Winter

V

If winter is the season of large sounds, it is also the season of small sounds, for it is the season of wide silence when the slightest of stirrings can be heard. Three of these small sounds you must listen for this winter: the smothered tinkle-tunkle of water running under thin ice, as where the brook passes a pebbly shallow; then the tick-tick-tick of the first snowflakes hitting the brown leaves on a forest floor; then the fine sharp scratch of a curled and toothed beech leaf skating before a noiseless breath of wind over the crusty snow. Only he that hath ears will hear these sounds, speaking, as they do, for the vast voiceless moments of the winter world.

VI

I have not heard the “covey call” of the quail this winter. But there is not a quail left alive in all the fields and sprout-lands within sound of me. I used to hear them here on Mullein Hill; a covey used to roost down the wooded hillside in front of the house; but even they are gone – hunted out of life; shot and eaten off of my small world. What a horribly hungry animal man is!

But you may have the quail still in your fields. If so, then go out toward dusk on a quiet, snowy day, especially if you have heard shooting in the fields that day, and try to hear some one of the covey calling the flock together: Whir-r-rl-ee! Whir-r-rl-ee! Whirl-ee-gee!– the sweetest, softest, tenderest call you will ever hear!

VII

And you certainly do have chickadees in your woods. If so, then go out any time of day, but go on a cold, bleak, blustery day, when everything is a-shiver, and, as Uncle Remus would say, “meet up” with a chickadee. It is worth having a winter, just to meet a chickadee in the empty woods and hear him call – a little pin-point of live sound, an undaunted, unnumbed voice interrupting the thick jargon of the winter to tell you that all this bluster and blow and biting cold can’t get at the heart of a bird that must weigh, all told, with all his winter feathers on, fully – an ounce or two!

VIII

And then the partridge – you must hear him, bursting like a bottled hurricane from the brown leaves at your feet!

IX

Among the sweet winter sounds, that are as good to listen to as the songs of the summer birds, you should hear: the loud joyous cackling of the hens on a sunny January day; the munching of horses at night when the wild winds are whistling about the barn; the quiet hum about the hives, —

“When come the calm mild days, as still such days will come,To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home.”

And then, the sound of the first rain on the shingles – the first February rain after a long frozen period! How it spatters the shingles with spring – spring – spring!

X

It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree-frog. And how small and thin it sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible.

Have you heard him yet?

XI

“After all,” says some one of our writers, “it is only a matter of which side of the tree you stand on, whether it is summer or winter.” Just so. But, after all, is it not a good thing to stand on the winter side during the winter? to have a winter while we have it, and then have spring? No shivering around on the spring side of the tree for me. I will button up my coat, brace my back against the winter side and shout to the hoary old monarch —

“And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere,And gie’s a hand o’ thine;”

and what a grip he has!

CHAPTER XIII

THE LAST DAY OF WINTER

According to the almanac March 21st is the last day of winter. The almanac is not always to be trusted – not for hay weather, or picnic weather, or sailing weather; but you can always trust it for March 21st weather. Whatever the weather man at Washington predicts about it, whatever comes, – snow, sleet, slush, rain, wind, or frogs and sunshine, – March 21st is the last day of winter.

The sun “crosses the line” that day; spring crosses with him; and I cross over with the spring.

Let it snow! I have had winter enough. Let the wind rage! It cannot turn back the sun; it cannot blow away the “equinoctial line”; it cannot snow under my determination to have done, here and now, with winter!

The sun crosses to my side of the Equator on the 21st of March; there is nothing in the universe that can stop him. I cross over the line with him; and there is nothing under the sun that can stop me. When you want it to be spring, if you have the sun on your side of the line you can have spring. Hitching your wagon to a star is a very great help in getting along; but having the big sun behind you —

“When descends on the AtlanticThe giganticStorm-wind of the equinox”

is a tremendous help in ridding you of a slow and, by this time, wearisome winter, storm-wind and all.

