III
On the 25th of April, before the trees were in leaf, I heard the first true wood-note of the spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the garden. "Clear, clear, clear up!" it rang, pure, untamed, and quickening. The solitary vireo! It was his whistle, inimitable, unmistakable; and though I had not seen him since last July, I hurried out to the woods, sure he would greet me.
Solitary is the largest, rarest, tamest, and sweetest-voiced of the vireos. I soon found him high in the tops of the trees; but I wanted him nearer. He would not descend. So I chased him, stoning and mocking him even, till, at last, he came down to the bushes and showed me his big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and yellow-washed sides.
"It was a love-song."
He did more than show himself: he sang for me. Within ten feet of me, he began a quiet little warble of a tenderness and contentment I never heard before. Such variety of notes, such sweetness of melody, such easy, unconscious rendering! It was a love-song, but sung all to himself, for he knew that there was no gentle heart to listen this side of Virginia. He sang to his own happy heart as pure and sweet a song as the very angels know.
Solitary disappeared from that day. I concluded he had gone to heavier, wilder woods to nest. It was late in June that, passing through this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sapling, just above my head, a soft, yellowish basket. It was a vireo's nest; but it was too large, too downy, too yellow for Red-eye. There were no bunches of white spider-webs upon it, such as Red-eye hangs all over his nest. I stepped aside for a better view, and had just caught the glint of a large, white-ringed eye peering over the nest's edge at me, when, off in the woods behind me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary's whistle—a round, pure, pearly note that broke the quiet as pearly teeth break through the smile of a beautiful face. He soon appeared, coming on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no hurry and in no alarm. When he reached the pine overhead, his mate left the nest to confer with him. They scolded me mildly while I climbed for a look at the four delicately spotted eggs; but as soon as I lay down upon the ground, the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into the nest and cuddled down over the eggs till her head hardly showed above the rim. Had a few bushes been removed I could have seen the nest from my front door.
Why do the wood-birds so persistently build their nests along the paths and roads? I said that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood with a road through it. If he possibly can he will build along that road. And what one of the birds will not? Is it mere stupidity? Is it curiosity to see what goes on? Is there some safety here from enemies worse than boys and cats and dogs? Or is it that these birds take this chance for human fellowship? If this last is the reason for their rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that overhang roads and tufts of grass in constantly traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned; otherwise they are foolish—fatally foolish.
The first black-and-white warbler's nest I ever found was at the base of a clump of bushes in a narrow wood-path not ten feet from a highway. There were acres of bushes beyond, thick and pathless, all theirs to choose from.
In the same piece of scrub-oak the summer after I found another black-and-white warbler's nest. The loud talk of three of the birds attracted me. Two of them were together, and just mated, evidently; the third was a male, and just as plainly the luckless suitor. He was trying to start a quarrel between the young couple, doing his best to make the new bride break her vows. He flew just ahead of them, darting to the ground, scuttling under the brush, and calling out, "See here! Come here! Don't fool with him any longer! I have the place for a nest!"
But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly as they ran up and down the trees and hunted under the fallen limbs and leaves for a home-site. The male led the way and found the places; the female passed judgment. I followed them.
"But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly."
Every spot the cock peeped into was the finest in the woods; his enthusiasm was constant and unbounded. "Any place is heaven," he kept repeating, "any place, so long as I have you." But she was to do the housekeeping, and the ecstasies of the honeymoon were not to turn her head. She was house-hunting; and, like every woman, at her best. She said "no," and "no," and "no." I began to think they never would find the place, when the male darted far ahead and went out of sight beneath some low huckleberry-bushes near a stone wall. This wall ran between the woods and a pasture; and parallel with it, on the woods side, was a foot-path.
Up came the little hen, and together they scratched about under the leaves. Suddenly the cock flew away and fetched a strip of chestnut bark. This he turned over to his wife. Then both birds flew out to the chestnut limbs for bark, and brought their strips back. The home was founded.
It was the merest cavity, pushed into the dead leaves, with three shreds of bark for first timbers. In less than a week the structure was finished and furnished—with a tiny white egg thickly sprinkled with brown. I watched the spot daily, and finally saw the four young warblers safely out into their new woods-world. But from the day the first egg was laid until the nestlings left I constantly expected to find everything crushed under the foot of some passer-by.
When free from household cares the chickadee is the most sociable of the birds of the woods. But he takes family matters seriously, and withdraws so quietly to the unfrequented parts of the woods during nesting-time as to seem to have migrated. Yet of the four chickadees' nests found about the house, one was in a dead yellow birch in a bit of deep swamp, two others were in yellow birches along wood-roads, and the fourth was in a rotten fence-post by the main road, a long way from any trees.
A workman while mending the fence discovered this last nest. The post crumbled in his hands as he tried to pull it down, revealing the nest of moss and rabbit hair, with its five brown-and-white eggs. He left the old post, propped it up with a sound one, and, mending the broken walls of the cavity the best he could, hurried along with his task, that the birds might return. They came back, found the wreckage of dust and chips covering the eggs, tried the flimsy walls—and went away. It was a desecrated home, neither safe nor beautiful now; so they forsook it.
There is no eagle's nest in this collection of thirty-six. But if Mr. Burroughs is correct, there is the next thing to it—a humming-bird's nest; three of them, indeed, one of which is within a stone's throw of my door! This one is in the oaks behind my garden, but the other two are even nearer to houses. One of these is upon the limb of a pear-tree. The tip of this limb rubs against a woodshed connected with a dwelling. The third nest is in a large apple orchard, in the tree nearest the house, and saddled upon that branch of the tree which reaches farthest toward the dwelling. So close is this nest that I can look out of the garret window directly into it.
"In a dead yellow birch."
I believe that Ruby-throat is so far domesticated that he rejoices over every new flower-garden. There was nearly half an acre of gladioli in the neighborhood one summer, where all the humming-birds gathered from far and near. Here, for the only time in my life, I saw a flock of humming-birds. I counted eight one day; and the gardener told me that he had often seen a dozen of them among the spikes. They squeaked like bats, and played—about as bullets might play. In fact, I think I dodged when they whizzed past me, as a soldier does the first time he is under fire.
"So close I can look directly into it."
One of my friends had a cellar window abloom with geraniums. A ruby-throat came often to this window. One day the mistress of the flowers caught the wee chap in her hands. He knew at once that she meant no harm and quietly submitted. A few days later he returned and was captured again. He liked the honey, and evidently the fondling, too, for he came very regularly after that for the nectar and the lady's soft hands.
The nest behind my garden is in the top of a tall, slender maple, with oaks and chestnuts surrounding and overshadowing it. Finding a nest like this is inspiration for the rest of life. The only feat comparable to it is the discovery of a bee-tree. Finding wild bees, I think, would be good training for one intending to hunt humming-birds' nests in the woods. But no one ever had such an intention. No one ever deliberately started into the woods a-saying, "Go to, now; I'll find a humming-bird's nest in here!"
