In New England Fields and Woods Part 9

THE DEAD CAMP-FIRE

A heap of ashes, a few half-burned brands, a blackened pair of crotched sticks that mark the place of the once glowing heart of the camp, furnish food for the imagination to feed upon or give the memory an elusive taste of departed pleasures.

If you were one of those who saw its living flame and felt its warmth, the pleasant hours pa.s.sed here come back with that touch of sadness which accompanies the memory of all departed pleasures and yet makes it not unwelcome. What was unpleasant, even what was almost unendurable, has nearly faded out of remembrance or is recalled with a laugh.

It was ten years ago, and the winds and fallen leaves of as many autumns have scattered and covered the gray heap. If it was only last year, you fancy that the smell of fire still lingers in the brands. How vividly return to you the anxious deliberation with which the site was chosen with a view to all attainable comfort and convenience, and the final satisfaction that followed the establishment of this short-lived home, short-lived but yet so much a home during its existence. Nothing contributed so much to make it one as the camp-fire. How intently you watched its first building and lighting, how labored for its maintenance with awkwardly-wielded axe, how you inhaled the odors of its cookery and essayed long-planned culinary experiments with extemporized implements, over its beds of coals, and how you felt the consequent exaltation of triumph or mortification of failure.

All these come back to you, and the relighting of the fire in the sleepy dawn, the strange mingling of white sunlight and yellow firelight when the sun shot its first level rays athwart the camp, the bustle of departure for the day's sport, the pleasant loneliness of camp-keeping with only the silent woods, the crackling fire, and your thoughts for company; the incoming at nightfall and the rekindling of the fire, when the rosy bud of sleeping embers suddenly expanded into a great blossom of light whose petals quivered and faded and brightened among the encircling shadows of the woods. You laugh again at the jokes that ran around that merry circle and wonder again and again at the ingenuity with which small performances were magnified into great exploits, little haps into strange adventure, and with which bad shots and poor catches were excused.

At last came breaking camp, the desolation of dismantling and leave-taking. How many of you will ever meet again? How many of those merry voices are stilled forever, from how many of those happy faces has the light of life faded?

Who lighted this camp-fire? Years have pa.s.sed since it illumined the nightly gloom of the woods, for moss and lichens are creeping over the charred back-log. A green film is spread over the ashes, and thrifty sprouts are springing up through them.

You know that the campers were tent-dwellers, for there stand the rows of rotten tent pins inclosing a rusty heap of mould that once was a fragrant couch of evergreens inviting tired men to rest,--or you know they spent their nights in a shanty, for there are the crumbling walls, the fallen-in roof of bark which never again will echo song or jest.

This pile of fish-bones attests that they were anglers, and skillful or lucky ones, for the pile is large. If you are an ichthyologist, you can learn by these vestiges of their sport whether they satisfied the desire of soul and stomach with the baser or the n.o.bler fishes; perhaps a rotting pole, breaking with its own weight, may decide whether they fished with worm or fly; but whether you relegate them to the cla.s.s of scientific or unscientific anglers, you doubt not they enjoyed their sport as much in one way as in the other.

You know that they were riflemen, for there is the record of their shots in the healing bullet wounds on the trunk of a great beech. For a moment you may fancy that the woods still echo the laughter that greeted the shot that just raked the side of the tree; but it is only the cackle of a yellow-hammer.

There is nothing to tell you who they were, whence they came, or whither they went; but they were campers, lovers of the great outdoor world, and so akin to you, and you bid them hail and farewell without a meeting.

x.x.xV

OCTOBER DAYS

Fields as green as when the summer birds caroled above them, woods more gorgeous with innumerable hues and tints of ripening leaves than a blooming parterre, are spread beneath the azure sky, whose deepest color is reflected with intenser blue in lake and stream. In them against this color are set the scarlet and gold of every tree upon their brinks, the painted hills, the clear-cut mountain peaks, all downward pointing to the depths of this nether sky.

Overhead, thistledown and the silken balloon of the milkweed float on their zephyr-wafted course, silver motes against the blue; and above them are the black cohorts of crows in their straggling retreat to softer climes. Now the dark column moves steadily onward, now veers in confusion from some suspected or discovered danger, or pauses to a.s.sail with a harsh clangor some sworn enemy of the sable brotherhood. Their gay-clad smaller cousins, the jays, are for the most part silently industrious among the gold and bronze of the beeches, flitting to and fro with flashes of blue as they gather mast, but now and then finding time to scold an intruder with an endless variety of discordant outcry.

How sharp the dark shadows are cut against the sunlit fields, and in their gloom how brightly shine the first fallen leaves and the starry bloom of the asters. In cloudy days and even when rain is falling the depths of the woods are not dark, for the bright foliage seems to give forth light and casts no shadows beneath the lowering sky.

