The Fall of the Year

by Dallas Lore Sharp

YOU ought to go out into the fields and woods as many as six times this fall, even though you have to take a long street-car ride to get out of the city. Let me give you just six bits of sound advice about going afield:—

First, go often to the same place, so that you can travel over and over the same ground and become very familiar with it. The first trip you will not see much but woods and fields. But after that, each succeeding walk will show you particular things—this dead tree with the flicker’s hole, that old rail-pile with its rabbit-hole—until, by and by, you will know every turn and dip, every pile of stones, every hole and nest; and you will find a thousand things that on the first trip you didn’t dream were there.

Secondly, when you go into the woods, go expecting to see something in particular—always looking for some particular nest, bird, beast, or plant. You may not find that particular thing, but your eyes will be sharpened by your expectation and purpose, and you will be pretty sure therefore to see something. At worst you will come back with a disappointment, and that is better than coming back without a thing!

Thirdly, go off when you can alone. Don’t be selfish, unsociable, offish—by no means that. But you must learn to use your own eyes and ears, think your own thoughts, make your own discoveries, and follow the hints and hopes that you alone can have. Go with the school class for a picnic, but for woodcraft go alone.

Fourthly, learn first of all in the woods to be as silent as an Indian and as patient as a granite rock. Practice standing still when the mosquitoes sing, and fixing your mind on the hole under the stump instead of the hole the mosquito is boring between your eyes.

Fifthly, go out in every variety of weather, and at night, as well as during the day. There are three scenes to every day—morning, noon, and early evening—when the very actors themselves are changed. To one who has never been in the fields at daybreak, the world is so new, so fresh and strange, as to seem like a different planet. And then the evening—the hour of dusk and the deeper, darker night! Go once this autumn into the woods at night.

And lastly, don’t go into the woods as if they were a kind of Noah’s Ark; for you cannot enter the door and find all the animals standing in a row. You will go a great many times before seeing them all. Don’t be disappointed if they are not so plentiful there as they are in your books. Nature books are like menageries—the animals are caught and caged for you. The woods are better than books and just as full of things, as soon as you learn to take a hint, to read the signs, to put two and two together and get—four—four paws—black paws, with a long black snout, a big ringed and bushy tail—a coon!