I
TO sit on one’s rustic porch, or at the door of one’s tent, and see the bees working on the catnip or motherwort or clover, to see the cattle grazing leisurely in the fields or ruminating under the spreading trees, or the woodchucks creeping about the meadows and pastures, or the squirrels spinning along the fences, or the hawks describing great spirals against the sky; to hear no sound but the voice of birds, the caw of crows, the whistle of marmots, the chirp of crickets; to smell no odors but the odors of grassy fields, or blooming meadows, or falling rain; and amid it all, to lift one’s eyes to the flowing and restful mountain lines—this is to get a taste of the peace and comfort of the summer hills.
This boon is mine when I go to my little gray farm-house on a broad hill-slope on the home farm in the Catskills. Especially is it mine when, to get still nearer nature and beyond the orbit of household sounds and interruptions, I retreat to the big hay-barn, and on an improvised table in front of the big open barn-doors, looking out into the sunlit fields where I hoed corn or made hay as a boy, and write this and other papers.
The peace of the hills is about me and upon me, and the leisure of the summer clouds, whose shadows I see slowly drifting across the face of the landscape. The dissonance and the turbulence and the stenches of cities, how far off they seem; the noise and the dust and the acrimony of politics—how completely the hum of the honey-bees and the twitter of swallows blot them all out!
In the circuit of the hills, the days take form and character as they do not in town, or in a country of low horizons. George Eliot says in one of her letters: “In the country the days have broad open spaces and the very stillness seems to give a delightful roominess to the hours.” This is especially true in a hilly and mountainous country, where the eye has a great depth of perspective opened to it. Take those extra brilliant days that we so often have in the autumn—what a vivid sense one gets of their splendor amid the hills! The deep, cradle-like valleys, and the long flowing mountain lines, make a fit receptacle for the day’s beauty; they hold and accumulate it, as it were. I think of Emerson’s line:
“O, tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire.”
The valleys are vast blue urns that hold a generous portion of the lucid hours.
To feel to the full the peace of the hills, one must choose his hills, and see to it that they are gentle and restful in character. Abruptness, jagged lines, sharp angles, frowning precipices, while they may add an element of picturesqueness, interfere with the feeling of ease and restfulness that the peace of the hills implies. The eye is disturbed by a confusion of broken and abrupt lines as is the ear by a volume of discordant sounds. Long, undulating mountain lines, broad, cradle-like valleys, easy basking hill-slopes, as well as the absence of loud and discordant sounds, are a factor in the restfulness of any landscape.
My landscape is very old geologically, as old as the order of vertebrate animals, but young historically, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty years. The original forests still cover the tops of the mountains with a dark-green mantle, which comes well down upon their sides, where it is cut and torn and notched into by the upper fields of the valley farms.
I call my place Woodchuck Lodge, as I tell my friends, because we are beleagured by these rodents. There is a cordon of woodchuck-holes all around us. In the orchard, in the meadows, in the pastures, these whistling marmots have their dens. Here one might easily have woodchuck venison for dinner every day, yea, and for supper and breakfast, too, if one could acquire a taste for it. I tried to dine on a woodchuck once when I was a boy, but never have felt inclined to repeat the experiment. If one were born in the woods and lived in the woods, maybe he could relish a woodchuck. Talk about being autocthonous, and savoring of the soil—try a woodchuck! The feeding habits of this animal are as cleanly as those of a sheep or a cow—clover, plantain, peas, beans, cucumbers, cabbages, apples—all sweet and succulent things go to the making of his flabby body; yet he spends so much of his time in pickle in the ground that his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He is not lean like a rabbit or a squirrel, nor so firm of muscle as a ’coon or a ’possum; he is little more than a skin filled with viscera. He is busy all summer storing up fat in his loose pouch of a body for fuel during his long winter sleep. This sleep appears to begin in late September, or after the first white frost. This year I saw my last specimen on the twenty-eighth of the month as he was running in great haste to his hole. Evidently he does not like the pinch of the cold. He is a fair-weather animal and is the epicure of the meadows and pastures. While the apples are still mellow on the ground, while the red-thorn is still dropping its fruit, and the aftermath is still fresh in the meadows, my woodchucks turn their backs upon the world and retreat to their underground chambers for their six months’ slumber. I know of no other hibernating animal that retires from the light of day so early in the season. His active life stretches from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox, and that is about all. Half the year he is under ground, and at least half of each summer day. No wonder his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He appears to live only to accumulate his winter store of fat. Apparently he comes out of his den in summer only to feed, and maybe occasionally to bask in the sunshine. He is never sportive or discursive like the birds and squirrels. Life is a very serious business with him, and he has reduced it to the lowest terms—eat, breed, and sleep. If woodchucks ever engage in any sort of play, like other wild creatures, I have never seen them, though I once had a tame young ’chuck that would play with the kitten.
