Wildwood Ways

Flowering fern it is rightly named, too, but it had flowered and gone, and I found of all its regal beauty but a single stalk with brown spore-cases held rigidly aloft among a tangle of brown leaves and bog grass.

Then I looked for the sensitive fern. This with its slender, creeping rootstock sending up single fronds is less woody than any of the others and I began to suspect that it would have disappeared utterly. So the sterile fronds had. There was no trace of them in spots that in summer were a perfect tangle. But this was not true of the fertile stalks. Here and there these, like the one of the royal fern, stood erect and bore their close-lipped spore cases, seal-brown and stiff, high above dead leaves and other decay of fragile annuals.

All this made a disheartening fern chase, and I turned to the steep side of the hemlock-shaded northern hill, sure of one hardy variety that would have no use for invisibility, however chill the north wind might blow. No smile of direct sunlight ever touches this hill. It is set so steep that only the mid-summer midday sun overtops its slant and this the dense hemlock foliage shuts out. No woodland grasses grow in its dense shadow and only here and there the partridge berry and the pyrola creep down a little from the top of the ridge where some sunlight slips in. Yet in its densest part the Christmas fern revels and throws up fronds that seem to catch some of their dark beauty from the deep green twilight of the place. In the spring these stand in varying degrees of erectness, but autumn seems to bring a change in the cellular structure of the lower part of the stipe and weaken it so that the fronds fall flat upon the earth. They lose none of their firm texture or color, however, and be the temperature ever so low or the snow ever so deep they undergo no further change till the next spring fronds are well under way. Sometimes even in mid-summer you may find the fronds of the year before, somewhat fungi-encumbered and darkened with age, but still green.

No other fern grows in the denser portions of this hemlock twilight, though the Christmas fern clings close to it, and does not spread to the more open glades on other portions of the hill. Another northern hill of similar steepness but shaded by an old growth of pines through which certain sunlight filters during most of the day has specimens of the Polystichum acrostichoides growing only in its most sheltered nooks from which they do not seem to spread even to the brighter spots near by on the same declivity. Hence I infer that the plant prefers the twilight, and does not thrive in even occasional sunlight.

Just at the base of this second hill, however, where cool springs begin to bubble forth in the mottled shadow, I caught a gleam of a lighter, lovelier green that was like a dapple of sunlight on clumps of Christmas ferns, and I came near passing it by for that. Then, because I had never seen this fern growing in a dapple of sunlight, I went to it and found that I had chanced upon a group of the spinulose wood fern. The plumose fronds showed no more winter effects than did those of the Christmas ferns. The keen frosts had not shrivelled them, nor was there any hint of the brown that might come with the ripening of leaves or the departure of sap.

Like the other ferns they had suffered a failing of tissues near the base of the stipe, but pinnules, midribs and rachis were as softly, radiantly green as they had been under the full warmth of the summer sun. Owing to this failure of tissues in the stipe they lay flat to the ground, but they were still beautiful, perhaps more so than they had been when they stood more erect in summer, and were obscured and hidden by the other green things of the wood. I know I tramped within a few feet of them again and again last summer without noticing them, yet to-day they caught my eye a long way off, and held it in admiration even after a long and close inspection.

Farther down in the very swamp, laid flat along the sphagnum and oftentimes frozen to it, were fronds of the crested shield-fern and the patches of these tolled me far from my find and it was only on coming back for another look that I discovered the prettiest thing about it. That was, near by and half sheltered by tips of the elder fronds, young plants of the same variety, just advancing from the prothallus stage and having one or two miniature fronds like those of the parent plant but not more than two or three inches long.

These looked so tiny as compared with the mature ferns, but were so erect and confident, so fresh and green and very much alive though the temperature about them night after night had been far below freezing and their roots then stood in ice, that it was worth a journey, just to look at them. How their tender tissues had stood the temperature of ten above zero that had surrounded them a few nights before is more than I can answer. The faintest touch of frost kills the fronds of the great seemingly tough cinnamon and ostrich ferns. Yet these dainty little plants of Nephrodium spinulosum with their miniature fronds of tender lacework had not even wilted or cowered before deep and continued cold as had the stalks of their elders of the same species, but stood erect, nonchalant and seemingly eagerly growing still.

We may say if we will that it is all a part of that magic of youth that makes a million miracles each spring but that does not explain it. Why should these be so strong and full of life when the fronds of the hay-scented fern, for instance, have been shrivelled to dry and crumbling brown fragments under the same conditions? I cannot answer this either.

Last of all I thought of the polypodys that grow in the rock crevices all down along the glen, and went to see how they fared. It has been a hard year for these little fellows. There must have been weeks at a time during the scorching days of the long summer’s drought that their roots, clinging precariously in rock crevices and dependent for moisture wholly on rain and dew, were dry to the tips. The very heat of the rock itself under the blister of the sun would not only evaporate all moisture, but would so remain in the rock all night as to prevent any dew from condensing on it.

I had seen the polypodys at midday curled up on themselves seemingly nothing but dried tissues that could never be again infused with the breath of green life. Yet, let there come but the briefest of showers and you would see them uncurl, lift their fronds to the breeze, and go on as cheerily as their lower level neighbors the lady-ferns whose pinnules flashed in the drip of the splashing stream and whose roots bathed in the shallows.

The summer must have weakened them. Were they the sort to shrivel at the touch of the freezing wind and vanish into the fern-seed magic of invisibility? Not they. The slender crevice of black dirt in which their roots grow was black adamant with frost, but the polypodys swayed in the biting wind as jauntily as they had in the soft airs of summer and were as green and unharmed by the winter thus far as the Christmas ferns had been.

