Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Grim and morose, indeed! The cassandra is like a gentle, pure-souled girl of the elder Puritans, arrayed for her coming-out party, her primness of garb only enhancing the beauty of soul that shines through it and finds visible expression in the pearls. And already lovers buzz about her. Their cheerful hum is like the sound of soft stringed instruments fanned by the warm breeze in this fairy-peopled land of loneliness. Here I see my first bumblebee of the season, seemingly less dunderheaded out here among the wild blooms than he will be later in the white clover of the lawn.

Perhaps the prim and definite arrangement of the cassandra blossoms, hung so close in long strings that he has a straight road to follow, helps keep his wits about him. Here are honeybees a-plenty, adding the clarinet to his bassoon, and many a wild bee, too, bringing the scintillation of iridescent thorax or wing, and his own peculiar pitch to the symphony. I dare say the hymenopterists know each bee by ear as well as by sight.

In this fairy land of bog tangle the hylas, that I had thought all through with their songs for the year, piped in chorus as each cloud slipped over the sun, and the leopard frogs yawned throatily, dreamily, all about in the full sunshine. The hotter it was the more they liked it, and in the brightest part of the day they cut up the yawns into brief words and phrases which made a most language-like gabble.

Of course I could not see this peace congress of leopard frogs and can prove only that it sounded like them. It may very well have been the pukwudgies talking over my presence and wondering if white men were now coming to oust them from their last stronghold in the bog, as they have driven them and the once more visible Indians from the rough hills and sandy plains about the pond. Indeed, as I sat quiet, hour after hour, in this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog, banshee or bird.

I began to get glints of sunlight reflecting from grassy islands all about. It was as if some very human folk had held high carnival here the night before and sown the dry spots with empty black bottles. But a second look showed these to be spotted turtles, sitting up above the water level, each with his head held up as if he wished especially to get the warmth of the sun on his throat. On such a day one might well envy the turtle for having his bones all on the outside. It is easy for him to let the spring sunshine into his very marrow.

The turtle, in spite of the canticle which, bubbling over with the enthusiastic poetry of spring, declares that “the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,” is usually reckoned dumb. The commentators have carefully announced that the turtle mentioned is the turtle-dove cooing in the joy of springtime. That may be, but I do not see how they know, for the turtle, denied a voice by naturalists and scriptural commentators alike, nevertheless has one, and a song of its own.

A turtle, suddenly jolted, will give a quaint little squeak as he yanks himself back into his shell. That is common enough, but this day there were two, sitting up on nearby tussocks, that piped a musical little song of spring, just a soft trill that was eminently frog-like but distinct. I heard it and tried at first to make it the trill of hylas, but it was more of a trill and different in quality. Try as I would I could but locate this quaint little song in the throats of the two turtles. I carefully scared one off his perch and one trill ceased. I scared the other, and both voices were silent, though here and there in the marsh I could hear others. It may have been the pukwudgies playing ventriloquial tricks on me from the shade of the swamp cedars just beyond, and laughing in their beaded sleeves at the joke; but if it was not they, I am convinced that my turtles sang, and that Solomon not only knew what he was talking about but meant exactly what he said.

While I was listening to the two turtles and wondering about them, I kept hearing over among the white cedars raucous profanity of the most outrageous sort. Bad words snarled in throaty squawks came oftener and oftener, till by the time the turtles had gone down into oblivion beneath the bog roots the most villainous language from at least two squawkers gave evidence that a low-bred row was going on. I could distinguish accusation and recrimination till it sounded like a family quarrel between drunken bog bogles.

Then there was the sound of blows, and with a wild shriek of a most reckless word a bittern flapped out, whirled round once or twice as if undecided where he would go, then dropped in the grass down the bog a way. Here he turned his black, stake-like head this way and that for a moment, then pulled it down out of sight. I had known the bittern was misanthropic, but I had never before realized that he was so ill-tempered and profane. I am positive he was beating his wife, and the whole affair sounded like a case of too much bog whiskey.

For an hour there was no sight or sound of this bittern, though uncouth conversation seemed to be going on still in the tangle whence he flew, but I heard no more profanity. Yet out of the heart of the bog curious sounds came floating at intervals,--sounds which often I had difficulty in getting any known creature to go bail for. I do not mean the ordinary bird voices, though the air was full of these. It seems as if all the small migrants made this a port of call or a refuge, and paid for their safety with music. Warblers trilled their varied notes from the cedars or the thicket of cassandra shrubs, some coming boldly near, others giving sign of their presence only by the glint of a wing or the shaking of a twig, others still invisible but vocal.

Thrush and catbird, song sparrow and chipping sparrow, chickadee and creeper, all helped to fill the air with sound, but it was not to these I listened. It was rather to obscure whinings and grumblings out of the deep heart of the bog, goblin talk very likely that seemed to grow louder and come nearer. Then after a little I heard splashing, and out into a clear space of grassy shallows came a splendid great muskrat followed by another just as large. In the middle of this tourney ground the two faced each other, and after a second of sparring closed.

It was hardly a scientific fight. They batted and clawed, butted and scratched and bit, whining like eager dogs, and now and then yelping with pain. But it was effective; in a very few minutes one had enough and turned and fled, ploughing a straight furrow through the shallows, to a plunge in a deep hole. The victor followed a few yards, then as if convinced that the retreat was a real one, turned and went proudly back, probably to the lady who was the cause of all this trouble. Muskrats are such gentle creatures that I was amazed to see this happen, but affairs of the heart are serious even in the depths of the bog. I lay a part of the bog bogle talk which still went on in the eerie depths behind the green of the cedars to the other muskrats. It does not seem as if they could have been to blame for it all.

Then I remembered the vanished bittern and began to work my boat toward the part of the bog where he disappeared. Very likely he had committed suicide in repentance for his bad behavior and his profanity. He ought to have, but he was simply sulking, after all. I think he felt so bad about it that his usual wariness was at fault, for I was almost upon him before he saw me. It may have been drunken stupor, but I like to believe it was remorse.

When he did see me his dismay was ludicrous. He almost fell over himself in getting into the air, and he flapped back toward the spot where the quarrel had gone on with wild squawks that said “Help, help!” as plainly as any language could. Out from among the cedars, in answer to this frenzied appeal, came the other bittern, and then another. I watched the three flapping down the bog and saw them light together at a safe distance. Then I knew the cause of all the trouble in the bittern family. The bog world, like the pasture world and the deep wood, at this time of year is full of blissful love making, but it is also full of heartrending jealousies and fights to a finish. No wonder the pukwudgies and bog bogles are full of talk and excitement back there; there is enough food for gossip.

Sitting quietly in the boat in this new part of the bog I had a queer feeling of being grimly watched by, I could not tell what. I have read tales of travelers in African jungles who felt the eyes of a lurking boa constrictor resting balefully on them when the creature itself was concealed. It was something like that, and I looked about rather uneasily. Probably the bog voices were getting on my nerves and it was time to go home. Then I glanced over one side of the boat and very nearly jumped over the other, for there were the two grim eyes, in a great horny head as big as my two fists, looking up at me.

I had been amusing myself with imagining that I heard the little people of the bog, but here was the great dragon, the very devil himself, sunning his black hulk on a fairy acre of bog grass. At its further end I saw his tail, as large as my forearm at the base, tapering with alligator-like corrugations to its tip. I saw his great webbed feet as large as my hand and furnished with claws. I saw his thick neck, and that was all of him in sight. The rest was concealed within a huge mound of black, plated, horny shell that was fourteen inches from side to side and sixteen inches from front to back. These were measurements which I took after I had decided that he did not intend to eat me right away, perhaps not at all.

_Chelydra serpentina_, the snapping turtle, or the alligator snapper, as he is sometimes called, and with reason, for, except for his casing of shell, he is very like an alligator, is not uncommon in the bog; but I had never before seen so huge or so ancient appearing a specimen. His black shell was worn gray with age and bore two deep scars where some sharp instrument very like a spear had been jabbed into his back. I suspect this to have been an Indian spear, and I fully believe that my black dragon of the bog was a well-grown turtle before the white man ever saw Ponkapog Pond.

There were parallel ridges in the structure of his shell that seemed to show much wear as if this turtle had carried weight on his back. The Indians have a legend that the world itself is held up on the back of a great turtle. Very well; this is the one. I saw the marks of its friction on his great muddy black structure as I looked him over, there in the middle of the loneliest place in the bog.

I might have taken him by that alligator tail and swung his seventy or eighty pounds into the boat, I suppose. Terrapin is valuable, and the snapping turtle is own cousin to the terrapin. I have a fancy, though, that if he had got into the boat I should have got out. No ordinary Ponkapog boat was likely to hold us both, and I wisely refrained. Nor did he molest me, but stood his ground, still gazing at me with that cold, critical eye. After a time he moved on, pushing his great weight with ease over the crushed bog growth and sliding with dignity down into the muddy depths of an open channel.

For myself, I turned the boat’s prow toward the distant landing and pushed, as he had, over the yielding shallows to the open pond. I had seen a hundred beauties in the lonely bog and been well initiated into its mysteries. For me the spotted turtles had sung, the muskrats had fought a tourney, the bitterns had voiced a family quarrel. And now it was nightfall, and the big old dragon of the bog had looked me over with measuring eye. It was high time that I headed for home if I expected to get there.

