Wildwood Ways

whence they ooze in the seeping of the upward current to our shores. No one has here found the seeds of these stemless pinheads of green that lie flat on the surface and send down for a wee fraction of an inch their two or three tiny root hairs into the water.

No one can say they are apetalous or monosepalous or sporangiferous or call them other hard names in Latin having reference to their flowering or fruiting for we may not say that they flower or fruit at all. These minutest Lemnas give us no sign of stamin or spore, of carpel or indusium, yet they multiply by millions and cover the surface of the spring pools whence they depart constantly with the outflowing current, voyaging gayly down Brobdingnagian rapids to the sea. The time of year when it is winter in the sky above and on the bank a few feet up the hillside, when all green life except that which grows with its roots in this magic water from the deep caves of earth is either killed or suspended, seems to be their time for growth.

They grow a little, to a certain stage when perhaps a plant covers surface to the size of a pinhead and a half, then split and become independent plants with a tiny root hair apiece. Brave equipment this for facing the January gales and frost of a northern winter. Yet they sail forth from the home pool as confidently as liners from the home port and rollick all along down the stream, making harbor in every tiny bay and collecting a fleet in each eddy. What potency of perpetual spring they sow as they traverse all the ways that wind in and about the levels below the fountain head we do not know, any more than we know what elixir vitæ dwells in the waters on which they are borne, yet something makes the region the lotus land of creatures of the wild where they linger on unmindful of their vanished kindred.

Out of the rich vegetable mould of ages, in the cool, moist shadows grow the rarer New England orchids in the summer, and the rarer migrant birds of our summer woods find asylum here for their nests and young. In the winter the ruffed grouse comes here to drink, finds gravel for his crop always bare and unfrozen on the hillside where the first seepings of water come forth, and no doubt gets an agreeable change of food in the succulent green things of the shallows. Several of these birds cling to the place, nor can I drive them away by simply flushing them. They circle and come back to the brook margin or its immediate neighborhood every time.

Where the swamp maples have grown large on the bank and lifted the soil with their roots high enough to form miniature dry islands the mink have built their burrows and thence they go forth to hunt the region all about, but especially

the brook and its tributaries, most ravenously. If you are patient, fortunate, and the wind is right you may at dusk get a glimpse of the weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze for game and enemies. In that light his fur will look black though it is really a pretty shade of brown, but you will not fail to see the white streak which runs from his chin downward. But, though you may not see the animal himself you cannot, if there is snow on the ground, fail to see his slender, aristocratic track with its clutching claws, for the mink is a desperate hunter and always hungry. All is fish that comes to his net,—trout, turtles, toads, snails, bugs, or anything he can find in the brook that seems in the least edible.

The semi-aquatic life of the enchanted region is sadly destructive of other life, and I feel little pity for the mink or the weasel, sleek and beautiful wild creatures though they are, if they in turn fall into the steel jaws which the trapper sets for them in the narrow passes all up and down the stream. It is the common lot of the woods and only the swiftest and most crafty can hope to escape it. The mink devour the trout, and they, seemingly innocent and beautiful enough to have come up, water sprites, from that unknown underground world whence well the crystal waters in which they live, are as greedy and irresponsible in their diet as the mink themselves. Like them, when hungry they will devour the young of their own species and smack their lips over the feast.

The trout will eat anything that looks to be alive either in the water or on the surface. I often amuse myself in summer by biting small chunks out of an apple and dropping them in, to see the trout swallow them as ravenously as if they had suddenly become vegetarians and had all the zeal of new converts. What the Jamaica ginger preparation of the brook world is I don’t know, unless it is watercress. That grows, green and peppery, all up and down the brook the year through. Perhaps the trout go from my green apple luncheon over to that and thus join the remedy to the disease.

One of the trout titbits is the gentle little caddice worm, grub of the little miller-like caddice fly that flits in at the open window of a May night and lights on the table under the glare of your lamp. He dwells on the bottom in these same pure waters and he has much to do to defend himself against the jaws of his nimble hunter. He is but a worm that crawls, so speed may not save him. His skin is tender and he has no weapon of defense save his brain which one would hardly think adequate in so humble a creature. Yet if you will sit on the brink and watch what goes on in the cool depths you will see how cleverly and in what a variety of ways he and his kindred, for there are several varieties, have become skilled in self-defense. The little fellow has, like most grubs, the power to spin fine silk. This would count for little though he spun a whole cocoon, for the trout would swallow him, silken overcoat and all. But he does better than that. He collects bits of log from the bottom and winds these in his silken warp till he has knotted himself firmly within a log house. There is no incentive to a trout to eat twigs from the bottom, so the defenseless caddice worm is passed unnoticed. He is snugly rolled in silk within his rough house and moves about by cautiously putting out a leg or two and crawling with the logs on his back. Another variety uses small pebbles instead of logs. Taking a stone from bottom in the swift running water of a tiny rapid to-day I found it covered with little gravel barnacles that clung like limpets to the proverbial rock.

I could pry them off only by the use of considerable force and even when I did this the wee bits of gravel, carefully fitted together in a hemisphere, still remained, bound in strong bands. Within the hollow was the little creature that had built the structure, his silken netting still holding him snug within his rock castle, so much brain has this seemingly blind and helpless worm for the preservation of himself. But more than this, the builder and riveter of this adamantine castle has other use for his silken bands than to bind stone or to weave himself a silken garment against the damp weather at the brook bottom. He is a fisherman as well, and stretched between two stones near by or perhaps hanging over the edge of the larger stone on which he dwells is his net, built funnel-form with the larger end toward the oncoming current, the smaller closed with silken netting, all carefully spread to catch tiny creatures slipping down stream with the current, on which the net-builder, castle-dweller, may feed. These homely, home-building, home-keeping fishermen lead an humble and pious life compared with that of the rakish, cannibalistic trout, and they have their reward. Some day, before the spring is very old, they will give up casting their nets, build their house firmer, though still leaving a chance for a circulation of water, and fall asleep. They will awaken to glide heavenward out of the swirl of the current, veritable white angels with downy wings which they will spread and on which they will soar away to a new world which is as different from that in which they bound themselves in logs or granite to escape their enemies as is the old-time orthodox heaven from the world in which the preachers of it lived.

IN THE WHITE WOODS

THE snow came out of the north at a temperature of only twenty degrees above zero, yet, strange to say, for some hours it came damp and froze immediately on every tree-trunk or twig that it struck. The temperature remained the same all day and through the night, but the streak of soft weather somewhere up above which was responsible for the damp snow soon passed away and frozen crystals sifted down that had in them no suspicion of moisture. Yet these tangled tips with those already frozen firmly to the trees, and made a wonderful snow growth the whole woodland through. The next morning it hung there untouched in the crystal stillness and as the woodland people waked they might well have rubbed their eyes, for they had found a new world.

It was a mystical white world that had crowded in and mocked the slender growth of all trees and shrubs with swollen facsimiles in white. The northerly side of tree-trunks, large or small, showed no longer gray bark or brown, rough or smooth. Instead, fluffy white boles rose from the white ground and divided into white limbs, which separated again into mighty twigs of white. The dark outlines of bare trees, the delicate tracery of gray and black that massed day before yesterday in the exquisite dark shades of the winter woods, existed only as a faint definition of the world of whiteness which had descended upon us in a night.

Upon each shrub and tree had grown another, its fellow in exact reproduction of line and curve, only swollen to forty times the size. This enormity of limb and twig shut off all vistas. Where it had been easy to see through the bare wood, the brush merely latticing your view and softening up the middle distance with gray or pink or brown, according to the growth, now the gaze was tangled in a narrow grotto heavily decorated with buttress and baluster, with fluting, frieze, and fillet, with mantel, moulding, mullion, and machicolation, and beat in vain against a solid wall of alabaster just beyond. The greater pines were pointed cones of white, each limb drooping with the weight of snow to its fellow below, and the hangings of the outer tips joining to form a surface wherein miniature domes, set strangely askew, yet massed in curves of superb beauty to the making of the symmetrical whole.

In it all there was no feeling of weight. As a matter of fact it pressed the smaller shrubs and trees well down toward earth. The narrow woodland path was barred with a woven portcullis of white that had swung down from either side. Here and there in the open the smaller pasture cedars were bowed to the ground, doing reverence to the garment of mystic purity with which the earth was sanctified as if for the passing of the grail. In a moment you expected to see some Galahad rise from his knees with shining face, take horse beneath the marble towers of this woodland Camelot, and ride down white lanes in holy quest. In the deep wood the seedling pines broke through the drifts like gnomes from mines of alabaster, whimsical green faces showing beneath grotesque caps and shoulder capes that were part of the whelming snow. Yet it all looked as light and airy as any structure of the imagination, seeming as if it might rise and float away with a change of mood, some substance of which air castles are built, some great white dream poised to drift lightly into the realm of the remembered, as white dreams do.

In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable.

Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.

A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.

I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore—which right or wrong we must perforce believe—informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one

does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic pas seul, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.

On the white page of the path that lay open under groined arches of alabaster no foot had written a record for many rods, then it seemed as if from side to side stretched a highway. Back and forth in straight lines had gone a creature that made a lovely decorative pattern of a trail, a straight line firmly drawn as if with a stylus, on either side at a distance say of three-fourths of an inch tiny footmarks just opposite each other, while alternating with these and nearer the middle line were fainter and finer footprints.

Here the tiny deer-mouse had drawn his long tail through the snow, whisking from stump to stump in a quiver of excitement lest an enemy gobble him up, shooting across like a gray shuttle weaving this exquisite pattern that is like that of a dainty embroidery on a lady’s collar. How he can gallop so regularly and make his tail mark so straight is more than I can tell. Indeed, so sly he is and so swiftly does he go that I have never seen him make it. Beside this tiny pattern the marks where the gray squirrel has leaped across are like those of an hippopotamus on a rampage and the print of my own snowshoe was as if there had been a catastrophe and a section of the sky had fallen.

Along with the tiny mouse tracks were those of our least squirrel, the chipmunk. There is no difficulty about seeing him. He will almost come if you whistle for him. If you will camp near his burrow you may teach him to come and eat nuts out of your hand, answering any prearranged signal, such as whacking them together or chirping to him.

Even though you are a total stranger he will not hesitate to whisk out of his hole under the brush heap right in your face and eyes, whisking back again in great terror, no doubt, but immediately putting out his whiskered nose to sniff and wrinkle it in comical confusion, half friendly, half frightened. So I had but to wait a moment before little Tamias striatus was out from under the brush pile and had flipped over to a fallen log, ploughing the soft snow off the end of it in a comically frantic rush to his hole there, the entrance being snowed up. He was in and out again in a jiffy, standing on his hind legs and peering over the log and making noses at me, jumping to the

top and whirling and jumping down again, and then flashing out and kicking up crystals in a rush across the road to another hole under another brush pile, his scantily furred half tail erect and as humorously vivacious as everything else about him. The chipmunk when he thinks he is going to be captured and is filled with great fear—half of it being, I believe, fear that he wont be—is the most delightfully comical little chap that grows in the woods. If he’d only keep as wild as that after he is tamed I’d like one for a pet.

