In New England Fields and Woods

TWO SHOTS

A boy of fourteen, alert, but too full of life to move slowly and cautiously, is walking along an old road in the woods, a road that winds here and there with meanderings that now seem vagrant and purposeless but once led to the various piles of cordwood and logs for whose harvesting it was hewn. Goodly trees have since grown up from saplings that the judicious axe then scorned. Beeches, whose flat branches are shelves of old gold; poplars, turned to towers of brighter metal by the same alchemy of autumn; and hemlocks, pyramids of unchanging green, shadow the leaf-strewn forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting of gray and russet stumps. How happy the boy is in the freedom of the woods; proud to carry his first own gun, as he treads gingerly but somewhat noisily over the fallen leaves and dry twigs, scanning with quick glances the thickets, imagining himself the last Mohican on the warpath, or Leather-Stocking scouting in the primeval wilderness.

Under his breath he tells the confiding chickadees and woodpeckers what undreamed-of danger they would be in from such a brave, were he not in pursuit of nobler game. Then he hears a sudden rustle of the dry leaves, the quit! quit! of a partridge, catches a glimpse of a rapidly running brown object, which on the instant is launched into a flashing thunderous flight. Impelled by the instinct of the born sportsman, he throws the gun to his shoulder, and scarcely with aim, but in the direction of the sound, pulls trigger and fires.

On the instant he is ashamed of his impulsive haste, which fooled him into wasting a precious charge on the inanimate evergreen twigs and sere leaves that come dropping and floating down to his shot, and is thankful that he is the only witness of his own foolishness.

But what is that? Above the patter and rustle of falling twigs and leaves comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid beat of wings upon the leaf-strewn earth. With heart beating as fast he runs toward the sound, afraid to believe his senses, when he sees a noble grouse fluttering out feebly his last gasp. He cannot be sure that it is not all a dream that may vanish in a breath, till he has the bird safe in his hand, and then he is faint with joy. Was there ever such a shot? Would that all the world were here to see, for who can believe it just for the telling? There never will be another such a bird, nor such a shot, for him. He fires a dozen ineffectual ones at fair marks that day, but the glory of that one shot would atone for twice as many misses, and he need not tell of them, only of this, whereof he bears actual proof, though he himself can hardly accept it, till again and again he tests it by admiring look and touch.

Years after the killing of grouse on the wing has become a matter-of-course occurrence in his days of upland shooting, the memory of this stands clearest and best. Sixty years later the old wood road winds through the same scene, by some marvel of kindliness or oversight, untouched by the devastating axe, unchanged but by the forest growth of half a century and its seemly and decorous decay. A thicker screen of undergrowth borders the more faintly traced way. The golden-brown shelves of the beech branches sweep more broadly above it, the spires of the evergreens are nearer the sky, and the yellow towers of the poplars are builded higher, but they are the same trees and beneath them may yet be seen the gray stumps and trunks mouldered to russet lines, of their ancient brethren who fell when these were saplings.

The gray-bearded man who comes along the old wood road wonders at the little change so many years have made in the scene of the grand achievements of his youth, and in his mind he runs over the long calendar to assure himself that so many autumns have glowed and faded since that happy day. How can he have grown old, his ear dull to the voices of the woods, his sight dim with the slowly but surely falling veil of coming blindness, so that even now the road winds into a misty haze just before him, yet these trees be young and lusty?

As they and the unfaded page of memory record the years, it was but a little while ago that his heart was almost bursting with pride of that first triumph. Would that he might once more feel that delicious pang of joy.

Hark! There is the quit! quit! of a grouse, and there another and another, and the patter and rustle of their retreating footsteps, presently launching into sudden flight, vaguely seen in swift bolts of gray, hurtling among gray tree trunks and variegated foliage. True to the old instinct his gun leaps to his shoulder, and he fires again and again at the swift target. But the quick eye no longer guides the aim, the timely finger no longer pulls the trigger, and the useless pellets waste themselves on the leaves and twigs.

The woods are full of grouse, as if all the birds of the region had congregated here to mock his failing sight and skill. On every side they burst away from him like rockets, and his quick but futile charges in rapid succession are poured in their direction, yet not a bird falls, nor even a feather wavers down through the still October air. His dim eyes refuse to mark down the birds that alight nearest; he can only vaguely follow their flight by the whirring rush of wings and the click of intercepting branches.

He is not ashamed of his loss of skill, only grieved to know that his shooting days are over, yet he is glad there is no one near to see his failure. He makes renunciation of all title to the name of a crack shot, too well knowing that this is no brief lapse of skill, but the final, inevitable falling off of the quick eye and sure hand. Slowly and sadly he makes his way to where the shaded path merges into the sunny clearing. There, from the cover of the last bush, a laggard bird springs as if thrown from a catapult, describing in his flight an arc of a great circle, and clearly defined against the steel-blue sky.

Again the gun springs instinctively to the shoulder, the instantaneous aim is taken well ahead on the line of flight, the trigger pressed in the nick of time, the charge explodes, and out of a cloud of feathers drifting and whirling in the eddies of his own wing-beats, the noble bird sweeps downward in the continuation of the course that ends with a dull thud on the pasture sward.

The old sportsman lifts his clean-killed bird without a thrill of exultation—he is only devoutly thankful for the happy circumstance which made successful the last shot he will ever fire, and that not as a miss he may remember it. Henceforth untouched by him his gun shall hang upon the wall, its last use linked with the pleasant memory of his last shot.

NOVEMBER DAYS

In a midsummer sleep one dreams of winter, its cold, its silence and desolation all surrounding him; then awakes, glad to find himself in the reality of the light and warmth of summer.

Were we dreaming yesterday of woods more gorgeous in their leafage than a flower garden in the flush of profusest bloom, so bright with innumerable tints that autumnal blossoms paled beside them as stars at sunrise? Were we dreaming of air soft as in springtime, of the gentle babble of brooks, the carol of bluebirds, the lazy chirp of crickets, and have we suddenly awakened to be confronted by the desolation of naked forests, the more forlorn for the few tattered remnants of gay apparel that flutter in the bleak wind? To hear but the sullen roar of the chill blast and the clash of stripped boughs, the fitful scurry of wind-swept leaves and the raving of swollen streams, swelling and falling as in changing stress of passion, and the heavy leaden patter of rain on roof and sodden leaves and earth?

