upon his cane and answered, with an air of
profound wisdom, that “when the atmosphere and hemisphere come together
it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces the rain,”—or the
fog, as the case may be. The explanation is a little vague, as his
biographer suggests, but it is picturesque, and there can be little
doubt that two somethings do come in contact that produce a sweating
when it rains or is foggy. More than that, the philosophy is simple and
comprehensive, which Goethe said was the main matter in such things.
Goethe’s explanation is still more picturesque, but I doubt if it is a
bit better philosophy. “I compare the earth and her atmosphere,” he
said to Eckermann, “to a great living being perpetually inhaling and
exhaling. If she inhale she draws the atmosphere to her, so that,
coming near her surface, it is condensed to clouds and rain. This state
I call water-affirmative.” The opposite state, when the earth exhales
and sends the watery vapors upward so that they are dissipated through
the whole space of the higher atmosphere, he called “water-negative.”

This is good literature, and worthy the great poet; the science of it I
would not be so willing to vouch for.

The poets, more perhaps than the scientists, have illustrated and held
by the great law of alternation, of ebb and flow, of turn and return,
in nature. An equilibrium, or, what is the same thing, a straight line,
Nature abhors more than she does a vacuum. If the moisture of the air
were uniform, or the heat uniform, that is, _in equilibrio,_ how could
it rain? what would turn the scale? But these things are heaped up, are
in waves. There is always a preponderance one way or the other; always
“a steep inequality.” Down this incline the rain comes, and up the
other side it goes. The high barometer travels like the crest of a sea,
and the low barometer like the trough. When the scale kicks the beam in
one place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. When the east
is burning up, the west is generally drowning out. The weather, we say,
is always in extremes; it never rains but it pours: but this is only
the abuse of a law on the part of the elements which is at the bottom
of all the life and motion on the globe.

The rain itself comes in shorter or longer waves,—now fast, now
slow—and sometimes in regular throbs or pulse-beats. The fall and
winter rains are, as a rule, the most deliberate and general, but the
spring and summer rains are always more or less impulsive and
capricious. One may see the rain stalking across the hills or coming up
the valley in single file, as it were. Another time it moves in vast
masses or solid columns, with broad open spaces between. I have seen a
spring snowstorm lasting nearly all day that swept down in rapid
intermittent sheets or gusts. The waves or pulsations of the storm were
nearly vertical and were very marked. But the great fact about the rain
is that it is the most beneficent of all the operations of nature; more
immediately than sunlight even, it means life and growth. Moisture is
the Eve of the physical world, the soft teeming principle given to wife
to Adam or heat, and the mother of all that lives. Sunshine abounds
everywhere, but only where the rain or dew follows is there life. The
earth had the sun long before it had the humid cloud, and will
doubtless continue to have it after the last drop of moisture has
perished or been dissipated. The moon has sunshine enough, but no rain;
hence it is a dead world—a lifeless cinder. It is doubtless true that
certain of the planets, as Saturn and Jupiter, have not yet reached the
condition of the cooling and ameliorating rains, while in Mars vapor
appears to be precipitated only in the form of snow; he is probably
past the period of the summer shower. There are clouds and vapors in
the sun itself,—clouds of flaming hydrogen and metallic vapors, and a
rain every drop of which is a burning or molten meteor. Our earth
itself has doubtless passed through the period of the fiery and
consuming rains. Mr. Proctor thinks there may have been a time when its
showers were downpourings of “muriatic, nitric, and sulphuric acid, not
only intensely hot, but fiercely burning through their chemical
activity.” Think of a dew that would blister and destroy like the oil
of vitriol! but that period is far behind us now. When this fearful
fever was past and the earth began to “sweat;” when these soft,
delicious drops began to come down, or this impalpable rain of the
cloudless nights to fall,—the period of organic life was inaugurated.
Then there was hope and a promise of the future. The first rain was the
turning-point, the spell was broken, relief was at hand. Then the
blazing furies of the fore world began to give place to the gentler
divinities of later times.

The first water,—how much it means! Seven tenths of man himself is
water. Seven tenths of the human race rained down but yesterday! It is
much more probable that Alexander will flow out of a bung-hole than
that any part of his remains will ever stop one. Our life is indeed a
vapor, a breath, a little moisture condensed upon the pane. We carry
ourselves as in a phial. Cleave the flesh, and how quickly we spill
out! Man begins as a fish, and he swims in a sea of vital fluids as
long as his life lasts. His first food is milk; so is his last and all
between. He can taste and assimilate and absorb nothing but liquids.
The same is true throughout all organic nature. ’Tis water-power that
makes every wheel move. Without this great solvent, there is no life. I
admire immensely this line of Walt Whitman’s:—

      “The slumbering and liquid trees.”


The tree and its fruit are like a sponge which the rains have filled.
Through them and through all living bodies there goes on the commerce
of vital growth, tiny vessels, fleets and succession of fleets, laden
with material bound for distant shores, to build up, and repair, and
restore the waste of the physical frame.

Then the rain means relaxation; the tension in Nature and in all her
creatures is lessened. The trees drop their leaves, or let go their
ripened fruit. The tree itself will fall in a still, damp day, when but
yesterday it withstood a gale of wind. A moist south wind penetrates
even the mind and makes its grasp less tenacious. It ought to take less
to kill a man on a rainy day than on a clear. The direct support of the
sun is withdrawn; life is under a cloud; a masculine mood gives place
to something like a feminine. In this sense, rain is the grief, the
weeping of Nature, the relief of a burdened or agonized heart. But
tears from Nature’s eyelids are always remedial and prepare the way for
brighter, purer skies.

I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation. Who does not
suffer in his spirit in a drought and feel restless and unsatisfied? My
very thoughts become thirsty and crave the moisture. It is hard work to
be generous, or neighborly, or patriotic in a dry time, and as for
growing in any of the finer graces or virtues, who can do it? One’s
very manhood shrinks, and, if he is ever capable of a mean act or of
narrow views, it is then.

Oh, the terrible drought! When the sky turns to brass; when the clouds
are like withered leaves; when the sun sucks the earth’s blood like a
vampire; when rivers shrink, streams fail, springs perish; when the
grass whitens and crackles under your feet; when the turf turns to
dust; when the fields are like tinder; when the air is the breath of an
oven; when even the merciful dews are withheld, and the morning is no
fresher than the evening; when the friendly road is a desert, and the
green woods like a sick-chamber; when the sky becomes tarnished and
opaque with dust and smoke; when the shingles on the houses curl up,
the clapboards warp, the paint blisters, the joints open; when the
cattle rove disconsolate and the hive-bee comes home empty; when the
earth gapes and all nature looks widowed, and deserted, and
heart-broken,—in such a time, what thing that has life does not
sympathize and suffer with the general distress?

The drought of the summer and early fall of 1876 was one of those
severe stresses of weather that make the oldest inhabitant search his
memory for a parallel. For nearly three months there was no rain to wet
the ground. Large forest trees withered and cast their leaves. In
spots, the mountains looked as if they had been scorched by fire. The
salt sea-water came up the Hudson ninety miles, when ordinarily it
scarcely comes forty. Toward the last, the capacity of the atmosphere
to absorb and dissipate the smoke was exhausted, and innumerable fires
in forests and peat-swamps made the days and the weeks—not blue, but a
dirty yellowish white. There was not enough moisture in the air to take
the sting out of the smoke, and it smarted the nose. The sun was red
and dim even at midday, and at his rising and setting he was as
harmless to the eye as a crimson shield or a painted moon. The
meteorological conditions seemed the farthest possible remove from
those that produce rain, or even dew. Every sign was negatived. Some
malevolent spirit seemed abroad in the air, that rendered abortive
every effort of the gentler divinities to send succor. The clouds would
gather back in the mountains, the thunder would growl, the tall masses
would rise up and advance threateningly, then suddenly cower, their
strength and purpose ooze away; they flattened out; the hot, parched
breath of the earth smote them; the dark, heavy masses were re-resolved
into thin vapor, and the sky came through where but a few moments
before there had appeared to be deep behind deep of water-logged
clouds. Sometimes a cloud would pass by, and one could see trailing
beneath and behind it a sheet of rain, like something let down that did
not quite touch the earth, the hot air vaporizing the drops before they
reached the ground.

Two or three times the wind got in the south, and those low,
dun-colored clouds that are nothing but harmless fog came hurrying up
and covered the sky, and city folk and women folk said the rain was at
last near. But the wise ones knew better. The clouds had no backing,
the clear sky was just behind them; they were only the nightcap of the
south wind, which the sun burnt up before ten o’clock.

Every storm has a foundation that is deeply and surely laid, and those
shallow surface-clouds that have no root in the depths of the sky
deceive none but the unwary.

At other times, when the clouds were not reabsorbed by the sky and rain
seemed imminent, they would suddenly undergo a change that looked like
curdling, and when clouds do that no rain need be expected. Time and
again I saw their continuity broken up, saw them separate into small
masses,—in fact saw a process of disintegration and disorganization
going on, and my hope of rain was over for that day. Vast spaces would
be affected suddenly; it was like a stroke of paralysis: motion was
retarded, the breeze died down, the thunder ceased, and the storm was
blighted on the very threshold of success.

I suppose there is some compensation in a drought; Nature doubtless
profits by it in some way. It is a good time to thin out her garden,
and give the law of the survival of the fittest a chance to come into
play. How the big trees and big plants do rob the little ones! there is
not drink enough to go around, and the strongest will have what there
is. It is a rest to vegetation, too, a kind of torrid winter that is
followed by a fresh awakening. Every tree and plant learns a lesson
from it, learns to shoot its roots down deep into the perennial
supplies of moisture and life.

But when the rain does come, the warm, sun-distilled rain; the
far-traveling, vapor-born rain; the impartial, undiscriminating,
unstinted rain; equable, bounteous, myriad-eyed, searching out every
plant and every spear of grass, finding every hidden thing that needs
water, falling upon the just and upon the unjust, sponging off every
leaf of every tree in the forest and every growth in the fields; music
to the ear, a perfume to the smell, an enchantment to the eye; healing
the earth, cleansing the air, renewing the fountains; honey to the bee,
manna to the herds, and life to all creatures,—what spectacle so fills
the heart? “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, down on the plowed fields of the
Athenians, and on the plains.”