BOBBING FOR EELS

It is fortunate that the angleworm is born without a voice, else throughout the length and breadth of the land were now resounding a chorus of doleful shrieks, for great is the dismemberment of angleworms about this time. The same warmth of imminent summer which made the grass jump six inches in length over night, has brought him forth in great numbers, over night also, for the angleworm is a lover of darkness.

I know Darwin thought earthworm a more proper designation of him, but it is to be believed that Darwin was not a fisherman. Had he been he would have known that the chief end of worm is to become bait. There may be nicer things to have than these somewhat attenuated hermits of the mold, but if there are the fishes do not know it, and there are few anglers but on May fifteenth would give their weight in gold for them if such was the price. It is fortunate, therefore, that angleworms are inhabitants of the earth, so to speak, and not of any one neighborhood. It is, no doubt, possible to catch fish with other bait. There are grasshoppers, to be sure, though not at this time of year. There are various artificial flies and lures, spoon hooks and other wastrel inventions. Of these little is to be said; indeed, some of them are unspeakable.

On fortunate springs April showers linger into May, finally hastening northward lest summer catch them here and make a wet June of it. The seductive warmth of summer is in them now, and as they go spilling by of perfumed nights they work all kinds of wonder. Things that were beginning to grow up suddenly blow up. My cherry tree has exploded over night. Two days ago the grass, we noted with delight, was really quite green. This morning it waves in the wind, and I am confident that by to-morrow, at this rate, it will be full of bobolinks and mowing machines. Yesterday you could see far through the woodland. To-day it is clouded with its own green leaves, and along aisles that begin to be shady the truant ovenbirds are shouting “Teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher,” in warning to one another every time they hear a human footfall in the path.

The first dragon flies have come, and in woodland places lovely little brown butterflies skip about like mad. No wonder the Hesperidæ are commonly known as skippers. These that I saw to-day, most of them _Thanaos brizo_, the sleepy dusky-wing, defied any but the most alert eye to follow them as they dashed from invisibility on some dark fallen limb to vanishment on brown mud of the path. They seemed to skip in and out of existence at will. I call them brown, for you will see that they are that if you have a chance to see one sitting at rest. You may get near enough to see the beautiful blueish spots surrounded with dark rings on the fore wings, and the double row of yellow spots on the hind wings. For all that _Thanaos brizo_ is as black as your hat to the eye when he is in flight. Perhaps that is why he vanishes so readily. You are looking for a black butterfly, and what you see is nothing but a brown bit of bark or leaf.

Darwin was convinced that the earthworm, as he called him, was of inestimable value to man, and he cites how he works over the mold and loosens it up, ploughing it, as it were, for future planters who should thus be able to enjoy the fruits of the earth, leveling it and working in various ways for the good of mankind. But Darwin never says a word of the inestimable value of earthworms as angleworms. Thus often do our greatest scientists fail to interpret things at their true value. Very likely Darwin never had an opportunity to bob for eels in a New England pond. If so he would have seen worms as they are, for no man can really know things till he has yearned for them.

In the winter time the angleworm goes down well below the reach of frost which will kill him. Indeed, he is sensitive to the cold, and comes to the surface only when the sun has warmed the earth so that it is comfortable. Under the May moon he comes, sometimes clear out of his hole, and wanders far in search of friends or new countries. Often of a moist early morning you may find big ones caught out on the concrete sidewalk or marooned in the dry dust of the road, remaining to be an easy prey for early birds.

But these are the adventurous or unfortunate few. The many have remained all night stretched far from the mouths of their burrows, indeed, but with tails still hooked into the door jamb, and able to make a rapid backward scramble into safety. It is this habit of the worm of warm summer evenings that the wise angler utilizes for his capture. The robin knows it too, and he spices his rapture of matin song with trips across the lawn, where, between staccato hops, he eyes the grass sidewise and catches late roisterers before they can get under cover. These he takes by the scruff of the neck, as one might say, hauls them, stretching and resisting, forth from their homes and swallows them.

Thus with the unrighteous, but even the upright, or rather the downright, who are that, snugly ensconced as they intended to be, he is apt to see and seize, for the robin’s eye is good and his bill is long enough. Angleworms, after the joys or labors of the night are over, withdraw into their holes, but often not very far. They like to lie with the head drawn back just out of sight, near enough to the surface to bask in the warmth of the sun.

Some line the outer ends of their burrows with leaves to keep them from the damp of the earth, thus further to enjoy themselves. Some, too, on retiring, draw leaves and sticks in, thus going into their holes and pulling the holes in after them, as the saying goes. Some merely pile small stones in a sort of an ant heap about the mouth. In the gravel walk these little mounds are often taken for those piled by the industrious ants. The robin gets many of these as he hops, and it is no wonder that his chestnut-red front looms as round as a pumpkin and almost as big.

