Woodland Paths

by Winthrop Packard

Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind, which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days, for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into wood roads.

These on such days have an atmosphere of their own. Here the thrill of the sun is as potent as the push of the X-ray. It slips through clothes and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is the very gate itself.

My way to the most secret and withdrawn country of these wood roads always leads me across Ponkapog brook at the spot where rest the ruins of the old mill. It is three-quarters of a century or more since it ground grist, and of its timbers scarcely a moss-grown remnant remains. The gate to the old dam has been gone almost as long, but the waters do not forget. Every year the spring floods bring down what driftwood the pond banks can spare and bar their own course with it at this spot. The water rises as high as of old, for a brief time.

It is as if the brook paid a memorial tribute thus yearly to the honest labor of the pioneers, now long gone. For a time it lasts, then the cementing bonds of dead leaves fail and the black flood roars through to the sea. Come two months later and where its highest rim touched you will find that it planted flowers in loving remembrance also, and saxifrage and dwarf blue violet lean in fragrant affection over the waters. I like to think that on Memorial day at least the stream makes echo of the clank of the old-time mill-wheel in its liquid prattle, and that the shuttle of reflected sunshine dancing back and forth is a glorified ghost of the old wheels whirling once more in memory of the miller and his neighbors.

Farther on I reach the pond shore, and on the narrow ridge which marks the old-time high tide of winter ice pressure, a dry moraine always, though running through marshy land, I strike what must be the oldest trail in this part of the country. Here is a path which was traveled before the time of the Norman conquest, or, for that matter, before Cæsar led his victorious legions into Gaul. Here the first Indians trod dry-footed when they went back and forth about the pond in their hunting and fishing, for then, as now, it was a natural causeway.

To-day a stranger, seeking his way about the pond for the first time, would not fail to find it, and the habitual wood-rover of the region, old or young, knows its every turn. Upon this to-day, between the marsh and the bog in the alluring spring sunshine, I found a whole bird convention. Such an uproar! It was as if the suffragettes in one grand concerted movement had swooped down upon Parliament by the air-ship route, as the cable says they threaten, and were in the heat of battering down its walls of deafness with racket and roaring, after the fashion of the attempt on Jericho of old.

The blackbirds were in the greatest numbers and made the most noise individually. There were a hundred of them, more or less, sitting about in the trees and bushes, a few on the ground, and all of them practicing every call or song that blackbird was ever known to make. All the harsh croaking of frogs that as young birds they heard from the nest by the bog they voiced in their calls; all the liquid melody of gentle brooks tinkling over shallows, and the piping of winds in hollow marsh reeds, they reproduced in their songs, and the whole was jumbled in this uproarious medley. They even shamed a robin or two into singing,—the first time I have heard these laggards do it this year, though they have been here in force for some weeks.

There seemed to be no cause for this other than the joy of living. It was just an impromptu concert in honor of the spring. I think I never noticed before how vigorously the blackbird uses his tail at one of these concerts. All the long black tails present worked up and down as if each were a pump-handle working a bellows to supply wind for the pipings. It reminded me of the church organ-loft, and the labors of the boy when the choir is in full swing and the organist has everything opened up and is dancing on the pedal notes to keep up.

Either side of this trail the wood should be a paradise for woodpeckers, for the trees are here allowed to grow old without interference. In birch and maple stubs the flickers have dug hole after hole, sometimes all up and down a single trunk. The downy woodpeckers have been active also and the chickadees have reared many a nestful of fluffy chicks in the same neighborhood. Yet, with all the opportunity that the flickers have had to bore in soft decaying wood for food or for shelter, I see that they have also dug a round hole through the inch boards in the peak of the old cranberry house. This, too, was probably for shelter, for many flickers winter with us, and there would be room in the old cranberry house-loft for a whole community, but I wonder sometimes if there is not another reason.

Just as beavers and squirrels must gnaw to keep their teeth from growing too long, so I sometimes think that woodpeckers need to hammer about so much, whether for food or not, to keep their bills in good condition. It is difficult to otherwise account for their continual practice. I knew a flicker once who used to drum a half-hour at a time on a sheet-iron ventilator on the roof of a building. I think he did it to keep his bill properly calloused and his muscle up, so that when he did tackle a shagbark tree with a fat, inch-long borer waiting in its heart-wood the chips would fly.