Old Plymouth Trails Part 8

"It was a tough time to be without any shot, but grandfather was equal to the emergency. He simply left his ramrod right in the gun, put on a cap, and began to worm his way through the cedars to the sh.o.r.e, where he could get a good, close shot at the geese.

Just as he did this another hunter who was no kind of a shot, came to the other side of the pond and saw the birds. He was one of the kind that have the buck fever at the sight of game, and he put up his gun and shot slam at the flock, too far away to do any execution; then he let out a yell and began to run down to the sh.o.r.e as fast as he could go.

"Of course he scared the geese and they lit out, swinging right by grandfather. Grandfather was a nervy hunter. He held his fire till he got the heads of those seven geese right in line, and then he shot and strung 'em all right through the eyes with the ramrod.

Granddad couldn't quite see where he had hit 'em, but when the smoke cleared away he saw the seven geese still flying and his ramrod going off with 'em, and he was some considerable astonished and a good deal put about at losing his ramrod."

"Now here's the queer part of it: Those seven geese were blinded, of course, with a ramrod strung right through their eyes, but the life in a wild goose is powerful strong and they kept flying on just the same, until they went out of sight, right in the direction of granddad's home. But he got home and had hung up his gun without seeing anything more of them and he thought his ramrod was sure gone for good. Then grandmother came to him, kind of scared, saying she heard spirit rappings on the pantry wall.

Granddad heard the noise, a sort of tapping, but he couldn't see anything until he looked out the pantry window.

"Yes, there they were seven of 'em, hung on the ramrod and the ramrod hung on a blind-hook, just outside Granddad's pantry window, their wings still flapping a little and making that rapping sound, just as if they were knocking to be let in at the pantry of the man that had shot 'em. All the relations used to come to grandfather's for Thanksgiving, and thirty-five of 'em sat down to dinner that year and every one of 'em had all the roast goose they could eat."

Frightened or injured game birds do perform strange feats as many an honest huntsman will tell you. I myself have a neighbor, no relative of Jotham's, who shot at a partridge in the woods a quarter of a mile from his house and saw the bird fly away. When he got home a half-hour later he found his pantry window broken and a partridge lying dead on the pantry floor, either the one he had shot at or another just as good and as the proverb has it, one story is good until another one is told. Jotham usually caps his list with the following:

"I guess the greatest wild goose hunting grandfather ever did was the time the big flock got caught in the ice storm. It came in November, a foot of soft snow and then one of those rainstorms that freeze as soon as the rain touches anything. Every twig on the trees that storm was as big as your wrist with ice and there was an inch or two of clear ice on everything and more coming all the time, when grandfather heard a big flock of wild geese honking. They didn't seem to be going over, but their voices hung in the air right over the big steep hill from the barn up into the back pasture. After they'd been honking up there for some time grandfather went up to see what it was all about, but he didn't take his gun. As he climbed the hill through the wet snow he heard 'em plainer and plainer, and when he got to the top he saw a most 'strodinary sight. There was a good-sized flock, ninety-seven geese, to be exact, that had got so iced up that they had to settle on the top of the hill.

"The ice had formed on their feathers as they flew and they were so weighted down they couldn't fly and they were getting more and more iced up every minute. Granddad didn't care to go back for his gun for fear some of the other nimrods in the neighborhood would come on the scene and bag the game first, but there wasn't any need of a gun. All he had to do was to drive 'em home. They were terribly iced up, but their legs were still free and he chased 'em about for some time before he got 'em started down hill. But once over the edge of the hill the weight of ice on 'em turned 'em right over and over, and so they rolled on down. It was a wet snow and as they rolled they took up more and more of it till by the time they came slap up against the side of the barn every single goose was sealed up in the middle of a hard, round s...o...b..ll. They all stopped there and all that grandfather had to do was to pile them up, and there they were, in cold storage for the winter. Every time the family wanted roast goose they went out and split open a s...o...b..ll. The folks in granddad's time used often to freeze their fresh meat and keep it but in the snow all winter, but he was the only one that I ever heard of that stored wild geese in that way."