Humming-birds' nests are the gifts of the gods—rewards for patience and for gratitude because of commoner grants. My nests have invariably come this way, or, if you choose, by accident. The nearest I ever came to earning one was in the case of this one in the maple. I caught a glimpse of a humming-bird flashing around the high limbs of a chestnut, so far up that she looked no bigger than a hornet. I suspected instantly that she was gathering lichens for a nest, and, as she darted off, I threw my eyes ahead of her across her path. It was just one chance in ten thousand if I even saw her speeding through the limbs and leaves, if I got the line of her flight, to say nothing of a clue to her nesting-place. It was little short of a miracle. I had tried many times before to do it, but this is the only time I ever succeeded: my line of vision fell directly upon the tiny builder as she dropped to her nest in the sapling.
The structure was barely started. I might have stared at it with the strongest glass and never made it out a nest; the sapling, too, was no thicker at the butt than my wrist, and I should not have dreamed of looking into its tall, spindling top for any kind of a nest. Furthermore, as if to rob one of the last possibility of discovering it, a stray bud, two years before, had pushed through the bark of the limb about three inches behind where the nest was to be fixed, and had grown, till now its leaves hung over the dainty house in an almost perfect canopy and screen.
For three weeks the walls of this house were going up. Is it astonishing that, when finished, they looked like a growth of the limb, like part and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily visit to the sapling until the young birds flew away; then I bent the tree to the ground and brought the nest home. It now hangs above my desk, its thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy canopy telling still of the little mother's unwearied industry, of her infinite love and foresight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to the limb, so exquisitely lichened into harmony with the green around, this tiniest nest speaks for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry, would be the loss of these beautiful neighbors of our copses and fields!
["MUS'RATTIN'"]
"Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and went chuckling down the bank."
"MUS'RATTIN'"
One November afternoon I found Uncle Jethro back of the woodshed, drawing a chalk-mark along the barrel of his old musket, from the hammer to the sight.
"What are you doing that for, Uncle Jeth?" I asked.
"What fo'? Fo' mus'rats, boy."
"Muskrats! Do you think they'll walk up and toe that mark, while you knock 'em over with a stick?"
"G'way fum yhere! What I take yo' possumin' des dozen winters fo', en yo' dunno how to sight a gun in de moon yit? I's gwine mus'rattin' by de moon to-night, en I won't take yo' nohow."
Of course he took me. We went out about nine o'clock, and entering the zigzag lane behind the barn, followed the cow-paths down to the pasture, then cut across the fields to Lupton's Pond, the little wood-walled lake which falls over a dam into the wide meadows along Cohansey Creek.
It is a wild, secluded spot, so removed that a pair of black ducks built their nest for several springs in the deep moss about the upper shore.
It is shallow and deeply crusted over with lily-pads and pickerel-weed, except for a small area about the dam, where the water is deep and clear. There are many stumps in the upper end; and here, in the shallows, built upon the hummocks or anchored to the submerged roots, are the muskrats' houses.
The big moon was rising over the meadows as we tucked ourselves snugly out of sight in a clump of small cedars on the bank, within easy range of the dam and commanding a view of the whole pond. The domed houses of the muskrats—the village numbered six homes—showed plainly as the moon came up; and when the full flood of light fell on the still surface of the pond, we could see the "roads" of the muskrats, like narrow channels, leading down through the pads to the open space about the dam.
"The big moon was rising over the meadows."
A muskrat's domestic life is erratic. Sometimes there will be a large village in the pond, and, again, an autumn will pass without a single new house being built. It may be that some of the old houses will be fitted up anew and occupied; but I have known years when there was not a house in the pond. At no time do all of the muskrats build winter houses. The walls of the meadow ditches just under the dam are honeycombed with subterranean passages, in which many of the muskrats live the year round. Neither food nor weather, so far as I have found, influence them at all in the choice of their winter quarters. In low, wet meadows where there are no ditches, the muskrats, of course, live altogether in mud and reed houses above ground, for the water would flood the ordinary burrow. These structures are placed on the tussocks along a water-hole, so that the dwellers can dive out and escape under water when danger approaches. But here in the tide-meadows, where the ditches are deep, the muskrats rear their families almost wholly in underground rooms. It is only when winter comes, and family ties dissolve, that a few of the more sociable or more adventurous club together, come up to the pond, and while away the cold weather in these haystack lodges.
Section of muskrat's house.
These houses are very simple, but entirely adequate. If you will lift the top off an ordinary meadow lodge you will find a single room, with a bed in the middle, and at least one entrance and one exit which are always closed to outsiders by water.
The meadow lodge is built thus: The muskrat first chooses a large tussock of sedge that stands well out of the water for his bedstead. Now, from a foundation below the water, thick walls of mud and grass are erected inclosing the tussock; a thatch of excessive thickness is piled on; the channels leading away from the doors are dug out if necessary; a bunch of soaking grass is brought in and made into a bed on the tussock—and the muskrat takes possession.
The pond lodges at the head of Lupton's are made after this fashion, only they are much larger, and instead of being raised about a tussock of sedge, they are built upon, and inclose, a part of a log or stump.
This lodge life is surely a cozy, jolly way of passing the winter. The possums are inclined to club together whenever they can find stumps that are roomy enough; but the muskrats habitually live together through the winter. Here, in the single room of their house, one after another will come, until the walls can hold no more; and, curling up after their night of foraging, they will spend the frigid days blissfully rolled into one warm ball of dreamful sleep. Let it blow and snow and freeze outside; there are six inches of mud-and-reed wall around them, and, wrapped deep in rich, warm fur, they hear nothing of the blizzard and care nothing for the cold.
Nor are they prisoners of the cold here. The snow has drifted over their house till only a tiny mound appears; the ice has sealed the pond and locked their home against the storm and desolation without: but the main roadway from the house is below the drifting snow, and they know where, among the stumps and button-bushes, the warm-nosed watchers have kept breathing-holes open. The ice-maker never finds their inner stair; its secret door opens into deep, under-water paths, which run all over the bottom of the unfrozen pond-world.
"The snow has drifted over their house till only a tiny mound appears."
Unless roused by the sharp thrust of a spear, the muskrats will sleep till nightfall. You may skate around the lodge and even sit down upon it without waking the sleepers; but plunge your polo-stick through the top, and you will hear a smothered plunk, plunk, plunk, as one after another dives out of bed into the water below.
The moon climbed higher up the sky and the minutes ran on to ten o'clock. We waited. The night was calm and still, and the keen, alert air brought every movement of the wild life about us to our ears. The soft, cottony footfalls of a rabbit, hopping leisurely down the moonlit path, seemed not unlike the echoing steps on silent, sleeping streets, as some traveler passes beneath your window; a wedge of wild geese honked far over our heads, holding their mysterious way to the South; white-footed mice scurried among the dried leaves; and our ears were so sharpened by the frosty air that we caught their thin, wiry squeaks.
Presently there was a faint plash among the muskrat houses. The village was waking up. Uncle Jethro poked the long nose of his gun cautiously through the bushes, and watched. Soon there was a wake in one of the silvery roads, then a parting of waves, and stemming silently and evenly toward us, we saw the round, black head of a muskrat.