There are many ways of getting angleworms and many ways of using them after you get them; but he who wants them in bulk will do well to imitate the robin,--only do it in the night instead of the day. Of course you may go out with a spade and assault likely spots in the garden. That is often satisfactory, though crude. It is likely to result in small numbers and not well assorted sizes.

I knew a man once who used to jab for angleworms with a crowbar, and it was a rather astonishing thing to watch him and see the results. The angleworm’s hearing is crude in the extreme. Indeed, hearing in the ordinary sense of the word he has none. Mary Garden might sing at the mouth of his burrow and he would never know it. Sousa’s finest march on fifty instruments--count ’em fifty--might be played on the bandstand just over his head and he would never feel one thrill. The only sound he gets is a crunching and grubbing in the earth near him. This he feels, for he is the chief food of the grubbing mole, and that sound means but one thing to him,--that he is being dug for. So when he heard that crowbar wriggling and crunching in the gravel beneath he used to flee to the surface in numbers.

This man always whistled an eerie little tune while he wriggled the bar. He said he was calling them, and it was quite like magic the way in which they hustled to the surface and crawled about his feet. Most people fail in this method. It takes a peculiar motion to the bar and a good eye in choosing the spot where the worms are. And then, few people know the tune.

Nightfall and the robin’s method are best. Wait till the full darkness of a moist night. Hang a lantern about your neck and get down on your marrow bones by a grassy roadside. Worms do not see, and are not sensitive to light. You have but to crawl quietly forward and pick them up with a quick snatch, for the worm can feel, and he gets back into his burrow with an agility which is surprising.

On the right kind of a May night I have seen the roadside of a Massachusetts village the scene of more than one such spectacle. A stranger from the big world, seeing a very fat man crawling by the roadside with a lantern hung about his neck, making frantic dabs here and there, and hauling forth great worms that resisted and hung on valiantly and stretched like red rubber, might well have said that here was voodoo worship or a Dickey initiate gone mad. But it was nothing of the sort,--merely the crack local fisherman getting his bait.

I have looked in vain in Izaak Walton for a pæan on angleworms or a description of a proper method for making a bob for eels, and I thereby find the “Compleat Angler” incomplete. However, Izaak was an admirable fisherman in the rather patient and conservative way of the England of his time. He advises to bait for eels “with a little, a very little, lamphrey, which some call a pride, and may in the hot months be found many of them in the river Thames, and in many mud-heaps in other rivers; yea, almost as usually as one finds worms in a dung-hill.”

He should have seen a Yankee catch eels with a pole and line with a big wad of worms tied on the end of the line and no hook at all, for such is a “bob,” as we know it in Norfolk County. The making of a bob is not a pleasant affair for the angleworms, which seem born for destruction, so many are the creatures that prey on them, and I am glad of Darwin’s assurance that, in spite of the fact that they wriggle when rent, they have little fineness of perception and feeling and do not suffer--much.

This crack fisherman who was so stout and who used to get his bait by lantern light at night, to whom my memory runs, always made a bob of shoemaker’s thread, because it was fine and of great strength. He had a long wire needle like an upholsterer’s needle, and with this he would deftly string great angleworms from head to tail, sliding them one by one down upon his shoemaker’s thread till he had a rope of them twelve feet long or so. Then tying the ends together he looped this up till it hung in a wad of loops as big as his two fists. This, hung upon the end of his line, was all he needed for a night’s fishing.

The way of its use is this. First catch your night, one of those nights when there is a promise of soft rain in the sky and the wind that is to bring it just sighs gently over the trees from the southward. Too much wind is bad, for it so ruffles the surface that the fish cannot find you. A very gentle ripple, on the contrary, is helpful, for it makes a dancing path of light from your fire, up which the eels may trail you to the very spot where hangs the bob.

The stout fisherman used to take along at least two boys who would be useful in gathering wood for the fire and in other matters. Then, picking the exactly most favorable spot on the dam where the deep, dark water shoulders the bank, he built his fire after the full darkness had come. In common with many others I regret the passing of the old-time cedar rail fence. Wire abominations may be cheaper, but who ever heard of building a fishing fire out of tariff-nurtured, wire-trust, fencing material? Fishing fire material of the proper sort is rare nowadays, and I can but feel that the youth of the present generation are born to barren years.

With the fire well alight and the deep half-bushel basket placed handy by, the fisherman would make his line fast to the tip of that long, light, supple but strong birch pole and cast the big bob far from him with a generous splash into the water, letting it sink till within a foot or two of bottom. How far under the dark water the eels might see that flickering fire and be drawn to it as moths circle about a light at night I cannot say, but I think it was very far, for on favorable nights it seemed as if all the eels in the pond must have been drawn thither. I know that fishing without a fire you may catch one eel or perhaps two, but you will never get such numbers as come to a proper blaze made of the dryest of good old cedar rails.

