HUNTING THE SNOW
THE hunt began at the hen-yard gate, where we saw tracks in the thin, new snow that led us up the ridge, and along its narrow back, to a hollow stump. Here the hunt began in earnest, for not until that trail of close, double, nail-pointed prints went under the stump were the three small boys convinced that we were tracking a skunk and not a cat.
This creature had moved leisurely. That you could tell by the closeness of the prints. Wide-apart tracks in the snow mean hurry. Now a cat, going as slowly as this creature went, would have put down her dainty feet almost in single line, and would have left round, cushion-marked holes in the snow, not triangular, nail-pointed prints like these. Cats do not venture into holes under stumps, either.
We had bagged our first quarry! No, no! We had not pulled that wood pussy out of his hole and put him into our game-bag. We did not want to do that. We really carried no bag; and if we had, we should not have put the wood pussy in it, for we were hunting tracks, not the animals, and “bagging our quarry” meant trailing a creature to its den, or following its track until we had discovered something it had done, or what its business was, and why it was out. We were on the snow for animal facts, not animal pelts.
We were elated with our luck, for this stump was not five minutes by the steep ridge path from the hen-yard. And here, standing on the stump, we were only sixty minutes away from Boston Common by the automobile, driving no faster than the law allows. So we were not hunting in a wilderness, but just outside our dooryard and almost within the borders of a great city.
And that is the interesting fact of our morning hunt. No one but a lover of the woods and a careful walker on the snow would believe that here in the midst of hay-fields, in sight of the smoke of city factories, so many of the original wild wood-folk still live and travel their night paths undisturbed.
Still, this is a rather rough bit of country, broken, ledgy, boulder-strewn, which accounts for the swamps and woody hills that alternate with small towns and cultivated fields all the way to the Blue Hill Reservation, fifteen miles to the westward. This whole region, this dooryard of Boston, is one of Nature’s own reservations, a preserve that she has kept for her small and humble folk, who are just as dear to her as we are, but whom we have driven, except in such small places as these, quite off the earth.
Here, however, they are still at home, as this hole of the skunk’s under the stump proved. But there was more proof. As we topped the ridge on the trail of the skunk, we crossed another trail, made up of bunches of four prints,—two long and broad, two small and roundish,—spaced about a yard apart.
A hundred times, the winter before, we had tried that trail in the hope of finding the form or the burrow of its maker, the great Northern hare, but it crossed and turned and doubled, and always led us into a tangle, out of which we never got a clue.
As this was the first tracking snow of the winter, we were relieved to see the strong prints of our cunning neighbor again, for what with the foxes and the hunters, we were afraid it might have fared ill with him. But here he was, with four good legs under him; and after bagging our skunk, we returned to pick up the hare’s trail, to try our luck once more.
We brought him in long, leisurely leaps down the ridge, out into our mowing field, and over to the birches below the house. Here he had capered about in the snow, had stood up on his haunches and gnawed the bark from off a green oak sucker two and a half feet from the ground. This, doubtless, was pretty near his length, stretched out—an interesting item; not exact to the inch, perhaps, but close enough for us; and much more fascinating, guessed at by such a rule, than if measured dead, with scientific accuracy.
Nor was this all, for up the foot-path through the birches came the marks of two dogs. They joined the marks of the hare. And then, back along the edge of the woods to the bushy ridge, we saw a pretty race.
It was all in our imaginations, all done for us by those long-flinging footprints in the snow. But we saw it all—the white hare, the yelling hounds, nip and tuck, in a burst of speed across the open field that left a gap in the wind behind.
It had all come as a surprise. The hounds had climbed the hill on the scent of a fox, and had “jumped” the hare unexpectedly. But just such a jump of fear is what a hare’s magnificent legs were intended for.
They carried him a clear twelve feet in some of the longest leaps for the ridge, and they carried him to safety, so far as we could read the snow. In the medley of hare-and-hound tracks on the ridge there was no sign of a tragedy. He had escaped again—but how and where we have still to learn.
We had bagged our hare,—yet still we have him to bag,—and taking up the trail of one of the dogs, we continued our hunt.