Down in the open meadow where the unfrozen brook ran black in its banks of snow, touched only here and there with the green of luxuriant watercress, I found the trail of the crows. Not one was in sight and there was no sound from them anywhere. It was as if the snow had covered them under and they were unable to break through it. Here, however, was evidence to the contrary. Surely they had breakfasted, and no doubt well. They had marched all up and down the low banks, and where a snowy island lay in midstream they had promenaded it from one end to the other. Here and there I could see where they had stepped into shallow water and waded. The marks of muddy claws in the white snow were much in evidence where they had jumped out again. Just as summer bathers “tread for quahaugs” in the summer shallows south of the cape, I could fancy them feeling with their toes for shell-fish and prodding for them with long bill when found. But they had had a salad, too, with breakfast. I could see where they had pulled out the watercress all along and cropped it down to the larger stems. Even in winter weather when the snow lies deep the crow knows where to find what is good for him.

Where the path wound round the brow of the hill and the birches stand, their granaries still full of manna for the wandering bird, it seemed again as if my plunge into the white thicket had baptized me with invisibility. Of a sudden the air was full of the sound of wings and a flock of tree sparrows that must have numbered hundreds swung about my head and charged the snow-covered birches. Their dash shook some snow off and a few lighted, the others swinging off and having at them again. This time all found a footing and began to feed eagerly on the seeds from the tiny cones, scattering the birdlike scales in flocks far greater than their own.

I had stopped stock-still at the sound of their wings, and they took no more notice of me than if I had been a snowed-up fence post or a pasture cedar. I tried to count them, but it was not easy. They seemed to twinkle from twig to twig like wavelets in the sun, and though their garb is sober their movements dazzle. Just as I would get a group on a single tree nicely tallied they flashed as one bird over to another tree, and mingling with their fellows there spoiled the count. I finally estimated, rather roughly, that there were three hundred of them, a half of a light brigade of as merry fellows as I wish to meet. They twittered jovially and musically among themselves, and now and then one essayed a little sotto voce song which he never could finish because immediately his mouth was full.

Once or twice some inaudible order seemed to thrill through the flock and they whirled upward as if a single muscle moved every wing, swung a short ellipse and lighted again, often in the same trees. As they worked into the birches almost over my very head I could see every marking on them; the black mandibles, the lower yellowish at the base, the reddish brown crown and the back streaked with the same color, with black, and a yellowish buff, the wing coverts tipped with white and the grayish white breast with what looks like an indistinct dark spot in the center. In a kaleidoscopic flock of three hundred or more it is not easy to give every bird even a passing glance, but I am quite sure there were other than tree sparrows present. I seemed to see birds without the faint dark spot in the breast. A few, I know, had a distinctly rufous tint there, and I fancy swamp sparrows, a few of which winter hereabouts, and perhaps other birds for sociability’s sake, were with my winter chippies.

The shaking of the snow from the trees and their gleaning among the birch cones had scattered the little seeds which they love so well all about on the snow and soon they followed them. The surface a little before had been white. Before the birds were ready to come down it was spiced so liberally with the seeds and scales that they had shaken down that it was the color of cinnamon. Then with one motion the flock dropped like autumn leaves and began a most systematic seed hunt in which they left no bit of the space unsought. Yet when they were gone you would hardly find two tracks that crossed; they hopped in winding parallels that never went over the same ground a second time, leaving figures much like the mazes which schoolboys of long ago used to draw on their slates. They came almost to my feet and I was beginning to feel that my fancy of invisibility was very real after all when with a twitter of alarm and a single united action they whirred into the air and vanished over the treetops.

I turned away in chagrin. The magic was destroyed, evidently, and in turning I saw the cause. Just behind me in the snow with quivering tail and green eyes glaring accusingly was the family cat. He was hunting far from home, but I saw contemptuous recognition in his eyes and I knew he was thinking that here was that great, clumsy creature that was always scaring away his game.

THE ROAD TO MUDDY POND

TWO days of greedy south wind had licked up the crisp snow till all the fields and southerly slopes were bare. Then came the lull before the north wind should come back, a lull in which you had but to sniff the air to smell the coming spring; its faint perfume crisped with a frosty odor that lured the senses like a flavor of stephanotis frappé. It was a day that tempts a man to take staff and scrip and climb the hills due south to meet the romance the two days’ wind has brought from far down the map, perhaps from Venezuela and the highlands that border the banks of Orinoco. By noon the north wind will be driving it back again, though bits of it will still be tangled in southerly facing corners of the hills.

Such a day is fine for cedar swamps. The boggy morasses under foot will be firm with the winter’s ice still, but the warm wind has swept all things clear of snow. Into the most tangled depths you may penetrate with at least firm footing. Where in summer the treacherous mosses wait to let you through into black depths of soft muck that have no bottom, you may walk in safety on the way that the winter has laid for you.

It is not a time of year to find new things, this season of mid-February, and yet I had hardly faced the bewildering sun a mile before, seeking the cool depths of a hemlock-clad northern hillside to rest my eyes from the glare, I found a yellow birch all hung with fluffy tassels, as if the wine aroma of the air had fooled it into foliage. Now the yellow birch is not exactly rare in our woods, here south-west of Boston, but it is rare enough to be called occasional. Where the Betula alba is as common, almost, as the grass under foot, the Betula lutea may not occur once in a square mile. I know it only on cold northern hillsides or in dense swamps where cool springs bathe its roots all summer long. There the silvery yellow, silky shreds of its outer bark mark its trunk as a thing of beauty, winter or summer. You feel like stroking these curls as if they were those of a flaxen-haired youngster lost in the deep woods and brave but a bit troubled and in need of comfort from one who knows. That is the only impression the yellow birch had ever made on me in all my greetings of it, yet here it was wearing a semblance of young leaves in this wine-sweet February air.

Even after the cool depths of the woods had cured my eyes of the sun glare the illusion remained and I had to climb the tree and pluck some of this foliage before I was sure what it could be. Surely eyes and no eyes have we all, for, in all my life, I had never noticed what happens in winter to the catkins of the yellow birch. Instead of hanging rigid like wee cones, as do those of the white birch, giving up seeds and scales to sprinkle the snow or the bare earth as the creatures of the woods have need of them, these had shed their fleur-de-lis scales and then held them fluttering in the wind, each by a tiny thread. On looking at them closely I saw the slim, rat-tail spindle sticking out, its surface file-like with the sockets of seed and scale, but the effect of the whole was that of fluffy tan-colored tassels hung along the twigs. Here and there among these fleur-de-lis the round, flat, wing-margined seeds were still tangled by the two pistils which still remained, seeming like tiny black roots, or something like those hooks by which the tick-seed fastens to you for a free ride.

Surely the wilderness families have strongly marked individuality. Both the white and yellow birches must hold their seeds and scatter them little by little the whole season through, that they may have the better chance to germinate and continue the race, and I can never see why they should not do it in the same way. But they do not. Perhaps this infinite variability is arranged wisely so that people who blunder about with half seeing eyes may now and then have them opened a little wider and so be pleased and teased into blundering on. Another season I shall watch the yellow birches and find, if I can, on what winter date their catkins blossom into tassels.

The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;

That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the Nesæa verticillata, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags—decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.

Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the Nesæa verticillata were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter—and all he heard was frogs.

Looking down upon it this brilliant February day, with a tiny cloud drawn across the sun, it was a pearl. The winter and the distance made the bog edging pure gold in which it shone with all the white radiance of its opaque, foot-thick ice. Anon the sun came out and what had been a pearl gathered subtle fires of blue and red in its crystalline heart and flashed opaline tints back at me that changed again as I plunged down the hill toward it, and it lay a Norwegian sunstone shooting forth fire-yellow glows as the rays of the sun caught the right angle. Nor was the ice less beautiful when I stood on it. Here opaqueness wove sprightly patterns with crystalline purity. The surface was smooth under foot and yet these patterns rose and fell in the ice itself, and it was hard to believe they were not carved intaglio and then the surface iced over to a level. It was no prettier ice than I had crossed on the big pond, but its setting brought out the beauty.

Ice grown old, after all, is far more beautiful than young ice. Character is built into it. Living has taught it the highest form of art, which is to repeat beauty without sameness. What designs might the makers of floor coverings win from this surface if they would but study it, and how trite and tame in comparison seem their tiresome interweaving of square and circle and their endless repetition!

This solid floor, woven by winter witchery, goes on through the spongy surface of the bog, mingling with it, yet by some necromancy never interfering with its own intricate patterns of growth. The sphagnum fluffs up through it with its delicate fiber unharmed. The pitcher plants sit jauntily holding their ewers to the sky, filled with ice instead of water, to be sure, but uncracked and waiting in rows as if for bogle bellboys to rush with them to unseen guests. I found one flower-scape with its nodding head still persistent. The seed pod had cracked along the sides, but the umbrella-like style was still there, opened and inverted, and it had caught many of the seeds that the pod had spilled and was holding them for a more favorable season, without doubt.

Everywhere the solemn cassandra pushed its black twigs up through the moss and held its leathery leaves, brown and discouraged, drooping yet persistent. The cassandra always reminds me of thin, elderly New England spinsters who enjoy poor health. It is so homely and solemn; even in joyous June it never cracks a smile, but is just as lugubrious and sallow and barely holds on to an unprofitable life. And all about, indeed in many places crowding the very life out of it, grow these brave, virid, white cedars. You’d think it might catch geniality from them. Their footing is as precarious as its own. Of course, now, the ice has set all things in its firm grip, but in summer there is little enough to hold up the swamp cedars and it is only by entwining their roots and growing them firmly together in a mat that they are able to keep their sprightly uprightness. So closely are the young trees set on the edge of their grove that it is difficult to penetrate their intertwining branches, and even when you have passed this barrier you find the trunks so close that often there is no room to go between them. Here all branches have passed and the straight trunks run upward in close parallels making all their struggle at the top. And a struggle it has been indeed for all that are now alive. You may note this by the bare poles of those that have lagged behind a little in the fight and lost the magic touch of sunlight on their tops. These are dead and bare, and their companions have so immediately taken up their slender space that you wonder how the dead ones ever got so far as they did. It is a very solemn temple under these cedars. The living wall the dead within the catacombs and the sighing of the motionless leaves above your head still leaves you in doubt. It may be trees that sorrow for dead neighbors or gasp in the struggle to retain their own breathing space.

