Jungle days

Next to the dynamic crashing syncopation of a regimental band, or the subtle, infinitely more emotionally hypnotic beat of a tomtom, comes the thrilling rhythm hour after hour, of a double row of paddles tearing and eddying through water in unison, not only the thump and splash from the dugouts of tropical savages but the deep-dipped rush and swirl from bark canoes. This is the obvious, the much-described, but how many of us have listened for, and heard, the low, sibilant swish of the blades through the air, as they reach forward for the next stroke. Until mind and ear are focussed it is inaudible, but when once caught it out-sings more blatant sounds of water and voice. The blind spots of our perceptions conceal many phases of delicate beauty in the things around us, aspects which are dulled by the opacity of familiarity, passed over by the unseeing activity of our surface-skimming minds.

The living leaf—both singly and in foliage mass—has been epitaphed, eulogized, sung, praised and similed for centuries, but except for occasional references to the “sere and yellow leaf,” dying, falling and dead leaves have been left where they lie, with only the incense of their funeral pyres woven into the haze of Indian Summer.

I have seen an orang-utan build him a sleeping platform of leaves in less than three minutes, so it is not improbable that the first artificial home our more direct ancestors knew was a leafy nest. Leaves at least formed the sole clothing of our early parents, according to Scripture, and from nursery days we have always known that falling leaves were a shroud for the babes in the wood. More than this, botanists tell us that the leaf is the foundation of flower and fruit, so that it was really only a mass of highly specialized leaves which introduced Newton to gravitation.

But the importance and interest of falling leaves in this world needs no brief from me. I merely want to know them better for my own pleasure, I wish to hear and see and feel them, and so I leave my laboratory after a day of intensive technical work and slip into the jungle, where millions of leaves are falling during my lifetime, and hundreds of millions fell before I was born.

I am sitting at the edge of a tropical swamp and for the moment trying to close my mind and sense to the sounds and sights of birds and insects, and focus on leaves, and especially dead ones. This is no more difficult than it would have been to have forgotten Caruso and the orchestra in order to meditate on the kind of wood of which the chairs were fashioned.

Further than this I am putting out of my mind the letters L E A V E S and thinking of them innominately as a vast multitude of spread-out sheets of green and brown tissue. They are really the jungle, for without them it would be like the bare masts and rigging of a vessel. High overhead beyond the clouds of chlorophyll are other white clouds of moisture, driven swiftly westward by the steady trade-wind. Around me the air is as quiet as in a room, and, as so often the case, of just the right temperature to be forgotten, neither too hot nor too cold, a distinct effort being necessary to realize that I am not in some great enclosed chamber; so calm and equable are the surroundings.

It is the dry season, and the short daily shower does little to soften the crackle of the fallen leaves. Even after a month of heavy unseasonable rain when our records show that it is the dry season, the noise of treading on the jungle floor reveals the actual lack of humidity at times other than actual precipitation. Now and then, near my feet, a leaf draws its edges together, turns a little and rustles gently all by itself as if even in death it dreamed of some pleasant trifle, something which would please a green leaf, in sunlight, swaying high in air. Then, like a crumpled bit of paper in a wastebasket, it settles lower among its fallen fellows. Here it will wait patiently for the impact of the heavy rains, three or four months hence, to soften its stiff, crinkling tissues, and re-mold it into incarnations of other leaves to come.

Fallen leaves have a wind song all their own which is to be heard only when listened for consciously. When a fitful breeze is blowing, if the ear is held close to the ground, a low intermittent clatter and shuffling is audible, with occasionally a real rustle as a delicately balanced leaf is blown over. Stand up and the carpet of dead leaves becomes silent, their gentle talk lost in the hubbub of living, moving foliage.

In this quiet, cool swamp I am impressed with the vast number of leaves which have started to fall but have not reached the earth. Some have landed in crotches, or become entangled in masses of vines, others have driven their stems clear through the live tissue of leaves in their downward path and hang dangling. Just above me a living and a dead palmated frond have their leafy fingers intertwined like the outer points of fighting buckles, with no chance of release until the death and fall of the second leaf.