Almanacs are not much to trust in; but if ever you prize one, it is on the 21st of March, – that is, if you chance to live in New England. Yet you can get along without the almanac – even in New England. Hang it up under the corner of the kitchen mantelpiece and come out with me into the March mud. We are going to find the signs of spring, the proofs that this is the last day of winter, that the sun is somewhere in the heavens and on this side of the equatorial line.

Almanac or no, and with all other signs snowed under, there are still our bones! Spring is in our bones. I cannot tell you how it gets into them, nor describe precisely how it feels. But, then, I do not need to. For you feel it in your bones too – a light, hollow feeling, as if your bones were birds’ bones, and as if you could flap your arms and fly!

Only that you feel it more in your feet; and you will start and run, like the Jungle-folk, like Mowgli – run, run, run! Oh, it is good to have bones in your body, young bones with the “spring-running,” in their joints, instead of the grit of rheumatism to stiffen and cripple you!

The roads are barely thawed. The raw wind is penetrating, and we need our greatcoats to keep out the cold. But look! A flock of robins – twenty of them, dashing into the cedars, their brown breasts glowing warm and red against the dull sky and the dark green of the trees! And wait – before we go down the hill – here behind the barn – no, there he dives from the telephone wire – Phœbe! He has just gotten back, and is simply killing time now (and insects too), waiting for Mrs. Phœbe to arrive, and housekeeping to begin.

Don’t move! There in the gray clouds – two soaring, circling hen-hawks! Kee-ee-you! Kee-ee-you! Round and round they go, their shrill, wild whistle piercing the four quarters of the sky and tingling down the cold spine of every forest tree and sapling, stirring their life blood until it seems to run red into their tops.

For see the maple swamp off yonder – the ashy gray of the boles, a cold steel-color two thirds of the way toward the top, but there changing into a faint garnet, a flush of warmth and life that seems almost to have come since morning!

Let us go on now, for I want to get some watercress from the brook – the first green growing thing for the table thus far! – and some pussy-willows for the same table, only not to eat. (There are many good things in this world that are not good to eat.) If the sun were shining I should take you by way of the beehives to show you, dropping down before their open doors, a few eager bees bringing home baskets of pollen from the catkins of the hazelnut bushes. The hazelnut bushes are in bloom! Yes, in bloom! No, the skunk-cabbages are not out yet, nor the hepaticas, nor the arbutus; but the hazelnut bushes are in bloom, and – see here, under the rye straw that covers the strawberry-bed – a small spreading weed, green, and cheerily starred with tiny white flowers!

It is the 21st of March; the sun has crossed the line; the phœbes have returned; and here under the straw in the garden the chickweed, —starwort, – first of the flowers, is in blossom!

But come on; I am not going back yet. This is the last day of winter. Cold? Yes, it is cold, raw, wretched, gloomy, with snow still in the woods, with frost still in the ground, and with not a frog or hyla anywhere to be heard. But come along. This is the last day of winter – of winter? No, no, it is the first day of spring. Robins back, phœbes back, watercress for the table, chickweed in blossom, and a bird’s nest with eggs in it! Winter? Spring? Birds’ eggs, did I say?

The almanac is mixed again. It always is. Who’s Who in the Seasons when all of this is happening on the 21st of March? For here is the bird’s nest with eggs in it, just as I said.

Watch the hole up under that stub of a limb while I tap on the trunk. How sound asleep! But I will wake them. Rap-rap-rap! There he comes – the big barred owl!

Climb up and take a peek at the eggs, but don’t you dare to touch them! Of course you will not. I need not have been so quick and severe in my command; for, if we of this generation do not know as much about some things as our fathers knew, we do at least know better than they that the owls are among our best friends and are to be most jealously protected.

Climb up, I say, and take a peek at those round white eggs, and tell me, Is it spring or winter? Is it the last day, or the first day, or the first and last in one? What a high mix-up is the weather – especially this New England sort!

But look at that! A snowflake! Yes, it is beginning to snow – with the sun crossing the line! It is beginning to snow, and down with the first flakes, like a bit of summer sky drops a bluebird, calling softly, sweetly, with notes that melt warm as sunshine into our hearts.