There is a fine sibilant chorus audible in the sod, and in the dust of
the road, and in the porous plowed fields. Every grain of soil and
every root and rootlet purrs in satisfaction, Because something more
than water comes down when it rains; you cannot produce this effect by
simple water; the good-will of the elements, the consent and
approbation of all the skyey influences, come down; the harmony, the
adjustment, the perfect understanding of the soil beneath and the air
that swims above, are implied in the marvelous benefaction of the rain.
The earth is ready; the moist winds have wooed it and prepared it, the
electrical conditions are as they should be, and there are love and
passion in the surrender of the summer clouds. How the drops are
absorbed into the ground! You cannot, I say, succeed like this with
your hose or sprinkling-pot. There is no ardor or electricity in the
drops, no ammonia, or ozone, or other nameless properties borrowed from
the air.

Then one has not the gentleness and patience of Nature; we puddle the
ground in our hurry, we seal it up and exclude the air, and the plants
are worse off than before. When the sky is overcast and it is getting
ready to rain, the moisture rises in the ground, the earth opens her
pores and seconds the desire of the clouds.

Indeed, I have found there is but little virtue in a sprinkling-pot
after the drought has reached a certain pitch. The soil will not absorb
the water. ’Tis like throwing it on a hot stove. I once concentrated my
efforts upon a single hill of corn and deluged it with water night and
morning for several days, yet its leaves curled up and the ears failed
the same as the rest. Something may be done, without doubt, if one
begins in time, but the relief seems strangely inadequate to the means
often used. In rainless countries good crops are produced by
irrigation, but here man can imitate in a measure the patience and
bounty of Nature, and, with night to aid him, can make his thirsty
fields drink, or rather can pour the water down their throats.

I have said the rain is as necessary to man as to vegetation. You
cannot have a rank, sappy race, like the English or the German, without
plenty of moisture in the air and in the soil. Good viscera and an
abundance of blood are closely related to meteorological conditions,
unction of character, and a flow of animal spirits, too; and I suspect
that much of the dry and rarefied humor of New England, as well as the
thin and sharp physiognomies, are climatic results. We have rain
enough, but not equability of temperature or moisture,—no steady,
abundant supply of humidity in the air. In places in Great Britain it
is said to rain on an average three days out of four the year through;
yet the depth of rainfall is no greater than in this country, where it
rains but the one day out of four. John Bull shows those three rainy
days both in his temper and in his bodily habit; he is better for them
in many ways, and perhaps not quite so good in a few others: they make
him juicy and vascular, and maybe a little opaque; but we in this
country could well afford a few of his negative qualities for the sake
of his stomach and full-bloodedness.

We have such faith in the virtue of the rain, and in the capacity of
the clouds to harbor and transport material good, that we more than
half believe the stories of the strange and anomalous things that have
fallen in showers. There is no credible report that it has ever yet
rained pitchforks, but many other curious things have fallen. Fish,
flesh, and fowl, and substances that were neither, have been picked up
by veracious people after a storm. Manna, blood, and honey, frogs,
newts, and fish-worms, are among the curious things the clouds are
supposed to yield. If the clouds scooped up their water as the flying
express train does, these phenomena could be easier explained. I myself
have seen curious things. Riding along the road one day on the heels of
a violent summer tempest, I saw the ground swarming with minute hopping
creatures. I got out and captured my hands full. They proved to be
tree-toads, many of them no larger than crickets, and none of them
larger than a bumblebee. There seemed to be thousands of them. The mark
of the tree-toad was the round, flattened ends of their toes. I took
some of them home, but they died the next day. Where did they come
from? I imagined the violent wind swept them off the trees in the woods
to windward of the road. But this is only a guess; maybe they crept out
of the ground, or from under the wall near by, and were out to wet
their jackets.

I have never yet heard of a frog coming down chimney in a shower. Some
circumstantial evidence may be pretty conclusive, Thoreau says, as when
you find a trout in the milk; and if you find a frog or toad behind the
fire-board immediately after a shower, you may well ask him to explain
himself.

When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds were hollow and carried
their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds
bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way,
perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the
barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a
distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When
fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by
the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more
compact: ’tis like the threads that issue from the mass of flax or roll
of wool, only here there are innumerable threads, and the fingers that
hold them never tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a humming it
makes at times, and how the footsteps of the invisible spinner resound
through the cloud-pillared chambers!

The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; and were they not
constantly recruited from the atmosphere as the storm-centre travels
along,—was new wool not forthcoming from the white sheep and the black
sheep that the winds herd at every point,—all rains would be brief and
local; the storm would quickly exhaust itself, as we sometimes see a
thunder-cloud do in summer. A storm will originate in the far West or
Southwest—those hatching-places of all our storms—and travel across the
continent, and across the Atlantic to Europe, pouring down incalculable
quantities of rain as it progresses and recruiting as it wastes. It is
a moving vortex, into which the outlying moisture of the atmosphere is
being constantly drawn and precipitated. It is not properly the storm
that travels, but the low pressure, the storm impulse, the
meteorological magnet that makes the storm wherever its presence may
be. The clouds are not watering-carts, that are driven all the way from
Arizona or Colorado to Europe, but growths, developments that spring up
as the Storm-deity moves his wand across the land. In advance of the
storm, you may often see the clouds grow; the condensation of the
moisture into vapor is a visible process; slender, spiculæ-like clouds
expand, deepen, and lengthen; in the rear of the low pressure, the
reverse process, or the wasting of the clouds, may be witnessed. In
summer, the recruiting of a thunder-storm is often very marked. I have
seen the clouds file as straight across the sky toward a growing storm
or thunder-head in the horizon as soldiers hastening to the point of
attack or defense. They would grow more and more black and threatening
as they advanced, and actually seemed to be driven by more urgent winds
than certain other clouds. They were, no doubt, more in the line of the
storm influence. All our general storms are cyclonic in their
character, that is, rotary and progressive. Their type may be seen in
every little whirlpool that goes down the swollen current of the river;
and in our hemisphere they revolve in the same direction, namely, from
right to left, or in opposition to the hands of a watch. When the water
finds an outlet through the bottom of a dam, a suction or whirling
vortex is developed that generally goes round in the same direction. A
morning-glory or a hop-vine or a pole-bean winds around its support in
the same course, and cannot be made to wind in any other. I am aware
there are some perverse climbers among the plants that persist in going
around the pole in the other direction. In the southern hemisphere the
cyclone revolves in the other direction, or from left to right. How do
they revolve at the equator, then? They do not revolve at all. This is
the point of zero, and cyclones are never formed nearer than the third
parallel of latitude. Whether hop-vines also refuse to wind about the
pole there I am unable to say.

All our cyclones originate in the far Southwest and travel northeast.
Why did we wait for the Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all
the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first appear from the
general direction of the sunset? Who ever saw them pushing their opaque
filaments over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we not have
“northeasters” both winter and summer? True, but the storm does not
come from that direction. In such a case we get that segment of the
cyclonic whirl. A northeaster in one place may be an easter, a norther,
or a souther in some other locality. See through those drifting,
drenching clouds that come hurrying out of the northeast, and there are
the boss-clouds above them, the great captains themselves, moving
serenely on in the opposite direction.

Electricity is, of course, an important agent in storms. It is the
great organizer and ring-master. How a clap of thunder will shake down
the rain! It gives the clouds a smart rap; it jostles the vapor so that
the particles fall together more quickly; it makes the drops let go in
double and treble ranks. Nature likes to be helped in that way,—likes
to have the water agitated when she is freezing it or heating it, and
the clouds smitten when she is compressing them into rain. So does a
shock of surprise quicken the pulse in man, and in the crisis of action
help him to a decision.

What a spur and impulse the summer shower is! How its coming quickens
and hurries up the slow, jogging country life! The traveler along the
dusty road arouses from his reverie at the warning rumble behind the
hills; the children hasten from the field or from the school; the
farmer steps lively and thinks fast. In the hay-field, at the first
signal-gun of the elements, what a commotion! How the horserake
rattles, how the pitchforks fly, how the white sleeves play and twinkle
in the sun or against the dark background of the coming storm! One man
does the work of two or three. It is a race with the elements, and the
hay-makers do not like to be beaten. The rain that is life to the grass
when growing is poison to it after it becomes cured hay, and it must be
got under shelter, or put up into snug cocks, if possible, before the
storm overtakes it.

The rains of winter are cold and odorless. One prefers the snow, which
warms and covers; but can there be anything more delicious than the
first warm April rain,—the first offering of the softened and pacified
clouds of spring? The weather has been dry, perhaps, for two or three
weeks; we have had a touch of the dreaded drought thus early; the roads
are dusty, the streams again shrunken, and forest fires send up columns
of smoke on every hand; the frost has all been out of the ground many
days; the snow has all disappeared from the mountains; the sun is warm,
but the grass does not grow, nor the early seeds come up. The
quickening spirit of the rain is needed. Presently the wind gets in the
southwest, and, late in the day, we have our first vernal shower,
gentle and leisurely, but every drop condensed from warm tropic vapors
and charged with the very essence of spring. Then what a perfume fills
the air! One’s nostrils are not half large enough to take it in. The
smoke, washed by the rain, becomes the breath of woods, and the soil
and the newly plowed fields give out an odor that dilates the sense.
How the buds of the trees swell, how the grass greens, how the birds
rejoice! Hear the robins laugh! This will bring out the worms and the
insects, and start the foliage of the trees. A summer shower has more
copiousness and power, but this has the charm of freshness and of all
first things.

The laws of storms, up to a certain point, have come to be pretty well
understood, but there is yet no science of the weather, any more than
there is of human nature. There is about as much room for speculation
in the one case as in the other. The causes and agencies are subtle and
obscure, and we shall, perhaps, have the metaphysics of the subject
before we have the physics.

But as there are persons who can read human nature pretty well, so
there are those who can read the weather.