In South American waters there is an electric eel which can give a stout shock to such as touch him; but I think all eels must be electric, else why the shock that one in the deep water off the pond bank can send through a dozen feet of line and as much more of birch pole to your hand the moment he pokes his nose against a bob? It tingles in your palms, and is as good as prescribed electric treatment from a battery, for it thrills you with a quickening of life and nerve and a magical alertness.

The eel is not nearly so cautious with a bob as with a hook. He nibbles, which is the first shock; he bites, which is the second and stronger; then he takes hold. I can see the stout fisherman now with the fire gleam on his rugged face, his feet planted wide apart and his weight well on the hinder one, his hands wide apart on the pole and his whole attitude that of a lion couchant for a back somersault.

At the nibble his face twitches, at the bite his knee bends, and then the end of the pole sags quickly downward with the line as taut as a violin string. The eel has taken hold, his throat-pointing teeth are tangled in the thread of the bob, and the stout fisherman’s weight has gone far back of his point of support. If the line should break so would the fisherman’s neck.

They prate much to me about the stance and the swing, the addressing and the following through in driving a ball at golf. The words are used glibly, but I doubt if many know their real significance. Whatever that is it all applies, and more, to the proper bobbing of an eel. It is the summoning of all the forces of a man’s vigor and personality in one supreme stroke. Holding on, quite literally by the skin of his teeth, the eel circles a section of the pond with his tail and seems to lift it with him. The line sings and the birch pole bends nearly double. It is for a second a question which will win, but the shoemaker’s thread is very strong, and so is the stout fisherman.

Suddenly the eel gives up. Still hung to the bob he shoots into the air the full length of the line, describes a circle in high heaven, of which the fisherman’s feet are the center, and drops in the grass, while the fisherman, in marvelous defiance of all laws of gravity, brings his two hundred and fifty pounds back to an upright position without losing his footing. Golf may be all very well, but it does not equal this. Small blame to the fisherman if he poises a moment like Ajax defying the lightning.

Now, the boys have their innings. Somewhere in classic literature the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. So the boys upon the eel that flops mightily and wriggles in vain in the tall grass. He is dumped in the deep basket; and hardly is he there before the fisherman has swung another in that mighty circle. An eel is very canny, and often escapes a hook even when well on. I never knew one to get away from a bob. Sometimes the half-bushel basket would go back home nearly full of them. And as for their size, I do not wish to say, except that no small ones seem to bite at a bob. In that I will quote from Izaak Walton, who, after giving excellent directions for dressing and cooking an eel, says:

“When I go to dress an Eel thus I wish he were as long and as big as that which was caught in Peterborough River in the year 1667, which was a yard and three-quarters long.” To which I can but add that I defy old England to produce any bigger eels than we have in New England.

THE VANISHING NIGHT HERONS

It is a long time since I have set eyes, in broad daylight, upon the black-crowned night heron, often known as “quawk,” and otherwise derisively named by the impuritans. The scientists have also, it seems to me, joined in this derision, for they have dubbed him _Nycticorax nycticorax nævius_, which is a libel on his language. At any rate, it sounds like it. The roots are evidently the same.

Yesterday, however, in broad daylight, I saw two pair sailing down out of the sunlit sky to light on a tree by the border of the pond. Very white they looked in the glare of day, and I wondered at first if four snowy egrets had not escaped the plume hunters after all and fled north for safety. Probably I shall never see snowy egrets again, though they used to stray north as far as this on occasions. Now, even the night heron, which used to nest hereabout in colonies of hundreds, is rarely seen.

I suppose if bird species must become, one by one, extinct, we can as well afford to lose the night heron as any. He is not a particularly beautiful bird in appearance, though these four seemed handsome enough as they sailed grandly down into the trees on the pond border. His voice is unmelodious. Quawk is only a convenient handle for his one word. It should rather be made up of the roughest consonants in the language, thrown together with raucous vigor. It sounds more like “hwxzvck!” shot into the mud out of a damp cloud. The voices of night herons, sailing in companies over the marshes and ponds used to sound like echoes of a convocation of witches, falling through damp gloom as broomstick flights went over. Shakespeare named a witch Sycorax. He may have been making game of herons.

To-day, having seen these four, I went down to the places which used to be the old-time haunts of night herons, and looked carefully but in vain for traces of their presence. It is their nesting time. There should be eggs about to hatch, or young about to make prodigious and ungainly growth in singularly flimsy nests that let you see the blue of the eggs faintly visible through the loosely crossed twigs against the blue of the sky. These I did not find, and the big cedars which used to be so populous were lonely enough.

Once there would be a nest in every tree, two-thirds of the way up, and a big heron sitting on guard at the top of the tree, or astride the eggs on the nest itself. How the long legged mother bird could sit on this loose nest and not resolve it into its component parts and drop the two-inch long eggs to destruction on the peat-moss beneath is still a mystery to me. But she could do it, and the young after they were hatched did it, sometimes six of them, and the nests remained after they were gone, in proof of it. Most birds’ nests are marvels of construction; the black-crowned night heron’s seems a marvel of lack of it, but I think few of us could make so ill a nest so well.

