Part 13

Two years ago I found a Cape May settled in a certain spot in an extensive tract of valley woods. The manner of the discovery--which was purely accidental, the bird’s voice being so faint as to be inaudible beyond the distance of a few rods--and the pains I took to keep him under surveillance for the remainder of my stay, so as to make practically sure of his intention to pass the summer here, have been fully recounted in a previous chapter. The experience was one of those which fill an enthusiast with such delight as he can never hope to communicate, or even to make seem reasonable, except to men of his own kind.

We had never met with Dendroica tigrina before anywhere about the mountains, and I had no serious expectation of ever finding it here a second time. Still “hope springs immortal;” “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;” and one of my earliest concerns, on arriving in Franconia again at the right season of the year, was to revisit the well-remembered spot and listen for the equally well-remembered sibilant notes.

Our first call was on May 17. Perhaps we were ahead of time; at any rate, we found nothing. On the 23d we passed the place again, and heard, somewhat too far away, what I believed with something like certainty to be the zee-zee-zee-zee of the bird we were seeking; but the dense underbrush was drenched with rain, we had other business in hand, and we left the question unsettled. If the voice really was the Cape May’s we should doubtless have another chance with him. So I told my companion; and the result justified the prophecy, which was based upon the bird’s behavior of two years before, when all his activities seemed to be very narrowly confined--say within a radius of four or five rods.

We had hardly reached the place, two days afterward, before we heard him singing close by us,--in the very clump of firs where he had so many times shown himself,--and after a minute or two of patience we had him under our opera-glasses. The sight gave me, I am not ashamed to confess, a thrill of exquisite pleasure. It was something to think of--the return of so rare a bird to so precise a spot. With all the White Mountain region, not to say all of northern New England and of British America, before him, he had come back from the tropics (for who could doubt that he was indeed the bird of two years ago, or one of that bird’s progeny?) to spend another summer in this particular bunch of Franconia evergreens. He had kept them in mind, wherever he had wandered, and, behold, here he was again, singing in their branches, as if he had known that I should be coming hither to find him.

The next day our course took us again past his quarters, and he was still there, and still singing. I knew he would be. He could be depended on. He was doing exactly as he had done two years before. You had only to stand still in a certain place (I could almost find it in the dark, I think), and you would hear his voice. He was as sure to be there as the trees.

That afternoon some ladies wished to see him, and my companion volunteered his escort. Their experience was like our own; or rather it was better than ours. The warbler was not only at home, but behaved like the most courteous of hosts; coming into a peculiarly favorable light, upon an uncommonly low perch, and showing himself off to his visitors’ perfect satisfaction. It was bravely done. He knew what was due to “the sex.”

On the morning of the 27th I took my farewell of him. He had been there for at least five days, and would doubtless stay for the season. May joy stay with him. I think I have not betrayed his whereabouts too nearly. If I have, and harm comes of it, may my curse follow the man that shoots him.

The “spectacular duck,” of which I have spoken, was one of several (three or more) that seemed to be settled in the valley of the Landaff River. Our first sight of them was on the 20th; two birds, flying low and calling, but in so bewildering a light, and so quick in passing, that we ventured no guess as to their identity. Three days later, on the morning of the 23d, we had hardly turned into the valley before we heard the same low, short-breathed, grunting, grating, croaking sounds, and, glancing upward, saw three ducks steaming up the course of the river. This time, as before, the sun was against us, but my companion, luckier than I with his glass, saw distinctly that they carried a white speculum or wing-spot.

We were still discussing possibilities, supposing that the birds themselves were clean gone, when suddenly (we could never tell how it happened) we saw one of them--still on the wing--not far before us; and even as we were looking at it, wondering where it had come from, it flew toward the old grist-mill by the bridge and came to rest on the top of the chimney! Here was queerness. We leveled our glasses upon the creature and saw that it was plainly a merganser (sheldrake), with its crest feathers projecting backward from the crown, and its wing well marked with white. Its head, unless the light deceived me, was brown. The main thing, however, for the time being, was none of these details, but the spectacle of the bird itself, in so strange and sightly a position. “It looks like the storks of Europe,” said my companion. Certainly it looked like something other than an every-day American duck, with its outstretched neck and its long, slender, rakish bill showing in silhouette against the sky.

