"HE TURNS THAT SOLEMN FACE" (p. 71)
From a hole in the side of a fallen log the chipmunk peeps warily, comes out quickly, but whisks back again in fancied fright. Soon he returns and sits on the log awhile, barking his bird-like "chip, chip," and flirting his tail with each note. Then he sets about gathering the old oak leaves which were piled near the log by the winds last March and have lain undisturbed through the summer. Grabbing two or three in his mouth, he pushes them into his pouches with his paws and is gone into his hole like a flash. The hole in the log is the entrance to the long passageway which goes down perpendicularly for three feet, and then gradually ascends, until at a distance of eight feet it is about a foot below the surface of the ground. Here the chipmunk will pass the cold days of winter, snugly sleeping in his leafy bed which he is now preparing, with a store of food nearby to use in wakeful spells of warm weather and in the lean days next spring after he has fairly roused himself from lethargy. For half an hour he comes and goes, carrying two or three, even four leaves at a time. Then he comes a little farther away from the log, suddenly looks up and sees me sitting. He stops short, breathes quickly, his little sides tremble; I take out an old envelope and write his description, like this:
"Size, about half way between a mouse and a rat, five or six inches long, with a tail perhaps five inches more, about as big around as a man's thumb, bushy, but of even size the whole length, top of head dark gray, yellowish circles about the shining black eyes; short, erect ears; light gray underneath, with whitish legs; a narrow black stripe down the middle of the back, then on either side, a stripe of reddish gray; then a stripe of black, next a stripe of yellow, then black again and after that, reddish fox color down to the whitish under-parts."
At length the chipmunk makes a dash for the thicket ten feet away and his "chip, chip," rings out excitedly as he reaches the friendly shelter.
The chipmunk is not the only woods creature preparing for winter during the hottest days of August. For more than a week the flying squirrel has been making the small mossy cup acorns rain down on the roof of the bungalow. He begins on them when they are scarcely acorns, merely green cups with a dot at the top. But he knows. He bites them in two, and deftly extracts the acorn, which is in the milky state, scarcely as large as a pea. He does it in the darkness, but with amazing rapidity. Speeding from twig to twig, from one cluster of acorns to another, he cuts the cups in two and extracts the meat so fast that the pieces rain down on the roof. When he is working at top speed, he will probably average twenty acorns a minute. In the morning the roof of the porch is covered with pieces of the husks.
For half an hour after sunset he keeps up this fast speed. Apparently he is getting supper after his long sleep through the day. At the end of half an hour he begins to work more leisurely. The pieces fall on the roof every now and then. Possibly he is taking the sweetmeats to his hole, high up in a tree. Through the night there is the intermittent sound of his labor. Sometimes, towards morning, he drops in for a visit,—literally drops in, by way of the chimney and the open fireplace. He knows no fear. Going to the kitchen, he helps himself to the doughnut left on the table for him. If it is a whole one, he nibbles all around it. If only half a one he carries it away. You may close the kitchen door and catch him with your bare hands. He will neither squeal nor bite. But he makes a poor pet, because he sleeps in the daytime and works in the darkness. He strongly dislikes the light. If put into a box he backs up into the darkest corner, brings his beautiful flat tail between his four legs and up over his nose and his eyes. Rolled up lengthwise in this ball he spends the day; but when evening comes he is active enough. If kept for any length of time he makes a very docile pet and will beg permission to sleep in your pocket. But it is better to give him his freedom, and see him scamper up one tree and "fly" to another. As he springs he spreads out the whitish membranes along each side, holds his flat tail rigid, quivering. Thus he goes down, parachute fashion, on an inclined plane. Just before he gets to the tree trunk which is his objective point, he makes momentum aid his muscles in the accomplishment of an upward curve.
Crickets and katydids droned and fiddled all night, and when the katydids quit at daybreak, other grasshoppers and cicadas were ready to take their places in the screechy orchestra. Night and day they shrill their ceaseless music. It is all masculine love music, as much an expression of their tender feelings towards listening maidens, as the old troubadour songs to fair ladies or as the exquisite song of the rose-breasted grosbeak is to his brown-garbed spouse in May and June. Late in July it began with the short rasps and screeches of tiny hoppers flitting in the grass; the katydid began to tune up on the evening of July 29. Then the long-legged conductor waved his baton and the orchestra was off. It started moderato, but quickly increased to an allegro, and sometimes it is almost presto. For the first two weeks in August new fiddlers were constantly being added, and now there are enough to fill every band stand all through the woods. The noise at night is almost ear-splitting. The old preacher was right about it. There are times when the grasshopper is a burden. At the hour of sunset the cicada winds his rattle most joyously, subsiding into silence as darkness comes and making way for the katydid.
