Wild Pastures

Part 1

WILD PASTURES

WILD PASTURES

WINTHROP PACKARD

ILLUSTRATED BY

CHARLES COPELAND

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1909

By Small, Maynard & Company

(INCORPORATED)

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

MY WIFE AND THE WEE BOY

WHO HAVE MADE AND SHARED THE PASTURE SUNSHINE

CONTENTS

PAGE

WAYLAYING THE DAWN 1

STALKING THE WILD GRAPE 25

THE FROG RENDEZVOUS 47

A BUTTERFLY CHASE 69

DOWN STREAM 89

BROOK MAGIC 109

IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS 131

SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS 151

THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS 173

THE POND AT LOW TIDE 193

HOW THE RAIN CAME 215

Part 2

ILLUSTRATIONS

He was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of the morning sun with melodious uproar Frontispiece

OPPOSITE PAGE

The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop 6

The mother bird, dancing and mincing along 38

Out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a veritable queen of the fairies 64

There was the swish of wings, the snip-snap of a bird’s beak, and it was all over 86

The way of the “kiver” is this. There is a single, snappy, business-like bob, then another, then three in quick succession 96

That such things are not seen oftener is simply because people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon 114

Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the muskrat grubbing roots there ... and hear his snort and splash when he dives at sudden sight of you 142

Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their black veins 160

The English sparrow has the true instincts of the browbeating coward 180

The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he isn’t even on his way 198

My lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back a little, swelled his white throat, and whistled 222

WAYLAYING THE DAWN

WAYLAYING THE DAWN

The most beautiful place which can be found on earth of a June morning is a New England pasture, and fortunate are we New Englanders who love the open in the fact that, whatever town or city may be our home, the old-time pastures lie still at our very doors.

The way to the one that I know best lies through the yard of an old, old house, a yard that stands hospitably always open. It swings along by the ancient barn and turns a right angle by a worn-out field. Then you enter an old lane leading to what has been for more than a century a cow pasture. Here the close-cropped turf is like a lawn between the gray and mossy old stone fences that the farmer of a century and more gone grubbed from the rocky fields and made into metes and bounds. There they stand to-day, just as he set them, grim mementos of toil which the softening hand of time has made beautiful. Where cattle still travel such lanes day by day these walls are undecorated, but many of the lanes are untraveled and have been so these fifty years. Such are garlanded with woodbine, sentineled by red cedars, and fragrant with the breath of wild rose, azalea, and clethra.

Side by side with this lawn-like lane is another which was once traversed by the cattle of the next farm, but which has not been used for a lifetime. In this the wild things of the wood are untrammeled, save by one another, and they hold it in riotous possession. Just as the first lane is tame and sleek this other is wild and unkempt. The raspberry and blackberry tangle catches you by the leg if you enter, as if to hold you until birch and alder, cedar and sassafras, look you over and decide whether or not you are of their lodge. If you give them the right grip you may pass. If not, you will be well switched and scratched before you are allowed to go on.

Here the wild grape climbs unpruned from wall to cedar, from cedar to birch and from birch to oak, whence it sends its witching fragrance far on the morning air. You may stalk a wild grape in bloom a mile by the scent and be well rewarded by finding the very place where the air tingles with it.

This lane is wild, and the wild things of the woods that come on fleet wing and nimble foot frequent it. You may never see a partridge in the sleek lane, and if by chance the red fox crosses it he does so gingerly and as if it were hot under foot. In the other, however, the fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop, the red squirrel builds his nest in the cedar, and the partridge leads her young brood among the blackberry bushes of an early morning.

The azalea sends out its white fragrance from the one lane, and never a buttercup, even, nods to the wind in the other; yet you love the smooth shorn one best. It talks to you of the homely life of the farm, the lazy cattle drowsing contentedly to the barn at milking time while the farmer’s boy sings as he puts up the bars behind them. You love it best because, however much you may love the wild things, the lure of the home-leading and well-trodden paths is strong upon you. It is more than a sturdy, rough-built stone wall that separates the two lanes; there is all the long road from the wilderness down to civilization between them.

For the story the pasture teaches us, more than anything else is the story of how the fathers wrested the dominion of the New England earth from the wilderness and of the way in which the wilderness still hems their world about and not only waits the opportunity to spring upon us and regain possession, but invests our fields like an invading army and takes by stealth what it may not win by force.

The pasture bars divide the world of the smooth-trodden lane and the close-shorn fields from the picket line of the wilderness. Let us pause a moment upon the line of demarcation. Behind us are the entrenchments of civilization, the farmhouse and barn and other buildings,--its fort. The town road is the military way leading from fortified camp to fortified camp, the mowing field its glacis, and the stone walls its outer entrenchments. These the cohorts of the wilderness continually dare, and are kept from carrying only by the vigilance of the farmer and his men.

Let but this vigilance relax for a year, a spring month even, and bramble and bayberry, sweet-fern and wild rose, daring scouts that they are, will have a foothold that they will yield only with death. Close upon these will follow the birches, the light infantry which rushes to the advance line as soon as the scouts have found the foothold. These intrench and hold the field desperately until pine and hickory, maple and oak, sturdy men of the main line of battle, arrive, and almost before you know it the farm is reclaimed. The wilderness has regained its lost ground and the cosmos of the wild has wiped out that curious chaos which we call civilization.

In this debatable land of the pasture, this Tom Tiddler’s ground where the fight between man and the encroaching wilderness goes yearly in favor of the wilderness, dwell the pasture people. The woodchuck, the rabbit, and even the fox have their burrows here, the woodchuck and the rabbit finding the farmer’s clover field and garden patch a convenient foraging ground, the fox finding the chicken coop and the rabbit equally convenient.

The pasture is the happy hunting-ground of the hawks and owls, though they dwell by preference in the deep wood, the nearer approaching to the forest primeval the better, but the crow often nests in a pine among a group of several in the pasture. The pasture is peculiarly the home of scores of varieties of what one might term the half wild birds, the thrushes from honest robin down to the catbird, warblers, finches, and a host of others who are as shy of the deep woods as they are of the highway; and here, in those magic hours that come between the first faint flush of dawn and sunrise, you may hear the full chorus of their matins swell in triumphant jubilation.

Here in Eastern Massachusetts the dawn comes early, very early, in June. It will be a little before three that if you watch the east you will see it flush a bit like the coming of color on the face of a dark-tressed maiden who has had sudden news of the coming of her lover. This flush of color fades again soon, and it is evident that it is all a mistake, for the darkness grows thicker than ever, and night, like that of the Apocalypse, is upon the face of the world. The dawn is long coming when you wait for it. Joshua evidently has arisen and is holding the sun in Syria as of old, that he may have time further to confound his enemies.

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