Part 9

In their dull, autumn colors the warblers have an unfamiliar look. They come disguised in winter cloaks which, if you do not know their little mannerisms, may be effective enough. With provoking celerity they flit in and out the thick foliage, and you dance attendance; now this way and now that, stumbling over pasture stones or plunging into the midst of blackberry and rose thickets, to be detained at last by the persuasive catbrier. Again you go forth to find the game has stolen away and not a warbler is to be seen. Such are the exigencies of bird study in September; yet in a few days other flocks may arrive. Every faintest clue is valuable to the ornithologist who honestly refrains from the gun. Were it not for the peculiar jerking of the tail, one would hardly recognize the yellowpoll in his dull suit. The fly-catchers frequently declare their identity through mannerisms. Were it not for difference of manner and voice, the phoebe and the pewee might easily be confused; so also the redeye and the warbling vireo. I have known the redeye for years, but can never make out his red eye, unless it be a glass one.

Now comes the winter wren, peeping and prying round about a mossy tussock like a little mouse, but far more self-contained. His wee tail is elevated and his whole demeanor pert. What a picture he makes, prying about in the hair-caps, his head little higher than the capsules,--a ruddy, rich-hued, speckled little fellow. If only he would give us a measure of that fabled song, that Orphean strain of the far North and of the mountain tops, which is denied to dwellers on these lower levels! There are songs to be heard only on Parnassus.

These are the days of journeying seeds. In spring it was blowing pollen; in early autumn, mushroom spores; and now winged seeds flying before the wind. Those of the hop-hornbeam are done up in little papery bags which, though incapable of an extended flight, manage to sail out and away from the parent tree. Even the small seeds of birch and alder, compact as they are, have wings provided,--for no ambitious flight, to be sure, but a gentle excursion only, such as the broad-winged maple seed may take when its hour arrives. Acorns will fall directly below the tree, perhaps roll some little distance on uneven ground and lie in rich confusion--a symbol of plenty. For any further transportation they must depend upon the wings of the jay and the feet of the squirrel. In this respect the sweet acorns of the white oak have the better chance, while at the same time they run the greater risk of being eaten. Jays constantly carry acorns, and may frequently drop them. Gray squirrels bury them, and recover a surprising number later when the snow is on the ground. They know wherein the white are superior and are as well informed about acorns as are we about apples or the varieties of squash. The white oak acorn is to them Hubbard squash or Baldwin apple.

When Nature planned that the nut trees should bear as they do, she doubtless considered the squirrel and the boy that was to be. She had no idea of deriving a thousand seedlings from a hickory, but perhaps one only, and allowing for those that should come to naught, the boys and the squirrels might have the rest--to say nothing of weevils, which get ahead of both when it comes to chestnuts, being on hand to lay their eggs in the flower. When the boy arrives, it is to find them already in possession--surely nine-tenths of the law in this case. The chestnut-bur was seemingly designed as a means of protection rather than of transportation,--unless it be that in remote times the tertiary monkey got them in his coat, or perhaps slyly pelted the mastodon with these monster burs, and they were thus conveyed, as now a dog will carry beggar-ticks. As a protection it does not serve against its most insidious foe, the larva of the weevil, which works not from without but from within. Nature has treated the butternut better by surrounding it with a husk, as food for the grubs, which are content to go no deeper. One is a case of armed resistance, the other of diplomacy, and diplomacy wins.

How evidently all Nature is flowing. It is as though we stood on the banks of a river and saw pass--today arbutus, tomorrow, columbines, and later, goldenrod. The last is hardly gone before the advance guard of skunk-cabbage appears again. Autumn nourishes a vigorous brood--whole acres of wild sunflowers, acres again of joepye-weed, and salt marshes aglow with the great rose-mallow. Presently there will be only asters and goldenrod--everywhere purple and gold; royal robes worn not for long, to give way to the sober dress of early winter--a monk's garb.