As I watched, three leaves fell, each with characteristic motion. I once made a key to more than a dozen kinds of jungle trees, based on the way the leaves fell, and to anyone who wishes to enter an untrodden botanical field I commend this idea. The third leaf fluttered and eddied, fighting with all its expanse of plane against the pull of gravitation, and at the very last, came to rest on a mattress of fern frond—a respite merely, for the first real gust would send it to the ground. As it touched the fern a butterfly rose, a black heliconian, with a large red spot on each wing. Its flight was astonishingly like that of the descending leaf, a tremulous fluttering just carrying it along, now rising, now descending—a flight wholly deceiving, for these butterflies can thread the mazes of jungle vines all day without tiring. But this butterfly was also like the leaf in its sear and faded garb. The wings were frayed and torn—the black was a thread-bare brown, the red weathered to faded salmon, and the seams of its wings showed plainly. Life was nearly over, yet weak as it was, it would probably die no violent death. The most awkward bird or predatory insect could catch it at will, yet it flew slowly along, unmolested by jacamars and cuckoos, dragon and robber flies. Its conspicuous colors and slow, tantalizing flight, like all else in the jungle, had a reason—it was its own advertisement of inedibility. Soon, however, this Wandering Jew of a butterfly would slip from its sleeping porch, and, like the fluttering leaf, make a last ineffectual struggle against the pull of earth and its wings would lie among the leaves.

Before the butterfly passed from view, I was startled by a sudden, rough rip of sound,—and just overhead a macaw put all the harshness of its beak and the blatancy of its coloring into its voice, and almost the leaves around me seemed to rustle. Into a clear space of sky four great, flame-winged birds passed, and with flight direct as arrows, but otherwise exactly like the falling leaf and the butterfly, they vibrated northward.

Without intention, but very happily, I found I had chosen my seat between extremes in leaves. Close along one side lay a fallen leaf which began eight feet behind and extended twenty-three feet in front,—thirty-one feet of palm frond. In its fall it had crushed several young mora saplings and many lesser growths. The least movement near it aroused a crashing which could be heard to the river. The leaflets, two hundred in number, lay stretched out four to six feet on each side, and the mighty stem was like a length of channel iron, with edges sharp as razors. It was parched and shrunken and had probably hung dead for a long time before it fell. A billion ordinary leaves fall unnoticed in the tropics, while in the north we lump this vast assemblage of happenings under the one word “autumn.” But the fall of a palm leaf is an event. Once as I was leaving my Station for a trip north, I noticed that one of the leaves of our sentinel cuyuru palm was drooping and browned. Months later when I returned, it was still hanging, and two weeks afterwards fell in the night with a crash which wakened us all. Dynasties of history might be dated by the falling of such a leaf, and if I could have been present at the dropping of all the leaves of my palm, whose scars were still so plain, there would be material for an epic. The remark of Charles the Second on his deathbed could be applied to the dead leaf at my side, for these gigantic fronds grow and live their lives much more rapidly than they die and disintegrate. Years from now I could probably find traces of the reinforced cellulose-hardened main stem.

And now my faded and forlorn heliconian butterfly fluttered again toward me, and almost alighted on this paper, but turning at the last moment, it rose a bit, and came to rest at my elbow, on a stem lined with small leaflets. Hardly had the insect furled its wings, when it fluttered and took to flight again. The cause delighted me beyond measure,—it had been unseated and frightened by the movement of a living leaf! At the impact of its delicate feet, the leaflets of the sensitive plant closed abruptly together and the stem sank. So exquisite was the reaction that the several leaflets beyond the insect were unmoved. A few seconds later while I was still watching, an adjoining twiglet closed every one of its leaflets and dropped 120° upon its parent branch. Nothing had touched it, no breath of air had moved it. I was puzzled. Lifting it very gently, it broke off and fell to the ground, green, fresh,—as far as I could see quite without cause. I picked it up and examined the base and there I found the source of the trouble. A tiny beetle had cut it almost off, and the slight fall of the twig, together with my touch had parted the few remaining fibres. The beetle was very small and must have been laboring for a long time, and it was a mystery why the featherdom tread of a butterfly’s feet had accomplished what the hacking and sawing of the beetle’s jaws had not.

All the leaves on the mimosa would not have equalled one of the lesser leaflets of the palm frond, and on the ground they were almost invisible, sinking almost at once into the mold. The sensitive leaves had the semblance of animal nerves and movement; the palm leaf would have brained me if it had fallen while I passed beneath.

