Chapter II: Part 2

The young are not much smaller than their parents, and without a close watch it might be hard to tell the difference at first; but their heads are gray, as compared with the jet-black napes and crowns on the adults. They still spend most of the time waiting to be fed. Some make inexperienced, practice flights over the water, plunging in and out in an almost kittenish, hit-or-miss way, while their parents dive like arrows, pinpointing the surface with little flashes of spray, from which they rise up with silver quarries in their sharp bills. But as many more of the young terns stand along the beach or on shoals at the mouth of the inlet, crying, begging to be fed.

Terns are intensely active and brilliant in performance. They are comparatively small birds, but they are capable of migrating over thousands of miles of ocean waters, and their long, angled wings beat deep, low, and strong. They are all black and white sharpness, flashing as bright as the gold circlets of water around sharp grasses at the mouth of the inlet. They swing. They dart. They winnow the air. Their lovely white shuttlecock tails spread out and settle as they turn against the wind, crying: “Kierr! Kierr!”

Two juveniles wait on a shoal, constantly calling in a high-pitched tremolo, intensified when a parent bird flies over them. The trim expert adult flies past, then swings back down the shore and circles back, finally coming in to land between them. It has no food in its bill, but stands there for a minute or so, and then begins to move away from them, as they crouch and strut after it in an almost elderly way, crying their protests. It signals departure with a slight lift of its wings and in a few seconds flies up, the thwarted young ones taking off behind it.

In this behavior I see the play of learning, the many repetitions that precede a balanced natural art. Other adults swing in with sand eels or fish in their bills and hover, or circle back, avoiding rivals, then drop down next to a twittering, beak-gaping child, giving it the whole fish, or holding on to it and flying away, which has the effect of teasing the young one to follow after. In this way the fledgling terns, some still crouching down in a submissive manner as they did in their nests, learn to fly up, to chase, dive, and dodge, to breast the air, and beat their wings for all the long voyages their lives may hold.

In a few weeks most of them will suddenly flock away and migrate. In the meantime they practice the instinctive measures of growth, training in the insistent, excitable ways of a tern, for air and open waters over half the earth.

_September_

_Youth on the Move_

The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses. Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see when I take off my dark glasses?

I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.”

The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in order, earth-honored, momentous changes.

In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east, join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future, with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the day blow away?”

When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.

This is a marginal season like the spring. It is full of new appearances, as well as late fruitions. The goldenrod, strong flower of the sun, still plumes its store of light, and represents me well in my country, in spite of congressional inclination to award some puffy, manufactured rose with the title of national flower.

Asters, lilac and white, grow abundantly in the sandy soil. Their little pin wheel flowers are as crisp and clean as the new dresses of the girls when they go off for the first day of school. The novelty, after the closed-in summer tempo, is an outwardness. There are many immature birds that appear suddenly in various untried places, and not necessarily because of the demands of a set migration. Because of these fledglings the various bird populations have so increased that they are pushed into looking for food beyond their nesting areas.

Immature hermit thrushes appear as if at random, and many robins and towhees. The towhee, once called red-eyed, a name that seems to have been changed to rufous-sided, is a handsome black, white, and terra-cotta bird which likes scrubby areas, thickets, and open woods. So we see it frequently. It has a black and white tail with which it puts on a spectacular performance, flicking and flashing its feathers like a gambler with a deck of cards; and it floats over the brush and across the ground with its tail spread wide behind it.

Now the young towhees call “Twee! Twee!” not quite at adult strength and clarity, but they are finding themselves. They are on the move.

A covey of young quail suddenly starts across the road, coming out of a field still loud with insects. Heads and necks up, they run almost trippingly forward with sweet, piping alarm.

A young red-tailed hawk is brought into school by a boy whose father found it trapped in his chicken yard and killed it ignominiously with a baseball bat. Red tails are big beauties with a thick supply of feathers. Their backs are brown, their white bellies flecked with brown. The usual place to find them is high up, wheeling around the sky on a watch for rodents; and occasionally they fly out of pitch pine woods where they roost. The dead one has lost its piercing cry and the electric glare in its eyes, but its talons still look formidable. They are black, and as sharp-tipped, as wildly curved, as hooks of steel, joined in power and flexibility.

Bright days warm the surface of the inland ponds that have their outlet in the waters of our local brook and estuary leading through marshes to Cape Cod Bay. The sun’s radiance hurries up the alewife fry in their ancient impulse to go down to salt water, from which they will return in three or four years’ time to spawn like their elders, usually in the same fresh-water system where they were hatched. These little silver fish, with an unfathomed stare in their big eyes, run out on an ebb tide from Paine’s Creek. They attract gulls and terns, which hover in crowds against the west wind.

