The Jonathan Papers Part 16

But I suppose the very best about hunting can never be told at all. That is true of any really good thing, and there is nothing better than a long day after the birds. It is always good to be out of doors. And there are seasons when one is glad to wander slowly over the fields and byways; there are times when it seems best of all to be still--in the heart of the woods, on the wide hill pastures, in the deep gra.s.s of the meadows. But not in the fall! Is it a breath of the migrating instinct that makes us want to be off and away, to go, and go, and go? Yes, fall is the time for the hunt--gay, boisterous fall, rioting in wind and color to keep up its spirits against the stealthy approach of winter.

And whether we shoot well or ill, whether our game pockets are heavy or light, no matter what the weather we find or the country we cross, it is all good hunting, very good. And at night we come in to a blazing fire, feeling tired, oh, so tired! and hungry, oh, so hungry! and with soul and body shriven clean by wind and sun.

XV

Beyond the Realm of Weather

Our friends say to us now and then, "But why must you do these things with a gun? Why can't you do the same things and leave the gun at home?"

Why, indeed? When I put this question to Jonathan, he smokes on placidly. But of one thing I am sure: if it had not been for the guns and the ducks, I should never have known what the marshes were like in winter fog--what they were like under a winter sky with a wind straight from the North Pole sweeping over their bare stretches.

It was early afternoon. Through the study window I looked out upon a raw, foggy world, melting snow underfoot and overhead. It was the kind of day about which even the most deliberately cheerful can find little to say except that this sort of thing can't last forever, you know.

However, if I had had a true instinct for "nature," I should, I suppose, have seen at a glance that it was just the day to go and lie in a marsh. But this did not occur to me. Instead, I thought of open fires, and popcorn, and hot peanuts, and novels, and fudge, and other such things, which are supposed to be valuable as palliatives on days like these.

The telephone rang. "Oh, it's you, Jonathan!... What? No, not really!

You wouldn't!... Well, if the ducks like it, they may have it all. I'm not a duck.... Why, of course, if you really want me to, I'll go, only.... All right, I'll get out the things.... Three o'clock train?

You'll have to hurry!"

I hung up the receiver and sat a moment, dazed, looking out at the reek of weather. Then I shook myself and darted upstairs to the hunting-closet. In half an hour the bag was packed and Jonathan was at the door. In an hour we were on the train, and at twilight we were tramping out into a fog-swept marsh. Grayness was all around us; underfoot was mud, glimmering patches of soft snow, and the bristly stubble of the close-cut marsh gra.s.s.

"What fools we are!" I murmured.

"Why?" said Jonathan contentedly.

"Oh, if you can't see--" I said.

And then, suddenly, as we walked, my whole att.i.tude changed. The weather, as weather, seemed something that belonged in a city--very far away, and no concern of mine. This wasn't weather, here where we walked; it was a gray and boundless world of mystery. We raised our heads high and breathed long, deep breaths as the fog drifted against our faces. We were aware of dim ma.s.ses of huddling bushes, blurred outlines of sheds and fences. Then only the level marsh stretched out before us and around us.

"Can we find our way out again?" I murmured, though without real anxiety.

"Probably," said Jonathan. "Isn't it great! You feel as if you had a soul out here! By the way, what was it you said about fools?"

"I forget," I said.

We went on and on, I don't know just where or how long, until we came to the creek, where the tide sets in and out. I should have walked into it if Jonathan hadn't held me back. As we followed it, there rose a hoa.r.s.e, raucous "_Ngwak! ngwak! ngwak!_" and a great rush of wings. Jonathan dropped on one knee, gun up, but we saw nothing.

"We'll settle down here," he said. "There'll be more coming in soon.

Wait a minute--hold my gun." He disappeared in the fog, and came back with an armful of hay, taken from the heart of a haystack of whose existence he seemed, by some sixth or seventh sense, to be aware.

