TRAPPING GNOMES.
When the harvest moon is large and the nights clear, I love to spend an evening hour or two under the great oak-trees on the shore of my lonely lake. The soft mists creep across the water, bats flit back and forth squeaking, the whippoorwills call to each other that the time for migration is near at hand, and sometimes the voices of the barred owls wake weird echoes in the lake’s curves. Sitting motionless in the black shadow, I am unseen and unsuspected by the night creatures round me. Many feet move upon the dry leaves, and the fluttering of wings disturbs the still air. Measuring the evening from sunset until ten o’clock, it seems a period of more activity than the day. Hours roll by in the September sunlight with scarce a sign of life near the lake, but the coming of twilight is a signal for awakening. High in the oaks the gray squirrels are busy with the acorns. In the stillness of the night an acorn falling against one and another bunch of stiff leaves, finally striking upon the ground, seems to make an unduly loud noise. The fine squeak of a bat might pass unnoticed in the daytime, but in the gloom it carries far and comes upon the ear sharply.
In these hours the ground gives up its cave-dwellers, and their soft feet rustle the leaves in all the forest and by every brookside. From the ledges of Chocorua, foxes by dozens descend upon the surrounding farms and search for mice and other prey. It is the light snowfall which betrays the great number of these wary marauders, and not the secretive leaves of autumn, upon whose dry surfaces the fox-tread makes no imprint. From his den under the screes the hedgehog wanders through the woods or seeks the orchard. The skunk, too, is abroad, poking his snout into ant-hills or among mouldering leaves where insects lie hidden. It is neither fox nor skunk which makes the soft pattering just behind the old oak against which I lean. A smaller wanderer than they comes there, and as surely as gnomes have settled in America this must be one of their haunts. I feel certain of it when a squeaky little whisper follows the pattering, or when occasionally a tiny form darts across a patch of moonlight near the edge of the water.
In these September hunting-days I have left the grouse to feed undisturbed among the blackberries, and the hare to dream away the sunlit hours in his form among the swamp evergreens. Gnome-hunting has been my pastime, and so low is our human estimate of the character and usefulness of these tiny creatures that my conscience has not given the faintest bit of a twinge when I have brought home dead gnomes from field, meadow, mountain, and forest. Our gnomes are not all of one kind, and when I started with my game-bag in the September sunlight I did not feel sure what manner of elf I might bring home with me. Setting out early on the morning of the 12th, I dashed the dew from the brakes as I crossed an open pasture on the way to my lonely lake. The brakes were growing brown, yet we had had no frost, and the equinox was still ten days distant. The sumacs were gorgeous in green, scarlet, and orange, waiting for the first rain or wind to hurl to the ground half their gay leaves. As they hung motionless in the sunlight, they seemed brilliant enough for the tropics. Asters and goldenrod joined them in painting part of the picture with high colors, and so did the maples on the high ledges of the mountain where a bear-hunter’s fire raged last October. A bit of woodbine climbing up the maple trunk gleamed like flames, mountain-ash berries were full of the same fire, and the clustered fruit of the hobble-bush glowed in the midst of its maroon and crimson foliage.
What means this decking of the earth in autumn with scarlet and purple, crimson and gold, russet and orange? The flowers of the springtime are full of joyous color, in order that the wandering bee and butterfly may aid in their fertilization. The bird gleams with color as the glow-worm gleams with fire, that his mate may not forget him in the mazes of the life-dance. The autumn is the season of ripening, of the gathering of harvests, of the decay of the earthly, and the creation of that which shall endure. Are these colors only the emblems of death, the garlands upon the pall, or are they the signals which Nature hangs on high to call her forces into ranks for the battle against extinction and in favor of persistent life? Surely the berry which by its brilliancy of color calls the bird to it, in order that it may be eaten and its seeds carried afar, is as wise as the flower which by its tints and perfume attracts the bee and secures fertilization. Perhaps the tree which blazes with autumn color is avoided by insects whose instinct teaches them to shun colors in contrast to their own.
Just beyond the sumacs is the stump of a prehistoric pine. It has lasted generations since its towering pillar fell and sank year by year deeper into the soil. Its hard gray walls look as though they might endure half a century more of snow and sunshine. Gnomes live under that stump, and the first of my traps was set at their cave archway. Kneeling down behind the clustering blackberry briers, I could see the archway just at the head of the opening between two of the great buttress roots of the stump. Moss was growing at the threshold, ferns overhung the doorway, and a tiny path led through the grass from the arch into the dry pasture beyond the briers. Yes, the trap had been sprung, and crushed beneath its cruel springs was a gray gnome. His eyes were large and dark. His coat was of soft gray, and his waistcoat snowy. His hands and feet were very white and his elfin ears mischievously large and erect. The name of this gnome is quite musical,—Hesperomys, the evening gnome.
