Old Plymouth Trails Part 7

After perch and bream have left, satisfied, a little group of thumbling hornpouts come and grub and dabble in the muddy hole whence the unio came, feeding upon I know not what; probably tiny infusoriae of the fresh water. These little black cats are the busiest folk of the brook at this time of the year, and just whence they come or whither they go I cannot say. If you fish the waters with angle worms you will not pull out one of these little fellows till the summer is fairly on. Then, dog days having arrived, you will get a chance to catch nothing else, so long as one of them remains in the pool you choose. They are great angle-worm chasers and will get across a pool and grab a bait before any other denizen of the place can possibly get to it. Their agility is the more surprising when one remembers that the grown hornpout is but a sluggish chap and that they are not built on lines that presage swiftness. You may catch the big horn pouts at any season, but these little chaps are peculiar to the dog days. I have an idea they hibernate in the mud at bottom until warm weather calls them forth, and that by next spring, so voracious is their appet.i.te and such their agility in satisfying it, they are as big as the others of their kind. So eager are these gourmands for bait that if but one is in a pool you may catch him, throw him back and catch him again times without number, provided the hook does not happen to injure his tough jaw.

Such a glimpse of the submarine life of the brook the muskrat has given me with the musky odor of his pa.s.sing. After a little all is quiet down there and I have a chance to admire the life which flits above the surface. The hawking dragonflies weave gossamer fabrics of dreams in their unending flight to and fro and the lull of the forest symphony bids one yield to these as the waning afternoon builds up its shadows from all hollows and glens. In the open pastures the heat still quivers, but here the woodland deities are building night, block on block, for the cooling and soothing of the world. The heliographing ceases. The foam writing blurs in the shadows. Down long aisles of perfumed green the voice of the wood thrush rings mellow and serene. Here is a woodland chorister who sings of peace and calls to holy thoughts, voicing the evening prayer of the woodland world. As his angelus rings out I fancy all wild heads bowed in adoration. Certainly the wood thrush's call touches that chord in the human breast. To listen to it with open heart is to know all things are for good and that a peace from mystic s.p.a.ces far above the woodland is descending upon it. Heard through this song the tone of the brook's voice changes and instead of swift-syllabled gossip I seem to hear it softly crooning a hymn.

CHAPTER XV

GHOSTS OF THE NORTHEASTER

"The Fourth of July is past; the summer is gone," says a New England proverb. In this as in many a quaint saying of our weather-wise, hill-tramping ancestors, there is more than a half-truth hidden in what seems a humorous distortion. In mid-August we look about us and know this, for we see ourselves slipping more and more rapidly down the long slope that leads from flower-crowned hilltop to frozen lake. Some day a snowstorm will get under the runners and the balance of the descent will be but a single shish. Meanwhile we may note the pa.s.sage by certain landmarks. In the seven weeks that come between the longest day and the fifteenth of August, thunderstorms may bring local relief to the parched earth, but otherwise it is our dry season, and by the first week in August the farmers are holding their hands to heaven in vain prayers for rain, vowing that never was so dry a time and that if the seasons thus continue to change Ma.s.sachusetts will be a desert.

Always during August Jupiter Pluvius is wont to change all this.

He sends us not showers, but a rain that wets us for a day and a night and perhaps longer, and, however greedily the parched earth may suck it up, finally irrigates all the waste places and covers all the sore earth with a soothing, healing salve of mud. Such rains come in to us riding on the broad back of the east wind, as rode the prince in Andersen's fairy tale, and as the big drops fall upon us we catch intoxicating scents borne to us from far Cathay. On the east wind's back the prince rode into paradise itself, which still lies hidden beneath hills to the eastward of the Himalayas. We should not blame him for kissing the fairy princess and being banished, for if he had not done so he had not brought back the tale and we should not know whence came the soothing odors that drip with the rain from the wings of the east wind. Fragrance of spice and of flowers, bloom of ripe fruit, of grape and fig and pomegranate and quaint odor of olive, scents that have ripened long in the purple dusk of paradise, the east wind caught in his garments and bore back to the cold forests of Northern Germany that night that the prince rode with him. Nor has he since lost them altogether in crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic to our sh.o.r.es. Instead the rich vigor of the brine subtends them and bears them, tanged with salt, to our deeper delectation. In long carriage they have lost potency, one needs keen scent to find them, but all the subtle essence of dreams is in them still, and as the rain brings down early twilight you know that the prince saw true.