One of the joys of this snow-walking is having a definite road or trail blazed for you by knowing, purposeful feet. You do not have to blunder ahead, breaking your way into this wilderness world, trusting luck to bring you somewhere. The wild animal or the dog goes this way, and not that, for a reason. You are following that reason all along; you are pack-fellow to the hound; you hunt with him.
Here the hound had thrust his muzzle into a snow-capped pile of slashings, had gone clear round the pile, then continued on his way. But we stopped, for out of the pile, in a single, direct line, ran a number of mice-prints, going and coming. A dozen white-footed mice might have traveled that road since the day before, when the snow had ceased falling.
We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods,—small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution,—is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.
It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why?—a hundred times!
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that—Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what
root and all, and all in all,
the humblest flower is.
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.
The squirrel’s track wound up and down the hillside, wove in and out and round and round, hitting every possible tree, as if the only road for a squirrel was one that looped and doubled and tied up every stump and zigzagged into every tree trunk in the woods.
But all this maze was no ordinary journey. The squirrel had not run this coil of a road for breakfast, because when he travels, say, for distant nuts, he goes as directly as you go to your school or office; but he goes not by streets, but by trees, never crossing more of the open in a single rush than the space between him and the nearest tree that will take him on his way.
What interested us here in the woods was the fact that a second series of tracks just like the first, only about half as large, dogged the larger tracks persistently, leaping tree for tree, and landing track for track with astonishing accuracy—tracks which, had they not been evidently those of a smaller squirrel, would have read to us most menacingly.
As this was the mating season for squirrels, I suggested that it might have been a kind of Atalanta’s race here in the woods. But why did so little a squirrel want to marry one so big? They would not look well together, was the answer of the small boys. They thought it much more likely that Father Squirrel had been playing wood-tag with one of his children.
Then, suddenly, as sometimes happens in the woods, the true meaning of the signs was literally hurled at us, for down the hill, squealing and panting, rushed a large male gray squirrel, with a red squirrel like a shadow, like a weasel, at his heels.
For just an instant I thought it was a weasel, so swift and silent and gliding were its movements, so set and cruel seemed its expression, so sure, so inevitable its victory.
Whether it ever caught the gray squirrel or not, and what it would have done had it caught the big fellow, I do not know. But I have seen the chase often—the gray squirrel put to the last extremity with fright and fatigue, the red squirrel an avenging, inexorable fate behind. They tore round and round us, then up over the hill, and disappeared.
One of the rarest prints for most snow-hunters nowadays, but one of the commonest hereabouts, is the quick, sharp track of the fox. In the spring particularly, when my fancy young chickens are turned out to pasture, I have spells of fearing that the fox will never be exterminated here in this untillable but beautiful chicken country. In the winter, however, when I see Reynard’s trail across my lawn, when I hear the music of the baying hounds, and catch a glimpse of the white-tipped brush swinging serenely in advance of the coming pack, I cannot but admire the capable, cunning rascal, cannot but be glad for him, and marvel at him, so resourceful, so superior to his almost impossible conditions, his almost innumerable foes.
We started across the meadow on his trail, but found it leading so straightaway for the ledges, and so continuously blotted out by the passing of the pack, that, striking the wallowy path of a muskrat in the middle of the meadow, we took up the new scent to see what the shuffling, cowering water-rat wanted from across the snow.
A man is known by the company he keeps, by the way he wears his hat, by the manner of his laugh; but among the wild animals nothing tells more of character than their manner of moving. You can read animal character as easily in the snow as you can read act and direction.
The timidity, the indecision, the lack of purpose, the restless, meaningless curiosity of this muskrat were evident from the first in the loglike, the starting, stopping, returning, going-on track he had ploughed out in the thin snow.
He did not know where he was going or what he was going for; he knew only that he insisted upon going back, but all the while kept going on; that he wanted to go to the right or to the left, yet kept moving straight ahead.
We came to a big wallow in the snow, where, in sudden fear, he had had a fit at the thought of something that might not have happened to him had he stayed at home. Every foot of the trail read, “He would if he could; but if he wouldn’t, how could he?”
We followed him on, across a dozen other trails, for it is not every winter night that the muskrat’s feet get the better of his head, and, willy-nilly, take him abroad. Strange and fatal weakness! He goes and cannot stop.
