initial commit of ebook 36844HEADmain

1 files changed, 5456 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/36844.txt b/36844.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3aec734
--- /dev/null
+++ b/36844.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5456 @@
+Project Gutenberg's In New England Fields and Woods, by Rowland E. Robinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In New England Fields and Woods
+
+Author: Rowland E. Robinson
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2011 [EBook #36844]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Katherine Ward, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+        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
+
+
+          I. THE NAMELESS SEASON
+         II. MARCH DAYS
+        III. THE HOME FIRESIDE
+         IV. THE CROW
+          V. THE MINK
+         VI. APRIL DAYS
+        VII. THE WOODCHUCK
+       VIII. THE CHIPMUNK
+         IX. SPRING SHOOTING
+          X. THE GARTER-SNAKE
+         XI. THE TOAD
+        XII. MAY DAYS
+       XIII. THE BOBOLINK
+        XIV. THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER
+         XV. JUNE DAYS
+        XVI. THE BULLFROG
+       XVII. THE ANGLER
+      XVIII. FARMERS AND FIELD SPORTS
+        XIX. TO A TRESPASS SIGN
+         XX. A GENTLE SPORTSMAN
+        XXI. JULY DAYS
+       XXII. CAMPING OUT
+      XXIII. THE CAMP-FIRE
+       XXIV. A RAINY DAY IN CAMP
+        XXV. AUGUST DAYS
+       XXVI. A VOYAGE IN THE DARK
+      XXVII. THE SUMMER CAMP-FIRE
+     XXVIII. THE RACCOON
+       XXIX. THE RELUCTANT CAMP-FIRE
+        XXX. SEPTEMBER DAYS
+       XXXI. A PLEA FOR THE UNPROTECTED
+      XXXII. THE SKUNK
+     XXXIII. A CAMP-FIRE RUN WILD
+      XXXIV. THE DEAD CAMP-FIRE
+       XXXV. OCTOBER DAYS
+      XXXVI. A COMMON EXPERIENCE
+     XXXVII. THE RED SQUIRREL
+    XXXVIII. THE RUFFED GROUSE
+      XXXIX. TWO SHOTS
+         XL. NOVEMBER DAYS
+        XLI. THE MUSKRAT
+       XLII. NOVEMBER VOICES
+      XLIII. THANKSGIVING
+       XLIV. DECEMBER DAYS
+        XLV. WINTER VOICES
+       XLVI. THE VARYING HARE
+      XLVII. THE WINTER CAMP-FIRE
+     XLVIII. JANUARY DAYS
+       XLIX. A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE
+          L. A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION
+         LI. THE PERSISTENCY OF PESTS
+        LII. THE WEASEL
+       LIII. FEBRUARY DAYS
+        LIV. THE FOX
+         LV. AN ICE-STORM
+        LVI. SPARE THE TREES
+       LVII. THE CHICKADEE
+
+
+
+
+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, debris 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 phoebe
+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 phoebe, 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 reestablish 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 aesthetic 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It cannot be denied that the camp stove gives forth warmth and, with
+more comfort to the cook, serves to cook food of such tame flavor as one
+may get at home. But though the serviceable little imp roar till its
+black cheeks glow red as winter berries, it cannot make shanty or tent a
+camp in reality or impart to an outing its true flavor. This can only be
+given by the generous camp-fire, whose flames and embers no narrow walls
+inclose, whose hearth is on every side, whose chimney is the wide air.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+A RAINY DAY IN CAMP
+
+
+The plans of the camper, like those of other men, "gang aft agley." The
+morrow, which he proposed to devote to some long-desired hunting or
+fishing trip, is no more apt to dawn propitiously on him than on the
+husbandman, the mariner, or any other mortal who looks to the weather
+for special favor. On the contrary, instead of the glowing horizon and
+the glory of the sunburst that should usher in the morning, the slow
+dawn is quite apt to have the unwelcome accompaniment of rain.
+
+The hearing, first alert of the drowsy senses, catches the sullen patter
+of the drops on tent or shanty, their spiteful, hissing fall on the
+smouldering embers of the camp-fire, and with a waft of damp earth and
+herbage stealing into his nostrils, the disappointed awakener turns
+fretfully under his blanket, then crawls forth to have his lingering
+hope smothered in the veil of rain that blurs the landscape almost to
+annihilation.
+
+He mutters anathemas against the weather, then takes the day as it has
+come to him, for better or for worse. First, to make the best of it, he
+piles high the camp-fire, and dispels with its glow and warmth some
+cubic feet of gloom and dampness. Then he sets about breakfast-making,
+scurrying forth from shelter to fire, in rapid culinary forays, battling
+with the smoke, for glimpses of the contents of kettle and pan. His
+repast is as pungent with smoke as the strong waters of Glenlivat, but
+if that is valued for its flavor of peat-reek, why should he scorn food
+for the like quality?
+
+Then if he delights in petty warfare with the elements, to bide the
+pelting of the rain, to storm the abatis of wet thickets and suffer the
+sapping and mining of insidious moisture, he girds up his loins and goes
+forth with rod or gun, as his desire of conquest may incline him.
+
+But if he has come to his outing with the intention of pursuing sport
+with bodily comfort, he is at once assured that this is unattainable
+under the present conditions of the weather. Shall he beguile the
+tediousness of a wet day in camp with books and papers?
+
+Nay, if they were not left behind in the busy, plodding world that he
+came here to escape from, they should have been. He wants nothing here
+that reminds him of traffic or politics; nothing of history, for now he
+has only to do with the present; nothing of travel, for his concern now
+is only with the exploration of this wild domain. He does not wish to be
+bothered with fiction, idealized reality is what he desires. Neither
+does he care for what other men have written of nature. Her book is
+before him and he may read it from first hands.
+
+Looking forth from his snug shelter on the circumscribed landscape, he
+marvels at the brightness of a distant yellow tree that shines like a
+living flame through the veil of mist. The blaze of his sputtering
+camp-fire is not brighter. He notices, as perhaps he never did before,
+how distinctly the dark ramage of the branches is traced among the
+brilliant leaves, as if with their autumnal hues they were given
+transparency. Some unfelt waft of the upper air casts aside for a moment
+the curtain of mist and briefly discloses a mountain peak, radiant with
+all the hues of autumn, and it is as if one were given, as in a dream, a
+glimpse of the undiscovered country. He realizes a dreamy pleasure in
+watching the waves coming in out of the obscurity and dashing on the
+shore, or pulsing away in fading leaden lines into the mystery of the
+wrack.
+
+In the borders of the mist the ducks revel in the upper and nether
+wetness, and with uncanny laughter the loon rejoices between his long
+explorations of the aquatic depth. A mink, as heedless of rain as the
+waterfowl, comes stealing along the shore, thridding the intricacies of
+driftwood and web of wave-washed tree roots, often peering out in
+inquisitive examination of the quiet camp. Less cautious visitors draw
+nearer--the friendly chickadee, hanging from the nearest twig; the
+nuthatch, sounding his penny trumpet, accompanied by the tap of the
+woodpecker, as one creeps down, the other up a tree trunk; the scolding
+jays, making as noisy protest over human intrusion as if they had just
+discovered it; a saucy squirrel, scoffing and jeering, till tired of his
+raillery he settles down to quiet nut-rasping under shelter of his tail.
+
+There are unseen visitors, too: wood-mice, astir under cover of the
+fallen leaves, and, just discernible among the patter of the falling
+rain and of the squirrels' filings, footfalls unidentified, till a
+ruffed grouse starts new showers from the wet branches in the thunder of
+his flight.
+
+Narrowed to the width of tent or shanty front, the background but a
+pallid shroud of mist, the landscape yet holds much for pleasant study.
+But if the weather-bound camper exhausts this or tires of it, he may
+turn to gun-cleaning or tackle-mending. If a guide be with him, he can
+listen to his stories of hunting, fishing, and adventure, or learn
+woodcraft of him and the curious ways of birds and beasts. He may
+fashion birch-bark camp-ware, dippers, cups, and boxes, or whittle a
+paddle from a smooth-rifted maple. If he is of artistic turn, he can
+pleasantly devote an hour to etching pictures on the white under surface
+of the fungus that grows on decaying trees, and so provide himself with
+reminders of this rainy day in camp.
+
+So, with one and another pastime, he whiles away the sunless day, which,
+almost before he has thought of it, merges into the early nightfall, and
+he is lulled to sleep by the same sound that wakened him, the drip and
+patter of the rain. And when he looks back to these days of outing he
+may count this, which dawned so unpropitiously, not the least pleasant
+and profitable among them, and mark with a white stone the rainy day in
+camp.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+AUGUST DAYS
+
+
+With such unmistakable signs made manifest to the eye and ear the summer
+signals its fullness and decline, that one awakening now from a sleep
+that fell upon him months ago might be assured of the season with the
+first touch of awakening.
+
+To the first aroused sense comes the long-drawn cry of the locust fading
+into silence with the dry, husky clap of his wings; the changed voice of
+the song birds, no more caroling the jocund tunes of mating and nesting
+time, but plaintive with the sadness of farewell.
+
+The bobolink has lost, with his pied coat, the merry lilt that tinkled
+so continually over the buttercups and daisies of the June meadows;
+rarely the song sparrow utters the trill that cheered us in the doubtful
+days of early spring. The bluebird's abbreviated carol floats down from
+the sky as sweet as then, but mournful as the patter of autumn leaves.
+The gay goldfinch has but three notes left of his June song, as he tilts
+on the latest blossoms and fluffy seeds of the thistles. The meadowlark
+charms us no more with his long-drawn melody, but with one sharp,
+insistent note he struts in the meadow stubble or skulks among the
+tussocks of the pasture and challenges the youthful gunner. What an easy
+shot that even, steady flight offers, and yet it goes onward with
+unfaltering rapid wing-beats, while the gun thunders and the harmless
+shot flies behind him. The flicker cackles now no more as when he was a
+jubilant new comer, with the new-come spring for his comrade, but is
+silent or only yelps one harsh note as he flashes his golden wings in
+loping flight from fence-stake to ant-hill.
+
+The plover chuckles while he lingers at the bounteous feast of
+grasshoppers, but never pierces the August air with the long wail that
+proclaimed his springtime arrival. After nightfall, too, is heard his
+chuckling call fluttering down from the aerial path, where he wends his
+southward way, high and distinct above the shrill monotony of crickets
+and August pipers. The listening sportsman may well imagine that the
+departing bird is laughing at him as much as signaling his course to
+companion wayfarers.
+
+The woodland thrushes' flutes and bells have ceased to breathe and
+chime, only the wood pewee keeps his pensive song of other days, yet
+best befitting those of declining summer.
+
+The trees are dark with ripened leafage; out of the twilight of the
+woodside glow the declining disks of wild sunflowers and shine the
+rising constellations of asters. The meadow sides are gay with unshorn
+fringes of goldenrod and willow-herb, and there in the corners of the
+gray fences droop the heavy clusters of elderberries, with whose purple
+juice the flocking robins and the young grouse, stealing from the
+shadowed copses along this belt of shade, dye their bills.
+
+The brook trails its attenuated thread out of the woodland gloom to gild
+its shallow ripples with sunshine and redden them with the inverted
+flames of the cardinals that blaze on the sedgy brink. Here the brown
+mink prowls with her lithe cubs, all unworthy yet of the trapper's
+skill, but tending toward it with growth accelerated by full feasts of
+pool-impounded minnows. Here, too, the raccoon sets the print of his
+footsteps on the muddy shores as he stays his stomach with frogs and
+sharpens his appetite with the hot sauce of Indian turnip while he
+awaits the setting of his feast in the cornfields. The hounds are more
+impatient than he for the opening of his midnight revel, and tug at
+their chains and whimper and bay when they hear his querulous call
+trembling through the twilight. They are even fooled to melodiously
+mournful protest when their ears catch the shriller quaver of the
+screech owl's note.
+
+The woodcock skulks in the bordering alders, and when forced to flight
+does so with a stronger wing than when a month ago his taking off was
+first legally authorized. Another month will make him worthier game; and
+then, too, the ruffed grouse need not be spared a shot, as full grown
+and strong of pinion he bursts from cover; nor need the wood duck, now
+but a vigorous bunch of pin feathers, be let go untried or unscathed,
+when from his perch on a slanted log or out of a bower of rushes he
+breaks into the upper air with startling flutter of wings and startled
+squeak of alarm.
+
+Summer wanes, flowers fade, bird songs falter to mournful notes of
+farewell; but while regretfully we mark the decline of these golden
+days, we remember with a thrill of expectation that they slope to the
+golden days of autumn, wherein the farmer garners his latest harvest,
+the sportsman his first worthy harvest, and that to him that waits, come
+all things, and even though he waits long, may come the best.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+A VOYAGE IN THE DARK
+
+
+A few days ago, a friend who is kind and patient enough to encumber
+himself with the care of a blind man and a boy took me and my
+twelve-year-old a-fishing. It was with a fresh realization of my
+deprivation that I passed along the watery way once as familiar as the
+dooryard path, but now shrouded for me in a gloom more impenetrable than
+the blackness of the darkest night. I could only guess at the bends and
+reaches as the south wind blew on one cheek or the other, or on my back,
+only knowing where the channel draws near the shore upon which the
+Indians encamped in the old days by the flutter of leaves overbearing
+the rustle of rushes. By the chuckle of ripples under the bow, I guessed
+when we were in mid-channel; by the entangled splash of an oar, when we
+approached the reedy border where the water-lilies rode at anchor, and
+discharged their subtle freight of perfume as they tossed in our wake. I
+knew by his clatter, drawing nearer only with our progress, that a
+kingfisher was perched on a channel-side fishing-stake, used in turn by
+him and bigger but not more skillful fishers. I heard his headlong
+plunge, but whether successful or not the ensuing clatter did not tell
+me, for he has but one voice for all expressions. Yet as his rattling
+cry was kept up till the rough edge of its harshness was worn away in
+receding flight, I fancied he was proclaiming an unusually successful
+achievement. For the sake of his reputation, he would never make such a
+fuss over a failure, unless he was telling, as we do, of the big fish he
+just missed catching. At any rate, I wished him good luck, for who would
+begrudge a poor kingfisher such little fish as he must catch! They would
+need years of growth to make them worth our catching or bragging over
+the loss of, and by that time we may be done with fishing.
+
+Suddenly there was a roar of multitudinous wings as a host of redwings
+upburst from springing and swaying wild rice stalks, all of which I saw
+through the blackness illumined for an instant by memory,--the dusky
+cloud uprising like the smoke of an explosion, the bent rice springing
+up beneath its lifted burden, the dull-witted or greedy laggards
+dribbling upward to join the majority. My companions exclaimed in one
+voice at the rare sight of a white bird in the flock, and by the same
+light of memory I also saw it as I saw one in an autumn forty years ago,
+when, with my comrade of those days, I came "daown the crik"
+duck-shooting, or trolling as to-day. Again and again we saw this
+phenomenal bird like a white star twinkling through a murky cloud. The
+fitful gleam was seen day after day, till the north wind blew him and
+his cloud away southward.
+
+The pother of the blackbirds overhead disturbed the meditations of a
+bittern, who, with an alarmed croak, jerked his ungainly form aloft in a
+flurry of awkward wing-beats, and went sagging across the marshes in
+search of safer seclusion. I wished that he might find it, and escape
+the ruthless gunners that will presently come to desolate these
+marshes. Very different from his uprising was that of a pair of wood
+ducks, revealing their unsuspected presence with startling suddenness,
+as they sprang from water to air with a splash and whistle of rapid
+wings and their squeaking alarm cry, and then flew swiftly away, the
+sibilant wing-beats pulsing out in the distance. These, too, I wished
+might safely run the gauntlet of all the guns that will be arrayed
+against them when the summer truce is broken. If I had not been mustered
+out, or if my boy were mustered in, no doubt I should feel differently
+toward the inhabitants of these marshes. Compulsory abstinence makes one
+exceedingly virtuous, and because I am virtuous there shall be no cakes
+and ale for any one.
+
+The absence of the rail's cackle was noticeable, a clamor that used to
+be provoked at this season by every sudden noise. We never got sight of
+the "ma'sh chickens" as they skulked among the sedges; and when the
+birds were pressed to flight, rarely caught more than a fleeting glimpse
+as they topped the rushes for an instant, and dropped again into the
+mazes of the marsh. But they were always announcing a numerous if
+invisible presence where now not one answered to our voices or the noise
+of our oars.
+
+All this while our trolling gear was in tow: the boy's a "phantom
+minnow" bristling with barbs, a veritable porcupine fish; mine a fluted
+spoon. The larger fish seemed attracted by the better imitation, or
+perhaps age and experience had given them discernment to shun the other
+more glaring sham, and the best of them went to the boy's score; but the
+unwise majority of smaller fish were evidently anxious to secure
+souvenir spoons of Little Otter, and in consequence of that desire I was
+"high hook" as to numbers. They were only pickerel at best, though some
+of them, bearing their spots on a green ground, are honored with the
+name of "maskalonge" by our fishermen. A scratch of the finger-nail
+across the scaly gill-cover gives proof enough to convince even a blind
+man of the worthlessness of this claim to distinction.
+
+Once I enjoyed an exaltation of spirit only to suffer humiliation. There
+was a tug at the hooks, so heavy that my first thought was of a snag,
+and I was on the point of calling out to my friend to stop rowing. Then
+there was a slight yielding, and the tremor that tells unmistakably of a
+fish. "Now," said I, with my heart but a little way back of my teeth, "I
+am fast to something like a fish, but I shall never be able to boat him.
+He is too big to lift out with the hooks, and I can't see to get him by
+the gills, and so I shall lose him." As he came in slowly, stubbornly
+fighting against every shortening inch of line, I almost wished he had
+not been hooked at all only to be lost at last. When, after a time, my
+fish was hauled near the boat and in sight of my companions, my catch
+proved to be no monster, but a pickerel of very ordinary size hooked by
+the belly, and so my hopes and fears vanished together.
+
+I think distances are magnified to the blind, for it seemed twice as far
+as it did of old from the East Slang to the South Slang, as we passed
+these oddly named tributaries of Little Otter.
+
+At last I sniffed the fragrance of cedars and heard the wash of waves on
+the southward-slanted shore of Garden Island, and these informed me we
+were at the lake. In confirmation thereof was the testimony of my
+companions, given out of their light to my darkness, of an eagle's royal
+progress through his ethereal realm, making inspection of his disputed
+earthly possession. I was glad to know that his majesty had escaped the
+republican regicides who haunt the summer shores.
