Part 8

It was the sphagnums that led me to the brookside and caused me to recall that lusty scientist, Mr. Pickwick, and his discovery of the sources of the Hampstead ponds. And while I stood and wondered I saw a second brook, only a little further on, also flowing downward into the sphagnum and losing itself in the bog, to pass beneath the cedar roots and moss débris and enter the pond.

Some ancient traveler, perhaps Marco Polo, passing from Babylon to Bagdad, coming first upon the Euphrates and then the Tigris, may have felt some of the amazement and delight which I had in this discovery. Never before had I known of a brook entering the pond. It had always been a sheet of water self-contained and sufficient in itself, fed, I thought, by springs beneath its own surface. I had paddled by and tramped over the mouths of these two brooks a hundred times and never knew before why the pond always smiled and dimpled as I went by. No wonder it laughs; it has kept that same joke on ninety-nine of a hundred of the people who frequent it, and I am not sure there is another hundredth.

It seemed as if all the woodland burst into guffaws of laughter, now that the joke was out and there was no further need of keeping quiet about it. The cedars rocked in the west wind with suppressed merriment and a couple of red squirrels snickered like school children and tore up and down the lichen-covered trunks and fell off into a swamp birch and had hardly strength to hold on, so breathless were they. A pair of crows, looking up nesting material, haw-hawed right out over my head till they had to stop flapping and sail, they were so weak from it, and a whole flock of chickadees tittered all along behind my back for a quarter of a mile as I went on up the swamp on the left bank of the Euphrates.

It was amusing, and after a little I could see the joke and laugh myself. The Tigris was on my right, and by-and-by the two began to prattle down over a hard bottom from higher ground. Only for a little way, though, for here we came to another wide swamp which the two traversed under low sprouts of swamp maple and birch, the ground having been cut over within a few years.

And right here I ran into a full chorus, a raucous cacophony, an Homeric din that sounded as if all the rough-voiced goblins between Blue Hill and the Berkshires were assembled in convention up stream and had just heard the story, particularly well told. I knew them. They were the wood frogs, holding their annual convention, indeed, in the water all along the marshy margin of the swamp. Once a year they come down, as people go to the seashore, disporting themselves in the waves and making very merry about it. They were not laughing at me. They were simply shouting their happiness at being thawed out and finding it springtime once more.

Their voices, pitched about an octave below middle C, and all on one note, sound not unlike a great flock of ducks gabbling wildly, but they are really more nearly musical than that. After the convention is over they go back to the woods, where you will find them sitting among the leaves, though you will never see them till they see you. And when you do see them they are in the air. They have surprisingly long legs and can jump tremendously, turning in the air as they go, so that, having landed, their next leap will take them in a new direction. The earth seems to swallow them as they touch it, for their coloration is that of the brown leaves, and they leap from one invisibility to the next.

Beyond the frog chorus I found my stream again, dancing daintily along hemlock shaded shallows and rippling over slate ledges in the latticed shade of oak and maple twigs, and here another voice called me, a staccato whistle with a suspicion of a trill in it now and then, the voice of the very spirit of the spring woodland,--the hyla. I have called it a whistle, yet it is hardly that; it is rather the soft rich tone of a pipe, such as Pan might have imitated when he first blew into the hollow reed on the brook margin.

He is a shy fellow, this inch-long brown frog that swells his throat till it is like a balloon and pipes forth this mellow note, and he is even more invisible than the wood-frog. You may seek him diligently for years and not find him, for his voice is that of a ventriloquist and he seems to send it hither and thither. It is as if this were a trick of some frisky Ariel of the wood that danced about and whistled, now before and now behind you. When the trill comes in it you may well think the tricksy spirit is laughing at you so that his voice shakes. It would be no surprise if some trilling note ended in a giggle and Ariel himself should float by you on the mocking air.

