Part 3

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.

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.

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.