In New England Fields and Woods Part 3

During our summer acquaintance with her, when we see her oftenest, a valued inhabitant of our garden and a welcome twilight visitor at our threshold, we a.s.sociate silence with the toad, almost as intimately as with the proverbially silent clam. In the drouthy or too moist summer days and evenings, she never awakens our hopes or fears with shrill prophecies of rain as does her nimbler and more aspiring cousin, the tree-toad.

A rustle of the cuc.u.mber leaves that embower her cool retreat, the spat and shuffle of her short, awkward leaps, are the only sounds that then betoken her presence, and we listen in vain for even a smack of pleasure or audible expression of self-approval, when, after a nervous, gratulatory wriggle of her hinder toes, she dips forward and, with a lightning-like out-flashing of her unerring tongue, she flicks into her jaws a fly or bug. She only winks contentedly to express complete satisfaction at her performance and its result.

Though summer's torrid heat cannot warm her to any voice, springtime and love make her tuneful, and every one hears the softly trilled, monotonous song jarring the mild air, but few know who is the singer.

The drumming grouse is not shyer of exhibiting his performance.

From a sun-warmed pool not fifty yards away a full chorus of the rapidly vibrant voices arises, and you imagine that the performers are so absorbed with their music that you may easily draw near and observe them. But when you come to the edge of the pool you see only a half-dozen concentric circles of wavelets, widening from central points, where as many musicians have modestly withdrawn beneath the transparent curtain.

Wait, silent and motionless, and they will reappear. A brown head is thrust above the surface, and presently your last summer's familiar of the garden and doorstep crawls slowly out upon a barren islet of cobble-stone, and, a.s.sured that no intruder is within the precincts sacred to the wooing of the toads, she inflates her throat and tunes up her long, monotonous chant. Ere it ceases, another and another take it up, and from distant pools you hear it answered, till all the air is softly shaken as if with the clear chiming of a hundred swift-struck, tiny bells. They ring in the returning birds, robin, sparrow, finch and meadow lark, and the first flowers, squirrelcup, arbutus, bloodroot, adder-tongue and moose-flower.

When the bobolink has come to his northern domain again and the oriole flashes through the budding elms and the first columbine droops over the gray ledges, you may still hear an occasional ringing of the toads, but a little later the dignified and matronly female, having lost her voice altogether, has returned to her summer home, while her little mate has exchanged his trill for a disagreeable and uncanny squawk, perhaps a challenge to his rivals, who linger about the scenes of their courtship and make night hideous until midsummer. Then a long silence falls on the race of toads--a silence which even hibernation scarcely deepens.

XII

MAY DAYS

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the sun and the moist tinder of the brook's overflow.

The faithful swallows have returned, though the faithless season delays.

The flicker flashes his golden shafts in the sunlight and gladdens the ear with his merry cackle. The upland plover wails his greeting to the tussocked pastures, where day and night rings the shrill chorus of the hylas and the trill of the toads continually trembles in the soft air.

The first comers of the birds are already mated and nest-building, robin and song sparrow each in his chosen place setting the foundations of his house with mud or threads of dry gra.s.s. The crow clutters out his softest love note. The flicker is mining a fortress in the heart of an old apple-tree.

The squirrels wind a swift ruddy chain about a boll in their love chase, and even now you may surprise the vixen fox watching the first gambols of her tawny cubs by the sunny border of the woods.

The gray haze of undergrowth and lofty ramage is turning to a misty green, and the shadows of opening buds knot the meshed shadows of twigs on the brown forest floor, which is splashed with white moose-flowers and buds of bloodroot, like ivory-tipped arrows, each in a green quiver, and yellow adder-tongues bending above their mottled beds, and rusty trails of arbutus leaves leading to the secret of their hidden bloom, which their fragrance half betrays.

Marsh marigolds lengthen their golden chain, link by link, along the ditches. The maples are yellow with paler bloom, and the graceful birches are bent with their light burden of ta.s.sels. The dandelion answers the sun, the violet the sky. Blossom and greenness are everywhere; even the brown paths of the plough and harrow are greening with springing grain.

We listen to the cuckoo's monotonous flute among the white drifts of orchard bloom and the incessant murmur of bees, the oriole's half plaintive carol as of departed joys in the elms, and the jubilant song of the bobolink in the meadows, where he is not an outlaw but a welcome guest, mingling his glad notes with the merry voices of flower-gathering children, as by and by he will with the ringing cadence of the scythe and the vibrant chirr of the mower. Down by the flooded marshes the scarlet of the water maples and the flash of the starling's wing are repeated in the broad mirror of the still water. The turtle basks on the long incline of stranded logs.

