My Pond: a Symphony of the Woods
[[237]]
X
The Trail
To reach my pond you must leave your canoe on the shore of Sungeegamook, the home lake, and go eastward through the big woods. Yonder is the landing, that bank of green topped by “everlasting” and blue asters, with a cleft like an arched doorway in the forest behind it. A rugged jack-pine leans out over a bit of shingle, as if to indicate a good place to beach your canoe, and there is something curiously alive, almost sentient, in its attitude. The old tree seems to watch your approach; through its leaves runs a low murmur of welcome as you step ashore.
Entering the woods (and because you are alone, and therefore natural, something in their dim [[238]]aisles, their mysterious depths, their breathing silence, makes you go gently) you find yourself in an old logging-road, once a garish symbol of man’s destructiveness, but growing yearly more subdued, more beautiful, since Nature began her work of healing. The earth beneath your feet, the restful earth which the lumbermen left torn by iron tools or rent by dynamite, has again put on her soft-colored garments. Feathery beds of fern push boldly into the road from shadowy places; wild grasses fill all its sunny openings with their bloom and fragrance; and winding down through shade or sunshine comes a trail made by the feet of deer and moose. Already these timid animals have adopted the forgotten road as a runway; you may meet them here when you return in the evening twilight.
Everywhere beside the trail are old marks of the destroyer. Noble maples or cedars that were centuries growing have been slashed down, dismembered, thrust aside to decay, and all because they stood in the way of a lumber-boss who thought only of getting his cut of spruce down to the lake. To look upon such trees, dead and shorn of their beauty, is to feel pity or indignation; but Nature does not share your feeling, being too abundant of life and resource to waste any moment in regret. Already she is upbuilding what man [[239]]has torn down. Glaring ax-wounds have all disappeared under bandages of living moss; every fallen log has hidden its loss under a mantle of lichen, soft and gray, which speaks not of death but of life renewed.
Where the sun touches these prostrate giants a blush of delicate color spreads over them. See, it deepens as you look upon it curiously, and you examine it to find a multitude of “fairy-cups” on slender stems, each lifting its scarlet chalice to the light. Very soft and inviting seats they offer, yielding to your weight, sending up an odor as of crushed herbs; but do not accept the invitation. If you must halt to rest or to enjoy the stillness, sit not down on one of these mossy logs, but before it at a little distance, and let its blended colors be to your eye what the wind in the pine is to your ear, or the smell of hemlock to your nostrils. Then will all your senses delight in harmony, their natural birthright, while you rest by the way.
Where the old road winds about the end of a ridge, avoiding every steep pitch, young balsams are crowding thickly into it; where it turns downward to the lowlands, quick-growing alders claim it as their own; and as you leave the lake far behind it begins to divide interminably, each branch breaking into smaller branches, like the twigs of a tree as you trace them outward. The [[240]]twig ends with a bud in clear space; but the farther or landward end of a logging-road dwindles to a deer-path, the path to a rabbit-run, and the run vanishes in some gloomy cedar swamp or trackless thicket where is no outlook on any side.
It is in such places, while you puzzle over another man’s road instead of keeping your own trail straight, that you are most apt to get lost. Coming back you need have no fear of going astray, since all these trails lead to the main road, and thence downhill to the lake; but going forward it is well to steer clear of all branch roads, which lead nowhere and confuse the sense of direction.
Leaving the road behind, therefore, and heading still eastward, you cross a ridge where the hardwoods stand, as their ancestors stood, untouched by the tools of men. Immense trunks of beech or sugar-maple or yellow birch tower upward wide apart, the moss of centuries upon them; far overhead is a delicate tracery of leaves, a dance of light against the blue, and over all is the blessed silence.
Beyond the ridge the ground slopes downward to a uniform level. Soon the moss grows deeper underfoot, with a coolness that speaks of perpetual moisture. The forest becomes dense, almost bewildering; here a “black growth” of spruce or fir, there a tangle of moosewood, yonder a swale [[241]]where impenetrable alder-thickets make it impossible to hold a straight course. Because all this growth is useless to the lumberman, there is no cutting to be seen; but because I have passed this way before, instinctively following the same course like an animal, a faint winding trail begins to appear, with a bent twig or a blazed tree at every turn to give direction.
As you move forward more confidently, learning the woodsman’s way of looking far ahead to pick up the guiding signs before you come to them, the dim forest suddenly brightens; a wave of light runs in, saying as it passes overhead that you are near an opening. As if to confirm the message, the trail runs into a well-worn deer-path, which looks as if the animals that used it knew well where they were going. Clumps of delicate young larches spring up ahead; between them open filmy vistas, like windows draped in lace, and across one vista stretches a ribbon of silver. A few more steps and—there! my little pond is smiling at you, reflecting the blue deeps of heaven or the white of passing clouds from its setting of pale-green larch-trees and crimson mosses.
And now, if you are responsive, you shall have a new impression of this old world, the wonderful impression which a wilderness lake gives at the moment of discovery, but never again afterward. [[242]]As you emerge from cover of the woods, the pond seems to awaken like a sleeper. See, it returns your gaze, and on its quiet face is a look of surprise that you are here. Enjoy that first awakening look; for there is more of wisdom and pleasure in it, believe me, than in hurrying forth blindly intent on making a map or catching a trout, or doing something else that calls for sight to the neglect of insight. All sciences, including chartography and angling, can easily be learned by any man; but understanding is a gift of God, and it comes only to those who keep their hearts open.
Your own nature is here your best guide, and it shows you a surprising thing: that your old habitual impressions of the world have suddenly become novel and strange, as if this smiling landscape were but just created, and you were the first to look with seeing eyes upon the glory of it. It tells you, further, if you listen to its voice, that creation is all like this, under necessity to be beautiful, and that the beauty is still as delightful as when the evening and the morning were the first day. This dance of water, this rain of light, this shimmer of air, this upspringing of trees, this blue heaven bending over all—no artist ever painted such things; no poet ever sang or could sing them. Like a mother’s infinite tenderness, they await your appreciation, your silence, your [[243]]love; but they hide from your description in words or pigments.
Finally, in the lowest of whispers, your nature tells you that the most impressive and still most natural thing in this quiet scene is the conscious life that broods silently over it. As the little pond seems to awaken, to be alive and sentient, so also does that noble tree yonder when you view it for the first time, or that delicate orchid wafting its fragrance over the lonely bog. Each reflects something greater than itself, and it is that greater “something” which appeals to you when you enter the solitude. Your impressions here are those of the first man, a man who found many beautiful things in a garden, and God walking among them in the cool of the day. Call the brooding life God or the Infinite or the Unknown or the Great Spirit or the Great Mystery—what you will; the simple fact is that you have an impression of a living Being, who first speaks to you in terms of personality that you understand.
So much, and more, of eternal understanding you may have if you but tarry a moment under these larches with an open mind. Then, when you have honored your first impression, which will abide with you always, you may trace out the physical features of my pond at leisure. Just here it is not very wide; your eye easily overlooks it to rest [[244]]with pleasure on a great mound of moss, colored as no garden of flowers was ever colored, swelling above the bog on the farther shore. On either hand the water sparkles wider away, disappearing around a bend with an invitation to come and see. To the left it ends in velvety shadow under a bank of evergreen; to the right it seems to merge into the level shore, where shadow melts with substance in a belt of blended colors. A few yards back from the shore groups of young larches lift their misty-green foliage above the caribou moss; they seem not to be rooted deep in the earth, but to be all standing on tiptoe, as if to look over the brim of my pond and see their own reflections. Everywhere between these larch groups are shadowy corridors; and in one of them your eye is caught by a spot of bright orange. The spot moves, disappears, flashes out again from the misty green, and a deer steps forth to complete the wilderness picture with the grace of life.
