TWO KINDS OF GNOMES
Hesperomys
Zapus
On the way I crossed a strip of level pasture over which a grove of gray birches is rapidly spreading year by year. Several of them are bent so that their upper branches sweep the ground. They are victims of the snow and ice storms of winter, and, unlike the Arlington cedars, they are not resilient enough to recover an erect position. In the heart of the grove, a family of sapsucking woodpeckers had been at work in one of their “orchards.” Eight trees bore marks of their mischievous tapping, and in the two principal trees many hundreds of holes had been made by them. Their thirst is as insatiable as Mulvaney’s, but I supposed that before this time they had wearied of their summer fountains. Not so; one of them was hitching around the drills, dipping as persistently as in early July, and bees buzzed near him, enjoying their share of the tree’s sweets. Restraining my impatience to see the swamp traps, I watched long for a humming-bird to visit the drills, but none came, thus confirming my impression that they not only arrive in New England later than the sapsuckers, but that they migrate southward earlier.
While I waited under the birches, a gray squirrel came tripping over the grass and through the brakes. His great brush was not carried over his back, but in an arch behind him. His approach was so noisy that at first I thought a dog was coming towards me, but his voice betrayed him. “Cluck, cluck, cluck, cleck, cleck, cleck, cleck, clēēk.” If a “cyclone” had been choking him he could not have made sounds any more queer. When at last he discovered me, he lowered his tail and undulated very softly away.
The first of the second series of traps was set on the slope leading down towards the moist bed of the swamp. It contained one of the white-footed gray gnomes. The next three were empty. Number five was in the darkest part of the swamp on a huge upturned stump whose twisted roots, looking like the arms of a devil-fish, reached far into the air. The trap was sprung, and the gnome in it was as new to my eyes as Zapus had been. Coarse, chestnut-brown hair, in parts almost as bright as red mahogany, small eyes, conspicuous ears, and a tail so short that it seemed only a stump of something more satisfactory, were the conspicuous points in this gnome. His name, as I later learned, was Evotomys, the long-eared gnome. His rich coloring matched to perfection the decayed hemlock stump in which he lived, and harmonized with the brown bark of pines and the stained waters of the swamp brooks. In the sunlight, or upon the sand by the brookside, he would have been conspicuous. Where he lay he looked like a fragment of the reddish wood under him.
Five more of his tribe, and a tiny shrew, only three inches long, were found in the remaining swamp traps. One of the gnomes had been nearly devoured as he lay in the trap, the parts remaining being skin, feet, tail, and a small portion of the head. I suspected a big mole of being the ghoul. On my way home I looked in a trap set under a small foot-bridge which spanned a damp spot in a mowing-field. The victims here—for two had been caught at once—were of the family Arvicola, the sturdy gnomes of the fields. Their eyes were very small, their ears almost concealed by their coarse, dark-brown hair, and their bodies awkwardly but strongly built. They are the farming gnomes.
On September 17, I walked from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale, over the once “lost trail,” now nearly completed as a broad bridle-path and winter road. I took twenty-five “cyclones” with me and set them at the most favorable spots along the way. Brook crossings, big, moss-grown stumps or logs, boulders overhanging springs or rivulets, and old logging camps were among the places which seemed to me likely to be frequented by gnomes. As I was not to return until the next day, a night would intervene to give the little cave-dwellers time to smell the corn and to inspect and spring the traps.