A cock
I have to sing how day draws on.
We might rise and retire, indeed, with the clock of the cock, and at all times of day and at all seasons we would sadly miss his voice were he subject to laryngeal troubles. It is a cheery and companionable sound, the absence of which would cause an appreciable void. Many sounds not strictly belonging to outward Nature become complementary to her through familiarity, or through the surroundings amid which they are heard. Thus the hills and valleys speak through the roar of the railroad train, and the harvest fields find a fitting tongue in the thrashing machine. A domestic voice rather than a voice of Nature, the cock’s crow is, notwithstanding this, associated with Nature and rural scenes. It is more a voice of the country and a pulsation of the rural landscape than an expression of urban surroundings. The city hems it in; the country expands it. Orpheus might pause to listen to it when sounded from an autumnal upland, it is so resonant and sonorous. So much does the scene, or the conditions amid which sounds are uttered, affect the sounds themselves.
As a purely wild sound of Nature—the Nature of our own woods and fields—the cry of the owl is, perhaps, unrivaled. The bark of the fox has some analogy to it in point of wildness, except that his voice is always further removed. I hear it on moonlight winter nights following the undulations of the wooded hills—a short sharp bark thrice repeated at rather prolonged intervals. It is an eerie sound, the cry of the vulpine freebooter, ranging his native woods through the frosty winter nights. I never look up at the fox’s pelt slung across the portière-rod in the smoking-room without a feeling of regret for the lissom life that was slain. The grand brush that steadied him in his flight; the sharp pointed nose, once alive to every atom of the atmosphere; the fine soft fur, beautiful still in death, appeal mutely to me for a life wantonly sacrificed. I care not how many grouse and ground-birds may have fallen victims to his cunning—they were his rightful prey, the spoil of his domain.
The drumming of the ruffed-grouse imparts a sense of life and companionship to the woods such as few other sounds convey. Bonasa umbella! there is a whir of vigor in his very name. Every one should be born a sportsman to appreciate his glorious crescendo; hunting is given to man of the gods, Xenophon rightly said. The grouse is the woodland guide, the alcaid who holds the keys to all its guarded recesses, the courier who knows every lane and passage that thread the forest depths. Accept his invitation, and you are conducted into hidden nooks, and presented glimpses of sylvan beauty of whose existence you would otherwise never have dreamed. His roll-call is a stimulus to exercise, an excuse to explore the covers. Onward and onward and still onward he leads; now amid a sun-flecked vista of tree-trunks, now through a thicket of intertwining saplings, now to a woodland antechamber frescoed with October colors, now up some lofty hillside overlooking the empurpled valley. A taste of the bitter he also mixes with the sweet, as when flushed for the third or fourth time, weary of pursuit, he leads to an almost impenetrable thicket of bramble, perchance to skim off unseen on hearing your approach, or to dive deep down into a precipitous glen, only to mislead by suddenly wheeling up the hillside in a long deceptive flight. Most noticeably in the spring, and frequently in the autumn, and on tempered winter days do I hear the music of his wings, far away in some sequestered glade, beating a sylvan tattoo—most picturesque of all woodland sounds; it is as if the woods themselves were speaking.
The squirrel’s bark is emphatically a sylvan expression. He knows its effect upon the listener, and selects a bland, sunshiny day when he may be distinctly heard. But only at a safe distance, for has not the fox taught him caution, and the grouse the wile of placing a tree-trunk between himself and the double-barrel? Were I to analyze the sentiment of the squirrel’s bark, I should term it an utterance of derision. Not altogether derision, however; for besides a snarling tone, it has a perceptible sound of cracking and crunching, as of nuts and acorns being husked and split by a rodent’s tooth.
An eery cry is the “ssh-p! ssh-p!” of the twisting snipe—two fifths a whistle, two fifths a cry, while to the nervous sportsman the other fifth is a jeer. A guttural cry, a strange raucous cry, a very voice of the treacherous ooze and the rustling sedge. It can not be put into words, and only the snipe himself can sound it. Most voices of the marsh are characteristic; it has its distinctive gamut of sound. The cheerful music of the woodlands is wanting; its speech is pitched in a graver key, in keeping with its solitary haunts where Syrinx ever murmurs through her murmuring reeds. How expressive its many-sounding tongues—the boom of the bittern, the harsh quack of the heron, the scream of hawk and kildeer, the multitudinous calls of water birds—
cries that might
Be echoes of a water-spirit’s song.
All through the spring and autumn nights countless wings are cleaving the upper air, bearing the hurrying voyagers in search of distant climes—flocks of plover and woodcock, skeins of snipe and shore-birds, throngs of ducks and geese, voicing their way through the darkness, league after league, hour after hour on their long journey of migration.