The story of my house

by George H. Ellwanger

Shall I regret the summer with the October carnival at hand, when the woodcock whistles from the alder thicket and the grouse bursts through the painted covert? It is for this the sportsman has longed and waited during the lingering months of summer. Stanchly as he is drawn upon the covey, I am sure The Spanish Pointer, in the old print above the writing-desk, feels the advent of the season, and thinks, with the latter-day philosopher, that “the preacher who declared that all is vanity, never looked at a fall woodcock over the rib of a good gun.”

Always on his point on the knoll, the pointer’s riveted attitude now has an added meaning. His eye still fixed upon the quarry, he nevertheless moves unceasingly in his frame. There is no deception, no optical illusion; he moves—not forward or backward, but with an oscillating, sideward motion, as if the constant strain on his powerful tendons had caused them to relax. Rigid as a statue has he stood throughout the summer, the blue blood of generations of pointers holding him unflinchingly upon the game. Perhaps now the scent has grown cold. Or has he wearied of waiting for the volley of the barrels, and, looking up for a moment at the crimsoning copse, bethought him that a fresh season has dawned, and there are fresh coveys to spring? The grim lion by Barye, in the etching that hangs above him, remains motionless. Though you would dread to meet the beast of prey on the desert where he is stalking, he shows no signs of animation on the wall whence he looks down upon you. Only the old pointer moves unceasingly in his frame. Is the movement of the picture due to the furnace heat behind the partition wall? To you, perhaps. To me he is plainly motioning to the covers.

Methinks, also, that my good Irish terrier, who is often by my side, looks up at the fox’s pelt more intently as autumn draws on apace. The fox may suggest the covers and its denizens to him, as the motion of the pointer suggests them to me—the fleet forms that haunt their mazy fastnesses, the hares and rabbits and vanishing shadows his steel sinews are eager to pursue. Surely his sharply pointed ears, his quivering muscles, and his glittering hazel eyes are in sympathy with the movements of the pointer, and second his invitation to the woods.

Musing upon the ancient print, with its rolling background of hill and dale, I sometimes picture the scene of desolation which would ensue were the woods and waters stripped of their native tenants—the game which is at once their glory and their joy. Fancy the landscape denuded of the wild life that is as indigenous as its flora, that is nurtured upon its mast, and derives sustenance from the very twigs and leaves of its vegetation. Conceive, if it be possible, streams with no trout to people their pools and shallows, waters that never mirrored the wood-drake’s mail, and lakes unruffled by the web of wild fowl.

Imagine the woodlands with no grouse to beat the reveille of spring, no hares to thread their shaded labyrinths, no fox to prowl through their coverts. Silence the scream of the hawk, and the voice of the owl, crow, and jay, and instantly the landscape would be deprived of half its beauty, its innate beauty of sound. Game is the essence of the woods and free, uncivilized Nature—the division line that separates the wild from the tame—and he whose nerves have never tingled at the electric whir of a game-bird’s wing and the responsive boom of the double-barrel, has remained insensible to one of the most inspiring exhilarations of the senses. Just as the library refreshes and stimulates the mind, so do the woods, the streams, and the stubbles become a field of health for the body, and by the invigorating and elevating recreation they yield do field sports serve to strengthen both mind and body. Enough for me that autumn is here; I must accept the invitation of the old pointer, and examine for myself what the woods have in store.

Brilliant as they are in the flush of their October splendor, they will lose but little of their beauty as autumn wanes. The bare trees extend and expand the landscape for me, contributing enchantments of distance that only denuded vegetation may reveal. Then, with the weather in a gracious mood, I obtain effects that the green entanglement of summer never knew. The purple bloom upon my hills is never half so exquisite as when a thaw has freed them temporarily from their coverlet of snow, disclosing their russet slopes and leafless trees. A new palette of color is presented in these subtle gradations of umber and ochre, of drab and of bronze, that drape the withered stubbles. Sere and faded in the latter year, the lonely marsh is yet glorious with subdued hues when touched by the afternoon splendor. The hush which broods upon the landscape, too, has a charm of its own, in harmony with the quiet tones of the slumbering woods. The very lisp of the chickadee and solemn tap of the nut-hatch only intensify the repose of Nature; and I question if the combined glories of the midsummer twilight, when the bat and night-hawk raced upon the evening sky, yielded anything so radiantly beautiful as the slant November sunlight streaming through the trees of the lowland, its vivid crimsons reflected in the pools below.

The airy spray of the beech I may admire only during winter, and only when it stands divested of its summer garniture may I behold the marvelous framework of the elm. Attractive as it is when robed in the bloom and leafage of summer, the thorn develops a new beauty in its gnarled and naked branches and the hoariness of its gray antiquity. Loveliest, too, are the birch and hemlock in midwinter; whilst the swamp, ablaze with the scarlet fruit of the Prinos and smooth winterberry, presents its most vivid life above the snow. From it, likewise, I catch the gleam of the golden willow, with purple rufous lights that smolder amid the twigs and branchlets of the shrubs which seek its cool and solitude. Again, when the snow comes sifting down from the pallid sky, what magical effects do I not obtain amid the dark mysterious depths of the hemlock woods! Even then my hills and woods offer a glorious excuse for an outing. For have I not long pictured in imagination the shadowy vistas where I know the big white hares are in waiting?

It is worth scaling a dozen hillsides to breathe such air and obtain such views. No play of sunlight on an English South Down could be finer, and no lines of beauty fairer than those revealed by distant table-land and wide-extending vale. A silence, broken only by the roar of far-off railroad trains or the ring of the woodsman’s axe, rests like a benediction over all, a sleep of Nature—peaceful, deep, profound.

Within the shelter of the wood, beneath the refuge of the evergreens and undergrowth, it is warm; without, the gale may rave, and, above, the tree-tops wail a requiem for the departing year; but here below it is protected as within the walls of a building. On either hand extend the green arcades of the hemlocks, like the nave and transepts of a cathedral. The downy woodpecker and titmouse are here, ever present as choristers; the wild life of the woods is here, the companionship of bird and beast and dormant vegetable life. There is life beating beneath the mold, beneath the snowy mantle—the ermine with which Nature keeps her treasures warm. There is life—nimble, fleet, and stirring—above the tell-tale snow.

That is a fox’s track leading to his den on the hillside, the return trail of Reynard whose sortie toward the barn-yards you previously noticed. When he started on his foray his pace was a walk, as his footsteps close together reveal. Warily he was proceeding under cover of the darkness, planning the best means of ingress to his gallinaceous goal. All the caution of a skilled general on the eve of a decisive battle is apparent in his skulking foot-prints. His dreaded enemies are well known. Only yesterday the hounds were hot in his pursuit, and the echoes reverberated with the volley of barbarous vulpicides, which happily fell wide of its mark. But he will outwit them all! His trained cunning has taught him the danger of traps and gins; his fleet foot has long borne him through many a loop-hole of escape. The stork’s invitation to dine must needs be deftly perfumed and framed on an unusually tempting card to induce him to take his claret out of long-necked carafes or his pâté de foie gras from metal tureens.