A Watcher in The Woods Part 8

Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees is an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter live.

Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting--and marvelous too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood, yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than come from the native stock.

Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of the swamp-gums (_Nyssa uniflora_) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value trees according to their capacity for cavities,--the naturalist has a right to such a scale of valuation,--then these gums rank first.

The deliberate purpose of a swamp-gum, through its hundred years of life, is to grow as big as possible, that it may hollow out accordingly. They are the natural home-makers of the swamps that border the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. What would the c.o.o.ns, the turkey-buzzards, and the owls do without them? The wild bees believe the gums are especially built for them. No white-painted hive, with its disappearing squares, offers half as much safety to these free-booters of the summer seas as the gums, open-hearted, thick-walled, and impregnable.

When these trees alone make up the swamp, there is a roomy, empty, echo-y effect among the great gray boles, with their high, horizontal limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by no other trees I know.

It is worth a trip across the continent to listen, under a clear autumn moon, to the cry of a c.o.o.n-dog far away in the empty halls of such a swamp. To get the true effect of a barred owl's hooting, one wants to find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. I know such a home, along Cohansey Creek, where, the neighboring farmer tells me, he has heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since he remembers hearing anything.

I cannot reach around the b.u.t.t of the tree that holds the nest.

Tapering just a trifle and a little on the lean, it runs up smooth and round for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just above which is the capacious opening to the owls' cave. There was design in the bulge, or foresight in the owls' choice; for that excrescence is the hardest thing to get beyond I ever climbed up to. But it must be mounted, or the queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will go unseen.

The owls themselves first guided me to the spot. I was picking my way through this piece of woods, one April day, when a shadowy something swung from one high limb to another overhead, following me. It was the female owl. Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and watchful. As I pushed deeper among the gums, she began to snap her beak and drop closer. Her excitement grew every moment. I looked about for the likely tree. The instant I spied the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the direction of my eyes, and made a swoop at me that I thought meant total blindness.

I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair, perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully: _Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a!_ And faint and far away came back a timid _Woo-hoo, woo-a!_ from her mate, safely hid across the creek.

The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reechoing as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted into hiding.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."]

I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It was a raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here, backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos--tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Wrapped up like little Eskimos."]

Very green babies of all kinds are queer, uncertain, indescribable creations--faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal instincts.

But quite as astonis.h.i.+ng as the appearance of the young owls was the presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were fresh--the _crumbs_ of one night's dinner, the leavings of _one_ night's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?

Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two evening hours a day? The record at the summer's end is almost beyond belief.

Not counting what the two old owls ate, and leaving out of the count the two frogs, it is within limits to reckon not less than six small animals brought to the hollow gum every night of the three weeks that these young owls were dependent for food--a riddance in this short time of not less than one hundred and twenty-five muskrats, mice, and voles. What four boys in the same time could clear the meadows of half that number? And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.

Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a more profitable crop.

When fruit-growing in Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic farmer with a love for natural history will find large reward in his orchards of gums, that now are only swamps.

Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond all calculation in its sweetening effects upon our village life, is the annual yield of swallows by the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring tide carried away the south wing of the old bridge, but left the piles, green and grown over with moss, standing with their heads just above flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are holes, bored to pa.s.s lines through, or left by rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and wind. Besides these there are a few genuine excavations made by erratic woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. This whole clump of water-logged piles has been colonized by blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and cranny wide enough and deep enough to hold a nest being appropriated for domestic uses by a pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps; it is a swallow-Venice. And no gayer gondoliers ever glided over wave-paved streets than these swallows on the river. When the days are longest the village does its whittling on the new bridge in the midst of this twittering bird life, watching the swallows in the sunset skim and flash among the rotting timbers over the golden-flowing tide.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps."]

If I turn from the river toward the woods again, I find that the fences all the way are green with vines and a-hum with b.u.mblebees.

Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a living pillar of ivy.

All is life. There are no dead, no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made cemetery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, where the forest-fire came down and drank of the river, is a stretch of charred stumps; but every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. Not one of these stumps is a tombstone. We have graves and slabs and names in our burial-place, and nothing more. But there is not so much as a slab in the fields and woods. When the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut, the stumps are immediately prepared for new life, and soon begin blossoming into successive beds of mosses and mushrooms, while the birds are directed to follow the bare poles and make them live again.