Little obstructs your passage, now that the firm ice is underfoot, unless it is the too close set tree trunks. Goldthread and partridge berry creep in the moss that mounds about the very stumps of the cedars, but no other vine or shrub seems to have the vitality to grow here, or if it had it has wisely used it to flee to more sunny uplands. Not even in tropical jungles have I seen the struggle for existence so fierce as it is among these too closely set swamp cedars. One in ten eventually survives and makes a marketable growth. Other things bring them to disaster than the choking crowding of their neighbors, however. Here and there you can see big trees that lurch in strange fashion, some this way and some that. This is most often true of a pine that by some chance has grown among them. The cause is the uncertain footing of the slimpsy bog. As they get heavier and taller they cannot find sufficient anchorage in the yielding wallop beneath their roots, and sooner or later a wind comes that tips them over. But I found in places among the sheltering larger trees, groups of young ones, cedars, that could have suffered from no wind, they were so well protected and walled round by their elders. These were laid down in brief windrows all in the same direction, and I wonder still what force accomplished it. If it had been a tropical jungle I should have said that here a hippopotamus wandered up out of the depths and back again, or here an elephant fled from some retired statesman, but these are not beasts of our frozen forests.

In one place was another tropical suggestion that was a bit startling. This was the cast skin of a snake that must have been four inches in diameter. It was only the white bark of a dead birch that had fallen and rotted, as to its heart-wood, all away, but the tougher bark remained, dangling in white folds just as a snake’s skin does when cast.

But this is not the place to see the swamp cedars at their best. You are on their gloomy side now. Toward the vivifying sun they turn every cheerful atom within them and as you look down on them as the sun does from some near by southern ridge you get the full effect of their close-set masses of living green and realize the enormous virility within them. It seems to me that our toughest tree here in eastern Massachusetts is the red cedar. It grows on storm-swept rock cliffs where nothing else but lichens can seem to find a foothold. Yet close behind it I class this dweller in the rich, moist peat bogs. I find that many botanists do not differentiate this tree that I call swamp cedar from the red cedar, Juniperus virginiana. Yet it is nearer this than it is to the arbor vitæ which is the so-called cedar of the Maine woods. But it is not the red cedar in one important particular. It does not have that wonderful red fragrant heart-wood that the red cedar has. That alone, it seems to me, should give it a separate standing botanically. Then its leaves are flatter and more of the arbor vitæ type than those of the red cedar. And there you have it; but I know what happened. Long ages ago, when staid and sober evergreens were more frisky than they are now some particularly handsome young arbor vitæ lass came down from the north woods and met and loved one of our husky red cedars. How could she help it? Then there was a secret trip to Providence, or whatever place was the Gretna Green of those days, and the elopers settled down in Plymouth County, or perhaps here in Norfolk. That would account for my white cedar, and it is the only way I can do it.

I was two miles further toward the Plymouth woods and was broiling a chop for my dinner on the fork of a witch-hazel stick over the lovely clear flame of dry white pine limbs, when I came across the second new thing of my experience in the winter woods. That was black snow. It was on the northerly edge of an open meadow, a spot so tangled with wild rose and other slender shrubs that it was next to impossible to penetrate it. For some reason the south wind had failed to carry off all the snow here, and a thin coating of it lay on the ground. There was a bit of open water on the edge of the tangle, and I noticed that this was covered with a black coating. Going down to look closer I found that the snow as far as I could look into the meadow was covered with this same surface, making it fairly black. It looked quite like the soot from black coal, but when I poked at it with my finger to see if it smutted it hopped nimbly away. The open pool and the snow all about it was covered with tiny black fleas or some similar skipping minute insect. I was curious about these tiny black creatures, and I folded many of them carefully in a leaf of my note book, creasing the edges firmly so that I might keep them tight, and put them in my scrip. I intended to put them under a microscope and see how many legs they had for all this wonderful skipping; but they had too many for me. When I got home the paper was blank. They had all skipped.

AMONG THE MUSKRAT LODGES

I ALWAYS know the sound of the east wind as it comes over the Blue Hills for the twanging of the bow from which winter has shot his Parthian arrow. The keenest it is in all his quiver of keen darts, for it penetrates joints in one’s armor that no gale from Arctic barrens has been able to reach, that no fall of snow or of temperature has weakened. Facing it to-day and feeling its barbs turn in the marrow of my breastbone as I crossed Ponkapoag Pond I began to wonder how it fared with my friends the muskrats who were wintering in the very teeth of it over on the northwest shore. And so I turned my shoulder to the blow and my face to the bog where tepees in a long line spire conically out of the brown grasses on the bog edge, where the pickerel weed flaunted blue banners all summer long.

The thermometer marked a temperature of but a few degrees below freezing, but it was the coldest day of the winter. The bite of the wind off Hudson’s Bay is as nothing to the chill which the Arctic sea-water folds in its unfrozen heart as it sweeps from polar depths down the west coast of Greenland, along the Labrador shore, round Newfoundland and down again, shouldering into Massachusetts Bay; the reserve corps of the winter’s assault, the Old Guard plunging desperately to its Waterloo in the face of all-conquering spring. This chill the east wind had caught up from the green depths of the surges he tossed, and made it the poison of the points which he drove desperately home. Face this wind for a day and you shall feel the venom working long after you have sought shelter, nor shall even the cheer of a big open fire drive it easily from your bones.