+
+We made a difficult landing on the mainland, on the oozy shore of mixed
+sawdust and mud, and followed the old trail to the old camping ground
+under the rocks, a place full of pleasant memories for the elder two of
+our trio, and offering to the boy the charms of freshness and discovery.
+For him the cliff towered skyward but little below the eagle's flight;
+its tiny caves were unexplored mysteries, their coral-beaded curtains of
+Canada yew and delicate netting of mountain-fringe strange foreign
+growths. Through his undimmed eyes I had glimpses of those happy shores
+whereon the sun always shines and no cloud arises beyond. What a little
+way behind they seem in the voyage that has grown wearisome, and yet we
+can never revisit them for a day nor for an hour, and it is like a dream
+that we ever dwelt there.
+
+Bearing with us from this port something not marketable nor even
+visible, yet worth carrying home, we reembarked, and the wind, blowing
+in my face, informed me we were homeward bound. One after another, we
+passed five boats of fishing parties tied up at as many stakes, the
+crews pursuing their pastime with steadfast patience, as their intent
+silence proclaimed. To me they were as ships passed in the night. I had
+no other knowledge of them than this, except that my friend told me
+there was a fat woman in each boat, and that one of them boasted to us,
+with motherly pride, of a big pickerel caught by her little girl.
+
+A blended hum of bumblebees droned in among us, and my companions
+remarked that one of the aerial voyagers had boarded our craft, while I
+maintained there were two, which proved to be the fact; whereupon I
+argued that my ears were better than their eyes, but failed to convince
+them or even myself. I welcomed the bees as old acquaintances, who, in
+the duck-shooting of past years, always used to come aboard and bear us
+company for awhile, rarely alighting, but tacking from stem to stern on
+a cruise of inspection, till at last, satisfied or disappointed, they
+went booming out of sight and hearing over marshfuls of blue spikes of
+pickerel weed and white trinities of arrowhead. I cannot imagine why
+bees should be attracted to the barrenness of a boat, unless by a
+curiosity to explore such strange floating islands, though their dry
+wood promises neither leaf nor bloom.
+
+I hear of people every year who forsake leafage and bloom to search the
+frozen desolation of the polar north for the Lord knows what, and I
+cease to wonder at the bees, when men so waste the summers that are
+given them to enjoy if they will but bide in them.
+
+We passed many new houses of the muskrats, who are building close to the
+channel this year in prophecy of continued low water. But muskrats are
+not infallible prophets, and sometimes suffer therefor in starvation or
+drowning. The labor of the night-workers was suspended in the glare of
+the August afternoon, and their houses were as silent as if deserted,
+though we doubted not there were happy households inside them,
+untroubled by dreams of famine or deluge, or possibly of the
+unmercifulness of man, though that seems an abiding terror with our
+lesser brethren. Winter before last the marshes were frozen to the
+bottom, blockading the muskrats in their houses, where entire families
+perished miserably after being starved to cannibalism. Some dug out
+through the house roofs, and wandered far across the desolate wintry
+fields in search of food. Yet nature, indifferent to all fates, has so
+fostered them since that direful season that the marshy shores are
+populous again with sedge-thatched houses.
+
+As we neared our home port we met two trollers, one of whom lifted up
+for envious inspection a lusty pickerel. "He's as big as your leg," my
+friend replied to my inquiry concerning its dimensions, and in aid of my
+further inquisitiveness asked the lucky captor how much the fish would
+weigh. "Wal, I guess he ought to weigh abaout seven pounds," was
+answered, after careful consideration. We learned afterwards that its
+actual weight was nine pounds, and I set that man down as a very honest
+angler.
+
+Presently our boat ran her nose into the familiar mire of well-named Mud
+Landing, and we exchanged oars for legs, which we plied with right good
+will, for a thunderstorm was beginning to bellow behind us.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+THE SUMMER CAMP-FIRE
+
+
+A thin column of smoke seen rising lazily among the leafy trees and
+fading to a wavering film in the warm morning air or the hotter breath
+of noon, a flickering blaze kindling in the sultry dusk on some quiet
+shore, mark the place of the summer camp-fire.
+
+It is not, like the great hospitable flare and glowing coals of the
+autumn and winter camp-fires, the centre to which all are drawn, about
+which the life of the camp gathers, where joke and repartee flash to and
+fro as naturally and as frequently as its own sparks fly upward, where
+stories come forth as continuously as the ever-rising volume of smoke.
+
+Rather it is avoided and kept aloof from, held to only by the unhappy
+wretch upon whom devolves the task of tending the pot and frying-pan,
+and he hovers near it fitfully, like a moth about a candle, now backing
+away to mop his hot face, now darting into the torrid circle to turn a
+fish or snatch away a seething pot or sizzling pan. Now and then the
+curious and hungry approach to note with what skill or speed the cookery
+is progressing, but they are content to look on at a respectful distance
+and to make suggestions and criticisms, but not to interfere with aid.
+The epicurean smoker, who holds that the finest flavor of tobacco is
+evoked only by coal or blazing splinter, steals down upon the windward
+side and snatches a reluctant ember or an elusive flame that flickers
+out on the brink of the pipe bowl, but most who burn the weed are
+content now to kindle it with the less fervid flame of a match.
+
+And yet this now uncomfortable necessity is still the heart of the camp,
+which without it would be but a halting place for a day, where one
+appeases hunger with a cold bite and thirst with draughts of tepid
+water, and not a temporary home where man has his own fireside, though
+he care not to sit near it, and feasts full on hot viands and refreshes
+himself with the steaming cup that cheers but not inebriates.
+
+Its smoke drifted far through the woods may prove a pungent trail,
+scented out among the odors of balsams and the perfume of flowers that
+shall lead hither some pleasant stranger or unexpected friend, or its
+firefly glow, flashing but feebly through the gloaming, may be a beacon
+that shall bring such company. In its praise may also be said that the
+summer camp-fire demands no laborious feeding nor careful tending, is
+always a servant, seldom a master.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+THE RACCOON
+
+
+Summer is past its height. The songless bobolink has forsaken the shorn
+meadow. Grain fields, save the battalioned maize, have fallen from
+gracefulness and beauty of bending heads and ripple of mimic waves to
+bristling acres of stubble. From the thriftless borders of ripening
+weeds busy flocks of yellowbirds in faded plumage scatter in sudden
+flight at one's approach like upblown flurries of dun leaves. Goldenrod
+gilds the fence-corners, asters shine in the dewy borders of the woods,
+sole survivors of the floral world save the persistent bloom of the wild
+carrot and succory--flourishing as if there had never been mower or
+reaper--and the white blossoms of the buckwheat crowning the filling
+kernels. The fervid days have grown preceptibly shorter, the lengthening
+nights have a chilly autumnal flavor, and in the cool dusk the katydids
+call and answer one to another out of their leafy tents, and the
+delicate green crickets that Yankee folks call August pipers play their
+monotonous tune. Above the katydid's strident cry and the piper's
+incessant notes, a wild tremulous whinny shivers through the gloom at
+intervals, now from a distant field or wood, now from the near orchard.
+One listener will tell you that it is only a little screech owl's voice,
+another that it is the raccoon's rallying cry to a raid on the
+cornfield. There is endless disputation concerning it and apparently no
+certainty, but the raccoon is wilder than the owl, and it is pleasanter
+to believe that it is his voice that you hear.
+
+The corn is in the milk; the feast is ready. The father and mother and
+well grown children, born and reared in the cavern of a ledge or hollow
+tree of a swamp, are hungry for sweets remembered or yet untasted, and
+they are gathering to it, stealing out of the thick darkness of the
+woods and along the brookside in single file, never stopping to dig a
+fiery wake-robin bulb nor to catch a frog nor harry a late brood of
+ground-nesting birds, but only to call some laggard, or distant
+clansfolk. So one fancies, when the quavering cry is repeated and when
+it ceases, that all the free-booters have gained the cornfield and are
+silent with busy looting. Next day's examination of the field may
+confirm the fancy with the sight of torn and trampled stalks and munched
+ears. These are the nights when the coon hunter is abroad and the
+robbers' revel is likely to be broken up in a wild panic.
+
+Hunted only at night, to follow the coon the boldest rider must
+dismount, yet he who risks neck and limbs, or melts or freezes for
+sport's sake, and deems no sport manly that has not a spice of danger or
+discomfort in it, must not despise this humble pastime for such reason.
+
+On leaving the highway that leads nearest to the hunting ground, the way
+of the coon hunters takes them, in darkness or feeble lantern light,
+over rough and uncertain footing, till the cornfield's edge is reached
+and the dogs cast off. Away go the hounds, their course only indicated
+by the rustling of the corn leaves, as they range through the field,
+until one old truth-teller gives tongue on the track of a coon who
+perhaps has brought his whole family out on a nocturnal picnic. The
+hounds sweep straight away, in full cry, on the hot scent to hill or
+swamp, where their steadfast baying proclaims that the game is treed.
+
+Then follows a pell-mell scramble toward the musical uproar. Stones,
+cradle knolls, logs, stumps, mud holes, brambles and all the inanimate
+enemies that lie in wait for man when he hastens in the dark, combine to
+trip, bump, bruise, sprain, scratch, and bemire the hurrying hunters.
+
+Then when all have gathered at the centre of attraction, where the
+excited hounds are raving about the boll of some great tree, the best
+and boldest climber volunteers to go aloft into the upper darkness and
+shake the quarry down or shoot him if may be. If he succeeds in
+accomplishing the difficult task, what a melee ensues when the coon
+crashes through the branches to the ground and becomes the erratic
+centre of the wild huddle of dogs and men.
+
+Fewer voices never broke the stillness of night with sounds more
+unearthly than the medley of raging, yelping, growling, cheering, and
+vociferous orders given forth by dogs, coon, and hunters, while hillside
+and woodland toss to and fro a more discordant badinage of echo. The
+coon is not a great beast, but a tough and sharp-toothed one, who
+carries beneath his gray coat and fat ribs a stout heart and wonderful
+vitality; and a tussle with a veteran of the tribe of cornfield robbers
+tests the pluck of the dogs.
+
+If the coon takes refuge in a tree too tall and limbless for his
+pursuers to climb, there is nothing for them but to keep watch and ward
+till daylight discovers him crouched on his lofty perch. A huge fire
+enlivens the long hours of guard keeping. A foraging party repairs to
+the nearest cornfield for roasting ears, and the hunters shorten the
+slow nighttide with munching scorched corn, sauced by joke and song and
+tales of the coon hunts of bygone years.
+
+The waning moon throbs into view above a serrated hill-crest, then
+climbs the sky, while the shadows draw eastward, then pales in the dawn,
+and when it is like a blotch of white cloud in the zenith, a sunrise gun
+welcomes day and brings the coon tumbling to earth. Or perhaps not a
+coon, but some vagrant house cat is the poor reward of the long watch.
+Then the weary hunters plod homeward to breakfast and to nail their
+trophies to the barn door.
+
+When the sweet acorns, dropping in the frosty night, tempt the coon to a
+later feast, there is as good sport and primer peltry. In any of the
+nights wherein this sport may be pursued, the man of lazy mould and
+contemplative mind loves best the hunt deemed unsuccessful by the more
+ardent hunters, when the hounds strike the trail of a wandering fox and
+carry a tide of wild music, flooding and ebbing over valley and hilltop,
+while the indolent hunter reclines at ease, smoking his pipe and
+listening, content to let more ambitious hunters stumble over ledges and
+wallow through swamps.
+
+When winter begins, the coon retires for a long and comfortable sleep,
+warmly clothed in fur and fat. A great midwinter thaw awakens him,
+fooled out of a part of his nap by the siren song of the south wind, and
+he wanders forth in quest of something. If food, he never finds it, and
+as far as I have been able to determine, does not even seek it. I should
+imagine, reading the record of his journey as he prints it in his course
+from hollow tree or hollow ledge to other hollow trees and hollow
+ledges, that he had been awakened to a sense of loneliness and was
+seeking old friends in familiar haunts, with whom to talk over last
+year's cornfield raids and frogging parties in past summer
+nights--perchance to plan future campaigns. Or is it an inward fire and
+no outward warmth that has thawed him into this sudden activity? Has he,
+like many of his biggers and betters, gone a-wooing in winter nights?
+
+At such times the thrifty hunter who has an eye more to profit and prime
+peltry than to sport, goes forth armed only with an axe. Taking the
+track of the wanderers, he follows it to their last tarrying place. If
+it be a cave, they are safe except from the trap when they come forth to
+begin another journey; but if it is a hollow tree, woe betide the poor
+wretches. The hunter saps the foundation of their castle, and when it
+crashes to its fall he ignominiously knocks the dazed inmates on the
+head. It is fashionable for others to wear the coat which becomes the
+raccoon much better than them and which once robbed of he can never
+replace.
+
+During the spring and early summer little is seen of the raccoon. His
+tracks may be found on a sandy shore or margin of a brook and
+occasionally his call can be heard, if indeed it be his, but beyond
+these he gives little evidence of his existence. There must be nocturnal
+excursions for food, but for the most part old and young abide in their
+rocky fortress or wooden tower. They are reported to be a playful
+family, and the report is confirmed by the pranks of domesticated
+members of it. Sometimes there will be found in one of their ravaged
+homes a rounded gnarl worn smooth with much handling or pawing, the
+sole furniture of the house and evidently a plaything.
+
+This little brother of the bear is one of the few remaining links that
+connect us with the old times, when there were trees older than living
+men, when all the world had not entered for the race to gain the prize
+of wealth, or place, or renown; when it was the sum of all happiness for
+some of us to "go a-coonin'." It is pleasant to see the track of this
+midnight prowler, this despoiler of cornfields, imprinted in the mud of
+the lane or along the soft margin of the brook, to know that he
+survives, though he may not be the fittest. When he has gone forever,
+those who outlive him will know whether it was his quavering note that
+jarred the still air of the early fall evenings or if it was only the
+voice of the owl--if he too shall not then have gone the inevitable way
+of all the wild world.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+THE RELUCTANT CAMP-FIRE
+
+
+The depressing opposite of the fire that is the warm heart of the camp
+is the pile of green or rain-soaked fuel that in spite of all coaxing
+and nursing refuses to yield a cheerful flame. Shavings from the
+resin-embalmed heart of a dead pine and scrolls of birch bark fail to
+enkindle it to more than flicker and smoke, while the wet and hungry
+campers brood forlornly over the cheerless centre of their temporary
+home, with watery eyes and souls growing sick of camp life.
+
+Night is falling, and the shadows of the woods thicken into solid gloom
+that teems with mysterious horrors, which stretch their intangible claws
+through the darkness to chill the backs of the timid with an icy touch,
+and the silence is terrible with unuttered howlings of imaginary beasts.
+
+Each one is ready to blame the other for the common discomfort, and all,
+the high priest, who so far fails to kindle the altar fire. He is an
+impostor, who should be smothered in the reek of his own failure. Yet,
+as the group regard him with unkind glances and mutterings of
+disapproval, he perseveres, feeding the faint flame with choice morsels
+of fat wood and nursing it with his breath, his bent face and puffed
+cheeks now a little lightened, now fading into gloom, till suddenly the
+sullenness of the reluctant fuel is overcome, wings of flame flutter up
+the column of smoke, and the black pile leaps into a lurid tower of
+light, from whose peak a white banner of smoke flaunts upward, saluted
+by the waving boughs that it streams among.
+
+Tent and shanty, familiar trees, and moving figures with their circle of
+grotesque, dancing shadows, spring into sudden existence out of the
+blank darkness. The magic touch of the firelight dispels every sullen
+look, warms every heart to genial comradeship; jokes flash back and
+forth merrily, and the camp pulses again with reawakened cheerful life.
+Verily, fire worketh wonders in divers ways.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+SEPTEMBER DAYS
+
+
+September days have the warmth of summer in their briefer hours, but in
+their lengthening evenings a prophetic breath of autumn. The cricket
+chirps in the noontide, making the most of what remains of his brief
+life; the bumblebee is busy among the clover blossoms of the aftermath;
+and their shrill cry and dreamy hum hold the outdoor world above the
+voices of the song birds, now silent or departed.
+
+What a little while ago they were our familiars, noted all about us in
+their accustomed haunts--sparrow, robin, and oriole, each trying now and
+then, as if to keep it in memory, a strain of his springtime love song,
+and the cuckoo fluting a farewell prophecy of rain. The bobolinks, in
+sober sameness of traveling gear, still held the meadowside thickets of
+weeds; and the swallows sat in sedate conclave on the barn ridge.
+Then, looking and listening for them, we suddenly become aware they are
+gone; the adobe city of the eave-dwellers is silent and deserted; the
+whilom choristers of the sunny summer meadows are departed to a less
+hospitable welcome in more genial climes. How unobtrusive was their
+exodus. We awake and miss them, or we think of them and see them not,
+and then we realize that with them summer too has gone.
+
+This also the wafted thistledown and the blooming asters tell us, and,
+though the woods are dark with their latest greenness, in the lowlands
+the gaudy standard of autumn is already displayed. In its shadow the
+muskrat is thatching his winter home, and on his new-shorn watery lawn
+the full-fledged wild duck broods disport in fullness of feather and
+strength of pinion. Evil days are these of September that now befall
+them. Alack, for the callow days of peaceful summer, when no honest
+gunner was abroad, and the law held the murderous gun in abeyance, and
+only the keel of the unarmed angler rippled the still channel.
+Continual unrest and abiding fear are their lot now and henceforth, till
+spring brings the truce of close time to their persecuted race.
+
+More silently than the fisher's craft the skiff of the sportsman now
+invades the rush-paled thoroughfares. Noiseless as ghosts, paddler and
+shooter glide along the even path till, alarmed by some keener sense
+than is given us, up rise wood duck, dusky duck, and teal from their
+reedy cover. Then the ready gun belches its thunder, and suddenly
+consternation pervades the marshes. All the world has burst forth in a
+burning of powder. From end to end, from border to border, the fenny
+expanse roars with discharge and echo, and nowhere within it is there
+peace or rest for the sole of a webbed foot. Even the poor bittern and
+heron, harmless and worthless, flap to and fro from one to another now
+unsafe retreat, in constant danger of death from every booby gunner who
+can cover their slow flight.
+
+The upland woods, too, are awakened from the slumber of their late
+summer days. How silent they had grown when their songsters had
+departed, rarely stirred but by the woodpecker's busy hammer, the
+chatter and bark of squirrels, and the crows making vociferous
+proclamation against some winged or furred enemy. The grouse have waxed
+fat among the border patches of berry bushes, rarely disturbed in the
+seclusion of the thickets but by the soft footfall of the fox, the
+fleeting shadow of a cruising hawk, and the halloo of the cowboy driving
+home his herd from the hillside pasture. Now come enemies more
+relentless than beast or bird of prey, a sound more alarming than the
+cowboy's distant call--man and his companion the dog, and the terrible
+thunder of the gun. A new terror is revealed to the young birds, a
+half-forgotten one brought afresh to the old. The crows have found fresh
+cause for clamor, and the squirrels lapse into a silence of fear.
+
+Peace and the quietness of peace have departed from the realm of the
+woods, and henceforth while the green leaves grow bright as blossoms
+with the touch of frost, then brown and sere, and till long after they
+lie under the white shroud of winter, its wild denizens shall abide in
+constant fear and unrest.
+
+So fares it with the wood-folk, these days of September, wherein the
+sportsman rejoiceth with exceeding gladness.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+A PLEA FOR THE UNPROTECTED
+
+
+Why kill, for the mere sake of killing or the exhibition of one's skill,
+any wild thing that when alive harms no one and when killed is of no
+worth? The more happy wild life there is in the world, the pleasanter it
+is for all of us.
+
+When one is duck-shooting on inland waters, sitting alert in the bow of
+the skiff with his gun ready for the expected gaudy wood duck, or plump
+mallard, or loud quacking dusky duck, or swift-winged teal, to rise with
+a splashing flutter out of the wild rice, and there is a sudden beating
+of broad wings among the sedges with a startled guttural quack, and
+one's heart leaps to his throat and his gun to his shoulder, and
+then--only an awkward bittern climbs the September breeze with a slow
+incline, there is a vengeful temptation to let drive at the
+disappointing good-for-nothing. But why not let the poor fellow go? If
+you dropped him back into the marsh to rot unprofitably there, disdained
+even by the mink, unattainable to the scavenger skunk, what good would
+it do you? If he disappointed you, you disturbed him in his meditations,
+or in the pursuit of a poor but honest living. Perhaps a great heron too
+intent on his fishing or frogging, or dozing in the fancied seclusion of
+his reedy bower, springs up within short range and goes lagging away on
+his broad vans. He may be taken home to show, for he is worth showing
+even when killed. But if you wish your friends to see him at his best,
+bring them to him and let them see how well he befits these sedgy
+levels--a goodly sight, whether he makes his lazy flight above them or
+stands a motionless sentinel in the oozy shallows. The marshes would be
+desolate without him, or if one desires the charm of loneliness, his
+silent presence adds to it.
+
+A kingfisher comes clattering along the channel. As he jerks his swift
+way over the sluggish water he may test your marksmanship, but as he
+hangs with rapid wing-beats over a school of minnows, as steadfast for
+a minute as a star forever, needing no skill to launch him to his final
+unrewarded plunge, do not kill him! In such waters he takes no fish that
+you would, and he enlivens the scene more than almost any other
+frequenter of it, never skulking and hiding, but with metallic,
+vociferous clatter heralding his coming. One never tires of watching his
+still mid-air poise, the same in calm or wind, and his unerring headlong
+plunge.
+
+When one wanders along a willowy stream with his gun, cautiously
+approaching every lily-padded pool and shadowed bend likely to harbor
+wood duck or teal, and finds neither, and his ears begin to ache for the
+sound of his gun--if a green heron flaps off a branch before him he is
+sorely tempted to shoot the ungainly bird, but if the gun must be heard,
+let it speak to a stump or a tossed chip, either as difficult a target
+as he, and let the poor harmless little heron live. Uncouth as he is, he
+comes in well in the picture of such a watercourse, which has done with
+the worry of turning mills, left far behind with their noise and bustle
+on foaming rapids among the hills, and crawls now in lazy ease through
+wide intervales, under elms and water maples and thickets of willows.
+
+On the uplands, where the meadow lark starts out of the grass with a
+sharp, defiant "zeet!" and speeds away on his steady game-like flight,
+remember before you stop it, or try to, of how little account he is when
+brought to bag; and how when the weary days of winter had passed, his
+cheery voice welcomed the coming spring, a little later than the
+robin's, a little earlier than the flicker's cackle; and what an
+enlivening dot of color his yellow breast made where he strutted in the
+dun, bare meadows.
+
+In some States the woodpeckers are unprotected and are a mark for every
+gunner. Their galloping flight tempts the ambitious young shooter to try
+his skill, but they are among the best friends of the arboriculturist
+and the fruit-grower, for though some of them steal cherries and peck
+early apples, and one species sucks the sap of trees, they are the only
+birds that search out and kill the insidious, destructive borer.
+
+In some States, too, the hare is unprotected by any law, and it is
+common custom to hunt it, even so late as April, for the mere sake of
+killing, apparently; or perhaps the charm of the hound's music, which
+makes the butchery of Adirondack deer so delightful a sport to some,
+adds a zest to the slaughter of these innocents--though, be it said,
+there is no comparison in the marksmanship required. Alive, the northern
+hare is one of the most harmless of animals; dead, he is, in the opinion
+of most people, one of the most worthless; so worthless that hunters
+frequently leave the result of all their day's "sport" in the woods
+where they were killed. Yet the hare is legitimate game, and should be
+hunted as such, and only in proper seasons, and not be ruthlessly
+exterminated. A woodland stroll is the pleasanter if one sees a hare
+there in his brown summer suit, or white as the snow about him in his
+winter furs.
+
+Where there are no statute laws for the protection of game and harmless
+creatures not so classed, an unwritten law of common sense, common
+decency, and common humanity should be powerful enough to protect all
+these. The fox is an outlaw; it is every one's legal right to kill him
+whenever and however he may, and yet wherever the fox is hunted with any
+semblance of fair play, whether in New England with gun and hound, or
+elsewhere with horse and hound, the man who traps a fox, or kills one
+unseasonably, or destroys a vixen and her cubs, bears an evil
+reputation. A sentiment as popular and as potent ought to prevail to
+protect those that, though harmless, are as unshielded by legislative
+enactments as the fox, and much less guarded by natural laws and inborn
+cunning.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+THE SKUNK
+
+
+Always and everywhere in evil repute and bad odor, hunted, trapped, and
+killed, a pest and a fur-bearer, it is a wonder that the skunk is not
+exterminated, and that he is not even uncommon.
+
+With an eye to the main chance, the fur-trapper spares him when fur is
+not prime, but when the letter "R" has become well established in the
+months the cruel trap gapes for him at his outgoing and incoming, at the
+door of every discovered burrow, while all the year round the farmer,
+sportsman, and poultry-grower wage truceless war against him.
+
+Notwithstanding this general outlawry, when you go forth of a winter
+morning, after a night of thaw or tempered chill, you see his authentic
+signature on the snow, the unmistakable diagonal row of four footprints
+each, or short-spaced alternate tracks, where he has sallied out for a
+change from the subterranean darkness of his burrow, or from his as
+rayless borrowed quarters beneath the barn, to the starlight or pale
+gloom of midnight winter landscape.
+
+More often are you made aware of his continued survival by another sense
+than sight, when his far-reaching odor comes down the vernal breeze or
+waft of summer air, rankly overbearing all the fragrance of springing
+verdure, or perfume of flowers and new-mown hay, and you well know who
+has somewhere and somehow been forced to take most offensively the
+defensive.
+
+It may be said of him that his actions speak louder than his words. Yet
+the voiceless creature sometimes makes known his presence by sound, and
+frightens the belated farm boy, whom he curiously follows with a
+mysterious, hollow beating of his feet upon the ground.
+
+Patches of neatly inverted turf in a grub-infested pasture tell those
+who know his ways that the skunk has been doing the farmer good service
+here, and making amends for poultry stealing, and you are inclined to
+regard him with more favor. But when you come upon the empty shells of a
+raided partridge nest, your sportsman's wrath is enkindled against him
+for forestalling your gun. Yet who shall say that you had a better right
+to the partridges than he to the eggs?
+
+If you are so favored, you can but admire the pretty sight of the mother
+with her cubs basking in a sunny nook or leading them afield in single
+file, a black and white procession.
+
+If by another name the rose would smell as sweet, our old acquaintance
+is in far better odor for change of appellation from that so suggestive
+of his rank offenses. What beauty of fair faces would be spoiled with
+scorn by a hint of the vulgar name which in unadorned truth belongs to
+the handsome glossy black muff and boa that keep warm those dainty
+fingers and swan-like neck. Yet through the furrier's art and cunning
+they undergo a magic transformation into something to be worn with
+pride, and the every-day wear of the despised outlaw becomes the prized
+apparel of the fair lady.
+
+If unto this humble night wanderer is vouchsafed a life beyond his brief
+earthly existence, imagine him in that unhunted, trapless paradise of
+uncounted eggs and callow nestlings, grinning a wide derisive smile as
+he beholds what fools we mortals be, so fooled by ourselves and one
+another.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+A CAMP-FIRE RUN WILD
+
+
+Some wooden tent-pins inclosing a few square yards of ground half
+covered with a bed of evergreen twigs, matted but still fresh and
+odorous, a litter of paper and powder-smirched rags, empty cans and
+boxes, a few sticks of fire wood, a blackened, primitive wooden crane,
+with its half-charred supporting crotches, and a smouldering heap of
+ashes and dying brands, mark the place of a camp recently deserted.
+
+Coming upon it by chance, one could not help a feeling of loneliness,
+something akin to that inspired by the cold hearthstone of an empty
+house, or the crumbling foundations of a dwelling long since fallen to
+ruin. What days and nights of healthful life have been spent here. What
+happy hours, never to return, have been passed here. What jokes have
+flashed about, what merry tales have been told, what joyous peals of
+laughter rung, where now all is silence. But no one is there to see it.
+A crow peers down from a treetop to discover what pickings he may glean,
+and a mink steals up from the landing, which bears the keelmarks of
+lately departed boats, both distrustful of the old silence which the
+place has so suddenly resumed; and a company of jays flit silently
+about, wondering that there are no intruders to assail with their
+inexhaustible vocabulary.
+
+A puff of wind rustles among the treetops, disturbing the balance of the
+crow, then plunges downward and sets aflight a scurry of dry leaves, and
+out of the gray ashes uncoils a thread of smoke and spins it off into
+the haze of leaves and shadows. The crow flaps in sudden alarm, the mink
+takes shelter in his coign of vantage among the driftwood, and the jays
+raise a multitudinous clamor of discordant outcry. The dry leaves alight
+as if by mischievous guidance of evil purpose upon the dormant embers,
+another puff of wind arouses a flame that first tastes them, then licks
+them with an eager tongue, then with the next eddying breath scatters
+its crumbs of sparks into the verge of the forest. These the rising
+breeze fans till it loads itself with a light burden of smoke, shifted
+now here, now there, as it is trailed along the forest floor, now
+climbing among the branches, then soaring skyward.
+
+Little flames creep along the bodies of fallen trees and fluffy windrows
+of dry leaves, toying like panther kittens with their assured prey, and
+then, grown hungry with such dainty tasting, the flames upburst in a mad
+fury of devouring. They climb swifter than panthers to treetops, falling
+back they gnaw savagely at tree roots, till the ancient lords of the
+forest reel and topple and fall before the gathering wind, and bear
+their destroyer still onward.
+
+The leeward woods are thick with a blinding, stifling smoke, through
+which all the wild creatures of the forest flee in terror, whither they
+know not--by chance to safety, by equal chance perhaps to a terrible
+death in the surging deluge of fire. The billows of flame heave and
+dash with a constant insatiate roar, tossing ever onward a red foam of
+sparks and casting a jetsam of lurid brands upon the ever-retreating
+strand that is but touched with the wash of enkindling, when it is
+overrun by the sea of fire.
+
+The ice-cold springs grow hot in its fierce overwhelming wave, the
+purling rills hiss and boil and shrink before it, then vanish from their
+seared beds. All the living greenness of the forest is utterly
+consumed--great trees that have stood like towers, defying the
+centuries, with the ephemeral verdure of the woodland undergrowth; and
+to mark the place of all this recent majesty and beauty, there is but
+smouldering ruin and black and ashen waste. Little farms but lately
+uncovered to the sun out of the wilderness, cosy homesteads but newly
+builded, are swept away, and with them cherished hopes and perhaps
+precious lives. What irreparable devastation has been wrought by the
+camp-fire run wild!
+
+Meanwhile the careless begetters of this havoc are making their
+leisurely way toward the outer world of civilization, serenely noting
+that the woods are on fire, and complacently congratulating themselves
+that the disaster did not come to spoil their outing; never once
+thinking that by a slight exercise of that care which all men owe the
+world, this calamity, which a century cannot repair, might have been
+avoided.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+THE DEAD CAMP-FIRE
+
+
+A heap of ashes, a few half-burned brands, a blackened pair of crotched
+sticks that mark the place of the once glowing heart of the camp,
+furnish food for the imagination to feed upon or give the memory an
+elusive taste of departed pleasures.
+
+If you were one of those who saw its living flame and felt its warmth,
+the pleasant hours passed here come back with that touch of sadness
+which accompanies the memory of all departed pleasures and yet makes it
+not unwelcome. What was unpleasant, even what was almost unendurable,
+has nearly faded out of remembrance or is recalled with a laugh.
+
+It was ten years ago, and the winds and fallen leaves of as many autumns
+have scattered and covered the gray heap. If it was only last year, you
+fancy that the smell of fire still lingers in the brands. How vividly
+return to you the anxious deliberation with which the site was chosen
+with a view to all attainable comfort and convenience, and the final
+satisfaction that followed the establishment of this short-lived home,
+short-lived but yet so much a home during its existence. Nothing
+contributed so much to make it one as the camp-fire. How intently you
+watched its first building and lighting, how labored for its maintenance
+with awkwardly-wielded axe, how you inhaled the odors of its cookery and
+essayed long-planned culinary experiments with extemporized implements,
+over its beds of coals, and how you felt the consequent exaltation of
+triumph or mortification of failure.
+
+All these come back to you, and the relighting of the fire in the sleepy
+dawn, the strange mingling of white sunlight and yellow firelight when
+the sun shot its first level rays athwart the camp, the bustle of
+departure for the day's sport, the pleasant loneliness of camp-keeping
+with only the silent woods, the crackling fire, and your thoughts for
+company; the incoming at nightfall and the rekindling of the fire, when
+the rosy bud of sleeping embers suddenly expanded into a great blossom
+of light whose petals quivered and faded and brightened among the
+encircling shadows of the woods. You laugh again at the jokes that ran
+around that merry circle and wonder again and again at the ingenuity
+with which small performances were magnified into great exploits, little
+haps into strange adventure, and with which bad shots and poor catches
+were excused.
+
+At last came breaking camp, the desolation of dismantling and
+leave-taking. How many of you will ever meet again? How many of those
+merry voices are stilled forever, from how many of those happy faces has
+the light of life faded?
+
+Who lighted this camp-fire? Years have passed since it illumined the
+nightly gloom of the woods, for moss and lichens are creeping over the
+charred back-log. A green film is spread over the ashes, and thrifty
+sprouts are springing up through them.
+
+You know that the campers were tent-dwellers, for there stand the rows
+of rotten tent pins inclosing a rusty heap of mould that once was a
+fragrant couch of evergreens inviting tired men to rest,--or you know
+they spent their nights in a shanty, for there are the crumbling walls,
+the fallen-in roof of bark which never again will echo song or jest.
+
+This pile of fish-bones attests that they were anglers, and skillful or
+lucky ones, for the pile is large. If you are an ichthyologist, you can
+learn by these vestiges of their sport whether they satisfied the desire
+of soul and stomach with the baser or the nobler fishes; perhaps a
+rotting pole, breaking with its own weight, may decide whether they
+fished with worm or fly; but whether you relegate them to the class of
+scientific or unscientific anglers, you doubt not they enjoyed their
+sport as much in one way as in the other.
+
+You know that they were riflemen, for there is the record of their shots
+in the healing bullet wounds on the trunk of a great beech. For a moment
+you may fancy that the woods still echo the laughter that greeted the
+shot that just raked the side of the tree; but it is only the cackle of
+a yellow-hammer.
+
+There is nothing to tell you who they were, whence they came, or whither
+they went; but they were campers, lovers of the great outdoor world, and
+so akin to you, and you bid them hail and farewell without a meeting.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+OCTOBER DAYS
+
+
+Fields as green as when the summer birds caroled above them, woods more
+gorgeous with innumerable hues and tints of ripening leaves than a
+blooming parterre, are spread beneath the azure sky, whose deepest color
+is reflected with intenser blue in lake and stream. In them against this
+color are set the scarlet and gold of every tree upon their brinks, the
+painted hills, the clear-cut mountain peaks, all downward pointing to
+the depths of this nether sky.
+
+Overhead, thistledown and the silken balloon of the milkweed float on
+their zephyr-wafted course, silver motes against the blue; and above
+them are the black cohorts of crows in their straggling retreat to
+softer climes. Now the dark column moves steadily onward, now veers in
+confusion from some suspected or discovered danger, or pauses to assail
+with a harsh clangor some sworn enemy of the sable brotherhood. Their
+gay-clad smaller cousins, the jays, are for the most part silently
+industrious among the gold and bronze of the beeches, flitting to and
+fro with flashes of blue as they gather mast, but now and then finding
+time to scold an intruder with an endless variety of discordant outcry.
+
+How sharp the dark shadows are cut against the sunlit fields, and in
+their gloom how brightly shine the first fallen leaves and the starry
+bloom of the asters. In cloudy days and even when rain is falling the
+depths of the woods are not dark, for the bright foliage seems to give
+forth light and casts no shadows beneath the lowering sky.
+
+The scarlet maples burn, the golden leaves of poplar and birch shine
+through the misty veil, and the deep purple of the ash glows as if it
+held a smouldering fire that the first breeze might fan into a flame,
+and through all this luminous leafage one may trace branch and twig as a
+wick in a candle flame. Only the evergreens are dark as when they bear
+their steadfast green in the desolation of winter, and only they brood
+shadows.
+
+In such weather the woodland air is laden with the light burden of odor,
+the faintly pungent aroma of the ripened leaves, more subtle than the
+scent of pine or fir, yet as apparent to the nostrils, as delightful and
+more rare, for in the round of the year its days are few, while in
+summer sunshine and winter wind, in springtime shower and autumnal
+frost, pine, spruce, balsam, hemlock, and cedar distill their perfume
+and lavish it on the breeze or gale of every season.