Meanwhile, it had put its head partly out of sight in the top of the chimney, as if it had a nest there and were feeding its young. Then of a sudden it took wing, but in a minute or two was back again, to our increasing wonderment; and again it dropped the end of its bill out of sight below the level of the topmost bricks. Now, however, I could see the mandibles in motion, as if it were eating. Probably it had brought a fish up from the river. The chimney was simply its table. Again, for no reason that was apparent to us, it flew away, and again, after the briefest absence, it returned. A third time it vanished, and this time for good. We kept on our way up the valley, talking of what we had seen, but after every few rods I turned about to put my glass upon the chimney. Evidently that was the duck’s favorite perch, I said; we should find it there often. But whether my reasoning was faulty or we were simply unfortunate, the fact is that we saw it there no more. On the 25th, at a place two miles or more above this point, we saw a duck of the same kind--at least it was uttering the same grating, croaking sounds as it flew; and a resident of the neighborhood, whom we questioned about the matter, told us that he had noticed such birds (“ducks with white on their wings”) flying up and down the valley, and had no doubt that they summered there. As to their fondness for chimney-tops he knew nothing; nor do I know anything beyond the simple facts as I have here set them down. But I am glad of the picture of the bird that I have in my mind.

Enthusiasm is a good painter; it is not afraid of high lights, and it deals in fast colors. And to us old Franconians, enthusiasm seems to be one of the institutions, one of the native growths, one of the special delectabilities, if you please, of that delectable valley. The valley of cinnamon roses, we have before now called it; the valley of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries; the valley of bobolinks and swallows; but best of all, perhaps, it is the valley of hobbyists. Its atmosphere is heady. We all feel it. The world is far away. Worldly successes, yea, dollars and cents themselves, are nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity. A new flower, a new bird, the hundred and fiftieth spider, these are the things that count. We are like members of a conventicle, or like the logs on the hearth. Our inward fires are mutually communicative and sustaining. We laugh now and then, it may be, at one another’s peculiarities. Each of us can see, at certain moments, that the other is “a little off,” to use a “Francony” phrase; not quite “all there,” perhaps; a kind of eighth dreamer, “moving about in worlds not realized;” but at bottom we are sympathetic and appreciative. We would not have each other different, unless, indeed, it were a little younger. A grain of oddity is a good spice. If we are not deeply interested in the newest discovery, at least we participate in the exultation of the discoverer.

“That’s a good fly,” said the entomologist. We were driving, three of us, talking of something or nothing (we are never careful which it is), when the happy dipteran blundered into the carriage, and into the very lap of its admirer. Ten seconds more, and it was under the anæsthetic spell of cyanide of potassium, which (so we are told) puts its victims to sleep as painlessly, perhaps as blissfully, as chloroform. It was an inspiration to see how instantly the lady recognized a “good” one (it was one of a thousand, literally, for the day was summer-like), and how readily, and with no waste of motions, she made it her own. I was reminded of a story.

A friend of mine, a truly devout woman, of New England birth, and churchly withal (her books have all a savor of piety, though all the world reads them), is also an enthusiastic and widely famous entomological collector. One Sunday she had gone to church and was on her knees reciting the service (or saying her prayers--I am not sure that I remember her language verbatim), when she noticed on the back of the pew immediately in front of her a diminutive moth of some rare and desirable species. Instinctively her hand sought her pocket, and somehow, without disturbing the congregation or even her nearest fellow-worshiper (my helpless masculine mind cannot imagine how the thing was done) she found it and took from it a “poison bottle,” always in readiness for such emergencies. Still on her knees (whether her lips still moved is another point that escapes positive recollection), she removed the stopple, placed the mouth of the vial over the moth (which had probably imagined itself safe in such ecclesiastical surroundings), replaced the stopple above it, slipped the bottle back into her pocket, and resumed (or kept on with) her prayers. All this had taken but a minute. And who says that she had done anything wrong? Who hints at a disagreement between science and faith? Nay, let us rather believe with Coleridge--

“He prayeth best, who loveth best All things, both great and small,”--

especially small church-going lepidoptera of the rarer sorts.