Tally-sticks cast adrift are a symbol that the trapper's warfare against the muskrats is ended and that the decimated remnant of the tribe is left in peace to reestablish itself. The spendthrift waste of untimely shooting is stayed. Wild duck, plover, and snipe have entered upon the enjoyment of a summer truce that will be unbroken, if the collector is not abroad at whose hands science ruthlessly demands mating birds and callow brood.

Of all sportsmen only the angler, often attended by his winged brother the kingfisher, is astir, wandering by pleasant waters where the ba.s.s lurks in the tangles of an eddy's writhing currents, or the perch poises and then glides through the intangible golden meshes that waves and sunlight knit, or where the trout lies poised beneath the silver domes of foam bells.

The loon laughs again on the lake. Again the freed waves toss the shadows of the sh.o.r.es and the white reflections of white sails, and flash back the sunlight or the glitter of stars and the beacon's rekindled gleam.

Sun and sky, forest, field, and water, bird and blossom, declare the fullness of spring and the coming of summer.

XIII

THE BOBOLINK

The woods have changed from the purple of swelling buds to the tender grayish green of opening leaves, and the sward is green again with new gra.s.s, when this pied troubadour, more faithful to the calendar than leaf or flower, comes back from his southern home to New England meadows to charm others than his dusky ladylove with his merry song. He seldom disappoints us by more than a day in the date of his arrival, and never fails to receive a kindly welcome, though the fickle weather may be unkind.

"The bobolinks have come" is as joyful a proclamation as announces the return of the bluebird and robin. Here no shotted salute of gun awaits him, and he is aware that he is in a friendly country. Though he does not court familiarity, he tolerates approach; and permits you to come within a dozen yards of the fence stake he has alighted on, and when you come nearer he goes but to the next, singing the prelude or finale of his song as he flies. Fewer yards above your head he poises on wing to sing it from beginning to end, you know not whether with intent to taunt you or to charm you, but he only accomplishes the latter. He seems to know that he does not harm us and that he brings nothing that we should not lose by killing him. Yet how cunningly he and his mate hide their nest in the even expanse of gra.s.s. That is a treasure he will not trust us with the secret of, and, though there may be a dozen in the meadow, we rarely find one.

Our New England fathers had as kindly a feeling for this blithe comer to their stumpy meadows, though they gave him the uncouth and malodorous name of skunk blackbird. He sang as sweetly to them as he does to us, and he too was a discoverer and a pioneer, finding and occupying meadows full of sunshine where had only been the continual shade of the forest, where no bobolink had ever been before. Now he has miles of gra.s.sy sunlit fields wherein he sings violet and b.u.t.tercup, daisy and clover into bloom and strawberries into ripeness, and his glad song mingles with the happy voices of the children who come to gather them, and also chimes with the rarer music of the whetted scythe.

Then, long before the summer is past, he a.s.sumes the sober dress of his mate and her monosyllabic note, and fades so gradually out of our sight and hearing that he departs without our being aware of it. Summer still burns with unabated fervor, when we suddenly realize that there are no bobolinks. Nor are there any under the less changeful skies whither our changed bird has flown to be a reed-bird or rice-bird and to find mankind his enemies. He is no longer a singer but a gourmand and valued only as a choice morsel, doubtless delicious, yet one that should choke a New Englander.

XIV

THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODp.e.c.k.e.r

The migrant woodp.e.c.k.e.r whose cheery cackle a.s.sures us of the certainty of spring is rich in names that well befit him. If you take to high-sounding t.i.tles for your humble friends, you will accept _Colaptes auratus_, as he flies above you, borrowing more gold of the sunbeams that shine through his yellow pinions, or will be content to call him simply golden-winged. When he flashes his wings in straight-away flight before you, or sounds his sharp, single note of alarm, or peers down from the door of his lofty tower, or hangs on its wooden wall, or clinging to a fence stake displays his mottled back, you recognize the fitness of each name the country folk have given him--flicker, yellow-hammer, yarrup, highhole or highholder, and what Th.o.r.eau often termed him, partridge-woodp.e.c.k.e.r. It is a wonder that the joyous cackle wherewith he announces his return from his winter sojourn in the South has not gained him another, and that love note, so like the slow whetting of a knife upon a steel, still another. Perhaps it is because they are especially sounds of spring and seldom if ever heard after the season of joyful arrival and love-making.

