Part 16

A week ago, just after two o’clock on a bright afternoon, the birds suddenly came streaming from everywhere to the surf along the dunes. Skates had again driven in a people of “eels.” It was high tide; the seas gathered and broke, the heaviest shaking the beach. Into the curling baroque crests of the waves, into the advancing slopes of the gathering green swells, into the race and flow of white seethe and yellow sand, the bright air rained down birds on the now doubly imperilled and darting prey. The air was cut with wings and pierced with eager, hungry, and continuous cries. The birds make plummet dives and strike up jets of water from the surf. The harassed fish moving south, the terns followed after them; an hour later, through field glasses, I could see the thing still going on just north and seaward of the shoals.

Piratic jaegers, Stercorarius pomarinus, Stercorarius parasiticus, apparently never trouble these Eastham birds. I have seen but one jaeger on this beach, and that a solitary bird who chanced to pass the house one morning last September. Cape Cod neighbours, however, tell me that jaegers are numerous in the bay, and that they harry the terns who fish the shoals off Billingsgate.

Almost every day, in the full heat of noontide, I go down to the lower beach and lie down for a while on the hot sand, an arm over my eyes. The other day, in a spirit of fun, I raised my arm toward a passing tern--the returning birds fly scarce thirty feet above the beach--and to my amusement the creature paused, sank, and hovered above me for a few seconds scarce ten feet from my hand. I saw then that its under plumage, instead of being white, was a lovely faint rose; I had halted a roseate tern, Sterna dougalli. I wriggled my fingers; the bird responded with a cry in which I read bewildered indignation; then on it flew, and the incident ended.

This year a number of laughing gulls, Larus atricilla, accompany the terns fishing, the dozen or so gulls keeping to themselves while flying with their neighbours.

The most interesting adventure with birds I have had this summer I had with a flock of least terns, Sterna antillarum. It came to pass that early one morning in June, as I happened to be passing big dune, a covey of small terns unexpectedly sailed out at me and hovered about me, scolding and complaining. To my great delight, I saw that they were least terns or “tit gulls,” rare creatures on our coast, and perhaps the prettiest and most graceful of summer’s ocean birds. A miniature tern, the “leastie,” scarce larger than a swallow, and you may know him by the lighter grey of his plumage, his bright lemon-yellow bill, and his delicate orange-yellow feet.

The birds were nesting at the foot of big dune, and I had disturbed their peace. In the splendour of morning they hung above me, now uttering a single alarmed cheep, now a series of staccato cries.

I walked over to the nests.

The nest of such a beach bird is a singular affair. It is but a depression, and sometimes scarcely that, in the open, shelterless beach. “Nest building on the open sand,” says Mr. Forbush, “is but the work of a moment. The bird alights, crouches slightly, and works its little feet so rapidly that the motion seems a mere blur, while the sand flies out in every direction as the creature pivots about. The tern then settles lower and smooths the cavity by turning and working and moving its body from side to side.”

I have mislaid the scrap of paper on which I jotted down the number of nests I found that morning, but I think I counted twenty to twenty-five. There were eggs in every nest, in some two, in others three, in one case and one only, four. To describe the coloration of the shells is difficult, for there was a deal of variation, but perhaps I can give some idea of their appearance by saying that they were beach-coloured with overtones of bluish green, and speckled with browns and violet-browns and lavenders. What interested me most, however, was not the eggs, but the manner in which the birds had decorated their nests with pebbles and bits of shell. Here and there along the beach, the “leasties” had picked up flat bits of sea shell about the size of a finger nail, and with these bits they had lined the bowl of their nests, setting the flat pieces in flat, like parts of a mosaic.

For two weeks I watched these “leasties” and their nests, taking every precaution not to disturb or alarm the setting birds. Yet I had but to pass anywhere between them and the tide to put them up, and when I walked south with coast guardsmen, I heard single cries of alarm in the starry and enormous night. Toward the end of June, a sudden northeaster came.

