Moths of the Limberlost: A Book About Limberlost Cabin

by Gene Stratton-Porter

CHAPTER III The Robin Moth: Cecropia

When only a little child, wandering alone among the fruits and flowers of our country garden, on a dead peach limb beside the fence I found it—my first Cecropia. I was the friend of every bird, flower, and butterfly. I carried crumbs to the warblers in the sweetbrier; was lifted for surreptitious peeps at the hummingbird nesting in the honeysuckle; sat within a few feet of the robin in the catalpa; bugged the currant bushes for the phoebe that had built for years under the roof of the corn bin; and fed young blackbirds in the hemlock with worms gathered from the cabbages. I knew how to insinuate myself into the private life of each bird that homed on our farm, and they were many, for we valiantly battled for their protection with every kind of intruder. There were wrens in the knot holes, chippies in the fences, thrushes in the brush heaps, bluebirds in the hollow apple trees, cardinals in the bushes, tanagers in the saplings, fly-catchers in the trees, larks in the wheat, bobolinks in the clover, killdeers beside the creeks, swallows in the chimneys, and martins under the barn eaves. My love encompassed all feathered and furred creatures.

Every day visits were paid flowers I cared for most. I had been taught not to break the garden blooms, and if a very few of the wild ones were taken, I gathered them carefully, and explained to the plants that I wanted them for my mother because she was so ill she could not come to them any more, and only a few touching her lips or lying on her pillow helped her to rest, and made vivid the fields and woods when the pain was severe.

My love for the butterflies took on the form of adoration. There was not a delicate, gaudy, winged creature of day that did not make so strong an appeal to my heart as to be almost painful. It seemed to me that the most exquisite thoughts of God for our pleasure were materialized in their beauty. My soul always craved colour, and more brilliancy could be found on one butterfly wing than on many flower faces. I liked to slip along the bloom-bordered walks of that garden and stand spell-bound, watching a black velvet butterfly, which trailed wings painted in white, red, and green, as it clambered over a clump of sweet-williams, and indeed, the flowers appeared plain compared with it! Butterflies have changed their habits since then. They fly so high! They are all among the treetops now. They used to flit around the cinnamon pinks, larkspur, ragged-robins and tiger lilies, within easy reach of little fingers, every day. I called them 'flying flowers,' and it was a pretty conceit, for they really were more delicate in texture and brighter in colouring than the garden blooms.

Having been taught that God created the heavens, earth and all things therein, I understood it to mean a literal creation of each separate thing and creature, as when my father cut down a tree and hewed it into a beam. I would spend hours sitting so immovably among the flowers of our garden that the butterflies would mistake me for a plant and alight on my head and hands, while I strove to conceive the greatness of a Being who could devise and colour all those different butterfly wings. I would try to decide whether He created the birds, flowers, or butterflies first; ultimately coming to the conclusion that He put His most exquisite material into the butterflies, and then did the best He could with what remained, on the birds and flowers.

In my home there was a cellar window on the south, covered with wire screening, that was my individual property. Father placed a box beneath it so that I could reach the sill easily, and there were very few butterflies or insects common to eastern North America a specimen of which had not spent some days on that screen, feasted on leaves and flowers, drunk from saucers of sweetened water, been admired and studied in minutest detail, and then set free to enjoy life as before. With Whitman, "I never was possessed with a mania for killing things." I had no idea of what families they were, and I supplied my own names. The Monarch was the Brown Velvet; the Viceroy was his Cousin; the Argynnis was the Silver Spotted; and the Papilio Ajax was the Ribbon butterfly, in my category. There was some thought of naming Ajax, Dolly Varden; but on close inspection it seemed most to resemble the gayly striped ribbons my sisters wore.

I was far afield as to names, but in later years with only a glance at any specimen I could say, "Oh, yes! I always have known that. It has buff-coloured legs, clubbed antennae with buff tips, wings of purplish brown velvet with escalloped margins, a deep band of buff lightly traced with black bordering them, and a pronounced point close the apex of the front pair. When it came to books, all they had to teach me were the names. I had captured and studied butterflies, big, little, and with every conceivable variety of marking, until it was seldom one was found whose least peculiarity was not familiar to me as my own face; but what could this be?

It clung to the rough bark, slowly opening and closing large wings of grey velvet down, margined with bands made of shades of grey, tan, and black; banded with a broad stripe of red terra cotta colour with an inside margin of white, widest on the back pair. Both pairs of wings were decorated with half-moons of white, outlined in black and strongly flushed with terra cotta; the front pair near the outer margin had oval markings of blue-black, shaded with grey, outlined with half circles of white, and secondary circles of black. When the wings were raised I could see a face of terra cotta, with small eyes, a broad band of white across the forehead, and an abdomen of terra cotta banded with snowy white above, and spotted with white beneath. Its legs were hairy, and the antennae antlered like small branching ferns. Of course I thought it was a butterfly, and for a time was too filled with wonder to move. Then creeping close, the next time the wings were raised above its body, with the nerveless touch of a robust child I captured it.

I was ten miles from home, but I had spent all my life until the last year on that farm, and I knew and loved every foot of it. To leave it for a city home and the confinement of school almost had broken my heart, but it really was time for me to be having some formal education. It had been the greatest possible treat to be allowed to return to the country for a week, but now my one idea was to go home with my treasure. None of my people had seen a sight like that. If they had, they would have told me.

Borrowing a two-gallon stone jar from the tenant's wife, I searched the garden for flowers sufficiently rare for lining. Nothing so pleased me as some gorgeous deep red peony blooms. Never having been allowed to break the flowers when that was my mother's home, I did not think of doing it because she was not there to know. I knelt and gathered all the fallen petals that were fresh, and then spreading my apron on the ground, jarred the plant, not harder than a light wind might, and all that fell in this manner it seemed right to take. The selection was very pleasing, for the yellow glaze of the jar, the rich red of the petals, and the grey velvet of my prize made a picture over which I stood trembling in delight. The moth was promptly christened the Half-luna, because my father had taught me that luna was the moon, and the half moons on the wings were its most prominent markings.