Old Plymouth Trails Part 5

I have no doubt about the b.u.mblebees and the turtle-heads. Each vivid white corolla of the groups that stand so stiffly on the ends of the long stalks seems especially made for a b.u.mblebee. He goes into it as a hand into a glove, flattening himself amazingly for the entrance, but finding room to work in the interior, though not enough to turn about in. On his way in, what pollen he already may have collected on his furry back slips easily off on the very lip of the stigma which waits at the strategic point with the antlers crowding well forward, but firmly held a hair's breadth behind it. Thus each bloom is fertilized with the pollen from some other, insuring cross-fertilization. The b.u.mblebee takes his toll in honey, but when he comes to back out he has trouble. If you will listen close by you will hear him buzzing and burbling like an overheated teakettle as he struggles. The arching filaments of those fuzzy stamens have tangled his short legs and he is shaking the pollen out of the antlers all into the fur of his yellow overcoat. Before he gets out he is right mad and loaded with pollen for the fertilization of the next bloom. He comes squeezing out, as flat as a pancake, sharp end first, and though I watch close by I am very respectfully motionless. But he gets all over it by the time he has flown to the next bloom and his hum as he prods his way in has the tone of a cheerful "Good morning."

The turtle-heads have none of the frail loveliness of the jewel-weeds that suggest half-visible dryads, but they have a stanch beauty of their own which I think makes them seem very comely.

Each corolla is a smooth, opaque white through which no light may pa.s.s. It is easy to know how it looks inside a jewel of the jewel-weed. From without the imagination can appreciate that glow of pale gold which must there suffuse all things. To such tiny midges and beetles, spiders and moths as may enter it must be like walking about in the heart of the Tiffany yellow diamond. The b.u.mblebee might tell how it seems in the turtlehead petal, if he knows. I fancy, however, he is so everlastingly busy and so mad with the filaments when he is inside that he has no time to think of atmosphere. Often the pure white of this flower is tinged with a soft shading of delicate rose near the tip of the petal. It is an un.o.btrusive shading, as shy as the bloom itself. Ashes of roses might describe the tint better, for it is as gentle as the fading pink of a sunset sky, a shade that has dropped thence to the lips of these blossoms hiding in the dusk of the swamp. You see it best by looking close into the very face of the flower as the b.u.mblebee does when about to alight on it, and I think it is set there to show him the way. By the time he has seen that, he is near enough to be drawn by the faint but ravishing perfume which is breathed out by the flower. It is so faint that you must come like the bee to the very lip of the corolla before you will find it. It is so tender and of such refinement that when once you get it you will think no blossom has its equal. The white alder at this time of year is prodigal of rich and delectable odors. The jewel-weed with all its beauty has none that my sense can perceive. But that of Chelone glabra, as modest and withdrawn as the flower itself, seems hardly to belong in the swamp for all the beauty of the place. It should rather be that of some delicately nurtured plant, some rare orchid of sheltered conservatories, it is so delicate and delightful.

The jewel-weed is as frail as a dream for all its vigorous growth which reaches sometimes six feet. If you pluck it it withers before you can get it home to put in water and its jewels shrivel to nothing on the way. Turtle-head is far different and I like it for its st.u.r.diness, but most of all I like it because it is the hast of a small friend of mine, the Baltimore b.u.t.terfly. In summer you may see this little fellow, a plaid of yellow and orange on black, the Baltimore colors, whence his name, flitting about, never far from the place where the turtle-head grows. If you see one you may be almost sure that the other is nearby. I have not seen the b.u.t.terfly for many weeks, but among the stalks of Chelone I find the webs which shelter its children. These tiny caterpillars will feed on the leaves till winter, then by some witchery of nature survive the frost and snow and zero weather, sheltered only by this filmy, flimsy home, finish their growth in the spring, waxing fat on the young leaves and by late May be floating about, more Baltimore b.u.t.terflies.

There can be no better evidence of the witchery and romance of the place than this, that these frail pulpy creatures should with no covering worth the name withstand cold that under similar conditions would kill me before Christmas time. When I think of this dreams of dryads that troop down from the hillsides and stand, slender and adorable jewel-weeds, where the cool springs ooze from beneath the gravelly hill, do not seem in the least absurd or improbable.

