Sam Huntington, John’s younger brother, is a handsome, strong, slender-built fellow, taller than John and even darker. It was Sam who showed my father, one day out snipe shooting, what a bee line really means, and how to take one, and find the bee-tree. You catch two wild bees, and attach a bit of cotton wool, big enough to mark the bee’s flight, to each; let the first bee go, getting the line of his flight well, then walk on two or three hundred yards, and let the second go, taking note equally carefully. Where the two lines intersect is the bee-tree and the hidden treasure of wild honey.
Sitting in Jacob Damren’s clover field one day, my father showed me how to find bumble-bee honey. We sat still, and watched the fat bee go his buzzing way from head to head of red clover. At last he had honey enough, and off he started on a swifter, straighter flight, but he was heavy with honey, and we could easily follow. He did not go far, but swung on a long slant to his hole in the ground. We dug where he entered (he emerged, part way through the process, very angry and buzzing) and about six inches down we found the honey cells. There was a lump or cluster of them, perhaps half as big as your hand. They were longer than the cells of honey bees; not hexagonal like these, but roughly cylindrical, dark brown, and full of very good, clear, dark brown honey.
Tresumpscott Pond is a great haunt of whippoorwills. As dusk begins to fringe the coverts of the wood, they begin their strange, almost ghostly chorus, like the swift whistling of a rod through the air, powerful and regular, “whip,” and “whip,” and “whip” again, answering each other all night. I noticed the time of their first notes, one night in early July. The voices of the veeries fell away, and then stopped, at quarter past eight, and at quarter of nine the first whippoorwill struck up, and was instantly answered. (I have known them to begin sharp at eight o’clock, or even earlier.)
It is extremely hard to see the birds themselves, for they lie hid all day in the deep woods, sleeping. Like owls, they seem unable to see well if roused by daylight. At night they gather close about the farms, one perhaps on the roof of the barn, and one or two on a fence (sitting always lengthwise to their perch, never across), and sometimes you can see their shape silhouetted against the sky. Last May, a whippoorwill was bewildered in a sudden gale, and did not get back to the woods, but spent the day sound asleep in broad sunlight on the railing of a balcony, right in the midst of our town. I stood within four feet of him. He is a strange-shaped bird, with whiskers like a cat’s, and a flat head; about the size of a small hawk, and mottled, like his cousin the night-hawk, with gray and white markings like those of rocks and lichens, or of some of the larger moths.
CHAPTER XII—HARVEST
In late September an errand took us out to Sam Marston’s again. We wanted a quantity of early farm things, sweet cider, Porter apples, and honey.
The woods were in a flame of fiery color as we drove out through the intricacies of the river hills. They glowed like beds of tulips, with only the dark evergreens to set them off, and turned our whole country into a huge flower garden.
The crops had all been very good this season. Hay and grain were both heavy, and the apple trees had to be propped, the branches were so loaded with fruit. Our own grapes bore heavily.