+
+Out of the marshes, now changing their universal green to brown and
+bronze and gold, floats a finer odor than their common reek of ooze and
+sodden weeds--a spicy tang of frost-ripened flags and the fainter breath
+of the landward border of ferns; and with these also is mingled the
+subtle pungency of the woodlands, where the pepperidge is burning out in
+a blaze of scarlet, and the yellow flame of the poplars flickers in the
+lightest breeze.
+
+The air is of a temper neither too hot nor too cold, and in what is now
+rather the good gay wood than green wood, there are no longer pestering
+insects to worry the flesh and trouble the spirit. The flies bask in
+half torpid indolence, the tormenting whine of the mosquito is heard no
+more. Of insect life one hears little but the mellow drone of the
+bumblebee, the noontide chirp of the cricket, and the husky rustle of
+the dragonfly's gauzy wing.
+
+Unwise are the tent-dwellers who have folded their canvas and departed
+to the shelter of more stable roof-trees, for these are days that should
+be made the most of, days that have brought the perfected ripeness of
+the year and display it in the fullness of its glory.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+A COMMON EXPERIENCE
+
+
+The keenest of the sportsman's disappointments is not a blank day, nor a
+series of misses, unaccountable or too well accountable to a blundering
+hand or unsteady nerves, nor adverse weather, nor gun or tackle broken
+in the midst of sport, nor perversity of dogs, nor uncongeniality of
+comradeship, nor yet even the sudden cold or the spell of rheumatism
+that prevents his taking the field on the allotted morning.
+
+All these may be but for a day. To-morrow may bring game again to haunts
+now untenanted, restore cunning to the awkward hand, steady the nerves,
+mend the broken implement, make the dogs obedient and bring pleasanter
+comrades or the comfortable lonesomeness of one's own companionship, and
+to-morrow or next day or next week the cold and rheumatic twinges may
+have passed into the realm of bygone ills.
+
+For a year, perhaps for many years, he has yearned for a sight of some
+beloved haunt, endeared to him by old and cherished associations. He
+fancies that once more among the scenes of his youthful exploits there
+will return to him something of the boyish ardor, exuberance of spirit
+and perfect freedom from care that made the enjoyment of those happy
+hours so complete. He imagines that a draught from the old spring that
+bubbles up in the shadow of the beeches or from the moss-brimmed basin
+of the trout brook will rejuvenate him, at least for the moment while
+its coolness lingers on his palate, as if he quaffed Ponce de Leon's
+undiscovered fountain. He doubts not that in the breath of the old woods
+he shall once more catch that faint, indescribable, but unforgotten
+aroma, that subtle savor of wildness, that has so long eluded him,
+sometimes tantalizing his nostrils with a touch, but never quite inhaled
+since its pungent elixir made the young blood tingle in his veins.
+
+He has almost come to his own again, his long-lost possession in the
+sunny realm of youth. It lies just beyond the hill before him, from
+whose crest he shall see the nut-tree where he shot his first squirrel,
+the southing slope where the beeches hide the spring, where he
+astonished himself with the glory of killing his first grouse, and he
+shall see the glint of the brook flashing down the evergreen dell and
+creeping among the alder copses.
+
+He does not expect to find so many squirrels or grouse or trout now as
+thirty years ago, when a double gun was a wonder, and its possession the
+unrealized dream of himself and his comrades, and none of them had ever
+seen jointed rod or artificial fly, and dynamite was uninvented. Yet all
+the game and fish cannot have been driven from nor exterminated in
+haunts so congenial and fostering as these, by the modern horde of
+gunners and anglers and by the latter-day devices of destruction, and he
+doubts not that he shall find enough to satisfy the tempered ardor of
+the graybeard.
+
+Indeed, it is for something better than mere shooting or fishing that he
+has come so far. One squirrel, flicking the leaves with his downfall,
+one grouse plunging to earth midway in his thunderous flight, one trout
+caught as he can catch him, now, will appease his moderate craving for
+sport, and best and most desired of all, make him, for the nonce, a boy
+again. He anticipates with quicker heartbeat the thrill of surprised
+delight that choked him with its fullness when he achieved his first
+triumph.
+
+At last the hilltop is gained, but what unfamiliar scene is this which
+has taken the place of that so cherished in his memory and so longed
+for? Can that naked hillside slanting toward him from the further rim of
+the valley, forlorn in the desolation of recent clearing, be the wooded
+slope of the other day? Can the poor, unpicturesque thread of water that
+crawls in feeble attenuation between its shorn, unsightly banks be the
+wild, free brook whose voice was a continual song, every rod of whose
+amber and silver course was a picture? Even its fringes of willow and
+alders, useful for their shade and cover when alive, but cut down
+worthless even for fuel, have been swept from its margin by the ruthless
+besom of destruction, as if everything that could beautify the landscape
+must be blotted out to fulfill the mission of the spoiler.
+
+Near it, and sucking in frequent draughts from the faint stream, is a
+thirsty and hungry little sawmill, the most obtrusive and most ignoble
+feature of the landscape, whose beauty its remorseless fangs have gnawed
+away. Every foot of the brook below it is foul with its castings, and
+the fragments of its continual greedy feasting are thickly strewn far
+and near. Yet it calls to the impoverished hills for more victims; its
+shriek arouses discordant echoes where once resounded the music of the
+brook, the song of birds, the grouse's drum call, and the mellow note of
+the hound.
+
+Though sick at heart with the doleful scene, the returned exile descends
+to his harried domain hoping that he may yet find some vestige of its
+former wealth, but only more disappointments reward his quest. Not a
+trout flashes through the shrunken pools. The once limpid spring is a
+quagmire among rotting stumps. The rough nakedness of the hillside is
+clad only with thistles and fireweed, with here and there a patch of
+blanched dead leaves, dross of the old gold of the beech's ancient
+autumnal glory.
+
+Of all he hoped for nothing is realized, and he finds only woful change,
+irreparable loss. His heart heavy with sorrow and bursting with impotent
+wrath against the ruthless spoiler, he turns his back forever on the
+desolated scene of his boyhood's sports.
+
+Alas! That one should ever attempt to retouch the time-faded but
+beautiful pictures that the memory holds.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+THE RED SQUIRREL
+
+
+A hawk, flashing the old gold of his pinions in the face of the sun,
+flings down a shrill, husky cry of intense scorn; a jay scolds like a
+shrew; from his safe isolation in the midwater, a loon taunts you and
+the awakening winds with his wild laughter; there is a jeer in the
+chuckling diminuendo of the woodchuck's whistle, a taunt in the fox's
+gasping bark as he scurries unseen behind the veil of night; and a scoff
+on hunters and hounds and cornfield owners is flung out through the
+gloaming in the raccoon's quavering cry. But of all the wild world's
+inhabitants, feathered or furred, none outdo the saucy red squirrel in
+taunts, gibes, and mockery of their common enemy.
+
+He is inspired with derision that is expressed in every tone and
+gesture. His agile form is vibrant with it when he flattens himself
+against a tree-trunk, toes and tail quivering with intensity of ridicule
+as fully expressed in every motion as in his nasal snicker and throaty
+chuckle or in the chattering jeer that he pours down when he has
+attained a midway or topmost bough and cocks his tail with a saucy curve
+above his arched back.
+
+When he persistently retires within his wooden tower, he still peers out
+saucily from his lofty portal, and if he disappears you may yet hear the
+smothered chuckle wherewith he continues to tickle his ribs. When in a
+less scornful mood, he is at least supremely indifferent, deigning to
+regard you with but the corner of an eye, while he rasps a nut or chips
+a cone.
+
+Ordinarily you must be philosophical or godly to suffer gibes with
+equanimity, but you need be neither to endure the scoffs of this buffoon
+of the woods and waysides. They only amuse you as they do him, and you
+could forgive these tricks tenfold multiplied if he had no worse, and
+love him if he were but half as good as he is beautiful.
+
+He exasperates when he cuts off your half-grown apples and pears in
+sheer wantonness, injuring you and profiting himself only in the
+pleasure of seeing and hearing them fall. But you are heated with a
+hotter wrath when he reveals his chief wickedness, and you catch sight
+of him stealthily skulking along the leafy by-paths of the branches,
+silently intent on evil deeds and plotting the murder of callow
+innocents. Quite noiseless now, himself, his whereabouts are only
+indicated by the distressful outcry of the persecuted and sympathizing
+birds and the fluttering swoops of their futile attacks upon the
+marauder. Then when you see him gliding away, swift and silent as a
+shadow, bearing a half-naked fledgeling in his jaws, if this is the
+first revelation of such wickedness, you are as painfully surprised as
+if you had discovered a little child in some wanton act of cruelty.
+
+It seems quite out of all fitness of nature that this merry fellow
+should turn murderer, that this dainty connoisseur of choice nuts and
+tender buds, and earliest discoverer and taster of the maple's
+sweetness, should become so grossly carnivorous and savagely
+bloodthirsty. But anon he will cajole you with pretty ways into
+forgetfulness and forgiveness of his crimes. You find yourself offering,
+in extenuation of his sins, confession of your own offenses. Have not
+you, too, wrought havoc among harmless broods and brought sorrow to
+feathered mothers and woodland homes? Is he worse than you, or are you
+better than he? Against his sins you set his beauty and tricksy manners,
+and for them would not banish him out of the world nor miss the
+incomparable touch of wild life that his presence gives it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+THE RUFFED GROUSE
+
+
+The woods in the older parts of our country possess scarcely a trait of
+the primeval forest. The oldest trees have a comparatively youthful
+appearance, and are pygmies in girth beside the decaying stumps of their
+giant ancestors. They are not so shagged with moss nor so scaled with
+lichens. The forest floor has lost its ancient carpet of ankle-deep moss
+and the intricate maze of fallen trees in every stage of decay, and
+looks clean-swept and bare. The tangle of undergrowth is gone, many of
+the species which composed it having quite disappeared, as have many of
+the animals that flourished in the perennial shade of the old woods.
+
+If in their season one sees and hears more birds among their lower
+interlaced branches, he is not likely to catch sight or sound of many of
+the denizens of the old wilderness. No startled deer bounds away before
+him, nor bear shuffles awkwardly from his feast of mast at one's
+approach, nor does one's flesh creep at the howl of the gathering wolves
+or the panther's scream or the rustle of his stealthy footsteps.
+
+But as you saunter on your devious way you may hear a rustle of quick
+feet in the dry leaves and a sharp, insistent cry, a succession of
+short, high-pitched clucks running into and again out of a querulous
+"_ker-r-r-r_," all expressing warning as much as alarm. Your ears guide
+your eyes to the exact point from which the sounds apparently come, but
+if these are not keen and well trained they fail to detach any animate
+form from the inanimate dun and gray of dead leaves and underbrush.
+
+With startling suddenness out of the monotony of lifeless color in an
+eddying flurry of dead leaves, fanned to erratic flight by his
+wing-beats, the ruffed grouse bursts into view, in full flight with the
+first strokes of his thundering pinions, and you have a brief vision of
+untamed nature as it was in the old days. On either side of the
+vanishing brown nebula the ancient mossed and lichened trunks rear
+themselves again, above it their lofty ramage veils the sky, beneath it
+lie the deep, noiseless cushion of moss, the shrubs and plants that the
+old wood rangers knew and the moose browsed on, and the tangled trunks
+of fallen trees. You almost fancy that you hear the long-ago silenced
+voices of the woods, so vividly does this wild spirit for an instant
+conjure up a vision of the old wild world whereof he is a survival.
+
+Acquaintance with civilized man has not tamed him, but has made him the
+wilder. He deigns to feed upon apple-tree buds and buckwheat and
+woodside clover, not as a gift, but a begrudged compensation for what
+you have taken from him, and gives you therefor not even the thanks of
+familiarity; and notwithstanding his acquaintance with generations of
+your race he will not suffer you to come so near to him as he would your
+grandfather.
+
+If, when the leaves are falling, you find him in your barnyard, garden,
+or out-house, or on the porch, do not think he has any intention of
+associating with you or your plebeian poultry. You can only wonder where
+he found refuge from the painted shower when all his world was wooded.
+If he invites your attendance at his drum solo, it is only to fool you
+with the sight of an empty stage, for you must be as stealthy and
+keen-eyed as a lynx to see his proud display of distended ruff and wide
+spread of barred tail and accelerated beat of wings that mimic thunder,
+or see even the leafy curtain of his stage flutter in the wind of his
+swift exit.
+
+How the definite recognition of his motionless form evades you, so
+perfectly are his colors merged into those of his environment, whether
+it be in the flush greenness of summer, the painted hues of autumn or
+its later faded dun and gray, or in the whiteness of winter. Among one
+or the other he is but a clot of dead leaves, a knot upon a branch, the
+gray stump of a sapling protruding from the snow, or, covered deep in
+the unmarked whiteness, he bursts from it like a mine exploded at your
+feet, leaving you agape till he has vanished from your sight and your
+ears have caught the last flick of his wings against the dry branches.
+
+In May, his mate sits on her nest, indistinguishable among the brown
+leaves and gray branches about her. Later, when surprised with her
+brood, how conspicuous she makes herself, fluttering and staggering
+along the ground, while her callow chicks, old in cunning though so
+lately their eyes first beheld the world, scatter in every direction
+like a shattered globule of quicksilver and magically disappear where
+there is no apparent hiding-place. Did they con the first lesson of
+safety in the dark chamber of the egg, or absorb it with the warmth of
+the brooding breast that gave them life?
+
+Listen, and out of the silence which follows the noisy dispersion of the
+family hear the low sibilant voice of the mother calling her children to
+her or cautioning them to continued hiding. Perhaps you may see her,
+alertly skulking among the underbrush, still uttering that tender,
+persuasive cry, so faint that the chirp of a cricket might overbear it.
+Scatter her brood when the members are half grown and almost as strong
+of wing as herself, and you presently hear her softly calling them and
+assuring them of her continued care.
+
+Among many things that mark the changing season, is the dispersion of
+this wildwood family. Each member is now shifting for itself in matters
+of seeking food, safety, pleasure, and comfort. You will come upon one
+in the ferny undergrowth of the lowland woods where he is consorting
+with woodcock, frighten another from his feast on the fence-side
+elderberries, scare one in the thick shadows of the evergreens, another
+on the sparsely wooded steep of a rocky hillside, and later hear the
+drum-beat of a young cock that the soft Indian summer has fooled into
+springtime love-making, and each has the alertness that complete
+self-dependence has enforced.
+
+Still, you may come upon them gathered in social groups, yet each going
+his own way when flushed. Upon rare occasions you may surprise a grand
+convention of all the grouse of the region congregated on the sunny lee
+of a hillside. It is a sight and sound to remember long, though for the
+moment you forget the gun in your hands, when by ones, twos, and dozens
+the dusky forms burst away up wind, down wind, across wind, signalling
+their departure with volleys of intermittent and continuous thunder. Not
+many times in your life will you see this, yet, if but once, you will be
+thankful that you have not outlived all the old world's wildness.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+TWO SHOTS
+
+
+A boy of fourteen, alert, but too full of life to move slowly and
+cautiously, is walking along an old road in the woods, a road that winds
+here and there with meanderings that now seem vagrant and purposeless
+but once led to the various piles of cordwood and logs for whose
+harvesting it was hewn. Goodly trees have since grown up from saplings
+that the judicious axe then scorned. Beeches, whose flat branches are
+shelves of old gold; poplars, turned to towers of brighter metal by the
+same alchemy of autumn; and hemlocks, pyramids of unchanging green,
+shadow the leaf-strewn forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting of
+gray and russet stumps. How happy the boy is in the freedom of the
+woods; proud to carry his first own gun, as he treads gingerly but
+somewhat noisily over the fallen leaves and dry twigs, scanning with
+quick glances the thickets, imagining himself the last Mohican on the
+warpath, or Leather-Stocking scouting in the primeval wilderness.
+
+Under his breath he tells the confiding chickadees and woodpeckers what
+undreamed-of danger they would be in from such a brave, were he not in
+pursuit of nobler game. Then he hears a sudden rustle of the dry leaves,
+the _quit! quit!_ of a partridge, catches a glimpse of a rapidly running
+brown object, which on the instant is launched into a flashing
+thunderous flight. Impelled by the instinct of the born sportsman, he
+throws the gun to his shoulder, and scarcely with aim, but in the
+direction of the sound, pulls trigger and fires.
+
+On the instant he is ashamed of his impulsive haste, which fooled him
+into wasting a precious charge on the inanimate evergreen twigs and sere
+leaves that come dropping and floating down to his shot, and is thankful
+that he is the only witness of his own foolishness.
+
+But what is that? Above the patter and rustle of falling twigs and
+leaves comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid beat of wings upon the
+leaf-strewn earth. With heart beating as fast he runs toward the sound,
+afraid to believe his senses, when he sees a noble grouse fluttering out
+feebly his last gasp. He cannot be sure that it is not all a dream that
+may vanish in a breath, till he has the bird safe in his hand, and then
+he is faint with joy. Was there ever such a shot? Would that all the
+world were here to see, for who can believe it just for the telling?
+There never will be another such a bird, nor such a shot, for him. He
+fires a dozen ineffectual ones at fair marks that day, but the glory of
+that one shot would atone for twice as many misses, and he need not tell
+of them, only of this, whereof he bears actual proof, though he himself
+can hardly accept it, till again and again he tests it by admiring look
+and touch.
+
+Years after the killing of grouse on the wing has become a
+matter-of-course occurrence in his days of upland shooting, the memory
+of this stands clearest and best. Sixty years later the old wood road
+winds through the same scene, by some marvel of kindliness or
+oversight, untouched by the devastating axe, unchanged but by the forest
+growth of half a century and its seemly and decorous decay. A thicker
+screen of undergrowth borders the more faintly traced way. The
+golden-brown shelves of the beech branches sweep more broadly above it,
+the spires of the evergreens are nearer the sky, and the yellow towers
+of the poplars are builded higher, but they are the same trees and
+beneath them may yet be seen the gray stumps and trunks mouldered to
+russet lines, of their ancient brethren who fell when these were
+saplings.
+
+The gray-bearded man who comes along the old wood road wonders at the
+little change so many years have made in the scene of the grand
+achievements of his youth, and in his mind he runs over the long
+calendar to assure himself that so many autumns have glowed and faded
+since that happy day. How can he have grown old, his ear dull to the
+voices of the woods, his sight dim with the slowly but surely falling
+veil of coming blindness, so that even now the road winds into a misty
+haze just before him, yet these trees be young and lusty?
