In New England Fields and Woods Part 14

LII

THE WEASEL

A chain that is blown away by the wind and melted by the sun, links with pairs of parallel dots the gaps of farm fences, and winds through and along walls and zigzag lines of rails, is likely to be the most visible sign that you will find in winter of one bold and persistent little hunter's presence.

Still less likely are you to be aware of it in summer or fall, even by such traces of his pa.s.sage, for he is in league with nature to keep his secrets. When every foot of his outdoor wandering must be recorded she makes him as white as the snow whereon it is imprinted, save his beady eyes and dark tail-tip. When summer is green and autumn gay or sad of hue she clothes him in the brown wherewith she makes so many of her wild children inconspicuous.

Yet you may see him, now and then, in his white suit or in his brown, gliding with lithe, almost snake-like movement along the lower fence rails, going forth hunting or bearing home his game, a bird or a fat field-mouse. In a cranny of an old lichen-scaled stone wall you may see his bright eyes gleaming out of the darkness, like dewdrops caught in a spider's web, and then the brown head thrust cautiously forth to peer curiously at you. Then he may favor you with the exhibition of an acrobatic feat: his hinder paws being on the ground in the position of standing, he twists his slender body so that his forepaws are placed in just the reverse position on the stone or rail above him, and he looks upward and backward.

He may be induced to favor you with intimate and familiar acquaintance, to take bits of meat from your hand and even to climb to your lap and search your pockets and suffer you to lay a gentle hand upon him, but he has sharp teeth wherewith to resent too great liberties.

While he may be almost a pet of a household and quite a welcome visitor of rat-infested premises, he becomes one of the worst enemies of the poultry-wife when he is tempted to fall upon her broods of chicks. He seems possessed of a murderous frenzy, and slays as ruthlessly and needlessly as a wolf or a human game-butcher or the insatiate angler.

Neither is he the friend of the sportsman, for he makes havoc among the young grouse and quail and the callow woodc.o.c.k.

The trapper reviles him when he finds him in his mink trap, for all the beauty of his ermine a worthless prize drawn in this chanceful lottery.

When every one carried his money in a purse, the weasel's slender white skin was in favor with country folk. This use survives only in the command or exhortation to "draw your weasel." When the purse was empty, it gave the spendthrift an untimely hint by creeping out of his pocket.

In the primest condition of his fur he neither keeps nor puts money in your pocket now. He is worth more to look at, with his lithe body quick with life, than to possess in death.

LIII

FEBRUARY DAYS

In the blur of storm or under clear skies, the span of daylight stretches farther from the fading dusk of dawn to the thickening dusk of evening. Now in the silent downfall of snow, now in the drift and whirl of flakes driven from the sky and tossed from the earth by the shrieking wind, the day's pa.s.sage is unmarked by shadows. It is but a long twilight, coming upon the world out of one misty gloom, and going from it into another. Now the stars fade and vanish in the yellow morning sky, the long shadows of the hills, clear cut on the shining fields, swing slowly northward and draw eastward to the netted umbrage of the wood. So the dazzling day grows and wanes and the attenuated shadows are again stretched to their utmost, then dissolved in the flood of shade, and the pursued sunlight takes flight from the mountain peaks to the clouds, from cloud to cloud along the darkening sky, and vanishes beyond the blue barrier of the horizon.

There are days of perfect calm and hours of stillness as of sleep, when the lightest wisp of cloud fleece hangs moveless against the sky and the pine-trees forget their song. But for the white columns of smoke that, unbent in the still air, arise from farmstead chimneys, one might imagine that all affairs of life had been laid aside; for no other sign of them is visible, no sound of them falls upon the ear. You see the cows and sheep in the sheltered barnyards and their lazy breaths arising in little clouds, but no voice of theirs drifts to you.

No laden team crawls creaking along the highway nor merry jangle of sleigh bells flying into and out of hearing over its smooth course, nor for a s.p.a.ce do the tireless panting engine and roaring train divide earth and sky with a wedge of dissolving vapor. The broad expanse of the lake is a white plain of snow-covered ice: no dash of angry waves a.s.sails its sh.o.r.e still glittering with the trophies of their last a.s.sault; no glimmer of bright waters greets the sun; no keel is afloat; the lighthouse, its occupation gone, stares day and night with dull eyes from its lonely rock, upon a silent deserted waste.

In the wood you may hear no sound but your own m.u.f.fled footsteps, the crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from your pa.s.sage, and now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a clear resonant crack of frozen fibres and its faint echo. You hear no bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the pungent fragrance of his fire nor the subtler one of fresh-cut wood.

Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens, only scentless air reaches your nostrils.

