WOOD-FOLK COMEDIES

Books by
WILLIAM J. LONG

WOOD-FOLK COMEDIES
HOW ANIMALS TALK

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Established 1817

[See p. [105]

“Deer appear on the opposite shore, stepping daintily; the wild ducks glide out of their hiding place.”

WOOD-FOLK COMEDIES

The Play of Wild-Animal Life
on a Natural Stage

BY
William J. Long
Author of
“How Animals Talk” “Brier-Patch Philosophy”
“School of the Woods” “Northern Trails” etc.

Illustrated

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Wood-folk Comedies

Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1920
I-U

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WOOD-FOLK COMEDIES

PRELUDE: MORNING ON MOOSEHEAD

SUNRISE in the big woods, morning and springtime and fishing weather! For the new day Killooleet the white-throated sparrow has a song of welcome; fishing has its gleeman in Koskomenos the kingfisher, sounding his merry rattle along every shore where minnows are shoaling; and for the springtime even these dumb trees grow eloquent. Yesterday they were gray and dun, as if life had lost its sense of beauty; to-day a mist of tender green appears on every birch tree, a blush of rose color spreads over the hardwood ridges. Woods that all winter have been silent, as if deserted, are now alive with the rustling of eager feet, the flutter of wings, the call of birds returning with joy to familiar nesting places.

Above these quiet voices of rejoicing sounds another note, loud, rhythmic, jubilant, which says that Comedy, light of foot and heart, has once more renewed her lease of the wilderness. High on a towering hemlock a logcock has his sounding board, dry and resonant, where he makes all the hills echo to his lusty drumming. The morning light flames on his scarlet crest as he turns his head alertly, this way for the answer of a mate, that way for the challenge of a rival. Nearer, on the roof of my fishing camp, a downy woodpecker is thumping the metal cover of the stovepipe, a wonderful drum, on which he can easily make more noise than the big logcock.

Every day before sunrise that same little fellow appears on my roof, so punctually that one wonders if he keeps a clock, and bids me “Top o’ the Morning” by sending a fearful din clattering down the stovepipe. It is a love-call to his mate, no doubt; but the Seven Sleepers in my place must be roused by it as by dynamite. This morning he exploded me out of sleep at four-twenty, as usual; and so persistent was his rackety-packety that I lost patience, and threw a stick of wood at him. Away he went, crying “Yip! Yip!” at the meddlesome Philistine who had no heart for love, no ear for music. He was heading briskly for the horizon when, remembering his shy mate, he darted aside to the shell of a white pine, where he drummed out another message, only to meet violent opposition from another Philistine. He had sounded one call, listened for the effect, and was in the midst of another ecstatic vibration when there came a scurry of leaves, a shaking of boughs, and Meeko the red squirrel appeared, threatening death and destruction to all drummers.

Evidently Meeko was planning a nest of his own in that vicinity, and had no mind to tolerate such a noisy fellow as a near neighbor. As he came headlong upon the scene, hurling abuse ahead of him, the woodpecker vanished like a wink, leaving the enemy to threaten the empty air; which he did in a fashion to make one shudder at what might happen if a red squirrel were half as big as his temper. Once I saw a bull-moose accidentally shake a branch on which Meeko happened to be sitting while he ate a mushroom, turning it around in his paws as he nibbled the edges; and the peppery little beast followed the sober great beast two or three hundred yards, running just above the antlered head, calling down the wrath of squirrel-heaven on all the tribe of moose. Now, in greater rage because the object of it was so small, he whisked all over the pine, declaring it, kilch-kilch! to be his property, and warning all woodpeckers, zit-zit! to keep forever away from it. Hardly had he ended his demonstration of squirrel rights and gone away, swearing, to his interrupted affairs when another hammering, louder and more jubilant, began on the pine shell.

Here was defiance as well as trespass, and Meeko came rushing back to deal with it properly. Sputtering like a lighted fuse he darted up the pine and took a flying leap after the drummer, determined this time to make an end of him or chase him clean out of the woods. Into a thicket of spruce he went, shrilling his battle yell. Out of the thicket flashed the woodpecker, unseen, and doubled back to the starting point. There a curious thing happened, one which strengthened my impression that all birds have more or less ventriloquial power to make their calling sound near or far at will. The woodpecker lit on precisely the same spot he had used before, and hammered it with the same rapidity and rhythm; but now his drum sounded faintly, distantly, as if on the other side of the ridge. Growing bolder he changed his note, put more hallelujah into it, and was in the midst of a glorious rub-a-dub when Meeko came tearing back through the spruce thicket and hunted him away.

So the little comedy ran on, charge and retreat, till a second Meeko appeared and held the fort, while the first ran after the drummer. Now, as I watch the play, there is triumphant squirrel talk on the pine shell, and the woodpecker is again drumming lustily on the stovepipe cover.

Farther back in the woods sounds the roll of another drum, a muffled brum, brum, brum, which you must hear many times before you learn to locate it accurately. Of all forest sounds it is the vaguest, the most mysterious, the hardest to associate with distance or direction. Now it comes to you from above, like a dim echo of distant thunder, and suddenly you understand the bird’s Indian name, Seksagadagee, little thunder-maker; again it drifts in vaguely from all directions, filling the air like the surge of a waterfall at night. Listen attentively, and the drum seems to be near at hand, quite distinctly in front of you; but take a few careless steps in that direction and it is gone, like a flame that is blown out, and when you hear it once more it sounds faintly from the valley behind you.

Somewhere out yonder, not nearly so remote as you think, a cock partridge or ruffed grouse is finding a mate by the odd method of drumming her up; for he never goes in quest of her, but rumbles his drum day after day, sometimes also on moonlit nights, till she appears in answer to his summons. Though I have often seen little Thunder-maker when he was filling hill and valley with his love-call, never yet have I learned how he sounds his drum; so I must have another look at him. Taking every precaution against noise, moving only when the muffled thunder rolls through the woods, I creep nearer and nearer till I locate a great mossy log and— Ah! there he is, a beautiful creature, standing tense as if listening. There is a flash of wings up and down, so swift that I cannot follow the motion or tell whether the hollow brum sounds when the stiffened wings are above the bird’s back or in front of his pouting chest. He does not beat the log; I have an impression that the booming sound is made by columns of air caught under the wings and driven together when the grouse strikes forward. If you cup your hands and drive them almost against your ears, repeating the action till you hear the air boom, you will have a faint but excellent imitation of the partridge’s drum call. The explanation remains theoretical, however, for even with the bird under my eyes I cannot say for a certainty how the sound is made. I see flash after flash of the wings, and with each comes an answering brum; then the wing-beats follow faster and faster till individual sounds merge in a continuous roll; which suddenly grows faint, as if moving away, and seems to vanish in the far distance.

Thunder-maker now stands at attention, his ear cocked to something I cannot hear. In a few moments, as if well satisfied, he droops his wing-tips, spreads wide his tail, erects his crest and his bronzed ruff, and begins to strut, showing all his fine feathers. There is a stir beyond him; from behind a yellow birch a hen-grouse appears and glides on, pretending to be merely passing this way; while the drummer pretends not to see her or to be interested in anything save his own performance. So it seems to me, watching the play through the branches of a low fir. Thunder-maker drums again, as if his mate were yet to come; while the audience moves coyly away, picking at a seed here or there, till she enters the shadowy underbrush. There she hides and remains motionless, where she can see without being seen.

As I creep away, trying not to disturb the little comedy, I am startled by a rush behind me, and have glimpse of two deer bounding through the leafless woods. They take needlessly high jumps for such easy going, it seems; one has an impression that they are kicking up their heels in delight at being out of their winter yard, free to wander at will and find abundance of fresh food, tender and delicious, wherever they seek. A loon blows his wild bugle from the lake below. Multitudes of little warblers, the first ripple of a mighty wave, are sweeping northward with exultation, singing as they go. Frogs are piping, kingfishers clattering, thrushes chiming their silver bells,—everywhere the full tide of life, the impulse of play, the spirit of happy adventure.

One such morning, when every blessed bird or beast appears like a bit of happiness astray, should be enough to open one’s eyes to the meaning of nature; but yesterday was just like this in the woods, and in the back of my head is a memory of other mornings in that far, misty time when all days came as holidays, when one leaped out of bed with the wordless thought that life was too precious to waste any of its sunny hours in sleeping. Suddenly it occurs to me, looking out from my “Commoosie” at the sunrise on Moosehead, while the woods around are vocal and jubilant, that this inspiring morning is simply natural and as it should be; that this new day, with its tingle of life and joy, is typical of the whole existence of the wood folk. For them every day is a new day, joyous and expectant, without regret for yesterday or anxiety for the morrow.

“Ah, but wait!” you say. “Wait till winter returns with its hunger and snow and bitter cold. Then we shall see nothing of this springtime comedy, but a stern and terrible struggle for existence.”

That owlish hoot expresses the prevalent theory of wild life, I know; but forget all such borrowed notions here in the budding woods, and open your eyes to behold life as it is. “Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee, or the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee” that animal life is from beginning to end a gladsome comedy. The “tragedy” is a romantic invention of our story-writers; the “struggle for existence” is a bookish theory passed from lip to lip without a moment’s thought or observation to justify it. I would call it mythical were it not that myths commonly have some hint of truth or gleam of beauty in them; but this struggle notion is the crude, unlovely superstition of one who used neither his eyes nor his imagination. To quote Darwin as an authority is to deceive yourself; for he borrowed the notion of natural struggle from the economist Malthus, who invented it not as a theory of nature (of which he knew nothing), but to explain from his easy-chair the vice and misery of massed humanity. Moreover, Darwin used the “struggle for existence” as a crude figure of speech; but later writers accept it as a literal gospel, or rather bodespel, without once putting it to the test of out-door observation.[1]

A moment’s reflection here may suggest two things: first, that from lowly protozoans, which always unite in colonies, to the mighty elephant that finds comfort and safety in a herd of his fellows, coöperation of kind with kind is the universal law of nature; second, that the evolutionary processes, to which the violent name of struggle is thoughtlessly applied, are all so leisurely that centuries must pass before the change is noticeable, and so effortless that subject creatures are not even aware they are being changed. Meanwhile individual birds and beasts go their alert ways, finding pleasure in the exercise of every natural faculty. Singing or feeding, playing or resting, courting their mates or roving freely with their little ones, all wild creatures have every appearance of gladness, but give you never a sign that they are under a terrible law of strife or competition. And why? Because there is absolutely no such thing as a struggle for existence in nature. There is no evidence of struggle, no reason for struggle, no impression of the spirit of struggle, when you look on the natural world with frank unprejudiced eyes.

As for the coming winter, let not theory be as a veil over your sight to obscure the facts or to blur your impressions. One who camps in these big woods when they are white with snow finds them quite as cheery as the woods of spring or summer. Most of the birds that now fill the solitude with rejoicing will then be far away, pursuing the happy adventure under other skies; but the friendliest of them all, the tiny chickadee, will bide contentedly in his cold domain, and greet the sunrise with a note in which you detect no lack of cheerfulness. A few of the animals will then be snug in their dens, with the bear and chipmunk; others will show the same spirit of play—a little subdued, but still brave and confident—which moves them now as they go seeking their mates to the sound of running brooks and the fragrance of swelling buds. Keeonekh the otter will spend a large part of his time happily sliding downhill. Pequam the fisher will save his short legs much travel by putting his nose into every fox track till he finds one which tells him that Eleemos has been digging at a frozen carcass, and has the smell of it on his feet; then he will cunningly back-trail that fellow, knowing that food is somewhere ahead of him. Tookhees the wood mouse will be building his assembly rooms deep under the snow, and Meeko the red squirrel (mischief-maker the Indians call him) will still be making tragi-comedy of every passing event, berating the jays that spy upon him when he hides food, chasing the woodpeckers that hammer on his hollow tree, and scolding every big beast that pays no attention to him.

To sum up this prelude of the sunrise: whether you enter the solitude in the expectant spring or the restful winter, “nothing is here to wail or knock the breast.” The wood folk are invincibly cheerful, and need no pity for their alleged tragic fate. If I dared voice their unconscious philosophy, I might say that the lines are fallen unto them in pleasant places, and that, if ever they grow discontented with the place, they quickly change it for a better or for hope of a better. The world is wide and all theirs, and through it they go like perpetual Canterbury pilgrims.

THE BIRDS’ TABLE

THE impression of comedy among natural birds and beasts first came to me in childhood, a time when eyes are frankly open to behold the natural world as God made it. Long before it became the excellent fashion to feed our winter birds, I used to prepare a table under the grapevines and spread it with crumbs, raisins, cracked nuts, everything a child could think of that feathered folk might like. Scores of wild birds came daily to my table in bitter weather. Squirrels frisked over it, and were sometimes hungry enough to eat before they began to hide things away, as squirrels commonly do when they find unexpected abundance. Several times a family of Bob Whites, graceful and light footed, came swiftly over the wall, gurgling exquisite low calls as they sensed the feast; and once a beautiful cock partridge appeared from nowhere, gliding, turning, balancing like a dancing master, and hopped upon the table and ate all the raisins as his first morsel.

Unless a door were noisily opened or a sneaky cat crept into the scene, none of these dainty creatures gave me any impression of fearfulness, and such a notion as pity for their tragic existence could hardly enter one’s head; certainly not so long as one kept his eyes open. Though always finely alert, they seemed a contented folk, gay even in midwinter, and they quickly accepted the child who watched with eager eyes from the window or sat motionless out-of-doors within a few feet of their dining table. When their hunger was satisfied many would stay a little time, basking in the sunshine on the grapevines or the pear tree, as if they liked to be near the house. Some of them sang, and their note was low and sweet, very different from their springtime jubilation. A few uttered what seemed to be a food call, since it brought more of the same feather hurrying in; now and then it appeared that birds which are perforce solitary in winter (because of the necessity of seeking food over wide areas) were glad to be once more with their own kind. Among these were certain small groups, noticeable because they chattered together after the feast, and I wondered if they were not a mother bird and her reunited nestlings. I think they were, for I have since learned that family ties hold longer among the birds than we have been led to imagine.

One of the first things I noticed in the conduct of my little guests was that they were never quarrelsome so long as they were downright hungry. Indeed, unlike our imported house sparrow, very few of them showed a pugnacious disposition at any time; but now and then appeared a thrifty or grasping fellow who, after satisfying his hunger, would get a notion into his head that the food was all his if he could claim or corner it; and he was apt to be a trouble-maker. This early observation is one which I have since confirmed many times, both at home and in the snows of the North: the hunger which is supposed to make wild creatures ferocious invariably softens and tames them.

Another matter which soon became evident was that birds of the same species were not all alike. Their forms, their colors, even their faces distinguished them one from another. I began to recognize many of them at sight, and presently to note individual whims or humors which reminded me pleasantly of my neighbors; so much so that I called certain birds by names which might be found in the town records, but not in books of natural history. Some came with grace to the table, eating daintily or moving aside for a newcomer, as if timid of giving offense. Others swooped in and fed rudely, unmindful of others, as if eating had no savor of society or the Sacrament, but were a trivial matter to be finished quickly, with no regard for that natural courtesy and dignity which we now call manners.

Among these graceful or graceless birds there was constant individual variety. Alert juncos, forever on tiptoe, would be followed by some sleepy or indifferent junco; woodpeckers that seemed wholly intent on the marrow of a hollow bone would be replaced by a Paul-Pry woodpecker, who was always watching the other guests from behind a limb; and sooner or later in the day I would bid welcome to “Saryjane,” a fussy and suspicious bird that reminded me of a woman who had only to look at a boy to make him shamefully conscious that his face needed washing or his clothes mending.

No sooner did “Saryjane” light on the table than peace took to flight. Before she picked up a crumb she would lay down the law how crumbs must be picked up, and by her bossy or meddlesome ways she drove many of the birds into the grapevines; whither they went gladly, it seemed, to be rid of her. They soon learned to anticipate her ways; at her approach some dainty tree sparrow or cheerful titmouse would flit away with an air of “Here she comes!” in his hasty exit. She was a nuthatch, one of a half-dozen that came at odd times, peaceably enough, to explore a lump of suet suspended over the birds’ table; and whenever I see her like now, or hear her critical yank-yank, I always think of “Saryjane” rather than of Sitta carolinensis.

When I translate the latter jargon, using a monkey-wrench on the grammar, I get, “A she-thing that squats, inhabitating a place named after an imaginary counterpart of a he-one miscalled Carolus”; which illuminates the ornithologists somewhat, but leaves the nuthatch in obscurity. The other name has power, at least, to evoke a smile and a happy memory. The real or human “Saryjane” used to stipulate, when she hired a boy to pick her cherries, that he must whistle while he worked or lose his pay.

One morning—I remember only that the snow lay deep, and that all birds were uncommonly eager at their breakfast—a stranger appeared at the birds’ table, a sober fellow whom I had never before seen. Without paying the slightest attention to other guests he plumped into the feast, ate enough for two birds of his size, and then sat for a long time beside a pile of crumbs, as if waiting for another appetite. Thereafter he came regularly, and always acted in the same greedy way. He would light fair in the middle of the food, and gobble the first thing in sight, as if fearful that the supply might fail or that other birds might devour everything before he was satisfied. After eating he would sit at the edge of the table, his feathers puffed, a disconsolate droop to his tail, looking in a sad way at the abundance of things he could not eat, being too full. With the joy of Adam when he gave names to creatures that were brought before him, I promptly called this bird “Jake” after a boy about my size, one of a numerous and shiftless brood, whom I had brought most unexpectedly to our human table on Thanksgiving Day.

The table happened to be loaded, in the country fashion of that time, with every tasty or substantial thing that the farm provided, and Jake stuffed himself in a way to threaten famine. Turkey with cranberry sauce, sparerib with apple sauce, game potpie, mashed potatoes with cream, Hubbard squash with butter,—whatever was offered him vanished in fearful haste, and his eyes were fixed hungrily on something else. He said never a word; as I watched him, fascinated, he seemed to swell as he ate. Then came a great tray of plum pudding, with mince and pumpkin pies flanked by raisins and fruit; and the waif sat appalled, his greasy cheeks puffed out, tears rolling down over them into his plate. “I can’t eat no puddin’; I—can’t—eat—no—pie!” he wailed; while we forgot all courtesy to our guest and howled at the comedy. Poor little chap! he had more hunger and less discretion than any wild thing I ever fed.

That was long ago, when I knew most of the birds without naming them, and when no one within my ken could have given me book names for the half of them had I cared to ask. It was the bird himself, not his ticket or his species, that always interested me.

Among the visitors was one gorgeous blue-and-white fellow, a jay, as I guessed at once, who puzzled me all winter. He always came most politely, and would light on the pear tree to whistle a pleasant too-loo-loo! a greeting it seemed, before he approached the table. I took to him at once, with his gay attire and gallant crest, and immediately he proved himself the most courteous guest at the feast. He invariably lit at some empty place; he would move aside for the smallest bird, with deference in his manner; when he took a morsel it was always with an air of “By your leave, sir,” which showed his breeding.

The puzzle was that other birds disdained this handsome Chesterfield, refusing to have anything to do with him. Now and then, when he was most polite, some tiny sparrow would fly at his head or chivvy him angrily from the table; but for the most part they kept him at a distance until they had eaten, when they would move scornfully aside, leaving him to eat by himself. At first I thought they had bad tempers; but a child’s instinct is quick to measure any social situation, and when the jay had returned a few times I began to suspect that the fault was with him. Yes, surely there was something wrong, some pretense or imposture, in this fine fellow whom nobody trusted; but what?

The answer came in the spring, and was my own discovery. I am still more proud of it than of the time, years later, when I first touched a wild deer in the woods with my hand. Near my home was a woodsy dell with a brook singing through it, which I named “Bird Hollow” from the number of feathered folk that gathered or nested there. What attracted them I know not; perhaps the brook, with its shallows for bathing; or the perfect solitude of the place, for though cultivated fields lay about it, and from its edge a distant house could be seen, I never once met a human being there. It was just such a place as a child loves, because it is all his own, and because it is sure to furnish something new or old every day of the year,—birds’ nests, wood for whistles, early woodcock, frogs for pickerel bait, pools for sailing a fleet of cucumber boats, a mink’s track, a rabbit’s form, an owl’s cavernous tree, a thousand interesting matters.

One morning I was at the Hollow alone, watching some nests at a time when mother birds chanced to be away for a hurried mouthful. Presently came my blue jay, and he seemed a different creature from the Chesterfield I had known. No more polite or gallant ways now; he fairly sneaked along, hiding, listening, like a boy sent to plunder a neighbor’s garden. Without knowing why, I felt suddenly ashamed of him.

Just over a catbird’s nest the jay stopped and called, but very softly. That was a “feeler,” I think, for at the call he pressed against the stem of a tree, as if to hide, and he stood alert, ready to flit at a moment’s notice. Then he dropped swiftly to the nest, drove his bill into it, and tip-tilted his head with a speared egg. A dribble of yellow ran down the corner of his mouth as he ate. He finished off two more eggs, and went straight as a bee to another nest, which I had not discovered. Evidently he knew where they all were. He speared an egg here, and was eating it when there came a rush of wings, the challenge of an excited robin, and away went the jay screaming, “Thief! Thief!” at the top of his voice. A score of little birds came with angry cries to the robin’s challenge, and together they chased the nest-robber out of hearing.

And then I understood why the other guests had no patience with the jay’s comedy when he played the part of a fine fellow at the winter table. They knew him better than I did.

It was an experience, not a theory, of life that I sought in those early days, when nature spoke a language that I seemed to understand; and a host of experiences soon confirmed me in the belief that birds and beasts accept life, unconsciously perhaps, as a kind of game and play it to the end in a spirit of comedy. Later came the literature and alleged science of wild life, one filling the pleasant woods with tragedy, the other with a pitiless struggle for existence; but no sooner do I go out-of-doors to front life as it is than all such borrowed notions appear in their true light, the tragic stories as mere inventions, the scientific theories as bookish delusions.

The cheery lesson of the winter birds, for example, is one which I have since proved in many places, especially in the North, where I always spread a table for the birds before I dine at my own. The typical table is a broad and bountiful affair, set just outside the window on the sunny side of camp; but sometimes, when I am following the wolf trails, it is only a bit of bark on the snow beside my midday fire.

When the halt comes, and the glow of snowshoeing is replaced by the chill of a zero wind, a fire is quickly kindled and a dipper of tea set to brew. Next comes the birds’ table with its sprinkling of crumbs, and hardly is one returned to the fire before Ch’geegee appears, calling blithely as he comes to share the feast. His summons invariably brings more chickadees, each with gray, warm coat and jaunty black cap; their eager voices attract other hungry ones, a woodpecker, a pair of Canada jays (they always go in pairs, as if expecting another ark), and a shy, elusive visitor who is no less welcome because you cannot name him in his winter garb. Suddenly from aloft comes a new call, very wild and sweet; there is a whirl of wings in the top of a spruce, where Little Far-to-go, as the Indians name him, calls halt to his troop of crossbills at sight of the fire and the gathering birds. A brief moment of rest, a babel of soft voices, another flurry of wings, and the crossbills are gone, speeding away into the far distance. Next to arrive are the nuthatches, a squirrel or two, and then—well, then you never know who may answer your invitation. Before your feast ends you may learn two things: that these snow-filled woods shelter an abundant life, and that the life is invincibly cheerful.

So it happens that, though I have often been alone in the winter wilderness, I have never eaten a lonely meal there; always I have had guests, friendly, well-mannered little guests, and the pleasure they bring to the solitary man is beyond words. Very companionable it is, as one says grace over his bread and meat, to hear “Amen” from a score of pleasant voices making Thanksgiving of the homely fare. Warm as the radiance of the fire, soothing as the fragrance of a restful pipe, is the inner glow of satisfaction when one sees his guests linger awhile, gossiping over the unexpected, questioning the flame or the smoke, and anon turning up an inquisitive eye at the silent host from whose table they have just eaten. When I hear speaker or writer urging his audience to feed our winter birds because of their earthly or economic value, I find myself wondering why he does not emphasize the heavenly fun of the thing.

As I recall these many tables, spread in the snow at a season when, as we imagine, the pitiless struggle for existence is at its height, they all speak to strengthen the early impression of gladness, of good cheer, of a general spirit of play or comedy among wild creatures. I have counted over sixty chickadees, woodpeckers, grouse, jays, squirrels and other wayfarers around the table beside my camp; but though some of these have their enmities in the nesting season, when jays and squirrels are overfond of eggs, it was still a lively and a happy company, because all the wood folk have an excellent way of ending an unpleasantness by forgetting it. They live wholly in the present, being too full of vitality to dwell in the past, and too carefree to burden life by carrying a grudge.

Some of these remembered guests came boldly to my table, some with the exquisite shyness born of the silent places; but all were natural at first, and therefore peaceable. Unlike our mannerless house sparrows, they fed very daintily for the most part, and would chatter pleasantly before going away, to return when they were again hungry; but now and then some graceless bird or squirrel would insist on having the biggest morsel, or might even try to drive others away while he made sure of it; and it was these exceptional individuals who caused whatever brief, unnatural bickerings I have chanced to witness.

I remember especially one nuthatch that visited my winter camp in Ontario; he was different from all others of his kind, even from my early acquaintance, “Saryjane,” in that he seemed possessed of the notion that whatever I put out-doors in the way of food was his private property. He was always first at the table, arriving before the sun; and sometimes, when an angry chatter would break through my dawn dreams, I would go to the window to find him driving other early comers away from the relicts of yesterday’s abundance. “Food Baron” we dubbed him when some of his notions struck us as familiar and quite human.

As the sun rose, and more hungry birds appeared for the breakfast I always spread for them, the Baron would change his methods. Finding the hungry ones too many or too lively to be managed, he would proceed hurriedly to remove as much food as possible to a cache which he had somewhere back in the woods. In this individual whim of hiding food, as well as in his peculiar challenge, he was different from any other nuthatch I ever met. Returning from one of these hurried flights, he would perch a moment on a branch over the table, eye the feeding guests angrily, pick out one who was busy at a big morsel, and launch himself straight at the offender’s head. Deep in his throat sounded a terrifying chur-churr as he made his swoop.

The odd thing is that he always got the morsel he wanted. Though he often charged a jay or a squirrel much bigger than himself, I never saw one that had the nerve to stand against his headlong rush. Being peaceable and a little timid, as all wild things naturally are, they dropped whatever they were eating and dodged aside; whereupon the nuthatch swept over the table like a fury, whirring his wings and crying, “Churr! Away with you! Vamoose!” which sent most of the little birds with startled peeps into the trees. Then, with the board cleared, he would drag off his morsel, hide it, and come back as quickly as he could to repeat his extraordinary performance.

How the other birds regarded him would be hard to tell. At times they seemed to get a bit of fun or excitement out of the game by slipping in to steal a mouthful while the Baron was chasing some luckless fellow who had claimed too big a crumb. At other times they would wait patiently in the trees, basking in the sunshine, till the trouble-maker was gone away to hide things, when they would come down and feed alertly. In this way they would soon get all they wanted for the time, and flit away to their own affairs. Another odd thing is that the Baron, after storing things without opposition for a few minutes, would tire of it and disappear, leaving plenty still on the table.

Occasionally in the woods one meets a bird that by some freak of heredity seems to have been born without his proper instincts: a young wild goose sees his companions depart from the North, but feels no impulse to follow them, and remains to die in the winter snow; or a cow-bunting has no instinct to build a nest of her own, and makes a farce of life by leaving an egg here or there in some other bird’s household. Among the beasts it is the same story: a rare beaver has no instinct to build a house with his fellows, but lives by himself in a den in the bank; or some timid creature that has fled from you unnumbered times on a sudden upsets all your generalizations by showing the boldness of lunacy.

I remember one occasion when darkness and rain overtook me on the trail, and sent me to sleep in a deserted lumber camp; which is the most sleepless place on earth, I think, being full of creaks, groans, rustling porcupines, wild-eyed cats, spooks, mice, evil smells, and other distractions. Except in a downpour, any tree or bush offers more cheerful shelter. About the middle of the night I was awakened, or rather galvanized, by the impression that some creature was trying to get at me. In the black darkness of the place the very presence of the thing seemed to fill the whole shanty. I foolishly jumped up, charged with a yell, and ran bang into a huge, hairy object. There was a grunt, and a hasty, flaring match showed the grotesque head of a cow-moose sticking into the open window. Having been scared stiff, I belted her away roughly; but hardly had I straightened my poor nerves in sleep when she came again, head, neck, shoulders, all she could crowd into the low doorway. I shooed her off, hastening her flight with clubs, ax heads, old moccasins, everything throwable that I could lay hands on; yet she lingered about the yard for an hour or two, and once more came snuffling with her camel’s nose at the window. How do I account for her? I don’t. You can say that she mistook me for her lost calf, and I shall not contradict you.

So this nuthatch, at odds with all his kind, may possibly have been born without the common instinct of sociability and decency. The other birds were sometimes seen watching him curiously, as they watch any other strange thing. Now and then one of them would resent some personal indignity by giving the greedy one tit for tat; but for the most part they seemed well content to keep aloof from the nuisance. They had enough to eat, with a little sauce of excitement, and I think they accepted the nuthatch as a harmless kind of lunatic.

FOX COMEDY

THOUGH my early impressions of wild life were mostly heart-warming, one thing always troubled me, and that was the clamor of a pack of hounds running a fox to death. There were fox hunters in the neighborhood; I had shivered at stories of men who had been chased by wolves, and whenever I heard the winter woods ringing to dog voices I pictured the poor fox as running desperately for his life, with terror lifting his heels or tugging at his heart. I could see no comedy in that picture, probably because, never having witnessed a fox chase, I was viewing it with my imagination rather than with my eyes.

There came a day when the hounds were out in full cry, and I was in the snowy woods alone. For some time I had heard dogs in the distance, and when a louder clamor came on the breath of the wind I hid beside a hemlock fronting a stream, all eyes and ears for whatever might befall. Presently came the fox, the hunted beast, and my first glimpse of him was reassuring. He was moving easily, confidently, his beautiful fur fluffed out as if each individual hair were alive, his great brush floating like a plume behind him. There was no sign of terror, no evidence of haste in his graceful action. Though he could run like a red streak, as I well knew, having watched fox cubs playing outside their den, he was now trotting leisurely on his way, stopping often to listen or to sniff the air, while far behind him the heavy-footed hounds were wailing their hearts out over a tangled trail.