Such is my pond, hidden away in the heart of a caribou bog, which is itself well hidden in dense forest. Before I found it the wild ducks had made it a summer home from time immemorial; and now, since I disturb it no more, it is possessed in peace by a family of beavers; yet I still think of it as mine, not by grace of any artificial law or deed, but by the more ancient right of possession [[245]]and enjoyment. A hundred lakes by which I have tented are greater or more splendid; but the first charm of any wilderness scene is its solitude, and on these greater lakes the impression of solitude may be broken by the flash of a paddle-blade in the sun, or the chuck of an ax under the twilight, or the gleam of a camp-fire through the darkness. But here on my pond you may know how Adam felt when he looked abroad: no raft has ever ruffled its surface; no ax-stroke or moan of smitten tree has ever disturbed its quiet; no camp-fire has ever gleamed on its waters. Its solitude is still that of the first day; and it has no name, save for the Indian word that came unbidden at the moment of finding it, like another Sleeping Beauty, in the woods.
Do you ask how I came to find my pond? Not by searching, but rather by the odd chance of being myself lost. I had gone astray one afternoon, and was pushing through some black growth when an alarm rose near at hand. A deer whistled loudly, crying “Heu! heu! heu!” as he jumped away, and on the heels of his cry came a quacking of flushed ducks.
Till that moment I thought I knew where I was; but the quacking brought doubt, and then bewilderment. If a duck tells you anything in the woods, he tells you of water, plenty of it; but the [[246]]map showed no body of water nearer than Big Pine Pond, which I had fished that day, and which should be three or four miles behind me. Turning in the direction of the alarm, I soon broke out of the cover upon a caribou bog, a mysterious expanse never before suspected in that region, and before me was the gleam of water in the sunshine. “A pond, a new one, and what a beauty!” I thought with elation, as I caught its awakening look and feasted my eyes on its glory of color. Then I gave it an Indian name and hurried away; for I was surely off my course, and the hour was late for lingering in strange woods. Somewhere to the west of me was the home lake; so westward I headed, making a return-compass of bent twigs, till I set my feet in a branch of the old logging-road. And that chance trail is the one I have ever since followed.
[[247]]
XI
Woodsy Impressions
Next morning I returned to explore my find at leisure. One part of that exploration was to go completely around the bog, to learn its guiding landmarks and compass-bearings; but an earlier and better part was to sit quietly beside my pond to hear whatever it might have to say to me. If that last sounds fanciful, remember that many things are voiceless in this world, but few are wholly dumb. Of the numberless ponds that brighten the northern wilderness, some were made by beavers, others by flood or glacier or earthquake, and no two of them tell the same story or make the same impression. They are like so [[248]]many unspoiled Indians, whom we regard from a distance as being mysteriously alike, but who have different traditions, ideals, personalities, and even different languages.
I know not what the spell of any lonely place may be when you make yourself part of it; I only know that it stirs one strangely, like the flute note of a wood-thrush or a song without words. Though I never met with an adventure on my little pond, never cast a fly to learn whether any trout lurked in its waters, never thought of firing a shot at its abundant game, yet season after season I returned to it expectantly, and went away satisfied. Such a pond has a charm of its own, a spell which our forebears sought to express in terms of nymphs or puckwudgies or water-sprites. It grows a better crop than trout, attracts a finer game than deer or water-fowl, and you can seldom visit it without learning something new about your natural self or the wood folk or the friendly universe.
Thus, it happens on a day when you are waiting beside your pond, or wending your way to it, that a moose or a fox or a dainty grouse appears unexpectedly near you; and instantly, without thought or motive, you “freeze” in your tracks or, if you are not seen, shrink deeper into the shadow for concealment. The action is natural, involuntary, instinctive, precisely like the action of a [[249]]young deer under similar circumstances; but when it is over you understand it, and smile at finding yourself becoming more and more like other natural creatures,—going softly, that is, making yourself inconspicuous without trying or knowing how, and having no thought of harm to any bird or beast, but only of watching him or gauging his course while remaining yourself unseen. Only by some such method can you learn anything worth knowing about a wild animal: books describe, naturalists classify and sportsmen kill him; but to understand him you must be a sharer of his quiet ways.
Comes another day, a day when you are in love with solitude itself, when you learn with surprise that a man is never lonely when alone in the woods; that ideals may be quite as companionable as folks; and that around you in a goodly company are beauty, peace, spacious freedom and harmonious thoughts, with a hint also, to some minds, of angels and ministers of grace. The Attendant Spirit of “Comus,” the Ariel of “The Tempest,” the good fairies of all folk,—these are never understood in the town, nor in the woods unless you enter them alone.
At a later time, and with a thrill of great wonder, you may discover the meaning of silence, and of the ancient myth of a lovely goddess of silence; not the dead silence of a dungeon, which may roar [[250]]in a man’s ears till it deafens him or drives him mad, but the exquisite living silence of nature, a silence which at any moment may break into an elfin ringing of bells, or into a faintly echoing sound of melody, as if stars or unseen beings were singing far away.
This impression of melody is often real, not illusory, and may be explained by the impact of air-currents on resonant shells of wood, hundreds of which fall to humming with the voice of ’cellos and wind-harps; but there is another experience of the solitude, more subtle but none the less real, for which only the psychologist will venture to give an accounting. Once in a season, perhaps, comes an hour when, no matter what your plans or desires may be, your mind seems intent on some unrelated affair of its own. As you hurry over the trail, you may be thinking of catching a trout or stalking a buck or building a camp or getting to windward of a corporation; meanwhile your subconscious mind, disdaining your will or your worry, is busily making pictures of whatever attractive thing it sees,—radiant little pictures, sunshiny or wind-swept, which shall be reproduced for your pleasure long after the important matters which then occupied you are clean forgotten.
Here is the story of one such picture, a reflection, no doubt, of the primitive trait or quality called [[251]]place-memory, which enables certain animals or savages to recognize any spot on which their eyes have once rested.
One late afternoon, years after I had found my pond, I crossed the mountain from distant Ragged Lake, heading for the home lake by a new route. There was no trail; but near the foot of the western slope of the hills I picked up an old lumber road which seemed to lead in the right direction. For a time all went well, and confidently; but when the road dipped into an immense hollow, and there showed signs of petering out, I followed it with increasing doubt, not knowing where I might come out of the woods or be forced to spend the night. As I circled through a swale, having left the road to avoid a press of alders that filled it, an ash-tree lifted its glossy head above a thicket with a cheery “Well met again, pilgrim! Whither away now?”
It was a surprising hail in that wild place, suggestive of dreams or sleep-walking; but under the illusion was a grain of reality which brought me to an instant halt. After passing under thousands of silent trees all day, suddenly here was one speaking to me. And not only that, but wearing a familiar look, like a face which smiles its recognition of you while you try in vain to place it. Where, when had I seen that tree before? No, [[252]]impossible! I had never before entered this part of the vast forest. Yet I must have seen it somewhere, or it could not now stir a familiar memory. Nonsense! just a trick of the imagination. I must hurry on. Thus my thoughts ran, like a circling hare; and all the while the ash-tree seemed to be smiling at my perplexity.
The man who ignores such a hint has much to learn about woodcraft, which is largely a subconscious art; so I sat down to smoke a council-pipe with myself and the ash-tree over the matter. No sooner was the mind left to its own unhampered way than it began to piece bits of a puzzle-picture deftly together; and when the picture was complete I knew exactly where I was, and where I might quickly find a familiar trail. Eight years before, in an idle hour when nothing stirred on my pond, I had explored a mile or so beyond the bog to the south, only to find a swampy, desolate country without a trail or conspicuous landmark of any kind. It was while I passed through this waste, seeking nothing in particular and returning to my pond, that the mind took its snapshot of a certain tree, and preserved the picture so carefully, so minutely, that years later the original was instantly recognized. Many similar ash-trees grew on that flat, each with its glossy crown and its gray shaft flecked by dark-green moss; what [[253]]there was in this one to attract me, what outward grace or inward tree-sprite, I have not yet found out.
His massive head thrust forward as he tried to penetrate the far distance with his near-sighted eyes.
