The Lay of the Land

When I shall have been milking and huckleberrying and hen’s nesting and aimlessly wandering over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall have found, it may be, the very last of the woodchuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred years, for the families in the old holes keep multiplying, and the new holes keep multiplying too.

But woodchucks are not the only “things,” not the only crop that the farm yields, although it must certainly seem that there can be little room on these scant acres for anything more. My farming, however, is intensive, – from the tops of my tallest pines to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows, – so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chipmunks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits (few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many foxes).

Lately I found a den of young foxes within barking distance of the house, but along a stony ridge on the adjoining farm. No one would believe in the number of foxes (or the number of times I have counted the same fox) here on the farm, and this only sixteen miles by the roundabout road from Boston Common! But let him live here – and keep chickens!

One day, as we were sitting down to a noon dinner, I heard the hens squawk, and out I tore. The fox had a big black hen and was making off for the woods. I made after the fox. There is a sharp ridge back of the henyard, which was thickly covered with stump sprouts and slashings. The fox took to the ridge. From the house to the henyard it is all downhill, and I wanted that hen. She weighed a good eight pounds, – a load for any fox, – and what with her squawking and flopping, the tangle of brush and the steep hillside, it is small wonder that just short of the top I fell upon her, to the great sorrow of the fox, who held on until I was within reach of him.

But such an experience as this, while it would be quite impossible to a summer boarder, is yet a not uncommon experience for my unobserving, fox-hating neighbors. They seldom see more, however; whereas, a study of the lay of the land hereabout reveals a real fox community overlying our farm community like some faint tracing. We humans possess the land by day and the foxes keep to their dens; the foxes possess the land at night and we humans take to our dens.

One of the high roads of the foxes runs across the farm. Foxes, like men, are more or less mechanical in their coming and going. They will move within certain well-defined boundaries, running certain definite routes; crossing the stream at a particular ford every time, traveling this ridge and not that, leaving the road at this point, and swinging off in just such a circle through the swamp.

One autumn two foxes were shot at my lower bars as they were jumping the little river. Their road crosses the stream here, then leads through the bars, along the base of the ridge, and up my path to the pasture.

I stood in this path one night when a fox that the dogs were driving came up behind me, stopped, and sniffed at my boots. This last November, 1907, a young fox, leaving the hounds in the tangle of his trails, trotted up this same path, turned in the pasture, and came up to the house. He halted on the edge of the lawn just above the woodchuck hole that I mentioned a few pages back, and for full ten minutes sat there in the moonlight yapping back at the shepherd dog barking at him from my neighbor’s yard below.

This run up the ridge to the pasture is the highway from west to east. When the pack is baying off to the eastward, and coming nearer, I can stand by the fence between the yard and my neighbor’s pasture with the certainty of seeing the fox once in half a dozen times, and the dogs almost every time, for the fox breaks from the sprout land back of the henyard, crosses the neighboring pasture, jumps the wall, and runs my driveway to the public road and on to the woods beyond the river.

All of this sounds very wild, indeed, and so it is – at night; in the daylight it is all tame enough. Only the patient watcher knows what wild feet run these open roads; only he who knows the lay of every foot of this rocky, pastured land knows that these winding cow paths lead past the barnyards on into the ledges and into dens. And no one can find all of this out in a single June.

Many of our happiest glimpses of nature are accidental. We stumble upon things, yet it happens usually when we are trying to find something. The finding of a hummingbird’s nest is always an accident; and such accidents are extremely rare, as will be seen from a statement by Mr. Burroughs in which he says he has come upon but three hummingbirds’ nests in all his life! He has doubtless found many more than three owls’ nests, but perhaps not one of such finds was an accident. He hunted for the owls.

Night after night, in the sweet silence through which our little river sings, we hear the whimpering of the small screech owls. They are beating for mice and frogs over the meadow. So much we get without watching; but the sight of them and their nest, that came only with my visiting every tree in the neighborhood having a cavity big enough to hold the birds.

At twilight, in the late spring and early summer, we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the woods, or from below in the orchard. “What is it?” I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times had answered that it sounded like the hen partridge clucking to her brood; or that it made me think of the mate-call of a coon; or that I half inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks; or that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, I didn’t know the peculiar call, and year after year I kept waiting for an accident to reveal its maker and its meaning to me.