So likely is this storm to come to us in mid-August that the Old Farmer's Almanack, less oracularly and more bluntly by far than in its usual weather predictions, bids us look for it each year. Not only does its yearly recurrence make it a landmark of the pa.s.sing of seasons, but the cold northwest breeze which almost invariably follows it, sucked in from Saskatchewan, breathing of snow flurries on the frost-touched tundra of the Arctic barrens, carries a threat of winter that all the world knows. The summer is over, it says to outdoor creatures, and it is time to put in fall stores. It is time to hurry all plans that need warm weather for their completion. Particularly do the late summer and early autumn blooming plants heed this. Monday saw my favorite meadow dallying still with the languor of midsummer. Even the tender pink orchid blooms of arethusa lingered among the gra.s.ses, in shadowy, cool-rooted spots, though the arethusa begins to bloom there in late May. Hardly have hardhack and meadow-sweet, which are mid-summer plants, reached the fullness of mature bloom, so softly does the spring linger in this sheltered spot, so gently does the summer press her fervor on spring-watered sphagnum.

Crowding up among these have come green sprigs from perennial roots which are to bear on their tops yellow heads of goldenrod and loose panicles of purple asters. Yet on the day before the rain hardly had the green of the goldenrod tips become sun-glinted with yellow, scarcely an aster had lifted long lashes far enough so that you could see the iris beneath. After the rain the heads which had drooped so low in reverence before it rose in the clear sun and the whole meadow was cloth of gold where before it, had been olive green with ripe gra.s.s tips, while all among the gold the blue asters came out like stars on a frosty evening, p.r.i.c.king through the pale glow of sunset. The meadow has lacked vivid color ma.s.ses since June. Now it is a veritable mixing pat for the autumn colors to come, yellow with goldenrod, blue with asters, purple with Joe-Pye weed, rosy because of the hardhack, and rimmed with delicate gray-white of thoroughwort. These colors it will hold until the maples take fire and the green of birches pales to softest yellow at the expectation of October. So the flash of coolness in the air after rain set all the wood folk busy. The squirrels seemed to scold more shrilly and dance along the boughs inspecting the swelling chestnut burrs with a livelier kick than before. About this time, too, the bluejays begin to be prophetic of autumn. Hardly through July and early August has a loud note been heard from these birds. Often the recesses of the pines have been full of a gentle tinkling whicker as of muted tin pans that practised in the hope of some day becoming real phonographs, voices of young and old bluejays holding family councils interspersed with quiet joviality, but there has been none of the strident clamor which is the autumn voice of the bird. Today, however, in the cool, refreshing breeze out of the northwest it rang through the wood with familiar vigor, a herald, blowing trumpets in advance of autumn. It is really all settled; the bluejay has announced it and summer is over. As the rain brings down early twilight it brings not only dreams of faint odors of far Cathay, it brings also clinging in the gray garments of the east wind films of its mystery and romance. As the prince in his brief outlook through the window of paradise saw on the panes moving pictures of life which Time had set there, so through the dusk of the fields and into the tangle of the forest it is easy to see this wind from far Cathay moving pictures of Oriental magic and mystery. Gray djinns stalk across the open s.p.a.ces in the gathering dusk and what magician from Samarcand or what prince or princess of India may float to earth on these billowing praying-carpets of rain gusts it is impossible to tell. In the open fields and on the forest edges the effect of ghostly mystery is enhanced by the strange personality which all things take on. The most familiar path becomes new to us and each shrub and stump stands forth, pressing upon our attention, a newly arrived being out of the realms of s.p.a.ce.