[[253]]
Another subconscious record seems to have been made for beauty alone, with its consequent pleasure, rather than for utility. As I watched my pond one summer morning, intent on learning what attracted so many deer to its shores, the mind apparently chose its own moment for making a perfect picture, a masterpiece, which should hang in its woodsy frame on my mental wall forever. The sky was wondrously clear, the water dancing, the air laden with the fragrance of peat and sweet-scented grass. Deer were slow in coming that morning, and meanwhile nothing of consequence stirred on my pond; but there was still abundant satisfaction in the brilliant dragon-flies that balanced on bending reeds, or in the brood of wild ducks that came bobbing out like young mischief—makers from a hidden bogan, or even in the face of the pond itself, as it brightened under a gleam of sunshine or frowned at a passing cloud or broke into a laugh at the touch of a cat’s-paw wind. Suddenly all these pleasant minor matters were brushed aside when a bush quivered and held still on the farther shore.
All morning the bushes had been quivering, showing the silvery side of their leaves to every [[254]]breeze; but now their motion spoke of life, and spoke truly, for out from under the smitten bilberries came a bear to stand alert in the open. The fore part of his body was lifted up as he planted his paws on a tussock; his massive head was thrust forward as he tried to penetrate the far distance with his near-sighted eyes. He was not suspicious, not a bit; his nose held steady as a pointing dog’s, instead of rocking up and down, as it does when a bear tries to steal a message from the air. A moment he poised there, a statue of ebony against the crimson moss; then he leaped a bogan with surprising agility, and came at his easy, shuffling gait around a bend of the shore. Opposite me he sat down to cock his nose at the sky, twisting his head as he followed the motion of something above him, which I could not see,—a hornet, perhaps, or a troublesome fly that persisted in buzzing about his ears. Twice he struck quickly with a paw, apparently missing the lively thing overhead; for he jumped up, rushed ahead violently and spun around on the pivot of his toes. Then he settled soberly to his flat-footed shuffle once more, and disappeared in a clump of larches, which seemed to open a door for him as he drew near.
For me that little comedy was never repeated, though I saw many another on dark days or bright; [[255]]and the last time I visited my pond I beheld it sadly altered, its beauty vanished, its shores flooded, its green trees stark and dead. Unknown to me, however, the mind had made its photographic record, and always I see my pond, as on that perfect day, in its setting of misty-green larches and crimson bog. Again its quiet face changes, like a human face at pleasant thoughts, and over it comes to me the odor of sweet-scented grass. The sunshine brightens it; the clouds shadow it; brilliant dragon-flies play among its bending reeds; the same brood of ducklings glides in or out from bogan to grassy bogan; and forever the bear, big and glossy black, goes shuffling along the farther shore.
[[256]]
XII
Larch-trees and Deer
One of the subtler charms of my pond, a thing felt rather than seen, was a certain air of secrecy which seldom left it. In every wilderness lake lurks a mystery of some kind, which you cannot hope to penetrate,—a sense of measureless years, of primal far-off things, of uncouth creatures dead and gone that haunted its banks before the infancy of man; but on this little pond, with its sunny waters and open shore, the mystery was always pleasant, and at times provoking, as if it might be the place where an end of the rainbow rested.
Though small enough to give one a sense of possession (one can never feel that he owns a big [[257]]lake, or anything else which gives an impression of grandeur or sublimity), my pond had a mischievous way of hinting, when you were most comfortable, that it was hiding a secret; that it might show you, if it would, a much better scene than that you looked upon. It was shaped somewhat like an immense pair of spectacles, having two lobes that were flashing bright, with a narrow band of darker water between; and, what with its bending shores or intervening larches, you could never see the whole of it from any one place. So, like eyes that hide their subtlest lights of whim or fancy under glasses, it often seemed to be holding something in reserve, something which it would not reveal unless you searched for it. After watching awhile from one beautiful or restful spot, you began to feel or imagine that some comedy was passing unseen on the other half of the pond; and though you resisted the feeling at first, sooner or later you crept through the screen of larches to know if it were true.
On every side of the pond save one, where a bank of evergreen made velvet shadows intermingled with spots of heavenly blue, the shores were thickly spread with mosses, which began to color gloriously in midsummer, the colors deepening as the season waned, till the reflecting water appeared as the glimmering center of a gorgeous [[258]]Oriental rug. Along the edges of this rug, as a ragged fringe, stood groups of larches in irregular order,—little fairylike larches that bore their crown of leaves not as other trees bear them, heavily, but as a floating mist or nebula of sage green. Like New England ladies of a past age they seemed, each wearing a precious lace shawl which gave an air of daintiness to their sterling worth. When the time came for the leaves to fall, instead of rustling down to earth with a sound of winter, mournfully, they would scamper away on a merry wind, mingling their fragrance with that of the ripened grass; and then the twigs appeared plainly for the first time, with a little knot or twist in every twig, like toil-worn fingers that the lace had concealed.
Here or there amid this delicate new growth towered the ruin of a mighty tamarack, or ship-knee larch, such as men sought in the old clipper-ship days when they needed timbers lighter than oak, and even tougher to resist the pressure of the gale or the waves’ buffeting. Once, before the shipmen penetrated thus far into the wilderness, the tamaracks stood here in noble array, their heads under clouds, beckoning hungry caribou to feed from the lichens that streamed from their broad arms above the drifted snow; now most of them are under the moss, which covered them [[259]]tenderly when they fell. The few remaining ones stand as watch-towers for the hawks and eagles; their broken branches make strange sepia drawings of dragon-knots and hooked beaks on the blue sky. A tiny moth killed all these great larches; the caribou moved northward, leaving the country, and the deer moved in to take possession.
This and many other stories of the past my little pond told me, as I watched from its shores or followed the game-trails that were spread like a net about its edges. Back in the woods these trails wandered about in devious fashion, seeking good browse or easy traveling; while here or there a faint outgoing branch offered to lead you, if your eyes were keen, to the distant ridge where a big buck had his daily loafing-place. On the bog the trails went more circumspectly, uniting at certain places in a single deep path, a veritable path of ages, which was the only path that might safely be followed by any creature with more weight than a fox. The moment you ventured away from it the ground began to shiver, to quake alarmingly, to sink down beneath your feet. Only a thin mat of roots kept you afloat; the roots might anywhere part and drop you into black bottomless ooze, and close forever over your head. A queer place, one might think, for heavy beasts to gather, and so it was; but the old caribou-trails [[260]]or new deer-paths offered every one of them safe footing.
At first these game-trails puzzled me completely, being so many and so pointless. That they were in constant use was evident from the footprints in them, which were renewed almost every morning; yet I never once saw a deer approach the water to drink or feed. Something else attracted them; a highway from one feeding-ground to another, it might be, or the wider outlook which brings deer and caribou out of their dim woods to sightly places; but there was no certainty in the matter until the animals themselves revealed the secret. One day, when a young buck passed my hiding-place as if he were going somewhere, I followed him to the upper or southern end of the pond. There he joined four other deer, which were very busy about a certain spot, half hidden by low bushes, a couple of hundred yards back from the shore. And there they stayed, apparently eating or drinking, for a full half-hour or more.
When the deer were gone away, I went over and found a huge spring, to which converged a dozen deep trails. Like the hub of an immense wheel it seemed: the radiating paths were the spokes, and somewhere beyond the horizon was the unseen rim. From the depths of the spring came a surprising [[261]]volume of clear, coffee-colored water, bubbling over joyously as it leaped from the dark earth into the light, and then stealing quietly away under bending grasses to keep my pond brim full. Around the spring the earth was pitted by the feet of deer, and everywhere about its edges were holes lapped in the peat by eager tongues. Here, beyond a doubt, was what called so many animals to my pond,—a mineral spring or salt-lick, such as we read about in stories of pioneer days, when game was everywhere abundant, but such as one now rarely finds.