It was a pretty sight and a pretty shot; but I would not have had the stillness and the moonlit picture spoiled by the blare of that murderous musket for the pelts of fifty muskrats, and as the gun was coming to Uncle Jethro's shoulder, I slipped my hand under the lifted hammer.
With just an audible grunt of impatience the old negro understood,—it was not the first good shot that my love of wild things had spoiled for him,—and the unsuspecting muskrat swam on to the dam.
"They rubbed noses."
A plank had drifted against the bank, and upon this the little creature scrambled out, as dry as the cat at home under the roaring kitchen stove. Down another road came a second muskrat, and, swimming across the open water at the dam, joined the first-comer on the plank. They rubbed noses softly—the sweetest of all wild-animal greetings—and a moment afterward began to play together.
"Two little brown creatures washing calamus."
They were out for a frolic, and the night was splendid. Keeping one eye open for owls, they threw off all other caution, and swam and dived and chased each other through the water, with all the fun of boys in swimming.
On the bottom of the pond about the dam, in ten or twelve feet of water, was a bed of unios. I knew that they were there, for I had cut my feet upon them; and the muskrats knew they were there, for they had had many a moonlight lunch of them. These mussels the muskrats reckon sweetmeats. They are hard to get, hard to crack, but worth all the cost. I was not surprised, then, when one of the muskrats sleekly disappeared beneath the surface, and came up directly with a mussel.
There was a squabble on the plank, which ended in the other muskrat's diving for a mussel for himself. How they opened them I could not clearly make out, for the shells were almost concealed in their paws; but judging from their actions and the appearance of other shells which they had opened, I should say that they first gnawed through the big hinge at the back, then pried open the valves, and ate out the contents.
Having finished this first course of big-neck clams, they were joined by a third muskrat, and, together, they filed over the bank and down into the meadow. Shortly two of them returned with great mouthfuls of the mud-bleached ends of calamus-blades. Then followed the washing.
They dropped their loads upon the plank, took up the stalks, pulled the blades apart, and soused them up and down in the water, rubbing them with their paws until they were as clean and white as the whitest celery one ever ate. What a dainty picture! Two little brown creatures, humped on the edge of a plank, washing calamus in moonlit water!
One might have taken them for half-grown coons as they sat there scrubbing and munching. Had the big barred owl, from the gum-swamp down the creek, come along then, he could easily have bobbed down upon them, and might almost have carried one away without the other knowing it, so all-absorbing was the calamus-washing.
Muskrats, like coons, will wash what they eat, whether washing is needed or not. It is a necessary preliminary to dinner—their righteousness, the little Pharisees! Judging from the washing disease which ailed two tame muskrats that I knew, it is perfectly safe to say that had these found clean bread and butter upon the plank, instead of muddy calamus, they would have scoured it just the same.
Before the two on the plank had finished their meal, the third muskrat returned, dragging his load of mud and roots to the scrubbing. He was just dipping into the water when there was a terrific explosion in my ears, a roar that echoed round and round the pond. As the smoke lifted, there were no washers upon the plank; but over in the quiet water floated three long, slender tails.
"No man gwine stan' dat shot, boy, jis t' see a mus'rat wash hi' supper"; and Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and went chuckling down the bank.
[A STUDY IN BIRD MORALS]
"She melted away among the dark pines like a shadow."
A STUDY IN BIRD MORALS
The eternal distinctions of right and wrong upon which the moral law is based inhere even in the jelly of the amœba. The Decalogue binds all the way down. In the course of a little observation one must find how faithfully the animals, as a whole, keep the law, and how sadly, at times, certain of them are wont to break it.
To pass over such notorious cases as the cow-bird, cuckoo, turkey-buzzard, and crow, there is still cause for positive alarm, if the birds have souls, in the depraved habit of duplicity common among them. In a single short tramp, one June afternoon, no less than five different birds attempted to deceive me. The casuist may be able to justify all five of them; for, no doubt, there are extremities when this breach of the law should not merit condemnation; but even so, if in the limits of one short walk five little innocents deliberately act out the coolest of falsehoods, one cannot help wondering if it is not true that the whole creation needs redeeming.
The first of these five was a yellow warbler. I was trying to look into her nest, which was placed in the top of a clump of alders in a muddy pasture, when she slipped out and fluttered like an autumn leaf to the ground. She made no outcry, but wavered down to my feet with quivering wings, and dragged herself over the water and mud as if wounded. I paused to look at her, and, as long as I watched, she played her best to lure me. A black-snake would have struck at her instantly; but I knew her woman's ways and turned again to the nest. As soon as she saw that her tears and prayers would not avail; she darted into the bushes near me and called me every wicked thing that she could think of. I deserved it all, of course, though I was only curious to see her cradle and its holdings, which, had she been a human mother, she would have insisted on my stopping to see.
"She called me every wicked thing that she could think of."
On the way to Lupton's I climbed a sharp, pine-covered hill, where the needles were so slippery that I had to halt for a minute's rest at the top. The trees rose straight and close and slender, with scarcely a live branch reaching out nearer the ground than twenty feet. The roof of green shut out the light, and the matting of brown spread the ground so deep that only a few stunted blueberry-bushes, small ferns, and straying runners of ground-pine abode there. It was one of those cathedral-like clumps, a holy of holies of the woods, into whose dim silence the straggling bushes, briers, and other lowly forest folk dare not come, but fall upon their knees outside and worship.
"It was one of those cathedral-like clumps."
The birds, however, are not so reverent. I was scarcely stretched upon the needles when a slight movement overhead arrested my attention. As I looked, a soft fluttering of wings brought a blue jay into the branches directly above me. There is nothing peculiar in finding a blue jay among the pines—they usually nest there. But there was something peculiar about this jay; he moved so quietly, he appeared so entirely unconscious of me, though I knew that he saw me as plainly as I him. Then at his side alighted his mate, meeker and more modest than a chippy.
What did it signify—these squawking, scolding, garrulous birds suddenly gone silent and trustful? In the pines at this season one never gets nearer a jay than field-glass range—near enough to hear him dash away, screeching defiance. But here were these two gliding among the branches above my head as cautiously and softly as cuckoos, searching apparently for grubs, yet keeping all the time to the one spot, not leaving for a moment to hunt among other trees. Round and round the same limbs they went, without once screaming or uttering so much as a word of that sweet, confiding talk which one hears when he spies on a pair of lovers or a newly wedded couple of these birds. I became suspicious. All this meant something. They kept close together, and fluttered about, hanging from the twigs head down like chickadees, deliberately biting off bunches of needles, prying into the cones, and scaling off bits of bark, but finding nothing, nor even trying to find anything.
At this juncture I chanced to move my feet. The birds stopped instantly; but on my becoming quiet they went on scattering the needles and bark-chips again. Then I raised my glass. They paused just for a second, and continued, though now I saw that their picking was all at random, hitting the limb or not as might be. They were not hunting grubs: they were watching me; and more—they were keeping me watching them.
"They were watching me."
