Part 20

Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the dignity, the majesty, the divinity of life? And what life was here! Life whose beginnings lay so far back that I could no more reckon the years than I could count the atoms it had builded into this majestic form.

Looking down upon the oak from twice its height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-bolled for thirty feet, and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown. Its girth more than balanced the poplar’s greater height, and as for blossoms, Nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak.

My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled by the burrh! burrh! burrh! of three partridges taking flight just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding seemed all the more real when three little clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom and drifted up against the green.

Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the pine with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had snatched at the shallow, sandy bottom and torn out a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry above the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use, surely, for not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges, but also the quails, and such small things as the warblers, washed here,—though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it?

I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my guide. It saw me, too, and began to twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened, and with a heavy lurch that left the stub rocking, it dropped and was soon soaring high up in the blue.

This was the right locality; now where should I find the nest? Apparently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick that I could see hardly farther than my nose. A half-rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across the backs of several saplings which it had borne down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.

It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with an axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay with one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking, something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.

Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I had found my buzzard’s nest.

Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that they ever hatched.

But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. It was a right instinct which led the mother to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp and there hide her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness of things should have equaled hers, certainly, and I should have allowed her the privacy of the swamp. It was unfair of me and rude. Nature never intended a young buzzard for any eye but its mother’s, and she hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!

The two freaks in the log must have been three weeks old, I should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered, as young owls are, with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded their legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these, their receding heads drawn back, their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tomcats.

In order to examine them, I crawled into the den;—not a difficult act, for the opening measured four feet and a half at the mouth. The air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded tapestry over the walls.

I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled at the end, and where I had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as you have seen an infusorian scud across the field of your microscope, there swept a meteor of black,—the buzzard! and evidently in that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied me in the log.

I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen kinds of cramps, the maternal creature was soaring serenely far up in the clear, cool sky.

The Lay of the Land

SHE loved nature—from a veranda, a dog-cart, the deck of a vessel. She had been to the seashore for a whole June, the next June to the mountains, then a June to an inland farm. “And I enjoyed it!” she exclaimed; “the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and the green of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks—things! why, I simply didn’t. In fact, I believe that most of your fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philosophizing woodchucks are simply the creatures of a disordered imagination.”

I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and the philosophizing; I disagreed, however, as to the reality of the crabs and the woodchucks; for it was not the attributes and powers of these creatures that she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of the creatures themselves,—along her seashore, and upon the farm that she visited.

“As for fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks—things,” she did not see them. Certainly not. Yet a fiddler crab is as real an entity as a thousand-acre marsh,—and in its way as interesting. It is a sorry soul that looks for nothing out of doors but fiddler crabs, and insists upon their fiddling; that never sees the sky-blue, the sea-blue, and the green of the rolling hills. I shall never forget a moonrise over the Maurice River marshes that I witnessed one night in early June. It was a peculiarly solemn sight, and one of the profoundly beautiful experiences of my life, there in the wide, weird silence of the half sea-land, with the tide at flood. Nor shall I ever forget two or three of the stops which I made in the marshes that day to watch the fiddler crabs. Nor shall I forget how they fiddled. For fiddle they did, just as they used to years ago, when they and I lived on these marshes together.

If my skeptic found no fiddler crabs along her seashore, found nothing of interest smaller and more thing-like than color and fresh air, it may be that she did not understand how to look for crabs and things.

To go to the seashore for one June, to the mountains for a second, to the farm for a third, is not a good way to study the out-of-doors. A better way is to spend all three Junes at this shore or upon this same farm. It is when one abides upon the farm, indeed, the year around, through several Junes, that one discovers the woodchucks. The clover is too high in June. As one of twelve, June is a very good month to be out of doors; but as a season for nature study,—no single month, not even June, is satisfactory.

It takes time and patience and close watching to discover woodchucks. This means a limited territory; one can easily have too much ground to cultivate. I know a man who owns five hundred acres of Jersey pine barrens, and who can hardly till enough of it to pay taxes, whereas a friend of mine here near Boston is quietly getting rich on three acres and a half.

My skeptic had too many acres. She went to the seashore one summer, then to the mountains, then to a farm, and now she doubts the existence of crabs and woodchucks. Well she may. She might almost doubt the reality of the mountains and shore, to say nothing of the farm. One can scarcely come to believe in a mountain in the course of a mere June. The trouble is one of size. As well try to make friends with a crowded street. Crabs and woodchucks live in little holes. You must hunt for the holes; you must wait until the woodchucks come out.

For more than five years now I have been hunting holes here on the farm, and it is astonishing the number I have discovered. I doubt if driving past you would see anything extraordinary in this small farm of mine,—a steep, tree-grown ridge, with a house at the top, a patch of garden, a bit of meadow, a piece of woods, a stream, a few old apple trees, a rather sterile, stony field. But live here as I do, mow and dig and trim and chop as I do, know all the paths, the stumps, the stone heaps, the tree holes, earth holes,—there simply is no end of holes, and they are all inhabited.

By actual count there are forty-six woodchuck holes on these fourteen acres. Now forty-six woodchuck holes are a good many holes, but I have been these five years counting them. Only two of them are in the open, and visible from the road. Driving past, I say, you might actually think I had no woodchucks at all!

You should stop all summer and milk for me some morning. Throughout the early part of the season I had left the kitchen with my milk-pail rather late,—a little after five o’clock. One morning in September I stepped out of the door a little before five, and there in the clover close to the stoop sat a fine old woodchuck. I stood still and watched him. He was not expecting me yet, for he knew my comings out and goings in. He was up to his eyes in the clover, and he neither saw nor heard me.

Here about the kitchen door he had fed since the clover started, and I had not known it. He had timed his breakfast so as to be through by five o’clock,—before I came out. Had I been a boarder, with no cow to milk, perhaps I never should have known it. But after that morning I saw him frequently. I took pains to get up with him. Just over the edge of the lawn, about five feet down the wooded slope, was his burrow, which was one of the latest of the forty-six holes to be discovered.

When I shall have been milking and huckleberrying and hen’s nesting and aimlessly wandering over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall have found, it may be, the very last of the woodchuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred years, for the families in the old holes keep multiplying, and the new holes keep multiplying too.

But woodchucks are not the only “things,” not the only crop that the farm yields, although it must certainly seem that there can be little room on these scant acres for anything more. My farming, however, is intensive,—from the tops of my tallest pines to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows,—so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chipmunks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits (few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many foxes).