The Fall of the Year Part 15

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_long-tusked boar of the forest_: The wild boar, the ancestor of our domestic pigs is still to be found in the great game preserves in European forests; in this country only in zoological gardens.

_live in a pen_: How might one, though living in a big modern house, well furnished and ordered, still make a "pen" of it only.

CHAPTER XII

TO THE TEACHER

Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do and hear a few of the _characteristic_ sights and sounds and doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the characteristic notes and actions of individual things--birds, animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the galloping, waving motion of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r's flight, if his ear is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil _knows_ that bird and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy, his habits, his family traits.

The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate and distinguish things; and there is no better training for this than to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic.

Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life; so that some of the _sounds_ in this chapter may need to have others subst.i.tuted to meet those differences. Remember that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good teacher is a very much better thing.

FOR THE PUPIL

Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard these ten sounds; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not stop listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing else, learn just the day's lesson and nothing more, your teacher may think you a very "good scholar," but I will tell you that you are a poor student of nature. The woods are full of sounds--voices, songs, whisperings--that are to be heard when none of these ten are speaking.

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_hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the fox_: It is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as it is usually the young foxes in the summer and fall that bark.

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"Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread."

"The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day."

Study this whole poem ("The Death of the Flowers," by Bryant) for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written it had he been ignorant of nature? Can you appreciate it all unless you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can sound them again to you as you read? Nature is not only interesting for herself; but also absolutely necessary for you to know if you would know and love poetry.

_the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn_: What is the warning, would you say, in the scream of the jay? the solemn message in the caw of the crow?

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_cave days_: Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the history of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost wholly upon the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone weapons.

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_to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon_: Some of the birds go even farther south--away into Patagonia at the end of the southern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no more thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating birds--the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for the few weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start back again on the long, perilous journey!

CHAPTER XIII

TO THE TEACHER

Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling as possible to the paragraph beginning, "I love the sound of the surf," etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not try to _teach_ anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful pupil read the next section as far as, "_Honk, honk, honk_,"

beginning the third paragraph from the end. This contains the lesson, the moral, and if you stop anywhere to talk about bird-protection, do it here. Let a third pupil read the rest of the chapter. Better than a moral lesson directly taught (and such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will be the touching of the child's imagination by the picture of the long night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them "To a Water Fowl,"

by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by D. Lange ("The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life") in the _Atlantic_ _Monthly_ for August, 1909. Read to them Audubon's account of the wild goose, in his "Birds."

FOR THE PUPIL

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_followed through our open windows_: "followed" how? Must one have wings or a flying-machine in order to "follow" the wild geese?

_Round and dim swung the earth below us...._: What is the picture? It is seen from what point of view?

_the call to fly, fly, fly_: Did you ever feel the call to fly?

Ever wish you had wings? Ever start and run as Mowgli did, or long to get up and go somewhere as the pilgrims did in the Canterbury Tales?

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_in our hands to preserve_: Do you belong to the Audubon Society, to the "Grange," or to any of the organizations that are trying to protect and preserve the birds? And are you doing all you can in your neighborhood to protect them?

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_not in a heap of carca.s.ses, the dead and b.l.o.o.d.y weight of mere meat_: We may be hunters by instinct; we may love the chase, and we may like to kill things. But do you think that means we ought to, or that we any longer may, kill things? No; bird life has become so scarce that even if we do want to, it is now our duty to give over such sport in the larger interests of the whole country, and try to find a higher, finer kind of pleasure,--as we can in trying to photograph, or "shoot" with the camera, a bird, getting an interesting picture in place of a dead body.

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_the mated pairs of the birds have flocked together_: In domestic geese the mated pairs often live together for life; and among the wild geese this, doubtless, is often true.

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_may I be awake to hear you_: In what sense "awake"?

_The wild geese are pa.s.sing--southward_: the end of the autumn, the sign that winter is here.

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . Ma.s.sACHUSETTS U . S . A