So Eleemos came to the water and ran lightly beside it, heading downstream, taking in the possibilities of the situation with cunning glances of his bright eyes. The water was low; above it showed the heads of many rocks, from which the sun had melted all the snow, leaving dry spots that would hold no scent. Suddenly a beautiful jump landed Eleemos on a flat rock well out from shore; without losing momentum he turned and went flying upstream, leaping from rock to rock, till he was twenty yards above where he had first approached the water, and a broad stretch called halt to his rush. Again without losing speed, he whirled in to my side, leaped ashore, flashed up through the woods, and scrambled to the top of a ledge, where he could overlook his trail. When I saw him stretch himself comfortably in the sunshine, as if for a nap, and when, as the hounds came pounding into sight, he lifted his head to cock his ears and wrinkle his eyebrows at the lunatic beasts that were yelling up and down a peaceful world, trying to find out where or how he had crossed the stream—well, then and there I put imagination aside, and concluded that perhaps the fox was getting more fun out of the chase than any of the dogs. He had this advantage, moreover, that whenever he wearied of the play he had only to slip into the nearest ledge or den to make a safe end of it.

Another day when I was roaming the woods I heard in the distance the melodious voice of Old Roby, best of all possible foxhounds. It was a springlike morning, with melting snow; and Roby, thinking it an excellent time for smelling things, had pulled the collar over his head and gone off for a solitary hunt, as he often did. When his voice rose triumphant over a ridge and headed in my direction, I hurried to the edge of a wild meadow and stood against a big chestnut tree, waiting for the fox and growing more expectant that I should have a glimpse of him.

A short distance in front of me a cart-path came winding down through the leafless woods. Where this path entered the meadow was a dry ditch; over the ditch was a bridge of slabwood, and some loaded wagon had recently broken through it, crushing the slabs on one side down into the earth. On that side, therefore, the ditch was closed; but on the other side it appeared as a dark tunnel, hardly a foot high and three or four times as long,—an excellent refuge for any beastie that cared to shelter therein, since it was too low for a hound to enter bodily, and if he thrust his head in too far, the beastie would have a fine chance to teach him manners by nipping his nose.

I had waited but a few minutes when down the cart-path came the fox, running fast but not easily. One could see that at a glance. The soft snow made hard going; as he plunged into it, moisture got into his great brush, making it heavy, so that it no longer floated like a gallant plume. A gray fox would have taken to earth within a few minutes of the start, and now even this fleet red fox had run as far as he cared to go under such circumstances. At sight of the open meadow he put on speed, flying gloriously down the hill. One jump landed him fair in the middle of the bridge; a marvelous side spring carried him into the ditch, and with a final wave of his brush he disappeared into the tunnel.

A little later Old Roby hove into sight, singing ough! ough! oooooooh! in jubilation of the melancholy joy he followed. Clean over the bridge he went, head up, picking the rich scent from the air rather than from the ground, and took three or four jumps into the meadow before he discovered that the fox was no longer ahead of him. Then he came out of his trance, circled over the bridge, poked his nose into the tunnel. There before his bulging eyes was the fox, and in his nostrils was a reek to drive any foxhound crazy. “Ow-wow! here’s the villain at last! And, woooo! what won’t I do to him!” yelled Roby, pulling out his head and lifting it over the edge of the bridge for a mighty howl of exultation. Again he thrust his nose into the tunnel and began to dig furiously; but the sight of the fox, so near, so reeky, so surely caught at last, set the old dog’s heart leaping and his tongue a-clamoring. Every other minute he would stop digging, back out of the tunnel for room, for air, and lifting his head over the bridge send up to heaven another jubilation.

Now Roby was bow-legged, as many foxhounds are that run too young; also he was apt to spread his feet as he howled, so that there was plenty of room to pass under him, and when his head was lifted up for joy he could see nothing but the sky. He had been alternately digging and celebrating for some time, working his way farther under the bridge, when as he raised his head for another bowl of relief a flash of yellow passed between his bowlegs, out under his belly and up over the hill. The thing was done so boldly that it made one gasp, so quickly that a living streak seemed to be drawn through the woods; but the entranced old dog saw nothing of it. When he thrust his head confidently into the tunnel once more, there was no fox and no pungent odor of fox where landscape and smellscape had just been filled with foxiness.

Roby looked a second time and sniffed with a loud sniffing to be sure he was not dreaming. He looked all over the bridge, and sat down upon it. He examined the ditch on the other or closed side, and took a final squint into the tunnel; while every line and hair of him from furrowed face to ratty tail proclaimed that he considered himself the foolishest of all fool dogs that ever thought they could catch a fox. Then he shook his ears violently, as if ridding himself of hallucinations, and began to cast about methodically in circles. A fresh reek of fox poured into his nostrils, filling him with the old ecstasy; he threw up his head for a glad hoot, and went pounding up the hill after his nose, singing ough! ough! oooooh! as an epitome of all fox hunting.

Whenever I heard the hounds after that, I pictured comedy afoot and followed it eagerly, still roaming alone in hope of meeting the fox, and making myself a nuisance to many a proper fox hunter who, waiting expectantly for a shot, heard the chase draw away and fell to cursing the luck or the mischief that had turned the fox from his runway. So it befell, one winter, that I saw Old Roby and a pack of hounds completely fooled by a fox that lay quietly watching them while they hunted and howled for his lost trail.

The place was a deep gully in some big woods. Its sides were covered with a mat of vines and bushes; at the bottom ran a stream, too broad to jump and too swift to freeze even in severe weather. Several times an old fox had been “lost” here, his trail leading straight to the gully, and vanishing as completely as if the river had swallowed him up. He was frequently started in some rugged hills to the westward, and would commonly play back and forth from one ridge to another till he wearied of the game, or till he met a hunter and felt the sting of shot on a runway, when he would break away eastward at top speed. For a mile or more his course could be traced by the hounds giving tongue on a hot scent until they reached the gully, where their steady trail-cry changed to howls of vexation. And that was the end of the chase for that day, unless the weary dogs had ambition enough to hunt up another fox.

At first it was assumed that the game had run into a ledge, as red foxes do when they are fagged or wounded; but when hunters followed their baffled dogs time and again, they always found them running wildly up and down both banks of the stream, looking for a trail which they never found. Then some said that the fox had a secret den, which he approached by running over a tangle of vines where the hounds could not follow; but one old hunter, who had chased foxes for half a century, settled the matter briefly. “My dogs,” he said, “can follow anything that runs above ground. They can’t follow this fox. Therefore he takes to water, like a buck, and swims so far downstream that we never find where he comes out.” Though nobody had ever seen a fox take to water, a man who has followed foxes half a century is ready to believe almost anything within reason.

On stormy nights the hunters would forgather at the village store, and whenever the talk turned to the old fox of the gully I was all ears. I knew the place well, and wondered why some Nimrod, instead of merely shooting foxes or theorizing about them, did not take the simplest means of solving the mystery; but it would have been foolhardy in that veteran company to venture a new opinion on the ancient sport of fox hunting. I remember once, when they were swapping yarns, of breaking rashly into the conversation to tell of a fox I had seen at a lucky moment when he did not see me. He was nosing along the edge of a wood, and I threw a chunk of wood after him as he moved away. It missed him by a foot, and he pounced upon it like a flash as it went bouncing among the dead leaves.

Now that was perhaps the most natural thing for any hungry fox to do, to catch a thing which ran away, instead of asking where it came from; but the veterans received the tale in grim silence. One told me that I had surely seen a “sidehill garger”; another wished he could have seen it, too; the rest pestered me unmercifully about the beast all winter. One of them is now in his dotage; but he never meets me without asking, “Son, did that ’ere fox really run arter that chunk of wood you hove at him?” And when I answer, “Yes, he did, and caught it,” he says, “Well, well, well!” in a way to indicate that he has been straining at that gnat for forty years. Heaven only knows how many fox-hunting camels he has swallowed in the interim.

One Saturday morning (a glorious day it was, with all signs pointing to a good fox run) I went early to the gully, crossed it, and hid where I had a view up or down the stream. Several times during the day I heard hounds in the offing, but the chase did not head in my direction. When the winter sunset came, and an owl began to hoot in the darkening woods, it was time for a hungry boy to go home.

The next time I had better luck. From some hills far away the hoot of hounds came clear and sweet through the still air; then the flat report of a gun, a brief silence, a renewed clamor, and my ears began to tingle as the hunt drew my way, louder and louder. Suddenly there was a flash of ruddy color, warm and brilliant on the snow; the fox appeared on the farther side of the gully, slipped over the edge at a slow trot, and disappeared among the vines.

I was watching the stream keenly when the same flash of color caught my eye, again on the other side, but some fifty yards above where the fox had vanished. He bounded lightly up the steep bank, sprang to the level above, listened a moment to the dogs, ran along the edge a short distance, dropped down into the vines, came up quickly, and scuttled back again in another place. There were fleeting glimpses of orange fur as he dodged here or there, now near the stream, now among the thickest vines; then he tiptoed up and stood alert in the open, at the precise spot, apparently, where he had first entered the gully. After cocking his ears once more at the increasing clamor of hounds, he headed back toward them into the woods; and I had the impression that he was carefully stepping in his own footprints, back-tracking, as many hunted creatures do. So he went, cat-footedly at first, then in swift jumps, till he came to a huge tree that had been twisted off by a gale, leaving a slanting stub some fifteen feet high. Here Eleemos took a flying leap at the stub, scrambled up it with almost the ease of a squirrel, and disappeared into the top.

“He scrambled up it with almost the ease of a squirrel and disappeared into the top.”

The hounds were by this time close at hand. A wild burst of music preceded them as they rushed into sight, heads up, giving tongue at every jump, and followed the hot trail headlong over the gully’s edge into the vines. Evidently the fox had run about most liberally there; in a moment the bounds were tangled in a pretty crisscross, lost all sense of direction, and broke out in lamentation. Most of them went threshing about the gully till the delicate fox trail was covered by a maze of dog tracks; but one old fellow, who had been through the same mill before, lay down in an open spot and rolled about on his back, his feet in the air, as if to say, “Well, here’s the end of this chase.” Another veteran with furrowed face and a deep, sad voice (it was Roby again), managed to nose out half the puzzle, for he came creeping up over the edge of the gully at the point where the fox had first leaped out; but there he ran up and down, up and down, finding plenty of fresh scent everywhere without being able to follow it to any end except the empty vines. Another hound, a youngster with a notion in his head that anything which runs must go ahead, plunged into the stream, swam it, and went casting about the woods on the farther side.

Meanwhile there was a stir, the ghost of a motion, in the leaning stub. Over the top of it came two furry ears, then a pointed nose and a bright yellow eye. The fox was there, watching every play of the game with intense interest; and in his cocked ears, his inquisitive nose, his wrinkling eyebrows, were the same lively expressions that you see in the face of a fox when he is hunting mice, and thinks he hears one rustling about in the frozen grass.

PLAYERS IN SABLE

IN severe weather, when snow lay deep on the silent fields, a few crows would enter the yard in view of my birds’ table, sitting aloof in trees where they could view the feast, but making no attempt to join it. I did not then know that crows are nest-robbers, like the jay, or that the smallest bird at the table was ready to bristle his feathers if one of the black bandits approached too near.

For several days, while the crows grew pinched, I waited expectantly for hunger to tame them, only to learn that a crow never ventures into a flock of smaller birds, being absurdly afraid of their quickness of wing and temper. Then, because any hungry thing always appealed to me, I spread a variety of food, scraps of meat and the entrails of fish or fowl, on a special table at a distance; but the crows would not go near it, probably thinking it some new device to insnare them. They have waged a long battle with the farmer, and the battle has bred in them a suspicion that not even hunger can heal. As a last resort, I scattered food carelessly on the snow, and within the hour the hungry fellows were eating it. Their first meal was a revelation to me; no gobbling or quarreling, but a stately and courteous affair of very fine manners. Nor have I ever seen a crow do anything to belie that first impression.

Among the scraps was some field corn, dry and hard from the crib; but the canny birds knew too much to swallow the grain whole, ravenous though they were. Green or soft corn they will eat with gusto, but ripened field corn calls for proper treatment. Each crow would take a single kernel (never more than that at one time) to a flat rock on the nearest wall, and there, holding the kernel between the toes of a foot, would strike it a powerful blow with his pointed beak. I used to tremble for his toes, remembering my own experience with hammer or hatchet; but every crow proved himself a good shot. Occasionally a descending beak might glance from the outer edge of a kernel, sending it spinning out from under the crow’s foot; whereupon he hopped nimbly after it and brought it back to the block. After a trial or two he would hit it squarely in the “eye”; it would fly into bits, and he would gather up every morsel before going back for a fresh supply.

Once when a hungry crow splintered a kernel in this way, I saw a piece fly to the feet of another crow, who bent his head to eat it as the owner came running up. The two bandits bumped together; but instead of fighting over the titbit, as I expected, they drew back quickly with a sense of “Oh, excuse me!” in their nodding heads and half-spread wings. Then they went through a little comedy of manners, “After you, my dear Alphonse” or “You first, my dear Gaston,” till they settled the order of precedence in some way of their own, when the owner ate his morsel and went back to the wall to find the rest of the fragments.

Watching these crows, with their sable dress and stately manners, it was hard to imagine them off their dignity; but I soon learned that they are rare comedians, that they spend more time in play or mere fooling than any other wild creature of my acquaintance, excepting only the otters. I have repeatedly watched them play games, somewhat similar in outward appearance to games that boys used to play in country school yards, and once I witnessed what seemed to be a good crow joke. Indeed, so sociable are they, so dependent on one another for amusement, that a solitary crow is a great rarity at any season. Twice have I seen a white crow (an albino), but never a crow living by himself.

The joke, or what looked like a joke, occurred when I was a small boy. I was eating my lunch in a shady spot at the edge of a berry pasture when a young crow appeared silently in a pine tree, only a few yards away. A deformed tree it was, with a splintered top. In the distance a flock of crows were calling idly, and the youngster seemed to cock his ears to listen. Presently he set up a distressed wailing, which the flock answered on the instant. When a flurry of wings leaped into sight above the trees, the youngster dodged into the splintered pine, and remained there while a score of his fellows swept back and forth over him, and then went to search a grove of pines beyond. When they flew back across the berry pasture, and only an occasional haw came from the distance, the young crow came out and set up another wail; and again the flock went clamoring all over the place without finding where he was hidden.

The play ended in an uproar, as such affairs commonly end among the crows; but whether the uproar spelled anger or hilarity would be hard to tell. The youngster had called and hidden several times; each time the flock returned in great excitement, circled over the neighborhood, and straggled back to the place whence they had come. Then one crow must have hidden and watched, I think, for he came with a rush behind the youngster, and caught him in the midst of his wailing. A sharp signal brought the flock straight to the spot, and with riotous haw-hawing they chased the joker out of sight and hearing.

It was this little comedy which taught me how easily crows can be called, and I began to have no end of fun with them. In the spring when they were mating, or in autumn when immense flocks gathered in preparation for sending the greater part of their number to the seacoast for winter, I had only to hide and imitate the distressed call I had heard, and presto! a flock of excited crows would be clamoring over my head. Yet I noticed this peculiarity: at times every crow within hearing would come to my first summons; while at other times they would bide in their trees or hold steadily on their way, answering my call, but paying no further attention to it. I mark that crows still act in the same puzzling way, now coming instantly, again holding aloof; but what causes one or the other action, aside from mere curiosity, I have never learned. In the northern wilderness, where crows are comparatively scarce, it is almost impossible to call them at any season. They live there in small family groups, each holding its own bit of territory; and apparently they know each voice so perfectly that they recognize my imposture on the instant.

