Part 7

It is not only in our own land that the lapwing and all the tribe of the plover bear so evil a repute. Not always thus, however: for in some parts of Germany this plover, I do not know why, is called the Virgin Mary’s Dove, and is greeted with welcome. Even in Argyll there is a lost or confused kindly legend, for sometimes when children run along the moorland mocking the Pibhinn (pee-veen ... the Gaelic equivalent of the lowland peaseweep and the southern pee-weet) they cry

“Welcome back, welcome back, Pēe-veen, Pee-vēen! But keep the wind and the rain behind your tail, Or you’ll never see the fields of heaven again!...”

or words to that effect. In the East the Mohammedan women have a beautiful name for this bird ... the Sister of the Brother: and, says the authority whence in some forgotten reading I took this note, ‘when these women hear the cry in the evening, they run from their houses and throw water in the air, that the bird may use it to assuage the pain of the burn on the top of the head, still marked by some black feathers.’ This is in allusion to an oriental legend that the lapwing was once a princess. This princess had a passionate love for a brother who had long been absent, and when one day she heard that he was on his return and close at hand and weary, she snatched a bowl of hot milk from the fire and hastened to meet him. But an evil-wisher, knowing her great love and how she would not rest till she found her brother, had misinformed her, and for all the pain on her head caused by the heated bowl, she ran now this way and now that, continually crying Brother! O Brother! Hours passed, and then days, and week after week and month after month the girl vainly sought her loved one. At last, feeling her strength ebbing, she cried aloud to Allah. Allah, moved by compassion, gave her wings and changed her into a lapwing or black-plover, the better to accomplish her purpose. Hence, when the little brown children on the desert or on the sun-scorched ways of the East look up and see the lapwings wheeling overhead in long circling flights and sudden dashes, they hear, in the wailing voices, either the long yearning or the sudden eager hope in the cry which to their ears sounds as Brother! O Brother!

Perhaps the German name of the Virgin Mary’s Dove is merely a variant of the Swedish folk-legend concerning the lapwing. The tale goes that this bird was once one of Mary’s handmaidens, but lost place and honour because of her theft of a pair of scissors. The punishment was transformation into a bird with a forked scissor-tail, and to go out across the fjords and above all the meadows and pastures and keep crying incessantly Tyvit-Tyvit-Tyvit (i.e., I stole them! I stole them!). I think, however, I have heard or read the same story in connection with the wagtail. In his interesting book on the Manners and Customs of the Russian People, Mr. Ralston has the following Slavonic plover-legend. When God had created the earth, and wished to supply it with seas and lakes and rivers, He ordered the birds to convey the waters to their appointed places. All obeyed except the lapwing, whose reason for this indolence and impiety was that it had no need of seas, lakes, or rivers, to slake its thirst. At that the Lord waxed wroth, and forbade it and its posterity ever to approach a sea or stream, and that it might quench its thirst only with that water which remains in hollows and among stones after rain. So from that time this sorrowful plover has never ceased its wailing cry of Peet-peet! (i.e., Drink! Drink!). In another northern book (Thiel’s Danish Traditions, vol. ii.) there are two lapwing-legends not less homely than the Russian and the Swedish.

When Christ, says one, was a bairn, He took a walk one day and came to an old crone who was busy baking. She said she would give Him a new cake for His trouble, if He would go and split her a little wood for the oven. Christ did as she wanted, and the old wife put aside a small bit of dough for the promised cake. When the batch was drawn from the oven, however, she saw to her surprise and chagrin that the wee bit cake was equally large with the rest. So again she broke off a small bit of dough; but again the same thing happened. Hereupon she broke out with, ‘That’s a vast oure-muckle cake for the likes o’ you; thee’s get thy cake anither time.’ At this injustice Christ was angered, so He said to the old crone, ‘I split your wood as you asked me, and you would not give me the little cake you promised. Now you in turn shall go and cleave wood, and that, too, as long as the world shall last!’ And with that Our Lord turned her into a vipa (a weep). ‘So the weep fares betwixt heaven and earth as long as the world lasts; and fare where she will she says no other words than Klyf ved! Klyf ved!’ (i.e., Cleave wood! Cleave wood!).

