The Hills of Hingham Part 13

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing line toward the chicken-yard.

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested.

He found heaps of rotting carca.s.ses stripped of their fatally lovely plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

A few men with guns--for money--had done it. And the wild areas of the world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet"--literally, and he must go softly now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory the pa.s.senger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodp.e.c.k.e.r probably, this latter by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed the last pair of these n.o.ble birds reported from the Florida forests.

So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the Gulf coast--so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest of our animals for a long time to come.

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled region.

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there were all told over all of North America when the white men first came here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been given protection--pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and repression, if given only a measure of protection.

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.

Nature--man-nature--has been hard on the little brute--to save him!

His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally pa.s.ses in and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the earth.

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the bushes to let me pa.s.s, then comes back to the road and trots upon his four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard open.

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of the fox; no thought of Nature more rea.s.suring than the thought of the way Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.

If I am a.s.suming too much authority, it is because, here in the remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this determined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancy chickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming. He knows it, and comes just the same. At least the gun does not keep him away. My neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him away. Guns, dogs, traps, poison--nothing can keep the foxes away.

It must have been about four o'clock the other morning when one of my children tiptoed into my room and whispered, "Father, there's the old fox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind the barn."

I got up and hurried with the little fellow into his room, and sure enough, there in the fog of the dim morning I could make out the form of a fox moving slowly around the small coop.

The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks, her cries having awakened the small boys.

I got myself down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, seized my gun, and, gliding out through the cellar door, crept stealthily into the barn.

The back window was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but where was the fox?

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun out across the window-sill, I waited.

Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the fox! What a shot!

The old rascal c.o.c.ked his ears toward the house. All was still.

Quickly under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old hen fluttering and crying in fresh terror.

Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of the gun around on the window-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief. The cow in her stall beside me did not stir. I knew that four small boys in the bedroom window had their eyes riveted upon that fox waiting for me to fire. It was a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in the cold, white fog, and without anything much but slippers on. Usually, of course, I shot in boots.

But there stood the fox clawing out my young chickens, and, steadying the gun as best I could on the moving window-sill, I fired.

That the fox jumped is not to be wondered at. I jumped myself as both barrels went off together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of day, but so early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silence and the ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling.

I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, after jumping, turned around and looked all over the end of the barn to see if the shooting were going to happen again. I wished then that I had saved the other barrel.

All I could do was to shout at him, which made him run off.

The boys wanted to know if I thought I had killed the hen. On going out later I found that I had not even hit the coop--not so bad a shot, after all, taking into account the size of the coop and the thick, distorting qualities of the weather.

There is no particular credit to the fox in this, nor do I come in for any particular credit this time; but the little drama does ill.u.s.trate the chances in the game of life, chances that sometimes, usually indeed, are in favor of the fox.

He not only got away, but he also got away with eleven out of the twelve young chicks in that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire of the coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by frightening the chicks out, had eaten all of them but one.

That he escaped this time was sheer luck; that he got his breakfast before escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so many instances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the olden days of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, too!

One day last autumn I was climbing the steep ridge behind the mowing-field when I heard a fox-hound yelping over in the hollow beyond. Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw the hound off below me on the side of the parallel ridge across the valley. He was beating slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and evidently having a hard time holding the trail. Now and then he would throw his head up into the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in protest, begging the fox to stop its fooling and play fair.

The hound was walking, not running, and at a gait almost as deliberate as his howl. Round and round in one place he would go, off this way, off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, or in despair of ever hitting it (I don't know which), he would stand stock-still and howl.

That the hound was tired I felt sure; but that he was on the trail of a fox I could not believe; and I was watching him curiously when something stirred on the top of the ridge almost beside me.

Without turning so much as my head, I saw the fox, a beautiful creature, going slowly round and round in a circle--in a figure eight, rather--among the bushes; then straight off it went and back; off again in another direction and back; then in and out, round and round, utterly without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the steep hillside, the wily creature was off at an easy trot.

The hound did know what he was about. Across the valley, up the ridge, he worked his sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy.

Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, he began to weave in and out, back and forth, sniffling and whimpering like a tired child, beating gradually out into a wider and wider circle, and giving the fox all the rest it could want, before taking up the lead again and following on down the trail.

The hound knew what he was about; but so did the fox: the latter, moreover, taking the initiative, inventing the trick, leading the run, and so in the end not only escaping the hound, but also vastly widening the distance between their respective wits and abilities.

I recently witnessed a very interesting instance of this superiority of the fox. One of the best hunters in my neighborhood, a man widely known for the quality of his hounds, sold a dog, Gingles, an extraordinarily fine animal, to a hunter in a near-by town. The new owner brought his dog down here to try him out.

The hound was sent into the woods and was off in a moment on a warm trail. But it was not long before the baying ceased, and shortly after, back came the dog. The new owner was disappointed; but the next day he returned and started the dog again, only to have the same thing happen, the dog returning in a little while with a sheepish air of having been fooled. Over and over the trial was made, when, finally, the dog was taken back to its trainer as worthless.

Then both men came out with the dog, the trainer starting him on the trail and following on after him as fast as he could break his way through the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials before, the baying ceased, but before the baffled dog had had time to grow discouraged, the men came up to find him beating distractedly about in a small, freshly burned area among the bushes, his nose full of strong ashes, the trail hopelessly lost. With the help of the men the fox was dislodged, and the dog carried him on in a course that was to his new owner's entire satisfaction.

The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself. Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy species of wild things--thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning in the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, four in sh.e.l.ls, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)--seventy-five in all.

Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in an environment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of the ancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpen behind the barn. From this very joist, however, she has already brought off two broods since March, one of four and one of five.

As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be as long as the human race endures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure? The case of the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more room than a pigpen; but as long as the domestic hen endures, if we will but give the fox half the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure.

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, and stood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the hounds baying in the swamp far away to the west of me. You have heard at night the pa.s.sing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak of thole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barn door somewhere down the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was another such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of the night.

How clear their cries and bell-like! How mellow in the distance, ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging silver bell! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the sound rising and falling through the rolling woodland and spreading like a curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows.

I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for an instant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase swept unhindered across the meadows.

What was that? A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that cracked in the path behind me! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feet came up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on--as into the moonlight, beyond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked the fox.

The dogs were now very near and coming as swift as their eager legs could carry them. But I was standing still, so still that the fox did not recognize me as anything more than a stump.

No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately. But how much more than a stump?