Of course I wanted to see him. The only live thing outside of ourselves that we had seen (we had only heard the muskrats) had been a crow. Live birds on such days as these one would go far to see. So we all cut across toward the swamp where the hairy woodpecker reigned solitary in his bleak domain.
The “hole” was almost twenty-five feet up in a dead maple stub that had blown off and lodged against a live tree. The meadow had been bleak and wind-swept, but the swamp was naked and dead, filled with ice, and touched with a most forbidding emptiness and stillness. I was getting cold again, when the boy ahead tapped lightly on the old stub. At the hole upstairs appeared a head—a fierce black-and-white head, a sharp, long bill, a flashing eye—as Hairy came forth to fight for his castle. He was too wise a fighter to tackle all of us, however; so, slipping out, he spread his wings, and galloped off with a loud wild call that set all the swamp to ringing.
It was a thrilling, defiant challenge that set my blood to leaping again. Black and white, he was a part of the picture; but there was a scarlet band in the nape of his neck that, like his call, had fire in it and the warmth of life.
As his shout went booming through the hollow walls of the swamp, it woke a blue jay, which squalled back from a clump of pines, then, wavering out into the open on curious wings—flashing ice-blue and snow-white wings—he dived into the covert of pines again; and faint, as if beyond the swamp, the cheep of chickadees!
If anything was needed up to this moment to change my winter into spring, it was this call of the chickadees. The dullest day in winter smiles; the deepest, darkest woods speak cheerfully to me, if a chickadee is there. And did you ever know a winter day or a dank, gloomy forest hall without its chickadee? Give me a flower in my buttonhole and a chickadee in my heart and I am proof against all gloom and cold.
“What is all this noise about?” the chickadees came forward asking. It was a little troop of them, a family of them, possibly, last year’s children and one, or both, of the parents, hunting the winter woods together for mutual protection against the loneliness and long bitter cold.
How active and interested in life they were! A hard winter? Yes, of course, but what is the blue jay squawking over, anyhow? And the little troop of them came to peep into the racket, curious, but not excited, discussing the disturbance of the solemn swamp in that sewing-bee fashion of theirs, as if nipping off threads and squinting through needle-eyes between their running comments.
They too were gray and black, gray as the swamp beeches, black as the spotted bark of the birches. And how tiny! But—
“Here was this atom in full breath
Hurling defiance at vast death;