Part 5

Entering the cove in mid-afternoon you might think the swooning heat had left it no life awake other than the water insects and the dragon-flies that race them in airship fashion above. Yet you have but to ground your canoe on a sedgy shallow, sit motionless, and wait. Nor have you to wait long. There is a breathless pause as if all things waited to see what this leviathan of the outer deep meant to do next; then a voice at your very elbow says reassuringly, “Tu-g-g-g!” That is as near as you can come to it with type. There are no characters that will express its guttural vehemence which strikes you like a blow on the chest, or its sympathetic resonance. Take your violin, drop the G string to a tension so low that it will hardly vibrate musically, then twang it. That suggests the tone. But you know it well enough without description.

Immediately there comes an answering chorus of “tu-g-gs,” here, there, in a score of places all along the shore line and among the island clumps of bushes, prelude of frog talk galore for a moment or two, followed by brief silence. Then, taking advantage of the oratorical pause, an old-timer sets up a tremendously hoarse and vibrant bellow. “A-hr-r-h-h-u-m-mm!” he says, “A-hr-r-h-h-u-m-mm!” with the accent on the rum. You can hear him half a mile, and immediately there is a “chug-squeak-splash” from a little fellow, as if, unable to furnish the beverage at short notice, he became affrighted and without delay decided that a sequestered nook on bottom between two stones was for him. Then the cove goes to sleep again; you can almost hear the silence snore.

Little by little, if you look about you shall see them, some right within reach of your paddle. I never know whether they slip under when the canoe approaches and bob up again noiselessly after all is still, or whether they are there all the time, only so well concealed by nature that the eye does not note them at first; but I do know that you never see them until you have waited a bit. Their brown backs are just under water, their green-brown heads just enough above the surface so that the nostrils will get air; and there they wait, motionless, for hours and hours, for time and tide to serve luncheon. Even with only the tops of their heads visible they make you laugh, for their pop eyes are popped so high above the tops of their flat heads that they make you think of automobile bug lights set well up above the motor hood.

I note a shipwrecked June beetle clinging half drowned to a spear of grass and I toss him over within six inches of a frog. There is a splash, a gulp, and the beetle with his frantically clawing, thorny-toed legs is passed on to kingdom come without a crunch. Once or twice after that this frog stirred as if he had an uneasy conscience, but he seemed to suffer no internal pangs, indeed he winked the circular yellow lining of his eye at me these times as if he enjoyed it. It had all the effects of smacking the lips.

The afternoon dreams down from its pinnacle of hazy heat to the soft level of eventide. Under the pines of the west side of the cove the level sun slips in and seems to caress the green trunks, and the tops above sing a little sighing song of contentment. Strange you have not heard this before, for the wind has been there all the afternoon. But it is toward nightfall that the cove wakes up and you hear many lisping elfin sounds that you have never noticed during the mid-afternoon heat. You hear the sedges talking in the undulations now. You did not hear them before, yet the undulations have been gliding dreamily among the sedges all day. The pasture birds are waking up their preludes of evensong, and the sun across the cove to the west is glorifying all the quivering canopy of green leaves through which it shines with a luminous, diaphanous quality which makes magic all along that side of the cove.

You are on the borderland between the clear definition of reality and the mystic haze of nightfall. To the west, looking away from the glow, all is gently but clearly defined; to the east, looking into the golden rose of the sunset through the shimmering illusion of leaves, lies the pathway to the land that the king’s son saw in the Arabian Night’s tale.

The nightly entertainment, the evening minstrel show, is about to begin in the cove, an entertainment in which the frogs are the minstrels, an all star performance, for every one of them is capable of being an end man or interlocutor or soloist as the case may require.

Already the audience is beginning to gather. First comes a gray squirrel scratching down a maple trunk, his strong clawed hind feet digging into the bark and holding him wherever he wishes them to, as if he were an inverted lineman. Suddenly he sights the canoe and its occupant and--blows up. Nothing else will express his sudden outpouring of scolding and denunciation of this creature that has usurped a front seat. The sounds burst out of him like the escaping steam from a great mogul engine waiting on a siding for its freight, and he quivers from head to foot, like the engine, with the intensity of the ebullition. Suddenly there is a “quawk!” directly over his head, a single cry shot out from the catarrhal throat of a night heron that is just sailing down. The gray squirrel shoots three feet into the air, lands on another maple, flashes up a birch and goes crashing through the birch tops off into the woods, where you faintly hear him jawing still. The night heron whirls with a great flapping and puts to sea with more quawks of alarm. But these two were not especially wanted at the concert. The night heron particularly is an unlovely bird in appearance, voice, and manner. The skippers and the lucky bugs crowd in together, each among its kind, close to the reedy margin, to be as near the performers as possible, and behold, there come sailing in from sea tiny argosies of dainty people, the loveliest free swimmers of the pond. Golden heads nodding in gracious recognition, they come, slender bodied and graceful, trailing long robes of filmy lace beneath them in the water.

