Everyday Adventures

So it was that, like Christian of old, I suddenly decided to escape for my life from my city.

There were many reasons. It was a holiday. Then the sun rose on one of the most perfect days that ever dawned since the calendar was invented. Furthermore, there was the thought of a little cabin hidden in the heart of the pine barrens. So I ran away through snow-covered meadows and silent woods and past farmhouses that were old when this republic was first born, until my law offices and the city and the noise and the dust and the smoke were all behind the horizon.

An hour later I was following a little path that zigzagged back and forth through thickets of scrub oak and stiff rows of pitch pines. Above the trees was the rush of wings. The upper air was filled with the victorious sound of going that heartened David from the tops of the mulberry trees in that dread valley of Rephaim. Perhaps it was the wind; but why did not the tree-tops sway instead of standing in frozen rows? The sky above was the color of the eggs of the wood thrush, a tender blue faintly washed with white. As the sun rose higher and higher, the color deepened to that bluest of blues which burns in May under the breast of the brooding catbird. Filtered through frost, the sunlight shone, intensely bright but without heat. The air was full of the spicery of a million pine trees. With every breath it went tingling through my blood, carrying with it the joy of the open and the freedom of the barrens.

At last I came to the cabin. It is set on the very edge of the brownest, crookedest, sweetest stream in the world—the cedar-stained Rancocas. The wide porch overhangs the water, and over the doorway is a tiny horseshoe, which was dug out of the bog at Upper Mill, undoubtedly cast by some fairy steed. One whole side of the cabin is taken up by an arched fireplace built of brown and yellow and red sandstone, the only stone that can be found in the Barrens. Squat and curly, two massive andirons, hammered out of bog iron, stand among the ashes. They have a story all their own.

Five miles through the woods is Upper Mill, which is not a mill at all, but marks the place where, a century ago, one stood. The only occupied house there is a log cabin built of imperishable white-cedar logs in 1720, the date still showing on one of the logs. Charlie Rogers lives there alone. It used to be an old tavern on the cattle-road from Perth Amboy. Every now and then Charlie finds old coins, King George III pennies and farthings, and the rare New Jersey pennies which were coined only during two years, and which bear a plough and the old name of New Jersey—Nova Cæsarea. One day, when I was gossiping with Charlie, I told him that, if he took up the old dirt floor and sifted it through an ash-sifter during the long winter evenings, he might find a further store of rare coins. He took my advice, and the first treasure he uncovered was these andirons buried where once had been a hearth. Charlie gave them to me, and they hold up logs now as well as they did two hundred years ago.

As I slipped into a well-worn suit of khaki, all the worry of the month fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was drowned in the golden water. Tucking a pair of field-glasses into one pocket and a package of lunch into the other, I started off on an exploring trip. In the barrens everywhere are paths that wind for miles in and out among the trees and along the edges of brooks and bogs. Who made them? Who keeps them open? No one knows. I have been able to follow a few of them out to the end. One leads to Ong’s Hat, a little clearing in the heart of the woods, where grows an enormous white-oak tree. A century and a half ago Ong, the Indian, lived there. One day he disappeared. Nothing was ever found except his blood-stained hat. Then there is the path that leads to Sheep-Pen Hill, where seven empty houses and a well stand deserted and alone. Others lead to Gum Sprung, which, being translated, means Gum-Tree Cove, and to Double Trouble and Mount Misery, where the rattlesnake den is, and Apple-Pie Hill, and Friendship, and a host of other places that I have not explored.

To-day I walked for miles and miles through stretches of low, gleaming pines and past pools set in golden sphagnum moss. The wind had died down, and the silence seeped in and carried with it the comfort of the wilderness. The first friend I met was a little bird that dived like a mouse into a pile of brush. I saw a brook, and hurried to it, knowing that if the bird were a winter wren it could not possibly keep from running along the edges of that brook. Sure enough, in a minute I saw it darting in and out of holes and with cocked tail curtsying on the stones. It is the next to the smallest of our five wrens—only the rare short-billed marsh wren is tinier.

To-day all through the tree-tops I heard the high-pitched tiny notes of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Its forked tail, striped head, and wing-bars are the field-marks by which it can be told in spite of its quick movements. It is the third smallest of all our birds: only the hummingbird and the short-billed marsh wren are smaller. Beyond the kinglet I heard the clicking alarm-notes and saw a flutter of the white skirts of a junco as it flew up ahead of me, showing its white tail-feathers, while in the woods a silver-and-blue bird sprang out of the bushes, for a wonder without a sound. It was the blue jay, which scolds and squalls all day long. Overhead, in spite of the bitter cold, the grim black buzzards, with their fringed wings and black-and-gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the smaller crow flapped laboriously beneath them.

Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare climbing fern, an evergreen fern which climbs like a vine and has flat, veined leaves that look like little green hands with four and five fingers. The stem is like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met the pale-gray poison sumac, with its corpse-colored berries growing out from the sides of the twigs instead of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless varieties.

I followed Pond-Lily Path through the white sand that in the springtime is all golden with barrens-heather. It winds in and out through the scattered clumps of low pitch pine and thickets of scrub oak, and finally leads to a still brook all afloat in midsummer with pond lilies. When the path reached the bogs, which to-day were frozen solid, I turned in, crossing them on the snow-covered ice. Everywhere were lines of four-toed crow tracks, and here and there were rabbit trails, a series of four round holes in the snow.

The next morning, when I followed my own tracks, I found that for more than a mile I had been trailed by some animal making a series of little paw-prints like those of a small cat, except that they were close together and sometimes doubled, showing where the animal had given sudden bounds. It was none other than the trail of a weasel, probably the long-tailed variety, although that is rare in the barrens. Like others of his family, this animal oftens follows a man’s tracks for a long distance, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps in the hope of finding food. As I looked at the trail of this little killer, I was glad that he was not larger. If weasels, or those other killers, the shrews, were as large as a dog, no man’s life would be safe out of doors.

