Part 9

Three other butterflies I saw during the day in the neighborhood of my sunny hollow. One, the mourning cloak, Vanessa antiopa, I always expect to see on warm days in the sunny brown woods of April, and am rarely disappointed. Another which took the air from the hillocked ground of the two-century-old cornfield I thought to be Vanessa j-album, more familiarly known, perhaps, as the Compton tortoise. I would have been glad to know this surely, for this butterfly is rather rare here; but bless me, he went off over the hills at a rate that shamed the flipperty angle-wing. These dilly-dallying butterflies of the poet, indeed! They are the busiest creatures of the whole woodland.

Last of all was a little red chap that shot through the rich gold of the sunlight quite like an agitated bullet, his motor doing its very prettiest with the muffler off and both propellers roaring. Orville Wright could not have caught him. It was but a brief glimpse that I got, but I took him for one of the skippers, perhaps the silver-spotted, which is common here, though I have never seen one so early before. He was burly, thick-necked, short-winged, which is characteristic of the hesperids.

I would be glad to know what these early butterflies find to eat. Certain flowers are now in bloom, but you never find a mourning cloak or a hunter, a question mark or a painted lady fluttering about them. The bees are in the willow blooms and the alder catkins after pollen. The maples are in bloom. You can find hepaticas and violets, chickweed, crocus, snowdrop, and, I dare say, dandelions in blossom, and almost every day some new shrub or shy herb sends perfumed invitation out on the messenger winds.

Yet I find April butterflies most partial to such sunny spots as the ancient cornfield, where pines and scrub oaks will give no hint of bloom for weeks to come, and only dry lichens seem to flourish on the twig and chip-encumbered earth. Here the dainty cladonias thrive, the brown-fruited lifting tiny cups to the sun, while the scarlet-crested help this and the fringed variety to make crisp, tiny, fairy gardens that will show you great beauty if you will put your nose to the earth as the butterfly does in looking at them.

Perhaps these earliest spring butterflies sip from brown cups or draw from frost-moistened scarlet crests some potent elixir which warms the cockles of their wee hearts during the frigid nights of our Massachusetts Aprils. I hope so. I never catch them sipping honey at this time from any of the recognized sources. Perhaps the full flow of sap which is fairly bursting the young limbs of all trees now leaks enough to give syrup for the tasting, and they are thus more fortunate than their brethren, who will come later and dance attendance on lilac and milkweed. Maple sugar is better than honey.

There will be blossoms enough for them in the little hollow by and by, though at first it looked so brown and sere. Little by little, after my initiation at the antennæ of Pyrameis huntera, I began to see them, a rosette of green under my elbow, perhaps, or a serrate tip farther on. All under the brown grass the green rosettes of biennials and perennials have waited all winter long for a time like this. Out of the cores of growth built with slow labor in the increasing chill of autumn they are now sending new leaves, one after another in rapid succession, that top the brown grasses and begin to wreathe them with the tender green of spring.

There is joy in their very coloring as they stretch up to meet the enfolding warmth of the sun. Here an early buttercup waves a cleft and somewhat pinnate hand to me with jaunty assurance, though in the heart of its cluster is as yet no sign of the ascending stem that is to bear the glossy, yellow bloom aloft. Dandelion leaves shake their notched spears all about, proud that their buds are already visible, though still tucked down in the heart of the plant and showing no sign of yellow.

Here are the wee strawberry-like leaves of the cinquefoil, pale counterpart of the buttercup to which it looks up in gentle envy and admiration. The cinquefoil follows hard upon the heels of the violet, and already its buds are eager to be up and open. The linear root leaves of aster and goldenrod sit snug and green, growing a bit, but in no hurry to appear above the brown vegetation of last year. Their watch comes late, and there is no reason for them to be stirring thus early. And so the growth of lush green leaves is pushing up all over the dooryard of the old-time settler getting ahead of the lazy wood grasses that have hardly begun to put out tiny spears that eventually will stab through the old fog and help the others to make a new tapestry carpet for the empty woodland spaces.

Loveliest of all these now, and, indeed, the most germane to the spot, is the mullein. All winter long it has sat serene and self-sufficient, under the snow, armor-encased in pellucid ice, or in the bare, bitter nights when the stars of heaven were one solid coruscation of silver and the still cold bit very deep. Clad in kersey like the pioneer, its homespun clothing has defied the weather, holding the cold away from its thin leaf with all this padding of matted wool which makes the plant seem so rough and coarse. In the summer it will defy the fierce heat of the July sun with the same armor, sitting here with its feet in the burning sand and its tall spike tossing back the sunshine with a laugh from its golden efflorescence.

Like the pioneer, the mullein came from the Old World, well fitted to bear the rigors and defy the dangers of the New. Like him it took root, and its seed holds the land in the rough places, brave and beautiful, though rough-coated, tender at heart, and helpful always.