The other Danish plover-tale given by Thiel is one of the familiar Crucifixion legends. While Christ still hung upon the Cross, three birds came flying towards Calvary, the Styrkham (the Stork), the Svalham (the Swallow), and the Pün-ham (Pee-weet). As they flew overhead each cried a cry. The stork cried, Styrk ham! Styrk ham! (i.e., Strengthen Him!), and so has this bird called ever since, and been under God’s blessing and man’s care. The swallow cried, Sval ham! Sval ham! (i.e., Cool or refresh Him!), and so is evermore known by that name, and likewise is loved by man and guided by God. But the weep wheeled about the Cross, shrieking derisively, Pün ham! Pün ham! (i.e., Pine Him, make Him suffer!), and so is not only accursed by men from then till now, but is under God’s ban till the Last Day, after which the lapwing’s wail will never be heard again.

Although Guilbinn, or Wailing Music, is, as I have said, the common Gaelic name for the Curlew, as the Whaup in the lowlands, it is also often called the Crann-toch, the long-beaked one, or Coulter-neb, as they say in Dumfries and Galloway. Of the mythical origin of the name Crann-toch (a very obvious designation, and needing no mythical legend one would think) I remember hearing a year or so ago from a boatman of Lismore a wild and romantic legend, but it is too long to quote now. Few Gaelic tales, few poems, in which are not to be heard the voices of the wind or the sea or the wailing curlew. We have perhaps no bird more wild and solitary: a Highland saying places it with the herons and wild-geese. ‘When a man has shot six herons, six wild-geese, and six curlews, he may call himself a sportsman.’

When the Golden Plover, or Grey Plover as he is sometimes called, wheels in Spring above the fallowlands of the North the ploughman hears in his cry Plough weel! Sow weel! Harrow weel! This beautiful bird--of whom no poet has written a finer line than Burns in

“The deep-toned plover grey, wild whistling on the hill”--

is not exempt from the common tradition of uncanniness. He, too, is classed with the dreaded ‘Seven Whistlers’: and from Cornwall to Iceland he is often vituperated as one of these, or as of the spectral pack called Gabriel’s Hounds, or as of Odin’s Phantom Chase. I spoke of a name I had heard in Iona and Mull for the whimbrel, but applicable also to any plover or curlew ... the Guilchaismeachd or Wail of Warning, the Alarm Bird so to say: and this repute is held by the plover in many mining parts of England, where it is said that the miners will not descend a pit if the ‘Whistlers’ be heard lamenting overhead. To this day there are many regions not only in our own country but abroad where the plovers are called the Wandering Jews, from an old legend that the first of the clan were the transmuted souls of those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion. An old woman who gave me some plovers’ eggs told me in all good faith that the feadag (the Gaelic name, equivalent to flute-note or mellow whistle) neither ate nor drank but fed upon the wind ... a superstition said to have been almost universal in the Middle Ages.

As for many of us, surely they are birds of our love. The cry of the curlew on the hill, the wail of the lapwing in waste places, have not these something of the same enthralling spell, the same entrancing call--the summons to the wilderness, whether that be only to solitude, or to wild loneliness, or to the lonelier solitudes, the dim limitless wilderness of the imagination--that the wind has, at night, coming with rain through woods, or that the sea has, heard in inland hollows, or when athwart a long shore or among fallen rocks the tide rises on the breast-swell of coming storm? They call us to the wild.

THE AWAKENER OF THE WOODS

The Spirit of Spring is abroad. There is no one of our island coasts so lone and forlorn that the cries of the winged newcomers have not lamented down the wind. There is not an inland valley where small brown birds from the South have not penetrated, some from Mediterranean sunlands, some from the Desert, some from the hidden homes on unknown isles, some from beyond the foam of unfamiliar shores. Not a backwater surely but has heard the flute of the ouzel, or the loud call of the mallard. The wren, that sweet forerunner of ‘the little clan of the bushes’ as we say in Gaelic, clann bheag’ nam preas, the robin, the mavis, the merle, have been heard in every coppice and wildgrowth from the red combes of the winding Dart to the granite-ledges by the rushing Spey. From the last Cornish upland to the last brown moor on the Ord of Sutherland the curlew and the lapwing have wheeled with wailing cry or long melancholy flutelike whistle. The gorse, whose golden fires have been lit, has everywhere heard the prolonged sweet plaintive note of the yellow-hammer. From the greening boughs the woodpeckers call.