It was a clever little ruse. But it was too good, too new, too unjaylike for my faith. There was a nest against one of these pines, as sure as it was June. And this fearless unconcern? this new and absorbing interest in grubs? All assumed!—very genuinely assumed, indeed, and might have led me to do a dozen things other than looking for the nest, had I known a little less of jays. It was heroic, too. They were calm and had all their wits about them. Outwardly they were indifferent to my presence and gave me not the slightest heed. But this was all show. Every instant they saw me; and, while pretending not to know that I was near, they had come to intercept me, to attract my attention to themselves, and save their nest. And at how much cost! To have looked within those calm little bosoms were to have seen two hearts as anxious and fearful as ever thumped parental breasts.
If I had been deceived and led to waste my afternoon or to record something untrue of the blue jay, still, I think, these two birds could hardly have been condemned before the law. For did not their motive justify the deed?
The blue jays are braggarts, full of noise, and almost without morals; yet they have not seemed to me quite as bad as they used to, not quite the same blustering, quarrelsome, unmoral renegades, since these two showed me how they could conquer their instinctive fears and rise superior to everything common and cowardly by the power of their parental love.
I could not find the nest; so returning the next day, I crept under cover to the foot of the hill, and, ascending stealthily, saw the hen as she slipped from the home tree. She melted away among the dark pines like a shadow, but reappeared immediately with her mate to head me off again. Not this time, however, for I had their secret. My eye was upon the nest. It was a loose, rough affair of coarse sticks, fixed upon two dead branches well up against a slender pine's trunk. I could see patches of light sky through it, it was such a botch. But where art failed nature perfected. I saw the sky through the bungled structure, but not the eggs. I had to climb to see them, for they were so washed with shadowy green that they blended perfectly with the color of the nest and the subdued light of the pines.
After my adventure with the jays I had an interesting experience with a pair of tiny birds in the sand-bank on the north side of Lupton's Pond.
The country immediately surrounding the pond is exceedingly varied and full of life. The high, level farm-lands break off into sandbanks, which, in turn, spread into sweeping meadows that run out to the creek. The little pond lies between steep hills of chestnut-oak and pine, its upper waters being lost in a dense swamp of magnolia and alder, while over the dam at its foot there rushes a fall that echoes around the wooded hills and then goes purling among the elder and dog roses into the sullen tide-ditches of the meadow. Except the meadows and cultivated fields, everything is on a small scale, as if the place were made of the odds and ends, the left-over pieces in the making of the region round about. Such diversity of soils, such a medley of features, such profusion of life, in a territory of the same size I never saw elsewhere. At the boarding-school, near by, Lupton's Pond is known as "Paradise."
On reaching the pond I went over to the sand-bank to look for a pair of kingfishers who had nested there many years; but instead of them, I saw a pair of winter wrens fly sharply among the washed-out roots of a persimmon-tree which stood on the edge of the hill above. I instantly lost sight of one of the birds. The actions of the other were so self-conscious that I stopped and watched—I had never found a winter wren's nest. In a moment the missing bird appeared and revealed the nest. It was large for the size of the builders, made of sticks, grass, and feathers, and was fixed among the black roots just below the green hilltop, and set into the sand far enough to leave a little of one side exposed.
The wrens hurried away on my approach; but when I retreated to the foot of the bank, they darted back to the nest, the hen entering without a pause, while the cock perched upon a root at the door and began a most extraordinary performance.
He managed to put himself directly between me and the tiny portal, completely cutting off my view of the little brown wife inside the nest; then, spreading his wings, with tail up and head on one side, he fluttered and bobbed and wagged and poured out a volume of song that was prodigious. It lifted him fairly off his feet. Had he suddenly gone up with a whizz, like a sky-rocket, and burst into a shower of bubbles, trills, runs, and wild, ecstatic warbles, I should have looked on with no more wonder. Such a song! It was singing gone mad.
My head was on a level with him. I leaned forward nearer the bank. At this he went crazy with his efforts—into a fit, almost. I cannot have been mistaken: it was the first time that I had ever heard a bird sing when in terror; but I had whistled my way past too many dogs and through too many graveyards at night to be deceived in the note of fear, and in the purpose of this song. That bit of a husband was scared almost out of his senses; but there he stood, squarely between me and that precious nest and the more precious wife, guarding them from my evil eyes with every atom of his midget self.
It was as fine an illustration of courage as I ever saw, a triumph of love and duty over fear—fear that perhaps we have no way to measure. And it was a triumph of wedded love at that; for there were no young, not even an egg in the unfinished nest. It all happened in less than a minute. The female reappeared in an instant, satisfied that all was well with the nest, and both birds sped off and dropped among the briers.
How would the casuist decide for so sweet, so big, so heroic a deception—or the attempt?
A little farther down the creek, where the meadows meet the marsh, dwell the cousins of the winter wrens, the long-billed marsh-wrens. Here in the wide reaches of calamus and reeds, where the brackish tide comes in, the marsh-wrens build by hundreds. Their big, bulky nests are woven about a handful of young calamus-blades, or tied to a few long, stout sedge-stalks, and grow as the season grows.
"A triumph of love and duty over fear."
The nests are made of coarse marsh-grass,—of the floatage often,—and are so long in the process of construction that, when completed, they are all speared through with the grass-blades, as with so many green bayonets. They are about the size of a large calabash, nearly round, thick-walled and heavy, with a small entrance, just under the roof, leading upward like a short stair to a deep, pocket-like cavity, at whose bottom lie the eggs, barely out of finger reach.
I could hear the smothered racket of the singing wrens all about me in the dense growth, scoldings to my right, defiance to my left, discussions of wives, grumblings of husbands, and singing of lovers everywhere, until the whole marsh seemed a-sputter and a-bubble with a gurgling tide of song like a river running in. Now and then, a wave, rising higher than its fellows, splashed up above the reeds and broke into song-spray, as an ecstasy lifted the wee brown performer out of the green.
But these short dashes of the wrens into upper air, I have come to believe, are not entirely the flights of enraptured souls. Something more than Mr. Chapman's "mine of music bursts within them." Before they knew that I was near I rarely saw one make this singing dive into the air; but as soon as they were acquainted with my presence they appeared on every hand. I had not gone fifty feet into their reedy domain when I began to catch a furious berating. The knives of the mowing-machine up in the meadow went no faster nor sharper than these unseen tongues in the reeds. Suddenly a bit of brown fury dashed into view near me, spattered the air thick with song-notes, and, as if veiled by this cloud of melody, it turned on its head and dived back, chattering of all that was seen to the other furies in the reeds.
Does any one believe that exhibition to be an explosion of pure song—the exaltation of unmixed joy? If ever the Ninth Commandment was broken, it was broken here.
This uncontrollable emotion, this shower of song, is but a cloak to the singer's fear and curiosity. He wants to know where I am and what I am about. I once knew a little dog who was so afraid of the dark that he would run barking all the way to the barn when put out at night. So these little spies start up singing their biggest as a blind to their real feelings and purposes.
The quail's broken wings and rushes of blood to the head during nesting-time have lost their lure even for the small boy; yet they somehow still work on me. I involuntarily give my attention to this distress until too late to catch sight of the scurrying brood. I imagine, too, that the oldest and wisest of the foxes is still fooled by this make-believe, and will continue to be fooled to the end of time.