I explored so far that the sun had set before I turned back for the cabin. Suddenly, from far over where the tree-trunks were inked black against the golden afterglow, I heard a hoot, deep rather than loud. “Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo!” it went, and sometimes, “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” Usually, though, the second note was doubled. It meant that the great horned owl with its speckled gray back and white collar was hunting rabbits through the silent woods. If it had been the barred owl, the third note would have been doubled and the last note would have had a drop in its cadence.

In the frosty twilight I hurried along the winding path, back to the cabin and a long, dreamy evening before the roaring fire. First came a wonderful exhibition of free-hand cooking. Then I piled the great fireplace well up the chimney with masses of pitch-pine knots and stumps that I had dug up in the dry bogs. All of the sapwood had decayed, leaving nothing except the resinous bones of the fallen trees. They burned at the touch of a match, with a red smoky flame. Above them I banked dry lengths of swamp maple and post oak. Then, drawing up a vast rocker well within the circle of the heat, I settled down to read and dream in front of the red coals.

There is nothing in life sweeter than a little loneliness. Nowadays we live and die in crowds, like ants and bees, so that solitude is likely to become one of the lost arts. No book ever tastes so well as before a great fire in the heart of a wilderness, even if the wilderness be only a few miles away. In my cabin I keep a special shelf of the books which I have always wanted to read, and for which in some way I never find time in the hurry of everyday life. That evening I sat for long over the Saga of Burnt Njal, and read again of the bill of Gunnar and the grim axe, the “ogress of war,” of Skarphedinn and the sword of the dauntless Kari. In the flickering firelight I pictured the death-fight of Gunnar of Lithend, one of the four great fights of one man against a multitude in history, and heard again Hallgarda, the fair and the false, forsake him to his death.

“Give me two locks of thy hair,” said Gunnar to Hallgarda, when that his bow-string was cut in twain; “and ye two, my mother and thou, twist them together into a bow-string for me.”

“Does aught lie on it?” she says.

“My life lies on it,” he said.

“I will not do it,” said Hallgarda; “for know ye now that I never cared a whit for thee.”

At last it was time to go to bed. I went out to get a drink of the most wonderful water in the world. Near the cabin a little bog was frozen over a foot deep with white bubbled ice. In one place a round, black hole had betrayed the secret spring that flooded the whole swale. In the coldest weather this spring-hole remains unfrozen. I dipped up a pitcherful of the soft, spicy cedar-water pulsing from the very heart of the marsh. The Pinies have a saying that he who drinks cedar-water will always come back to the barrens, no matter how far afield he may wander.

As I came to the porch-steps, in the dark stream just below me I saw a strange thing. Underneath the water a ball of fire flashed down the stream and disappeared around the bend. For a long time I tried to puzzle out what it could be. There was no form of aquatic phosphorescent life that would swim through a northern stream in the depths of winter. It was only when I started to tell the time by the sky clock that the mystery was solved. I was looking at the star Caph in Cassiopeia, which is the hour-hand of the clock, when suddenly a meteor flashed down the sky, and I realized that my submarine of a few moments before had been only the reflection of another shooting star.

As I stopped on the porch with my pitcher, the open door made a long lane of light. Just across the creek, not fifty feet away, sounded a crash in the brush, and there in the spotlight, held by the glare, stood a big buck. For a moment I looked right into his beautiful, liquid, gleaming eyes. Then, with a snort, he plunged into the woods and was gone. For years I had tramped through the barrens and had found the tracks of the deer that still live not thirty miles from the third largest city in America, but until that night I had never seen one.

It grew colder and colder, and the little cabin snapped and cracked with the frost. Banking up the fireplace with logs, I pulled my bed up into the circle of heat, and fell asleep to the flickering of the fire and the croon of the wind among the pine trees outside. Through the window I could see the winter sky ablaze with stars, while the late moon shone like a bowl of frozen gold through the black tree-trunks.

The next morning I had to leave on the nine-o’clock train; and so I rose early and after breakfast took a last walk down to Lower Mill and back, to see if I could add any more winter birds to my list. It was a cold, clear, snapping winter morning, and as the sun came up through the pine trees I met first one and then another of the bird-folk abroad after their breakfasts. First I heard the “Pip, pip!” of the downy woodpecker, all black and white, with a bloodstain at the back of his head. He is a tree-climber who can go up a tree head-foremost, but must always back down. The nuthatches, with their white cheeks and grunting notes, can go up and down a tree either head-first or tail-first and the last of the tree-climbers, the brown creeper, climbs up in a spiral, but has to fly down.

Farther on, I heard the call of the big hairy woodpecker, which looks almost like the downy except that he is nearly twice as large. He was drilling a hole in the under side of a branch and sucking out hibernating ants with his long, sticky trident tongue. Next came a tree sparrow, with his white wing-bar and brown-red patch on the crown of his head. He was busily scratching on the ground; he is called a tree sparrow because never by any chance is he found in a tree. On the side of a white-oak tree a bit of bark seemed to move upward in a spiral, and I recognized the brown creeper, the last of the climbers. He went up the tree in a series of tiny hops and then, true to his training, flew down and started up again.

As I turned the curve by Lower Mill, I saw in a thicket near the dam a number of white-throated sparrows, with their striped white heads and white throat-patches. Near them suddenly hopped a bird that ought to have been far south. It was reddish brown with a long tail, and I recognized the female chewink. She hopped around and scratched among the leaves like a little hen, in true chewink style, as if the month were April instead of January.