One day there comes from the south a warm breath, and with it fleets of white clouds sailing across the blue upper deep, outstripped by their swifter shadows sweeping in blue squadrons along the glistening fields and darkening with brief pa.s.sage the gray woodlands. Faster come the clouds out of the south and out of the west, till they crowd the sky, only fragments of its intense azure showing here and there between them, only now and then a gleam of sunlight flashing across the earth. Then the blue sunlit sky is quite shut away behind a low arch of gray, darkening at the horizon with thick watery clouds, and beneath it all the expanse of fields and forest lies in universal shadow.

The south wind is warmer than yesterday's sunshine, the snow softens till your footsteps are sharply moulded as in wax, and in a little s.p.a.ce each imprint is flecked thick with restless, swarming myriads of snow-fleas. Rain begins to fall softly on snow-covered roofs, but beating the panes with the familiar patter of summer showers. It becomes a steady downpour that continues till the saturated snow can hold no more, and the hidden brooks begin to show in yellow streaks between white, unstable sh.o.r.es, and glide with a swift whisking rush over the smooth bottom that paves their rough natural bed; and as their yellow currents deepen and divide more widely their banks, the noise of their onflow fills the air like an exaggeration of the murmur of pines, and the song of the pines swells and falls with the varying wind.

After the rain there come, perhaps, some hours of quiet sunshine or starlight, and then out of the north a nipping wind that hardens the surface of the snow into solid crust that delights your feet to walk upon. The rivulets shrink out of sight again, leaving no trace but water-worn furrows in the snow, some frozen fluffs of yellow foam and stranded leaves and twigs, gra.s.s and broken weeds. The broad pools have left their sh.e.l.ls of unsupported ice, which with frequent sudden crashes shatters down upon their hollow beds.

When the crust has invited you forth, you cannot retrace your way upon it, and the wild snow walkers make no record now of their recent wanderings. But of those who fared abroad before this solid pavement was laid upon the snow, fabulous tales are now inscribed upon it. Reading them without question, you might believe that the well-tamed country had lapsed into the possession of its ancient savage tenants, for the track of the fox is as big as a wolf's, the racc.o.o.n's as large as a bear's, the house cat's as broad as the panther's, and those of the muskrat and mink persuade you to believe that the beaver and otter, departed a hundred years ago, have come to their own again. Till the next thaw or snowfall, they are set as indelibly as primeval footprints in the rocks, and for any scent that tickles the hounds' keen nose, might be as old. He sniffs them curiously and contemptuously pa.s.ses on, yet finds little more promising on footing that retains but for an instant the subtle trace of reynard's unmarked pa.s.sage.

The delicate curves and circles that the bent weeds etched on the soft snow are widened and deepened in rigid grooves, wherein the point that the fingers of the wind traced them with is frozen fast. Far and wide from where they fall, all manner of seeds drift across miles of smooth fields, to spring to life and bloom, by and by, in strange, unaccustomed places, and brown leaves voyage to where their like was never grown. The icy knolls shine in the sunlight with dazzling splendor, like golden islands in a white sea that the north wind stirs not, and athwart it the low sun and the waning moon cast their long unrippled glades of gold and silver. Over all winter again holds sway, but we have once more heard the sound of rain and running brooks and have been given a promise of spring.

LIV

THE FOX

Among the few survivals of the old untamed world there are left us two that retain all the raciness of their ancestral wildness.

Their wits have been sharpened by the attrition of civilization, but it has not smoothed their characteristics down to the level of the commonplace, nor contaminated them with acquired vices as it has their ancient contemporary, the Indian. But they are held in widely different esteem, for while the partridge is in a manner encouraged in continuance, the fox is an outlaw, with a price set upon his head to tempt all but his few contemned friends to compa.s.s his extermination.

For these and for him there is an unwritten code that, stealthily enforced, gives him some exemption from universal persecution. They, having knowledge of the underground house of many portals where the vixen rears her cubs, guard the secret as jealously as she and her lord, from the unfriendly farmer, poultry-wife, and bounty-hunting vagabond, confiding it only to sworn brethren of woodcraft, as silent concerning it to the unfriendly as the trees that shadow its booty-strewn precincts or the lichened rocks that fortify it against pick and spade. They never tell even their leashed hounds till autumn makes the woods gayer with painted leaves than summer could with blossoms, how they have seen the master and mistress of this woodland home stealing to it with a fare of field mice fringing their jaws or bearing a stolen lamb or pullet.

They watch from some unseen vantage, with amused kindliness, the gambols of the yellow cubs about their mother, alert for danger, even in her drowsy weariness, and proud of her impish brood, even now practicing tricks of theft and cunning on each other. They become abetters of this family's sins, apologists for its crimes, magnifiers of its unmeant well-doing.