In these jungles a falling leaf has a whole scale of sounds, as it runs the descending gamut of collisions. From the top of a tall tree a leaf may take fifteen or twenty seconds to reach the earth, disregarding the very good chance of lodgment, and each touch of vine, leaves,—living and dead,—the caroming off of branches and ripping through thorns, gives forth a different sound, of which our poor ears can distinguish very few, and which our language, spoken and written, is wholly helpless in reproducing. I would like very much to find a word or sound which would bring to mind the fall of a leaf upon leaves. I know it perfectly—the generic timbre—the composite echo etched into my mind by a thousand conscious listenings. But it will not get past my consciousness to my lips, and utterly refuses to siphon down my arm and pen.

Fallen leaves are of tremendous importance to those of us who do much hunting in the jungle, and chiefly on account of their susceptibility to moisture in the air. In the wet season it is possible to creep up to some of the wariest of animals, the thick mat of soft, damp leaves forming an admirable muffler. In the dry season this is hopeless, every step is ascream with crackling, and only when a leaf-rattling breeze is blowing can one pass through the jungle without blatant advertisement. This, however, is of slight assistance in hunting, for the blowing of the leaves conceals as well the audible whereabouts of the game. When the fallen leaves are dry the only method is to walk to some favorable spot, and there sit and wait for approaching or passing animals to register their footfalls. In estimating the abundance of jungle life I have constantly to check a tendency to underestimate numbers in the wet season. Ameiva lizards appear to be many times as abundant in times of drought, crashing along with the noise of a peccary, yet they have no season of æstivation, but only of silent progress.

We do not realize the acuteness of hearing of wild animals until we try to stalk them over dry leaves. A giant leaf may crash down from branch to branch and never cause a curassow or deer to start. I have seen a labba feeding in late afternoon under a nut tree when a whole branch with clusters of dead leaves hurtled to earth a few yards away, and the big, spotted rodent merely glanced up, casually munching as it looked. My next step slipped an inch sideways and crumbled a tiny leaf crust, and without a second’s investigation the animal gave one terrified squeal and fled headlong.

There are silent and there are boisterous leaves. Some, with finely pinnated foliage, have a pact of silence with the elements, from which wind and rain strive in vain to awaken them. Even when these filigree ones are dead and cling long to the branches, they give before the blasts, they let the rain drip from their finger tips without a sound. But a single, half-loose cecropia frond can imitate a rainstorm, the roar of a flushed covey of pheasants or a passing troop of monkeys, all by itself. More than this, it will begin uncannily to quiver and shake and rattle wildly about, while every adjacent leaf dangles as silently as if painted. Thus does its sensitive balance and crinkled shard betray the wandering little wind spouts which are born deep in the jungle, and, like other aquatic cousins, stretch straight upward in a tiny, clean-cut whorl of air.

A book could be written upon burning leaves—how they meet their cremation, how they curl when this new, devastating long-bottled-up sun heat chars their tissues. How they shout and crack in the wind of their own swan song, and how they look when the heat and roar have passed and the cold ash remains. A month of drought at Kartabo once made the thick mat of bamboo leaves about the compound considerable of a menace. So we had a great raking and bonfire of the ten million and one elongated slivers of pale brown leaves. (Even the color of dead leaves, like the plumage of hen pheasants, is far more subtle and beautiful than we suspect, for after the above sentence, I try to match a dead bamboo leaf color in Ridgway’s color book and fail utterly. It lies between vinaceous-buff and olive-buff and is of no human-named color.)

The ashy souls of leaves differ to as great a degree as do their shapes and life-greens. Some are so ethereal that they vanish in a curl of faint blue smoke and leave scarcely a trace of ponderable greyness. The bamboos are far otherwise. There is nothing quiet or sad about their cremation. They snap and crackle joyously in the flames, with more gust than ever they rattled in the trade winds. And indeed their passing is far less of a radical change than for most leaves. They are so surcharged with silica that the alchemy of glowing heat merely alters their hue to silvery white, and when the furnace of their tissues has cooled, they lie unchanged in shape and outline. A heavy rain or big wind shatters this crystalline ghost of a feuille, and the various salts are washed into the soil, ready for their next great adventure.

Before I lived under bamboos I never realized how friendly fallen leaves could be. Trees with heavy, leaded-stemmed leaves drop them straight to the ground. But bamboo leaves are like zeppelins when they are launched and, with the slightest breeze float along on even keels, drifting sometimes far into the laboratory. When at tea one day I idly watched a leaf dangling high up from one of the lofty stems, so far away I could not tell whether it was brown or green. A slight gust came and it broke off and, revolving slowly, scaled obliquely down, through the verandah and launched in my teacup.

