As the early October days glide by, these waves of migration come faster and faster, their acceleration seeming, as one looks back upon it, like the ever quicker throbbing of the air under the wing-beats of the grouse. Even as the drumming suddenly ceases and the summer air seems still and heavy in the silence which follows, so the migration suddenly ends, and the woods and fields become very still in the late Indian summer. Now and then the scream of a blue jay falls upon the ear, or a faint note of a tree sparrow comes from the weeds by the roadside; but as a rule nature is dumb, and the leaves fall like tears. All the beauty of sky and autumn foliage cannot bring the birds back to the silent forest. Warm though the sun may be, and soft the haze on the cheek of Passaconaway, these charms cannot woo back the birds from their migration. The music of the Pied Piper has bewitched them, they are dreaming of gushing waters and flowers of fairest hue; and many a frosty, starlit night will pass before their wings beat once more in the clear Chocorua air.
TRAPPING GNOMES.
When the harvest moon is large and the nights clear, I love to spend an evening hour or two under the great oak-trees on the shore of my lonely lake. The soft mists creep across the water, bats flit back and forth squeaking, the whippoorwills call to each other that the time for migration is near at hand, and sometimes the voices of the barred owls wake weird echoes in the lake’s curves. Sitting motionless in the black shadow, I am unseen and unsuspected by the night creatures round me. Many feet move upon the dry leaves, and the fluttering of wings disturbs the still air. Measuring the evening from sunset until ten o’clock, it seems a period of more activity than the day. Hours roll by in the September sunlight with scarce a sign of life near the lake, but the coming of twilight is a signal for awakening. High in the oaks the gray squirrels are busy with the acorns. In the stillness of the night an acorn falling against one and another bunch of stiff leaves, finally striking upon the ground, seems to make an unduly loud noise. The fine squeak of a bat might pass unnoticed in the daytime, but in the gloom it carries far and comes upon the ear sharply.
In these hours the ground gives up its cave-dwellers, and their soft feet rustle the leaves in all the forest and by every brookside. From the ledges of Chocorua, foxes by dozens descend upon the surrounding farms and search for mice and other prey. It is the light snowfall which betrays the great number of these wary marauders, and not the secretive leaves of autumn, upon whose dry surfaces the fox-tread makes no imprint. From his den under the screes the hedgehog wanders through the woods or seeks the orchard. The skunk, too, is abroad, poking his snout into ant-hills or among mouldering leaves where insects lie hidden. It is neither fox nor skunk which makes the soft pattering just behind the old oak against which I lean. A smaller wanderer than they comes there, and as surely as gnomes have settled in America this must be one of their haunts. I feel certain of it when a squeaky little whisper follows the pattering, or when occasionally a tiny form darts across a patch of moonlight near the edge of the water.
In these September hunting-days I have left the grouse to feed undisturbed among the blackberries, and the hare to dream away the sunlit hours in his form among the swamp evergreens. Gnome-hunting has been my pastime, and so low is our human estimate of the character and usefulness of these tiny creatures that my conscience has not given the faintest bit of a twinge when I have brought home dead gnomes from field, meadow, mountain, and forest. Our gnomes are not all of one kind, and when I started with my game-bag in the September sunlight I did not feel sure what manner of elf I might bring home with me. Setting out early on the morning of the 12th, I dashed the dew from the brakes as I crossed an open pasture on the way to my lonely lake. The brakes were growing brown, yet we had had no frost, and the equinox was still ten days distant. The sumacs were gorgeous in green, scarlet, and orange, waiting for the first rain or wind to hurl to the ground half their gay leaves. As they hung motionless in the sunlight, they seemed brilliant enough for the tropics. Asters and goldenrod joined them in painting part of the picture with high colors, and so did the maples on the high ledges of the mountain where a bear-hunter’s fire raged last October. A bit of woodbine climbing up the maple trunk gleamed like flames, mountain-ash berries were full of the same fire, and the clustered fruit of the hobble-bush glowed in the midst of its maroon and crimson foliage.