The plumage of the young terns still in the area now shows a more definite contrast between black and white. They have become more adept at flight. Many are still being fed ... almost continuously during those hours of shallow water when fish are easier to catch, so that the passivity of those still waiting on the sands looks like a consequence of being overstuffed. I get the impression that less food is being proffered by the parent birds, but they have certainly not relinquished their responsibility. They bring in small fish and their large children gulp them down and wait for more. Other young birds are now flying readily--chasing after their parents, beseeching attention, but more often trying to fish for themselves. Little by little, by rewards and refusal, failure and success, they are progressing toward the perfected action of mature birds. They are becoming more aggressive, fighting for space over a crowded channel, or protecting their catch. The adults, whose success in fishing they are beginning to approximate, hover over the water, beaks pointing down, then dive suddenly, wings partly folded back. They hit the water like small stones, then come up again, flying away fast if they have a fish in their bills, chased by other birds that cry “Karr! Karr!” with a slightly growling note. It is not so much that the young terns are taught, in our sense of the word, as that they become more and more a part of the communicable rhythm of the whole race of terns. Their circling, diving, hovering, or racing downwind are common proficiencies of motion, that fit the great environment of air and sea. Growing up is rhythmic practice. There is not such a gap between tutelage and its recipients as there might seem to be among human beings.

Terns seem involved in a ritualistic performance throughout their lives. Much of the behavior they show in getting food as nestlings and fledgling birds has its parallels in adulthood. There is the “fish flight,” for example, which has its origins in the begging, receiving, and then hunting food of a growing bird. (A fish is a master image, a center of recognition and attachment, with all the formality of action it entails.)

The fish flight is a term which in its strict sense is applied to the behavior of birds during pre-courtship. It involves emotional display between pairs of birds, as distinct from their food-getting habits in general. In detail it includes differences in calls, in the relative positions of birds during flight, and in the way they carry a fish. A fish in the bill not only represents the fulfillment of need. It may also be an offering, a display, and perhaps the instrument for a mutual awareness between male and female, even before sex recognition occurs. But if the fish flight can be tied down to behavior at a particular stage in their lives, the terns also show similar reactions before and after it. Mated birds go on offering fish as they fly by one another, or begging, so that feeding is used to maintain a bond between them. And of course the fish is the basis of all the instinctive training of the young. The process of begging and receiving, or offering for the uses of recognition, continues on in many forms through their life stages. They pursue a formality. Their flights show the grace in action of a whole society.

At half tide, when the water recedes over the sand flats, the terns flock there, preening and bathing in the tidal pools. Occasionally one will lift its wings up beautifully into the wind, receiving the wash of air. Some fly back to the inlet and drink the brackish water. The community seems to gather more and more closely together as time goes on. They all begin to roost densely in one area. At times they take to the air, as if alarmed. They rise and circle, crowds of white, crying shrilly, and then fly down again. Or they spin like a larger flock of sandpipers, a white cloud dancing with dizzy perfection over some fish weirs in the distance. Perhaps it could be called communal practice for the next journey. In their rhythms they are self-sustained, self-protective, like schools of fish, but at the same time bound out, under the laws of the wild air. One day soon I will go down to watch again, finding that most of them have flown away.

_An Open Shore_

We stay where we are, while the young migrant birds and the men of the city leave us. But the days sharpen and change. The nights grow longer and cooler. The westerly winds increase. There is a brilliance in the air, and the sea makes a clean statement to our senses. “Adjust your vision,” the sky seems to say, “to a turn in height and depth and in a new area of relentless winds.”

Those migratory birds that are still with us feed actively, fly with restless energy, and collect in flocks. In many undisturbed areas, down by the barrier beaches and through the salt marshes, treeless, open to the sun, you can see a great number using their special physical advantages to feed or fly, hide or attack, in the patterns of environment.

The U. S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted, salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea--whelks, surf clams, or scallops. Back in the marsh where mud snails stream slowly ahead in a long procession, the shore birds race in, or turn quickly in a shimmering flock, or settle among the hummocks, and along sandy rims.

Dowitchers stolidly probe the mud with their long bills. That mottled, distinctive bird, the ruddy turnstone, pushes, or turns over, pebbles and stones--thus proving its name--as it searches for the worms and crustaceans underneath. Shy piping plovers, white as oyster shells, stand by themselves behind a dune. Sanderlings hurry back and forth with little twinkling legs. The yellowlegs fly up and over with short, piercing cries, their wings curved like sickles. Or a solitary marbled godwit flies by, handsomely patterned on its wings with black and white. Least sandpipers, tiny animals with greenish legs, hurry and flit along, feeding at the edge of the tide pools and the rim of inlets.

