In New England Fields and Woods Part 13

p.r.o.ne like a crawling band of scouts, endwise like battering-rams, not upright with green banners waving, Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane to fight King Frost.

As the woodpile grows at the farmhouse door in a huge windrow of sled-length wood or an even wall of cord wood, so in the woods there widens a patch of uninterrupted daylight. Deep shade and barred and netted shadow turn to almost even whiteness, as the axe saps the foundations of summer homes of birds and the winter fastnesses of the squirrels and racc.o.o.ns. Here are the tracks of sled and team, where they wound among rocks and stumps and over cradle knolls to make up a load; and there are those of the chopper by the stump where he stood to fell the tree, and along the great trough made by its fall. The snow is flecked with chips, dark or pale according to their kind, just as they alighted from their short flight, bark up or down or barkless or edgewise, and with dry twigs and torn sc.r.a.ps of scattered moss.

When the chopper comes to his work in the morning, he finds traces of nightly visitors to his white island that have drifted to its sh.o.r.es out of the gray sea of woods. Here is the print of the hare's furry foot where he came to nibble the twigs of poplar and birch that yesterday were switching the clouds, but have fallen, manna-like, from skyward to feed him. A fox has skirted its shadowy margin, then ventured to explore it, and in a thawy night a racc.o.o.n has waddled across it.

The woodman is apt to kindle a fire more for company than warmth, though he sits by it to eat his cold dinner, casting the crumbs to the chickadees, which come fearlessly about him at all times. Blazing or smouldering by turns, as it is fed or starved, the fire humanizes the woods more than the man does. Now and then it draws to it a visitor, oftenest a fox-hunter who has lost his hound, and stops for a moment to light his pipe at the embers and to ask if his dog has been seen or heard. Then he wades off through the snow, and is presently swallowed out of sight by gray trees and blue shadows. Or the hound comes in search of his master or a lost trail. He halts for an instant, with a wistful look on his sorrowful face, then disappears, nosing his way into the maw of the woods.

If the wood is cut "sled length," which is a saving of time and also of chips, which will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a "day man,"

and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble in making their way through them than over them; and the man comes and goes according to his ambition to earn money.

In whichever capacity the chopper plies his axe, he is pretty sure to bring no sentimentalism to his task. He inherits the feeling that was held by the old pioneers toward trees, who looked upon the n.o.blest of them as only giant weeds, enc.u.mbering the ground, and best got rid of by the shortest means. To him the tree is a foe worthy of no respect or mercy, and he feels the triumph of a savage conquerer when it comes crashing down and he mounts the prostrate trunk to dismember it; the more year-marks encircling its heart, the greater his victory. To his ears, its many tongues tell nothing, or preach only heresy. Away with the old tree to the flames! To give him his due, he is a skillful executioner, and will compel a tree to fall across any selected stump within its length. If one could forget the tree, it is a pretty sight to watch the easy swing of the axe, and see how unerringly every blow goes to its mark, knocking out chips of a span's breadth. It does not look difficult nor like work; but could you strike "twice in a place," or in half a day bring down a tree twice as thick as your body? The wise farmer cuts, for fuel, only the dead and decaying trees in his woodlot, leaving saplings and thrifty old trees to "stand up and grow better," as the Yankee saying is.

There is a prosperous and hospitable look in a great woodpile at a farmhouse door. Logs with the moss of a hundred years on them, breathing the odors of the woods, have come to warm the inmates and all in-comers.

The white smoke of these chimneys is spicy with the smell of seasoned hard wood, and has a savor of roasts and stews that makes one hungry. If you take the back track on a trail of pitchy smoke, it is sure to lead you to a squalid threshold with its starved heap of pine roots and half-decayed wood. Thrown down carelessly beside it is a dull axe, wielded as need requires with spiteful awkwardness by a slatternly woman, or laboriously upheaved and let fall with uncertain stroke by a small boy.

The Yankees who possess happy memories of the great open fires of old time are growing few, but Whittier has embalmed for all time, in "Snow-Bound," their comfort and cheer and picturesqueness. When the trees of the virgin forest cast their shadows on the newly risen roof there was no forecasting provision for winter. The nearest green tree was cut, and hauled, full length, to the door, and with it the nearest dry one was cut to match the span of the wide fireplace; and when these were gone, another raid was made upon the woods; and so from hand to mouth the fire was fed. It was not uncommon to draw the huge backlogs on to the hearth with a horse, and sometimes a yoke of oxen were so employed. Think of a door wide enough for this: half of the side of a house to barricade against the savage Indians and savage cold! It was the next remove from a camp-fire. There was further likeness to it in the tales that were told beside it, of hunting and pioneer hardships, of wild beasts and Indian forays, while the eager listeners drew to a closer circle on the hearth, and the awed children cast covert scared backward glances at the crouching and leaping shadows that thronged on the walls, and the great samp-kettle bubbled and seethed on its trammel, and the forgotten johnny-cake scorched on its tilted board.