The night heron’s day begins at dusk and ends, as a rule, at daylight. His eyes have all the night-seeing ability of those of the owl, and he finds his way through fog and darkness, and his food as well. Yet the bird seems to see well enough by day. The four that sailed down to the pond yesterday in the full glare of the afternoon sun had no hesitation about their flight. They swung the corner of the wood and lighted on limbs of the trees with as much directness and certainty as a hawk might. Indeed, when their voracious young are growing up they have to fish night and day. It seems to me that fish must be becoming more plentiful now that the black-crowned night herons are few in number, for a single bird must consume yearly an enormous quantity.

I undertook the care and feeding of two once that I had taken from one of those impossible nests. They were the most solemnly ridiculous young creatures that were ever made. “Man,” says Plato, “is a featherless biped.” So were these youthful night herons. They were pretty nearly as naked as truth and might have passed for caricatures of the Puritan conscience, for they were so erect they nearly fell over backward.

They would not stay in any nest made for them, but preferred to inhabit the earth, usually just round the corner of something, whence they poked weird heads with staring eyes that discountenanced all creatures that they met. The family cat, notoriously fond of chicken, stalked them a bit the first day that they occupied the yard. At the psychological moment, when _Felis domesticatus_ was crouching, green eyed, for a spring, the two gravely rose and faced her. She took one look at those pods of bodies on stilts, those strange heads stretched high above on attenuated necks, and faced the wooden severity of their stare for but a second. Then she gave forth a yowl of terror and fled to her favorite refuge beneath the barn, whence she was not known to emerge for a space of twenty-four hours.

There was something so solemn, so “pokerish,” so preternaturally dignified about these creatures that they seemed to be out of another, eerier, world. If we ever get so advanced as to travel from planet to planet I shall expect to find things like them peering round corners at me on some of the out-of-the-way satellites, the moons of Neptune, for instance.

Most young birds will eat what you bring them and clamor for more until they are full. These young herons yawned at my approach as solemnly as if they were made of wood and worked by the pulling of a string. Never a sound did I know them to make during their brief stay with me, but they would stand motionless and silent and gape unwinkingly till a piece of fish was dropped within the yawn. Then it would close deliberately and reopen, the fish having vanished. Fish were plentiful that year and so seemed to be time and bait, and I became curious as to the actual capacity of a growing night heron. I could feed either one till I could see the last piece still in the back of his mouth because there was standing room only. Yet if I went away but for a moment and came back, there they stood, as prodigiously empty as ever. The thing became interesting until I began to discover assorted piles of uneaten fish about the yard, and watching soon showed what was happening.

Foot passengers out in the country have a motto which says, “never refuse a ride; if you do not want it now you may need it next time.” This seemed to be the idea which worked sap-wise in the cambium layers of these wooden young scions of the family _Nycticorax nycticorax nævius_. They never refused a fish. As long as I stood by, their beaks, having closed as well as possible on the very last piece required to stuff them to the tip, would remain closed. After they thought I had gone away they would stalk gravely round a corner, look over the shoulder with an innocence which was peculiarly blear-eyed, then, believing the coast clear, yawn the whole feeding into obscurity in the tall grass. Then they would stalk meditatively forth with hands clasped behind the back, so to speak, and gape for some more.

This was positively the only thing they did except to wait patiently for a chance to do it again, and I soon tired of them and took them back to the rookery, where they were received and, so far as I could see, taken care of, either by their own parents or as orphans at the public expense. It all seemed a matter of supreme indifference to these moon-hoax chicks. There is much controversy as to whether animals act from reason or from instinct. I am convinced that these young night herons contained spiral springs and basswood wheels and that thence came their actions. Probably had I looked them over carefully enough I should have found them inscribed with the motto, “Made in Switzerland.”

I fancy many people confound the night heron, known to them only by his wildwitch cry, voiced as he flies over their canoe in the summer dusk, with the great blue heron, which is nearly twice as big a bird. Perhaps I would better say twice as long, in speaking of herons, for bigness has little to do with them. I well remember my amazement as a small boy, coming out of the woods onto the shore of the pond with a big muzzle-loading army musket under my arm--my first hunting expedition--and scaring up a great blue heron.

I had been reading the “Arabian Nights,” and knew that the roc was a great bird that darkened the sun and carried off elephants in his talons. Very well, here was the very bird in full flight before me, darkening the entire cove with his wings. Es-Sindibad of the Sea might be tied to the leg of this one for aught I knew. Mechanically the old musket came to my shoulder and roared, and when I had picked myself up and collected the musket and my senses, there lay the bird on the beach, dead. But he was still an “Arabian Nights’” sort of a bird for one of his dimensions had vanished, his bulk. He was all bill, neck, legs, and feathers, the wonder being how so small a body could sustain such a spread.