"There! That'll keep you off the real marsh. Now settle down, and don't move, and listen with all your ears, and be ready. I'll go off a little way."

I sank down on the hay, and watched him melt into the grayness. I was alone in the dim marsh. There was no wind, no sound but the far-off whistle and rush of a train. I lay there and thought of nothing. I let myself be absorbed into the twilight. I did not even feel that I had a soul. I was nothing but a point of consciousness in the midst of a gray infinity.

Suddenly I was aware of a sound--a rapid pulsing of soft, high tone--too soft for a whistle, too high for a song,--pervasive, elusive; it was overhead, it was beside me, behind me, where? Ah--it was wings! The winnowing of wings! I half rose, grasping my gun, with a sense of responsibility to Jonathan. But my vision was caught in the grayness as in a web. The sound grew clearer, then fainter, then it pa.s.sed away. The twilight gathered, and the fog partly dissolved. A fine rain began to fall, and in the intense silence I could hear the faint p.r.i.c.king of the drops on the stiff marsh stubble. I had thought the patter of rain on a roof was the stillest sound I knew, but this was stiller. Again came the winnowing of wings--again and again; and sometimes I was able to see the dark shapes pa.s.sing overhead and vanishing almost before they appeared.

Now and then I heard the m.u.f.fled, flat sound of Jonathan's gun--he was evidently living up to his opportunities better than I was.

Occasionally, in a spasm of activity, I shot too.

Until night closed in about us that sound of wings filled the air, and I knelt, listening and watching. It is strange how one can be physically alert while yet one's soul is withdrawn, quiet and receptive. Out of this state, as out of a trance, I was roused by the sense of Jonathan's dim bulk, seeming "larger than mortal," as he emerged from the night.

"Cold?" he said.

"I don't know--no, of course I'm not." I found it hard to lay hold on clear ideas again.

"I heard you shoot. Get any?"

"I think I hurried them a little."

We started back. At least I suppose it was back, because after a while we came to the road we had left. I was conscious only of bewildering patches of snow that lay like half-veiled moonlight on the dark stretches of the marsh. At last a clump of cedars made themselves felt rather than seen. "There's the fence corner! We're all right," said Jonathan. A snow-filled horse rut gave faint guidance, the twigs of the hedgerow lightly felt of our faces as we pa.s.sed. We found the main road, and it led us through the quiet, fog-bound village, whose house lights made tiny blurs on the mist, to the hot, bright little station. Then came the close, flaringly lighted car, and people--commuters--getting on and off, talking about the "weather," and filling the car with the smell of wet newspapers and umbrellas. We had returned to the land of "weather." Yet it did not really touch us. It seemed a dream. The reality was the marsh, with its fog and its p.r.i.c.king raindrops and its sentinel cedars, its silence and its wings.

In the days that followed, the fog pa.s.sed, and there were long, warm rains. The marsh called us, but we could not go. Then the sky cleared, the wind rose, the mercury began to drop. Jonathan looked across the luncheon table and said, "What about ducks?"

"Can you get off?" I asked joyously.

"I can't, but I will," he replied.

And this time-- Did I think I knew the marsh? Did I suppose, having seen it at dawn in the fall days when the sun still rises early, having seen it in winter twilight, fog-beset, that I knew it? Do I suppose I know it now? At least I know it better, having seen it under a clearing sky, when the cold wind sweeps it clean, and the air, crystalline, seems like a lens through which one looks and sees a revelation of new things.

As we struck into the marsh, just at sundown, my first thought was a rushing prayer for words, for colors, for something to catch and hold the beauty of it. But there are no words, no colors. No one who has not seen it can know what a New England sh.o.r.e marsh can be in winter under a golden sky.