As conveniently near the shed as possible, the pile of sled-length wood is stretching itself slowly, a huge vertebrate, every day or two gaining in length; a joint of various woods, with great trunks at the bottom, then smaller ones, gradually growing less to the topping out of saplings and branches. Here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the b.u.t.t, with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as pa.s.sable tools for the purpose as any they had for another. These more distinct marks show where the auger of later years made its wounds. The old tree has distilled its sweets for two races and many generations of men, first into the bark buckets of Waubanakis, then into the ruder troughs of Yankee pioneers, then into the more convenient wide-bottomed wooden sap-tubs; and at last, when the march of improvement has spoiled the wilderness of the woods with trim-built sugar-houses and patent evaporators, the sap drips with resounding metallic tinkle into pails of shining tin. Now the old maple has come to perform its last office, of warming and cooking the food for a generation that was unborn when it was yet a l.u.s.ty tree.

Beside it lies a great wild-cherry tree that somehow escaped the cabinet maker when there was one in every town and cherry wood was in fashion.

Its fruit mollified the harshness of the New England rum of many an old-time raising and husking. Next is a yellow birch with a s.h.a.ggy mane of rustling bark along its whole length, like a twelve-foot piece of the sea serpent drifted ash.o.r.e and hauled inland; then a white birch, no longer white, but gray with a coating of moss, and black with belts of old peelings, made for the patching of canoes and roofing of shanties.

With these lies a black birch, whose once smooth bark age has scaled and furrowed, and robbed of all its tenderness and most of its pungent, aromatic flavor. Some of it yet lingers in the younger topmost twigs which the hired man brings home to the little folks, who fall to gnawing them like a colony of beavers. By it is an elm, whose hollow trunk was the home of racc.o.o.ns when it stood on its b.u.t.tressed stump in the swamp.

Near by is a beech, its smooth bark wrinkled where branches bent away from it, and blotched with spots of white and patches of black and gray lichen. It is marked with innumerable fine scratches, the track of the generations of squirrels that have made it their highway; and among these, the wider apart and parallel nail-marks of a racc.o.o.n, and also the drilling of woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. Here, too, are traces of man's visitation, for distorted with the growth of years are initials, and a heart and dart that symbolized the tender pa.s.sion of some one of the past, who wandered, love-sick, in the shadow of the woods. How long ago did death's inevitable dart pierce his heart? Here he wrote a little of his life's history, and now his name and that of his mistress are so completely forgotten one cannot guess them by their first letters inscribed in the yesterday of the forest's years.

Above these logs, rolled up on skids or sled stakes, are smaller yet goodly bodies of white ash, full of oars for the water and rails for the land; and of black ash, as full of barrel hoops and basket splints, the ridged and h.o.a.ry bark s.h.a.gged with patches of dark moss; and a pine too knotty for sawing, with old turpentine boxes gashing its lower part, the dry resin in them half overgrown, but odorous still; and oaks that have borne their last acorns; and a sharded hickory that will never furnish another nut for boy or squirrel, but now, and only this once, flail handles, swingles, and oxbows, and helves for axes to hew down its brethren, and wood to warm its destroyers, and smoke and fry ham for them; and a ba.s.swood that will give the wild bees no more blossoms in July, hollow-hearted and unfit for sleigh or toboggan, wood straight rifted and so white that a chip of it will hardly show on the snow, but as unprofitable food for fires as the poplars beside it, which, in the yellow-green of youth or the furrowed gray of age, have shivered their last.

Still higher in the woodpile are white birches, yet in the smooth skin of their prime, which is fit to be fashioned into drinking cups and berry baskets, or to furnish a page for my lady's alb.u.m. Here are hardhacks, some with grain winding like the grooves of a rifle. This is the timber the Indians made their bows of, and which now serves the same purpose for the young savages whom we have always with us. There are sinewy blue beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads and the "beech seals"

of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a man's thigh, a size at which they mostly stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet unlike them, sets folks to guessing what kind of wood it is. He will hit the mark who fires at random the names "shadblow," "service-berry," or "amelanchier." If the axe had been merciful, in early May its branches would have been as white with blossoms as if the last April snow still clung to them. Tossed on a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small stuff,--saplings improvidently cut, short-lived striped maple, and dogwood, the slender topmost lengths of great trees, once the perches of hawks and crows, and such large branches as were not too crooked to lie still on the sled.