It is a masculine subject, and quite beyond the province of woman. Ask
those who spend their time in the open air,—the farmer, the sailor, the
soldier, the walker; ask the birds, the beasts, the tree-toads: they
know, if they will only tell. The farmer diagnoses the weather daily,
as the doctor a patient: he feels the pulse of the wind; he knows when
the clouds have a scurfy tongue, or when the cuticle of the day is
feverish and dry, or soft and moist. Certain days he calls
“weather-breeders,” and they are usually the fairest days in the
calendar,—all sun and sky. They are too fair; they are suspiciously so.
They come in the fall and spring, and always mean mischief. When a day
of almost unnatural brightness and clearness in either of these seasons
follows immediately after a storm, it is a sure indication that another
storm follows close,—follows to-morrow. In keeping with this fact is
the rule of the barometer, that, if the mercury suddenly rises very
high, the fair weather will not last. It is a high peak that indicates
a corresponding depression close at hand. I observed one of these
angelic mischief-makers during the past October. The second day after a
heavy fall of rain was the fairest of the fair,—not a speck or film in
all the round of the sky. Where have all the clouds and vapors gone to
so suddenly? was my mute inquiry, but I suspected they were plotting
together somewhere behind the horizon. The sky was a deep ultramarine
blue; the air so transparent that distant objects seemed near, and the
afternoon shadows were sharp and clear. At night the stars were
unusually numerous and bright (a sure sign of an approaching storm).
The sky was laid bare, as the tidal wave empties the shore of its water
before it heaps it up upon it. A violent storm of wind and rain the
next day followed this delusive brightness. So the weather, like human
nature, may be suspiciously transparent. A saintly day may undo you. A
few clouds do not mean rain; but when there are absolutely none, when
even the haze and filmy vapors are suppressed or held back, then
beware.

Then the weather-wise know there are two kinds of clouds, rain-clouds
and wind-clouds, and that the latter are always the most portentous. In
summer they are black as night; they look as if they would blot out the
very earth. They raise a great dust, and set things flying and slamming
for a moment, and that is all. They are the veritable wind-bags of
Æolus. There is something in the look of rain-clouds that is
unmistakable,—a firm, gray, tightly woven look that makes you remember
your umbrella. Not too high nor too low, not black nor blue, but the
form and hue of wet, unbleached linen. You see the river water in them;
they are heavy-laden, and move slow. Sometimes they develop what are
called “mares’ tails,”—small cloud-forms here and there against a heavy
background, that look like the stroke of a brush, or the streaming tail
of a charger. Sometimes a few under-clouds will be combed and groomed
by the winds or other meteoric agencies at work, as if for a race. I
have seen coming storms develop well-defined vertebræ,—a long backbone
of cloud, with the articulations and processes clearly marked. Any of
these forms, changing, growing, denote rain, because they show unusual
agencies at work. The storm is brewing and fermenting. “See those
cowlicks,” said an old farmer, pointing to certain patches on the
clouds; “they mean rain.” Another time, he said the clouds were “making
bag,” had growing udders, and that it would rain before night, as it
did. This reminded me that the Orientals speak of the clouds as cows
which the winds herd and milk.

In the winter, we see the sun wading in snow. The morning has perhaps
been clear, but in the afternoon a bank of gray filmy or cirrus cloud
meets him in the west, and he sinks deeper and deeper into it, till, at
his going down, his muffled beams are entirely hidden. Then, on the
morrow, _not_

“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,”

but silent as night, the white legions are here.

The old signs seldom fail,—a red and angry sunrise, or flushed clouds
at evening. Many a hope of rain have I seen dashed by a painted sky at
sunset. There is truth in the old couplet, too:—

      “If it rains before seven,
       It will clear before eleven.”

An old Indian had a sign for winter: “If the wind blows the snow off
the trees, the next storm will be snow; if it rains off, the next storm
will be rain.”

Morning rains are usually short-lived. Better wait till ten o’clock.

When the clouds are chilled, they turn blue and rise up.

When the fog leaves the mountains, reaching upward, as if afraid of
being left behind, the fair weather is near.

Shoddy clouds are of little account, and soon fall to pieces. Have your
clouds show a good strong fibre, and have them lined,—not with silver,
but with other clouds of a finer texture,—and have them wadded. It
wants two or three thicknesses to get up a good rain. Especially,
unless you have that cloud-mother, that dim, filmy, nebulous mass that
has its root in the higher regions of the air, and is the source and
backing of all storms, your rain will be light indeed.

I fear my reader’s jacket is not thoroughly soaked yet. I must give him
a final dash, a “clear-up” shower.

We were encamping in the primitive woods, by a little trout lake which
the mountain carried high on his hip, like a soldier’s canteen. There
were wives in the party, curious to know what the lure was that
annually drew their husbands to the woods. That magical writing on a
trout’s back they would fain decipher, little heeding the warning that
what is written here is not given to woman to know.

Our only tent or roof was the sheltering arms of the great birches and
maples. What was sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose,
too, so the goose insisted. A luxurious couch of boughs upon springing
poles was prepared, and the night should be not less welcome than the
day, which had indeed been idyllic. (A trout dinner had been served by
a little spring brook, upon an improvised table covered with moss and
decked with ferns, with strawberries from a near clearing.)

At twilight there was an ominous rumble behind the mountains. I was on
the lake, and could see what was brewing there in the west.

As darkness came on, the rumbling increased, and the mountains and the
woods and the still air were such good conductors of sound that the ear
was vividly impressed. One seemed to feel the enormous convolutions of
the clouds in the deep and jarring tones of the thunder. The coming of
night in the woods is alone peculiarly impressive, and it is doubly so
when out of the darkness comes such a voice as this. But we fed the
fire the more industriously, and piled the logs high, and kept the
gathering gloom at bay by as large a circle of light as we could
command. The lake was a pool of ink and as still as if congealed; not a
movement or a sound, save now and then a terrific volley from the cloud
batteries now fast approaching. By nine o’clock little puffs of wind
began to steal through the woods and tease and toy with our fire.
Shortly after, an enormous electric bombshell exploded in the treetops
over our heads, and the ball was fairly opened. Then followed three
hours, with only two brief intermissions, of as lively elemental music
and as copious an outpouring of rain as it was ever my lot to witness.
It was a regular meteorological carnival, and the revelers were drunk
with the wild sport. The apparent nearness of the clouds and the
electric explosions was something remarkable. Every discharge seemed to
be in the branches immediately overhead and made us involuntarily
cower, as if the next moment the great limbs of the trees, or the trees
themselves, would come crashing down. The mountain upon which we were
encamped appeared to be the focus of three distinct but converging
storms. The last two seemed to come into collision immediately over our
camp-fire, and to contend for the right of way, until the heavens were
ready to fall and both antagonists were literally spent. We stood in
groups about the struggling fire, and when the cannonade became too
terrible would withdraw into the cover of the darkness, as if to be a
less conspicuous mark for the bolts; or did we fear that the fire, with
its currents, might attract the lightning? At any rate, some other spot
than the one where we happened to be standing seemed desirable when
those onsets of the contending elements were the most furious.
Something that one could not catch in his hat was liable to drop almost
anywhere any minute. The alarm and consternation of the wives
communicated itself to the husbands, and they looked solemn and
concerned. The air was filled with falling water. The sound upon the
myriad leaves and branches was like the roar of a cataract. We put our
backs up against the great trees, only to catch a brook on our
shoulders or in the backs of our necks. Still the storm waxed. The fire
was beaten down lower and lower. It surrendered one post after another,
like a besieged city, and finally made only a feeble resistance from
beneath a pile of charred logs and branches in the centre. Our garments
yielded to the encroachments of the rain in about the same manner. I
believe my necktie held out the longest, and carried a few dry threads
safely through. Our cunningly devised and bedecked table, which the
housekeepers had so doted on and which was ready spread for breakfast,
was washed as by the hose of a fire-engine,—only the bare poles
remained,—and the couch of springing boughs, that was to make Sleep
jealous and o’er-fond, became a bed fit only for amphibians. Still the
loosened floods came down; still the great cloud-mortars bellowed and
exploded their missiles in the treetops above us. But all nervousness
finally passed away, and we became dogged and resigned. Our minds
became water-soaked; our thoughts were heavy and bedraggled. We were
past the point of joking at one another’s expense. The witticisms
failed to kindle,—indeed, failed to go, like the matches in our
pockets. About midnight the rain slackened, and by one o’clock ceased
entirely. How the rest of the night was passed beneath the dripping
trees and upon the saturated ground, I have only the dimmest
remembrance. All is watery and opaque; the fog settles down and
obscures the scene. But I suspect I tried the “wet pack” without being
a convert to hydropathy. When the morning dawned, the wives begged to
be taken home, convinced that the charms of camping-out were greatly
overrated. We, who had tasted this cup before, knew they had read at
least a part of the legend of the wary trout without knowing it.




V
SPECKLED TROUT

I


The legend of the wary trout, hinted at in the last sketch, is to be
further illustrated in this and some following chapters. We shall get
at more of the meaning of those dark water-lines, and I hope, also, not
entirely miss the significance of the gold and silver spots and the
glancing iridescent hues. The trout is dark and obscure above, but
behind this foil there are wondrous tints that reward the believing
eye. Those who seek him in his wild remote haunts are quite sure to get
the full force of the sombre and uninviting aspects,—the wet, the cold,
the toil, the broken rest, and the huge, savage, uncompromising
nature,—but the true angler sees farther than these, and is never
thwarted of his legitimate reward by them.

I have been a seeker of trout from my boyhood, and on all the
expeditions in which this fish has been the ostensible purpose I have
brought home more game than my creel showed. In fact, in my mature
years I find I got more of nature into me, more of the woods, the wild,
nearer to bird and beast, while threading my native streams for trout,
than in almost any other way. It furnished a good excuse to go forth;
it pitched one in the right key; it sent one through the fat and
marrowy places of field and wood. Then the fisherman has a harmless,
preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant that nothing fears. He blends
himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle
and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream;
its impulse bears him along. At the foot of the waterfall he sits
sequestered and hidden in its volume of sound. The birds know he has no
designs upon them, and the animals see that his mind is in the creek.
His enthusiasm anneals him, and makes him pliable to the scenes and
influences he moves among.

Then what acquaintance he makes with the stream! He addresses himself
to it as a lover to his mistress; he wooes it and stays with it till he
knows its most hidden secrets. It runs through his thoughts not less
than through its banks there; he feels the fret and thrust of every bar
and boulder. Where it deepens, his purpose deepens; where it is
shallow, he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance
and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days.

