When this happens to me I am always surprised to see what a fine dignity the bird has in the woods, unconscious of observation. His carriage is that of a lord of the thicket, and he seems far larger and taller than his bulk and length when put to the yardstick would show. I always think his tracks in the snow show something of the same characteristics, as if he unwittingly wrote his character into his signature, as most of us do.
All in all it is a fine sport, this hunting of the wild creatures of the wood without harming them. To bag them in one's memory or one's notebook is to accomplish that feat long desired of mankind, to keep one's cake and eat it too, while he who shoots kills his joy in the acquiring of it.
At dusk of the still winter day the cold of interstellar space drops down among the treetops and seems to reflect back toward one's marrow from the snow beneath. Then I like to preface the homeward trip by one more campfire. A grove of young white pines provides the best material for a quick fire. The upper boughs of such trees so shade the lower ones that they die, but remain dry and brittle on the trees, full of pitch, making the finest kindling material in the woods. It takes but a strong pull to break such limbs off near the trunk and they may be broken into stove length over the knee or in the hands. Even in a rain the tiny twigs of these limbs will light at the touch of a match and no snow can be so deep in the winter woods but they are immediately available. They make a smokeless fire that gives off a fine aroma and much heat. In its ruddy glow is home, its flickering flames weaving an ever-changing tapestry on the gathering dusk, the black pines standing like beneficient genii watching over the altar flame in the snow.
Many a woodland thing will stand at gaze just beyond the circle of this campfire whose flare may shine back from the eyes of a wandering deer. More likely it will shine from the eyes of the only night bird of the winter woods, an owl. Perhaps the last greeting from the woods which the wayfarer will get as he leaves the diminishing red glow of the falling embers behind him and fares on under the keen, cold twinkle of the stars will be the questioning "who-who-whoo?" of the one of the big species of these birds, a barred owl or a great horned owl. More likely in our neighborhood it will be the gentle, quavering call of the little screech owl, a voice of friendliness out of the silence, dear to every true lover of the woods. With this voice and perhaps a gleam of the friendly eyes in the purple dusk the chronicle of the day's sport may well end.
CHAPTER XXIV
COASTING ON PONKAPOAG
Looking backward from these days of slothful ease in getting about it seems as if the golden days of Ponkapoag were those of a generation and more ago. Then it was an isolated hamlet. To be sure, there was a railroad a mile and a half away and the venturous traveller might go north or south on it twice a day, though few Ponkapoag people were that sort of venturesome travellers. The days of the stage coaches had passed and the place was more thrown upon its own resources, especially for excitement, than it had been since they had made it a stopping point on a main thoroughfare. The railroad brought bustle to many hamlets, but it took it away from Ponkapoag and left it a sleepy hollow. Even the days of the Cherry Tavern and the Ponkapoag Inn were past and the poet Aldrich and other people of latter-day renown had not appeared to make it famous.
Now the trolley car buzzes up and down the long steep slopes of Ponkapoag Hill and the automobiles honk in endless procession both ways. The old houses stand, but a new generation occupies them and the cosey, self-centered life of the old village has completely passed. Even the people who knew its traditions of a half-century ago are gone, too, and though the Christmas snow brought good coasting I doubt if it brought many coasters to the old hill. Yet Ponkapoag Hill was once famous in the region all about for its coasting and the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the Ponkapoag coasters. On days and nights in the old-fashioned winters, when the sledding of big logs to the sawmill on Ponkapoag brook had made the course down the hill one glare of adamantine snow between deep rifts, the population of the village used to turn out; not the big and little boys and girls only, but the grown-ups even to the venerable gaffers of those days who could remember how they used to coast there before the Civil War was thought of, when the Cherry Tavern still fed scores of pleasure-seeking Bostonians on big, luscious black-heart cherries each June, and in winter the Ponkapoag Inn had its patrons from the big city not only for coasting but for pickerel fishing on the pond.
Modern easy methods of transportation and communication have put the typical New England village, with its manly, self-reliant, self-centered life, out of existence, and with it have passed or become decadent many of its community sports. I doubt if Ponkapoag will ever again see such coasting as it has seen, and I fancy the same may be truly said of hundreds of big hills in other towns. The sport still holds in one form or another, but it has changed. Coasting in the streets is rightly forbidden now in many communities. The chances of meeting dangerous obstructions in these days of multitudinous automobiles and omnipresent trolley cars are too great: In the old Ponkapoag days such things were unknown, and the rarely occasional sleigh or wood-sled was little to be feared. The drivers who were not coasting themselves knew the coasters had the right of way and "cleared the lulla" to let them by.