+
+As they and the unfaded page of memory record the years, it was but a
+little while ago that his heart was almost bursting with pride of that
+first triumph. Would that he might once more feel that delicious pang of
+joy.
+
+Hark! There is the _quit! quit!_ of a grouse, and there another and
+another, and the patter and rustle of their retreating footsteps,
+presently launching into sudden flight, vaguely seen in swift bolts of
+gray, hurtling among gray tree trunks and variegated foliage. True to
+the old instinct his gun leaps to his shoulder, and he fires again and
+again at the swift target. But the quick eye no longer guides the aim,
+the timely finger no longer pulls the trigger, and the useless pellets
+waste themselves on the leaves and twigs.
+
+The woods are full of grouse, as if all the birds of the region had
+congregated here to mock his failing sight and skill. On every side they
+burst away from him like rockets, and his quick but futile charges in
+rapid succession are poured in their direction, yet not a bird falls,
+nor even a feather wavers down through the still October air. His dim
+eyes refuse to mark down the birds that alight nearest; he can only
+vaguely follow their flight by the whirring rush of wings and the click
+of intercepting branches.
+
+He is not ashamed of his loss of skill, only grieved to know that his
+shooting days are over, yet he is glad there is no one near to see his
+failure. He makes renunciation of all title to the name of a crack shot,
+too well knowing that this is no brief lapse of skill, but the final,
+inevitable falling off of the quick eye and sure hand. Slowly and sadly
+he makes his way to where the shaded path merges into the sunny
+clearing. There, from the cover of the last bush, a laggard bird springs
+as if thrown from a catapult, describing in his flight an arc of a great
+circle, and clearly defined against the steel-blue sky.
+
+Again the gun springs instinctively to the shoulder, the instantaneous
+aim is taken well ahead on the line of flight, the trigger pressed in
+the nick of time, the charge explodes, and out of a cloud of feathers
+drifting and whirling in the eddies of his own wing-beats, the noble
+bird sweeps downward in the continuation of the course that ends with a
+dull thud on the pasture sward.
+
+The old sportsman lifts his clean-killed bird without a thrill of
+exultation--he is only devoutly thankful for the happy circumstance
+which made successful the last shot he will ever fire, and that not as a
+miss he may remember it. Henceforth untouched by him his gun shall hang
+upon the wall, its last use linked with the pleasant memory of his last
+shot.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+NOVEMBER DAYS
+
+
+In a midsummer sleep one dreams of winter, its cold, its silence and
+desolation all surrounding him; then awakes, glad to find himself in the
+reality of the light and warmth of summer.
+
+Were we dreaming yesterday of woods more gorgeous in their leafage than
+a flower garden in the flush of profusest bloom, so bright with
+innumerable tints that autumnal blossoms paled beside them as stars at
+sunrise? Were we dreaming of air soft as in springtime, of the gentle
+babble of brooks, the carol of bluebirds, the lazy chirp of crickets,
+and have we suddenly awakened to be confronted by the desolation of
+naked forests, the more forlorn for the few tattered remnants of gay
+apparel that flutter in the bleak wind? To hear but the sullen roar of
+the chill blast and the clash of stripped boughs, the fitful scurry of
+wind-swept leaves and the raving of swollen streams, swelling and
+falling as in changing stress of passion, and the heavy leaden patter of
+rain on roof and sodden leaves and earth?
+
+Verily, the swift transition is like a pleasant dream with an unhappy
+awakening. Yet not all November days are dreary. Now the sun shines warm
+from the steel-blue sky, its eager rays devour the rime close on the
+heels of the retreating shadows, and the north wind sleeps. The voice of
+the brimming stream falls to an even, softer cadence, like the murmur of
+pine forests swept by the light touch of a steady breeze.
+
+Then the wind breathes softly from the south, and there drifts with it
+from warmer realms, or arises at its touch from the earth about us, or
+falls from the atmosphere of heaven itself, not smoke, nor haze, but
+something more ethereal than these: a visible air, balmy with odors of
+ripeness as the breath of June with perfume of flowers. It pervades
+earth and sky, which melt together in it, till the bounds of neither are
+discernible, and blends all objects in the landscape beyond the near
+foreground, till nothing is distinct but some golden gleam of sunlit
+water, bright as the orb that shines upon it. Flocks of migrating geese
+linger on the stubble fields, and some laggard crows flap lazily athwart
+the sky or perch contentedly upon the naked treetops as if they cared to
+seek no clime more genial. The brief heavenly beauteousness of Indian
+summer has fallen upon the earth, a few tranquil days of ethereal
+mildness dropped into the sullen or turbulent border of winter.
+
+In November days, as in all others, the woods are beautiful to the lover
+of nature and to the sportsman who in their love finds the finer flavor
+of his pastime. Every marking of the gray trunks, each moss-patch and
+scale of lichen on them, is shown more distinctly now in the intercepted
+light, and the delicate tracery of the bare branches and their netted
+shadows on the rumpled carpet of the forest floor, have a beauty as
+distinctive as the fullness of green or frost-tinted leafage and its
+silhouette of shade.
+
+No blossom is left in woods or fields, save where in the one the
+witch-hazel unfolds its unseasonable flowers yellow beneath cold skies,
+or a pink blossom of herb-robert holds out with modest bravery in a
+sheltered cranny of the rocks; and where in the other, the ghostly bloom
+of everlasting rustles above the leafless stalks in the wind-swept
+pastures. There are brighter flashes of color in the sombre woods where
+the red winter-berries shine on their leafless stems and the orange and
+scarlet clusters of the twining bitter-sweet light up the gray trellis
+of the vagrant climber.
+
+No sense of loss or sadness oppresses the soul of the ardent sportsman
+as he ranges the unroofed aisles alert for the wary grouse, the skulking
+woodcock, full-grown and strong of wing and keen-eyed for every enemy,
+or the hare flashing his half-donned winter coat among the gray
+underbrush as he bounds away before the merry chiding of the beagles.
+The brown monotony of the marshes is pleasant to him as green fields,
+while the wild duck tarries in the dark pools and the snipe probes the
+unfrozen patches of ooze. To him all seasons are kind, all days
+pleasant, wherein he may pursue his sport, though the rain pelt him,
+chill winds assail him, or the summer sun shower upon him its most
+fervent rays, and in these changeful days of November he finds his full
+measure of content.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+THE MUSKRAT
+
+
+A little turning of nature from her own courses banishes the beaver from
+his primal haunts, but his less renowned and lesser cousin, the muskrat,
+philosophically accommodates himself to the changed conditions of their
+common foster mother and still clings fondly to her altered breast.
+
+The ancient forests may be swept away and their successors disappear,
+till there is scarcely left him a watersoaked log to use as an
+intermediate port in his coastwise voyages; continual shadow may give
+place to diurnal sunshine, woodland to meadow and pasture, the plough
+tear the roof of his underground home, and cattle graze where once only
+the cloven hoofs of the deer and the moose trod the virgin mould, yet he
+holds his old place.
+
+In the springtides of present years as in those of centuries past his
+whining call echoes along the changed shores, his wake seams with
+silver the dark garment of the water, and his comically grim visage
+confronts you now as it did the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days when
+the otter and the beaver were his familiars.
+
+Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing crops, his food supply is constantly
+provided in the annual growth of the marshes. Here in banks contiguous
+to endless store of succulent sedge and lily roots and shell-cased
+tidbits of mussels, he tunnels his stable water-portaled home, and out
+there, by the channel's edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut before the
+earliest frost falls upon the marshes. In its height, some find prophecy
+of high or low water, and in the thickness of its walls the forecast of
+a mild or severe winter, but the prophet himself is sometimes flooded
+out of his house, sometimes starved and frozen in it.
+
+In the still, sunny days between the nights of its unseen building, the
+blue spikes of the pickerel-weed and the white trinities of the
+arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet
+brightness of autumn the departing wood drake rests on the roof to preen
+his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. Above it
+the wild geese harrow the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of
+sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw
+the veil of the long winter twilight over the muskrat's homes and
+haunts.
+
+These may be gloomy days he spends groping in the dark chambers of his
+hut and burrow, or gathering food in the dimly lighted icy water, with
+never a sight of the upper world nor ever a sunbeam to warm him.
+
+But there are more woful days when the sun and the sky are again opened
+to him, and he breathes the warm air of spring, hears the blackbirds
+sing and the bittern boom. For, amid all the gladness of nature's
+reawakened life, danger lurks in all his paths; the cruel, hungry trap
+gapes for him on every jutting log, on every feeding-bed, even in the
+doorway of his burrow and by the side of his house.
+
+The trapper's skiff invades all his pleasant waters; on every hand he
+hears the splash of its paddles, the clank of its setting pole, and he
+can scarcely show his head above water but a deadly shower of lead
+bursts upon it. He hears the simulated call of his beloved, and voyaging
+hot-hearted to the cheating tryst meets only death.
+
+At last comes the summer truce and happy days of peace in the tangled
+jungle of the marsh, with the wild duck and bittern nesting beside his
+watery path, the marsh wren weaving her rushy bower above it.
+
+So the days of his life go on, and the days of his race continue in the
+land of his unnumbered generations. Long may he endure to enliven the
+drear tameness of civilization with a memory of the world's old
+wildness.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+NOVEMBER VOICES
+
+
+With flowers and leaves, the bird songs have faded out, and the hum and
+chirp of insect life, the low and bleat of herds and flocks afield, and
+the busy sounds of husbandry have grown infrequent. There are lapses of
+such silence that the ear aches for some audible signal of life; and
+then to appease it there comes with the rising breeze the solemn murmur
+of the pines like the song of the sea on distant shores, the sibilant
+whisper of the dead herbage, the clatter of dry pods, and the fitful
+stir of fallen leaves, like a scurry of ghostly feet fleeing in affright
+at the sound of their own passage.
+
+The breeze puffs itself into a fury of wind, and the writhing branches
+shriek and moan and clash as if the lances of phantom armies were
+crossed in wild melee.
+
+The woods are full of unlipped voices speaking one with another in
+pleading, in anger, in soft tones of endearment; and one hears his name
+called so distinctly that he answers and calls again, but no answer is
+vouchsafed him, only moans and shrieks and mocking laughter, till one
+has enough of wild voices and longs for a relapse of silence.
+
+More softly it is broken when through the still air comes the cheery
+note of the chickadee and the little trumpet of his comrade the nuthatch
+and far away the muffled beat of the grouse's drum, or from a distance
+the mellow baying of a hound and its answering echoes, swelling and
+dying on hilltop or glen, or mingling in melodious confusion.
+
+From skyward comes the clangor of clarions, wild and musical,
+proclaiming the march of gray cohorts of geese advancing southward
+through the hills and dales of cloudland. There come, too, the quick
+whistling beat of wild ducks' pinions, the cry of a belated plover, and
+the creaking voice of a snipe. Then the bawling of a ploughman in a
+far-off field--and farther away the rumble and shriek of a railroad
+train--brings the listening ear to earth again and its plodding busy
+life.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+THANKSGIVING
+
+
+Doubtless many a sportsman has bethought him that his Thanksgiving
+turkey will have a finer flavor if the feast is prefaced by a few hours
+in the woods, with dog and gun. Meaner fare than this day of bounty
+furnishes forth is made delicious by such an appetizer, and the
+Thanksgiving feast will be none the worse for it.
+
+What can be sweeter than the wholesome fragrance of the fallen leaves?
+What more invigorating than the breath of the two seasons that we catch:
+here in the northward shade of a wooded hill the nipping air of winter,
+there where the southern slope meets the sun the genial warmth of an
+October day. Here one's footsteps crunch sharply the frozen herbage and
+the ice-bearded border of a spring's overflow; there splash in thawed
+pools and rustle softly among the dead leaves.
+
+The flowers are gone, but they were not brighter than the winter berries
+and bittersweet that glow around one. The deciduous leaves are fallen
+and withered, but they were not more beautiful than the delicate tracery
+of their forsaken branches, and the steadfast foliage of the evergreens
+was never brighter. The song-birds are singing in southern woods, but
+chickadee, nuthatch, and woodpecker are chatty and companionable and
+keep the woods in heart with a stir of life.
+
+Then from overhead or underfoot a ruffed grouse booms away into the gray
+haze of branches, and one hears the whirr and crash of his headlong
+flight long after he is lost to sight, perchance long after the echo of
+a futile shot has died away. Far off one hears the intermittent
+discharge of rifles where the shooters are burning powder for their
+Thanksgiving turkey, and faintly from far away comes the melancholy
+music of a hound. Then nearer and clearer, then a rustle of velvet-clad
+feet, and lo, reynard himself, the wildest spirit of the woods,
+materializes out of the russet indistinctness and flashes past, with
+every sense alert. Then the hound goes by, and footstep, voice, and echo
+sink into silence. For silence it is, though the silver tinkle of the
+brook is in it, and the stir of the last leaf shivering forsaken on its
+bough.
+
+In such quietude one may hold heartfelt thanksgiving, feasting full upon
+a crust and a draught from the icy rivulet, and leave rich viands and
+costly wines for the thankless surfeiting of poorer men.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+DECEMBER DAYS
+
+
+Fewer and more chill have become the hours of sunlight, and longer
+stretch the noontide shadows of the desolate trees athwart the tawny
+fields and the dead leaves that mat the floor of the woods.
+
+The brook braids its shrunken strands of brown water with a hushed
+murmur over a bed of sodden leaves between borders of spiny ice
+crystals, or in the pools swirl in slow circles the imprisoned fleets of
+bubbles beneath a steadfast roof of glass. Dark and sullen the river
+sulks its cheerless way, enlivened but by the sheldrake that still
+courses his prey in the icy water, and the mink that like a fleet black
+shadow steals along the silent banks. Gaudy wood duck and swift-winged
+teal have long since departed and left stream and shore to these
+marauders and to the trapper, who now gathers here his latest harvest.
+
+The marshes are silent and make no sign of life, though beneath the
+domes of many a sedge-built roof the unseen muskrats are astir, and
+under the icy cover of the channels fare to and fro on their affairs of
+life, undisturbed by any turmoil of the upper world.
+
+When the winds are asleep the lake bears on its placid breast the
+moveless images of its quiet shores, deserted now by the latest pleasure
+seekers among whose tenantless camps the wild wood-folk wander as
+fearlessly as if the foot of man had never trodden here. From the still
+midwaters far away a loon halloos to the winds to come forth from their
+caves, and yells out his mad laughter in anticipation of the coming
+storm. A herald breeze blackens the water with its advancing steps, and
+with a roar of its trumpets the angry wind sweeps down, driving the
+white-crested ranks of waves to assault the shores. Far up the long
+incline of pebbly beaches they rush, and leaping up the walls of rock
+hang fetters of ice upon the writhing trees. Out of the seething waters
+arise lofty columns of vapor, which like a host of gigantic phantoms
+stalk, silent and majestic, above the turmoil, till they fall in
+wind-tossed showers of frost flakes.
+
+There are days when almost complete silence possesses the woods, yet
+listening intently one may hear the continual movement of myriads of
+snow fleas pattering on the fallen leaves like the soft purr of such
+showers as one might imagine would fall in Lilliput.
+
+With footfall so light that he is seen close at hand sooner than heard,
+a hare limps past; too early clad in his white fur that shall make him
+inconspicuous amid the winter snow, his coming shines from afar through
+the gray underbrush and on the tawny leaves. Unseen amid his dun and
+gray environment, the ruffed grouse skulks unheard, till he bursts away
+in thunderous flight. Overhead, invisible in the lofty thicket of a
+hemlock's foliage, a squirrel drops a slow patter of cone chips, while
+undisturbed a nuthatch winds his spiral way down the smooth trunk. Faint
+and far away, yet clear, resound the axe strokes of a chopper, and at
+intervals the muffled roar of a tree's downfall.
+
+Silent and moveless cascades of ice veil the rocky steeps where in more
+genial days tiny rivulets dripped down the ledges and mingled their
+musical tinkle with the songs of birds and the flutter of green leaves.
+
+Winter berries and bittersweet still give here and there a fleck of
+bright color to the universal gray and dun of the trees, and the carpet
+of cast-off leaves and the dull hue of the evergreens but scarcely
+relieve the sombreness of the woodland landscape.
+
+Spanning forest and field with a low flat arch of even gray, hangs a sky
+as cold as the landscape it domes and whose mountain borders lie hidden
+in its hazy foundations. Through this canopy of suspended snow the low
+noontide sun shows but a blotch of yellowish gray, rayless and giving
+forth no warmth, and, as it slants toward its brief decline, grows yet
+dimmer till it is quite blotted out in the gloom of the half-spent
+afternoon.
+
+The expectant hush that broods over the forlorn and naked earth is
+broken only by the twitter of a flock of snow buntings which, like a
+straight-blown flurry of flakes, drift across the fields, and, sounding
+solemnly from the depths of the woods, the hollow hoot of a great owl.
+Then the first flakes come wavering down, then blurring all the
+landscape into vague unreality they fall faster, with a soft purr on
+frozen grass and leaves till it becomes unheard on the thickening
+noiseless mantle of snow. Deeper and deeper the snow infolds the earth,
+covering all its unsightliness of death and desolation.
+
+Now white-furred hare and white-feathered bunting are at one with the
+white-clad world wherein they move, and we, so lately accustomed to the
+greenness of summer and the gorgeousness of autumn, wondering at the
+ease wherewith we accept this marvel of transformation, welcome these
+white December days and in them still find content.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+WINTER VOICES
+
+
+Out of her sleep nature yet gives forth voices betokening that life
+abides beneath the semblance of death, that her warm heart still beats
+under the white shroud that infolds her rigid breast.
+
+A smothered tinkle as of muffled bells comes up from the streams through
+their double roofing of snow and ice, and the frozen pulse of the trees
+complains of its thralldom with a resonant twang as of a strained cord
+snapped asunder.
+
+Beneath their frozen plains, the lakes bewail their imprisonment with
+hollow moans awakening a wild and mournful chorus of echoes from
+sleeping shores that answer now no caress of ripples nor angry stroke of
+waves nor dip and splash of oar and paddle.
+
+The breeze stirs leafless trees and shaggy evergreens to a murmur that
+is sweet, if sadder than they gave it in the leafy days of summer, when
+it bore the perfume of flowers and the odor of green fields, and one may
+imagine the spirit of springtime and summer lingers among the naked
+boughs, voicing memory and hope.