While I gazed at them, admiring their toughness and courage, my eye caught a bit of greenery on the rock high above and I had found the second unexpected fern of my winter day’s hunt, for there from a crevice dripped the rounded, finely crenate, dark green pinnæ of Asplenium trichomanes, the maidenhair spleenwort.

Many a day during the summer had I sat on that ledge, listening to the prattle of the brook down the glen and watching the demoiselle flies flit coquettishly up and down stream while the dragonflies with masculine directness darted hither and thither. The polypodys must have often dropped their fern-seed on my head, but the magic that they invoked with it must have been of the sort that made not me, but the little fern above invisible, for it remained for this winter day of a green Christmas week to show me its fragile beauty still green and undisturbed in the winter weather. No other evidence was needed, nor could I have any so good, to prove that spring is indeed here before the winter comes, and though the cold and snow may retard they cannot prevent it from reaching the full beauty and climax of maturity.

THE BARE HILLS IN MIDWINTER

After a little the battlemented donjon of the observatory looms clear and you begin to notice other details of the gray earth beneath your feet. The south wind has brought and left with you for a brief space the atmosphere of the Bermudas, and you need only the joyous hubbub of bird songs to think it June instead of January. Instead there is a breathless silence that is like resignation and a portent all in one. Breathing this soft air in the golden glow of daybreak it seems as if there could never be such things as zero temperature and northwest gales; but the whole top of the hill keeps silence. It knows.

As the day grows brighter you can see the little scrub-oaks that make the summit plateau their home crouch and settle themselves together for the endurance test which is their winter lot. They have opened their hearts to the south rain while it lasted, but they know what to expect the moment it is gone. They studied the weather from Blue Hill summit long before the observatory was thought of.

All trees love the hill, but few can endure its winter rigors. You can see where the hickories and red cedars have swarmed up the steep from all sides, and as you note how the scrub-oaks compact themselves you will see also the cedars holding the rim of rock as did that thin red line of Scottish Highlanders at Inkermann, all dwarfed and crippled with the struggle till they seem far different trees from the debonair slim and sprightly red cedars of the alluvial plain. You can fairly see them clench their teeth and hang on.

Yet they love the rocks that they have gripped for some hundreds of years, and nothing but death will part them. There are red cedars growing out of the gray granite near the southern rim of Blue Hill that I believe were there when Bartholomew Gosnold stepped ashore, the first Englishman to set foot on the soil of Massachusetts. No such age belongs to the hickories that have managed to get head and shoulders above the rim of the plateau, yet they too have lost their slender straightness. The cold and the summit winds have pressed them back upon themselves till they are stubby, big-headed dwarfs.

Of how the other trees climb the hill we shall learn more if we begin at the bottom, and we could have no better day in which to look them up than this, for the south rain has swept the ground bare of all snow and left us for a space this temperature of the Carolinas rather than that of Labrador, which is our usual portion in January. Indeed, from the sunny plain which stretches from the southern base of the rock declivity you can see where even tender and jocund plants once began the climb most jauntily.

Stalwart yellow gerardias, six feet tall some of them, grow in the rich black mould that makes steps upward through the rock jumble. From August till the frost caught them they scattered sunshine all along beneath the hickories and chestnuts, maples and white oaks, tipping it out of golden bowls to be shattered into the mists of goldenrod blooms that followed after. These gerardias, though dry and dead, stand now, and will stand despite gales and snow all winter long, boldly lifting brown seed pods aloft, pods that grin in the teeth of bitter gales and send their chaffy seeds floating up the slope to plant the sunshine banner a little farther aloft for next year. Many centuries they have been at it, but few of them have climbed far, yet they so love the hill that they cling tenaciously to the ground they have gained and seem to grow more vigorously there than on less rugged soil.

The roughest ledges of the hill jut boldly to the southward, showing gray granite shoulders to the sun and making this side almost a sheer rock precipice. Yet here the Highlander cedars have chosen to make their climb in battalions, plaiding the gray surface with russet brown and olive green, clinging tenaciously by toe-tips where it would seem as if only air-plants might find nourishment. No other trees dare the bare granite steep, though hickories flank the cedars wherever the slopes of the ridge have crumbled a little and given a better foothold of black soil.

Strange to say, the purple wood-grass that surely loves sandy plains best has sent little scouting parties up with the hickories, and here and there occupies tiny plateaus among the ledges well up toward the ridge, often rimmed round with the purplish green of the mountain cranberry. At the bottom of the gullies the maples began the climb, but they did not last long. Red and white oaks have won farther up, but stopped invariably before the summit of the gully was reached.

From the beautiful Eliot Memorial Bridge, near the eastern limits of the summit plateau of Blue Hill, you catch a wonderful glimpse southeasterly right down a narrow ravine to a wider valley, and thence down again to a glow of white ice which is Houghton’s Pond. The bare trees no longer hide one another and you see where they made a flank movement in force for the summit, swarming over the wider upland valley, and narrowing to a wild charge of great chestnuts up the gully. These chestnuts do not seem to stand rooted. They sway this way and that and seem to hurrah and wave flags in the wild excitement of a desperate and hopeful venture. They are motionless, of course, but they have all the semblance of splendid action that genius has given to sculpture, and they add romance to the most picturesque spot on the range. Yet never a chestnut top is lifted above the ridge which tops the gully. To it they came in all the fine enthusiasm of a well-planned and concerted advance, but stopped so suddenly that you see them in splendid action still, as if with one foot in the air for the step that should take them above the ridge.