Winter does some things for us that summer cannot do. Summer gives us everything all at once--color, fragrance, line, sound--in an overwhelming exuberance of riches. And it is good. But winter-- Ah, winter is an artist, winter has reserves; he selects, he emphasizes, he interprets. Winter says, "I will give you nothing to-day but brown and white, but I will glorify these until you shall wonder that there can be any beauty except thus." And again winter says: "Did you think the world was brown and white? Lo, it is blue and rose and silver--nothing else!"

And we look, and it is so. On that other evening, in the fog, the world had been all gray--black-gray and pale gray and silver gray. On this evening winter said: "Gray? Not at all. You shall have brown and gold.

Behold and marvel!"

I marveled. There was a sweep of golden marsh, under a gold sky, and at its borders low lines of trees etched in rich brown ma.s.ses, and my sentinel cedars standing singly or by twos and threes--cedars in their winter tones of olive brown, dull almost to harshness, holding themselves stiffly against the great wind, yielding only at their delicate tips when the gusts came, recovering again in the lulls, to point dauntlessly skyward. The narrow boundary ditches, already gla.s.sing over in the sudden cold, stretched away in rigid lines, flashing back the light of the sky in shivers of gold. The haystacks reiterated the color notes--gold on their sunset side, deep brown on their shadowed one.

There is a moment sometimes, just at sundown, when the quality of light changes. It does not fall upon the world from without, it radiates from within. Things seem self-luminous. Yet, for all their brightness, we see them less clearly, one's vision is dazzled, enmeshed. It is the time when that wondrous old word "faerie" finds its meaning. It is a magic moment. It laid its spell upon us.

Jonathan emerged first, bracing himself. "It will shut down soon. We haven't a minute to spare. We ought to be on the creek now."

It was hard to believe that such brightness could ever shut down. But it did. By the time we reached the creek the gold had vanished, except for a narrow line in the western sky. The world lay in clear, brown twilight, and the wind swept over it.

Jonathan got more hay, and this time I saw the haystack from which he plucked it. I threw myself on it, collar up, cap down, lying as low as possible.

"Bad night for ducks, of course," growled Jonathan. "If only the thaw had held twelve hours more! However--"

He swung off to some chosen spot of his own.

I lay there and the wind surged over me. There was nothing to stop it, nothing to make it noisy. It sang a little around the flap of my coat, it swished a little in the short marsh gra.s.s, but chiefly it rushed by above me, in invisible, soundless might. It seemed as if it must come between me and the stars, but it did not, and I watched them appear, at first one by one, then in companies and cohorts, until the sky was powdered with them. Now and then a dark line of ducks streamed over me, high up, in direct, steady flight, but the sound of their wings was swallowed up by the wind. I did not even try to shoot; I was trying to find myself in an elemental world that seemed bigger and more powerful than I had ever conceived it.

Gradually I realized that I was cold. The wind seemed suddenly to have become aware of me. It roared down upon me, it shook me, worried me, let me go, and pounced upon me again in the sport of power. I said to myself, "I cannot resist, I will give myself up to it absolutely," I stopped feeling cold. I was no more than a ship's timber lying on the sh.o.r.e--with just a centre, a point of consciousness somewhere inside, to be aware of the difference between the elements and the something I knew was myself.

But at last I moved. It was fatal. A wave of cold started, p.r.i.c.king somewhere in my head, and undulated sinuously through me, down to my feet. More waves followed; they careered through me. I considered them with interest. Then they settled into aches at all the extremities. All at once it ceased to be interesting, and became a personal grievance--against the wind? the ducks? No-- Jonathan! Of course it was Jonathan's fault. Why didn't he come? I gazed into the twilight where he had disappeared. I couldn't go and hunt for him, because I should certainly get lost or fall into a ditch. Ah! What was that? The long red flash of a gun!--another!--then the double report! Well, of course, if he were shooting, I would suspend judgment a reasonable time.

But it seemed quite an unreasonable time before I felt the impact of his tread on the springy marsh floor. I rose stiffly, feeling cross.

"Did you think I was never coming?"

"I can't think. My brains are stiff."