Along the stone wall of the meadow we tracked him, across the highroad, over our garden, into the orchard, up the woody hill to the yard, back down the hill to the orchard, out into the garden, and back toward the orchard again; and here, on a knoll just in the edge of the scanty, skeleton shadow where the moon fell through the trees, we lost him.
Two mighty wings had touched the snow lightly here, and the lumbering trail had vanished as into the air.
Close and mysterious the silent wings hang poised indoors and out. Laughter and tears are companions. Comedy begins, but tragedy often ends the trail. Yet the sum of life indoors and out is peace, gladness, and fulfillment.
VIII
THE CLAM FARM
THE CLAM FARM:
A CASE OF CONSERVATION
OUR hunger for clams and their present scarcity have not been the chief factors in the new national movement for the conservation of our natural resources; nor are the soaring prices of pork and lumber and wheat immediate causes, although they have served to give point and application to the movement. Ours is still a lavishly rich country. We have long had a greed for land, but we have not felt a pang yet of the Old World’s land-hunger. Thousands of acres, the stay for thousands of human lives, are still lying as waste places on the very borders of our eastern cities. There is plenty of land yet, plenty of lumber, plenty of food, but there is a very great and growing scarcity of clams.
Of course the clam might vanish utterly from the earth and be forgotten; our memory of its juicy, salty, sea-fat flavor might vanish with it; and we, ignorant of our loss, be none the poorer. We should live on,—the eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave live on,—but life, nevertheless, would not be so well worth living. For it would be flatter, with less of wave-wet freshness and briny gusto. No kitchen-mixed seasoning can supply the wild, natural flavors of life; no factory-made sensations the joy of being the normal, elemental, primitive animal that we are.
The clam is one of the natural flavors of life, and no longer ago than when I was a freshman was considered one of life’s necessities. Part of the ceremony of my admission to college was a clambake down the Providence River—such a clambake as never was down any other river, and as never shall be again down the Providence River, unless the Rhode Island clam-diggers take up their barren flats and begin to grow clams.
This they will do; our new and general alarm would assure us of that, even if the Massachusetts clam-diggers were not leading the way. But Rhode Island already has one thriving clam farm of her own at Rumstick Point along the Narragansett. The clam shall not perish from our tidal flats. Gone from long reaches where once it was abundant, small and scattering in its present scanty beds, the clam (the long-neck clam) shall again flourish, and all of New England shall again rejoice and be glad.
We are beginning, as a nation, while still the years are fat with plenty, to be troubled lest those of the future come hungry and lean. Up to the present time our industrial ethics have been like our evangelical religion, intensely, narrowly individualistic,—my salvation at all costs. “Dress-goods, yarns, and tops” has been our industrial hymn and prayer. And religiously, even yet, I sing of my own salvation:—
While in this region here below,
No other good will I pursue:
I’ll bid this world of noise and show,
With all its glittering snares, adieu;
A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too common in both religion and business, yet far from representing, to-day, the guiding spirit of either business or religion. For the growing conception of human brotherhood is mightily expanding our narrow religious selfishness; and the dawning revelation of industrial solidarity is not only making men careful for the present prosperity of the ends of the earth, but is making them concerned also for the future prosperity of the Farther-Off.
Priests and prophets we have had heretofore. “Woodman, woodman, spare that tree,” they have wailed. And the flying chips were the woodman’s swift response. The woodman has not heard the poet’s prayer. But he is hearing the American public’s command to let the sapling alone; and he is beginning to heed. It is a new appeal, this for the sapling; there is sound scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too. We shall save our forests, our watersheds, and rivers; we shall conserve for time to come our ores and rich deposits; we shall reclaim the last of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of our eastern farms; we shall herd our whales of the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific, number and multiply our truant schools of mackerel that range the waters of the sea; just as we shall restock with clams the waste, sandy shores of the sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were as fruitful as Eden, but which through years of digging and no planting have become as barren as the bloodless sands of the Sahara.
It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the course of time, what one sows—even clams if one sows clams; but it is a more solemn saying that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for all eternity, what one has not sown—even clams out of the exhausted flats of the New England coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run brackish to the sea.