There were accidents and discoveries of many sorts during these years, but not this particular accident. The accident you wait for is slow in coming.

We were seated one evening on the porch listening to the whip-poor-wills, when some one said, “There’s your woodchuck singing again.” Sure enough, there sounded the tremulous woodchuck-partridge-coon-owl cry, and I slipped down through the birches determined to know that cry if I had to follow it all night.

The moon was high and full, the footing almost noiseless, and everything so quiet that I quickly located the clucking sounds as coming from the orchard. I came out of the birches into the wood road, and was crossing the open field to the orchard, when something dropped with a swish and a vicious clacking almost upon my head. I jumped from under, – I should say a part of my hair, – and saw a screech owl swoop softly up into the nearest apple tree. Instantly she turned toward me and uttered the gentle purring cluck that I had been guessing so hard at for at least three years. And even while I looked at her I saw in the tree beyond, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, two round bunches, – young owls evidently, – which were the interpretation of the calls. These two, and another young one, were found in the orchard the following day.

I rejoined the guessers on the porch, and gave them the satisfying facts. But let me say that this was very fast, even exceptional time, indeed, for the solving of an outdoor problem. I have questions enough for a big chapter upon which I have been working these more than three years. The point is this: I might have gone on guessing about the mother call of the screech owl to the end of time; whereas with a little searching and I must certainly have found out the cry in much less time than three years.

I had laughed at some good friends over on the other road who had bolted their front door and had gone out of the door at the side of the house for precisely twenty-one years because the key in the front door lock wouldn’t work. They kept intending to have it fixed, but the children were little and kept them busy; then they grew up, and of course kept them busy; got married at last and left home, – all but one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to fix the front door. One day this unmarried daughter, in a fit of dire impatience, got at the door herself, and found that the key had been inserted just twenty-one years before – upside down!

So I had sat on the porch and guessed about it. I had left the key upside down in the lock of the front door, and had gone out by way of the kitchen.

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city, – the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it all, then that is ideal.

But you must be limited. It is a small amount of land that one man can till with profit. Your very bees range hardly more than two miles from the hive. They cannot fly farther than that and store honey. Within this little world, however, they know every bank whereon the honey-yielding flowers grow. In early August I can follow their line of flight westward, through the woods for more than a mile, to an old pasture where great patches of dwarf sumac are in bloom. The bees hum about me in a fever of excitement. Then I fetch a compass far around toward home, and wherever I find the sumac in blossom, whether a hundred clustered bushes, or a single panicle of flowers hidden deep in the woods, there I find my golden bees. I wonder if, in all their range, they let waste one drop of this heavy golden sumac honey?

Do you know the flowers in your range as well as the bees know them in theirs? And, what is more, are you getting the honey? Do you know your dead trees and stone piles, and the folk who dwell in them? Could you take me, silent and soft of foot, from hole to hole, from nest to nest, from hedgerow to thicket, to cripple, to meadow, making me acquainted with your neighbors?

This is what Gilbert White could have done had you visited him at Selborne. This is what John Burroughs still does when the college girls go out to Slabsides.

Owning a farm is not necessary for all of this. Only the parish house and the yard belonged to the old naturalist of Selborne. Sometimes, indeed, I am quite convinced that, for pure and lasting joy in the fields, you should not be possessed even of a garden patch; for, once you have digged into earth of your own, then have a care, else along with the cucumber seed you will plant your soul. The man in the Scriptures who bought a piece of land and wished thereafter only to dig, had a real case.

Owning a farm is not necessary. To be near the open country is enough, so near that you can know it intimately the year around. “He is a thoroughly good naturalist,” says Kingsley, “who knows his own parish thoroughly.” He was thinking of Gilbert White, I am sure, – that gentle rector who lived in Selborne, and there grew old with his tortoise.

This is all there is to nature study, this growing old with your garden and your tame tortoise. The study of the out-of-doors is not a new cult; it is not a search after a living uintatherium, or after a frog that can swallow his pond, or a fish hawk that reads, – not a hunt for the extraordinary or the marvelous at all, but for things as the Lord made them. Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors.