The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered off among the naked bushes,—a moment of sound, a bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods. I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost; but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of his hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in such a night as this?—this vast of sweeping winds and frozen snow!

The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, where the winds were free. The cold was driving, numbing here with a power for death that the thermometer could not mark. I backed into the wind and hastened on toward the double line of elms that arched the road in front of the house. Already I could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass. It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold?

Could live? The question was hardly thought, when an answer was whirled past me into the nearest of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down, for I don’t know how far.

I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only an eddy of the gale sucking at the little round hole in the broken end, while far down in its hollow heart, huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the night, was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck the limb and turned in that he had been there before. He knew whither, across the sweeping meadows, he was being blown. He had even helped the winds as they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads till late. But he was safe for the night now, in the very bed, it may be, where he was hatched last summer, and where at this moment, who knows, were half a dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last summer’s brood, unscathed still, and still sharing the old home hollow, as snug and warm this bitter night as in the soft May days when they were nestlings here together.

The cold drove me on; but the chickadee had warmed me and all my naked world of night and death. And so he ever does. The winter has yet to be that drives him seeking shelter to the south. I never knew it colder than in January and February of 1904. During both of those months, morning and evening, I drove through a long mile of empty, snow-buried woods. For days at a time I would not see even a crow, but morning and evening, at a certain dip in the road, two chickadees would fly from bush to bush across the hollow and cheer me on the way. They came out to the road, really, to pick up whatever scanty crumbs were to be found in my wake. They came also to hear me, to see me pass,—to escape for a moment, I think, the silence, desertion, and death of the woods. They helped me to escape, too.

Four other chickadees, all winter long, ate with us, sharing, as far as the double windows would allow, the cheer of our dining-room. We served them on the lilac bush outside the window, tying their suet on so that they could see us and we them during meal time. Perhaps it was mere suet, no feast of soul at all, that they got; but constantly, when our pie was opened, the birds began to sing,—a dainty dish indeed, savory, wholesome, and good for our souls.

There are states in the far Northwest where the porcupine is protected by law, as a last food resource for men lost and starving in the forests. Perhaps the porcupine was not designed by nature for any such purpose. Perhaps chickadee was not left behind by summer to feed our lost and starving hope through the cheerless months. But that is the use I make of him. He is summer’s pledge to me. The woods are hollow, the winds chill, the earth cold and stiff, but there flits chickadee, and—I cannot lose faith, nor feel that this procession of bleak white days is all a funeral!

He is the only bird in my little world that I can find without fail three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. From December to the end of March he comes daily to my lilac bush for suet; from April to early July he is busy with domestic cares in the gray birches of the woodlot; from August to December he and his family come hunting quietly and sociably as a little flock among the trees and bushes of the farm; and from then on he is back for his winter meals at “The Lilac.”

Is it any wonder that he was the first bird I ever felt personally acquainted with, and the first bird my children knew? That early acquaintance, however, was not due to his abundance and intrusion, as it might be with the English sparrow, but rather due to the cheerful, confiding, sociable spirit of the little bird. He drops down and peeps under your hat-brim to see what manner of boy you are, and if you are really fit to be abroad in this world, so altogether good—for chickadees.

He has a mission to perform besides the eating of eggs and grubs of the pestiferous insects. This destruction he does that the balance of things may be maintained out of doors. He has quite another work to do, which is not economic, and which, in nowise, is a matter of fine feathers or sweet voice, but simply a matter of sweet nature, vigor, and concentrated cheerfulness.