It took me a long time to make that half mile on the upper road, with the narrow, freshly green valley outspread just below, the river running through it, and beyond a royal horizonful of mountains; some near and green, some farther away and blue, and some—the highest—still with the snow on them: Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Garfield, the Twins, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, and Adams; all perfectly clear, the sky covered with high clouds. A sober day it was, sober and still, though the bobolinks seemed not so to regard it. While I looked at the landscape, seating myself now and then to enjoy it quietly, I kept an ear open for the shout of a pileated woodpecker, a wildly musical sound often to be heard on this hillside; but to-day there was nothing nearer to it than a crested flycatcher’s scream, out of the big sugar orchard.
On my way down the hill toward the red bridge, I met a man riding in some kind of rude contrivance, not to be called a wagon or a cart, between two pairs of wheels. He lay flat on his back, as in a hammock, and, to judge by his tools and the mortar on his clothing, must have been a mason returning from his work. He was “taking it easy,” at all events. We saluted each other, and he stopped his horse and sat up. “You used to be round here, didn’t you?” he asked. Yes, I said, I had been here a good deal, off and on. He thought he remembered me. He had noticed me getting out of Mr. Prime’s carriage at the corner. “Let’s see,” he said: “you used to be looking after the birds a good deal, didn’t you?” I pleaded guilty, and he seemed glad. “You are well?” he added, and drove on. Neither of us had said anything in particular, but there are few events of the road more to my taste than such chance bits of neighborly intercourse. The man’s tone and manner gave me the feeling of real friendliness. If I had fallen among thieves, I confide that he would have been neither a priest nor a Levite. May his trowel find plenty of work and fair wages.
This was on May 22. The next three days were occupied with all-day excursions to Mount Agassiz, to Streeter Pond, and to Lonesome Lake path. With so many hands beckoning to me, the Cape May warbler was well-nigh forgotten. On the morning of the 26th, however, the weather being dubious, I betook myself again to the Landaff swamp, entering it, as usual, by the wood-road at the barn. Many birds were there: a tanager (uncommon hereabout), olive-sided flycatchers, alder flycatchers (first seen on the 23d, and already abundant), a yellow-bellied flycatcher (the recluse of the family), magnolia warblers, Canada warblers, parula warblers (three beautiful species), a Tennessee warbler, a Swainson thrush (whistling), a veery (snarling), and many more. The Swainson thrush, by the way, although present, in small numbers apparently, from May 22, was not heard to sing a note until June 1,—ten days of silence! Yet it sings freely on its migration, even as far south as Georgia. Close at hand was a grouse, who performed again and again in what seemed to me a highly original manner. First he delivered three or four quick beats. Then he rested for a second or two, after which he proceeded to drum in the ordinary way, beginning with deliberation, and gradually accelerating the beats, till the ear could no longer follow them, and they became a whir. That prelude of four quick, decisive strokes was a novelty to my ears, so far as I could remember.
I had taken my fill of this pleasant chorus, and was on my way back to the road, when suddenly I heard something that was better than “pleasant,”—a peculiarly faint and listless four-syllabled warbler song, which might be described as a monotonous zee-zee-zee-zee. The singer was not a blackpoll: of that I felt certain on the instant. What could it be, then, but a Cape May? That was a shrewd guess (I had heard the Cape May once, in Virginia, some years before); for presently the fellow moved into sight, and I had a feast of admiring him, as he flitted about among the fir trees, feeding and singing. If he was the one I had seen in the same wood on the 22d, he was making a long stay. Still I did not venture to think of him as anything but a migrant. The Tennessee had sung incessantly for five days in the Gale River larches near the hotel, as already mentioned, and then had taken flight.
The next morning, nevertheless, there was nothing for it—few as my days were growing—but I must visit the place again, on the chance of finding the Cape May still there. And he was there; sitting, for part of the time, at the very tip (on the terminal bud, to speak exactly) of a pointed fir. There, as elsewhere, he sang persistently, sometimes with three zees, sometimes with four, but always in an unhurried monotone. It was the simplest and most primitive kind of music, to say the best of it,—many an insect would perhaps have done as well; but somehow, with the author of it before me, I pronounced it good. A Tennessee was close by, and (what I particularly enjoyed) a tanager sat in the sun on the topmost spray of a tall white pine, blazing and singing. “This is the sixth day of the Cape May here, yet I cannot think he means to summer.” So my pencil finished the day’s entry.
Whatever his intentions, I could not afford to spend my whole vacation in learning them, and it was not until the afternoon of the 31st that I went again in search of him. Then he gave me an exciting chase; for, thank Fortune, a chase may be exciting though the bird is not a “game bird,” and the man is not a gunner. At first, to be sure, the question seemed in a fair way to be quickly settled. I was hardly in the swamp before I heard the expected zee-zee. The bird was still here! But after half a dozen repetitions of the strain he fell silent; and he had not shown himself. For a full hour I paced up and down the path, within a space of forty rods, fighting mosquitoes and awake to every sound. If the bird was here, I meant to make sure of him. This was the tenth day since I had first seen him, and to find him still present would make it practically certain that he was here for the season. As for what I had already heard,—well, the notes were the Cape May’s, fast enough; but if that were all, I should go away and straightway begin to question whether my ears had not deceived me. In matters of this kind, an ornithologist walks by sight.
Once, from farther up the path, I heard a voice that might be the one I was listening for; but as I hastened toward it, it developed into the homely, twisting song of a black-and-white creeper. Heard at a sufficient distance, this too familiar ditty loses every other one of its notes, and is easily mistaken for something else,—especially if something else happens to be on a man’s mind,—as I had found to my chagrin on more than one occasion. Eye and ear both are never more liable to momentary deception than when they are most tensely alert.
Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of the Tennessee, and it became evident that he had moved on. The customary water thrush was singing at short intervals; gayly dressed warblers darted in and out of the low evergreens, almost brushing my elbows, much to their surprise; and an olive-sided flycatcher kept up a persistent pip-pip. Something was troubling his equanimity; I had no idea what. It had been one of my special enjoyments, on this vacation trip, to renew my acquaintance with him and his humbler relative, the alder flycatcher,—the latter a commonplace body, whose emphatic quay-quéer had now become one of the commonest of sounds. The olive-side, by the bye, for all his apparent wildness, did not disdain to visit the shade trees about the hotel; and once a catbird, not far off, amused me by whistling a most exact reproduction of his breezy quit, quee-quée-o. If the voice had come from a treetop instead of from the depths of a low thicket, the illusion would have been complete. It is the weakness of imitators, always and everywhere, to forget one thing or another.
Still the bird I was waiting for made no sign, and finally I left the swamp and started up the road. Possibly he had gone in that direction, where I first saw him. No, he was not there, and, giving over the hunt, I turned back toward the village. Then, as I came opposite the barn again, I heard the notes in the old place, and hastened up the path. This time I was lucky, for there the bird sat on the outermost spray of a fir-tree branch. It was his most characteristic attitude. I can see him there now.
As I quitted the swamp for good, a man in a buggy was coming down the road. I put on my coat, and as he overtook me I said, “I was putting on my coat because I felt sure you would invite me to ride.” He smiled, and bade me get in; and though he had been going only to the post office, he insisted upon carrying me to the hotel, a mile beyond. Better still, we had a pleasant, humanizing talk of a kind to be serviceable to a narrow specialist, such as I seemed just now in danger of becoming. The use of tobacco was one of our topics, I remember, and the mutual duties of husbands and wives another. My host had seen a good deal of the world, it appeared, and withal was no little of a philosopher. I hope it will not sound egotistical if I say that he gave every sign of finding me a capable listener.