Verily, the swift transition is like a pleasant dream with an unhappy awakening. Yet not all November days are dreary. Now the sun shines warm from the steel-blue sky, its eager rays devour the rime close on the heels of the retreating shadows, and the north wind sleeps. The voice of the brimming stream falls to an even, softer cadence, like the murmur of pine forests swept by the light touch of a steady breeze.

Then the wind breathes softly from the south, and there drifts with it from warmer realms, or arises at its touch from the earth about us, or falls from the atmosphere of heaven itself, not smoke, nor haze, but something more ethereal than these: a visible air, balmy with odors of ripeness as the breath of June with perfume of flowers. It pervades earth and sky, which melt together in it, till the bounds of neither are discernible, and blends all objects in the landscape beyond the near foreground, till nothing is distinct but some golden gleam of sunlit water, bright as the orb that shines upon it. Flocks of migrating geese linger on the stubble fields, and some laggard crows flap lazily athwart the sky or perch contentedly upon the naked treetops as if they cared to seek no clime more genial. The brief heavenly beauteousness of Indian summer has fallen upon the earth, a few tranquil days of ethereal mildness dropped into the sullen or turbulent border of winter.

In November days, as in all others, the woods are beautiful to the lover of nature and to the sportsman who in their love finds the finer flavor of his pastime. Every marking of the gray trunks, each moss-patch and scale of lichen on them, is shown more distinctly now in the intercepted light, and the delicate tracery of the bare branches and their netted shadows on the rumpled carpet of the forest floor, have a beauty as distinctive as the fullness of green or frost-tinted leafage and its silhouette of shade.

No blossom is left in woods or fields, save where in the one the witch-hazel unfolds its unseasonable flowers yellow beneath cold skies, or a pink blossom of herb-robert holds out with modest bravery in a sheltered cranny of the rocks; and where in the other, the ghostly bloom of everlasting rustles above the leafless stalks in the wind-swept pastures. There are brighter flashes of color in the sombre woods where the red winter-berries shine on their leafless stems and the orange and scarlet clusters of the twining bitter-sweet light up the gray trellis of the vagrant climber.

No sense of loss or sadness oppresses the soul of the ardent sportsman as he ranges the unroofed aisles alert for the wary grouse, the skulking woodcock, full-grown and strong of wing and keen-eyed for every enemy, or the hare flashing his half-donned winter coat among the gray underbrush as he bounds away before the merry chiding of the beagles. The brown monotony of the marshes is pleasant to him as green fields, while the wild duck tarries in the dark pools and the snipe probes the unfrozen patches of ooze. To him all seasons are kind, all days pleasant, wherein he may pursue his sport, though the rain pelt him, chill winds assail him, or the summer sun shower upon him its most fervent rays, and in these changeful days of November he finds his full measure of content.

THE MUSKRAT

A little turning of nature from her own courses banishes the beaver from his primal haunts, but his less renowned and lesser cousin, the muskrat, philosophically accommodates himself to the changed conditions of their common foster mother and still clings fondly to her altered breast.

The ancient forests may be swept away and their successors disappear, till there is scarcely left him a watersoaked log to use as an intermediate port in his coastwise voyages; continual shadow may give place to diurnal sunshine, woodland to meadow and pasture, the plough tear the roof of his underground home, and cattle graze where once only the cloven hoofs of the deer and the moose trod the virgin mould, yet he holds his old place.

In the springtides of present years as in those of centuries past his whining call echoes along the changed shores, his wake seams with silver the dark garment of the water, and his comically grim visage confronts you now as it did the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days when the otter and the beaver were his familiars.

Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing crops, his food supply is constantly provided in the annual growth of the marshes. Here in banks contiguous to endless store of succulent sedge and lily roots and shell-cased tidbits of mussels, he tunnels his stable water-portaled home, and out there, by the channel's edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut before the earliest frost falls upon the marshes. In its height, some find prophecy of high or low water, and in the thickness of its walls the forecast of a mild or severe winter, but the prophet himself is sometimes flooded out of his house, sometimes starved and frozen in it.

In the still, sunny days between the nights of its unseen building, the blue spikes of the pickerel-weed and the white trinities of the arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet brightness of autumn the departing wood drake rests on the roof to preen his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. Above it the wild geese harrow the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw the veil of the long winter twilight over the muskrat's homes and haunts.

These may be gloomy days he spends groping in the dark chambers of his hut and burrow, or gathering food in the dimly lighted icy water, with never a sight of the upper world nor ever a sunbeam to warm him.

But there are more woful days when the sun and the sky are again opened to him, and he breathes the warm air of spring, hears the blackbirds sing and the bittern boom. For, amid all the gladness of nature's reawakened life, danger lurks in all his paths; the cruel, hungry trap gapes for him on every jutting log, on every feeding-bed, even in the doorway of his burrow and by the side of his house.

The trapper's skiff invades all his pleasant waters; on every hand he hears the splash of its paddles, the clank of its setting pole, and he can scarcely show his head above water but a deadly shower of lead bursts upon it. He hears the simulated call of his beloved, and voyaging hot-hearted to the cheating tryst meets only death.

At last comes the summer truce and happy days of peace in the tangled jungle of the marsh, with the wild duck and bittern nesting beside his watery path, the marsh wren weaving her rushy bower above it.

So the days of his life go on, and the days of his race continue in the land of his unnumbered generations. Long may he endure to enliven the drear tameness of civilization with a memory of the world's old wildness.