The terns--common, roseate, least--fly at a point where the tide comes in through an opening in the beach. Sharp-cut divers, they swoop low, dipping into the water again and again. A few ring-billed gulls move among the shore birds. They are a little like a small herring gull, but their heads are more rounded, like pigeons. They have a lighter flight, and a softer look than their raucous, flat-headed relatives. And over the ridge of the beach, against up-dune horizons, is a long belt of great black-backed gulls, large, proud, and with a look of supreme idleness and cruelty.

Here is “function” in all variety, each life to its place, filling a niche, with the special form and manner by which it feeds and tries to survive. And every bird is a bird of the sun, adapted to this treeless, narrow shore that blazes with cutting light, the light of sand, or rock turned to sand, of water, roaring and moaning in the sea, rushing back through a tidal cut on the ebb, then trickling, evaporating, and swelling in again at the flood. Each animal works an open coast, across its burning days. The fliers with wings so sharp, energies of light, fit the high or low wants of the wind, the curves and sweeps of the open marsh, the glaring sands. And they hurry on stilts, or tiny short legs. They bob up and down. They run trippingly along--all to the rhythm of the watered, indefinite shore, looking for food that is rhythmic in myriad ways. Here is a great tribe of searchers.

The human race, as it climbs laughingly into motor boats and roars down an inlet, or sits soberly baiting fish hooks in a row boat, or basks in the sun, is no less brought in, fitted to this region--for all our autonomous great world of threats and shelters. There is some compelling call, that springs its lives ahead, and will not be talked away. Even the large, extraneous footmarks of seventy male and female “birders”--a very special tribe--are evidence of an omnivorousness, a searching, communicating, flocking together, from which no animals are entirely exempt.

_Chipmunks_

As some of the inhabitants of sea and shore move on to the south, inland life adjusts itself to local climate. The leaves on the trees are still green, but the bracken, or dry land fern, has turned brown, one of the early signs of autumn. My surroundings are full of statements of this kind, an end result of preparation. I notice one of them. I stop--pleased to be told--and then I wonder what was silently going on in August to have placed us with such definition in September. Plants and animals move into a new light, a new scene, when I am merely groping with their names. Perhaps because I have read too many newspapers, I am limited to what we call events. I see some outward evidence, and am obliged to go backward in order to reconstruct what might have been, when the real show is already over.

So all September’s reassociations and revolutions may just end up for me as a clump of locust leaves tugged loose by the wind, or the sudden opening in a milkweed pod, or a new chill in the air. One day I notice that a milkweed pod--on the same plant where I saw the butterflies--erect like a lamp on its bent stem, has developed a dimpled line down the middle. The next day it has cracked apart, and there in the sheath are the compact seeds, overlapping like fish scales, making a kind of cone with a tail of soft silk made up of myriads of threads. They are moist at first, in their womb, then they dry out and each seed parachutes away, the silky rays darting, swirling, racing high, subject to every turn and twist of air. There will be new populations, out of old circumstances. What happened to the milkweed before this culmination? How many hairstreak and monarch butterflies paid it a visit? How did it change with change in temperature and moisture and length of days? Where did it come from originally? Next year, if I have not been sent ahead myself, I will stand watch over the plant so as not to miss what might be the greatest show on earth.

We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little “ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity, or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a kind of actively questioning mood.

I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is--a striped, bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion, quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity. Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away, with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump behind a boulder.

It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought together into relationship by another danger--the dark universe of chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a chipmunk’s eye.

I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying part of an apple up a slope toward its hole, located in the side of a ridge some twenty feet above an old apple tree. When it saw me it dropped the apple, which promptly rolled downhill. Then it watched me with that silent waiting on chance, that throbbing look of expectation which they have, one paw twitching slightly and clutched to its chest. I was quiet, and at a respectable distance, so the chipmunk picked up its food again and hurried back to the hole; but the apple was too big to go in, and it rolled back downhill. This happened four times. The apple rolled down. The chipmunk hauled it back up, turned it around, put it up against the hole, a little like a man facing the problem of moving a large bed through a narrow door. Finally it nibbled bits off the edge, slipped sideways into the hole, and pulled the apple in after it. I stole up as quietly as I could and saw that it was eating away successfully with its food overhead. A problem had been solved, and with a fair amount of intelligence.

