Wood-folk comedies

by William J. Long

While trout fishing one day I climbed the bank to a beautiful spot in the budding woods, which invited me to linger and fill my heart instead of my creel. The spring sun shone warmly; birds sang welcome to their arriving mates; violets and marigolds were distilling sunshine into bright color, and leaf mold into sweet fragrance. Meanwhile the brook prattled of the mountains whence it came, or murmured of the sea to which it hastened, or lisped and tinkled of other matters which one has tried in vain since childhood to interpret. Truly a lovely place, a perfect hour; but even as I picked the cushion of dry leaves on which to rest and attune my soul to a harmonious universe, there came a heart-stopping whir, a writhing of horrible coils, and a rattlesnake lifted its ugly head, fangs bared, tail buzzing forth a deadly warning.

It was a shock, I confess. The instant backward leap was slow beside the chills that ran like flood over me; but as I think of it now, impersonally, the element of comedy is still uppermost. For the snake, too, had answered the call of the sun, perhaps thinking in his unemotional way that a frog would come out of the brook to enjoy such weather, a frog of which he had greater need than I of the trout I had been catching. Instead of a frog, the brook produced an unexpected biped, and the snake acted pretty decently in sounding a warning rattle before he struck—on the whole, more decently than I acted when I grabbed a stick and, without warning, proceeded to break his neck. But even had he struck home, to defend himself as he thought, the result would have been a mere incident and no tragedy from Nature’s viewpoint. Had she not bred in me, as a son of Adam, an instinct against all creeping serpents? Had she not, as if to supplement that instinct, furnished me with nimble legs, quick eyes and plentiful timidity wherewith to take care of myself? Had she not even added the supererogatory gift of medicinal plants and minerals, in order that I might heal me of the painful result of my own carelessness?

Surely, then, it were most illogical as well as ungrateful on my part, a truly lunatic conclusion, to misjudge Nature’s motives, to forget my mercies, to overlook the beauty of the world and the evident gladness of ten-thousand other creatures, all because of one reptile that had come forth with no other purpose than to enjoy the sunshine, the frogs and the general comedy of life in his own way.

Yes, to be sure I killed the snake, which would have killed the frog, which would have killed the fly; and so in a house-that-Jack-built descension to the microbes, which kill smaller creatures to us invisible. Life feeds upon life, and can be nourished from no other source; that is the first rule of the game, a rule which governs the lowly grass as well as the lordly lion. But forgetting our serpent, a questionable character since Eve first met him, the natural man has no sense of struggle or tragedy when he eats eggs for breakfast, since most eggs were laid for just that purpose; neither does a fox dream of tragedy when luckily he finds a partridge’s nest, nor a partridge when she uncovers a swarm of fat young grubs. If you could get the instinctive attitude of such wild creatures toward their world, it would be precisely that of Dante, who called his great work Divina Commedia with the thought that the cosmos is a mighty comedy because all things are divinely ordered, balanced, harmonized, turning out well and fair for all in the end.

That is no new or romantic notion; on the contrary, it is the oldest and most persistent notion of Nature in the thinking world. Because it comes straight from Nature herself, all poets have it, all prophets, all simple out-door men. It is your own notion, harsh and artificial, which you get not from Nature but from modern books, that is without warrant of reason or observation. The accepted fashion now is to put yourself in the skin of a fox running before the dogs, or of a buck that springs up alert at the hunting howl of a wolf, and from your own fears, your vivid imagination, your weak legs or weak heart, and your ignorance of animal psychology, to fill the quiet woods with advancing terror and tragedy.

Now I have followed many fox hunts in the New England woods, and have yet to meet the first fox that does not appear to be getting more fun out of the chase than comes to the heavy-footed hounds as their portion. Except in damp weather or soft snow, which weights his brush and makes him take to earth, a fox runs lightly, almost leisurely, stopping often to listen, and even snatching a nap when his speed or his criss-crossed trail has put a safe distance between him and danger. He has a dozen fastnesses among the ledges, where he can find safety at any time; but the simple fact is that a red fox prefers to keep his feet in the open, knowing that he can outrun or outwit any dog if he be given a fair field.

Also I have witnessed the death of a buck at the fangs of a wolf, and it was utterly different from what I had imagined. The buck ran down a ridge through deep snow, and out on a frozen lake, where he might easily have escaped had he put his mind into the running, since his sharp hoofs clung to the ice where the wolf’s paws slithered wildly, losing grip and balance at every jump. Instead of running for his life, the buck kept stopping to look, as if dazed or curious to know what the chase was all about. The wolf held easily close at heel, stopping when the buck stopped, until he saw his chance, when he flashed in, threw his game, and paralyzed it by a single powerful snap. Before that buck found out what was up, he was dead or beyond all feeling. The wolf raised his head in a tingling cry that rang over the frozen waste like an invitation; and out of the woods beyond the lake raced a wolf pack to share in the feast.

That might appear a tragic or terrible ending, I suppose, if you viewed it imaginatively from the side of Hetokh the buck; but how would it appear if you looked at it imaginatively from the viewpoint of Malsun the wolf, a hungry wolf, who must take whatever good thing his Mother Nature offers to satisfy his hunger? If you elect to stand by the buck, as the better animal, it is still unreasonable to form a judgment from the last event of his life, ignoring all the happy days that went before. He had lived five or six years, as I judged from his development, and he died in a minute. This also is to be remembered, that the idea of death and the fear of death are wholly the result of imagination. And of imagination—that marvelous creative faculty which enables us to picture the unseen or to follow the unknown, and which is the highest attribute of the human mind—the buck had probably very little; certainly not enough either to inspire or to trouble him. Life was all that he knew when the end came quickly. He had absolutely no conception of death, and therefore no fear of it. Any such thing as tragedy was to him unthinkable.

The point is, you see, that in our modern view of nature, which we imagine to be scientific when it is merely bookish and thoughtless, we are prone to let the moment or the passing incident of death obscure the entire vista of life,—life with its leisure hours, its changing seasons, its work and play and rest. To go out-of-doors and look upon nature with unprejudiced eyes is to learn that death is but a curtain let down on a play. Of the stage to which the play is removed, as of that other stage whence it came here, we have as yet no knowledge; but this much we see plainly, that for its completion every life, however small or great, must have its exit as well as its entrance. The quality of that life is to be judged not by either of its momentary and mysterious extremes, but by the long, pleasure-seeking, pleasure-finding days which lie between its end and its beginning.