I hurried around a bend in the road and heard over my head a series of loud pips, much like the note of an English sparrow. I looked up—and there was my great adventure. A little locust tree was filled with a flock of plump, large birds. At first I thought that they were cedar birds, but in a moment I caught sight of their coloring. Six of the males out of the flock of seventy-four were in full plumage. Their forked tails were velvet black. Their wings were the golden white of old ivory, with a broad black edge, their heads grayish black, and their breasts and backs a deep, rich gold; and, strangest of all, their thick beaks were of a greenish-white color.

It was a great moment. For the first time in my life I had met the evening grosbeaks, and had found what afterwards proved to be the largest flock ever reported of this rare bird of the far north so far south. For a delightful hour I followed them. They were restless, but not shy. Sometimes they alighted on the ground and then flew up all together, like a flock of starlings. They looked like overgrown goldfinches, just as the pine grosbeak looks like an overgrown purple finch, and the blue grosbeak of the south for all the world like a monstrous indigo bunting. As I followed them, suddenly I heard a sharp chip, and to my delight there flashed into sight the crested cardinal grosbeak, blood-red against the snow. For a moment the lithe, nervous, flaming bird of the south met its squat, strong, stolid cousin of the far north.

I could come quite near without alarming them, and then suddenly they would all fly away together to some other tree without any apparent reason. Besides the sparrow-like note that I first heard, they had a sort of trilling chirp. Once they all started like a flock of goldfinches or grackles in a chirping chorus. When they flew, they sometimes gave a single, clear flight-note, but never made a sound when feeding on the ground. The birds had short, slightly forked tails, and the yellow ring around the eye gave them, when seen in profile, a curious spectacled appearance; while the huge beak and short tail made them seem clumsy as compared with the other grosbeaks. The plumage of the females showed mottled black-and-white wings and greenish-yellow backs and breasts. The iris of the eye in both sexes was red, the legs of a bluish-gray pink, and the feet of a grayish-pink color.

Later I found that the birds fed on the berries of the poison ivy, red cedar, climbing bittersweet, and the buds and embryo needles of the pitch pine, together with the seeds of the box elder. The favorite food of the flock that I watched seemed always to be the pits of the wild black cherry (Prunus serotina). They would take the pits well out of sight back into their beaks, keeping their bills half open in a comical manner, as if they had a bone in the throat. A second later there would be a cracking noise and out would drop two nicely split segments of the cherry pits, the meat having been swallowed. Sometimes in the trees they would sidle along the limbs exactly as a parrot does along its perch.

The authorities state that the evening grosbeak has no immature plumage, but passes after its first moulting immediately into full plumage. I saw one, however, that I am sure was in immature plumage. The back was yellowish instead of being gray, like the females’, and the wings were of a dirty white color instead of being mottled black and white, like the plumage of the females, or half black and half white, like the plumage of the males. Both sexes seemed to have the same call and gave it equally often.

The history of the evening grosbeak illustrates the far-reaching and never-ending consequences of a falsehood. This bit of moralizing is called forth because of the name of this sorely misdescribed bird. In three languages, English, Greek and Latin, the myth is perpetuated that the evening grosbeak, or Hesperiphona vespertina, sings only at twilight. It all began in 1823, when one Major Delafield, a boundary agent of the United States government, was camping northwest of Lake Superior. There he met a flock of evening grosbeaks in the twilight, and instantly jumped to the conclusion that the birds were accustomed to spend the day in the dark recesses of impassable swamps and come out and sing only at evening.

As a matter of fact, the evening grosbeak goes to bed at dark, like all other respectable, reputable birds. Its song is a wandering, jerky warble that the singer himself recognizes as a miserable failure, for he often stops and looks discontented and then remains silent for a minute before trying again. It sounds like the early part of a robin’s song, but is always suddenly checked as if the performer were out of breath. The guess of the imaginative major was later elaborated by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Nuttall, and even by later ornithologists,—Coues among them,—not one of whom had ever seen or heard the bird. Coues’s description in his “Key to North American Birds” is worth quoting as a specimen of the rhetoric in which a past generation of ornithologists dared to indulge.

“A bird of distinguished appearance, whose very name suggests the far-away land of the dipping sun and the tuneful romance which the wild bird throws around the close of day. Clothed in striking color contrast of black, white and gold, he seems to represent the allegory of diurnal transmutation, for his sable pinions close around the brightness of his vesture, as night encompasses golden hues of sunset, while the clear white space enfolded in these tints foretells the dawn of the morrow.”

That morning I knew nothing of the history or the habits of this unknown and misrepresented bird. All I knew was that for me the twenty-ninth day of January, 1917, would be marked in my calendar forever by a bird from the north, all dusky gold and velvet black and ivory white—the Day of the Evening Grosbeak.

At last the time came to leave them. As I started back for home, the sun showed through the trees like a vast red coal, with a smoke of clouds drifting across its face, and I traveled back to town in the full glory of a clear winter morning, filled with the measureless content of a great discovery. It was good to be alive and to look forward to more work and to more glorious, adventure-filled runaway days.

V
THE RAVEN’S NEST

After all, the Rosicrucians were an ignorant lot. They spent their days over alembics, cucurbits, and crucibles—yet they grew old. In our days many men—and a few women—have discovered the Elixir of Youth—but never indoors. The prescription is a simple one. Mix a hobby with plenty of sky-air, shake well, and take twice a week. I know a railroad official who retired when he was seventy. “He’ll die soon,” observed his friends kindly. Instead, he began to collect native orchids from all points of the compass. Now he is too busy tramping over mountains and through woods and marshes even to think of dying. Anyway, he would not have time until he has found the ram’s-head and the crane’s-bill orchids and finished his monograph on the Habenaria. He will never grow old.

