A Northern Countryside

by Rosalind Richards

Muskrat are found in Tresumpscott Pond and its small tributary streams, hares and partridges and foxes all through its woods. Black duck, and sometimes wood duck, breed about the Pond, and Carolina rails; and where the brooks that feed the Pond spread out into broad estuaries of alder covert, you may see the marked flight of snipe or woodcock.

It was in these woods that Jerome Mitchell, our local authority on game and fur (a very fair naturalist, also), grew up. He is a slender, well-knit fellow, whose mother had great ambitions for him. He walked into town, five miles and back, every day, to get one year in the High School, after his country schooling. He could not afford any more, but when he was seventeen, having picked up a knowledge of taxidermy and simple mechanics, he moved into town. He worked early and late with dogged patience, taking every smallest job that offered, till at last he realized his ambition, and opened a small, but good sportsmen’s and general repair shop. Gradually he picked up the fur trade of the neighborhood. He is anxiously fair, and boys from the farms soon began to bring in skunk, squirrel, and muskrat skins, and every little while a fox or a coon.

Last year Jerome ran into hard luck. A stranger, a good-looking man, brought in an extra fine looking lot of muskrat skins. There were $600 worth, and this was a low figure for them. It was a serious venture, still Jerome took them; they turned out, however, to be stolen goods, and he had to pay the rightful owner, as the stranger was nowhere to be found. Poor Jerome! he was near tears when he told my father about it. Then, when he just had his store new painted and set in order for the summer’s trade, someone dropped a lighted match among the shavings, and the whole stock and fixtures were in a blaze.

This loss turned out to be not so serious. Jerome worked nearly all night for a week, and made better fittings than he had had before. The wholesale dealers were generous, and the shop re-opened with the best outfit of goods that it has had at all.

Now a good windfall has come to him. A rural mail-carrier brought word of a silver fox which had been trapped on a farm fifteen miles out in the country. Jerome only waited to telegraph to a big fur dealer for whom he works, who has lately established a fox farm, and started off at once. He found even better than he had hoped. The fox was a perfect young male, coal black, and hardly scratched by the trap.

In the recent craze over fox-raising, as much as ten thousand dollars has been paid, in our State, for a first-rate black fox. Of course Jerome would only get a commission, but this was the first big chance that had come to him and he was beside himself with anxiety lest it miscarry. It was a sharp February night, but he slept in the barn beside his prize, and the next morning drove home, dreading every drift and thank-you-ma’am, for fear they might upset, and the slight crate that held the fox might break.

That night he slept on the floor of his shop, wrapping himself in the sleigh robes. The fox ate the meat given him with a good appetite, and curled up contentedly enough to sleep; but as the first grayness began to show before dawn, he stood up, bristling a little, and barked, a far-away, lonely sound, Jerome said. The next day he was forwarded to the dealer in safety.

My father has shot and hunted all about this region, going on snow-shoes after foxes and hares in winter, with one of the forest farmers—generally one of the Huntingtons—as guide or companion; coming into the warm dark farm kitchen for a warm-up before the long ride or drive home. The Huntingtons always had good dogs. Bugle, a fox-hound famous through the countryside, belonged to them.

John Huntington is the man whom neither bee nor wasp will sting. He is sent for all about to take away troublesome hornets’ nests, which he simply tears down and pulls to pieces with his bare hands. Some hornets built a huge nest over the door of the stable at the Homestead not long ago, just where the men come and go for milking. One of the farm men wanted to take a torch and smoke it out, but Thomas Burnham, the farmer in charge, sent all the way over to Tresumpscott for John Huntington. He came, a silent, dark, shambling man; looked at the nest, nodded, asked for a ladder, climbed up, and unconcernedly pulled the whole thing down, while the furious hornets swarmed over his uncovered face and hands. He reached a finger down his neck, first on one side, then the other, and took out handfuls of them, and scraped them off where they had crawled up his sleeves. He tore the nest up, threw it on the ground, and stamped on it, and with few words went back to his farm.

I have never heard any adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Some people say that persons having this power have a distinctive odor about them, which wasps and bees dislike, and others ascribe it only to an entire fearlessness and unconcern.