Part 7
So all this day of passing April the sun shone in the placid heart of the little cove with the full fervor of summer. The leopard frog throated his dreamy yawn from the bog, and the rich, soft perfume of the spicebush seemed to wrap all the senses in longing that thrilled and disquieted even while it lulled. There is a call to _vagabondia_ in the odor of the spicebush, that gipsy of the wilder wood, which finds ready echo in the hearts of us all. If it bloomed the year round there would be no cities.
While I breathed the witchery to the full there fell from the sky above a gentle call, a single bird note out of the blue, that made me sit up straight and look eagerly.
A swift wing stabbed the air above the tree tops, and the note sounded nearer. “Quivit, quivit,” it said in liquid gentleness, and the first barn swallow of my season slipped down toward the pond and skimmed the surface in graceful flight. May is welcome. She could be ushered in by no sweeter music than the gentle call of the barn swallow, nor could she send before her more dignified couriers than the glowing pasture cedars or more richly sensuous odors than that of the spicebush which makes all the swamps yellow with sunshine in her honor.
BOG BOGLES
A spirit of mystery always broods over the great bog of Ponkapog Pond. Only occasionally does man disturb its quaking, sinking surface with his foot. You may wade all about on it, even to the edge where the billowing moss yields to the scarcely less stable pond surface; but to do so in safety you must know it intimately, else you will go down below, suddenly, to become a nodule in the peat, and perhaps be dug up intact a thousand years from now and put in a museum.
Hence man rather shuns the bog, and it has become, or perhaps I might better say it has remained, the home of all sorts of shy creatures that shun man. It would not be surprising if the little people that the Ponkapog Indians knew so well, the pukwudgies which were their fairies, the little manitous which were guardian spirits, and the fearsome folk, the Indian bogies, still linger here, though the Indians are long gone.
This morning in the lonesomest spot I thought I heard speech of them all, and though various creatures appeared later and claimed the voices, it is to be believed that these merely came out of the tall grass to go straw bail for them. At this time of year you may reach this lonesomest spot by boat, if you will take a light one with smooth flat bottom and push valiantly through winding passages where you may not row and boldly ride over grassy surfaces that yield beneath you.
It is a different bog edge from that of last summer; a new world. The Nesæa, which made wickets of bog-hopple all about, is hardly to be seen, and you will wonder at the absence of the millions of serried stems of pickerel weed that held the outer defences with halberds and made them blue with flaunting banners of the bog’s advance guard.
If you will look over the boat’s side as you glide through open water near the edge you will see these, lying in heaps, blades pointing bravely to seaward almost a half-fathom deep, slain by the winter’s cold, indeed, but their bodies a bulwark on which younger warriors will stand firmly in the skirmish line this year. Already the slender spears of these prick upward out of the gray tangle at bottom, and it will not be long before they stab the surface, eager for the accolade of the field marshal sun.
In the little channels up which you glide tiny tides flow back and forth, driven, no doubt, by the undulations of the waves in the open pond, and here through the dark depths the brownish green clusters of pointed peat-moss roll along like Russian tumble-weeds driven across the Dakotas by prairie winds, to grow again in new soil. On either side are island clumps of meadow grass, and in the shallows you may see, as carefully planted as if by some landscape gardener of the pond bottom, most wonderfully beautiful fairy gardens of young water-lily leaves.
Out of the brown ooze at varied dignified distances apart spring the slender, erect stems, some only a few inches long, others longer, till a precocious few tickle the surface with the upper rim of the rounded leaf. These leaves are set at quaint angles that give the garden a perky, Alice-in-Wonderland effect. The Welsh rabbit and the mock turtle might well come down these garden paths hand in hand, or the walrus and the carpenter sit beneath the flat shade of these dado-decoration leaves and swap poems.
But, after all, the wonder of it is not the quaint beauty of the arrangement but the bewildering richness of the coloring of these leaves. Only the faintest suggestion of green is in them. Instead, they glow with a velvety crimson maroon in varying shades, a color inexpressibly soft and rich. The blood-red of last year’s cranberries that form a floating bead edge to the bog in many places is more vivid, but not so rich. The lilies of next July will be lovely, indeed, but never so sumptuously beautiful or so full of quaint delight.
At the end of the waterway you come to a barrier of cassandra, which blocks your further passage and half surrounds you with a low, irregular hedge. I fear I have misnamed the cassandra. I thought it dour and morose; but that was in late April. Now it is early May, and by some trick of the bog pukwudgies the gloom of its still clinging last year’s leaves is lightened into a soft sage green that is prim indeed, but lovely in its primness, while all underneath these leaves, in festoons along the arching stems, are tiny white blossoms that are like ropes of dripping pearls.
