It was a beautiful summer morning, tender with the half-light of breaking dawn, and fresh with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the skunks’ den, I sat down on the stump to wait a moment, for the loveliness and wonder of the opening day came swift upon me. From the top of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple, earnest song ringing down the wooded slope, and, soft as an echo, floated up from the swampy tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes of a wood thrush, mellow and globed, and almost fragrant of the thicket where the white honeysuckle was in bloom. Voices never heard at other hours of the day were vocal now; odors and essences that vanish with the dew hung faint in the air; shapes and shadows and intimations of things that slip to cover from the common light, stirred close about me. It was very near—the gleam! the vision splendid! How close to a revelation seems every dawn! And this early summer dawn, how near a return of that
time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.
From the crest of my ridge I looked out over the treetops far away to the Blue Hills still slumbering in the purple west. How huge and prone they lie! How like their own constant azure does the spirit of rest seem to wrap them round! On their distant slopes it is never common day, never more than dawn, for the shadows always sleep among their hollows, and a haze of changing blues, their own peculiar beauty, hangs, even at high noon, like a veil upon them, shrouding them with largeness and mystery.
A rustle in the dead leaves down the slope recalled me. I reached instinctively for the gun, but stayed my hand. Slowly nosing his way up the ridge, came a full-grown skunk, his tail a-drag, his head swinging close to the ground. He was coming home to the den, coming leisurely, contentedly, carelessly, as if he had a right to live. I sat very still. On he came, scarcely checking himself as he winded me. How like the dawn he seemed!—the black of night with the white of day—the furtive dawn slipping into its den! He sniffed at the gun and cannon-cracker, made his way over them, brushed past me, and calmly disappeared beneath the stump.
The chewink still sang from the top of the sapling, but the tame broad day had come. I stayed a little while, looking off still at the distant hills. We had sat thus, my six-year-old and I, only a few days before, looking away at these same hills, when the little fellow, half questioningly, half pensively asked, “Father, how can the Blue Hills be so beautiful and have rattlesnakes?”
I gathered up the kit, gun and cannon-cracker, and started back toward home, turning the question of hills and snakes and skunks over and over as I went along. Over and over the question still turns: How can the Blue Hills be so beautiful? The case of my small wood-lot is easier: beautiful it must ever be, but its native spirit, the untamed spirit of the original wilderness, the free wild spirit of the primeval forest, shall flee it, and vanish forever, with this last den of the skunks.