A double line of these pole-specters stretches along the road in front of my door, holding hands around the world. I have grown accustomed to the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the sound. But one May morning recently there was a new note in the pole just outside the yard. I laid my ear to the wood. _Pick--pick--pick_; then all was still. Again, after a moment's pause, I heard _pick--pick--pick_ on the inside. At my feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Backing off a little, I discovered the hole, about the size of my fist, away up near the cross-bars. It was not the first time I had found High-hole laying claim to the property of the telegraph companies. I stole back and thumped. Instantly a dangerous bill and a flas.h.i.+ng eye appeared, and High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning red in the top of his cap lunged off across the fields in some ill humor, no doubt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy."]

Throughout the summer there was telegraphing with and without wires on that dry, resonant pole. And meantime, if there was anything unintelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Was.h.i.+ngton, it was high-hole talk. For there was reared inside that pole as large, as noisy, and as red-headed a family of flickers as ever hatched. What a brood they were! They must have snarled the wires and Babelized their talk terribly.

While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up, only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek but brave little mother.

There is still another dead-tree crop that the average bird-lover and summer naturalist rarely gathers--I mean the white-footed mice. They are the jolliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. It is when the woods are bare and deep with snow, when the cold, dead winter makes outside living impossible, that one really appreciates the coziness and protection of the life in these deep rooms, sunk like wells into the hearts of the trees. With what unconcern the mice await nightfall and the coming of the storms! They can know nothing of the anxiety and dread of the crows; they can share little of the crows' suffering in the bitter nights of winter. A warm, safe bed is a large item in out-of-doors living when it is cold; and I have seen where these mice tuck themselves away from the dark and storm in beds so snug and warm that I wished to be an elf myself, with white feet and a long tail, to creep in with them.

I had some wood-choppers near the house on the lookout for mice, but, though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the winter nearly pa.s.sed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to dust.

The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and stuck out like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and through by woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, and now lay several feet away, buried in the snow; and the hole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but covered instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked with fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small animals. I almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of the doc.u.mentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there were mice in the old corpse. The Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping off my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor me, though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, and would infinitely rather have subst.i.tuted his skates. I insisted, however, and he disappeared for the ax.

The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodp.e.c.k.e.r holes since the last storm.

The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as eager now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense--a kind of X-ray organ that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was (shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of the chase of--mice!

I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly through the air; the preacher was repeating between strokes: "_I'm--truly--sorry--man's--dominion--has--_" when suddenly there was a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only mouse captured.

We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound, stairway-like, just inside the hard outer sh.e.l.l. Here and there we came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded bark--a complete fortress against the siege of winter.

That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor one half so full of goings on, as this same old sh.e.l.l of a pine, with scarcely heart enough to stand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: moon]

IN THE OCTOBER MOON

An October night, calm, crisp, and moonlit! There is a delicate aroma from the falling leaves in the air, as sweet as the scent of fresh-filled haymows. The woods are silent, shadowy, and sleepful, lighted dimly by the moon, as a vague, happy dream lights the dark valley of our sleep. Dreamful is this night world, but yet not dreaming. When, in the highest noon, did every leaf, every breeze, seem so much a self, so full of ready life? The very twigs that lie brittle and dead beneath our feet seem wakeful now and on the alert.

In this silence we feel myriad movings everywhere; and we know that this sleep is but the sleep of the bivouac fires, that an army is breaking camp to move under cover of the night. Every wild thing that knows the dark will be stirring to-night. And what softest foot can fall without waking the woods?

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

Not a mouse can scurry, not a chestnut drop, not a wind whisper among these new-fallen leaves without discovery; even a weasel cannot dart across the moon-washed path and not leave a streak of brown upon the silver, plain enough to follow.

