A Bird-Lover in the West Part 13

On this occasion we placed ourselves boldly, though very quietly, in the paths that run through the oak-brush. We had abandoned all attempt at concealment; we could hope only for tolerance. The birds readily understood; they appreciated that they were seen and watched, and their manners changed accordingly. The first one of the black-and-white gentry who entered the grove discovered my comrade, and announced the presence of the enemy by a loud cry, in what somebody has aptly called a "frontier tone of voice." Instantly another appeared and added his remarks; then another, and still another, till within five minutes there were ten or twelve excited magpies, shouting at the top of their voices, and hopping and flying about her head, coming ever nearer and nearer, as if they meditated a personal attack. I did not really fear it, but I kept close watch, while remaining motionless, in the hope that they would not notice me. Vain hope! nothing could escape those sharp eyes when once the bird was aroused. After they had said what they chose to my friend, who received the taunts and abuse of the infuriated mob in meek silence, lifting not her voice to reply, they turned the stream of their eloquence upon me.

I was equally pa.s.sive, for indeed I felt that they had a grievance. We have no right to expect birds to tell one human being from another, so long as we, with all our boasted intelligence, cannot tell one crow or one magpie from another; and all the week they had suffered persecution at the hands of the village boys. Young magpies, nestlings, were in nearly every house, and the birds had endured pillage, and doubtless some of them death. I did not blame the grieved parents for the reception they gave us; from their point of view we belonged to the enemy.

After the storm had swept by, and while we sat there waiting to see if the birds would return, one of the horses of the pasture made his appearance on the side where I sat, now eating the top of a rosebush, now snipping off a flower plant that had succeeded in getting two leaves above the ground, but at every step coming nearer me. It was plain that he contemplated retiring to this shady grove, and, not so observing as the magpies, did not see that it was already occupied. When he was not more than ten feet away, I s.n.a.t.c.hed off my sun hat and waved it before him, not wishing to make a noise. He stopped instantly, stared wildly for a moment, as if he had never seen such an apparition, then wheeled with a snort, flung out his heels in disrespect, and galloped off down the field.

The incident was insignificant, but the result was curious. So long as we stayed in that bit of brush, not a horse attempted to enter, though they all browsed around outside. They avoided it as if it were haunted, or, as my comrade said, "filled with beckoning forms." Nor was that all; I have reason to think they never again entered that particular patch of brush, for, some weeks after we had abandoned the study of magpies and the pasture altogether, we found the spot transformed, as if by the wand of enchantment. From the burned-up desert outside we stepped at once into a miniature paradise, to our surprise, almost our consternation.

Excepting the footpaths through it, it bore no appearance of having ever been a thoroughfare. Around the foot of every tree had grown up clumps of ferns or brakes, a yard high, luxuriant, graceful, and exquisite in form and color; and peeping out from under them were flowers, dainty wildings we had not before seen there. A bit of the tropics or a gem out of fairyland it looked to our sun and sand weary eyes. Outside were the burning sun of June, a withering hot wind, and yellow and dead vegetation; within was cool greenness and a mere rustle of leaves whispering of the gale. It was the loveliest bit of greenery we saw on the sh.o.r.es of the Great Salt Lake. It was marvelous; it was almost uncanny.

Our daily trips to the pasture had ceased, and other birds and other nests had occupied our thoughts for a week or two, when we resolved to pay a last visit to our old haunts, to see if we could learn anything of the magpies. We went through the pasture, led by the voices of the birds away over to the farther side, and there, across another fenced pasture, we heard them plainly, calling and chattering and making much noise, but in different tones from any we had heard before. Evidently a magpie nursery had been established over there. We fancied we could distinguish maternal reproof and loving baby talk, beside the weaker voices of the young, and we went home rejoicing to believe, that in spite of nest robbers, and the fright we had given them, some young magpies were growing up to enliven the world another summer.

XIX.

THE SECRET OF THE WILD ROSE PATH.

"Shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?"

Wordsworth's lines are addressed to the cuckoo of the Old World, a bird of unenviable reputation, notorious for imposing his most sacred duties upon others; naturally, therefore, one who would not court observation, and whose ways would be somewhat mysterious. But the American representative of the family is a bird of different manners. Unlike his namesake across the water, our cuckoo never--or so rarely as practically to be never--shirks the labor of nest-building and raising a family. He has no reason to skulk, and though always a shy bird, he is no more so than several others, and in no sense is he a mystery.