It was a night storm. I built a little fire, wrote a letter or two, and listened to the howling wind and the bursts of rain. All night long, and it was a wakeful, noisy night, I had the “leasties” on my mind. I felt them out there on the wild shelterless beach, with the black gale screaming over them and the rain pouring down. Opening my door, I looked for a moment into the drenching blackness and heard a great roaring of the sea.

The tide and the gale had ebbed together when I rose at five the next morning, but there was still wind and a grey drizzle. At the foot of big dune I found desolation. The tide had swept the beach. Not a nest remained or a sign of a nest, and the birds had gone. Later that day, just south of big dune, I saw bits of bluish-green eggshell in a lump of fresh weed. Where the birds went to, I never knew. Probably to a better place to try again.

Bless me! I thought, returning; what of the song sparrows?

Through the drenching grass, bare-legged, I hurried to the dusty-miller bush. The sand had been moving during the night; it had crept along the dunes, it had rained down with the drops of rain, and the bush was now well embedded. Indeed, it was a bush no more, but a thicket of separate stalks growing out of a deep, rain-soaked mound of sand. As I drew close to it, I saw through the rain the prudent eye of Madam Sparrow aglint in the leaves. The sand had risen to within an inch of her nest, the leaves which concealed it were awry with wind and choked with sand, but there sat the little bird, resolved and dutiful. She raised her brood--how well she deserved to--and some time in July the whole family moved out into the dunes.

I must now add a paragraph from my autumnal notes and tell of my last sight of the great summer throng of terns. It was an unforgettable experience. During August the birds thinned out, and as the month drew to a close, whole days passed without a sight or sign of their presence. By September 1st, I imagined that most of them had gone. Then came the unexpected. On Saturday, September 3d, friends came down the beach to see me, and at the close of their visit, as I opened the Fo’castle door, I found that the air above the dunes was snowy with young terns. The day had been mild, and the late afternoon light was mild and rosy golden--the sun was an hour from his setting--and high in space and golden light the myriads of birds drifted and whirled like leaves. North and south we saw them for miles along the dunes. For twenty minutes, perhaps, or half an hour, the swarming filled my sky, and during all that time I did not hear a single bird utter a single sound.

At the end of that period, withdrawing south and inland, the gathering melted away.

It was really a very curious thing. Apparently some impulse from heaven had suddenly seized upon the birds, entered into their feathered breasts, and led them into the air above the dunes. Whence came that spirit, whence its will, and how had it breathed its purpose into those thousand hearts? The whole performance reminded me very much of a swarming of bees. A migrational impulse, yes, and something more. The birds were flying high, higher than I had ever seen terns go, and as far as I could judge--or guess--the great majority of the fliers were young birds of the year. It was a rapture, a glory of the young. And this was the last of the terns.

Late August, and day by day, I see more shore birds and see them oftener. All summer long there have been sandpipers and ringnecks on the beach, but earlier in the season the birds are elusive and may disappear for days. The first great flocks to return from the Northern breeding grounds arrived here about the middle of July. I remember their coming. For four interminable days a strong and tireless southwest wind had billowed across the lagoon and off to a smoky sea; on the morning of the fifth day, just before sunrise, this wind had died; then had come dullness and quiet, and, between nine and ten o’clock, a breath of easterly air. All that fifth afternoon the beach had been black with birds, most of them ringnecks or semipalmated plovers. The long southwester had apparently dammed up a great migrational stream. These first flocks were vagrant mobs. Walking to Nauset between two and three o’clock, I must have put up between two and three thousand birds. As I drew near, mob after mob after mob crowded the air and sought feeding grounds ahead. The smaller autumnal flocks had flown in psychic unity, rising and falling, wheeling and alighting together; these mobs scattered and divided into wandering companies.

Late August, and my wild ducks, having raised their families, are returning by hundreds to the marsh. During May and June and early July, when I wandered about this region in the night, I heard no sound from the flats. Now, when I get out to signal to the first coast guardsman coming south at half-past nine, I hear from the dark levels a sentinel quack, a call. The marsh fills with life again; the great sun goes south along green treetops and moorlands fruiting and burned brown.

The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer. Stirred by the vernal fire, a group psychically dissolves, for every creature in a flock is intent upon the use and the offering of his own awakened flesh. Even creatures who are of the flocking or herding habit emerge as individuals. With the rearing of the young, and their integration into the reëstablished group, life becomes again a social rhythm. The body has been given and sacrificially broken, its own gods and all gods obeyed.

The other day I saw a young swimmer in the surf. He was, I judged, about twenty-two years old and a little less than six feet tall, splendidly built, and as he stripped I saw that he must have been swimming since the season began, for he was sunburned and brown. Standing naked on the steep beach, his feet in the climbing seethe, he gathered himself for a swimmer’s crouching spring, watched his opportunity, and suddenly leaped headfirst through a long arc of air into the wall of a towering and enormous wave. Again and again he repeated his jest, emerging each time beyond the breaker with a stare of salty eyes, a shake of the head, and a smile. It was all a beautiful thing to see: the surf thundering across the great natural world, the beautiful and compact body in its naked strength and symmetry, the astounding plunge across the air, arms extended ahead, legs and feet together, the emerging stroke of the flat hands, and the alternate rhythms of the sunburned and powerful shoulders.

Watching this picture of a fine human being free for the moment of everything save his own humanity and framed in a scene of nature, I could not help musing on the mystery of the human body and of how nothing can equal its rich and rhythmic beauty when it is beautiful or approach its forlorn and pathetic ugliness when beauty has not been mingled in or has withdrawn. Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciful use of clothes! Though some scold to-day because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful. All my life it has given me pleasure to see beautiful human beings. To see beautiful young men and women gives one a kind of reverence for humanity (alas, of how few experiences may this be said), and surely there are few moods of the spirit more worthy of our care than those in which we reverence, even for a moment, our tragic and bewildered kind.

My swimmer having gone his way, out of a chance curiosity I picked the top of a dune goldenrod, and found at the very bottom of a cocoon of twisted leaves the embryo head of the late autumnal flower.

Chapter X

ORION RISES ON THE DUNES

So came August to its close, ending its last day with a night so luminous and still that a mood came over me to sleep out on the open beach under the stars. There are nights in summer when darkness and ebbing tide quiet the universal wind, and this August night was full of that quiet of absence, and the sky was clear. South of my house, between the bold fan of a dune and the wall of a plateau, a sheltered hollow opens seaward, and to this nook I went, shouldering my blankets sailorwise. In the star-shine the hollow was darker than the immense and solitary beach, and its floor was still pleasantly warm with the overflow of day.

I fell asleep uneasily, and woke again as one wakes out-of-doors. The vague walls about me breathed a pleasant smell of sand, there was no sound, and the broken circle of grass above was as motionless as something in a house. Waking again, hours afterward, I felt the air grown colder and heard a little advancing noise of waves. It was still night. Sleep gone and past recapture, I drew on my clothes and went to the beach. In the luminous east, two great stars aslant were rising clear of the exhalations of darkness gathered at the rim of night and ocean--Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, the shoulders of Orion. Autumn had come, and the Giant stood again at the horizon of day and the ebbing year, his belt still hidden in the bank of cloud, his feet in the deeps of space and the far surges of the sea.

My year upon the beach had come full circle; it was time to close my door. Seeing the great suns, I thought of the last time I marked them in the spring, in the April west above the moors, dying into the light and sinking. I saw them of old above the iron waves of black December, sparkling afar. Now, once again, the Hunter rose to drive summer south before him, once again autumn followed on his steps. I had seen the ritual of the sun; I had shared the elemental world. Wraiths of memories began to take shape. I saw the sleet of the great storm slanting down again into the grass under the thin seepage of moon, the blue-white spill of an immense billow on the outer bar, the swans in the high October sky, the sunset madness and splendour of the year’s terns over the dunes, the clouds of beach birds arriving, the eagle solitary in the blue. And because I had known this outer and secret world, and been able to live as I had lived, reverence and gratitude greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else aside, and space and silence an instant closed together over life. Then time gathered again like a cloud, and presently the stars began to pale over an ocean still dark with remembered night.