My neighbor makes smooth the way of the plow and of the mower. Last summer I saw him take enough stones and rocks from a three-acre field to build quite a fortress; and land whose slumbers had never been disturbed by the plow was soon knee-high with Hungarian grass. How one likes to see a permanent betterment of the land like that!—piles of renegade stone and rock. It is such things that make the country richer. If all New England and New York had had such drastic treatment years ago, the blight of discouraged farming never would have fallen upon them, and the prairie States would not have so far distanced the granite States. A granite soil should grow a better crop of men than the silt of lake or river bottom, though it yields less corn to the acre.
The prairie makes a strong appeal to a man’s indolence and cupidity; it is a place where he can sit at ease and let his team do most of his work. But I much doubt whether the western farms ever will lay the strong hands upon their possessors that our more varied and picturesque eastern farms lay. Every field in these farms has a character of its own, and the farms differ from one another as much as the people do. An eastern farm is the place for a home; the western farm is the place to grow wheat, pork, and beef. Oh, the flat, featureless, monotonous, cornstalk-littered middle West! how can the rural virtues of contentment and domesticity thrive there? There is no spot to make your nest except right out on the rim of the world; no spot for a walk or a picnic except in the featureless open of a thousand miles of black prairie—the roads black, straight lines of mud or dust through the landscape; the streams slow, indolent channels of muddy water; the woods, where there are woods, a dull assemblage of straight-trunked trees; the sky a brazen dome that shuts down upon you; there are no hills or mountains to lift it up. The prairie draws no strong distinct lines against the sky; the horizon is vague and baffling. Ah, my mountains are very old measured by the geologic calendar! Yet how foreign to our experience or ways of thinking it seems to speak of mountains as either old or young, as if birth and death apply to them also. But such is the fact: mountains have their day, which day is the geologist’s day of millions of years. My mountains were being carved out of a great plateau by the elements while the prairies were still under the sea, and while most of the Rocky Mountains and the Alps, and the Himalayas were gestating in the vast earth-womb. In point of age, these mountains beside the Catskills are like infants beside their great-grandfathers. Yet it is a singular contradiction that in their outlines old mountains look young, and young mountains look old. The only youthful feature about young mountains is that they carry their heads very high, and the only old feature about old mountains is that they have a look of repose and calmness and peace. All the gauntness, leanness, angularity, and crumbling decrepitude are with the young mountains; all the smoothness, plumpness, graceful flowing lines of youth are with the old mountains. Not till the rocks are clothed with soil made out of their own decay are outlines softened and life made possible. Youthful mountains like the Alps are battle-marked by the elements, and their proud heads are continually being laid low by frost, wind, and snow; they are scarred and broken by avalanches the season through. Old mountains, such as the Appalachian range, wear an armor of soil and verdure over their rounded forms on which the arrows of time have little effect. The turbulent and noisy and stiff-necked period of youth is far behind them.
Hundreds of dairy-farms nestle in the laps of the Catskills; and their huge, grassy aprons, only a little wrinkled here and there, hold as many grazing herds. Woodchuck Lodge is well upon the knee of one of the ranges, and the fields we look upon are like green drapery lying in graceful curves and broad, smooth masses over huge extended limbs. Patches of maple forest here and there bend over a rounded arm or shoulder, like a fur cape upon a woman. Here and there also huge, weather-worn boulders rest upon the ground, dropped there by the moving ice-sheet tens upon tens of thousands of years ago; and here and there are streaks of land completely covered with smaller rocks wedged and driven into the ground. It used to be told me in my youth that the devil’s apron-string broke as he was carrying a load of these rocks overhead, and let the mass down upon the ground. The farmers seldom attempt to clear away these leavings of the devil.