The illumination we find in nature does not necessarily come from comparing degrees of intelligence, in which man always finds himself the winner. The light goes deeper. Our analytical ways, our methods of order, imitate an order which is indefinitely resourceful. Sometimes it shows itself past explanation. It is like this September evening after rain. For a short time, ten minutes perhaps, not long before dark, the earth is colored with magic, shadowless light. The grass is intensely green. The sky turns gray and pink. Distant fields are red and astonishingly bright. All colors are sure and strong, joining in pure gradations. The evening is full of mystic peace. A kitten watches the light, transfixed in the doorway (together, for all I know, with some chipmunk by the stone wall outside), arrested by what I in my own silence can only think of as an unmatchable glory, never to return in quite the same measure.

_October_

_Where Is Home?_

The ordered days wheel on and fall into patterns consistently new. On further acquaintance, the place I live in seems to extend its boundaries and add to its store of lives. I struggle to understand. The more I add to my list of things as time goes on, the less my crude interpretations fit the circumstances. I started here with a tract of land. I built a house. I have a family. I am not yet sure of my location. The kingfisher says one thing, and the frog another. The snake travels a few thousand feet of home area, and the tern thousands of miles. They are both on Cape Cod. Then one leaves another. All action blows hot and cold with endless variations. A little knowledge makes my center rock with uncertainty.

I am not even a native in the strict sense, and cannot be said to know my way around by feel, as a man might who was born here. I had a talk the other day with a time-honored Cape Codder on the subject of how fish or birds found their way. He was not able to give me any illumination on the scientific aspects of the subject, but when it came to human beings, he did give me some tips on how to avoid getting lost. I had confessed that I once set off in a rowboat and was lost in an offshore fog for the better part of a morning, rowing steadily in the wrong direction.

The next time that happened to me, he suggested, I should drop anchor and wait for the fog to lift. In that dense shroud it is also possible, if you happen to be wading in shallow water, to lose sight of your boat when it is only a few yards away. Under such circumstances he once used his fishing line to help him get back to the boat by using the lead sinker as the center of a compass, playing out the line and circling until he reached it.

The sea can be a trackless wilderness only a few yards offshore. Natives have been lost in it as well as newcomers. Still, there is no substitute for acquaintance, for knowing the sea’s look and its ways. This man claimed he could feel his way in the fog. In other words, taking in all factors, familiar or deducible, such as the way the tide is running, whether it is ebbing or rising, how the wind goes, and from what quarter, or even guessing direction by the ridges on a sand bar, he could take the right course, without, as he put it “letting my judgment interfere.”

It took me a while just to learn the local compass directions, but now that I have my north, south, east, and west inside me, I am not sure, even walking through the trees, that I will not bump into my old ignorance. It takes time to find your way. A man new to the countryside might well be envious of some of the older inhabitants that know where they are without trying--a turtle, for example. A box turtle’s slow motion over the year seems like a true measure of ancientness. While the birds, the fish, the men depart, this dry land reptile seems to feel responsible for holding back, for the weight of the earth itself. In the springtime I have seen a slow pair approaching each other in a mood of affinity, while the rest of the procreative world danced overhead, and I have seen a female laying her eggs in a sand bank, covering them over with a last shove of her hind legs, then moving away, a little more quickly than usual, it seemed to me, as if to return to the more agreeable task of waiting things out. When fall comes and their cold blood slows, they grow torpid and finally dig out of sight into the ground.

On one of these warm days in early October I hear a slow dragging in the leaves, and come upon a box turtle eating a mushroom. They have beautifully patterned shells, ocher or yellow, sometimes orange, and dusty black, almost batik in design, with many variations. I stand about eight feet away, while it holds its head and neck straight up, watching me. I guess it to be a male, by the bright red little eyes. The eyes of a female are a darker reddish brown.

His wrinkled red neck pulses a little. His yellow beak and curved mouth line are tight shut under his flat-topped head, with bits of mushroom sticking out on either side. Very comical, he looks; but he stares down any inclination in me to laugh out loud. He watches me without moving for a full fifteen minutes before I get tired of the experiment and go away. Nothing, he seems to realize, can outlast a box turtle. This old male, with his wrinkled red jowls, and his soft, puddled-looking feet, must represent some antediluvian complacency, or, for all I know, a reasonable pride.

In captivity box turtles have exceeded forty years before they died, and some grow to be much older than that, if they avoid being crushed on the highways or killed by forest fires, since they are otherwise invulnerable to most predators, excepting man. This year a box turtle was found locally by a man whose deceased relative had carved his initials on its shell in 1889, making the turtle seventy-one years old. How old the turtle was when so tagged is not known.

