The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

It had come leisurely, yet with a definiteness that was unmistakable and that was also meaningful. It had discovered me in the distance, and while still invisible to my eyes, had started down to perch upon that giant stub in order to watch me. Its eye had told it that I was not a workman upon the track, nor a traveler between stations. If there was a purpose to its movements that suggested just one thing to me, there was a lack of purpose in mine that meant many things to it. It was suspicious, and had come because somewhere beneath its perch lay a hollow log, the creature’s den, holding the two eggs or young. A buzzard has some soul.

Marking the direction of the stub, and the probable distance, I waded into the deep underbrush, the buzzard for my guide, and for my quest the stump or hollow log that held the creature’s nest.

The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up, and shut out at times even the sight of the sky. Nothing could be seen of the buzzard. Half an hour’s struggle left me climbing a pine-crested swell in the low bottom, and here I sighted the bird again. It had not moved.

I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. It was a land of giants; huge tulip poplar and swamp white oak, so old that they had become solitary, their comrades having fallen one by one, or else, unable to loose the grip upon the soil that had widened and tightened through centuries, they had died standing. It was upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped.

Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white oak, the greatest tree, I think, that I have ever seen. It was not the highest, nor the largest round, perhaps, but individually, spiritually, the greatest. Hoary, hollow, and broken-limbed, its huge bole seemed encircled with the centuries, and into its green and grizzled top all the winds of heaven had some time come.

One could worship in the presence of such a tree as easily as in the shadow of a vast cathedral.

For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree.

Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the dignity, the majesty, the divinity of life? And what life was here! Life whose beginnings lay so far back that I could no more reckon the years than I could count the atoms it had builded into this majestic form.

Looking down upon the oak from twice its height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-bolled for thirty feet, and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown. Its girth more than balanced the poplar’s greater height, and as for blossoms, Nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak.