In New England Fields And Woods

By Rowland E. Robinson

OUT OF BONDAGE. 16mo, $1.25.
IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS. 16mo, $1.25.
DANVIS FOLKS. A Novel. 16mo. $1.25.
UNCLE 'LISHA'S OUTING. 16mo, $1.25.
A DANVIS PIONEER. 16mo, $1.25.
SAM LOVEL'S BOY. 16mo, $1.25.
VERMONT: A Study of Independence. In American
Commonwealths Series. With Map. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY,
Boston and New York.

In New England Fields and Woods

By
Rowland E. Robinson

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1896,
By ROWLAND E. ROBINSON.
All rights reserved.

TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER

THIS BOOK

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

The weather and the changes of the seasons are such common and convenient topics that one need not apologize for talking about them, though he says nothing new.

Still less need one make an apology if he becomes garrulous in relation to scenes which are now hidden from him by a curtain of darkness, or concerning some humble acquaintances with whom he was once on familiar terms, but who now and hereafter can only be memories, though they are yet near him and he may still hear their voices.

So without excuse I offer this collection of sketches, which with a few exceptions were first published in the columns of "Forest and Stream."

R. E. R.

CONTENTS

IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS

I

THE NAMELESS SEASON

In the March page of our almanac, opposite the 20th of the month we find the bold assertion, "Now spring begins;" but in the northern part of New England, for which this almanac was especially compiled, the weather does not bear out the statement.

The snow may be gone from the fields except in grimy drifts, in hollows and along fences and woodsides; but there is scarcely a sign of spring in the nakedness of pasture, meadow, and ploughed land, now more dreary in the dun desolation of lifeless grass, débris of stacks, and black furrows than when the first snow covered the lingering greenness of December.

It is quite as likely that the open lands are still under the worn and dusty blanket of snow, smirched with all the litter cast upon it by cross-lot-faring teams, and wintry winds blowing for months from every quarter. The same untidiness pervades all outdoors. We could never believe that so many odds and ends could have been thrown out of doors helter-skelter, in three months of ordinary life, till the proof confronts us on the surface of the subsiding snow or lies stranded on the bare earth. The wind comes with an icier breath from the wintrier north, and yet blows untempered from the south, over fields by turns frozen and sodden, through which the swollen brooks rush in yellow torrents with sullen monotonous complaint.

One may get more comfort in the woods, though the snow still lies deep in their shelter; for here may be found the sugar-maker's camp, with its mixed odors of pungent smoke and saccharine steam, its wide environment of dripping spouts and tinkling tin buckets, signs that at last the pulse of the trees is stirred by a subtle promise of returning spring.

The coarse-grained snow is strewn thickly with shards of bark that the trees have sloughed in their long hibernation, with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn branches. But all this litter does not offend the eye nor look out of place, like that which is scattered in fields and about homesteads. When this three months' downfall of fragments sinks to the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as comely as the shifting mesh of browner shadows that trunks and branches weave between the splashes of sunshine. Among these is a garnishment of green moss patches and fronds of perennial ferns which tell of life that the stress of winter could not overcome. One may discover, amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup leaves, downy buds that promise blossoms, and others, callower, but of like promise, under the rusty links of the arbutus chain.

One hears the resonant call of a woodpecker rattled out on a seasoned branch or hollow stub, and may catch the muffled beat of the partridge's drum, silent since the dreamy days of Indian summer, now throbbing again in slow and accelerated pulsations of evasive sound through the unroofed arches of the woodlands. And one may hear, wondering where the poor vagrants find food and water, the wild clangor of the geese trumpeting their aerial northward march, and the quick whistle of the wild duck's pinions,—hear the carol of an untimely bluebird and the disconsolate yelp of a robin; but yet it is not spring.

Presently comes a great downfall of snow, making the earth beautiful again with a whiteness outshining that of the winter that is past. The damp flakes cling to every surface, and clothe wall, fence and tree, field and forest, with a more radiant mantle than the dusty snow and slanted sunshine of winter gave them.

There is nothing hopeful of spring but a few meagre signs, and the tradition that spring has always come heretofore.

It is not winter, it is not spring, but a season with an individuality as marked as either, yet without a name.

II

MARCH DAYS

Back and forth across the land, in swift and sudden alternation, the March winds toss days of bitter cold and days of genial warmth, now out of the eternal winter of the north, now from the endless summer of the tropics.

Repeated thawing and freezing has given the snow a coarse grain. It is like a mass of fine hailstones and with no hint of the soft and feathery flakes that wavered down like white blossoms shed from the unseen bloom of some far-off upper world and that silently transformed the unseemliness of the black and tawny earth into the beauty of immaculate purity.

One day, when the wind breathes from the south a continuous breath of warmth, your feet sink into this later coarseness come of its base earthly association, with a grinding slump, as in loose wet sand, so deep, perhaps, that your tracks are gray puddles, marking your toilsome way.

As you wallow on, or perch for a moment's rest on a naked fence-top among the smirched drifts, you envy the crows faring so easily along their aerial paths above you. How pleasant are the voices of these returning exiles, not enemies now, but friendly messengers, bringing tidings of spring. You do not begrudge them the meagre feasts they find, the frozen apple still hanging, brown and wrinkled, in the bare orchard, or the winter-killed youngling of flock or herd, cast forth upon a dunghill, and which discovered, one generous vagabond calls all his black comrades to partake of.

Watching them as they lag across the sky, yet swifter than the white clouds drift above them, you presently note that these stand still, as you may verify by their blue shadows on the snow, lying motionless, with the palpitating shadows of the crows plunging into them on this side, then, lost for an instant in the blue obscurity, then, emerging on that side with the same untiring beat of shadowy wings. A puff of wind comes out of the north, followed by an angry gust, and then a howling wintry blast that the crows stagger against in labored flight as they make for the shelter of the woods.

You, too, toil to shelter and fireside warmth, and are thankful to be out of the biting wind and the treacherous footing. The change has come so suddenly that the moist, grainy snow is frozen before it has time to leach, and in a little while gives you a surface most delightful to walk upon, and shortens distances to half what they were. It has lost its first pure whiteness wherewith no other whiteness can compare, but it is yet beyond all things else, and in the sunlight dazzles you with a broad glare and innumerable scintillating points of light, as intense as the sun itself.

The sunshine, the bracing air, the swaying boughs of the pines and hemlocks beckoning at the woodside, and the firm smooth footing, irresistibly invite you forth. Your feet devour the way with crisp bites, and you think that nothing could be more pleasant to them till you are offered a few yards of turf, laid bare by winds and sun, and then you realize that nothing is quite so good as the old stand-by, a naked ground, and crave more of it, even as this is, and hunger for it with its later garnishing of grass and flowers. The crows, too, are drawn to these bare patches and are busy upon them, and you wonder what they can find; spiders, perhaps, for these you may see in thawy days crawling sluggishly over the snow, where they must have come from the earth.

The woods are astir with more life than a month ago. The squirrels are busy and noisy, the chickadees throng about you, sometimes singing their sweet brief song of three notes; the nuthatches pipe their tiny trumpets in full orchestra, and the jays are clamoring their ordinary familiar cries with occasional notes that you do not often hear. One of these is a soft, rapidly uttered cluck, the bird all the time dancing with his body, but not with his feet, to his own music, which is pleasant to the ear, especially when you remember it is a jay's music, which in the main cannot be recommended. To-day, doubtless, he is practicing the allurements of the mating season.

You hear the loud cackle of a logcock making the daily round of his preserves, but you are not likely to get more than a glimpse of his black plumage or a gleam of his blood-red crest.

By rare luck you may hear the little Acadian owl filing his invisible saw, but you are likelier to see him and mistake him for a clot of last year's leaves lodged midway in their fall to earth.

The forest floor, barred and netted with blue shadows of trunks and branches, is strewn with dry twigs, evergreen leaves, shards of bark, and shreds of tree-moss and lichen, with heaps of cone scales,—the squirrel's kitchen middens,—the sign of a partridge's nightly roosting, similar traces of the hare's moonlight wanderings, and perhaps a fluff of his white fur, showing where his journeys have ended forever in a fox's maw.

Here and there the top of a cradle knoll crops out of the snow with its patches of green moss, sturdy upright stems and leaves and red berries of wintergreen, as fresh as when the first snow covered them, a rusty trail of mayflower leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes of squirrelcup with a downy heart of buds full of the promise of spring.

The woods are filled with a certain subtle scent quite distinct from the very apparent resinous and balsamic aroma of the evergreens, that eludes description, but as a kind of freshness that tickles the nose with longing for a more generous waft of it. You can trace it to no source, as you can the odors of the pine and the hemlocks or the sweet fragrance of the boiling sap, coming from the sugar-maker's camp with a pungent mixture of wood-smoke. You are also made aware that the skunk has been abroad, that reynard is somewhere to windward, and by an undescribed, generally unrecognized, pungency in the air that a gray squirrel lives in your neighborhood. Yet among all these more potent odors you still discover this subtle exhalation, perhaps of the earth filtered upward through the snow, perhaps the first awakening breath of all the deciduous trees.

Warmer shines the sun and warmer blows the wind from southern seas and southern lands. More and more the tawny earth comes in sight among puddles of melted snow, which bring the mirrored sky and its fleecy flocks of clouds, with treetops turned topsy-turvy, down into the bounds of fields. The brooks are alive again and babbling noisily over their pebbled beds, and the lake, hearing them, groans and cries for deliverance from its prison of ice.

On the marshes you may find the ice shrunken from the shores and an intervening strip of water where the muskrat may see the sun and the stars again. You hear the trumpets of the wild geese and see the gray battalion riding northward on the swift wind.

The sun and the south wind, which perhaps bears some faint breath of stolen fragrance from far-off violet banks, tempt forth the bees, but they find no flowers yet, not even a squirrelcup or willow catkin, and can only make the most of the fresh sawdust by the wood-pile and the sappy ends of maple logs.

Down from the sky, whose livery he wears and whose song he sings, comes the heavenly carol of the bluebird; the song sparrow trills his cheery melody; the first robin is announced to-day, and we cry, "Lo, spring has come." But to-morrow may come winter and longer waiting.

III

THE HOME FIRESIDE

Weeks ago the camp-fire shed its last glow in the deserted camp, its last thin thread of smoke was spun out and vanished in the silent air, and black brands and gray ashes were covered in the even whiteness of the snow. The unscared fox prowls above them in curious exploration of the desolate shanty, where wood-mice are domiciled and to whose sunny side the partridge comes to bask; the woodpecker taps unbidden to enter or departs from the always open door; and under the stars that glitter through the net of branches the owl perches on the snowy ridge and mopes in undisturbed solemnity.

For a time, camping-days are over for the sportsman, and continue only for the lumberman, the trapper, and the merciless crust-hunter, who makes his secret lair in the depths of the forest. In the chill days and evenings that fall first in the interim between winter and summer camping, the man who makes his outings for sport and pleasure must content himself by his own fireside, whose constant flame burns throughout the year.

Well may he be content when the untempered winds of March howl like a legion of wolves at his door, snow and sleet pelt roof and pane with a continuous volley from the lowering sky, or when the chilly silence of the last winter nights is broken by the sharp crack of frozen trees and timbers, as if a hidden band of riflemen were besieging the house. Well may he be content, then, with the snug corner of his own hearthstone, around which are gathered the good wife, the children, and his camp companions, the dogs.

Better than the camp, is this cosy comfort in days and nights such as these, or in those that fall within that unnamed season that lies between winter and spring, when, if one stirs abroad, his feet have sorry choice between saturated snow and oozy mould,—a dismal season but for its promise of brighter days, of free streams, green trees, and bird songs.

Better, now, this genial glow that warms one's marrow than the camp-fire that smokes or roasts one's front while his back freezes. With what perfect contentment one mends his tackle and cleans his gun for coming days of sport, while the good wife reads racy records of camp-life from Maine to California, and he listens with attention half diverted by break or rust spot, or with amused watching of the youngsters playing at camping out. The callow campers assail him with demands for stories, and he goes over, for their and his own enjoyment, old experiences in camp and field, while the dogs dream by the fire of sport past or to come,—for none but dogs know whether dog's dreams run backward or forward.

Long-used rod and gun suggest many a tale of past adventure as they bring to mind recollections of days of sport such as may never come again. The great logs in the fireplace might tell, if their flaming tongues were given speech, of camps made long ago beneath their lusty branches, and of such noble game as we shall never see,—moose, elk, deer, panther, wolf, and bear, which are but spectres in the shadowy forest of the past. But the red tongues only roar and hiss as they lick the crackling sinews of oak and hickory, and tell nothing that ordinary ears may catch. Yet one is apt to fall dreaming of bygone days, and then of days that may come to be spent by pleasant summer waters and in the woods gorgeous with the ripeness of autumn.

So one is like to dream till he awakens and finds himself left with only the dogs for comrades, before the flameless embers, deserted even by the shadows that erstwhile played their grotesque pranks behind him. Cover the coals as if they were to kindle to-morrow's camp-fire, put the yawning dogs to bed, and then to bed and further dreaming.

IV

THE CROW

The robin's impatient yelp not yet attuned to happy song, the song sparrow's trill, the bluebird's serene melody, do not herald the coming of spring, but attend its vanguard. These blithe musicians accompany the soft air that bares the fields, empurples the buds, and fans the bloom of the first squirrelcups and sets the hyla's shrill chime a-ringing.

Preceding these, while the fields are yet an unbroken whiteness and the coping of the drifts maintain the fantastic grace of their storm-built shapes, before a recognized waft of spring is felt or the voice of a freed stream is heard, comes that sable pursuivant, the crow, fighting his way against the fierce north wind, tossed alow and aloft, buffeted to this side and that, yet staggering bravely onward, and sounding his trumpet in the face of his raging antagonist, and far in advance of its banners, proclaiming spring.

It is the first audible promise of the longed-for season, and it heartens us, though there be weary days of waiting for its fulfillment, while the bold herald is beset by storm and pinched with hunger as he holds his outpost and gleans his scant rations in the winter-desolated land.

He finds some friendliness in nature even now. Though her forces assail him with relentless fury, she gives him here the shelter of her evergreen tents, in windless depths of woodland; bares for him there a rood of sward or stubble whereon to find some crumb of comfort; leaves for him ungathered apples on the naked boughs, and on the unpruned tangles of vines wild grapes,—poor raisins of the frost,—the remnants of autumnal feasts of the robins and partridges.

Thankful now for such meagre fare and eager for the fullness of disgusting repasts, in the bounty of other seasons, he becomes an epicure whom only the choicest food will satisfy. He has the pick of the fattest grubs; he makes stealthy levies on the earliest robins' nests; and from some lofty lookout or aerial scout watches the farmer plant the corn and awaits its sprouting into the dainty tidbits, a fondness for whose sweetness is his overmastering weakness. For this he braves the terrible scarecrow and the dread mystery of the cornfield's lined boundary, for this risks life and forfeits the good name that his better deeds might give him. If he would not be tempted from grubs and carrion, what a worthy bird he might be accounted. In what good if humble repute might he live, how lamented, die. O Appetite! thou base belly-denned demon, for what sins of birds and men art thou accountable!

In the springtide days, the crow turns aside from theft and robbery to the softer game of love, whereunto you hear the harsh voice attuned in cluttering notes. After the wooing the pair begin house building and keeping.

It is the rudest and clumsiest of all bird architecture that has become the centre of their cares—such a jumble of sticks and twigs as chance might pile on its forked foundations; but woe betide the hawk who ventures near, or owl who dares to sound his hollow trumpet in the sacred precincts. At the first alarm signal, as suddenly and mysteriously as Robin Hood's merry men appeared at the winding of his horn, the black clansmen rally from every quarter of the greenwood, to assail the intruder and force him to ignominious retreat.

When at last the young crows, having clad their uncouth nakedness with full sable raiment, are abroad in the world, they, with unwary foolhardiness and incessant querulous cries of hunger or alarm, are still a constant source of anxiety to parents and kindred. But in the late summer, when the youngsters have come to months of discretion and the elders are freed from the bondage of their care, a long holiday begins for all the tribe. The corn has long since ceased to tempt them, and the persecution of man has abated. The shorn meadows and the close-cropped pastures swarm with grasshoppers, and field and forest offer their abundant fruits.

Careless and uncared for, what happy lives they lead, sauntering on sagging wing through the sunshine from chosen field to chosen wood, and at nightfall encamping in the fragrant tents of the pines.

At last the gay banners of autumn signal departure, and the gathered clans file away in straggling columns, flecking the blue sky with pulsating dots of blackness, the green earth with wavering shadows. Sadly we watch the retreat of the sable cohorts, whose desertion leaves our northern homes to the desolation of winter.

V

THE MINK

This little fur-bearer, whose color has been painted darker than it is, singularly making his name proverbial for blackness, is an old acquaintance of the angler and the sportsman, but not so familiar to them and the country boy as it was twoscore years ago.

It was a woeful day for the tribe of the mink when it became the fashion for other folk to wear his coat, which he could only doff with the subtler garment of life.

Throughout the term of his exaltation to the favor of fashion, he was lain in wait for at his own door and on his thoroughfares and by-paths by the traps, dead-falls, and guns of professional and amateur trappers and hunters, till the fate of his greater cousin the otter seemed to overtake him. But the fickle empress who raised him to such perilous estate, changing her mood, thrust him down almost to his old ignoble but safer rank, just in time to avert the impending doom of extermination. Once more the places that knew him of old, know him again.

In the March snow you may trace the long span of his parallel footprints where, hot with the rekindled annual fire of love, he has sped on his errant wooing, turning not aside for the most tempting bait, halting not for rest, hungering only for a sweetheart, wearied with nothing but loneliness. Yet weary enough would you be if you attempted to follow the track of but one night's wandering along the winding brook, through the tangle of windfalls, and across the rugged ledges that part stream from stream. When you go fishing in the first days of summer, you may see the fruits of this early springtide wooing in the dusky brood taking their primer-lesson in the art that their primogenitors were adepts in before yours learned it. How proud one baby fisher is of his first captured minnow, how he gloats over it and defends his prize from his envious and less fortunate brothers.

When summer wanes, they will be a scattered family, each member shifting for himself. Some still haunt the alder thicket where they first saw light, whose netted shadows of bare branches have thickened about them to continued shade of leafage, in whose midday twilight the red flame of the cardinal flower burns as a beacon set to guide the dusky wanderer home. Others have adventured far down the winding brook to the river, and followed its slowing current, past rapids and cataract, to where it crawls through the green level of marshes beloved of water fowl and of gunners, whose wounded victims, escaping them, fall an easy prey to the lurking mink.

Here, too, in their season are the tender ducklings of wood duck, teal, and dusky duck, and, all the year round, fat muskrats, which furnish for the price of conquest a banquet that the mink most delights in.

In the wooded border are homes ready builded for him under the buttressed trunks of elms, or in the hollow boles of old water maples, and hidden pathways through fallen trees and under low green arches of ferns.

With such a home and such bountiful provision for his larder close at hand, what more could the heart and stomach of mink desire? Yet he may not be satisfied, but longs for the wider waters of the lake, whose translucent depths reveal to him all who swim beneath him, fry innumerable; perch displaying their scales of gold, shiners like silver arrows shot through the green water, the lesser bass peering out of rocky fastnesses, all attainable to this daring fisher, but not his great rivals, the bronze-mailed bass and the mottled pike, whose jaws are wide enough to engulf even him.

Here, while you rest on your idle oar or lounge with useless rod, you may see him gliding behind the tangled net of cedar roots, or venturing forth from a cranny of the rocks down to the brink, and launching himself so silently that you doubt whether it is not a flitting shadow till you see his noiseless wake breaking the reflections lengthening out behind him.

Of all swimmers that breathe the free air none can compare with him in swiftness and in a grace that is the smooth and even flow of the poetry of motion. Now he dives, or rather vanishes from the surface, nor reappears till his wake has almost flickered out.

His voyage accomplished, he at once sets forth on exploration of new shores or progress through his established domain, and vanishes from sight before his first wet footprints have dried on the warm rock where he landed.

You are glad to have seen him, thankful that he lives, and you hope that, sparing your chickens and your share of trout, partridges, and wild ducks, he too may be spared from the devices of the trapper to fill his appointed place in the world's wildness.

VI

APRIL DAYS

At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furrows of last year's ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phœbe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter's ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.

The woodchuck and chipmunk have got on top of the world again. You hear the half querulous, half chuckling whistle of the one, the full-mouthed persistent cluck of the other, voicing recognition of the season.

The song of the brooks has abated something of its first triumphant swell, and is often overborne now by the jubilant chorus of the birds, the jangled, liquid gurgle and raucous grating of the blackbirds, the robin's joyous song with its frequent breaks, as if the thronging notes outran utterance, the too brief sweetness of the meadowlark's whistle, the bluebird's carol, the cheery call of the phœbe, the trill of the song sparrow, and above them all the triumph of the hawk in its regained possessions of northern sky and earth.

The woods throb with the muffled beat of the partridge's drum and the sharp tattoo of the woodpecker, and are filled again with the sounds of insect life, the spasmodic hum of flies, the droning monotone of bees busy among the catkins and squirrelcups, and you may see a butterfly, wavering among the gray trees, soon to come to the end of his life, brief at its longest, drowned in the seductive sweets of a sap bucket.

The squirrels are chattering over the wine of the maple branches they have broached, in merrier mood than the hare, who limps over the matted leaves in the raggedness of shifting raiment, fitting himself to a new inconspicuousness.

We shall not find it unpleasant nor unprofitable to take to the woods now, for we may be sure that they are pleasanter than the untidy fields. Where nature has her own way with herself, she makes her garb seemly even now, after all the tousling and rents she gave it in her angry winter moods. The scraps of moss, bark, and twigs with which the last surface of the snow was obtrusively littered lie now unnoticed on the flat-pressed leaves, an umber carpet dotted here with flecks of moss, there sprigged with fronds of evergreen fern, purple leaves of squirrelcups, with their downy buds and first blossoms. Between banks so clad the brook babbles as joyously as amid all the bloom and leafage of June, and catches a brighter gleam from the unobstructed sunbeams. So befittingly are the trees arrayed in graceful tracery of spray and beads of purpling buds, that their seemly nakedness is as beautiful as attire of summer's greenness or autumn's gorgeousness could make them.

Never sweeter than now, after the long silence of winter, do the birds' songs sound, and never in all the round of the year is there a better time to see them than when the gray haze of the branches is the only hiding for their gay wedding garments.

If you would try your skill at still-hunting, follow up that muffled roll that throbs through the woods, and if you discover the ruffed grouse strutting upon his favorite log, and undiscovered by him can watch his proud performance, you will have done something better worth boasting of than bringing him to earth from his hurtling flight.

Out of the distant fields come, sweet and faint, the call of the meadowlark and the gurgle of the blackbirds that throng the brookside elms. From high overhead come down the clarion note of the goose, the sibilant beat of the wild ducks' wings, the bleat of the snipe and the plover's cry, each making his way to northern breeding grounds. Are you not glad they are going as safely as their uncaught shadows that sweep swiftly across the shadowy meshes of the forest floor? Are you not content to see what you see, hear what you hear, and kill nothing but time?

Verily, you shall have a clearer conscience than if you were disturbing the voice of nature with the discordant uproar of your gun, and marring the fresh odors of spring with the fumes of villainous saltpetre.

In the open marshes the lodges of the muskrats have gone adrift in the floods; but the unhoused inmates count this a light misfortune, since they may voyage again with heads above water, and go mate-seeking and food-gathering in sunshine and starlight, undimmed by roof of ice. As you see them cutting the smooth surface with long, swift, arrowy wakes, coasting the low shore in quest of brown sweethearts and wives, whimpering their plaintive call, you can hardly imagine the clumsy body between that grim head and rudder-like tail capable of such graceful motion.

The painted wood drake swims above the submerged tree roots; a pair of dusky ducks splash to flight, with a raucous clamor, out of a sedgy cove at your approach; the thronging blackbirds shower liquid melody and hail of discord from the purple-budded maples above you. All around, from the drift of floating and stranded water weeds, arises the dry, crackling croak of frogs, and from sunny pools the vibrant trill of toads.

From afar come the watery boom of a bittern, the song of a trapper and the hollow clang of his setting pole dropping athwart the gunwales of his craft, the distant roar of a gun and the echoes rebounding from shore to shore.

The grateful odor of the warming earth comes to your nostrils; to your ears, from every side, the sounds of spring; and yet you listen for fuller confirmation of its presence in the long-drawn wail of the plover and the rollicking melody of the bobolink.

VII

THE WOODCHUCK

Chancing to pass a besmirched April snowbank on the border of a hollow, you see it marked with the footprints of an old acquaintance of whom for months you have not seen even so much as this.

It is not that he made an autumnal pilgrimage, slowly following the swift birds and the retreating sun, that you had no knowledge of him, but because of his home-keeping, closer than a hermit's seclusion. These few cautious steps, venturing but half way from his door to the tawny naked grass that is daily edging nearer to his threshold, are the first he has taken abroad since the last bright lingering leaf fluttered down in the Indian summer haze, or perhaps since the leaves put on their first autumnal tints.

He had seen all the best of the year, the blooming of the first flowers, the springing of the grass and its growth, the gathering of the harvests and the ripening of fruits, and possibly the gorgeousness of autumn melting into sombre gray. He had heard all the glad songs of all the birds and the sad notes of farewell of bobolink and plover to their summer home; he had seen the swallows depart and had heard the droning of the bumblebee among the earliest and latest of his own clover blossoms. All the best the world had to give in the round of her seasons, luxuriant growth to feed upon, warm sunshine to bask in, he had enjoyed; of her worst, he would have none.

So he bade farewell to the gathering desolation of the tawny fields and crept closer to the earth's warm heart to sleep through the long night of winter, till the morning of spring. The wild scurry of wind-tossed leaves swept above him unheard, and the pitiless beat of autumnal rain and the raging of winter storms that heaped the drifts deeper and deeper over his forsaken door. The bitterness of cold, that made the furred fox and the muffled owl shiver, never touched him in his warm nest. So he shirked the hardships of winter without the toil of a journey in pursuit of summer, while the starved fox prowled in the desolate woods and barren fields, the owl hunted beneath the cold stars, and the squirrel delved in the snow for his meagre fare.

By and by the ethereal but potent spirit of spring stole in where the frost-elves could not enter, and awakening the earth awakened him. Not by a slow and often impeded invasion of the senses, but as by the sudden opening of a door, he sees the naked earth again warming herself in the sun, and hears running water and singing birds. No wonder that with such surprise the querulous tremolo of his whistle is sharply mingled with these softer voices.

Day by day as he sees the sun-loved banks blushing greener, he ventures further forth to visit neighbors or watch his clover, or dig a new home in a more favored bank, or fortify himself in some rocky stronghold where boys and dogs may not enter. Now, the family may be seen moving, with no burden of furniture or provision, but only the mother with her gray cubs, carried as a cat carries her kittens, one by one to the new home among the fresher clover.

On the mound of newly digged earth before it, is that erect, motionless, gray and russet form a half decayed stump uprising where no tree has grown within your memory? You move a little nearer to inspect the strange anomaly, and lo! it vanishes, and you know it was your old acquaintance, the woodchuck, standing guard at his door and overlooking his green and blossoming domain.

Are you not sorry, to-day at least, to hear the boys and the dog besieging him in his burrow or in the old stone wall wherein he has taken sanctuary? Surely, the first beautiful days of his open-air life should not be made so miserable that he would wish himself asleep again in the safety and darkness of winter. But you remember that you were once a boy, and your sympathies are divided between the young savages and their intended prey, which after all is likelier than not to escape.

He will tangle the meadow-grass and make free with the bean patch if he chances upon it, yet you are glad to see the woodchuck, rejoicing like yourself in the advent of spring.

VIII

THE CHIPMUNK

As the woodchuck sleeps away the bitterness of cold, so in his narrower chamber sleeps the chipmunk. Happy little hermit, lover of the sun, mate of the song sparrow and the butterflies, what a goodly and hopeful token of the earth's renewed life is he, verifying the promises of his own chalices, the squirrelcups, set in the warmest corners of the woodside, with libations of dew and shower drops, of the bluebird's carol, the sparrow's song of spring.

Now he comes forth from his long night into the fullness of sunlit day, to proclaim his awakening to his summer comrades, a gay recluse clad all in the motley, a jester, maybe, yet no fool.

His voice, for all its monotony, is inspiring of gladness and contentment, whether he utters his thin, sharp chip or full-mouthed cluck, or laughs a chittering mockery as he scurries in at his narrow door.

