Chapter 7

She looked up at me patiently, sweetly inscrutable as she added:--

"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs are nothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are living here on Mullein Hill for."

She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs--or perhaps they were her thoughts; leaving thoughts around being a habit of hers.

What did she mean by my needing a pig? She was quite sure I needed _one_ pig. Is it my own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly be, for I am not different from other men. There may be in all men, deep down and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits and tendencies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think this must be so, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens or the parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred to invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel.

The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterly unrelated in her mind to _salt_ pork. And she is right about that. No man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody knows that it costs less to buy your pig in the barrel. And there is little that is edifying about a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind with cheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fish a cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle.

Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certain present joy of his _being_ pork, does a man need a pig. In all his other possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig he has a constant, present reward: because the pig _is_ and there is no question as to what he shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not spirit, to our deep relief.

Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with lard, a fatty, opaque, snow-white substance, that boils and grows limpid clear and flames with heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, nevertheless it is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not after the soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solid comfort--the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pig the most difficult of all one's goods to bestow.

The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the flower in the crannied wall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have they been, so long shall be; but the pig--no one ever plucked up a pig from his sty to say,--

"I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand, Little pig--but _if_ I could understand What you are, squeal and all, and all in all"--

No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they have kept pigs. Here is Matthew Arnold writing to his mother about _Literature and Dogma_ and poems and--"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, and Peter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon. We consume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear and not good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she does not seem to like the idea."

"Very large and handsome "--this from the author of

"The evening comes, the fields are still!"

And here is his wife, again, not caring to have them killed, finding, doubtless, a better use for them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often went out there to scratch them.

Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I think, from their poetry. For a big snoring pig is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little roast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (in this country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him! You put on your old clothes for him. He takes you out behind the barn; there shut away from the prying gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, you deliberately fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till he grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling in the sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any other flesh. You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it would not be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the hens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for the horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them to scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo your--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pig and feed _it_, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and to hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spirit demands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfies the flesh and is winked at by the soul.

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs just such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on the fourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel somewhat removed, at sea somewhat.

Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchor with the pig.

XI

LEAFING

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. But keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day in the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen. And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and zest enough to the labor.

But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hills of Hingham has its own reward,--and when you can say that of any labor you are speaking of its poetry.

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig. You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are; you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy capers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods and the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays and the crows?

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my heart.

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within the range of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as greyhounds.

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.

Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too, hear a "fine, plaintive" sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.

We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries--a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.

But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a woodchuck's--

"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuff in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and pack the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag.

Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and let us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt! Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for the stump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything that your heart does with you?--even though you do it for a pig!

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. There is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of pure pig joy.

"Boosh! Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down within him.

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the forest for him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of pig, _roast_ pig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to give my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not want to; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into the wide, sweet woods, my ancestral home.

XII

THE LITTLE FOXES

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out from the road:--

"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"

I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region, and answered:--

"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens lately."

"Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's been trapped and killed. Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 've hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em." And he disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that spread in every direction about him. I did not see which way he went, for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing through the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump to think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did not return.

He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! I don't know how he found them. But patience and knowledge and love, and a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursed them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then, that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.

But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes were shot at my lower bars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard fence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun. For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human nature and in all nature--to preserve a remnant, that no line perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and smaller-growing globe of ours.

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing line toward the chicken-yard.

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

A few men with guns--for money--had done it. And the wild areas of the world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet"--literally, and he must go softly now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the Gulf coast--so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest of our animals for a long time to come.

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled region.

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there were all told over all of North America when the white men first came here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been given protection--pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and repression, if given only a measure of protection.

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.

Nature--man-nature--has been hard on the little brute--to save him! His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the earth.

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon his four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard open.

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of the fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of the way Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.

If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in the remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this determined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancy chickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming. He knows it, and comes just the same. At least the gun does not keep him away. My neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him away. Guns, dogs, traps, poison--nothing can keep the foxes away.