The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

A few men with guns—for money—had done it. And the wild areas of the world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet"—literally, and he must go softly now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the Gulf coast—so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest of our animals for a long time to come.

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled region.

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there were all told over all of North America when the white men first came here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been given protection—pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and repression, if given only a measure of protection.

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.

Nature—man-nature—has been hard on the little brute—to save him! His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the earth.

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon his four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard open.