He winds along his crooked pathway of the fence rails and forages for half-forgotten nuts in the familiar grounds, brown with strewn leaves or dun with dead grass. Sometimes he ventures to the top rail and climbs to a giddy ten-foot height on a tree, whence he looks abroad, wondering, on the wide expanse of an acre.

Music hath charms for him, and you may entrance him with a softly whistled tune and entice him to frolic with a herds-grass head gently moved before him.

When the fairies have made the white curd of mallow blossoms into cheeses for the children and the chipmunk, it is a pretty sight to see him gathering his share handily and toothily stripping off the green covers, filling his cheek pouches with the dainty disks and scampering away to his cellar with his ungrudged portion. Alack the day, when the sweets of the sprouting corn tempt him to turn rogue, for then he becomes a banned outlaw, and the sudden thunder of the gun announces his tragic fate. He keeps well the secret of constructing his cunning house, without a show of heaped or scattered soil at its entrance. Bearing himself honestly, and escaping his enemies, the cat, the hawk, and the boy, he lives a long day of happy inoffensive life. Then when the filmy curtain of the Indian summer falls upon the year again, he bids us a long good-night.

IX

SPRING SHOOTING

The Ram makes way for the Bull; March goes out and April comes in with sunshine and showers, smiles and tears. The sportsman has his gun in hand again with deadly purpose, as the angler his rod and tackle with another intention than mere overhauling and putting to rights. The smiles of April are for them.

The geese come wedging their way northward; the ducks awaken the silent marshes with the whistle of their pinions; the snipe come in pairs and wisps to the thawing bogs—all on their way to breeding grounds and summer homes. The tears of April are for them. Wherever they stop for a day's or an hour's rest, and a little food to strengthen and hearten them for their long journey, the deadly, frightful gun awaits to kill, maim, or terrify, more merciless than all the ills that nature inflicts in her unkindest moods.

Year after year men go on making laws and crying for more, to protect these fowl in summer, but in spring, when as much as ever they need protection, the hand of man is ruthlessly against them.

When you made that splendid shot last night in the latest gloaming that would show you the sight of your gun, and cut down that ancient goose, tougher than the leather of your gun-case, and almost as edible, of how many well-grown young geese of next November did you cheat yourself, or some one else of the brotherhood?

When from the puddle, where they were bathing their tired wings, sipping the nectar of muddy water, and nibbling the budding leaves of water weeds, you started that pair of ducks yesterday, and were so proud of tumbling them down right and left, you killed many more than you saw then; many that you might have seen next fall.

When the sun was shining down so warm upon the steaming earth that the robins and bluebirds sang May songs, those were very good shots you made, killing ten snipe straight and clean, and—they were very bad shots. For in November the ten might have been four times ten fat and lusty, lazy fellows, boring the oozy margins of these same pools where the frogs are croaking and the toads are singing to-day.

"Well, it's a long time to wait from November till the earth ripens and browns to autumn again. Life is short and shooting days are few at most. Let us shoot our goose while we may, though she would lay a golden egg by and by."

Farmers do not kill their breeding ewes in March, nor butcher cows that are to calve in a month; it does not pay. Why should sportsmen be less provident of the stock they prize so dearly; stock that has so few care-takers, so many enemies? Certainly, it does not pay in the long run.

X

THE GARTER-SNAKE

When the returned crows have become such familiar objects in the forlorn unclad landscape of early spring that they have worn out their first welcome, and the earliest songbirds have come to stay in spite of inhospitable weather that seems for days to set the calendar back a month, the woods invite you more than the fields. There nature is least under man's restraint and gives the first signs of her reawakening. In windless nooks the sun shines warmest between the meshes of the slowly drifting net of shadows.

There are patches of moss on gray rocks and tree trunks. Fairy islands of it, that will not be greener when they are wet with summer showers, arise among the brown expanse of dead leaves. The gray mist of branches and undergrowth is enlivened with a tinge of purple. Here and there the tawny mat beneath is uplifted by the struggling plant life below it or pierced through by an underthrust of a sprouting seed. There is a promise of bloom in blushing arbutus buds, a promise even now fulfilled by the first squirrelcups just out of their furry bracts and already calling the bees abroad. Flies are buzzing to and fro in busy idleness, and a cricket stirs the leaves with a sudden spasm of movement. The first of the seventeen butterflies that shall give boys the freedom of bare feet goes wavering past like a drifting blossom.

A cradle knoll invites you to a seat on the soft, warm cushion of dead leaves and living moss and purple sprigs of wintergreen with their blobs of scarlet berries, which have grown redder and plumper under every snow of the winter. This smoothly rounded mound and the hollow scooped beside it, brimful now of amber, sun-warmed water, mark the ancient place of a great tree that was dead and buried, and all traces by which its kind could be identified were mouldered away and obliterated, before you were born.

The incessant crackling purr of the wood-frogs is interrupted at your approach, and they disappear till the wrinkled surface of the oblong pool grows smooth again and you perceive them sprawled along the bottom on the leaf paving of their own color. As you cast a casual glance on your prospective seat, carelessly noting the mingling of many hues, the brightness of the berries seems most conspicuous, till a moving curved and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion.

With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out one token of spring's awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter-snake. He is so harmless to man, that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion—a motion that charms us in the undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs. His colors are fresh and bright as ever you will see them, though he has but to-day awakened from a long sleep in continual darkness.

He is simply enjoying the free air and warm sunshine without a thought of food for all his months of fasting. Perhaps he has forgotten that miserable necessity of existence. When at last he remembers that he has an appetite, you can scarcely imagine that he can have any pleasure in satisfying it with one huge mouthful of twice or thrice the ordinary diameter of his gullet. If you chance to witness his slow and painful gorging of a frog, you hear a cry of distress that might be uttered with equal cause by victim or devourer. When he has fully entered upon the business of reawakened life, many a young field-mouse and noxious insect will go into his maw to his own and your benefit. If there go also some eggs and callow young of ground-nesting birds, why should you question his right, you, who defer slaughter out of pure selfishness, that a little later you may make havoc among the broods of woodcock and grouse?

Of all living things, only man disturbs the nicely adjusted balance of nature. The more civilized he becomes the more mischievous he is. The better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the bison and the Indian shared a continent, but in two hundred years or so the white man has destroyed the one and spoiled the other.

Surely there is little harm in this lowly bearer of a name honored in knighthood, and the motto of the noble order might be the legend written on his gilded mail, "Evil to him who evil thinks." If this sunny patch of earth is not wide enough for you to share with him, leave it to him and choose another for yourself. The world is wide enough for both to enjoy this season of its promise.

XI

THE TOAD

During our summer acquaintance with her, when we see her oftenest, a valued inhabitant of our garden and a welcome twilight visitor at our threshold, we associate silence with the toad, almost as intimately as with the proverbially silent clam. In the drouthy or too moist summer days and evenings, she never awakens our hopes or fears with shrill prophecies of rain as does her nimbler and more aspiring cousin, the tree-toad.

A rustle of the cucumber leaves that embower her cool retreat, the spat and shuffle of her short, awkward leaps, are the only sounds that then betoken her presence, and we listen in vain for even a smack of pleasure or audible expression of self-approval, when, after a nervous, gratulatory wriggle of her hinder toes, she dips forward and, with a lightning-like out-flashing of her unerring tongue, she flicks into her jaws a fly or bug. She only winks contentedly to express complete satisfaction at her performance and its result.

Though summer's torrid heat cannot warm her to any voice, springtime and love make her tuneful, and every one hears the softly trilled, monotonous song jarring the mild air, but few know who is the singer. The drumming grouse is not shyer of exhibiting his performance.

From a sun-warmed pool not fifty yards away a full chorus of the rapidly vibrant voices arises, and you imagine that the performers are so absorbed with their music that you may easily draw near and observe them. But when you come to the edge of the pool you see only a half-dozen concentric circles of wavelets, widening from central points, where as many musicians have modestly withdrawn beneath the transparent curtain.

Wait, silent and motionless, and they will reappear. A brown head is thrust above the surface, and presently your last summer's familiar of the garden and doorstep crawls slowly out upon a barren islet of cobble-stone, and, assured that no intruder is within the precincts sacred to the wooing of the toads, she inflates her throat and tunes up her long, monotonous chant. Ere it ceases, another and another take it up, and from distant pools you hear it answered, till all the air is softly shaken as if with the clear chiming of a hundred swift-struck, tiny bells. They ring in the returning birds, robin, sparrow, finch and meadow lark, and the first flowers, squirrelcup, arbutus, bloodroot, adder-tongue and moose-flower.

When the bobolink has come to his northern domain again and the oriole flashes through the budding elms and the first columbine droops over the gray ledges, you may still hear an occasional ringing of the toads, but a little later the dignified and matronly female, having lost her voice altogether, has returned to her summer home, while her little mate has exchanged his trill for a disagreeable and uncanny squawk, perhaps a challenge to his rivals, who linger about the scenes of their courtship and make night hideous until midsummer. Then a long silence falls on the race of toads—a silence which even hibernation scarcely deepens.

XII

MAY DAYS

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the sun and the moist tinder of the brook's overflow.

The faithful swallows have returned, though the faithless season delays. The flicker flashes his golden shafts in the sunlight and gladdens the ear with his merry cackle. The upland plover wails his greeting to the tussocked pastures, where day and night rings the shrill chorus of the hylas and the trill of the toads continually trembles in the soft air.

The first comers of the birds are already mated and nest-building, robin and song sparrow each in his chosen place setting the foundations of his house with mud or threads of dry grass. The crow clutters out his softest love note. The flicker is mining a fortress in the heart of an old apple-tree.

The squirrels wind a swift ruddy chain about a boll in their love chase, and even now you may surprise the vixen fox watching the first gambols of her tawny cubs by the sunny border of the woods.

