Part 5

A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or so of butternuts upon it this year; the squirrels might be seen almost any hour in the day darting about the branches of that tree, hunting the green nuts, and in early September the last nut was taken. They carried them away and placed them, one here and one there, in the forks of the apple-trees. I noticed that they did not depend upon the eye to find the nuts; they did not look the branches over from some lower branch as you and I would have done; they explored the branches one by one, running out to the end, and, if the nut was there, seized it and came swiftly down. I think the red squirrel rarely lays up any considerable store, but hides his nuts here and there in the trees and upon the ground. This habit makes him the planter of future trees, of oaks, hickories, chestnuts, and butternuts. These heavy nuts get widely scattered by this agency.

One morning I saw a chipmunk catch a flying grasshopper on the wing. Little Striped-Back sat on the wall with stuffed pockets, waiting for something, when along came the big grasshopper in a hesitating, uncertain manner of flight. As it hovered above the chipmunk, the latter by a quick, dexterous movement sprang or reached up and caught it, and in less than one half-minute its fanlike wings were opening out in front of the captor's mouth and its body was being eagerly devoured. This same chipmunk, I think it is, has his den under the barn near me. Often he comes from the stone wall with distended cheek-pouches, and pauses fifteen feet away, close by cover, and looks to see if any danger is impending. To reach his hole he has to cross an open space a rod or more wide, and the thought of it evidently agitates him a little. I am sitting there looking over my desk upon him, and he is skeptical about my being as harmless as I look. "Dare I cross that ten feet of open there in front of him?" he seems to say. He sits up with fore paws pressed so prettily to his white breast. He is so near I can see the rapid throbbing of his chest as he sniffs the air. A moment he sits and looks and sniffs, then in hurried movements crosses the open, his cheek-pockets showing full as he darts by me. He is like a baseball runner trying to steal a base: danger lurks on all sides; he must not leave the cover of one base till he sees the way is clear, and then--off with a rush! Pray don't work yourself up to such a pitch, my little neighbor; you shall make a home-run without the slightest show of opposition from me.

One day a gray squirrel came along on the stone wall beside the road. In front of the house he crossed an open barway, and then paused to observe two men at work in full view near the house. The men were a sculptor, pottering with clay, and his model. The squirrel sprang up a near-by butternut-tree, sat down on a limb, and had a good, long look. "Very suspicious," he seemed to think; "maybe they are fixing a trap for me"; and he deliberately came down the tree and returned the way he had come, spinning along the top of the wall, his long, fine tail outlined by a narrow band of silver as he sped off toward the woods.

WILD LIFE IN WINTER

To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human beings--travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it means death.

Most of the flies and beetles, wasps and hornets, moths, butterflies, and bumblebees die. The grasshoppers all die, with eggs for next season's crop deposited in the ground. Some of the butterflies winter over. The mourning cloak, the first butterfly to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides." The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their paper nests and die--all but the queen or mother hornet; she hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter beyond the reach of frost. In the spring she comes forth and begins life anew, starting a little cone-shaped paper nest, building a few paper cells, laying an egg in each, and thus starting the new colony.

The same is true of the bumblebees; they are the creatures of a summer. In August, when the flowers fail, the colony breaks up, they desert the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there, doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the inclement season. Emerson has put this fact into his poem on "The Humble-Bee":--

"When the fierce northwestern blast Cools sea and land so far and fast, Thou already slumberest deep; Woe and want thou canst outsleep; Want and woe, which torture us, Thy sleep makes ridiculous."

In early August of the past year I saw a queen bumblebee quickly enter a small hole on the edge of the road where there was no nest. It was probably her winter quarters.

