The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

A hundred grubs for one night, by one skunk! It took me only a little while to figure out the enormous number of grubs that a fair-sized family of skunks would destroy in a summer. A family of skunks would rid my farm of the pest in a single summer and make inroads on the grubs of the entire community.

Ah! the community! the ignorant, short-sighted, nature-hating community! What chance had a family of skunks in this community? And the fire of my mission burned hot within me.

And so did my desire for more skunks. My hay crop was short, was nil, in fact, for the hayfield was as barren of green as the hen-yard. I had to have it ploughed and laid down again to grass. And all because of this scarcity of skunks.

Now, as the green of the springing blades began to show through the melting snow, it was with immense satisfaction that I thought of the three skunks under the stump. That evening I went across to my neighbor’s, the milkman’s, and had a talk with him over the desirability, the necessity indeed, of encouraging the skunks about us. I told him a good many things about these harmless and useful animals that, with all his farming and chicken-raising, he had never known.

But these rural folk are quite difficult. It is hard to teach them anything worth while, so hopelessly surrounded are they with things—common things. If I could only get them into a college class-room—removed some way from hens and hoes—I might, at least, put them into a receptive attitude. But that cannot be. Perhaps, indeed, I demand too much of them. For, after all, it takes a naturalist, a lover of the out-of-doors, to appreciate the beautiful adjustments in nature. A mere farmer can hardly do it. One needs a keen eye, but a certain aloofness of soul also, for the deeper meaning and poetry of nature. One needs to spend a vacation, at least, in the wilderness and solitary place, where no other human being has ever come, and there, where the animals know man only as a brother, go to the school of the woods and study the wild folk, one by one, until he discovers them personally, temperamentally, all their likes and dislikes, their little whimseys, freaks, and fancies—all of this, there, far removed from the cankering cares of hens and chickens, for the sake of the right attitude toward nature.

My nearest neighbor had never been to the wilderness. He lacked imagination, too, and a ready pen. Yet he promised not to kill my three skunks in the stump; a rather doubtful pledge, perhaps, but at least a beginning toward the new earth I hoped to see.

Now it was perfectly well known to me that skunks will eat chickens if they have to. But I had had chickens—a few hens—and had never been bothered by skunks. I kept my hens shut up, of course, in a pen—the only place for a hen outside of a pie. I knew, too, that skunks like honey, that they had even tampered with my hives, reaching in at night through the wide summer entrances and tearing out the brood combs. But I never lost much by these depredations. What I felt more was the destruction of the wild bees and wasps and ground-nesting birds, by the skunks.

But these were trifles! What were a few chickens, bees, yellow-jackets, and even the occasional bird’s-nest, against the hay-devouring grubs of the June-bug! And as for the characteristic odor which drifted in now and again with the evening breeze, that had come to have a pleasant quality for me, floating down across my two wide acres of mowing.

February passed gently into March, and my chickens began to hatch. Every man must raise chickens at some period of his life, and I was starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my specialty heretofore, making two blades grow where there had been one very thin one. But once your two acres are laid down, and you have a stump full of skunks, near by, against the ravages of the June-bugs, then there is nothing for you but chickens or something, while you wait. I got Rhode Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,—for what is the use of chickens if you cannot take them to the show?

The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls of yellow, with their pedigrees showing right through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew! I never lost one. And now the second batch of sitters would soon be ready to come off.