There are worse tales and more of them, but I fear that cold type chills out the subtle aroma of probability with which Jotham always manages to invest them. One needs to hear them told with the fragrance of a barn full of new-made hay in the nostrils, the swish of the northeaster to accompany the voice in his ears, and with his eye on the distant hillside pastures all hung with mysterious draperies of mist to make a proper background of quaint shadows of romance. Then he can really appreciate the folk lore that goes with us by the familiar t.i.tle of "Jotham stories."

CHAPTER XVII

GOOD-BYE TO SUMMER

I think the daintiest scent that can be found in the woodland in these last days of September is that of the coral-root flower, which looks like a wan, tan ghost of a blossom, but nevertheless is sweet and succulent. The plant is by no means common in my world. Many a year goes by without my seeing it at all. In autumn it grows from among dry pine leaves, a slender spike that has neither root leaves nor stem leaves, but looks like the dried flower scape of some spring blooming plant. So protective is its coloration that I stand among its blooms and look long before I see them at all. It is only by getting very close that one can see that the tiny forests scattered along the pale brown scape are themselves beautifully colored with purple and white on the same soft tan foundation as the scape. They have, too, the quaintly mysterious formation of all orchid blooms and that alluring, elusive odor which must be sought intimately to be known. You must get this dainty perfume where it grows. If you pluck the blooms and take them home they will hold their beauty and color for days, but the scent will have strangely slipped from them and trembled along the still, soft air back to the woodland haunts whence it came. You might find it there, wandering disconsolate in the lonely brown s.p.a.ces seeking for its own heart of bloom, but from under your roof it has departed.

The flower is a strange one, anyway, in all its growth. Fibrous roots it has none, just a bunch of coral-like tubercles which draw nourishment by their own subtle processes from the roots of trees that shade them. Leaves it has none, just a scarious brown bract that encloses a part of the stem. Living upon canned food, so to speak, it has lost its ability to win sustenance from earth and air. It seems to live, not upon the sap of these trees, but upon the dead roots and decayed wood, a specially prepared humus without which it may not thrive, even in its own limited, elusive way. Among our wild flowers doomed to ultimate extinction I fancy this will be one of the first to disappear. In the days of great stretches of moist, deep woodland it may well have flourished. In my town it is rare and any year I may find it for the last time.

On many counts I would not miss it, and yet that faint, refined odor which somehow always reminds me of ghosts of mignonette, of tender, almost forgotten memories once more stirred, gives a gentle melancholy to the woodland that all the glories of October will not be able to a.s.suage.

It is by such subtle hints as this that autumn announces her presence among us. The prevailing tone of the upland wood is yet that of summer. Hardly will you see a splash of color in all the miles of green. It is in shady woods where no frost has yet penetrated, spots like that in which the coral-root is sheltered and befriended that nevertheless you read the open tale of what is to come. In low-lying open meadows the frost has spoken. In these on one night the chill of frozen s.p.a.ce weighed down and turned the dew to ice and wrecked some tender herbage, leaving it brown as if touched by fire instead of frost. But it is only here and there in places peculiarly subject to this warning that this has happened.

In shielding forest depths the coverlets of multiple green leaves have kept the tender things of the wood wrapped warm through the nights and the frost has said no word. Yet there too the message has penetrated, by what means I cannot say. The ferns have heard it and have turned pale. The tender, slender fronds of the hay-scented d.i.c.ksonia are very wan and the odor from them now as you tramp through is not so much that of new-mown hay, as it was in June, but rather that of the stack or the mow, always with their own inimitable woodsy flavor added. The brake whose woody stems have held its ternate, palm-like fronds bravely aloft all summer is now a sallow yellow, and the lovely Osmundas and stately Struthiopteris are bowing their heads in brown acquiescence with the inevitable. I doubt if it is a message from the air. It is rather a command from the nerve centres at the base of the stalk, a message from the brain of the heart-roots that gives the fronds warning that their day is over. If it were in the air the polypodys, the Christmas ferns and the spinulose wood ferns would have lost their color also. It is different with these. There is a hardier quality in their nature and they seem to revel in the killing frosts of late autumn and the ice and snow of winter; I find them as green and as hearty in December as I do now.