If one could take the cover off the ground in the fields and woods in winter, or have some magic ointment put upon his eyes that would enable him to see through opaque substances, how many curious and interesting forms of life he would behold in the ground beneath his feet as he took his winter walk--life with the fires banked, so to speak, and just keeping till spring. He would see the field crickets in their galleries in the ground in a dormant state, all their machinery of life brought to a standstill by the cold. He would see the ants in their hills and in their tunnels in decaying trees and logs, as inert as the soil or the wood they inhabit. I have chopped many a handful of the big black ants out of a log upon my woodpile in winter, stiff, but not dead, with the frost, and brought them in by the fire to see their vital forces set going again by the heat. I have brought in the grubs of borers and the big fat grubs of beetles, turned out of their winter beds in old logs by my axe and frozen like ice-cream, and have seen the spark of life rekindle in them on the hearth.

With this added visual power, one would see the wood frogs and the hylas in their winter beds but a few inches beneath the moss and leaf-mould, one here and one there, cold, inert, biding their time. I dug a wood frog out one December and found him not frozen, though the soil around him was full of frost; he was alive but not frisky. A friend of mine once found one in the woods sitting upon the snow one day in early winter. She carried him home with her, and he burrowed in the soil of her flower-pot and came out all right in the spring. What brought him out upon the snow in December one would like to know.

One would see the tree-frogs in the cavities of old trees, wrapped in their winter sleep--which is yet not a sleep, but suspended animation. When the day is warm, or the January thaw comes, I fancy the little frog feels it and stirs in his bed. One would see the warty toads squatted in the soil two or three feet below the surface, in the same way. Probably not till April will the spell which the winter has put upon them be broken. I have seen a toad go into the ground in late fall. He literally elbows his way into it, going down backwards.

Beneath rocks or in cavities at the end of some small hole in the ground, one would see a ball or tangle of garter snakes, or black snakes, or copperheads--dozens of individual snakes of that locality entwined in one many-headed mass, conserving in this united way their animal heat against the cold of winter. One spring my neighbor in the woods discovered such a winter retreat of the copperheads, and, visiting the place many times during the warm April days, he killed about forty snakes, and since that slaughter, the copperheads have been at a premium in our neighborhood.

Here and there, near the fences and along the borders of the wood, these X-ray eyes would see the chipmunk at the end of his deep burrow with his store of nuts or grains, sleeping fitfully but not dormant. The frost does not reach him and his stores are at hand. One which we dug out in late October had nearly four quarts of weed-seeds and cherry-pits. He will hardly be out before March, and then, like his big brother rodent the woodchuck, and other winter sleepers, his fancy will quickly "turn to thoughts of love."

One would see the woodchuck asleep in his burrow, snugly rolled up and living on his own fat. All the hibernating animals that keep up respiration, must have sustenance of some sort--either a store of food at hand or a store of fat in their own bodies. The woodchuck, the bear, the coon, the skunk, the 'possum, lay up a store of fuel in their own bodies, and they come out in the spring lean and hungry. The squirrels are lean the year through, and hence must have a store of food in their dens, as does the chipmunk, or else be more or less active in their search all winter, as is the case with the red and gray squirrels. The fox puts on more or less fat in the fall, because he will need it before spring. His food-supply is very precarious; he may go many days without a morsel. I have known him to be so hungry that he would eat frozen apples and corn which he could not digest. The hare and the rabbit, on the other hand, do not store up fat against a time of need; their food-supply of bark and twigs is constant, no matter how deep the snows. The birds of prey that pass the winter in the north take on a coat of fat in the fall, because their food-supply is so uncertain; the coat of fat is also a protection against the cold.

Of course, all the wild creatures are in better condition in the fall than in the spring, but in many cases the fat is distinctly a substitute for food.

The skunk is in his den also from December till February, living on his own fat. Several of them often occupy the same den and conserve their animal heat in that way. The coon, also, is in his den in the rocks for a part of the winter, keeping warm on home-made fuel. The same is true of the bear in our climate. The bats are hibernating in the rocks or about buildings. The muskrats are leading hidden lives in the upper chambers of their snow-covered houses in the marshes and ponds or in the banks of streams, feeding on lily-roots and mussels which they get under the ice.