The north wind of the ages has stopped them right there where their tops are just far enough above the level of the ridge edge to be safe from it. You see them best by climbing down the little gully among evergreen wood ferns which grow in the rich, moist soil among the rocks, the only touches of green unless you happen upon some polypodys seemingly growing out of the rock itself.

Right among the chestnuts the semblance changes again with the harlequin-like magic of the woods. The big trees are no longer fixed in the attitude of desperate charge upon a rampart, as you saw them from above. Among them they seem to be tipsy bacchanals who have chosen the little secluded glen for a place of revelry, and are reeling about it like clumsy woodsmen in a big-footed dance. A chestnut tree standing by itself on a plain is as stately and dignified as a village patriarch. Grouped together in level, rich woodland, chestnuts are prim and almost lady-like. Why these particular trees in the little glen at the east side of Blue Hill summit should skip about in clumsy riot is more than I can tell, but they certainly seem to do it, and I am not the only one who has seen it and been shocked by it.

Right near by is a company of schoolgirl beeches, very straight and slim and fair-skinned and pale. These have drawn together in a shivering group and show every symptom of feminine dignity, very young and quite outraged. They whisper and draw themselves up to the full tenuity of their height and you can hear the dry snip of indignation in their voices long before you reach them. No doubt they thought to have the glen all to themselves for a proper picnic with prunes and pickles, and here are these great fellows thus misbehaving! It is a shame and the park police should put a stop to it. The beeches are so frosty in their indignant withdrawal that the icy whispering of their dry leaves sounds like fast falling sleet. Slip among them when you are next on the hill, shut your eyes and listen. The day may be as sunny and warm as a winter day can be, but you will think you hear the snow falling fast and will be sorry you have not brought your fur muffler.

As for the chestnuts, I suspect they drank mountain dew at the illicit still just below the gully. Surely no springs should have a license to do business among the hilltops of this granite range. Yet they well up freely among the lesser spurs that lie between Great Blue and Hancock, and their moisture, drawn from cool depths to little ponds where the southern sun shines in and the north and west winds are held back by granite ridges, make rallying places for all kinds of wood and pasture people that have yearned for mountain heights, but could not stand the rigors of the summits. There are three of these little ponds on the heights of the range almost within a stone’s throw of one another. It may be that the seepage from surrounding ledges accounts for their flow of water, but I am more inclined to think that cracks in the backbone of the hills let the water flow up from subterranean depths. The margins of two of them are the happy home of greenbrier which grows in tropical luxuriance all about, so binding the bushes together with its spiny twine that it is almost impossible to pass through them to the water. Button-ball and high-bush blueberry grow with it and hold out their branches for its smilax-like decoration, and the solemn and secretive witch-hazel stalks meditatively about wherever the overhead foliage is dense enough to make the mysterious twilight that it best loves. It strolls up the gully beneath the shade of the chestnuts and you can but fancy it smiling sardonically at their revelry and the prim indignation of the schoolgirl beeches. Here and there swamp maples, strangely out of place on hilltops, glow gray in the dusk as you stand below them, or blush red in the clear sun as you look at their branch tips from the cliffs. It is a picturesque little three-spurred peak lying here between Great Blue and Hancock so sheltered and warm in the midday sun that it is only by watching the sky that you know it is winter, though the ice is white and strong on the little ponds.

I think you can get the best view of all of Great Blue Hill from the summit of the lesser hill beyond the spurs and ponds and south of Hancock, just overhanging Houghton’s Pond. There you see the forest-clad slope sweep grandly up to form this broad upland valley, wrinkle a bit with the folds where lie the three little ponds, then rise again most majestically all along the steep side of the hill. At this time of year it is one broad, majestic mass of the warm gray of bare tree trunks in which rock ridges stand indistinct in purer color, while here and there clustering twig masses purple it. You can see the black shadows in the face of the cliff where stands the little glen in which the chestnuts disport, and down near the highest of the three ponds is a beautiful little splash of white all flushed with pink. This marks the location of a group of young birches, the only ones I find on the heights of the range.

Midday had passed and with it the genial warmth that the south wind had brought us. Instead romping northern breezes had a tang in them and torn clouds sailed swiftly into view over the summit of Great Blue, rushing deep blue shadows across the warm grays of the landscape. The age-old battle of sun and wind was going on on every summit of the range. Climbing the southerly slope of Hancock it was hard to believe it winter. You got either season on the summit plateau according to the nook you chose, but standing on the rim of the precipice, which faces north you had no doubts. From your feet to the foot of the hill in this direction it was winter indeed. Yet here was the greenest spot in the whole range. Scrambling perilously down the face of the cliff I touched rich green vegetation with either hand and stood amid luxuriance at the bottom. For here you are at the meeting place of ferns.

Little sunshine reaches the face of this cliff in the high noon of a midsummer day. No direct ray touches it all winter long, yet in the chill twilight the polypodys swarm all along the summit of the ridge and drip and dance down and stretch out their hands to neighbor ferns that climb cheerily to meet them out of the moist shadows below. These are the evergreen wood ferns. In the rich black frozen earth of the lower woodland they grow in profusion. On the rocky acclivity they hold each coign of vantage and splash the plaid of gray rock and brown leaves with their rich green. Where cliff meets rock jumble the two draw together and fraternize, and the polypodys come farther off the cliff than I have often seen them, and the wood ferns grow in slenderer crevices of the bare rock than anywhere else that I know.