Next to the tender ferns it is the woody undergrowth that recognizes the season first. Long ago some limb of a red maple growing in the shade has been seen to flare up with a sudden flame while else all the wood was green. But this in itself is no sign.

This happens here and there in low ground even in very early summer. Now, however, it is not only here and there but everywhere that you will find this occasional limb adding scarlet beauty to the sombre shade of the deep wood, and as your glance pa.s.ses from the cool pale ferns to this it slips on and finds color growing on many things in the woodland shadow. Here is the cornel, whose lovely blooms filled the forest with b.u.t.terfly beauty, it seems no longer ago than yesterday. Today I find the cornel foliage green still as to midrib and veining, but with the woof of the leaf gone such a fine apple red that it is surely good enough to eat. If color counts the deer should find rich browse in the shrubbery these days. The hazels that were so green are suddenly a ripe brown that is all warm with red tones, and where the summac grows there is forest fire without smoke burning in the scarlet flame-tongues of the pointed leaflets of this modern burning bush.

And all this is beneath the shelter of the still green forest into which we must go to find it. From without the full green of summer ripeness prevails, and we must seek other signs of the autumn season.

But must we, after all? Yesterday or the day before it was true and we were saying that the summer held on well. Today, so suddenly does the change seem to become visible, I saw them blaze up out of a cool swamp at the foot of the hill on which I stood.

The smoke of autumn's peace pipe was blue on all the distant hills, and he must have dropped his match in my swamp, where it smouldered and flared and caught the maple even as I looked in the full expectancy of seeing nothing but green. The red fire of greeting seemed to run from tree to tree, and all the lowlands for a mile were ablaze, as if some subdominant political party had won an unexpected victory and could not wait for night to light its fires of celebration. All the little swamp maples were red with this fire, and though I suppose they have been days in turning the effect was that of their flashing up as I looked. Then I saw that the birches among them were all set with candles, whose pale yellow flames lighted them with a most chaste fire, just as in the old days of torchlight enthusiasm over political campaigns we used to put rows of them in the windows on the night that the parade was to pa.s.s. Seeing all that I felt as if autumn were again triumphantly elected, and we all ought to take off our hats and "give three cheers far the illumination on the right."

Surely autumn is the finest season of the year. I always know that as soon as it gets here. Yesterday I revelled in the summer that had stayed with us so long and, still seemed to show few signs of going. Today the fall coloring is burning, like a wood fire on a still day, slowly up from the swamps into the upland woods. Now that I have begun to notice it I see that the coloring is touching the underleaves of the hillside birches, those nearest the stem, and that perhaps one in five has the same cool, pale yellow fire alight. Thus rapidly does the conflagration spread from swamp to hillside, from the shade of the grove to its topmost boughs and before we know it the year will have once more set the world on fire.

As far those other signs, there is a whole calendar of bird voices and bird movements that might well give us the dates, day by day.

To me the first warning of the pa.s.sing of summer comes in the tin-trumpet notes of the blue jays. While the nesting season is on the blue jay is as dumb as an oyster. The woods may be full of him and his tribe, but never an old bird says a word. After the young can fly you may hear them if you slip quietly along in the pine woods.

You have to be pretty near though, to do it. They sit in a family group in the treetops and complain, under the breath, hungrily. It is not until the young are well grown, the moulting season is over and the summer pretty nearly the same that any blue jay gets his voice. Then, almost as suddenly as the coming of autumn coloring in the trees the racket begins. You may not have seen a blue jay in the woods for months. Suddenly they appear in flocks, swooping down on the orchard in brand new uniforms of conspicuous blue, white and black, yelling tooting and chattering. They have been shy and careful. They are now tame and reckless. They troop into the pasture after the wild cherries which they eat with chattering and scolding. On vibrant limbs they give spirit rappings in imitation of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r. Then they laugh and scream about it.

Hearing them we always say, "How fallish it sounds."