There is, however, one American bird for whom Wordsworth's verse might have been written; one whose chief aim seems to be, reversing our grandmothers' rule for little people, to be heard, and not seen. To be seen is, with this peculiar fellow, a misfortune, an accident, which he avoids with great care, while his voice rings out loud and clear above all others in the shrubbery. I refer to the yellow-breasted chat (_Icteria virens_), whose summer home is the warmer temperate regions of our country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and whose unbirdlike utterances prepare one to believe the stories told of his eccentric actions; this, for example, by Dr. Abbott:--

"Aloft in the sunny air he springs; To his timid mate he calls; With dangling legs and fluttering wings On the tangled smilax falls; He mutters, he shrieks-- A hopeless cry; You think that he seeks In peace to die, But pity him not; 't is the ghostly chat, An imp if there is one, be sure of that."

I first knew the chat--if one may be said to know a creature so shy--in a spot I have elsewhere described, a deserted park at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. I became familiar with his various calls and cries (one can hardly call them songs); I secured one or two fleeting glimpses of his graceful form; I sought and discovered the nest, which thereupon my Lady Chat promptly abandoned, though I had not laid a finger upon it; and last of all, I had the sorrow and shame of knowing that my curiosity had driven the pair from the neighborhood. This was the Western form of _Icteria_, differing from the Eastern only in a greater length of tail, which several of our Rocky Mountain birds affect, for the purpose, apparently, of puzzling the ornithologist.

Two years after my unsuccessful attempt to cultivate friendly relations with "the ghostly chat," the middle of May found me on the sh.o.r.e of the Great Salt Lake, where I settled myself at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, at that point bare, gray, and unattractive, showing miles of loose bowlders and great patches of sage-bush. In the monotonous stretches of this shrub, each plant of which looks exactly like every other, dwelt many shy birds, as well hidden as bobolinks in the meadow gra.s.s, or meadow-larks in the alfalfa.

But on this mountain side no friendly cover existed from which I could spy out bird secrets. Whatever my position, and wherever I placed myself, I was as conspicuous as a tower in the middle of a plain; again, no shadow of protection was there from the too-ardent sun of Utah, which drew the vitality from my frame as it did the color from my gown; worse than these, the everywhere present rocks were the chosen haunts of the one enemy of a peaceful bird lover, the rattlesnake, and I hesitated to pursue the bird, because I invariably forgot to watch and listen for the reptile. Bird study under these conditions was impossible, but the place presented a phase of nature unfamiliar to me, and for a time so fascinating that every morning my steps turned of themselves "up the stony pathway to the hills."

The companion of my walks, a fellow bird-student, was more than fascinated; she was enraptured. The odorous bush had a.s.sociations for her; she reveled in it; she inhaled its fragrance as a delicious perfume; she filled her pockets with it; she lay for hours at a time on the ground, where she could bask in the sunshine, and see nothing but the gray leaves around her and the blue sky above.

I can hardly tell what was the fascination for me. It was certainly not the view of the mountains, though mountains are beyond words in my affections. The truth is, the Rocky Mountains, many of them, need a certain distance to make them either picturesque or dignified. The range then daily before our eyes, the Wasatch, was, to dwellers at its feet, bleak, monotonous, and hopelessly prosaic. The lowest foothills, being near, hid the taller peaks, as a penny before the eye will hide a whole landscape.

Let me not, however, be unjust to the mountains I love. There is a range which satisfies my soul, and will rest in my memory forever, a beautiful picture, or rather a whole gallery of pictures. I can shut my eyes and see it at this moment, as I have seen it a thousand times. In the early morning, when the level sun shines on its face, it is like one continuous mountain reaching across the whole western horizon; it has a broken and beautiful sky line; Pike's Peak looms up toward the middle, and lovely Cheyenne ends it in graceful slope on the south; lights and shadows play over it; its colors change with the changing sky or atmosphere,--sometimes blue as the heavens, sometimes misty as a dream; it is wonderfully beautiful then. But wait till the sun gets higher; look again at noon, or a little later. Behold the whole range has sprung into life, separated into individuals; gorges are cut where none had appeared; chasms come to light; canons and all sorts of divisions are seen; foothills move forward to their proper places, and taller peaks turn at angles to each other; shapes and colors that one never suspected come out in the picture: the transformation is marvelous. But the sun moves on, the magical moment pa.s.ses, each mountain slips back into line, and behold, you see again the morning's picture.

