Part 5

I was sitting under a big pine tree, high up on a hillside. The hillside was more than seven thousand feet above the sea, and that is higher than many mountains which people travel hundreds of miles to look at. But this hillside was in Colorado, so there was nothing wonderful in being up so high.

I had been watching the great mountains with snow on them, and the great forests of pine trees—miles and miles of them—so close together that it looks as if you could lie down on their tops and not fall through; and my eyes were tired with looking at such great, grand things, so many miles off.

So I looked down on the ground where I was sitting, and watched the ants which were running about everywhere, as busy and restless as if they had the whole world on their shoulders.

Suddenly I saw a tiny caterpillar, which seemed to be bounding along in a very strange way. In a second more I saw an ant seize hold of him and begin to drag him off.

The caterpillar was three times as long as the ant, and his body was more than twice as large round as the biggest part of the ant’s body.

“Ho! ho! Mr. Ant,” said I, “you needn’t think you’re going to be strong enough to drag that fellow very far.”

Why, it was about the same thing as if you or I should drag off a calf, which was kicking and struggling all the time; only that the calf hasn’t half so many legs to catch hold of things with as the caterpillar had.

Poor caterpillar! how he did try to get away! But the ant never gave him a second’s time to take a good grip of anything; and he was cunning enough, too, to drag him on his side, so that he couldn’t use his legs very well.

Up and down, and under and over stones and sticks; in and out of tufts of grass; up to the very top of the tallest blades, and then down again; over gravel and sand, and across bridges of pine needles from stone to stone; backward all the way ran that ant, dragging the caterpillar after him.

I watched him very closely, thinking, of course, he must be going toward his house. Presently he darted up the trunk of a pine tree.

“Dear me!” said I, “ants don’t live in trees! What does this mean?”

The bark of the tree was all broken and jagged, and full of seams twenty times as deep as the height of the ant’s body. But he didn’t mind; down one side and up the other he went.

They must have been awful chasms to him, and yet he never once stopped or went a bit slower. I had to watch the ant very closely, not to lose sight of him altogether.

I began to think that he was merely trying to kill the caterpillar; that, perhaps, he didn’t mean to eat him, after all. How did I know but some ants might hunt caterpillars, just as some men hunt deer, for fun, and not at all because they need food?

If I had been sure of this, I would have spoiled Mr. Ant’s sport for him very soon, you may be sure, and set the poor caterpillar free. But I never heard of an ant’s being cruel; and if it were really for dinner for his family that he was working so hard, I thought he ought to be helped, and not hindered.

Just then I heard a sharp cry overhead. I looked up, and there was an enormous hawk, sailing round in circles, with two small birds flying after him. They were pouncing down on his head, and then darting away, and all the time making shrill cries of fright and hatred.

I knew very well what that meant. Mr. Hawk was also out trying to do some marketing for his dinner. He had his eye on some little birds in their nest, and there were the father and mother birds driving him away.

You wouldn’t have believed that two such little birds could drive off such a big creature as the hawk, but they did. They seemed to fairly buzz round his head just as flies buzz round a horse’s head.

At last he gave up the quest and flew off so far that he vanished in the blue sky, and the little birds came skimming home again into the forest.

“Well, well,” said I, “the little people are stronger than the big ones, after all! Where has my ant gone?”

Sure enough! It hadn’t been two minutes that I had been watching the hawk and the birds, but in that two minutes the ant and the caterpillar had disappeared. At last I found them,—where do you think? In a fold of my coat, on which I was sitting!

The ant was running round and round the caterpillar. I shook the fold out, and as soon as the cloth lay straight and smooth, the ant fastened his nippers into his prey and started off as fast as ever.

I suppose if I could have seen his face, and had understood the language of ants’ features, I should have seen plainly written there, “Dear me, what sort of a country was that I tumbled into?”

By this time the caterpillar had had the breath pretty well knocked out of his body, and was so limp and helpless that the ant was not afraid of his getting away from him. So he stopped now and then to rest.

Sometimes he would spring on the caterpillar’s back, and stretch himself out there; sometimes he would stand still on one side and look at him sharply, keeping one nipper on his head.

All the time he was working steadily in one direction; he was headed for home I felt certain.

It astonished me very much, at first, that none of the ants he met took any notice of him; they all went on their own way, and never took so much as a sniff at the caterpillar.

But pretty soon I said to myself, “You stupid woman, not to suppose that ants can be as well behaved as people! When you passed Mr. Jones yesterday, you didn’t peep into his market-basket, nor touch the cabbage he had under his arm.”

Presently the ant dropped the caterpillar, and ran on a few steps—I mean inches—to meet another ant who was coming towards him. They put their heads close together for a second.

