Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

Midday had passed and with it the genial warmth that the south wind had brought us. Instead romping northern breezes had a tang in them and torn clouds sailed swiftly into view over the summit of Great Blue, rushing deep blue shadows across the warm grays of the landscape. The age-old battle of sun and wind was going on on every summit of the range. Climbing the southerly slope of Hancock it was hard to believe it winter. You got either season on the summit plateau according to the nook you chose, but standing on the rim of the precipice, which faces north you had no doubts. From your feet to the foot of the hill in this direction it was winter indeed. Yet here was the greenest spot in the whole range. Scrambling perilously down the face of the cliff I touched rich green vegetation with either hand and stood amid luxuriance at the bottom. For here you are at the meeting place of ferns.

Little sunshine reaches the face of this cliff in the high noon of a midsummer day. No direct ray touches it all winter long, yet in the chill twilight the polypodys swarm all along the summit of the ridge and drip and dance down and stretch out their hands to neighbor ferns that climb cheerily to meet them out of the moist shadows below. These are the evergreen wood ferns. In the rich black frozen earth of the lower woodland they grow in profusion. On the rocky acclivity they hold each coign of vantage and splash the plaid of gray rock and brown leaves with their rich green. Where cliff meets rock jumble the two draw together and fraternize, and the polypodys come farther off the cliff than I have often seen them, and the wood ferns grow in slenderer crevices of the bare rock than anywhere else that I know.

The sun was gone from all the little ravines on the way back from Hancock to Great Blue, and the chill of the fern-festooned shadow of the cliff that I had just left seemed to go with me all along. It was especially dark and chill in the little gully and I reached the summit of the big hill too late to find the sun. There, where daybreak had breathed of spring, nightfall shivered in the bite of winter winds. A million electric glints splintered the purple dusk to northward, but there was no warmth in them even when they fused into the glow of the great city. With the shadow of night the cruel grip of winter had shut down on the hilltop and I knew again, as I had known in the golden glow of the morning, that it was midwinter. The dwarfed and storm-toughened shrubs seemed to crouch a little closer to the adamantine earth, and their frost-stiffened twigs sang in the bitter north wind. I felt the chill in my own marrow and eagerly tramped the ringing granite toward home.

SOME JANUARY BIRDS

IT seems to be our lot this winter to have April continually smiling up in the face of January. Again and again the north wind has come down upon us and set his adamantine face against all such folly. The turf has become flint; the ice has been eight inches thick on pond and placid stream, and the very next morning, maybe, the soft air has breathed of spring, and bluebirds have twittered deprecatingly as if glad to be here, but altogether ashamed to be found so out of season. As a matter of fact, of course, some bluebirds winter with us, but they don’t warble “cheerily O” in the teeth of the north winds. On those days you must seek them in the cuddly seclusion of dense evergreens, more than likely among close-set cedars where the blue cedar-berries are still sweet and plenty. But we have had many days in this January of 1909 when the bluebirds have had a right to feel called to at least take a hurried glimpse at the bird boxes or the holes in the old apple trees, just as people take a flying trip to the summer cottage on a warm Sunday; they know they can’t stay, but it is delightful to just look it over and plan.

I think the crows, though they are tough old winter residents, have something of the same impulse to plan nests and make eyes and cooing conversation, one to another. To-day I heard, in the pine treetops of a little pasture wood where several pair nest every year, the unmistakable note. In that great song of Solomon which the whole out-door world will chorus in the full tide of spring the crows have the bass part, no doubt, but they sing it none the less musically. It is surprising what a croak can become, between lovers.

I saw them slip away silently and shamefacedly as I approached, and I knew them for callow youngsters, high-school age, let us say, to whom shy love-making is never quite out of season. But they got their come-uppance the moment they sailed out of the grove, for their appearance was greeted with a wild and raucous chorus of crow ha-ha-ha’s. High in the air, flapping round and round in silence above the pines, a half dozen riotous youngsters of their own age had been observing them, chuckling no doubt and winking to one another, and now that the culprits were driven out into the open where all could see them the chorus of jeers knew no bounds. It was as unmistakable as the caressing tone, this jeering laughter. You had but to hear it to know very well what they were saying. The crow language has but one word, which in type is caw. But their inflections and tone qualities are such that it is easy to make it express the whole diatonic scale of primitive emotion.

Many of our summer birds whose winter range barely includes us seem to be more than usually prevalent this winter. It may be that the mild season has to do with this, but it is equally probable that a plenitude of food is more directly responsible. Seed-eating birds are particularly in luck this year. I do not know of a winter when the birch trees have fruited so plentifully, nor have I noticed so many flocks of song sparrows as this year. I find them twittering happily along through the wood, hanging in quite unsparrow-like attitudes from slender birch twigs, busy robbing the pendant cones of their tiny seeds. In the summer you know the song sparrow as a very erect bird. He sits on some topmost twig of cedar or berry bush and pours forth quite the cheeriest and sweetest home song of the pasture land. Or perchance he flies, and the usual short and oft-repeated refrain seems to be broken up by flutter of his wings into a longer, softer, and more varied song that has less of challenge and more of sweet content in it. In his winter notes, which are really nothing but a cheery twittering, I always think I hear something of the mellow singing quality of this song of the wing.