Yet you may draw from the chill this cheer, if you will, that no longer is the worst yet to come; it is here and soon the prospect must mend. It seems odd to think that some day next July we shall sniff this frigidity drawn from the depths of the boreal current, borne on the wings of the east wind, and revel in the intoxicating ozone with which it soothes our heat-fevered nostrils.

Over on the bog edge are twenty-seven lodges, built of bog turf and roots, dead grass and rushes, almost any rubbish in fact which Mussascus, as Captain John Smith called him, has been able to get in the neighborhood. Each has a foundation of some sort; one a stump submerged in the muck, another a rude framework of alder sticks which the muskrat cuts with his strong, chisel-like teeth and brings in his mouth as a beaver would; others variously upheld, but all so placed that the entrance may be beneath the water and beneath the ice also, however thick it may freeze.

Little does the muskrat care for my marrow-piercing east wind. I’ll wager that he never knows it blows, for rarely indeed at this time of year does he put his nose out where he might feel it. His stairway leads from the under-water entrance to a cosy and comfortable nest lined with soft grass where he and his fellows cuddle. The mud-smeared, water-soaked material of their walls is frozen to adamant. It is porous enough in spots to give them air for breathing but does not let the cold wind enter. It is as snug and safe a place as any one could devise. An enemy must break through from without and long before he can smash the frozen walls Mussascus has slipped into the water and gone his way beneath the ice, first to another tepee, or if driven from that on again to his burrows in the hard bank a thousand feet away.

Bending my ear close to the nearest lodge I rapped sharply on the rough wall and listened. There was no sound. Again I rapped and my knock was all that disturbed the silence within. Outside the frozen marsh grasses sawed silkily one on another and the frost crystals that the wind was sweeping from the thick white ice shrilled infinitesimally as they slid by, but no sound came from the lodge. Evidently no one was at home. At the next lodge it was different. The rap was succeeded by a second of breathless silence, then there was the sound of scrambling, and as I watched the dark clear ice that always obtains just about the lodge I saw three silver gleams shoot athwart the clear space and vanish under the opaque ice just beyond. Three Mussascuses had fled, their dense, dark, close-set under fur holding the air entangled in its fine fuzz which is impervious to water, thus accounting for the gleam.

Like the fur-seal the muskrat has an outer coat of rather coarse hair and an undervest of much finer, more silky texture. This provides an air space which enfolds him, however long he remains under water, and its chill may not reach him nor can the moisture. Only the soles of his feet and the very tip of his muffle, the nose-pad, are bare. His ears are set down within his fur, and when he is beneath the surface each holds an earful of air that catches under-water sounds and transmits them as faithfully as it does the sounds of the upper world. He swims by vigorous “dog-paddle” motions of his hind feet, which are large and furnished with stiff, coarse hair that answers for a webbing between the toes. Moreover, these feet are “hung-in” a little in a peculiar club-footed way that makes his gait on land an awkward shamble, but which allows them to “feather” as an oar does in swimming, thus giving his propulsive apparatus the greatest possible efficiency.

People who know Mussascus best differ about the use of his tail. I have never seen him use it except as a very efficient steering oar, but I have been told that he sculls with it as a fish does with his, and thus helps his progress. It is admirably adapted for either purpose, but it is a tail that does not look as if it belonged to any fur-bearing animal. It is almost as long as the muskrat himself and has never a hair from butt to tip. Instead, it is furnished with small stiff scales which might just as well be those of a snake. It is flattened sidewise and trimmed down to almost a knife-edge at top and bottom, and the muskrat uses it most efficiently.

But however well adapted their feet and tails are for swimming and their fur for keeping them warm and dry beneath the ice, it would seem as if the three little soft-furred, brown chaps that I had just driven from their snug wigwam had a far greater problem to solve than that of warmth or locomotion. How were they to breathe in the water beneath this foot-thick coating where was no hole to give them an outlet to the air? In a few minutes their lungs must have a new supply of oxygen, and if let alone they are able to get it in a rather curious fashion. Coming up beneath the ice, they expel the vitiated air, making a bubble which in a short time absorbs new oxygen from the ice and water; then they re-breathe it and go on.

In the early autumn when the ice is thin and clear you may capture Mussascus by first driving him from his lodge, then following him as he swims, a silvery streak beneath the ice, till he makes that telltale bubble. Then go up and hit the ice sharply over the bubble and you drive the little fellow away from his own breath and drown him. But you would be unable to play any such mean trick as this along the Ponkapoag bog edge now, for the muskrats are abundantly provided for, and I believe they did it themselves. Here and there along by their tepees you find open breathing holes. These, I am quite sure, the little fellows keep open, just to be able now and then to take a glimpse at the upper world, though they do not need them otherwise. But that is not the provision which I mean. As far along the bog front as the tepees go there are everywhere big white air-bubbles. From the tepees out into the pond they show in many places for a distance of a hundred feet or more, and then cease. Nowhere else in the pond are these bubbles and I believe the muskrats have stored them here in their various excursions as relays, providing against just such folk as myself, who might come along, force them from their homes, and drown them beneath the thick ice covering. Thus provided, the three that I had driven out would have no trouble in reaching the most distant tepee or the higher bank beyond the bog edge, where are their summer burrows.