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” But see how it snows! Yes, but see —

The willows gleam with silver light;The maples crimson glow —The first faint streaks on winter’s east,Far-off and low.The northward geese, with winged wedge,Have split the frozen skies,And called the way for weaker wings,Where midnight lies.To-day a warm wind wakes the marsh;I hear the hylas peepAnd o’er the pebbly ford, unbound,The waters leap.The lambs bleat from the sheltered folds;Low whispers spread the hills:The rustle of the spring’s soft robesThe forest fills.The night, ah me! fierce flies the stormAcross the dark dead wold;The swift snow swirls; and silence fallsOn stream and fold.All white and still lie stream and hill —The winter dread and drear!Then from the skies a bluebird fliesAnd – spring is here!

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER ITO THE TEACHER

“It must be a lovely place in the summer!” the dull and irritating often say to me, referring to my home in the country. What they mean is, of course, “How wretched a place the country is in winter!” But that attitude toward winter grows less and less common. We are learning how to enjoy the winter; and it is my hope that this volume may distinctly contribute to the knowledge that makes for that joy. Behind such joy is love, and behind the love is understanding, and behind the understanding is knowledge.

The trouble with those who say they hate winter is a lack of knowledge. They do not know the winter; they never tramp the woods and fields in winter; they have no calendar of the rare, the high-festival days of winter.

Such a day is the one of this opening chapter – “Hunting the Snow.” And the winter is full of them; as full as the summer, I had almost said! The possibilities of winter for nature-study, for tramps afield, for outdoor sport – for joy and health and knowledge and poetry are quite as good as those of summer. Try it this winter. Indeed, let the coldest, dullest, deadest day this winter challenge you to discover to yourself and to your pupils some sight, some sound, some happening, or some thought of the world outside that shall add to their small understanding, or touch their ready imaginations, or awaken their eager love for Nature.

And do not let the rarer winter days pass (such as the day that follows the first snow-fall) without your taking them or sending them a-hunting the snow, else you will fail in duty as grievously as you would if you allowed a child to finish his public-school education without hearing of Bunker Hill.

In reading this first chapter lay emphasis upon: (1) the real excitement possible without a gun in such a hunt; (2) the keener, higher kind of joy in watching a live animal than in killing it; (3) the unfairness of hunting to kill; (4) the rapid extinction of our wild animals, largely caused by guns; (5) the necessity now for protection – for every pupil’s doing all he can to protect wild life everywhere.

FOR THE PUPIL

Study the drawings of the tracks in this chapter, then go into the woods and try to identify the tracks you find in the snow. Every track you discover and identify will be quarry in your bag – just as truly as though you had killed a deer or a moose or a bear. You can all turn snow-hunters without leaving blood and pain and death and emptiness and silence behind you. And it is just as good and exciting sport.

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cushion-marked holes: Examine a cat’s feet. Make a study of cat tracks: how they are placed; how wide apart; how they look when she walks, when she runs, when she jumps, when she gathers herself together for a spring. You can learn the art of snow-hunting by studying the tracks of the cat in your own dooryards.

wood pussy: a polite name in New England for the skunk.

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the great northern hare: The northern hare is not often seen here, and I am not sure but that this may be the common brown rabbit.

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slashings: The name for the waste limbs and tops left after cutting forest trees. Tree wardens should compel the woodchoppers to pile this brush up as they cut and burn it while the snow is on the ground to prevent forest fires in summer.

hazelnuts: small brown nuts like the filberts of the stores. They grow on a bush two to six feet high. There are two kinds, – common hazelnut and beaked hazelnut. The green husk looks like a cap, hence its Saxon name haesle, a cap, and the scientific name Corylus from the Greek corys, a helmet.

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Burns: Robert Burns, the Scotch poet.

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root and all, and all in all: from a poem by Lord Tennyson called “Flower in the Crannied Wall.”

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Atalanta’s race: Look up the story of the beautiful girl runner who lost her race with her lover because of her desire to pick up a golden apple.

