Part 1

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By Rowland E. Robinson

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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

In New England Fields and Woods

By Rowland E. Robinson

_Boston and New York_ Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1896, BY ROWLAND E. ROBINSON.

_All rights reserved._

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

The weather and the changes of the seasons are such common and convenient topics that one need not apologize for talking about them, though he says nothing new.

Still less need one make an apology if he becomes garrulous in relation to scenes which are now hidden from him by a curtain of darkness, or concerning some humble acquaintances with whom he was once on familiar terms, but who now and hereafter can only be memories, though they are yet near him and he may still hear their voices.

So without excuse I offer this collection of sketches, which with a few exceptions were first published in the columns of "Forest and Stream." R. E. R.

CONTENTS

I. THE NAMELESS SEASON II. MARCH DAYS III. THE HOME FIRESIDE IV. THE CROW V. THE MINK VI. APRIL DAYS VII. THE WOODCHUCK VIII. THE CHIPMUNK IX. SPRING SHOOTING X. THE GARTER-SNAKE XI. THE TOAD XII. MAY DAYS XIII. THE BOBOLINK XIV. THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER XV. JUNE DAYS XVI. THE BULLFROG XVII. THE ANGLER XVIII. FARMERS AND FIELD SPORTS XIX. TO A TRESPASS SIGN XX. A GENTLE SPORTSMAN XXI. JULY DAYS XXII. CAMPING OUT XXIII. THE CAMP-FIRE XXIV. A RAINY DAY IN CAMP XXV. AUGUST DAYS XXVI. A VOYAGE IN THE DARK XXVII. THE SUMMER CAMP-FIRE XXVIII. THE RACCOON XXIX. THE RELUCTANT CAMP-FIRE XXX. SEPTEMBER DAYS XXXI. A PLEA FOR THE UNPROTECTED XXXII. THE SKUNK XXXIII. A CAMP-FIRE RUN WILD XXXIV. THE DEAD CAMP-FIRE XXXV. OCTOBER DAYS XXXVI. A COMMON EXPERIENCE XXXVII. THE RED SQUIRREL XXXVIII. THE RUFFED GROUSE XXXIX. TWO SHOTS XL. NOVEMBER DAYS XLI. THE MUSKRAT XLII. NOVEMBER VOICES XLIII. THANKSGIVING XLIV. DECEMBER DAYS XLV. WINTER VOICES XLVI. THE VARYING HARE XLVII. THE WINTER CAMP-FIRE XLVIII. JANUARY DAYS XLIX. A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE L. A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION LI. THE PERSISTENCY OF PESTS LII. THE WEASEL LIII. FEBRUARY DAYS LIV. THE FOX LV. AN ICE-STORM LVI. SPARE THE TREES LVII. THE CHICKADEE

IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS

I

THE NAMELESS SEASON

In the March page of our almanac, opposite the 20th of the month we find the bold assertion, "Now spring begins;" but in the northern part of New England, for which this almanac was especially compiled, the weather does not bear out the statement.

The snow may be gone from the fields except in grimy drifts, in hollows and along fences and woodsides; but there is scarcely a sign of spring in the nakedness of pasture, meadow, and ploughed land, now more dreary in the dun desolation of lifeless grass, debris of stacks, and black furrows than when the first snow covered the lingering greenness of December.

It is quite as likely that the open lands are still under the worn and dusty blanket of snow, smirched with all the litter cast upon it by cross-lot-faring teams, and wintry winds blowing for months from every quarter. The same untidiness pervades all outdoors. We could never believe that so many odds and ends could have been thrown out of doors helter-skelter, in three months of ordinary life, till the proof confronts us on the surface of the subsiding snow or lies stranded on the bare earth. The wind comes with an icier breath from the wintrier north, and yet blows untempered from the south, over fields by turns frozen and sodden, through which the swollen brooks rush in yellow torrents with sullen monotonous complaint.

