They were all gone, and the little house under the ledge was deserted. In one of the tumble-down rooms I found a rag doll beside the cold hearth, and some poor toys on a shelf under a broken window. In the whole lonely forgotten house these were the only things that brought the light to one's face and the moisture to his eyes as he beheld them. All else spoke of ruin and decay; but these poor playthings that little hands had touched went straight to the heart with an eternal suggesting of life and innocence and a childhood that never grows old in the world. I dusted them tenderly with my handkerchief and put them back in their places, and went away softly down the path that led to the other house where the Little Brother to the Bear used to live.
Everything was changed here, too. The dam that the beavers had built, and that the years had covered over, still stood as strong as ever; but the woods had been cut away, and the pond had dwindled till the wild duck no longer found a refuge there. The ledges were no longer green, for the sun that came in when the big trees fell had killed most of the mosses and ferns that decked them; and the brook's song, though cheery still, was scarcely heard as it trickled and seeped where once it had rushed and tumbled down the woodsy valley, which remained woodsy still, because happily the soil there was too poor to raise anything but brush and cowslips, and so the woodsmen had spared it from desolation.
The old tree that had once been the coon's house was blown down. When it missed the support and the wind-break of its fellows, it could not stand alone, and toppled over in the first storm. The old claw marks of Mooweesuk were hidden deep under lichens. From this ruined home I went to the den among the rocks by the path that the coons used to follow. The hunters had been here long ago; the den was pried open, the sheltering rocks were thrust aside, and the interior was full of last year's leaves. As I brushed them away sadly to see what the house was like, my hand struck something hard in a dark corner, and I brought it out into the light again. It was a little knot with a crook in it, all worn smooth by much handling—the plaything that I had first seen, and that was now the last memory of a home where the Little Brothers to the Bear had once lived and played together happily.
WHITOOWEEK THE HERMIT
WHITOOWEEK THE HERMIT
WHITOOWEEK, the woodcock, the strangest hermit in all the woods, is a bird of mystery. Only the hunters know anything about him, and they know him chiefly as a glorious bird that flashes up to the alder tops with a surprised twitter before their dogs, and poises there a moment on whirring wings to get his bearings, and then from his vantage-point at the moment of his exultation he either falls down dead at the bang of their guns and the rip of shot through the screen of leaves, or else happily he slants swiftly down to another hiding-place among the alders. To the hunters, who are practically his only human acquaintances, he is a game bird pure and simple, and their interest is chiefly in his death. The details of his daily life he hides from them, and from all others, in the dark woods, where he spends all the sunny hours, and in the soft twilight when he stirs abroad, like an owl, after his long day's rest. Of a hundred farmers on whose lands I have found Whitooweek or the signs of his recent feeding, scarcely five knew from observation that such a bird existed, so well does he play the hermit under our very noses.
The reasons for this are many. By day he rests on the ground in some dark bit of cover, by a brown stump that exactly matches his feathers, or in a tangle of dead leaves and brakes where it is almost impossible to see him. At such times his strange fearlessness of man helps to hide him, for he will let you pass within a few feet of him without stirring. That is partly because he sees poorly by day and perhaps does not realize how near you are, and partly because he knows that his soft colors hide him so well amidst his surroundings that you cannot see him, however near you come. This confidence of his is well placed, for once I saw a man step over a brooding woodcock on her nest in the roots of an old stump without seeing her, and she never moved so much as the tip of her long bill as he passed. In the late twilight when woodcock first stir abroad you see only a shadow passing swiftly across a bit of clear sky as Whitooweek goes off to the meadow brook to feed, or hear a rustle in the alders as he turns the dead leaves over, and a faint peeunk, like the voice of a distant night-hawk, and then you catch a glimpse of a shadow that flits along the ground, or a weaving, batlike flutter of wings as you draw near to investigate. No wonder, under such circumstances, that Whitooweek passes all his summers and raises brood upon brood of downy invisible chicks in a farmer's wood lot without ever being found out or recognized.