I believe that one of the very best things about our way of following a partridge is the sense of intimacy with the countryside which it creates—an intimacy which nothing else has ever given us. In most outdoor faring one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one keeps to the water-courses, in cross-country tramping one unconsciously goes around obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and undeviating pursuit of a bird along a path of his choosing would ever have given me that acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel copse that I now possess. I know our swamp as a hippopotamus might, or—to stick to plain Yankee creatures—a mud turtle. It is a very swampy swamp, with spring holes and channels and great shallow pools where the leaves from the tall swamp maples—scarlet and rose and ashes of roses—sift slowly down and float until they sink into the leaf mould beneath. I have favorite paths through it as the squirrels have in the tree-tops; I know where the mud is too deep to venture, where the sprawling, moss-covered roots of the maples offer grateful support; I know the brushy edges where the blossoming witch-hazel fills the air with its quaint fragrance; I know the sunny, open places where the tufted ferns, shoulder high, and tawny gold after the early frosts, give insecure but welcome footing; I know—too well indeed—the thickets of black alder that close in about me and tug at my gun and drive me to fury.
Yes, we know that swamp, and other swamps only less well. We know the rock ledges, the big dry woods of oak and chestnut and maple and beech. We know the ravines where the great hemlocks keep the air always dim and still, and one goes silent-footed over the needle floor. We grow familiar, too, with all the little things about the country. We discover new haunts of the fringed gentian, the wonderful, the capricious, with its unbelievable blue that one sees nowhere else save under the black lashes of some Irish eyes. We find the shy spring orchids, gone to seed now, but we remember and seek them out again next May. We surprise the spring flowers in their rare fall blossoming—violets white and blue in the warm, moist bottom-lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies, hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones— I have seen all these in a single day in raw November. We learn where the biggest chestnuts grow—great silky brown fellows almost twice the size of Jonathan's thumb. We discover old landmarks in the deep woods, surveyors' posts, a heap of stones carefully piled on a big rock. We find old clearings, overgrown now, but our feet still feel underneath the weeds the furrows left by the plow. Now and then we come upon a spot where once there must have been a home. There is no house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac-bush and the apple tree stubbornly cling to a worn-out life amidst the forest of young white oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about them. Once we came upon a little group of gravestones, only three or four, sunken in the ground and so overgrown and weather-worn that we could read nothing. There was no sign of a human habitation, but I suppose they must have been placed there in the old days when the family burial-ground was in one corner of the farm itself.
We learn to know where the springs of pure water are, welling up out of the deep ground in a tiny pool under some big rock or between the roots of a great yellow birch tree. And when the sun shines hot at noon, and a lost trail and a vanished bird leave us to the sudden realization that we are tired and thirsty, we know where is the nearest water. We know, too, the knack of drinking so as not to swallow the little gnats that skim its surface—you must blow them back ever so gently, and drink before they close in again. How good it tastes as we lie at full length on the matted brown leaves! How good the crackers taste, too, and the crisp apples, as we sit by the spring and rest, and talk over the morning's hunt and plan the afternoon's—subject to the caprices of the birds.
But I suppose the very best about hunting can never be told at all. That is true of any really good thing, and there is nothing better than a long day after the birds. It is always good to be out of doors. And there are seasons when one is glad to wander slowly over the fields and byways; there are times when it seems best of all to be still—in the heart of the woods, on the wide hill pastures, in the deep grass of the meadows. But not in the fall! Is it a breath of the migrating instinct that makes us want to be off and away, to go, and go, and go? Yes, fall is the time for the hunt—gay, boisterous fall, rioting in wind and color to keep up its spirits against the stealthy approach of winter. And whether we shoot well or ill, whether our game pockets are heavy or light, no matter what the weather we find or the country we cross, it is all good hunting, very good. And at night we come in to a blazing fire, feeling tired, oh, so tired! and hungry, oh, so hungry! and with soul and body shriven clean by wind and sun.
XV
Beyond the Realm of Weather
Our friends say to us now and then, "But why must you do these things with a gun? Why can't you do the same things and leave the gun at home?" Why, indeed? When I put this question to Jonathan, he smokes on placidly. But of one thing I am sure: if it had not been for the guns and the ducks, I should never have known what the marshes were like in winter fog—what they were like under a winter sky with a wind straight from the North Pole sweeping over their bare stretches.
It was early afternoon. Through the study window I looked out upon a raw, foggy world, melting snow underfoot and overhead. It was the kind of day about which even the most deliberately cheerful can find little to say except that this sort of thing can't last forever, you know. However, if I had had a true instinct for "nature," I should, I suppose, have seen at a glance that it was just the day to go and lie in a marsh. But this did not occur to me. Instead, I thought of open fires, and popcorn, and hot peanuts, and novels, and fudge, and other such things, which are supposed to be valuable as palliatives on days like these.
The telephone rang. "Oh, it's you, Jonathan!... What? No, not really! You wouldn't!... Well, if the ducks like it, they may have it all. I'm not a duck.... Why, of course, if you really want me to, I'll go, only.... All right, I'll get out the things.... Three o'clock train? You'll have to hurry!"