The tides of Blossom have begun to flow. The land soon will be inundated. Already a far and wide forethrow of foam is flung along the blackthorn hedges. Listen ... that chaffinch’s blithe song comes from the flowering almond!... that pipit’s brief lay fell past yonder wild-pear! In the meadows the titlarks are running about looking in the faces of the daisies, as children love to be told. On the fenlands and mosses the windy whimper of the redshank is heard like the cry of a phantom: and like a ‘bogle,’ too, is the perturbing drumming of the snipe falling swiftly on sloping wings back to the marsh.

The shores, the meadows, the uplands, on each there is a continual rumour. It is the sound of Spring. Listen ... put your ear to the throbbing earth that is so soon to become the green world: you will hear a voice like the voice which miraculously evades in the hollow curves of a shell. Faint, mysterious, yet ever present, a continual rhythm. Already rhythm is become a cadence: the birds chant the strophes, flower and blossom and green leaf yield their subtler antiphones, the ancient yet ever young protagonist is the heart of man. Soon the cadence will be a song, a pæan. The hour of the rose and the honeysuckle will come, the hour of the swallow hawking the grey gnat above the lilied stream, the hour when the voice of the cuckoo floats through ancient woods rejoicing in their green youth, that voice which has in it the magic of all springs, the eternal cry of the renewal of delight.

True, one may as yet more universally see the feet of Spring, or the blossom-touch of her hands, in the meadows and by the shores, than in the woods. She passes by the hedgerows or along the pastures, and her trail has the sheen of gold. Do not the celandine and the flaming dandelion, the pale cowslip and delicate crowsfoot, the jonquil and daffodil, the yellow of the broom and the bee-loved gorse, everywhere show it? She goes by the upland meadows, and touches the boughs of the wild-apple or leaning pear, stoops by the quince or the wild-cherry, and the white foam of the miraculous wind that is in the hollow of her hand is left upon the branches. The slim gean at the edge of the woodland catches the spray, the twisted crab is an old woman suddenly become a lovely girl cream-white and rose-flusht. Or she goes down the island-shores, or by the brackened coasts of inland lochs, or along the overhanging brows of streams, or where brooks glide between grassy banks; or, facing northward, she wanders where the hill-burn falls from ledge to ledge, or leaps past the outswung roots of mountain-ash or birch, or steals between peaty grasses where the wren has her nest in the pendent bramble and the greenfinch calls across the fern. And wherever she goes the yellow iris is left by her feet, the yellow-white willow-catkins have become musical with a myriad bees, dust of gold has fallen into the milk-white snow of the countless clans of the daisy, tides of an invisible flood have foamed along the hawthorns, the wild crocus has shone like the spear of Pisarr, the buttercup is brimmed with golden wine, and even the kingcup-ingots are melted in the waters--for whence else can come that flowing gold which is blent with yonder moving emerald that is as the breath of the grass, yonder floating azure as of drowned speedwells, yonder wandering violet, child of shadow and the wind, yonder mysterious phantom of pale mauve which tells that a becalmed cloud-ship drifts on the deeps of heaven.

Nevertheless it is in the woods that the miracle may be more intimately seen. The Presence perchance is not universally abroad so much as immediately evident. A hand touched that larch yonder: for why is it so suddenly green, with a greenness as of a sea-wave, or as the wet emerald crystal one finds on the sands of Iona, or, rather, with the softer, moister, the indescribable greenness of the rainbow’s breast? A foot leaned upon the moss beneath that vast oak, on whose southern slopes the russet leaves still hang like a multitude of bats along dark ragged cliffs: for why has the cyclamen suddenly burned in a faint flame, there; why has the sky suddenly come up through the moss, in that maze of speedwells? Who rose, yonder, and passed like a phantom westward? Some one, surely, of the divine race, for the tips of the sycamore-boughs have suddenly burned with a bronze-hued fire. Who went suddenly down that mysterious alley of dim columnar pines, stirring the untrodden silent ways? For, look, the air is full of delicate golden dust. The wind-wooer has whispered, and the pine tree has loved, and the seed of the forests to come floats like summer-dust along the aerial highways.