The great chorus of spring peepers is to come later; now, but an occasional one has waked from his frosty nest beneath the woodland leaves and come down to the water margin to sing. Nor do I know whether it was the ventriloquial call of one that sounded now ahead and now behind, now above and now below, or whether relays of jovial invisible sprites passed me on from pool to pool. What I do know is that, a mile or more beyond its outlet under the ooze of the little bog, I found the source of my Euphrates in springs that boil clear through the sand and send forth the cool, pure water for the delectation of all who will come to drink.

Here upon the margin I heard another chorus that repaid me for all the rough laughter of the wood-goblin frogs,--the plaintive melodies of a little flock of vesper sparrows, newly arrived and very happy about it. These come later than the song sparrows, and bring a quality of wistfulness in their song which in this differs from the bluff heartiness of the earlier bird. It is as if their joy in the strong sun and the awakening of creation was tempered and softened to a touch of tears at some gentle remembrance. The vesper sparrows recall the vanished happiness of past summers in their greeting to that which comes.

After that my way led me home through the purpling woodland toward the golden greeting of the sunset. I had tasted to the full the joy of exploration and discovery. I doubt if Humboldt felt any better coming back from his exploration of the sources of the Caspian. My Euphrates I know; my Tigris I have reserved for future, perhaps even greater joy of tracing to its source in the mystic depths of, to me, untrodden woodland.

EARLIEST BUTTERFLIES

Just as in midsummer the people of the little pasture and woodland hollows must envy those of the hilltop their cool, breezy outlook, so in mid-April the thought must be reversed. For still the warfare between the north wind and the sun which began in February skirmishes and reached its Gettysburg in late March, goes fitfully on, with Appomattox hardly in sight.

The South is to win in this fratricidal struggle though, and in the summer millennium of peace and prosperity the two forces will join hands and work for the good of the whole land. Already the warriors of the North are driven to the hilltops, where they still shout defiance, and whence they rush in determined raids on the valleys below. It is a losing fight, for all day long the golden forces of the sun roll up the land and fill all the hollows and hold them in serene warmth and peace. However hard last night’s frost, however stiff the gale overhead, I can always find bowl-shaped depressions where summer already coaxes the winter-worn woodland.

The very first squatters in this land, whose presence antedates those people of record who held land by deeds and grants, seem to have found and loved these little sun-warmed hollows too, for in them I find the only traces of this pioneer occupation. Records in ink or on parchment of these pioneers are few, indeed, and these which they left on the land itself are but slight. Here a depression may show where a tiny cellar was dug, though no trace of stone work will be found. It was easier for the pioneer to frame his cellar wall of logs, just as he built those of the house above it.

You may find by careful search the worn path to the spring nearby, for that which is written on the earth itself remains visible long after inscriptions on stone are gone. The wind and the sun, the frost and the rain, will erase the carving from your marble tablet. But the path across a plain, once worn deep and firm by many passing feet, will always show its tracing to the discerning eye. Perhaps a huge old apple-tree stump may have lasted till now, even showing faint signs of life, and round about what was the immediate dooryard the trees of the wood may cluster; but they will hold back and leave some open space, as if they still respected invisible bounds set by the long departed human occupant.

There seem to be many such sleepy hollows in my town, spots where dreams dwell and the once trodden earth clings tenaciously to the prints of long-vanished feet. Over their tops to-day the north wind sings his war song, but his failing arrows fall to earth harmless, for golden troops of sunshine roll over the southern rim and fill the space below with quivering delight.

Just to walk about in this sunshine is a pleasure, and to sit in the pioneer’s hollow land and let it flood your marrow is to be thrilled with a primal joy that is the first the race has to remember. It antedates the first man by unknown millions of years. The same sun touched with the same joy the first primordial cell. With the thrill the one quivered into two and thus came the origin of species.