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Two mighty wings: an owl’s wing marks, perhaps the barred owl or the great horned owl, or the snowy owl, which sometimes comes down from the north in the winter.

CHAPTER IITO THE TEACHER

This herding and driving of turkeys to market is common in other sections of the country, particularly in Kentucky. I have told the story (as told to me by one who saw the flock) in order to bring out the force of instinct and habit, and the unreasoning nature of the animal mind as compared with man’s.

FOR THE PUPIL

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Shepherd-dog: Only a well-trained dog would do, for turkeys are very timid and greatly afraid of a strange dog.

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Black Creek: a local name; not in the Geography.

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a chorus of answering gobbles: Turkeys will follow their leader. It was this habit or trait that the boys now made use of.

CHAPTER IIITO THE TEACHER

There is a three-pronged point to this chapter: (1) the empty birds’ nests are not things to mourn over. The birds are safe and warm down south; and they will build fresh, clean nests when they get back. Teach your children to see things as they are – the wholesomeness, naturalness, wisdom, and poetry of Nature’s arrangement. The poets are often sentimental; and most sentimentality is entirely misplaced. (2) The nest abandoned by the bird may be taken up by the mouse. The deadest, commonest of things may prove full of life and interest upon close observation. Summer may go; but winter comes and brings its own interests and rewards. So does youth go and old age come. There is nothing really abandoned in nature – nothing utterly lacking interest. (3) A mouse is not a Bengal tiger; but he is a whole mouse and in the completeness of his life just as large and interesting as the tiger. If the small, the common, the things right at hand, are not interesting, it is not their fault – not the mouse’s fault – but ours.

FOR THE PUPIL

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white-foot: the deer, or wood mouse (Peromyscus leucopus).

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“There are no birds in last year’s nest”: a line from a poem by Longfellow called “It is not always May.”

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Darwin’s book on earthworms: Read in this book how the worms make garden soil.

CHAPTER IVTO THE TEACHER

If you have at hand “The Fall of the Year,” read again the suggestions on page 112 for the chapter on “Things to See this Fall,” making use of this chapter as you did of that (1) as the object of a field excursion – or of several excursions until all the things suggested here have been seen; (2) as a test of the pupil’s actual study of nature; for there is scarcely a city child who cannot get far enough into nature (though he get no farther than the city park), and often enough to see most of the things pointed out in this chapter; (3) as suggestions for further study and observation by the pupils – things that they have seen which might be added to these ten here, and written about for composition work in English.

FOR THE PUPIL

Here are ten different things for you to see this winter, and most of them, whether you live in the city or country, you can see, provided you live where the snow falls. But you will have some kind of a winter no matter where you live. Don’t miss it – its storms, its birds, its animals, its coasting, skating, snowshoeing, its invitations to tramp the frozen marshes and deep swamps where you cannot go in the summer, and where, on the snow you will catch many a glimpse of wild life that the rank summer sedges will never reveal. Don’t stop with these ten suggestions; there are a hundred other interesting things to see. And as you see them, write about them.

CHAPTER VTO THE TEACHER

Let this chapter be read very close to the Christmas recess, when your children’s minds are full of Christmas thoughts. This unconventional turn to the woods, this thought of Christmas among the animals and birds, might easily be the means of awakening many to an understanding of the deeper, spiritual side of nature-study – that we find in Nature only what we take to her; that we get back only what we give. It will be easy for them to take the spirit of Christmas into the woods because they are so full of it; and so it will be easy for them to feel the woods giving it back to them – the very last and best reward of nature-study. No, don’t be afraid that they are incapable of such lessons, of such thoughts and emotions. Some few may be; but no teacher ever yet erred by too much faith in the capacity of her pupils for the higher, deeper things.

FOR THE PUPIL

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These lines of poetry you all know. But who can tell who wrote them? Where did he live and when?

gum swamp: See description of such a swamp on pages 262-263 of the author’s “Wild Life Near Home.” This is the tree known as sour gum, more properly tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica or uniflora).

cardinal grosbeak: Commonly called “cardinal,” or “redbird.”

