Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

They grow a little, to a certain stage when perhaps a plant covers surface to the size of a pinhead and a half, then split and become independent plants with a tiny root hair apiece. Brave equipment this for facing the January gales and frost of a northern winter. Yet they sail forth from the home pool as confidently as liners from the home port and rollick all along down the stream, making harbor in every tiny bay and collecting a fleet in each eddy. What potency of perpetual spring they sow as they traverse all the ways that wind in and about the levels below the fountain head we do not know, any more than we know what elixir vitæ dwells in the waters on which they are borne, yet something makes the region the lotus land of creatures of the wild where they linger on unmindful of their vanished kindred.

Out of the rich vegetable mould of ages, in the cool, moist shadows grow the rarer New England orchids in the summer, and the rarer migrant birds of our summer woods find asylum here for their nests and young. In the winter the ruffed grouse comes here to drink, finds gravel for his crop always bare and unfrozen on the hillside where the first seepings of water come forth, and no doubt gets an agreeable change of food in the succulent green things of the shallows. Several of these birds cling to the place, nor can I drive them away by simply flushing them. They circle and come back to the brook margin or its immediate neighborhood every time.

Where the swamp maples have grown large on the bank and lifted the soil with their roots high enough to form miniature dry islands the mink have built their burrows and thence they go forth to hunt the region all about, but especially

You may get a glimpse of the weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze for game and enemies

the brook and its tributaries, most ravenously. If you are patient, fortunate, and the wind is right you may at dusk get a glimpse of the weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze for game and enemies. In that light his fur will look black though it is really a pretty shade of brown, but you will not fail to see the white streak which runs from his chin downward. But, though you may not see the animal himself you cannot, if there is snow on the ground, fail to see his slender, aristocratic track with its clutching claws, for the mink is a desperate hunter and always hungry. All is fish that comes to his net,—trout, turtles, toads, snails, bugs, or anything he can find in the brook that seems in the least edible.

The semi-aquatic life of the enchanted region is sadly destructive of other life, and I feel little pity for the mink or the weasel, sleek and beautiful wild creatures though they are, if they in turn fall into the steel jaws which the trapper sets for them in the narrow passes all up and down the stream. It is the common lot of the woods and only the swiftest and most crafty can hope to escape it. The mink devour the trout, and they, seemingly innocent and beautiful enough to have come up, water sprites, from that unknown underground world whence well the crystal waters in which they live, are as greedy and irresponsible in their diet as the mink themselves. Like them, when hungry they will devour the young of their own species and smack their lips over the feast.

The trout will eat anything that looks to be alive either in the water or on the surface. I often amuse myself in summer by biting small chunks out of an apple and dropping them in, to see the trout swallow them as ravenously as if they had suddenly become vegetarians and had all the zeal of new converts. What the Jamaica ginger preparation of the brook world is I don’t know, unless it is watercress. That grows, green and peppery, all up and down the brook the year through. Perhaps the trout go from my green apple luncheon over to that and thus join the remedy to the disease.

One of the trout titbits is the gentle little caddice worm, grub of the little miller-like caddice fly that flits in at the open window of a May night and lights on the table under the glare of your lamp. He dwells on the bottom in these same pure waters and he has much to do to defend himself against the jaws of his nimble hunter. He is but a worm that crawls, so speed may not save him. His skin is tender and he has no weapon of defense save his brain which one would hardly think adequate in so humble a creature. Yet if you will sit on the brink and watch what goes on in the cool depths you will see how cleverly and in what a variety of ways he and his kindred, for there are several varieties, have become skilled in self-defense. The little fellow has, like most grubs, the power to spin fine silk. This would count for little though he spun a whole cocoon, for the trout would swallow him, silken overcoat and all. But he does better than that. He collects bits of log from the bottom and winds these in his silken warp till he has knotted himself firmly within a log house. There is no incentive to a trout to eat twigs from the bottom, so the defenseless caddice worm is passed unnoticed. He is snugly rolled in silk within his rough house and moves about by cautiously putting out a leg or two and crawling with the logs on his back. Another variety uses small pebbles instead of logs. Taking a stone from bottom in the swift running water of a tiny rapid to-day I found it covered with little gravel barnacles that clung like limpets to the proverbial rock.