+
+Amid all the desolation of their woodland haunts the squirrels chatter
+their delight in windless days of sunshine, and scoff at biting cold and
+wintry blasts. The nuthatch winds his tiny trumpet, the titmouse pipes
+his cheery note, the jay tries the innumerable tricks of his unmusical
+voice, and from their rollicking flight athwart the wavering slant of
+snowflakes drifts the creaking twitter of buntings.
+
+The sharp, resonant strokes of the woodman's axe and the groaning
+downfall of the monarchs that it lays low, the shouts of teamsters, the
+occasional report of a gun, the various sounds of distant farmstead
+life, the jangle of sleigh bells on far-off highways, the rumbling roar
+of a railroad train rushing and panting along its iron path, and the
+bellowing of its far-echoed signals, all proclaim how busily affairs of
+life and pleasure still go on while the summer-wearied earth lies
+wrapped in her winter sleep.
+
+Night, stealing upon her in dusky pallor, under cloudy skies, or
+silvering her face with moonbeams and starlight, brings other and wilder
+voices. Solemnly the unearthly trumpet of the owl resounds from his
+woodland hermitage, the fox's gasping bark, wild and uncanny, marks at
+intervals his wayward course across the frozen fields on some errand of
+love or freebooting, and, swelling and falling with puff and lapse of
+the night wind, as mournful and lonesome as the voice of a vagrant
+spirit, comes from the mountain ridges the baying of a hound, hunting
+alone and unheeded, while his master basks in the comfort of his
+fireside.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+THE VARYING HARE
+
+
+It is wonderful that with such a host of enemies to maintain himself
+against, the varying hare may still be counted as one of our familiar
+acquaintances. Except in the depths of the great wildernesses, he has no
+longer to fear the wolf, the wolverine, the panther, and the lesser
+_felidae_, but where the younger woodlands have become his congenial
+home, they are also the home of a multitude of relentless enemies. The
+hawk, whose keen eyes pierce the leafy roof of the woods, wheels above
+him as he crouches in his form. When he goes abroad under the moon and
+stars, the terrible shadow of the horned owl falls upon his path, and
+the fox lurks beside it to waylay him, and the clumsy raccoon, waddling
+home from a cornfield revel, may blunder upon the timid wayfarer.
+
+But of all his enemies none is more inveterate than man, though he is
+not, as are the others, impelled by necessity, but only by that
+savagery, the survival of barbarism, which we dignify by the name of the
+sporting instinct.
+
+Against them all, how slight seem the defenses of such a weak and timid
+creature. Yet impartial nature, having compassed him about with foes,
+has shod his feet with swiftness and silence, and clad his body with an
+almost invisible garment. The vagrant zephyrs touch the fallen leaves
+more noisily than his soft pads press them. The first snow that whitens
+the fading gorgeousness of the forest carpet falls scarcely more
+silently.
+
+Among the tender greens of early summer and the darker verdure of
+midsummer, the hare's brown form is as inconspicuous as a tuft of last
+year's leaves, and set in the brilliancy of autumnal tints, or the
+russet hue of their decay, it still eludes the eye. Then winter clothes
+him in her own whiteness so he may sit unseen upon her lap.
+
+When he has donned his winter suit too early and his white coat is
+dangerously conspicuous on the brown leaves and among the misty gray of
+naked undergrowth, he permits your near approach as confidently as if he
+were of a color with his surroundings. Is he not aware that his spotless
+raiment betrays him, or does he trust that he may be mistaken for a
+white stone or a scroll of bark sloughed from a white birch? That would
+hardly save him from the keener-sensed birds and beasts of prey, but may
+fool your dull eyes.
+
+In summer wanderings in the woods you rarely catch sight of him, though
+coming upon many faintly traced paths where he and his wife and their
+brown babies make their nightly way among the ferns. Nor are you often
+favored with a sight of him in more frequent autumnal tramps, unless
+when he is fleeing before the hounds whose voices guide you to a point
+of observation. He has now no eyes nor ears for anything but the
+terrible clamor that pursues him wherever he turns, however he doubles.
+If a shot brings him down and does not kill him, you will hear a cry so
+piteous that it will spoil your pleasant dreams of sport for many a
+night.
+
+After a snowfall a single hare will in one night make such a multitude
+of tracks as will persuade you that a dozen have been abroad. Perhaps
+the trail is so intricately tangled with a purpose of misleading
+pursuit, perhaps it is but the record of saunterings as idle as your
+own.
+
+As thus you wander through the pearl-enameled arches, your roving
+glances are arrested by a rounded form which, as white and motionless as
+everything around it, yet seems in some way not so lifeless. You note
+that the broad footprints end there, and then become aware of two wide,
+bright eyes, unblinkingly regarding you from the fluffy tuft of
+whiteness. How perfectly assured he is of his invisibility, and if he
+had but closed his bright eyes you might not guess that he was anything
+but a snow-covered clump of moss. How still and breathless he sits till
+you almost touch him, and then the white clod suddenly flashes into life
+and impetuous motion, bounding away in a halo of feathery flakes as if
+he himself were dissolving into white vapor.
+
+Happy he, if he might so elude all foes; but alas for him, if the
+swift-winged owl had been as close above him or the agile fox within
+leap. Then instead of this glimpse of beautiful wild life to treasure in
+your memory, you would only have read the story of a brief tragedy,
+briefly written, with a smirch of blood and a tuft of rumpled fur.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+THE WINTER CAMP-FIRE
+
+
+The chief requisite of a winter camp-fire is volume. The feeble flame
+and meagre bed of embers that are a hot discomfort to the summer camper,
+while he hovers over coffee-pot and frying-pan, would be no more than
+the glow of a candle toward tempering this nipping air. This fire must
+be no dainty nibbler of chips and twigs that a boy's hatchet may
+furnish, but a roaring devourer of logs, for whose carving the axe must
+be long and stoutly wielded--a very glutton of solid fuel, continually
+demanding more and licking with its broad red tongues at the branches
+that sway and toss high above in its hot breath.
+
+So fierce is it that you approach cautiously to feed it and the snow
+shrinks away from it and can quench of it only the tiny sparks that are
+spit out upon it. You must not be too familiar with it, yet it is your
+friend after its own manner, fighting away for you the creeping demon of
+cold, and holding at bay, on the rim of its glare, the wolf and the
+panther.
+
+With its friendly offices are mingled many elfish tricks. It boils your
+pot just to the point you wish, then boils it over and licks up the
+fragrant brew of celestial leaf or Javanese berry. It roasts or broils
+your meat to a turn, then battles with you for it and sears your fingers
+when you strive to snatch the morsel from its jaws, and perhaps burns it
+to a crisp before your very eyes, vouchsafing but the tantalizing
+fragrance of the feast.
+
+Then it may fall into the friendliest and most companionable of moods,
+lazily burning its great billets of ancient wood while you burn the
+Virginian weed, singing to you songs of summer, its tongues of flame
+murmuring like the south wind among green leaves, and mimicking the
+chirp of the crickets and the cicada's cry in the simmer of exuding sap
+and vent of gas, and out of its smoke blossom sparks, that drift away
+in its own currents like red petals of spent flowers.
+
+It paints pictures, some weird or grotesque, some beautiful, now of
+ghosts and goblins, now of old men, now of fair women, now of lakes
+crinkled with golden waves and towers on pine-crowned crags ruddy with
+the glow of sunset, sunny meadows and pasture lands, with farmsteads and
+flocks and herds.
+
+The ancient trees that rear themselves aloft like strong pillars set to
+hold up the narrow arch of darkness, exhale an atmosphere of the past,
+in which your thoughts, waking or sleeping, drift backward to the old
+days when men whose dust was long since mingled with the forest mould
+moved here in the rage of war and the ardor of the chase. Shadowy forms
+of dusky warriors, horribly marked in war paint, gather about the
+camp-fire and sit in its glare in voiceless council, or encircle it in
+the grotesquely terrible movement of the war dance.
+
+Magically the warlike scene changes to one of peace. The red hunters
+steal silently in with burdens of game. The squaws sit in the ruddy
+light plying their various labors, while their impish children play
+around them in mimicry of battle and the chase.
+
+All then vanish, and white-clad soldiers of France bivouac in their
+place--or red-coated Britons, or Provincial rangers, unsoldierly to look
+upon, in home-spun garb, but keen-eyed, alert, and the bravest of the
+brave.
+
+These dissolve like wreaths of smoke, and a solitary white hunter,
+clothed all in buckskin, sits over against you. His long flint-lock
+rifle lying across his lap, he is looking with rapt gaze into the fire,
+dreaming as you are.
+
+So, growing brighter as the daylight grows dim and the gloaming thickens
+to the mirk, and paling again as daylight creeps slowly back upon the
+world, but always bright in the diurnal twilight of the woods, the
+camp-fire weaves and breaks its magic spells, now leaping, now lapsing,
+as its own freaks move it. Then, perhaps, when it has charmed you far
+across the border of dreamland and locked your eyes in the blindness of
+sleep, it will startle you back to the cold reality of the wintry woods
+with a crash and roar of sudden revival.
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+JANUARY DAYS
+
+
+In these midwinter days, how muffled is the earth in its immaculate
+raiment, so disguised in whiteness that familiar places are strange,
+rough hollows smoothed to mere undulations, deceitful to the eye and
+feet, and level fields so piled with heaps and ridges that their owners
+scarcely recognize them. The hovel is as regally roofed as the palace,
+the rudest fence is a hedge of pearl, finer than a wall of marble, and
+the meanest wayside weed is a white flower of fairyland.
+
+The woods, which frost and November winds stripped of their leafy
+thatch, are roofed again, now with an arabesque of alabaster more
+delicate than the green canopy that summer unfolded, and all the floor
+is set in noiseless pavement, traced with a shifting pattern of blue
+shadows. In these silent aisles the echoes are smothered at their
+birth. There is no response of airy voices to the faint call of the
+winter birds. The sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther than the
+pungent fragrance of the smoke that drifts in a blue haze from the
+chopper's fire. The report of the gun awakes no answering report, and
+each mellow note of the hound comes separate to the ear, with no jangle
+of reverberations.
+
+Fox and hound wallow through the snow a crumbling furrow that
+obliterates identity of either trail, yet there are tracks that tell as
+plain as written words who made them. Here have fallen, lightly as
+snowflakes, the broad pads of the hare, white as the snow he trod;
+there, the parallel tracks of another winter masker, the weasel, and
+those of the squirrel, linking tree to tree. The leaps of a tiny
+wood-mouse are lightly marked upon the feathery surface to where there
+is the imprint of a light, swift pinion on either side, and the little
+story of his wandering ends--one crimson blood drop the period that
+marks the finis.
+
+In the blue shadow at the bottom of that winding furrow are the dainty
+footprints of a grouse, and you wonder why he, so strong of wing,
+should choose to wade laboriously the clogging snow even in his briefest
+trip, rather than make his easy way through the unresisting air, and the
+snow-written record of his wayward wanderings tells not why. Suddenly,
+as if a mine had been sprung where your next footstep should fall and
+with almost as startling, though harmless effect, another of his wild
+tribe bursts upward through the unmarked white floor and goes whirring
+and clattering away, scattering in powdery ruin the maze of delicate
+tracery the snowfall wrought; and vanishes, leaving only an aerial
+pathway of naked twigs to mark his impetuous passage.
+
+In the twilight of an evergreen thicket sits a great horned owl like a
+hermit in his cell in pious contemplation of his own holiness and the
+world's wickedness. But this recluse hates not sin, only daylight and
+mankind. Out in the fields you may find the white-robed brother of this
+gray friar, a pilgrim from the far north, brooding in the very face of
+the sun, on some stack or outlying barn, but he will not suffer you to
+come so near to him as will this solemn anchorite who stares at you
+unmoved as a graven image till you come within the very shadows of his
+roof.
+
+Marsh and channel are scarcely distinguishable now but by the white
+domes of the muskrats' winter homes and here and there a sprawling
+thicket or button bush, for the rank growth of weeds is beaten flat, and
+the deep snow covers it and the channel ice in one unbroken sheet.
+
+Champlain's sheltered bays and coves are frozen and white with snow or
+frost, and the open water, whether still or storm-tossed, black beneath
+clouds or bluer than the blue dome that arches it, looks as cold as ice
+and snow. Sometimes its steaming breath lies close above it, sometimes
+mounts in swaying, lofty columns to the sky, but always cold and
+ghostly, without expression of warmth or life.
+
+So far away to hoary peaks that shine with a glittering gleam against
+the blue rim of the sky, or to the furthest bluegray line of woodland
+that borders the horizon, stretches the universal whiteness, so coldly
+shines the sun from the low curve of his course, and so chilly comes the
+lightest waft of wind from wheresoever it listeth, that it tasks the
+imagination to picture any land on all the earth where spring is just
+awakening fresh life, or where summer dwells amid green leaves and
+bright flowers, the music of birds and running waters, and of warm waves
+on pleasant shores, or autumn yet lingers in the gorgeousness of many
+hues. How far off beyond this world seems the possibility of such
+seasons, how enduring and relentless this which encompasses us.
+
+And then, at the close of the brief white day, the sunset paints a
+promise and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the sky. The gray clouds
+kindle with red and yellow fire that burns about their purple hearts in
+tints of infinite variety, while behind them and the dark blue rampart
+of the mountains flames the last glory of the departing sun, fading in a
+tint of tender green to the upper blue. Even the cold snow at our feet
+flushes with warm color, and the eastern hills blush roseate against
+the climbing, darkening shadow of the earth.
+
+It is as if some land of summer whose brightness has never been told lay
+unveiled before us, its delectable mountains splendid with innumerable
+hues, its lakes and streams of gold rippling to purple shores seeming
+not so far before us but that we might, by a little journey, come to
+them.
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE
+
+
+When the charitable mantle of the snow has covered the ugliness of the
+earth, as one looks towards the woodlands he may see a distant dark
+speck emerge from the blue shadow of the woods and crawl slowly
+houseward. If born to the customs of this wintry land, he may guess at
+once what it is; if not, speculation, after a little, gives way to
+certainty, when the indistinct atom grows into a team of quick-stepping
+horses or deliberate oxen hauling a sled-load of wood to the farmhouse.
+
+It is more than that. It is a part of the woods themselves, with much of
+their wildness clinging to it, and with records, slight and fragmentary,
+yet legible, of the lives of trees and birds and beasts and men coming
+to our door.
+
+Before the sounds of the creaking sled and the answering creak of the
+snow are heard, one sees the regular puffs of the team's breath jetting
+out and climbing the cold air. The head and shoulders of the muffled
+driver then appear, as he sticks by narrow foothold to the hinder part
+of his sled, or trots behind it beating his breast with his numb hands.
+Prone like a crawling band of scouts, endwise like battering-rams, not
+upright with green banners waving, Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane to
+fight King Frost.
+
+As the woodpile grows at the farmhouse door in a huge windrow of
+sled-length wood or an even wall of cord wood, so in the woods there
+widens a patch of uninterrupted daylight. Deep shade and barred and
+netted shadow turn to almost even whiteness, as the axe saps the
+foundations of summer homes of birds and the winter fastnesses of the
+squirrels and raccoons. Here are the tracks of sled and team, where they
+wound among rocks and stumps and over cradle knolls to make up a load;
+and there are those of the chopper by the stump where he stood to fell
+the tree, and along the great trough made by its fall. The snow is
+flecked with chips, dark or pale according to their kind, just as they
+alighted from their short flight, bark up or down or barkless or
+edgewise, and with dry twigs and torn scraps of scattered moss.
+
+When the chopper comes to his work in the morning, he finds traces of
+nightly visitors to his white island that have drifted to its shores out
+of the gray sea of woods. Here is the print of the hare's furry foot
+where he came to nibble the twigs of poplar and birch that yesterday
+were switching the clouds, but have fallen, manna-like, from skyward to
+feed him. A fox has skirted its shadowy margin, then ventured to explore
+it, and in a thawy night a raccoon has waddled across it.
+
+The woodman is apt to kindle a fire more for company than warmth, though
+he sits by it to eat his cold dinner, casting the crumbs to the
+chickadees, which come fearlessly about him at all times. Blazing or
+smouldering by turns, as it is fed or starved, the fire humanizes the
+woods more than the man does. Now and then it draws to it a visitor,
+oftenest a fox-hunter who has lost his hound, and stops for a moment to
+light his pipe at the embers and to ask if his dog has been seen or
+heard. Then he wades off through the snow, and is presently swallowed
+out of sight by gray trees and blue shadows. Or the hound comes in
+search of his master or a lost trail. He halts for an instant, with a
+wistful look on his sorrowful face, then disappears, nosing his way into
+the maw of the woods.
+
+If the wood is cut "sled length," which is a saving of time and also of
+chips, which will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the
+tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the
+woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a "day man,"
+and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a
+professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too
+high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble
+in making their way through them than over them; and the man comes and
+goes according to his ambition to earn money.
+
+In whichever capacity the chopper plies his axe, he is pretty sure to
+bring no sentimentalism to his task. He inherits the feeling that was
+held by the old pioneers toward trees, who looked upon the noblest of
+them as only giant weeds, encumbering the ground, and best got rid of by
+the shortest means. To him the tree is a foe worthy of no respect or
+mercy, and he feels the triumph of a savage conquerer when it comes
+crashing down and he mounts the prostrate trunk to dismember it; the
+more year-marks encircling its heart, the greater his victory. To his
+ears, its many tongues tell nothing, or preach only heresy. Away with
+the old tree to the flames! To give him his due, he is a skillful
+executioner, and will compel a tree to fall across any selected stump
+within its length. If one could forget the tree, it is a pretty sight to
+watch the easy swing of the axe, and see how unerringly every blow goes
+to its mark, knocking out chips of a span's breadth. It does not look
+difficult nor like work; but could you strike "twice in a place," or in
+half a day bring down a tree twice as thick as your body? The wise
+farmer cuts, for fuel, only the dead and decaying trees in his woodlot,
+leaving saplings and thrifty old trees to "stand up and grow better," as
+the Yankee saying is.
+
+There is a prosperous and hospitable look in a great woodpile at a
+farmhouse door. Logs with the moss of a hundred years on them, breathing
+the odors of the woods, have come to warm the inmates and all in-comers.