Grim and morose, indeed! The cassandra is like a gentle, pure-souled girl of the elder Puritans, arrayed for her coming-out party, her primness of garb only enhancing the beauty of soul that shines through it and finds visible expression in the pearls. And already lovers buzz about her. Their cheerful hum is like the sound of soft stringed instruments fanned by the warm breeze in this fairy-peopled land of loneliness. Here I see my first bumblebee of the season, seemingly less dunderheaded out here among the wild blooms than he will be later in the white clover of the lawn.
Perhaps the prim and definite arrangement of the cassandra blossoms, hung so close in long strings that he has a straight road to follow, helps keep his wits about him. Here are honeybees a-plenty, adding the clarinet to his bassoon, and many a wild bee, too, bringing the scintillation of iridescent thorax or wing, and his own peculiar pitch to the symphony. I dare say the hymenopterists know each bee by ear as well as by sight.
In this fairy land of bog tangle the hylas, that I had thought all through with their songs for the year, piped in chorus as each cloud slipped over the sun, and the leopard frogs yawned throatily, dreamily, all about in the full sunshine. The hotter it was the more they liked it, and in the brightest part of the day they cut up the yawns into brief words and phrases which made a most language-like gabble.
Of course I could not see this peace congress of leopard frogs and can prove only that it sounded like them. It may very well have been the pukwudgies talking over my presence and wondering if white men were now coming to oust them from their last stronghold in the bog, as they have driven them and the once more visible Indians from the rough hills and sandy plains about the pond. Indeed, as I sat quiet, hour after hour, in this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog, banshee or bird.
I began to get glints of sunlight reflecting from grassy islands all about. It was as if some very human folk had held high carnival here the night before and sown the dry spots with empty black bottles. But a second look showed these to be spotted turtles, sitting up above the water level, each with his head held up as if he wished especially to get the warmth of the sun on his throat. On such a day one might well envy the turtle for having his bones all on the outside. It is easy for him to let the spring sunshine into his very marrow.
The turtle, in spite of the canticle which, bubbling over with the enthusiastic poetry of spring, declares that “the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,” is usually reckoned dumb. The commentators have carefully announced that the turtle mentioned is the turtle-dove cooing in the joy of springtime. That may be, but I do not see how they know, for the turtle, denied a voice by naturalists and scriptural commentators alike, nevertheless has one, and a song of its own.
A turtle, suddenly jolted, will give a quaint little squeak as he yanks himself back into his shell. That is common enough, but this day there were two, sitting up on nearby tussocks, that piped a musical little song of spring, just a soft trill that was eminently frog-like but distinct. I heard it and tried at first to make it the trill of hylas, but it was more of a trill and different in quality. Try as I would I could but locate this quaint little song in the throats of the two turtles. I carefully scared one off his perch and one trill ceased. I scared the other, and both voices were silent, though here and there in the marsh I could hear others. It may have been the pukwudgies playing ventriloquial tricks on me from the shade of the swamp cedars just beyond, and laughing in their beaded sleeves at the joke; but if it was not they, I am convinced that my turtles sang, and that Solomon not only knew what he was talking about but meant exactly what he said.
While I was listening to the two turtles and wondering about them, I kept hearing over among the white cedars raucous profanity of the most outrageous sort. Bad words snarled in throaty squawks came oftener and oftener, till by the time the turtles had gone down into oblivion beneath the bog roots the most villainous language from at least two squawkers gave evidence that a low-bred row was going on. I could distinguish accusation and recrimination till it sounded like a family quarrel between drunken bog bogles.
Then there was the sound of blows, and with a wild shriek of a most reckless word a bittern flapped out, whirled round once or twice as if undecided where he would go, then dropped in the grass down the bog a way. Here he turned his black, stake-like head this way and that for a moment, then pulled it down out of sight. I had known the bittern was misanthropic, but I had never before realized that he was so ill-tempered and profane. I am positive he was beating his wife, and the whole affair sounded like a case of too much bog whiskey.
For an hour there was no sight or sound of this bittern, though uncouth conversation seemed to be going on still in the tangle whence he flew, but I heard no more profanity. Yet out of the heart of the bog curious sounds came floating at intervals,--sounds which often I had difficulty in getting any known creature to go bail for. I do not mean the ordinary bird voices, though the air was full of these. It seems as if all the small migrants made this a port of call or a refuge, and paid for their safety with music. Warblers trilled their varied notes from the cedars or the thicket of cassandra shrubs, some coming boldly near, others giving sign of their presence only by the glint of a wing or the shaking of a twig, others still invisible but vocal.
Thrush and catbird, song sparrow and chipping sparrow, chickadee and creeper, all helped to fill the air with sound, but it was not to these I listened. It was rather to obscure whinings and grumblings out of the deep heart of the bog, goblin talk very likely that seemed to grow louder and come nearer. Then after a little I heard splashing, and out into a clear space of grassy shallows came a splendid great muskrat followed by another just as large. In the middle of this tourney ground the two faced each other, and after a second of sparring closed.
It was hardly a scientific fight. They batted and clawed, butted and scratched and bit, whining like eager dogs, and now and then yelping with pain. But it was effective; in a very few minutes one had enough and turned and fled, ploughing a straight furrow through the shallows, to a plunge in a deep hole. The victor followed a few yards, then as if convinced that the retreat was a real one, turned and went proudly back, probably to the lady who was the cause of all this trouble. Muskrats are such gentle creatures that I was amazed to see this happen, but affairs of the heart are serious even in the depths of the bog. I lay a part of the bog bogle talk which still went on in the eerie depths behind the green of the cedars to the other muskrats. It does not seem as if they could have been to blame for it all.
Then I remembered the vanished bittern and began to work my boat toward the part of the bog where he disappeared. Very likely he had committed suicide in repentance for his bad behavior and his profanity. He ought to have, but he was simply sulking, after all. I think he felt so bad about it that his usual wariness was at fault, for I was almost upon him before he saw me. It may have been drunken stupor, but I like to believe it was remorse.
When he did see me his dismay was ludicrous. He almost fell over himself in getting into the air, and he flapped back toward the spot where the quarrel had gone on with wild squawks that said “Help, help!” as plainly as any language could. Out from among the cedars, in answer to this frenzied appeal, came the other bittern, and then another. I watched the three flapping down the bog and saw them light together at a safe distance. Then I knew the cause of all the trouble in the bittern family. The bog world, like the pasture world and the deep wood, at this time of year is full of blissful love making, but it is also full of heartrending jealousies and fights to a finish. No wonder the pukwudgies and bog bogles are full of talk and excitement back there; there is enough food for gossip.
Sitting quietly in the boat in this new part of the bog I had a queer feeling of being grimly watched by, I could not tell what. I have read tales of travelers in African jungles who felt the eyes of a lurking boa constrictor resting balefully on them when the creature itself was concealed. It was something like that, and I looked about rather uneasily. Probably the bog voices were getting on my nerves and it was time to go home. Then I glanced over one side of the boat and very nearly jumped over the other, for there were the two grim eyes, in a great horny head as big as my two fists, looking up at me.
I had been amusing myself with imagining that I heard the little people of the bog, but here was the great dragon, the very devil himself, sunning his black hulk on a fairy acre of bog grass. At its further end I saw his tail, as large as my forearm at the base, tapering with alligator-like corrugations to its tip. I saw his great webbed feet as large as my hand and furnished with claws. I saw his thick neck, and that was all of him in sight. The rest was concealed within a huge mound of black, plated, horny shell that was fourteen inches from side to side and sixteen inches from front to back. These were measurements which I took after I had decided that he did not intend to eat me right away, perhaps not at all.
_Chelydra serpentina_, the snapping turtle, or the alligator snapper, as he is sometimes called, and with reason, for, except for his casing of shell, he is very like an alligator, is not uncommon in the bog; but I had never before seen so huge or so ancient appearing a specimen. His black shell was worn gray with age and bore two deep scars where some sharp instrument very like a spear had been jabbed into his back. I suspect this to have been an Indian spear, and I fully believe that my black dragon of the bog was a well-grown turtle before the white man ever saw Ponkapog Pond.
There were parallel ridges in the structure of his shell that seemed to show much wear as if this turtle had carried weight on his back. The Indians have a legend that the world itself is held up on the back of a great turtle. Very well; this is the one. I saw the marks of its friction on his great muddy black structure as I looked him over, there in the middle of the loneliest place in the bog.
I might have taken him by that alligator tail and swung his seventy or eighty pounds into the boat, I suppose. Terrapin is valuable, and the snapping turtle is own cousin to the terrapin. I have a fancy, though, that if he had got into the boat I should have got out. No ordinary Ponkapog boat was likely to hold us both, and I wisely refrained. Nor did he molest me, but stood his ground, still gazing at me with that cold, critical eye. After a time he moved on, pushing his great weight with ease over the crushed bog growth and sliding with dignity down into the muddy depths of an open channel.
For myself, I turned the boat’s prow toward the distant landing and pushed, as he had, over the yielding shallows to the open pond. I had seen a hundred beauties in the lonely bog and been well initiated into its mysteries. For me the spotted turtles had sung, the muskrats had fought a tourney, the bitterns had voiced a family quarrel. And now it was nightfall, and the big old dragon of the bog had looked me over with measuring eye. It was high time that I headed for home if I expected to get there.
BOBBING FOR EELS
It is fortunate that the angleworm is born without a voice, else throughout the length and breadth of the land were now resounding a chorus of doleful shrieks, for great is the dismemberment of angleworms about this time. The same warmth of imminent summer which made the grass jump six inches in length over night, has brought him forth in great numbers, over night also, for the angleworm is a lover of darkness.
I know Darwin thought earthworm a more proper designation of him, but it is to be believed that Darwin was not a fisherman. Had he been he would have known that the chief end of worm is to become bait. There may be nicer things to have than these somewhat attenuated hermits of the mold, but if there are the fishes do not know it, and there are few anglers but on May fifteenth would give their weight in gold for them if such was the price. It is fortunate, therefore, that angleworms are inhabitants of the earth, so to speak, and not of any one neighborhood. It is, no doubt, possible to catch fish with other bait. There are grasshoppers, to be sure, though not at this time of year. There are various artificial flies and lures, spoon hooks and other wastrel inventions. Of these little is to be said; indeed, some of them are unspeakable.
On fortunate springs April showers linger into May, finally hastening northward lest summer catch them here and make a wet June of it. The seductive warmth of summer is in them now, and as they go spilling by of perfumed nights they work all kinds of wonder. Things that were beginning to grow up suddenly blow up. My cherry tree has exploded over night. Two days ago the grass, we noted with delight, was really quite green. This morning it waves in the wind, and I am confident that by to-morrow, at this rate, it will be full of bobolinks and mowing machines. Yesterday you could see far through the woodland. To-day it is clouded with its own green leaves, and along aisles that begin to be shady the truant ovenbirds are shouting “Teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher,” in warning to one another every time they hear a human footfall in the path.
The first dragon flies have come, and in woodland places lovely little brown butterflies skip about like mad. No wonder the Hesperidæ are commonly known as skippers. These that I saw to-day, most of them _Thanaos brizo_, the sleepy dusky-wing, defied any but the most alert eye to follow them as they dashed from invisibility on some dark fallen limb to vanishment on brown mud of the path. They seemed to skip in and out of existence at will. I call them brown, for you will see that they are that if you have a chance to see one sitting at rest. You may get near enough to see the beautiful blueish spots surrounded with dark rings on the fore wings, and the double row of yellow spots on the hind wings. For all that _Thanaos brizo_ is as black as your hat to the eye when he is in flight. Perhaps that is why he vanishes so readily. You are looking for a black butterfly, and what you see is nothing but a brown bit of bark or leaf.
Darwin was convinced that the earthworm, as he called him, was of inestimable value to man, and he cites how he works over the mold and loosens it up, ploughing it, as it were, for future planters who should thus be able to enjoy the fruits of the earth, leveling it and working in various ways for the good of mankind. But Darwin never says a word of the inestimable value of earthworms as angleworms. Thus often do our greatest scientists fail to interpret things at their true value. Very likely Darwin never had an opportunity to bob for eels in a New England pond. If so he would have seen worms as they are, for no man can really know things till he has yearned for them.
In the winter time the angleworm goes down well below the reach of frost which will kill him. Indeed, he is sensitive to the cold, and comes to the surface only when the sun has warmed the earth so that it is comfortable. Under the May moon he comes, sometimes clear out of his hole, and wanders far in search of friends or new countries. Often of a moist early morning you may find big ones caught out on the concrete sidewalk or marooned in the dry dust of the road, remaining to be an easy prey for early birds.
But these are the adventurous or unfortunate few. The many have remained all night stretched far from the mouths of their burrows, indeed, but with tails still hooked into the door jamb, and able to make a rapid backward scramble into safety. It is this habit of the worm of warm summer evenings that the wise angler utilizes for his capture. The robin knows it too, and he spices his rapture of matin song with trips across the lawn, where, between staccato hops, he eyes the grass sidewise and catches late roisterers before they can get under cover. These he takes by the scruff of the neck, as one might say, hauls them, stretching and resisting, forth from their homes and swallows them.
Thus with the unrighteous, but even the upright, or rather the downright, who are that, snugly ensconced as they intended to be, he is apt to see and seize, for the robin’s eye is good and his bill is long enough. Angleworms, after the joys or labors of the night are over, withdraw into their holes, but often not very far. They like to lie with the head drawn back just out of sight, near enough to the surface to bask in the warmth of the sun.
Some line the outer ends of their burrows with leaves to keep them from the damp of the earth, thus further to enjoy themselves. Some, too, on retiring, draw leaves and sticks in, thus going into their holes and pulling the holes in after them, as the saying goes. Some merely pile small stones in a sort of an ant heap about the mouth. In the gravel walk these little mounds are often taken for those piled by the industrious ants. The robin gets many of these as he hops, and it is no wonder that his chestnut-red front looms as round as a pumpkin and almost as big.
There are many ways of getting angleworms and many ways of using them after you get them; but he who wants them in bulk will do well to imitate the robin,--only do it in the night instead of the day. Of course you may go out with a spade and assault likely spots in the garden. That is often satisfactory, though crude. It is likely to result in small numbers and not well assorted sizes.