Part 6

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only a half-dozen concentric circles of wavelets, widening from central points, where as many musicians have modestly withdrawn beneath the transparent curtain.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.