Such nature lovers, I say, may properly enough come to the mountains in August. As for bird students, who, not being poets, are in no danger of knowing “too much,” if they can come but once a year, let them by all means choose a birdier season.
For myself, though my present mood was rather Whitmanian than scientific, I did devote one forenoon to what might be called an ornithological errand: I went up to the worn-out fields at the end of the Coal Hill road, to see whether by any chance a pair of horned larks might be summering there, as I had heard of a pair’s doing eight or ten years ago. Even this jaunt, however, ran into—I will not say degenerated into—something like a berry-picking excursion. Raspberries and blueberries so thick as to color the roadside, mile after mile, are a delightful temptation to a natural man whose home is in a closely settled district where every edible berry that turns red (actual ripeness being out of the question) finds a small boy beside the bush ready to pick it. I succumbed at once. In fact, I succumbed too soon. The road was long, and the berries grew fatter and riper, or so I thought, as I proceeded. It was a real tragedy. Does anything in my reader’s experience tell him what I mean? If so, I am sure of his sympathy. If not,—well, in that case he has my sympathy. Perhaps he has once in his life seen a small boy who, at table, not suspecting what was in store for him, ate so much of an ordinary dinner that out of sheer physical necessity he was compelled to forego his favorite dessert. Alas, and alas! A wasted appetite is like wasted time, a loss irreparable. You may have another, no doubt, on another day, but never the one you sated upon inferior fruit.
Why should berries be so many, and a man’s digestive capacity so near to nothing? The very bushes reproached me; like a jealous housewife who finds her choicest dainties discarded on the plate. “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced,” they seemed to mutter. I grew shame-faced and looked the other way: at the splendid rosettes of red bunchberries; at a bush full of red (another red) mountain-holly berries, red with a most exquisite purplish bloom, the handsomest berries in the world, I am ready to believe. Or I stopped to consider a cluster of varnished baneberries, or a few modest, drooping, leaf-hidden jewels of the twisted stalk. In truth, and in short, it was berry-time in Franconia. What a strait a man would have been in if all kinds had been humanly edible!
With all the rest there was no passing the strangely blue bear-plums, as Northern people call the fruit of clintonia. A strange blue, I say. Left to myself I should never have found a word for it; but by good luck I raised the question with a man who, as I now suppose, is probably the only person in the world who could have told me what I needed to know. He is an authority upon pottery and porcelain, and he answered on the instant, though I cannot hope to quote him exactly, that the color was that of the Ming dynasty. Every Chinese dynasty, I think he said, has a color of its own for its pottery. When the founder of the Ming dynasty was asked of what shade he would have the royal dinner set, he replied: “Let it be that of the sky after rain.” And so it was the color of Franconia bear-plums. Which strikes me as a circumstance very much to the Ming dynasty’s credit.
In a lonely stretch of the road, with a cattle pasture on one side and a wood on the other, where tall grass in full flower stood between the horse track and the wheel rut (this was a good berrying place, also, had I been equal to my opportunity), I stood still to enjoy the music of a hermit thrush, which happened to be at just the right distance. A holy voice it was, singing a psalm, measure responding to measure out of the same golden throat. I tried to fit words to it. “Oh,” it began, but for the remainder of the strophe there were no syllables in our heavy, consonant-weighted English tongue. It might be Spanish, I thought—musical vowels with l’s and d’s holding them together. I remembered the reputed saying of Charles V., that Spanish is the language of the gods, and was ready to add, “and of hermit thrushes.” But perhaps this was only a fancy. One thing was certain: the bird sang in Spanish or in something better. If a man could eat raspberries as long as he can listen to sweet sounds!
Before the last house there was a brilliant show of poppies, and beyond, at the limit of the clearing, an enormous beanfield. Poppies and beans! Poetry and prose! Something to look at and something to eat. Such is the texture of human life. For my part, I call it a felicitous combination. Here, only a little while ago, the man of the house—and of the beanfield—had come face to face with a most handsome, long-antlered deer, which stamped at him till the two, man and deer, were at close quarters, and then made off into the woods. Somewhere here, also, the entomological collector had within a week or two found a beetle of a kind that had never been “taken” before except in Arizona! But though I beat the grass over from end to end, there was no sign of horned larks. Ornithology was out of date, as was more and more apparent.
My homeward walk, with the cold wind cutting my face, took on the complexion of a retreat. I could hardly walk fast enough, though here and there a clump of virginal raspberry vines still detained me briefly. It is amazing how frigid August can be when the mood takes it. A farmer was mowing with his winter coat buttoned to the chin. I looked at him with envy. For my own part I should have been glad of an overcoat; and that afternoon, when I went out to drive, I wore one, and a borrowed ulster over it. Such feats are pleasant to think of a few days afterward, when the weather has changed its mind again, and the mercury is once more reaching for the century mark.
In the course of my five days I walked twice over the road newly cut through the mountain forest from the foot of Echo Lake to the golf grounds: first upward, in an afternoon, returning to Franconia by the old highway; then downward, in a forenoon, after reaching the lake by way of the Butter Hill road and the sleepers, that is to say, the railroad. Forenoon and afternoon the impression was the same,—silence, as if the birds’ year were over, though everything was still green and the season not so late but that tardy wood-sorrel blossoms still showed, here and there one, among the clover-like leaves; old favorites, that I had not seen for perhaps a dozen years.
On the railroad—a place which I have always found literally alive with song and wings, not only in May and June, but in September and October—I walked for forty-five minutes, by the watch, without hearing so much as a bird’s note. Almost the only living creature that I saw (three berry-pickers and a dog excepted) was a red squirrel which sat on end at the top of a tall stump, with his tail over his back, and ate a raspberry, as if to show me how. “You think you are an epicure,” he said; “and you stuff yourself so full in half an hour that you have to fast for half a day afterward. What sort of epicurean philosophy is that? Look at me.” And I looked. He held the berry—which must have been something less than ripe—between his fore paws, just as he would have held a nut, and after looking at me to make sure I was paying attention twirled it round and round against his teeth till it grew smaller and smaller before my eyes, and then was gone. “There!” said the saucy chap, as he held up his empty fingers. The operation had consumed a full minute, at the very least. At that rate, no doubt, a man could swallow raspberries from morning till night. But what good would it do him? He might as well be swallowing the wind. No human mouth could tell raspberry juice from warm water, in doses so infinitesimal.