After that happy discovery I shifted my blind to another larch with low-drooping branches, beneath which one might rest comfortably and look out through a screen of lace upon a gathering of the deer. They are creatures of habit as well as of freedom; and one of their habits is to rest at regular intervals, the hours being hard to forecast, since they vary not only with the season of lengthening or shortening days, but also each month with the changes of the moon. Thus, when the moon fulls and weather is clear, deer are abroad most of the night. At dawn they seek their day-beds, instinctively removing far from where they have left their scent in feeding; and during the day they are apt to remain hidden save for one brief hour, when they take a comforting [[262]]bite here or there, giving the impression that they eat now from habit rather than from hunger. As the moon wanes they change their hours to take advantage of its shining; and on the “dark of the moon” they browse only in the early part of the night, then rest many hours, and have two periods of feeding or roaming the next day.
Such seems to be the rule in the North, with plenty of exceptions to keep one guessing,—as in the November mating-season, when bucks are afoot at all hours; or during a severe storm, which keeps deer and all other wild animals close in their coverts.
Because of this regularity of habit at irregular hours, the only certainty about the salt-lick was that the animals would come if one waited long enough. As I watched expectantly from my larch bower, the morning shadows might creep up to me, halt, and lengthen away on the other side, while not a deer showed himself in the open. Then there would be a stir in the distant larches, a flash of bright color; a doe would emerge from one of the game-trails, hastening her springy steps as she neared the spring. As my eyes followed her, noting with pleasure her graceful poses, her unwearied alertness, her frequent turning of the head to one distant spot in the woods where she had left her fawn, there would come another [[263]]flash of color from another trail, then two or three in a flecking of light and shadow, till half a dozen or more deer were gathered at the lick, some lapping the mud eagerly, others sipping, sipping, as if they could never have enough of the water. After a time they would slip away as they had come, singly or in groups; the spring would be deserted, and one could never tell how many hours or days might pass before another company began to gather.
However eager for salt they might be, the deer came or went in that mysteriously silent way of theirs, appearing without warning in one trail, or vanishing down another without a sound to mark their passing. Now and then, however, especially if one watched at the exquisite twilight hour, a very different entrance might be staged on the lonely bog,—a gay, prancing “here I come: get out of the way” kind of entrance, which made one glad he had stayed to witness it. On the slope of the nearest ridge your eye would catch an abrupt motion, the upward surge of a bough or the spring-back of a smitten bush; presently to your ears would come a rapid thudding of earth, or a sqush, sqush, sqush of water; the larches would burst open and a buck leap forth, flourishing broad antlers or kicking up mad heels as he went gamboling down the game-trail. If [[264]]other deer were at the spring, they would throw up their heads, set their ears at the dancing buck, take a last quick sip from the spring, and move aside as he jumped in to muzzle the mud as if famished. For it was the mud rather than the water which first claimed his attention, no doubt because it held more of the magic salt. He often gave the impression, as he approached in high feather, that he had been tasting the stuff in anticipation and could hardly wait to get his tongue into it.
The first time I saw that frisky performance I went over to taste the mud for myself, but found little to distinguish it from the mud of any other peat-bog. The water from the spring was wholesome, with a faint taste of something I could not name; and I drank it repeatedly without learning its secret. That it held a charm of some kind, which chemistry might reveal, was evident from the fact that deer came from miles around to enjoy its flavor. Some of the trails could be traced clear across the bog to distant ridges and a broken country beyond; and in following these trails, to learn what creatures used them and where they came from, I repeatedly came upon a deer asleep in his day-bed. Whether the animals couched here before drinking at the spring, or after drinking, or “just by happentry” I could not tell. [[265]]
Once the sleeper was a buck with noble antlers. He was resting beside a great log on the edge of an opening, half surrounded by dense fir thickets. I speak of him as asleep; but that is mere habit of speech or poverty of language. Of a score of wild birds or beasts that I have found “asleep” in the woods, not one seemed to lose touch with the waking world even for an instant. The buck’s eyelids were blinking, his head nodding heavily; yet all the while his feet were curled in readiness for an instant jump; and somehow those expressive feet gave the impression of being as wide awake as a squirrel. Occasionally as I watched him, fascinated by the rare sight, his head would drop almost to the ground, only to be jerked up with an air of immense surprise; then the sleepy fellow would stare in a filmy, unseeing, “who said I was asleep” kind of way at a little tree that stood in the opening. The stare would end with a slow closing of the eyelids, and in a moment he would be nodding again.
[[266]]
XIII
Black Mallards
Next to the deer, the wild ducks were the chief attraction of my pond. Indeed, they might well be placed first, since they were always at home there, and much of the time engaged in one or another of the little comedies that make ducks the most amusing of all birds. Eight summers in succession, and again after an interval of two years, I found my pond occupied by a pair of black mallards with their brood; and I fancied, since migratory birds return to the place of their birth, and their nestlings after them, that one of the pair was the lineal descendant of ducks that had held the place in undisputed possession for tens of thousands of years. Here was a succession, [[267]]modest like all true nobility, which made the proud family trees of Mayflower folk or English kings or Norman barons look like young berry-bushes in the shade of a towering pine.
Until late midsummer the family had the pond all to themselves. Never a stranger-duck appeared to share or challenge their heritage; while day after day the mother watched over the little brood as they fed or played or learned the wild-duck signals. Like our dogs, every manner of beast or bird has its own tribal ways or customs, some of which do not appear in the young until they begin to roam abroad or to mingle with their kind. So, as I watched the brood emerge from down to pin-feathers, there would come a red-letter day when two of them, meeting as they rounded a grassy point, would raise their wings as if in salutation; and a later day when, the pin-feathers having grown to fair plumage, their young cheepings or whistlings would change to a decided quack.
Thereafter their talk was endlessly entertaining, if one took the trouble to creep near enough to appreciate its modulations, expressive of every emotion between drowsiness and tense alarm; for it cannot be heard, except as a meaningless sound, beyond a few yards. The little hen-ducks got on famously, having the mother’s quacking as a [[268]]model; but male ducks cannot or will not learn to quack, and since a male voice was rarely heard on the pond at this season, each little drake was a law unto himself, and made a brave show of his liberty. Climbing on a tussock, as if for more room, he would stretch his wings, make odd motions with his neck, and finally pump out a funny wheekle, wheekle, as if he had swallowed a whistle.
Meanwhile the old drake and father of the family was seldom about; only two or three times did I see him enter the pond, stay a brief while, and then wing away over the tree-tops in the direction of a larger lake, some three miles to the eastward. On that lake there was never a brood of young ducks, so far as I could learn; but when trout-fishing there I often surprised the drake, at times taking precious care of his own skin in solitude, again clubbing sociably with three or four other drakes, who had run away each from a family and the cares thereof on some other lonely pond.
As the summer waned, a new sound of quacking, joyous and exultant, would greet me when I drew near my pond. Creeping to my blind under the larches, I would find a second brood making merry acquaintance with the family I had watched over; then a third and a fourth company of strangers, as young ducks of all that region began [[269]]to traffic about in preparation for the autumn flight. A little later the flocks fairly reveled in sociability, gathering here or there with increasing numbers, till on a late-September day I might find my pond deserted, the owners being on a visit elsewhere, or I might catch breath at sight of so many ducks that I could not accurately count them or distinguish one brood from another.
At such a time my little pond seemed to awaken, to shed its silence like a garment, to put on its most animated expression, as at a happy festival or family reunion. The air was never still from the gabble of meeting groups (probably all more or less related), or from the resounding quank, quank, quank of some old gossip who went about proclaiming her opinion to the whole company. Everywhere the still water was broken into undulating wakes as the drakes swept grandly over it, with that rhythmic, forward-and-back motion of their heads which is like duck poetry,—a motion that is not seen when the birds are feeding, but only when they are well satisfied with themselves or their audience. Through the shadows under the bank glided knots or ribbons of young birds which had not yet quite satisfied their appetites, some exploring every crevice for ripened seeds, others tip-tilting their tails to the blue sky as they probed the bottom for water-bugs and other titbits. [[270]]In an open space a solitary hen-duck bobbed and teetered ecstatically, dipping the fore part of her body under, then heaving it up quickly so as to send the cleansing water in a foamy wave over her back and wings. Here or there on a tussock stood a quiet group of the splendid birds, oiling their glossy feathers, setting a wing-cover just right, or adding some other last touch to an elaborate toilet before settling down for a nap.