Hitherto we have reaped where we have not sown, and gathered where we have not strawed. But that was during the days of our industrial pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the wilderness, where manna and quails and clams are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only barberries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had nowadays for the gathering. There are still enough barberries to go round without planting or trespassing, for the simple, serious reason that the barberries do not carry their sugar on their bushes with them, as the clams carry their salt. The Sugar Trust carries the barberries’ sugar. But soon or late every member of that trust shall leave his bag of sweet outside the gate of Eden or the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it now, lest once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his eternal feeding, but barberries!
We have not sown the clam hitherto: we have only digged; so that now, for all practical purposes, that is to say, for the old-time, twenty-five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, uncultivated clam has had its day; as the unenterprising, unbelieving clammers themselves are beginning to see.
The Providence River fishermen are seeking distant flats for the matchless Providence River clams, bringing them overland from afar by train. So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Duxbury clams come out of flats that reach all the way from the mouth of the St. Johns, on the down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake. And this, while eight hundred acres of superb clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town, which might be producing yearly, for the joy of man, eighty thousand bushels of real Duxbury clams!
What a clambake Duxbury does not have each year! A multitude of twice eighty thousand might sit down about the steaming stones and be filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more, that Duxbury does not hunger thus alone. For this is the story of fifty other towns in Massachusetts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to Dighton—a tale with a minus total of over two million bushels of clams, and an annual minus of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.
Nor is this the story of Massachusetts alone, nor of the tide-flats alone. It is the story of the whole of New England, inland as well as coast. The New England farm was cleared, worked, exhausted, and abandoned. The farmer was as exhausted as his farm, and preferring the hazard of new fortunes to the certain tragedy of the old, went West. But that tale is told. The tide from New England to the West is at slack ebb. There is still a stream flowing out into the extreme West; rising in the Middle Western States, however, not in the East. The present New England farmers are staying on their farms, except where the city buyer wants an abandoned farm, and insists upon its being abandoned at any price. So will the clammer stay on his shore acres, for his clams shall no more run out, causing him to turn cod-fisher, or cranberry-picker, or to make worse shift. The New England clam-digger of to-day shall be a clam-farmer a dozen years hence; and his exhausted acres along shore, planted, cultivated, and protected by law, shall yield him a good living. A living for him and clams for us; and not the long-neck clams of the Providence River and Duxbury flats only: they shall yield also the little-neck clams and the quahaug, the scallop, too, the oyster, and, from farther off shore, the green-clawed lobster in abundance, and of a length the law allows.
Our children’s children may run short of coal and kerosene; but they need never want for clams. We are going to try to save them some coal, for there are mighty bins of it still in the earth, while here, besides, are the peat-bogs—bunkers of fuel beyond the fires of our imaginations to burn up. We may, who knows? save them a little kerosene. No one has measured the capacity of the tank; it has been tapped only here and there; the plant that manufactured it, moreover, is still in operation, and is doubtless making more. But whether so or not, we still may trust in future oil, for the saving spirit of our new movement watches the pipes that carry it to our cans. There is no brand of economy known to us at present that is more assuring than our kerosene economy. The Standard Oil Company, begotten by Destiny, it would seem, as distributor of oil, is not one to burn even its paraffine candles at both ends. There was, perhaps, a wise and beneficent Providence in its organization, that we might have five gallons for fifty-five cents for our children’s sake—a price to preserve the precious fluid for the lamps of coming generations.
But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not. The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of perfect human character, may be a process requiring all eternity,—longer than we can wait,—so that the present deposits may some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection, is—conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or the roundness of the “Square Deal”)—except, I say, for a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands.
The day of the abandoned farm is past; the time of the adopted, of the adapted, farm has come. We are not going to abandon anything any more, because we are not going to work anything to death any more. We shall not abandon even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn them into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet undreamed. We have found a way to utilize the arid land of the West—a hundred and fifty thousand acres of it at a single stroke, as President Taft turns the waters of the Gunnison River from their ancient channel into a man-made tunnel, and sends them spreading out
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the lowlying lanes,
And the desert is meshed with a million veins,—
in order that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet, saying, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming the desert for a garden, with an effort of hands and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short of the original creative work which made the world—as if the divine fiat had been: “In our image, to have dominion; to subdue the earth; and to finish the work we leave undone.” And while we are finishing these acres and planting them with fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we continue stupidly and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead these eleven thousand acres of natural clam garden on the Massachusetts coast? If a vast irrigating work is the divine in man, by the same token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted and shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned plough-lands, and these lifeless flats of the shore the devils in him—here where no reclaiming is necessary, where the rain cometh down from heaven, and twice a day the tides flow in from the hills of the sea!
