The Lay of the Land

The litter and havoc that those squirrels made were dreadful. But instead of exterminating them root and branch, a big box was prepared the next summer and lined with tin, in which the linen was successfully wintered.

But how real was the loss, after all? Here is a rough log cabin on the side of Thorn Mountain. What sort of a tablecloth ought to be found in such a cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed by chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to the woods in summer? The chipmunks are well worth a tablecloth now and then, – well worth, besides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they can steal from my small patch.

Only it isn’t stealing. Since I ceased throwing stones and began to watch the chipmunks carefully, I do not find their manner that of thieves in the least. They do not act as if they were taking what they have no right to. For who has told chipmunk to earn his oats in the sweat of his brow? No one. Instead he seems to understand that he is one of the innumerable factors ordained to make me sweat, – a good and wholesome experience for me so long as I get the necessary oats.

And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though I don’t like to guess at how much they carried off, – anywhere, I should say, from a peck to a bushel, which they stored, as they tried to store the berries, somewhere in the big recesses of the stone wall.

All this, however, is beside the point. It isn’t a case of oats and berries against June-bugs. You don’t haggle with Nature after that fashion. The farm is not a marketplace where you get exactly what you pay for. You must spend on the farm all you have of time and strength and brains; but you must not expect merely your money’s worth. Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farming is like virtue, – its own reward. It pays the man who loves it, no matter how short the oats and corn.

So it is with chipmunk. Perhaps his books don’t balance, – a few June-bugs short on the credit side. What then? It isn’t mere bugs and berries, as I have just suggested, but stone piles. What is the difference in value to me between a stone pile with and without a chipmunk in it. Just the difference, relatively speaking, between the house with or without my four boys in it.

Chipmunk, with his sleek, round form, his rich color and his stripes, is the daintiest, most beautiful of all our squirrels. He is one of the friendliest of my tenants, too, friendlier even than chickadee. The two are very much alike in spirit, but however tame and confiding chickadee may become, he is still a bird, and, despite his wings, belongs to a different and a lower order of beings. Chickadee is often curious about me; he can be coaxed to eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than curious; he is interested; and it is not crumbs that he wants, but friendship. He can be coaxed to eat from my lips, sleep in my pocket, and even come to be stroked.

I have sometimes seen chickadee in winter when he seemed to come to me out of very need for living companionship. But in the flood-tide of summer life chipmunk will watch me from his stone pile and tag me along with every show of friendship.

The family in the orchard wall have grown very familiar. They flatter me. I really believe, to be Emersonian, that I am the great circumstance in this household. One of the number is sure to be sitting upon the high flat slab to await my coming. He sits on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful, and if I take a single step aside toward him he flips, and all there is left of him is a little angry squeak from the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass properly along, do not stop or make any sudden motions, he sees me past, then usually follows me, especially if I get well off and pause.

During a shower one day I halted under a large hickory just beyond his den. He came running after me, so interested that he forgot to look to his footing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his nose hard against a stone, – so hard that he sat up immediately and vigorously rubbed it. Another time he followed me across to the garden and on to the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. Here he climbed a post and continued after me by way of the middle strand of the wire, wriggling, twisting, even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain his balance. He got midway between the posts, when the sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a splash into a shallow pool below.

Did the family in the orchard wall stay together as a family for the first summer, I should like to know. As late as August they all seemed to be in the wall, for in August I cut my oats, and during this harvest they all worked together.

I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow, cocking them to cure for hay. It was necessary to let them “make” for six or seven days, and all this time the squirrels raced back and forth between the cocks and the stone wall. They might have hidden their gleanings in a dozen crannies nearer at hand; but evidently they had a particular storehouse, near the home nest, where the family could get at their provisions in bad weather without coming forth.

Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest, I should have found a tunnel leading into the ground for a few feet and opening into a chamber filled with a bulky grass nest, – a bed capable of holding half a dozen chipmunks, and adjoining this, by a short passageway, the storehouse of the oats.

