And thus ended the trial between Filkins and Beadle.
CHAPTER III.
Wanderings in the Wilderness.—A Bee-Hunt.—Sunrise.—The Fox-Squirrel.—The Blue-Jay.—The Gopher.—The Partridges.—Wild Geese, Ducks, and Cranes.—Blackbirds and Meadow-Larks.—Venison's Account of the Bees' Domestic Economy.—How Venison found what he was in Search of.—Honey Secured.—After Reflections.
Venison Styles and myself, as I have stated, had now become intimate. Together we scoured the woods and streams, in pursuit of fish and game. There was a kind of rustic poetry about the old man that fascinated my soul. His thoughts and feelings had been drawn from nature, and there was a strange freshness and life about everything he said and did. He was as firm and fiery as a flint; and the sparks struck out of him were as beautiful. Winds and storms, morn's early dawn, the hush of evening, the seasons and all their changes, had become a part of him—they had moulded and kept him. They played upon him like a breeze upon a harp. How could I help loving him?
Before daybreak, one morning in October, Venison, myself, his honey-box, and axes, set out "a bee-hunting," as he called it. It was in the beautiful and inspiring season of Indian summer, a season that lingers long and lovely over the forests of the west. There had been a hard, black frost during the night, and the great red sun rose upon it, shrouded in smoke. We were soon deep in the heart of the wilderness, tramping over the fallen leaves, and pushing forward to where the "bees were thick a-workin'," according to Venison.
As the sun rose higher and higher, the leaves began, all around, to thaw, and detach themselves from the trees, and silently settle to the ground. There stood the yellow walnut, the blood-red maple, side by side with the green pine and the spruce. Ten thousand rainbows were interlaced through the tops of the trees, and now and then a sharp peak shot up its pile of mosaic into the sky.
Not a sound was heard around us till morning's dawn. The tranquillity was oppressive. The mighty wilderness was asleep. Everything felt as fixed and awful as eternity. The vast extent of the wooded waste, reaching thousands of miles beyond, on, and on, and on, filled with mountains, lakes, and streams, lying in solitary grandeur, as unchanged as on the day the Pyramids were finished, overwhelmed the imagination. And then the future arose upon the mind, when all this will be busy with life—when the present will be history, referred to, but not remembered—when the present population of the globe will have been swept from the face of it, and another generation in our place, playing with the toys that so long amused, and which we, at last, left behind us.
But as day dawned, and morning began to throw in her arrows of gold about our feet, the wilderness began to wake up. A fox-squirrel shot out from his bed in a hollow tree, where he had been lodging during the night; and scampering up a tall maple, he sat himself down, threw his tail over his back, and broke forth with his chick-chick-chickaree, chickaree, chickaree!—making the woods ring with his song.