One may get more comfort in the woods, though the snow still lies deep in their shelter; for here may be found the sugar-maker's camp, with its mixed odors of pungent smoke and saccharine steam, its wide environment of dripping spouts and tinkling tin buckets, signs that at last the pulse of the trees is stirred by a subtle promise of returning spring.

The coarse-grained snow is strewn thickly with shards of bark that the trees have sloughed in their long hibernation, with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn branches. But all this litter does not offend the eye nor look out of place, like that which is scattered in fields and about homesteads. When this three months' downfall of fragments sinks to the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as comely as the shifting mesh of browner shadows that trunks and branches weave between the splashes of sunshine. Among these is a garnishment of green moss patches and fronds of perennial ferns which tell of life that the stress of winter could not overcome. One may discover, amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup leaves, downy buds that promise blossoms, and others, callower, but of like promise, under the rusty links of the arbutus chain.

One hears the resonant call of a woodpecker rattled out on a seasoned branch or hollow stub, and may catch the muffled beat of the partridge's drum, silent since the dreamy days of Indian summer, now throbbing again in slow and accelerated pulsations of evasive sound through the unroofed arches of the woodlands. And one may hear, wondering where the poor vagrants find food and water, the wild clangor of the geese trumpeting their aerial northward march, and the quick whistle of the wild duck's pinions,--hear the carol of an untimely bluebird and the disconsolate yelp of a robin; but yet it is not spring.

Presently comes a great downfall of snow, making the earth beautiful again with a whiteness outshining that of the winter that is past. The damp flakes cling to every surface, and clothe wall, fence and tree, field and forest, with a more radiant mantle than the dusty snow and slanted sunshine of winter gave them.

There is nothing hopeful of spring but a few meagre signs, and the tradition that spring has always come heretofore.

It is not winter, it is not spring, but a season with an individuality as marked as either, yet without a name.

II

MARCH DAYS

Back and forth across the land, in swift and sudden alternation, the March winds toss days of bitter cold and days of genial warmth, now out of the eternal winter of the north, now from the endless summer of the tropics.

Repeated thawing and freezing has given the snow a coarse grain. It is like a mass of fine hailstones and with no hint of the soft and feathery flakes that wavered down like white blossoms shed from the unseen bloom of some far-off upper world and that silently transformed the unseemliness of the black and tawny earth into the beauty of immaculate purity.

One day, when the wind breathes from the south a continuous breath of warmth, your feet sink into this later coarseness come of its base earthly association, with a grinding slump, as in loose wet sand, so deep, perhaps, that your tracks are gray puddles, marking your toilsome way.

As you wallow on, or perch for a moment's rest on a naked fence-top among the smirched drifts, you envy the crows faring so easily along their aerial paths above you. How pleasant are the voices of these returning exiles, not enemies now, but friendly messengers, bringing tidings of spring. You do not begrudge them the meagre feasts they find, the frozen apple still hanging, brown and wrinkled, in the bare orchard, or the winter-killed youngling of flock or herd, cast forth upon a dunghill, and which discovered, one generous vagabond calls all his black comrades to partake of.

Watching them as they lag across the sky, yet swifter than the white clouds drift above them, you presently note that these stand still, as you may verify by their blue shadows on the snow, lying motionless, with the palpitating shadows of the crows plunging into them on this side, then, lost for an instant in the blue obscurity, then, emerging on that side with the same untiring beat of shadowy wings. A puff of wind comes out of the north, followed by an angry gust, and then a howling wintry blast that the crows stagger against in labored flight as they make for the shelter of the woods.

You, too, toil to shelter and fireside warmth, and are thankful to be out of the biting wind and the treacherous footing. The change has come so suddenly that the moist, grainy snow is frozen before it has time to leach, and in a little while gives you a surface most delightful to walk upon, and shortens distances to half what they were. It has lost its first pure whiteness wherewith no other whiteness can compare, but it is yet beyond all things else, and in the sunlight dazzles you with a broad glare and innumerable scintillating points of light, as intense as the sun itself.