Whenever the “civilized” crows found me, after hearing my invitation, they rarely seemed to associate me with the crow talk they had just heard; for they would go searching elsewhere, and would readily come to my call in another part of the wood. If I were well concealed, and they found nothing to account for the disturbance, most of the flock would go about their affairs; but some were almost sure to wait near at hand for hours, apparently standing guard over the place where I had been calling.

Once at midday I called a large flock to a thicket of scrub pine, and resolved to see the end of the adventure. Though they circled over me again and again, they learned nothing; for I kept well hidden, and a crow will not enter thick scrub where he cannot use his wings freely. Late in the afternoon it set in to rain, and I thought that the crows were all gone away, since they paid no more attention to my calling; but the first thing I saw when my head came out of the scrub was a solitary crow on guard. He was on the tip of a hickory tree, hunched up in the rain, and he gave one derisive haw as I appeared. From behind came an answering haw, and I had a glimpse of another crow that had evidently been keeping watch over the other side of the thicket.

Next I discovered that my dignified crows are always ready for fun at the expense of other birds or beasts, and especially do they make holiday of an owl whenever they have the luck to find one asleep for the day. To wake him up, berate him, and follow him with peace-shattering clamor from one retreat to another, seems to furnish them unfailing entertainment. I have watched them many times when they were pestering an owl or a hawk or a running fox, and once I saw them square themselves for all the indignity they had suffered at the beaks of little birds by paying it back with interest to a bald eagle. These last were certainly making a picnic of their rare occasion; never again have I seen crows so crazily happy, or a free eagle so helpless and so furious.

It was on the shore of a river, near the sea, in midwinter. The eagle may have come down to earth after a dead fish, unmindful of crows that were ranging about; but I think it more likely that they had cornered him in an unguarded moment, as they are themselves often cornered by sparrows or robins. Have you seen a crowd of small birds chivvy a crow that they catch in the open, whirling about his slow flight till they drive him to cover and sit around him, scolding him violently for all the nests he has robbed; while he cowers in the middle of the angry circle, very uncomfortable where he is, but afraid to move lest he bring another tempest around his ears? That is how the lordly eagle now stood on the open shore, twisting his head uneasily, his eyes flashing impotent fury. Around him in a jubilant circle were half-a-hundred crows, some watchfully silent, some jeering; and behind him on a rock perched one glossy old bandit, his head cocked for trouble, his eye shining. “Oh, if I could only grip some of you!” said the eagle. “If I could only get these” (working his great claws) “into your black hides! If I could once get aloft, where I could use my—”

He crouched suddenly and sprang, his broad wings threshing heavily. “Haw! haw! To him, my bullies!” yelled the old crow on the rock, hurling himself into the air, shooting over the eagle and ripping a white feather from the royal neck. In a flash the whole rabble was over and around the laboring lord of the air, pecking at his head, interfering with his flight, making a din to crack his ears. He stood it for a turbulent moment, then dropped, and the jeering circle closed around him instantly. He was a thousand times more powerful, more dangerous than any crow; but they were smaller and quicker than he, and they knew it, and he knew it. That was the comedy of what might have been imagined a tragical situation.

Twice, while I watched, the eagle tried to escape, and twice the crows chivvied him down to earth, the only place where he is impotent. Then he gave up all thought of the blue sky and freedom, standing majestically on his dignity, his eyes half closed, as if the sight of such puny babblers wearied him. But under the narrowed lids was a fierce gleam that kept his tormentors at a safe distance. Then a man with a gun blundered upon the stage, and spoiled the play.

One day, as I watched a crowd of crows yelling themselves hoarse over an owl, an idea fell upon me with the freshness, the delight of inspiration. In the barn was a dilapidated stuffed owl, once known in the house as Bunsby, which had been gathering dust for many seasons. Somehow, for some occult reason, people never throw a stuffed bird on the rubbish heap, where it belongs; when they can stand its ugliness no longer, they store it away in barn or attic till they can give it as a precious thing to some beaming naturalist. Bunsby was in this unappreciated stage when I rescued him. With some filched hairpins I poked him together, so as to make him more presentable; gave him a glass eye, the only one I could find, and sewed up the other in a grotesque wink. Then I perched him in the woods, where the crows, coming blithely to my call, proceeded to give him a hazing.

Thereafter, when I heard crows playing, I sometimes used Bunsby to raise a terrible pother among them. By twos or threes they would come streaming in from all directions till the trees were full of them, all vociferating at once, hurling advice at one another or insults at the solemn caricature. Once a more venturesome crow struck a blow with his wing as he shot past (an accident, I think), which knocked Bunsby from his upright balance and dignity. He was an absurd figure at any time, and now with one wing flapping and one foot in the air he was clean ridiculous; but the crows evidently thought they had him groggy at last, and let loose a tumult of whooping.

Another day, when some clamoring crows would pay no attention to my call, I stole through the woods in their direction till I reached the edge of an upland pasture, where a score of the birds were deeply intent on some affair of their own. On the ground, holding the center of the stage, was a small crow that either could not or would not fly, and was acting very queerly. At times he would stand drooping, while a circle of crows waited for his next move in profound silence. After keeping them expectant awhile, he would stretch his neck and say, ker-aw! kerrrr-aw! an odd call, like the cry of a rooster when he spies a hawk, such as I had never before heard from a crow. Instantly from the waiting circle a crow would step briskly up to the invalid, if such he was, and feel him all over, rubbing a beak down from shoulder to tail and going around to repeat on the other side. This rubbing, or whatever it was, would last several seconds, while not a sound was heard; then the investigator would fly to a cedar bush and begin a violent harangue, bobbing his head and striking the branches as he talked. The other crows would apparently listen, then break out in what seemed noisy approval or opposition, and fly wildly about the field. After circling for a time, their tongues clamorous, they would gather around the odd one on the ground, hush their jabber, and the silent play or investigation would begin all over again.

Whether this were another comedy or something deeper I cannot say. Crows do not act in this noisy, aimless way when they find a wounded member of the flock. I have watched them when they gathered to a wing-broken or dying crow, and while some perched silent in the trees a few others were beside the stricken one, seemingly trying to find out what he wanted. An element of play is suggested by the fact that, when I showed myself, the small crow on the ground flew away with the others. Moreover, I have repeatedly seen crows go through a somewhat similar performance, with alternate silence and yelling, when they were listening to a performer, as I judge, who was clucking or barking or making some other sound that crows ordinarily cannot make. As you may learn by keeping tame crows, a few of these sable comedians have ability to imitate other birds or beasts. I have heard from them, early and late, a variety of calls from a deep whistle to a gruff bark, and have noticed that, when one of the mimics chances to display his gift in the woods, he has what appears to be a circle of applauding crows close about him.

On the other hand, I once saw a pack of wolves on the ice of a northern lake acting in a way which strongly reminded me of the crows in the upland pasture; and these wolves were certainly not playing or fooling. One of the pack had just been hit by a bullet, which came at long range from a hidden rifle, against a wind that blew all sound of the report away, and the wounded brute did not know what was suddenly the matter with him. When he was silent, the other wolves would watch or follow him in silence. When he raised his head to whine, as he several times did, instantly a wolf or two would come close to nose him all over, and then all the wolves would run about with muzzles lifted to the sky in wild howling.

WOLVES AND WOLF TALES

THERE must be something in a wolf which appeals powerfully to the imagination; otherwise there would be no proper wolf stories. You shall understand that “something” if ever you are alone in the winter woods at night, and suddenly from the trail behind you comes a wolf outcry, savage and exultant. There is really no more danger in such a cry than in the clamor of dogs that bay the moon; but, whether it be due to the shadow-filled woods or the remembrance of old nursery tales or the terrible voice of the beast, no sooner does that fierce howling shake your ears than your imagination stirs wildly, your heels also, unless you put a brake on them.

Therefore it befalls, whenever I venture to say, that wolves do not chase men, that some fellow appears with a story to contradict me. Indeed, I contradict myself after a fashion, for I was once rushed by a pack of timber wolves; but that was pure comedy in the end, while the man with a wolf tale always makes a near-tragedy of it. Like this, from a friend who once escaped by the skin of his teeth from a wolf pack:

“It happened out in Minnesota one winter, when I was a boy. The season was fearfully bitter, and the cold had brought down from the north a pest of wolves, big, savage brutes that killed the settlers’ stock whenever they had a chance. We often heard them at night, and it was hard to say whether we were more scared when we heard them howling through the woods or when we didn’t hear them, but knew they were about. Nobody ventured far from the house after dark that winter, I can tell you; not unless he had to.”

Here, though I am following my friend intently, I must jot down a mental note that all good wolf stories are born of just such an atmosphere. They are like trout eggs, which hatch only in chilly water. But let the tale go on:

“Well, father and I were delayed by a broken sled one afternoon, and it was getting dusky when we started on our way home. And a mighty lonely way it was, with nothing but woods, snow, frozen ponds, and one deserted shack on the ten-mile road. This winter road ran five or six miles through solid forest; then to save rough going it cut across a lake and through a smaller patch of woods, coming out by the clearing where our farm was. I remember vividly the night, so still, so moonlit, so killing-cold. I can hear the sled runners squealing in the snow, and see the horses’ breath in spurts of white rime.

“We came through the first woods all right, hurrying as much as we dared with a light load, and were slipping easily over the ice of the lake when—Woooo! a wolf howled like a lost soul in the woods behind us. I pricked up my ears at that; so did the horses; but before we could catch breath there came an uproar that bristled the hair under our caps. It sounded as if a hundred wolves were yelling all at once; they were right on our trail, and they were coming.

“Father gave just one look behind; then he lashed the horses. They were nervous, and they jumped in the traces, jerking the sled along at a gallop. Only speed and marvelous good luck kept us from upsetting; for there was no pole to steady the sled, only tugs and loose chains, and it slithered over the bare spots like a mad thing. Flying lumps of ice from the horses’ hoofs blinded or half stunned us; all the while we could hear a devilish uproar coming nearer and nearer.

“That rush over the ice was hair-raising enough, but worse was waiting for us on the rough trail. We were dreading it; at least I was, for I knew the horses could never keep up the pace, when we hit the shore of the lake, and hit it foul. The sled jumped in the air and came bang-up against a stump, splintering a runner. I was pitched off on my head; but father flew out like a cat and landed at the horses’ bridles. He had his hands full, too. Before I was on my feet I heard him shouting, ‘Where are you, son? Unhitch! unhitch!’ Almost as quick as I can tell it we had freed the horses, leaped for their backs, and started up the road on the dead run. I was ahead, father pounding along behind, and behind him the howling.

“So we tore out of the woods into the clearing, smashed through the bars, and reached the barn all blowing. There I slid off to swing the door open; but I didn’t have sense enough left to get out of the way of it. My horse was crazy with fright; hardly had I started the door when he bolted against it and knocked me flat. At his heels came father on the jump, and whisked through the doorway, thinking me safe inside. That is the moment which comes back to me most keenly, the moment when he disappeared, and my heart went down with a horrible sinking. The thought of being left out there alone fairly paralyzed me for a moment; then I yelled like a loon, and father came out faster than he went in. He picked me up like a sack, ran into the barn, and slammed the door to. ‘Safe, boy, safe!’ was all he said; but his voice had a queer crack when he said it.

“Then we realized, all of a sudden, that the wolves had quit their howling. Inside the barn we could hear the horses wheezing; outside, the world and everything in it was dead-still. Somehow that awful stillness scared us worse than the noise; we could feel the brutes coming at us from all sides. After watching through a window and listening at cracks for a while, we made a break for the house, and got there before the wolves could catch us.”

I have given only the outline and atmosphere of this wolf story, and it is really too bad to spoil it so; for as my friend tells it, with vivid or picturesque detail, it is very thrilling and all true so far as it goes. After showing my appreciation by letting the tale soak into me, I venture to ask, “Did you see any wolves that night?”

“No,” he says, frankly, “I didn’t, and I didn’t want to. The howling was plenty for me.”

And there you have it, a right good wolf story with everything properly in it except the wolves. There were no wolf tracks about the sled when father and son went back with guns in hand next morning; but there were numerous fresh signs in the distant woods, and these with the howling were enough to convince any reasonable imagination that only the speed of two good horses saved two good men from death or mutilation.

Another friend of mine, a mining engineer in Alaska, is also quite sure that wolves may be dangerous, and in support of this opinion he quotes a personal experience. He went astray in a snowstorm one fall afternoon, and it was growing dark when he sighted a familiar ridge, beyond which was his camp. He was hurrying along silently, as a man goes after nightfall, and had reached a natural opening with evergreens standing thickly all about, when a terrific howling of wolves broke out on a hillside behind him.

The sudden clamor scared him stiff. He listened a moment, his heart thumping as he remembered all the wolf stories he had ever heard; then he started to run, but stopped to listen again. The howling changed to an eager whimper; it came rapidly on, and thinking himself as good as a dead man he jumped for a spruce, and climbed it almost to the top. Hardly was he hidden when a pack of wolves, dark and terrible looking, swept into the open and ran all over it with their noses out, sniffing, sniffing. Suspicion was in every movement, and to the watcher in the tree the suspicion seemed to point mostly in his direction.

Presently a wolf yelped, and began scratching at a pile of litter on the edge of a thicket. The pack joined him at his digging, dragged out a carcass of some kind from where they had covered it, ate what they wanted, and slipped away into the woods. But once, at some vague alarm, they all stopped eating while two of the largest wolves came slowly across the opening, heads up and muzzles working, like pointers with the scent of game in their nose. And then my friend thought surely that his last night on earth had come, that the ferocious brutes would discover him and hold him on his perch till he fell from cold or exhaustion. Which shows that he, too, gets his notions of a wolf from the story books.

By northern camp fires I have listened to many other wolf tales; but these two seem to me the most typical, having one element of undoubted truth, and another of unbridled imagination. That wolves howl at night with a clamor that is startling to an unhoused man; that when pinched by hunger they grow bold, like other beasts; that they have a little of the dog’s curiosity, and much of the dog’s tendency to run after anything that runs away,—all that is natural and wolflike; but that they will ever chase a man, knowing that he is a man, seems very doubtful to one who had always found the wolf to be as wary as any eagle, and even more difficult of approach. In a word, one’s experience of the natural wolf is sure to run counter to all the wolf stories.

For example, if you surprise a pack of wolves (rarely do they let themselves be seen, night or day), they vanish slyly or haltingly or in a headlong rush, according to the fashion of your approach; but if ever they surprise you in a quiet moment, you have a rare chance to see a fascinating bit of animal nature. The older wolves, after one keen look, pass on as if you did not exist, and pretend to be indifferent so long as you are in sight; after which they run like a scared bear for a mile or two, as you may learn by following their tracks. Meanwhile some young wolf is almost sure to take the part that a fox plays in similar circumstances. He studies you intently, puzzled by your quietness, till he thinks he is mistaken or has the wrong angle on you; then he disappears, and you are wondering where he has gone when his nose is pushed cautiously from behind a bush. Learning nothing there he draws back, and now you must not move or even turn your head while he goes to have a look at you from the rear. When you see him again he will be on the other flank; for he will not leave this interesting new thing till he has nosed it out from all sides. And to frighten him at such a time, or to let him frighten you, is to miss all that is worth seeing.