The sun was gone from all the little ravines on the way back from Hancock to Great Blue, and the chill of the fern-festooned shadow of the cliff that I had just left seemed to go with me all along. It was especially dark and chill in the little gully and I reached the summit of the big hill too late to find the sun. There, where daybreak had breathed of spring, nightfall shivered in the bite of winter winds. A million electric glints splintered the purple dusk to northward, but there was no warmth in them even when they fused into the glow of the great city. With the shadow of night the cruel grip of winter had shut down on the hilltop and I knew again, as I had known in the golden glow of the morning, that it was midwinter. The dwarfed and storm-toughened shrubs seemed to crouch a little closer to the adamantine earth, and their frost-stiffened twigs sang in the bitter north wind. I felt the chill in my own marrow and eagerly tramped the ringing granite toward home.

SOME JANUARY BIRDS

IT seems to be our lot this winter to have April continually smiling up in the face of January. Again and again the north wind has come down upon us and set his adamantine face against all such folly. The turf has become flint; the ice has been eight inches thick on pond and placid stream, and the very next morning, maybe, the soft air has breathed of spring, and bluebirds have twittered deprecatingly as if glad to be here, but altogether ashamed to be found so out of season. As a matter of fact, of course, some bluebirds winter with us, but they don’t warble “cheerily O” in the teeth of the north winds. On those days you must seek them in the cuddly seclusion of dense evergreens, more than likely among close-set cedars where the blue cedar-berries are still sweet and plenty. But we have had many days in this January of 1909 when the bluebirds have had a right to feel called to at least take a hurried glimpse at the bird boxes or the holes in the old apple trees, just as people take a flying trip to the summer cottage on a warm Sunday; they know they can’t stay, but it is delightful to just look it over and plan.

I think the crows, though they are tough old winter residents, have something of the same impulse to plan nests and make eyes and cooing conversation, one to another. To-day I heard, in the pine treetops of a little pasture wood where several pair nest every year, the unmistakable note. In that great song of Solomon which the whole out-door world will chorus in the full tide of spring the crows have the bass part, no doubt, but they sing it none the less musically. It is surprising what a croak can become, between lovers.

I saw them slip away silently and shamefacedly as I approached, and I knew them for callow youngsters, high-school age, let us say, to whom shy love-making is never quite out of season. But they got their come-uppance the moment they sailed out of the grove, for their appearance was greeted with a wild and raucous chorus of crow ha-ha-ha’s. High in the air, flapping round and round in silence above the pines, a half dozen riotous youngsters of their own age had been observing them, chuckling no doubt and winking to one another, and now that the culprits were driven out into the open where all could see them the chorus of jeers knew no bounds. It was as unmistakable as the caressing tone, this jeering laughter. You had but to hear it to know very well what they were saying. The crow language has but one word, which in type is caw. But their inflections and tone qualities are such that it is easy to make it express the whole diatonic scale of primitive emotion.

Many of our summer birds whose winter range barely includes us seem to be more than usually prevalent this winter. It may be that the mild season has to do with this, but it is equally probable that a plenitude of food is more directly responsible. Seed-eating birds are particularly in luck this year. I do not know of a winter when the birch trees have fruited so plentifully, nor have I noticed so many flocks of song sparrows as this year. I find them twittering happily along through the wood, hanging in quite unsparrow-like attitudes from slender birch twigs, busy robbing the pendant cones of their tiny seeds. In the summer you know the song sparrow as a very erect bird. He sits on some topmost twig of cedar or berry bush and pours forth quite the cheeriest and sweetest home song of the pasture land. Or perchance he flies, and the usual short and oft-repeated refrain seems to be broken up by flutter of his wings into a longer, softer, and more varied song that has less of challenge and more of sweet content in it. In his winter notes, which are really nothing but a cheery twittering, I always think I hear something of the mellow singing quality of this song of the wing.

To-day I saw a sharp-shinned hawk, hunting noiselessly, no doubt for these same sparrows. He flitted among the treetops like a nervous flash of slaty gray, and was gone so quickly that had I not heard the welt of his wing tips on the resisting air as he turned a sharp corner I should never have seen him. Most of our hawks, though well known to take an occasional chicken, are mouse and grasshopper eaters. The sharp-shinned is the real chicken hawk, for he eats more birds than anything else, though the small songsters of the thicket form the greater part of his diet. I have rarely seen him here in winter, though his summer nest is common in the deep woods, with its cream-buff eggs heavily blotched with chocolate brown. Just as the plenitude of food of their kind kept the song sparrows with us to enjoy the mild weather, so I think the multitude of song sparrows and other succulent titbits made the sharp-shinned hawk willing to winter where he had summered.

All these birds which are wintering as far north as they dare seem to come out and cheer up in the April-like days, but in those which are distinctly January you may tramp the woods for days and not see one of them. The flicker is a rather common bird with us the winter through. In a warm January rain you will often surprise him wandering about in the thawed fields, looking for iced crickets and half concealed grubs and chrysalids among the stubble. Let the snow come deep and the wind blow out of the north and the flicker vanishes from the landscape. It is as if he had gone into a hole and pulled his thirty-six nicknames in after him, so completely has the flicker disappeared. He is a strong-winged bird and I have always been willing to think that at such times he simply whirled aloft on the northerly gale and never lighted till he was a few hundred miles to the south. He could do it easily enough. He would find bare ground and good feeding in the tidewater country of Virginia when New England is three feet under snow and the zero gales are drifting it deeper and freezing the heart out of the very trees in the wood.