The sunshine, the bracing air, the swaying boughs of the pines and hemlocks beckoning at the woodside, and the firm smooth footing, irresistibly invite you forth. Your feet devour the way with crisp bites, and you think that nothing could be more pleasant to them till you are offered a few yards of turf, laid bare by winds and sun, and then you realize that nothing is quite so good as the old stand-by, a naked ground, and crave more of it, even as this is, and hunger for it with its later garnishing of grass and flowers. The crows, too, are drawn to these bare patches and are busy upon them, and you wonder what they can find; spiders, perhaps, for these you may see in thawy days crawling sluggishly over the snow, where they must have come from the earth.

The woods are astir with more life than a month ago. The squirrels are busy and noisy, the chickadees throng about you, sometimes singing their sweet brief song of three notes; the nuthatches pipe their tiny trumpets in full orchestra, and the jays are clamoring their ordinary familiar cries with occasional notes that you do not often hear. One of these is a soft, rapidly uttered cluck, the bird all the time dancing with his body, but not with his feet, to his own music, which is pleasant to the ear, especially when you remember it is a jay's music, which in the main cannot be recommended. To-day, doubtless, he is practicing the allurements of the mating season.

You hear the loud cackle of a logcock making the daily round of his preserves, but you are not likely to get more than a glimpse of his black plumage or a gleam of his blood-red crest.

By rare luck you may hear the little Acadian owl filing his invisible saw, but you are likelier to see him and mistake him for a clot of last year's leaves lodged midway in their fall to earth.

The forest floor, barred and netted with blue shadows of trunks and branches, is strewn with dry twigs, evergreen leaves, shards of bark, and shreds of tree-moss and lichen, with heaps of cone scales,--the squirrel's kitchen middens,--the sign of a partridge's nightly roosting, similar traces of the hare's moonlight wanderings, and perhaps a fluff of his white fur, showing where his journeys have ended forever in a fox's maw.

Here and there the top of a cradle knoll crops out of the snow with its patches of green moss, sturdy upright stems and leaves and red berries of wintergreen, as fresh as when the first snow covered them, a rusty trail of mayflower leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes of squirrelcup with a downy heart of buds full of the promise of spring.

The woods are filled with a certain subtle scent quite distinct from the very apparent resinous and balsamic aroma of the evergreens, that eludes description, but as a kind of freshness that tickles the nose with longing for a more generous waft of it. You can trace it to no source, as you can the odors of the pine and the hemlocks or the sweet fragrance of the boiling sap, coming from the sugar-maker's camp with a pungent mixture of wood-smoke. You are also made aware that the skunk has been abroad, that reynard is somewhere to windward, and by an undescribed, generally unrecognized, pungency in the air that a gray squirrel lives in your neighborhood. Yet among all these more potent odors you still discover this subtle exhalation, perhaps of the earth filtered upward through the snow, perhaps the first awakening breath of all the deciduous trees.

Warmer shines the sun and warmer blows the wind from southern seas and southern lands. More and more the tawny earth comes in sight among puddles of melted snow, which bring the mirrored sky and its fleecy flocks of clouds, with treetops turned topsy-turvy, down into the bounds of fields. The brooks are alive again and babbling noisily over their pebbled beds, and the lake, hearing them, groans and cries for deliverance from its prison of ice.

On the marshes you may find the ice shrunken from the shores and an intervening strip of water where the muskrat may see the sun and the stars again. You hear the trumpets of the wild geese and see the gray battalion riding northward on the swift wind.

The sun and the south wind, which perhaps bears some faint breath of stolen fragrance from far-off violet banks, tempt forth the bees, but they find no flowers yet, not even a squirrelcup or willow catkin, and can only make the most of the fresh sawdust by the wood-pile and the sappy ends of maple logs.