[Illustration: trout stream]

I am sure I run no risk of overpraising the charm and attractiveness of
a well-fed trout stream, every drop of water in it as bright and pure
as if the nymphs had brought it all the way from its source in crystal
goblets, and as cool as if it had been hatched beneath a glacier. When
the heated and soiled and jaded refugee from the city first sees one,
he feels as if he would like to turn it into his bosom and let it flow
through him a few hours, it suggests such healing freshness and
newness. How his roily thoughts would run clear; how the sediment would
go downstream! Could he ever have an impure or an unwholesome wish
afterward? The next best thing he can do is to tramp along its banks
and surrender himself to its influence. If he reads it intently enough,
he will, in a measure, be taking it into his mind and heart, and
experiencing its salutary ministrations.

Trout streams coursed through every valley my boyhood knew. I crossed
them, and was often lured and detained by them, on my way to and from
school. We bathed in them during the long summer noons, and felt for
the trout under their banks. A holiday was a holiday indeed that
brought permission to go fishing over on Rose’s Brook, or up
Hardscrabble, or in Meeker’s Hollow; all-day trips, from morning till
night, through meadows and pastures and beechen woods, wherever the
shy, limpid stream led. What an appetite it developed! a hunger that
was fierce and aboriginal, and that the wild strawberries we plucked as
we crossed the hill teased rather than allayed. When but a few hours
could be had, gained perhaps by doing some piece of work about the farm
or garden in half the allotted time, the little creek that headed in
the paternal domain was handy; when half a day was at one’s disposal,
there were the hemlocks, less than a mile distant, with their
loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and their dusky, fragrant
depths. Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his way along, startled now and
then by the sudden bursting-up of the partridge, or by the whistling
wings of the “dropping snipe,” pressing through the brush and the
briers, or finding an easy passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree,
carefully letting his hook down through some tangle into a still pool,
or standing in some high, sombre avenue and watching his line float in
and out amid the moss-covered boulders. In my first essayings I used to
go to the edge of these hemlocks, seldom dipping into them beyond the
first pool where the stream swept under the roots of two large trees.
From this point I could look back into the sunlit fields where the
cattle were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and mystery; the trout were
black, and to my young imagination the silence and the shadows were
blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and penetrated the
woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart of the
mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year of my
piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the pasture and
meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks, to where the
little stream joined the main creek of the valley.

In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day
arrived, I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant,
that came down out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid
mountain brook presenting many difficult problems to the young angler,
but a very enticing stream for all that, with its two saw-mill dams,
its pretty cascades, its high, shelving rocks sheltering the mossy
nests of the phœbe-bird, and its general wild and forbidding aspects.

But a meadow brook was always a favorite. The trout like meadows;
doubtless their food is more abundant there, and, usually, the good
hiding-places are more numerous. As soon as you strike a meadow the
character of the creek changes: it goes slower and lies deeper; it
tarries to enjoy the high, cool banks and to half hide beneath them; it
loves the willows, or rather the willows love it and shelter it from
the sun; its spring runs are kept cool by the overhanging grass, and
the heavy turf that faces its open banks is not cut away by the sharp
hoofs of the grazing cattle. Then there are the bobolinks and the
starlings and the meadowlarks, always interested spectators of the
angler; there are also the marsh marigolds, the buttercups, or the
spotted lilies, and the good angler is always an interested spectator
of them. In fact, the patches of meadow land that lie in the angler’s
course are like the happy experiences in his own life, or like the fine
passages in the poem he is reading; the pasture oftener contains the
shallow and monotonous places. In the small streams the cattle scare
the fish, and soil their element and break down their retreats under
the banks. Woodland alternates the best with meadow: the creek loves to
burrow under the roots of a great tree, to scoop out a pool after
leaping over the prostrate trunk of one, and to pause at the foot of a
ledge of moss-covered rocks, with ice-cold water dripping down. How
straight the current goes for the rock! Note its corrugated, muscular
appearance; it strikes and glances off, but accumulates, deepens with
well-defined eddies above and to one side; on the edge of these the
trout lurk and spring upon their prey.

The angler learns that it is generally some obstacle or hindrance that
makes a deep place in the creek, as in a brave life; and his ideal
brook is one that lies in deep, well-defined banks, yet makes many a
shift from right to left, meets with many rebuffs and adventures,
hurled back upon itself by rocks, waylaid by snags and trees, tripped
up by precipices, but sooner or later reposing under meadow banks,
deepening and eddying beneath bridges, or prosperous and strong in some
level stretch of cultivated land with great elms shading it here and
there.

But I early learned that from almost any stream in a trout country the
true angler could take trout, and that the great secret was this, that,
whatever bait you used, worm, grasshopper, grub, or fly, there was one
thing you must always put upon your hook, namely, your heart: when you
bait your hook with your heart the fish always bite; they will jump
clear from the water after it; they will dispute with each other over
it; it is a morsel they love above everything else. With such bait I
have seen the born angler (my grandfather was one) take a noble string
of trout from the most unpromising waters, and on the most unpromising
day. He used his hook so coyly and tenderly, he approached the fish
with such address and insinuation, he divined the exact spot where they
lay: if they were not eager, he humored them and seemed to steal by
them; if they were playful and coquettish, he would suit his mood to
theirs; if they were frank and sincere, he met them halfway; he was so
patient and considerate, so entirely devoted to pleasing the critical
trout, and so successful in his efforts,—surely his heart was upon his
hook, and it was a tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every angler
is. How nicely he would measure the distance! how dexterously he would
avoid an overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the
right spot! Of course there was a pulse of feeling and sympathy to the
extremity of that line. If your heart is a stone, however, or an empty
husk, there is no use to put it upon your hook; it will not tempt the
fish; the bait must be quick and fresh. Indeed, a certain quality of
youth is indispensable to the successful angler, a certain
unworldliness and readiness to invest yourself in an enterprise that
doesn’t pay in the current coin. Not only is the angler, like the poet,
born and not made, as Walton says, but there is a deal of the poet in
him, and he is to be judged no more harshly; he is the victim of his
genius: those wild streams, how they haunt him! he will play truant to
dull care, and flee to them; their waters impart somewhat of their own
perpetual youth to him. My grandfather when he was eighty years old
would take down his pole as eagerly as any boy, and step off with
wonderful elasticity toward the beloved streams; it used to try my
young legs a good deal to follow him, specially on the return trip. And
no poet was ever more innocent of worldly success or ambition. For, to
paraphrase Tennyson,—

      “Lusty trout to him were scrip and share,
       And babbling waters more than cent for cent.”

He laid up treasures, but they were not in this world. In fact, though
the kindest of husbands, I fear he was not what the country people call
a “good provider,” except in providing trout in their season, though it
is doubtful if there was always fat in the house to fry them in. But he
could tell you they were worse off than that at Valley Forge, and that
trout, or any other fish, were good roasted in the ashes under the
coals. He had the Walton requisite of loving quietness and
contemplation, and was devout withal. Indeed, in many ways he was akin
to those Galilee fishermen who were called to be fishers of men. How he
read the Book and pored over it, even at times, I suspect, nodding over
it, and laying it down only to take up his rod, over which, unless the
trout were very dilatory and the journey very fatiguing, he never
nodded!


II

The Delaware is one of our minor rivers, but it is a stream beloved of
the trout. Nearly all its remote branches head in mountain springs, and
its collected waters, even when warmed by the summer sun, are as sweet
and wholesome as dew swept from the grass. The Hudson wins from it two
streams that are fathered by the mountains from whose loins most of its
beginnings issue, namely, the Rondout and the Esopus. These swell a
more illustrious current than the Delaware, but the Rondout, one of the
finest trout streams in the world, makes an uncanny alliance before it
reaches its destination, namely, with the malarious Wallkill.

In the same nest of mountains from which they start are born the
Neversink and the Beaverkill, streams of wondrous beauty that flow
south and west into the Delaware. From my native hills I could catch
glimpses of the mountains in whose laps these creeks were cradled, but
it was not till after many years, and after dwelling in a country where
trout are not found, that I returned to pay my respects to them as an
angler.

My first acquaintance with the Neversink was made in company with some
friends in 1869. We passed up the valley of the Big Ingin, marveling at
its copious ice-cold springs, and its immense sweep of heavy-timbered
mountain-sides. Crossing the range at its head, we struck the Neversink
quite unexpectedly about the middle of the afternoon, at a point where
it was a good-sized trout stream. It proved to be one of those black
mountain brooks born of innumerable ice-cold springs, nourished in the
shade, and shod, as it were, with thick-matted moss, that every
camper-out remembers. The fish are as black as the stream and very
wild. They dart from beneath the fringed rocks, or dive with the hook
into the dusky depths,—an integral part of the silence and the shadows.
The spell of the moss is over all. The fisherman’s tread is noiseless,
as he leaps from stone to stone and from ledge to ledge along the bed
of the stream. How cool it is! He looks up the dark, silent defile,
hears the solitary voice of the water, sees the decayed trunks of
fallen trees bridging the stream, and all he has dreamed, when a boy,
of the haunts of beasts of prey—the crouching feline tribes, especially
if it be near nightfall and the gloom already deepening in the
woods—comes freshly to mind, and he presses on, wary and alert, and
speaking to his companions in low tones.

After an hour or so the trout became less abundant, and with nearly a
hundred of the black sprites in our baskets we turned back. Here and
there I saw the abandoned nests of the pigeons, sometimes half a dozen
in one tree. In a yellow birch which the floods had uprooted, a number
of nests were still in place, little shelves or platforms of twigs
loosely arranged, and affording little or no protection to the eggs or
the young birds against inclement weather.

Before we had reached our companions the rain set in again and forced
us to take shelter under a balsam. When it slackened we moved on and
soon came up with Aaron, who had caught his first trout, and,
considerably drenched, was making his way toward camp, which one of the
party had gone forward to build. After traveling less than a mile, we
saw a smoke struggling up through the dripping trees, and in a few
moments were all standing round a blazing fire. But the rain now
commenced again, and fairly poured down through the trees, rendering
the prospect of cooking and eating our supper there in the woods, and
of passing the night on the ground without tent or cover of any kind,
rather disheartening. We had been told of a bark shanty a couple of
miles farther down the creek, and thitherward we speedily took up our
line of march. When we were on the point of discontinuing the search,
thinking we had been misinformed or had passed it by, we came in sight
of a bark-peeling, in the midst of which a small log house lifted its
naked rafters toward the now breaking sky. It had neither floor nor
roof, and was less inviting on first sight than the open woods. But a
board partition was still standing, out of which we built a rude porch
on the east side of the house, large enough for us all to sleep under
if well packed, and eat under if we stood up. There was plenty of
well-seasoned timber lying about, and a fire was soon burning in front
of our quarters that made the scene social and picturesque, especially
when the frying-pans were brought into requisition, and the coffee, in
charge of Aaron, who was an artist in this line, mingled its aroma with
the wild-wood air. At dusk a balsam was felled, and the tips of the
branches used to make a bed, which was more fragrant than soft; hemlock
is better, because its needles are finer and its branches more elastic.

