Wild Pastures

by Winthrop Packard

The pines indeed, which always stretch out their arms in Sabbath-like benediction, seem asking a pious blessing on all these, their pasture children; and they fold their slim leaves together like hands in a soft prayer of thankfulness. But the soft rain cuddles them as well, and before they know it they are decked with the clear pearls as for a bridal and their plumes nod in reverence, yet are so beautiful in gems and there is such a soft grace in their curves—they that stood so grim and sombre before—that each tree seems like some bounteous and beautiful woman, arrayed for wedding festivities, who yet bows a moment at a sanctuary in prayer, even as she joins the guests.

The rain had been long coming. A solitary quail predicted it; the first I have heard since the severe cold and deep snows of three winters in succession not long ago. I had thought every quail smothered in the white depths or frozen by the bitter cold. Three years is a long time not to hear a quail whistle, and this I believe to be no survivor of the old stock, but one that has worked up from Southern fields where the snows were less deadly during those rigid winters.

It is pretty hard to tell whether a quail is simply announcing his own name for all who care to hear, or making a weather prediction. Jotham, one of the farmer’s men who knows all, says it is simple enough. In an announcement he says, “Bob, Bob White.” The weather prediction is different. Then he says, “Wet, more wet.” All you have to do is listen.

This is like Jotham’s grandmother’s recipe for making soap. You collected potash from the hearth, added water in an iron kettle, and boiled till a certain thickness was reached. You would know this point by placing an egg on the surface, and if the concoction was right the egg would either sink or swim, the old lady was blessed if she could remember which. This is a way that successful oracles have. That one at Delphos did it.

So, when my lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back a little, swelled his white throat and whistled, round and clear, I went out to meet him, scanning the sky meanwhile for a change of weather. The sky of the day before had been like a brass bowl shut down over the gasping land. Shrubs of the upland hung their leaves piteously, the tougher herbs wilted, and the tenderer ones dried up and died.

My lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back
a little, swelled his white throat, and whistled

On such days when the long summer drought has wreaked its worst, when the parched pasture lies on its back, open-mouthed, gasping for water, when even the pond which has given so freely for the refreshment of the pasture people has shrunk back upon itself till a rod-wide rim of gravel and rough stones forbids them to come down and drink, I love to go down to the water’s edge and marvel at the hedge hyssop. All along the shore the summer drought forbids the water weeds to grow. This rod-wide space is not for them. The flood of the winter and spring denies other land plants a roothold; yet, just when you think the shore is to be bare and barren for always, troops forth the hedge hyssop and clothes it with verdure, lighted with a golden smile.

The common name of the plant seems to me to express ingenuity rather than purpose. It has nothing to do with hedges and is not a hyssop, which is a garden plant belonging with thyme and lavender and other sweet herbs beloved of old ladies in kerchief caps and figured gowns. The hedge hyssop is none of these. Nine months of the twelve it bides its time under water. During the other three it glows in golden contentment on the sandy stretches left bare by this yearly receding tide, climbing along the rocky shore and filling every crevice, lifting its yellow cups to the glare of the brazen sky and distilling subtle perfume to the antennæ of the little low-flying insects that are its friends. Yet if its common name means little, that given it by the botanists fits. Gratiola aurea may well mean a plant that is golden grace or a golden benediction, as you choose to take the Latin.

The day before, then, I had no heart for the upland pasture, but Jotham’s reading of the quail had been the right one, for yesterday the brazen look was all blown out of the sky by the south wind. It did not leave it clear blue, for that would have meant cooler and still dry, but put into it a pallor that seemed to well up from all the horizon round. It was not the pallor of clouds, for there was not even a cumulus thunder head in sight, but the pallor that comes with the wind that has a storm behind it, yet is to blow itself out before the storm arrives.