A barren, stony hillside slopes gradually to the marsh where the wrens live. Here I was met by the fifth deceiver, a killdeer plover. The killdeer's crocodile tears are bigger and more touchingly genuine than even the quail's. And, besides all her tricks, she has a voice that fairly drips woe.
The killdeer always builds in a worn-out, pebbly pasture or in a bare, unused field. Here among the stones she makes her nest by scraping out a shallow cavity, into which she scratches a few bits of rotten wood and weed-stalks in sizes that would make good timber for a caddis-worm's house. Instead of digging the cavity, she often hunts up two or three stones and a corn-butt, which happen to lie so that she can crowd in between them, and makes this shift serve her for a nest.
"He wants to know where I am and what I am about."
Her eggs are one of the world's small wonders. They lie out in the open like so many of the pebbles about them—resembling the stones so perfectly that they are more often overlooked or crushed than discovered. The ground color of the egg is that of the earth, and the markings correspond marvelously to the size, shade, and distribution of the bits of wood beneath them in the nest. I know of no other instance of protective coloring among the birds so nearly perfect, unless it be the killdeer herself when playing her favorite trick of "invisible."
She had seen me before I entered the reeds of the marsh-wrens. Squatting close over her eggs, she watched me silently, and seeing that I was approaching her nest on my way up the hill, she glided off and suddenly appeared at my feet. Where she came from I did not know. It was as if the earth had opened and let her out. I stopped. That was what she wanted. "You numskull, look at me and make a fool of yourself," she said by the light in her eye. I did exactly so.
With her head outstretched and body close to the ground, she slid like a ghost before me as I followed. Now she took form like a stone, now seemed to sink out of sight into the earth, reappearing only to vanish again into thin air. Thus she led me on, contriving to keep from beneath my feet, and always just out of reach, till, seeing that my credulity and patience were failing, she broke silence for a desperate last act, and fell in a fit, screaming, Kill-dee, kill-dee, kill-dee!
There she lay in the agony of death. I stooped to pick her up; but she happened to flutter a little—the death-spasm. I stepped forward to take her. Putting my hand down, I—ah! not dead yet! Poor thing! She jerked just out of my hand—reflex action, no doubt. But now it is all over; she is dead, and I bend to pick her up, when, springing like an arrow from my grasp, killdeer, ringing out her wail, goes swiftly flying across the hill.
Fooled! Yes; but not altogether fooled, for I knew that it would turn out so. The impostor! But wasn't it beautifully done? I shall never grow too wise to be duped.
She has played me a trick, and now I will revenge myself and find her nest. I shall—perhaps.
"In the agony of death."
[RABBIT ROADS]
RABBIT ROADS
In your woods walks did you ever notice a little furrow or tunnel through the underbrush, a tiny roadway in the briers and huckleberry-bushes? Did you ever try to follow this path to its beginning or end, wondering who traveled it? You have, doubtless. But the woods must be wild and the undergrowth thick and you must be as much at home among the trees as you are in your own dooryard, else this slight mark will make no impression upon you.
But enter any wild tract of wood or high swamp along the creek, and look sharp as you cut across the undergrowth. You will not go far before finding a narrow runway under your feet. It is about five inches wide, leading in no particular direction, and is evidently made by cutting off the small stems of vines and bushes at an inch or more from the ground. The work looks as if it had been laid out by rule and done with a sharp knife, it is so regular and clean.
This is a rabbit road. Follow it a few rods and you will find it crossed by another road, exactly similar. Take this new path now, and soon you are branching off, turning, and joining other roads. You are in rabbit-land, traveling its highways—the most complicated and entangling system of thoroughfares that was ever constructed. The individual roads are straight and plain enough, but at a glance one can see that the plan of the system is intended to bewilder and lead astray all who trespass here. Without a map and directions no one could hope to arrive at any definite point through such a snarl.
There often comes along with the circus a building called the "Moorish Maze," over whose entrance is this invitation:
COME IN AND GET LOST!
This is what one reads at the cross-roads in rabbit-land. There are finger-boards and mile-stones along the way; but they point nowhere and mark no distances except to the rabbits.
An animal's strong points usually supplement each other; its well-developed powers are in line with its needs and mode of life. So, by the very demands of his peculiar life, the beaver has become chief among all the animal engineers, his specialty being dams. He can make a good slide for logging, but of the construction of speedways he knows absolutely nothing. The rabbit, on the other hand, is a runner. He can swim if he is obliged to. His interests, however, lie mostly in his heels, and hence in his highways. So Bunny has become an expert road-maker. He cannot build a house, nor dig even a respectable den; he is unable to climb, and his face is too flat for hole-gnawing: but turn him loose in a brambly, briery wilderness, and he will soon thread the trackless waste with a network of roads, and lay it open to his nimble feet as the sky lies open to the swallow's wings.
But how maddening these roads are to the dogs and foxes! In the first place, they have a peculiar way of beginning nowhere in particular, and of vanishing all at once, in the same blind fashion. I am not sure that I ever found a satisfactory end to a rabbit's road—that is, a nest, a playground, or even a feeding-place. Old Calamity, the hound, is always tormented and undone whenever she runs foul of a rabbit road.
"Calamity is hot on his track."
She will start Bunny in the open field, and trail away after him in full tongue as fast as her fat bow-legs will carry her. The rabbit makes for the woods. Calamity is hot on his track, going down toward the creek. Suddenly she finds herself plunging along a rabbit road, breaking her way through by sheer force where the rabbit slipped along with perfect ease. She is following the path now rather than the scent, and, all at once, discovers that she is off the trail. She turns and goes back. Yes, here the rabbit made a sharp break to the right by a side-path; the track is fresh and warm, and the old hound sings in her eager delight. On she goes with more haste, running the path again instead of the trail, and—there is no path! It is gone. This bothers the old dog; but her nose is keen and she has picked up the course again. Here it goes into another road. She gives tongue again, and rushes on, when—Wow! she has plunged into a thick and thorny tangle of greenbrier.
That is where the torment comes in. These roads have a habit of taking in the brier-patches. Calamity will go round a patch if she can; she will work her way through if she must—but it is at the cost of bloody ears and a thousand smarting pricks. Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next brier-patch, counting the digs of his clumsy pursuer.
I suppose that this "blind alley" kind of road is due to the fact that the rabbits have no regular homes. They make a nest for the young; but they never have dens, like minks and coons. In New England they often live in holes and among the crannies of the stone walls; and there, as far as I have seen, they rarely or never make roads. Farther south, where the winters are less severe, they dig no holes, for they prefer an open, even an exposed, bed to any sort of shelter.
Shelters are dangerous. Bunny cannot back into a burrow and bare his teeth to his enemy; he is not a fighter. He can run, and he knows it; legs are his salvation, and he must have room to limber them. If he has to fight, then give him the open, not a hole; for it is to be a kangaroo kicking match, and a large ring is needed. He had as well surrender himself at once as to run into a hole that has only one opening.