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Holy Day: What was the oldest form of our word “holiday”?

ilex: Ilex verticillata, the black alder, or winterberry, one of the holly family. A low swamp bush covered with red berries all winter.

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Lupton’s Pond: A little pond along Cohansey Creek near Bridgeton, N. J.

Persimmon trees: found from New Haven, Conn., to Florida.

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Bob Cratchit’s goose: There never was such a goose, as you all know who have read Dickens’s “Christmas Carol.”

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liquid amber: The balsamic juice of the sweet gum tree, sometimes called “bilsted” (Liquidambar styraciflua), a large, beautiful swamp tree found from Connecticut to Florida and west to Texas.

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half-human tracks: Because the coon is a relative of the bears and has a long hind foot that leaves a track much like that of a small baby.

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tupelo: See note on gum swamp, page 141.

sour gums: same as tupelo.

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chicken or frost grapes: Vitis cordifolia: the smallest, sourest, best (boy standards) of all our wild grapes. They ripen after the frost and feed the boys and birds when all other such fruits have gone from the woods.

Smooth winterberry: is really another ilex, Ilex lævigata, a larger bush than Ilex verticillata, the black alder or winterberry.

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Fox sparrows: See the frontispiece. The largest, most beautiful of our sparrows. Nests in the Far North. A migrant to New England and the Southern States.

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The crows were winging over toward their great roost: Don’t fail this winter to spend, if not Christmas Day, then one of your Christmas vacation days, in the woods, from morning until the crows go over to their roost. You will never forget that day.

CHAPTER VITO THE TEACHER

Read to the pupils Emerson’s poem “The Titmouse,” dwelling on the lines, —

“Here was this atom in full breath,Hurling defiance at vast death,” etc.

and the part beginning, —

“’Tis good will makes intelligence,”

letting the students learn by heart the chickadee’s little song, —

“Live out of doorsIn the great woods, on prairie floors,” etc.

Poem and chapter ought mutually to help each other. Read the chapter slowly, explaining clearly as you go on, making it finally plain that this mere “atom” of life is greater than all the winter death, no matter how “vast.”

FOR THE PUPIL

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“The Lilac”: My lilac bush with its suet has become a kind of hotel, or inn, or boarding-house, for the chickadees.

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Phœ-ee-bee!: more often the spring call than the winter call of Chickadee. It is to be distinguished from the “phœ’be” call of the phœbe, the flycatcher, by its greater softness and purity, and by its very distinct middle syllable, as if Chickadee said “Phœ’ – ee – bee.” Phœbe’s note is two-syllabled.

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protective coloration: a favorite term with Darwin and many later naturalists to describe the wonderful harmony in the colors of animals, insects, etc., and their natural surroundings, the animal’s color blending so perfectly into the color of its surroundings as to be a protection to the creature.

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card house: as if made of cards, easily pushed, even blown down.

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the workman’s chips: Look on the ground under a newly excavated woodpecker’s hole, and you will find his “chips.”

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a tiny window: The tough birch-bark would bend readily. I would shut the window in leaving by means of a long, sharp thorn.

CHAPTER VIITO THE TEACHER

Make a point of going into the winter woods and fields, taking the pupils as often as possible with you. It may be impossible for your city children to get the rare chance of glare ice; but don’t miss it if it comes.

This is the time to start your bird-study; to awaken sympathy and responsibility in your pupils by teaching them to feed the birds; to cultivate cheerfulness and the love of “hardness” in them by breasting with them a bitter winter gale for the pure joy of it. Use the suggestions here for whatever of resourcefulness and hardiness you can cultivate in the girls as well as in the boys.

FOR THE PUPIL

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the good things to read: To name only a few of them, we might mention John Burroughs’s “Winter Sunshine” and “Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers,” Bradford Torrey’s “Footing it in Franconia,” Frank Bolles’s “At the North of Bearcamp Water,” William Hamilton Gibson’s “Eye Spy,” William L. Finley’s “American Birds,” and Edward Breck’s “Wilderness Pets.”