There was a spirt or two of rain during the night, but not enough to
find out the leaks in our roof. It took the shower or series of showers
of the next day to do that. They commenced about two o’clock in the
afternoon. The forenoon had been fine, and we had brought into camp
nearly three hundred trout; but before they were half dressed, or the
first panfuls fried, the rain set in. First came short, sharp dashes,
then a gleam of treacherous sunshine, followed by more and heavier
dashes. The wind was in the southwest, and to rain seemed the easiest
thing in the world. From fitful dashes to a steady pour the transition
was natural. We stood huddled together, stark and grim, under our
cover, like hens under a cart. The fire fought bravely for a time, and
retaliated with sparks and spiteful tongues of flame; but gradually its
spirit was broken, only a heavy body of coal and half-consumed logs in
the centre holding out against all odds. The simmering fish were soon
floating about in a yellow liquid that did not look in the least
appetizing. Point after point gave way in our cover, till standing
between the drops was no longer possible. The water coursed down the
underside of the boards, and dripped in our necks and formed puddles on
our hat-brims. We shifted our guns and traps and viands, till there was
no longer any choice of position, when the loaves and the fishes, the
salt and the sugar, the pork and the butter, shared the same watery
fate. The fire was gasping its last. Little rivulets coursed about it,
and bore away the quenched but steaming coals on their bosoms. The
spring run in the rear of our camp swelled so rapidly that part of the
trout that had been hastily left lying on its banks again found
themselves quite at home. For over two hours the floods came down.
About four o’clock Orville, who had not yet come from the day’s sport,
appeared. To say Orville was wet is not much; he was better than
that,—he had been washed and rinsed in at least half a dozen waters,
and the trout that he bore dangling at the end of a string hardly knew
that they had been out of their proper element.

But he brought welcome news. He had been two or three miles down the
creek, and had seen a log building,—whether house or stable he did not
know, but it had the appearance of having a good roof, which was
inducement enough for us instantly to leave our present quarters. Our
course lay along an old wood-road, and much of the time we were to our
knees in water. The woods were literally flooded everywhere. Every
little rill and springlet ran like a mill-tail, while the main stream
rushed and roared, foaming, leaping, lashing, its volume increased
fifty-fold. The water was not roily, but of a rich coffee-color, from
the leachings of the woods. No more trout for the next three days! we
thought, as we looked upon the rampant stream.

After we had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road
turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a
gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as
poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the
imagination than any of us were then capable of to believe it had ever
been a favorite resort of wood-nymphs or sylvan deities. It savored
rather of the equine and the bovine. The bark-men had kept their teams
there, horses on the one side and oxen on the other, and no Hercules
had ever done duty in cleansing the stables. But there was a dry loft
overhead with some straw, where we might get some sleep, in spite of
the rain and the midges; a double layer of boards, standing at a very
acute angle, would keep off the former, while the mingled refuse hay
and muck beneath would nurse a smoke that would prove a thorough
protection against the latter. And then, when Jim, the two-handed,
mounting the trunk of a prostrate maple near by, had severed it thrice
with easy and familiar stroke, and, rolling the logs in front of the
shanty, had kindled a fire, which, getting the better of the dampness,
soon cast a bright glow over all, shedding warmth and light even into
the dingy stable, I consented to unsling my knapsack and accept the
situation. The rain had ceased, and the sun shone out behind the woods.
We had trout sufficient for present needs; and after my first meal in
an ox-stall, I strolled out on the rude log bridge to watch the angry
Neversink rush by. Its waters fell quite as rapidly as they rose, and
before sundown it looked as if we might have fishing again on the
morrow. We had better sleep that night than either night before, though
there were two disturbing causes,—the smoke in the early part of it,
and the cold in the latter. The “no-see-ems” left in disgust; and,
though disgusted myself, I swallowed the smoke as best I could, and
hugged my pallet of straw the closer. But the day dawned bright, and a
plunge in the Neversink set me all right again. The creek, to our
surprise and gratification, was only a little higher than before the
rain, and some of the finest trout we had yet seen we caught that
morning near camp.

We tarried yet another day and night at the old stable, but taking our
meals outside squatted on the ground, which had now become quite dry.
Part of the day I spent strolling about the woods, looking up old
acquaintances among the birds, and, as always, half expectant of making
some new ones. Curiously enough, the most abundant species were among
those I had found rare in most other localities, namely, the small
water-wagtail, the mourning ground warbler, and the yellow-bellied
woodpecker. The latter seems to be the prevailing woodpecker through
the woods of this region.

That night the midges, those motes that sting, held high carnival. We
learned afterward, in the settlement below and from the barkpeelers,
that it was the worst night ever experienced in that valley. We had
done no fishing during the day, but had anticipated some fine sport
about sundown. Accordingly Aaron and I started off between six and
seven o’clock, one going upstream and the other down. The scene was
charming. The sun shot up great spokes of light from behind the woods,
and beauty, like a presence, pervaded the atmosphere. But torment,
multiplied as the sands of the seashore, lurked in every tangle and
thicket. In a thoughtless moment I removed my shoes and socks, and
waded in the water to secure a fine trout that had accidentally slipped
from my string and was helplessly floating with the current. This
caused some delay and gave the gnats time to accumulate. Before I had
got one foot half dressed I was enveloped in a black mist that settled
upon my hands and neck and face, filling my ears with infinitesimal
pipings and covering my flesh with infinitesimal bitings. I thought I
should have to flee to the friendly fumes of the old stable, with “one
stocking off and one stocking on;” but I got my shoe on at last, though
not without many amusing interruptions and digressions.

In a few moments after this adventure I was in rapid retreat toward
camp. Just as I reached the path leading from the shanty to the creek,
my companion in the same ignoble flight reached it also, his hat broken
and rumpled, and his sanguine countenance looking more sanguinary than
I had ever before seen it, and his speech, also, in the highest degree
inflammatory. His face and forehead were as blotched and swollen as if
he had just run his head into a hornets’ nest, and his manner as
precipitate as if the whole swarm was still at his back.

No smoke or smudge which we ourselves could endure was sufficient in
the earlier part of that evening to prevent serious annoyance from the
same cause; but later a respite was granted us.

About ten o’clock, as we stood round our camp-fire, we were startled by
a brief but striking display of the aurora borealis. My imagination had
already been excited by talk of legends and of weird shapes and
appearances, and when, on looking up toward the sky, I saw those pale,
phantasmal waves of magnetic light chasing each other across the little
opening above our heads, and at first sight seeming barely to clear the
treetops, I was as vividly impressed as if I had caught a glimpse of a
veritable spectre of the Neversink. The sky shook and trembled like a
great white curtain.

After we had climbed to our loft and had lain down to sleep, another
adventure befell us. This time a new and uninviting customer appeared
upon the scene, the _genius loci_ of the old stable, namely, the
“fretful porcupine.” We had seen the marks and work of these animals
about the shanty, and had been careful each night to hang our traps,
guns, etc., beyond their reach, but of the prickly night-walker himself
we feared we should not get a view.

We had lain down some half hour, and I was just on the threshold of
sleep, ready, as it were, to pass through the open door into the land
of dreams, when I heard outside somewhere that curious sound,—a sound
which I had heard every night I spent in these woods, not only on this
but on former expeditions, and which I had settled in my mind as
proceeding from the porcupine, since I knew the sounds our other common
animals were likely to make,—a sound that might be either a gnawing on
some hard, dry substance, or a grating of teeth, or a shrill grunting.

Orville heard it also, and, raising up on his elbow, asked, “What is
that?”

“What the hunters call a ‘porcupig,’” said I.

“Sure?”

“Entirely so.”

“Why does he make that noise?”

“It is a way he has of cursing our fire,” I replied. “I heard him last
night also.”

“Where do you suppose he is?” inquired my companion, showing a
disposition to look him up.

“Not far off, perhaps fifteen or twenty yards from our fire, where the
shadows begin to deepen.”

Orville slipped into his trousers, felt for my gun, and in a moment had
disappeared down through the scuttle hole. I had no disposition to
follow him, but was rather annoyed than otherwise at the disturbance.
Getting the direction of the sound, he went picking his way over the
rough, uneven ground, and, when he got where the light failed him,
poking every doubtful object with the end of his gun. Presently he
poked a light grayish object, like a large round stone, which surprised
him by moving off. On this hint he fired, making an incurable wound in
the “porcupig,” which, nevertheless, tried harder than ever to escape.
I lay listening, when, close on the heels of the report of the gun,
came excited shouts for a revolver. Snatching up my Smith and Wesson, I
hastened, shoeless and hatless, to the scene of action, wondering what
was up. I found my companion struggling to detain, with the end of the
gun, an uncertain object that was trying to crawl off into the
darkness. “Look out!” said Orville, as he saw my bare feet, “the quills
are lying thick around here.”

And so they were; he had blown or beaten them nearly all off the poor
creature’s back, and was in a fair way completely to disable my gun,
the ramrod of which was already broken and splintered clubbing his
victim. But a couple of shots from the revolver, sighted by a lighted
match, at the head of the animal, quickly settled him.

He proved to be an unusually large Canada porcupine,—an old patriarch,
gray and venerable, with spines three inches long, and weighing, I
should say, twenty pounds. The build of this animal is much like that
of the woodchuck, that is, heavy and pouchy. The nose is blunter than
that of the woodchuck, the limbs stronger, and the tail broader and
heavier. Indeed, the latter appendage is quite club-like, and the
animal can, no doubt, deal a smart blow with it. An old hunter with
whom I talked thought it aided them in climbing. They are inveterate
gnawers, and spend much of their time in trees gnawing the bark. In
winter one will take up its abode in a hemlock, and continue there till
the tree is quite denuded. The carcass emitted a peculiar, offensive
odor, and, though very fat, was not in the least inviting as game. If
it is part of the economy of nature for one animal to prey upon some
other beneath it, then the poor devil has indeed a mouthful that makes
a meal off the porcupine. Panthers and lynxes have essayed it, but have
invariably left off at the first course, and have afterwards been found
dead, or nearly so, with their heads puffed up like a pincushion, and
the quills protruding on all sides. A dog that understands the business
will manœuvre round the porcupine till he gets an opportunity to throw
it over on its back, when he fastens on its quilless underbody. Aaron
was puzzled to know how long-parted friends could embrace, when it was
suggested that the quills could be depressed or elevated at pleasure.

The next morning boded rain; but we had become thoroughly sated with
the delights of our present quarters, outside and in, and packed up our
traps to leave. Before we had reached the clearing, three miles below,
the rain set in, keeping up a lazy, monotonous drizzle till the
afternoon.

The clearing was quite a recent one, made mostly by barkpeelers, who
followed their calling in the mountains round about in summer, and
worked in their shops making shingle in winter. The Biscuit Brook came
in here from the west,—a fine, rapid trout stream six or eight miles in
length, with plenty of deer in the mountains about its head. On its
banks we found the house of an old woodman, to whom we had been
directed for information about the section we proposed to traverse.

“Is the way very difficult,” we inquired, “across from the Neversink
into the head of the Beaver-kill?”

“Not to me; I could go it the darkest night ever was. And I can direct
you so you can find the way without any trouble. You go down the
Neversink about a mile, when you come to Highfall Brook, the first
stream that comes down on the right. Follow up it to Jim Reed’s shanty,
about three miles. Then cross the stream, and on the left bank, pretty
well up on the side of the mountain, you will find a wood-road, which
was made by a fellow below here who stole some ash logs off the top of
the ridge last winter and drew them out on the snow. When the road
first begins to tilt over the mountain, strike down to your left, and
you can reach the Beaverkill before sundown.”

As it was then after two o’clock, and as the distance was six or eight
of these terrible hunters’ miles, we concluded to take a whole day to
it, and wait till next morning. The Beaverkill flowed west, the
Neversink south, and I had a mortal dread of getting entangled amid the
mountains and valleys that lie in either angle.

Besides, I was glad of another and final opportunity to pay my respects
to the finny tribes of the Neversink. At this point it was one of the
finest trout streams I had ever beheld. It was so sparkling, its bed so
free from sediment or impurities of any kind, that it had a new look,
as if it had just come from the hand of its Creator. I tramped along
its margin upward of a mile that afternoon, part of the time wading to
my knees, and casting my hook, baited only with a trout’s fin, to the
opposite bank. Trout are real cannibals, and make no bones, and break
none either, in lunching on each other. A friend of mine had several in
his spring, when one day a large female trout gulped down one of her
male friends, nearly one third her own size, and went around for two
days with the tail of her liege lord protruding from her mouth! A
fish’s eye will do for bait, though the anal fin is better. One of the
natives here told me that when he wished to catch large trout (and I
judged he never fished for any other,—I never do), he used for bait the
bullhead, or dart, a little fish an inch and a half or two inches long,
that rests on the pebbles near shore and darts quickly, when disturbed,
from point to point. “Put that on your hook,” said he, “and if there is
a big fish in the creek, he is bound to have it.” But the darts were
not easily found; the big fish, I concluded, had cleaned them all out;
and, then, it was easy enough to supply our wants with a fin.

Declining the hospitable offers of the settlers, we spread our blankets
that night in a dilapidated shingle-shop on the banks of the Biscuit
Brook, first flooring the damp ground with the new shingle that lay
piled in one corner. The place had a great-throated chimney with a
tremendous expanse of fireplace within, that cried “More!” at every
morsel of wood we gave it.

But I must hasten over this part of the ground, nor let the delicious
flavor of the milk we had that morning for breakfast, and that was so
delectable after four days of fish, linger on my tongue; nor yet tarry
to set down the talk of that honest, weatherworn passer-by who paused
before our door, and every moment on the point of resuming his way, yet
stood for an hour and recited his adventures hunting deer and bears on
these mountains. Having replenished our stock of bread and salt pork at
the house of one of the settlers, midday found us at Reed’s shanty,—one
of those temporary structures erected by the bark jobber to lodge and
board his “hands” near their work. Jim not being at home, we could gain
no information from the “women folks” about the way, nor from the men
who had just come in to dinner; so we pushed on, as near as we could,
according to the instructions we had previously received. Crossing the
creek, we forced our way up the side of the mountain, through a perfect
_cheval-de-frise_ of fallen and peeled hemlocks, and, entering the
dense woods above, began to look anxiously about for the wood-road. My
companions at first could see no trace of it; but knowing that a casual
wood-road cut in winter, when there was likely to be two or three feet
of snow on the ground, would present only the slightest indications to
the eye in summer, I looked a little closer, and could make out a mark
or two here and there. The larger trees had been avoided, and the axe
used only on the small saplings and underbrush, which had been lopped
off a couple of feet from the ground. By being constantly on the alert,
we followed it till near the top of the mountain; but, when looking to
see it “tilt” over the other side, it disappeared altogether. Some
stumps of the black cherry were found, and a solitary pair of
snow-shoes was hanging high and dry on a branch, but no further trace
of human hands could we see. While we were resting here a couple of
hermit thrushes, one of them with some sad defect in his vocal powers
which barred him from uttering more than a few notes of his song, gave
voice to the solitude of the place. This was the second instance in
which I have observed a song-bird with apparently some organic defect
in its instrument. The other case was that of a bobolink, which, hover
in mid-air and inflate its throat as it might, could only force out a
few incoherent notes. But the bird in each case presented this striking
contrast to human examples of the kind, that it was apparently just as
proud of itself, and just as well satisfied with its performance, as
were its more successful rivals.

After deliberating some time over a pocket compass which I carried, we
decided upon our course, and held on to the west. The descent was very
gradual. Traces of bear and deer were noted at different points, but
not a live animal was seen.

About four o’clock we reached the bank of a stream flowing west. Hail
to the Beaverkill! and we pushed on along its banks. The trout were
plenty, and rose quickly to the hook; but we held on our way, designing
to go into camp about six o’clock. Many inviting places, first on one
bank, then on the other, made us linger, till finally we reached a
smooth, dry place overshadowed by balsam and hemlock, where the creek
bent around a little flat, which was so entirely to our fancy that we
unslung our knapsacks at once. While my companions were cutting wood
and making other preparations for the night, it fell to my lot, as the
most successful angler, to provide the trout for supper and breakfast.
How shall I describe that wild, beautiful stream, with features so like
those of all other mountain streams? And yet, as I saw it in the deep
twilight of those woods on that June afternoon, with its steady, even
flow, and its tranquil, many-voiced murmur, it made an impression upon
my mind distinct and peculiar, fraught in an eminent degree with the
charm of seclusion and remoteness. The solitude was perfect, and I felt
that strangeness and insignificance which the civilized man must always
feel when opposing himself to such a vast scene of silence and
wildness. The trout were quite black, like all wood trout, and took the
bait eagerly. I followed the stream till the deepening shadows warned
me to turn back. As I neared camp, the fire shone far through the
trees, dispelling the gathering gloom, but blinding my eyes to all
obstacles at my feet. I was seriously disturbed on arriving to find
that one of my companions had cut an ugly gash in his shin with the axe
while felling a tree. As we did not carry a fifth wheel, it was not
just the time or place to have any of our members crippled, and I had
bodings of evil. But, thanks to the healing virtues of the balsam which
must have adhered to the blade of the axe, and double thanks to the
court-plaster with which Orville had supplied himself before leaving
home, the wounded leg, by being favored that night and the next day,
gave us little trouble.

That night we had our first fair and square camping out,—that is,
sleeping on the ground with no shelter over us but the trees,—and it
was in many respects the pleasantest night we spent in the woods. The
weather was perfect and the place was perfect, and for the first time
we were exempt from the midges and smoke; and then we appreciated the
clean new page we had to work on. Nothing is so acceptable to the
camper-out as a pure article in the way of woods and waters. Any
admixture of human relics mars the spirit of the scene. Yet I am
willing to confess that, before we were through those woods, the marks
of an axe in a tree were a welcome sight. On resuming our march next
day we followed the right bank of the Beaverkill, in order to strike a
stream which flowed in from the north, and which was the outlet of
Balsam Lake, the objective point of that day’s march. The distance to
the lake from our camp could not have been over six or seven miles;
yet, traveling as we did, without path or guide, climbing up banks,
plunging into ravines, making detours around swampy places, and forcing
our way through woods choked up with much fallen and decayed timber, it
seemed at least twice that distance, and the mid-afternoon sun was
shining when we emerged into what is called the “Quaker Clearing,”
ground that I had been over nine years before, and that lies about two
miles south of the lake. From this point we had a well-worn path that
led us up a sharp rise of ground, then through level woods till we saw
the bright gleam of the water through the trees.

I am always struck, on approaching these little mountain lakes, with
the extensive preparation that is made for them in the conformation of
the ground. I am thinking of a depression, or natural basin, in the
side of the mountain or on its top, the brink of which I shall reach
after a little steep climbing; but instead of that, after I have
accomplished the ascent, I find a broad sweep of level or gently
undulating woodland that brings me after a half hour or so to the lake,
which lies in this vast lap like a drop of water in the palm of a man’s
hand.

Balsam Lake was oval-shaped, scarcely more than half a mile long and a
quarter of a mile wide, but presented a charming picture, with a group
of dark gray hemlocks filling the valley about its head, and the
mountains rising above and beyond. We found a bough house in good
repair, also a dug-out and paddle and several floats of logs. In the
dug-out I was soon creeping along the shady side of the lake, where the
trout were incessantly jumping for a species of black fly, that,
sheltered from the slight breeze, were dancing in swarms just above the
surface of the water. The gnats were there in swarms also, and did
their best toward balancing the accounts by preying upon me while I
preyed upon the trout which preyed upon the flies. But by dint of
keeping my hands, face, and neck constantly wet, I am convinced that
the balance of blood was on my side. The trout jumped most within a
foot or two of shore, where the water was only a few inches deep. The
shallowness of the water, perhaps, accounted for the inability of the
fish to do more than lift their heads above the surface. They came up
mouths wide open, and dropped back again in the most impotent manner.
Where there is any depth of water, a trout will jump several feet into
the air; and where there is a solid, unbroken sheet or column, they
will scale falls and dams fifteen feet high.

We had the very cream and flower of our trout-fishing at this lake. For
the first time we could use the fly to advantage; and then the contrast
between laborious tramping along shore, on the one hand, and sitting in
one end of a dug-out and casting your line right and left with no fear
of entanglement in brush or branch, while you were gently propelled
along, on the other, was of the most pleasing character.

There were two varieties of trout in the lake,—what it seems proper to
call silver trout and golden trout; the former were the slimmer, and
seemed to keep apart from the latter. Starting from the outlet and
working round on the eastern side toward the head, we invariably caught
these first. They glanced in the sun like bars of silver. Their sides
and bellies were indeed as white as new silver. As we neared the head,
and especially as we came near a space occupied by some kind of
watergrass that grew in the deeper part of the lake, the other variety
would begin to take the hook, their bellies a bright gold color, which
became a deep orange on their fins; and as we returned to the place of
departure with the bottom of the boat strewn with these bright forms
intermingled, it was a sight not soon to be forgotten. It pleased my
eye so, that I would fain linger over them, arranging them in rows and
studying the various hues and tints. They were of nearly a uniform
size, rarely one over ten or under eight inches in length, and it
seemed as if the hues of all the precious metals and stones were
reflected from their sides. The flesh was deep salmon-color; that of
brook trout is generally much lighter. Some hunters and fishers from
the valley of the Mill Brook, whom we met here, told us the trout were
much larger in the lake, though far less numerous than they used to be.
Brook trout do not grow large till they become scarce. It is only in
streams that have been long and much fished that I have caught them as
much as sixteen inches in length.

The “porcupigs” were numerous about the lake, and not at all shy. One
night the heat became so intolerable in our oven-shaped bough house
that I was obliged to withdraw from under its cover and lie down a
little to one side. Just at daybreak, as I lay rolled in my blanket,
something awoke me. Lifting up my head, there was a porcupine with his
forepaws on my hips. He was apparently as much surprised as I was; and
to my inquiry as to what he at that moment might be looking for, he did
not pause to reply, but hitting me a slap with his tail which left
three or four quills in my blanket, he scampered off down the hill into
the brush.

Being an observer of the birds, of course every curious incident
connected with them fell under my notice. Hence, as we stood about our
camp-fire one afternoon looking out over the lake, I was the only one
to see a little commotion in the water, half hidden by the near
branches, as of some tiny swimmer struggling to reach the shore.
Rushing to its rescue in the canoe, I found a yellow-rumped warbler,
quite exhausted, clinging to a twig that hung down into the water. I
brought the drenched and helpless thing to camp, and, putting it into a
basket, hung it up to dry. An hour or two afterward I heard it
fluttering in its prison, and cautiously lifted the lid to get a better
glimpse of the lucky captive, when it darted out and was gone in a
twinkling. How came it in the water? That was my wonder, and I can only
guess that it was a young bird that had never before flown over a pond
of water, and, seeing the clouds and blue sky so perfect down there,
thought it was a vast opening or gateway into another summer land,
perhaps a short cut to the tropics, and so got itself into trouble. How
my eye was delighted also with the redbird that alighted for a moment
on a dry branch above the lake, just where a ray of light from the
setting sun fell full upon it! A mere crimson point, and yet how it
offset that dark, sombre background!

I have thus run over some of the features of an ordinary trouting
excursion to the woods. People inexperienced in such matters, sitting
in their rooms and thinking of these things, of all the poets have sung
and romancers written, are apt to get sadly taken in when they attempt
to realize their dreams. They expect to enter a sylvan paradise of
trout, cool retreats, laughing brooks, picturesque views, and balsamic
couches, instead of which they find hunger, rain, smoke, toil, gnats,
mosquitoes, dirt, broken rest, vulgar guides, and salt pork; and they
are very apt not to see where the fun comes in. But he who goes in a
right spirit will not be disappointed, and will find the taste of this
kind of life better, though bitterer, than the writers have described.




VI
BIRDS AND BIRDS

I


There is an old legend which one of our poets has made use of about the
bird in the brain,—a legend based, perhaps, upon the human significance
of our feathered neighbors. Was not Audubon’s brain full of birds, and
very lively ones, too? A person who knew him says he looked like a bird
himself; keen, alert, wide-eyed. It is not unusual to see the hawk
looking out of the human countenance, and one may see or have seen that
still nobler bird, the eagle. The song-birds might all have been
brooded and hatched in the human heart. They are typical of its highest
aspirations, and nearly the whole gamut of human passion and emotion is
expressed more or less fully in their varied songs. Among our own
birds, there is the song of the hermit thrush for devoutness and
religious serenity; that of the wood thrush for the musing, melodious
thoughts of twilight; the song sparrow’s for simple faith and trust,
the bobolink’s for hilarity and glee, the mourning dove’s for hopeless
sorrow, the vireo’s for all-day and every-day contentment, and the
nocturne of the mockingbird for love. Then there are the plaintive
singers, the soaring, ecstatic singers, the confident singers, the
gushing and voluble singers, and the half-voiced, inarticulate singers.
The note of the wood pewee is a human sigh; the chickadee has a call
full of unspeakable tenderness and fidelity. There is pride in the song
of the tanager, and vanity in that of the catbird. There is something
distinctly human about the robin; his is the note of boyhood. I have
thoughts that follow the migrating fowls northward and southward, and
that go with the sea-birds into the desert of the ocean, lonely and
tireless as they. I sympathize with the watchful crow perched yonder on
that tree, or walking about the fields. I hurry outdoors when I hear
the clarion of the wild gander; his comrade in my heart sends back the
call.


II

Here comes the cuckoo, the solitary, the joyless, enamored of the
privacy of his own thoughts; when did he fly away out of this brain?
The cuckoo is one of the famous birds, and is known the world over. He
is mentioned in the Bible, and is discussed by Pliny and Aristotle.
Jupiter himself once assumed the form of the cuckoo in order to take
advantage of Juno’s compassion for the bird.

We have only a reduced and modified cuckoo in this country. Our bird is
smaller, and is much more solitary and unsocial. Its color is totally
different from the Old World bird, the latter being speckled, or a kind
of dominick, while ours is of the finest cinnamon-brown or drab above,
and bluish white beneath, with a gloss and richness of texture in the
plumage that suggests silk. The bird has also mended its manners in
this country, and no longer foists its eggs and young upon other birds,
but builds a nest of its own and rears its own brood like other
well-disposed birds.

The European cuckoo is evidently much more of a spring bird than ours
is, much more a harbinger of the early season. He comes in April, while
ours seldom appears till late in May, and hardly then appears. He is
printed, as they say, but not published. Only the alert ones know he is
here. This old English rhyme on the cuckoo does not apply this side the
Atlantic:—

      “In April
       Come he will,
       In flow’ry May
       He sings all day,
       In leafy June
       He changes his tune,
       In bright July
       He’s ready to fly,
       In August
       Go he must.”

Our bird must go in August, too, but at no time does he sing all day.
Indeed, his peculiar guttural call has none of the character of a song.
It is a solitary, hermit-like sound, as if the bird were alone in the
world, and called upon the Fates to witness his desolation. I have
never seen two cuckoos together, and I have never heard their call
answered; it goes forth into the solitudes unreclaimed. Like a true
American, the bird lacks animal spirits and a genius for social
intercourse. One August night I heard one calling, calling, a long
time, not far from my house. It was a true night sound, more fitting
then than by day.

The European cuckoo, on the other hand, seems to be a joyous, vivacious
bird. Wordsworth applies to it the adjective “blithe,” and says:—

      “I hear thee babbling to the vale
       Of sunshine and of flowers.”

English writers all agree that its song is animated and pleasing, and
the outcome of a light heart. Thomas Hardy, whose touches always seem
true to nature, describes in one of his books an early summer scene
from amid which “the loud notes of three cuckoos were resounding
through the still air.” This is totally unlike our bird, which does not
sing in concert, but affects remote woods, and is most frequently heard
in cloudy weather. Hence the name of rain-crow that is applied to him
in some parts of the country. I am more than half inclined to believe
that his call does indicate rain, as it is certain that of the
tree-toad does.

The cuckoo has a slender, long-drawn-out appearance on account of the
great length of tail. It is seldom seen about farms or near human
habitations until the June canker-worm appears, when it makes frequent
visits to the orchard. It loves hairy worms, and has eaten so many of
them that its gizzard is lined with hair.

The European cuckoo builds no nest, but puts its eggs out to be
hatched, as does our cow blackbird, and our cuckoo is master of only
the rudiments of nest-building. No other bird in the woods builds so
shabby a nest; it is the merest makeshift,—a loose scaffolding of twigs
through which the eggs can be seen. One season, I knew of a pair that
built within a few feet of a country house that stood in the midst of a
grove, but a heavy storm of rain and wind broke up the nest.

If the Old World cuckoo had been as silent and retiring a bird as ours
is, it could never have figured so conspicuously in literature as it
does,—having a prominence that we would give only to the bobolink or to
the wood thrush,—as witness his frequent mention by Shakespeare, or the
following early English ballad (in modern guise):—

      “Summer is come in,
       Loud sings the cuckoo;
       Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
       And springs the wood now.
           Sing, cuckoo;
       The ewe bleateth for her lamb,
           The cow loweth for her calf,
           The bullock starteth.
       The buck verteth,
       Merrily sings the cuckoo,
       Cuckoo, cuckoo;
       Well sings the cuckoo,
       Mayest thou never cease.”


III

I think it will be found, on the whole, that the European birds are a
more hardy and pugnacious race than ours, and that their song-birds
have more vivacity and power, and ours more melody and plaintiveness.
In the song of the skylark, for instance, there is little or no melody,
but wonderful strength and copiousness. It is a harsh strain near at
hand, but very taking when showered down from a height of several
hundred feet.

