Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

The squirrel had won, though I can but think it was a foolhardy trick, and he would have done much better to slip down from tip to tip of the hickory limbs and circumvent me by circumnavigating me.

The crimson of the sunset lighted the path home with lambent radiance that made a twilight of the yellow glow beneath the birches and dulled the fire of the sumacs on the upland to a red as of dying embers. The purple wood-grass caught and held the complementaries of these fires reflected in its shadows till I seemed to stride through ashes of roses to the dun shadows of the lilacs in my own dooryard.

Here I bethought me of the bat, too long enshrouded in my pocket for his comfort, perhaps, and I unknotted the handkerchief, planning to slip him into an empty squirrel cage for a day’s observation before I set him free. But I had forgotten that the sun was now below the horizon and that the bat could see as well as I could. Seemingly, he could see quicker, for before I could put fingers on him he slipped from the fold of the handkerchief, dove into the air, and with swift, sculling wings mounted over the tree tops and was away like the wind.

However, I had my chestnuts left, and my Telia polyphemus larva. Him I put in the butterfly cage without delay, along with some chestnut leaves, on which he might feed. He proceeded instead to spin himself a cocoon, rolling himself in one of the leaves in the corner of the box. There he will sleep lightly till spring, when I hope to see him come out a full-grown moth. I shall watch for him with much interest, for this species is very variable, and many aberrant forms and local races occur. There are even albinos, and melanic specimens also have been noted with the wings almost black.

AMONG AUTUMN LEAVES

THE deep woods catch all the rich colors of the autumn sunsets in their foliage. The dull reds and the vivid ones, the maroons and the scarlets, the golden yellows and the wondrously soft and mellow shades of tan and brown they hold till from a hilltop you see the forest afire. Flames flutter, embers glow and fall, and brown ashes and cinders remain.

Yet, if you walk far below the fire, in the forest aisles that are beginning to crisp under foot with the fallen embers of this conflagration, you are conscious of but one color sensation. A subtle glow pervades all things,—an atmosphere that is a yellow from which the sap has run, a very ghost of color. The domes of the hickories that grow in the open pasture are a rich brown, a most lovable shade; those hickory saplings that are rooted in the shade, and wait so patiently for fate to carry off the big trees that they may take their places, take an autumnal tint of this ghost of yellow also, and all the leaves of the wood ferns are pale with it,—a paleness that becomes with the more delicate an almost transparent whiteness.

We may ingeniously say that the reason that these leaves are so anæmic is that they grew in the shade and had not in their veins the good green blood of those that flourished in the open and absorbed from the sun and wind of summer the burn and tan that were to show in autumn. Yet, how can we be sure of this when those leaves which grow side by side on the same tree vary so in their autumnal tints?