The botanists, who shall be hung some day for their literalness, have named these lovely denizens of the cove bladder-worts, or Utricularia, if you wish the Latin form, because they float on their air-inflated leaves and trail their roots beneath them, free in the water, scorning the contaminating touch of earth. The off-shore wind of noon had sailed these out well beyond the mouth of the cove, now the evening breeze is bringing them in again for the concert.

They should have been named after some dainty lady of the old Greek mythology, some fair sailor lass who crossed the wake of Ulysses, perchance, and lingers on placid seas waiting his return to this day, for you will see their golden heads nodding along on the little waves of the cove all summer.

These are the patricians of the concert. There is a great tuning of instruments going on already and a trying out of voices, yet for some reason there is delay. Then comes the queen herself. The golden shimmer on the eastern shore has faded and dusk dances up from the undergrowth on the west. It is time, and out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a veritable queen of the fairies, clad in ostrich plumes and softest of white velvet, with the most beautiful trailing and undulating opera cloak of softest, delicate green, trimmed with brown and white. You may call her a luna moth if you will. The thing which somewhat resembles her, stuck on a pin in your collection, may be that, but this graceful, soaring creature, pulsing and quivering with life, floating through perfumed dusk, is the queen of the fairies--no less.

Her arrival is a signal for the olio to begin. Then, indeed, you learn the astonishing number and variety of the frog performers within the cove. The basso profundos sing “Ah-r-h-u-m-m” with amazing gusto. Surely that waiter frog has got over his fright and brought it in quantity. “T-u-g-gs” resound all about like the rattle of a drum corps. There are altos whose voices sound like rasping a stick cheerfully on a picket fence, others whose strain hath a dying fall of internal agony outwardly expressed. A lone belated hyla pipes his plaintive soprano, but the tenors are the strongest of all. The tree toad flutes a fluttering, liquid tremolo, and the toad, the common toad, sits on the grassy margin and swells his throat and sings “Wha-a-a-a-” in long-drawn, dreamy cadence.

You may imitate this sound after a fashion if you wish. Purse your lips and say the French “Eu” in a long drawl once or twice, then the next time you do it whistle at the same time. You will have a very tolerable imitation of this dreamy note. It invites to slumber and it is time to paddle home, for the dusk has deepened to darkness and there is little more for you to see in the cove.

A BUTTERFLY CHASE

A BUTTERFLY CHASE

It was a great purple butterfly which led me over the brow of the hill, one of the “white admirals,” curiously enough so called, though this one had but four minute spots of white on him near the tips of his wings. Some members of his genus have a right to the name for they have broad bands of white across all four wings, but this one, the Basilarchia astyanax, is a black sheep.

Nevertheless he is a beautiful creature, well worth following under any circumstances to note the ease and sureness of his floating flight and admire the beauty of his velvety rufous-black, shoaling into lustrous blue in the rounded crenulations of the after wings. This one I thought worth following for another reason, however, for he seemed to have something on his mind. Not that his flight was direct. A bird with something to do goes to his work in a straight line; but a butterfly must dance along, even if it were to a funeral in the family. And yet with all this my blue and rufous-black white admiral carried in his dancing progress something which told me he was troubled and led me to follow him over the brow of the hill.

The hill itself is worth noting. Here the glaciers which some thousands of years ago planed off the rougher surface of eastern New England dropped their chips in a vast terminal moraine of sand and gravel, whose northern declivity is so steep that you may throw a stone from its rim to the top of a pine growing on the level, eighty or ninety feet below. I know many terminal moraines in New England; but I know no other at once so high and so abrupt in its declivity. A few rods back from its summit the trolley car clangs incessantly, and the speed-mad automobilist tears hooting through.

Along the crest, in spite of this, sleep peacefully the forefathers of the hamlet. I like to feel that they neither note nor heed the uproar of the highway; that they now and then cock a pleased ear to the rumble of a passing hay-cart or the jog of a farmer’s horse, but that the bedlam of modern hurry whangs by them unperceived. Rather they turn their faces to the sough of the summer winds in the century-old pines which shade the steep and sleep on, happy in the benediction that descends from the spreading branches. Wonderful pines, these, so shading the whole declivity that not more than a dapple of sunlight has touched the ground beneath them for a century.

