Part 8

This small tree-toad had a home, had it in his soul, I believe, precisely where John Howard Payne had it, and where many another of us has it. He had it in a tree, too,--in a hickory tree, this one that dwelt by my house; he had it in an apple tree, that one yonder across the meadow.

“East, west, Hame’s best,”

croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive minor that wakened memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things than any other voice I ever knew.

These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have never had a home; and none of us has ever had more than one. There can be but one--mine--and that has always been, must always be, as imperishable as memory, and as far beyond all barter as the gates of the sunset are beyond my horizon’s picket fence of pines.

The toad seems to feel it all, but feels it whole, not analyzed and itemized as a memory. Here in the hickory for four years (for seven, I am quite sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs, but back he would come, without mate or companion, to his tree. Stronger than love of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow cold heart is his instinct for home.

If I go down to the orchard and bring up from the apple tree another toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing, the Heimweh which he shares with me; and guided by it, as the bee and the pigeon and the dog are guided, he makes his sure way back to the orchard home.

Would he go back beyond the orchard, over the road, over the wide meadow, over to the Baldwin tree, half a mile away, if I brought him from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then watch the old apple tree yonder. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not let him rest; and guided by his mysterious sense of direction--for this one place--he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the way.

Yet I could wish there were another tree here, besides the apple, and another toad. Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great deal more than that. Here in the old Baldwin he has made his home for I don’t know how long, hunting over its world of branches in the summer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the winter--down under the chips and punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the débris at the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he preserved himself until thawed out by the spring. I never pass the old apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my respects to the toad; nor in the winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep in there. He is no mere toad any more. He has passed into a genius loci, the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within the tree’s thin ribs, as if to save the old shell to another summer.

A toad is a toad, and if he never got back to the tree there would be one toad less, nothing more. If anything more, then it is on paper, and it is cant, not toad at all. And so, I suppose, stones are stones, trees trees, brooks brooks--not books and tongues and sermons at all--except on paper and as cant. Surely there are many things in writing that never had any other, any real existence, especially in writing that deals with the out-of-doors. One should write carefully about one’s toad; fearfully, indeed, when that toad becomes one’s teacher; for teacher my toad in the old Baldwin has many a time been.

Often in the summer dusk I have gone over to sit at his feet and learn some of the things my college professors could not teach me. I have not yet taken my higher degrees. I was graduated A. B. from college. It is A. B. C. that I am working toward here at the old apple tree with the toad.

Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait; the toad comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the fields. We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is the lesson--one of the majors in this graduate course with the toad.

The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whippoorwill drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, but is blotted out by the darkness, only to blaze again, and again be blotted, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker for the quick, unsteady glow.

We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had been taught every manner of stirring, and this unwonted exercise of being still takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts me painfully out of breath in my soul. “Wisdom is the principal thing,” my other teachers would repeat, “therefore get wisdom, but keep exceedingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short. There are only twenty-four hours to the day. The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do. Let us then be up and doing”--all of this at random from one of their lectures on “The Simple Life, or the Pace that Kills.”

Of course there is more or less of truth in this teaching of theirs. A little leisure has no doubt become a dangerous thing--unless one spend it talking or golfing or automobiling, or aëroplaning or elephant-killing, or in some other diverting manner; otherwise one’s nerves, like pulled candy, might set and cease to quiver; or one might even have time to think.

“Keep going,”--I quote from another of their lectures,--“keep going; it is the only certainty you have against knowing whither you are going.” I learned that lesson well. See me go--with half a breakfast and the whole morning paper; with less of lunch and the 4:30 edition. But I balance my books, snatch the evening edition, catch my car, get into my clothes, rush out to dinner, and spend the evening lecturing or being lectured to. I do everything but think.

But suppose I did think? It could only disturb me--my politics, or ethics, or religion. I had better let the editors and professors and preachers think for me. The editorial office is such a quiet thought-inducing place; as quiet as a boiler factory; and the thinkers there, from editor-in-chief to the printer’s devil, are so thoughtful for the size of the circulation! And the college professors, they have the time and the cloistered quiet needed. But they have pitiful salaries, and enormous needs, and their social status to worry over, and themes to correct, and a fragmentary year to contend with, and Europe to see every summer, and-- Is it right to ask them, with all this, to think? We will ask the preachers instead. They are set apart among the divine and eternal things; they are dedicated to thought; they have covenanted with their creeds to think; it is their business to study, but, “to study to be careful and harmless.”

