Suddenly one of the boys dashed off, crying: “Let’s go see if the muskrats have gone to bed yet!” and, trailing after him, we made for a little mound that stood about three feet high out in the meadow, more like a big ant hill or a small, snow-piled haycock, than a lodge of any sort. Only a practiced eye could have seen it, and only a lover of bleak days would have known what might be alive in there.
We crept up softly and surrounded the lodge; then with the axe we struck the frozen, flinty roof several ringing blows. Instantly one-two-three muffled, splashy “plunks” were heard as three little muskrats, frightened out of their naps and half out of their wits, plunged into the open water of their doorways from off their damp, but cosy couch.
It was a mean thing to do—but not very mean as wild animal life goes. And it did warm me up so, in spite of the chilly plunge the little sleepers took! Chilly to them? Not at all and that is why it warmed me. To hear the splash of water down under the two feet of ice and snow that sealed the meadow like a sheet of steel! To hear the sounds of stirring life, and to picture that snug, steaming bed on the top of a tough old tussock, with its open water-doors leading into freedom and plenty below! “Why, it won’t be long before the arbutus is in bloom,” I began to think. I looked at the axe and the shovel and said to myself, “Well, the boys may know what they are doing after all, though three muskrats do not make a spring.”
We had cut back to our path, but had not gone ten paces along it before another boy was off to the left in the direction of a piece of maple swamp.
“He’s going to see if ‘Hairy’ is in his hole,” they informed me, and we all took after him. The “hole” was almost twenty-five feet up in a dead oak stub that had blown off and lodged against a live tree. The meadow had been bleak and wind-swept, but the swamp was naked and dead, filled with ice and touched with a most forbidding emptiness and stillness. I was getting cold again, when the boy ahead tapped lightly on the old stub, and at the empty hole appeared a head—a fierce black and white head, a sharp, long beak, a flashing eye—as “Hairy” came forth to fight for his castle. He was too wise a fighter to tackle all of us, however, so, slipping out, he spread his wings and galloped off with a loud, wild call that set all the swamp to ringing.
It was a thrilling, defiant challenge that set my blood to leaping again. Black and white, he was a part of the picture, but there was a scarlet band at the nape of his neck that, like his call, had fire in it and the warmth of life.
As his woodpecker shout went booming through the hollow halls of the swamp, it woke a blue jay who squalled back from a clump of pines, then wavering out into the open on curious wings—flashing ice-blue and snow-white wings—he dived into the covert of pines again; and faint, as if from beyond the swamp, the cheep of chickadees! Here a little troop of them came to peep into the racket, curious but not excited, discussing the disturbance of the solemn swamp in that desultory, sewing-bee fashion of theirs, as if nipping off threads and squinting through needle-eyes between their running comment.
They, too, were grey and black, grey as the swamp beeches, black as the spotted bark of the birches. And how tiny! But——
“Here was this atom in full breath
Hurling defiance at vast death—
This scrap of valour just for play
Fronts the north wind in waistcoat grey.”
And this, also, is what Emerson says he sings,