Again, our northern wolf is like a dog in that he has many idle moments when he wishes something would happen, and in such moments he would rather have a bit of excitement than a bellyful of meat. During the winter he lives with his pack, as a rule, following a simple and fairly regular routine. At dusk the wolves stir themselves, and often howl a bit; then they hunt and eat their one daily meal, after which they roam idly over a wide territory, nosing into all sorts of places, but holding a general direction toward their next hunting ground; for they rarely harry the same covert two nights in succession. Before sunrise they have settled on a good place to rest for the day; and it has happened, on the few occasions when I have had time or breath enough to trail wolves to their day bed, that I have always found them in a sightly spot, where they could look down on a lake or a wide stretch of country.

If from such a place of rest and observation the wolves see you passing through their solitude, some of them are apt to follow you at a distance, keeping carefully out of sight, till they find out who you are or what you are doing. Should you pass near their day bed without being seen or heard, they will surely discover that fact when they begin to hunt at nightfall; and then a wolf, a young wolf especially, will raise a great howl when he runs across your snowshoe trail; not a savage or ferocious howl, so far as I can understand it, but a howl with wonder in it, and also some excitement. It is as if the wolf that found the trail were saying, “Come hither, all noses! Here’s something new, something that you or I never smelled before. Woooo-ow-ow-ow! what’s all this now?” And if the pack be made up mostly of young wolves, you shall hear a wild chorus as they debate the matter of the trail you have just left behind you.

Such an impression, of harmless animal excitement rather than of ferocity, must surely be strengthened when you follow it up confidently with an open mind. If instead of running away when you hear wolves on your trail you steal back to meet them, the situation and the consequent story will change completely. In some subtle way the brutes seem to read your intention before you come within sight of them. They may be ready to investigate you, but have no notion of being themselves investigated; they melt away like shadows among deeper shadows, and you are at a loss to know where they are even while their keen noses are telling them all about you.

The European wolf, if one may judge him by a slight acquaintance, is essentially like our timber wolf; but his natural timidity has been modified by frequent famines, and especially by dwelling near unarmed peasant folk who are mortally afraid of him. In the summer he lives shyly in the solitudes, where he finds enough mice, grubs, and such small deer to satisfy his appetite. In winter he is always hungry, and when hunger approaches the starvation point he descends from his stronghold to raid the farms. A very little of his raiding starts a veritable reign of terror; every man, woman or child whom he meets runs away, and presently he becomes bold or even dangerous. At least, I can fancy him to be dangerous, having been in an Italian village when a severe winter brought wolves down from the mountains, and when terrified villagers related specific and horrible instances of wolf ferocity. Whenever I searched for the brutes the natives would advise or implore me not to venture into the forest alone. The rural guards kept themselves carefully housed at night, and a single guard, though armed with a rifle, would not enter the woods or cross open country even by daylight for fear of meeting the wolf pack.

It was hard for a stranger to decide whether such terrors came from bitter experience, or whether, like our own fear of the wolf, they were the product of a lively imagination; but one was soon forced to the conclusion that where was so much smoke there must be some fire also. Moreover, as evidence of the fire, I found some official records which indicate that the European wolf may be so crazed by hunger as to kill and eat human beings. Such records inevitably pass into fireside tales, repeated, enlarged, embellished, and thereafter the wolf’s character is blackened forever. He is naturally a timid beast; but his one evil deed, done in a moment of hunger, becomes typical of a ferocious disposition. For, say what you will, the common man’s most lasting impressions of the world are not reasonable, but imaginative; they come not from observation, but from tales heard in childhood. That is perhaps the reason why Indians, in dealing with their children, always represent nature and nature’s beasts as peaceable and friendly.

Our pioneers brought many harrowing wolf tales with them to the New World, and promptly applied them to the timber wolf, a more powerful beast than his European relative, but wholly guiltless, I think, of the charge of eating human flesh even in a season of famine. Neither in our own country nor in Canada, so far as I can learn by searching, is there a single trustworthy record to indicate that our wolves have ever killed a man. Yet the tale is against them, and the consequence is, when a belated traveler hears a clamor in the darkening woods, that ferocity gets into his imagination and terror into his heels; he starts on a hatless run for shelter, and appears with another blood-curdling story of escape from a ravening pack of wolves.

In all such stories certain traits appear to betray a common and romantic origin. Thus, the imaginary pack always terrifies you by reason of its numbers; scores of grim shapes flit through shadowy woods or draw a circle of green eyes to flash back the firelight. The real pack is invariably small, since it consists of a single wolf family. The mother wolf leads; the dog wolf is in the same neighborhood, but commonly hunts by himself; with the mother go her last litter of cubs and a few grown wolves of a former litter that have not yet found their mates. From five to eight wolves make the ordinary pack. Where game is plentiful (leading to large wolf families) ten or twelve may occasionally follow the mother; but such a large pack is exceptional, even in winter. In the subarctic region, where uncounted caribou move north in spring or south in autumn, several different packs hang about the flanks of the migrating herds; but never at such times do the wolves unite or mass, and being well fed with the best of venison they are uncommonly peaceable.

Another romantic trait of the terrible packs of the tale is that they always howl when they charge home. It is one of the marked characteristics of the real wolf that he is silent when stalking or running down game of any kind. His howling has nothing to do with his hunting, being reserved for social or other occasions; he wastes no breath in noise, as hounds do, when he means to overtake anything. Indeed, one of the most uncanny qualities of a wolf is the fleet, soundless, mysterious way he has of appearing where he is least expected. In the northern wilderness this is the typical way of it:

You are swinging along campward, following your lonely snowshoe trail over ice-locked waters, through snow-filled woods, when there comes a vague change or chill in the air. It is the moment when we say that night is falling, when gray shadows rise from the lake to meet other shadows flowing down from the hills; and that is the moment when you can count most surely on hearing the first howl of a stirring wolf. It is a creepy sound in such a place or moment, especially when it is followed by the clamor of a pack, a cry that carries far over the silent places, and that may come from the hills on either side or from the trail behind you. However far away it may be, there is always a menace in the wolf’s challenge; your nerves tingle as you stop to listen.

If you believe your imagination now, the fierce outcry grows louder, sweeps nearer; but if you trust your ears, you will know that it remains stationary, dying away where it began. Those noisy brutes are only proclaiming their ego, like awakened dogs; and having marked their direction you move homeward again, noting the increasing tension of the brief winter twilight, so different from the summer gloaming with its velvet shadows, its thrush song, its lingering light. Presently you have lost all thought of the distant wolves; if you remember them at all, you are thinking of the morrow’s hunt, how you will go back and search out their trail, when suddenly and most startlingly—there they are! And always the disturbing part of such a meeting is this: the wolves are behind you, in front of you, and on either side, before you have the first inkling that they are anywhere near.

So open is the forest here, and so white the snow, that you fancied a rabbit could hardly move without betraying himself to your eyes; yet without noise or shadow of motion surely that is a wolf watching you over a fallen log, where you can see only his eyes and his cocked ears. On the other side of the trail a bush quivers as a wolf creeps under it, but you catch no sure glimpse of him. Look behind you, and a gray something vanishes; then the woods are motionless again. And that is all you will see or hear of your ferocious wolf pack, unless, perchance, you run away; in which event some cub-wolf that knows no better may take a jump or two after you.

These timber wolves of the north are immensely interesting brutes, tireless, powerful, unbelievably cunning. To follow their trail is to have increasing respect for their keenness, their vim, their hair-trigger way of meeting any emergency. Once when I was tracking a solitary dog wolf, an uncommonly big brute, and lazy after eating his fill of venison, I came out of the woods to a frozen lake, and saw him ambling along near shore a few hundred yards ahead of me. He happened to be passing under an icy ledge, utterly unsuspicious of man or danger, when a bullet struck the ice, ping! at his heels.

That was a range shot, a bit shy, and I expected him to give me another chance; but he never even looked around to see where the ping or the bang came from. Almost, it seemed, before the report could reach him he had tried the ledge twice, only to find it overhigh for a standing jump and too slippery to climb. Without an instant’s hesitation he darted out on the lake for a flying start, whirled to the right-about, came at the ledge, and went superbly over it into thick cover. The ledge was over eight feet in the rise, and from the foot of it to his take-off was another ten feet; but in a flash he had measured his leap and taken it rather than expose himself any longer in the open.

Another time I saw a single wolf throw and kill a buck, a matter which called for skill as well as strength, and he did it so easily that one was left wondering what chance a man would have with a few brutes of that kind rolling in upon him. In numbers or when made reckless by hunger our timber wolves might well prove terrible enemies; but the simple fact is that they have no desire to meet a man. They are afraid of him, and avoid him even when they are hungry. Again and again, when wolves have howled about my winter camp at night, I have gone out and given them opportunity for a man hunt; but though they are much bolder by night than by day, they have never, save in one peculiar instance, shown any evidence of a hostile or dangerous disposition. And then they scared me properly, making me know how a man might feel if he were running with a pack of wolves at his heels.

The startling exception came one winter afternoon as I was crossing a frozen lake in a snowstorm. It was almost dusk when I came out of the woods, hurrying because I had far to go, and started fair across the middle of the lake. Soon the wind was blowing the snowflakes in level lines; what with snow and darkened air it became difficult to keep one’s bearings, and in order to see my way better I edged in nearer and nearer to the weather shore.

Two or three times, as I headed steadily up the lake, I had a vague impression that something moved in the woods, and moved so as to keep abreast of me; but the flying flakes interfered with clear vision till I began to come under the lee of a point of evergreens. Then I surely saw a creeping motion among the trees on my left, and stopped dead in my tracks to watch it. The next instant the underbrush was ripped open in a dozen places, and a pack of wolves rushed out. One turned and loped swiftly between me and the point ahead; another that I dared not watch sped down the lake, at a broad angle from the course of the first; the rest spread into a fan-shaped formation that broadened swiftly and must soon spring its ends together like a trap. In a twinkling every avenue of escape to the woods was shut by a wolf; there was left only a fight or a straightaway run across the ice.

“The rest spread into a fan-shaped formation as they came straight on.”

The wolves were perhaps a hundred yards distant when they broke cover. They came on easily, their heads low, some with a curious sidling motion that presented a rough shoulder till the fangs had a chance to snap. The brutes uttered no cry, not a howl of any kind. They had been upwind from me when I came out of the woods, and I think now that they mistook me in the storm for a deer or some other game animal; but at the moment their rush looked dangerous, and their grim silence was more terrifying than any clamor. Bending down, I threw off the snowshoe straps for free footing and, as I straightened up, pulled a heavy revolver from its sheath. Then I stood stock-still, which is the most surprising thing you can do to any charging wild beast. He is so accustomed to running away from danger himself, and to seeing other beasts run away from it, that a motionless figure puzzles him, makes him suspect that there must be a mistake somewhere.

From one end of the charging line a big wolf suddenly shot out at top speed, circling to get behind me. I picked him as the one I must first kill; but I would wait till the last moment for two reasons: because shooting must be straight, there being only half as many bullets as there were wolves; and because here was the chance of a lifetime to learn whether a wolf, knowing what he was doing, would ever run into a man. The mental process is slow and orderly now, but then it came and went with a snowflake that swept before my eyes.

As the big wolf whirled in on the run, still some forty yards away, the wind came fair from me to him; he got his first whiff of the man scent, and with it a terrible shock, I think, since its effect was a contortion which looked as if it might dislocate the brute’s back. At the top of a jump he tried to check himself by a violent wriggle. Down he came, his legs stiff as bars, and slid to his toes and leaped straight up again with a wild yelp, as if I had shot him. Yet up to that moment, when his nose told him what game he was running, I had not stirred a muscle.

That single yelp stopped the rush as if by magic. Most of the pack scattered on the instant; but two or three younger wolves that did not understand their blunder hesitated a bit, with surprise written all over them. Then they, too, caught the alarm, and the whole pack went speeding for cover in immense bounds, which grew convulsive when I began to play my part in the comedy. At the shot every flying brute went up in the air, as if safety lay only in the clouds or on the other side of the mountain.

Such are the real wolves. I see them yet, the snow powdering their grizzled coats, streaking away like flushed quail and vanishing with one last tremendous jump into the dusky woods, whenever I hear a good wolf story.

EARS FOR HEARING

ONE night in June I heard a new bird note, wonderfully clear and sweet, but so dreamlike that it seemed some tiny creature had blown a flute from elfland. The note came from far away, apparently; but I traced it at last to a branch just over my head, where a pair of grosbeaks had built their nest. There the male bird was singing near his brooding mate, singing in his dreams, I think, for his song was like no other that I ever heard from him.

The surprise of that dream song returned to me at dawn, one winter morning, when I heard low, eager voices outside my “Commoosie,” and crept out to find a family of partridges under the birds’ table.

Now a mother partridge has many notes, from the sibilant squeal of anger to the deep kroo-kroo that calls the chicks from hiding; but these voices were quite different from all grouse sounds with which I had grown familiar in the woods. They had what one might call an intimate quality, musical, softly modulated, marvelously expressive. When the partridges were gone, gliding away as if they had not meant to be overheard, I spread the table abundantly, as usual; and that day hardly a bird came without giving me at least one new note, perhaps because I was for the first time really listening.

From that time forth the voices of these feeding birds were a revelation to me, as I heard them close at hand. Surprise, confidence, pleasure, resentment, hunger, loneliness, alarm,—a dozen different emotions seemed to find ready expression, either in varied cries or by modulations of a single note. In making mental register of this bird “talk,” I became convinced that the ear needs more training than the eye if one is to understand the wood folk or enter into the spirit of their little comedy. Even if you turn mere ornithologist, with an interest in feathers or species rather than in birds, hearing is a better or surer sense than sight if you would name birds without the needless barbarity of killing them for identification. Once you recognize the peculiar quality of any bird’s voice, you may surely name him at any season. He may change his plumage as he will, for youth or age, for spring or winter; but he cannot change his natural voice, and, like Peter’s, his speech bewrayeth him.

One morning, in that same winter camp where the grouse appeared, a woodpecker sent a long call rattling across the frozen lake. The first subtle feeling of spring was in the air. Deep under snow the sap began to well upward from roots of the sugar maples to express itself in coloring buds; and I fancy that something stirred upward from some root of being in the woodpecker, also, to find expression in lusty drumming. Ever since we made camp we had heard him or his fellows signaling, answering, drilling their food out of frost-bound wood; but this call was entirely different, and Bob’s keen ears were instantly turned to it.

“Aha! that chap wants something. Can ye answer him now?” he said; and in his eye was a challenge.

I imitated the drumming, closely as I thought; but though I tried repeatedly, I received nothing like an answer. Downy or logcock or goldenwing, a woodpecker is an independent chap that I have never been able to call fairly; not even in spring, when he is all ears for a mate or a rival. Like many other birds, he will come quickly to an excited and deceptive squeaking between my fingers, but to my best drumming he remains deaf or indifferent.