The gray haze of undergrowth and lofty ramage is turning to a misty green, and the shadows of opening buds knot the meshed shadows of twigs on the brown forest floor, which is splashed with white moose-flowers and buds of bloodroot, like ivory-tipped arrows, each in a green quiver, and yellow adder-tongues bending above their mottled beds, and rusty trails of arbutus leaves leading to the secret of their hidden bloom, which their fragrance half betrays.

Marsh marigolds lengthen their golden chain, link by link, along the ditches. The maples are yellow with paler bloom, and the graceful birches are bent with their light burden of tassels. The dandelion answers the sun, the violet the sky. Blossom and greenness are everywhere; even the brown paths of the plough and harrow are greening with springing grain.

We listen to the cuckoo's monotonous flute among the white drifts of orchard bloom and the incessant murmur of bees, the oriole's half plaintive carol as of departed joys in the elms, and the jubilant song of the bobolink in the meadows, where he is not an outlaw but a welcome guest, mingling his glad notes with the merry voices of flower-gathering children, as by and by he will with the ringing cadence of the scythe and the vibrant chirr of the mower. Down by the flooded marshes the scarlet of the water maples and the flash of the starling's wing are repeated in the broad mirror of the still water. The turtle basks on the long incline of stranded logs.

Tally-sticks cast adrift are a symbol that the trapper's warfare against the muskrats is ended and that the decimated remnant of the tribe is left in peace to reëstablish itself. The spendthrift waste of untimely shooting is stayed. Wild duck, plover, and snipe have entered upon the enjoyment of a summer truce that will be unbroken, if the collector is not abroad at whose hands science ruthlessly demands mating birds and callow brood.

Of all sportsmen only the angler, often attended by his winged brother the kingfisher, is astir, wandering by pleasant waters where the bass lurks in the tangles of an eddy's writhing currents, or the perch poises and then glides through the intangible golden meshes that waves and sunlight knit, or where the trout lies poised beneath the silver domes of foam bells.

The loon laughs again on the lake. Again the freed waves toss the shadows of the shores and the white reflections of white sails, and flash back the sunlight or the glitter of stars and the beacon's rekindled gleam.

Sun and sky, forest, field, and water, bird and blossom, declare the fullness of spring and the coming of summer.

XIII

THE BOBOLINK

The woods have changed from the purple of swelling buds to the tender grayish green of opening leaves, and the sward is green again with new grass, when this pied troubadour, more faithful to the calendar than leaf or flower, comes back from his southern home to New England meadows to charm others than his dusky ladylove with his merry song. He seldom disappoints us by more than a day in the date of his arrival, and never fails to receive a kindly welcome, though the fickle weather may be unkind.

"The bobolinks have come" is as joyful a proclamation as announces the return of the bluebird and robin. Here no shotted salute of gun awaits him, and he is aware that he is in a friendly country. Though he does not court familiarity, he tolerates approach; and permits you to come within a dozen yards of the fence stake he has alighted on, and when you come nearer he goes but to the next, singing the prelude or finale of his song as he flies. Fewer yards above your head he poises on wing to sing it from beginning to end, you know not whether with intent to taunt you or to charm you, but he only accomplishes the latter. He seems to know that he does not harm us and that he brings nothing that we should not lose by killing him. Yet how cunningly he and his mate hide their nest in the even expanse of grass. That is a treasure he will not trust us with the secret of, and, though there may be a dozen in the meadow, we rarely find one.

Our New England fathers had as kindly a feeling for this blithe comer to their stumpy meadows, though they gave him the uncouth and malodorous name of skunk blackbird. He sang as sweetly to them as he does to us, and he too was a discoverer and a pioneer, finding and occupying meadows full of sunshine where had only been the continual shade of the forest, where no bobolink had ever been before. Now he has miles of grassy sunlit fields wherein he sings violet and buttercup, daisy and clover into bloom and strawberries into ripeness, and his glad song mingles with the happy voices of the children who come to gather them, and also chimes with the rarer music of the whetted scythe.

Then, long before the summer is past, he assumes the sober dress of his mate and her monosyllabic note, and fades so gradually out of our sight and hearing that he departs without our being aware of it. Summer still burns with unabated fervor, when we suddenly realize that there are no bobolinks. Nor are there any under the less changeful skies whither our changed bird has flown to be a reed-bird or rice-bird and to find mankind his enemies. He is no longer a singer but a gourmand and valued only as a choice morsel, doubtless delicious, yet one that should choke a New Englander.

XIV

THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER

The migrant woodpecker whose cheery cackle assures us of the certainty of spring is rich in names that well befit him. If you take to high-sounding titles for your humble friends, you will accept Colaptes auratus, as he flies above you, borrowing more gold of the sunbeams that shine through his yellow pinions, or will be content to call him simply golden-winged. When he flashes his wings in straight-away flight before you, or sounds his sharp, single note of alarm, or peers down from the door of his lofty tower, or hangs on its wooden wall, or clinging to a fence stake displays his mottled back, you recognize the fitness of each name the country folk have given him—flicker, yellow-hammer, yarrup, highhole or highholder, and what Thoreau often termed him, partridge-woodpecker. It is a wonder that the joyous cackle wherewith he announces his return from his winter sojourn in the South has not gained him another, and that love note, so like the slow whetting of a knife upon a steel, still another. Perhaps it is because they are especially sounds of spring and seldom if ever heard after the season of joyful arrival and love-making.

During the same season you frequently hear him attuning his harsh sharp voice to its softest note of endearment, a long-drawn and modulated variation of his cackle. When household cares begin, the lord and lady of the wooden tower, like too many greater and wiser two-legged folk, give over singing and soft words. At home and abroad their deportment is sober and business-like, and except for an occasional alarm-cry they are mostly silent.

As you wander through the orchard of an early midsummer day and pause beside an old apple-tree to listen to the cuckoo's flute or admire the airy fabric of the wood pewee's nest, a larger scale of lichen on the lichened boughs, you hear a smothered vibrant murmur close beside you, as if the heart of the old tree was pulsating with audible life. It is startlingly suggestive of disturbed yellow-jackets, but when you move around the trunk in cautious reconnoissance, you discover the round portal of a flicker's home, and the sound resolves itself into harmlessness. It is only the callow young clamoring for food, or complaining of their circumscribed quarters.

Not many days hence they will be out in the wide world of air and sunshine of which they now know as little as when they chipped the shell. Lusty fellows they will be then, with much of their parents' beauty already displayed in their bright new plumage and capable of an outcry that will hold a bird-eating cat at bay. A little later they will be, as their parents are, helpful allies against the borers, the insidious enemies of our apple-tree. It is a warfare which the groundling habits of the golden-wings make them more ready to engage in than any other of the woodpecker clans.

In sultry August weather, when the shrill cry of the cicada pierces the hot air like a hotter needle of sound, and the dry husky beat of his wings emphasizes the apparent fact of drouth as you walk on the desiccated slippery herbage of meadow and pasture, the golden-wings with all their grown-up family fly up before you from their feast on the ant hills and go flashing and flickering away like rockets shot aslant, into the green tent of the wild cherry trees to their dessert of juicy black fruit.

Early in the dreariness of November, they have vanished with all the horde of summer residents who have made the season of leaf, flower, and fruit the brighter by their presence. The desolate leafless months go by, till at last comes the promise of spring, and you are aware of a half unconscious listening for the golden-wings. Presently the loud, long, joyous iteration breaks upon your ear, and you hail the fulfillment of the promise and the blithe new comer, a golden link in the lengthening chain that is encircling the earth.

XV

JUNE DAYS

June brings skies of purest blue, flecked with drifts of silver, fields and woods in the flush of fresh verdure, with the streams winding among them in crystal loops that invite the angler with promise of more than fish, something that tackle cannot lure nor creel hold.

The air is full of the perfume of locust and grape bloom, the spicy odor of pine and fir, and of pleasant voices—the subdued murmur of the brook's changing babble, the hum of bees, the stir of the breeze, the songs of birds. Out of the shady aisles of the woods come the flute note of the hermit thrush, the silvery chime of the tawny thrush; and from the forest border, where the lithe birches swing their shadows to and fro along the bounds of wood and field, comes that voice of June, the cuckoo's gurgling note of preparation, and then the soft, monotonous call that centuries ago gave him a name.

General Kukushna the exiles in Siberia entitle him; and when they hear his voice, every one who can break bounds is irresistibly drawn to follow him, and live for a brief season a free life in the greenwood. As to many weary souls and hampered bodies there, so to many such here comes the voice of the little commander, now persuasive, now imperative, not to men and women in exile or wearing the convict's garb, but suffering some sort of servitude laid upon them or self-imposed. Toiling for bread, for wealth, for fame, they are alike in bondage—chained to the shop, the farm, the desk, the office.

Some who hear, obey, and revel in the brief but delightful freedom of June days spent in the perfumed breath of full-leafed woods, by cold water-brooks and rippled lakes. Others listen with hungry hearts to the summons, but cannot loose their fetters, and can only answer with a sigh, "It is not for me," or "Not yet," and toil on, still hoping for future days of freedom.

But saddest of all is the case of such as hear not, or, hearing, heed not the voice of the Kukushna, the voices of the birds, the murmurous droning of bees amid the blossoms, the sweet prattle of running waters and dancing waves. Though these come to them from all about, and all about them are unfolded the manifold beauties of this joyous month, no sign is made to them. Their dull ears hear not the voices of nature, neither do their dim eyes see the wondrous miracle of spring which has been wrought all about them. Like the man with the muck-rake, they toil on, intent only upon the filth and litter at their feet. Sad indeed must it be to have a soul so poor that it responds to no caress of nature, sadder than any imposition of servitude or exile which yet hinders not one's soul from arising with intense longing for the wild world of woods and waters when Kukushna sounds his soft trumpet call.