These leaves register very accurately the force of the wind, and I have seen a thick bed of ashes of burned bamboo leaves studded thickly as a porcupine’s skin with the javelins of recent falls, two lots having speared the ashes at different angles. One was almost upright, having landed in a gentle wind that afternoon, the other at an oblique angle, after volplaning on the stronger trades of morning.

Leaves in death still mirror many of the characteristics of their living fellows. In the tropics a host of plants flower once or at most twice a year, but attract insects at all times by setting forth a little bowl of nectar on each leaf stalk. I have observed a small bush with forty-nine leaves and counted nine and forty ants thereon, one guest to each nectar-cup,—each having visited, sipped and remained—perhaps by their jealous gormandizing keeping away other more harmful insects. On fallen leaves the sides of the bowls still seem to contain some sweetness, and to these come other ants (as we used to love to scrape the emptied ice-cream freezer), who gnaw eagerly at the shrivelled cups and the sweet crusts which have fallen from the table of the jungle.

There are parts of jungle clearings which I hardly know in early morning, while their foliage is still asleep. Some leaves are surprisingly drowsy and not until the sun actually fillips them with its beams do they raise their heads, twist on their stalks in a leafy yawn, and eat to their daily stint in their chlorophyll factory. These leaves die in the position of sleep, so that if we had a fallen twigful we would know their somnolent attitude in life.

By far the phase of dominant interest in fallen or dead leaves is the part they have played in the evolution of animal life. If we can infer the position of sleep from that in death, how vastly greater is possible the reconstruction of dead vegetation from living creatures of the jungle. If every leaf and twig, flower and fruit, branch and trunk were to vanish suddenly from the earth, their memory would remain deeply impressed in form, size, movement, pattern and color of a host of creatures, while we would still have even the jungle lights and shadows etched upon fur and feathers. As we go down the scale in life we find more and more marvels of resemblance, and it would be an easy matter to reconstruct an entire plant of animals. I have caught monster walking-stick insects over a foot in length, which were dead wood to the keenest eye. Smaller ones carry the resemblance to an inordinate extreme. Not only do they look like twigs and stems, but they act like them, clinging with four feet and dangling the other two out in midair, while every now and then the whole insect sways gently, as does a tiny twig moved by a breath. Things such as this make a scientist’s work wonderful and holy beyond Bryan’s utmost conception of these words.

From day to day in the jungle I add to my animal-plants. I discover giant katy-dids so green and flat, so veined and stemmed, that no passing observer could say, “This is leaf, this insect.” Others have spoiled the symmetry and perfection of their sham chlorophyll with simulated holes, and apparent tears and spots of fungi, and the droppings of birds. All the diseases, parasites and injuries of leaves have been photographed upon the wings of insects, in unconscious endeavor to escape observation. At this point we come upon interactions, complications, subtleties of great delicacy, such as are shown by mantids, or “rar’hor’ses” as they are called in the Southern States. These are incarnated, material sophists, camouflaged under chlorophyll color not for protection but for attack. As the white fox creeps upon the white ptarmigan over the white snow, so here in the tropics, the mantids re-enact a similar, but viridescent drama.

Passing on from growing leaves we find flower bugs and orchid spiders, the latter being forced to conceal their brilliant pigments in the shadow of under-leaf, until some particular blossom appears. Then, with their colors and patterns so exact that they might have been fashioned in the same petal shop the spiders take their place on or near the flowers. Some even eat away the heart of the blossom, substituting their stamen leg and pistil palpi, and with the unharmed nectary still giving forth perfume, these deadly frauds of flowers await the visiting bees.

Caterpillars gnaw out bits of leaf and then fill up the space with their own painted bodies, but butterflies and moths are the veritable reflections of leaves, they would indeed be naked and blatant to the world were foliage to vanish. Here again not only are color and pattern invoked but even the movement in falling. I have had a brown butterfly flutter in short, oblique eddies to my feet, and there alight warelessly and sway from side to side. Dozens of times I have crept up and enmeshed a dead leaf in my net, and as many times have brushed heedlessly by a dead leaf only to have it take wings to itself and fly away.

Two adventures which befell me yesterday had to do with leaves, and touched the extremes of the gamut of an explorer’s life—from the danger of death to the glory of new discovery. Every morning a bird had been calling from a certain tree-top—a short, raucous, unpleasant call, but a new one. So ventriloquil was it that it had wholly baffled me. Only by triangulation, the successive focussing from three distant points, could I ever hope to find it. I was creeping slowly on my second lap, lifting my feet high to clear twigs and vines, when something drew my eyes from the tree overhead to the dead leaves below. This has happened to me perhaps a score of times and I hope will continue in the future—the sudden, inexplicable perception of a poisonous snake on which my foot is about to descend. A large fer-de-lance, more like dead leaves than the leaves themselves, was coiled less than two feet away. On its scales it mirrored the brown dead leaves, the dark fungus spots, the shadows of the curled-up edges, the high lights of the burnished surface sheen. Optically there was no interruption of the floor of dead foliage; actually a horrible death lay twelve inches beneath my upraised foot. The lethal mat was coiled as evenly as a rope on a battleship and in the exact center lay the arrow head with its unwinking eyes and the flickering tongue. As I withdrew my foot and began to breathe again, I forgot my raucous-voiced bird and sat down to ponder this. I took my strong butterfly net and drew the netting taut across the ring and behind this barrier I slowly approached. Closer and closer I drew until I could see the slit-like pupil and the green and livid mottling of the iris. When I almost touched the sharp snout with the other side of the mesh, I sniffed carefully and repeatedly, dulling every other sense but that of smell. There came to my nostrils a faint but distinct odor, an unpleasant musk, which, once detected, remained vivid. It was a faint adumbration of that strong, repulsive smell which permeates the cage where one of these reptiles is confined, and I believe that, without invoking any more radically psychic process, my attention is attracted and focussed at these times by the faint, unconsciously stimulating odor of the snake on the jungle floor. I cannot otherwise explain my invariable detection at the last minute, of creatures who more than any others are of the leaves, leafy.

My second adventure was also a thrilling one but from a wholly different point of view. I was walking along a trail after a shower, looking idly at a big, palmated leaf at my very elbow when there suddenly materialized upon it a large lizard. It was one of the most beautiful of all lizards and fortunately had been named with imagination—Polychrus marmoratus—the many-colored Marble One. It was sprawled flat upon the great green expanse, its scales shimmering leaf-green with enough spots here and there to be a convincing portion of the full-grown, insect-defaced foliage. I leaned toward it and it began slowly to creep away. The long, slender tail was curled and twisted into a lifeless tendril, and the toes dangled half in midair like no imaginable piece of any live reptile. Progress was by means of the forefeet alone, one after the other being pushed ahead stealthily, taking hold and dragging the rest of the creature onward. The body, hind legs and tail simply scraped over the leaf.

When it reached the thick, brown twig, magic began before our eyes—for fortunately I had two companions to share this wonder. As it left the green tissue and crawled slowly out along the twig its course was traceable not only by its position in space, but by most exquisitely adjusted and timed pigmental change,—at the exact edge of the leaf the green gradually faded and a wave of brown swept down the reptile. Never have I seen a more perfect use of obliterative color. In captivity these polychrus will often run through their whole little palatal gamut from mere emotion, or light and shadow. The whole soul of my lizard on the leaf was concentrated in his half-closed eyes watching my every motion, yet it must have been through the eye alone that the amazingly accurate somatic color change was dictated and regulated. Here was surely the ultimate example of vegetable imitation, twigs, leaves—both green and brown—tendril swaying movement, all in one organism. Not for anything would I have betrayed the lizard’s trust in the magnificent shield which nature had built up about it. We pretended to be completely deceived and left it—an irregular bit of half-greenness on the second leaf, and half brownness on the twig.

A classic volume will some day be written on the adventures of fallen leaves, for when a leaf has evaded the inroads of insects and fungi, has resisted wind and rain, succumbing finally to the pull of gravitation, there awaits it, in addition to ultimate mold and desiccation, a host of possible adventures on the jungle floor.

With all my desire to clothe the fallen leaf with dramatic interest and an abstract vitality, my first and last thoughts are those of sadness. Alien as I am to these tropical jungles, a mere transient injection from the North, the sear and yellow leaf means to me the end of a season, of a year—a very appreciable fraction of lifetime—and even in this evergreen land, this jungle de le printemps éternel, the dead leaf eddying to earth is a sad and a tragic happening.