Early in September the common brakes turn, imparting a faint glow to the woods. Dicksonia has a brighter hue, and patches surrounding a pasture boulder fairly seem to emit light. But this is as nothing to the splendor of cinnamon-ferns in the open bogs, now dry, and the spagnum withered and sear. It is as if the smouldering earth-fires leapt at the touch of autumn and glowed in these stately fronds. In the woods is always a predominance of yellow at this season; so lately somber and damp, heavy with the mustiness and humidity of the dog-days, they are now full of imprisoned sunshine. As by a touch of enchantment, the falling of the lower leaves on all shrubbery and in brier thickets has suddenly given us distances, larger perspective and new vistas, where before we were hedged in between dense green walls. Aspen, shadbush, blackberry, birch and hickory all incline to yellow, mottled and speckled more or less with brown. Ochre, umber, sienna, gamboge are on Nature's palette; soon she will replace these with crimson and scarlet. Already there is a touch of vermilion in the brilliant poison-ivy; and she has spilled drops of scarlet everywhere on the outskirts of the woods, along a wall, over a fence, up in a pine, in the very midst of a radiant gleaming hickory--wherever the Virginia creeper grows.

Nature works deftly, at first with delicate brush touching a shadbush, a clump of osmunda, or again only a leaf, a spot of color, a patch here and a streak there; but the day of transfiguration approaches. Early October sees the stag-horn sumacs fairly scintillate with color. At last the whole color-box is upset and runs red down a hillside huckleberry patch, meeting a yellow streak in a ravine and spreading out over the swamps, a sea of scarlet and gold. Every year Nature starts out in this modest fashion and ends in an upset and riot of color. We should know her ways by this time, but though her plan is the same she varies the details infinitely and there are always surprises. These same earth-fires which blazed in the osmunda now glow deep red in the dwarf sumacs--a dull, fierce flame, as if for the nonce Pluto's fires shone through the thin shell of earth. The poison-ivy is in its glory, and no tupelo, no sugar-maple, can rival its scarlet and vermilion. Earth indeed wears a jewel now. But there is nowhere a warmer, mellower tint than the shadbush has caught and held,--not brilliant nor showy, not a shining mark in the woods, but a cheery sight that warms the cockles of your heart. Little clumps of the maple-leaved viburnum are now of a delicate smoky pink, while the ash turns an indescribable hue--a greenish maroon or purplish green if such there be.

Already the hickory leaves are falling, detaching themselves one by one and floating leisurely to earth. It will now be our gentle pleasure to walk through crisp and rustling leaves. Barberries are ripe, and old-fashioned folk gather them for jelly or preserve them in molasses, wherein they are as so many shoe-pegs drowned in sweetness. The solitary sandpiper comes again to preside briefly over the ponds--a lone, wild spirit. Little flocks of coots scud low over the water, and in the dark, spongy humus of the hemlock swamp, red squirrels are digging caches and concealing the small cones, a dozen or more in a place. Such are the signs of the times.

Yet another sign--the last effort of the dying year--is the witch-hazel, which sheds its leaves and stands arrayed in yellow blossoms. A brave suggestion is this flower of the late autumn, blossoming when all else is in the sear and yellow, that it may bear seed in another year. When all others have given up and are retreating, this one comes forth as much as to say it is never too late. There is a very witchery in the crinkled yellow flower born of the old year in a frosty world; a borean child brought hither on the wings of the North wind; a sturdy blossom that will not show itself till it hears the music of rustling leaves.

Late in autumn the white pines shed their needles and lay down a new carpet. No turning of the old here, but every year another--fresh, wholesome, fragrant; a plain, well-wearing groundwork that never offends the eye and on which is traced from time to time a rare and original design. It is now a scarlet tupelo or a maple leaf dropped here and there, and again a creeping mitchella with a red berry or two, or a clump of ground-pine and a drift of beech and scarlet oak leaves. On occasion appears a solitary gleaming amanita. Over the rich seal-brown of ancient hemlock stumps is a tracery of the gray-green cladonia with its scarlet fruiting cups. What are Tabriz, Daghestan, Bokhara and the rest to this? These odorous pine-needles are the magic carpet which gently conveys one into the sylvan world of faun and nymph. Now it is a sunbath we want rather than a cold dip,--to bask in the warmth like any cottontail. To lie in some sheltered spot while the frost is taking off the last leaves, and become saturated with sunlight, is a mellowing process, and ripens one,--as tomatoes are ripened on the window-sill or grapes on the trellis.

As the vivid hues of the red maple fade in the swamp and are replaced by the soft silvery gray and purplish sheen of the bark, the oaks on the hillside become ruddy. The coloring is rich and subdued, rather than brilliant and glowing as at first--mahogany and maroon set off by the purple mists of Indian summer. And now at last branches are bare and leaves rustle underfoot.