The glassy water reflected every form, color, motion of these untroubled ducks as in a glass, doubling the graceful effect. Around them stretched the gloriously colored bog; and beyond the bog were the nebulous-green larches, the somber black growth and the lifting hills, on which autumn had laid its golden touch. Truly a beautiful sight, a sight to make the heart of hunter or naturalist tremble with expectancy as he fingered his gun. I have known that trembling, that expectancy; but there was greater pleasure, perhaps greater freedom also, in leaving the happy comedy undisturbed.
At such a time my pond seemed to awaken and shed its silence like a garment.
[[270]]
Because of its solitude, its utter wildness, my pond seemed to be the chosen resting-place of the flocks on an autumn day (they feed or travel mostly by night), and perhaps for the same reason the ducks that frequented it were among the wildest creatures I have ever tried to stalk. A [[271]]black mallard is not an easy bird to outwit at any time or place; but here some magic mirror or sounding-board seemed to supplement his natural eyes or ears. The slightest unnatural voice or appearance, the snap of a twig or the quiver of a leaf or the glimpse of a face in the larches, would send a flock away on the instant; and sometimes, when I was sure no sound or motion of mine had broken the perfect quiet, they would take wing in such incomprehensible fashion as to leave me wondering what extra sense had warned them of danger.
Several times in the course of a summer, when I wanted to observe the little duck family more nearly, or to learn the meaning of some queer play that I could not understand from a distance, I would creep out of the larches unseen, worming my way along a sunken deer-path, and stopping whenever heads were turned in my direction. One might think it an easy matter to approach any game by such methods; yet almost invariably, before I could be safe behind a bush or a tuft of grass at the water’s edge, the old mother-duck would become uneasy, like a deer that catches a vague hint of you floating far down the wind. That she could not see or hear me was certain; that she could not smell me I had repeatedly proved; nevertheless, after searching the [[272]]shores narrowly she would stretch her neck straight up from the water, as if attentive to some wireless message in the air.
A wild duck does not take that alert attitude unless she is suspicious; and a curious thing was, that though the mother was silent, uttering never a word, the young would crouch and remain motionless wherever they happened to be. Suddenly, as if certain of danger but unable to locate it, the mother would spring aloft to go sweeping in wide circles over the bog. She seemed to know it by heart, every pool and bump and shadow of it; and when her keen eyes picked up an unfamiliar shadow on a certain deer-path she would come at it with a rush, whirling over it in an upward-climbing spiral till she became sure of me, as of something out of place, when she would speed away with a warning note over the tree-tops. If the young were strong of wing, they would follow her swiftly, giving wide berth to the deer-path as if she had told them beware of it; but if they did not yet trust themselves in the air, they would skulk away, their heads down close to the water, and hide in one of the grassy bogans of the pond, where because of the quaking shore it was impossible to come near them.
Once, when the mother left in this way, I waited till the ducklings had been some minutes hidden [[273]]before creeping back to my blind in the larches. An hour or more passed in the timeless quiet; while the water became as glass under the afternoon sun, and a deer moved near the hidden brood without flushing them or even bringing a head up where I could see it. Then the mother returned, calling as she came; and the first thing she did was to circle warily over the same deer-path, stretching her neck down for a close inspection. “Aha! that thing is gone, but where?” she said in every line and motion of her inquisitive head or pulsating wings, as she sped away to find the answer.
Twice she circled the bog, her eyes searching every cranny and shadow of it. From her high flight she slanted straight down and pitched fair in the middle of the pond, where for some moments she sat motionless, her head up, looking, listening,—a perfect image of alertness in the midst of wildness. Satisfied at last that no trouble was near, she turned to the shore with a low call; and out of the bogan pell-mell rushed the little ones, splashing, cheeping, half lifting themselves with their tiny wings as they scurried over the water to join the mother. For a full hour I had kept my glasses almost continuously on that bogan; then with divided attention I cast expectant glances at it when I heard the mother’s incoming note, the [[274]]whish of her wings as she circled the bog and the splash as she took the water; but not till the right signal came did I see a motion or a sign of life from the hidden brood.
The pond was shaped, as we have noticed, like a pair of spectacles; and a favorite place for the autumn flock to rest or preen or sleep was at the bend between the two lobes. Down into that bend ran a screen of alder-bushes, the only good cover between woods and water on the entire pond; and it was so dense that a cat could hardly have crept through it without making a disturbance. That was one reason, I suppose, why the ducks felt safe at the outer end of the tangle: they could see everything in front or on either side, and hear anything that moved behind them.
One day, when the shore at this bend was freshly starred by ducks’ feet and littered with feathers, showing that a large flock had just left the roost, I began at the fringe of larches and cut a passageway, a regular beaver’s tunnel, down the whole length of the alder run, making an end in a point of grass, where the water came close on three sides. One had to consider only the birds’ keen ears, the alder screen being so thick that not even a duck’s eye could penetrate it; therefore I smoothed the way most carefully, leaving no stick below to crack under my weight, and no [[275]]branch reaching down to rustle or quiver as I crawled beneath it. When the tunnel was well finished I left the pond to its solitude a few days, thinking that the birds would surely notice some telltale sign of my work, some fresh-cut stick or wilted bough that my eyes had overlooked, and be wary of the alders for a little time.
And why such pains to get near a bird, you ask, since one might better observe or shoot him from a comfortable distance? Oh, just a notion of mine, an odd notion, which can hardly be appreciated till one has proved it in the open. As you can seldom “feel” the quality of a stranger while he remains even a few yards away, so with any wild bird or beast: there is an impression arising from nearness, from contact, which cannot be had in any other way; and that swift impression, which is both physical and mental, a judgment as it were of the entire nature, is often more illuminating than hours of ordinary observation or speculation.
Such an impression is not new or strange, or even modernly psychological. On the contrary, it is the simplest matter in the world of sense, I think, and perhaps also the surest. Most animals have a significant way of touching their noses to one of their own kind at meeting; not to smell him, as we imagine (they can smell him, or even [[276]]his tracks, at a distance), but in order to receive a more intimate or convincing message than the sense of smell can furnish. Likewise, a man naturally pats the head of a dog, or fingers an object after minutely scanning it with his eyes; and in this instinctive action is the ancient touch of recognition. Touch is the oldest and most universal of the bodily senses, sight, smell, taste and hearing being later specializations thereof; by it the living creature first became aware of a world outside of self; and to it we all return for verification of our sense impressions. Therefore it happens most naturally that, despite warning signs or penalties, thoughtless men will put their hands into the bear or monkey cage, where animals are no longer natural or to be trusted, and our children must be forever lectured, or sometimes spanked, for handling things which they have been told to let alone.
Besides, when one is very near a strange bird or beast, one becomes vaguely conscious of an extra sense at work,—that real but uncatalogued sense-of-presence (to coin a name for it) which makes two persons in a room aware of each other at every instant, even while both are absorbed in quiet work or reading. The “feel” of the same room when one occupies it alone is very different; and the difference may help to explain why gregarious [[277]]animals are uncomfortable, uneasy, unless they are near their own kind,—near enough, that is, not simply to hear or see them but to feel their bodily presence. A herd-animal is always restless, and often sickens, if his herd is not close about him. The same mysterious sense (mysterious to us, because we do not yet know the organ through which it works) often warns the solitary man in the woods or in the darkness that some living creature is near him, at a moment when his eyes or ears are powerless to verify his impression.
But that is another and more subtle matter, familiar enough to a few sensitive persons and natural woodsmen, but impossible of demonstration to others; you cannot explain color to a man born blind. The simple answer is, that for my own satisfaction I wanted to touch one of the wary birds of my pond, as I had before touched eagle and crow, bear and deer, and many another wild creature in his native woods. Such was the notion. In other places I had several times tried to indulge it; but save in one instance, when I found a winter flock weakened by hunger, I had never laid my hand fairly on a black mallard when he had the free use of his wits and wings.