NOVEMBER VOICES

With flowers and leaves, the bird songs have faded out, and the hum and chirp of insect life, the low and bleat of herds and flocks afield, and the busy sounds of husbandry have grown infrequent. There are lapses of such silence that the ear aches for some audible signal of life; and then to appease it there comes with the rising breeze the solemn murmur of the pines like the song of the sea on distant shores, the sibilant whisper of the dead herbage, the clatter of dry pods, and the fitful stir of fallen leaves, like a scurry of ghostly feet fleeing in affright at the sound of their own passage.

The breeze puffs itself into a fury of wind, and the writhing branches shriek and moan and clash as if the lances of phantom armies were crossed in wild mêlée.

The woods are full of unlipped voices speaking one with another in pleading, in anger, in soft tones of endearment; and one hears his name called so distinctly that he answers and calls again, but no answer is vouchsafed him, only moans and shrieks and mocking laughter, till one has enough of wild voices and longs for a relapse of silence.

More softly it is broken when through the still air comes the cheery note of the chickadee and the little trumpet of his comrade the nuthatch and far away the muffled beat of the grouse's drum, or from a distance the mellow baying of a hound and its answering echoes, swelling and dying on hilltop or glen, or mingling in melodious confusion.

From skyward comes the clangor of clarions, wild and musical, proclaiming the march of gray cohorts of geese advancing southward through the hills and dales of cloudland. There come, too, the quick whistling beat of wild ducks' pinions, the cry of a belated plover, and the creaking voice of a snipe. Then the bawling of a ploughman in a far-off field—and farther away the rumble and shriek of a railroad train—brings the listening ear to earth again and its plodding busy life.

THANKSGIVING

Doubtless many a sportsman has bethought him that his Thanksgiving turkey will have a finer flavor if the feast is prefaced by a few hours in the woods, with dog and gun. Meaner fare than this day of bounty furnishes forth is made delicious by such an appetizer, and the Thanksgiving feast will be none the worse for it.

What can be sweeter than the wholesome fragrance of the fallen leaves? What more invigorating than the breath of the two seasons that we catch: here in the northward shade of a wooded hill the nipping air of winter, there where the southern slope meets the sun the genial warmth of an October day. Here one's footsteps crunch sharply the frozen herbage and the ice-bearded border of a spring's overflow; there splash in thawed pools and rustle softly among the dead leaves.

The flowers are gone, but they were not brighter than the winter berries and bittersweet that glow around one. The deciduous leaves are fallen and withered, but they were not more beautiful than the delicate tracery of their forsaken branches, and the steadfast foliage of the evergreens was never brighter. The song-birds are singing in southern woods, but chickadee, nuthatch, and woodpecker are chatty and companionable and keep the woods in heart with a stir of life.

Then from overhead or underfoot a ruffed grouse booms away into the gray haze of branches, and one hears the whirr and crash of his headlong flight long after he is lost to sight, perchance long after the echo of a futile shot has died away. Far off one hears the intermittent discharge of rifles where the shooters are burning powder for their Thanksgiving turkey, and faintly from far away comes the melancholy music of a hound. Then nearer and clearer, then a rustle of velvet-clad feet, and lo, reynard himself, the wildest spirit of the woods, materializes out of the russet indistinctness and flashes past, with every sense alert. Then the hound goes by, and footstep, voice, and echo sink into silence. For silence it is, though the silver tinkle of the brook is in it, and the stir of the last leaf shivering forsaken on its bough.

In such quietude one may hold heartfelt thanksgiving, feasting full upon a crust and a draught from the icy rivulet, and leave rich viands and costly wines for the thankless surfeiting of poorer men.

DECEMBER DAYS

Fewer and more chill have become the hours of sunlight, and longer stretch the noontide shadows of the desolate trees athwart the tawny fields and the dead leaves that mat the floor of the woods.

The brook braids its shrunken strands of brown water with a hushed murmur over a bed of sodden leaves between borders of spiny ice crystals, or in the pools swirl in slow circles the imprisoned fleets of bubbles beneath a steadfast roof of glass. Dark and sullen the river sulks its cheerless way, enlivened but by the sheldrake that still courses his prey in the icy water, and the mink that like a fleet black shadow steals along the silent banks. Gaudy wood duck and swift-winged teal have long since departed and left stream and shore to these marauders and to the trapper, who now gathers here his latest harvest.

The marshes are silent and make no sign of life, though beneath the domes of many a sedge-built roof the unseen muskrats are astir, and under the icy cover of the channels fare to and fro on their affairs of life, undisturbed by any turmoil of the upper world.

When the winds are asleep the lake bears on its placid breast the moveless images of its quiet shores, deserted now by the latest pleasure seekers among whose tenantless camps the wild wood-folk wander as fearlessly as if the foot of man had never trodden here. From the still midwaters far away a loon halloos to the winds to come forth from their caves, and yells out his mad laughter in anticipation of the coming storm. A herald breeze blackens the water with its advancing steps, and with a roar of its trumpets the angry wind sweeps down, driving the white-crested ranks of waves to assault the shores. Far up the long incline of pebbly beaches they rush, and leaping up the walls of rock hang fetters of ice upon the writhing trees. Out of the seething waters arise lofty columns of vapor, which like a host of gigantic phantoms stalk, silent and majestic, above the turmoil, till they fall in wind-tossed showers of frost flakes.

There are days when almost complete silence possesses the woods, yet listening intently one may hear the continual movement of myriads of snow fleas pattering on the fallen leaves like the soft purr of such showers as one might imagine would fall in Lilliput.

With footfall so light that he is seen close at hand sooner than heard, a hare limps past; too early clad in his white fur that shall make him inconspicuous amid the winter snow, his coming shines from afar through the gray underbrush and on the tawny leaves. Unseen amid his dun and gray environment, the ruffed grouse skulks unheard, till he bursts away in thunderous flight. Overhead, invisible in the lofty thicket of a hemlock's foliage, a squirrel drops a slow patter of cone chips, while undisturbed a nuthatch winds his spiral way down the smooth trunk. Faint and far away, yet clear, resound the axe strokes of a chopper, and at intervals the muffled roar of a tree's downfall.

Silent and moveless cascades of ice veil the rocky steeps where in more genial days tiny rivulets dripped down the ledges and mingled their musical tinkle with the songs of birds and the flutter of green leaves.

Winter berries and bittersweet still give here and there a fleck of bright color to the universal gray and dun of the trees, and the carpet of cast-off leaves and the dull hue of the evergreens but scarcely relieve the sombreness of the woodland landscape.

Spanning forest and field with a low flat arch of even gray, hangs a sky as cold as the landscape it domes and whose mountain borders lie hidden in its hazy foundations. Through this canopy of suspended snow the low noontide sun shows but a blotch of yellowish gray, rayless and giving forth no warmth, and, as it slants toward its brief decline, grows yet dimmer till it is quite blotted out in the gloom of the half-spent afternoon.

The expectant hush that broods over the forlorn and naked earth is broken only by the twitter of a flock of snow buntings which, like a straight-blown flurry of flakes, drift across the fields, and, sounding solemnly from the depths of the woods, the hollow hoot of a great owl. Then the first flakes come wavering down, then blurring all the landscape into vague unreality they fall faster, with a soft purr on frozen grass and leaves till it becomes unheard on the thickening noiseless mantle of snow. Deeper and deeper the snow infolds the earth, covering all its unsightliness of death and desolation.

Now white-furred hare and white-feathered bunting are at one with the white-clad world wherein they move, and we, so lately accustomed to the greenness of summer and the gorgeousness of autumn, wondering at the ease wherewith we accept this marvel of transformation, welcome these white December days and in them still find content.

WINTER VOICES

Out of her sleep nature yet gives forth voices betokening that life abides beneath the semblance of death, that her warm heart still beats under the white shroud that infolds her rigid breast.

A smothered tinkle as of muffled bells comes up from the streams through their double roofing of snow and ice, and the frozen pulse of the trees complains of its thralldom with a resonant twang as of a strained cord snapped asunder.

Beneath their frozen plains, the lakes bewail their imprisonment with hollow moans awakening a wild and mournful chorus of echoes from sleeping shores that answer now no caress of ripples nor angry stroke of waves nor dip and splash of oar and paddle.

The breeze stirs leafless trees and shaggy evergreens to a murmur that is sweet, if sadder than they gave it in the leafy days of summer, when it bore the perfume of flowers and the odor of green fields, and one may imagine the spirit of springtime and summer lingers among the naked boughs, voicing memory and hope.

Amid all the desolation of their woodland haunts the squirrels chatter their delight in windless days of sunshine, and scoff at biting cold and wintry blasts. The nuthatch winds his tiny trumpet, the titmouse pipes his cheery note, the jay tries the innumerable tricks of his unmusical voice, and from their rollicking flight athwart the wavering slant of snowflakes drifts the creaking twitter of buntings.

The sharp, resonant strokes of the woodman's axe and the groaning downfall of the monarchs that it lays low, the shouts of teamsters, the occasional report of a gun, the various sounds of distant farmstead life, the jangle of sleigh bells on far-off highways, the rumbling roar of a railroad train rushing and panting along its iron path, and the bellowing of its far-echoed signals, all proclaim how busily affairs of life and pleasure still go on while the summer-wearied earth lies wrapped in her winter sleep.

Night, stealing upon her in dusky pallor, under cloudy skies, or silvering her face with moonbeams and starlight, brings other and wilder voices. Solemnly the unearthly trumpet of the owl resounds from his woodland hermitage, the fox's gasping bark, wild and uncanny, marks at intervals his wayward course across the frozen fields on some errand of love or freebooting, and, swelling and falling with puff and lapse of the night wind, as mournful and lonesome as the voice of a vagrant spirit, comes from the mountain ridges the baying of a hound, hunting alone and unheeded, while his master basks in the comfort of his fireside.

THE VARYING HARE

It is wonderful that with such a host of enemies to maintain himself against, the varying hare may still be counted as one of our familiar acquaintances. Except in the depths of the great wildernesses, he has no longer to fear the wolf, the wolverine, the panther, and the lesser felidæ, but where the younger woodlands have become his congenial home, they are also the home of a multitude of relentless enemies. The hawk, whose keen eyes pierce the leafy roof of the woods, wheels above him as he crouches in his form. When he goes abroad under the moon and stars, the terrible shadow of the horned owl falls upon his path, and the fox lurks beside it to waylay him, and the clumsy raccoon, waddling home from a cornfield revel, may blunder upon the timid wayfarer.

But of all his enemies none is more inveterate than man, though he is not, as are the others, impelled by necessity, but only by that savagery, the survival of barbarism, which we dignify by the name of the sporting instinct.

Against them all, how slight seem the defenses of such a weak and timid creature. Yet impartial nature, having compassed him about with foes, has shod his feet with swiftness and silence, and clad his body with an almost invisible garment. The vagrant zephyrs touch the fallen leaves more noisily than his soft pads press them. The first snow that whitens the fading gorgeousness of the forest carpet falls scarcely more silently.

Among the tender greens of early summer and the darker verdure of midsummer, the hare's brown form is as inconspicuous as a tuft of last year's leaves, and set in the brilliancy of autumnal tints, or the russet hue of their decay, it still eludes the eye. Then winter clothes him in her own whiteness so he may sit unseen upon her lap.

When he has donned his winter suit too early and his white coat is dangerously conspicuous on the brown leaves and among the misty gray of naked undergrowth, he permits your near approach as confidently as if he were of a color with his surroundings. Is he not aware that his spotless raiment betrays him, or does he trust that he may be mistaken for a white stone or a scroll of bark sloughed from a white birch? That would hardly save him from the keener-sensed birds and beasts of prey, but may fool your dull eyes.

In summer wanderings in the woods you rarely catch sight of him, though coming upon many faintly traced paths where he and his wife and their brown babies make their nightly way among the ferns. Nor are you often favored with a sight of him in more frequent autumnal tramps, unless when he is fleeing before the hounds whose voices guide you to a point of observation. He has now no eyes nor ears for anything but the terrible clamor that pursues him wherever he turns, however he doubles. If a shot brings him down and does not kill him, you will hear a cry so piteous that it will spoil your pleasant dreams of sport for many a night.

After a snowfall a single hare will in one night make such a multitude of tracks as will persuade you that a dozen have been abroad. Perhaps the trail is so intricately tangled with a purpose of misleading pursuit, perhaps it is but the record of saunterings as idle as your own.

As thus you wander through the pearl-enameled arches, your roving glances are arrested by a rounded form which, as white and motionless as everything around it, yet seems in some way not so lifeless. You note that the broad footprints end there, and then become aware of two wide, bright eyes, unblinkingly regarding you from the fluffy tuft of whiteness. How perfectly assured he is of his invisibility, and if he had but closed his bright eyes you might not guess that he was anything but a snow-covered clump of moss. How still and breathless he sits till you almost touch him, and then the white clod suddenly flashes into life and impetuous motion, bounding away in a halo of feathery flakes as if he himself were dissolving into white vapor.

Happy he, if he might so elude all foes; but alas for him, if the swift-winged owl had been as close above him or the agile fox within leap. Then instead of this glimpse of beautiful wild life to treasure in your memory, you would only have read the story of a brief tragedy, briefly written, with a smirch of blood and a tuft of rumpled fur.

THE WINTER CAMP-FIRE

The chief requisite of a winter camp-fire is volume. The feeble flame and meagre bed of embers that are a hot discomfort to the summer camper, while he hovers over coffee-pot and frying-pan, would be no more than the glow of a candle toward tempering this nipping air. This fire must be no dainty nibbler of chips and twigs that a boy's hatchet may furnish, but a roaring devourer of logs, for whose carving the axe must be long and stoutly wielded—a very glutton of solid fuel, continually demanding more and licking with its broad red tongues at the branches that sway and toss high above in its hot breath.

So fierce is it that you approach cautiously to feed it and the snow shrinks away from it and can quench of it only the tiny sparks that are spit out upon it. You must not be too familiar with it, yet it is your friend after its own manner, fighting away for you the creeping demon of cold, and holding at bay, on the rim of its glare, the wolf and the panther.

With its friendly offices are mingled many elfish tricks. It boils your pot just to the point you wish, then boils it over and licks up the fragrant brew of celestial leaf or Javanese berry. It roasts or broils your meat to a turn, then battles with you for it and sears your fingers when you strive to snatch the morsel from its jaws, and perhaps burns it to a crisp before your very eyes, vouchsafing but the tantalizing fragrance of the feast.

Then it may fall into the friendliest and most companionable of moods, lazily burning its great billets of ancient wood while you burn the Virginian weed, singing to you songs of summer, its tongues of flame murmuring like the south wind among green leaves, and mimicking the chirp of the crickets and the cicada's cry in the simmer of exuding sap and vent of gas, and out of its smoke blossom sparks, that drift away in its own currents like red petals of spent flowers.

It paints pictures, some weird or grotesque, some beautiful, now of ghosts and goblins, now of old men, now of fair women, now of lakes crinkled with golden waves and towers on pine-crowned crags ruddy with the glow of sunset, sunny meadows and pasture lands, with farmsteads and flocks and herds.

The ancient trees that rear themselves aloft like strong pillars set to hold up the narrow arch of darkness, exhale an atmosphere of the past, in which your thoughts, waking or sleeping, drift backward to the old days when men whose dust was long since mingled with the forest mould moved here in the rage of war and the ardor of the chase. Shadowy forms of dusky warriors, horribly marked in war paint, gather about the camp-fire and sit in its glare in voiceless council, or encircle it in the grotesquely terrible movement of the war dance.

Magically the warlike scene changes to one of peace. The red hunters steal silently in with burdens of game. The squaws sit in the ruddy light plying their various labors, while their impish children play around them in mimicry of battle and the chase.

All then vanish, and white-clad soldiers of France bivouac in their place—or red-coated Britons, or Provincial rangers, unsoldierly to look upon, in home-spun garb, but keen-eyed, alert, and the bravest of the brave.

These dissolve like wreaths of smoke, and a solitary white hunter, clothed all in buckskin, sits over against you. His long flint-lock rifle lying across his lap, he is looking with rapt gaze into the fire, dreaming as you are.

So, growing brighter as the daylight grows dim and the gloaming thickens to the mirk, and paling again as daylight creeps slowly back upon the world, but always bright in the diurnal twilight of the woods, the camp-fire weaves and breaks its magic spells, now leaping, now lapsing, as its own freaks move it. Then, perhaps, when it has charmed you far across the border of dreamland and locked your eyes in the blindness of sleep, it will startle you back to the cold reality of the wintry woods with a crash and roar of sudden revival.

JANUARY DAYS

In these midwinter days, how muffled is the earth in its immaculate raiment, so disguised in whiteness that familiar places are strange, rough hollows smoothed to mere undulations, deceitful to the eye and feet, and level fields so piled with heaps and ridges that their owners scarcely recognize them. The hovel is as regally roofed as the palace, the rudest fence is a hedge of pearl, finer than a wall of marble, and the meanest wayside weed is a white flower of fairyland.

The woods, which frost and November winds stripped of their leafy thatch, are roofed again, now with an arabesque of alabaster more delicate than the green canopy that summer unfolded, and all the floor is set in noiseless pavement, traced with a shifting pattern of blue shadows. In these silent aisles the echoes are smothered at their birth. There is no response of airy voices to the faint call of the winter birds. The sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther than the pungent fragrance of the smoke that drifts in a blue haze from the chopper's fire. The report of the gun awakes no answering report, and each mellow note of the hound comes separate to the ear, with no jangle of reverberations.

Fox and hound wallow through the snow a crumbling furrow that obliterates identity of either trail, yet there are tracks that tell as plain as written words who made them. Here have fallen, lightly as snowflakes, the broad pads of the hare, white as the snow he trod; there, the parallel tracks of another winter masker, the weasel, and those of the squirrel, linking tree to tree. The leaps of a tiny wood-mouse are lightly marked upon the feathery surface to where there is the imprint of a light, swift pinion on either side, and the little story of his wandering ends—one crimson blood drop the period that marks the finis.

In the blue shadow at the bottom of that winding furrow are the dainty footprints of a grouse, and you wonder why he, so strong of wing, should choose to wade laboriously the clogging snow even in his briefest trip, rather than make his easy way through the unresisting air, and the snow-written record of his wayward wanderings tells not why. Suddenly, as if a mine had been sprung where your next footstep should fall and with almost as startling, though harmless effect, another of his wild tribe bursts upward through the unmarked white floor and goes whirring and clattering away, scattering in powdery ruin the maze of delicate tracery the snowfall wrought; and vanishes, leaving only an aerial pathway of naked twigs to mark his impetuous passage.

In the twilight of an evergreen thicket sits a great horned owl like a hermit in his cell in pious contemplation of his own holiness and the world's wickedness. But this recluse hates not sin, only daylight and mankind. Out in the fields you may find the white-robed brother of this gray friar, a pilgrim from the far north, brooding in the very face of the sun, on some stack or outlying barn, but he will not suffer you to come so near to him as will this solemn anchorite who stares at you unmoved as a graven image till you come within the very shadows of his roof.

Marsh and channel are scarcely distinguishable now but by the white domes of the muskrats' winter homes and here and there a sprawling thicket or button bush, for the rank growth of weeds is beaten flat, and the deep snow covers it and the channel ice in one unbroken sheet.

Champlain's sheltered bays and coves are frozen and white with snow or frost, and the open water, whether still or storm-tossed, black beneath clouds or bluer than the blue dome that arches it, looks as cold as ice and snow. Sometimes its steaming breath lies close above it, sometimes mounts in swaying, lofty columns to the sky, but always cold and ghostly, without expression of warmth or life.

So far away to hoary peaks that shine with a glittering gleam against the blue rim of the sky, or to the furthest bluegray line of woodland that borders the horizon, stretches the universal whiteness, so coldly shines the sun from the low curve of his course, and so chilly comes the lightest waft of wind from wheresoever it listeth, that it tasks the imagination to picture any land on all the earth where spring is just awakening fresh life, or where summer dwells amid green leaves and bright flowers, the music of birds and running waters, and of warm waves on pleasant shores, or autumn yet lingers in the gorgeousness of many hues. How far off beyond this world seems the possibility of such seasons, how enduring and relentless this which encompasses us.

And then, at the close of the brief white day, the sunset paints a promise and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the sky. The gray clouds kindle with red and yellow fire that burns about their purple hearts in tints of infinite variety, while behind them and the dark blue rampart of the mountains flames the last glory of the departing sun, fading in a tint of tender green to the upper blue. Even the cold snow at our feet flushes with warm color, and the eastern hills blush roseate against the climbing, darkening shadow of the earth.

It is as if some land of summer whose brightness has never been told lay unveiled before us, its delectable mountains splendid with innumerable hues, its lakes and streams of gold rippling to purple shores seeming not so far before us but that we might, by a little journey, come to them.

A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE

When the charitable mantle of the snow has covered the ugliness of the earth, as one looks towards the woodlands he may see a distant dark speck emerge from the blue shadow of the woods and crawl slowly houseward. If born to the customs of this wintry land, he may guess at once what it is; if not, speculation, after a little, gives way to certainty, when the indistinct atom grows into a team of quick-stepping horses or deliberate oxen hauling a sled-load of wood to the farmhouse.

It is more than that. It is a part of the woods themselves, with much of their wildness clinging to it, and with records, slight and fragmentary, yet legible, of the lives of trees and birds and beasts and men coming to our door.

Before the sounds of the creaking sled and the answering creak of the snow are heard, one sees the regular puffs of the team's breath jetting out and climbing the cold air. The head and shoulders of the muffled driver then appear, as he sticks by narrow foothold to the hinder part of his sled, or trots behind it beating his breast with his numb hands. Prone like a crawling band of scouts, endwise like battering-rams, not upright with green banners waving, Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane to fight King Frost.

As the woodpile grows at the farmhouse door in a huge windrow of sled-length wood or an even wall of cord wood, so in the woods there widens a patch of uninterrupted daylight. Deep shade and barred and netted shadow turn to almost even whiteness, as the axe saps the foundations of summer homes of birds and the winter fastnesses of the squirrels and raccoons. Here are the tracks of sled and team, where they wound among rocks and stumps and over cradle knolls to make up a load; and there are those of the chopper by the stump where he stood to fell the tree, and along the great trough made by its fall. The snow is flecked with chips, dark or pale according to their kind, just as they alighted from their short flight, bark up or down or barkless or edgewise, and with dry twigs and torn scraps of scattered moss.

When the chopper comes to his work in the morning, he finds traces of nightly visitors to his white island that have drifted to its shores out of the gray sea of woods. Here is the print of the hare's furry foot where he came to nibble the twigs of poplar and birch that yesterday were switching the clouds, but have fallen, manna-like, from skyward to feed him. A fox has skirted its shadowy margin, then ventured to explore it, and in a thawy night a raccoon has waddled across it.

The woodman is apt to kindle a fire more for company than warmth, though he sits by it to eat his cold dinner, casting the crumbs to the chickadees, which come fearlessly about him at all times. Blazing or smouldering by turns, as it is fed or starved, the fire humanizes the woods more than the man does. Now and then it draws to it a visitor, oftenest a fox-hunter who has lost his hound, and stops for a moment to light his pipe at the embers and to ask if his dog has been seen or heard. Then he wades off through the snow, and is presently swallowed out of sight by gray trees and blue shadows. Or the hound comes in search of his master or a lost trail. He halts for an instant, with a wistful look on his sorrowful face, then disappears, nosing his way into the maw of the woods.

If the wood is cut "sled length," which is a saving of time and also of chips, which will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a "day man," and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble in making their way through them than over them; and the man comes and goes according to his ambition to earn money.