A morning in May is best of all the year to be afield with the birds; but to watch for the wild four-footed things, a moonlight night in October is the choice of the seasons. May-time is bird-time. That is their spring of mate-winning and nest-building, and it bubbles over with life and song. The birds are ardent lovers; they sometimes fight in their wooing: but fighting or singing, they are frank, happy creatures, and always willing to see you. The mammals are just as ardent lovers as the birds, and infinitely more serious. But they are not poets; they are not in the show business; and they want no outsider to come and listen to their pretty story of woe. Their spring, their courting-time, is not a time of song and play. The love-affairs of a timid, soulful-eyed rabbit are so charged and intense as not always to be free from tragedy. Don't expect any attention in the spring, even from that bunch of consuming curiosity, the red squirrel; he has something in hand, for once, more to his mind than quizzing you. Life with the animals then, and through the summer, has too much of love and fight and fury, is too terribly earnest, to admit of any frolic.

But autumn brings release from most of these struggles. There is surcease of love; there is abundance of food; and now the only pa.s.sions of the furry b.r.e.a.s.t.s are such gentle desires as abide with the curious and the lovers of peace and plenty. The animals are now engrossed with the task of growing fat and furry. Troubled with no higher ambitions, curiosity, sociability, and a thirst for adventure begin to work within them these long autumn nights, and not one of them, however wild and fearful, can resist his bent to prowl in the light of the October moon.

To know much of the wild animals at home one must live near their haunts, with eyes and ears open, forever on the watch. For you must wait their pleasure. You cannot entreat them for the sake of science, nor force them in the name of the law. You cannot set up your easel in the meadow, and hire a mink or muskrat to pose for you any time you wish; neither can you call, when you like, at the hollow gum in the swamp and interview a c.o.o.n. The animals flatly refuse to sit for their pictures, and to see reporters and a.s.sessors. But carry your sketch-book and pad with you, and, after a while, in the most unlikely times and places, the wariest will give you sittings for a finished picture, and the most reticent will tell you nearly all that he knows.

At no time of the year are the animals so loquacious, so easy of approach, as along in the October nights. There is little to be seen of them by day. They are cautious folk. By nature most of them are nocturnal; and when this habit is not inherited, fear has led to its acquisition. But protected by the dark, the shy and suspicious creep out of their hiding-places; they travel along the foot-paths, they play in the wagon-roads, they feed in our gardens, and I have known them to help themselves from our chicken-coops. If one has never haunted the fields and woods at night he little knows their mult.i.tude of wild life. Many a hollow stump and uninteresting hole in the ground--tombs by day--give up their dead at night, and something more than ghostly shades come forth.

If one's pulse quickens at the sight and sound of wild things stirring, and he has never seen, in the deepening dusk, a long, sniffling snout poked slowly out of a hollow chestnut, the glint of black, beady eyes, the twitch of papery ears, then a heavy-bodied possum issue from the hole, clasping the edge with its tail, to gaze calmly about before lumbering off among the shadows--then he still has something to go into the woods for.

Our forests by daylight are rapidly being thinned into picnic groves; the bears and panthers have disappeared, and by day there is nothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations exercise. But the night remains, and if we hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, here is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty sure chance for excitement.

Never to have stood face to face in a narrow path at night with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have missed excitement and suspense second only to the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed wildcat.

It is surely worth while, in these days of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and adventure has fled the woods, to sally out at night for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the shock of standing before a beast that will not give you the path. As you back away from him you feel as if you were really escaping. If there is any genuine adventure left for us in this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by the dark.

Who ever had a good look at a muskrat in the glare of day? I was drifting noiselessly down the river, recently, when one started to cross just ahead of my boat. He got near midstream, recognized me, and went under like a flash. Even a glimpse like this cannot be had every summer; but in the autumn nights you cannot hide about their houses and fail to see them. In October they are building their winter lodges, and the clumsiest watcher may spy them glistening in the moonlight as they climb with loads of sedge and mud to the roofs of their sugar-loaf houses. They are readily seen, too, making short excursions into the meadows; and occasionally the desire to rove and see the world will take such hold upon one as to drive him a mile from water, and he will slink along in the shadow of the fences and explore your dooryard and premises. Frequently, in the late winter, I have followed their tracks on these night journeys through the snow between ponds more than a mile apart.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "In October they are building their winter lodges."]