CHAPTER XI

THE WAY OF A WOODCHUCK

The memory of my first glimpse of a woodchuck always reminds me of an old story which needs to be retold that it may point my moral even though it does not adorn my tale.

A minister, supplying for a time in a country parish, took a pleasant path through the fields to the church of a Sunday morning just before the service. There he found a boy digging most furiously in the sandy ground.

"My lad," said the minister, in kindly reproof, "you ought not to do this on Sunday morning unless it is a labor of necessity."

"I don't know nuthin' about necessity," replied the boy without stopping for a moment, "but I've got to get this woodchuck. The minister's comin' to dinner."

n.o.body has ever told whether the boy--and after him the minister--got the woodchuck or not, but there is at least an even chance that he did not, for a woodchuck in sandy ground will move on into it, taking his hole with him, at a rate that has defied more than one industrious pursuer. Just how he breathes while this is going on is more than I know, for he fills the pa.s.sage behind him with the debris of his digging, but he evidently does find air enough, for after tiring out the excavating hunter and waiting a reasonable time he digs up and out and proceeds to the deglut.i.tion of kitchen gardens with an artistic thoroughness that has been his since days of the Pilgrim Fathers, and I will not undertake to say how long before that. I do not doubt that the first Indian that ever planted corn and beans and "iskooter-squashes" said the same things about the woodchuck that I do, in his own language; and I believe that the woodchuck then, as he does now, just wrinkled his stubby black nose and retired to his burrow to sleep upon it while the garden digested.

No one to look casually at the woodchuck would think he was hard to get, but he is. The first time I ever glimpsed one I learned that. The woodchuck was eating second-crop clover in a hayfield that had been mown about three weeks before. A little c.o.c.ker spaniel and I were strolling in the field when suddenly we heard a squeal that was shrill enough to be a whistle and a fuzzy brown blur streaked for the stone wall, followed by another. The c.o.c.ker spaniel had decided, like that boy, that he had got to get the woodchuck. I fancy he thought he had him when they came together about five feet outside the crevice in the wall for which the woodchuck had made his fuzzy bee line, but as a matter of fact the woodchuck got the first grip. His long yellow incisors met in the c.o.c.ker's shoulder and that worthy gave forth a yelp of pain and indignation as the battle began with that strange hold.

I wish I might describe the Homeric conflict that followed, but it was too full of action for anyone to grasp the details. A furry pinwheel revolved in varying planes, smearing the stubble with gore and filling the air with cries of mingled pain and defiance, for what seemed to an astounded and perturbed small boy a good part of the afternoon. Most of the gore and all the cries came from the dog, for the woodchuck fought in grim silence, though no whit more pluckily than his opponent. In the end the dog won, but he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces him to do battle.

But I have never known a woodchuck to do battle that was not forced upon him. In point of fact he is one of the most home-loving, peaceful animals I have known. He is the original home-body and if the market where he is forced to seek supplies is not near enough to his home he moves the home nearer the market. In that often lies his undoing. His safety is in the woodland border or in the far pasture stone wall. There if he would content himself with aromatic barks and wild pasture herbs he might dwell unharmed of man, who is his chief enemy. But he loves the clover field, and often his first move toward disaster is coming up from the pasture wall and digging a burrow in the midst of the clover where he soon has regular paths which take him from one rich clump to another. After that he sniffs the kitchen garden, and the descent to Avernus is easy. He moves in to the borders, finds a crevice or digs a hole, and revels. Nor does he recognize the place as Avernus--which it is bound to be sooner or later--but spells it Olympus in very truth. Man may be the devastator of the earth, and he certainly is so far as its wild life is concerned, but as a producer of succulence in the kitchen garden he is a deity before whom any woodchuck must fall down and worship.