But what of the Forest-Awakener? Who is he? Her name, is it known of men? Who can it be but the Wind of the South, that first-born of the wooing Year and sweetheart Spring? But what if the name be only that of a bird? Then, surely, it must be the wood-thrush, or perchance the cushat, or, no, that wandering Summer-herald, the Cuckoo! Not the skylark, for he is in the sunlight, lost above the pastures: not the merle, for he is flooding the wayside elms with ancient music of ever-young love: not the blithe clans of the Finch, for one and all are gypsies of the open. Perchance, then, the Nightingale? No, he is a moon-worshipper, the chorister of the stars, the incense-swinger before the altars of the dawn: and though he is a child of the woods, he loves the thickets also. Besides, he will not come far north. Are there not deep woods of silence and dream beyond the banks of the Tyne? Are there no forest sanctuaries north of the green ramparts which divide Northumbria from the glens of Tweed and the solitudes of the shadowy Urr? Are there no inland valleys buried in sea-sounding woods beyond the green vale of Quair? Alas, the sweet Songmaker from the South does not think so, does not so dream. In moon-reveries in the woods of Surrey, in starry serenades along the lanes of Devon, in lonely nocturnes in the shadowy groves of the New Forest, he has no thought of more vast, more secret and impenetrable woods through which move mountain-airs from Schiehallion, chanting winds from the brows of the Grampians: he has no ancestral memory of the countless battalions of the red pine which throng the wilds of Argyll or look on the grey shoreless seas of the west, these green pillars which once covered the barren braes of Balquhidder, the desolate hill-lands of the Gregara, and, when the world was young, were wet with the spray of the unquiet wastes wherein are set the treeless Hebrides.

No, in the north at least, we cannot call the nightingale the Forest-Awakener. In truth, nowhere in our land. For he comes late when he comes at all. The great awakening has already happened. Already in the south the song-thrush, the dandelion, the blackthorn-snow are old tales: far in Ultima Thule to the north-west the gillebride has whistled the tidings to Gaelic ears, far in Ultima Thule to the north-east the Shetlander has rejoiced in that blithest thicket-signal of spring, the tossed lilt of the wren.

It is of the green woodpecker I speak. We do not know him well, most of us: but then most of us are alien to the woods. Town-dwellers and homestayers know little or nothing of the secret signals. It is only the obvious that they note, and seldom read in the great Script of Nature anything more than the conventional signature of certain loved and familiar names and tokens.

It was in the Forest of Fontainebleau I first heard the green woodpecker called by this delightful name, the Awakener of the Woods, le Réveilleur de la Forêt. My French friend told me it was not a literary name, as I fancied, but one given by the foresters. And how apt it is. In the first weeks of March--in the first week of April, it may be, as the scene moves northward--there is no more delightful, and certainly no more welcome, sound than the blithe bugle-call of the green woodpecker calling through the woods for love, and, after long expectant pauses, hearing love call back in thrilling response, now a flute-note of gladness, now a challenging clarion-cry. True, whether in the vast forest of Fontainebleau or in our northern woods, the woodpecker is not so readily to be heard in the inward solitudes. He loves the open glades, and commonly the timbered park-land is his favourite resort. Still, save in the deepest and darkest woods, that delightful rejoicing note is now everywhere to be heard fluting along the sunlit ways of the wind. It awakes the forest. When the voice of the woodpecker is heard it is the hour for Nature to celebrate her own Ides of March. Elsewhere the song-thrush and the skylark have been the first heralds. Even in the woods the missel-thrush may have flung a sudden storm of song out on the cold tides of the wind swaying the elm-tops like dusky airweed of the upper ocean. But, in the glades themselves, in the listening coverts, it is the call of the green woodpecker that has awakened the dreaming forest.

And what an ancient old-world tale Picus could tell. For, in the long ago, was he not Picus the antique Italiot god. A forest-god he was, son of ancient Saturn, and himself the father of that beautiful being of the woods, Faunus. And how far he wandered from Thracian valley and Sabine oak-grove ... for in that far northern Finland, which to the Latins was but an unknown remote waste under the star Septentrion, he and his son reappear, though now his name is Tapio and Faunus is become Nyyrikki....

“O Nyyrikki, mountain-hero, Son of Tapio of forests, Hero with the scarlet headgear, Notches make along the pathway, Landmarks upward on the mountain, That the hunter may not wander.”