Indulge me one moment, while I try to show you the last picture impressed upon my memory as the train bore me, unwilling, away. It was cloudy, a storm was coming up, and the whole range was in deep shadow, when suddenly through some rift in the clouds a burst of sunshine fell upon the "beloved mountain" Cheyenne, and upon it alone. In a moment it was a smiling picture,

"Glad With light as with a garment it was clad;"

all its inequalities, its divisions, its irregularities emphasized, its greens turned greener, its reds made more glowing,--an unequaled gem for a parting gift.

To come back to Utah. One morning, on our way up to the heights, as we were pa.s.sing a clump of oak-brush, a bird cry rang out. The voice was loud and clear, and the notes were of a peculiar character: first a "chack" two or three times repeated, then subdued barks like those of a distressed puppy, followed by hoa.r.s.e "mews" and other sounds suggesting almost any creature rather than one in feathers. But with delight I recognized the chat; my enthusiasm instantly revived. I unfolded my camp chair, placed myself against a stone wall on the opposite side of the road, and became silent and motionless as the wall itself.

My comrade, on the contrary, as was her custom, proceeded with equal promptness to follow the bird up, to hunt him out. She slipped between the barbed wires which, quite unnecessarily, one would suppose, defended the bleak pasture from outside encroachment, and pa.s.sed out of sight down an obscure path that led into the brush where the bird was hidden.

Though our ways differ, or rather, perhaps, _because_ our ways differ, we are able to study in company. Certainly this circ.u.mstance proved available in circ.u.mventing the wily chat, and that happened which had happened before: in fleeing from one who made herself obvious to him, he presented himself, an unsuspecting victim, to another who sat like a statue against the wall. To avoid his pursuer, the bird slipped through the thick foliage of the low oaks, and took his place on the outside, in full view of me, but looking through the branches at the movements within so intently that he never turned his eyes toward me. This gave me an opportunity to study his manners that is rare indeed, for a chat off his guard is something inconceivable.

He shouted out his whole _repertoire_ (or so it seemed) with great vehemence, now "peeping" like a bird in the nest, then "chacking" like a blackbird, mewing as neatly as p.u.s.s.y herself, and varying these calls by the rattling of castanets and other indescribable sounds. His perch was half way down the bush; his trim olive-drab back and shining golden breast were in their spring glory, and he stood nearly upright as he sang, every moment stretching up to look for the invader behind the leaves. The instant she appeared outside, he vanished within, and I folded my chair and pa.s.sed on. His disturber had not caught a glimpse of him.

My next interview with a chat took place a day or two later. Between the cottage which was our temporary home and the next one was a narrow garden bordered by thick hedges, raspberry bushes down each side, and a ma.s.s of flowering shrubs next the street. From my seat within the house, a little back from the open window, I was startled by the voice of a chat close at hand. Looking cautiously out, I saw him in the garden, foraging about under cover of the bushes, near the ground, and there for some time I watched him. He had not the slightest repose of manner; the most ill-bred tramp in the English sparrow family was in that respect his superior, and the most nervous and excitable of wrens could not outdo him in posturing, jerking himself up, flirting his tail, and hopping from twig to twig. When musically inclined, he perched on the inner side of the bushes against the front fence, a foot or two above the ground, and within three feet of any one who might pa.s.s, but perfectly hidden.

The performance of the chat was exceedingly droll; first a whistle, clear as an oriole note, followed by chacks that would deceive a red-wing himself, and then, oddest of all, the laugh of a feeble old man, a weak sort of "yah! yah! yah!" If I had not seen him in the act, I could not have believed the sound came from a bird's throat. He concluded with a low, almost whispered "chur-r-r," a sort of private chuckle over his unique exhibition. After a few minutes' singing he returned to his foraging on the ground, or over the lowest twigs of the bushes, all the time bubbling over with low joyous notes, his graceful head thrown up, and his beautiful golden throat swelling with the happy song. The listener and looker behind the screen was charmed to absolute quiet, and the bird so utterly unsuspicious of observers that he was perfectly natural and at his ease, hopping quickly from place to place, and apparently s.n.a.t.c.hing his repast between notes.