I could not hear what they said, but I could easily imagine, for they both ran quickly back to the caterpillar, and one took him by the head and the other by the tail, and then they lugged him along finely. It was only a few steps, however, to the ant’s house; that was the reason he happened to meet this friend just coming out.

The door was a round hole in the ground, about as big as my little finger. Several ants were standing in the doorway, watching these two come up with the caterpillar. They all took hold as soon as the caterpillar was on the doorstep, and almost before I knew he was there, they had tumbled him down, heels over head, into the ground, and that was the last I saw of him.

The oddest thing was, how the ants came running home from all directions. I don’t believe there was any dinner bell rung, though there might have been one too fine for my ears to hear; but in a minute, I counted thirty-three ants running down that hole. I fancied they looked as hungry as wolves.

I had a great mind to dig down into the hole with a stick, and see what had become of the caterpillar. But I thought it wasn’t quite fair to take the roof off a man’s house to find out how he cooks his beef for dinner; so I sat still and wondered whether they would eat him all up or whether they would leave any for Tuesday; then I went home to my own dinner.

—_Helen Hunt Jackson._

MY ANT’S COW

My Ant lives in the country and keeps a cow. I am ashamed to say that, although I have always known she was a most interesting person, I never went to see her until last week.

I am afraid I should not have gone then, if I had not found an account of her, and her house, and her cow, in a book which I was reading.

“Dear me,” said I, “and there she has been living so near me all this time, and I never have been to call on her.”

To tell the truth, it was much worse than that; I had often met her in the street, and had taken such a dislike to her looks that I always brushed by as quickly as possible without speaking to her.

I had great difficulty in finding her house, though it is quite large. She belongs to a very peculiar family; they prefer to live in the dark; so they have no windows in their houses, only doors; and the doors are nothing but holes in the roof.

The houses are built in the shape of a mound, and are not more than ten inches high. They are built out of old bits of wood, dead leaves, straw, old bones; in short, every sort of old thing that they find, they stick in the walls of their houses. Their best rooms are all down cellar; and dark enough they must be on a rainy day, when the doors are always kept shut tight.

But I ought to have told you about my Ant herself before I told you about her house. When you hear what an odd person she is, you will not be surprised that she lives in such an outlandish house.

To begin with, I must tell you that she belongs to a family that never does any work.

You’d never suppose so, to see her. I really think she is the queerest-looking creature I ever met.

In the first place, her skin is of a dark brown color, darker than an Indian’s, and she has six legs. Of course she can walk three times as fast as if she had only two,—but I would rather go slower and be more like other people.

She has frightful jaws, with which she does all sorts of things besides eating. She uses them for scissors, tweezers, pickaxes, knife and fork, and in case of a battle, for swords.

Then she has growing out of the front part of her head two long slender horns, which she keeps moving about all the time, and with which she touches everything she wishes to understand.

The first thing she does, when she meets you, is to bend both these horns straight towards you, and feel of you. It is quite disagreeable,—almost as bad as shaking hands with strangers.

My Ant’s name is Fornica Rufa. If I knew her better I should call her Ant Ru, for short. But I do not expect ever to know her very well. She evidently does not like to be intimate with anybody but her own family; and I am not surprised, for I was never in any house so overrun with people as hers is. I wondered how they knew themselves apart.

When I went to see her last week I found her just going out, and I thought perhaps that was one reason that she didn’t take any more notice of me.

“How do you do, Ant?” said I. “I am spending the summer near by, and thought I would like to become acquainted with you. I hear you have a very curious cow, and I have a great desire to see it.”

“Humph!” said she, and snapped her horns up and down, as she always does when she is displeased, I find.

“I hope it will not give you any trouble to show her to me. You must be very proud of having such a fine cow. Perhaps you are on the way to milking now, and if so I should be most happy to go with you.”

“Humph!” said my Ant again. At least I think that was what she said. It looked like it, but I can’t say that I heard any sound.

But she turned short on her heels (I suppose she has heels), and plunged into the woods at the right, stopping and looking back at me as if she expected me to follow. So I stepped along after her as fast as I could, and said, “Thank you; I suppose this is the way to the pasture.”

My Ant said nothing, but went ahead, snapping her horns furiously.

“Oh, well,” thought I to myself, “you are an uncivil Ant. Even if I have come simply out of curiosity, you might be a little more polite in your own house, or at least on your own grounds, which is the same thing. I sha’n’t speak to you again.”

That’s about all the conversation I have ever had with my Ant. But she took me to the pasture, and I saw her cow.

I am almost afraid to tell you where the pasture was, and what the cow was; but if you don’t believe me, you can look in books written about such things, and they will prove to you that every word I say is true.

The pasture was the stalk of a green brier; and there stood, not only my Ant’s cow, but as many as five hundred others, all feeding away upon it. You have seen millions of them in your lives, for you must know that they are nothing but little green plant-lice, like those that we find on our rosebushes, and that we try in every possible way to get rid of.