When I returned to my pond, and from a distance swept my glasses over it, the water was alive with ducks; never before had I seen so many [[278]]there at one time. Single large birds, the drakes undoubtedly, were moving leisurely over the open spaces. Groups of five or six, each a brood from some neighboring pond, were gliding in an exploring kind of way under the banks or through the weed-beds; and scattered along the shore at the end of the alder run were wisps or companies of the birds, all preening or dozing with an air of complete security. Here at last was my chance, my perfect chance, I told myself, as I carefully marked one brood standing at the tip of the grassy point where my tunnel ended.
More carefully than ever I stalked a bear, I circled through the black growth, crept under the fringe of larches, and entered the alder run unobserved. Inch by inch I wormed along the secret passageway, flat to the ground, not once raising my head, hardly daring to pull a full breath, till, just as I emerged from the alder shade into the grass, a gamy scent in my nose and a low gabble in my ears told me that I was almost near enough, that the birds were all around me, and that for the rest of the way I must move as a shadow.
From under my hat-brim I located the gabblers, a large family of black mallards outside the fringe of grass on my left. They were abreast of me, not more than five or six feet away. I had not marked these birds when I began my stalk; they [[279]]were hidden in a tiny cove or bend of the shore, and had it not been for their voices I would surely have crept past without seeing them. At the mouth of the cove was a single tussock, on which stood the mother-duck, wavering between dreams and watchfulness as the sunshine poured full upon her, making her very sleepy. On the bare earth beneath her the others were getting ready for a nap, so near that I could see every motion, the settling of a head, the blink of an eyelid. Occasionally through the tangle of grass stems came the penetrating gleam of their eyes,—marvelously bright eyes, alert and intelligent.
For several minutes I held motionless, still flat to the ground, listening to the sleepy talk, admiring the mottled-brown plumage of a breast or the bar of brilliant color drawn athwart a sooty wing. All the while my nose was trying to get in a warning word, telling me to give heed that the ducky odor which flowed in waves over the whole point was different from this strong reek, as of a disturbed nest, in the near-by grass; but my eyes were so occupied that I paid no attention to other senses. As the duck on the tussock at last settled down to sleep and I worked my toes into the earth for a noiseless push forward, there was a slight but startling motion almost at my shoulder. A neck was raised and twisted sleepily, as if to get [[280]]the kink out of it; and the thrill of success ran over me as I made out another and nearer group of ducks. They were under the bank and the bending grass, where I had completely overlooked them. Every one was within reach; and every one I could see had his head drawn in or tucked away under his wing.
Slowly my left hand stole toward them, creeping forward in the deliberate fashion of a measuring-worm, first the fingers stretched, then the knuckles raised, then out with the fingers again. It would have been very easy to stroke or to catch one of the birds by a swift motion; but that was not what I wanted, and would have instantly spoiled the whole comedy. For the right effect, the hand must rest upon a duck before he was aware of it, so quietly that at first he would give his attention to the hand itself, not to the thing it came from. Then he would probably give it a questioning peck, examine it curiously, and finally grow indifferent to it, as other birds had done when I touched them from hiding. But here my head was too close to the ground, and my body too cramped for easy action. As my hand reached the edge of the bank, just over an unconscious duck, it ran into a tuft of saw-grass, which cut my fingers and rustled dangerously. To clear this obstruction I drew back slightly, lifted up a grain; and [[281]]in my other ear, which was turned away, a resonant voice cried Quock! with a challenge that broke the tension like a pistol-shot.
Involuntarily I turned my head, just when I should have held most still; and so I lost my chance. There, at arm’s-length on the other side of the point, a wild-eyed duck was looking over the bank, her neck stretched like a taut string, her olive-colored bill pointing straight at me. She never said another word, and had no need to repeat her challenge. All over the point and along the shore necks were stretched up from the grass; a dozen alert forms rose like sentinels from as many tussocks, and forty pairs of keen eyes were every one searching the spot at which the old hen-duck pointed her accusation.
For a small moment that tableau lasted, without a sound, without a motion; while one was conscious only of the tense necks, the pointing bills, the gleaming little eyes, each with its diamond-point of light; and then the old duck took wing. She did not even crouch to jump, so far as I could follow her motion; she simply went into the air like a rocket, shooting aloft as if hurled from a spring. As she rose, there was an answering rush of wings, whoosh! in my very ears, a surge as of smitten water in the distance; and in the same fraction of an instant every duck to [[282]]the farthest ends of the pond was up and away in a wild tumult of quacking.
Only one of these birds had seen me, and that one probably had no notion of what she had glimpsed in the grass. It was a round thing with eyes, and it moved a second time—that was enough for the old hen-duck, and the others did not stop to ask any questions.
[[283]]
XIV
Memories
Two full years passed before I returned to my pond on a sunny September day, in my mind’s eye seeing it smile a welcome, hearing it cry, “Lo here! Lo there!” and planning, as I came down the silent trail, how I would accept all its invitations. First, the salt-lick must be spied out from a distance; and the examination would tell me whether to keep on down my own trail or, if the lick were occupied, to branch off by a certain game-path, which would lead me to the blind where I had so often watched the deer unseen. Next, I would have a restful look at a mound of moss swelling above the bog near a certain tamarack, which always showed the first [[284]]blush of crimson in midsummer, and which became in autumn like a gorgeous bed of Dutch tulips, only more wondrously colored. Then I would look into the doorway under the larches, where my bear had disappeared. I always picked that out from a hundred similar doorways to watch or question it a moment, as if at any time the green curtain might open to let the bear out. For a curious thing about all woodsmen is this: if they see a buck or a bear or even a fox enter a certain place, they must forever afterward stop to have another expectant look at it.
From the bear’s doorway my thoughts turned naturally to a little bogan of my pond, which was different from all the other bogans, because once a family of minks darted out of it and came dodging along the shore in my direction. Luckily I was close to the water at that moment. While the minks were out of sight under some bushes, I swung my feet over the bank and sat down in their path to wait for them.
In advance came the mother, looking rusty in her sunburnt summer coat, and she was evidently in a great hurry about something. The little ones, trailing out behind, were hard put to it to keep up the pace. She was fairly under me before she noticed a new scent in the air, which made her halt to look about for the meaning of it. Her neck [[285]]was lifted, weasel-fashion, to thrice its ordinary length; at the end of it her pointed head swung like a vane to the bank, to the pond, to the bank again; while her busy nose wiggled out its sharp questions. Probably she had no notion of man, never having met the creature; neither did she associate the motionless figure above her with life or danger. She passed directly over one of my shoes, halted with her paws raised against the other, and scampered on as if she had no use for such trifles.
Before the little ones arrived I half turned to meet them, spreading my feet so as to leave a narrow passageway between the heels; and over this, as a cover, rested my hand, making a shadowy runway such as minks like. When the kits entered it, sleek and glossy and half grown, I touched them lightly on the neck, feeling the soft brush of fur and the ripple of elastic muscles as one after another glided under my finger, with no more concern than if it had been one of the roots among which they were accustomed to creep. But when the last one came I blocked the runway by placing a hand squarely across it, stopping him short in great astonishment. He sniffed at the obstruction, and his nose was like a point of ice as it wandered over my palm. Then he tried a finger with his teeth, wriggled under it to follow his leader, and the whole family disappeared in a [[286]]twisting, snakelike procession around the next bend. These were wild animals, remember; and ounce for ounce there is no more “savage” beast in the woods than Cheokhes the mink.
As with birds or beasts, so also with the trees about my pond: somehow they seemed different from all other trees, perhaps because of more intimate association; for though all the cedars or hemlocks of a forest look alike to a stranger, no sooner do you spend days alone among them than you begin to have a curious feeling of individuality, of comradeship, of understanding even, as if they were not wholly dumb or insensate. It was inevitable, therefore, as I came down the trail, recalling this or that tree under which I had often passed or rested, that certain of them stood forth in memory as having given me pleasure or greeting in the lonely woods, just as certain faces emerge from the sea of faces in a crowd or a great audience of strangers, and instantly make one feel his kinship to humanity.