During the cold, snowy weather the rabbits usually leave the bare fields for the woods, though the older and wiser ones more frequently suffer the storms than risk the greater danger of such a move. When pressed by hunger or hounded hard, they often take to a rail-pile, and sometimes they grow so bold as to seek hiding under a barn or house. One young buck lived all winter in the wood-pile of one of my neighbors, becoming so tame that he fed with the chickens.
"Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next brier-patch."
The nearest approach that a rabbit makes to a house is his "squat," or form. This is simply a sitting-place in the fields or along the woods, that he will change every time he is thoroughly frightened out of it. Undisturbed he will stay in this squat for months at a time. Occasionally a rabbit will have two or three squats located over his range, each one so placed that a wide view on every side may be had. If it is along the woods, then he sits facing the open fields, with his ears laid back toward the trees. He can hear as far as he can see, and his nose tells him who is coming up the wind sooner than either eyes or ears.
It is cold, lonely living here in the winter. But everybody, except the mice and little birds, are enemies, his only friends being his wits and legs. In the long run, wits and legs are pretty safe insurance. "He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day," is Bunny's precept—and it works well; he still thrives.
The squat is a cold place. The sky is its roof, and its only protection is the tuft of grass, the stone, or the stump beside which it is placed. Bunny may change to the lee or windward side, as suits him, during a storm; but usually he keeps his place and lies close to the ground, no matter how the wind blows, or how fiercely falls the rain and snow. I have frequently started them from their squats in bleak, wind-swept fields, when the little brown things were completely snowed under.
There is great individuality among all animals, and though the rabbits look as much alike as peas, they are no exception to the rule. This personality is especially shown in their whimsical fancies for certain squats. Here, within sight of the house and the dog, an old rabbit took up her abode on a big, flat rail in the corner of the fence. Of course no hawk or owl could touch her here, for they dared not swoop between the rails; the dog and cat could scent her, but she had already whipped the cat, and she had given Calamity so many long runs that the hound was weary of her. The strategic value of such a situation is plain: she was thus raised just above the level of the field and commanded every approach. Perhaps it was not whim, but wisdom, that led to this selection.
I knew another, a dwarf rabbit, that always got into a bare or plowed field and squatted beside a brown stone or clod of earth. Experience had taught him that he looked like a clod, and that no enemy ever plagued him when he lay low in the brown soil.
"The squat is a cold place."
One summer I stumbled upon a squat close along the public road. Cart-loads of trash had been dumped there, and among the debris was a bottomless coal-scuttle. In the coal-scuttle a rabbit made his squat. Being open at both ends, it sheltered him beautifully from sun and rain. Here he sat, napping through the day, watching the interesting stream of passers-by, himself hidden by the rank weeds and grass. When discovered by a dog or boy, he tripped out of one of his open doors and led the intruder a useless run into the swamp.
At one time my home was separated from the woods by only a clover-field. This clover-field was a favorite feeding-ground for the rabbits of the vicinity. Here, in the early evening, they would gather to feed and frolic; and, not content with clover, they sometimes went into the garden for a dessert of growing corn and young cabbage.
Take a moonlight night in autumn and hide in the edge of these woods. There is to be a rabbit party in the clover-field. The grass has long been cut and the field is clean and shining; but still there is plenty to eat. The rabbits from both sides of the woods are coming. The full moon rises above the trees, and the cottontails start over. Now, of course, they use the paths which they cut so carefully the longest possible way round. They hop leisurely along, stopping now and then to nibble the sassafras bark or to get a bite of wintergreen, even quitting the path, here and there, for a berry or a bunch of sweet wood-grass.
"Stop a moment; this won't do! Here is a side-path where the briers have grown three inches since they were last cut off. This path must be cleared out at once," and the old buck falls to cutting. By the time he has finished the path a dozen rabbits have assembled in the clover-field. When he appears there is a thump, and all look up; some one runs to greet the new-comer; they touch whiskers and smell, then turn to their eating.
The feast is finished, and the games are on. Four or five of the rabbits have come together for a turn at hop-skip-and-jump. And such hop-skip-and-jump! They are professionals at this sport, every one of them. There is not a rabbit in the game that cannot leap five times higher than he can reach on his tiptoes, and hop a clean ten feet.
"The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox."
Over and over they go, bounding and bouncing, snapping from their marvelous hind legs as if shot from a spring-trap. It is the greatest jumping exhibition that you will ever see. To have such legs as these is the next best thing to having wings.
Right in the thick of the fun sounds a sharp thump! thump! Every rabbit "freezes." It is the stamp of an old buck, the call, Danger! danger! He has heard a twig break in the woods, or has seen a soft, shadowy thing cross the moon.
As motionless as stumps squat the rabbits, stiff with the tenseness of every ready muscle. They listen. But it was only a dropping nut or a restless bird; and the play continues.
They are chasing each other over the grass in a game of tag. There go two, round and round, tagging and re-tagging, first one being "it" and then the other. Their circle widens all the time and draws nearer to the woods. This time round they will touch the bush behind which we are watching. Here they come—there they go; they will leap the log yonder. Flash! squeak! scurry! Not a rabbit in the field! Yes; one rabbit—the limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox trotting off yonder in the shadows, along the border of the woods!
The picnic is over for this night, and it will be some time before the cottontails so far forget themselves as to play in this place again.
It is small wonder that animals do not laugh. They have so little play. The savage seldom laughs, for he hunts and is hunted like a wild animal, and is allowed so scant opportunity to be off guard that he cannot develop the power to laugh. Much more is this true of the animals. From the day an animal is born, instinct and training are bent toward the circumvention of enemies. There is no time to play, no chance, no cause for laughter.
The little brown rabbit has least reason of all to be glad. He is utterly inoffensive, the enemy of none, but the victim of many. Before he knows his mother he understands the meaning of Be ready! Watch! He drinks these words in with his milk. The winds whisper them; the birds call them; every leaf, every twig, every shadow and sound, says: Be ready! Watch! Life is but a series of escapes, little else than vigilance and flight. He must sleep with eyes open, feed with ears up, move with muffled feet, and, at short stages, he must stop, rise on his long hind legs, and listen and look. If he ever forgets, if he pauses one moment for a wordless, noiseless game with his fellows, he dies. For safety's sake he lives alone; but even a rabbit has fits of sociability, and gives way at times to his feelings. The owl and the fox know this, and they watch the open glades and field-edges. They must surprise him.
The barred owl is quick at dodging, but Bunny is quicker. It is the owl's soft, shadow-silent wings that are dreaded. They spirit him through the dusk like a huge moth, wavering and aimless, with dangling dragon-claws. But his drop is swift and certain, and the grip of those loosely hanging legs is the very grip of death. There is no terror like the ghost-terror of the owl.
"His drop is swift and certain."
The fox is feared; but then, he is on legs, not wings, and there are telltale winds that fly before him, far ahead, whispering, Fox, fox, fox! The owl, remember, like the wind, has wings—wings that are faster than the wind's, and the latter cannot get ahead to tell of his coming. Reynard is cunning. Bunny is fore-sighted, wide awake, and fleet of foot. Sometimes he is caught napping—so are we all; but if in wits he is not always Reynard's equal, in speed he holds his own very well with his enemy. Reynard is nimble, but give the little cottontail a few feet handicap in a race for life, and he stands a fair chance of escape, especially in the summer woods.