Nor need they trouble their minds the winter through about provisions. Some curious skater or perhaps a would-be fur dealer has been along at one end of the bog and broken into a number of houses and scattered others all to bits. A long thaw enabled him to do this, else the winter had kept them so safe from vandals that only a heavy ax or pick would give entrance. Among the ruins that this human earthquake caused are fat roots of the yellow pond lily, the spatter dock, as long as my arm. It looks as if some of the houses were half built of these petrified reptiles broken in chunks, scaly looking remnants of a previous geological age. These are the muskrat’s bread, or perhaps we might better say his potatoes. Rough and forbidding as they look they are white and crisp inside, and though their taste is as flat and insipid as that of a raw potato to you and me the muskrat votes them delicious and satisfying. The bottom of the pond is stored with them and he has but to dive and dig, and he even buttresses his winter wigwams with them.

If he wants something a little more spicy there are spots in the bog, now safe under water and ice but within easy reach of a submarine like himself, where grow the pungent roots of the calamus, the sweet flag, of which he is very fond and which, when dried and sugared, most humans like to nibble. Stored all along the shallows are his shell-fish, the fresh water mussels whose thin shells he can easily tear open and whose white flesh he finds exceedingly toothsome. These, too, are as available in winter as in summer. Indeed some of his houses are built in the autumn, not so much for winter homes as restaurants where he may dine in seclusion on these very mollusks. Quite a distance from the bog, over in a shallow part of the pond, is a bed of these mussels with a flat-topped rock near by rising above the surface. Here last fall the muskrats built a lodge, right on the rock, which they used for this purpose. The first skaters kicked this lodge to pieces. It was fairly crammed with the empty shells of many a rare feast, showing that here Mussascus had undoubtedly entertained his friends in true Bohemian style.

So, while I shivered in the searching east wind on the sky side of the ice, the muskrats were well fed and comfortable in a region of even higher temperature, a country where the spring, which we say comes up out of the south, but the muskrat knows wells up out of the ground beneath, is already at his door. Its warmth is in the bog below and has softened and even melted the ice all about the tepees. The ice on the pond is a foot thick still, but the water beneath it is thrilled with this same potency and you have but to stir it to sniff its fragrance. Below the pond the brook which is its outlet splashes over the long-abandoned sills of what was a gristmill dam in the days of the early settlers. Here in spite of the keen lances of the wind and its roar in the frozen maples overhead, I heard the soft tones of the coming season in every babble of the brook. All the air was full of a fresh, inviting fragrance which the water gives off as it flows. All the pond is full of it beneath the ice already, and the muskrat breathes it in his every excursion under the crystal depths. Soon he will abandon the winter houses, which as soon as the frost leaves them will sag and flatten and begin to sink into the bog itself, building its outer edge a little firmer here and there, and thus helping it in its yearly encroachment on the pond itself. As the ages have gone by, Mussascus has been a pretty potent factor in this encroachment.

As the beaver has been a maker of ponds and a conserver of streams, holding and delaying their waters with his dams, so the muskrat has helped in the making of meadows and the sanding and grading of pond edges. The first is done by his winter nests, the second by his summer burrows which start under water at the pond edge and slant along near the surface for thirty to fifty feet. Many cubic yards of sand and loam are dug from these burrows and spread along in the shallows. His river habits are strong upon him in this work, for he usually makes a delta of entrances, three or four leading up into the same passage which often has a wee exit above water, near the edge. Here if you are particularly fortunate you may in midsummer see his young poke their noses up, longing for a peek at the great world, before they are big enough to swim out into it. Here, too, weasel and mink sometimes find entrance and devour his family. But there are three litters a year, as a rule, so the occasional weasel serves to keep down a too great increase in the population.

His greatest enemy, however, is man, who so pollutes the streams with sewage and factory refuse that no self-respecting muskrat can live in many of them, and who hunts him for his fur for the making of automobile coats. Yet in the case of my Ponkapoag Pond friends man’s hand for once is for him rather than against. His home there is now a part of the park system and he may be shot or trapped only under penalty of the law. This has been so for some years now and I think it explains the numbers of the winter lodges which are this year greater than ever before.

THICK ICE

Taking to-day my first canoe trip of the year about the edges where the imperative orders of the coming spring have opened clear water for a half-hundred feet, I could not help noticing this thinner disk. The west wind blew keen, but lightly, and had crowded the ice over toward the eastern shore, leaving me free northwest passage in sunny shallows where no ripple disturbed. Every dip of the paddle threw drops of water on the surface, drops that shone like diamonds in the warm sun, but sought, always for a time in vain, to reunite with their kindred water. This invisible barrier held them up and they rolled about without wetting it, just as they might have on a glossy disk of metal, though they finally vanished into it. Like the drops the disk was made up of molecules of water, but the fact that these rested on the very summit of their fellows and between them and the air seemed to change their character and give them a property of impenetrability.

It is this disk of water on water that holds up the summer water striders, lean and ferocious-looking insects that skip about on the surface, the tips of their long legs denting it but never being wet. There is a big black land spider that lives on the water’s edge summers, who is husky and heavy, yet will run along the surface, galloping and jumping just as if on a dry and sandy beach and neither falling in nor wetting his feet.

When I see the silver dimples that the water strider’s feet make in this elastic surface and note this land spider galloping across a cove, the disk of the pond’s summer telephone receiver and transmitter becomes very real to my eyes. Very likely the under-water people, mullet and bream and perch, read these messages in summer and know in advance what the weather is going to be. If not, what is it that stops their feeding and disturbs them before any rumble of the approaching thunderstorm has reached my ears? Perhaps in this way they learn of other universe happenings, if such are the subjects of messages that pass, though I am not sure of this, for such information as I have been able to intercept has always referred to approaching meteorological conditions.