The blue jay has not only a whole vocabulary of his own, both in conversation, from twittering to oratory, and in calls from a.s.sembly cries and notes of warning to screams of derision and defiance, but he is an imitator in certain lines. He will imitate the red-shouldered hawk and the sparrow hawk and I suspect him of mixing it in conversation with the flicker. Often at this time of year I hear a subdued, rather sweet-voiced murmur in the wood as if a ladies' sewing society was just beginning to get busy pulling out the bastings. I know very well it is a convention composed of blue jays or flickers, but it is not so easy to tell which until I slip up and surprise them at it. The subdued tones of both birds in such conventions a.s.sembled are very much alike and I suspect that their polite conversation is in a common language. But I never can prove this, for they do not fraternize. The convention is sure to be of one feather or the other. They do not flock together. That is no doubt just as well, for I have great respect for the flicker. He is a whimsical old codger, very p.r.o.ne to talk to himself and go through strange gymnastics in a rather ridiculous way, but the flicker is honest. He brings up a large family in the strictest probity and I have never known a flicker to do a wrong thing. On the other hand, the blue jay is a thief, a mocker and a murderer. Just now he is living honestly on nuts and wild fruit, taking almost as many acorns as the squirrels and making a great deal of talk about it. You would think him the most open-hearted chap in the world, but if you will watch him carefully in the spring you will learn things which are to his disadvantage. You will likely find him taking a raw egg or two with his breakfast, to the sorrow of some small bird. Later, the fledglings are not safe from him, and if you shake a blue jay up in a bag with a crow and then open the bag, two arrant rogues will fly out, and it is hard telling which will have the other's tail feathers. For all that, I rather like the blue jay. If we are going strictly to condemn all who have a liking for an occasional small hot bird, there will be but few of us left. At this season he is the town crier of the wood, clanging his bell loudly at every wood-road corner and announcing in strident monotones that straw hats are called in and there is an exhibition sale of fall garments at Wood & Field's.

Even in August we get the first spray on the great wave of southward migrating warblers, and all through early September the woods are again full of their slender, flitting forms and their gentle voices. If you know your locality well you may mark the very dates of the month by their coming and going. So with equal definiteness the earlier departing of our summer residents leaves gaps in our hearts and the woodland on pretty definite September days. The cry-baby young of the orioles have hardly ceased to complain about the house, making the midsummer peevish, before the birds are flocking. They take August off the calendar with them.

On the date that I miss them and the kingbirds September first is very near if not among those present. The redwing blackbird may linger a day or two after these, but he does not wait to any more than see September arrive before he, too, is off. The bobolinks, perfectly unrecognizable in plain brown coats, continue to flock sparrow-wise about the meadows until say, the tenth. Then they go c.h.i.n.k-c.h.i.n.king down the marshes southward by way of Florida to Central America. Yucatan and the delta of the Orinoco may be lonely places in summer, but I do not think one need to be homesick there in mid-winter with all these intimate friends sitting about on the palm trees and chatting about the way things went in my meadows and woods a few months before.

As our summer residents go and the pa.s.sing migrants arrive and depart we may begin to expect the winter visitants. I am looking for myrtle warblers now. Their usual date of arrival is the twentieth, and if I do not find them here it is probably my fault.

The pastures are blue now with bayberries, which seem to be their favorite food. Feeding on these the myrtle warblers should be spicy, sprightly creatures, full of quaint romance, as indeed they are. The junco may come as early as this, according to the best authorities, though I confess I never have any luck in finding him much before November. The junco is a s...o...b..rd, anyway, his colors match leaden skies, and he seems to me out of place without a fellow flock of snow flakes.

The golden crowned kinglet and the winter wren, the white-throated sparrow and the brown creeper, all may be looked for between the 20th of September and the pa.s.sing of the month, though as for the brown creeper those two ardent bird students, Frederic H. Kennard and Fred McKechnie have demonstrated that it is not a winter visitant only but an occasional all-the-year resident, they having found nests and eggs in the Ponkapoag swamp. So the list might be enlarged vastly till we found a new comer or a new goer or both for every day in this month of transition, September.