To-day in such a hollow and under such a sun the pageant of woodland life passed before me, much as it may have passed before the pioneer as he sat on his log doorstep and rested perhaps from labors in the cornfield, whose hills of earth still checker the level, sandy plain behind his hollow. Strange that the brawny, seventeenth-century adventurer should be but vanished dust and a dream, while the loam that he stirred with careless hoe holds the form that he gave it more than two hundred years ago! Five or six times his cornfield has matured a forest, and the great trees have been cut down and carted away, and yet the corn hills linger. Thus easily does the clay outlast the potter.

When I first marched into the tiny clearing the place was silent, brown and deserted, but that is the way of the woodland, and we soon learn to understand it. A certain aboriginal courtesy is required before you are allowed to become one of the company. Thus among the Eskimos you enter an assembly and sit quietly a moment until one of those already present notices and speaks to you. In this way you are admitted to fellowship. It is very bad taste for the newcomer to speak first.

So at first I noticed only the brown of last year’s grasses, the dead stems of goldenrod and aster, of St. John’s-wort and mullein. A tiny cloud slid across the face of the sun and a scout of the north wind blew down the slope and chilled the golden glow of sunlight with which the hollow had seemed filled to the brim. Looking down into it from a sheltered spot on the rim, I had thought the place full of dreams of June. As I sat down in the shadow on the pioneer’s grass-plot with the scouting north wind at my back, it was rather a recollection of November.

A dead leaf, frightened by that scurrying wind, dashed down over the tree tops and lighted, a brown splash on the pale, dead grass. Then all in a moment the cloud blew by, the north wind saw the enemy all about him in force and dashed over the rim of the hill, the amber warmth of the sun descending and filling the cup to the brim with the gentle ecstasy of returning summer.

In the still radiance the brown leaf floated into the air again, hovered a moment before my very eyes, and lighted near by on the gray bones of what had once been the pioneer’s apple tree. Thus I received my introduction. I had been spoken to by one of the people of the place, received my accolade as it were, and was privileged to see clearly. For the brown leaf was not a brown leaf at all, but a hunter’s butterfly.

It is astonishing to find already so many forms of frail life stirring in the sun, though just a night or two ago the thermometer registered ten degrees of frost, and the ground was frozen solid the next morning. Here was my hunter’s butterfly, a wee dab of pulpy cell that a touch of my finger could crush, borne on wings of gossamer frailness that might be whipped to tatters by a wind-snapped twig, yet sailing serenely about, defying anything to harm him.

The strange part of it is that he has been somewhere hereabouts all winter long. All about in the pastures are the frail ghosts of last year’s cudweed, on which as a caterpillar he fed. But it is six months at least since he cast off his chrysalis skin and emerged in his present form to face bitter winds and a constantly lowering temperature, days of chilling rain, smothering snow, and ice that coated all things with an inch-thick armor for days. All the wrecks that these might have caused him he has in some mysterious fashion escaped, and here he is, as merry as a grig.

He did not seem to be hungry, unless, like me, he was eager to devour the sunshine. He sat on the gray, weather-worn, fallen trunk of the ancient apple tree, his wings gently rising and falling, while I noted the beauty of his rich reds with their black and white markings and margins of black just tipped with a blueish tinge on the tips of the fore wings. Then he closed them for a minute, showing me the dark blurring of the under parts that had made me think him a dead leaf as he blew over the ridge with the wind, though now I could note the blue ocelli of the after wings.

It was only for a moment that he rested motionless thus, and it was hard not to think him a chip of ancient bark or a fragment of a leaf, then he flipped himself into the air and was off over the hill again in a tremendous hurry. All butterflies get occasional aerograms and go off as if on a matter of life or death in response to the messages, but it seems as if these over-winter chaps were especially subject to them in the first warm days. Later an angle-wing came down into my valley, but he did not stay long enough for me to find out which of the Graptas he was,--whether the question mark or the comma, Grapta interrogationis or Grapta comma. I should call him the comma, for his stop was of the shortest, if it were not that my doubt of his identity leaves me with the query.

The rush of his business was even greater than that of Pyrameis huntera, and with one flip of his crooked-edged wings he was out of sight.