“Ye haven’t the right combination, b’y,” said Bob when I gave over my fruitless attempt, and using his hunting knife as a hammer he began talking woodpecker-talk on a dry stub. At his first tunk-a-tunk (which was not like the call we had just heard) the answer came back like an echo, and when he varied his note the woodpecker came speeding across the lake. He could do that almost any time when woodpeckers were talking, as he could excite a red squirrel into emotional fits by his gibbering; but he abused me when I told him the truth, that it was not his secret combination of raps but the fellow feeling he put into it which brought the woodpeckers.

Still more amusing have been my efforts to make talk with the timber wolves. The dog wolf has a tremendous voice for occasions, and his pack has several distinct calls, challenge, trail yelp, rallying cry, lunatic baying of the moon; but though I seem to recognize these when I hear them, and to imitate them closely enough to deceive some ears, it is seldom that I can put into my voice the true wolf quality which brings an answer. For in the woods, as elsewhere, “the tone makes the music”; it is tone quality rather than any sound or combination of sounds, the feeling behind a cry rather than the cry itself, which appeals to moose or owl or any other wild beast or bird you happen to be calling.

One still, winter night I stood in front of my “Commoosie” and repeatedly gave the gray wolf’s challenge. That wolves were within hearing I was quite sure, having crossed the fresh trail of a pack at sundown; but none made answer. Then old Noel stirred and came forth from his blanket. “Hwolf don’ spik dat way; he spik dis way,” he said, and gave a howl so nearly like mine that no ordinary ear could detect the difference. Something was in his voice, however, some primal or animal quality which a wolf understood; for hardly had his howl gone forth when it was flung back eagerly from the woods behind us; and when the Indian changed his howl to a whimper, he had wolves answering from three different directions.

The point is, that when one opens his ears to the medley of calls that enliven the day or the night, he receives many an invitation which beforetime had passed over his head unheeded. Around your summer camp, for example, red squirrels are the most numerous and, as you think, the most familiar of animals; but did you ever attempt to interpret the astonishing variety of sounds which a squirrel uses habitually in the way of speech? Until you do that, Meeko the mischief-maker is a stranger to you, dwelling far on the other side of an unbridged gulf.

I do not mean that Meeko or any other animal has a language, for that is a doubtful matter; but all wild creatures communicate with others of their kind; and even when alone an animal is like a child in that he has changing moods or emotions which he expresses very plainly by modulations of his voice. So these familiar squirrels, which you hear about your camp, are not jabbering idiotically or without meaning. When angry they scold; when surprised they snicker; at other times they fling jest or repartee or abuse at one another, their voices changing noticeably with their changing moods. Now and then, as you follow Meeko to see what he is doing, he utters a long, vibrant and exultant call, in sheer delight at being alive, you think; or he stops short in a gambol and puzzles you by sitting very still, very attentive, with his nose pressed against a branch between his paws. Gone suddenly are all his jeers, his exultations, his mischief-making; he has a sober, introspective air, as if trying to remember something, or as if listening to what his other self might be saying.

If you watch Meeko’s eye at such a moment, noting its telltale lights, you will have a different opinion of his silence. He is listening, indeed, but to something so fine or distant that he cannot be quite sure what it is, or rather what it says. Therefore does he use the branch as a sounding board, pressing nose or teeth against it to catch the faint vibrations in a way to help his ears, just as woodpeckers use their tongues for the same purpose of better hearing. There! you hear the sound faintly now, and Meeko hears it distinctly enough to understand it, if one may judge by his actions. It comes from another squirrel out yonder, a truculent fellow, who is proclaiming his heretical opinion to the universe, and to this little dogmatist in particular.

Watch Meeko now; see his silent absorption change to violent rage. He barks; he seems to curse in his own way; he springs up and down on the same spot, like a boastful Quebec lumberman who jumps on his hat to work himself up to the fighting pitch. Out of breath, he stops a moment to listen, to ascertain whether he has silenced his opponent. A jeer floats in from the distance. Meeko says, “Kilch-kilch! I’ll show that impostor; I’ll teach him a lesson,” and away he goes headlong. To follow him is to witness a characteristic squirrel argument, a challenge, a rush, an upset, a furious chase up and down the swaying branches, till your head grows dizzy in following it. And then one long, triumphant yell to proclaim that another heresy is silenced forever.

Many times I have thus watched Meeko as he listened to something I could not at first hear; and almost invariably, when I have followed his rush, I have found him either berating some passing animal much bigger than himself or engaged in a hurry-scurry kind of argument with another squirrel.

Once I saw that the fellow who dared dispute Meeko’s doctrine was a very little squirrel, not big enough to hold opinion of his own, much less to challenge a quidnunc. He was bowled over at the first charge, and fell to the ground, where he darted off at top speed, doubling and dodging here, there, anywhere for a quiet life. Hot at his heels followed the irate Meeko, berating him like a pirate, giving him no chance to retract his impudence. The little fellow whisked up a tree at last, and squirmed into a knothole that seemed too small for any squirrel. Meeko was so close behind that nose met tail; but wriggle as he would, he could not get halfway into the knothole. It was an impossible squeeze for a squirrel of his bulk. As he worked and scolded himself into a passion, every now and then came a hollow, muffled snicker from within the doorway, which seemed to drive Meeko frantic.

He gave up the attempt after a time, and headed down the tree, threatening vengeance as he went. Before he was halfway to the ground the little fellow put his head out and repeated his original opinion, which started the explosive argument all over again. Eight times, while I watched, Meeko went away fuming, after vainly trying to force himself into the knothole; and every time Meekosis, as Simmo calls the little squirrel, came to the doorway to jibe at him, bringing him back in a fury that ran the gamut from volubility to speechlessness. The comedy was still running when lengthening shadows called me away to the trout pool, where my supper needed catching.

That same pool recalls another wood-folk comedy, none the less amusing because two of the actors were serious as owls when they played it out. Simmo, the Indian, and I were on our homeward way through the wilderness when we came to a beautiful place on the river, and camped there, day after heavenly day, until my vacation drew to an end. Then, because trout were plentiful at the mouth of a cold brook, I broke my rule of catching only enough for my table, and decided to take a few good fish as a thank-offering to some people who had been kind to me, a stranger. Two mornings and evenings I whipped the pools, ignoring small rises, striking only at the big fellows; and at dusk of the second day I packed away my catch and my rod with a sigh of heartfelt content. It was my last fishing for the year. There were only fifteen fish to show for it; but they weighed full thirty pounds, all clean, silvery, beautiful trout. Each one was wiped dry for keeping, wrapped separately in dried moss, and set away under a rock by a cold spring.

Early next morning Simmo went to fetch one of the trout for breakfast. I was stirring the fire when I heard him calling, “Come here! Oh, by cosh, come here!” and ran to find him standing open-mouthed over the storehouse, his eyes like gimlets, a blank, utterly bewildered expression spread all over his dark face. There was not a fish left, and not a sign on the hard soil to tell who had taken them.

We gave up the puzzle and went back to a meager breakfast, wagging our heads soberly. A bear or a lynx would have left plenty of signs for us to read. As we were eating, I saw a mink dodging along the shore, humping his back in true weasel fashion, as if in a great hurry. He disappeared under a root, all but his tail, and seemed to be very busy about something. When he backed out he was dragging a big trout.

“Das de feller! Cheokhes steal-um,” yelled Simmo, all excitement, and away he went on the jump. Startled by the thumping behind him, Cheokhes dropped his fish and took to the river, leaving a V-shaped wake trailing behind him as he forged away.

“Keep still, Simmo; let’s watch him,” I cautioned, and we both sat motionless on the bank; but not till the Indian had made sure of a more ample breakfast. His fingers were hooked into the gills of the big trout, his face a study in satisfaction.

The mink circled uneasily a few moments; then he whirled and headed for us, wiggling his pointed nose as he smelled the fish. Simmo was sitting with elbows on knees, the trout hanging down between, when the nervy little beast crossed over my foot, grabbed his prize, and attempted to drag it out of the Indian’s hand.

“By cosh, now, das too cheeky!” said Simmo, and with the tail of the trout he batted Cheokhes over the head. Away he went with a screech and a show of sharp teeth; but in a moment he was back again, and twice attempted to get possession of what he considered his property. Then, as Simmo grew impatient and batted the little thief coming and going, he made off indignantly with an air of, “Well, I know where to find a better one.” Following him up, I took away from him another trout, which he dragged from a pile of drift stuff, and after some search I unearthed two more which he had hidden under a pine stump.

That was all we ever found of our fine catch, and I am still wondering what a creature not much bigger than a rat expected to do with thirty pounds of fresh fish. Indeed, from his unprejudiced viewpoint, what should anybody expect to do with them? They belonged first of all to the river, and then to any light-footed fellow who could appreciate their flavor. But Simmo was wrathy. As we paddled downriver that day, he talked of mink and white men’s children, and read me a little homily on the vice of stealing.

HEALTH AND A DAY

“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”—Emerson.

DURING the night I had been up to watch Tookhees playing in the moonlight. Tookhees is the wood mouse, a dainty and a pretty creature, who is happily ignorant that he is an important item in nature’s food supply. He and his fellows have a way of amusing themselves, as I judge, by creeping up one slope of my tent and tumbling or sliding down the other; and before they come together for play, if such it be, you will hear them drumming in all directions, signaling and answering by tapping on the ground. The wood mice ran away when Kook’skoos, “the mother of the moon,” began a doleful hooting to her owlets; then through the light, dreamless sleep of the woodsman came the first chirping of awakened birds. My day had begun; expectantly I came forth to enjoy its uncovenanted mercies.

Killooleet the white-throated sparrow was already singing, and though his voice was a bit rusty, as it always is when summer wanes, there was yet gladness in it. You will hear it said that birds sing only in nesting time; but the saying comes of late sleeping. When dawn comes with its rosy invitation to a new day, birds at any season seem to feel the old Sursum Corda, and are impelled to some joyous expression. Though the springtime was long past, a score of warblers and thrushes were ringing their matins, and among them one shy wood thrush sent forth a heavenly note, beautiful and solemn, as from a silver flute. Then a jay cried thief! thief! seeming different from other birds in that he called attention to himself, while they were content to herald the morning. From a hollow cedar behind my tent a red squirrel began to snicker; on the lake shore a kingfisher raised his Jubilate; as I listened to the medley of awakening life a word of Anne Bradstreet came into my head:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,

The black-clad cricket bear a second part;

They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Most of Anne’s poetry was rather “punk,” to be sure, but here her feeling was excellent; so from primeval woods I sent greeting across the centuries to the Colonial singer who had lived in their shadow, and was first to put our New World nature to melody. Then, to keep proper company with her and all glad creatures, I joined the chorus with “From All That Dwell Below the Skies.” The grand old hymn needs a church organ and ten-thousand voices; but I must sing it softly for two reasons: because some sleepers in camp regarded early rising as a sign of lunacy; and because others might wake up and ask where I was going, or whether they might not go with me. And I did not yet know where I was going. I had picked this day for a “good lonesome,” to go where I listed, and perhaps to grow better acquainted with God and Nature by meeting them in solitude face to face.

As the canoe glided from the landing there was a faint stir in the mist, which hung low over all the lake. Out of the mist came first a thrush song, then a glow of soft color, like mother-of-pearl, finally something dark and solid, which turned into the crown of a mighty pine as I approached. Its stem was hidden under a white veil, as was the island on which it grew; but its topmost branches spread lightly over the sea of cloud, like the wings of a floating raven.

Doubling the point on which the pine stood sentinel, I used my sounding line to locate a channel that wound deeply amid shoals and gravel bars. I had discovered this channel one day when swimming; and it seemed, now that fish had retired to deep water, the likeliest place for a big trout on the entire lake. Under the shroud of mist the water lay dreamy, placid, formless, giving no hint of what it concealed save in one spot on the edge of the outermost shoal. There, as if indeed all things were foreordained, tiny ripples and splashes kept the surface in commotion. It was a school of fresh-water smelts, darting about or leaping into the air to escape the rush of feeding fish below. Suddenly came a plunge, a swirl; a mottled back rolled into sight among the smelts.

“Aha! I knew I’d catch a big one here this morning,” I thought, thus deceiving myself again; for I did not know anything of the kind. I was merely exalting hope above experience, which is the everlasting occupation of all fishermen.

Close beside the shoaling smelts I lowered my killick, and turned overboard from my bucket a dozen minnows that were plainly in need of fresher water. Soon two delicately curving rods were out, one swinging its shining lure close to bottom for fat or lazy fellows, the other holding a lively red-fin near the surface. Then, my part being properly played, I leaned back against an air-cushion in heavenly content. Once more I was fishing, my companions the bird songs and the awakening day.

He who counts time in such a place is no philosopher, and therefore no fisherman. I had waited an hour or a minute, one being short as the other to him who is sure of a bite, when the slender tip of a rod arched sharply, once, twice, and again. A moment’s wait, because fish that refuse a fly are slow about a minnow; then I struck, and was fast to something that seemed charged with electricity. He was netted after a heart-kindling struggle filled by hopes, thrills, anxieties, with one awful sinking moment when the line slacked and I could not feel his tugging. There he was, safe in the canoe, a firm-fleshed, deep-bodied, five-pound trout, his olive back mottled as if by the ripples under which he had lived, his sheeny sides flecked with flaming crimson.

I was feasting my eyes on the trout, the beauty and goodly size of him, and was humming the Doxology, when the other rod rattled on the thwart, and its tip ducked out of sight under water. Another age of thrills, livelier but shorter than the last; then a big whitefish—a rare catch here, and a delicious bonne bouche anywhere—is placed tenderly in his box of moss. He flaunts blue and silver as his colors; they form airy contrast to the deeper hues of the gorgeous trout.

I am admiring the splendid catch as I reel in my lines and turn overboard the remaining minnows. There are more fish under those darting smelts, perhaps much larger fish; but enough is plenty for one morning. I shall come again. The pine, which is still my only visible landmark, begins to hide his crown. The mist is rising, and glowing in the east with a gorgeous promise. “I shall hide these fish in the Indian spring,” I tell myself, “and begin another day before the sun rises.”

The Indian spring is on the mainland, halfway up a hardwood ridge. Out of it flows a run, mossy and ice-cold, a perfect place for storing fish; and the run joins a little brook that goes singing down to the lake. As I follow up this brook, brushing the moist ferns, inhaling the fragrance of balsam and hemlock, there is a swift movement ahead. Here or there I have glimpse of an arched back, and down the bank of the stream comes a mink on the jump, wiggling his pointed nose as he smells my fish. Then I change my mind about storing the catch, since to hide it here is to lose it. Once I left two grilse and a salmon of fifteen pounds in a spring brook, and when I returned I found only mink tracks. How the little beast could get away with that salmon without leaving a trail for me to follow is still a mystery. I think he floated him down the brook, as a beaver handles a heavy log.

The mink darts up to my foot and rests a paw upon it before he begins to suspect something wrong in the motionless figure with two big fish hanging beside it. He goes away unwillingly, still wiggling his nose; and I make my way back to camp, and hang the fish where the cook must see them when he comes to get breakfast for the lazy ones. I shall miss the transient flavor of that whitefish; but I have something better, the lasting taste of catching him. Then I slip away, leaving the campers fast asleep. Their day has not yet begun; mine stretches away in both directions into endless vistas.