Daines Barrington, the naturalist of the last century, to whom White of
Selborne addressed so many of his letters, gives a table of the
comparative merit of seventeen leading song-birds of Europe, marking
them under the heads of mellowness, sprightliness, plaintiveness,
compass, and execution. In the aggregate, the songsters stand highest
in sprightliness, next in compass and execution, and lowest in the
other two qualities. A similar arrangement and comparison of our
songsters, I think, would show an opposite result,—that is, a
predominance of melody and plaintiveness. The British wren, for
instance, stands in Barrington’s table as destitute of both these
qualities; the reed sparrow also. Our wren-songs, on the contrary, are
gushing and lyrical, and more or less melodious,—that of the winter
wren being preeminently so. Our sparrows, too, all have sweet,
plaintive ditties, with but little sprightliness or compass. The
English house sparrow has no song at all, but a harsh chatter that is
unmatched among our birds. But what a hardy, prolific, pugnacious
little wretch it is! These birds will maintain themselves where our
birds will not live at all, and a pair of them will lie down in the
gutter and fight like dogs. Compared with this miniature John Bull, the
voice and manners of our common sparrow are gentle and retiring. The
English sparrow is a street gamin, our bird a timid rustic.

The English robin redbreast is tallied in this country by the bluebird,
which was called by the early settlers of New England the blue robin.
The song of the British bird is bright and animated, that of our bird
soft and plaintive.

The nightingale stands at the head in Barrington’s table, and is but
little short of perfect in all the qualities. We have no one bird that
combines such strength or vivacity with such melody. The mockingbird
doubtless surpasses it in variety and profusion of notes; but falls
short, I imagine, in sweetness and effectiveness. The nightingale will
sometimes warble twenty seconds without pausing to breathe, and when
the condition of the air is favorable, its song fills a space a mile in
diameter. There are, perhaps, songs in our woods as mellow and
brilliant, as is that of the closely allied species, the water-thrush;
but our bird’s song has but a mere fraction of the nightingale’s volume
and power.

Strength and volume of voice, then, seem to be characteristic of the
English birds, and mildness and delicacy of ours. How much the
thousands of years of contact with man, and familiarity with artificial
sounds, over there, have affected the bird voices, is a question.
Certain it is that their birds are much more domestic than ours, and
certain it is that all purely wild sounds are plaintive and elusive.
Even of the bark of the fox, the cry of the panther, the voice of the
coon, or the call and clang of wild geese and ducks, or the war-cry of
savage tribes, is this true; but not true in the same sense of
domesticated or semi-domesticated animals and fowls. How different the
voice of the common duck or goose from that of the wild species, or of
the tame dove from that of the turtle of the fields and groves! Where
could the English house sparrow have acquired that unmusical voice but
amid the sounds of hoofs and wheels, and the discords of the street?
And the ordinary notes and calls of so many of the British birds,
according to their biographers, are harsh and disagreeable; even the
nightingale has an ugly, guttural “chuck.” The missel-thrush has a
harsh scream; the jay a note like “wrack,” “wrack;” the fieldfare a
rasping chatter; the blackbird, which is our robin cut in ebony, will
sometimes crow like a cock and cackle like a hen; the flocks of
starlings make a noise like a steam saw-mill; the white-throat has a
disagreeable note; the swift a discordant scream; and the bunting a
harsh song. Among our song-birds, on the contrary, it is rare to hear a
harsh or displeasing voice. Even their notes of anger and alarm are
more or less soft.

I would not imply that our birds are the better songsters, but that
their songs, if briefer and feebler, are also more wild and
plaintive,—in fact, that they are softer-voiced. The British birds, as
I have stated, are more domestic than ours; a much larger number build
about houses and towers and outbuildings. The titmouse with us is
exclusively a wood-bird; but in Britain three or four species of them
resort more or less to buildings in winter. Their redstart also builds
under the eaves of houses; their starling in church steeples and in
holes in walls; several thrushes resort to sheds to nest; and jackdaws
breed in the crannies of the old architecture, and this in a much
milder climate than our own.

They have in that country no birds that answer to our tiny, lisping
wood-warblers,—genus _Dendroica,_—nor to our vireos, _Vireonidœ._ On
the other hand, they have a larger number of field-birds and
semi-game-birds. They have several species like our robin; thrushes
like him, and some of them larger, as the ring ouzel, the
missel-thrush, the fieldfare, the throstle, the redwing, White’s
thrush, the blackbird,—these, besides several species in size and
habits more like our wood thrush.

Several species of European birds sing at night besides the true
nightingale,—not fitfully and as if in their dreams, as do a few of our
birds, but continuously. They make a business of it. The sedge-bird
ceases at times as if from very weariness; but wake the bird up, says
White, by throwing a stick or stone into the bushes, and away it goes
again in full song. We have but one real nocturnal songster, and that
is the mockingbird. One can see how this habit might increase among the
birds of a long-settled country like England. With sounds and voices
about them, why should they be silent, too? The danger of betraying
themselves to their natural enemies would be less than in our woods.

That their birds are more quarrelsome and pugnacious than ours I think
evident. Our thrushes are especially mild-mannered, but the
missel-thrush is very bold and saucy, and has been known to fly in the
face of persons who have disturbed the sitting bird. No jay nor magpie
nor crow can stand before him. The Welsh call him master of the
coppice, and he welcomes a storm with such a vigorous and hearty song
that in some countries he is known as storm-cock. He sometimes kills
the young of other birds and eats eggs,—a very unthrushlike trait. The
whitethroat sings with crest erect, and attitudes of warning and
defiance. The hooper is a great bully; so is the greenfinch. The
wood-grouse—now extinct, I believe—has been known to attack people in
the woods. And behold the grit and hardihood of that little emigrant or
exile to our shores, the English sparrow! Our birds have their tilts
and spats also; but the only really quarrelsome members in our family
are confined to the flycatchers, as the kingbird and the great crested
flycatcher. None of our song-birds are bullies.

Many of our more vigorous species, as the butcherbird, the crossbills,
the pine grosbeak, the redpoll, the Bohemian chatterer, the shore lark,
the longspur, the snow bunting, etc., are common to both continents.

Have the Old World creatures throughout more pluck and hardihood than
those that are indigenous to this continent? Behold the common mouse,
how he has followed man to this country and established himself here
against all opposition, overrunning our houses and barns, while the
native species is rarely seen. And when has anybody seen the American
rat, while his congener from across the water has penetrated to every
part of the continent! By the next train that takes the family to some
Western frontier, arrives this pest. Both our rat and mouse or mice are
timid, harmless, delicate creatures, compared with the cunning, filthy,
and prolific specimens that have fought their way to us from the Old
World. There is little doubt, also, that the red fox has been
transplanted to this country from Europe. He is certainly on the
increase, and is fast running out the native gray species.

Indeed, I have thought that all forms of life in the Old World were
marked by greater prominence of type, or stronger characteristic and
fundamental qualities, than with us,—coarser and more hairy and virile,
and therefore more powerful and lasting. This opinion is still subject
to revision, but I find it easier to confirm it than to undermine it.


IV

But let me change the strain and contemplate for a few moments this
feathered bandit,—this bird with the mark of Cain upon him, _Lanius
borealis,_—the great shrike or butcher-bird. Usually the character of a
bird of prey is well defined; there is no mistaking him. His claws, his
beak, his head, his wings, in fact his whole build, point to the fact
that he subsists upon live creatures; he is armed to catch them and to
slay them. Every bird knows a hawk and knows him from the start, and is
on the lookout for him. The hawk takes life, but he does it to maintain
his own, and it is a public and universally known fact. Nature has sent
him abroad in that character, and has advised all creatures of it. Not
so with the shrike; here she has concealed the character of a murderer
under a form as innocent as that of the robin. Feet, wings, tail,
color, head, and general form and size are all those of a
songbird,—very much like that master songster, the mockingbird,—yet
this bird is a regular Bluebeard among its kind. Its only
characteristic feature is its beak, the upper mandible having two sharp
processes and a sharp hooked point. It cannot fly away to any distance
with the bird it kills, nor hold it in its claws to feed upon it. It
usually impales its victim upon a thorn, or thrusts it in the fork of a
limb. For the most part, however, its food seems to consist of
insects,—spiders, grasshoppers, beetles, etc. It is the assassin of the
small birds, whom it often destroys in pure wantonness, or merely to
sup on their brains, as the Gaucho slaughters a wild cow or bull for
its tongue. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Apparently its victims
are unacquainted with its true character and allow it to approach them,
when the fatal blow is given. I saw an illustration of this the other
day. A large number of goldfinches in their fall plumage, together with
snowbirds and sparrows, were feeding and chattering in some low bushes
back of the barn. I had paused by the fence and was peeping through at
them, hoping to get a glimpse of that rare sparrow, the white-crowned.
Presently I heard a rustling among the dry leaves as if some larger
bird was also among them. Then I heard one of the goldfinches cry out
as if in distress, when the whole flock of them started up in alarm,
and, circling around, settled in the tops of the larger trees. I
continued my scrutiny of the bushes, when I saw a large bird, with some
object in its beak, hopping along on a low branch near the ground. It
disappeared from my sight for a few moments, then came up through the
undergrowth into the top of a young maple where some of the finches had
alighted, and I beheld the shrike. The little birds avoided him and
flew about the tree, their pursuer following them with the motions of
his head and body as if he would fain arrest them by his murderous
gaze. The birds did not utter the cry or make the demonstration of
alarm they usually do on the appearance of a hawk, but chirruped and
called and flew about in a half-wondering, half-bewildered manner. As
they flew farther along the line of trees the shrike followed them as
if bent on further captures. I then made my way around to see what the
shrike had caught, and what he had done with his prey. As I approached
the bushes I saw the shrike hastening back. I read his intentions at
once. Seeing my movements, he had returned for his game. But I was too
quick for him, and he got up out of the brush and flew away from the
locality. On some twigs in the thickest part of the bushes I found his
victim,—a goldfinch. It was not impaled upon a thorn, but was carefully
disposed upon some horizontal twigs,—laid upon the shelf, so to speak.
It was as warm as in life, and its plumage was unruffled. On examining
it I found a large bruise or break in the skin on the back of the neck,
at the base of the skull. Here the bandit had no doubt griped the bird
with his strong beak. The shrike’s blood-thirstiness was seen in the
fact that he did not stop to devour his prey, but went in quest of
more, as if opening a market of goldfinches. The thicket was his
shambles, and if not interrupted, he might have had a

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