With zealots like this about you, as I have intimated, you may safely speak out. If you have seen an unexpected, long-expected warbler, or a chimney-top duck, or a skyward soaring lark, you may talk of it without fear, with no restraint upon your feelings or your phrases. Here things are seen as they are; truth is cleared of false lights, and Wisdom is justified of her children. Happy Franconia!

“Has she not shown us all? From the clear space of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove’s large eyebrow, to the tender greening Of April meadows?”

Happy Franconia! “Nested and quiet in a valley mild!” I think of her June strawberries and her perennial enthusiasms, and I wish I were there now.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ

Mount Agassiz is rather a hill than a mountain; there is no glory to be won in climbing it, unless, perhaps, by very small children and elderly ladies; but if a man is in search of a soul-filling prospect he may climb higher and see less. The road to it, furthermore (I speak as a Franconian), is one of those that pay the walker as he goes along. Every rod of the five miles is worth traveling for its own sake, especially on a bright and comfortable August morning such as the Fates had this time sent me. It was eight o’clock when I set out, and with a sandwich in my pocket I meant to be in no haste. If invitations to linger by the way were as many and as pressing as I hoped for, a mile and a quarter to the hour would be excellent speed.

Red crossbills and pine siskins were calling in the larch trees near the house as I left the piazza. The siskins have never been a frequent sight with me in the summer season, and finding almost at once a flock in the grass by the roadside, feeding upon seeds, as well as I could make out, and delightfully fearless, I stopped for a few minutes to look them over. Some of the number showed much more yellow than others, but none of them could have been dressed more strictly in the fashion if their costumes had come straight from Paris. Every bird was in stripes.

Both they and the crossbills are what writers upon such themes agree to pronounce “erratic” and “irregular.” Of most birds it can be foretold that they will be in certain places at certain times; their orbits are known; but crossbills and siskins wander through space as the whim takes them. If they have any schedule of times and seasons, men have yet to discover it. When I come to Franconia, for example, I never can tell whether or not I shall find them; a piece of ignorance to be thankful for, like many another. The less knowledge, within limits, the more surprise; and the more surprise--also within limits--the more pleasure. At present I can hardly put my head out of the door without hearing the wheezy calls of siskins and the importunate cackles of crossbills. They are among the commonest and most voluble inhabitants of the valley, and seem even commoner and more talkative than they really are because they are so incessantly on the move.

An alder flycatcher is calling as I go up the first hill (he, too, is very common and very free with his voice, although, unlike siskin and crossbill, he knows where he belongs, and is to be found there, and nowhere else), and when I reach the plateau a sapsucker alights near the foot of a telegraph post just before me; a bird in Quakerish drab, with no trace of red upon either crown or throat. He (or she) is only two or three months old, I suppose, like more than half of all the birds now about us. Not far beyond, as the road runs into light woods, with a swampy tract by a brook on the lower side, I hear a chickadee’s voice and look up to see also two Canadian warblers, bits of pure loveliness, the first ones of my present visit. I talk to them, and one, his curiosity responsive to mine, comes near to listen. The Canadian warbler, I have long noticed, has the bump of inquisitiveness exceptionally well developed.