Again the canoe glides into the mist, which is swaying now in fantastic shapes, gloriously colored. To watch it is to remember Lanier’s “Sunrise” and “Marshes of Glynn”; but life is all a poem just now, and no one has ever written a line of it. Across the lake we go, and up a stream where great trees bend low over feeding deer. The deer lift their heads to point each a velvety black muzzle at our approach. From the stream we steal into a smaller lake, profoundly still; it seems to be sleeping under its blanket of mist, amid hills of spruce and pine.

It is beautiful here, and lonely enough to satisfy the most fastidious; but to-day the Beyond is calling, and the spirit answers, “I come.” Leaving the canoe overturned in a shady spot, and tapping various pockets to be sure of compass, matches and other things needful, I take gladly to the trail. In my hand is a cased fishing rod, at my belt a good ax, before me a silent wilderness. The wilderness has its road, unfortunately, and so it is not quite unspoiled; but of two things you may be sure: you shall meet no traveler on the road, and find no inn at the end of it.

The way leads eastward at first, following the old lumber road; then, if one looks sharply, one may find the entrance to a blazed trapper’s trail. At the end of that trail, I am told, is a lake of wondrous beauty, over which hangs a tradition of trout. I have not been this way before; the joy of Balboa and of all explorers since time began is in the air.

The big woods are quiet, as if just awake, and fragrant with the breath of morning. A multitude of little birds, having spent a happy summer here, are now flocking with their young in the open places; jays are calling loudly, and hiding things; chipmunks are busily filling their winter bins. Even the red squirrels, most careless of wood folk, seem to have a thought in their empty heads as they hurry about. They no longer gather a winter store, like the chipmunk; but when abundant autumn approaches they hide a few morsels here or there with some dim instinct of lean days to come. One passes me in haste, as if time were suddenly important; he is carrying something in his mouth, and I await his return, lured by a little brook that cries its invitation to all who are thirsty. In my heart is the old fancy, which has dwelt there since childhood, that a brook always sings a happier song when you stop to drink from it. Thus pleasantly to a roundelay I learn a new and surprising thing about squirrels.

Through all forests the squirrels have regular tree-paths; they never run blindly on a journey, but follow definite runways along the branches, which are apparently as well known to them as are lanes or alleys to the city gamin. Knowing this, I wait confidently for Meeko, and presently see him coming along the path by which he disappeared. Beyond the brook his trail leads through a spruce thicket, an unusual course, for squirrels like open going. Examining the thicket, I find that Meeko has recently been clearing this trail by cutting many of the obstructing twigs. No doubt he has found an unexpected food supply, and is using this new runway as a short cut to his cache, where he is storing things in his usual hit-or-miss fashion.

That looks promising from such a scatter-brained creature; so I sit down in the spruce thicket, making myself inconspicuous, to await Meeko’s coming. His trail runs ten feet above my head; as he rushes over it with another mouthful, he bumps into a twig that crosses his course at an awkward angle. The bump throws him off his perfect balance, and instantly he falls to swearing, though his full mouth interferes with what he would like to say. He grows silent as he examines the troublesome twig; then he rushes away as if he had made up what he calls his mind. In a few minutes, having left his mouthful at the cache, he reappears in the same path. He is silent now, and look! he is not running in his wonted breakneck fashion, but following his trail in an exploring kind of way. So he reaches the twig that hindered him, swears at it again, and cuts it with his teeth. Resting his chin between his forepaws, he follows the falling twig, his eyes shining, till it strikes the ground beside me, when he snickers his satisfaction. A motion of my head attracts his attention; he sees me for the first time, and instantly forgets everything else. He leaves his trail to come down where he can see better. In his eye is the question, “Are you alive, or am I mistaken?” When I nod to him again he breaks forth in scolding, asking who I am, demanding my business, ordering me out, all in the same breath.

So the little comedy runs on till I have enough of squirrel jabber, and leave Meeko to his own affairs; but that is the last thing he proposes to do with me. When I turn away from the thicket he rushes over branches above me, reiterating his demand, growing more wrathy as I keep silence. I am wishing I knew his language, which sounds like an imprecatory psalm with a pirate’s variation, as he follows me abusively along the road. Not till he reaches the boundary of his small territory (for squirrels, like other beasts, have limits beyond which they rarely go) does he turn back, leaving other squirrels to deal with me as an intruder. Searching the woods to the left, I soon find a blazed hemlock, and turn gladly from the lumber road into a trapper’s winter trail.

Here, save for an occasional old “blaze” on a tree, for which guiding signal one must look ahead sharply, there is no trace of man or his destruction. All is still, fragrant, beautiful, just as Nature left her handiwork. There is a sudden bumping of feet on soft earth, a flash of orange color, and I catch the waving of white flags as a deer and her fawns bound away. Farther on a brood of partridges barely move aside into the underbrush, where they stop to watch me as I pass. A hare darts out from underfoot, and he, too, is inquisitive; he crouches in the first bit of cover to find out who I am.

Up and down goes the trail, now over hardwood ridges where great sugar maples stand wide apart, now through dim evergreen valleys or cedar swamps where one must feel his way; and at last, from the summit of a ridge, comes a gleam of blue ahead. It is the lake, eureka, I have found it, asleep amid its eternal hills! Over it bend the trees, as if they loved it. On every point stands a giant pine, like the king-man of old, lifting head and shoulders above his fellows. From the water’s edge the forest sweeps away grandly to the sky line. A moose and her ungainly calf are feeding on the farther shore. Some animal that I cannot name slips unseen into the cover; a brood of wild ducks stretch their necks, alert and questioning, as I appear in the open.

It is a little lake, and therefore companionable, a perfect place to spend the day and find the hours too short. Searching out a pretty spot where I can see without being seen, I rest at ease, enjoying the quiet beauty of the lake; enjoying also the rare blessing of silence. I have been awake and keenly alive since the birds called me, ages ago; a thousand tongues, voices, messages, have been heard and understood; yet not a solitary word has been spoken, not once has the exquisite peace been disturbed. The plash yonder, behind the rock where I cannot see what made it, is hardly a sound; like everything else one hears, it seems like a fragment of the great stillness. It reminds me, however, that when I return to camp two questions will be asked: the first, Did you find the lake? and the second, Are there any trout in it? It seems a pity, almost a profanation, to disturb such a place by human noises; I would rather be quiet; but I have promised to answer that second question.

In a swampy spot I find some dry cedars near the lake shore. Though dead, they are standing on their own roots; they are therefore weathered, and will float like corks. Soon I have cut enough for a dozen logs, with cross-pieces, and have gathered them at the water’s edge. One should be true Indian now, I suppose, and bind the raft together with bark; but to do that it is necessary to kill or scar a living tree, which is a thing I never do if it can be avoided; so I use some spikes which I have brought in my pocket. The only objection to such civilized implements is that the loud hammering seems horribly out of place. The first time I drive a spike I look around guiltily, as if I had been breaking the law. When the work is done and I push out bravely on my homely craft, I know how the man felt who found himself afloat for the first time on his own invention. It is a good feeling which makes one understand his old ancestors.

Yes, the trout are surely here; but the sun has risen over the hills and the day is bright. A few fingerlings answer as I cast in the shadow of the rocks; they chivvy the feathered lure a moment (for I do not care to catch trout to-day, nor such little fellows at any time), and flash away unharmed to the depths. Farther out from shore, out from under the lee of the hills, the water is ruffled by a light breeze; so I push in that direction, lengthening my cast as I go. The fly lights in the very center of a “catspaw”; there is a gleam of red-gold under it, followed by a terrific rush. Aha! a big one. Though I had intended merely to locate the trout without striking them, no fisherman ever trained himself so fine that he could withhold the snap of his wrist at an unexpected rise like that. Involuntarily I strike; the hook goes solidly home; the reel sets up a shrill yell of exultation as the line flies out.

I shall play this trout to a standstill, then unhook him tenderly without lifting him from the water, and let him go when I see how big he is. Yes, of course; I am not fishing to-day. But as the beautiful fish comes in, fighting every inch of the way, threatening to part my delicate leader as he darts under the raft, something reminds me that man must eat, and that a trout can be well broiled on a split stick, a green fir preferred, to give him an added woodsy flavor. Fortunately there is a pinch of salt in my pocket, put there in hopeful expectancy of the unexpected.

Killing the trout as mercifully as such a thing can be done, I run a string through his red gills, and tie him to my loose-jointed craft. Then, just to see if there are any more like him (and to avoid temptation) I break my hook at the bend, leaving only a harmless bit of steel on the fly. Here comes a cloud-shadow, drifting up the lake. I wait for it, and cast again in the same place. Yi-yi, what a fool I was to break that hook! The flashing rise that follows my cast is such as a fisherman dreams of in his sleep.

There must be a spring hereabouts, I think; such trouty vim and dash at this season bespeak living water. The raft drifts over the spot where my fish rose, and I stretch out to become as one of the logs, shading my eyes with my hands to exclude the upper light. There to the left I dimly discern a ring of white sand; in the middle, where the water rolls in ceaseless commotion, boils up a spring as big as my hat. As the raft grows quiet, shadows glide in from all directions to rest on the rim of sand. Shades of Izaak Walton, look at them! My trout weighs two pounds; but I wish I had let him alone and waited for a big one.

The shadows dart away at the first motion of my head; but they will come back, and one has only to bring his raft within casting distance to have wonderful fishing. This is a sure-thing place, one of the few I have found in drifting over many northern lakes, and I must locate it past forgetting. Carefully I take the ranges: big pine east and larch stub west; hawk’s nest south and split rock north. Where the imaginary lines cross is the hidden spring with its treasures. No fear that I shall miss it when I come again!

The raft moves heavily shoreward and lands at the mouth of a little brook. There I broil the lordly trout, noting with satisfaction that his flesh is pink as a salmon’s; also I make a dipper of tea, and spread a birch-bark cloth, on which is a feast for a freeman. As I eat in thankfulness, after dousing my fire to kill all scent of smoke, the moose and her calf come circumspectly out of the woods; a deer appears on the opposite shore, stepping daintily; the wild ducks glide out of their hiding place, and I am one with the silent wilderness again.

Now comes the best time of all, the time when one remembers the traveler who came to a place where it was always afternoon. At one moment I am lost in the immense tranquillity of the woods; the next I am following some little comedy which begins with a flutter of wings or a rustle of feet on leaves, and which runs on till the actors discover that a stranger is watching them.

Slowly, imperceptibly, my lovely day slips away to join all the other days; each moment of it is like a full hour of life; each hour, when it is past, seems but a fleeting moment. From an endless period of alternate watching and reverie I start up with the consciousness that the sun is below the western hills, that shadows are growing long, that I have a dim trail to follow before I find familiar landmarks again.

As I hurry along, picking up the blazed spots with difficulty in the fading light, at times over-running the trail, there comes now and then a tingling of the skin, as at the touch of cold, when I pass through darkening thickets where the night life begins to stir and rustle. If the philosopher Hume had ever followed this or any other wilderness trail after sundown, he would have found under his own skin some illustrative matter for his central doctrine. He sought to tell what the mind of man is by determining its contents at any one instant, as if its continuity and identity were of no consequence. Had he lived in the woods, he must have noticed that there are moments on a darkening trail when the mind seems to be reduced to an acute point of attraction, at the tip of which, like an electric spark, is a sense-impression. One becomes at such a time a veritable part of wild nature; a multitude of sights, sounds and flavors that ordinarily pass unnoticed are each one bringing its warning, its challenge, its question. A man’s dull ears grow keen; the pupils of his eyes expand like an animal’s; his nose resumes its almost forgotten function of taking messages from the air; his whole skin becomes a delicate receiving instrument, like the skins of the lower orders; and the strange “sixth sense” of unseen things, which most animals possess, begins to stir in its long sleep. The flow of thought is suspended; reason retreats to its hidden spring, and one grows sensitive all over, alert and responsive in every fiber of his nature. Such is the way of a man alone in the woods at night.

If this be the way the higher animals live continually (and I think it is), I heartily envy them their aliveness. It is alleged that they live a life of ceaseless fear; but fear is almost wholly mental or imaginative, and is therefore beyond the animal’s horizon. All wild creatures are naturally timid, but they have no means of knowing what fear is. That which our naturalists thoughtlessly call fear in an animal (doubtless because civilized and imaginative man, having no wild experience, is himself fearful in the dark woods) is in reality only exquisite sensitiveness to physical and pleasurable impressions.

It is almost dark when I reach the old lumber road, thankful that I need no longer search out the trapper’s trail, and turn down the open way to the lake. Yet I go more cautiously, more cat-footedly, because a few minutes ago a hidden deer stood watching my approach till I could have touched him with the fishing rod. He reminds me that most animals are now at their ease, and that twilight is the best time to come near them. The birds are asleep, all save the owls; but I hear many a faint stir or lisp of surprise as my shoulder brushes a thicket.

Presently I come to an open spot beside the road, where trees and underbrush have been cut away. A hundred roots or stubs rise above the ground, looking all alike in the gloom; yet somehow I am aware, without knowing why or how, that one motionless object is different from all the rest. I fix attention upon it, and approach softly, nearer and nearer. My eyes say that it is only a lump, dark and silent; my ears and nose tell me nothing. There is no sound, no motion, no form even to suggest what huddles there in the dark; but I know it is a living thing. I bend forward to touch it—Br-r-r-room! With a roar of whirring wings a cock partridge bursts away like a bomb, giving me a terrible shock.

I never saw that explosive fellow before; but I ought to have guessed who he was, because several times I have surprised a solitary cock grouse asleep amid stubs of his own size, or else leaning against a huge stump, where he looks precisely like an extra root in the dusk. Meanwhile mother partridges with their broods are roosting higher, some in thick alders where the leaves hide them, others close against the stem of a spruce or cedar, where it is hard for eyes to distinguish them even in broad daylight.

At the foot of a hill, where a jumper trail enters the logging road from the right, I hear a strange cry from the opposite side, and stop to learn what it is. For several minutes I wait, hearing the cry at intervals, till I have located it far away on a ridge and have recognized it as the voice of a cub-bear.

The dusk is now heavy in the sleeping woods; not a breath of air stirs; the silence is intense. I am listening for the bear, when suddenly comes a feeling that something is near or watching me. Where it is, what it is, I have absolutely no notion; but the sense-of-presence grows stronger, and I trust it because I have seldom known it to be wrong. I search the lumber road up and down, but there is nothing to be seen. I search the woods on both sides, slowly, minutely, but there is no sound. Then, as I turn to the jumper trail that comes winding down the hill behind me, a current of air drifts in; my nose begins to recognize a faint odor.

A few yards up the trail is a huge black object, an upturned tree with a mat of soil clinging to its roots. Yes, it is a root, surely; but there is something in its shadow. I watch it, bending slightly so as to get the outline against the sky; and there, clearly showing now above the root, are the antlers of a bull-moose. He is still as a rock, pointing ears and ungainly nose straight at me. Undoubtedly he was coming down the trail when he saw a motion in the road ahead, and froze in his tracks to find out about it. He knows now that he is seen, and that one of us must move. For a full minute we stare at each other; then he takes a nervous step, swings broadside to the trail, and turns his head for another look. Big as he is, not a sound marks his going; he takes a few springy, silent steps up the trail, and fades into the gloom of the big woods.