Monday afternoon when there was just the promise of rain in the air the pine woods were so friendly a place that all the birds flocked in and seemed to be full of soft and gentle jubilation because of this promise. The s.p.a.ces that have been so quiet of late were full of feathers as they had been in June. Here were robins innumerable, flitting jerkily about and crying "tut, tut"

in a subdued and genial way that was positively ladylike.

Partridge woodp.e.c.k.e.rs flocked in, drolly jollying each other and making much talk, sotto voce. Not one of them cried aloud and though in their humorous antics more than one cried, "flicker, flicker, flicker," there was in it none of the usual horse-laugh tone of the high-hole when he is on a rampage. It was reduced to a gentle whinny that seemed to vie with the boudoir-built notes of the robins. Bluejays were there too, but there was no clamor, just a gentle murmur of subdued tones in the soft, resin-scented twilight.

In the twilight of twenty-four hours after, all my wood-rimmed world of pasture and meadow was filled with, the eerie presence of the rain. It was not like a gentle shower of summer when the patter of falling drops is like a tinkle of fairy music and showers spell laughter. The coming of a local shower at nightfall is as gentle and seems as homelike as the gathering of the birds in the grove. In this east storm brought from far s.p.a.ces on the wings of the east wind there was something of wild unrest. The cool, salt flavor of the air spoke of wild stretches of the North Atlantic where sea-fogs have touched the eerie loneliness of Greenland bergs and pa.s.sed it on to the wind. In this ghostly dusk of driving mist the smear of the rain across the face is like a touch of phantom hands coming out of unfathomed s.p.a.ces, gentle but uncanny. All the soft perfumes of wood and field seem beaten to the ground by this rain which brings with its salt tang faint breathings of some distant spiciness.

The gray light of the lower s.p.a.ces goes up into the clouds and in the dusk below shadowless shrubs take on strange shapes. The pasture edge is familiar no longer. Gray groups grow where surely was but clear s.p.a.ce and all across the long meadow and up the slope mist horizons jostle one another one moment and are blotted out the next. The road entrance to the wood is a black cavern out of which lean grotesque goblins that wave a disquieting welcome.

Here to the right and left as I enter stand black figures where in daylight I am sure nothing stood, nor does it help to lay the hand on them and know they are stumps. It is damp and draughty as it was in the cavern where the prince first found the east wind, and I look about half expecting to see the strong old woman who tended the fire and put the winds in bags when they did not behave. There she stands in the dusk nearby and only by putting my hand on the p.r.i.c.kly needles and the rough trunk do I recognize a familiar pitch pine. The trees near this entrance to the enchanted wood sigh as the east wind touches them, seeming to draw deep breaths as living creatures might and thus add verisimilitude to the terror that stands on either hand to reach for me. Thus ancient hermits depicted the soul on the walls of their caverns, a shrinking shape that fled among goblins that clutched at it from all sides. The primal instinct of fear of things half seen still lurks in each man's bones. On a pitch dark night I had made the entrance to the wood without thought of ghosts. It is the half known that frightens us.

Once within the wood in the deepening dusk I seemed to leave the bogies behind. Not far through the pines the path brought me to a halt cleared hollow where three-year sprouts mingle their lush aspirations with scattered growth seeded half a century ago. A lone deer seems to make this spot a sanctuary. Often in daylight we meet here almost face to face and look at one another curiously, neither much afraid. In the deepening darkness, just freed from the primal terrors of the wood edge, I seemed to know why the deer finds the place a refuge. Here in the little sheltered hollow no goblins gibbered, no banshee wailed in the wet wood. Instead the sprout clumps seemed to rustle cheery a.s.surance and the taller trees to bend in cozy friendliness over them. The soft fingers of the rain had a soothing touch and wind and darkness were kindly. I do not know why some spots in the woods seem thus to shelter and protect whether by night or day while others repel or fill with distrust, but I know it is so. On a woodc.o.c.k haunted slope or in a thicket beloved of ruffed grouse I almost always feel as if my camp had been pitched in some previous existence and I had just got home again, though the place, perhaps, ought to be new to me. I fancy the deer feels that way and I hope he was snuggled down in the shelter of some of those big-leaved sprouts, warm and dry, as I pa.s.sed by.