Foremost among these memorable trees was a great white-pine, to me the noblest of all forest growths, which stood on a knoll to westward of my pond, on the way to camp, and which always seemed to cry hail or farewell as I came or went. It had a stem to make one wonder, almost to make one reverent. Massive, soft-colored, finely reticulated [[287]]it was; wide as the span of a man’s arms, and rising near a hundred feet without knot or branch,—a glorious upspringing shaft, immensely strong, yet delicate in its poise as a lance in rest. From the top of the shaft rugged arms were stretched out above the tallest trees, and on these rested lightly as a cloud its crown of green. Like others that overtop their fellows, the old pine had paid the penalty of greatness. Whirlwinds that left lower trees untouched had stripped it of half its branches; lightning had leaped upon it from the clouds, leaving a spiral scar from crown to foot; but the wound which threatened its death was meanwhile its life, because the lumbermen, seeing the lightning’s mark, had passed on and left the pine in its solitary grandeur.
When I first saw that tree I changed the trail so as to pass beneath it; and thereafter it was like a living presence, benign and friendly, beside the way. To lay a hand on its mighty stem, as one passed eastward in the early morning, was to receive an impression of renewed power,—a power which the scornful might attribute to imagination, the chemist to electrons or radio-activity, and the simple man to his Mother Nature. At evening, as one followed the dim trail homeward in the fading light, one had only to look up for a guiding sign; and there, solemn and still against the twilight [[288]]splendor, was the crown of the old pine to give direction. Its very silence at such an hour was like the Angelus ringing. To halt beneath it, as one often did unconsciously, was to feel the spell of its age, its serenity, its peace; while harmonious thoughts came or went attuned to the low melody of the winds, crooning their vesper song far up among its green leaves. And, morning or midday or evening, to look up at the pine’s lofty crown, which had tossed in the free winds that bore Pilgrim and Puritan westward with their immortal dream of freedom, was to be bound with stronger ties of loyalty to the fathers of my native state,—men of vision and imagination as well as of stern courage, who heard the pine booming out its psalm to the gale and instantly adopted it as their new symbol, stamping it on their coins or emblazoning it on their banners as an emblem of liberty. Never another symbol, whether dragon or eagle or lion, had so much majesty, or was so worthy of free men. The remembrance of it in any national crisis or call to duty sets the American heart beating to the rhythm of Whittier’s “Pine-Tree”:
Lift again the stately emblem on the Bay State’s rusted shield,
Give to northern winds the Pine-Tree on our banner’s tattered field. [[289]]
Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
Answering England’s royal missive with a firm “Thus saith the Lord,”
Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array!
What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do to-day.
Very different from the majestic pine was a little larch-tree, under which I often sat while watching the deer. As I came down the trail, after a year’s absence, it would seem to lift its head and step forth from all the other larches, calling out cheerily: “Welcome once more! And why so long away? See, here is your old place waiting.” And drawing aside the delicate branches, I would find the seat of dry moss and springy boughs, the back-rest, the open window with its drapery of lace,—everything just as I had left it.
Near this sociable young larch stood its dead ancestor, grim and silent, which the moths had killed; and this, too, seemed different from all other trees living or dead. On sunny days it threw a straight shaft of shadow over my blind; and the shadow moved along the ground from west to east, telling the creeping hours like a sun-dial. At the tip of the lofty stub a short branch thrust itself out at a right angle, and this served [[290]]as the finger of my strange timepiece. When it rested on a bed of brimming pitcher-plants it pointed to the lunch in my pocket; when it touched the root of a water-maple it spoke of the home trail; and between, at irregular intervals, were a nanny-bush, a tuft of wild cotton and a shy orchid to mark the less important hours. Once, when I glanced at the slow-moving shadow, it was topped by a striking symbolic figure, and looking up quickly I found an eagle perched on the outstretched finger of my dial. After that the old tamarack had a new dignity in my eyes; it stood on an eagle’s line of flight, one of his regular ways in crossing from mountain to lake, and from it the kingly-looking bird was wont to survey this part of his silent domain, the sun gleaming on his snow-white crest.
A stone’s-throw behind my larch blind was a portly young fir, which I could never pass without a smile as it nodded to remind me that it was not like other firs. Thousands of these trees, crowding the northern forest, seem to be all grown on the same model, like peas in a pod; but this one had a character and a history to set it forever apart from its kind. And this is the tale which always passed silently between us when we met:
One day, as I watched some deer at the salt-lick, they suddenly became uneasy, looking and harking [[291]]about as if for danger, and then vanished down the several game-trails. Not till they were gone did I notice that the air was ominously still, or understand the cause of the alarm: a tempest was coming, and the sensitive animals were away to cover before my dull senses had picked up the first warning sign. Soon the landscape darkened; the face of my pond became as I had never seen it before; thunder growled in the distance; coppery clouds with light flaming through them came rolling over the tree-tops; and all nature said, as plainly as a fire-bell, “Get to cover, and quickly!”
As I went back into the woods, seeking shelter, a few big drops hit the leaves like flails; then came a pause, still as death, and then the deluge. Ahead in the gloom I spied a young fir (never pick a tall tree, or a solitary tree, in a tempest of lightning) which thrust out a mass of feathery branches from a thicket of its fellows. “This for mine,” I said as I dived under it, accompanied by a blinding flare of light and an ear-splitting crack—and almost ran against the heels of a buck that jumped out on the other side. By an odd chance, one in ten thousand, he had picked the same fir for shelter, and was no doubt thinking he had picked well when I came blundering in with the thunderbolt and drove him out into the downpour. [[292]]“Hold on, old sport! Come back; it’s your tree,” I called after him, feeling as if I had stolen a child’s umbrella; but he paid no attention.
Thinking he would not go far, and knowing he could hear or smell nothing in that rush of rain and crashing of thunder, I crept slowly after him. There he was, hunched up in the lee of a big hemlock, ears drooping, legs streaming, and little spurts of mist popping up from his pelted hide. Though woebegone enough, he had not forgotten caution; oh no! trust an old buck for that in any weather. His tail was to the tree, his head turned warily to the trail over which he had come. And there I left him, wishing as I turned back that he would let me stand under his hemlock, or else come and share my fir, just for a little company.
Near the lower end of my pond was still another tree which I must revisit; yes, surely, not only for its happy memories, but also in anticipation of some merry surprise, of which it seemed to have endless store. It stood on a bank overlooking a sunny dell in the woods, a wonderfully pleasant place where no wind entered, where the air was always fragrant, and a runlet of cool water sang a little tune to itself all day long. Its gnarled trunk was scarcely more than a shell, which boomed like a drum when a woodpecker sounded it; and above were hollow limbs with knot-hole [[293]]entrances, offering hospitality to any wild creature in search of a weather-proof den or nesting-place.
The first time I passed this old tree a family of red squirrels were laying claim to it in a tiff with some larger beast or bird, which slipped away as I approached. The next time I saw it, a year later, it was silent and apparently deserted; but as I rose from drinking at the runlet the head of a little gray owl appeared at a knot-hole. For full ten minutes he remained there motionless, without word or sign or even a blink to say that he was watching me, though it was undoubtedly some noise or stir of mine which brought him up to his window.
After that I fell in the way of turning aside to loaf awhile under the inn-tree; and rarely could one loaf there very long without overhearing something not intended for a stranger’s ear, some low dialogue or hammering signal or petulant whining or cautious scratching, to remind one of the running comedy of the woods. It was evidently an exchange, a crossroad or meeting-place for the wood folk, calling in every passer-by as a certain store or corner of a sleepy town invites all idlers, boys and stray dogs, while other stores or corners are empty, save for women folk, and quite respectable.
