The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

It is a lucky man who has boys, or who knows and “trains,” as our New Englanders say, with boys. They won’t let him freeze up.

“Come, father,” they say, “get into your scuffs and boots, and hit the old trail for the woods!” And father drops his pen; bundles up; “clomps” out in his boots, grumbling at the weather and the boys and the birthdays and the stiffness in his knees and in his soul—for a whole hundred yards or more into the meadow! Then he begins to warm up. Then he takes the axe from one of the boys and looks at its edge, and “hefts” it; and looks about for a big birthday flower, about the size of a hundred-year-old oak, to chop down. Something queer is happening to father. He is forgetting his knees; he is capering about on the snow; he is getting ahead of the boys; he hardly realizes it, but he is beginning to feel like a birthday inside of him; and he will soon be in danger of getting this January day mixed up with the days of June!

But not right off. I was warming up, I do confess, yet it was a numb, stiff world about us, and bleak and stark. It was a world that looked all black and white, for there was not a patch of blue overhead. The white underfoot ran off to meet the black of the woods, and the woods in turn stood dark against a sky so heavy with snow as to shut us apparently into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black pencil-line across the picture—the one sign of life that we could see besides ourselves. Only small boys are likely to leave their firesides on such a day; only small boys and those men who can’t grow up. Yet never before, perhaps, had boys or men ever gone afield on such a tramp with an axe, a shovel, and a basket.

Suddenly one of the boys dashed off calling, “Let’s go see if the muskrats have gone to bed yet!” And trailing after him away we went, straight across the meadow. I knew what he was after; I could see the little mound, hardly more than an anthill in size, standing up in the meadow where the alder bushes and elderberry marked the bend in the brook. If my farmer neighbor had forgotten a small haycock, when he cut his rowen, it would have looked about as this muskrat lodge here buried under the snow. I was glad the boys had seen it. For only a practiced eye could have discovered it; and only a lover of bleak gray days would have known what might be alive deep down under its thatch of cat-tails and calamus here in the silent winter.

But is there any day in the whole year out of doors that real live boys and real live girls do not love? or any wild thing that they do not love—flower or bird or beast or star or storm?

We crept up softly, and surrounded the lodge; then with the axe we struck the frozen, flinty roof several ringing blows. Instantly one—two—three muffled splashy “plunks” were heard, as three little muskrats, frightened out of their naps and half out of their wits, plunged into the open water of their doorways from off their damp but cozy couch.

It was a mean thing to do, but not very mean as wild animal life goes. And it did warm me up so, in spite of the chilly plunge the little sleepers took! Chilly to them? Not at all, and that is why it warmed me. To hear the splash of water down under the two feet of ice and snow that sealed the meadow like a sheet of steel! To hear the sound of stirring life, and to picture that snug, steaming bed on the top of a tough old tussock, with its open water-doors leading into freedom and plenty below! “Why, it won’t be long before the arbutus is in bloom,” I began to think. I looked at the axe and shovel, and said to myself, “Well, the boys may know what they are doing, after all, though three muskrats don’t make a spring or a bouquet.”

But they did make me warmer inside and outside, too. Warm up your heart and you soon feel warmer in your fingers and toes.

We turned back from the muskrats’ lodge and headed again for the woods, where the flowers must be. Hardly had we reached the cart-path before another of the boys was off—this time to the left, going rapidly toward a low piece of maple swamp perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

“He’s going over to see if Hairy Woodpecker is in his hole,” said the boys in answer to my question. “Hairy has a winter hole over there in a big dead maple. Want to see him?”