Part 4
Along the stream to-day, noting the pussy-willows all out in spring garments of pearl gray and the alders swaying and sifting yellow dust from their open stamens, I passed the spot where Bose and I met as early a spring run of fish as often occurs. Bose would corroborate it if he could, but, unfortunately, Bose is somewhat dead, as much so as a dog of his spirit and imagination can be. His bones lie decently buried down under the great oak where he loved to sit and think about foxes, but I am not so sure about the rest of it. If there are any happy hunting-grounds where the souls of game flee away I warrant Bose leads the pack. He was a full-blooded foxhound, deep-chested, musical, lop-eared; and he didn’t know a fox from a buff cochin. He hunted continually, but rarely on a real trail. His nose was for visions.
It was on a first day of April that we came out of the door together, and Bose took one sniff, lifted his head, bayed musically, and was off into the pasture with me following, both of us ripe for any adventure. There was a smell of spring in the air; indeed, I was not sure but it was the green-robed, violet-crowned goddess whom the dog set forth to hunt. If so, I was more than glad to follow, for the winters seem long in my town. We know that the sun-god is pursuing Daphne northward. We have signs of her in the yearning of willow twigs and the shy blooming of hepaticas. If she should already be hiding in some sunny, sheltered nook of the pasture Bose would be as likely to go after her as any other vision.
March had gone out like a lamb, trailing a shorn fleece of mists behind him,--mists that morning sun tinted with opal fires that burned out after a little and left pale-blue ashes smeared in the hollows and blown soft against the distant hills. All through the air thrilled the glamor of those new-born hopes that attend the goddess, and I wanted to give tongue with Bose when I found him quartering the barberry slope of the upper pasture with clumsy gallop.
He had led me plump into fairy-land at the first plunge, for the brown leaves of last year rustled with the tread of brownies, and I came up in time to see a fat gnome rolling along, humping his shoulders and jiggling with laughter before the uproarious onslaught of the dog, turning at the burrow’s mouth to grin in the teeth of eager jaws and vanish into thin air as they clicked. A woodchuck? So Hodge would call it, seeing according to his kind. Probably Bose knew it for a fox, a silver-gray at least, according to his foxhound dreams. I myself knew that spring glamor was on all the woodland and that this was a round-paunched gnome, guardian of buried treasure, out for an April day frolic, and going back reluctantly to his post after having a moment’s fun with the dog.
As for the brownies, they were signs, or rather forerunners, pacemakers to the spring. I could see the little black eyes and droll-pointed noses of them as they worked eagerly all about in the shrubbery, passing the word that the goddess might arrive at any moment and that it was time to dress for her. Now they whispered it to terminal buds, and now to lateral, but mostly they put their brown heads down among the leaves, giving the message to bulb and corm, tuber and root stock. I could hear them calling all about, a quaint little elfin note of “tseep, tseep,” and anon one would turn a roguish handspring and vanish, thus hocus-pocusing himself to the next northward grove.
Busy brownies they were,--hop-o’-my-thumbs clad in rufous-brown feather coats that so harmonized with the dead leaves among which they worked that it was difficult to see them except when they moved. Ornithologists, bound by the letter of their knowledge, would, I dare say, name these fox sparrows; but even these might have hesitated and forgotten their literalness, looking into newborn April’s smiling face that blue-misted morning, out trailing the spring with Bose.
Then, much like the brownies, Bose vanished. He seemed to have lost the trail, nor was my scent keener, though all about were signs. The maple twigs were decorated with rosettes of red and yellow in honor of her coming. Birch twigs reddened with them, and the woodland that had been gray was fairly blushing with tell-tale color. Over on an open, sandy hillside the cinquefoil buds were beginning to curl upward, and in the heart of violet leaves faint hints of blue made you think of sleepy children just opening a little of one eye at promise of morning.
Here, too, I was conscious of a faint, ethereally fine perfume that seemed to float suddenly to my senses as if it had come over the treetops from the south. From up stream came the babble of the brook like dainty laughter. If I had heard the swish of silken garments floating away in the direction from which these came I had not been surprised. Eagerly I turned and followed where they led me.
Soon I heard Bose again, a half-mile behind; he, too, had caught the trail. Baying eagerly, he galloped by a few minutes later, interjecting into his uproar by some strange method of dog elocution a whine of recognition and an invitation to follow.
So he went on down the pasture. No leaf bud had opened, though many were agape, ready to burst with the pulse of new life that throbbed through the twigs and heightened their colors. The swamp blueberry bushes and the wild smilax were the greener for it, just as the maples and birches were the redder. With your ear to the bark you might hear the thrumming of the sap in the cambium layers, practicing a second to the drone of bees to come a little later. And still the fairy fine scent lured me, and I could hear Bose’s voice, eager to incoherence, just ahead. If you did not know about his visions you would surely think he had a fox in his jaw and was shaking him.
Down a sunny slope, robed in the diaphanous gray-green of bursting birch-buds, the fairy odor led me to a little bower on the bank, where for a moment I saw the nymph herself stand, rosy pink, slender and sweet, gowned in the birch-bud color all shimmered with the yellow of alder pollen drawn in filmy gauze about her. Strange goblins in silvery brown danced in grotesque gambols at her feet, while behind the bank I heard the splashing of Bose in shallow water, frenzied howls of excitement and ecstasy followed each time by another of the clumsy goblins somersaulting up from below to join the dance. Fairy-land and goblin town had indeed come together in celebration of the arrival of the spring!
On the threshold of this realm I trod a moment bewildered, and then, stumbling, broke the spell with a hasty exclamation. The enchantment vanished like a dream. Standing by the brookside I saw only the homely world again. Yet it was a strange enough sight. Up at the dam the gate had suddenly been closed, and a dozen three-pound fish, on their way up to spawn, had been marooned in the shallow water. These Bose was shaking up in wild delight and tossing up on the bank, where they danced in clumsy, fish-out-of-water dismay. These were the dancing goblins; nor had I been very far wrong about Daphne. There she stood still, slender and dainty, only, just as when pursued by Apollo of old, she had turned into a shrub. There she stood, the Daphne mezereum of the elder botanists, the clustering blooms of pink sending forth their faint, sweet odor that had come so far down the pasture to Bose and me and sent us hunting visions.
To be sure, it was the first of April! But the joke was not all on us, for Bose had for once found real game, albeit such as foxhound never hunted before, and I had found the spring. Two bluebirds, house-hunting among the willows, caroled in confirmation of it, and Apollo himself, shining through the gray mist of birch twigs, kissed Daphne rapturously.
She was so sweet that I did not blame him. As for Bose, he actually came up and licked the blushing twigs, then in sudden confusion at being caught in such sentimental actions, tore off on the make-believe trail of more visions, leaving me to rescue his gamboling goblins and put them back into their native water.
EXPLORATIONS
To-day I remind myself forcibly of Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G. C., M. P. C., whose paper entitled “Speculations on the Sources of the Hampstead Ponds” was received with such enthusiasm on the part of the Pickwick Club, for I have made new discoveries of the sources of Ponkapog Pond. These are quite as astounding to me as were the Hampstead revelations to the Pickwick Club, and just as those sent Mr. Pickwick and his friends forth on new voyages, so these led me to a hitherto undiscovered country.
In spite of our increasing population and our progressive business activity, there are portions of eastern Massachusetts towns that are forgotten. Often these are large tracts where the foot of man rarely treads and the creatures of the wilderness roam and prey, breed and die undisturbed by civilization. They may hear the hoot of the factory whistle morning, noon, and evening, or the faint echoes of the distant roar of trains, but they give no heed.
Their world is the wilderness and their problem that of living with their forest neighbors. Man hardly enters into their arrangements. Now and then one of these tracts has a past that is related to humanity, though the casual passer would never suspect it. The wilderness sweeps over the trail of man gleefully and his monuments must be built high and strong or they will be swept away with a rapidity that is startling.
It is only by perpetual efforts that we hold on to our landmarks. The rain will come in between the shingles and, beginning with the roof, sweep your house into the cellar just a mass of brown mold before you know it. Then the frost and sun tumble the cellar wall in upon it, and where once your proud dwelling stood is a grass-grown hollow. To-day’s generation trips on the capstone of what was the tower of its ancestors and thinks it merely a projection of the earth’s rib, which it is and to which it has returned.
I fancy every old Massachusetts town has these woodland places that were once the hopeful clearings of early settlers. Now and then, roaming the deep wood where only the creatures of the primal forest seem to have freehold tenure, I find an alien has strayed from the elder years, a hermit of the wood and of our own time. I know a purple lilac that dwells thus serenely, miles from present-day habitations, in a scrub forest that was fifty years ago a stretch of cathedral pines. Only long search showed me the faint hollow in the brown earth which was once the narrow cellar of a wee house. No record of an early householder here remains other than that planted by the hopeful housewife’s hand,--the lilac shrub.
For more than a century it has held the ground where its fellow-pioneers planted it, holding close within its pinky heart-wood memories of English lanes white with hawthorne and, far beyond these, indistinct recollections of rose-perfumed Persian gardens, the home of its race. Perhaps upon its ancestral root rested the feet of Omar Khayyam when he wrote:
And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass Among the guests star-scattered on the grass, And in your blissful errand reach the spot Where I made one--turn down an empty glass.
Perhaps within the fragrance of a blossom that sprang from the same stock old Cromwell and his Ironsides paused some May morning and breathed deep and sang a surly hymn. We propagate the lilac from the root, not the seed, and the same sap has flowed through the veins of the present strain for a thousand years. A whiff of lilac perfume in a woodland tangle next month, and out of the wilderness we step, from one ancient garden to another, back by centuries into the pleasant places of a world long gone.
To many a New England child the smell of lilacs brings homesickness, and he does not know why. It is because it is the May odor of the vanished home garden, not only of Myles and Priscilla of Plymouth, but of a thousand generations of his own stock before them.
The woodland of to-day’s discoveries is not such. I do not believe pioneer ever stoned a cellar in its depths, and if the Indian set his teepee here it was only in passing. Now and then the harrying hand of man has cut off its greater growth and let the sunlight in on its roots, that the adventitious buds may have a chance, and newer and stronger trunks tower upward eventually, but the shadows that dapple its brown-leaf mold carry no dreams of human domination.
The vexation of axe and gun, and even the searing scar of flame, are only minor incidents in the great work of the wood, whose ultimate purpose no man knows. We see the rocks disintegrated and the hollows filled with richer soil, that the forest may grow taller and more surely shelter the gentler things of earth. We find it holding back the waters in its cunningly contrived bogs, and hiding medicinal plants in its hollows, waiting always with benediction in its leaves for the comforting of weary men; but we feel when we know the woods best that these, too, are but its casual benefits; its great purpose lies deeper, and the more we seek it the better we know we are.
Great men come out of the forests of the earth. If they are not born there they seek the place before coming to their greatness. Lincoln hews rails, Washington surveys and scouts, and Roosevelt ranches in the Western wilderness. Perhaps it is for these and their kin that the woods exist. It is always Peter the Hermit that leads the crusade, and without crusades the world were a poor place. It seems as if all our prophets must wrestle at least forty days in the wilderness before coming forth with brows white with the mark of immortality.
It lies at the southeast corner of the pond, beginning at the little bogs, from which it springs abruptly. Along the water’s edge of these bogs picknickers row their boats all summer long, and catch fish and eat sandwiches. Inland, a foot or two, the duck hunter in the autumn treads precariously along the quaking surface with his eyes on the margin, or perhaps on the ducks that swim in the open pond, but rarely does any one penetrate the bog-carpeted swamp of great cedars just back of this quaking margin.
And this is strange. The passion for exploration is born in all hearts. We are prompted to go to Tibet, or seek the sources of the Nile, or penetrate the jungles that lie between the Amazon and the Orinoco. I have felt this impulse strongly myself, and longing for distant lands have passed unnoticed this opportunity right at hand for penetrating an untrodden wilderness. With most of us the undiscovered country lies just a step off the beaten track. So across the rolling bog and into the twilight greenness beneath the cedars I sailed to-day, venturing as Columbus did over a known sea to an unknown, and thence to a new world,--one where straight, limbless cedar trunks stand close like temple columns under a gray-green roof of twigs and leaves.
All the upper tones are gray and green, for this is the world of the mosses and lichens. The ground is built of them, and the temple columns are so covered with their arabesques and bas-reliefs, so daintily frescoed and carved, that it seems as if here were a museum of all designs for the beautifying of interiors that ever occurred. And as all the tree trunks are gray and green till the texture and color of bark is hardly to be discerned, so the carpeting of the floor of this temple and the upholstering of its furniture is brown and green. The thin rays of the sun that filter through here and there are greenish gold, till the whole gives an under-water atmosphere to the place, and you walk about as a diver might on the sea-bottom, with things new and strange floating at every hand.
Mosses in the ordinary woodland we are apt to pass with unseeing eye. They decorate rocks and trees, dead stumps and earth with such unobtrusive good taste that we come back feeling the beauty of the woodland, and not at all knowing what made it. Some fence corner or group of trees or shrubs or a stump has touched us with its beauty, and so well dressed it is in its moss clothes that we have not seen them at all, but have come away only with the recollection of how well the rock or the stump looked, and we cannot say whether it wore a plaid or a check or just plain goods.
In this swamp, however, it is as if the whole woodland wardrobe were hung up for inspection, an Easter opening of all kinds of wood wear. Here the _Usnea barbata_ trails its old man’s beard from the cedar limbs well up in the arches above the pillars, its drooping softness having the effect of delicate tapestry. Clinging lichens, those delicate unions of algal cells and fond fungi, paint the northerly sides of the tree trunks all the way down, while the freer-growing fringe or fleck the southern exposures. _Parmelias_ to north, _cetrarias_ and _stictas_ to the south might well guide the wanderer, giving him the points of the compass and leading him thus to his path again.
Under foot the _sphagnums_ build the bog and hold chief sway, but other common varieties dispute the footing with them. Here is the _acutifolia_ with its pointed leaves giving the tufts the appearance of a bunch of pointed petaled chrysanthemums, the greens and purples softly shading into one another and showing a fine contrast with the drier, yellower portions of the plant. Here, too, is the edelweiss-like _squarrosum_ in its loosely-crowded clusters of bluish green, and the robust _cymbifolium_.
All these grow from their own débris in the wettest portions of the footing. Wherever there is, in this many-colored and lovely carpet, a dead cedar trunk the dainty cedar moss, creeping everywhere, has occupied the space with its delicate fern-like leaves, making of all ugly rotten wood the loveliest furnishing imaginable for these solemn, twilight spaces. Cushion mosses pad with their bluish-green velvet hassocks here and there, and, sitting on one of them that I might put all my wit into seeing, I noted for the first time, though growing all about me, in fact, a moss that I had never seen before,--the _mnium_.
Its delicate, translucent green leaves are little like those of a moss at first sight. One thinks it rather some rare and delicate flowering plant of the wet bog, now but thrusting up its delicate leaves, to bloom later. I dare say the _mnium punctatum_ is a common bog moss. Very likely I have trampled it ruthlessly under foot before this in following some more showy denizen of the deep woods; but to find it thus, exploring a new swamp for the first time, it gave me as great pleasure as I might have had in finding a new orchid hiding about the sources of the Orinoco.
It was the _sphagnums_ that led me to the brookside and caused me to recall that lusty scientist, Mr. Pickwick, and his discovery of the sources of the Hampstead ponds. And while I stood and wondered I saw a second brook, only a little further on, also flowing downward into the _sphagnum_ and losing itself in the bog, to pass beneath the cedar roots and moss débris and enter the pond.
Some ancient traveler, perhaps Marco Polo, passing from Babylon to Bagdad, coming first upon the Euphrates and then the Tigris, may have felt some of the amazement and delight which I had in this discovery. Never before had I known of a brook entering the pond. It had always been a sheet of water self-contained and sufficient in itself, fed, I thought, by springs beneath its own surface. I had paddled by and tramped over the mouths of these two brooks a hundred times and never knew before why the pond always smiled and dimpled as I went by. No wonder it laughs; it has kept that same joke on ninety-nine of a hundred of the people who frequent it, and I am not sure there is another hundredth.
It seemed as if all the woodland burst into guffaws of laughter, now that the joke was out and there was no further need of keeping quiet about it. The cedars rocked in the west wind with suppressed merriment and a couple of red squirrels snickered like school children and tore up and down the lichen-covered trunks and fell off into a swamp birch and had hardly strength to hold on, so breathless were they. A pair of crows, looking up nesting material, haw-hawed right out over my head till they had to stop flapping and sail, they were so weak from it, and a whole flock of chickadees tittered all along behind my back for a quarter of a mile as I went on up the swamp on the left bank of the Euphrates.
It was amusing, and after a little I could see the joke and laugh myself. The Tigris was on my right, and by-and-by the two began to prattle down over a hard bottom from higher ground. Only for a little way, though, for here we came to another wide swamp which the two traversed under low sprouts of swamp maple and birch, the ground having been cut over within a few years.
And right here I ran into a full chorus, a raucous cacophony, an Homeric din that sounded as if all the rough-voiced goblins between Blue Hill and the Berkshires were assembled in convention up stream and had just heard the story, particularly well told. I knew them. They were the wood frogs, holding their annual convention, indeed, in the water all along the marshy margin of the swamp. Once a year they come down, as people go to the seashore, disporting themselves in the waves and making very merry about it. They were not laughing at me. They were simply shouting their happiness at being thawed out and finding it springtime once more.
Their voices, pitched about an octave below middle C, and all on one note, sound not unlike a great flock of ducks gabbling wildly, but they are really more nearly musical than that. After the convention is over they go back to the woods, where you will find them sitting among the leaves, though you will never see them till they see you. And when you do see them they are in the air. They have surprisingly long legs and can jump tremendously, turning in the air as they go, so that, having landed, their next leap will take them in a new direction. The earth seems to swallow them as they touch it, for their coloration is that of the brown leaves, and they leap from one invisibility to the next.
Beyond the frog chorus I found my stream again, dancing daintily along hemlock shaded shallows and rippling over slate ledges in the latticed shade of oak and maple twigs, and here another voice called me, a staccato whistle with a suspicion of a trill in it now and then, the voice of the very spirit of the spring woodland,--the _hyla_. I have called it a whistle, yet it is hardly that; it is rather the soft rich tone of a pipe, such as Pan might have imitated when he first blew into the hollow reed on the brook margin.
He is a shy fellow, this inch-long brown frog that swells his throat till it is like a balloon and pipes forth this mellow note, and he is even more invisible than the wood-frog. You may seek him diligently for years and not find him, for his voice is that of a ventriloquist and he seems to send it hither and thither. It is as if this were a trick of some frisky Ariel of the wood that danced about and whistled, now before and now behind you. When the trill comes in it you may well think the tricksy spirit is laughing at you so that his voice shakes. It would be no surprise if some trilling note ended in a giggle and Ariel himself should float by you on the mocking air.