In a deep hollow between wooded banks runs the pasture brook. It comes from the forest-clad mountain-side, and flows to a dark swamp, beyond which is the lake. Gnomes live by the brook, both in the hollow and in the swamp. Nine traps were set in the hollow and eighteen in the swamp. These traps are, with true Yankee originality, named “cyclones,” and they are nearly perfect as engines of destruction. Upon a small square of tin are hinged two rectangles of stiff wire, so attached to strong springs that they naturally lie flat upon the square of tin. One rectangle is smaller than the other so that it just lies within it. The trap is set by raising the rectangles until they make a tent-like frame, and then securing them by a catch. The best lure for gnomes is whole corn, which is placed near the centre of the square of tin in a tiny cup suspended by a lever to the catch which holds the trap open. The gnome steps softly through the wire rectangles and tries to lift the grain from the cup. Woe to him if he presses ever so lightly upon the side of the cup, for if it is depressed, and the other end of the lever moved, the catch is cast free and the rectangles fall together with such force as to crush any small creature which stands below them.
The nine traps set by the brook were in groups of three. As I drew near the first group, I looked for broken twigs and a scrap of white cotton tied to a branch, my signals to show where the traps were placed. Bent twigs with their leaves slightly withered and drooping are readily seen at a long distance. The first three traps were set at a point where the banks of the brook were steep, and the level moss near the water only a narrow belt. At one place a mossy log crossed this level, a mouldering stump crowned with ferns flanked it, and a big boulder raised a wall of granite parallel with the stream. Just across the brook was another long log covered with moss, violet leaves, and rue. One trap was on this log, one by the boulder close to a little hole running under it, and the third near the mouldering stump. At first as I stood in the midst of the traps I could see none of them. The corn scattered near had been carried away or eaten, and the strings by which the traps were tied to stakes were not where I remembered to have left them. Suddenly I saw one trap. It was sprung and drawn away among the leaves. Something was in it, something I had never before seen, a creature more beautiful than any squirrel, as graceful as a swallow and as suggestive of speed and lightness. I knelt over this slender, brightly-clad gnome, and released his lifeless body from the trap. His cobweb-like whiskers were wonderfully long, his coat was of pale straw color and brown, his waistcoat of purest white. No monkey has a tail proportionally longer than the seemingly endless white-tipped appendage of Zapus insignis, this jumping gnome of the mountain streams. Exquisite creature, I thought, how can I have lived so long among woods and brooks without suspecting your presence? But for a “cyclone” I might never have known that such a being existed.
The other two traps were sprung, one containing a second Zapus, and the third a gray Hesperomys. Similar fortune had attended the remaining traps by the brook, three containing specimens of Zapus, two of Hesperomys, and one a large mole with fur as fine as the softest silk velvet. I pushed on eagerly to the series of traps in the swamp.
TWO KINDS OF GNOMES
Hesperomys
Zapus
On the way I crossed a strip of level pasture over which a grove of gray birches is rapidly spreading year by year. Several of them are bent so that their upper branches sweep the ground. They are victims of the snow and ice storms of winter, and, unlike the Arlington cedars, they are not resilient enough to recover an erect position. In the heart of the grove, a family of sapsucking woodpeckers had been at work in one of their “orchards.” Eight trees bore marks of their mischievous tapping, and in the two principal trees many hundreds of holes had been made by them. Their thirst is as insatiable as Mulvaney’s, but I supposed that before this time they had wearied of their summer fountains. Not so; one of them was hitching around the drills, dipping as persistently as in early July, and bees buzzed near him, enjoying their share of the tree’s sweets. Restraining my impatience to see the swamp traps, I watched long for a humming-bird to visit the drills, but none came, thus confirming my impression that they not only arrive in New England later than the sapsuckers, but that they migrate southward earlier.
While I waited under the birches, a gray squirrel came tripping over the grass and through the brakes. His great brush was not carried over his back, but in an arch behind him. His approach was so noisy that at first I thought a dog was coming towards me, but his voice betrayed him. “Cluck, cluck, cluck, cleck, cleck, cleck, cleck, clēēk.” If a “cyclone” had been choking him he could not have made sounds any more queer. When at last he discovered me, he lowered his tail and undulated very softly away.
The first of the second series of traps was set on the slope leading down towards the moist bed of the swamp. It contained one of the white-footed gray gnomes. The next three were empty. Number five was in the darkest part of the swamp on a huge upturned stump whose twisted roots, looking like the arms of a devil-fish, reached far into the air. The trap was sprung, and the gnome in it was as new to my eyes as Zapus had been. Coarse, chestnut-brown hair, in parts almost as bright as red mahogany, small eyes, conspicuous ears, and a tail so short that it seemed only a stump of something more satisfactory, were the conspicuous points in this gnome. His name, as I later learned, was Evotomys, the long-eared gnome. His rich coloring matched to perfection the decayed hemlock stump in which he lived, and harmonized with the brown bark of pines and the stained waters of the swamp brooks. In the sunlight, or upon the sand by the brookside, he would have been conspicuous. Where he lay he looked like a fragment of the reddish wood under him.