The snow-fleas, harbingers and attendants of thaws, are making the snow in the woods gray with their restless myriads, when the sled makes its last trip across the slushy fields, which are fast turning from white to dun under the March winds and showers and sunshine.

The completed woodpile basks in the growing warmth, as responsive to the touch of spring as if every trunk yet upheld its branches in the forest.

The buds swell on every chance-spared twig, and sap starts from the severed ducts. From the pine drip slowly lengthening stalact.i.tes of amber, from the hickory thick beads of honeydew, and from the maples a flow of sweet that calls the bees from their hives across the melting drifts. Their busy hum makes an island of summer sound in the midst of the silent ebbing tide of winter.

As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled odors of the many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of the axe,--fiddle, ba.s.s-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all somehow in tune. The parts stop a little when the fiddler saws off his string, the two drawers of the long ba.s.s-viol bow sever theirs, and the drummer splits his drum, but each is soon outfitted again, and the funeral march of the woodpile goes on. Here is the most delightful of places for those busy idlers the children, for it is full of pioneers'

and hunters' cabins, robbers' caves and bears' dens, and of treasures of moss and gum and birch, and of punk, the tinder of the Indians and our forefathers, now gone out of use except for some conservative Canuck to light his pipe or for boys to touch off their small ordnance.

It is a pretty sight to watch the nuthatches and t.i.tmice searching the grooves of the bark for their slender fare, or a woodp.e.c.k.e.r chopping his best for a living with his sharp-pointed axe, all having followed their rightful possessions from the woods, taking perhaps the track of the sled. It is wonderful to hear the auger of the pine-borer, now thawed into life, crunching its unseen way through the wood. Then there is always the chance of the axe unlocking the stores of deermice, quarts of beechnuts with all the sh.e.l.ls neatly peeled off; and what if it should happen to open a wild-bee hive full of honey!

If the man comes who made the round of the barns in the fall and early winter with his threshing-machine, having exchanged it for a sawing machine, he makes short work of our woodpile. A day or two of stumbling clatter of the horses in their treadmill, and the buzzing and screeching of the whirling saw, gnaws it into a heap of blocks.

Our lounging-place and the children's wooden playground have gone, and all the picturesqueness and woodsiness have disappeared as completely as when splitting has made only firewood of the pile. It will give warmth and comfort from the stove, but in that black sepulchre all its beauty is swallowed out of sight forever. If it can go to a generous fireplace, it is beautified again in the glowing and fading embers that paint innumerable shifting pictures, while the leaping flames sing the old song of the wind in the branches.

L

A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION

It seems quite probable that this nineteenth century may be unpleasantly memorable in centuries to come as that in which many species of animate and inanimate nature became extinct. It has witnessed the extinction of the great auk, so utterly swept off the face of the earth that the skin, or even the egg of one, is a small fortune to the possessor. Reduced from the hundreds of thousands of twenty-five years ago to the few hundred of to-day, it needs but a few years to compa.s.s the complete annihilation of the bison. It is not improbable that the elk and the antelope will be overtaken by almost as swift a fate. The skin hunters, and the game butchers miscalled sportsmen, are making almost as speedy way with them as they have with the buffalo.

The common deer, hedged within their narrowing ranges by civilization, and hunted by all methods in all seasons, may outlast the century, but they will have become wofully scarce at the close of it, even in such regions as the Adirondacks which seem to have been set apart by nature especially for the preservation of wild life.

The wild turkey is pa.s.sing away, and it is a question of but few years when he shall have departed forever. In some localities the next n.o.blest of our game birds, the ruffed grouse, has become almost a thing of the past, and in some years is everywhere so scarce that there are sad forebodings of his complete disappearance from the rugged hills of which he seems as much a belonging as the lichened rocks, the arbutus and the wind-swept evergreens. One little island on the New England coast holds the handful that is left of the race of heath hens.

The woodc.o.c.k is being cultivated and improved and murdered out of existence with clearing and draining and summer shooting, and unseasonable shooting is doing the same for many kinds of waterfowl. In the Eastern States a wild pigeon is a rare sight now, and has been for years; the netters and slaughterers have done their work too thoroughly.