+The white smoke of these chimneys is spicy with the smell of seasoned
+hard wood, and has a savor of roasts and stews that makes one hungry. If
+you take the back track on a trail of pitchy smoke, it is sure to lead
+you to a squalid threshold with its starved heap of pine roots and
+half-decayed wood. Thrown down carelessly beside it is a dull axe,
+wielded as need requires with spiteful awkwardness by a slatternly
+woman, or laboriously upheaved and let fall with uncertain stroke by a
+small boy.
+
+The Yankees who possess happy memories of the great open fires of old
+time are growing few, but Whittier has embalmed for all time, in
+"Snow-Bound," their comfort and cheer and picturesqueness. When the
+trees of the virgin forest cast their shadows on the newly risen roof
+there was no forecasting provision for winter. The nearest green tree
+was cut, and hauled, full length, to the door, and with it the nearest
+dry one was cut to match the span of the wide fireplace; and when these
+were gone, another raid was made upon the woods; and so from hand to
+mouth the fire was fed. It was not uncommon to draw the huge backlogs on
+to the hearth with a horse, and sometimes a yoke of oxen were so
+employed. Think of a door wide enough for this: half of the side of a
+house to barricade against the savage Indians and savage cold! It was
+the next remove from a camp-fire. There was further likeness to it in
+the tales that were told beside it, of hunting and pioneer hardships, of
+wild beasts and Indian forays, while the eager listeners drew to a
+closer circle on the hearth, and the awed children cast covert scared
+backward glances at the crouching and leaping shadows that thronged on
+the walls, and the great samp-kettle bubbled and seethed on its trammel,
+and the forgotten johnny-cake scorched on its tilted board.
+
+As conveniently near the shed as possible, the pile of sled-length wood
+is stretching itself slowly, a huge vertebrate, every day or two gaining
+in length; a joint of various woods, with great trunks at the bottom,
+then smaller ones, gradually growing less to the topping out of saplings
+and branches. Here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt,
+with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of
+them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method
+of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew
+the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the
+aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable
+tools for the purpose as any they had for another. These more distinct
+marks show where the auger of later years made its wounds. The old tree
+has distilled its sweets for two races and many generations of men,
+first into the bark buckets of Waubanakis, then into the ruder troughs
+of Yankee pioneers, then into the more convenient wide-bottomed wooden
+sap-tubs; and at last, when the march of improvement has spoiled the
+wilderness of the woods with trim-built sugar-houses and patent
+evaporators, the sap drips with resounding metallic tinkle into pails of
+shining tin. Now the old maple has come to perform its last office, of
+warming and cooking the food for a generation that was unborn when it
+was yet a lusty tree.
+
+Beside it lies a great wild-cherry tree that somehow escaped the cabinet
+maker when there was one in every town and cherry wood was in fashion.
+Its fruit mollified the harshness of the New England rum of many an
+old-time raising and husking. Next is a yellow birch with a shaggy mane
+of rustling bark along its whole length, like a twelve-foot piece of the
+sea serpent drifted ashore and hauled inland; then a white birch, no
+longer white, but gray with a coating of moss, and black with belts of
+old peelings, made for the patching of canoes and roofing of shanties.
+
+With these lies a black birch, whose once smooth bark age has scaled and
+furrowed, and robbed of all its tenderness and most of its pungent,
+aromatic flavor. Some of it yet lingers in the younger topmost twigs
+which the hired man brings home to the little folks, who fall to gnawing
+them like a colony of beavers. By it is an elm, whose hollow trunk was
+the home of raccoons when it stood on its buttressed stump in the swamp.
+Near by is a beech, its smooth bark wrinkled where branches bent away
+from it, and blotched with spots of white and patches of black and gray
+lichen. It is marked with innumerable fine scratches, the track of the
+generations of squirrels that have made it their highway; and among
+these, the wider apart and parallel nail-marks of a raccoon, and also
+the drilling of woodpeckers. Here, too, are traces of man's visitation,
+for distorted with the growth of years are initials, and a heart and
+dart that symbolized the tender passion of some one of the past, who
+wandered, love-sick, in the shadow of the woods. How long ago did
+death's inevitable dart pierce his heart? Here he wrote a little of his
+life's history, and now his name and that of his mistress are so
+completely forgotten one cannot guess them by their first letters
+inscribed in the yesterday of the forest's years.
+
+Above these logs, rolled up on skids or sled stakes, are smaller yet
+goodly bodies of white ash, full of oars for the water and rails for the
+land; and of black ash, as full of barrel hoops and basket splints, the
+ridged and hoary bark shagged with patches of dark moss; and a pine too
+knotty for sawing, with old turpentine boxes gashing its lower part, the
+dry resin in them half overgrown, but odorous still; and oaks that have
+borne their last acorns; and a sharded hickory that will never furnish
+another nut for boy or squirrel, but now, and only this once, flail
+handles, swingles, and oxbows, and helves for axes to hew down its
+brethren, and wood to warm its destroyers, and smoke and fry ham for
+them; and a basswood that will give the wild bees no more blossoms in
+July, hollow-hearted and unfit for sleigh or toboggan, wood straight
+rifted and so white that a chip of it will hardly show on the snow, but
+as unprofitable food for fires as the poplars beside it, which, in the
+yellow-green of youth or the furrowed gray of age, have shivered their
+last.
+
+Still higher in the woodpile are white birches, yet in the smooth skin
+of their prime, which is fit to be fashioned into drinking cups and
+berry baskets, or to furnish a page for my lady's album. Here are
+hardhacks, some with grain winding like the grooves of a rifle. This is
+the timber the Indians made their bows of, and which now serves the same
+purpose for the young savages whom we have always with us. There are
+sinewy blue beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads and the "beech seals"
+of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a man's thigh, a
+size at which they mostly stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet unlike
+them, sets folks to guessing what kind of wood it is. He will hit the
+mark who fires at random the names "shadblow," "service-berry," or
+"amelanchier." If the axe had been merciful, in early May its branches
+would have been as white with blossoms as if the last April snow still
+clung to them. Tossed on a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small
+stuff,--saplings improvidently cut, short-lived striped maple, and
+dogwood, the slender topmost lengths of great trees, once the perches of
+hawks and crows, and such large branches as were not too crooked to lie
+still on the sled.
+
+The snow-fleas, harbingers and attendants of thaws, are making the snow
+in the woods gray with their restless myriads, when the sled makes its
+last trip across the slushy fields, which are fast turning from white to
+dun under the March winds and showers and sunshine.
+
+The completed woodpile basks in the growing warmth, as responsive to the
+touch of spring as if every trunk yet upheld its branches in the forest.
+The buds swell on every chance-spared twig, and sap starts from the
+severed ducts. From the pine drip slowly lengthening stalactites of
+amber, from the hickory thick beads of honeydew, and from the maples a
+flow of sweet that calls the bees from their hives across the melting
+drifts. Their busy hum makes an island of summer sound in the midst of
+the silent ebbing tide of winter.
+
+As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy
+bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on
+while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled odors of the
+many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home
+in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher
+music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the
+longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of
+the axe,--fiddle, bass-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all
+somehow in tune. The parts stop a little when the fiddler saws off his
+string, the two drawers of the long bass-viol bow sever theirs, and the
+drummer splits his drum, but each is soon outfitted again, and the
+funeral march of the woodpile goes on. Here is the most delightful of
+places for those busy idlers the children, for it is full of pioneers'
+and hunters' cabins, robbers' caves and bears' dens, and of treasures of
+moss and gum and birch, and of punk, the tinder of the Indians and our
+forefathers, now gone out of use except for some conservative Canuck to
+light his pipe or for boys to touch off their small ordnance.
+
+It is a pretty sight to watch the nuthatches and titmice searching the
+grooves of the bark for their slender fare, or a woodpecker chopping
+his best for a living with his sharp-pointed axe, all having followed
+their rightful possessions from the woods, taking perhaps the track of
+the sled. It is wonderful to hear the auger of the pine-borer, now
+thawed into life, crunching its unseen way through the wood. Then there
+is always the chance of the axe unlocking the stores of deermice, quarts
+of beechnuts with all the shells neatly peeled off; and what if it
+should happen to open a wild-bee hive full of honey!
+
+If the man comes who made the round of the barns in the fall and early
+winter with his threshing-machine, having exchanged it for a sawing
+machine, he makes short work of our woodpile. A day or two of stumbling
+clatter of the horses in their treadmill, and the buzzing and screeching
+of the whirling saw, gnaws it into a heap of blocks.
+
+Our lounging-place and the children's wooden playground have gone, and
+all the picturesqueness and woodsiness have disappeared as completely as
+when splitting has made only firewood of the pile. It will give warmth
+and comfort from the stove, but in that black sepulchre all its beauty
+is swallowed out of sight forever. If it can go to a generous fireplace,
+it is beautified again in the glowing and fading embers that paint
+innumerable shifting pictures, while the leaping flames sing the old
+song of the wind in the branches.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION
+
+
+It seems quite probable that this nineteenth century may be unpleasantly
+memorable in centuries to come as that in which many species of animate
+and inanimate nature became extinct. It has witnessed the extinction of
+the great auk, so utterly swept off the face of the earth that the skin,
+or even the egg of one, is a small fortune to the possessor. Reduced
+from the hundreds of thousands of twenty-five years ago to the few
+hundred of to-day, it needs but a few years to compass the complete
+annihilation of the bison. It is not improbable that the elk and the
+antelope will be overtaken by almost as swift a fate. The skin hunters,
+and the game butchers miscalled sportsmen, are making almost as speedy
+way with them as they have with the buffalo.
+
+The common deer, hedged within their narrowing ranges by civilization,
+and hunted by all methods in all seasons, may outlast the century, but
+they will have become wofully scarce at the close of it, even in such
+regions as the Adirondacks which seem to have been set apart by nature
+especially for the preservation of wild life.
+
+The wild turkey is passing away, and it is a question of but few years
+when he shall have departed forever. In some localities the next noblest
+of our game birds, the ruffed grouse, has become almost a thing of the
+past, and in some years is everywhere so scarce that there are sad
+forebodings of his complete disappearance from the rugged hills of which
+he seems as much a belonging as the lichened rocks, the arbutus and the
+wind-swept evergreens. One little island on the New England coast holds
+the handful that is left of the race of heath hens.
+
+The woodcock is being cultivated and improved and murdered out of
+existence with clearing and draining and summer shooting, and
+unseasonable shooting is doing the same for many kinds of waterfowl. In
+the Eastern States a wild pigeon is a rare sight now, and has been for
+years; the netters and slaughterers have done their work too thoroughly.
+
+Gentle woman is making an end of the song-birds that she may trick her
+headgear in barbaric and truly savage fashion. The brighter plumaged
+small birds are becoming noticeably scarce even in those parts of the
+country that the milliners' collector and the pot-naturalist have not
+yet invaded, and such as the scarlet tanager, never anywhere numerous,
+are like to be soon "collected" out of living existence. If they are to
+be saved, it is by no dallying, nor slow awakening of popular feeling in
+their behalf.
+
+There will be pine-trees, no doubt, for centuries to come, but who that
+live twenty years hence will see one of these venerable monarchs of the
+woods towering above all other forest growth, or see any ancient tree,
+however historic or precious for its age and beauty and majesty and
+mystery of long past years, if it is worth the cutting for timber or
+fuel?
+
+Even the lesser growths of the old woods are passing away. Some, as the
+carpeting sphagnum and the sprawling hobble bush, disappear through
+changed conditions; others, as the medicinal spikenard, sarsaparilla,
+and ginseng, and the decorative running pine and the arbutus, through
+ruthless, greedy gathering, which leaves no root nor ripened seed to
+perpetuate their kind.
+
+An old man may be glad that his eyes are not to behold the coming
+desolation, but he must be sad when he thinks of the poor inheritance of
+his children.
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+THE PERSISTENCY OF PESTS
+
+
+From the sowing and planting of his seed, almost indeed from the turning
+of the furrow, the farmer enters upon a contest with the weeds, for a
+place in which his crops may grow, and if he or the crops are not
+vanquished, as the weeds never are, the warfare continues till harvest
+time.
+
+While he, with infinite labor, prepares the ground and sows his seed
+with all care, praying that drouth may not wither nor floods drown it,
+and that frosts may not cut down the tender plants, the winds of heaven
+and the fowls of the air scatter broadcast the seeds of the noxious
+weeds, or these lie dormant in the ground awaiting opportunity. They
+germinate in sterile places, fence corners and nooks of the wayside, and
+flourish alike in scorching sunshine and in sodden soil.
+
+Weeds defy the latest and the earliest frosts, grow with their roots in
+the air; and cut down, spring up, grow on, blossoming and ripening their
+seed in creeping stealth and ever unscathed by blight; and so flourish
+in spite of all unkindliness of man or stress of nature, that the
+husbandman wishes that they might by some freak of demand become the
+useful plants, his present crop the undesired ones.
+
+Somewhat the same position in which weeds stand opposed to the plants
+which the husbandman depends upon for his livelihood, vermin hold toward
+the beasts and birds upon which the sportsman depends for his
+recreation. While they whose protection men endeavor to maintain during
+the season of procreation, and at times when scarcity of food prevails,
+decrease often to complete extinction, the vermin, whom the hand of man
+is always against, continue to increase and multiply, or at least hold
+their own. With them as with the weeds nature seems to deal with a
+kinder hand. She spares and nourishes them, while she destroys their
+betters.
+
+The snow crust, which walls the quail in a living tomb, makes a royal
+banqueting hall for the pestiferous field mice, where they feast and
+revel in plenty, secure from all their enemies, feathered or furred. It
+impounds the deer, but gives free range to the wolf and to his as
+pitiless two-legged brother, the crust hunter.
+
+The wet seasons that drown the callow woodcock and grouse work no harm
+to the ravenous brood of the hawk and owl, nor to the litter of fox,
+mink, or weasel. Wet or dry, hot or cold, the year fosters them
+throughout its varied round.
+
+Winged ticks kill the grouse, but the owl endures their companionship
+with sedate serenity and thrives with a swarm of the parasites in the
+covert of his feathers.
+
+The skunk has always been killed on sight as a pest that the world would
+be the sweeter for being rid of. In later years the warfare against him
+has received an impetus from the value of his fur, but though this has
+gone on relentlessly for many years, his tribe still live to load the
+air with a fragrance that incites the ambitious trapper to further
+conquest.
+
+All the year round, farmers and their boys wage war upon the crows, but
+each returning autumn sees the columns of the black army moving
+southward with apparently unthinned ranks, while, year by year, the
+harried platoons of ducks and geese return fewer and less frequent.
+Those detested foreigners, the English sparrows, increase and multiply
+in spite of bitter winters and righteous persecution, while our natives,
+the beloved song-birds, diminish in numbers. On every hand we find the
+undesirable in animated nature, the birds and beasts that we would
+gladly be rid of, maintaining their numbers, while those whose increase
+we desire are losing ground and tending toward extinction.
+
+The prospect for the sportsman of the future is indeed gloomy, unless he
+shall make game of the pests and become a hunter of skunks and a shooter
+of crows and sparrows. Who can say that a hundred years hence the
+leading sportsmen of the period will not be wrangling over the points
+and merits of their skunk and woodchuck dogs and bragging of their bags
+of crows and sparrows?
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+THE WEASEL
+
+
+A chain that is blown away by the wind and melted by the sun, links with
+pairs of parallel dots the gaps of farm fences, and winds through and
+along walls and zigzag lines of rails, is likely to be the most visible
+sign that you will find in winter of one bold and persistent little
+hunter's presence.
+
+Still less likely are you to be aware of it in summer or fall, even by
+such traces of his passage, for he is in league with nature to keep his
+secrets. When every foot of his outdoor wandering must be recorded she
+makes him as white as the snow whereon it is imprinted, save his beady
+eyes and dark tail-tip. When summer is green and autumn gay or sad of
+hue she clothes him in the brown wherewith she makes so many of her wild
+children inconspicuous.
+
+Yet you may see him, now and then, in his white suit or in his brown,
+gliding with lithe, almost snake-like movement along the lower fence
+rails, going forth hunting or bearing home his game, a bird or a fat
+field-mouse. In a cranny of an old lichen-scaled stone wall you may see
+his bright eyes gleaming out of the darkness, like dewdrops caught in a
+spider's web, and then the brown head thrust cautiously forth to peer
+curiously at you. Then he may favor you with the exhibition of an
+acrobatic feat: his hinder paws being on the ground in the position of
+standing, he twists his slender body so that his forepaws are placed in
+just the reverse position on the stone or rail above him, and he looks
+upward and backward.
+
+He may be induced to favor you with intimate and familiar acquaintance,
+to take bits of meat from your hand and even to climb to your lap and
+search your pockets and suffer you to lay a gentle hand upon him, but he
+has sharp teeth wherewith to resent too great liberties.
+
+While he may be almost a pet of a household and quite a welcome visitor
+of rat-infested premises, he becomes one of the worst enemies of the
+poultry-wife when he is tempted to fall upon her broods of chicks. He
+seems possessed of a murderous frenzy, and slays as ruthlessly and
+needlessly as a wolf or a human game-butcher or the insatiate angler.
+Neither is he the friend of the sportsman, for he makes havoc among the
+young grouse and quail and the callow woodcock.
+
+The trapper reviles him when he finds him in his mink trap, for all the
+beauty of his ermine a worthless prize drawn in this chanceful lottery.
+When every one carried his money in a purse, the weasel's slender white
+skin was in favor with country folk. This use survives only in the
+command or exhortation to "draw your weasel." When the purse was empty,
+it gave the spendthrift an untimely hint by creeping out of his pocket.
+In the primest condition of his fur he neither keeps nor puts money in
+your pocket now. He is worth more to look at, with his lithe body quick
+with life, than to possess in death.
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+FEBRUARY DAYS
+
+
+In the blur of storm or under clear skies, the span of daylight
+stretches farther from the fading dusk of dawn to the thickening dusk of
+evening. Now in the silent downfall of snow, now in the drift and whirl
+of flakes driven from the sky and tossed from the earth by the shrieking
+wind, the day's passage is unmarked by shadows. It is but a long
+twilight, coming upon the world out of one misty gloom, and going from
+it into another. Now the stars fade and vanish in the yellow morning
+sky, the long shadows of the hills, clear cut on the shining fields,
+swing slowly northward and draw eastward to the netted umbrage of the
+wood. So the dazzling day grows and wanes and the attenuated shadows are
+again stretched to their utmost, then dissolved in the flood of shade,
+and the pursued sunlight takes flight from the mountain peaks to the
+clouds, from cloud to cloud along the darkening sky, and vanishes beyond
+the blue barrier of the horizon.