They are wanderers--more so, for example, than the water turtles, and with a certain assurance. Within their chosen environment, of open field, shrubby slope, or marsh periphery, they cover a great deal of ground. They seem to carry a staying power with them, and an ancient decorum. They are like old natives true to ancestral places. There is something enviable about this fittingness to home.

Still, I have enough modern restlessness or rootlessness in me to think that a home or piece of land probably has fewer boundaries than ever before. We are going to have to know our location “way out,” as some of the old Cape Codders used to say. I have an equal envy of the terns that are flying toward the Caribbean or the Antarctic. They are birds of the world, in which they know their direction by markers that are light-years away, or so some scientists believe after much investigation. The latest theory is that migrating birds find their way by the sun’s changing position during daylight hours and by some of the constellations at night. They have a built-in mastery of what it took many thousands of years for man to learn, with his surpassing intellect. They are readers of the stars. Their home is in the wide blind sky.

_The Field of Learning_

We are committed far from home, but for a field of learning, the start and the finish is still here, still in place, just as that unique season of October, presaging a death in the glory of its color and clouds, brings the first frost, as if to say: “Regard necessity, in all its aspects. Look no further.”

It never comes without warning. One night a thrashing, thicket-tearing wind arrives with much greater cold. Two nights later another wind blasts all warmth away, and when it dies down the frost settles in, leaving a crisp whiteness on the grass at dawn, and clouds of white vapor over the pond waters. The garden beans go limp and the wild indigo turns black.

In that wind the low trees are like a sea, pluming and foaming. They are tossed and rocked, they pitch and writhe, while the stars in ordered majesty stream overhead. When the temperature starts to go down there is not a sound from the insect musicians any more, not one pizzicato, nor audible dry pulsing in the trees. You might think all breeding was over, though generation is latent everywhere.

Then it grows warm again. The insects sound in the grass and in the trees, if to a diminished extent. Crows gather in the early morning, and their various calls, synchronized in the open air, over the treetops, sound highly melodious. I hear a robin caroling, but very quietly, almost out of a playfulness, a musing. In spite of inexorable change, there are false dawns, days, or hours of deceptive warmth that set the long-horned grasshoppers to their buzzing and clicking and the flickers to shouting with renewed energy. All through the woods tiny tree frogs pipe at intervals from the cover of damp leaves. The pools in the fishway at the Brewster Herring Run are loaded with warm October sunlight and three-to four-inch alewives going down to salt water. A kingfisher planes up from branches above the stream with a rattling cry.

The pattern is one of reduction, depopulation, cutting down to size, but like all other shifts in a season, this one is manifested as another angle of light, a different feel to the air, a new set of circumstances, as much as a stop to all activity. When the fall winds swish and swoop along the shore, and I walk the tidal flats, a wide space played upon by light--gold, brown, and blue reflections running through pools and across long ribs of sand--I am regenerated by all the choices that are still ahead of me. Nothing is fixed or finished. It seems to me that everything I encounter is driven by indirection, like the waves and rivulets, sun tangled, that are crossing each other and separating over sand bars during an oncoming tide. Here is the ordered complexity which ensures that our findings, or rather, our search, will never have an end.

The finding-out process begins in childhood. That is why teaching is so great a profession. We intellectual animals have a long period in which to learn our wings. The teacher’s role is to bring us toward our highest capacity, and the tortures of that are immeasurable, on both sides. The field of learning is as wide as the sand flats, and the results as hard to catch as the waves; but a teacher has help from his pupils in ways over which they themselves have little control. Children have new fingers and new eyes and have to be coaxed into using them, but the touch and sight they bring cannot be taught in the schools.

I have found out lately, after some attempts at teaching natural history, that nature springs in a child and a child in nature. You learn that you are teaching both.

Why is one so proud of ignorance, and another of hiding what he knows? Some make a violent effort to be noticed; others, to retreat from view. You have an ambivalent and groping world to deal with, as hard to tape or tie as some of the phenomena you lead it to. But life is present tense to them, neither past nor future. They seem to pick up its manifestations not with adult skill but on the fly, like a boy casually catching a ball after missing ten, and then being surprised at himself. How did it happen? Memories, complexities, prejudices, risks taken on behalf of the future are largely unknown to them. It is enough to be new. There is not even any choice, since all choices are open, being new. Children are the unpredicting and the unpredictable. The one thing in which they never fail is growth, like the natural environment which never fails in its variations on the theme of fertility.

One mild afternoon two of us take out a group of boys on a field trip along the shore, a beginners collecting expedition. The class runs ahead. They find a dead loon on the beach, with rove beetles, lovers of carrion, roaming through its body. These beetles have black and white stripes, suggesting a skunk to one boy, who is still young enough to admit all affinities.