To me, though, the most potent signs of the presence of autumn are neither the migrants nor the changing foliage. They are the mysterious voices of the woodland which change at about this time often to an eerier and lonelier note. The voice of late September winds in the trees has a wild call of melancholy in it. There is a spot in my wood where an ancient pine, dead and stark long ago, lies in the arms of a st.u.r.dy scarlet oak. All summer the leaning trunk has shed bark and small limbs, silently, patiently waiting, final dissolution. With the coming of cool autumn winds it has begun to complain. On rainy days especially I have heard this low lonesome voice crying softly to itself through the dusk and been at a loss to know what creature made it. Foxes in the mating season along about St. Valentine's day make strange outcry in the wood, but at this time of year the fox if he speaks at all simply barks. A racc.o.o.n might whimper thus but there were some cries that no c.o.o.n ever made. Once I stalked it for a lost child and I was long in locating the exact spot whence it came. After all it was only the complaining of the old tree as it rubbed on its support in the swaying wind, but it voiced all the loneliness of the good-byes which a thousand bright creatures have been saying to the wood these pleasant September days.

CHAPTER XVIII

MYSTICAL PASTURES

Two century-old pasture pines shelter my favorite sleeping spot in the pasture, and croon solemn, mystical tunes all night long. If I could but, with my dull ear grown finer, some day learn to interpret these I might grow wise with the yet unfathomed wisdom of the universe. Their runes are not of the gentle, vivid life that thrills below them. Before the little creatures of the pasture world were created, before pines grew upon earth, the words they sing were set to the sagas of vast s.p.a.ce, rhythmic runes of unremembered ages taught by the great winds of the world to these patriarchs that seem to tell them over and over lest they forget. They tower virid and virile. They stretch wide arms over the pasture people in benediction and sheltering love, but they are not of them. The reading of the deep riddle of the universe has made them prophets and seers and they dwell alone in their dignity. I may make my home beneath their sheltering shade, caress their rugged gray trunks and fall asleep to the mystical murmur of their voices, but I can never be intimate with them.

There is nothing of this aloofness about the other pasture people.

The younger pines do not whisper solemn riddles, but are gently friendly without mystery, and so are many of the myriad creatures that crowd the s.p.a.ces boldly or dwell quietly in unsuspected seclusion. Of all the outdoor world the pasture is the most friendly place, yet it is not obtrusively so and you must dwell in it long before you know many of even your elbow neighbors by sight. If you know them very well you will be able to detect their nearness by sound, oftentimes, long before sight of them is vouchsafed you. When they do appear it is usually a sort of embodiment. They materialize as if out of thin air and disintegrate by the same route. This is not because they fear you. It is simply because it has been the habit of pasture people for untold generations.

Thus it is that a lovely white moth flits often in the veriest gray of dawn just to the eastward of where I lie. It always seems as if he were a condensation out of the white mists that are born in that darkest hour when the night winds cease and that runic rhyme of the pines is lulled for a time. He seems as transparent as they and is nothing but the ghost of a moth as he pa.s.ses from one head of goldenrod bloom to another. Some mornings he vanishes in the amber glow that ushers in the daylight and then I think I have merely been dreaming of lepidoptera. This morning he did not appear, either in the early gray or the amber glow, and I went out to look for him. The waning moon hung wan and white in the west, a white paper ghost of a moon that had no light left in her. All the east had the clear translucent yellow radiance of the yellow birch leaves, a cool, pale gold, and between lay dead the morning mists, chilled to white frost on all the pasture shrubs and the level reaches of brown gra.s.s. Along the hedgerow of barberry, wild cherry, raspberry, hardhack, meadow sweet, sweet fern and goldenrod that deck the ancient wall I looked for the white radiance of my moth's wings in vain, and I pictured him as dead among the frozen gra.s.ses, and mourned him thus.

The day grew with all the wonderful still radiance which so often follows a frosty morning in October. The pine trees could not sing; there was no wind to give them voice. The still flood of golden sunshine warmed to the marrow, yet did not wilt as in summer. Instead, it informed all things with a glow like an elixir of life. To feel it well within one's flesh is to have a forecasting of immortality, to know that one is to be born again and again. I did not wonder that as I once more scanned the hedgerow along the ancient wall I saw my white moth clamber bravely up a goldenrod stem and begin a half-scrambling, half-fluttering pilgrimage from one to another of the hardy blooms that had survived the frost as well as he. Most of the goldenrod and meadow sweet blooms are well past their prime and are showing gray with age and ripening pappus, but here and there you find belated specimens that hold color and honey still, and on these he paused to breakfast. Then, as his wings rested for a moment, I could see that his pure white was touched with tiny chain patterns of black spots and I knew him for Cingalia catenaria, the chain-streak moth. Somehow I am half-sorry to have found him out. I am not sure but I would rather have remembered him as one of the mystical fancies of the early dawn, some pure white dream materialized out of the tenuous mists by the incantations of the Druid pines.

Neighborly and simple as are all the pasture people when we sit quiet long enough to see them and gain their confidence by making them feel that we are an integral portion of the place, as they are, they all have something of the mystical about them. There are four chipmunks, sleek and beautiful striped children of a this year's late litter. These frolic about on the stones and among the bushes at my very feet. They eat crusts almost from my hand. Yet they might as well be mahatmas, for in their going and coming they are as mysterious. I hear a scratching on a stone, and there sits a chipmunk. With a swish he is gone, and unless I hear the skittering of tiny feet a rod away I may not tell in what direction or how. Then, too, the skittering may be that of some entirely different creature. I prefer to think of them thus, as furry bogles that bob up out of fairy tales and bob back again to the making of a mythology that sniffs of sweet fern and bayberry and has the flavor of barberry sauce.

The tender glow of still October days seems to fill the pasture with such mysteries as this. Commonplace things are touched with the softening haze of romance, and in the crystal stillness, the happy aloofness of the place, the consciousness goes groping for the unseen. It may be that by digging and grubbing I might unearth the veritable home of my chipmunks, trace their cunning runways under stone and through fog and brush and prove that there is nothing of the theosophist about them. But not for worlds would I do it, nor would I believe it if I found them. Therein lies the inscrutability of faith.

In the golden morning glow the sounds of the far and near world seem to come without interference from intervening s.p.a.ce and the roar of the steam whistle on the liner at sea, eighteen miles away over rough hilltops, is as intimate as the drumming of the partridge in the swamp, scarcely more than a stone's throw away.

Indeed it is less aloof, far less mysterious. Its raucous bellow is soothed to a deep musical tone by distance. It speaks of the human touch and the man-made whistle. I may measure, define, place it; know the steamer that it speaks far and the man that pulls the throttle cord. I may find the pitch, touch the identical note on guitar or cornet. I have neither wind nor stringed instrument that will record so low a note as that of the drumming of the partridge. I count the vibrations of the first of it with ease.

They speed up toward the end, but they do not raise the pitch. I know nothing in our human musical notation that will touch its depth. Yet it is a musical tone and a most goblin-like and eerie one. The partridge may be commonplace enough and his drumming but a strut of complacency and self-satisfaction. With patience and good luck I may see him doing it and follow him from his roost in the morning till he returns to it at night. But I cannot fathom the mystery which haunts the pasture in the genial melancholy of these sunny October days, to which his drum seems to sound the marching note.

In the midday stillness when the blue sky arches over the place like a crystal bell which no winds may penetrate it seems as if the witchery grew. The warmth of the sun is like that of summer though without languor. The world is in a breathless swoon in the midst of which I wonder dreamily how this soft brown gra.s.s on which I lie could have been crisp and white with frost six hours ago. The morning waked all the hardier forest creatures who seemed to revel in the crisp exhilarating air. Red and gray squirrels crashed about in the tree tops making noisy merriment in their indescribable squirrel jargon. Their thrashing and chattering in the trees was almost equal to a crowd of schoolboys nutting. With them the blue jays blew trumpets and clanged bells, the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs drummed and shrieked and crows and chewinks added to the clamor. Even my chipmunks blew squeaky shrill whistles in staccato notes. The pasture was full of picnic.