How many trips they made between this crib and the oat patch, how many kernels they carried in their pouches at a trip, and how big a pile they had when all the grains were in, – these are more of the questions I should like to know.

I might have killed one of the squirrels and numbered the contents of his pouches, but my scientific zeal does not quite reach that pitch any more. The knowledge of just how many oat kernels a chipmunk can stuff into his left cheek (into both cheeks he can put twenty-nine kernels of corn) is really not worth the cost of his life. Of course some one has counted them, – just as some one has counted the hairs on the tail of the dog of the child of the wife of the Wild Man of Borneo, or at least seriously guessed at the number.

But this is thesis work for the doctors of philosophy, not a task for farmers and mere watchers in the woods. The chipmunks are in no danger because of my zeal for science; not that I am uninterested in the capacity of their cheeks in terms of oats, but that I am more interested in the whole squirrel, the whole family of squirrels.

When the first frosts come, the family – if they are still a family – seek the nest in the ground beneath the stone wall. But they do not go to sleep immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air, and, of course, plenty of food, – acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and oats. They doze quietly for a time and eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls into some side passage prepared beforehand to receive the débris.

But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh air, and one day, though not sound sleepers, the family cuddles down and forgets to wake, – until the frost has begun to creep back toward the surface, and down through the softened soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring.

XIV

The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp

To most eyes, no doubt, the prospect would have seemed desolate, even forbidding. A single track of railroad lay under my feet, while down and away in front of me stretched the Bear Swamp, the largest, least-trod area of primeval swamp in southern New Jersey.

To me it was neither desolate nor forbidding, because I knew it well, – its gloomy depths, its silent streams, its hollow stumps, its trails, and its haunting mysteries. Yet I had never crossed its borders. I was born within its shadows, close enough to smell the magnolias of the margin, and had lived my first ten years only a little farther off; but not till now, after twice ten years of absence, had I stood here ready to enter and tread the paths where so long I had slipped to and fro as a shadow.

But what a pity ever to cross such a country! ever to map these unexplored child-lands to a scale of after years! I tramped the Bear Swamp over from edge to edge, letting the light of day into the deepest of its recesses, and found – a turkey buzzard’s nest.

The silent streams, the stumps, the trails, I found, too, and there, it seems, they must be found a century hence; but the haunting mysteries of the great swamp fled away before me, and are gone forever. So much did I pay for my buzzard’s nest.

The cost in time and trouble was what came near undoing my good uncle, with whom I was staying near the swamp. “What in thunderation!” he exclaimed, when I made known my desires. “From Boston to Haleyville to see a buzzard’s nest!” As there are some things that even one’s wife cannot quite understand, I didn’t try to reason the matter of buzzards’ nests with an uncle. If it had been a hawk’s nest or a cardinal’s, he would have thought nothing strange. But a buzzard’s!

Perhaps my years of absence from the skies of the buzzard account for it. Yet it was never mere bird, mere buzzard, to me; so much more than buzzard, indeed, that I often wish it would sail into these empty New England skies. How eagerly I watch for it when homeward bound toward Jersey! The moment I cross the Delaware I begin to search the skies, and I know, for sure, when it swims into view, that I am near the blessed fields once more. No matter how wide and free, how full of clouds and color, my sky to the end will always need a soaring buzzard.

This is a burst of sentiment, truly, and doesn’t explain at all why I should want to see the creature of these divine wings in the gruesome light of an earth-view, on its nesting stump or in its hollow log.

Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!It must, or we shall rue it:We have a vision of our own;Ah! why should we undo it?

I understand. Nevertheless, I wanted to find a buzzard’s nest, – the nest of the Bear Swamp buzzard; and here at last I stood; and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the distance, floated one of the birds. It was coming toward me over the wide reach of the swamp.