Down from the sky, whose livery he wears and whose song he sings, comes the heavenly carol of the bluebird; the song sparrow trills his cheery melody; the first robin is announced to-day, and we cry, "Lo, spring has come." But to-morrow may come winter and longer waiting.

III

THE HOME FIRESIDE

Weeks ago the camp-fire shed its last glow in the deserted camp, its last thin thread of smoke was spun out and vanished in the silent air, and black brands and gray ashes were covered in the even whiteness of the snow. The unscared fox prowls above them in curious exploration of the desolate shanty, where wood-mice are domiciled and to whose sunny side the partridge comes to bask; the woodpecker taps unbidden to enter or departs from the always open door; and under the stars that glitter through the net of branches the owl perches on the snowy ridge and mopes in undisturbed solemnity.

For a time, camping-days are over for the sportsman, and continue only for the lumberman, the trapper, and the merciless crust-hunter, who makes his secret lair in the depths of the forest. In the chill days and evenings that fall first in the interim between winter and summer camping, the man who makes his outings for sport and pleasure must content himself by his own fireside, whose constant flame burns throughout the year.

Well may he be content when the untempered winds of March howl like a legion of wolves at his door, snow and sleet pelt roof and pane with a continuous volley from the lowering sky, or when the chilly silence of the last winter nights is broken by the sharp crack of frozen trees and timbers, as if a hidden band of riflemen were besieging the house. Well may he be content, then, with the snug corner of his own hearthstone, around which are gathered the good wife, the children, and his camp companions, the dogs.

Better than the camp, is this cosy comfort in days and nights such as these, or in those that fall within that unnamed season that lies between winter and spring, when, if one stirs abroad, his feet have sorry choice between saturated snow and oozy mould,--a dismal season but for its promise of brighter days, of free streams, green trees, and bird songs.

Better, now, this genial glow that warms one's marrow than the camp-fire that smokes or roasts one's front while his back freezes. With what perfect contentment one mends his tackle and cleans his gun for coming days of sport, while the good wife reads racy records of camp-life from Maine to California, and he listens with attention half diverted by break or rust spot, or with amused watching of the youngsters playing at camping out. The callow campers assail him with demands for stories, and he goes over, for their and his own enjoyment, old experiences in camp and field, while the dogs dream by the fire of sport past or to come,--for none but dogs know whether dog's dreams run backward or forward.

Long-used rod and gun suggest many a tale of past adventure as they bring to mind recollections of days of sport such as may never come again. The great logs in the fireplace might tell, if their flaming tongues were given speech, of camps made long ago beneath their lusty branches, and of such noble game as we shall never see,--moose, elk, deer, panther, wolf, and bear, which are but spectres in the shadowy forest of the past. But the red tongues only roar and hiss as they lick the crackling sinews of oak and hickory, and tell nothing that ordinary ears may catch. Yet one is apt to fall dreaming of bygone days, and then of days that may come to be spent by pleasant summer waters and in the woods gorgeous with the ripeness of autumn.

So one is like to dream till he awakens and finds himself left with only the dogs for comrades, before the flameless embers, deserted even by the shadows that erstwhile played their grotesque pranks behind him. Cover the coals as if they were to kindle to-morrow's camp-fire, put the yawning dogs to bed, and then to bed and further dreaming.

IV

THE CROW

The robin's impatient yelp not yet attuned to happy song, the song sparrow's trill, the bluebird's serene melody, do not herald the coming of spring, but attend its vanguard. These blithe musicians accompany the soft air that bares the fields, empurples the buds, and fans the bloom of the first squirrelcups and sets the hyla's shrill chime a-ringing.

Preceding these, while the fields are yet an unbroken whiteness and the coping of the drifts maintain the fantastic grace of their storm-built shapes, before a recognized waft of spring is felt or the voice of a freed stream is heard, comes that sable pursuivant, the crow, fighting his way against the fierce north wind, tossed alow and aloft, buffeted to this side and that, yet staggering bravely onward, and sounding his trumpet in the face of his raging antagonist, and far in advance of its banners, proclaiming spring.

