Winter Part 4

When the snow hardens, especially after a strong wind, go out to see what you can find in the wind furrows of the snow--in the holes, hollows, pockets, and in footprints in the snow. Nothing? Look again, closely--that dust--wind-sweepings--seeds! Yes, seeds. Gather several small boxes of them and when you return home take a small magnifying gla.s.s and make them out--the sticktights, gray birches, yellow birches, pines, ragweeds, milfoil--I cannot number them! It is a lesson in the way the winds and the snows help to plant the earth.

Last winter I followed for some distance the deep frozen tracks of a fox, picking out the various seeds that had drifted into every footprint, just so far apart, as if planted in the snow by some modern planting-machine. It was very interesting.

V

When the snow lies five or six inches deep, walk out along the fence-rows, roadsides, and old fields to see the juncos, the sparrows, and goldfinches feeding upon the seeds of the dead weeds standing stiff and brown above the snow. Does the sight mean anything to you?

What does it mean?

VI

Burns has a fine poem beginning--

"When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r,"

in which, he asks,--

"Ilk happing bird--wee, helpless thing!--

What comes o' thee?

Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, An' close thy e'e?"

Did you ever ask yourself the question? Go forth, then, as the dusk begins to fall one of these chill winter days and try to see "what comes o'" the birds, where they sleep these winter nights. You will find an account of my own watching in a chapter called "Birds' Winter Beds" in "Wild Life Near Home."

VII

You will come back from your watching in the dusk with the feeling that a winter night for the birds is unspeakably dreary, perilous, and chill. You will close the door on the darkness outside with a shiver as much from dread as from the cold.

"List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle,"--

you will think of the partridge beneath the snow, the crow in his swaying pine-top, the kinglet in the close-armed cedar, the wild duck riding out the storm in his freezing water-hole, and you will be glad for your four thick walls and downy blankets, and you will wonder how any creature can live through the long, long night of cold and dark and storm. But there is another view of this same picture; another picture, rather, of this same stormy, bitter night which you must not miss seeing. Go out to see how the animals sleep, what beds they have, what covers to keep off the cold: the mice in the corn-shocks; the muskrats in their thick mud homes; the red squirrels in their rocking, wind-swung beds, so soft with cedar bark and so warm that never a tooth of the cold can bite through!

"I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer Shook off the pouthery snaw, And hail'd the morning with a cheer, A cottage-rousing craw."

VIII

This winter I have had two letters asking me how best to study the mosses and lichens, and I answered, "Begin now." Winter, when the leaves are off, the ground bare, the birds and flowers gone, and all is reduced to singleness and simplicity--winter is the time to observe the shapes, colors, varieties, and growth of the lichens. Not that every lover of nature needs to know the long Latin names (and many of these lesser plants have no other names), but that every lover of the out-of-doors should notice them--the part they play in the color of things, the place they hold in the scheme of things, their exquisite shapes and strange habits.

IX

You should see the brook, "bordered with sparkling frost-work ... as gay as with its fringe of summer flowers." You should examine under a microscope the wonderful crystal form of the snow-flakes--each flake shaped by an infinitely accurate hand according to a pattern that seems the perfection, the very poetry, of mechanical drawing.

X

What a world of gray days, waste lands, bare woods, and frozen waters there is to see! And you should see them--gray and bare and waste and frozen. But what is a frozen pond for if not to be skated on? and waste white lands, but to go sleighing over? and cold gray days, but so many opportunities to stay indoors with your good books?

See the winter bleak and cheerless as at times you will, and as at times you ought; still if you will look twice, and think as you look, you will see the fishermen on the ponds catching pickerel through the ice--life swimming there under the frozen surface! You will see the bare empty woodland fresh budded to the tip of each tiny twig--life all over the trees thrust forward to catch the touch of spring! You will see the wide flinty fields thick sown with seeds--life, more life than the sun and the soil can feed, sleeping there under "the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow"!

CHAPTER V

CHRISTMAS IN THE WOODS

"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

But on the night before this particular Christmas every creature of the woods that could stir was up and stirring; for over the old snow was falling swiftly, silently, a soft, fresh covering that might mean a hungry Christmas unless the dinner were had before morning.

Yet, when the morning dawned, a cheery Christmas sun broke across the great gum swamp, lighting the snowy boles and soft-piled limbs of the giant trees with indescribable glory, and pouring, a golden flood, into the deep, spongy bottom of the swamp below. It would be a perfect Christmas in the woods, clear, mild, stirless, with silent footing for me, and everywhere the telltale snow.

And everywhere in the woods would be the Christmas spirit, too. As I paused among the pointed cedars of the pasture, looking down into the tangle at the head of the swamp, a clear, wild whistle rang in the thicket, followed by a flash through the alders like a tongue of fire, as a cardinal grosbeak shot down to the tangle of greenbrier and magnolia under the slope of the hill. The bird was a fleck of flaming summer. As warm as summer, too, were the pointed cones of stag-horn sumac burning on the crest of the ridge against the group of holly trees--trees as fresh as April, and all aglow with red berries.

The woods were decorated for the Holy Day. The gentleness of the soft, new snow touched everything; cheer and good-will lighted the unclouded sky and warmed the thick depths of the evergreens, and blazed in the crimson-berried bushes of the ilex and the alder. The Christmas woods were glad. The heart of the woods was full of Christmas peace.

Now I did not imagine all of this as I went along. Perhaps there was the spirit of Christmas in my heart, and so I found the spirit of Christmas in the woods; but so it must have been with the household I had just left, back on the city street. Every one had Christmas in his heart, and so every one found Christmas in the Christmas-tree blazing and glittering in its candle-flame blossoms and jeweled fruit.

So there was real Christmas joy and peace--a real Christmas spirit--abroad in the woods this snowy Christmas morning. The sky had it, the trees had it, the soft white slopes had it, the softly flowing creek had it, flowing softly toward the bay.

But doubtless my own feelings had something to do with it all. This was Christmas Day, and these were my home woods, the woods where I tramped and trapped and "grew up" when a boy; and this was I, after twenty years of absence, I, the boy again, back in the old familiar pasture on my way to Lupton's Pond!

Yes, I must say that I was almost afraid as I followed the old cow-path across the pasture, now only a slightly sunken line in the snow; I was afraid that the path might be gone. Twenty years are a good many years for a cow-path to last. But evidently the cows had been crossing every year since I had been away; and not a single new crook had they worn in the old winding trail. Then I was afraid, as I came to the fence where I could look down upon the pond, lest the pond might have disappeared. But no, there it lay, sealed over, as if kept for me by the snow! Then I looked fearfully over the pond, over the steep ridge on the opposite sh.o.r.e to where there used to stand two particular persimmon trees.

My heart beat wildly for a moment. The woods up the ridge had been cut off! Things had changed! I was confused and looked this way and that, when, so near to me that I could scarcely believe my eyes, I saw the twin trees, their hard, angular limbs closely globed with fruit, and standing softly out against the sky!

It was enough. Forgetting the twenty years, I hurried down across the pond and up to the persimmon trees on the other side--up _into_ the trees indeed, for I never stopped until I had climbed clear up into the top among the ripe persimmons!

Do you know what a persimmon, picked from a particular tree along Cohansey Creek on Christmas Day, tastes like? especially when you have not had a taste of persimmon for twenty years? No, you do not--because you are not twenty years old, perhaps, and because you were not a boy along Cohansey Creek, perhaps, and because, if you were, you did not know those two particular persimmon trees, maybe.

n.o.body ever seemed to know the perfection of those persimmons, except myself and the 'possums. Not one of the Luptons, who owned the pasture, the pond, and the trees, had ever been a boy, so far as I could remember, and certainly not one of them had ever tasted the fruit of those two trees. There were other persimmon trees up and down the township, others here along the pond; but these two were the only trees to hold their fruit until Christmas, preserved with such richness of flavor, such a gummy, candied, wild, woodsy quality, that it could not decay. Those persimmons never decayed. They candied, evaporated, wrinkled, fell, and vanished away.

Or else the 'possums ate them--those that I did not eat. A 'possum had already been here this Christmas morning before me. I had noted his fresh tracks beneath the tree when I came up; and now, in the tree, I saw where the snow had been brushed from several of the large limbs as the 'possum had moved about in the top, eating his Christmas dinner.

You never ate a Christmas dinner high up in the top of a persimmon tree? But you will, perhaps, some day, as good a Christmas dinner, I hope, as ours was. For such persimmons! Bob Cratchit's goose ("There never was such a goose!") could not have been any better flavored. Nor could the little Cratchits have been any hungrier for goose than I was for persimmons.

Now the 'possum had been having persimmons every night since the frosts of October; so of course he felt no such hunger for persimmons as I felt. But ripe persimmons would be a Christmas dinner for a 'possum every day in the year. There is nothing so unspeakably good as persimmons if you happen to be a 'possum, or if you happen to be a boy--even after twenty years!

So the 'possum and I had our Christmas dinner together at Nature's invitation, in the top of the persimmon tree. The 'possum, to be sure, had eaten and gone before I came. But that is good form in the woods. He was expecting me, so he came early, just before dawn, that neither of us might be embarra.s.sed, leaving his greetings for me in sign-language in the snow.

A Christmas dinner all alone would be cold cheer indeed. But I was not alone. Here was good company and plenty of it. Did not the tracks talk to me? With abundance of fruit still left in the tree, did I need to see that 'possum fold up his napkin, pull down his vest, spread his hands over his expansive person and groan in the fullness of his feast? No; all of that was printed plainly in the snow. Why, I could even hear his groans in his tumbled tracks at the foot of the tree, where the fat old fellow had literally fallen over himself! What an appet.i.te! What a pudding of persimmons he must be! He can hardly walk for fat! Look at his trail in the snow leading down toward the pond--a big wide wallow where he has bounced along!