Its coming seemed perfectly natural, as the sight of the swamp seemed entirely familiar, though I had never looked upon it from this point before. Silent, inscrutable, and alien it lay, untouched by human hands except for this narrow braid of railroad binding its outer edges. Over it hung a quiet and reserve as real as twilight. Like a mask it was worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach. I could feel the silent spirit of the place drawing back away from me, though not to leave me quite alone. I should have at least a guide to lead me through the shadow land, for out of the lower living green towered a line of limbless stubs, their bleached bones gleaming white, or showing dark and gaunt against the horizon and marking for me a path far out across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard winding slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral changed to a long pendulum swing, till just above the skeleton trees it wheeled, and bracing itself with its flapping wings, dropped heavily upon one of their headless trunks.

It had come leisurely, yet with a definiteness that was unmistakable and that was also meaningful. It had discovered me in the distance, and while still invisible to my eyes, had started down to perch upon that giant stub in order to watch me. Its eye had told it that I was not a workman upon the track, nor a traveler between stations. If there was a purpose to its movements that suggested just one thing to me, there was a lack of purpose in mine that meant many things to it. It was suspicious, and had come because somewhere beneath its perch lay a hollow log, the creature’s den, holding the two eggs or young. A buzzard has some soul.

Marking the direction of the stub, and the probable distance, I waded into the deep underbrush, the buzzard for my guide, and for my quest the stump or hollow log that held the creature’s nest.

The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up, and shut out at times even the sight of the sky. Nothing could be seen of the buzzard. Half an hour’s struggle left me climbing a pine-crested swell in the low bottom, and here I sighted the bird again. It had not moved.

I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. It was a land of giants; huge tulip poplar and swamp white oak, so old that they had become solitary, their comrades having fallen one by one, or else, unable to loose the grip upon the soil that had widened and tightened through centuries, they had died standing. It was upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped.

Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white oak, the greatest tree, I think, that I have ever seen. It was not the highest, nor the largest round, perhaps, but individually, spiritually, the greatest. Hoary, hollow, and broken-limbed, its huge bole seemed encircled with the centuries, and into its green and grizzled top all the winds of heaven had some time come.

One could worship in the presence of such a tree as easily as in the shadow of a vast cathedral.

For it had bene an auncient tree,Sacred with many a mysteree.

Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the dignity, the majesty, the divinity of life? And what life was here! Life whose beginnings lay so far back that I could no more reckon the years than I could count the atoms it had builded into this majestic form.

Looking down upon the oak from twice its height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-bolled for thirty feet, and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown. Its girth more than balanced the poplar’s greater height, and as for blossoms, Nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak.

My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled by the burrh! burrh! burrh! of three partridges taking flight just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding seemed all the more real when three little clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom and drifted up against the green.

Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the pine with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had snatched at the shallow, sandy bottom and torn out a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry above the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use, surely, for not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges, but also the quails, and such small things as the warblers, washed here, – though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it?

I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my guide. It saw me, too, and began to twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened, and with a heavy lurch that left the stub rocking, it dropped and was soon soaring high up in the blue.

This was the right locality; now where should I find the nest? Apparently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick that I could see hardly farther than my nose. A half-rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across the backs of several saplings which it had borne down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.

It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with an axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay with one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking, something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.

Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I had found my buzzard’s nest.

Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that they ever hatched.

But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. It was a right instinct which led the mother to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp and there hide her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness of things should have equaled hers, certainly, and I should have allowed her the privacy of the swamp. It was unfair of me and rude. Nature never intended a young buzzard for any eye but its mother’s, and she hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!

The two freaks in the log must have been three weeks old, I should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered, as young owls are, with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded their legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these, their receding heads drawn back, their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tomcats.

In order to examine them, I crawled into the den; – not a difficult act, for the opening measured four feet and a half at the mouth. The air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded tapestry over the walls.

I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled at the end, and where I had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as you have seen an infusorian scud across the field of your microscope, there swept a meteor of black, – the buzzard! and evidently in that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied me in the log.

I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen kinds of cramps, the maternal creature was soaring serenely far up in the clear, cool sky.

