Wild Life Near Home

Part 1

WILD LIFE NEAR HOME

Wild Life Near Home

By Dallas Lore Sharp

With Illustrations By Bruce Horsfall

NEW YORK

The Century Co.

1901

Copyright, 1901, by The Century Co.

Copyright, 1897, by The J. B. Lippincott Co. Copyright, 1897, by Perry Mason & Co. Copyright, 1898, by Frank Leslie's Publishing House.

Published October, 1901.

TO MY WIFE

CONTENTS

PAGE

IN PERSIMMON-TIME 1

BIRDS' WINTER BEDS 31

SOME SNUG WINTER BEDS 47

A BIRD OF THE DARK 65

THE PINE-TREE SWIFT 79

IN THE OCTOBER MOON 95

FEATHERED NEIGHBORS 111

"MUS'RATTIN'" 169

A STUDY IN BIRD MORALS 185

RABBIT ROADS 207

BRICK-TOP 233

SECOND CROPS 247

WOOD-PUSSIES 277

FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP 295

A BUZZARDS' BANQUET 321

Part 2

UP HERRING RUN 341

I wish to thank the editors of "Lippincott's Magazine," "Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly," "Zion's Herald," and the "Youth's Companion" for allowing me to reprint here the chapters of "Wild Life Near Home" that first appeared in their pages.

DALLAS LORE SHARP.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The feast is finished and the games are on Frontispiece

Ripe and rimy with November's frosts 5

Swinging from the limbs by their long prehensile tails 7

Under such conditions he looks quite like a ferocious beast 10

Filing through the corn-stubs 13

Here on the fence we waited 16

He had stopped for a meal on his way out 20

Playing possum 22

She was standing off a dog 26

The cheerful little goldfinches, that bend the dried ragweeds 37

There she stood in the snow with head high, listening anxiously 45

And--dreamed 46

I shivered as the icy flakes fell thicker and faster 52

The meadow-mouse 55

It was Whitefoot 60

From his leafless height he looks down into the Hollow 63

It caught at the insects in the air 71

Unlike any bird of the light 77

They peek around the tree-trunks 83

The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them 88

In October they are building their winter lodges 103

The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight 106

They probe the lawns most diligently for worms 117

Part 3

Even he loves a listener 118

She flew across the pasture 121

Putting things to rights in his house 122

A very ordinary New England "corner" 124

They are the first to return in the spring 127

Where the dams are hawking for flies 130

They cut across the rainbow 135

The barn-swallows fetch the summer 137

From the barn to the orchard 138

Across the road, in an apple-tree, built a pair of redstarts 140

Gathered half the gray hairs of a dandelion into her beak 143

In the tree next to the chebec's was a brood of robins. The crude nest was wedged carelessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that the cats and roving boys could help themselves without trouble 145

I soon spied him on the wires of a telegraph-pole 148

He will come if May comes 151

Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely frightened quail 152

On they go to a fence-stake 154

It was a love-song 156

But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly 161

In a dead yellow birch 163

So close I can look directly into it 164

Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and went chuckling down the bank 170

The big moon was rising over the meadows 173

Section of muskrat's house 174

The snow has drifted over their house till only a tiny mound appears 177

They rubbed noses 179

Two little brown creatures washing calamus 180

She melted away among the dark pines like a shadow 186

She called me every wicked thing that she could think of 189

Part 4

It was one of those cathedral-like clumps 191

They were watching me 192

A triumph of love and duty over fear 199

He wants to know where I am and what I am about 203

In the agony of death 205

Calamity is hot on his track 212

Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next brier-patch 215

The squat is a cold place 217

The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox 220

His drop is swift and certain 225

Seven young ones in the nest 231

The land of the mushroom 239

Witch-hazel 244

I knew it suited exactly 252

With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously 254

In a solemn row upon the wire fence 257

Young flying-squirrels 258

The sentinel crows are posted 260

She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me 265

Wrapped up like little Eskimos 266

It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps 269

Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy 272

A family of seven young skunks 284

The family followed 289

"Spring! spring! spring!" 300

A wretched little puddle 303

He was trying to swallow something 307

In a state of soured silence 322

Part 5

Ugliness incarnate 325

Sailing over the pines 328

A banquet this sans toasts and cheer 333

Floating without effort among the clouds 337

From unknown regions of the ocean 345

A crooked, fretful little stream 346

Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes! 349

Here again hungry enemies await them 355

IN PERSIMMON-TIME

WILD LIFE NEAR HOME

IN PERSIMMON-TIME

The season of ripe persimmons in the pine-barren region of New Jersey falls during the days of frosty mornings, of wind-strewn leaves and dropping nuts. Melancholy days these may be in other States, but never such here. The robin and the wren--I am not sure about all of the wrens--are flown, just as the poet says; but the jay and the crow are by no means the only birds that remain. Bob White calls from the swales and "cut-offs"; the cardinal sounds his clear, brilliant whistle in the thickets; and the meadow-lark, scaling across the pastures, flirts his tail from the fence-stake and shouts, Can you see-e me? These are some of the dominant notes that still ring through the woods and over the fields. Nor has every fleck of color gone from the face of the out-of-doors. She is not yet a cold, white body wrapped in her winding-sheet. The flush of life still lingers in the stag-horn sumac, where it will burn brighter and warmer as the shortening days darken and deaden; and there is more than a spark--it is a steady glow--on the hillsides, where the cedar, pine, and holly stand, that will live and cheer us throughout the winter. What the soil has lost of life and vigor the winds have gained; and if the birds are fewer now, there is a stirring of other animal life in the open woods and wilder places that was quite lost in the bustle of summer.

And yet! it is a bare world, in spite of the snap and crispness and the signs of harvest everywhere; a wider, silenter, sadder world, though I cannot own a less beautiful world, than in summer. The corn is cut, the great yellow shocks standing over the level fields like weather-beaten tepees in deserted Indian villages; frosts have mown the grass and stripped the trees, so that, from a bluff along the creek, the glistening Cohansey can be traced down miles of its course, and through the parted curtains, wide vistas of meadow and farm that were entirely hidden by the green foliage lie open like a map.

This is persimmon-time. Since most of the leaves have fallen, there is no trouble in finding the persimmon-trees. They are sprinkled about the woods, along the fences and highways, as naked as the other trees, but conspicuous among them all because of their round, dark-red fruit.

What a season of fruit ours is! Opening down in the grass with the wild strawberries of May, and continuing without break or stint, to close high in the trees with the persimmon, ripe and rimy with November's frosts! The persimmon is the last of the fruits. Long before November the apples are gathered--even the "grindstones" are buried by this time; the berries, too, have disappeared, except for such seedy, juiceless things as hang to the cedar, the dogwood, and greenbrier; and the birds have finished the scattered, hidden clusters of racy chicken-grapes. The persimmons still hold on; but these are not for long, unless you keep guard over the trees, for they are marked: the possums have counted every persimmon.

You will often wonder why you find so few persimmons upon the ground after a windy, frosty night. Had you happened under the trees just before daybreak, you would have seen a possum climbing about in the highest branches, where the frost had most keenly nipped the fruit. You would probably have seen two or three up the trees, if persimmons were scarce and possums plentiful in the neighborhood, swinging from the limbs by their long prehensile tails, and reaching out to the ends of the twigs to gather in the soft, sugary globes. Should the wind be high and the fruit dead ripe, you need not look into the trees for the marauders; they will be upon the ground, nosing out the lumps as they fall. A possum never does anything for himself that he can let the gods do for him.

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