In whichever capacity the chopper plies his axe, he is pretty sure to bring no sentimentalism to his task. He inherits the feeling that was held by the old pioneers toward trees, who looked upon the noblest of them as only giant weeds, encumbering the ground, and best got rid of by the shortest means. To him the tree is a foe worthy of no respect or mercy, and he feels the triumph of a savage conquerer when it comes crashing down and he mounts the prostrate trunk to dismember it; the more year-marks encircling its heart, the greater his victory. To his ears, its many tongues tell nothing, or preach only heresy. Away with the old tree to the flames! To give him his due, he is a skillful executioner, and will compel a tree to fall across any selected stump within its length. If one could forget the tree, it is a pretty sight to watch the easy swing of the axe, and see how unerringly every blow goes to its mark, knocking out chips of a span's breadth. It does not look difficult nor like work; but could you strike "twice in a place," or in half a day bring down a tree twice as thick as your body? The wise farmer cuts, for fuel, only the dead and decaying trees in his woodlot, leaving saplings and thrifty old trees to "stand up and grow better," as the Yankee saying is.

There is a prosperous and hospitable look in a great woodpile at a farmhouse door. Logs with the moss of a hundred years on them, breathing the odors of the woods, have come to warm the inmates and all in-comers. The white smoke of these chimneys is spicy with the smell of seasoned hard wood, and has a savor of roasts and stews that makes one hungry. If you take the back track on a trail of pitchy smoke, it is sure to lead you to a squalid threshold with its starved heap of pine roots and half-decayed wood. Thrown down carelessly beside it is a dull axe, wielded as need requires with spiteful awkwardness by a slatternly woman, or laboriously upheaved and let fall with uncertain stroke by a small boy.

The Yankees who possess happy memories of the great open fires of old time are growing few, but Whittier has embalmed for all time, in "Snow-Bound," their comfort and cheer and picturesqueness. When the trees of the virgin forest cast their shadows on the newly risen roof there was no forecasting provision for winter. The nearest green tree was cut, and hauled, full length, to the door, and with it the nearest dry one was cut to match the span of the wide fireplace; and when these were gone, another raid was made upon the woods; and so from hand to mouth the fire was fed. It was not uncommon to draw the huge backlogs on to the hearth with a horse, and sometimes a yoke of oxen were so employed. Think of a door wide enough for this: half of the side of a house to barricade against the savage Indians and savage cold! It was the next remove from a camp-fire. There was further likeness to it in the tales that were told beside it, of hunting and pioneer hardships, of wild beasts and Indian forays, while the eager listeners drew to a closer circle on the hearth, and the awed children cast covert scared backward glances at the crouching and leaping shadows that thronged on the walls, and the great samp-kettle bubbled and seethed on its trammel, and the forgotten johnny-cake scorched on its tilted board.

As conveniently near the shed as possible, the pile of sled-length wood is stretching itself slowly, a huge vertebrate, every day or two gaining in length; a joint of various woods, with great trunks at the bottom, then smaller ones, gradually growing less to the topping out of saplings and branches. Here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt, with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable tools for the purpose as any they had for another. These more distinct marks show where the auger of later years made its wounds. The old tree has distilled its sweets for two races and many generations of men, first into the bark buckets of Waubanakis, then into the ruder troughs of Yankee pioneers, then into the more convenient wide-bottomed wooden sap-tubs; and at last, when the march of improvement has spoiled the wilderness of the woods with trim-built sugar-houses and patent evaporators, the sap drips with resounding metallic tinkle into pails of shining tin. Now the old maple has come to perform its last office, of warming and cooking the food for a generation that was unborn when it was yet a lusty tree.

Beside it lies a great wild-cherry tree that somehow escaped the cabinet maker when there was one in every town and cherry wood was in fashion. Its fruit mollified the harshness of the New England rum of many an old-time raising and husking. Next is a yellow birch with a shaggy mane of rustling bark along its whole length, like a twelve-foot piece of the sea serpent drifted ashore and hauled inland; then a white birch, no longer white, but gray with a coating of moss, and black with belts of old peelings, made for the patching of canoes and roofing of shanties.

With these lies a black birch, whose once smooth bark age has scaled and furrowed, and robbed of all its tenderness and most of its pungent, aromatic flavor. Some of it yet lingers in the younger topmost twigs which the hired man brings home to the little folks, who fall to gnawing them like a colony of beavers. By it is an elm, whose hollow trunk was the home of raccoons when it stood on its buttressed stump in the swamp. Near by is a beech, its smooth bark wrinkled where branches bent away from it, and blotched with spots of white and patches of black and gray lichen. It is marked with innumerable fine scratches, the track of the generations of squirrels that have made it their highway; and among these, the wider apart and parallel nail-marks of a raccoon, and also the drilling of woodpeckers. Here, too, are traces of man's visitation, for distorted with the growth of years are initials, and a heart and dart that symbolized the tender passion of some one of the past, who wandered, love-sick, in the shadow of the woods. How long ago did death's inevitable dart pierce his heart? Here he wrote a little of his life's history, and now his name and that of his mistress are so completely forgotten one cannot guess them by their first letters inscribed in the yesterday of the forest's years.

Above these logs, rolled up on skids or sled stakes, are smaller yet goodly bodies of white ash, full of oars for the water and rails for the land; and of black ash, as full of barrel hoops and basket splints, the ridged and hoary bark shagged with patches of dark moss; and a pine too knotty for sawing, with old turpentine boxes gashing its lower part, the dry resin in them half overgrown, but odorous still; and oaks that have borne their last acorns; and a sharded hickory that will never furnish another nut for boy or squirrel, but now, and only this once, flail handles, swingles, and oxbows, and helves for axes to hew down its brethren, and wood to warm its destroyers, and smoke and fry ham for them; and a basswood that will give the wild bees no more blossoms in July, hollow-hearted and unfit for sleigh or toboggan, wood straight rifted and so white that a chip of it will hardly show on the snow, but as unprofitable food for fires as the poplars beside it, which, in the yellow-green of youth or the furrowed gray of age, have shivered their last.

