Part 9

Having admired them sufficiently, I passed on. Titlarks were beginning to abound, but where were the longspurs? A shot was fired some distance away, and as I looked in that direction two great blue herons went flying across the marsh, each with his legs behind him. It was good to see them still able to fly.

Then something--I have no idea what; no sight or sound that I was sensible of--told me to look at a bird beside the little pool of water I had just passed. It was another white-rumped sandpiper, all by himself, nearer to me even than those I had left a little way back. What a beauty he was!--his dark eye (which I could see winking), the lovely cinnamon-brown shading of his back and wings, setting off the marbled black and white, and his shyly confiding demeanor. I had scarcely stopped before he flew to my side of the pool and stood as near me as he could get--too near to be shot at. He too had been hit, or so it seemed. One foot was painful, though he could put it down, if necessary, and even take a limping step upon it. Happy bird! He had fared well!

Up the steep, grassy hill I started out of the road; but I soon halted again, this time to gaze into the sky. Straight above me were numbers of herring gulls, some far, far up under the fleecy cirrus clouds, others much lower. All were resting upon the air, sailing in broad circles. Round and round they went,--a kind of stationary motion, a spectator might have called it; but in a minute or two they had disappeared. They were progressing in circles, circle cutting circle. It is the sea-gull’s way of taking a long flight. I remember it of old, and have never seen anything to surpass it for gracefulness. If there were only words to describe such things! But language is a clumsy tool.

The hilltop offered beauty of another kind: the blue ocean, the broad, brown marshes, dotted with haycocks innumerable, the hills landward, a distant town, with its spires showing, the inlet yonder, whitened with swimming gulls. Crickets chirped in the grass, herds of cattle and sheep grazed peacefully on all sides, and when I turned my head, there behind me, a mile away, perhaps, were the shining Ipswich dunes, wave on wave of dazzling white sand. I ought to have stayed with the picture, perhaps; but there were no longspurs, and somehow this was a day for birds rather than for a landscape. I would return to the muddy flats, and spend my time with the sandpipers and the plover. The telltale yellow-legs were whistling, and who could guess what I might see?

At the little pool I must stop for another visit with my single sandpiper. He would be there, I felt certain. And he was; as pretty as before, and no more alarmed at my presence, though as he balanced himself on one leg his body shook with a constant rhythmical pulsation, as if his heart were beating more violently than a bird’s heart should. He did not look happy, I thought. And why should he, far from home, with a wounded foot, no company, and an unknown number of guns yet to face before reaching the end of his long journey? He was hardly bigger than a sparrow, but he was one of the creatures which lordly man, endowed with “godlike reason,” a being of “large discourse,” so wise and good that he naturally thinks of the Creator of all things as a person very like himself, finds it amusing to kill.

And when I came to the few rods of beach, there stood my seven sandpipers, exactly as before. They stirred uneasily under my gaze, whispering a few words to one another (“Will he shoot, do you think?”), but they kept their places, bunched closely together for safety. Did they know anything about their lonely brother--or sister--up yonder on the hillside? If they noticed her absence, they probably supposed her dead. Death is so common and so sudden, especially in migration time.

Now I am back again on a grassy mound by the muddy flats, and the big plover is still here. How alert he looks as he sees me approach! Yet now, as an hour ago, he shows no inclination to fly. The tide is coming in fast. He steps about in the deepening water with evident discomfort, and whether he will or not, he must soon take to wing or wade ashore. And while I am eyeing his motions my glass falls unexpectedly on two sandpipers near him in the grass; pectoral sandpipers--grass-birds--I soon say to myself, with acute satisfaction. It is many years since I saw one. How small their heads look,--in contrast with the plover’s,--and how thickly and finely their breasts are streaked! I remember the portrait in Nelson’s “Birds of Alaska,” with its inflated throat, a monstrous vocal sac, half as large as the bird itself. A graceful wooer!

They, too, are finding the tide a trouble, and no doubt are wishing the human intruder would take himself off. Now, in spite of my presence, one of them follows the other toward the land, scurrying from one bit of tussock to another, half wading, half swimming. Time and tide wait for no bird. Both they and the plover have given up all thoughts of eating. They have enough to do to keep their eyes upon me and the water.

The sandpipers, being smaller, make their retreat first. One, as he finds himself so near a stranger, is smitten with sudden fright, and runs by at full speed on his pretty dark-green legs. Yet both presently become reassured, and fall to feeding with all composure almost about my feet. I have been still so long that I must be harmless. And now the plover himself takes wing (I am glad to find he can), but only for a rod or two, alighting on a conical bit of island. There is nothing for him to eat there, apparently, but at least the place will keep his feet dry. He stands quiet, waiting. And so he continues to do for the hour and more that I still remain.