The screechy orchestra is a poor substitute for the grand birds' concerts of June and July. For the birds, August is a month of silence. Except for an occasional solo, nearly all the birds are silent, moulting and moping in the thickets. If you steal into the thicket you may find the thrushes and the thrashers feeding on the ground. Once in a while one of them shows himself in the morning or the evening, but not often. Nesting done, the brown thrasher ceased his long and brilliant solos from the treetops after the first week of July. Next week the catbird's song was heard for the last time. Because the first nest of the wood thrush was robbed by the blue-jays, a second nest was built. This family was safely reared, and the wood thrush sang until the third week in July, when one clear sunset night, the sky all aglow with banners of golden red, he sang his farewell solo. For seven weeks the Maryland yellow throat sang just at the turn of the old woods road, where his mate had her nest in a low bush. As the babies waxed large his song waned, and he was not heard during the last week in July, nor since. Still the dickcissel, the lark sparrow and the indigo bunting continued their trio. Evidently their babies were somewhere over in the field nearby, a field that was corn last year, and now is grown up thickly with smartweed. August came with a rush of the mercury above the ninety mark, and there it has stayed. A week of it was enough for this trio. They ceased their concert work, but now and then the lark sparrow pipes up a feeble imitation of his sweet notes in July. Like the song sparrow, he cannot wholly refrain from expressing his satisfaction in being alive. Many men and women are just like that. The vireos also ceased singing at the end of the first week in August, but sometimes the red-eye gives a little preachment from his leafy pulpits in the woods. Latest among the singers are the chewinks, the wood pewees, the field sparrows, and, of course, the goldfinches and the cuckoos. The young chewinks left their nests in the pasture on the third, and the chewink's feelings expressed themselves in song for two weeks after that. He out-sang the field sparrows, whose young were hatched August third, and left their nest on the twelfth. Apparently the field sparrow stopped singing and went to work providing for his family of three. But the chewink was not to be sobered so quickly. Why not sing with the work? The days are long enough, happy enough, for both. Even now he gives occasional bursts of song. Evidently this is the theory of the tanager also, for he sang all through July, and here in mid-August his trumpet tones occasionally ring through the leafy silences of the woods. The young wood pewees which left their nests on the eleventh are now able to shift for themselves; but the parents have much the same song as they had when the three eggs lay in the nest, saddled to the burr-oak bough. Still, through the peaceful morning air comes the loud, clear, cheery call of the Bob White—a note that has in it health and vigor for the healing of many a tired heart. As for the cuckoo, well, his mate is guarding those bluish-green eggs in the apology for a nest built in the lower branches of a young black-oak; they will not be hatched until the very last of the month. He does his best to be cheerful and to make a joyful sound. "Kut-Kut-Kut," and "Kow-Kow-Kow"—you may often hear the latter sound in the middle of the night. Does he try to let his lady dear know that he is near her through the darkness, or is he happily singing in his dreams?
Perched on a mullen spike, a goldfinch is singing to his mate, whose nest is in a sapling not far away. His jet black wings fold over his yellow back, shaping it into a pointed shield of gold. He is so happy and so fond that he can not bear long to remain out of her sight. Now he sings a tender serenade, then his joy rises to ecstasy. He takes wings and floats up and down the imaginary waves, circling higher and higher, his sweet notes growing more rapturous until finally they reach their climax as he goes abruptly skyward. Then his fluttering wings close, and he drops from a height of perhaps forty or fifty feet, to alight again on his original perch and resume his tender serenade, singing now in a sweet, dreamy way, sounding just like a ripple of moonlit water looks. This love-song of the goldfinch is the climax of the summer's bird-song. If there were none other, the summer would be worth while.
Dreamily sitting on a bare twig, the wood pewee is content. She has raised her family, they are now able to get their own food. Though she is worn and wasted since the spring, and may easily be told from her husband, because he is handsome and well-groomed, yet is she content to sit and wait for the food to come her way. Now she circles from her perch and returns. Watching her catch an insect on the way, I hear the sharp snap of her bill, as if two pebbles had been smartly struck together.
Fanning the air with gauzy wings, the honey bee comes for a feast on the flowers of the figwort. Visiting every open blossom, he loads up with the honey and departs in a line for his hive. Bye-and-bye a humble-bee wanders along, quickly finding that another has drained the blossoms of their sweets. He passes on undismayed; there are more flowers. Over by the wire fence the tick-trefoil, desmodium, is in its glory. Its lower petal stands out like a doorstep, and on it the humble-bee alights. Two little yellow spots, bordered with deep red, show him where lies the nectar. Here he thrusts his head, forcing open the wing petals from the standard. Instantly the keel snaps down as if a steel spring had been released. The bee is dusted with pollen, which he carries with him to fertilize another flower. How did the flower learn to fashion that mechanism, to construct those highly colored nectar-guides? How many centuries of accumulated intelligence or instinct,—call it what the scientists please,—are there behind that action of the bee, thrusting his head just where those nectar-guides are placed? Is the bee more sentient than the flower? Or, is the flower which provided the nectar and placed the nectar-guides just at the right place on the bright blossoms, as special allurements for the senses of the bee, the more to be admired for its intelligence? One by one the bee opens the flowers, which were so fresh and beautiful at sunrise. When he goes to his nest in the grass at evening, they will all have been drained of their nectar, and the petals will be wilted by the sun. But they have achieved their object, the ovules have been fertilized. Tomorrow morning there will be many bright, new blossoms, their nectar crying to the bees, like the voice in Omar Khayyam's tavern to those outside the door:
"When all the temple is prepared within,
Why lags the drowsy worshiper outside?"
