Part 17

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.