XV

The Lay of the Land

She loved nature – from a veranda, a dog-cart, the deck of a vessel. She had been to the seashore for a whole June, the next June to the mountains, then a June to an inland farm. “And I enjoyed it!” she exclaimed; “the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and the green of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks – things! why, I simply didn’t. In fact, I believe that most of your fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philosophizing woodchucks are simply the creatures of a disordered imagination.”

I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and the philosophizing; I disagreed, however, as to the reality of the crabs and the woodchucks; for it was not the attributes and powers of these creatures that she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of the creatures themselves, – along her seashore, and upon the farm that she visited.

“As for fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks —things,” she did not see them. Certainly not. Yet a fiddler crab is as real an entity as a thousand-acre marsh, – and in its way as interesting. It is a sorry soul that looks for nothing out of doors but fiddler crabs, and insists upon their fiddling; that never sees the sky-blue, the sea-blue, and the green of the rolling hills. I shall never forget a moonrise over the Maurice River marshes that I witnessed one night in early June. It was a peculiarly solemn sight, and one of the profoundly beautiful experiences of my life, there in the wide, weird silence of the half sea-land, with the tide at flood. Nor shall I ever forget two or three of the stops which I made in the marshes that day to watch the fiddler crabs. Nor shall I forget how they fiddled. For fiddle they did, just as they used to years ago, when they and I lived on these marshes together.

If my skeptic found no fiddler crabs along her seashore, found nothing of interest smaller and more thing-like than color and fresh air, it may be that she did not understand how to look for crabs and things.

To go to the seashore for one June, to the mountains for a second, to the farm for a third, is not a good way to study the out-of-doors. A better way is to spend all three Junes at this shore or upon this same farm. It is when one abides upon the farm, indeed, the year around, through several Junes, that one discovers the woodchucks. The clover is too high in June. As one of twelve, June is a very good month to be out of doors; but as a season for nature study, – no single month, not even June, is satisfactory.

It takes time and patience and close watching to discover woodchucks. This means a limited territory; one can easily have too much ground to cultivate. I know a man who owns five hundred acres of Jersey pine barrens, and who can hardly till enough of it to pay taxes, whereas a friend of mine here near Boston is quietly getting rich on three acres and a half.

My skeptic had too many acres. She went to the seashore one summer, then to the mountains, then to a farm, and now she doubts the existence of crabs and woodchucks. Well she may. She might almost doubt the reality of the mountains and shore, to say nothing of the farm. One can scarcely come to believe in a mountain in the course of a mere June. The trouble is one of size. As well try to make friends with a crowded street. Crabs and woodchucks live in little holes. You must hunt for the holes; you must wait until the woodchucks come out.

For more than five years now I have been hunting holes here on the farm, and it is astonishing the number I have discovered. I doubt if driving past you would see anything extraordinary in this small farm of mine, – a steep, tree-grown ridge, with a house at the top, a patch of garden, a bit of meadow, a piece of woods, a stream, a few old apple trees, a rather sterile, stony field. But live here as I do, mow and dig and trim and chop as I do, know all the paths, the stumps, the stone heaps, the tree holes, earth holes, – there simply is no end of holes, and they are all inhabited.

By actual count there are forty-six woodchuck holes on these fourteen acres. Now forty-six woodchuck holes are a good many holes, but I have been these five years counting them. Only two of them are in the open, and visible from the road. Driving past, I say, you might actually think I had no woodchucks at all!

You should stop all summer and milk for me some morning. Throughout the early part of the season I had left the kitchen with my milk-pail rather late, – a little after five o’clock. One morning in September I stepped out of the door a little before five, and there in the clover close to the stoop sat a fine old woodchuck. I stood still and watched him. He was not expecting me yet, for he knew my comings out and goings in. He was up to his eyes in the clover, and he neither saw nor heard me.

Here about the kitchen door he had fed since the clover started, and I had not known it. He had timed his breakfast so as to be through by five o’clock, – before I came out. Had I been a boarder, with no cow to milk, perhaps I never should have known it. But after that morning I saw him frequently. I took pains to get up with him. Just over the edge of the lawn, about five feet down the wooded slope, was his burrow, which was one of the latest of the forty-six holes to be discovered.