My own stay, I should mention, is by this time compulsory. I, too, am on an island (I have just discovered the fact), and not choosing to turn wader on my own account, must wait till the tide goes down. It is no hardship. Every five minutes brings me something new. I have only now noticed (a slight cry having drawn my attention) that there are sandpipers of another kind here--a little flock of dunlins, or redbacks. They are bunched on the pebbly edge of a second island (which was not an island a quarter of an hour ago), nearer to me even than the plover’s, and are making the best of the high tide, which has driven them from their feeding-grounds, by taking a siesta. Once, when I look that way,--which I can do only now and then, there are so many distractions,--I find the whole eight with their bills tucked under their wings. Now, isn’t that a pretty sight! Their name, as I say, is the red-backed sandpiper; but at this season their upper parts are of a uniform mouse color, or soft, dark gray--I hardly know how to characterize it. It is very distinctive, whatever word we use, and equally so is the shape of the bill, long and stout, with a downward inflection at the tip. Eight birds, did I say? No, there are nine, for I have just discovered another, not on the island, but under the very edge of the grassy bank on which I am standing. He has a broken leg, poor fellow, and seems to prefer being by himself; but by and by, with a sudden cry of alarm, for which I can see no occasion, he flies to rejoin his mates.

Meanwhile, seven white-rumps have come and settled near them; the same flock that I saw yonder on the roadside beach, I have little question. Probably the encroaching tide has disturbed them also. At the same time I hear distant voices of yellow-legs, and presently six birds are seen flying in this direction. They wheel doubtfully at the unexpected sight of a man, and drop to the ground beyond range; but I can see them well enough. How tall they are, and how wide-awake they look, with their necks stretched out; and how silly they are,--“telltales” and “tattlers” indeed,--to publish their movements and whereabouts to every gunner within a mile! While my head is turned they disappear, and I hear them whistling again across the marsh. They are all gone, I think; but as I look again toward my sandpipers’ island, behold! there stands a tall fellow, his yellow legs shining, and his eye fastened upon me. Either he has lost his reason, if he ever had any, or he knows I have no gun. Perfectly still he keeps (he is not an absolute fool, I rejoice to see) as long as I am looking at him. Then I look elsewhere, and when my eye returns to his place, he is not there. He has only moved behind the corner of the islet, however, as I find when I shift my own position by a rod or two. He seems to be dazed, and for a wonder he holds his tongue.

Titlarks are about me in crowds. One is actually wading along the shore, with the water up to his belly. Yes, he is doing it again. I look twice to be sure of him. A flock of dusky ducks fly just above my head, showing me the lining of their wings. Truly this is a birdy spot; and luckily, though there are two or three “blinds” near, and guns are firing every few minutes up and down the marshes, there is no one here to disturb me and my friends. I could stay with them till night; but what is that? A buggy is coming down the road out of the hills with only one passenger. This is my opportunity. I pack up my glass, betake myself to the roadside, and when the man responds to my question politely, I take a seat beside him. As he gets out to unlatch the gate, a minute afterward, a light-colored--dry-sand-colored--bird flies up and perches on a low fence-rail. This is no wader, but is none the less welcome. It is an Ipswich sparrow, I explain to my benefactor, who waits for me to take an observation. The species was discovered here, I tell him, and was named in the town’s honor. He seems interested. “I shouldn’t have known it,” he says. So I have done some good to-day, though I have thought only of enjoying myself.

ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN

If you have once seen a picture, says Emerson somewhere, never look at it again. He means that hours of insight are so rare that a really high and satisfying experience with a book, picture, landscape, or other object of beauty is to be accepted as final, a favor of Providence which we have no warrant to expect repeated. If you have seen a thing, therefore, really seen it and communed with the soul of it, let that suffice you. Attempts to live the hour over a second time will only result in failure, or, worse yet, will cast a shadow over what ought to have been a permanently luminous recollection.

There is a modicum of sound philosophy in the advice. We must take it as the counsel of an idealist, and follow it or not as occasion bids. The words of such men, as one of them was given to saying, are only for those who have ears to hear. We may be sure of one thing: poems, landscapes, pictures, and all other works of art (art human or superhuman) are never to be exhausted by one look, or by a hundred. If a man is good for anything, and the poem or the landscape is good for anything, he will find new meanings with new perusals. In other words, we may turn upon Emerson and say: “Yes, but then, you know, we never do see a picture--a picture that is a picture.”

As was related a week ago, I spent the 12th of October on the North Shore. I brought back the remembrance of a glorious piece of the world’s beauty. In outline, I had it in my mind. But I knew perfectly, both at the time and afterward, that I had not really made it my own. I had been too much taken up with other things. The eye does not see the landscape; nor does the mind see it. The eye is the lens, the mind is the plate. The landscape prints itself upon the mind, through the eye. But the mind must be sensitive and still, and--what is oftener forgotten--the exposure must be sufficiently prolonged. The clearest-eyed genius ever born never saw a landscape in ten minutes.

