When the first frosts come, the family—if they are still a family—seek the nest in the ground beneath the stone wall. But they do not go to sleep immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air, and, of course, plenty of food,—acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and oats. They doze quietly for a time and eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls into some side passage prepared beforehand to receive the débris.
But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh air, and one day, though not sound sleepers, the family cuddles down and forgets to wake,—until the frost has begun to creep back toward the surface, and down through the softened soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring.
XIV
The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp
To most eyes, no doubt, the prospect would have seemed desolate, even forbidding. A single track of railroad lay under my feet, while down and away in front of me stretched the Bear Swamp, the largest, least-trod area of primeval swamp in southern New Jersey.
To me it was neither desolate nor forbidding, because I knew it well,—its gloomy depths, its silent streams, its hollow stumps, its trails, and its haunting mysteries. Yet I had never crossed its borders. I was born within its shadows, close enough to smell the magnolias of the margin, and had lived my first ten years only a little farther off; but not till now, after twice ten years of absence, had I stood here ready to enter and tread the paths where so long I had slipped to and fro as a shadow.
But what a pity ever to cross such a country! ever to map these unexplored child-lands to a scale of after years! I tramped the Bear Swamp over from edge to edge, letting the light of day into the deepest of its recesses, and found—a turkey buzzard’s nest.