Eagerly I sought to follow my Basilarchia astyanax and learn more, but it was not so easy. To follow his flight without care as to the setting of my feet might well be to reach a country undiscovered indeed, for from the very bottom of the northern declivity of the terminal moraine well the springs of the fountain head, and out across these he lightly floated, toward the sphagnum-bottom pasture swamp beyond.
I suppose it is well settled, geologically, that a river of pure water flows from some distant northern point, Labrador perhaps, under the eastern portion of Massachusetts. Driven wells find this water almost everywhere. In places it rises to the surface in clear ponds which have no apparent inlet, and from which little water flows, but which are clear and sparkling at a good level the year round. Houghton’s Pond, in the Blue Hill Reservation, is one of these nearest Boston. Walden Pond is another, and there are plenty more.
In other places still the water boils out of springs through quicksands of unknown depths, flowing in clear streams through surrounding swamps where trees have made firm ground alternating with bits of quaking bog and open pools, where a misstep will drop you over your head in a clinging mud that never gives up what it once gets.
Such is the fountain head, and you would know you were coming to it of a hot day even were your eyes shut, for the ice-cold water makes its own atmosphere. We read of bodies of ice that have lasted since the glacial age buried under these terminal moraines whence well such cooling springs; I do not know about the ice, but I can testify to the cold, sparkling water and the grateful atmosphere which it disseminates on these our Arabian days. Yet you must mark well your going. Just under the slope the water boils up through fine sand that dances in the up current. A few feet farther down it wells more silently, and the decayed vegetation of centuries has made a mud bank over the quicksand. You may sink to the knee here and find bottom. A few steps farther on you may drive a twenty-foot pole down through mud and sand and find nothing to obstruct it.
Yet Nature always provides the remedy. Mosses and swamp grass have grown on the surface of this liquid mud and alders and swamp maple have rooted in these and encouraged wild rose and elder and many another shrub, till their intertwined roots have formed a surface which is in part safe to the foot. And here is a world of itself in this hidden pasture corner, for here linger the trout and the water-cress, and many another shy woodland thing, driven to bay by the encroachments of surrounding civilization.
In early July you will find the water-cress in bloom in the open pools, surrounded by quaking bog and alder shade. Toward this my butterfly had gone, and I followed, balancing warily from clump to clump in the grateful coolness, testing each foothold lest it drop me into the clinging depths below whence nothing but a derrick might lift me. The arethusa, daintiest of orchids, nodded its pink head at me from the quaking sphagnum, daintily bowing me on, but I paused a moment.
In the water right between my feet was a spotted turtle that had just captured an appetizing, but by no means dainty morsel. This was a terrapin-like bug that was more than a mouthful. His body, indeed, was already out of sight, but claw-like legs protruded from both sides of that isosceles triangle which a turtle’s mouth makes when it is closed, and waved a frantic farewell to the passing under-water world. The turtle was a long time in masticating his terrapin, but it was a happy time. His whole body blinked contentedly, and he waved his forelegs with a caressing out-push, a motion exactly like that of a child at the breast. Then he wagged his head solemnly from side to side as a wise turtle might who feels that such good lunches are put up by fate only for the knowing ones of this watery world, and pushed himself half way under the roots of a tussock for a nap. Soon the nether half circle of his shell was motionless, with his hind legs drawn up within. Only his little spike tail protruded, waving to a wee passing trout the news that the millennium was at hand, and the turtle and the bug-terrapin had lain down together in peace and prosperity, with the bug-terrapin inside.
I looked up for the butterfly. He was nowhere to be seen. Yet my trip was to be worth while, for right in front of me was an open pool surrounded by a quaking bog, a pool twenty feet across packed almost solid with the white panicled heads of water-cress blooms in which swarmed a myriad of bees. Their drone was like that at the front door of a hive on a hot July day, yet it was not a monotone as that is. It was rather like a grand chorus singing many parts, for these were all wildwood bees of a dozen varieties. There was not a hive tender among them.
Lifting my admiring gaze from the pool with its white panicles and swarming bees I saw further beauty beyond. On firmer ground nestling lovingly against an old chestnut post was a great, glorious spike of habenaria, the purple-fringed orchis. It is not uncommon, the habenaria, in peaty meadows, but no man sees it for the first time in the season without a great glow of delight, and I hastened over to give it nearer greeting. Just as I reached it the butterfly came dancing up, but not to sip the sweets of the wonderful great orchid. Instead he lighted, right under my nose, on the roughest part of the old fence post and began to lick this as he had the pine trunk.