So I go on--a few rods of progress and a few minutes’ halt. If there are no birds to look at, there are always flowers, leaves, and berries: goldthread leaves, the prettiest of the pretty--it is a joy to praise them; and dwarf cornel berries, gorgeous rosettes; and long-stemmed mountain-holly berries, of a color indescribable, fairly beyond praising; and bear-plums, the deep-blue berries of the clintonia. And while the eye feasts upon color the ear feasts upon music: a distant brook babbling downhill among stones, and a breath of air whispering in a thousand treetops; noises that are really a superior kind of silence, speaking of deeper and better things than our human speech has words for. Quietness, peace, contentment, we say; but such vocables, good as they are, are but poor renderings of this natural chorus of barely audible sounds. If you are still enough to hear it--inwardly still enough--as may once in a long while happen, you feel things that tongue of man never uttered. Life itself is less sweet. Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, “Blessed are the dead.” I foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white-birch stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my spirit is getting in tune.

In the white-pine grove, where a few small birds are stirring noiselessly among the upper branches, my attention is taken by clusters of the ghostly, colorless plant which men know as the Indian pipe (its real name, of necessity, is quite beyond human ken); the flowers, every head bowed, just breaking through a bed of last year’s needles, while a bumblebee, a capable economic botanist, visits them one by one. Then, as I emerge from the grove on its sunny edge, I catch a sudden pungent odor of balsam. It rises from the dry leaves, the sunlight having somehow set it free. In the shade of the wood nothing of the kind was perceptible. The fact strikes me curiously as one that I have often been half consciously aware of, but now for the first time really notice. On the instant I am taken far back. It is a July noon; I am trudging homeward, and in my proud boyish hand is a basket of shining black huckleberries carefully rounded over. The sense of smell is naturally a sentimentalist; or perhaps the olfactory nerves have some occult connection with the seat of memory.

Here is one of my favorite spots: a level grassy field, with a ruined house and barn behind me, between the road and a swampy patch, and in front “all the mountains,” from Moosilauke to Adams. How many times I have stopped here to admire them! I look at them now, and then fall to watching the bluebirds and the barn swallows, that are here at home. A Boston lady holds the legal title to the property (be it said in her honor that she bought it to save the pine wood from destruction), but the birds are its actual owners. Six bluebirds sit in a row on the wire, while the swallows go twittering over the field. Once I fancy that I hear the sharp call of a horned lark; but the note is not repeated, and though I beat the grass over I discover nothing.

Beyond this level clearing the road winds to the left and begins its climb to the height of land, whence it pitches down into Bethlehem village. Every stage of the course is familiar. Here a pileated woodpecker once came out of the woods and disported himself about the trunk of an apple tree for my delectation--mine and a friend’s who walked with me; here a hare sat quiet till I was close upon him, and then scampered across the field with flying jumps; here is a backward valley prospect that I never can have enough of; and here, just over the wall, I once surprised myself by finding a bunch of yellow lady’s-slippers. All this, and much else, I now live over again. So advantageous is it to walk in one’s own steps. Many times as I have come this way, I have never come in fairer weather.

And what is this? It looks like a haying-bee. Eight horses and two yokes of oxen, with several empty “hay-riggings” and as many buggies, stand in confused order beside the road, and over the wall men are mowing, spreading, and turning. It is some widow’s grass field, I imagine, and her loyal neighbors have assembled to harvest the crop. Human nature is not so bad, after all. So I am saying, with the inexpensive charity natural to a sentimental traveler, when I find myself near a group of younger men who are bantering one of their number (I am behind a bushy screen), mixing their talk plentifully with oaths; such a vulgar, stupid, witless repetition of sacred names--without one saving touch of originality or picturesqueness--as our honest, thoroughbred, rustic New Englander may challenge the world to equal. These can be no workers for charity, I conclude; and when I inquire of a man who overtakes me on the road (with an invitation to ride), he says: “Oh, no, that is Mr. Blank’s farm, and those are all his hired men. He is about the richest man in Bethlehem.” So my pretty idyl vanishes in smoke; the smoke, I am tempted to say, of burning brimstone. I have one consolation, such as it is: the men are Bethlehemites, not Franconians, though I am not so certain that a swearing match between the two towns would prove altogether one-sided. It is nothing new, of course, that beautiful scenery does not always refine those who live near it. It works to that end, within its measure, I am bound to believe, for those who see it; but “there’s the rub.”