The woodchuck probably sleeps more than half the time in summer; he economizes his precious fat. Only once have I seen his tracks on the snow. This was in late December; and following them up, I found the woodchuck wandering about the meadow like one half demented. Something had evidently gone wrong with him. Apparently he had not succeeded in storing up his usual amount of fat. He showed little fight, and we picked him up by the tail, put him into the sleigh, and brought him home. A place under the barn floor was given to him, but he did not long survive. All the glory of the fall, the heyday of the ’coon and the squirrels, the woodchuck misses. No golden October, no Indian summer for him; he has had his day.
Though the woodchuck’s muscles are flabby, his heart is stout. The farm-dog can kill him, but he cannot make him show fear or dismay; he is game to the last. Twice I have seen him from my porch at Woodchuck Lodge put on so bold a front, and become so aggressive, when surprised in the middle of a field by a big shepherd-dog, that the dog did not dare attack him, but circled about, seeking some unfair advantage, only to be met at every point with those threatening, grating teeth. In one case the woodchuck was far from his hole, and he kept charging the dog and driving him nearer and nearer the stone wall, where his own safety lay. An observer inoculated with the idea of animal reason would have said that the tactics of the ’chuck were premeditated; but I am sure he was too much engrossed with the task of defending himself from the jaws of that dog to do any logical thinking or planning. It was only the fortunes of battle that finally brought the hunter and the hunted near the hole of safety, when, seeing his chance, the woodchuck made a sudden, successful dash, too hurried, I fancy, even to whistle his usual note of defiance. In the other case, the dog was of a still more timid nature, and when the surprised woodchuck showed fight, he concluded that he had no business at all with that particular ’chuck, which actually chased him from the meadow. I can still see the woodchuck’s bristling, expanded tail as he drove fiercely after the fleeing dog, which, with a tail anything but threatening, escaped over the wall into the road.
I find that one may be the principal actor in a little comedy, and not see the humor of it at all at the time. I know the humor of a race I had with a ’chuck last summer in my orchard was quite lost upon me till it was over, and the ’chuck was in his hole, and I was back upon my porch recovering my wind. The ’chuck was a hundred yards or more from his den when I leaped over the fence from the road and surprised him. I pressed him so closely that he took refuge in an apple-tree. Instantly seeing his mistake, as the missile I hurled struck the tree, he sprang down and rushed for his hole, a hundred and fifty feet away. But I got there first. The ’chuck paused twenty feet to one side and regarded me intently, defiantly. We stood and glared at each other a few moments, while I recovered my breath. I wanted the scalp of that “varmint.” I knew that he would make himself believe that I had planted my garden for his special benefit, and I wanted to anticipate that conclusion. I was weaponless. Twenty or more feet from me, on the opposite side from the ’chuck, I saw a stone that would answer my purpose. I calculated the chances; so did the woodchuck; I sprang for the stone and the ’chuck sprang for his hole, and was in it as my hand touched the stone. He had won! As I sat on my porch, the recklessness and absurdity of a man more than threescore and ten running down a woodchuck came over me; and I have not yielded to such a temptation since.