What means this decking of the earth in autumn with scarlet and purple, crimson and gold, russet and orange? The flowers of the springtime are full of joyous color, in order that the wandering bee and butterfly may aid in their fertilization. The bird gleams with color as the glow-worm gleams with fire, that his mate may not forget him in the mazes of the life-dance. The autumn is the season of ripening, of the gathering of harvests, of the decay of the earthly, and the creation of that which shall endure. Are these colors only the emblems of death, the garlands upon the pall, or are they the signals which Nature hangs on high to call her forces into ranks for the battle against extinction and in favor of persistent life? Surely the berry which by its brilliancy of color calls the bird to it, in order that it may be eaten and its seeds carried afar, is as wise as the flower which by its tints and perfume attracts the bee and secures fertilization. Perhaps the tree which blazes with autumn color is avoided by insects whose instinct teaches them to shun colors in contrast to their own.
Just beyond the sumacs is the stump of a prehistoric pine. It has lasted generations since its towering pillar fell and sank year by year deeper into the soil. Its hard gray walls look as though they might endure half a century more of snow and sunshine. Gnomes live under that stump, and the first of my traps was set at their cave archway. Kneeling down behind the clustering blackberry briers, I could see the archway just at the head of the opening between two of the great buttress roots of the stump. Moss was growing at the threshold, ferns overhung the doorway, and a tiny path led through the grass from the arch into the dry pasture beyond the briers. Yes, the trap had been sprung, and crushed beneath its cruel springs was a gray gnome. His eyes were large and dark. His coat was of soft gray, and his waistcoat snowy. His hands and feet were very white and his elfin ears mischievously large and erect. The name of this gnome is quite musical,—Hesperomys, the evening gnome.
In a deep hollow between wooded banks runs the pasture brook. It comes from the forest-clad mountain-side, and flows to a dark swamp, beyond which is the lake. Gnomes live by the brook, both in the hollow and in the swamp. Nine traps were set in the hollow and eighteen in the swamp. These traps are, with true Yankee originality, named “cyclones,” and they are nearly perfect as engines of destruction. Upon a small square of tin are hinged two rectangles of stiff wire, so attached to strong springs that they naturally lie flat upon the square of tin. One rectangle is smaller than the other so that it just lies within it. The trap is set by raising the rectangles until they make a tent-like frame, and then securing them by a catch. The best lure for gnomes is whole corn, which is placed near the centre of the square of tin in a tiny cup suspended by a lever to the catch which holds the trap open. The gnome steps softly through the wire rectangles and tries to lift the grain from the cup. Woe to him if he presses ever so lightly upon the side of the cup, for if it is depressed, and the other end of the lever moved, the catch is cast free and the rectangles fall together with such force as to crush any small creature which stands below them.
The nine traps set by the brook were in groups of three. As I drew near the first group, I looked for broken twigs and a scrap of white cotton tied to a branch, my signals to show where the traps were placed. Bent twigs with their leaves slightly withered and drooping are readily seen at a long distance. The first three traps were set at a point where the banks of the brook were steep, and the level moss near the water only a narrow belt. At one place a mossy log crossed this level, a mouldering stump crowned with ferns flanked it, and a big boulder raised a wall of granite parallel with the stream. Just across the brook was another long log covered with moss, violet leaves, and rue. One trap was on this log, one by the boulder close to a little hole running under it, and the third near the mouldering stump. At first as I stood in the midst of the traps I could see none of them. The corn scattered near had been carried away or eaten, and the strings by which the traps were tied to stakes were not where I remembered to have left them. Suddenly I saw one trap. It was sprung and drawn away among the leaves. Something was in it, something I had never before seen, a creature more beautiful than any squirrel, as graceful as a swallow and as suggestive of speed and lightness. I knelt over this slender, brightly-clad gnome, and released his lifeless body from the trap. His cobweb-like whiskers were wonderfully long, his coat was of pale straw color and brown, his waistcoat of purest white. No monkey has a tail proportionally longer than the seemingly endless white-tipped appendage of Zapus insignis, this jumping gnome of the mountain streams. Exquisite creature, I thought, how can I have lived so long among woods and brooks without suspecting your presence? But for a “cyclone” I might never have known that such a being existed.
The other two traps were sprung, one containing a second Zapus, and the third a gray Hesperomys. Similar fortune had attended the remaining traps by the brook, three containing specimens of Zapus, two of Hesperomys, and one a large mole with fur as fine as the softest silk velvet. I pushed on eagerly to the series of traps in the swamp.