XVI

THE BULLFROG

The flooded expanse of the marshes has shrunken perceptibly along its shoreward boundaries, leaving a mat of dead weeds, bits of driftwood, and a water-worn selvage of bare earth to mark its widest limits. The green tips of the rushes are thrust above the amber shallows, whereon flotillas of water-shield lie anchored in the sun, while steel-blue devil's-needles sew the warm air with intangible threads of zigzag flight.

The meshed shadows of the water-maples are full of the reflections of the green and silver of young leaves. The naked tangle of button-bushes has become a green island, populous with garrulous colonies of redwings. The great flocks of wild ducks that came to the reopened waters have had their holiday rest, and journeyed onward to summer homes and cares in the further north. The few that remain are in scattered pairs and already in the silence and seclusion of nesting. You rarely see the voyaging muskrat or hear his plaintive love calls.

Your ear has long been accustomed to the watery clangor of the bittern, when a new yet familiar sound strikes it, the thin, vibrant bass of the first bullfrog's note. It may be lacking in musical quality, but it is attuned to its surroundings, and you are glad that the green-coated player has at last recovered his long-submerged banjo, and is twanging its water-soaked strings in prelude to the summer concert. He is a little out of practice, and his instrument is slightly out of tune, but a few days' use will restore both touch and resonance, when he and his hundred brethren shall awaken the marsh-haunting echoes and the sleeping birds with a grand twilight recital. It will reach your ears a mile away, and draw you back to the happy days of boyhood, when you listened for the bullfrogs to tell that fish would bite, and it was time for boys to go a-fishing.

In the first days of his return to the upper world of water, this old acquaintance may be shy, and neither permit nor offer any familiarity. The fixed placidity of his countenance is not disturbed by your approach, but if you overstep by one pace what he considers the proper limit, down goes his head under cover of the flood. Marking his jerky course with an underwake and a shiver of the rushes, he reappears, to calmly observe you from a safer distance.

Custom outwears his diffidence, and the fervid sun warms him to more genial moods, when he will suffer you to come quietly quite close to him and tickle his sides with a bullrush, till in an ecstasy of pleasure he loses all caution, and bears with supreme contentment the titillation of your finger tips. His flabby sides swell with fullness of enjoyment, his blinking eyes grow dreamy and the corners of his blandly expressionless mouth almost curve upward with an elusive smile. Not till your fingers gently close upon him does he become aware of the indiscretion into which he has lapsed, and with a frantic struggle he tears himself away from your grasp and goes plunging headlong into his nether element, bellowing out his shame and astonishment.

Another day as you troll along the channel an oar's length from the weedy borders, you see him afloat on his lily-pad raft, heeding you no more than does the golden-hearted blossom whose orange odor drifts about him, nor is he disturbed by splash of oar nor dip of paddle, nor even when his bark and her perfume-freighted consort are tossed on your undulating wake.

As summer wanes you see and hear him less frequently, but he is still your comrade of the marshes, occasionally announcing his presence with a resonant twang and a jerky splash among the sedges.

The pickerel weeds have struck their blue banners to the conquering frost, and the marshes are sere, and silent, and desolate. When they are warmed again with the new life of spring, we shall listen for the jubilant chorus of our old acquaintance, the bullfrog.

XVII

THE ANGLER

I

Angling is set down by the master of the craft, whom all revere but none now follow, as the Contemplative Man's Recreation; but is the angler, while angling, a contemplative man?

That beloved and worthy brother whose worm-baited hook dangles in quiet waters, placid as his mind—till some wayfaring perch, or bream, or bullhead shall by chance come upon it, he, meanwhile, with rod set in the bank, taking his ease upon the fresh June sward, not touching his tackle nor regarding it but with the corner of an eye—he may contemplate and dream day dreams. He may watch the clouds drifting across the blue, the green branches waving between him and them, consider the lilies of the field, note the songs of the catbird in the willow thicket, watch the poise and plunge of the kingfisher, and so spend all the day with nature and his own lazy thoughts. That is what he came for. Angling with him is only a pretense, an excuse to pay a visit to the great mother whom he so dearly loves; and if he carries home not so much as a scale, he is happy and content.

But how is it with him who comes stealing along with such light tread that it scarcely crushes the violets or shakes the dewdrops from the ferns, and casts his flies with such precise skill upon the very handsbreadth of water that gives most promise to his experienced eye; or drops his minnow with such care into the eddying pool, where he feels a bass must lie awaiting it. Eye and ear and every organ of sense are intent upon the sport for which he came. He sees only the images of the clouds, no branch but that which impedes him or offers cover to his stealthy approach. His ear is more alert for the splash of fishes than for bird songs. With his senses go all his thoughts, and float not away in day dreams.

Howsoever much he loves her, for the time while he hath rod in hand Mother Nature is a fish-woman, and he prays that she may deal generously with him. Though he be a parson, his thoughts tend not to religion; though a savant, not to science; though a statesman, not to politics; though an artist, to no art save the art of angling. So far removed from all these while he casts his fly or guides his minnow, how much further is his soul from all but the matter in hand when a fish has taken the one or the other, and all his skill is taxed to the utmost to bring his victim to creel. Heresy and paganism may prevail, the light of science be quenched, the country go to the dogs, pictures go unpainted, and statues unmoulded till he has saved this fish.

When the day is spent, the day's sport done, and he wends his way homeward with a goodly score, satisfied with himself and all the world besides, he may ponder on many things apart from that which has this day taken him by green fields and pleasant waters. Now he may brood his thoughts, and dream dreams; but while he angles, the complete angler is not a contemplative man.

II

The rivers roaring between their brimming banks; the brooks babbling over their pebbled beds and cross-stream logs that will be bridges for the fox in midsummer; the freed waters of lakes and ponds, dashing in slow beat of waves or quicker pulse of ripples against their shores, in voices monotonous but never tiresome, now call all who delight in the craft to go a-fishing.

With the sap in the aged tree, the blood quickens in the oldest angler's veins, whether he be of the anointed who fish by the book, or of the common sort who practice the methods of the forgotten inventors of the art.

The first are busy with rods and reels that are a pleasure to the eye and touch, with fly-books whose leaves are as bright with color as painted pictures, the others rummaging corner-cupboards for mislaid lines, searching the sheds for favorite poles of ash, ironwood, tamarack, or cedar, or perhaps the woods for one just budding on its sapling stump.

Each enjoys as much as the other the pleasant labor of preparation and the anticipation of sport, though perhaps that of the scientific angler is more æsthetic enjoyment, as his outfitting is the daintier and more artistic. But to each comes the recollection of past happy days spent on lake, river and brook, memories touched with a sense of loss, of days that can never come again, of comrades gone forever from earthly companionship.

And who shall say that the plebeian angler does not enter upon the untangling of his cotton lines, the trimming of his new cut pole, and the digging of his worms, with as much zest as his brother of the finer cast on the testing and mending of lancewood or split bamboo rod, the overhauling of silken lines and leaders, and the assorting of flies.

III

Considering the younger generation of anglers, one finds more enthusiasm among those who talk learnedly of all the niceties of the art. They scorn all fish not acknowledged as game. They plan more, though they may accomplish less than the common sort to whom all of fishing tackle is a pole, a line, and a hook. To them fishing is but fishing, and fish are only fish, and they will go for one or the other when the signs are right and the day propitious.

Descending to the least and latest generation of anglers, we see the conditions reversed. The youth born to rod and reel and fly is not so enthusiastic in his devotion to the sport as the boy whose birthright is only the pole that craftsman never fashioned, the kinky lines of the country store, and hooks known by no maker's name. For it is not in the nature of a boy to hold to any nicety in sport of any sort, and this one, being herein unrestrained, enters upon the art called gentle with all the wild freedom of a young savage or a half-grown mink.

For him it is almost as good as going fishing, to unearth and gather in an old teapot the worms, every one of which is to his sanguine vision the promise of a fish. What completeness of happiness for him to be allowed to go fishing with his father or grandfather or the acknowledged great fisherman of the neighborhood, a good-for-nothing ne'er-do-well, but wise in all the ways of fish and their taking and very careful of and kind to little boys.

The high-hole never cackled so merrily, nor meadow lark sang sweeter, nor grass sprang greener nor water shone brighter than to the boy when he goes a-fishing thus accompanied. To him is welcome everything that comes from the waters, be it trout, bass, perch, bullhead, or sunfish, and he hath pride even in the abominable but toothsome eel and the uneatable bowfin.

Well, remembering that we were once boys and are yet anglers, though we seldom go a-fishing, we wish, in the days of the new springtide, to all the craft, whether they be of high or low degree, bent and cramped with the winter of age or flushed with the spring of life, pleasant and peaceful days of honest sport by all watersides, and full creels and strings and wythes.

IV

In the soft evenings of April when the air is full of the undefinable odor of the warming earth and of the incessant rejoicing of innumerable members of the many families of batrachians, one may see silently moving lights prowling along the low shores of shallow waters, now hidden by trunks of great trees that are knee-deep in the still water, now emerging, illuminating bolls and branches and flashing their glimmering glades far across the ripples of wake and light breeze.

If one were near enough he could see the boat of the spearers, its bow and the intent figure of the spearman aglow in the light of the jack which flares a backward flame with its steady progress, and drops a slow shower of sparks, while the stern and the paddler sitting therein are dimly apparent in the verge of the gloom.

These may be honest men engaged in no illegal affair; they exercise skill of a certain sort; they are enthusiastic in the pursuit of their pastime, which is as fair as jacking deer, a practice upheld by many in high places; yet these who by somewhat similar methods take fish for sport and food are not accounted honest fishermen, but arrant poachers. If jacking deer is right, how can jacking fish be wrong? or if jacking fish be wrong, how can jacking deer be right? Verily, there are nice distinctions in the ethics of sport.