The other day, though, I caught one of them sitting in the hollow of an ancient apple tree. There was an opening of some size facing the south into which the midday sun shone with refreshing warmth. Here, sheltered from the bite of the north wind the flicker had tucked himself away and was enjoying his sunny nook much as pigeons do in just the right angle of the city cornices. But he was better off than the pigeons for there were fat grubs in the decaying wood that formed his shelter and he could use his meal ticket without leaving his lodgings. Our woods are full of such hostelries and they shelter more of the woodland creatures than we know as we tramp carelessly by.

But if the bluebirds and flickers hide themselves securely through the coldest winter days and the song sparrows and even the crows are apt to be scarce and subdued, as is certainly the case in my woods, there are other feathered folk who seem to delight in the cold and be never so gay as when the sky is leaden, the wind bites, and the frost flakes of snow squalls let the sun struggle through the upper atmosphere because it is too bitter cold to really snow. Of these the chickadees lead. They seem to be never so merry as when they hear the sweet music of the tinkle of cold-tense snow crystals on the bare twigs.

In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would

be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.

Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.

The chickadees were very happy that day. Little groups of half a dozen flipped gaily from tree to tree, bustling awkwardly and jovially about picking up food continually, though it is rarely possible to see what they get as they glean from limb to limb. Winter is the time for sociability, say the chickadees, and they welcome to their number the red-breasted nuthatches that have followed the season down from the Maine woods. The chickadee in his cheery endeavors to take his own in the way of food where he finds it does some surprising acrobatic feats, but they are almost always clumsy and you expect him momentarily to break his neck. Not so the nuthatch. He runs along the under side of a limb with his back to the ground as easily as he would run along the upper side. He comes down the smooth trunk of a pine head down, just as a squirrel does, his feet seeming to be reversible and to stick like clamps wherever he cares to put them. All the time his busy little head is poking here and there with sinuous agility and his slim, pointed bill is gathering in the same invisible food, no doubt, that the chickadee is after. And as he eats he talks, a quaint high-pitched, nasal drawl of yna, yna, yna, that gets on your nerves after a while and you are glad to see him let go his upside-down hold, turn a flip-flap in the air, and light on another tree some distance away. I think Stockton got his idea of negative gravity from watching the nuthatches. If I were mean enough to shoot one I should as soon expect to see him fall up into the sky as down to the earth, so usually regardless and defiant is he toward the proper and accepted force of gravity.

Quite prim and upright as compared with these shifty wrigglers is the third boon companion of these winter day expeditions, the downy woodpecker. You are not so apt to find him as the other two, for his work is deeper and more laborious and they are likely to flit flightily away while he still drills and ogles. Yet you can hear him much farther away than the others, and it is not difficult to slip quietly up and see him at his work. Prim and erect he stands on some rotten stub, his stiff tail-feathers jabbing it to hold him steady, his head now driving his nail-like bill with taps like those of a busy carpenter’s hammer, anon speeding up till it has almost the effect of an electric buzzer. Then he looks solemnly with one eye in at the hole that he has made, prods again eagerly and pulls out a fat white grub, gulps it, and goes hop-toading up the stub looking for more probe possibilities. Or perhaps he writes scrawly Ms. in the atmosphere as he flits jerkily over to the next tree that pleases him.

Thus though not of a feather these three flock together in the biting cold of winter days and seem to be cheery and courageous if not exactly contented. They are all hole-born and hole-building birds and when night overtakes them they know well where to find wind-proof hollow trunks where they may snuggle, round and warm in their fluffed out feathers till dawn calls them to work again.

Yet, with all the yearning of the trees and the joy of the woodland creatures in the prospect of snow it ended in no snow storm. All day long the sun shone palely through a frost fog and the frost crystals sprang out of it at the touch of the icy wind and tinkled into snowflakes right before your eyes. The wind swept a feathery fluff together in corners but at nightfall when the moon shone through a clearer air and a near-zero temperature the crystals had begun to evaporate, and by morning hardly a trace of them was left. To-day it is April-like; to-morrow we may have zero weather again and before these words get into print perhaps the yearned-for snow will have come and with its kindly shelter covered the succulent green things of pasture and woodland that need it so badly.

It is wonderful, though, how they stand freezing and thawing and yet remain green, firm in texture, and wholesome. The birds of the air have feathers which they can fluff out and make into a down puff for a winter night covering. Here in the pine grove is the pipsissewa starring the ground with its rich green clumps. It is as full of color and sap, seemingly, as it was in July when its fragrant wax-like blossoms starred its green with pink. No cell of the fleshy texture of its green leaves is broken nor is there a tarnish in their gloss. Its seedpod stands dry on a dry scape in place of its flower, but that alone shows the difference between summer and winter. Yet it stands naked to the north wind protected by neither feathers nor fur. Who can tell me by what principle it remains so? Why is the thin-leaved pyrola and the partridge berry, puny creeping vine that it is, still green and unharmed by frost when the tough, leathery leaves of the great oak tree not far off are withered and brown?

Chlorophyl, and cellular structure, and fibro-vascular bundles in the one plant wither and lose color and turn brown at a touch of frost. In another not ten feet away they stand the rigors of our northern winters and come out in the spring, seemingly unharmed and fit to carry on the internal economy of the plant’s life until it shall produce new leaves to take their places. Then in the mild air of early summer these winter darers fade and die. Here in the swamp the tough and woody cat-o’-nine-tails is brown and papery to the tip of its six-foot stalk. The blue flag that was a foot high is brown and withered alongside it, yet the tender young leaves of the Ranunculus repens growing between the two and not having a tenth of their strength are tender and young and green and unharmed still. The first two died at a touch of the frost. The buttercup leaves have been frozen and thawed a score of times without hurt.

You might guess that the swamp water has an elixir in it that saves the life of the repens; but how about the Ranunculus bulbosus, European cousin of the repens? That grows on the sandy hillside, and even the root tips that extend below its little white bulb have been frozen stiff a score of times since the woody stemmed goldenrod beside it dropped dead, sere and brown, at the first good freeze. Yet to-day in the smiling sun I found the young leaves of the Ranunculus bulbosus green and succulent and unharmed of their cellular structure, and so I am sure they will remain, under the snow or bare, as the case may be when the first yellow bud pushes upward from that white bulb where it is now patiently waiting the word. Our botanists who study heroically to find some minute variation in form that they may add another Latin name to their text-books might study these variations in habit and result and tell me the reason for them. I’d be glad to buy some more books on botany; but none that I have seen have so far within their pages any explanation of this puzzle.

WHEN THE SNOW CAME

I HAVEN’t seen my friend the cottontailed rabbit for some days. All the winter, so far, he has frequented his little summer camp on the southern slope of the hill, well up toward the top, among the red oaks. Here in a little tangle of tiny undergrowth and brown leaves, with a fallen trunk for overhead shelter, you might find him any forenoon. He had backed into this place and trampled and snuggled till he had a round and cosy form just a bit bigger than himself, where the sun might warm him until he was drowsy and he could sit in a brown ball with his feet tucked beneath his fluffy fur, his ears laid along his back, and his eyes half closed in dreamy contentment.

I could step quietly up the path and see him sometimes a second before he saw me, but only for a second. Then his dream of succulent bark of wild apple trees and other delicacies of the winter woods would pass with a single thump of his sturdy hind feet as he struck the earth a half dozen feet away from his snug lodging, and more thumps and the bobbing of a white tail would carry him out of sight in a flash. He bobs and thumps just as a deer does when you surprise him in the forest, and flies a white flag in just the same way. Both go jerking away like sturdy but nervous sprites, and though a deer in the forest is supposed to be the epitome of grace, I can never see it. The startled fawn and the startled bunny are both too eager to get on to be graceful.

We have just had some touches of real

winter and these have sent the cottontail to the seclusion of his burrow, where he lacks the health-giving warmth of the sun, it is true, but where he is snug and comfortable beneath the frost line. Like the rabbit most of the wild creatures of the wood seem to endure the snow with cheerful philosophy, but I am convinced that few of them like it. It hides their food from them, and if it is deep or a strong crust makes its surface difficult of penetration its long-continued presence mean short rations or even starvation and death. The squirrels have some stores within hollow trunks and these are available at any season, but much of their winter food is buried helter-skelter beneath brown leaves and too deep snow shuts them off from it. The fox must range farther and pounce more surely, for the field mice which are his bread and butter are squeaking about their usual business in pearly tunnels where he may not reach them. The woodchucks are tucked away for the winter, the skunks are dozing fitfully on short rations, hungry but inert, and even Brer Rabbit does not venture out of his hole for days at a time when his enemies, winter and rough weather, are upon him.

Yet if the furred and feathered people of pasture and woodland have no occasion to love the snow it is far different with the trees and shrubs and tender plants of the out-door world. These have yearned for it with love and a faith that has rarely lacked fulfilment. They talked about it incessantly, each in the voice of its kind, the big forest oaks with the cheery rustle of sturdy burghers, the little scrub oaks with the tittle-tattle of small-natured folk. Let the wind blow north or south or high or low the birches sang a little silky song of snow and the pines hummed or roared to the same refrain. Then it came, “announced by all the trumpets of the sky,” as Emerson says, but muted trumpets that blared without sound. The eyes saw the flourish of them, the nose mayhap whiffed the rich odor of the storm. You could see it in the sky and feel the light touch of its unwonted air on your cheek, but you could not say that the wind blew north or blew south when the culmination of signs made you sure of it. The storm may bleat along the hillside like a lost lamb or roar high above in the clashings of the infinite skies after it is well under way, but always before it begins is this little breathless pause between the dying of one wind and the birth of another.

So it was that the first of this snow came to the woods. In the hush of expectation there was a certain feeling of awe. The trees felt it as much as I did and stood as breathless and expectant. Instead of clearly defined clouds, the whole air seemed to thrill with the dusky gray presence of a spirit out of unknown space, of whose beneficence we might hope, but of whom we were not without dread. And so the dusk of the storm we hoped for gloomed down on us in the breathless stillness and tiny flakes slipped down so quietly that the touch of their ghost fingers on my cheek was the first that I knew of their actual coming. The pine boughs high over my head caught these first flakes and held them lovingly and let them slip through their fingers only after many caresses, and soon through all the pine wood you could hear a little sigh that was a purr of contentment in the first faint breathing of the north wind bearing many flakes.

Thus the snow comes to the woods. You can see its portent glooming in the sky for hours beforehand, smell it in the rich, still air and feel its touch on your cheek. When I stepped out from under the cathedral gloom of the space beneath the pines, I found the air full of flakes whirling down from the north and the field white with them.