During the same season you frequently hear him attuning his harsh sharp voice to its softest note of endearment, a long-drawn and modulated variation of his cackle. When household cares begin, the lord and lady of the wooden tower, like too many greater and wiser two-legged folk, give over singing and soft words. At home and abroad their deportment is sober and business-like, and except for an occasional alarm-cry they are mostly silent.

As you wander through the orchard of an early midsummer day and pause beside an old apple-tree to listen to the cuckoo's flute or admire the airy fabric of the wood pewee's nest, a larger scale of lichen on the lichened boughs, you hear a smothered vibrant murmur close beside you, as if the heart of the old tree was pulsating with audible life. It is startlingly suggestive of disturbed yellow-jackets, but when you move around the trunk in cautious reconnoissance, you discover the round portal of a flicker's home, and the sound resolves itself into harmlessness. It is only the callow young clamoring for food, or complaining of their circ.u.mscribed quarters.

Not many days hence they will be out in the wide world of air and sunshine of which they now know as little as when they chipped the sh.e.l.l. l.u.s.ty fellows they will be then, with much of their parents'

beauty already displayed in their bright new plumage and capable of an outcry that will hold a bird-eating cat at bay. A little later they will be, as their parents are, helpful allies against the borers, the insidious enemies of our apple-tree. It is a warfare which the groundling habits of the golden-wings make them more ready to engage in than any other of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r clans.

In sultry August weather, when the shrill cry of the cicada pierces the hot air like a hotter needle of sound, and the dry husky beat of his wings emphasizes the apparent fact of drouth as you walk on the desiccated slippery herbage of meadow and pasture, the golden-wings with all their grown-up family fly up before you from their feast on the ant hills and go flashing and flickering away like rockets shot aslant, into the green tent of the wild cherry trees to their dessert of juicy black fruit.

Early in the dreariness of November, they have vanished with all the horde of summer residents who have made the season of leaf, flower, and fruit the brighter by their presence. The desolate leafless months go by, till at last comes the promise of spring, and you are aware of a half unconscious listening for the golden-wings. Presently the loud, long, joyous iteration breaks upon your ear, and you hail the fulfillment of the promise and the blithe new comer, a golden link in the lengthening chain that is encircling the earth.

XV

JUNE DAYS

June brings skies of purest blue, flecked with drifts of silver, fields and woods in the flush of fresh verdure, with the streams winding among them in crystal loops that invite the angler with promise of more than fish, something that tackle cannot lure nor creel hold.

The air is full of the perfume of locust and grape bloom, the spicy odor of pine and fir, and of pleasant voices--the subdued murmur of the brook's changing babble, the hum of bees, the stir of the breeze, the songs of birds. Out of the shady aisles of the woods come the flute note of the hermit thrush, the silvery chime of the tawny thrush; and from the forest border, where the lithe birches swing their shadows to and fro along the bounds of wood and field, comes that voice of June, the cuckoo's gurgling note of preparation, and then the soft, monotonous call that centuries ago gave him a name.

General Kukushna the exiles in Siberia ent.i.tle him; and when they hear his voice, every one who can break bounds is irresistibly drawn to follow him, and live for a brief season a free life in the greenwood. As to many weary souls and hampered bodies there, so to many such here comes the voice of the little commander, now persuasive, now imperative, not to men and women in exile or wearing the convict's garb, but suffering some sort of servitude laid upon them or self-imposed. Toiling for bread, for wealth, for fame, they are alike in bondage--chained to the shop, the farm, the desk, the office.

Some who hear, obey, and revel in the brief but delightful freedom of June days spent in the perfumed breath of full-leafed woods, by cold water-brooks and rippled lakes. Others listen with hungry hearts to the summons, but cannot loose their fetters, and can only answer with a sigh, "It is not for me," or "Not yet," and toil on, still hoping for future days of freedom.

But saddest of all is the case of such as hear not, or, hearing, heed not the voice of the Kukushna, the voices of the birds, the murmurous droning of bees amid the blossoms, the sweet prattle of running waters and dancing waves. Though these come to them from all about, and all about them are unfolded the manifold beauties of this joyous month, no sign is made to them. Their dull ears hear not the voices of nature, neither do their dim eyes see the wondrous miracle of spring which has been wrought all about them. Like the man with the muck-rake, they toil on, intent only upon the filth and litter at their feet. Sad indeed must it be to have a soul so poor that it responds to no caress of nature, sadder than any imposition of servitude or exile which yet hinders not one's soul from arising with intense longing for the wild world of woods and waters when Kukushna sounds his soft trumpet call.