Down the glade and along the swamp edge I pa.s.sed with the night falling fast. Twilight lingers long in our lat.i.tude and the gray sky still lighted the path dimly, though the woods were black on either side. The tranquillity of the home-like hollow was with me yet, but I was in for another panic shudder. A fitful gleam of pale light showed just ahead of me through the black thicket and I rounded a familiar curve in the path to stand face to face with a most portentous presence. A veritable ghost stood just within the wood, seven feet tall, stretching out a rattling bone of an arm and glowing from shapeless head to formless foot with pale gleaming garments of bluish white.

More years ago than I like to count up there used to come to my town an old man with a magic lantern. He would hire the audience room in the ancient town hall for an evening, hung up a sheet, charge ten cents admission and show to a crowd of wondering and delighted urchins pictures wonderful, humorous and startling. He always wound up with one for which he apologized, then showed it with much gusto, saying that he did not believe in such things himself, but that some people liked to see them. This was "death on the pale horse," and boys used to band together and see one another home through the darkness after looking at it. The creature that pointed his fleshless arm at me from the thicket was not that of the old time magic lantern exhibit, but it reminded me of that immediately, probably because it struck the same formless shudder through my bones. Yet it was only for a moment. I had seen such phosph.o.r.escent ghosts before and I had but to step boldly forward and give the stub a kick to send the spectre flying in fragments that dropped like huge glowworms in chunks to the sodden ground. Often in a northeast rain after long drought a rotten birch stump will thus glow with phosph.o.r.escent fire producing a most formidable and tradition-satisfying ghost.

There is nothing to be feared in a phosph.o.r.escent birch stub, even with the drip of rain from the leaves making stealthy, ghostly footfalls all through the wood and the voice of the east wind in the trees overhead beginning to take up a querulous, wordless complaint that moved back and forth with the footfalls. Foxfire is a common enough phenomenon. It is easy to explain it all as I do now. The strange part of such things is always that, at the time, no matter what a man's training and experience, he feels creeping back and forth in his bones the old, pale terror of primitive man in the presence of such things. Science has veneered us with knowledge of phosphorus and the chemic action of fungi and the effects of darkness and of light, but a half hour's tramp into the wet woods while a northeaster blows through the darkness takes all the gloss off that. We may go boldly on our way with undiminished front, but something always stirs uneasily within us and looks out at the back of the neck to see if that scattered glow has not rea.s.sembled and followed us.

Soon the path led me up out of the swamp, the sooner perhaps for the glowing eyes of foxfire now far behind, and I caught the beckoning gleam of electric light through the quiver of the rain.

From the brow of cemetery hill the country below rose from velvety blackness of complete night to a gray sky that was somehow comforting and friendly. Through it, far down the road toward Blue Hill, the street lamps glowed yellow through the gloom, showing the route to the invisible hill. The wind crooned in the pines, and the swish of sheeted rain seemed a lullaby. Here again, like the deer-frequented hollow, was a homelike and friendly spot. Even when I faced the street I found nothing disquieting in the sudden gleams of reflected light on the wet headstones. These should have been far more terrifying than any foxfire. Recent traditions of the race make the cemetery a place of ghosts, and here within its bounds were gnome lights that sprang into being, flared brightly for a second, then flashed out of sight as I walked. The long row of lights seemed to give almost every stone its turn, and the dancing gnome lanterns flared and vanished behind and before. As I neared the street puddles in the path caught up the flashes fitfully till all the quiet acre of the dead seemed full of goblins bobbing up from below with lanterns, taking a hasty look about, then pulling the lid dawn upon themselves with an unheard slam. It should have been disquieting, but it was not. We easily discount the petty superst.i.tions that tradition and the frills of literature have made for us. That that grows out of the foxfire in the swamp has its roots too far back in the inheritance of the race to be discounted. The cemetery ghosts made only a friendly illumination for the last stages of a pleasant trip.

