Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

dangerous thing to go far enough out on them to reach the tips. Light-weight, daring boys sometimes do this, and often fall in the attempt, as accident records show. Sometimes the squirrel falls too, though this is of comparatively rare occurrence.

The wild creatures of the wood are as liable to accident as you and I, but they are not so prone to it. That severe pruning which wild life gives all who are robust enough to live it lops off all the clumsy branches of the squirrel family tree. Few but the cool-headed and skillful live to reproduce many of their kind.

The boy who falls from the upper limbs of the chestnut may save his neck by catching a lower limb as he falls—I have known boys to do it. Or he may even land with no serious injury if he is fortunate enough and the distance is not too great. The squirrel would be almost sure to land safely either in the lower limb or on the ground. This is more sure in the case of the red squirrel than in that of the gray, for the gray is two or three times the weight of the red. Yet I have seen a gray squirrel come down forty feet though the air and land uninjured.

My own method of loosing the unripe burs from their tenacious hold on the limb tips lacks the finesse of that of the squirrel. I do my work with a club. Nevertheless, it takes wisdom and precision. To stand twenty feet or so below a bunch of chestnut burs and hurl your club at them with such accuracy that it hits the limb just behind them at the right spot to snap them off their perch is an art that you must learn in boyhood or never.

You may hit the burs themselves or you may hit the limb farther back, and nothing happens. With the burs on the ground your task is to open them, which you must do by pounding with one stone upon another. Hit in the right place and with the right force, the green, prickly envelope yields and the soft, brown nuts roll out uncrushed. To me they are sweetest when this brown is just beginning to tinge them, before the shells are very hard and the kernel is too resilient and crunchy.

On these October mornings the chestnuts are ripe,—a wonderful rich brown, still clinging in close companionship in the center of the burs, which have opened and revealed the precious kernels within. To harvest them now by the quart your task is more easy than it was to get a few when they were three weeks younger. The squirrels know this. There is no need to climb to the dangerous limb tips and cling there precariously while gnawing them through. The ground is strewn with bounty, and the reds and the grays both are busy among the rustling brown leaves garnering what the winds, the boys, and I have shaken from the open burs and failed to gather.

Now and then they eat one, but for the most part they are busy storing them up for future use. In hollow trees, under stumps, they pile them in little hoards. But beside that they dig little holes in the ground here and there and put a nut at the bottom of them and pat the brown leaves down on top. I have always inferred that these were for special luncheons, stored ready to hand when the owner did not care to go to the main larder. I know that they do go to these in the winter on occasions, for I have often seen the hole through the crusted snow where the squirrel resolutely dug his way in and left behind him the chipped shells of the nut which he found there. But I do not believe that one nut out of a hundred that is thus buried is ever resurrected by the squirrels; it is nature’s method of getting her chestnut trees properly planted, and I half believe that the squirrels realize this; that they do not mean to dig these nuts up again, and only do so when hard pressed by hunger.

My path to the chestnut wood to-day lay through a shallow sea of purple wood-grass. It is a wild grass, scorned of the farmer and left ungarnered of his scythe, standing now in clumps in all waste places of the pasture,—an amber wine of autumn tint that intoxicates you as you pass through. It is a stirrup cup for your expedition. Old as the hills, amber-purple and clear, yet with a fine bubbling of hoary leaf tips, it warms the heart as wine of the grape does, and already you begin to be drunk with the beauty of the day. Afterward you pass through aisles of birch wood, where the once green leaves are a translucent yellow, fining the gold of the sunlight down to a soft radiance, a richness of pale effulgence that I have seen matched only in one gem.

Some years ago there came from South African mines a wonderful lump of crystallized carbon,—a great diamond that, cut and polished, yet weighed one hundred and twenty-five carats,—the famous Tiffany yellow diamond, in whose heart glows the same yellow radiance which wells throughout the birch wood of a sunlit October day. The Tiffany gem is worth its hundreds of thousands, and you might lose it from a hole in your vest pocket. The birch wood is a half-mile wide, and once you have felt its soft radiance flood your soul it is yours forever. Neither deserts nor cities can take it from you.

Sitting secure in a crotch of the chestnut tree of my choice, beating the chestnuts from the half-open burs with a birch pole and listening to their patter on the dry leaves far beneath, I was conscious after a time of a little gritting squeak,—a squeak that sounded much like a small, unoiled joint that was very mad about it. It might have been two tree limbs rubbing together, only that it was too personal. Creaking limbs are always mournful in tone; this squeak was full of impotent, nervous rage.