Standing in the midst of the storm in the field, you have a chance to see something of its color, for after all falling snow is only relatively white. Looking toward the dense, dark foliage of the pine wood, you see it at its best, especially across the wind, for the contrast is most vivid and the color most distinct. Each individual flake is so distinct and so white, from those near you, which go scurrying earthward as if in a great hurry, to those of the distance, which float leisurely down. Look again up the wind toward the gray of the hard-wood forest and you shall find the falling hosts almost as gray as the wood which they half blot out. But if you would see black snow, you have but to lift your eyes to the leaden gray sky out of which, as you see them from below, flakes float in black blots that erase themselves only when they lie at your feet. In open wells in the deep wood you can see this still more definitely as you look up, a black snow falling all about you, to be changed to spotless white by some miracle of contact with the earth.

In the deep woods, too, you hear the cry of the snow, not the song of the trees in the joy of its coming, but the voices of the flakes themselves, their little shrill cries as they touch leaf or twig. To the pines that held up soft arms of welcome and clasp them close and will not let them go away though each bough is weighted down, they whisper a soft little cooing word that is surely “love” in any language. No wonder it is warm under pine boughs in a snow-storm. The great trees glow with the happiness of it and the radiance of their delight filters down to you as you stand beneath. The flakes seem to love the bare, smooth twigs of the hard-wood maples less, they give them just a pat and a gentle word of greeting as they go by, and they touch the birches almost flippantly. Among the fine pointed tridents of the pasture cedars, however, they linger somewhat as they do among the pines, though their song here is of jovial friendship only, with even something waggish about it. They linger in groups among the cedar boughs for awhile, but often start up in gentle glee and shake themselves clear, leaving the tree in a sort of blank dismay until more of their fellows come to take their places. There is a little swish of fairy laughter as they do this, as of the snickering of fat bogles as they play pranks in the white wilderness.

But it is over on the oak hillside where the red and black oaks still hold resolutely to their dried leaves that the cry of the snow will most astonish you. It is not at all the rustle of these oak leaves in a wind. It is an outcry, an uproar, that drowns any other sound that might be in the wood. It is impossible to distinguish voices or words. It is as if ten thousand of the little people of the wood and field and sky had suddenly come together in great excitement over something and were shouting all up and down the gamut of goblin emotion. After I have stood and listened to it for a minute or two I begin to look at one shoulder and then the other fully expecting to see gabbling goblins grouped there, yelling to one another in my very ears. Here with closed eyes you may easily tell the quality of the snow about you by the sound. Each sort of flake has its distinct tone which is easily recognized through all the uproar. At nightfall of this first snow of ours it happened that in the meeting of northerly and southerly currents which had brought the storm, the north wind lulled and the south began to have its way again. This gave us at first a great downfall of big flakes that seemed to blot out all the world in an atmosphere of fluff. Then, evidently, the warmth in the upper atmosphere increased for the big flakes gave way to a fine fall of rounded sleet. Then, indeed, we got outcry the most astonishing in the oak wood. The voices shrilled and fined and all crepitation was lost in a vast chorus of a million peeping frogs. Nothing else ever sounded like it. It was as if a goblin springtime had burst upon us in the white gloom of the oak wood and all the hylas in the world were piping their shrillest from the boughs.

I went home. I think it was time. People used to get among goblins at dusk in this way in the old country and when they got back from goblin land they found that they had been gone three years, and I didn’t care to stay away so long.

During the night the sleet changed to rain which froze as it fell, and in the morning the snow everywhere was but an inch or two deep and covered with an icy crust that broke underfoot with a great noise and effectually scared away any woodland thing that you approached, provided it had powers of locomotion. Fox or crow, partridge or rabbit, must have thought that Gulliver was once more walking in among the Lilliputians with his very biggest boots on. Never were such thunderous footsteps heard in my wood, at least not since the last icy crust. Frozen in the icy surface were the trails that had been made when the snow was soft, the squirrel’s long, plunging leaps with his hind feet dropping into the hole his front feet had made, giving something you might mistake for deer tracks, except that they went back up the tree. You saw where the crow had dropped to earth and trailed his aristocratically long hind toe, with its incurving claw. The crow’s foot is fine for grasping a limb, but it does not fit the ground well. On the other hand, the trail of the ruffed grouse which may lie beside it shows an ideal footprint for walking woodland paths, the hind toe stubby nailed, short but firm, and the whole print well planted and fitting the earth.

These and many more I found modeled in ice, but the trails that interested me most were those beneath the crust, the long tunnels that wound here and there, intersected and doubled and made portions of the fields and forests for all the world like the blue veining of a white skin. These were the trails of the shaggy-coated, crop-eared, short-legged, shorttailed meadow mouse. This firm crust had opened to him the opportunity of safety in paths that had been before dangerous in the extreme. He knew where chestnuts had lain open to the sky for months, but he dared not go into the open path to get them. Fox, cat, skunk, weasel, hawk, owl, crow, all watched the paths and the edges of the thick grass for him. He must burrow or die. So he does burrow all the year through, just beneath the surface, in dirt if he must, under light leaves and brush and matted grasses by preference, for there he may go the more easily and quickly to his food. His eyesight and hearing are good, and he moves like a little brown flash when he has to go into the open.