There are none of us here along the Atlantic coast who do not think with joy of that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made yonder in the distant West. It means more, and cheaper, and still fairer fruit for us of the East; more musk-melons, too, we hope; but we know that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam, also, is good. Man cannot live on irrigated fruit alone. He craves clams—clams as juicy as a Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor of wind-blown spray.
And he shall have them, for the clam farm—the restocked, restored flat of earlier times—has passed the stage of theory and experiment, being now in operation on the New England shore, a producing and very paying property.
The clam farm is not strictly a new venture, however, but up to the present it has been a failure, because, in the first place, the times were not ripe for it; the public mind lacked the necessary education. Even yet the state, and the local town authorities, give the clam-farmer no protection. He can obtain the state’s written grant to plant the land to clams, but he can get no legal protection against his neighbor’s digging the clams he plants. And the farm has failed, because, in the second place, the clam-farmer has lacked the necessary energy and imagination. A man who for years has made his bread and butter and rubber boots out of land belonging to everybody and to nobody, by simply digging in it, is the last man to build a fence about a piece of land and work it. Digging is only half as hard as “working”; besides, in promiscuous digging one is getting clams that one’s neighbor might have got, and there is something better than mere clams in that.
But who will plant and wait for a crop that anybody, when one’s back is turned, and, indeed, when one’s back isn’t turned, can harvest as his own? Yet this the fishing laws of Massachusetts still allow. Twenty years ago, in 1889, grants were made for clam farms in and around the town of Essex, but no legal rights were given with the grants. Any native of Essex, by these old barnacled laws, is free to help himself to clams from any town flat. Of course the farm failed.
Meantime the cry for clams has grown louder; the specialists in the new national college of conservators have been studying the subject; “extension courses,” inter-flat conventions, and laboratory demonstrations have been had up and down the coast; and as a result, the clam farm in Essex, since the reissue of the grants in 1906, has been put upon a hopeful, upon a safe and paying basis.
It is an interesting example of education,—a local public sentiment refined into an actual, dependable public conscience; in this case largely through the efforts of a state’s Fish and Game Commission, whose biologists, working with the accuracy, patience, and disinterestedness of the scientist, and with the practical good sense of the farmer, made their trial clam gardens pay, demonstrating convincingly that a clam-flat will respond to scientific care as readily and as profitably as a Danvers onion-bed or the cantaloupe fields at Rocky Ford.
This must be the direction of the new movement for the saving of our natural resources—this roundabout road of education. Few laws can be enacted, fewer still enforced, without the help of an awakened public conscience; and a public conscience, for legislative purposes, is nothing more than a thorough understanding of the facts. As a nation, we need a popular and a thorough education in ornithology, entomology, forestry, and farming, and in the science and morality of corporation rights in public lands. We want sectionally, by belts or states, a scientific training for our specialty, as the shell-fish farmer of the Massachusetts coast is being scientifically trained in clams. These state biologists have brought the clam men from the ends of the shore together; they have plotted and mapped the mollusk territory; they have made a science of clam-culture; they have made an industry of clam-digging; and to the clam-digger they are giving dignity and a sense of security that make him respect himself and his neighbor’s clams—this last item being a most important change in the clam-farm outlook.
With so much done, the next work—framing new laws to take the place of the old fishing laws—should be a simple matter. Such a procedure will be slow, yet it is still the only logical and effective one. Let the clam-digger know that he can raise clams; let New England know that the forests on her mountains must be saved, and within a twelvemonth the necessary bills would be passed. So with the birds, the fish, the coal of Alaska, and every other asset of our national wealth. The nation-wide work of this saving movement will first be educative, even by way of scandals in the Cabinet. We shall hasten very slowly to Congress and the legislatures with our laws. The clam-flat is typical of all our multitudinous wealth; the clam-digger is typical of all of us who cut, or mine, or reap, or take our livings, in any way, directly from the hands of Nature; and the lesson of the clam farm will apply the country over.
