Woodland Paths

by Winthrop Packard

All through the night the fresh smell of the open pores of earth met you everywhere, and moist air built upon this all other odors and carried them very far. An opened kitchen door in the distance let out not only a rainbow-edged blur of yellow light, but the smell of fresh-baked bread cooling on the table before being put away in the big stone crock in the pantry by some belated New England housewife.

With the lullaby roar of the distant brook came the odor of the willow blooms, and with a shift of wind the faint resinous perfume of the pine wood. The darkness which blots outlines from the sight leaves the location of things to the other senses which serve faithfully. Scent and sound are as apprehensive as sight. Often, walking in the darkness, one may feel faintly the obscure workings of a sense which is none of these, whereby he dodges a tree trunk or a fence corner which he feels is there, yet through none of the five ordinary senses. The darkness gives us antennæ.

The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.

In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes.

But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.

Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.

As the pattering music of the April showers on the waiting land is a rune of the ancient earth, so the love song of the swamp tree frog dreams down the years to us all the way from the carboniferous age. When the coal measures were forests of tree ferns, and the first men paddled through steaming shallows in their shade, the swamp tree frog was a tree frog indeed, and sang his soothing song from their branches. Since then he has degenerated and has lost most of the adhesive power of the tiny disks on fingers and toes. He no longer clings readily to trees, and is but an awkward climber. So, too, the webbing between his toes has nearly vanished, and he is not a strong swimmer. He haunts the shallows of the swamps and the sunny pools on the margin of the deep cove.

Perhaps he knows that he is degenerate, and that his safety lies mainly in silence and obscurity, for he sings rarely, except in the first heyday of spring, when the air is full of soft mists and warmth that stirs the deep-lying memories of the carboniferous age. He is a beautiful fellow, hardly more than an inch long, often flesh-colored, and with coppery iris tints that should make the mouths of frog-eating creatures water. It is for desire of him I believe that the pickerel haunt the veriest shallows at this time of year, where you may see them of an evening with their back fins sticking out like the latticed sails of a Chinese junk.

I do not believe there is anywhere to be heard a dreamier or more soothing lullaby than that sung by the swamp tree frogs of a misty April night to the tinkling accompaniment of showers pattering upon the dancing surface of the pond. It begins in a sigh, swells till it stirs a memory, and dies away in a dream of its own happiness.

All the warm, soothing night the swamp tree frogs sang, and the showers made music for the laboring sprites, and when the morning came it was to a world new clothed in all Easter finery. The raindrop sprites had beaten and relaid the pasture carpets that had been so brown with the dust of last year, and now they were so clean and had such a soft, green nap that it was a renewed pleasure to walk on them. Green, too, was the wear of many of the pasture shrubs, and the fripperies of the shadbush made the more sober ones turn heads to look at her again. Already she had creamed the sage green of her delicate gown with the white of opening buds, and the berry bushes and the wild cherry, the viburnums, and all the other early flowering shrubs felt a touch of their own coming joy in just looking at her.