XVIII

FARMERS AND FIELD SPORTS

"Happy the man whose only care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
On his own ground."

Happier still is such a one who has a love for the rod and gun, and with them finds now and then a day's freedom from all cares by the side of the stream that borders his own acres and in the woods that crest his knolls or shade his swamp.

As a rule none of our people take so few days of recreation as the farmer. Excepting Sundays, two or three days at the county fair, and perhaps as many more spent in the crowd and discomfort of a cheap railroad excursion, are all that are given by the ordinary farmer to anything but the affairs of the farm. It is true that his outdoor life makes it less necessary for him than for the man whose office or shop work keeps him mostly indoors, to devote a month or a fortnight of each year to entire rest from labor. Indeed, he can hardly do this except in winter, when his own fireside is oftener the pleasantest place for rest. But he would be the better for more days of healthful pleasure, and many such he might have if he would so use those odd ones which fall within his year, when crops are sown and planted or harvested. A day in the woods or by the stream is better for body and mind than one spent in idle gossip at the village store, and nine times out of ten better for the pocket, though one come home without fin or feather to show for his day's outing. One who keeps his eyes and ears on duty while abroad in the field can hardly fail to see and hear something new, or, at least, more interesting and profitable than ordinary gossip, and the wear and tear of tackle and a few charges of ammunition wasted will cost less than the treats which are pretty apt to be part of a day's loafing.

Barring the dearth of the objects of his pursuit, the farmer who goes a-fishing and a-hunting should not be unsuccessful if he has fair skill with the rod and gun. For he who knows most of the habits of fish and game will succeed best in their capture, and no man, except the naturalist and the professional fisherman and hunter, has a better chance to gain this knowledge than the farmer, whose life brings him into everyday companionship with nature. His fields and woods are the homes and haunts of the birds and beasts of venery, from the beginning of the year to its end, and in his streams many of the fishes pass their lives. By his woodside the quail builds her nest, and when the foam of blossom has dried away on the buckwheat field she leads her young there to feed on the brown kernel stranded on the coral stems. If he chance to follow his wood road in early June, the ruffed grouse limps and flutters along it before him, while her callow chicks vanish as if by a conjurer's trick from beneath his very footfall. A month later, grown to the size of robins, they will scatter on the wing from his path with a vigor that foretells the bold whir and the swiftness of their flight in their grown-up days, when they will stir the steadiest nerve, whether they hurtle from an October-painted thicket or from the blue shadows of untracked snow. No one is likelier to see and hear the strange wooing of the woodcock in the soft spring evenings, and to the farmer's ear first comes that assurance of spring, the wail of the Bartram's sandpiper returning from the South to breed in meadow and pasture, and then in hollow trees that overhang the river the wood ducks begin to spoil their holiday attire in the work and care of housekeeping. The fox burrows and breeds in the farmer's woods. The raccoon's den is there in ledge or hollow tree. The hare makes her form in the shadow of his evergreens, where she dons her dress of tawny or white to match the brown floor of the woods or its soft covering of snow. The bass comes to his river in May to spawn, the pike-perch for food, and the perch lives there, as perhaps the trout does in his brook.

All these are his tenants, or his summer boarders, and if he knows not something of their lives, and when and where to find them at home or in their favorite resorts, he is a careless landlord. His life will be the pleasanter for the interest he takes in theirs, and the skill he acquires in bringing them to bag and creel.

XIX

TO A TRESPASS SIGN

Scene, A Wood. An old man with a fishing-rod speaks:—

What strange object is this which I behold, incongruous in its staring whiteness of fresh paint and black lettering, its straightness of lines and abrupt irregularity amid the soft tints and graceful curves of this sylvan scene? As I live, a trespass sign!

Thou inanimate yet most impertinent thing, dumb yet commanding me with most imperative words to depart hence, how dost thou dare forbid my entrance upon what has so long been my own, even as it is the birds' and beasts' and fishes', not by lease or title deed, but of natural right? Hither from time immemorial have they come at will and so departed at no man's behest, as have I since the happy days when a barefoot boy I cast my worm-baited hook among the crystal foam bells, or bearing the heavy burden of my grandsire's rusty flint-lock, I stalked the wily grouse in the diurnal twilight of these thickets.

Here was I thrilled by the capture of my first trout; here exulted over the downfall of my first woodcock; here, grown to man's estate, I learned to cast the fly; here beheld my first dog draw on his game, and here, year after year, till my locks have grown gray, have I come, sharp set with months of longing, to live again for a little while the carefree days of youth.

Never have I been bidden to depart but by storm or nightfall or satiety, until now thou confrontest me with thy impudent mandate, thou, thou contemptible, but yet not to be despised nor unheeded parallelogram of painted deal, with thy legal phrases and impending penalties; thou, the silent yet terribly impressive representative of men whose purses are longer than mine!

What is their right to this stream, these woods, compared with mine? Theirs is only gained by purchase, confirmed by scrawled parchment, signed and sealed; mine a birthright, as always I hoped it might be of my sons and my sons' sons. What to the usurpers of our rights are these woods and waters but a place for the killing of game and fish? They do not love, as a man the roof-tree where-under he was born, these arches and low aisles of the woods; they do not know as I do every silver loop of the brook, every tree whose quivering reflection throbs across its eddies; its voice is only babble to their ears, the song of the pines tells them no story of bygone years.

Of all comers here, I who expected most kindly welcome am most inhospitably treated. All my old familiars, the birds, the beasts, and the fishes, may fly over thee, walk beneath thee, swim around thee, but to me thou art a wall that I may not pass.

I despise thee and spit upon thee, thou most impudent intruder, thou insolent sentinel, thou odious monument of selfishness, but I dare not lay hands upon thee and cast thee down and trample thee in the dust of the earth as thou shouldst of right be entreated. To rid myself of thy hateful sight, I can only turn my back upon thee and depart with sorrow and anger in my heart.

Mayst thou keep nothing but disappointment for the greedy wretches who set thee here.

XX

A GENTLE SPORTSMAN

All the skill of woodcraft that goes to the making of the successful hunter with the gun, must be possessed by him who hunts his game with the camera. His must be the stealthy, panther-like tread that breaks no twig nor rustles the fallen leaves. His the eye that reads at a glance the signs that to the ordinary sight are a blank or at most are an untranslatable enigma. His a patience that counts time as nothing when measured with the object sought. When by the use and practice of these, he has drawn within a closer range of his timid game than his brother of the gun need attain, he pulls trigger of a weapon that destroys not, but preserves its unharmed quarry in the very counterfeit of life and motion. The wild world is not made the poorer by one life for his shot, nor nature's peace disturbed, nor her nicely adjusted balance jarred.

He bears home his game, wearing still its pretty ways of life in the midst of its loved surroundings, the swaying hemlock bough where the grouse perched, the bending ferns about the deer's couch, the dew-beaded sedges where the woodcock skulks in the shadows of the alders, the lichened trunks and dim vistas of primeval woods, the sheen of voiceless waterfalls, the flash of sunlit waves that never break.

His trophies the moth may not assail. His game touches a finer sense than the palate possesses, satisfies a nobler appetite than the stomach's craving, and furnishes forth a feast that, ever spread, ever invites, and never palls upon the taste.

Moreover, this gentlest of sportsmen is hampered by no restrictions of close time, nor confronted by penalties of trespass. All seasons are open for his bloodless forays, all woods and waters free to his harmless weapon.

Neither is he trammeled by any nice distinctions as to what may or may not be considered game. Everything counts in his score. The eagle on his craggy perch, the high-hole on his hollow tree, are as legitimate game for him as the deer and grouse. All things beautiful and wild and picturesque are his, yet he kills them not, but makes them a living and enduring joy, to himself and all who behold them.

XXI

JULY DAYS

The woods are dense with full-grown leafage. Of all the trees, only the basswood has delayed its blossoming, to crown the height of summer and fill the sun-steeped air with a perfume that calls all the wild bees from hollow tree and scant woodside gleaning to a wealth of honey gathering, and all the hive-dwellers from their board-built homes to a finer and sweeter pillage than is offered by the odorous white sea of buckwheat. Half the flowers of wood and fields are out of bloom. Herdsgrass, clover and daisy are falling before the mower. The early grain fields have already caught the color of the sun, and the tasseling corn rustles its broad leaves above the rich loam that the woodcock delights to bore.

The dwindling streams have lost their boisterous clamor of springtide and wimple with subdued voices over beds too shallow to hide a minnow or his poised shadow on the sunlit shallows. The sharp eye of the angler probes the green depths of the slowly swirling pools, and discovers the secrets of the big fish which congregate therein.

The river has marked the stages of its decreasing volume with many lines along its steep banks. It discloses the muskrat's doorway, to which he once dived so gracefully, but now must clumsily climb to. Rafts of driftwood bridge the shallow current sunk so low that the lithe willows bend in vain to kiss its warm bosom. This only the swaying trails of water-weeds and rustling sedges toy with now; and swift-winged swallows coyly touch. There is not depth to hide the scurrying schools of minnows, the half of whom fly into the air in a curving burst of silver shower before the rush of a pickerel, whose green and mottled sides gleam like a swift-shot arrow in the downright sunbeams.

The sandpiper tilts along the shelving shore. Out of an embowered harbor a wood duck convoys her fleet of ducklings, and on the ripples of their wake the anchored argosies of the water lilies toss and cast adrift their cargoes of perfume. Above them the green heron perches on an overhanging branch, uncouth but alert, whether sentinel or scout, flapping his awkward way along the ambient bends and reaches. With slow wing-beats he signals the coming of some more lazily moving boat, that drifts at the languid will of the current or indolent pull of oars that grate on the golden-meshed sand and pebbles.