It may be, after all, that my politics and ethics and religion need disturbing, as the soil about my fruit trees needs it. Is it the tree? or is it the soil that I am trying to grow? Is it I, or my politics, my ethics, my religion? I will go over to the toad, no matter the cost. I will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the worry of work even less. He has all time and no task; he is not obliged to labor for a living, much less to think. My other teachers all are; they are all professional thinkers; their thoughts are words: editorials, lectures, sermons,--livings. I read them or listen to them. The toad sits out the hour silent, thinking, but I know not what, nor need to know. To think God’s thoughts after Him is not so high as to think my own after myself. Why then ask this of the toad, and so interrupt these of mine? Instead we will sit in silence and watch Altair burn along the shore of the sky, and overhead Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the apple tree.

The darkness has come. The toad is scarcely a blur between me and the stars. It is a long look from him, ten feet above me, on past the fireflies to Arcturus and the regal splendors of the Northern Crown--as deep and as far a look as the night can give, and as only the night can give. Against the distant stars, these ten feet between me and the toad shrink quite away; and against the light far off yonder near the pole, the firefly’s little lamp becomes a brave but a very lesser beacon.

There are only twenty-four hours to the day--to the day and the night! And how few are left to that quiet time between the light and the dark! Ours is a hurried twilight. We quit work to sleep; we wake up to work again. We measure the day by a clock; we measure the night by an alarm clock. Life is all ticked off. We are murdered by the second. What we need is a day and a night with wider margins--a dawn that comes more slowly, and a longer lingering twilight. Life has too little selvage; it is too often raw and raveled. Room and quiet and verge are what we want, not more dials for time, nor more figures for the dials. We have things enough, too, more than enough; it is space for the things, perspective, and the right measure for the things that we lack--a measure not one foot short of the distance between us and the stars.

If we get anything out of the fields worth while, it will be this measure, this largeness, and quiet. It may be only an owl or a tree-toad that we go forth to see, but how much more we find--things we cannot hear by day, things long, long forgotten, things we never thought or dreamed before.

The day is none too short, the night none too long; but all too narrow is the edge between.

THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS

THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS

The ragged quilt of snow had slipped from the shoulders of the slopes, the gray face of the maple swamp showed a flush of warmth, and the air, out of the south to-day, breathed life, the life of buds and catkins, of sappy bark, oozing gum, and running water--the life of spring; and through the faintly blending breaths, as a faster breeze ran down the hills, I caught a new and unmistakable odor, single, pointed, penetrating, the sign to me of an open door in the wood-lot, to me, indeed, the Open Sesame of spring.

“When does the spring come? And who brings it?” asks the watcher in the woods. “To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders and the pussy-willows begin to swell,” writes Mr. Burroughs, “when the ice breaks up on the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward.” So I have written, also; written verses even to the pussy-willow, to the bluebird, and to the hepatica, as spring’s harbingers; but never a line yet to celebrate this first forerunner of them all, the gentle early skunk. For it is his presence, blown far across the February snow, that always ends my New England winter and brings the spring. Of course there are difficulties, poetically, with the wood-pussy. I don’t remember that even Whitman tried the theme. But, perhaps, the good gray poet never met a spring skunk in the streets of Camden. The animal is comparatively rare in the densely populated cities of New Jersey.

It is rare enough here in Massachusetts; at least, it used to be; though I think, from my observations, that the skunk is quietly on the increase in New England. I feel very sure of this as regards the neighborhood immediate to my farm.

This is an encouraging fact, but hard to be believed, no doubt. I, myself, was three or four years coming to the conviction, often fearing that this little creature, like so many others of our thinning woods, was doomed to disappear. But that was before I turned to keeping hens. I am writing these words as a naturalist and nature-lover, and I am speaking also with the authority of one who keeps hens. Though a man give his life to the study of the skunk, and have not hens, he is nothing. You cannot say, “Go to, I will write an essay about my skunks.” There is no such anomaly as professional nature-loving, as vocational nature-writing. You cannot go into your woods and count your skunks. Not until you have kept hens can you know, can you even have the will to believe, the number of skunks that den in the dark on the purlieus of your farm.

That your neighbors keep hens is not enough. My neighbors’ hens were from the first a stone of stumbling to me. That is a peculiarity of next-door hens. It would have been better, I thought, if my neighbors had had no hens. I had moved in among these half-farmer folk, and while I found them intelligent enough, I immediately saw that their attitude toward nature was wholly wrong. They seemed to have no conception of the beauty of nature. Their feeling for the skunk was typical: they hated the skunk with a perfect hatred, a hatred implacable, illogical, and unpoetical, it seemed to me, for it was born of their chicken-breeding.