Five more of his tribe, and a tiny shrew, only three inches long, were found in the remaining swamp traps. One of the gnomes had been nearly devoured as he lay in the trap, the parts remaining being skin, feet, tail, and a small portion of the head. I suspected a big mole of being the ghoul. On my way home I looked in a trap set under a small foot-bridge which spanned a damp spot in a mowing-field. The victims here—for two had been caught at once—were of the family Arvicola, the sturdy gnomes of the fields. Their eyes were very small, their ears almost concealed by their coarse, dark-brown hair, and their bodies awkwardly but strongly built. They are the farming gnomes.
On September 17, I walked from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale, over the once “lost trail,” now nearly completed as a broad bridle-path and winter road. I took twenty-five “cyclones” with me and set them at the most favorable spots along the way. Brook crossings, big, moss-grown stumps or logs, boulders overhanging springs or rivulets, and old logging camps were among the places which seemed to me likely to be frequented by gnomes. As I was not to return until the next day, a night would intervene to give the little cave-dwellers time to smell the corn and to inspect and spring the traps.
The intervale was very beautiful as it lay tranquil in the autumn haze, but the memories of last Christmas-time had a charm about them which even the foretaste of Indian summer could not equal. Snow adds greatly to the dignity and grandeur of our New England mountains, making them more akin to the Alps, perpetual in their wintry covering. Chocorua, always a reminder of the Matterhorn, is much more like it when clad in ice, and rose-tinted by the morning sun. Even Swift River, framed in meadow brakes, waving osmundas, and gay scarlet maples, seemed less sparkling than when set in ice and overhanging banks of pure white snow.
As night came, coldness suggestive of winter crept over the great plain. The first light frost came caressingly in the still night hours and fell upon the pumpkin vines and the delicate ferns by the roadside, so that morning saw them wither away and die in the early sunbeams. With the dawn came many bird-notes. Crows, jays, flickers, red nuthatches, chickadees, golden kinglets, robins, cedar-birds, and goldfinches all made their voices heard. In the bushes by the road, Maryland yellow-throats mingled with various migrating sparrows, and among the spruces dozens of warblers flitted joyously back and forth, saying little, perhaps because nuthatches and red-eyed vireos said too much. Swallows had gone, but grace of flight was shown by hawks of various kinds which circled, soared, or shot past on even wing. The fickle crossbills, present a year ago this week in large numbers, were nowhere to be seen.
Sabba Day Falls were even grander than I remembered them to be, and although nothing could surpass in loveliness the icicles, frozen spray, masses of snow, and other paraphernalia of winter which had surrounded them in December, their present dress of tender green and brown, relieved by autumnal colors and crowned by a cloudless sky of purest blue, was wonderfully fair to look upon, and to lay away in the mind for weary days when brick walls and English sparrows should replace the wilderness and its warblers.
It was high noon when I turned my back on Carrigain and Bear and climbed the ridge towards Paugus valley. Would the traps be sprung? The question gave speed to my footsteps, which might otherwise have lagged by spring or brookside, for the day was meltingly warm and no breeze came over the Paugus ramparts. The first trap was near the top of the ridge, under a huge boulder. It was two miles from the nearest house in the intervale, and more than double that distance from Berry’s or any other inhabited dwelling in Tamworth. Perhaps gnomes did not live in spots so remote from man and his grain-fields. The trap was sprung. Evotomys had found it and perished. The next one was sprung, and a second long-eared victim lay in it. So with the third and fourth, set at intervals of many rods. The fifth was sprung, but empty; the sixth contained a gray Hesperomys; the seventh another Evotomys. I was now in the deep, dark valley between the northern ridges of Paugus and Chocorua. Three miles and a half of the roughest mountain woodland lay between this spot and tilled land, yet animal life was so abundant that it seemed to make no difference where I set my traps and scattered my corn; gnomes were everywhere waiting.
Out of twenty-five traps, fifteen held victims and six others were sprung, but empty. One of the slain was a chipmunk, another a mole. Of the remainder, three were long-tailed gray Hesperomys, and ten were red-backed Evotomys. The latter are clearly the most numerous inhabitants of the dark evergreen forests, but they are also to be found near secluded farm buildings in spots where the fulvous Hesperomys is the prevailing sprite. Among these gnomes of the woods and fields, all true American species, a European intruder is found. In some thickly settled places he has done among gnomes what the European sparrow has done among birds, elbowed himself into exclusive possession. When found in a trap, or seen scampering along the pantry shelf, this gnome is called, in vulgar English, a mouse.