If I wish to see him I watch well-worn footpaths through matted grass and leaves. Here his tunnels end on one side of the path and begin on the other and he takes the chance of crossing this risky opening to sun and sky as often as he feels he must, but he wrecks the speed limit every time he does it. So quickly does he go that you cannot be sure what has happened; there was the stirring of a leaf on one side and a grass stem on the other and a sudden vanishing touch of brown between the two, but which way it went or whether it went at all is doubtful. So, too, his tunnels come down and open at the water’s edge by the meadow brook and if you are patient and have rare luck you may see him swim across. Here trout and mink are on the watch for him. His numbers need to be great if, with all his caution and agility, he is going to survive all these huntsmen, and they are great. He may breed at two months of age and have many litters a season and his progeny, if unchecked, soon swarm. All the meadows are full of them this year, but it is only when such a snow as we now have comes that we have a chance to see what they may do.

In the summer-time they stick close to their meadows, living on succulent roots and stems. They are especially fond of tuberous roots of the wild morning-glory, which they store by the pound in their grass larders near their nests. But under the welcome cover of the snow they push their excursions far afield and their netted-veined trails come even to your house itself, though they rarely dispute the wainscoting with the house mouse. Now and then they do, however, and I fancy they have no trouble in holding their own against their slighter and more aristocratic cousins. When they do come you will know their presence by the extraordinary noise of their gnawing. Once a stone crusher, no less by the sound, got into my garret, and after one sleepless night I set the biggest trap I had, expecting to get the most enormous brown rat that ever happened, if not some new and more elephantine rodent. What I caught was a well-grown field mouse, and the noise passed with him.

The rain which produced this thunderous and telltale snow crust brought a new and gorgeous growth to the trees. From trunk to topmost twig, each was garmented in regal splendor of crystal ice. I had been in goblin land when I fled, at twilight, from the eerie shrilling of bogle hylas among the oak trees. I had come back into fairyland with the rising sun. The demure shrubs, gray Cinderellas of the ashes of the year, had been touched by the magic wand and were robed in more gems than might glow in the wildest dreams of the most fortunate princess of Arabian tale. Ropes of pearl and festoons of diamonds weighed the more slender almost to earth. The soft white shoulders of the birches drooped low in bewildering curtsey, and to the fiddling of a little morning wind the ball began with a tinkling of gem on gem, a stabbing of scintillant azure, so that I was fain to shut my eyes with the splendor of it.

Then came the prince himself to dance with them, the morning sun, flashing his gold emblazonry through their gems till the corruscation drowned the sight in an outpouring of fire. The princesses all began to speak as he came among them, a speech wherein dropped from their lips all jewels and precious stones. Sunbursts of diamonds fell from dainty young pines and ropes of pearls slid from the coral lips of slender birches. The babble fell all about their feet in such ecstasies of brilliant speech, such tinkling of fairy laughter as the wood had never yet seen. Brave revels have the little people of the forest under the moon of midsummer night, no doubt, but never could they show such royal, dainty splendor as their own trees did this midwinter day when the sun shone in upon them after the ice storm.

THE MINK’S HUNTING GROUND

I WISH I could have seen the country about the great spring which goes by the name, locally, of “Fountain Head” the year that the clock stopped for the glaciers hereabout. That year when the last bit of the ice cap, that for ages had slid down across southeastern Massachusetts and built up its inextricable confusion of sand and gravel moraines, melted away, would have shown a thousand great springs like it, bubbling up all through the region, almost invariably from the northerly base of gravelly cliffs over which the sun can hardly peep at noonday, so steep they are. Here they flow to-day in the same mystery. Why should these unfailing springs rush forth so steadily, be the weather hot or cold, or the drought never so long or so severe? Why should their temperature like their flow be changeless, summer or winter?

I sometimes believe that their waters filter through deep caverns from far Arctic glaciers continually renewed. Perhaps to have looked at them before the changing seasons of more thousands of years had clothed the gravel and sand with humus, grown the forests all about and choked the fountains themselves with acres of the muck of decayed vegetation no one knows how deep, would have been to see them with clearer eyes and have been led to an answer to the questions. Now I know them only as bits of the land where time seems to have stood still, fastnesses where dwell the lotus eaters of our New England woods, where winter’s cold howls over their heads, but does not descend, and where summer’s heat rims them round, but hardly dares dabble its toes in their cool retreat.

Progress has built its houses on the hills about them, freight trains two miles away roar so mightily that the quaggy depths tremble with the vibrations, and you may sit with the arethusas in mossy muck and hear the honk of the automobile mingling with that of the wild geese as they both go by in spring. Yet the one makes as much impression on the land and its inhabitants as the other. The lotus eaters know not Ulysses; if he wants them for his ships of progress he must capture them by force and tie them beneath the rowers’ benches, else they return. Even the temperature of those last days of the ice cap seems to have got tangled in the spell and to dwell with the mild-eyed melancholy of the place the year round. In midsummer the thermometer may stand at 120 in the quivering nooks where the sun beats down upon the sandy plains above; the waters of the fountain head are ice cold still, and give their temperature to the brook and its borders. In midwinter the mercury may register twenty below, and the gales from the very boreal pole freeze the pines on those same sandy plains till their deep hearts burst; the waters that flow from those mysterious fountains will have no skim of ice on their surface.

From what unfathomed depths the waters draw their constancy we may never know, nor on what day may well forth with them some new form of life bred on the potency of their elixir. To-day is freezing cold and now and then snow-squalls whirl in among the swamp maples, eddying in flocks as the goldfinches do, yet the surface of the biggest pool where the waters well up is covered with the vivid green of new plant life. Millions of tiny boreal creatures swim free on the cool surface, plants reduced to their simplest terms, born for aught I know in depths below like those