For the woodchuck besides being the original home-body is without doubt one of the founders of vegetarianism. Born in the desert places, feeding on locust bark and wild honeysuckle, he added inches to his girth when he learned that red clover which the early settlers kindly brought with them had a nourishing quality that defies compet.i.tion. A woodchuck can get so fat on clover that by November, when he retires for the year, he is as near a complete globe as anything with feet and a face can ever be. The convexity begins at his eyebrows above, at his chin beneath, and though he has feet, they have the effect of being merely pinned on to the lower hem of his garment, as those of a proper young lady in our grandmother's day were supposed to be. The woodchuck can get no fatter than that on garden truck, but he likes it better. I doubt if Charles d.i.c.kens ever saw the animal, but when he created Mr. Wardle's fat boy he might well have taken him for a model.

"D--n that boy," says Mr. Wardle, "he's asleep again." That was when he had ceased eating, and so it is with the woodchuck. In the early dawn when the dew is on the lettuce, he takes his toll of the bed, seasoning it with a radish and a snip at a leaf or two from the herb bed. But such are mere appetizers for the feast. The next course is the peas. He can go down a row of peas that are about to set their flat pods swelling to become fat pods and eliminate everything but a stubble of tough b.u.t.ts that have been shorn of their ladylike and smiling greenness. Pea vines in the garden always seem such gentle ladies, clad in a fabric of soft, semitransparent green, nodding and smiling, slender, tall and sweet. But when the woodchuck romps back up the row nothing is to be seen but the smile.

They returned from the ride With the lady inside, And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I once heard a vigorous discussion amongst men who know the woods and the ways of wild creatures, as to whether or not a woodchuck can climb a tree. The discussion ended rather abruptly when one of the party produced a photograph of a woodchuck a dozen feet up a big pine sitting on a small stub of a limb, looking somewhat exultant but also as if he wondered not only how he got so high but how on earth he was ever to get down again. I myself would not have believed a woodchuck could climb a tree of that size if I had not seen the photograph, and I fear there are some doubters in the party to this day. But whether or not a woodchuck can climb a big pine he can go up a bean pole as far as a bean vine can climb, and return with the bean vine inside. It takes but a few mornings for a woodchuck who means to keep fat enough not to shame his tribe to send a fleet of beans, that but now had everything set in living green from main truck to keelson, scudding down the garden under bare poles, a melancholy sight to the amateur truck farm navigator. On peas and beans the woodchuck holds his own, and he reckons as his own all that the garden contains. For all that you find frequently one that has a special taste. My last year's most intimate woodchuck climbed the bean poles and romped the rows of early peas as I have described. These were his occupation, his day's work, so to speak, and he went at them at the first blink of dawn and got them off his mind. Then he retired to his burrow just on the corner of the garden before either the sun or I got up, and slept the dreamless sleep of one who has labored righteously and fed well. I suspect him of letting out his belt a hole a day on this plethora of protein that I had been coaxing up the bean poles all the spring.

After that for the balance of the day Mr. Woodchuck was a dilettante, sitting at his door in the sun and dreaming dreams of artistic elegance in horticulture. I used to see him there about 10 A.M., wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic temperament, batting a speculative eye at me meanwhile, but not in any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing to resent. He had absorbed the unearned increment and I had my original capital, the bean poles, intact--and that's more than most of us realize on small investments, nowadays. So I dare say he thought I had nothing to feel grieved about. Later he would sally forth and carry out his artistic dreams on my Hubbard squashes. I have never had Hubbard squashes pruned into such artistic shapes as that year. The squash vine is a great stragger if left to its own devices.

It will start from the corn hill where it is produced and go down the row fifteen feet, then climb a corn stalk, leap to the fence six feet away and eventually hang a row of Hubbard squashes around a neighbor's pet pear tree. The woodchuck stopped all that. He began early in the summer on the vine tips and worked inward well up to the stump at each meal. The vines were husky and had more latent buds than I had believed possible. Every time the woodchuck cut them back they started something in a new place for his incisive pruning shears. Some people trim evergreens on their lawns into grotesque shapes. My woodchuck invented that sort of thing all over again on Hubbard squash vines. After some weeks I had a new and strange race of decorative plants that, like Katisha's left elbow, people came miles to see. But they did not produce squashes. Dilettantism doesn't.