IV
MY interest in the birds is not as keen as it once was, but they are still an asset in my life. I must live where I can hear the crows caw, the robins sing, and the song-sparrow trill. If I can hear also the partridge drum, and the owl hoot, and the chipmunk cluck in the still days of autumn, so much the better. The crow is such a true countryman, so much at home everywhere, so thoroughly in possession of the land, going his way winter and summer in such noisy contentment and pride of possession, that I cannot leave him out. The bird I missed most in California was the crow. I missed his glistening coat in the fields, his ebony form and hearty call in the sky.
One advantage of sleeping out of doors, as we do at Woodchuck Lodge, is that you hear the day ushered in by the birds. Toward autumn you hear the crows first, making proclamation in all directions that it is time to be up and doing, and that life is a good thing. There is not a bit of doubt or discouragement in their tones. They have enjoyed the night, and they have a stout heart for the day. They proclaim it as they fly over my porch at five o’clock in the morning; they call it from the orchard, they bandy the message back and forth in the neighboring fields; the air is streaked with cheery greetings and raucous salutations. Toward the end of August, or in early September, I witness with pleasure their huge mass-meetings or annual congress on the pasture-hills or in the borders of the woods. Before that time, you see them singly or in loose bands; but on some day in late summer, or in early autumn, you see the clans assemble as if for some rare festival and grand tribal discussion. A multitudinous cawing attracts your attention when you look hillward and see a swarm of dusky forms circling in the air, their voices mingling in one dissonant wave of sound, while loose bands of other dusky forms come from all points of the compass to join them. Presently many hundred crows are assembled, alternately lighted upon the ground and silently walking about as if feeding, or circling in the air, cawing as if they would be heard in the next township. What they are doing or saying or settling, what it all means, whether they meet by appointment in the human fashion, whether it is a jubilee, a parliament, or a convention, I confess I should like to know. But second thought tells me it is more likely the gregarious instinct asserting itself after the scatterings and separations of the summer. The time of the rookery is not far off, when the inclement season will find all the crows from a large section of the country massed at night in lonely tree-tops in some secluded wood.
These early noisy assemblages may be preliminary to the winter union of the tribe. What an engrossing affair it seems to be with the crows, how oblivious they appear to all else in the world! The world was made for crows, and what concerns them is alone important. The meeting adjourns, from time to time, from the fields to the woods, then back again, the babel of voices waxing or waning according as they are on the wing or at rest. Sometimes they meet several days in succession and then disperse, going away in different directions and irregularly, singly or in pairs and bands, as men do on similar occasions. No doubt in these great reunions the crows experience some sort of feeling or emotion, though one would doubtless err in ascribing to them anything like human procedure. It is not a definite purpose, but a tribal instinct, that finds expression in their jubilees.
The crow seems to have a great deal of business besides getting a living. How social, how communicative he is—what picnics he has in the fields and woods, how absolutely at home is he at all times and places! I see them from my window flying by, by twos or threes or more, on happy, holiday wings, sliding down the air, or diving and chasing one another, or walking about the fields, their coats glistening in the sun, the movement of their heads timing the movements of their feet—what an air of independence and respectability and well-being attends them always! The pedestrian crow! no more graceful walker ever trod the turf. How different his bearing from that of a game-bird, and from any of the falcon tribe. He never tries to hide like the former, and he is never morose and sulky like the latter. He is gay and social and in possession of the land; the world is his and he knows it, and life is good.
I suppose that if his flesh were edible, like that of the gallinaceous birds, he would have many more enemies and his whole demeanor would be different. His complacent, self-satisfied air would vanish. He would not advertise his comings and goings so loudly. He would be less conspicuous in the landscape; his huge mass-meetings in September would be more silent and withdrawn. Well, then, he would not be the crow—the happy, devil-may-care creature as we now know him.
His little gaily dressed brother, the jay, does not tempt the sportsman any more than the crow does, but he tempts other creatures—the owl and squirrels, and maybe the hawks. Hence his tribe is much less. His range is also more restricted, and his feeding habits are much less miscellaneous. Only the woods and groves are his; the fields and rivers he knows not.