They run on, with erratic energy. They lend a puzzled ear to our explanations of how life forms are related to the places in which we find them. They are not quite certain of our terms. What is “environment?” What, for that matter, is “life?”

Classifications come hard to them at first. Certain types of recognition take a long time to learn. When I think that at the age of thirty I didn’t know the difference between one gull and another, not to speak of their different calls, I am hardly surprised.

“What’s this?”: a dune-dwelling locust, an ichneumon fly; a slipper shell, a shred of kelp, a spider, a scallop shell ... all parts of a game, novelties. But when will we know how to fit them all together? An impatient teacher might think from these boys, with their degrees of inattention, that the game will never get under way, that the preparation will never end. Yet their own lesson is that readiness is all, and the outcome immaterial.

I am only half acquainted with them, although some of their native traits stand out plain to see. In one there is a shade of melancholy transplanted from his father, in another courtesy and gaiety. One is rough and full of the fever of unregulated competition. Another is quiet and slow, or quick and sensitive. Together they share a mystery. They are in active flight like young birds, and at this point, this moment of being, allowed its own growth without real harm or hindrance, they give an offering. It is the act of their unknown selves.

They catch some more insects with their nets. They find the bright yellow feathers of a flicker which had been caught and eaten by fox or owl in the beach grass. They identify the remains of a young herring gull washed onto the upper beach. The tide has ebbed and the sands stretch off with glittering lanes and rivulets--gulls stalking in the distance, or resting in white flotillas on the water--and blue salt water curves beyond, over the earth’s perimeter. The October shadows begin to stretch farther down the sands. Light, smoky clouds drift over and a strange little shower of rain comes down, running along the beach, disturbing no one. Then the sun comes clear again, moving westward. Everything we collect, all that we can say about it, is only a start, a suggestion, although each sample leads to all others. We have left a great deal behind. If the north wind roars in again tomorrow, sweeping all warmth away, killing more of life’s visible evidence, or making it cower in the earth, and causing colds and crabbedness in human society, we will still be setting out.

_Colors of the Season_

There is yellow and peach pink on the leaves of the red maples, and some of the oaks begin to show signs of changing, but the most colorful plants are the mushrooms. The wet weather has been providential for them, and they have come up in some areas where I cannot remember having seen them before. They thrust mysteriously but stubbornly through the grass in a wide semicircle of white moons. They parade up the side of trees, and across the wood floor their cups or parasols stand comfortably grounded in dead leaves or decaying wood. (We see only the flower of the mushroom protruding above the ground, while underneath lies the complex mat of fine fibers from which they blossom, the mycelium.)

For such pulpy, soft, almost immaterial-looking plants, mushrooms show a strange power to lift, which is caused, in reality, by hydraulic pressure within them, amounting to as much as six or eight pounds per square inch. They come up through an inch or two of concrete, or through the asphalt surface of a road. They move the heavy bark of old logs aside. One of them puts up a scaly dome under the edge of a pump house eave that almost touches the ground, as if it intended to lift the roof off.

When we think of fungi, we have a justifiable association with rot and decay, mildew and mold. They lack chlorophyll, that famous green substance by which other plants are able to absorb the energy of the sunlight and through it convert carbon dioxide and water into food. The mushrooms, like other fungi, get their food directly from organic matter, rich soil, rotting wood, or leaf mold. They reproduce by billions of tiny spores, each of which, or rather, the comparatively few that catch, are started in such a matrix. In a sense they are procreative flowers of the darkness, annuals which the earth puts forth in its own teeming right, regardless of the gay slaves of the sunlight. But they are colorful. They wear the earth’s sulfurs, umbers, and ochers, its iron rusts, light greens, grays, and whites, as well as some startling rose-reds and vermilions.

I find a small one in the wet leaves which is a lavender-blue, named, according to my reference book, the violet cortinarius, and good to eat--surprisingly enough. Color is no criterion of what is poisonous. The deadly amanita does not have the flickering blue-green color of something low and ominous, nor is it a dangerous red, a signal for all but the most reckless to keep off. Some of the reddest mushrooms, in point of fact, are the best to eat. But the deadly amanita is almost tempting in appearance. It is white and succulent-looking, and to eat enough of it means death.