Neither will that other friend of mine who collects fresh-water pearls, nor the one who makes me visit black-snake and rattlesnake dens with him every spring, nor those others who spend their time in collecting butterflies, beetles, wasps, and similar bric-a-brac. As for those four abandoned oölogists who have hunted with me for years, they will be young at a hundred. They rank high in their respective callings. Yet from February, when the great horned owl begins its nest, until the goldfinch lays her white eggs in July, the four spend every holiday and vacation hunting birds’ nests.

Personally I collect only notes, out-of-door secrets, and little everyday adventures. Bird-songs, flower-fields, and friendships with the wild-folk mean far more to me than cabinets of pierced eggs, dried flowers, stuffed birds, and tanned skins. Nor am I much of a hunter. When it comes to slaughtering defenseless animals with high-powered guns, I prefer a position in an abattoir. One can kill more animals in a day, and with less exertion. Yet my collecting and sporting friends make allowances for my vagaries and take me with them on their journeyings. Wherefore it happened that in early March I received a telegram. “Raven’s nest located. Come if you are man enough.”

Now a middle-aged lawyer and the father of a family has no business ravening along the icy and inaccessible cliffs which that gifted fowl prefers for nursery purposes. I have, however, a maxim of Thoreau which I furbish up for just such occasions. “A man sits as many risks as he runs,” wrote that wanderer in the woods. Accordingly the next morning found me two hundred miles to the north, plodding through a driving snow-storm toward Seven Mountains, with the first man in recent years to find the nest of a northern raven in Pennsylvania.

For fifteen freezing miles we clambered over and around three of the seven. By the middle of the afternoon we reached a cliff hidden behind thickets of rhododendron. In the meantime the snow had changed to a lashing rain, probably the coldest that has ever fallen on the North American continent. Ploughing through slush, the black rhododendron stems twisted around us like wet rubber, and the hollow green leaves funneled ice-water down our backs and into our ears. Breaking through the last of the thickets, we at length reached a little brook which ran along the foot of the cliff. A hundred feet above, out from the middle of the cliff stretched a long tongue of rock. Over this the cliff arched like a roof, with a space between which widened toward the tip of the tongue. In a niche above this cleft a dark mass showed dimly through the rain.

“The nest!” muttered the Collector hoarsely, pouring a pint or so of rain-water down my neck from his hat-brim as he bent toward me. I stared with all my eyes, at last one of the chosen few to see the nest of a Pennsylvania raven. It was made of large sticks. The fresh broken ends and the droppings on the cliff-side showed that it was a recent one. There were no signs of either of the birds. We solemnly removed our coats and sweaters and prepared for the worst. To me the cliff looked much like the Matterhorn, only slipperier. The Collector, however, was most reassuring. He told me that the going looked worse than it really was, and that, anyway, if I did fall, death would be so nearly instantaneous as to involve little if any suffering.

Thus encouraged, I followed him gruntingly up a path which had evidently been made by a chamois or an ibex. At last I found myself perched on a shelf of stone about the width of my hand. The Collector, who was above me on an even smaller foothold, took this opportunity to tell me that the rare Allegheny cave-rat was found on this cliff, and nearly fell off his perch trying to point out to me a crevice where he had once seen the mass of sticks, stones, leaves, feathers, and bones with which these versatile animals barricade their passage-ways. I refused to turn my head. That day I was risking my life for ravens, not rats. Above us was the long, rough tongue of rock. Below us, a far hundred feet, the brook wound its way through snow-covered boulders.

Again the Collector led the way. Hooking both arms over the tongue of rock above him, he drew himself up until his chest rested on the edge, and then, sliding toward the precipice, managed to wriggle up in some miraculous way without slipping off. From the top of the tongue he clambered up to the niche where the nest was, calling down to me to follow. Accordingly I left my shelf and hung sprawlingly on the tongue; but there was no room to push my way up between it and the rock-roof above.

“Throw your legs straight out,” counseled the Collector from above, “and let yourself slide.”

I tried conscientiously, but it was impossible. My sedentary, unadventurous legs simply would not whirl out into space. At last, under the jeers of my friend, I shut my eyes and, kicking out mightily, found myself sliding toward eternity. Just before I reached it, under the Collector’s bellowed instructions, I thrust my left arm up as far as I could, and found a hand-hold on the slippery rock. After getting my breath, I managed to wriggle up through the crevice and lay safe on the top of the tongue. The niche above was not large enough for us both, so the Collector came down while I took his place. I was lashed by a freezing rain, my numb hands were cut and bleeding, and there were ten weary miles still ahead. Yet that moment was worth all that it cost. There is an indescribable fascination and triumph in sharing a secret with the wild-folk, which can be understood only by the initiate. The living naturalists who had looked into the home of the Northern raven in Pennsylvania could be counted on the thumb and first three fingers of one hand. At last the little finger belonged to me.

The deep cup of the nest was about one foot in diameter and over a yard across on the outside. It was firmly anchored on the shelf of rock, the structure being built into the crevices and made entirely of dead oak branches, some of them fully three quarters of an inch in diameter. It looked from a distance like an enormous crow’s nest. The cup itself was some six inches deep, and lined with red and white deer-hair and some long black hairs which were probably those of a skunk. Inside, it had a little damp green moss; while the rim was made of green birch twigs bruised and hackled by the beaks of the builders. On this day, March 9, 1918, there were no eggs, although in a previous year the Collector had found two as early as February 25, when the cliffs were covered with snow; and on March 5, of another year he collected a full set of five fresh eggs, which I afterwards examined in his collection. The birds had built a nest the year before, without laying. This fact, with the absence of eggs this year, convinced the Collector that the birds were sterile from age. During the last years of their long life, which is supposed to approach a century, a pair of ravens will sometimes build, with pathetic pains, nest after nest which are never occupied by eggs. The Collector promised to show me a set, however, the next day in another nest.

At last it was time to start down. The Collector, who was waiting on his shelf, warned me that the descent was more difficult than the climb which I had just lived through, as it was necessary to slide some six feet backwards to the shelf from which we started. As I looked down the cliff-side I decided to remain with the ravens. It was not until the Collector promised most solemnly to catch me, that I at last let go and found myself back on the shelf with him. Then came another wonderful moment. “Crrruck, crrruck, crrruck,” sounded hoarsely from the valley below—a note like that of a deep-voiced crow with a bad cold.

“Hurry!” urged the Collector; “it’s one of the old birds coming back.”

I claim to have hurried as much as any man of my age could be expected to do, but by the time I had reached the path the wary raven had disappeared. I clambered down the cliff while the Collector reproached me for my senile slowness. We stopped to rest at the foot, and I was just telling him that the Cornishmen hate the raven because to their ears he always cries “Corpse, corpse!” when suddenly the bird itself came back again. It flew across the valley and alighted on a tree-top by the opposite cliff, looking like a monster crow, being about one-third longer. One might mistake a crow for a raven, but never a raven for a crow. If there be any doubt about the bird, it is always safe to set it down as a crow.

The flight of the raven, which consisted of two flaps and a soar, and its long tail resembling that of an enormous grackle, were its most evident field-marks.

For long we sat and watched the wary birds, until, chilled through by the driving rain, we started to cover the ten miles that lay between us and the house of Squire McMahon, a mountain friend of the Collector, where we planned to pass the night. On the way the Collector told me that he saw his first raven while wandering through the mountains in the spring of 1909, and how he trailed and hunted and watched until, in 1910, he found the first nest. Since then he had found twelve. His system was a simple one. Selecting from a gazetteer a list of mountain villages with wild names, such as Bear Creek, Paddy’s Mountain, and Panther Run, he would write to the postmasters for the names of noted hunters and woodsmen. From them he would secure more or less accurate information about the haunts of ravens, which usually frequent only the loneliest and most inaccessible parts of the mountains.

The trail led through deep forests and up and across mountains, and was so covered with ice and snow as to be difficult going. At one point the Collector showed me a place where he had been walking years ago, when he suddenly became conscious that he was being followed by something or somebody. At a point where the trail doubled on itself, he ran back swiftly and silently, just in time to see a bay-lynx—which had been trailing him, as those big cats sometimes will—dive into a nearby thicket. Anon he cheered the way with snake stories, for Seven Mountains in summer swarm with rattlesnakes and copperheads.

By the time he had finished it was dark, and I thought with a great longing of food and fire—especially fire. It did not seem possible to be so cold and still live. In the very nick of time, for me at least, we caught sight of the lamplight streaming from the windows of the Squire’s house. Dripping, chilled, tired, and starving, we burst into Mrs. McMahon’s immaculate kitchen and were treated by the old couple like a pair of long-lost sons. In less than two minutes our waterlogged shoes were off, our wet coats and sogged sweaters spread out to dry, and we sat huddled over a glowing stove while Mrs. McMahon fried fish, made griddle-cakes, and brewed hot tea simultaneously and with a swiftness that just saved two lives. We ate and ate and ate and ate, and then, in a huge feather-bed, we slept and slept and slept and slept. Long after I have forgotten the difference between a tort and a contract, and whether A. Edward Newton or Marie Corelli wrote the “Amenities,” that dinner and that sleep will stand out in my memory.

The next morning we started off again in a driving snowstorm, to look at another nest some ten miles farther on. The first bird we met was a prairie horned lark flying over the valley, with its curious tossing, mounting flight, like a bunch of thistle-down. It differs from the more common horned, or shore, lark by having a white instead of a yellow throat and eye-line; and it nests in the mountain meadows in upper Pennsylvania, while its larger brother breeds in the far north.

Noon found us at a deer camp. Through the uncurtained windows we could see the mounted body of a golden eagle, which, after stalking and destroying one by one a whole flock of wild turkeys, had come to an ignoble end while gorged on the carcass of a dead deer. The man who captured it by throwing his coat over its head thought at first that it was a turkey buzzard, which southern bird, curiously enough, finds its way through the valleys up into these northern mountains. In fact, the Collector once found a buzzard’s nest just across a ravine from the nest of a raven. Beyond the camp, on the other side of a rushing torrent, we found another raven’s nest swaying in the gale, in the very top of a slender forty-foot white pine, the only raven’s nest the Collector had ever found in a tree. It was deserted, and we reached home late that night with frost-bitten faces and ears, and without a sight of the eggs of the northern raven.

The next day we took a train, and traveled forty miles down the river to where, on a cliff overhanging the water, a pair of ravens had nested for the last fifty years. There we found numerous old nests, but never a trace of any that were fresh. There too we found a magnificent wild turkey hanging dead in a little apple tree; it had come to a miserable end by catching the toes of one foot in between two twigs in such a way that it could not release itself. The bright red color of its legs distinguished it from a tame turkey. The Collector confided to me that the ambition of his life was to find the nest of a wild turkey, which is the rarest of all Pennsylvania nests. Next to it from a collecting standpoint come the nests of the Northern raven, pileated woodpecker, and Blackburnian warbler, in the order named.

March 12, 1919, found me again on a raven hunt with the Collector. Before sunrise I was dropped from a sleeper at a little mountain station set in a hill country full of broad fields, swift streams, and leafless trees, flanked by dark belts of pines and hemlocks. Beyond the hills was raven-land, lonely, wind-swept, full of lavender and misty-purple mountains, with now and then a gap showing in their ramparts. It was in these gaps that the ravens nested, always on the north side, farthest from the sun.

Nearby was Treaster’s Valley, which old Dan Treaster won from a pack of black wolves before the Revolution. When he lay a-dying, three quarters of a century later, the wailing howl of a wolf-pack sounded outside his cabin, although wolves had been gone from the Valley for fifty years. Old Dan sat up with the death-sweat on his forehead and grinned. “They’ve come to see me off,” he whispered and fell back dead.

They bred hunters in that Valley. Peter Penz, the Indian fighter, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday by killing a red bear, came from there. So did Jacob Quiggle, who killed a maned panther one winter night, under the light of a wind-swept moon, with his famous gun, Black Sam. Over on Panther’s Run not ten miles away, lived Solomon Miller, who shot the last wood-bison, and died at the age of eighty-eight, clapping his hands and shouting the chorus of a hunting-song.

As the light began to show in the eastern sky, came the first bird-notes of the day. The caw of a crow, a snatch of song-sparrow melody, the chirp of a robin, the fluted alto note of a blue-bird, and the squeal of a red-tailed hawk sounded before the sun came up.

A change of trains, and I met the Collector, as enthusiastic as ever. Already that year he had found six ravens’ nests with eggs in them, but the one he had promised to show me was the best of the lot. It was located in Poe’s Gap, where local tradition hath it that the poet wooed, not unsuccessfully, a mountain girl, and wrote “The Raven” in her cabin. On the way to the Gap we heard and saw nineteen different kinds of birds, including siskin, fox sparrows, and killdeer, and saw a buzzard sail on black-fringed wings over the peaks. On a farmer’s barn we saw a goshawk nailed, its blue-gray back and finely penciled breast unmistakable, even after the winter storms.

As we entered the Gap, patches of snow showed here and there, and a mad mountain brook of foaming gray water came frothing and raging to meet us. When we were full two hundred and fifty yards away from the nest, the female raven flapped and soared away. The nest itself was only thirty feet from the ground, on a shelf protected by a protruding ledge, some ten feet down from the top of the cliffs. Rigging a rope to a tree, I managed to swarm up and look at last on the eggs of a Northern raven. They were three in number, a full clutch. The number ranges from three to five, very rarely six, with one instance of seven. The eggs themselves were half as large again as those of a crow, and all different in coloration. One was light-blue-flecked and speckled with brown and lavender; another heavily marked with lavender and greenish-brown; while the last was of a solid greenish-brown color.

The nest itself faced the Gap, and from it one could look clear across the forest to the settled country beyond, while behind the cliff stretched a range of low, unexplored mountains. The nest itself was made of smaller sticks than the one I had seen over at Seven Mountains, and had a double lining of brown and white deer-hair, a fresh lining having been laid over that of the year before. As we climbed to the nest, the ravens soared near, giving only the hoarse “Crrruck.” They have also a soft love-note, which cannot be heard fifty yards away and sounds something like the syllables “Ga-gl-gl-gli.” As they soared near us, their plumage shone like black glass, and we could see the long tapered feathers of the neck swell whenever either of them croaked. They had a peculiar trick of gliding side by side and suddenly touching wings, overlapping each other for an instant. While we watched them, a red-shouldered hawk unwarily approached the Gap. In an instant, the male raven was upon him, and there was a sharp fight. The Buteo was not to be driven away easily, and made brave play with beak and talons; but he never had a chance. The raven glided round and round him with wonderful speed and smoothness, driving in blow after blow with his heavy, punishing beak, until the hawk was glad to escape.

For long and long I watched the dark, wise mysterious birds circle through the blue sky. As I sat in their eyrie, I could look far, far across the forests and the ranges of hills, to where the ploughed fields began. Perhaps that poet whose heart-strings were a lute had looked from that same raven-cliff before he went back to die among the tame folk, and wished that he could stay in wild-folk land where he belonged.

VI
HIDDEN TREASURE

It cost me an appendix to become a treasure-hunter, but it was worth the price. I really had very little use for that appendix anyway, while my membership in the Order of Treasure-Hunters has brought me in several million dollars’ worth of health and happiness.

It all began when I was sent from a city hospital to an old farmhouse in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, with instructions to avoid all but the most ladylike kind of exercise. Accordingly one morning I found myself tottering feebly along a wood-road that led over Pond Hill, highly resolved to walk to Hen’s Pine and back. This was the lone tree which stood on the crest of the wooded hill which, half a century ago, old Hen, a freed slave, had begged from the charcoal-burners when they coaled that region. Hen’s old horse, Bill, is buried at its foot, and Hen had hoped to lie there himself with his axe, his fiddle, and his whip. Instead, he sleeps in a little graveyard on a bare hill beside his old master.

My path had just crossed a round green circle in the woods where an old charcoal-pit had set its seal forever. Suddenly a brown bird flew up from beside the road a few yards ahead of me. If she had kept quiet, I never would have learned her secret. When, however, she came back, flying from branch to branch with fluttering wings and jerking tail, keeping up at the same time a rattle of alarm-notes like a tiny machine-gun, even a novice like myself would suspect a nest.

Fortunately a broken hazel bush marked the exact spot from which she had flown. On going there, and looking carefully near its base, I found what has always seemed to me one of the most beautifully hidden nests of all the hundreds which I have seen since—perhaps because it was my first rare nest. It was roofed in by the split hazel-branch, and made of woven dry grass and leaves, with a scanty lining of horse-hair and a flooring of leaf-fragments. Inside were five eggs. Four of them were bluish-white, with aureoles of reddish-brown blotches around the blunt ends; but the fifth was larger, and was specked and splashed with blotches of rufous and brown-purple. Long afterwards I learned that this last egg was the fatal gift of that vampire the cow-bird, and that by leaving it there I had doomed the four legitimate future birds of that nest to certain death. Sooner or later the deadly changeling would hatch from that egg and roll its foster-brothers out of the nest to starve.

That day, however, I was ignorant even of the name of the bird whose nest I had found. For long I stood and gloated like a miser over the little jewel-casket which the mother-bird had shown me, and for the first time realized that anywhere in the woods and fields I might come upon other treasure-hordes of the same kind. Then and there I became a treasure-hunter. Ever since then I leave my treasures where I find them, so that my recollections of them may not be marred by any memories of fluttering, mourning mother birds. Aside from any sentimental reasons, it has always seemed to me that he who takes the eggs which he has discovered is guilty of the economic error of spending his principal. If left undisturbed, the nest will pay dividends in the way of information and observations which are worth more than the mere possession of the pierced and empty eggs.

All the time that I was studying this nest both the parent birds were moving around me in anxious circles. At times the mother bird would drop her wings and scurry along just in front of me, pretending that she was wounded nigh unto death and that, if I would but follow her away from the nest, she could easily be caught. Both the birds had brown backs and buff breasts and sides spotted with black, and constantly tilted their tails and walked instead of hopping. As soon as I came back to the farmhouse, I rummaged through colored charts and bird-books until I had decided that the nest was that of a fox sparrow, which also has a brown back and a spotted breast. It was not until another year that I learned that the fox sparrow nests in the far North and that the bird whose home I had discovered was none other than the oven-bird—or golden-crowned accentor, to give him his more sonorous title. This is the bird which comes in late April or early May and sings all through the woods the best example of a crescendo song in all bird-music. His nest on the ground usually has a domed overhanging roof which makes it resemble an old-fashioned Dutch oven.

In spite of my ignorance there followed the happiest week of my life. I forgot that I was an invalid, as well as all the injunctions of my doctor. From morning until night I hunted birds’ nests. As usual fortune favored the novice, and I found nests that first week which I have found but few times since.

The very next morning, on the other side of Pond Hill I turned a sudden corner of the path through the dim green silence, and stepped right into a breakfast-party. Mrs. Ruffed Grouse, known in that part of the country as partridge, was breakfasting in the open path with at least a dozen little grouse—or is it greese. Although taken by surprise, neither she nor her children hesitated for the fraction of a second. Falling upon the ground, she rolled and flapped as if in the last agonies of death, whining like a puppy and dragging herself almost to my feet. I looked away from the covey for a minute, to watch the bird struggling and whining at my very feet. As I stretched my hand out toward her, she feebly flopped away, still apparently well within reach. I took a step or so after her, to see if she would really permit herself to be caught. Suddenly realizing that she was only decoying me away from her brood, I turned back. Although I had gone less than six feet, and the little birds had been huddled together close to me on the bare path, they had absolutely disappeared. It seemed impossible that in a few seconds they could have gained the shelter of the woods or could have found cover in the scanty grass and scattered leaves close at hand. Not one could I find although I searched and searched. When I turned back the mother grouse was gone also, although I could hear her whining through the bushes.

Years later, again at the edge of the woods, one day early in June, I came upon another mother grouse leading a covey of little chicks, evidently just hatched, in single file out from the woods into the open, probably to catch grasshoppers. She went through the same performance as the first one, but this time I selected the two nearest chicks, which stood directly in front of me, and resolved that nothing would make me take my eyes away from them. Even as I watched, they melted away into the grass. One I found lying motionless on its side under a big brown leaf, looking exactly like its covering. The other I never did find. At first the leaf-hidden partridge refused to move even when I touched it, until I picked it up. Then it gave a shrill peep almost like a little chicken. Instantly the poor mother bird rushed up to my very feet and dashed her wings frantically against my legs, jumping up from the ground and whining so piteously that, after I had stroked her fuzzy, soft little chick, I put it back on the ground without any further examination. At once it disappeared, and the mother bird, still whining, also sidled away into the woods.

I hid behind an apple tree and waited nearly half an hour. At last from the woods sounded a low “Cluck, cluck, cluck,” and instantly nine little partridge chicks, one by one, started up from the most impossible hiding-places. It was like watching a resurrection. Some came from under leaves, others out of clumps of grass, and two or three rose from the almost bare ground, where they had lain in perfect concealment. Falling into single file, they hurried like little ghosts into the thicket, and the last I heard of that little family was a few soft and very satisfied clucks from the hidden mother bird.

During that golden week of treasure-hunting I found a number of common nests which, although everyday affairs to an experienced ornithologist, were then, as they are now, a source of never-ending interest. There was the robin’s nest partly made of wool, which I found in a thorn-bush in the sheep-pasture, with its four long, sky-blue eggs. Over in the woods, just back of the deserted house where Nat Bunker, the Indian, used to weave wonderful baskets out of maiden-hair stems, I found the nest of a wood thrush in a witch-hazel about seven feet from the ground, by the simple process of running my head against the bush while going through the thick undergrowth. This accident bunted the mother thrush off the nest; and pulling the bush down, I peered in and saw three light-blue eggs.

If I had taken these eggs, as some bird’s-nesters do, I never should have had the experience of actually seeing a little wood thrush come into the world. It was the last morning of my stay, and I had been making my round of nests, examining each one and beginning the bird-notes which I have kept up ever since. As I pulled the nest down and looked at the three eggs, I suddenly saw a tiny black speck appear out of the side of one. Then the shell cracked and split, and I realized that what I had seen was the beak of the little bird within. In a moment the crack spread, and finally, with a tremendous effort, one half of the blue shell slid off and there in front of me, snugly resting in the other half of the shell, was the naked baby-thrush, its long neck curled down beside its round stomach. Raising its blind head, it pressed against the confining shell, while its whole bare body shook with the heart-throbs of a new life. I realized that before my eyes this bare, blind bird was passing from one world into another; and when the birth was finally accomplished and, free from the prisoning shell, the little thrush lay panting on the bottom of the soft nest, I turned away with a certain sense of uplift that I had watched a fellow creature win a battle for a higher life.