Still higher in the woodpile are white birches, yet in the smooth skin of their prime, which is fit to be fashioned into drinking cups and berry baskets, or to furnish a page for my lady's album. Here are hardhacks, some with grain winding like the grooves of a rifle. This is the timber the Indians made their bows of, and which now serves the same purpose for the young savages whom we have always with us. There are sinewy blue beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads and the "beech seals" of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a man's thigh, a size at which they mostly stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet unlike them, sets folks to guessing what kind of wood it is. He will hit the mark who fires at random the names "shadblow," "service-berry," or "amelanchier." If the axe had been merciful, in early May its branches would have been as white with blossoms as if the last April snow still clung to them. Tossed on a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small stuff,—saplings improvidently cut, short-lived striped maple, and dogwood, the slender topmost lengths of great trees, once the perches of hawks and crows, and such large branches as were not too crooked to lie still on the sled.

The snow-fleas, harbingers and attendants of thaws, are making the snow in the woods gray with their restless myriads, when the sled makes its last trip across the slushy fields, which are fast turning from white to dun under the March winds and showers and sunshine.

The completed woodpile basks in the growing warmth, as responsive to the touch of spring as if every trunk yet upheld its branches in the forest. The buds swell on every chance-spared twig, and sap starts from the severed ducts. From the pine drip slowly lengthening stalactites of amber, from the hickory thick beads of honeydew, and from the maples a flow of sweet that calls the bees from their hives across the melting drifts. Their busy hum makes an island of summer sound in the midst of the silent ebbing tide of winter.

As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled odors of the many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of the axe,—fiddle, bass-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all somehow in tune. The parts stop a little when the fiddler saws off his string, the two drawers of the long bass-viol bow sever theirs, and the drummer splits his drum, but each is soon outfitted again, and the funeral march of the woodpile goes on. Here is the most delightful of places for those busy idlers the children, for it is full of pioneers' and hunters' cabins, robbers' caves and bears' dens, and of treasures of moss and gum and birch, and of punk, the tinder of the Indians and our forefathers, now gone out of use except for some conservative Canuck to light his pipe or for boys to touch off their small ordnance.

It is a pretty sight to watch the nuthatches and titmice searching the grooves of the bark for their slender fare, or a woodpecker chopping his best for a living with his sharp-pointed axe, all having followed their rightful possessions from the woods, taking perhaps the track of the sled. It is wonderful to hear the auger of the pine-borer, now thawed into life, crunching its unseen way through the wood. Then there is always the chance of the axe unlocking the stores of deermice, quarts of beechnuts with all the shells neatly peeled off; and what if it should happen to open a wild-bee hive full of honey!

If the man comes who made the round of the barns in the fall and early winter with his threshing-machine, having exchanged it for a sawing machine, he makes short work of our woodpile. A day or two of stumbling clatter of the horses in their treadmill, and the buzzing and screeching of the whirling saw, gnaws it into a heap of blocks.

Our lounging-place and the children's wooden playground have gone, and all the picturesqueness and woodsiness have disappeared as completely as when splitting has made only firewood of the pile. It will give warmth and comfort from the stove, but in that black sepulchre all its beauty is swallowed out of sight forever. If it can go to a generous fireplace, it is beautified again in the glowing and fading embers that paint innumerable shifting pictures, while the leaping flames sing the old song of the wind in the branches.

A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION

It seems quite probable that this nineteenth century may be unpleasantly memorable in centuries to come as that in which many species of animate and inanimate nature became extinct. It has witnessed the extinction of the great auk, so utterly swept off the face of the earth that the skin, or even the egg of one, is a small fortune to the possessor. Reduced from the hundreds of thousands of twenty-five years ago to the few hundred of to-day, it needs but a few years to compass the complete annihilation of the bison. It is not improbable that the elk and the antelope will be overtaken by almost as swift a fate. The skin hunters, and the game butchers miscalled sportsmen, are making almost as speedy way with them as they have with the buffalo.

The common deer, hedged within their narrowing ranges by civilization, and hunted by all methods in all seasons, may outlast the century, but they will have become wofully scarce at the close of it, even in such regions as the Adirondacks which seem to have been set apart by nature especially for the preservation of wild life.

The wild turkey is passing away, and it is a question of but few years when he shall have departed forever. In some localities the next noblest of our game birds, the ruffed grouse, has become almost a thing of the past, and in some years is everywhere so scarce that there are sad forebodings of his complete disappearance from the rugged hills of which he seems as much a belonging as the lichened rocks, the arbutus and the wind-swept evergreens. One little island on the New England coast holds the handful that is left of the race of heath hens.

The woodcock is being cultivated and improved and murdered out of existence with clearing and draining and summer shooting, and unseasonable shooting is doing the same for many kinds of waterfowl. In the Eastern States a wild pigeon is a rare sight now, and has been for years; the netters and slaughterers have done their work too thoroughly.

Gentle woman is making an end of the song-birds that she may trick her headgear in barbaric and truly savage fashion. The brighter plumaged small birds are becoming noticeably scarce even in those parts of the country that the milliners' collector and the pot-naturalist have not yet invaded, and such as the scarlet tanager, never anywhere numerous, are like to be soon "collected" out of living existence. If they are to be saved, it is by no dallying, nor slow awakening of popular feeling in their behalf.

There will be pine-trees, no doubt, for centuries to come, but who that live twenty years hence will see one of these venerable monarchs of the woods towering above all other forest growth, or see any ancient tree, however historic or precious for its age and beauty and majesty and mystery of long past years, if it is worth the cutting for timber or fuel?

Even the lesser growths of the old woods are passing away. Some, as the carpeting sphagnum and the sprawling hobble bush, disappear through changed conditions; others, as the medicinal spikenard, sarsaparilla, and ginseng, and the decorative running pine and the arbutus, through ruthless, greedy gathering, which leaves no root nor ripened seed to perpetuate their kind.

An old man may be glad that his eyes are not to behold the coming desolation, but he must be sad when he thinks of the poor inheritance of his children.