On all grounds, then, I was entitled to another look. And this time, perhaps, the Lapland longspurs would be there to be enjoyed with the rest. I would go again, therefore; and on the morning of the 18th, long before daylight, judging by the quietness of the trees outside that the wind had gone down (for wind is a serious hindrance to quiet pleasure at the seashore in autumn, and visits must be timed accordingly), I determined to set out in good season and secure a longish day. Venus and the old moon were growing pale in the east when I started forth, and three hours afterward I was footing it through Ipswich village toward East Street and the sea.

As I crossed the marsh and approached the gate, a stranger overtook me. We managed the business together, one pulling the gate to, the other tending the hook and staple, and we spoke of the unusual greenness of the hills before us, on which flocks and herds were grazing. “There’s better feed now than there’s been all summer,” the stranger said. It was easy to believe it. Those broad-backed, grassy hills are one of the glories of the North Shore.

I followed the road as it led me among them. A savanna sparrow had been dodging along the edge of a ditch near the gate; titlark voices at once became common, and after a turn or two I saw before me a bunch of shore larks dusting themselves in the sandy middle of the track. They were making thorough work of it, crowding their breasts and necks, and even the sides of their heads into the soil, with much shaking of feathers afterward.

The road brought me to a beach, where were two or three houses, and, across the way, a pond stocked with wooden geese and ducks, with an underground blind for gunners in the side of the hill. Some delights are so keen that it is worth elaborate preparations to enjoy them. Here the titlarks were in extraordinary force, and I lingered about the spot for half an hour, awaiting the longspurs that might be hoped for in their company. Hoped for, but nothing more. I was still too early, perhaps.

Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet, and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure, two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through. Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered. Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.

When I had left the hills behind me, and was again skirting the muddy flats, I found myself all at once near a few sandpipers,--a dozen, more or less, of white-rumps,--one with a foot dragging, one with a leg held up, and beside them a single red-back, or dunlin, staggering on one leg, the same bird, it seemed likely, that I had pitied a week ago. I pitied him still. Ornithology, studied under such conditions, was no longer the cheerful, exhilarating science to which I am accustomed. It was more like sociology.

Perhaps I am sentimental. If so, may I be forgiven. There is no man but has his weakness. The dunlin was nothing, I knew; one among thousands; a few ounces of flesh with feathers on it; what if he did suffer? It was none of my business. Why should I take other men’s amusements sadly? The bird was greatly inferior to the being who shot him; at least that is the commonly accepted theory; and the superior, as every one but an anarchist must admit, has the rights of superiority. And for all that, the dunlin seemed a pretty innocent, and I wished that he had two good legs. As for his being only one of thousands, so am I--and no very fine one either; but I shouldn’t like to be shot at from behind a wall; and when I have a toothache, the sense of my personal insignificance is of small use in dulling the pain. Poor dunlin!

I allowed myself two hours from the gate back to the railroad station, though it is less than an hour’s walk. Some of the fairest views are to be obtained from the road; and there, I told myself, I should be sheltered from the wind and could sit still at my ease. The first half of the distance, too, would take me between pleasant hedgerows, in which are many things worthy of a stroller’s notice.

For some time, indeed, I did little but stop and look behind. The marshes pulled me about: so level, so expansive, so richly brown, so pointed with haycocks (once, the notion taking me, I counted far enough to see that there were more than two hundred in sight), and so beautifully backed by the golden autumnal hills. I can see them yet, though I have nothing to say about them.

“The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!”

Trains of gulls went flying up the inlet as the tide went out. They live by the sea’s almanac as truly as the clam-diggers, two of whom I had watched, an hour before, sailing across the inlet in a rude boat (more picturesque by half than a gentleman’s yacht), and setting about their day’s work on a shoal newly uncovered. Thank Heaven, there are still some occupations that cannot be carried on in a factory.

The roadsides were bright with gay-colored fruits: barberries, thorn apples, Roxbury waxwork, and rose-hips. Of thorn bushes there were at least two kinds; one already bare-branched, with scattered small fruit; the other still in leaf, and loaded with gorgeous clusters of large red apples. More interesting to me than any of these were the frost grapes; familiar acquaintances of an Old Colony boyhood, but now grown to be strangers. They were shining black, ripe and juicy (of the size of peas), and if their sweetness failed to tempt the palate, that, for aught I know, may have been the eater’s fault rather than theirs. Why might not their quality be of a too excellent sort, beyond his too effeminate powers of appreciation? Is there any certainty that man’s taste is final in such matters? Was my own criticism of them anything more than a piece of unscientific, inconclusive impressionism?