A strange thing, the mushroom, of short annual appearances (though the roots, or mycelium, are perennial), of quick growth and quick decay. Some of them are already turned into rotten dark brown, nearly liquid heaps. Others will gradually dry up and disappear, but now, on this tag end of a moist season, they are the local bounty. They have curled edges like cabbage or dead oak leaves. They take the form of single stems and fronds like seaweed. They are fringed, scalloped, round or flat, thin or fat. They bunch together at the base of an old stump, or they climb the side of a tree in shelves. Their heads take the form of lima beans, or floppy rabbit ears, fans, umbrellas, trumpets, shaggy hats, or cottage roofs. They are scaly, rough, smooth, or silky. They have thin stems and dainty heads like flowers; or both head and stem look like one great overgrown protuberance. Here and there, coming through the leaf litter, are yellow bunches of coral mushrooms, so called because they have the look of branched coral; and in the deep shade they seem almost luminous. In fact, whether or not any mushrooms do have a luminosity, like some fungi, they have a glimmer of decay about them in our imagination. They are of the earth unearthly, in spite of the fact that many of them provide substantial beds for insect larvae, that they are good, if sometimes treacherous food, and that they can raise the top off a road.

This year has also been rich in Indian pipes. This is that unreal, pure-white plant, which, in more mythical times, has been called the corpse plant, or ghost flower. It blooms by itself, though out of the moist woodland humus like the mushrooms, lacking chlorophyll as they do. There is some dispute apparently, consistent with the Indian pipe’s ghostly nature, about what it really is. Some books refer to it as a “saprophyte,” which means a plant that absorbs its nutrition from dead or decaying organic matter, but in others it is called a “parasite.” A parasite gets its nourishment from a living host. The Indian pipe has a very small mat of rootlets where the thick stems join together at the base of the plant. If you dig it out of the ground it looks as if it were resting on bare knuckles. These roots, according to the botanists, have an outer layer of funguslike tissue, which means that the fungus rather than the roots has actual contact with the soil. So it sounds as though the Indian pipe, being dependent for its food on the fungus and not the soil or humus, were a parasite. Another alternative, if the fungus gets any nourishment from the plant, is that they live in a state of mutual association, or symbiosis. Thus science, still trying for exactitude, and the Indian pipe, still unaccountable. It seems to be on the verge of several worlds rather than an integral part of one, a plant you might meet in a dream.

Other old and once popular names for it are: Dutchman’s-pipe; fairy smoke; convulsion weed; eyebright; bird’s nest; and American ice plant. It was called ice plant, according to Alice O. Albertson in her _Nantucket Wild Flowers_ (1921), because “it resembles frozen jelly and is juicy and tender and dissolves in the hands like ice.” One contemporary authority calls it “clammy,” which is accurate enough, and keeps it in the realm of ghosts and chills, but I think it was an exaggeration to say that it dissolves in the hands. I find it solid enough, not fragile or perishable to the touch. Its stems have a fibrous, tough core, which is sometimes hard to tear. It also has a pungent, woody smell, though this probably comes from the soil it grows in.

All the same, it is an elusive, beautiful flower, a miraculous specialty. Coral pink shines almost translucently through the stems, which are covered with tiny white bracts, or scales, taking the place of leaves--scales of a tiny albino fish perhaps--and the bell-like flowers hang their stiff white heads straight down, with pink seed pods standing up between them, round, decoratively grooved little crowns. When the plant dies, it stands for months as a thin, brownish black string, having turned from beautiful ghost to lifeless reality.

Over the mushrooms and Indian pipes, in subtle relationship to them, the leaves are losing their green chlorophyll and revealing the other, more stable pigments that last out long enough to make the familiar glory of the autumn. There is not so much a general “dying” in the fall, as an adjustment. Insect eggs are in the bark or ground, the mushroom spores are being carried through the air, the grasses are heavy with seed, acorns drop to the ground. One day last October I was hit with a shower of acorns from the white oaks. This year, since oaks fruit heavily on different years, I notice more acorns from the black oaks. How fast these acorns get to work! A little curling, probing, adventurous sprout comes from the nut, and in a short time has grown several inches. A few manage to take hold before the ground is frozen. A multitude of others provide food for squirrels, chipmunks, or blue jays. The measure of these arrangements is complex and elaborate. Between the leaf of a tree and a mushroom, worlds apart in function, there are connections of rainfall, temperature, or sunlight, in a context continually new, and though the ground colors fade, sunsets, seas, and inland waters will take over their active play.

That great bonfire of a maple tree--one special to my boyhood--that I used to marvel at in the New Hampshire fall, is here replaced by second-or third-growth oaks. I now live in a stunted land; but as it is the sea which surrounds it, so, in its long low stretches, its glacial hollows and running hills, it rides ahead like open billows. The early splashes of color come from the red of the sumac and the purple-reds of the huckleberries and blueberries. Then color begins to spread through the oaks, that war with yellow-green pitch pines for living space. Yellow or red streaks show in the leaves of the white oak, orange in the waxy leaves of the post oak, brilliant red in the scarlet oak. Then deep reds, maroons, cowhide yellows and browns pervade them, and our woodland surroundings seem full of a beautiful propriety, a beauty in necessity.