Now there comes sidling, gliding along the barbed wire fence, the Baltimore oriole, always a charming fellow because of his flaming plumage, which has won for him the name of the golden robin and firebird. He walks along the wire fence in a gliding, one-leg-at-a-time fashion, as he often does on the twig of a tree. His head is down, he is on the lookout for caterpillars. Now he reaches the tick-trefoil, and nips out some stamens from its purple blossoms, which he eats with relish.
The work of the year will soon be done. Most of the trees have completed the growth for the year and nothing remains but to complete the filling of the buds which already have formed for next year. Pull down a twig of the white-oak and you find a cluster of terminal buds at the end, marking the close of this year's growth, each of them containing the nucleus of next year's life. In the axils of the leaves on the elm are the little jeweled buds which will be brown and dull all winter, but will shine like garnets when the springtime comes. The fat, green buds on the linden are yellowing now, and next they are to be tinted into the ruby red which is so attractive in the winter months when contrasted with the snow.
As the sun nears the zenith the heat waves on the ridges, and across the cornfields seem to have a rhythmic motion, as if they are manifestations of the great throbbing pulse-beat of nature, working at almost feverish haste to ripen her fruits and prepare for the winter in the few weeks of summer that yet remain. And now the sunshine has a new and deeper meaning. If we have ever complained of it, we hasten to pray pardon. Not only in the cornfields, where the milky ears are fast filling, but all over upland and lowland, in woods and fields and meadows, Nature is busy making and storing starch and sugar, protein and albumen, that the earth and all that therein is may have cause to rejoice in the fullness of the year. Above the ground she stores it in drupe and pome and berry, nut and nutlet and achene, and below the ground in rootstock and rhizome, corm and tuber, pumping them full with strokes quick and strong in these grand climacteric days of the summer. All the water which seemed so useless in April, all the rain which seemed so superfluous and so dreary in May and June, has been used. Not a drop of it was wasted. Its office was to feed life, to dissolve the substances in the rocks and the soils which the plants needed, to be mixed with the sunshine in the manufacture of food for the present and for the future. Nor is the heat nor the light wasted. Both are stored in the trunks of the trees, and when in the winter the back log sends out its steady heat and the foresticks their cheerful blaze, the old tree will give back, measure for measure, the light and heat it has stored through the years. Let us rejoice in the fervent heat and the grand work of the August days. So a man works as he approaches his ideals. Feebly at first he begins. Winds of adversity buffet him, cold disdain would freeze his ambition, hot scorn would shrivel his soul. Still he perseveres, striving towards his ideal, firmly rooted in faith and his heart ever open for the beauty and the sunshine of the world. In periods of storm and cloud, his heart, like the sun, makes its own warmth and splendor, knowing that the season of its strength shall come. When he seems to be growing nearer his ideal his fervor is at August heat; for him there is no burden in the heat of the day; tirelessly, joyously, he strives, achieves, attains. Thus he does his share of the work of the world and adds his mite to the heritage of its future.
The plants of the woodlands seem strangely unfamiliar since the springtime. If you have not called upon them during these months that have fled so swiftly you will almost feel the need of being introduced to them again. Some of them, such as the Dutchman's breeches and the bluebell, have gone, like the beautiful children who died when life was young. Others have grown away from you, like the children you used to know in the days gone by, so strangely altered now. The little uvularia, whose leaves were so soft and silky in May and whose blossom drooped so prettily, like a golden bell, is tall, and branched now, and its leaves are stiff and papery. Its curious, triangular, leathery pods have lifted their lids at the top and discharged their bony seeds. The blood-root, the hepatica, and the wild ginger are showing big and healthy leaves, but the few lady slippers, here and there, have faded almost beyond recognition.
When the summer shower patters down among the leaves the music of the insect orchestra ceases and the performers shield their instruments with their wings. It passes and gleams of sunshine make jewels of the raindrops. Then a little breeze brings the aroma of the blossoming bergamot, wild mint, basil and catnip, filling the air with a spicy fragrance. The insects tune up; soon the orchestra is at it again. White cumulus clouds appear, floating lazily in the azure, reflected by the river below. They chase the sunlight across the amber stubble of the oat-fields and weave huge pictures which flash and fade among the swaying tassels of the corn.