So, when the sun has gone over the western ridge and the north wind scouts have again mustered courage to invade the place, I leave the little hollow to the wilderness that still enfolds dreams of the one-time occupant. In its sheltered nooks some of the day’s golden warmth will remain, even until the sun comes again. I cannot tell where my busy butterflies will spend the night, but if I were one of them I should flip back into the dooryard of the pioneer’s homestead and cuddle down in the great heart of one of those rosettes of mullein leaves, there to slumber, warm and serene, wrapped to the eyes in its blankets of soft wool.

APRIL SHOWERS

At nightfall the wind ceased, ashamed perhaps of its prolonged violence, and we felt the soft presence of April all about. Someone had suddenly wrapped the world in a protecting mantle of perfumed dreams.

Hitherto it had been struggling to realize spring, succeeding here and there indeed, but always against cold disfavor and sullen opposition. Now, in a breath almost, joys and relaxation had come to all out-door creatures, and the air itself was suffused with tears of relief that brimmed over and made little laughing patterings on bare twigs and brown grass. Till then we had had no green of spring. The woodland world had been pink, and amber, and full of soft yearning of colors in hope and promise; flowers had struggled bravely forth here and there, but they had smiled patiently on a land brown with pasture grass of last year.

Yet in a night the full warmth of April fondness and her tears of joy at being really home again changed all that. Under the patter of wee showers the wan grasses of last year laid weary heads upon the black earth beneath them and went to sleep, while up in their places sprang the lush green spears of this year, glinting back a million joyous facets to the next morning’s sun that thus seemed to sprinkle all things with gleam of jewels.

They came very softly at first in the black dusk, these April showers, growing out of the air so close to my cheek that their touch upon it was infinitely fine and soothing. Thus the dew touches the grass on still nights in summer. To be alone in the pasture on such a night is to become one with all the primal gentleness of the universe. I could feel the happiness of the pasture shrubs and perennial herbs and germinating annuals, growing now on the warm bosom of mother earth, tucked away beneath the perfumed robe of April night.

The night before the cold sky was blown miles high in the air by the rough winds, and the pasture people sighed and shrank and shivered. The night out of which April showers were to be born descended like a benediction, and swathed all humble things in caressing warmth that was tremulous with moisture and perfume.

With the rain came gentle woodland sprites; and while it played them a merry, ghostly tune, they worked in harmony. They pressed the wan brown grass lovingly down and patted the black earth over it till it went to sleep. They pulled lustily at germinating blades, and in their labor, there under the darkness, they painted out in a night the brown of last year with the verdant pigment of this. They hammered and pried at the tough, varnished outer husks of buds, and finally worked them open and began unfolding the soft yellow-green of the young leaves within.

Thus the tips of huckleberry twigs, which had given a soft shade of wine red to the pasture all winter long, lost this tint and bourgeoned into palest green, and the shadbush buds began to shake loose their racemes of bloom. The little people worked in squads, and showers played their merry tunes hither and yon as they labored.

All through the night the fresh smell of the open pores of earth met you everywhere, and moist air built upon this all other odors and carried them very far. An opened kitchen door in the distance let out not only a rainbow-edged blur of yellow light, but the smell of fresh-baked bread cooling on the table before being put away in the big stone crock in the pantry by some belated New England housewife.

With the lullaby roar of the distant brook came the odor of the willow blooms, and with a shift of wind the faint resinous perfume of the pine wood. The darkness which blots outlines from the sight leaves the location of things to the other senses which serve faithfully. Scent and sound are as apprehensive as sight. Often, walking in the darkness, one may feel faintly the obscure workings of a sense which is none of these, whereby he dodges a tree trunk or a fence corner which he feels is there, yet through none of the five ordinary senses. The darkness gives us antennæ.

The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.

In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes.

But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.

Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.

As the pattering music of the April showers on the waiting land is a rune of the ancient earth, so the love song of the swamp tree frog dreams down the years to us all the way from the carboniferous age. When the coal measures were forests of tree ferns, and the first men paddled through steaming shallows in their shade, the swamp tree frog was a tree frog indeed, and sang his soothing song from their branches. Since then he has degenerated and has lost most of the adhesive power of the tiny disks on fingers and toes. He no longer clings readily to trees, and is but an awkward climber. So, too, the webbing between his toes has nearly vanished, and he is not a strong swimmer. He haunts the shallows of the swamps and the sunny pools on the margin of the deep cove.

Perhaps he knows that he is degenerate, and that his safety lies mainly in silence and obscurity, for he sings rarely, except in the first heyday of spring, when the air is full of soft mists and warmth that stirs the deep-lying memories of the carboniferous age. He is a beautiful fellow, hardly more than an inch long, often flesh-colored, and with coppery iris tints that should make the mouths of frog-eating creatures water. It is for desire of him I believe that the pickerel haunt the veriest shallows at this time of year, where you may see them of an evening with their back fins sticking out like the latticed sails of a Chinese junk.

I do not believe there is anywhere to be heard a dreamier or more soothing lullaby than that sung by the swamp tree frogs of a misty April night to the tinkling accompaniment of showers pattering upon the dancing surface of the pond. It begins in a sigh, swells till it stirs a memory, and dies away in a dream of its own happiness.