It was another wood thrush’s nest that same week, in the deep of a thicket, that gave me still another experience. The nest was in a tiny bush much lower than I have ever found a wood thrush’s nest since. When the mother thrush left the nest, she wasted no time in idle alarm-notes, but, circling around the bush, flew straight for my face. I ducked, and she went over me, only to turn and come back; and if I had not guarded myself by striking at her with my hands, I have no manner of doubt that she would have struck me with her beak.

In only one other instance in many years of bird’s-nesting have I ever been actually attacked by a nesting bird. Once in the twilight I had found my first and last nest of a Kentucky warbler on the edge of a wood. Taking a short cut through the trees, I was instantly assailed by a pair of screech-owls, which flew directly at my face, snapping their beaks and making little wailing notes. The light was so dim and their flight so swift, that I actually ran out into the open, fearing lest they might land with beak or claw on my eyes.

It was on the third day that I found in a white-thorn bush the little horse-hair nest of the chipping sparrow. This last summer, in the depths of Northern Canada, while hunting for such rare nests as the bay-breasted, the yellow-palm and the Tennessee warblers, I found the same little horse-hair home of the chipping sparrow. I thought with this my last, as I did with my first, that there are no eggs of American birds more beautiful than those little blue, brown-flecked eggs of the dear gentle little chippy.

That same day, on the edge of the thick woods near the schoolhouse, I found swinging from maple saplings, four and five feet from the ground, the beautiful little woven baskets, thatched on the outside with white birch-bark and lined within with pine-needles, of the red-eyed vireo, with the black line through and the white line above her red eye. In the vast, bare hardhack pasture on the slope of Pond Hill, I watched a field sparrow fly down under a hardhack bush with a bug in its beak. Hurrying there, I found on the ground, concealed by the bush, her little nest of woven grass, with four little field sparrows inside, whose gaping beaks kept both father and mother field sparrow busy all day to fill them. As the parent birds flitted around me, I could see plainly the pink beak which distinguishes the field sparrow from all others of its family. Beside the brook, among the cat-tails on the ground, I found the rough nest of the red-winged blackbird, with its four eggs scrawled with strange black hieroglyphics.

The fourth day was another treasure-trove day. Just at dawn, in a dew-drenched thicket of spirea, I found three nests not six feet apart. In one, root-lined and thatched with strips of grape-vine bark, glowed the four deep blue eggs of the cat bird. The next nest, singularly deep and made of dried grass, was owned by a black-blue indigo bunting who, in spite of his intense coloring, seemed content with three washed-out white eggs and a light-brown wife. On the last nest the bird was brooding, and showed the golden-crowned head and the chestnut band along the side which has given its name to the chestnut-sided warbler. The nest, a humble affair of grass and hair, sheltered four wonderful eggs, pink-white, spotted at the largest end with flecks of chocolate and lilac and umber. Back of the thickets tottered an old, old house. For fifty years it had been leased to the wild-folk. As I looked at it, one of them flitted out of the cellar-way, a gray bird whose name-note was phœbe. Just within the doorway, on an oak beam, I found her new-finished nest of fresh, bright, green moss.

All that morning I followed orchid-haunted paths through dim aisles of high pine trees without finding a nest. When I gave up hunting for them, they appeared. Toward noon I had put together a pocket rod and was wading down the bed of a little brook, to catch a few trout for lunch. In a little pool at the foot of a laurel bush, I landed a plump jeweled fish. I cast again, and my hook caught a low hanging branch. I gave the bough a shake, and from the foot of the bush a pale brown bird stole out. A moment later I was looking at my first veery’s nest. It seemed strange to meet face to face this dweller in the dark woods. Usually I had heard his weird harp-notes from the cool green depths of the thicket, but with never a glimpse of the singer. To-day he sat on a low branch within six feet, and I could plainly see the faintly marked breast and the white spot under the beak which are the field-marks of the veery, or Wilson’s thrush. Both birds flittered around me like ghosts, saying faintly, “Wheer! wheer! wheer!” The nest was built just off the ground and lined with brown leaves, and held four of the most vivid blue eggs owned by any of the bird-folk. The eggs of the cat-bird are of a deeper blue, but the strange vivid brightness of the veery’s eggs makes all other blue eggs look faded by contrast.

All too soon my glorious week of treasure-hunting drew to a close. For the last day were reserved the best two of my bird-adventures. During the morning I had followed a wood-road which led through dark woods into a marsh, and then up a wooded slope. I sat down to rest, and suddenly saw a gray bird fly up into a tree, alight on a limb, and before my eyes suddenly disappear. Bringing my field-glasses to bear, I discovered saddled on that limb a lichen-covered nest, which looked so exactly like the limb itself that, if the bird had not shown me her home, I would never by any chance have discovered it. It was a far climb for an invalid, but I felt that life was not worth living unless I could have a closer look at this strange nest which had flashed into sight right before my eyes. Gruntingly I clambered up the trunk, and for the first time looked into the beautiful nest of the wood pewee. It was lined with down and held four perfect eggs, pearly-white and flecked with heavy brown and black spots.

For a long time I sat perched aloft, rejoicing over every perfect detail of that nest and the eggs, and studying the gentle, silent, anxious parent birds, of a dark-brownish-gray with two white wing-bars and whitish under-parts. I went back to lunch feeling that my last day had been well spent. However, the best was yet to be. I realize from later experiences in bird’s nesting that all this has an impossible sound, but I can only say that I am setting down the happenings of this week of treasure-hunting exactly as they came, and as they appear in the battered canvas-bound note-book in which I scrawled my field-notes that summer. The Wild Folk had evidently decided to celebrate my discovery of their world by granting me seven days of nest-finding rarely vouchsafed even to veteran ornithologists.