It is the first audible promise of the longed-for season, and it heartens us, though there be weary days of waiting for its fulfillment, while the bold herald is beset by storm and pinched with hunger as he holds his outpost and gleans his scant rations in the winter-desolated land.

He finds some friendliness in nature even now. Though her forces assail him with relentless fury, she gives him here the shelter of her evergreen tents, in windless depths of woodland; bares for him there a rood of sward or stubble whereon to find some crumb of comfort; leaves for him ungathered apples on the naked boughs, and on the unpruned tangles of vines wild grapes,--poor raisins of the frost,--the remnants of autumnal feasts of the robins and partridges.

Thankful now for such meagre fare and eager for the fullness of disgusting repasts, in the bounty of other seasons, he becomes an epicure whom only the choicest food will satisfy. He has the pick of the fattest grubs; he makes stealthy levies on the earliest robins' nests; and from some lofty lookout or aerial scout watches the farmer plant the corn and awaits its sprouting into the dainty tidbits, a fondness for whose sweetness is his overmastering weakness. For this he braves the terrible scarecrow and the dread mystery of the cornfield's lined boundary, for this risks life and forfeits the good name that his better deeds might give him. If he would not be tempted from grubs and carrion, what a worthy bird he might be accounted. In what good if humble repute might he live, how lamented, die. O Appetite! thou base belly-denned demon, for what sins of birds and men art thou accountable!

In the springtide days, the crow turns aside from theft and robbery to the softer game of love, whereunto you hear the harsh voice attuned in cluttering notes. After the wooing the pair begin house building and keeping.

It is the rudest and clumsiest of all bird architecture that has become the centre of their cares--such a jumble of sticks and twigs as chance might pile on its forked foundations; but woe betide the hawk who ventures near, or owl who dares to sound his hollow trumpet in the sacred precincts. At the first alarm signal, as suddenly and mysteriously as Robin Hood's merry men appeared at the winding of his horn, the black clansmen rally from every quarter of the greenwood, to assail the intruder and force him to ignominious retreat.

When at last the young crows, having clad their uncouth nakedness with full sable raiment, are abroad in the world, they, with unwary foolhardiness and incessant querulous cries of hunger or alarm, are still a constant source of anxiety to parents and kindred. But in the late summer, when the youngsters have come to months of discretion and the elders are freed from the bondage of their care, a long holiday begins for all the tribe. The corn has long since ceased to tempt them, and the persecution of man has abated. The shorn meadows and the close-cropped pastures swarm with grasshoppers, and field and forest offer their abundant fruits.

Careless and uncared for, what happy lives they lead, sauntering on sagging wing through the sunshine from chosen field to chosen wood, and at nightfall encamping in the fragrant tents of the pines.

At last the gay banners of autumn signal departure, and the gathered clans file away in straggling columns, flecking the blue sky with pulsating dots of blackness, the green earth with wavering shadows. Sadly we watch the retreat of the sable cohorts, whose desertion leaves our northern homes to the desolation of winter.

V

THE MINK

This little fur-bearer, whose color has been painted darker than it is, singularly making his name proverbial for blackness, is an old acquaintance of the angler and the sportsman, but not so familiar to them and the country boy as it was twoscore years ago.

It was a woeful day for the tribe of the mink when it became the fashion for other folk to wear his coat, which he could only doff with the subtler garment of life.

Throughout the term of his exaltation to the favor of fashion, he was lain in wait for at his own door and on his thoroughfares and by-paths by the traps, dead-falls, and guns of professional and amateur trappers and hunters, till the fate of his greater cousin the otter seemed to overtake him. But the fickle empress who raised him to such perilous estate, changing her mood, thrust him down almost to his old ignoble but safer rank, just in time to avert the impending doom of extermination. Once more the places that knew him of old, know him again.