The chat's secret of invisibility was thus plainly revealed. It is not in his protective coloring, for though his back is modest of hue, his breast is conspicuously showy; nor is it in his size, for he is almost as large as an oriole; it is in his manners. The bird I was watching never approached the top of a shrub, but invariably perched a foot or more below it, and his movements, though quick, were silence itself. No rustle of leaves proclaimed his presence; indeed, he seemed to avoid leaves, using the outside twigs near the main stalk or trunk, where they are usually quite bare, and no flit of wing or tail gave warning of his change of position. There was a seemingly natural wariness and cautiousness in every movement and att.i.tude, that I never saw equaled in feathers.

Then, too, the clever fellow was so constantly on his guard and so alert that the least stir attracted his attention. Though inside the house, as I said, not near the window, and further veiled by screens, I had to remain as nearly motionless as possible, and use my gla.s.s with utmost caution. The smallest movement sent him into the bushes like a shot,--or rather, like a shadow, for the pa.s.sage was always noiseless. Suspicion once aroused, the bird simply disappeared. One could not say of him, as of others, that he flew, for whether he used his wings, or melted away, or sank into the earth, it would be hard to tell. All I can be positive about is, that whereas one moment he was there, the next he was gone.

After this exhibition of the character of the chat, his constant watchfulness, his distrust, his love of mystery, it may appear strange that I should try again to study him at home, to find his nest and see his family. But there is something so bewitching in his individuality, that, though I may be always baffled, I shall never be discouraged.

Somewhat later, when it was evident that his spouse had arrived and domestic life had begun, and I became accustomed to hearing a chat in a certain place every day as I pa.s.sed, I resolved to make one more effort to win his confidence, or, if not that, at least his tolerance.

The chat medley for which I was always listening came invariably from one spot on my pathway up the mountain. It was the lower end of a large horse pasture, and near the entrance stood a small brick house, in which no doubt dwelt the owner, or care-taker, of the animals. The wide gate, in a common fashion of that country, opened in the middle, and was fastened by a link of iron which dropped over the two centre posts. The rattle of the iron as I touched it, on the morning I resolved to go in, brought to the door a woman. She was rather young, with hair cut close to her head, and wore a dark cotton gown, which was short and scant of skirt, and covered with a "checked ap.r.o.n." She was evidently at work, and was probably the mistress, since few in that "working-bee" village kept maids.

I made my request to go into the pasture to look at the birds.

"Why, certainly," she said, with a courtesy that I have found everywhere in Utah, though with a slow surprise growing in her face. "Come right in."

I closed and fastened the gate, and started on past her. Three feet beyond the doorsteps I was brought to a standstill: the ground as far as I could see was water-soaked; it was like a saturated sponge. Utah is dominated by Irrigation; she is a slave to her water supply. One going there from the land of rains has much to learn of the possibilities and the inconveniences of water. I was always stumbling upon it in new combinations and unaccustomed places, and I never could get used to its vagaries. Books written in the interest of the Territory indulge in rhapsodies over the fact that every man is his own rain-maker; and I admit that the arrangement has its advantages--to the cultivator. But judging from the standpoint of an outsider, I should say that man is not an improvement upon the original providence which distributes the staff of life to plants elsewhere, spreading the vital fluid over the whole land, so evenly that every gra.s.s blade gets its due share; and as all parts are wet at once, so all are dry at the same time, and the surplus, if there be any, runs in well-appointed ways, with delight to both eye and ear. All this is changed when the office of Jupiter Pluvius devolves upon man; different indeed are his methods. A man turns a stream loose in a field or pasture, and it wanders whither it will over the ground.

The gra.s.s hides it, and the walker, bird-student or botanist, steps splash into it without the slightest warning. This is always unpleasant, and is sometimes disastrous, as when one attempts to cross the edge of a field of some close-growing crop, and instantly sinks to the top of the shoes in the soft mud.

On the morning spoken of, I stopped before the barrier, considering how I should pa.s.s it, when the woman showed me a narrow pa.s.sage between the house and the stone wall, through which I could reach the higher ground at the back. I took this path, and in a moment was in the grove of young oaks which made her out-of-doors kitchen and yard. A fire was burning merrily in the stove, which stood under a tree; frying-pans and baking-tins, dippers and dishcloths, hung on the outer wall of her little house, and the whole had a camping-out air that was captivating, and possible only in a rainless land. I longed to linger and study this open-air housekeeping; if that woman had only been a bird!

But I pa.s.sed on through the oak-grove back yard, following a path the horses had made, till I reached an open place where I could overlook the lower land, filled with clumps of willows with their feet in the water, and rosebushes

"O'erburdened with their weight of flowers, And drooping 'neath their own sweet scent."