They come to my ears only in winter, after the ice has reached a thickness of a foot or so, these promptings out of unknown space. Sometimes you need to be very near the receiver to note them. It is not possible for a mile-square, foot-thick telephone disk to whisper, yet often it grumbles only a hoarse word or two at so deep a pitch that you would hardly know it was spoken. The lowest note on a piano is shrill in comparison to this tone, audible only when the ear is within a few feet of the ice. But there are other times when the winter ice on the pond whoops and roars, and bellows and whangs as if all Bedlam were let loose and were celebrating Guy Fawkes day. A mile away, of a still winter evening, you may hear this and be dismayed, for the groanings and bellowings are such as belong to no monsters of the present day, though they might be echoes of antedeluvian battles corked within the earth for ages and now for the first time let loose.

It is all very simple, of course, says my friend the scientist. It is caused by vibrations due to the expanding or contracting of the ice, or the expanding or contracting of a portion of it causing big cracks to run hither and thither. It means simply that a change in temperature is going on.

But does it? Or if so, is that all it means? I crossed the pond not long ago of a beautiful springlike morning, after the sun had been up for two hours or more. There was then no voice in the receiver other than the gentle thrumming caused by the chopping of the fishermen, making holes wherein to set pickerel traps, nor was there a cloud in the sky. An hour later the soft haze of a coming warm gale spread over the horizon to the southward, and as if at the touch of a key the pond began to speak a word now and then that rapidly changed to full conversation. From the near hilltop where I stood it was as if I had cut in on a telephone line where two giants were eagerly talking under conditions that made the hearing a difficult matter. There was question and answer, query and interruption and repetition and change of tone from a low voice to a shout.

It was humorously like a fellow townsman having trouble with Central so far as inflection went, but there was a quality in the tone which barred the human. You had but to listen with closed eyes to know that here spoke the primal forces of nature. You may hear that same quality in the voice of a gale at sea. I don’t mean the shrilling of the wind in the rigging, or the cry of the waters, even, but that burbling undertone of the upper air currents, growling and shouting at one another as they roar by far overhead. An Arabian might say these are the voices of Afrites, journeying through the air to the kingdom of Ethiopia. So even in the bright sun of that springlike morning these solemn voices of the winter ice seemed like echoes of messages superhuman, passing from deep to deep.

At the time I laid the cause to the changes in temperature produced by the warmth of the morning sun on the thick ice. Yet the uproar began after the sun had been shining for an hour or two, and it ceased within a half-hour. That night came the south blow and a warm storm.

In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word—audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts.

I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.

Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.

But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth. Anyway it was a great uproar. I fancy winter ice makes the same outcry on other ponds, though I never happened to hear it anywhere else.

To-day the ice was quiet enough on my side of the pond, though you could see where it had been at work. With the west wind as team mate it was dredging and grading over on the east shore. This is the every-day winter work of thick ice. It picks up big rocks on the beach and carries them off into deep water or moves them up or down the shore as it sees fit. But always it pushes back the sand and gravel and stones on low shores and steadily builds them up till you find wide shallow ridges between the water’s edge and the slope of the land farther ashore. My pond is very young, scarcely three-quarters of a century old, yet it shows marked evidence of this work all along shore. When ice is thick and the wind strong, especially toward spring when there is apt to be free water along the edge, you may stand by and see the dredging effect at work, see the low, long mound of gravel or sand slide backward up the beach while the edge of the floe crumples and grinds and crumbles, but still moves irresistibly to its work.

Over at Ponkapoag Pond, which is perhaps a hundred thousand years older, the effect of this pushing ice through the ages, working at various levels, has been to produce mounds and dikes almost beyond belief. Moreover, these are placed in such situations that it is plain to see that the water was for the greater part of that long time some feet higher than now. In my first acquaintance with these ridges I thought them dikes raised by modern men, early farmers, perhaps, who thus for some occult reason banked the pond as they surrounded their fields with the stone fences which last still. No man of to-day, however ardent a farmer, builds these great barriers between field and field. Yet even with the stone walls before the eye it is hard to believe that men built dykes along the pond shore that averaged a hundred feet across and were in some places much more. A ten-foot bank would do, and it was hard to believe that so much labor would be willingly wasted. Yet along the Ponkapoag Pond shore in one place is a barrier many feet high and broad built, not of sand, but of the rough slate rock of the region, thrown together loosely in huge rough blocks and tamped with earth. This is so much bigger than any of the field-enclosing stone walls that it puts the modern farmer quite out of the question, and on finding it I had pleasant dreams of a prehistoric race of mound-builders who might have preceded the Indians in their occupation of the land and have built these pond embankments for purposes of their own.

Again my scientific friend disapproves my dream theory in well-chosen argument that is very convincing—to him. Nevertheless I go my way with mind equally divided,—between theories as to prehistoric men-mound-builders and the probabilities of the work having been done by that great beaver which, according to the Algonquin legend, made the world out of mud brought up from the bottom of a lake.

Mind you, I am quite convinced that it is the ice which is doing this on the Reservoir shore, but Ponkapoag—that is far enough away to be in the land of legend and all sorts of wonderful things may have happened on its borders.