The lean, bloodthirsty minks and weasels are on the hunt all winter. Our native mice are also active. That pretty stitching upon the coverlet of the winter snow in the woods is made by our white-footed mouse and by the little shrew mouse. The former often has large stores of nuts hidden in some cavity in a tree; what supply of food the latter has, if any, I do not know. In the winter the short-tailed meadow or field mice come out of their retreat in the ground and beneath stones and lead gay, fearless lives beneath the snow-drifts. Their little villages, with their runways and abandoned nests, may be seen when the snow disappears in the spring. Their winter life beneath the snow, where no wicked eye or murderous claw can reach them, is in sharp contrast to their life in summer, when cats and hawks, owls and foxes, pounce upon them day and night. It is only in times of deep snows that they bark our fruit-trees.

We have in this latitude but one species of hibernating mouse--the long-tailed jumping mouse, or kangaroo mouse, as it is sometimes called from its mode of locomotion. Late one fall, while making a road near "Slabsides," we dug one out from its hibernation about two feet below the surface of the ground. It was like a little ball of fur tied with a string. In my hand it seemed as cold as if dead. Close scrutiny showed that it breathed at intervals, very slowly. The embers of life were there, but slumbering beneath the ashes. I put it in my pocket and went about my work. After a little time, remembering my mouse, I put my hand into my pocket and touched something very warm and lively. The ember had been fanned into a flame, so to speak. I kept my captive in a cage a day or two and then returned it to the woods, where I trust it found a safe retreat against the cold.

VII

BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

The distribution of our birds over the country in summer is like that of the people, quite uniform. Every wood and field has its quota, and no place so barren but it has some bird to visit it. One knows where to look for sparrows and thrushes and bobolinks and warblers and flycatchers. But the occupation of the country by our winter residents is like the Indian occupation of the land. They are found in little bands, a few here and there, with large tracts quite untenanted.

One may walk for hours through the winter woods and not see or hear a bird. Then he may come upon a troop of chickadees, with a nuthatch or two in their wake, and maybe a downy woodpecker. Birds not of a feather flock together at this inclement season. The question of food is always an urgent one. Evidently the nuthatch thinks there must be food where the chickadees flit and call so cheerily, and the woodpecker is probably drawn to the nuthatch for a similar reason.

Together they make a pretty thorough search,--fine, finer, finest. The chickadee explores the twigs and smaller branches; what he gets is on the surface, and so fine as to be almost microscopic. The nuthatch explores the trunks and larger branches of the trees; he goes a little deeper, into crevices of the bark and under lichens. Then comes Downy, who goes deeper still. He bores for larger game through the bark, and into the trunks and branches themselves.

In late fall this band is often joined by the golden-crowned kinglet and the brown creeper. The kinglet is finer-eyed and finer-billed than even the chickadee, and no doubt gathers what the latter overlooks, while the brown creeper, with his long, slender, curved bill, takes what both the nuthatch and the woodpecker miss. Working together, it seems as if they must make a pretty clean sweep. But the trees are numerous and large, and the birds are few. Only a mere fraction of tree surface is searched over at any one time. In large forests probably only a mere fraction of the trees are visited at all.

One cold day in midwinter, when I was walking through the snowless woods, I saw chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers upon the ground, and upon roots and fallen branches. They were looking for the game that had fallen, as a boy looks for apples under the tree.

The winter wren is so called because he sometimes braves our northern winters, but it is rarely that one sees him at this season. I think I have seen him only two or three times in winter in my life. The event of one long walk, recently, in February, was seeing one of these birds. As I followed a byroad, beside a little creek in the edge of a wood, my eye caught a glimpse of a small brown bird darting under a stone bridge. I thought to myself no bird but a wren would take refuge under so small a bridge as that. I stepped down upon it and expected to see the bird dart out at the upper end. As it did not appear, I scrutinized the bank of the little run, covered with logs and brush, a few rods farther up.

Presently I saw the wren curtsying and gesticulating beneath an old log. As I approached he disappeared beneath some loose stones in the bank, then came out again and took another peep at me, then fidgeted about for a moment and disappeared again, running in and out of the holes and recesses and beneath the rubbish like a mouse or a chipmunk. The winter wren may always be known by these squatting, bobbing-out-and-in habits.