PASTURE STONES

In New England pastures, the boulders are as much in harmony with their environment as any tree or shrub. They have the appearance of having grown here, quite as naturally as the bayberry and the sweet fern, and are kindred of the savin, and the low-spreading juniper which circles round them and hugs the stone like the lichen itself. The migrant boulders from the North are congenial to these hardy northern plants which reflect the somber character of the rock.

A field that has been entirely cleared of its pasture stones and left to stand thus, somehow looks barren and deserted. You feel you would like to restore a boulder here and there and invite the juniper and the bayberry to return. There is character in these ancient pasture stones, and they cannot be removed without depriving the landscape of that which they imparted; it is no longer virile and forceful, but tame and meek as though shorn of its strength.

If you would build your house on truly historic ground, lay it on foundation of pasture stones, and incorporate, as it were, Time itself into the structure. This is to let the very elements work for you. On many a farm the boulders are as good a crop as any; when they are gathered into the walls to give room for one more lucrative, this value at least of the farm is still represented. The fields have produced but one crop of boulders, and only the ages could mature this. If the pastures must lose this ancient beauty, let the house gain by it. Build it into your chimney. Take it to your hearth that it may not be lost. Let the boulder tell its story by the light of the hickory logs.

There is a rustic notion that boulders somehow grow, in some inexplicable manner enlarging like puff balls and drawing sustenance from the earth--and what could be more puzzling to the uninitiated than the presence of these pasture stones? His was an ingenious mind who conjured up that remote ice age from this fragmentary evidence and derived a history from these scattered letters and elliptical sentences. It was like tracing the stars to their origin.

It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these familiar fields and woods overlaid with a mile's thickness of ice; to recognize here in this present landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made hospitable. There was need of a solid foundation of fact, patiently garnered, before such an arch of fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. Here was a frozen waste as barren as the face of the moon. But beneath lay the soil that was to nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a fine satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to earth, to corner it and see it resolve itself into the working of natural laws.

Nature appears as intent on breaking up the old rocks as in forming new ones. The ledge is, after all, but a mass of masonry in which huge blocks are set without mortar and as closely and evenly as jewels. What a lathe was that ancient glacier in which to turn and smooth these rough gems; or rather a great file which rasped their edges and corners. In rectangular blocks that have weathered, the decay is deeper at the corners, so that a cubical block tends to become a sphere as it diminishes. Frost is the stone-cutter, who scatters his chips over the world; Rain, the giant who is bent on turning these into soil. Consider what power lay in this tongue of ice which licked up the crumbs of the earth; carried Canada into New England and New England into New York, depositing its burden as gently as the petal falls from a rose.

Boulders are to be considered veterans of glacial times, which carry still the scars of that strenuous day. What tales they have to tell of that mammoth conflict, that prehistoric incursion of the Arctic hosts, but only to very good listeners are they unfolded. You must needs have a sympathetic ear to become their confidant. The unconscious rock assumes dignity in view of its past, as though here were an imprisoned earth-spirit, proceeding thus through the strenuous life to some ultimate freedom. Sermons in stones indeed! A terminal moraine is the most ancient battle-ground of the world. Here are the very heroes themselves, stretched upon the field in imperturbable granite, as certain others were fixed in the heavens as constellations. To walk among them is to see in fancy the advent of the wall of ice, mile-high, which buried the primitive jungle forever. Here the great glacier began its retreat, and over the spot there broods a silence, as over historic ground once the theater of great actions. After untold centuries, the wild rose and the hay-scented fern cluster round the boulder, and dandelions star the grass.

I please myself with imagining the venerable pasture stones to have been observant of events and to have retained the memory of it all, as the Colosseum might have memories of Rome, or the Sphinx of Egypt and the desert. Such have seen races live out their lives and disappear. That every dog has his day might well be a maxim among these ancient ones of the earth who saw a tropic jungle resolve itself into an Arctic solitude and as slowly give way to a temperate zone. I salute the pasture stone as having witnessed the advent of man upon the earth. It is difficult to associate the tertiary animals with anything but the museum, or to realize that those preposterous Paleozoic reptiles were ever other than fossils. But here is a weather-beaten observer that was actually contemporary with that life, to us so intangible and shadowy; that knew the ancestor of the horse, and ages before the separation from the mother ledge, it may be, was wont to see the sky darkened by flying reptiles.