Who would ever suppose there could be anything for which these little green plant-lice could serve as cows! I assure you it is true, and if you live in the country you can see it for yourself; but you will have to look through a magnifying glass to see them milked.

Think of looking through a magnifying glass at anybody’s cow! I looked at my Ant’s for an hour, and it seemed to me I hardly winked, I was so much interested in the curious sight.

Its skin was smooth as satin and of a most beautiful light green color. It had six legs, and little hooks at the end, instead of hoofs. The oddest thing of all was that the horns were not on its head, but at the other end of its body, where the tail would have been if it had had a tail like any other cow.

The horns were hollow tubes, and it is out of them that the milk comes, a drop at a time. The milk is meant for the little plant-lice to drink before they are old enough to hook their six legs on to stalks and leaves, and feed on sap.

But I think that in any place where there are many of my Ant’s race, the little plant-lice must fare badly, for the Ants are so fond of this milk that sometimes they carry off whole herds of the plant-lice and shut them up in chambers in their houses. There they feed them as we do cows in barns, and go and milk them whenever they please.

“Oh, dear Ant,” said I to my Ant, “do pray milk your cow! I have such a desire to see how you do it.”

She did not appear to understand me, and I dare say if she had she would not have done it any sooner. But presently I saw her go up behind her cow, and begin to tap her gently on her back, just at the place where the horns grew out.

The cow did not look round nor stop eating, but in a moment out came a tiny drop of liquid from the tip of each tube. My Ant picked it up with her wonderful horns and whisked it into her mouth as quickly as you would a sugarplum.

Then she went on to the next cow and milked that in the same manner, and then to a third one. She took only two drops from each one. Perhaps that is all that this kind of a cow can give at a time.

There were several of her friends there at the same time doing their milking; and I could not help thinking how easy it would be for the great herd of cows to kill my Ant and all her race, if they chose. But it is thought by wise people who have studied these wonderful things that the cows are fond of being milked in this way, and would be sorry to be left alone by themselves.

After my Ant had finished her supper, she stood still watching the cows for some time. I thought perhaps she would be in a better humor after having had so much to eat, and might possibly feel like talking with me. But she never once opened her mouth, though I sat there an hour and a half.

At last it began to grow dark, and as I had quite a long walk to take, I knew I must go, or I should not get home in time for my own supper of milk.

“Good-night, Ant,” said I. “I have had a charming visit. I am very much obliged to you for showing me your cow. I think she is the most wonderful creature I ever saw. I should be very happy to see you at my house.”

“Humph!” said my Ant.

—_Helen Hunt Jackson._

COLORADO SNOW-BIRDS

I’ll tell you how the snow-birds come, Here in our Winter days; They make me think of chickens, With their cunning little ways.

We go to bed at night, and leave The ground all bare and brown, And not a single snow-bird To be seen in all the town.

But when we wake at morning The ground with snow is white, And with the snow, the snow-birds Must have travelled all the night;

For the streets and yards are full of them, The dainty little things, With snow-white breasts, and soft brown heads, And speckled russet wings.

Not here and there a snow-bird, As we see them at the East, But in great flocks, like grasshoppers, By hundreds, at the least,

They push and crowd and jostle, And twitter as they feed, And hardly lift their heads up, For fear to miss a seed.

What ’tis they eat, nobody seems To know or understand; The seeds are much too fine to see, All sifted in the sand.

But winds last Summer scattered them, All thickly on these plains; The little snow-birds have no barns, But God protects their grains.

. . . . . . .

Some flocks count up to thousands, I know, and when they fly, Their tiny wings make rustle, As if a wind went by.

They go as quickly as they come, Go in a night or day; Soon as the snow has melted off, The darlings fly away,

But come again, again, again, All winter with each snow; Brave little armies, through the cold; Swift back and forth they go.

I always wondered where they lived In summer, till last year I stumbled on them in their home, High in the upper air;

’Way up among the clouds it was, A many thousand feet, But on the mountain-side gay flowers Were blooming fresh and sweet.

Great pine trees’ swaying branches Gave cool and fragrant shade; And here, we found, the snow-birds Their summer home had made.

“Oh, lucky little snow-birds!” We said, “to know so well, In summer time and winter time, Your destined place to dwell—

“To journey, nothing doubting, Down to the barren plains, Where harvests are all over, To find your garnered grains!

“Oh, precious little snow-birds! If we were half as wise, If we were half as trusting To the Father in the skies,—

“He would feed us, though the harvests Had ceased throughout the land, And hold us, all our lifetime, In the hollow of his hand!” —_Helen Hunt Jackson._

THE PETERKINS’ EXCURSION AFTER MAPLE SYRUP

The Peterkins had decided not to go to Egypt.

Of course the little boys were very much disappointed, so Mr. Peterkin said that he would take them out into the woods to get some maple syrup instead. But it was almost as difficult to arrange an excursion for maple sugar as to arrange for a trip to Egypt.

You see, sugar can not be made until it is warm enough to make the sap run. On the other hand, it must be cold enough for snow, as you can only reach the woods on snow-sleds.

Now, if there were sun enough for the sap to rise, it would melt the snow; and if it were cold enough for sledding, it must be too cold for the syrup. The little boys, however, said there always had been maple sugar every spring,—they had eaten it; why shouldn’t there be this spring?

Elizabeth Eliza said that this was probably old sugar they had eaten,—you never could tell in the shops.

Mrs. Peterkin thought there must be fresh sugar once in a while, as the old sugar would be eaten up. She felt the same about chickens. She never could understand why there were only the old, tough ones in the market, when there were certainly fresh young broods to be seen around the farmhouses every year.

She supposed the market-men had begun with the old, tough fowls, and so they had to go on so. She wished they had begun the other way; and she had done her best to have the family eat up the old fowls, hoping they might, some day, get down to the young ones.

As to the weather, she suggested they should go to Grandfather’s the day before. But how can you go the day before, when you don’t know the day?

All were much delighted, therefore, when Hiram appeared with the wood-sled, one evening, to take them, as early as possible the next day, to their grandfather’s.

He said that the sap had started, the kettles had been on some time, there had been a slight snow for sleighing, and to-morrow promised to be a fine day.

It was decided that he should take the little boys and Elizabeth Eliza in the wood-sled; the others would follow later, in the carryall.

Mrs. Peterkin thought it would be safer to have some of the party go on wheels, in case of a thaw the next day.

A brilliant sun awoke them in the morning. The wood-sled was filled with hay, to make it warm and comfortable, and an armchair was tied in for Elizabeth Eliza.

The little boys put on their India-rubber boots and their red mittens. Elizabeth Eliza took a shawl, a hot brick, and a big bag of cookies, and they started off.

In passing the school-house the little boys saw five of their friends, who had reached the school door a full hour before the time. They asked these five boys to go with them, but Elizabeth Eliza thought they ought to inquire if their parents would be willing they should go, as they all expected to spend the night at Grandfather’s.

Hiram thought it would take too much time to ask all the parents; if the sun kept on shining so brightly, the snow would be gone before they would reach the woods.

But the little boys said that most of these boys lived in a row, and Elizabeth Eliza felt she ought not to take the boys away for all night without asking their parents.

At each place they were obliged to stop for tippets and great-coats and India-rubber boots for the little boys. At the Harrimans’, too, the Harriman girls insisted on dressing up the wood-sled with evergreens, and made one of the boys bring the Christmas tree that was leaning up against the barn, to set it up in the back of the sled, over Elizabeth Eliza.

All this took a good deal of time; and when they reached the highroad again, the snow was indeed fast melting. Elizabeth Eliza thought they ought to turn back, but Hiram said they would find the sleighing better farther up among the hills.

The armchair joggled about a good deal, and the Christmas tree creaked and swayed, and Hiram was obliged to stop once in a while and tie in the chair and the tree more firmly.

But the warm sun was very pleasant, the eight little boys were very lively, and the sleigh bells jingled gaily as they went on.

It was so late when they reached the wood-road that Hiram decided they had better not go up the hill to their grandfather’s, but turn off into the woods.

“Your grandfather will be up at the sugar camp by this time,” he declared.

Elizabeth Eliza was afraid the carryall would miss them, and thought they had better wait. Hiram did not like to wait longer, and said that one or two of the little boys could stop to show the way.

But it was so difficult to decide which little boys should stay that he gave it up. So he explained that there was a lunch hidden somewhere in the straw; and the little boys thought this was a good time to eat it, so they decided to stop in the sun at the corner of the road.

Elizabeth Eliza felt a little jounced in the armchair, and was glad of a rest; and the boys soon discovered a good lunch,—just what might have been expected from Grandfather’s,—apple pie and doughnuts, and plenty of them! “It is lucky we brought so many little boys!” they exclaimed.

Hiram, however, began to grow impatient. “There’ll be no snow left,” he exclaimed, “and no afternoon for the syrup!”

But far in the distance the Peterkin carryall was seen slowly approaching through the snow, Solomon John waving a red handkerchief. The little boys waved back, and Hiram turned the sled into the wood-road, but he drove slowly, as Elizabeth Eliza still feared that by some accident the family might miss them.

It was difficult for the carryall to follow in the deep but soft snow, in among the trunks of the trees and over piles of leaves hidden in the snow.

At last they reached the edge of a meadow. On the high bank above it stood a row of maples, and back of which was a little shanty with smoke coming out of its chimney. The little boys screamed with delight, but there was no reply. Nobody there!