In the end, of course, like the small boy at whose house the minister was to take dinner, I had to get the woodchuck, after which the garden was more productive if not so picturesque and romantic.

The full-grown woodchuck rarely leaves the burrow except to forage. That done he spends some time usually just at the entrance sunning himself. But most of the time, day and night, he is within, presumably asleep half the summer long. The young woodchucks at this time of year are more often seen abroad, for the parents send them forth upon the world to earn their own living at a rather tender age. They roam the fields and thickets and do not seem especially afraid of man, scuttling into the underbrush perhaps with their whistling squeal, but just as likely to sit back on their haunches and offer to fight. The mortality among them at this time must be great. Foxes pick them up and feed them to their own young. Hawks and owls do the same and dogs find them an easy prey. But enough get by such dangers to dig burrows in the fall and next spring move up to somebody's garden patch, there to absorb feasts and defy fates until the outraged householder stalks forth and deals death amid the ruins of his hopes. The woodchuck sitting by his burrow in the far pasture is a friendly little chap, whom I wish well. I would not harm a hair of him. But the woodchuck that has adopted suburban life is a menace of whom I am forced to say in the words of Cato of old "Delenda est Carthago."

The forefathers found the woodchuck here, probably in the first spring garden which they planted over the graves of the dead in Plymouth, saw how much he had eaten and promptly named him, his name meaning "little pig of the woods." Chuck or chuckie is a word of their time, and I dare say now, meaning "little pig." The idea is again expressed in the rather less polite form of "ground hog"

and the hereabouts at least, little known "Maryland marmot" is a third. Scientifically he is known as Arctomys monax, being a rodent and cla.s.sed with the marmots, very close relatives of the squirrels. Perhaps it is through this family affinity that he is able to climb my bean poles.

The woodchuck has one other distinguishing characteristic which deserves reference, that is his ability as a sleeper. As a home body he is great. As an absorber of garden truck he is greater.

But when the sun of October swings low in the south and he has become so fat that he seems to roll to and from his burrow on castors is when he shows his most surprising characteristic. Mr.

Wardle's fat boy with all his fame never slept as the woodchuck then prepares to sleep, however well he matched his eating. The first chill wind sets him to dragging dry leaves and gra.s.s down into the snuggest chamber of his burrow and there a little later he tucks his nose in between his little black-gloved forepaws and goes to sleep. When the woodchuck is leaner he goes to sleep by drowsily sitting upright, his head drooping lower and lower until he finally rolls into a round ball and falls on his side. But in late October the woodchuck is so nearly round with obesity that he cannot roll up and I fancy him just withdrawing his nose and his toes a little farther into himself, and going to sleep in that att.i.tude with a sigh of content. The woodchuck's chief fame seems to rest on this trait, his ability to go to sleep before cold weather and not wake up again until the spring has again brought out the green things for his delectation. To be sure tradition has it that the ground hog comes to the mouth of his burrow on Candlemas Day and looks for his shadow that he may figure out how much longer he may sleep. But that I take to be a mere literary furnishing, like the chuck part of the animal's name, brought from England with the pioneers and adapted to use in this country.

Probably it is said in England of the dormouse, which also sleeps winters, as does the woodchuck, though I believe lightly compared with our animal. The woodchuck is far too sound a sleeper to wake up on a February day, whatever the inducements.

That matter is no more to be taken seriously than is the old-time Yankee query--

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, If a woodchuck would chuck wood?

which seems to me to emphasize the whole popular conception of the animal. Of all the common New England animals he is the one taken least seriously. Even if he does eat up all our summer garden we are apt to grin as we bear it; or if we do go out and "get" him, we do it with a forgiving, pitying smile.