CHAPTER XVI

JOTHAM STORIES

Almost daily in our hottest season the east wind brings coolness and refreshment to the dwellers at the sea beach. Nor does it stop at the seacoast. Often hills a dozen miles inland feel its cool caress.

The inland, simmering beneath the sun, with the thermometer in the eighties or worse, sends heavenward great columns of heated air.

To take the place of this the lower strata draws in from the sea, filled with the coolness and sparkle of the brine and informed with that mysterious tonic which seems born of wind-tossed salt water. At such times the east wind brings the breath of life to our nostrils and sets the jaded motor centres of our nerves atingle with new power.

Often we dwellers far inland get more than a cool breath of the sea. Then for a day or two a northeaster comes pelting over the seaward range of hills, murking the sky with dun clouds, whining about the eaves and roaring down the chimney, bringing deluges of rain to the heat-browned pastures and draping them in obscurity of gray mists, blotting out the roar of cities and the flurry of modern life, making us believe for a little that we are children of the farm once more. On sunny days we do not quite get this.

Even in the east wind we smell the soot as well as the sea, but the genuine northeaster shuts all that out.

On such days the work of the farm ceases. What hay is out is c.o.c.ked and capped, snugged down to wait for fair weather. The weeds in the garden drink and drink again and forget the hoe which idles in the tool-house corner, and Jotham putters about the barn, making pretence of indoor work but really luxuriating in idleness.

The place is redolent of the rich, sweet odor of the new hay and mingled with, this comes that salt tang of the east wind bearing scent also of all the hills and pastures over which it has blown.

You may if you will tell what gust touched the elders in white bloom down by the brook, which one lingered in the swamp a moment to caress the azaleas, and which stopped only long enough to s.n.a.t.c.h a kiss from the sweet fern on the pasture hill-top.

It is pleasant then to sit sheltered from the rain just within the wide barn doors, to hear the twittering of the swallows as they comfort their young on the beams, and to listen to the wind and to Jotham. The old-time New England farm hand--he who wore the smock frock as did his master while they both worked about the barn and then, the ch.o.r.es done, stood for half an hour in the dusk, either side of the barn door like caryatids, drinking in the pleasures of rest in the twilight has pa.s.sed, but Jotham remains.

He has told the tales of his grandfather's exploits as a hunter so many times that he not only believes them himself but is equally sure that everyone else believes them.

Yet Jotham is in the main taciturn. It is only when the northeaster soughs in the eaves and brings him leisure that he drops into narrative. His tales are grotesque fancies, simple yarns withal, such as fluttered from the homely life of pasture and woodland in early days of enforced idleness to light on the threshing floor of some great old barn, or to warm themselves at the big kitchen fireplace on winter nights when the wind guffawed down the throat of the big chimney and sprinkled the hearth with an attic salt of snow for the seasoning of them for the country palate. I do not doubt Jotham's grandfather told them of his grandfather and that they belong to neither but are local folk lore, pasture sagas, changelings born of the queer union of east wind and blueberry blooms, brought up by hand--farm hand.

"My grandfather," says Jotham, "was a great hunter. On stormy days like this he would take down his old long, singlebarrelled gun and go out and bring home all kinds of game, mostly ducks and geese.

In his day the ducks and geese bred around here and you could get 'em any time, but the best shooting was in the early fall on a northeaster. The heavy waves down on the coast drive the birds out of their feeding grounds and they come up to the fresh-water ponds inland to drink and get a change of feed. It is the same way with the sh.o.r.e birds; yellow-legs and plover and the like; though in my grandfather's day they didn't care much about such small game.