Here the hepatica finds the cool, dry seclusion that it loves and lifts shy blue eyes to you while yet the winter ice nestles beside it among the pine roots. Here while the July sun distills pitchy aroma from the great trees the partridge berry carpets favored spots with the rich green of its little round leaves,--leaves no bigger than the pink nail of your sweetheart’s little finger, a green figured with the scarlet of last year’s berries and the white of its wee starry twin flowers. Here, too, in July the pyrola lifts its spike of bells like a woodland lily-of-the-valley and the pipsissewa shows its waxy flowers to the questing bee.

A butterfly, especially a large butterfly, rarely bothers with these low-growing herbs, though each has its own delicious fragrance--and a butterfly’s scent is keen. So my black white admiral alternately danced and soared on down through the richly perfumed areas of the wood while I plunged eagerly after, glissading the needle-carpeted slope, making station from trunk to trunk lest a too headlong flight plunge me to oblivion in what I knew was at the foot of the hill.

Without, the perfervid July sun beat upon the landscape till the dust of its concussion rose in a blue haze that loomed the nearby hills into misty mountain tops and glamoured the whole world with tropical illusion. To our hard-cornered, clear-cut New England it is the midsummer which brings the atmosphere of romance. The swoon of Arabian Nights is upon the landscape, and it is through such heat and through such misty evasion that the Caliph of Bagdad was accustomed to set forth incognito to meet strange adventures.

At the foot of the hill, almost at the borderland which separates this under-pine world from another far different, the resinous air is shut in like the genie in the bottle. You feel the oppression of its restraint and wonder, if like the fisherman you might uncork it, if it would loom aloft in a dense cloud that would speak to you in a mighty voice. Here my butterfly paused for the first time and lighted upon the trunk of a pine, head high.

Quietly I drew near. His wings were rising and falling in rhythmic unconscious motion that was tremulous with what seemed eagerness. One of them, I noted, had a little triangular bit snipped out of it with a clean cut. Some insect-eating bird had snapped at him not long before, and he had come within a half-inch of death. Yet this did not trouble him; very likely he never knew it. It was something else which absorbed him so that he took no notice of my close approach. And now I could see that his proboscis was uncoiled and apparently he was eating rapidly. Now the proboscis of any butterfly is simply a double-barrelled tube through which he sucks honey or other moist nutriment. That a Basilarchia astyanax, or any other butterfly for that matter, should be able to draw nourishment from the dry, rough bark of a pine-tree was sufficient cause for astonishment, and I drew eagerly nearer to see what he was getting.

It was a humid day and I was thirsty myself. What woodland brew could be on tap here? In Ireland it used to be true that the Leprechauns, the little men of the hedge, could make good beer of heath, and if you could only catch and hold one he would tell you how. Here might be a similar chance. My nose was within six inches of the white admiral’s now and my eyes were bulging out with surprise as much as his do naturally, for behold he had what butterfly never had before,--a little red tongue on the tip of his proboscis, and with it he was nervously licking the bark in its roughest places as hard as he could.

I might have seen more had not my foot slipped on the glossy pine needles, and while I clutched the trunk of the pine to save myself the butterfly danced away, thinking, I dare say, that I was an abnormally developed wood peewee and had just missed getting him for luncheon. Evidently the south wind had blown up from the gulf more than an Arabian Night’s atmosphere; it had sent along portions of the fauna as well. A butterfly with a tongue on the end of his proboscis belongs in the land where rocs pick up elephants in their talons and soar away with them!

Eagerly I sought to follow my Basilarchia astyanax and learn more, but it was not so easy. To follow his flight without care as to the setting of my feet might well be to reach a country undiscovered indeed, for from the very bottom of the northern declivity of the terminal moraine well the springs of the fountain head, and out across these he lightly floated, toward the sphagnum-bottom pasture swamp beyond.

I suppose it is well settled, geologically, that a river of pure water flows from some distant northern point, Labrador perhaps, under the eastern portion of Massachusetts. Driven wells find this water almost everywhere. In places it rises to the surface in clear ponds which have no apparent inlet, and from which little water flows, but which are clear and sparkling at a good level the year round. Houghton’s Pond, in the Blue Hill Reservation, is one of these nearest Boston. Walden Pond is another, and there are plenty more.