The pale yellow glow of autumn twilight settles in deep peace upon the place. You seem to be at once in a vast silence and yet able to note all that goes on in the world for many miles about by unobtrusive sounds. To stand here in the open with the night descending in blessing upon you is to be in touch with the universe: In town night shuts you away from the rest of the world, wraps you in your own tiny seclusion. Out here it makes you one with the deep secrets of common life. The mystical quality for the time vanishes and the radiance which long holds the sky seems but the light of home, a light which is no longer within a room or shut off by the walls of a house, but the real home of all the world's creatures to which you have come at last.
As the glow fades and the darkness deepens it seems good to lie down beneath the silent pines that stretch their great arms over you in protecting fatherliness and become an integral part of the peace of the place. Sleep that comes thus is deep and refreshing. Yet always with it there goes a subtle sub-consciousness which makes you alert to what goes on about you. Thus with the piping up of the night wind you hear once more the rapt voices of the great pines, the chanting of those weird sages of the unknown. All the mystical comes back to the pasture with the sound and the deep song of the elder trees comes nearer to finding words for you than, it can at any other time. I fancy that all the wee lives that sleep and wake beneath it are part of its mystery, its longing and its unfathomable promise.
CHAPTER XIX
WHITE PINE GROVES
A tiny brown wing brushed my cheek this morning, flitting madly southeastward on the wings of the November gale. It was a belated one of many that have scattered from the pine taps this autumn, for it was the single wing of a white pine seed and the cone harvest has been good. Ever since August the squirrels have known this and the stripped spindles lie by the score under the big pasture pines where these have left them after eating the seeds. It seems much work for small pay for the squirrel. He must climb venturesomely to the very tip of the slippery limb, gnaw the cone from its hold, then run down the tree and gnaw it to pieces for the tiny seeds within. So light are these seeds, wing and all, that it takes twenty to thirty thousand of them to weigh a pound and it is probably fortunate that squirrels do not live by pine seed alone. However, the gnawing means as much to the squirrel as the eating, for the squirrel's teeth grow constantly and he must continually wear them off or he dies, stabbed by his own incisors which grow in the arc of a circle. Yet the squirrel is an adept at getting at the tiny, toothsome seed and he can strip a cone of its scales far faster than I can, even if I use my knife. He holds the cone stem end upward in his fore paws which are so like hands, severs the base of the scale with his ivory shears and has munched the two little seeds that cling under the very bottom of the scale, almost before you can see him do it.
Certain wise naturalists assure us that the squirrel does not use reason in this handling of the cone, merely acting automatically by blind instinct. Yet he gets his results in the shortest time and with the least effort. The highest reasoning could teach him no more and if instinct is such a splendid short cut to the solution of problems it is a pity that it is not added to our common school course. The squirrel, they say, does it because he and his ancestors have done it in the same way for untold generations, the automatic impulse being born in him and bound to appear at the right moment, just as his teeth grow without his own volition. Yet there must have been a time when the first squirrel sat up on a limb with his first pine cone in his paws. Did he reason out the way to get those seeds or did he know instinctively? And if so what is instinct in his case?
For all the squirrels got so many cones that in some places in the woods the ground is fairly carpeted with the brown scales which they severed, prompted by this clever whatever-it-is that is such an excellent substitute for wisdom, there are plenty still left on the trees where they dangle from the branch tips, their scales gaping and the seeds for the most part gone. Left to themselves they have been flying away ever since September, a few at a time on dry, windy days when their single wings would scull them farthest. One might impute instinct or whatever it is to the pine tree too, she works so methodically for the preservation of her species. A year ago last spring the mother pine put forth the beginnings of those pine cones that now dangle brown and pitchy, or drop to the ground, useless except as kindlings for my campfire. Then they were wee golden-green buds of pistillate flowers, set high on the uppermost branch tips that the pollen from the tree's own staminate blooms might miss them in its flight down the wind and thus avoid in breeding. If they miss fertilization altogether they fall off. It is commonly said that the pines produce a crop of cones once in five or seven years, which is true in part, just as the statement that every seventh wave at sea is larger than any of its preceding six is occasionally borne out by the facts. I do not recall years in which the pines have failed to put forth both staminate and pistillate blossoms. Sometimes frost gets these and they fail to reproduce. Sometimes a long rain will prevent the pollen from being disseminated by the wind until its time is passed and again there is a failure in cones. Only once in a while is the season perfectly favorable, and then we get that seventh wave in pine cones and the squirrels rejoice that they can file their teeth and fill their cheek pouches at the same time. The years when there are no cones at all sending forth their seeds in September are few indeed. This year the harvest in my neighborhood has been an excellent one.
The fertilized bloom soon ceases to be a little Christmas candle on the tree top, closes its tiny scales over its growing seeds and becomes a little green cone, still sitting upright on the upper branch tip where it grew. By autumn it is an inch and a half long, the short peduncle which attaches it to the branch has lengthened and thickened, but is not able to hold it wholly erect, so much has it gained in weight. At that season the young cone and its fellows have tipped over horizontal or even becomes slightly pendulous. Thus it remains through the winter, its scales pressed close to its core and to one another, defending the tender seeds from all cold and making a seemingly solid chunk of the whole. Toward spring I have known squirrels to attack these young cones, but rarely, and I am not sure whether it was because of the pressure of hunger or whether some young squirrel's instinct to sharpen his teeth on them made him a bit precocious. These adolescent cones begin growing again very early in the spring. Youth will have its way, and in this case it seems to seize on the first sap that gets as far as the topmost branch tips, compelling it to the nourishing of the young cones before it can go to the making of new leaves or even of the crop of staminate and pistillate blossoms for the ensuing summer. The cones add a quarter of an inch to their length before the blossoms of that year appear, and their weight sags them still more on the stem, making them distinctly pendulous. By the last of August these greedy feeders have not only ripened the seeds within the still close-pressed scales, but have multiplied their own length by four, being four to six inches long and hanging pretty nearly straight down by their weight.
Their work is done then. Fifty or more scales has each cone, a hundred or more seeds, if the fertilization has been perfect, are ripe and ready to go forth and produce other pine trees. In early September the sap begins to recede from these ripe cones, the scales lose their green plumpness and begin to dry and curl back toward the base of the cone. This gives the seed eating birds, the siskins, the pine grosbeaks and especially the crossbills their best opportunity and they eagerly pluck out such seeds as the narrow openings will give them a chance at. Between these and the squirrels the pine forests of the future are decimated before their seeds have been planted. Nature provides bountifully for the reproduction of all her favorites, yet far more bountifully in some instances than in others. A thousand young birches spring from seed, to one pine in our Massachusetts woods, and no wonder. Each birch tree ripens a thousand seeds to one that comes to maturity in the great cones of the pine. Yet there are compensations for the pine tree. Barring axes and accidents it may live out its third century and yearly give more and more comfort and inspiration to mankind as it increases in dignity and beauty. The birch may give comfort and inspiration too through its grace and beauty, but it is lucky if it lasts out a score of years.