In these last days of July the most conspicuous bird of the pastures is the indigo bunting. I say this advisedly and in the presence of goldfinches, myrtle and magnolia warblers, purple finches and various sparrows, including the white-throat, also some other birds who breed and sing there. Yet of all these the indigo bunting seems by numbers and pervasiveness to be most in the public eye; I being the public. Early in the morning he sings. In the full warmth of noontide he sings, and I hear him when the sun is low behind the Presidential Range and the clouds are putting their gray nightcap on the summit of Washington. Always it is the same song, which slight variations only tend to emphasize without obscuring. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it, who-is-it, who-is-it? dear, dear, dear." And sometimes he adds a little whimsical, stuttering, "What-do-you-know-about-that?" He sits as he sings on the penultimate twig of some pasture shrub or tree, and as the sun shines on his indigo blue suit it flashes little coppery reflections from it that might well make one think him the product of some skilled jeweller's art rather than born of an egg in the bushes.
With the self-consciousness of the average summer visitor, I at first thought that this song of his referred to me. I fancied that he was calling to his little brown wife at the nest in the nearby bushes, exclaiming about this stranger who was tramping the pastures and asking her about him. If you wish to know about new people in town ask your wife. Any happily married indigo bunting will give you that advice. But I know his theme better now. I have seen the wife slip slyly out of the dense green of the thicket, and have most impolitely invaded it, there to find the compact grass nest full of a new-born bunting family. I know now that the father bunting sits in the tree tip and exclaims all day long over the arrival of these. Seeing their huddled, naked forms, their astounding mouths and unopened eyes, I do not wonder that he exclaims in perplexity and indeed some dismay over the new arrivals. "Dear, dear," he says, "Who-is-it, who-is-it? What-do-you-know-about-that?" He will never get over his astonishment at such tiny gorgons coming from those pale, pretty eggs that were there but a few days ago. Nor do I blame him one bit. It does not seem possible that these miracles of ugliness can ever grow up to be such sleek, beautiful birds as this father of theirs that sits on the treetop and all day long fills the pasture with echoes of his song of wonder over them. No. His song had no reference to me, but was strictly concerned with his own affairs. Like the other native-born mountaineers, he does not take the summer visitors any too seriously. It is interesting to go up the mountains from one pasture, scramble to another and see what lowland folk fall behind and how the habits of those that keep up the climb change as they progress into the higher altitudes. The woodchuck is not missing here, but he is not the same. He is the northern woodchuck, very like his Massachusetts cousin in habits but grayer, leaner and rangier. At this time of year a Massachusetts woodchuck is so fat that if you meet him he fairly rolls to his hole. The northern woodchuck gets into his with a scrambling bound that shows much less accumulation of adipose tissue. I fancy this leanness and greater alertness is due to the greater numbers and greater alertness of his woodland enemies. The pastures are full of foxes, and when they get hungry they go down and dig out a woodchuck for dinner. But even the northern woodchuck fails the pastures in their higher portions.
One by one the lowland flowers fall back and the lowland trees and shrubs, also, until high on the Presidential Range the pastures themselves, in the common use of the word, have failed as well. Yet I like to think the true use of the word includes that debateable land at the tree limit as pasture land. In the economy of a farm it would surely be of use for nothing else, and it would make excellent pasturage in summer, were there farms near enough to use it. It always seems homelike, this region of grass and browse, coming to it as one does from the dark depths of fir woods and dwarfed deciduous trees. The hemlocks, beeches, yellow birches and maples have stayed behind in the region of cow pastures. Here where sometimes the deer come and where mountain sheep ought to find pasturage, only the hardiest of pasture people have dared to take their stand. The firs and spruces have come up, growing stockier and more gnome-like at every hundred-foot rise, until above the head walls of the ravines they shrink to low-growing shrubs not knee high, except where they have cunningly taken advantage of some hollow. Even there they rise no higher than the shelter that fends them from the north wind. Above that they are trimmed down, often into grotesque shapes like those that old-time gardeners affected, shearing evergreens into strange caricatures of beasts or men. Often on these Alpine pastures you find a boulder behind which on the south a fir has taken refuge. Close up to the rock it mats, drifting away from it, southerly, in much the same lines that a snowdrift would assume in the same position. There is in this nothing of the spiring shape of the same variety of spruce or fir in the valley pastures far below. Yet the botanists accept this as an individual distortion due to environment and do not class these firs or spruces of the mountain pastures as a variety different from those that grow below.
Mountain Sandwort in bloom on a little lawn near Mount Pleasant on the last day in July
They think otherwise of other trees.
The white birches come up in location and come down in size on these mountain pastures very much as do the spruces and firs. We have the big canoe birch of the lower slopes, often a splendid tree that matches any in the forest in height. On higher ranges it shrinks and even undergoes certain structural changes that have given excuse for the naming of new varieties. Hence, beginning with Betula papyrifera in the valleys we have a shrinkage to cordifolia, minor, and glandulosa with its sub-variety rotundifolia, this last a veritable creeping birch which sticks its branches but a little above the tundra moss in places where the spruce and fir trees are not much different in character and the willow becomes most truly an underground shrub with no bit of twig showing above the surface and only the little round leaves cropping out, making a growth that is more like that of a moss than that of a tree. To such straits do wind and cold reduce the trees that defy them.
Yet in spite of the botanical classification which sets up these dwarfed trees as different varieties from those of the lower slopes, one cannot help wondering if the differentiation is justified. Suppose the seeds of a big paper birch from the lower valley were planted among the creeping willows of the Alpine Garden on Mount Washington. Would they not grow a dwarfed and semi-creeping Betula glandulosa or rotundifolia? Would not the seeds of glandulosa, if blown down into the lower valley and growing in the soil among the paper birches produce Betula papyrifera? It always seems to me that there is less difference between the creeping birches of the high plateaus of the Presidential Range and the paper birches of the lower slopes than there is between the grotesquely dwarfed firs and spruces of the Alpine Garden, and the big ones that grow in Pinkham Notch and in the rich bottom lands of the lower part of the Great Gulf.