Lazily, unexpectantly, the angler casts his line, to be only a convenient perch for the dragonflies; for the fish, save the affrighted minnows and the hungry pickerel, are as lazy as he. To-day he may enjoy to the full the contemplative man's recreation, nor have his contemplations disturbed by any finny folk of the under-water world, while dreamily he floats in sunshine and dappled shadow, so at one with the placid waters and quiet shores that wood duck, sandpiper, and heron scarcely note his unobtrusive presence.

No such easy and meditative pastime attends his brother of the gun who, sweating under the burden of lightest apparel and equipment, beats the swampy covers where beneath the sprawling alders and arching fronds of fern the woodcock hides. Not a breath stirs the murky atmosphere of these depths of shade, hotter than sunshine; not a branch nor leaf moves but with his struggling passage, or marking with a wake of waving undergrowth the course of his unseen dog.

Except this rustling of branches, sedges and ferns, the thin, continuous piping of the swarming mosquitoes, the busy tapping and occasional harsh call of a woodpecker, scarcely a sound invades the hot silence, till the wake of the hidden dog ceases suddenly and the waving brakes sway with quickening vibrations into stillness behind him. Then, his master draws cautiously near, with gun at a ready and an unheeded mosquito drilling his nose, the fern leaves burst apart with a sudden shiver, and a woodcock, uttering that shrill unexplained twitter, upsprings in a halo of rapid wing-beats and flashes out of sight among leaves and branches. As quick, the heelplate strikes the alert gunner's shoulder, and, as if in response to the shock, the short unechoed report jars the silence of the woods. As if out of the cloud of sulphurous smoke, a shower of leaves flutter down, with a quicker patter of dry twigs and shards of bark, and among all these a brown clod drops lifeless and inert to mother earth.

A woodcock is a woodcock, though but three-quarters grown; and the shot one that only a quick eye and ready hand may accomplish; but would not the achievement have been more worthy, the prize richer, the sport keener in the gaudy leafage and bracing air of October, rather than in this sweltering heat, befogged with clouds of pestering insects, when every step is a toil, every moment a torture? Yet men deem it sport and glory if they do not delight in its performance. The anxious note and behavior of mother song-birds, whose poor little hearts are in as great a flutter as their wings concerning their half-grown broods, hatched coincidently with the woodcock, is proof enough to those who would heed it, that this is not a proper season for shooting. But in some northerly parts of our wide country it is woodcock now or never, for the birds bred still further northward are rarely tempted by the cosiest copse or half-sunned hillside of open woods to linger for more than a day or two, as they fare southward, called to warmer days of rest and frostless moonlit nights of feeding under kindlier skies.

While the nighthawk's monotonous cry and intermittent boom and the indistinct voice of the whippoorwill ring out in the late twilight of the July evenings, the alarmed, half-guttural chuckle of the grass plover is heard, so early migrating in light marching order, thin in flesh but strong of wing, a poor prize for the gunner whose ardor outruns his humanity and better judgment. Lean or fat, a plover is a plover, but would that he might tarry with us till the plump grasshoppers of August and September had clothed his breast and ribs with fatness.

Well, let him go, if so soon he will. So let the woodcock go, to offer his best to more fortunate sportsmen. What does it profit us to kill merely for the sake of killing, and have to show therefor but a beggarly account of bones and feathers? Are there not grouse and quail and woodcock waiting for us, and while we wait for them can we not content ourselves with indolent angling by shaded streams in these melting days of July rather than contribute the blaze and smoke of gunpowder to the heat and murkiness of midsummer? If we must shed blood let us tap the cool veins of the fishes, not the hot arteries of brooding mother birds and their fledgelings.

XXII

CAMPING OUT

"Camping out" is becoming merely a name for moving out of one's permanent habitation and dwelling for a few weeks in a well-built lodge, smaller than one's home, but as comfortable and almost as convenient; with tables, chairs and crockery, carpets and curtains, beds with sheets and blankets on real bedsteads, a stove and its full outfit of cooking utensils, wherefrom meals are served in the regular ways of civilization. Living in nearly the same fashion of his ordinary life, except that he wears a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, and fishes a little and loafs more than is his ordinary custom, our "camper" imagines that he is getting quite close to the primitive ways of hunters and trappers; that he is living their life with nothing lacking but the rough edges, which he has ingeniously smoothed away. He is mistaken. In ridding himself of some of its discomforts, he has lost a great deal of the best of real camp life; the spice of small adventure, and the woodsy flavor that its half-hardships and makeshift appliances give it. If one sleeps a little cold under his one blanket on his bed of evergreen twigs, though he does not take cold, he realizes in some degree the discomfort of Boone's bivouac when he cuddled beside his hounds to keep from freezing—and feels slightly heroic. His slumbers are seasoned with dreams of the wild woods, as the balsamic perfume of his couch steals into his nostrils; his companions' snores invade his drowsy senses as the growl of bears, and the thunderous whir of grouse bursting out of untrodden thickets. When he awakes in the gray of early morning he finds that the few hours of sleep have wrought a miracle of rest, and he feels himself nearer to nature when he washes his face in the brook, than when he rinses off his sleepiness in bowl or basin. The water of the spring is colder and has a finer flavor when he drinks it from a birch bark cup of his own making. Tea made in a frying-pan has an aroma never known to such poor mortals as brew their tea in a teapot, and no mill ever ground such coffee as that which is tied up in a rag and pounded with a stone or hatchet-head. A sharpened stick for a fork gives a zest to the bit of pork "frizzled" on as rude a spit and plattered on a clean chip or a sheet of bark, and no fish was ever more toothsome than when broiled on a gridiron improvised of green wands or roasted Indian fashion in a cleft stick.

What can make amends for the loss of the camp-fire, with innumerable pictures glowing and shifting in its heart, and conjuring strange shapes out of the surrounding gloom, and suggesting unseen mysteries that the circle of darkness holds behind its rim? How are the wells of conversation to be thawed out by a black stove, so that tales of hunters' and fishers' craft and adventure shall flow till the measure of man's belief is overrun? How is the congenial spark of true companionship to be kindled when people brood around a stove and light their pipes with matches, and not with coals snatched out of the camp-fire's edge, or with twigs that burn briefly with baffling flame?

But it will not be long before it will be impossible to get a taste of real camping without taking long and expensive journeys, for every available rod of lake shore and river bank is being taken up and made populous with so-called camps, and the comfortable freedom and seclusion of a real camp are made impossible there. One desiring that might better pitch his tent in the back woodlot of a farm than in any such popular resort. This misnamed camping out has become a fashion which seems likely to last till the shores are as thronged as the towns, and the woods are spoiled for the real campers, whom it is possible to imagine seeking in the summers of the future a seclusion in the cities that the forests and streams no longer can give them.

Yet, let it be understood that make-believe camping is better than no camping. It cannot but bring people into more intimate relations with nature than they would be if they stayed at home, and so to better acquaintance with our common mother, who deals so impartially with all her children.

XXIII

THE CAMP-FIRE

If "the open fire furnishes the room," the camp-fire does more for the camp. It is its life—a life that throbs out in every flare and flicker to enliven the surroundings, whether they be the trees of the forest, the expanse of prairie, shadowed only by clouds and night, or the barren stretch of sandy shore. Out of the encompassing gloom of all these, the camp-fire materializes figures as real to the eye as flesh and blood. It peoples the verge of darkness with grotesque forms, that leap and crouch and sway with the rise and fall and bending of the flame to the wind, and that beckon the fancy out to grope in the mystery of night.

Then imagination soars with the updrift of smoke and the climbing galaxy of fading sparks, to where the steadfast stars shine out of the unvisited realm that only imagination can explore.

The camp-fire gives an expression to the human face that it bears in no other light, a vague intentness, an absorption in nothing tangible; and yet not a far-away look, for it is focused on the flame that now licks a fresh morsel of wood, now laps the empty air; or it is fixed on the shifting glow of embers, whose blushes flush or fade under their ashen veil. It is not the gaze of one who looks past everything at nothing, or at the stars or the mountains or the far-away sea-horizon; but it is centred on and revealed only by the camp-fire. You wonder what the gazer beholds—the past, the future, or something that is neither; and the uncertain answer you can only get by your own questioning of the flickering blaze.

As the outers gather around this cheerful centre their lips exhale stories of adventure by field and flood, as naturally as the burning fuel does smoke and sparks, and in that engendering warmth, no fish caught or lost, no buck killed or missed, suffers shrinkage in size or weight, no peril is lessened, no tale shorn of minutest detail. All these belong to the camp-fire, whether it is built in conformity to scientific rules or piled clumsily by unskilled hands. What satisfaction there is in the partnership of building this altar of the camp, for though a master of woodcraft superintends, all may take a hand in its erection; the youngest and the weakest may contribute a stick that will brighten the blaze.

What hospitality the glow of the camp-fire proclaims in inviting always one more to the elastic circle of light and warmth, that if always complete, yet expands to receive another guest. A pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night, it is a beacon that guides the wanderer to shelter and comfort.

The Indian weed has never such perfect flavor as when, contending with heat and smoke, one lights his pipe with a coal or an elusive flame, snatched from the embers of the camp-fire, and by no other fireside does the nicotian vapor so soothe the perturbed senses, bring such lazy contentment, nor conjure such pleasant fancies out of the border of dreamland.

There is no cooking comparable with that which the camp-fire affords. To whatever is boiled, stewed, roasted, broiled or baked over its blaze, in the glow of its embers or in its ashes, it imparts a distinctive woodsy flavor that it distills out of itself or draws from the spiced air that fans it; and the aroma of every dish invites an appetite that is never disappointed if the supply be large enough.