When in palliation of the slaughter of a turkey that has robbed a field of his weight in corn they offset the destruction of hordes of field mice, they are reviled by those who are righteously exalted above the idleness of hunting and the foolishness of sentiment.

At such hands one fares no better who covets the fox, not for the sport he may give, but for the tang of wild flavor that he imparts to woods that have almost lost it and to fields that lose nothing of thrift by its touch.

You may not see him, but it is good to know that anything so untamed has been so recently where your plodding footsteps go. You see in last night's snowfall the sharp imprint of his pads, where he has deviously quested mice under the mat of aftermath, or trotted slowly, pondering, to other more promising fields, or there gone airily coursing away over the moonlit pastures. In imagination you see all his agile gaits and graceful poses. Now listening with p.r.i.c.ked ears to the m.u.f.fled squeak of a mouse, now pouncing upon his captured but yet unseen prize, or where on sudden impulse he has coursed to fresh fields, you see him, a dusky phantom, gliding with graceful undulations of lithe body and brush over the snowy stretches; or, halting to wistfully sniff, as a wolf a sheepfold, the distant henroost; or, where a curious labyrinth of tracks imprint the snow, you have a vision of him dallying with his tawny sweetheart under the stars of February skies; or, by this soft mould of his furry form on a snow-capped stump or boulder, you picture him sleeping off the fatigue of hunting and love-making, with all senses but sight still alert, unharmed by the nipping air that silvers his whiskers with his own breath.

All these realities of his actual life you may not see except in such pictures as your fancy makes; but when the woods are many-hued or brown in autumn, or gray and white in winter, and stirred with the wild music of the hounds, your blood may be set tingling by the sight of him, his coming announced by the rustle of leaves under his light footfalls.

Perhaps unheralded by sound, he suddenly blooms ruddily out of the dead whiteness of the snow.

Whether he flies past or carefully picks his way along a fallen tree or bare ledge, you remark his facial expression of incessant intentness on cunning devices, while ears, eyes, and nose are alert for danger. If he discovers you, with what ready self-possession he instantly gets and keeps a tree between himself and you and vanishes while your gun vainly searches for its opportunity. If your shot brings him down, and you stand over him exultant, yet pitying the end of his wild life, even in his death throes fearing you no more, he yet strains his dulled ears to catch the voices of the relentless hounds.

Bravely the wild freebooter holds his own against the encroachments of civilization and the persecution of mankind, levying on the flocks and broods of his enemy, rearing his yellow cubs in the very border of his field, insulting him with nightly pa.s.sage by his threshold.

Long ago his fathers bade farewell to their grim cousin the wolf, and saw the beaver and the timid deer pa.s.s away, and he sees the eagle almost banished from its double realm of earth and sky, yet he hardily endures. For what he preserves for us of the almost extinct wildness, shall we begrudge him the meagre compensation of an occasional turkey?

LV

AN ICE-STORM

Of all the vagaries of winter weather, one of the rarest is the ice-storm; rain falling with a wind and from a quarter that should bring snow, and freezing as it falls, not penetrating the snow but coating it with a shining armor, sheathing every branch and twig in crystal and fringing eaves with icicles of most fantastic shapes.

On ice-clad roofs and fields and crackling trees the rain still beats with a leaden clatter, unlike any other sound of rain; unlike the rebounding pelting of hail or the swish of wind-blown snow.

The trees begin to stoop under their increasing burden, and then to crack and groan as it is laid still heavier upon them. At times is heard the thin, echoless crash of an overladen branch, first bending to its downfall with a gathering crackle of severed fibres, then with a sudden crash, shattering in a thousand fragments the brief adornments that have wrought its destruction.

Every kind of tree has as marked individuality in its icy garniture as in its summer foliage. The gracefulness of the elms, the maples, the birches, the beeches, and the hornbeams is preserved and even intensified; the clumsy ramage of the b.u.t.ternut and ash is as stiff as ever, though every unbending twig bears its row of glittering pendants.

The hemlocks and firs are tents of ice, but the pines are still pines, with every needle exaggerated in bristling crystal.

Some worthless things have become of present value, as the wayside thistles and the bejeweled gra.s.s of an unshorn meadow, that yesterday with its dun unsightliness, rustling above the snow, proclaimed the shiftlessness of its owner.

Things most unpicturesque are made beautiful. The wire of the telegraph with its dull undulations is transformed to festoons of crystal fringe, linking together shining pillars of gla.s.s that yesterday were but bare, unsightly posts.