The scarlet maples burn, the golden leaves of poplar and birch shine through the misty veil, and the deep purple of the ash glows as if it held a smouldering fire that the first breeze might fan into a flame, and through all this luminous leaf.a.ge one may trace branch and twig as a wick in a candle flame. Only the evergreens are dark as when they bear their steadfast green in the desolation of winter, and only they brood shadows.

In such weather the woodland air is laden with the light burden of odor, the faintly pungent aroma of the ripened leaves, more subtle than the scent of pine or fir, yet as apparent to the nostrils, as delightful and more rare, for in the round of the year its days are few, while in summer sunshine and winter wind, in springtime shower and autumnal frost, pine, spruce, balsam, hemlock, and cedar distill their perfume and lavish it on the breeze or gale of every season.

Out of the marshes, now changing their universal green to brown and bronze and gold, floats a finer odor than their common reek of ooze and sodden weeds--a spicy tang of frost-ripened flags and the fainter breath of the landward border of ferns; and with these also is mingled the subtle pungency of the woodlands, where the pepperidge is burning out in a blaze of scarlet, and the yellow flame of the poplars flickers in the lightest breeze.

The air is of a temper neither too hot nor too cold, and in what is now rather the good gay wood than green wood, there are no longer pestering insects to worry the flesh and trouble the spirit. The flies bask in half torpid indolence, the tormenting whine of the mosquito is heard no more. Of insect life one hears little but the mellow drone of the b.u.mblebee, the noontide chirp of the cricket, and the husky rustle of the dragonfly's gauzy wing.

Unwise are the tent-dwellers who have folded their canvas and departed to the shelter of more stable roof-trees, for these are days that should be made the most of, days that have brought the perfected ripeness of the year and display it in the fullness of its glory.

x.x.xVI

A COMMON EXPERIENCE

The keenest of the sportsman's disappointments is not a blank day, nor a series of misses, unaccountable or too well accountable to a blundering hand or unsteady nerves, nor adverse weather, nor gun or tackle broken in the midst of sport, nor perversity of dogs, nor uncongeniality of comradeship, nor yet even the sudden cold or the spell of rheumatism that prevents his taking the field on the allotted morning.

All these may be but for a day. To-morrow may bring game again to haunts now untenanted, restore cunning to the awkward hand, steady the nerves, mend the broken implement, make the dogs obedient and bring pleasanter comrades or the comfortable lonesomeness of one's own companionship, and to-morrow or next day or next week the cold and rheumatic twinges may have pa.s.sed into the realm of bygone ills.

For a year, perhaps for many years, he has yearned for a sight of some beloved haunt, endeared to him by old and cherished a.s.sociations. He fancies that once more among the scenes of his youthful exploits there will return to him something of the boyish ardor, exuberance of spirit and perfect freedom from care that made the enjoyment of those happy hours so complete. He imagines that a draught from the old spring that bubbles up in the shadow of the beeches or from the moss-brimmed basin of the trout brook will rejuvenate him, at least for the moment while its coolness lingers on his palate, as if he quaffed Ponce de Leon's undiscovered fountain. He doubts not that in the breath of the old woods he shall once more catch that faint, indescribable, but unforgotten aroma, that subtle savor of wildness, that has so long eluded him, sometimes tantalizing his nostrils with a touch, but never quite inhaled since its pungent elixir made the young blood tingle in his veins.

He has almost come to his own again, his long-lost possession in the sunny realm of youth. It lies just beyond the hill before him, from whose crest he shall see the nut-tree where he shot his first squirrel, the southing slope where the beeches hide the spring, where he astonished himself with the glory of killing his first grouse, and he shall see the glint of the brook flashing down the evergreen dell and creeping among the alder copses.

He does not expect to find so many squirrels or grouse or trout now as thirty years ago, when a double gun was a wonder, and its possession the unrealized dream of himself and his comrades, and none of them had ever seen jointed rod or artificial fly, and dynamite was uninvented. Yet all the game and fish cannot have been driven from nor exterminated in haunts so congenial and fostering as these, by the modern horde of gunners and anglers and by the latter-day devices of destruction, and he doubts not that he shall find enough to satisfy the tempered ardor of the graybeard.

Indeed, it is for something better than mere shooting or fishing that he has come so far. One squirrel, flicking the leaves with his downfall, one grouse plunging to earth midway in his thunderous flight, one trout caught as he can catch him, now, will appease his moderate craving for sport, and best and most desired of all, make him, for the nonce, a boy again. He antic.i.p.ates with quicker heartbeat the thrill of surprised delight that choked him with its fullness when he achieved his first triumph.

At last the hilltop is gained, but what unfamiliar scene is this which has taken the place of that so cherished in his memory and so longed for? Can that naked hillside slanting toward him from the further rim of the valley, forlorn in the desolation of recent clearing, be the wooded slope of the other day? Can the poor, unpicturesque thread of water that crawls in feeble attenuation between its shorn, unsightly banks be the wild, free brook whose voice was a continual song, every rod of whose amber and silver course was a picture? Even its fringes of willow and alders, useful for their shade and cover when alive, but cut down worthless even for fuel, have been swept from its margin by the ruthless besom of destruction, as if everything that could beautify the landscape must be blotted out to fulfill the mission of the spoiler.

Near it, and sucking in frequent draughts from the faint stream, is a thirsty and hungry little sawmill, the most obtrusive and most ign.o.ble feature of the landscape, whose beauty its remorseless fangs have gnawed away. Every foot of the brook below it is foul with its castings, and the fragments of its continual greedy feasting are thickly strewn far and near. Yet it calls to the impoverished hills for more victims; its shriek arouses discordant echoes where once resounded the music of the brook, the song of birds, the grouse's drum call, and the mellow note of the hound.

Though sick at heart with the doleful scene, the returned exile descends to his harried domain hoping that he may yet find some vestige of its former wealth, but only more disappointments reward his quest. Not a trout flashes through the shrunken pools. The once limpid spring is a quagmire among rotting stumps. The rough nakedness of the hillside is clad only with thistles and fireweed, with here and there a patch of blanched dead leaves, dross of the old gold of the beech's ancient autumnal glory.

Of all he hoped for nothing is realized, and he finds only woful change, irreparable loss. His heart heavy with sorrow and bursting with impotent wrath against the ruthless spoiler, he turns his back forever on the desolated scene of his boyhood's sports.

Alas! That one should ever attempt to retouch the time-faded but beautiful pictures that the memory holds.

x.x.xVII

THE RED SQUIRREL

A hawk, flashing the old gold of his pinions in the face of the sun, flings down a shrill, husky cry of intense scorn; a jay scolds like a shrew; from his safe isolation in the midwater, a loon taunts you and the awakening winds with his wild laughter; there is a jeer in the chuckling diminuendo of the woodchuck's whistle, a taunt in the fox's gasping bark as he scurries unseen behind the veil of night; and a scoff on hunters and hounds and cornfield owners is flung out through the gloaming in the racc.o.o.n's quavering cry. But of all the wild world's inhabitants, feathered or furred, none outdo the saucy red squirrel in taunts, gibes, and mockery of their common enemy.

He is inspired with derision that is expressed in every tone and gesture. His agile form is vibrant with it when he flattens himself against a tree-trunk, toes and tail quivering with intensity of ridicule as fully expressed in every motion as in his nasal snicker and throaty chuckle or in the chattering jeer that he pours down when he has attained a midway or topmost bough and c.o.c.ks his tail with a saucy curve above his arched back.

When he persistently retires within his wooden tower, he still peers out saucily from his lofty portal, and if he disappears you may yet hear the smothered chuckle wherewith he continues to tickle his ribs. When in a less scornful mood, he is at least supremely indifferent, deigning to regard you with but the corner of an eye, while he rasps a nut or chips a cone.

Ordinarily you must be philosophical or G.o.dly to suffer gibes with equanimity, but you need be neither to endure the scoffs of this buffoon of the woods and waysides. They only amuse you as they do him, and you could forgive these tricks tenfold multiplied if he had no worse, and love him if he were but half as good as he is beautiful.

He exasperates when he cuts off your half-grown apples and pears in sheer wantonness, injuring you and profiting himself only in the pleasure of seeing and hearing them fall. But you are heated with a hotter wrath when he reveals his chief wickedness, and you catch sight of him stealthily skulking along the leafy by-paths of the branches, silently intent on evil deeds and plotting the murder of callow innocents. Quite noiseless now, himself, his whereabouts are only indicated by the distressful outcry of the persecuted and sympathizing birds and the fluttering swoops of their futile attacks upon the marauder. Then when you see him gliding away, swift and silent as a shadow, bearing a half-naked fledgeling in his jaws, if this is the first revelation of such wickedness, you are as painfully surprised as if you had discovered a little child in some wanton act of cruelty.

It seems quite out of all fitness of nature that this merry fellow should turn murderer, that this dainty connoisseur of choice nuts and tender buds, and earliest discoverer and taster of the maple's sweetness, should become so grossly carnivorous and savagely bloodthirsty. But anon he will cajole you with pretty ways into forgetfulness and forgiveness of his crimes. You find yourself offering, in extenuation of his sins, confession of your own offenses. Have not you, too, wrought havoc among harmless broods and brought sorrow to feathered mothers and woodland homes? Is he worse than you, or are you better than he? Against his sins you set his beauty and tricksy manners, and for them would not banish him out of the world nor miss the incomparable touch of wild life that his presence gives it.