We have been a nation of wasters, spoiled and made prodigal by over-easy riches; we have demanded our inheritance all at once, spent it, and as a result we are already beginning to want—at least for clams. At this moment there are not enough clams to go round, so that the market-man sticks the end of a rubber hose into his tub of dark, salty, fresh-shucked clams, and soaks them; soaks them with fresh water out of rusty iron pipes, soaks them, and swells them, whitens them, bloats them, sells them—ghastly corpses, husks, that we would fain fill our soup-bowls with; for we are hungry, and must be fed, and there are not enough of the unsoaked clams for a bowl around.
But there shall be. With the coming of the clam farm there shall be clams enough, and oysters and scallops; for the whole mollusk industry, in every flat and bar and cove of the country, shall take to itself a new interest, and vastly larger proportions. Then shall a measure of scallops be sold for a quarter, and two measures of clams for a quarter, and nothing, any more, be soaked.
For there is nothing difficult about growing clams, nothing half so difficult and expensive as growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam farm offers most remarkable opportunities, although the bid, it must be confessed, is pretty plainly to one’s love of ease and one’s willing dependence. To begin with, the clam farm is self-working, ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. While this cannot happen generally, still the clam-farmer has a second distinct advantage in having his seed, if not actually sown for him, at least grown, and caught for him on these natural breeding-bars, in such quantities that he need only sweep it up and cradle it, as he might winnow grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island Sound there is such a bar, where it seems that Nature, in expectation of the coming clam farm, had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal currents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the entire state with its yearly stock of seed.
With all of this there is little of romance about a clam farm, and nothing at all spectacular about its financial returns. For clams are clams, whereas cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs and ginseng roots, are different,—according to the advertisements. The inducements of the clam farm are not sufficient to cause the prosperous Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East, as he has been selling out and going on to the farther West, for its larger, cheaper farms, and bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, whatever we have had to do, in fact, directly with Nature, has been for us, thus far, a speculation and a gamble. Earnings have been out of all proportion to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not earn, we strike it rich; and we have struck it rich so long in this vast rich land, that the strike has lost its element of luck, being now the expected thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and move on to the farthest West, where there is still a land of chance. But that land is passing, and with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is approaching when a man will pay for a western farm what he now pays for an eastern farm—the actual market value, based upon what the land, in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield. Values will rise to an even, normal level; earnings will settle to the same level; and the clam farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie will yield alike—a living; and if, when that day comes, there is no more “Promised Land” for the American, it will be because we have crossed over, and possessed the land, and divided it among us for an inheritance.
When life shall mean a living, and not a dress-parade, or an automobile, or a flying-machine, then the clam farm, with its two or three acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its average maximum yield, of four hundred and fifty dollars an acre, will be profits enough. For the clammer’s outfit is simple,—a small boat, two clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-boots, the total costing thirty dollars.
The old milk farm here under the hill below me, with its tumbling barn and its ninety acres of desolation, was sold not long ago for six thousand dollars. The milkman will make more money than the clam man, but he will have no more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking, calling for a larger type of man, and developing larger qualities of soul, perhaps, than could ever be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out of the soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of men, not of farms. We must have clams; somebody must dig clams; and matters of the spirit all aside, reckoned simply as a small business, clam-farming offers a sure living, a free, independent, healthful, outdoor living—and hence an ample living—to thousands of men who may lack the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed, the time for the larger undertakings. And viewed as the least part of the coming shell-fish industry, and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming national industry, due to our reclaiming, restocking, and conserving, and wise leasing, the clam farm becomes a type, a promise; it becomes the shore of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-lasting country than our pioneer fathers found here.
For behold the clam crop how it grows!—precisely like any other crop, in the summer, or more exactly, from about the first of May to the first of December; and the growth is very rapid, a seed-clam an inch long at the May planting, developing in some localities (as in the Essex and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three inches long by December. This is an increase in volume of about nine hundred per cent. The little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, burrow with the first tide into the sand, where with each returning tide they open their mouths, like young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice a day, with never too much water, with never a fear of drouth, until they are grown fat for the clammer’s basket.
If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the uncertainties of his vineyard could sing,—
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,—
surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea can sing, and all of us with him,—
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave comes to the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
IX
THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING