I never tramp these roads, which it sometimes seems as if the pukwudgies moved about in the night for the confusion of men, without being lost, at least for a time, and finding a new boulder to worship. Once, thus lost, I found a little gem of a pond, which hides in the hollows a half-mile or so east from Ponkapog Pond. This, too, I fear the pukwudgies move about in the night, for I hear of many men who have found it once and sought it again in vain.
To-day I came upon it once more,—a cup of clear water in the hollow of the forest’s hand, smiling up at the sky with neither inlet or outlet. The black ducks had found it, too. They greeted my approaching footsteps with quacks of alarm, and I had hardly rounded the bushes on the bank before sixteen of them, with much splashing, rose heavily into the air and sailed off toward the big pond.
Even in their fright I noticed that they went out as the animals did from the ark,—two by two,—and I smiled, for it is one more sign of spring. I noticed the crows in couples to-day for the first time. A few black duck breed hereabout, and the little pond with the button-bushes growing along one shallow shore as thick as mangroves in a West India swamp might well be considered by house-hunting couples. Sitting under a mountain laurel whose leaves furnish the only shade on the bank, I watched quietly for nearly half an hour. Then there was a soft swish of sailing wings, and a pair dropped lightly in without splash enough to be heard. Yet there was little to see, after all. They simply sat mirrored in the motionless water for another half-hour by the town clock, looking adoration into one another’s eyes, then snuggled close and swam in among the button-bushes as if with one foot. That was all. It was a veritable quaker-meeting love-making; but just the same I shall look for the nest among the button-bush mangroves in another month, and I do hope that pukwudgies will not have mixed the wood roads and hidden the pond so well that I cannot find it.
THE BROOK IN APRIL
THE pond is a mile long, but it is shallow, with a level bottom that was once a peat meadow, and the water, holding some of this peat in solution, has a fine amber tinge. It is as if the sphagnums that wrought for ages in the bog and died to give it its black levels held in reserve vast stores of their own rich wine reds and mingled them with the yellows of hemlock heart-wood and the soft tan of marsh grasses that lie dead, all robed in funereal black at the pond bottom.
By what mystery of alchemy the water compounds during its winter wait under the thick ice this amethystine glow in its pellucid depths I do not know, but the spring sunlight always shows it as it sends its shafts down into the quivering shallows, and it creams the foam that fluffs beneath the gate of the old dam and flows seaward.
This gate is always lifted a little and the stream never fails. In spring its brimming volume floods the meadows and roars down miniature rocky gorges,—a soothing lullaby of a roar that you may hear crooning in at your window of an April night to surely sing you to sleep. In summer the gateman comes along and puts a mute on the stream by dropping the gate a little, and it lisps and purls through the little gorges, slipping from one rock-bound pool to another.
In April the suckers come up, breasting the flood from another pond a half-mile down stream, to spawn; great, sturdy, lithe, shiny-sided fellows they are, at this time of year almost as beautiful and as alert as salmon, weighing sometimes five or six pounds. The same intoxication which makes the flood froth and dance and shout as it tumbles down the steeps from meadow to meadow seems to thrill in their veins and give them strength to cleave an arrow flight through the quivering rapids and gambol up the falls with an exultant agility that seems strange in this fish that is so sluggish and dull on the pond bottom in midsummer.