When the hounds are on his trail the rabbit saves his legs by outwitting his pursuers. He will win a long distance ahead of them, and before they overtake him he will double on his track, approaching as near as he dare to the dogs, then leap far aside upon a log, into a stream, or among the bushes, and strike out in a new direction, gradually making back toward the starting-place. He rises on his haunches to listen, as he goes along, and before the dogs have again picked up the trail, he has perhaps had time to rest and lunch.
If it were a matter of dogs only, life would be just full enough of excitement to be interesting. He can double, balk, and mix trails on them, and enjoy it. They are nothing to fool. But the gun! Ah, that's a foe which he cannot get up with. He may double and confuse the dogs; but as he comes back along a side-road, with them yelping far in the rear, he often hops right into a game-bag.
To do justice to the intelligence of the dog, and to be truthful about the rabbit, it must be remembered that, in the chase, Bunny usually has the advantage of knowing the lay of the land. The short cuts, streams, logs, briers, and roads are all in mind before he takes a jump. The dog is often on strange ground. Free the rabbit for the hunt, as you do the fox, on unknown territory, and the dogs will soon take the frightened, bewildered little creature.
There is no braver or more devoted mother in all the wilds than Molly Cottontail. She has a mother's cunning and a mother's resourcefulness, also. But this is to be expected. If number of children count for experience, then, surely, Molly ought to be resourceful. There are seasons when she will raise as many as three families—and old-fashioned families for size, too. It is not uncommon to find ten young rabbits in a nest. Five times twins! And all to be fed, washed, and kept covered up in bed together! But animal children, as a rule, behave better than human children, so we may not measure the task of Mother Molly by any standard of our own. It is task enough, however, since you can scarcely count the creatures that eat young rabbits, nor the enemies that unwittingly destroy them. A heavy rain may drown them, cattle may crush them, mowing-machines may cut them to pieces, and boys who are starting menageries may carry them away to starve.
Molly's mother-wit and craft are sufficient for most of these things. She picks out a sunny hillside among high grasses and bushes for the nest, so that the rain will flow off and not flood it, and because that here the cows are not so likely to trample, nor the plow and mowing-machine to come. She must also have ready and hidden access to the nest, which the grass and bushes afford.
She digs a little hollow in the sand about a foot deep and as big around as a duck's nest, lines it first with coarse grasses and leaves, then with a layer of finer grass, and fills the whole with warm, downy fur plucked from her own sides and breast. This nest, not being situated at the end of an inaccessible burrow, like the tame rabbit's or woodchuck's, requires that all care be taken to conceal every sign of it. The raw sand that is thrown out is artfully covered with leaves and grass to blend with the surrounding ground; and over the nest itself I have seen the old rabbit pull vines and leaves until the inquisitive, nosing skunk would have passed it by.
Molly keeps the young ones in this bed for about two weeks, after which time, if frightened, they will take to their heels. They are exceedingly tender at this age and ought not to be allowed to run out. They do not know what a man is, and hardly understand what their hind legs are. I saw one that was at least a month old jump up before a mowing-machine and bolt across the field. It was his first real scare, and the first time that he had been called upon to test his legs. It was funny. He didn't know how to use them. He made some tremendous leaps, and was so unused to the powerful spring in his hind feet that he turned several complete somersaults in the air.
Molly feeds the family shortly after nightfall, and always tucks them in when leaving, with the caution to lie quiet and still. She is not often surprised with her young, but lingers near on guard. You can easily tell if you are in the neighborhood of her nest by the way she thumps and watches you, and refuses to be driven off. Here she waits, and if anything smaller than a dog appears she rushes to meet it, stamping the ground in fury. A dog she will intercept by leaving a warm trail across his path, or, in case the brute has no nose for her scent, by throwing herself in front of him and drawing him off on a long chase.
One day, as I was quietly picking wild strawberries on a hill, I heard a curious grunting down the side below me, then the quick thud! thud! of an angry rabbit. Among the bushes I caught a glimpse of rabbit ears. A fight was on.
Crouching beside a bluish spot, which I knew to be a rabbit's nest, was a big yellow cat. He had discovered the young ones, and was making mouths at the thought of how they would taste, when the mother's thump startled him. He squatted flat, with ears back, tail swelled, and hair standing up along his back, as the rabbit leaped over him. It was a glimpse of Molly's ears, as she made the jump, that I had caught. It was the beginning of the bout—only a feint by the rabbit, just to try the mettle of her antagonist.
The cat was scared, and before he got himself together, Molly, with a mighty bound, was in the air again, and, as she flashed over him, she fetched him a stunning whack on the head that knocked him endwise. He was on his feet in an instant, but just in time to receive a stinging blow on the ear that sent him sprawling several feet down the hill. The rabbit seemed constantly in the air. Back and forth, over and over the cat she flew, and with every bound landed a terrific kick with her powerful hind feet, that was followed by a puff of yellow fur.
The cat could not stand up to this. Every particle of breath and fight was knocked out of him at about the third kick. The green light in his eyes was the light of terror. He got quickly to a bush, and ran away, else I believe that the old rabbit would have beaten him to death.
The seven young ones in the nest were unharmed. Molly grunted and stamped at me for looking at them; but I was too big to kick as she had just kicked the cat, and I could not be led away to chase her, as she would have led a dog. The little fellows were nearly ready to leave the nest. A few weeks later, when the wheat was cut in the field above, one of the seven was killed by the long, fearful knife of the reaper.
"Seven young ones in the nest."
Perhaps the other six survived until November, the beginning of the gunning season. But when the slaughter was past, if one lived, he remembered more than once the cry of the hounds, the crack of the gun, and the sting of shot. He has won a few months' respite from his human enemies; but this is not peace. There is no peace for him. He may escape a long time yet; but his foes are too many for him. He fights a good fight, but must lose at last.
[BRICK-TOP]
BRICK-TOP
That man was not only an item in the reckoning when the world was made, but that his attributes were anticipated too, is everywhere attested by the way nature makes use of his wreckage. She provides bountifully for his comfort, and, not content with this, she takes his refuse, his waste, what he has bungled and spoiled, and out of it fashions some of her rarest, daintiest delicacies. She gathers up his chips and cobs, his stubble and stumps,—the crumbs which fall from his table,—and brings them back to him as the perfection of her culinary art.
So, at least, any one with an imagination and a cultivated taste will say after he has eaten that October titbit, the brick-top mushroom.
The eating of mushrooms is a comparatively unappreciated privilege in our country. The taste is growing rapidly; but we have such an abundance of more likely stuff to live upon that the people have wisely abstained from a fungus diet. All things considered, it is a legitimate and wholesome horror, this wide-spread horror of toadstools. The woods, the wild fields, and the shaded roadsides gleam all through July and August with that pale, pretty "spring mushroom," the deadly Agaricus (Amanita) vernus; yet how seldom we hear of even a child being poisoned by eating it! Surely it seems as if our fear of toadstools, like our hatred for snakes, has become an instinct. I have never known a mushroom enthusiast who had not first to conquer an almost mortal dread and to coax his backward courage and appetite by the gentlest doses. And this is well. An appetite for mushrooms is not wholly to be commended. Strangely enough, it is not the novice only who happens to suffer: the professional, the addicted eater, not infrequently falls a victim.