A bird was singing as I took my seat, a grosbeak,--perhaps the one who had entertained me in the field below, while I had waited hour after hour, for his calm-eyed mate to point out her nest. He sang there from the top of a tall tree, and she busied herself in the low bushes, but up to that time they had kept their secret well. He was a beautiful bird, in black and orange-brown and gold,--the black-headed grosbeak; and his song, besides being very pleasing, was interesting because it seemed hard to get out. It was as if he had conceived a brilliant and beautiful strain, and found himself unable to execute it. But if he felt the incompleteness of his performance as I did, he did not let it put an end to his endeavor. I sat there listening, and he came nearer, even to a low tree over my head; and as I had a glimpse or two of his mate in a tangle of willow and roses far out in the wet land, I concluded he was singing to her, and not to me. Now that he was so near, I heard more than I had before, certain low, sweet notes, plainly not intended for the public ear. This undertone song ended always in "sweet! sweet!

sweet!" usually followed by a trill, and was far more effective than his state performances. Sometimes, after the "sweet" repeated half a dozen times, each note lower than the preceding one, he ended with a sort of purr of contentment.

I became so absorbed in listening that I had almost forgotten the object of my search, but I was suddenly recalled by a loud voice at one side, and the lively genius of the place was on hand in his usual role.

Indeed, he rather surpa.s.sed himself in mocking and taunting cries that morning, either because he wished, as my host, to entertain me, or, what was more probable, to reproach me for disturbing the serenity of his life. Whatever might have been his motive, he delighted me, as always, by the spirit and vigor with which he poured out his chacks and whistles and rattles and calls. Then I tried to locate him by following up the sound, picking my way through the bushes, and among the straggling arms of the irrigating stream. After some experiments, I discovered that he was most concerned when I came near an impenetrable tangle that skirted the lower end of the lot. I say "near:" it was near "as the crow flies,"

but for one without wings it may have been half a mile; for between me and that spot was a great gulf fixed, the rallying point of the most erratic of wandering streamlets, and so given over to its vagaries that no bird-gazer, however enthusiastic, and indifferent to wet feet and draggled garments, dared attempt to pa.s.s. There I was forced to pause, while the bird flung out his notes as if in defiance, wilder, louder, and more vehement than ever.

In that thicket, I said to myself, as I took my way home, behind that tangle, if I can manage to reach it, I shall find the home of the chat.

The situation was discouraging, but I was not to be discouraged; to reach that stronghold I was resolved, if I had to dam up the irrigator, build a bridge, or fill up the quagmire.

No such heroic treatment of the difficulty was demanded; my problem was very simply solved. As I entered the gate the next morning, my eyes fell upon an obscure footpath leading away from the house and the watery way beyond it, down through overhanging wild roses, and under the great tangle in which the chat had hidden. It looked mysterious, not to say forbidding, and, from the low drooping of the foliage above, it was plainly a horse path, not a human way. But it was undoubtedly the key to the secrets of the tangle, and I turned into it without hesitation.

Stooping under the branches hanging low with their fragrant burden, and stopping every moment to loosen the hold of some hindering thorn, I followed in the footsteps of my four-footed pioneers till I reached the lower end of the marsh that had kept me from entering on the upper side.

On its edge I placed my chair and seated myself.

It was an ideal retreat; within call if help were needed, yet a solitude it was plain no human being, in that land where (according to the Prophet) every man, woman, and child is a working bee, ever invaded;

"A leafy nook Where wind never entered, nor branch ever shook,"

known only to my equine friends and to me. I exulted in it! No discoverer of a new land, no stumbler upon a gold mine, was ever more exhilarated over his find than I over my solitary wild rose path.

The tangle was composed of a varied growth. There seemed to have been originally a straggling row of low trees, chokecherry, peach, and willow, which had been surrounded, overwhelmed, and almost buried by a rich growth of shoots from their own roots, bound and cemented together by the luxuriant wild rose of the West, which grows profusely everywhere it can get a foothold, stealing up around and between the branches, till it overtops and fairly smothers in blossoms a fair-sized oak or other tree. Besides these were great ferns, or brakes, three or four feet high, which filled up the edges of the thicket, making it absolutely impervious to the eye, as well as to the foot of any straggler. Except in the obscure pa.s.sages the horses kept open, no person could penetrate my jungle.