Occasional copses of beech trees are shining with golden bronze; and tupelo, or black gum, trees, with scraggy, undulant branches, have little leaves that are a blazing, livid red. Over bare hillsides the “hog cranberry,” or bearberry, a perennial ground cover with shiny leaves, is hung with cherry-red fruit. The cultivated cranberry bogs show broad stretches of purple-red, shaped, depending on the area, in squares, circles, or oblongs, all, if well cared for, neatly ditched. The tidal inlets and marshes run with flaxen and gold, spotted at their edges with light festival red from the berries of black alder, a form of holly.

These flaming revelations signal the trees’ reaction to the decrease in light’s intensity, or the colder temperature of the soil. The leaf decomposes. The tree withdraws and makes ready for a leaner season; but it is too big a display for mere “adjustment.” You will not find the category of color in a historical dictionary or the encyclopedia of social sciences, but in this temperate zone at least, it is now an integral part of the history of change, and of natural society.

* * * * *

There is a deep little hollow nearby called Berry’s Hole. Many years ago it contained a cranberry bog, and it is still wet bottom land with water around its edge, and a center choked with moisture-loving shrubs and reeds. Frogs take advantage of it, as well as water insects and their larvae. Wood peewees nest around it in the springtime. Now it is radiant with its special version of the fall. In the middle of October, sheep laurel is still green on the surrounding slopes, through the purple huckleberry bushes. I walk down them into a raining screen of leaves. Berry’s Hole is circled by red, also called swamp, maples, and their red and yellow leaves, light and delicate compared to those of the oak trees on dry slopes above them, slip down constantly through the bright air, drift, eddy, and finally touch the ground, or fill the brown water with loose-lying, sinking rafts of color.

A green frog leaps into the water with a squeak. I notice a box turtle on the bank, with its head determinedly locked in this time. Its markings, on an almost black shell, are dashes of yellow, and a rich reddish orange that reminds me of a Blackburnian warbler.

Response to color is response to energy, the radiance and the reflection of light. I close my eyes after looking across the sun and see red, the color of warmth and desire. Around the eye of Berry’s Hole is the red of blood and the yellow of the sun.

_The Last Day in October_

The night, after a deceptively bright and soothing day, seems suddenly withdrawn. The wind has a hard feel to it, as if a northern authority had come to stay. Heavy rolls of cumulus clouds hang in the sky when morning breaks, and the Cape begins to look like my winter image of it, dank and cold, with inert, slate-colored seas investing its shores. The oak leaves have turned a darker, more lifeless red, or they are light brown. I notice that the leaves of the white oaks are among the first to die, beginning to curl up like stiff, ancient hands, with an ashy pallor on them. The scarlet oaks are the last to lose their color.

As a result of their definite adjustment, insisting on certain rules of change before many of the rest of us are quite ready, the oak woods seem to have a dark, plenipotentiary look. The trees stand in self-saved, stiff company, although the animals that visit them are lively enough. I watch a gray squirrel burying acorns in loose dirt at the edge of the road. He has that continually twitching, starting and stopping, restless being of his rodent relatives the red squirrels and the chipmunks. He runs back and forth over the sandy earth burying the acorns, and then, as if unsatisfied with the places he put them, bringing them out again.

The squirrel’s gray, fur-clad body flows with suppleness. The big gray tail is sudden too in its motion, stretching out behind, or up, with curled tip when the animal stops to sit. He quits his activity, and with a long bound and dive he is up a tree. Along with its slapdash motion, but provident method, the gray squirrel may also have a touch of foolhardiness in its nature, though even the most practiced make their slips. I have never seen it happen myself, but a friend tells me that he has seen gray squirrels miss their leap occasionally in high trees near his house and fall to their death.

The leaf litter still fairly jumps with mice and shrews. A little blind shrew with dark gray pelt and pink nose slips out of a bank of leaves where I walk. It swerves with astonishing speed and squeaks angrily at me before it dives out of sight into the leaves. This, in contrast to other members of the mouse family, is a fighter.

I go into a part of the oak wood which has been a little more protected ... a hollow fenced in and fringed by strands of bull briar. It is an open space where deer have come in to paw the ground and settle down at night. Skunks have left little holes where they clawed into the leaf mold on their hunt for grubs. Towhees have scratched the leaves apart. Cottontails have stopped here, hopped, nibbled, and jumped away.