The risk the beginner runs is mainly from ignorance of the species. In gathering anything one naturally picks the fairest and most perfect. Now among the mushrooms the most beautiful, the ideal shapes are pretty sure to be of the poisonous Amanita tribe, whose toxic breath throws any concentrated combination of arsenic, belladonna, and Paris green far into the shade. There is nothing morally wrong in the mushroom habit, yet for downright fatality it is eclipsed only by the opium habit and the suicidal taste for ballooning.
There are good people, nevertheless, who will eat mushrooms-toadstools even, if you please. The large cities have their mycological societies in spite of muscarine and phallin, as they have kennel clubs in spite of hydrophobia. Therefore, let us take the frontispiece of skull and crossbones, which Mr. Gibson thoughtfully placed in his poetic book on toadstools, for the centerpiece of our table, bring on the broiled brick-tops, and insist that, as for us, we know these to be the very ambrosia of the gods.
The development of a genuine enthusiasm for mushrooms—for anything, in fact—is worth the risk. Eating is not usually a stimulus to the imagination; but one cannot eat mushrooms in any other than an ecstatic frame of mind. If it chances to be your first meal of brick-tops (you come to the task with the latest antidote at hand), there is a stirring of the soul utterly impossible in the eating of a prosaic potato. You are on the verge all the time of discovery—of quail on toast, oysters, beefsteak, macaroni, caviar, or liver, according to your nationality, native fancy, and mycological intensity. The variety of meats, flavors, and wholesome nutrients found in mushrooms by the average mycologist beggars all the tales told by breakfast-food manufacturers. After listening to a warm mycologist one feels as Caleb felt at sight of the grapes and pomegranates: the children of Anak may be there, but this land of the mushroom is the land of milk and honey; let us go up at once and possess it.
"The land of the mushroom."
If eating mushrooms quickens the fancy, the gathering of them sharpens the eye and trains the mind to a scientific accuracy in detail that quite balances any tendency toward a gustato-poetic extravagance. When one's life, when so slight a matter as one's dinner, depends upon the nicest distinctions in stem, gills, color, and age, even a Yankee will cease guessing and make a desperate effort to know what he is about.
Here is where brick-top commends itself over many other species of mushroom that approach the shape of the deadly Amanita. It is umbrella-shaped, moderately long-stemmed, regularly gilled, and without a "cup" or bulge at the root, rather pointed instead. It is a rich brick-brown or red at the center of the cap, shading off lighter toward the circumference. The gills in fresh young specimens are a light drab, turning black later with the black spores. It comes in September, and lasts until the heavy snows fall, growing rarely anywhere but in the woods upon oak stumps. I have found a few scattering individuals among the trees, and I took two out of my lawn one autumn. But oak-trees had stood in the lawn until a few years before, and enough of their roots still remained to furnish a host for the mushrooms. A stump sometimes will be covered with them, cap over cap, tier crowding tier so closely that no particle of the stump is seen. This colony life is characteristic. I have more than once gathered half a peck of edible specimens from a single stump.
The most inexperienced collector, when brick-top has been pointed out to him, can hardly take any other mushroom by mistake. It is strange, however, that this delicious, abundant, and perfectly harmless species should be so seldom pictured among the edible fungi in works upon this subject. I have seen it figured only two or three times, under the names Hypholoma perplexum and H. sublateritius, with the mere mention that it was safe to eat. Yet its season is one of the longest, and it is so abundant and so widely distributed as to make the gathering of the more commonly known but really rarer species quite impractical.
No one need fear brick-tops. When taken young and clean, if they do not broil into squab or fry into frogs' legs, they will prove, at any rate, to be deliciously tender, woodsy sweetmeats, good to eat and a joy to collect.
And the collecting of mushrooms is, after all, their real value. Our stomachs are too much with us. It is well enough to beguile ourselves with large talk of rare flavors, high per cents. of proteids, and small butcher's bills; but it is mostly talk. It gives a practical, businesslike complexion to our interest and excursions; it backs up our accusing consciences at the silly waste of time with a show of thrift and economy; but here mushroom economy ends. There is about as much in it as there is of cheese in the moon. No doubt tons and tons of this vegetable meat go to waste every day in the woods and fields, just as the mycologists say; nevertheless, according to my experience, it is safer and cheaper to board at a first-class hotel than in the wilderness upon this manna, bounty of the skies though it be.
It is the hunt for mushrooms, the introduction through their door into a new and wondrous room of the out-of-doors, that makes mycology worthy and moral. The genuine lover of the out-of-doors, having filled his basket with fungi, always forces his day's gleanings upon the least resisting member of the party before he reaches home, while he himself feeds upon the excitement of the hunt, the happy mental rest, the sunshine of the fields, and the flavor of the woods. After a spring with the birds and a summer with the flowers, to leave glass and botany-can at home and go tramping through the autumn after mushrooms is to catch the most exhilarating breath of the year, is to walk of a sudden into a wonder-world. With an eye single for fungi, we see them of every shape and color and in every imaginable place—under leaves, up trees, in cellars, everywhere we turn. Rings of oreads dance for us upon the lawns, goblins clamber over the rotting stumps, and dryads start from the hollow trees to spy as we pass along.
Brick-top is in its prime throughout October—when, in the dearth of other interests, we need it most. By this time there are few of the birds and flowers left, though the woods are far from destitute of sound and color. The chickadees were never friendlier; and when, since last autumn, have so many flocks of goldfinches glittered along our paths? Some of the late asters and goldenrods are still in bloom, and here and there a lagging joepye-weed, a hoary head of boneset, and a brilliant tuft of ironweed show above the stretches of brown.
October is not the month of flowers, even if it does claim the witch-hazel for its own. It is the month of mushrooms. There is something unnatural and uncanny about the witch-hazel, blossoming with sear leaf and limbs half bare. I never come upon it without a start. The sedges are dead, the maples leafless, the robins gone, the muskrats starting their winter lodges; and here, in the yellow autumn sun, straggles this witch-hazel, naked like the willows and alders, but spangled thick with yellow blossoms! Blossoms, indeed, but not flowers. Hydras they look like, from the dying lily-pads, crawling over the bush to yellow and die with the rest of the dying world.
Witch-hazel.
No natural, well-ordered plant ought to be in flower when its leaves are falling; but if stumps and dead trees are to blossom, of course leaf-falling time would seem a proper enough season. And what can we call it but blossoming, when an old oak-stump, dead and rotten these ten years, wakes up after a soaking rain, some October morning, a very mound of delicate, glistening, brick-red mushrooms? It is as great a wonder and quite as beautiful a mystery as the bursting into flower of the marsh-marigolds in May. But no deeper mystery, for—"dead," did I call these stumps? Rotten they may be, but not dead. There is nothing dead out of doors. There is change and decay in all things; but if birds and bugs, if mosses and mushrooms, can give life, then the deadest tree in the woods is the very fullest of life.
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