+
+There are days of perfect calm and hours of stillness as of sleep, when
+the lightest wisp of cloud fleece hangs moveless against the sky and the
+pine-trees forget their song. But for the white columns of smoke that,
+unbent in the still air, arise from farmstead chimneys, one might
+imagine that all affairs of life had been laid aside; for no other sign
+of them is visible, no sound of them falls upon the ear. You see the
+cows and sheep in the sheltered barnyards and their lazy breaths arising
+in little clouds, but no voice of theirs drifts to you.
+
+No laden team crawls creaking along the highway nor merry jangle of
+sleigh bells flying into and out of hearing over its smooth course, nor
+for a space do the tireless panting engine and roaring train divide
+earth and sky with a wedge of dissolving vapor. The broad expanse of the
+lake is a white plain of snow-covered ice: no dash of angry waves
+assails its shore still glittering with the trophies of their last
+assault; no glimmer of bright waters greets the sun; no keel is afloat;
+the lighthouse, its occupation gone, stares day and night with dull eyes
+from its lonely rock, upon a silent deserted waste.
+
+In the wood you may hear no sound but your own muffled footsteps, the
+crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from
+your passage, and now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a
+clear resonant crack of frozen fibres and its faint echo. You hear no
+bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the
+pungent fragrance of his fire nor the subtler one of fresh-cut wood.
+Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up
+in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens, only
+scentless air reaches your nostrils.
+
+One day there comes from the south a warm breath, and with it fleets of
+white clouds sailing across the blue upper deep, outstripped by their
+swifter shadows sweeping in blue squadrons along the glistening fields
+and darkening with brief passage the gray woodlands. Faster come the
+clouds out of the south and out of the west, till they crowd the sky,
+only fragments of its intense azure showing here and there between them,
+only now and then a gleam of sunlight flashing across the earth. Then
+the blue sunlit sky is quite shut away behind a low arch of gray,
+darkening at the horizon with thick watery clouds, and beneath it all
+the expanse of fields and forest lies in universal shadow.
+
+The south wind is warmer than yesterday's sunshine, the snow softens
+till your footsteps are sharply moulded as in wax, and in a little space
+each imprint is flecked thick with restless, swarming myriads of
+snow-fleas. Rain begins to fall softly on snow-covered roofs, but
+beating the panes with the familiar patter of summer showers. It becomes
+a steady downpour that continues till the saturated snow can hold no
+more, and the hidden brooks begin to show in yellow streaks between
+white, unstable shores, and glide with a swift whisking rush over the
+smooth bottom that paves their rough natural bed; and as their yellow
+currents deepen and divide more widely their banks, the noise of their
+onflow fills the air like an exaggeration of the murmur of pines, and
+the song of the pines swells and falls with the varying wind.
+
+After the rain there come, perhaps, some hours of quiet sunshine or
+starlight, and then out of the north a nipping wind that hardens the
+surface of the snow into solid crust that delights your feet to walk
+upon. The rivulets shrink out of sight again, leaving no trace but
+water-worn furrows in the snow, some frozen fluffs of yellow foam and
+stranded leaves and twigs, grass and broken weeds. The broad pools have
+left their shells of unsupported ice, which with frequent sudden crashes
+shatters down upon their hollow beds.
+
+When the crust has invited you forth, you cannot retrace your way upon
+it, and the wild snow walkers make no record now of their recent
+wanderings. But of those who fared abroad before this solid pavement was
+laid upon the snow, fabulous tales are now inscribed upon it. Reading
+them without question, you might believe that the well-tamed country
+had lapsed into the possession of its ancient savage tenants, for the
+track of the fox is as big as a wolf's, the raccoon's as large as a
+bear's, the house cat's as broad as the panther's, and those of the
+muskrat and mink persuade you to believe that the beaver and otter,
+departed a hundred years ago, have come to their own again. Till the
+next thaw or snowfall, they are set as indelibly as primeval footprints
+in the rocks, and for any scent that tickles the hounds' keen nose,
+might be as old. He sniffs them curiously and contemptuously passes on,
+yet finds little more promising on footing that retains but for an
+instant the subtle trace of reynard's unmarked passage.
+
+The delicate curves and circles that the bent weeds etched on the soft
+snow are widened and deepened in rigid grooves, wherein the point that
+the fingers of the wind traced them with is frozen fast. Far and wide
+from where they fall, all manner of seeds drift across miles of smooth
+fields, to spring to life and bloom, by and by, in strange,
+unaccustomed places, and brown leaves voyage to where their like was
+never grown. The icy knolls shine in the sunlight with dazzling
+splendor, like golden islands in a white sea that the north wind stirs
+not, and athwart it the low sun and the waning moon cast their long
+unrippled glades of gold and silver. Over all winter again holds sway,
+but we have once more heard the sound of rain and running brooks and
+have been given a promise of spring.
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+THE FOX
+
+
+Among the few survivals of the old untamed world there are left us two
+that retain all the raciness of their ancestral wildness.
+
+Their wits have been sharpened by the attrition of civilization, but it
+has not smoothed their characteristics down to the level of the
+commonplace, nor contaminated them with acquired vices as it has their
+ancient contemporary, the Indian. But they are held in widely different
+esteem, for while the partridge is in a manner encouraged in
+continuance, the fox is an outlaw, with a price set upon his head to
+tempt all but his few contemned friends to compass his extermination.
+
+For these and for him there is an unwritten code that, stealthily
+enforced, gives him some exemption from universal persecution. They,
+having knowledge of the underground house of many portals where the
+vixen rears her cubs, guard the secret as jealously as she and her lord,
+from the unfriendly farmer, poultry-wife, and bounty-hunting vagabond,
+confiding it only to sworn brethren of woodcraft, as silent concerning
+it to the unfriendly as the trees that shadow its booty-strewn precincts
+or the lichened rocks that fortify it against pick and spade. They never
+tell even their leashed hounds till autumn makes the woods gayer with
+painted leaves than summer could with blossoms, how they have seen the
+master and mistress of this woodland home stealing to it with a fare of
+field mice fringing their jaws or bearing a stolen lamb or pullet.
+
+They watch from some unseen vantage, with amused kindliness, the gambols
+of the yellow cubs about their mother, alert for danger, even in her
+drowsy weariness, and proud of her impish brood, even now practicing
+tricks of theft and cunning on each other. They become abetters of this
+family's sins, apologists for its crimes, magnifiers of its unmeant
+well-doing.
+
+When in palliation of the slaughter of a turkey that has robbed a field
+of his weight in corn they offset the destruction of hordes of field
+mice, they are reviled by those who are righteously exalted above the
+idleness of hunting and the foolishness of sentiment.
+
+At such hands one fares no better who covets the fox, not for the sport
+he may give, but for the tang of wild flavor that he imparts to woods
+that have almost lost it and to fields that lose nothing of thrift by
+its touch.
+
+You may not see him, but it is good to know that anything so untamed has
+been so recently where your plodding footsteps go. You see in last
+night's snowfall the sharp imprint of his pads, where he has deviously
+quested mice under the mat of aftermath, or trotted slowly, pondering,
+to other more promising fields, or there gone airily coursing away over
+the moonlit pastures. In imagination you see all his agile gaits and
+graceful poses. Now listening with pricked ears to the muffled squeak of
+a mouse, now pouncing upon his captured but yet unseen prize, or where
+on sudden impulse he has coursed to fresh fields, you see him, a dusky
+phantom, gliding with graceful undulations of lithe body and brush over
+the snowy stretches; or, halting to wistfully sniff, as a wolf a
+sheepfold, the distant henroost; or, where a curious labyrinth of tracks
+imprint the snow, you have a vision of him dallying with his tawny
+sweetheart under the stars of February skies; or, by this soft mould of
+his furry form on a snow-capped stump or boulder, you picture him
+sleeping off the fatigue of hunting and love-making, with all senses but
+sight still alert, unharmed by the nipping air that silvers his whiskers
+with his own breath.
+
+All these realities of his actual life you may not see except in such
+pictures as your fancy makes; but when the woods are many-hued or brown
+in autumn, or gray and white in winter, and stirred with the wild music
+of the hounds, your blood may be set tingling by the sight of him, his
+coming announced by the rustle of leaves under his light footfalls.
+Perhaps unheralded by sound, he suddenly blooms ruddily out of the dead
+whiteness of the snow.
+
+Whether he flies past or carefully picks his way along a fallen tree or
+bare ledge, you remark his facial expression of incessant intentness on
+cunning devices, while ears, eyes, and nose are alert for danger. If he
+discovers you, with what ready self-possession he instantly gets and
+keeps a tree between himself and you and vanishes while your gun vainly
+searches for its opportunity. If your shot brings him down, and you
+stand over him exultant, yet pitying the end of his wild life, even in
+his death throes fearing you no more, he yet strains his dulled ears to
+catch the voices of the relentless hounds.
+
+Bravely the wild freebooter holds his own against the encroachments of
+civilization and the persecution of mankind, levying on the flocks and
+broods of his enemy, rearing his yellow cubs in the very border of his
+field, insulting him with nightly passage by his threshold.
+
+Long ago his fathers bade farewell to their grim cousin the wolf, and
+saw the beaver and the timid deer pass away, and he sees the eagle
+almost banished from its double realm of earth and sky, yet he hardily
+endures. For what he preserves for us of the almost extinct wildness,
+shall we begrudge him the meagre compensation of an occasional turkey?
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+AN ICE-STORM
+
+
+Of all the vagaries of winter weather, one of the rarest is the
+ice-storm; rain falling with a wind and from a quarter that should bring
+snow, and freezing as it falls, not penetrating the snow but coating it
+with a shining armor, sheathing every branch and twig in crystal and
+fringing eaves with icicles of most fantastic shapes.
+
+On ice-clad roofs and fields and crackling trees the rain still beats
+with a leaden clatter, unlike any other sound of rain; unlike the
+rebounding pelting of hail or the swish of wind-blown snow.
+
+The trees begin to stoop under their increasing burden, and then to
+crack and groan as it is laid still heavier upon them. At times is heard
+the thin, echoless crash of an overladen branch, first bending to its
+downfall with a gathering crackle of severed fibres, then with a sudden
+crash, shattering in a thousand fragments the brief adornments that have
+wrought its destruction.
+
+Every kind of tree has as marked individuality in its icy garniture as
+in its summer foliage. The gracefulness of the elms, the maples, the
+birches, the beeches, and the hornbeams is preserved and even
+intensified; the clumsy ramage of the butternut and ash is as stiff as
+ever, though every unbending twig bears its row of glittering pendants.
+The hemlocks and firs are tents of ice, but the pines are still pines,
+with every needle exaggerated in bristling crystal.
+
+Some worthless things have become of present value, as the wayside
+thistles and the bejeweled grass of an unshorn meadow, that yesterday
+with its dun unsightliness, rustling above the snow, proclaimed the
+shiftlessness of its owner.
+
+Things most unpicturesque are made beautiful. The wire of the telegraph
+with its dull undulations is transformed to festoons of crystal fringe,
+linking together shining pillars of glass that yesterday were but bare,
+unsightly posts.
+
+The woods are a maze of fantastic shapes of tree growth. Wood roads are
+barricaded with low arches of ice that the hare and the fox can barely
+find passage beneath, and with long, curved slants of great limbs bent
+to the earth. The wild vines are turned to ropes and cables of ice, and
+have dragged down their strong supports, about whose prostrate trunks
+and limbs they writhe in a tangle of rigid coils. The lithe trunks of
+second growth are looped in an intricate confusion of arches one upon
+another, many upon one, over whole acres of low-roofed forest floor.
+
+The hare and the grouse cower in these tents of ice, frightened and
+hungry; for every sprout and bud is sheathed in adamant, and scarlet
+berries, magnified and unattainable, glow in the heart of crystal
+globules. Even the brave chickadees are appalled, and the disheartened
+woodpecker mopes beside the dead trunk, behind whose impenetrable shield
+he can hear the grub boring in safety.
+
+Through the frozen brambles that lattice the doorway of his burrow the
+fox peers dismayed upon a glassy surface that will hold no scent of
+quarry, yet perhaps is comforted that the same conditions impose a
+truce upon his enemies the hounds. The squirrel sits fasting in his
+chamber, longing for the stores that are locked from their owner in his
+cellar. It is the dismalest of all storms for the wood folk, despite all
+the splendor wherewith it adorns their realm.
+
+One holds out his hand and lifts his face skyward to assure himself that
+the rain has ceased, for there is a continual clattering patter as if it
+were yet falling. But it is only the crackling of the icy trees and the
+incessant dropping of small fragments of their burden.
+
+The gray curtain of the sky drifts asunder, and the low sun shines
+through. It glorifies the earth with the flash and gleam of ten million
+diamonds set everywhere. The fire and color of every gem that was ever
+delved burn along the borders of the golden pathway that stretches from
+your feet far away to the silver portals of the mountains that bar our
+glittering world from the flaming sky.
+
+The pallid gloom of the winter night falls upon the earth. Then the full
+moon throbs up behind the scintillating barrier of the hills. She
+presently paves from herself to us a street of silver among the long
+blue shadows, and lights it with a thousand stars; some fallen quite to
+earth, some twinkling among the drooping branches, all as bright as the
+eternal stars that shine in the blue sky above.
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+SPARE THE TREES
+
+
+All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game
+naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is
+deforested, nor keep fish in waters that have shrunk to a quarter of
+their ordinary volume before midsummer. The streams of such a country
+will thus shrink when the mountains, where the snows lie latest and the
+feeding springs are, and the swamps, which dole out their slow but
+steady tribute, are bereft of shade. The thin soil of a rocky hill, when
+deprived of its shelter of branches, will be burned by the summer sun
+out of all power to help the germination of any worthy seed, or to
+nurture so noble a plant as a tree through the tender days of its
+infancy. It supports only useless weeds and brambles. Once so denuded,
+it will be unsightly and unprofitable for many years if not always.
+Some swamps at great expense may be brought into tillage and meadow, but
+nine times out of ten, when cleared of the lusty growth of woods, they
+bear nothing but wild grass, and the streams that trickled from them all
+the summer long in their days of wildness show in August only the
+parched trail of the spring course.
+
+Our natives have inherited their ancestors' hatred of trees, which to
+them were only cumberers of the ground, to be got rid of by the
+speediest means; and our foreign-born landholders, being unused to so
+much woodland, think there can be no end to it, let them slash away as
+they will.
+
+Ledges and steep slopes that can bear nothing but wood to any profit,
+are shorn of their last tree, and the margins of streams to the very
+edge robbed of the willows and water-maples that shaded the water and
+with their roots protected the banks from washing. Who has not known a
+little alder swamp, in which he was sure to find a dozen woodcock, when
+he visited it on the first day of the season each year? Some year the
+first day comes and he seeks it as usual, to find its place marked only
+by brush heaps, stubs, and sedges; and for the brook that wimpled
+through it in the days of yore, only stagnant pools. The worst of it is,
+the owners can seldom give any reason for this slaughter but that their
+victims were trees and bushes.
+
+The Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, appears
+entirely to lose these gifts when it comes to the proper and sensible
+management of woodlands. Can he not understand that it is more
+profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but
+wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is
+slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one, and is every year
+becoming a more valuable one. It breaks the fierceness of the winds, and
+keeps the springs from drying up, and is a comfort to the eye, whether
+in the greenness of the leaf or the barrenness of the bough, and under
+its protecting arms live and breed the grouse, the quail and the hare,
+and in its shadowed rills swim the trout.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+THE CHICKADEE
+
+
+The way to the woods is blurred with a mist of driven snow that veils
+the portal of the forest with its upblown curtain, and blots out all
+paths, and gives to the familiar landmarks a ghostly unreality. The
+quietude of the woods is disturbed by turbulent voices, the angry roar
+and shriek of the wind, the groaning and clashing of writhing, tormented
+trees. Over all, the sunned but unwarmed sky bends its blue arch, as
+cold as the snowy fields and woods beneath it.
+
+In such wild weather you are not tempted far abroad in quest of old
+acquaintances of fields and woods, yet from the inhospitable woods some
+of them come to you. Among them all, none is more welcome than that
+feathered atom of life, the chickadee. With the same blithe note that
+welcomed you to his woodland haunts in spring, in summer, and in
+autumn, when he attended you with such charming familiarity, amusing you
+with pretty acrobatic feats, as he flitted now before, now beside, now
+above you, he hails you now, and asks that hospitality be extended to
+him.
+
+Set forth a feast of suet on the window-sill, and he will need no
+bidding to come and partake of it. How daintily he helps himself to the
+tiniest morsels, never cramming his bill with gross mouthfuls as do his
+comrades at the board, the nuthatch and the downy woodpecker! They, like
+unbidden guests, doubtful of welcome or of sufferance even, make the
+most of time that may prove all too brief, and gorge themselves as
+greedily as hungry tramps; while he, unscared by your face at the
+window, tarries at his repast, pecking his crumbs with leisurely
+satisfaction. You half expect to see him swept from your sight like a
+thistledown by the gusty blast, but he holds bravely to his perch,
+unruffled in spirit if not in feathers, and defies his fierce assailant
+with his oft-repeated challenge.
+
+As often as you spread the simple feast for him he will come and sit at
+your board, a confiding guest, well assured of welcome, and will repay
+you with an example of cheerful life in the midst of dreariness and
+desolation. In the still, bright days, his cheery voice rings through
+the frosty air, and when the thick veil of the snow falls in a wavering
+slant from the low sky its muffled cadence still heartens you.
+
+What an intense spark of vitality must it be that warms such a mite in
+such an immensity of cold; that floats his little life in this deluge of
+frigid air, and keeps him in song while we are dumb with shivering! If
+our huge hulks were endowed with proportionate vitality, how easily we
+might solve the mysteries of the frozen north!
+
+On some February day, when the first promise of spring is drifted to you
+in the soft south wind, the tenderness of spring is voiced in his
+love-note, brief but full of melody, and sweet as the evening song of
+the wood pewee. When the spring songsters come, he takes leave of you.
+He has seen you safely through the winter, and departs to the woods on
+affairs of his own. He is no longer a vagrant, but at home in his own
+greenwood, yet as unfretted by the cares of housekeeping as he was by
+the heavy weariness of winter.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In New England Fields and Woods, by
+Rowland E. Robinson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 36844.txt or 36844.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/6/8/4/36844/
+
+Produced by Katherine Ward, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.