Part 12

Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--a manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.

It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.

UNDER GENIAL SKIES

I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND

The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of a world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the granite of our coast.

As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.

The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous and tough.

I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.

II. LAWN BIRDS

To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black phœbe flits about your porch and arbor vines.

Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are next in number.

Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a teetering motion of the hind part of the body.

While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain such as Alaska alone can afford.

But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings. They fly around the world.

The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in its behavior?

However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass, but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their food-supplies.

On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which discharge on the beach.

There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking creature as before.

A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.

I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions. In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of the shore.

III. SILKEN CHAMBERS

The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to the place.

The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed, found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the straight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! I was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silken chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.

Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find them unaided.

We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther down in her burrow.

Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the night.

As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.

All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and working it up into a finer product.