CHAPTER XII

ALONG THE SALT MARSHES

When the wind is east Sumner's Islands seems to tug at its moorings like a cruiser swinging at a short hawser in the shelter of Stony beach. If you will stand on the tip of its gray rock prow and face the sea it is hard not to feel the rise and fall of surges under you, and in fancy you have one ear c.o.c.ked for the boatswain's whistle and the call to the watch to bear a hand and get the anchor aboard. Just a moment and you will feel the pulse of the screw, hear the clink-clank of shovels and slice-bars, tinkling faintly up the ventilator; one bell will sound in the engine room and under slowest speed she will fall away from the sheltering beach, round the fragrant greenery of the Glades rocks and, free from their b.u.t.tressing, prance exultantly to four bells and a jingle out into the surgent tumult of the roaring sea. Wow!

but the fancy sets your blood to bubbling and your pulse to swinging in rhythm with the long surges that leap about Minot's and froth white over Chest ledge and the w.i.l.l.i.e.s, that come on to drown the inner Osher rocks in exultant whirlpools and fluff the loose stones of the beach into a foam that ripples over the breakwater into the road that snuggles behind it.

But that is when the wind is east and really blows, when November has stripped the oak and hickory upper works of the cruiser bare of leaves and she stands grim in her gray war-paint, ready for the winter's battles. Now she is gay in summer greenery and many a string of flower signals flutters from mast head and signal yard.

You must go astern to get the wind in your face, for now it sings gently in from the west across a mile of salt marsh, pools of imprisoned tide where night-herons feed and tiny crabs and cobblers scurry to shelter beneath the mud at the jar of your footfall, winding creeks that twice a day brim with silver water, and levels of quivering marsh gra.s.s, to Coha.s.set harbor and the green hillsides of the Jerusalem road.

The island is an island by courtesy only at this time of year, aground in the green marsh. The bashful tides of summer yearn shyly toward it, and twice every twenty-four hours stretch soft white arms up the creeks from Coha.s.set harbor to the east and the west and fondle it. They hold it close at the hour of flood, but hand does not clasp hand about it, and the dry sand that links it to the beach and the breakwater is not wet. When the autumn winds shall come and the sea shakes itself out of its summer lethargy and a.s.serts its power and will not be denied, it is different. At such times it roars over the beach and the breakwater and drowns the white sands that have kept the hands of its summer tides apart. It marches deep green up Coha.s.set harbor and brims the slender creeks. It pa.s.ses their limits at a leap, and swirls in defiant, dogged depths over the drowned marshes. Then the island is an island in very truth, and the sea takes his love upon his broad bosom and rocks it, not always so tenderly. No man can guess the power of the floods and the deep sea currents herded by an easterly gale till he has seen the leaping of the flood tide at such a time.

Now it is a time of July gentleness and fripperies of color. The salt marsh, to be sure, never lacks these, even in the dead of winter, when high tides continually load it with sea ice, and then receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to use it for a mixing pot for the coloring of the October woods. All their flame and gold are there, toned to soft warm browns and tender olives just flecked with crimson and with yellow flame.

Looking westward from the island at high tide this morning you could see already deep hints of this coming autumn coloring, swelling out of the deep green of gra.s.ses that make up the main carpeting of the marsh, touches of brown and olive that are singularly pleasing to the eye under the summer blue of the sky and its fleecy flecking of white clouds. Amid these, scattered here and there, round eye-like pools reflect this summer blue and fleecy whiteness and all along the island's verge and that of other islands and the borders of the Glades was the pink of wild roses and morning glories, both of which seem to thrive better and bloom later in the season here than inland. But the softest and loveliest coloring that the marsh will ever get is that which the gray mists of early morning seem to have brought in and left like a fragrant memory of themselves, the lavender gray of the marsh-rosemary. "There's rosemary; that's for remembrance," said Ophelia, and many a lover of sea and marsh-side will carry longest in memory the gentle sadness that the tint of the sea-lavender gives the marsh when all its other colors are still those of the flush joy of summer. Remembering Ophelia, marsh-rosemary seems its best name, though you have a right to sea-lavender if you wish. If the sea fogs did not bring it as an essence of the first glimpse of dawn in gray ocean s.p.a.ces, then I am convinced that the loving tides bear it as a gift to the island and scatter it shyly at its feet, after dark.

You have but to wander about the sh.o.r.es of the island at the marsh line to find strange evidence of this gift-bearing propensity of the shy tides. Trinkets of all sorts that they gather in travels in distant seas the tides bring and lay lovingly at the roots of black oak and sweet gum, hickory and stag-horn sumac. Here is bamboo that for all I know grew near the head waters of the Orinoco, though it may have sprouted in the Bahamas, floated north by the Gulf Stream, shunted from its warm edge into the chill of the Labrador current and drawn thence by the Coha.s.set tides.

Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come, chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a thousand tiny things picked up at points between.

But the tides bring to the marsh and the island in it, to all sh.o.r.es that they touch here on our Atlantic seaboard, more than this. They bear deep in their emerald hearts, generated in their cool, clear depths, a rich vivific principle that bears vigor to all that they touch and sends rich emanations forth on the air beyond. Today on the inland hills and land-bound pastures the sun beat in sullen insolence and the wind from the west scorched and wilted the life in all things. The same wind, coming to me across two miles of salt marsh, had in its cool, salty aroma a life-giving principle that set the pulse to bounding and renewed vigor.

It had gathered up from the marsh this tonic of the tides, this elixir vitae which all the doctors of the world have sought in vain. Some day some one of them, wiser than the rest, will distil its potency from the cool salt of sea tides, and humanity, poor hitherto, will find itself rich in possibilities of physical immortality. Sea captains have a foolish custom of settling down at eighty to enjoy life on sh.o.r.e, else there is no knowing how long they would live. They have breathed the aroma of this life-giving essence all their lives.

Yet the sea itself is dead; it is a vast acc.u.mulation of the product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite s.p.a.ce, shocking together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life thereon, so it seems as if the atoms of sea water, ever rushing to restless collision, burst continually into renewed life. All forms are in it, from the mightiest mammals to the protozoa which the microscope suspects rather than surely discovers. Every time molecule touches molecule in the depths, a new spark of tiny life must flare up, else never so many could inhabit the water. The coa.r.s.er aggregations of these we see in bewildering profusion and variety every time the tides fall back and leave the rocks bare.

At the bottom of the ebb I like to climb perilously down the rough Glades cliffs to life-brooding pools and inlets, where lazy waves swirl or are for a brief hour cut off. At the half-tide line the rock that is a reddish granite becomes chalky white with the sh.e.l.ls of barnacles that cover every inch of s.p.a.ce from there down. Acorn-like, they cl.u.s.ter closer than ever acorns did on the most prolific oak. After the tides reach them as they rise, the whole surface of the rock must be fuzzy with their curved cirri of tongues which protrude and lap the rising waves. Their number is legion, yet how infinite must be the fine floating life, so fine that we cannot note that it clouds the limpid water, on which these sessile gray creatures feed.

Below a certain level these are crowded out by the mussels which grow in such dense acc.u.mulations that they cling not only to the rock but to one another and to stubby brown seaweed till they are like nothing so much as pods of bees swarming about their queen.

So dense is this grouping of living creatures that the inner ones are smothered by their crowding fellows and serve merely as a foundation on which these build. Even among these swarm starfishes and limpets and other crustaceans, and streamers of kelp squirm out from the rock where they keep slender hold, to sway in the restless water, just as all the rocks above a certain depth and below a certain height are olive black with dense hangings of rockweed while in depths that are just awash at low tide they are olive brown with unending mats of Irish moss. These are but the forms of overwhelming life that meet the eye on first descending into the cool depths. To name all that may be noted in just the pause of a single ebb would be to become a catalogue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Along the Salt Marsh]

Yet howsoever vivid the life or astounding by its multiplicity it is not impressions of these that linger long after one has come up from the bottom of the ebb. It is rather that here one has breathed the air of the deep life laboratory of the world, that into his lungs and pores and all through his marrow has thrilled a breath of that subtle essence, that life renewing principle which Fernando de Soto sought in the fountain of youth which he thought bubbled from Florida sands but which in reality foamed beneath his furrowing keel as he ploughed the sea in search of it. It is the same thrill which the wilting west wind steeps from the salt marsh as it comes across, some baffling and alluring ether distilled from under-sea caverns where cool green mermen tend emerald fires.

The scent of it levitates from the wash of every wave and if you will watch with pure eyes and clear sight you may of moonlight nights see white-bodied mermaids flashing through the combers to drink of it. No wonder these are immortal.