Gentle woman is making an end of the song-birds that she may trick her headgear in barbaric and truly savage fashion. The brighter plumaged small birds are becoming noticeably scarce even in those parts of the country that the milliners' collector and the pot-naturalist have not yet invaded, and such as the scarlet tanager, never anywhere numerous, are like to be soon "collected" out of living existence. If they are to be saved, it is by no dallying, nor slow awakening of popular feeling in their behalf.

There will be pine-trees, no doubt, for centuries to come, but who that live twenty years hence will see one of these venerable monarchs of the woods towering above all other forest growth, or see any ancient tree, however historic or precious for its age and beauty and majesty and mystery of long past years, if it is worth the cutting for timber or fuel?

Even the lesser growths of the old woods are pa.s.sing away. Some, as the carpeting sphagnum and the sprawling hobble bush, disappear through changed conditions; others, as the medicinal spikenard, sarsaparilla, and ginseng, and the decorative running pine and the arbutus, through ruthless, greedy gathering, which leaves no root nor ripened seed to perpetuate their kind.

An old man may be glad that his eyes are not to behold the coming desolation, but he must be sad when he thinks of the poor inheritance of his children.

LI

THE PERSISTENCY OF PESTS

From the sowing and planting of his seed, almost indeed from the turning of the furrow, the farmer enters upon a contest with the weeds, for a place in which his crops may grow, and if he or the crops are not vanquished, as the weeds never are, the warfare continues till harvest time.

While he, with infinite labor, prepares the ground and sows his seed with all care, praying that drouth may not wither nor floods drown it, and that frosts may not cut down the tender plants, the winds of heaven and the fowls of the air scatter broadcast the seeds of the noxious weeds, or these lie dormant in the ground awaiting opportunity. They germinate in sterile places, fence corners and nooks of the wayside, and flourish alike in scorching sunshine and in sodden soil.

Weeds defy the latest and the earliest frosts, grow with their roots in the air; and cut down, spring up, grow on, blossoming and ripening their seed in creeping stealth and ever unscathed by blight; and so flourish in spite of all unkindliness of man or stress of nature, that the husbandman wishes that they might by some freak of demand become the useful plants, his present crop the undesired ones.

Somewhat the same position in which weeds stand opposed to the plants which the husbandman depends upon for his livelihood, vermin hold toward the beasts and birds upon which the sportsman depends for his recreation. While they whose protection men endeavor to maintain during the season of procreation, and at times when scarcity of food prevails, decrease often to complete extinction, the vermin, whom the hand of man is always against, continue to increase and multiply, or at least hold their own. With them as with the weeds nature seems to deal with a kinder hand. She spares and nourishes them, while she destroys their betters.

The snow crust, which walls the quail in a living tomb, makes a royal banqueting hall for the pestiferous field mice, where they feast and revel in plenty, secure from all their enemies, feathered or furred. It impounds the deer, but gives free range to the wolf and to his as pitiless two-legged brother, the crust hunter.

The wet seasons that drown the callow woodc.o.c.k and grouse work no harm to the ravenous brood of the hawk and owl, nor to the litter of fox, mink, or weasel. Wet or dry, hot or cold, the year fosters them throughout its varied round.

Winged ticks kill the grouse, but the owl endures their companionship with sedate serenity and thrives with a swarm of the parasites in the covert of his feathers.

The skunk has always been killed on sight as a pest that the world would be the sweeter for being rid of. In later years the warfare against him has received an impetus from the value of his fur, but though this has gone on relentlessly for many years, his tribe still live to load the air with a fragrance that incites the ambitious trapper to further conquest.

All the year round, farmers and their boys wage war upon the crows, but each returning autumn sees the columns of the black army moving southward with apparently unthinned ranks, while, year by year, the harried platoons of ducks and geese return fewer and less frequent.

Those detested foreigners, the English sparrows, increase and multiply in spite of bitter winters and righteous persecution, while our natives, the beloved song-birds, diminish in numbers. On every hand we find the undesirable in animated nature, the birds and beasts that we would gladly be rid of, maintaining their numbers, while those whose increase we desire are losing ground and tending toward extinction.

The prospect for the sportsman of the future is indeed gloomy, unless he shall make game of the pests and become a hunter of skunks and a shooter of crows and sparrows. Who can say that a hundred years hence the leading sportsmen of the period will not be wrangling over the points and merits of their skunk and woodchuck dogs and bragging of their bags of crows and sparrows?