Still does Nyyrikki, or Pikker as he was called by the northmen long before the Kalevala was wrought into Finnish runes, make notches along the pathways of the woods, still the huntsman on the hillside sees his signals on the oak-boles. Perhaps to this day the Esthonian peasant offers in his heart a prayer to Pikker the woodpecker-god, god of thunder and storm, so god too of the glades and fields where these can devastate--a prayer such as that which Johann Gutsloff, a Finnish author of the seventeenth century, cites as the supplication of an old Esthonian farmer: ‘... Beloved Pikker, we will sacrifice to thee an ox with two horns and four hoofs, and want to beg you as to our ploughing and sowing that our straw shall be red as copper and our grain as yellow as gold. Send elsewhere all thick black clouds over great swamps, high woods, and wide wastes. But give to us ploughmen and sowers a fertile season and sweet rain.’

In Gaelic lands many an old name has been dropped from common use, because thus associated with some shy and yet never-far divinity, and so too the Finn and the Esth ceased to call the woodpecker Pikker (a word so strangely like Picus) and thus it is that now the peasant knows him only as Tikka. With the Romans, Picus the god was figured with a woodpecker on his head, and all of us who have read Pliny will remember the great store laid by the auspices of Rome on the flight and direction and general procedure of this forest-traveller. Recently a sculptor, I know not of what nationality, exhibited in Paris a statue of the Unknown Pan, and on his shoulder perched a woodpecker. Was this a reminiscence, or ancestral memory, or the divining vision of the imagination? I have some fifty pages or more of MS. notes dealing with the folklore and legendary names and varying ways and habits of the fascinating woodlander, from his Greek appearance as Pelekas, the axe-hewer (Aristophanes calls him the oak-striker)--whence no doubt ‘Picus’ and ‘Pikker’ and ‘Peek’ and the rest--to Latin Tindareas, mortal father of Leda, to the White Woodpecker, the magic bird of mediæval legend, to ‘der olle Picker,’ the horrible laughing god of human sacrifice in ancient Prussia, to Pak-a-Pak, ‘the lost lover of the woman in the oak,’ in a strange tale I heard once in the woods of Argyll. But of all this I would recall to-day only that tradition of the woodpecker which describes her (she is a wise-woman in the folk-tales) as knowing where the spring-wurzel grows, that mysterious plant of Pan and the sun with which one may open the faces of cliffs with a breath, as did the deer-mother of Oisìn of the Songs, with which too one may find the secret ways of Venusberg and behold incalculable treasure.

For hark!... Pak-a-Pak, and the long cry of love! It is answered from the listening woods! Here must ‘the spring-wurzel’ grow ... here, for sure, are the green palaces of Venusberg, here, at very hand, are the incalculable treasures of the awakened Forest.

THE WILD APPLE

The foam of the White Tide of blossom has been flung across the land. It is already ebbing from the blackthorn hedges; the wild-cherry herself is no longer so immaculately snow-white. It drifts on the wind that has wooed the wild-apple. The plum is like a reef swept with surf. Has not the laurustinus long been as cream-dappled as, later, the elder will be in every hedgerow or green lane or cottage-garden? Not that all the tides of blossom are like fallen snow: is not the apple-bloom itself flushed with the hearts of roses? Think of the flowering almond, that cloud of shell-heart pink: of the delicate bloom of the peach that lives on the south wind: of the green-gold of the sallow catkins: of the blazing yellow of the gorse: of the homely flowering-currant, which even by mid-March had hung out her gay tangle of pinky blooms: of the purple-red of the deadnettle in the ditch, and of the ruddy-hued fallaways of the poplar overhead. I wonder if in most places the flowering-currant is no more than an ordinary shrub. Here, where I write, there are several small trees of it, taller than the general growth of the lilac, tall as the laburnum, though at the time of their unloosening the one had not revealed her delicate mauve and white, while the other was still a miser of the countless gold he will now soon be spreading upon the wind. The pink blooms, carmine-ended where the five or six unfolded blossoms hang like fruit, droop in a roseal shower, as innumerous as the golden drops of the laburnum-rain or the suspended snowflakes of the white lilac themselves. The brown bees have long discovered this flusht Eden; their drowsily sweet murmurous drone is as continuous as though these slow-swaying pastures were of linden-bloom and the hour the heart of summer.