Bigger birds were plenty enough. Grandfather used to hate yellow-legs, though, for they are telltales."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wild Geese in Flight over the Pond]

"Once he went over to Muddy Pond loaded for duck. It is a great place for ducks. In those days they used to come in there and sometimes pack it solid full. You could hardly see the pond for the ducks in it. Grandfather always knew just the right day to go, and this time when 'he looked down on the pond from the hill he saw hardly any water at all, nothing much but ducks. It was the chance of his life. He slipped down the hill among the scrubs to the cedars and then began to creep carefully up. You know what the pond is like; perfectly round and only a couple of acres or so, with a rim of marsh and then another big rim of swamp cedars, then the hills all about; neither inlet nor outlet; a queer pond anyway and queer things happen on it, same as they did that day.

Grandfather had got half way through the swamp cedars when he came to a little opening which he had to cross. Just then there came up on the east wind a big flock of telltales, 762 of them, whirling over the hills without a sound till they saw him. Then they began to yelp."

"Look here, Jotham," I am always careful to say at this point, "How could he tell that there were just 762 of them? He couldn't count so many as they flew."

"Didn't have to count 'em as they flew," answers Jotham. "He counted 'em after he had shot 'em.

"Well, they began to yelp 'Look out for him! Look out for him!'

and the ducks knew what that meant. All that great blanket of ducks uncovered the pond with one motion. Grandfather said it was just like a curtain rising straight up, for they were all black ducks. There is no other duck can go straight up in the air. Other ducks slide off on a slant against the wind."

How Jotham manages to put the lonely quaver of the yellow-leg's call into that phrase "Look out for him! Look out for him!" with its four-note repet.i.tion is more than I know, but he always does, and you can see the big flock swing through the mist as he says it.

"Grandfather was pretty mad to lose that chance at good game and he made up his mind that he'd take it out of the telltales, so he began to whistle 'em back. He was a master hand at any wild call and pretty soon he lit the flock. There they were, a rim of yellow-legs all around the pond, a perfect circle except in one place, where some dogwood bushes made down to the water's edge.

Then granddad had a great idea. He saw his chance to kill every one of those infernal telltales where they sat. He studied on the size of that circle for a minute. Then he put the long barrel of that old gun between two swamp cedar stumps and bent on it carefully. He kept doing this, looking at the circle, then bending the gun barrel till he had the gun bent just on the curve of the circle of yellow-legs sitting round the pond. Then he smiled for he knew he had 'em. He crept carefully into the dogwood bushes till he was in just the right place, took a good aim round that circle, and then he unlatched on 'em.

"Well, he'd figured that circle just right. The shot swung round it and killed every one of them seven hundred and sixty-two yellow-legs right where they stood. But tarnation! He'd forgotten all about himself, he was so interested in the science of it. The back of his neck was right in that circle and the shot came round true as could be and hit him right there. The force of it was pretty well spent going so far and killing so many yellow-legs, but it dented some bits of dogwood leaves right into his system and he had dogwood poisoning pretty bad. He used to have it every year after that, about the time the first northeaster set in."

Anybody who knows Muddy Pond will know that Jotham's story ought to be true, for the pond is there to prove it, just as he describes it.

"Of course," says Jotham at this point, "that was skill. Not one hunter in a hundred would have thought to bend his gun so as to throw the shot in a circle or would have been able to estimate the amount of the curve so exactly right. Another thing happened to my grandfather over at that pond that was part skill and part luck.

He was on his way home from partridge shooting one day just before Thanksgiving. He found he was out of shot just before he got to the pond. His flask had leaked and let every bit of the shot out, and when he came to load up after shooting his last partridge he stopped with the powder, for there was no shot to put in. Just then he came in sight of the pond and there were seven geese swimming round in it; and that the day before Thanksgiving!