CHAPTER XIV WINTER ASPECTS AND A BIRD VISITATION
Back to the land—Golden days in winter—Colour of dead bracken—Lichen on trees in winter—Furze and bracken in winter—A New Forest memory—Effect of rain on dead bracken—An artist in the rain—Snow and bird migration from the east—The birds return east—How the migrants are received at St. Ives—Birds taken with fish-hooks—Bush-beating—Dolls and gins for the children—Maimed birds—Wesley revisits St. Ives—A compassionate woman—Story of a robin—Mr. Ebblethwaite and the gulls—The author follows Ruskin's advice.
HAVING finished, not very satisfactorily perhaps either to myself or readers, with the difficult subjects which occupy the last few chapters, I returned with renewed zest to my solitary rambles among the hills and along the coast, particularly to that most fascinating strip of country named "Cornwall's Connemara." It was going back to the land and the simple life in a fresh sense—to have moorland donkeys and conies, and daws, gulls and yellow-hammers, instead of men for company; creatures whose lowly minds do not baffle us. I doubt if even the wildest American of the "new school of natural history" would maintain that these friends in fur and feathers possess the faculty of imagination in any degree. It was very pleasant and restful to sit on a granite boulder on the hillside and gaze by the hour, thinking of nothing, on the blue expanse of ocean and the more ethereal blue of the sky beyond, with perhaps a few floating white clouds and soaring white gulls in the void to add to the sense of height and vastness.
There is no question that the best days in the six months from October to March, which are more or less charged with gloom in these northern realms, are those rare days when the sky is clear, the wind still, and the sun floods the world with light and heat. Such days are apt to be warmer here than in other parts; even the adder, hibernating in his deep dark den beneath the rocks, is stirred by the heavenly influence, and crawls forth on a midwinter day to lie basking in the delicious beams. And the entire visible world, sea and land, is a glittering serpent, its discontent now forgotten, slumbering peacefully, albeit with wide-open eyes, in the face of the sun.
Here, in such weather, the futility of all our efforts, whether with pen or pencil, to convey the picture to another has forced itself on me. Some of the details in a description are visualised and remain, but refuse to arrange themselves in their proper place and order, and the result is a mere confusion. I can but go down to a distance of a mile or two from the hills and, turning my back to the sea, look at the prospect before me, and omitting all the small details speak only of its shape and colour. On the right hand and on the left it stretches away to the horizon, and it rises before me up to the rock-crowned peaks and ridges of the hills, the slopes and the moor below splashed and variegated with dead heath-brown, darkest green, and dull red, the hues of heather, furze and dead bracken; and everywhere among the harsh, rough, almost verdureless vegetation appear the granite boulders and masses of rock cropping out of the earth. A scene that enchants with its wildness and desolation; also, on wet days and when the air is charged with moisture, with its novel and strikingly beautiful colour.
The colour of bracken, living or dead—of a plant so universal and abundant—is familiar to everybody, yet I would like now to dwell at some length on its winter colour because it is a strange thing in itself—one of the most beautiful hues in nature which appears in a dead and faded vegetation after the beech-like brilliant autumn tints of russet, gold and copper-red have vanished, and glows and lives again as it were, and fades and vanishes only to return again and yet again, right on to the time when the deep undying roots shall thrust up new stems to uncurl at their tips, spreading out green fresh fronds to cover and conceal that mystery, even as we cover our dead, beautiful in death, with earth and with green and flowering plant. This phenomenon is common enough, but in no place known to me is the landscape so deeply and so constantly coloured by dead bracken as on these slopes, on account of the great abundance of the plant and the excessive moisture in the atmosphere.
In other parts of the county where trees grow a curious effect of the excessive humidity is seen in some woods, especially in deep valleys and coombes sheltered from the winds, in which the mists remain longest. Here you will find the trees thickly clothed from the roots to the highest terminal twigs with long coarse grey lichen like that which grows so abundantly on the granite boulders on the slopes and the rocks on the headlands. The trees are leafless but not naked in winter and look as if covered with a grey foliage, or grey with a faint tinge of green. The effect is not only singular; in walking through such a wood under the grey canopy of branches, and when you come out into an open glade and see the trees in multitudes extending far beyond and all clothed in the same dim mysterious unearthly colour, you are apt to have the fancy that you are in a ghostly wood and are, perhaps, a ghost yourself.
Another singular and magnificent effect of dead bracken where it flourishes greatly among furze bushes can be best seen among the hills.
The first time I particularly noticed this effect was in April near Boldre, in the New Forest, a good many years ago. There was a patch of furze about three acres in extent, where the big rounded bushes grew so close as to touch one another and appeared to occupy the ground to the exclusion of all other plant life; yet it could be seen that bracken had also flourished there during the previous summer, growing tall among the bushes; for now the old dead and withered fronds were everywhere visible lying against or mixed with the dark massy spiky branchlets of the furze. Only it was so shrivelled and pale in colour, or rather colourless, amid the mound-like masses of the dark living green as almost to escape the sight. The mind at all events took no account of those thin and bleached lace-like rags of dead vegetable matter.
One day I walked in this place when it was raining, and after rain had been steadily falling for several hours; but the grey sky was now full of light and the wet grass and foliage had a silvery brightness that was full of promise of fair weather. The rain-soaked dead bracken had now opened and spread out its shrivelled and curled-up fronds and changed its colour from ashen grey and the pallid neutral tints of old dead grass to a beautiful, deep rich mineral red. It astonished me to think that I had never observed the effect before—this marvellous transformation of the sere and almost invisible lace rags to these rich red fabrics of curious design spread upon the monotonous dark green bushes like deepest red cornelian or reddest serpentine on malachite.