Once in the late morning, as I sat with an ear to [[294]]the resonant shell, listening to the talk of unseen creatures which I fancied were young ’coons, a big log-cock flashed into the old tree, drew himself up on a stub over my head, and seemed to cock his ear at the voices to which I had been listening.
Now the log-cock is naturally a wary bird, shy and difficult of approach; but this gorgeous fellow with the scarlet crest became almost sociable in his curiosity, perhaps because the place was so quiet, so friendly, with no motion or hint of danger to disturb its tranquillity. He saw me at once, as the change in his bright eye plainly said; but, deceived by my stillness or the sober coloring of my clothes, he set me down as a tree-fungus or mushroom that had grown since his last visit, and looked about for something more interesting. When I called his attention by a curt nod, telling him that this was no dull mushroom, he came down at once to light against the side of the tree, where he examined my head minutely. Learning nothing from my wink, he went around the tree in a series of side-jumps to have a look from the other side; then he hopped up and down, this side or that, all the while uttering a low surprised chatter. Even when I began to flip bits of wood at him (for he soon grew impatient, and interrupted the ’coon talk by an unseemly rapping), instead of rushing off in alarm, he twice followed a missile [[295]]that rattled near him, as if to demand, “Well, what in the world sent you flying?” Presently he sent forth a call, not the loud, high, prolonged note which you hear from him at a distance, but a soft, wheedling ah-koo! ah-koo! only twice repeated. When his call was answered in a different strain, a questioning strain it seemed to me, he darted away and returned within the minute accompanied by another log-cock.
But enough of such pictures! They flash joyously upon the mental vision whenever one recalls a cherished spot in the woods, but fade quickly if one attempts to hold or describe them, saying as they vanish that the lure of solitary lakes, the companionship of trees, the fascination of wild creatures that hide and look forth with roundly curious eyes at a stranger’s approach,—these are matters that can never be set down in words: the best always escapes in the telling. I meant only to say (when my pine lifted its crown in the light of an evening sky, and then the mink family came dodging along the shore of memory, and the buck and the log-cock interrupted to urge me be sure and tell the happiest part of the story before I made an end) that many pleasant memories greeted me as I came down the silent trail after a long absence. In the distance sounded a lusty quacking; my imagination painted the mallards [[296]]at the end of the alder run, with sunshiny water and crimson bog and misty-green larches around them, as a frame for the picture; and then the whole beautiful anticipation came tumbling in ruin about my ears.
Before I reached my pond, before I saw the welcoming gleam of it even, I was at every step going over my shoetops in water, where formerly I had always found dry footing. Something disastrous had happened in my absence; the whole bog was overflowed; around it was no mist of delicate foliage but only skeleton trees, stark and pitiful. In my heart I was berating the lumbermen, whose ugly works are the ruination of every place they visit, when at last I waded to an opening that gave outlook on my pond; and the first thing I noticed, as my eyes swept the familiar scene, was a beaver-house cocked up on the shore, like a warning sign of new ownership.
It is true that blessings brighten as they take their flight: not till I read that crude sign of dispossession did I know how much pleasure my little pond had given me. The lonely beauty which could quiet a man like a psalm, or like an Indian’s wordless prayer; the glimpses of wild creatures at home and unafraid; the succession of radiant pictures, at sunny midday, or beneath the hushed twilight, or in the expectant morning before [[297]]the shadows come,—all these had suddenly taken wing, driven away by mud-grubbing animals with a notion in their dull heads that they wanted deeper water about the site they had chosen for their house of sticks. It was too bad, too hopeless! I might have prevented the ruin had I known; but now it was beyond all remedy. With a different interest, therefore, and still resentful that my pond was spoiled as thoroughly as any lumberman would have spoiled it, I made my way around the flood to examine the beavers’ work at the outlet.
[[298]]
XV
Beaver Work
Hidden among the larches at the lower end of my pond was a tiny outgoing stream, which had proved hard to find when first I explored the region, and almost impossible to follow afterward. Under a fallen log, so weathered and mossy that it seemed part of the natural shore, a volume of water escaped without ripple or murmur, wandering away under bending grasses to lose itself in an alder swamp, where innumerable channels offered it lingering passage. From the swamp it found its way, creepingly, among brooding cedars to a little brook, which went singing far down through the woods to Upper Pine Pond; and beyond that on the farther side was a long dead-water, [[299]]and then Pine Stream making its tortuous way through an untraveled region to the Penobscot. The nearest beavers, a colony of four lodges which I unearthed on a hidden branch of Pine Stream, were twelve or fifteen miles away, as the water flowed; yet over all that distance an exploring family had made its lonely way, guided at every turn by the flavor of distant springs, till one after another they crept under the fallen log and entered my pond, which was solitary enough to satisfy even their pioneer instincts. They had first picked a site for their new lodge, on a point overlooking the lower half of the pond, and had then gone back to the outlet to raise the water.
Their dam was a rare piece of wild engineering; so much I had to confess, even while I wished that the beavers had chosen some other place to display their craft. Finding where the water escaped, they stopped the opening beneath the log, and made a bank of mud and alder-brush above it. This bank was carried out a dozen feet or more on either side of the stream, the ends being bent forward (toward the pond above) so as to make a very fine concave arch. On a small or quiet stream like this, beavers almost invariably build a straight dam; and where swift water calls for a stronger or curving structure, they present the convex side to the current; but here they had [[300]]reversed both rules, for some reason or impulse which I could not fathom,—except on the improbable assumption that the animals could foresee the end of their work from the beginning. The finished dam was an amazingly good one, as you shall see; but whether it resulted from planning or happy experiment or just following the water, only a certain old beaver could tell.
Since there was no other outlet to my pond, the beavers were obliged to build here; but the site was a poor one, the land being uniformly low on all sides, and no sooner did they finish their dam than the rising water flowed around both ends of it. To remedy this they pushed out a curving wing from either end of their first arch, so that the line of their dam was now a pretty triple-curve. Again and again the outgoing water crept around the obstacle; each time the beavers added other curving wings, now on this side, now on that, bending them steadily forward till the top of their dam suggested the rim of an enormous scallop-shell. Then, finding the water deep enough for their needs, they thrust out a straight wing from either end of their dam, resting their work on the slopes of two hillocks in the woods, some fifty yards apart,—this in a straight line, or across the hinge of the scallop-shell: if measured on the curves, their dam was three or four times that length. Their [[301]]next task was to build a lodge on the point above; then they dug a canal through the bog to the nearest grove of hardwood, and cut down a liberal part of the trees for their winter supply of bark. The branches of these trees had been cut into convenient lengths, floated through the canal, and stored in a great food-pile in the deep water near the lodge.
When I found the dam, several deer (to judge from the tracks) were already using the top of it as a runway in passing from the flooded ground on one side of the pond to the other. From either end a game-trail led upward along the shore, no longer following immemorial paths over the bog, which was submerged with all its splendor of color, but making a new and rougher way through the black growth. When I followed one of these trails it led me completely around the pond, going confidently till it neared the salt-lick, where it halted, wavered and trickled out in aimless wanderings. There, where once the ground was trodden smooth by many feet, was now no ground to be seen. The precious spring, over which a thousand generations of deer had lingered, had vanished in a dull waste of water. Twice I watched the place from early morning till owls began to cry the twilight; in that time only a few animals appeared, singly, at long intervals; and after wandering about as if [[302]]seeking something and finding it not, they disappeared in the dusky woods.
And so I went away, looking for the last time sadly on the little pond, as upon a place one has owned and loved, but which has passed into other hands. Though the wild ducks still breed or gather there, it is no longer the same. There is no restful spot from which to watch the waters dance with the wind, or frown at the cloud, or smile at the sunshine; the little larches are all dead beside their ancestors; the carpet of colored moss is but a memory. When the beavers go to pioneer a remoter spot, I shall break their dam and let the water return to its ancient level. Then, if happily I live long enough for another fringe of larches to grow, and another mossy rug to crimson under the waning sun, perhaps it will be my pond once more.
THE END