They were fashioned roughly, these boulders, cast in a rude mould, as if they had emerged from chaos itself before form had become defined. The sea would have all the pebbles on its shore of a size and shape. It takes a block from the cliff and turns it in its lathe that it may become a polished sphere, as in that larger and cosmic lathe the planets are turned. On the beach are innumerable stones that look as much alike as so many eggs. But no two pasture stones are the same. They were turned in no such precise lathe as the sea's, but by a rough-handed force, which here planed a surface and there gouged a depression. Pasture stones are thus almost as individual in appearance as men. Here is one squat like a toad, one humpbacked as a dromedary, another flat as a cake--a mere slab of granite. They are wrinkled and deformed, as so many gnomes, and covered with excrescences--razor-backed or round-shouldered, lopsided or with protruding paunch, while the great solitary boulders rise from the pasture, massive domes and pinnacles of granite.

But none are polished, none are symmetrical; nowhere is there an ellipsoid, such as the sea loves to turn, but rough outlines always. Frequently one surface is rounded; the work of making a sphere was begun but progressed only thus far. Again, two surfaces may be approximately parallel and the remainder rough and angular. Commonly it is an affair of many angles, all unequal, and of a multitude of curves of different radii. It is cast in a mould it would be difficult to classify. With the multiform aspects of crystals, they are still not so varied as these pasture stones. For crystals, for leaves, for snowflakes, there are definite patterns. But the boulder is a thing by itself, subject to other laws and formed under a different order of architecture--or under no order--but the will of the glacier, which has left here and there the marks of its icy fingers.

There is a suggestion of friendliness in the way the lichens clothe these stones, as though Nature aimed to cover the scars she could not heal, or to hang them with such rich medallions as the parmelia in token of that ancient service. Here are colors such as only Time can mix,--shades which are the work of centuries, unspeakably softened and mellowed, like ivory and meerschaum and bronze. In its day the Acropolis may have been glaring and crude in tone; the raw marble, fresh from the quarry, needed these centuries to subdue and mellow it. It has acquired a tender beauty unknown to that classic day which saw it in its splendor. Some such service has been rendered to the pasture stone and the ledge. When the Archæan granite was poured out from the depths it must have worn a new and crude look, albeit so fresh and clean. Then it was but so much raw feldspar and quartz and mica. But it has long been wooed by the air and the water, by moss and lichen; the years have lent it beauty, softened its curves, rounded its angles and brought it the richness of age.

Boulders are sometimes clothed with a larger growth. I have in mind one, from whose apex springs a maple at least half a century old. It lies at the head of a swamp, and in autumn this tree is always one of the first to turn. In August when the tupelos show signs of change, the maple is already glowing with color. The tree springs from the very summit of the rock while its main root reaches through a split some fifteen feet to the earth. Looking across the swamp, it appears to crown the boulder with a noble dignity--a landmark in the country round--as if reflecting those elementary forces which conspired to bring about this unusual condition,--the glacier which brought the boulder, the winds which carried the maple seed, the frost which split the rock.

After their many vicissitudes, the boulders have settled down upon the bosom of the pasture and come to be a fixture in the landscape. This present age is to them the serene and mellow autumn of their troubled life. Their day is a thousand years. But they are melting into soil--as icicles dissolve in the sun--in that measureless and yet imperceptible thaw which melts granite. The pasture land is perhaps the dust of a still more primitive race whose life has been transmuted into the dandelion and the thistle.

NEIGHBORS

All wild animals are wary and suspicious, even when they do not prey upon one another. What friend has the rabbit, the chipmunk or the weasel? They lead friendless lives and die tragic deaths. Why should not a rabbit gossip with a woodchuck, for instance? One would think their common danger might draw them together, and that they might perhaps learn a little woodcraft one of the other. But caste is nowhere stronger than in the woods. They do not sit at meat together unless, indeed, one is himself the repast.

Like a subtle atmosphere the spirit of the wild pervades the forest. Whoever enters comes under its spell. In the woods the dog tends to revert to the wolf, and savage instincts come to light. On the street he may pay no heed to people, will move in and out among them, himself a bit of civilization; but let him leave the village and go into the woods, and he is suspicious and on his guard.