The great blue heron, in spite of his slenderness, which you can interpret as grace or awkwardness, as you will, is a beautiful bird and a welcome addition to the pond shore, the sheltered cove or the sheltered brookside pool which he frequents. If you will come very softly to his accustomed stand you may have a chance to see him sit, erect and motionless, the personification of dignity and vigilance. The very crown of his head is white, but you are more apt to notice the black feathers which border it and draw together behind into a crest which gives a thought of reserved alertness to his motionless pose.

The general impression of his coloring is that of a slaty gray, this melting into brownish on his neck and being prettily

touched with rufous and black on other parts of the body. It is a pleasure to watch his graven-image pose, but it is an even greater one to see him take flight. His long legs bend under him, and he springs forward into the air in a mighty parabola. The wings arch in similar curves and lift him with the very first stroke seemingly a rod in air, and as they arch forward for the second the long outstretched neck draws back and the long legs trail in very faithful reproduction of the ornamentation on a Japanese screen. You hardly feel that here is a living creature, flying away from fear of you. It is rather as if a skillful decorator had magically painted the great bird in on the drop scene in front of you. But the flight of the great blue heron is strong if his body is small in comparison with his other dimensions, and he rapidly rises in the majesty of power and flaps out of sight over the tree tops.

The great blue heron is not rare, but I think he, too, is much less common than he used to be. Usually he does not summer with us, going farther north, where he nests in colonies. I seem to find him most often in late September or October, when he drops off for a few weeks, a pleasant fishing trip interlude in his flight to winter quarters in the south. But he is here now, and may be met with on most any May morning if you will seek out his haunts.

Fully as common but by no means so noticeable is our little green heron, the third species of the genus that one is apt to see hereabouts. You will usually pass him unnoticed as he sits all day long in the shadow on a limb near the shore. Nor will you be apt to see him until he becomes convinced that you are about to approach too near. Then, with a little frightened croak, that is more like a squeak, as if his hinges were rusty, he springs into the air, flutters along shore a few rods and disappears into the woods again.

The thought of this little fellow always brings to my mind the silent drowse and quivering heat of August afternoons along a drought-dwindled brook where cardinal flowers lift crimson plumes on the margin of the still remaining pools. Here where deciduous trees shade the winding reaches he loves to sit and wait for the cool of evening before dropping to the margin and hunting his supper.

I always suspect him of being asleep there with his glossy black head thrust under his green wing. That would give him an excuse for being surprised at close quarters and account for his vast alarm when he does see you. If not I think he would slip quietly away before you got too near as so many birds do that see you in the woods before you see them. But perhaps not; perhaps he trusts to luck and hopes till the very last that you will pass on and leave him to watch his game preserves in peace and decide which fishes and frogs he will find most appetizing. The little green heron is a solitary bird, a very recluse in fact, and I do not recall ever seeing two together. He is a nervous chap, after you have once flushed him, however, and if you watch his flight with care you may see him light, stretch his head high to see if you are following him, meanwhile nervously twitching his apology for a tail.

HARBINGERS OF SUMMER

Out of the violet dusk of some June dawn you will see the summer coming over the hills from the south and you will know her from the spring at sight. I do not know how. I doubt if the whip-poor-will, who has a jealous eye on the dawn and its signs, for its first appearance means bedtime and surcease from labor for him, knows. Yet he feels her presence, for he waits it as a sign to select the spot for his nest.

The whip-poor-will is hardly a home builder. He just occupies a flat for the summer, a place that seems no more fit for a home than any other flat. Just as I often wonder how apartment-house dwellers find their way back at dinner-time, in spite of the bewildering sameness of the surroundings, so it seems to me quite miraculous that the whip-poor-will can find the way back to the eggs or young at daybreak. Nest there is none. It is simply a spot picked, seemingly, at random, on the brown last year’s leaves, or the bare rock of the pasture.

But the whip-poor-will has been here since early May, and till now has not offered to take an apartment. Yesterday, without doubt, he saw the summer coming and picked his site. By to-morrow or next day you might find the two eggs there--if you are a wizard. It takes such to find a whip-poor-will’s eggs. You might look at them and never see them, so well do they match the ground on which they lie,--more like pebbles than anything else, with their dull white obscurely marked with lilac and brownish-gray spots. I sometimes think the mother bird herself fails to find them and that may be one reason why whip-poor-wills do not seem to increase in numbers.

Like the whip-poor-will the scarlet tanager waits sight of the coming of summer before he begins his nest. It is odd that the two should have even this habit in common, for otherwise they are far apart. The tanager is essentially a bird of the daylight, his very colors born of the sun. I rarely hear him or see his scarlet flame until the sunlight is on his tree top to make him seem all the more vivid. Then as the day waxes, and the robins one by one cease their singing, he takes up their song and continues it, often until the robins return to the choir as the afternoon shadows lengthen. The tanager’s song is singularly like that of the robin, only more leisurely and refined. After you have become familiar with it you begin to feel that the robin is a very huckster of a soloist.

“Kill ’im, cure ’im, give ’im physic,” is what the early settlers thought the robin sang to them. It always seems to me as if he sang, “Cherries; berries; strawberries. Buy a box; buy a box.” You might translate the scarlet tanager’s song into either set of words but you would not. Instead, you would ponder long to find a phrase whose gentle refinement should express just the quality of it. Then I think you would give it up, as I always do, content to feel its pure serenity, which is quite beyond words.

The tanager is just about beginning the weaving of his home, which is as gentle and refined in structure as his song. You may see through it if you get just the right position from below, yet it is well built and strong, woven of slender selected twigs and tendrils, a delicate cup, just big enough to hold the three or four eggs of tender blue with their rufous-brown markings, and the olive-green mother bird. The tanager’s life is as open as the day, and as he watches southward from his pine tree top you may well mark the coming of summer by the beginning of that nest well out on a lower pine bough.

And if you are not fortunate enough to have a tanager in your pine grove you might well take the time from another bird, as different from the scarlet flame of the tree top as the tanager is from the whip-poor-will; that is the wood pewee. As the whip-poor-will loves the darkness and the tanager the bright sun of the topmost boughs of the grove, so the wood pewee loves the resinous depths of the pines, where in the hot twilight of a summer midday he pipes his cheerful little three-note song. Like the cicada, he seems to sing best when it is hottest, and the thought of his song inevitably brings to mind the drone of the summer-loving insect, the prattle of the brook at the foot of the hill, and the lazy dappling of the sunlight as it falls perpendicularly to the feathery fronds of the cinnamon ferns far below.

He who would find humming birds’ nests would do well to first take a course in hunting those of the wood pewee. The two seem to have the same type of mind when it comes to nest-building, though the wood pewee’s is five times the size of the other and proportionally easy to find. Each saddles his nest on a limb and covers it outside with gray lichens from the trees nearby, so that from below it looks like merely a lichen-covered knot. As the wood pewee loves to sing his song in the shadows of the upper levels of the deep pine wood, so he loves to look down as he sings upon his nest on a limb below, usually twenty or more feet from the ground.

Such humming birds’ nests as I have found have been made of fern wool or the pappus of the blooms of dandelions or other compositæ just compacted together and lichen-covered. The wood pewee builds of moss and fine fiber, grass and rootlets, using the lichen covering for the outside, as does the humming bird. It is a beautiful nest, a rustic home which perfectly fits the dead pine limb on which you often find it, and its surroundings, a nest as rustic as the grove and the bird.

These two, the tanager and the wood pewee, I know are already picking the limbs for their nests and having an eye out for available material, for I know that they have had the first word that summer is here. I got it myself from the southerly slope of Blue Hill, a spot to which I like to climb as the lookout goes to the cross-trees, whence the southerly outlook is far and you may sight the sails of spring or summer while yet they are hull down below the horizon of the season.

All creatures love to climb. Here along the rocky path the young gerardias have found a foothold, and put forth strange sinuate or pinnatifid leaves that puzzle you to identify them until you note the last year’s stalks and seed-pods, now empty but persistent. Exuberance and young life often take frolicsome ways of expending their vitality. When the gerardias are two months older, and have settled down to the growing of those wonderful yellow bells which fill the woodland with golden delight, their stem leaves will lose all this riot of outline and coloration and settle down to plain, smooth-edged green. The blossoms may need a foil, but will brook no rival on their own stem.

The path that I take to my southerly looking masthead soon leaves the gerardias behind. They need alluvium and a certain fertility and moisture, and the crevices of the rock are not for them. There as I climb among the cedars I pass the withered stalks of the saxifrage that a month ago made the crevices white. Now only an occasional belated blossom, scraggly and worn as if with dissipation, seems hastening to reach oblivion with its fellows.

But the wild columbine still holds horns of honey plenty for the sipping of moth and butterfly, whose proboscides are long enough to reach the ultimate tip where it is stored. You may have a mouthful of honey if you will bite off the tiny bulbs at the very ends of these cornucopias,--a honey that has a fragrant sweetness that is unsurpassed in flavor. Nor are the bees behind you in knowledge. They may not reach the honey through the mouth of the horn, but they, too, can bite, and many a flower shows it, now that their season is passing. Their coral red and yellow glows with a rich radiance in the dusk under the cedars, and they have climbed far higher than the gerardias.