So I come to the canoe at last, and cross the pond and run the stream, which is now a veritable tunnel with a tattered ribbon of sky overhead. As I cross the big lake campward, the evening star is sparkling like a great jewel on the pointed tip of a spruce, which towers above his fellows on the crown of the western hills. Overhead passes a sound of hurrying wings; a loon calls far away, and again these wild sounds are as fragments of a mighty stillness. Under the gliding canoe the waters are quiet, as if in slumber; but in the distance you can hear them talking to the shore with a voice that is now a whisper, again a faint echo of music. On every side the woods come closer, as if to look upon their reflection in the inky mirror; and they seem to be waiting, to be listening. Over all this silent, expectant world some sublime presence, living but unseen, is brooding upon the mystery of life.

And at last I, too, begin to brood. For the first time in uncounted hours comes a touch of relaxation, a quieting of the alert senses, the well-done of a perfect day. I quote softly from Lanier:

“And now from the vast of the Lord shall the waters of sleep

Roll in on the souls of men;

But who will reveal to our waking ken

The forms that swim and the shapes that creep

Under the waters of sleep?”

As I double the point toward which the canoe has long been heading, a light flashes cheerily out of the dark woods; the camp fire sends out its invitation, and a voice calls, “Welcome home!” Though my “good lonesome” is ended, and better things are waiting, I must still turn for a last look at the sleeping lake, to watch the ultimate glimmer of twilight fade and vanish over the western steeps.

Good-by, my Day; and hail! You go, yet you stay forever. You have taught me something of the nature of eternity, of the day of the Lord that is as a thousand years, and of the thousand years that are as one day.

NIGHT LIFE OF THE WILDERNESS

TWILIGHT is deepening into dusk as you leave camp to follow the silent trail. The long summer day has had its lesson, broken short off, as all lessons are before we learn them; now what of the night?

With the sunset a subtle change comes over the big woods; they are fragrant and profoundly still. Trees that were massed in the sunshine now seem more individual, standing with outstretched arms, praying their myriad prayer; and viewing them against the sky you see their delicate grace as well as their strength. The birds have long been quiet, all but the robin, who on the tip of the tallest evergreen, where he can see a gleam of afterglow, pours out a strangely wild song. He is always the last to go to bed. Chipmunks that have been silently busy all day, and red squirrels that have been noisily idle, are now in their dens asleep. Something like a shadow passes before your face, swooping downward in quivering flight; you hear the scratching of tiny feet on bark, and there at your shoulder, looking at you with round inquisitive eye, is Molepsis the flying squirrel. He is the gentlest, the most lovable of his tribe, and he belongs to the night. You are watching him, your heart warming to the little fellow, when leaves rustle and a twig cracks.

If your ears were better trained, you would know now what is passing, since no two animals rustle the leaves or snap a twig in precisely the same way. Lacking such lore of the woods, you halt at the first sound, straining your eyes in the gloom. The rustle draws nearer; and there in the shadow stands Hetokh the buck, observing you keenly and asking, “Who are you, Pilgrim, and whither does your trail lead?”

There is no fear in his alert poise, you see; nor does he whirl and bound away in alarm, as you expect him to do, because you know him only by daylight. Receiving no answer, he goes his own way, but haltingly, looking back as he disappears. Then Molepsis loses interest in you, or remembers his small affairs; he runs to the top of his tree, launches himself out in slanting flight, and is swallowed up in the immensity of the dusk. Such a little life to trust itself so boldly in a great darkness!

Again the trail is before you, silent but never lifeless; it seems always to be listening. As you follow it onward, you are wiser than before, having learned the odor of a deer and the meaning of a tiny shadow that often passes before your face in the twilight. You are also more sympathetic, and richer by two happy memories; for the flying squirrel has softened your heart to all innocent creatures, and that questioning pose of the buck has awakened a desire to know more of the real animal, the living mysterious anima of him, not the babble of his death or the jargon of his bones that fill our books of hunting or of science. Meanwhile Kook’skoos the great horned owl is sounding for rain, and his voice is no longer a foreboding; it is a call, an invitation to come and learn.

And speaking of learning, you will not follow the twilight trail very far before it is impressed on your mind that the wild creature you surprise or startle by day is very different from the creature that surprises and often startles you by night. He has at first all the advantage, being at home in dark woods where you are a wary stranger. Then, as you grow familiar with the dusk, more in tune with its harmony, you begin to appreciate this distinction: by day you see a strange wild animal at a distance; by night you may meet him as a fellow traveler on the same road of mystery. This natural equality, this laying aside of all killing or collecting for a live-and-let-live policy, is absolutely essential if you would learn anything worth knowing about the wood folk.

All this is at variance with the prevalent notion that timid beasts spend their nights in a state of terror; but never mind that notion now. It is pure delusion. You will learn from the night woods that the alleged terror of animals is, like their imaginary struggle for existence, the distorted reflection of a human and most unnatural experience. A lone man in the woods after nightfall is like one who has lost his birthright of confidence in nature. His spine goes chilly at every rustling; his overstrained eyes irritate his whole nervous system, which becomes “like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh”; whereupon his imagination conjures up a world of savage beasts and other hallucinations. When he returns to his fire-lighted camp, there to think of small or large creatures roaming the dusk from which he has just escaped with trembling, he easily attributes to them his own human fears or terrors. It does not occur to our fevered fancy that the animal is abroad because he prefers the dusk to the daylight, or that he has, as we shall see, an excellent reason for his preference. The simple fact is that of fear, in any human sense, the wild animal is wholly and happily ignorant.

Let me emphasize, therefore, as the first lesson of the night woods, that they have no fear in them, except such as you carry in your own heart. Banish that fear, and you shall speedily learn this other lesson: by day your civilized man is by force of habit an intruder, a meddlesome adventurer who makes noises and disturbs the peace; but by night his transgressions are covered; he is peaceable because powerless, unable to use his inventions, and nature accepts him as part of a reasonable universe in which sizes vary but rights are all equal. Gradually his spirit, set free from its worldly business, expands into the immensity around him. From the stars and the still night he absorbs tranquillity; and then it is that the animal seems to recognize his changed disposition and meets him unafraid. This, I think, is the most illuminating experience that comes to a man who enters into the spirit of the night, that the wild animal has little or no fear of him.

One evidence of this is the fact that you can come much nearer to an animal by night than by day. Though all his senses are then much better than yours, he will often wait beside trail or waterway till you are almost upon him, when he is apt to startle you as he breaks away. He has sensed you long before you became aware of him, and has been watching you closely; but your approach, timid and halting in the uncertain light, has disarmed his suspicion. Another plain piece of evidence is that the same timid creatures which this morning fled from you, as if you had a demon, will to-night come confidently to your tenting ground, so near that you may be awakened by their low calls or their soft footsteps.

You may think that this careless approach is due to the animal’s ignorance, that he cannot smell you because the scent of men, as of all birds or beasts, is very faint in sleep; and so I thought till I learned better. I think now that it is not the smell of man, but of something variable in man, which arouses an animal’s suspicion. Before a little child, who certainly has the man scent, most timid beasts show no fear whatever, but only a lively curiosity.

Near a permanent camp of mine I once constructed a roof of bark, a shelter open on all sides, wherein to tie trout-flies and do other woodsy work in stormy weather. Soon I noticed fresh tracks all about; then I kept vegetables in the shed, with salt and other things that deer like. One rainy night I heard sounds out there, and crept from my tent to investigate. Some animal slipped away as I approached; but so black was the night that I could not see the shelter till I went beyond and viewed it against the open lake. Presently a shadow glided past to stand under the roof; my nose told me it was a deer, and behind it trotted two smaller shadows that were her fawns. They smelled me, no doubt, and I think they also saw me, their eyes being better than mine in such light; but they showed no alarm until I walked past them on my way to the tent. Then they ran away, but without their usual warning cries, and within a few minutes I heard the doe calling her little ones under the roof again.

These deer are but types of many other timid animals that may be met after darkness has fallen, at such close range that one who has known them only by daylight is amazed at their boldness. As a rule, the so-called savage beasts are always difficult of approach, being more shy than any rabbit; while harmless creatures that we imagine to be governed by terror give the impression at night that they are frolicsome rather than fearful. Even the wood mice—clean, beautiful little creatures, so delicately balanced that the sudden appearance of danger may paralyze or kill them—seem to lose much of their natural timidity as they run about among the twilight shadows. By day you see them, if at all, only as vanishing streaks; by night you may hear them climbing up one side of your tent and sliding down the other. They will enter freely and, as I have often tested, will sit in your open palm, as at a friendly table, and eat what you offer them.

Two rules of courtesy must be observed, however, when you entertain such little guests. You must eschew mental excitement, which is contagious; and you must never make a sudden motion.

One reason for the boldness of animals at night is that they apparently recognize man’s helplessness, his lack of confidence in his own senses. At times one may even think that an animal is playing with him, as children are moved to play with one who is blindfolded. Such was my impression, at least, when I went astray one night in making my way back to camp. A half-moon was shining, giving enough light in the open places, but sadly confusing matters in the forest depths, where one’s eyes were never quite sure whether they were looking upon substance or shadow. I had missed the trail, and was casting for it in circles, hurrying as one does when lost, blundering through the woods with the clumsiness that distinguishes man from all other creatures. Down into a valley of gloom I went, only to find myself in surroundings that were all strange and wild. Next I floundered through a stream, and was climbing the bank when I saw something in front of me, something big, motionless, and misty-white.

Now I had been seeing white things for an hour past, bleached rocks, spots of moonlight, silver birches; but this was different. I knew instantly that the thing was alive; for there is something in a living animal that makes itself known, though your ordinary senses cannot tell you why or how you know. For a long moment I faced the thing steadily; but it was dead-still, and I could make nothing of it. As I started forward, the misty-white spot enlarged to twice its size, narrowed again, drifted away among the trees like a ghost. When I followed, straining my eyes after it, I fell into a hidden branch of the stream where water was deep and the mud bottomless. The white thing stood, as if watching me, only a few yards beyond.

Yes, it was rather creepy just then. The chill in my spine was not of the cold water when all the grisly doings of ha’nts, wanderlights and banshees (tales that I heard in childhood and forgotten) came back in a vivid troop. For a time I was as pagan as any of my old ancestors, and as ready to believe in any kind of hobgoblin; only I must find out what the mysterious thing was.

When I struggled out of the pool, the white spot floated up a hill in front of me, noiselessly as an owl, and vanished in a thicket of fir. As I smashed in after it, out it blew on the opposite side, making me feel creepy again till a twig cracked. That was the first sound I heard, and it told me that the thing had legs long enough to reach the ground. Twice afterward I saw it close ahead, broadening, narrowing, drifting away; but except that it was an animal, and a large one, I had no notion of what I was following. Then it vanished for good, and on my right was a gleam of the lake. I had my bearings then, and turning to the left I soon found the lost trail, making an Indian compass of broken twigs as I went.

At daybreak I was back at the place and following my Indian compass. Near the fir thicket I found the track of a large deer, but was unable to follow it on the hard ground. An hour later, as I watched the lake shore, a buck white as snow stepped out. He was an albino, the first I had ever met, and to this day I have never again seen so magnificent a specimen. It was he, undoubtedly, who had played with me in the dark woods, waiting till I came close to him, then moving on to watch my flounderings from another vantage ground. The widening of the white spot, which had so completely mystified me, was due to a momentary glimpse of his broadside as he turned away.

A second reason for the animal’s boldness has already been suggested; namely, that at night a man’s feeling undergoes a change. He is no longer confident of his superior power; as eyes fail him he grows doubtful of himself; and the wild animal is like certain dogs in that he seems able to recognize one’s mental attitude. Hunters who call moose will tell you that the bulls are extraordinarily wary after dark, and that is often true; but for this wariness the hunter, not the moose, is responsible. In the first place, your modern hunter goes out with a guide; and two men make ten times as much noise as one, and spread far more terror. Next, the hunter is eager to see, to shoot, to kill; his excitement gets into his skin, gets into the guide and the call, and a sensitive moose probably feels this contagion of excitement as he draws near it; though it might be hard to explain why or how. As Simmo the Indian says, “Moose don’t know how he know somet’ing; he jus’ know.”

I think Simmo is right, and that he has an explanation of the fact that a sportsman who is most keen to kill in the calling season is often the one who must wait longest for his chance; while to the man who goes out unarmed opportunity comes with both hands full. Though I am a very poor caller, measured by Simmo’s art, I have seldom found much difficulty in bringing out a bull; but this may be due to the fact that most of my calling has been done far from settlements, in regions where moose are seldom hunted. Yet even in Maine, where moose are literally hunted to death, during the summer or “closed” season they have no more fear than in the remote wilderness. If you meet one on the trail at night, he may come quite as near as you care to have him; and in the early part of the mating season it is not unusual to have two or three bulls answer the call. After the hunting season opens, it is much more difficult to deceive the ungainly brutes; but the difficulty is largely due to the fact that, because of the law which protects cows and so makes them abundant, the bulls are already mated and no longer interested in your wailing.

In the wilder region of northern New Brunswick, the first time I ever tried to call moose a truculent old bull burst out of the woods and chased me into my canoe. On another occasion I was sitting on a big rock in the moonlight, “talking” to a young bull that answered but was shy of showing himself, when a huge brute with magnificent antlers came silently behind me, and would, I think, have poked me off my rock had I not made a hasty exit. As I have never done any shooting at such times, I do not know whether bulls would come as readily to my call if there were a rifle behind it; but I do know, from repeated experiment, that when I take others with me it is much harder to bring a bull into the open than when I call alone.

Perhaps the chief reason for the fearlessness of wild beasts at night is that their senses then become so acute as to produce almost perfect self-reliance. In the daytime your eyes are better than theirs; but after nightfall they have you at a disadvantage, and they seem to know it. Not only do their eyes or ears tell them of your coming, but their nostrils seem to detect your very quality or condition. This is not theory, but experience. Repeatedly animals that run from me by day have at night stood quietly beside the trail till I was almost upon them.

The nose of a beast is wonderful enough at any hour; but at night it is to him what a lamp is to you, because the moist air is then laden with odors which are quenched by the dry sunlight. No sooner does twilight fall than the forest becomes a huge bouquet. If you test the matter, you can soon learn to recognize every tree or shrub you pass by its characteristic fragrance. You can wind a beast before you see him, and can pick up from the dewy grass the musky odor of a deer, the heavy smell of a moose, the pungent reek of a fox, long after one of these animals has crossed the trail. Curiously enough, the pine and balsam needles call in their odorous messengers with the night; many flowers suspend their fragrant activity when they close their petals, and not till the sun rises will they be known once more.

From such human experience one may judge what the sense of smell must be to wild animals, which are better endowed in this respect, and which daily cultivate a gift that we neglect. Watch any beast, your dog for example, and note that he does not trust even his master till his nose brings its perfect message. When a deer with his exquisite nostrils passes through the night woods, finding at every step odors which invite or check or warn him, the sensation must be like that of a keen-eyed man who looks upon a landscape flooded with sunshine. Because a man trusts only his sight (the least trustworthy of the senses) he is timid in the darkness, and grows bold with the morning. For the same psychological reason an animal, which trusts his nose, is wary in the dry sunshine when odors are faintest, but grows confident when night falls and the woods fill with messages that he understands perfectly.

The night is better also for hearing. Sounds travel farther, more clearly and more accurately in the elastic air, and the animal’s keen ears are then like another pair of eyes. Even a man’s ears grow sensitive to the meaning of sounds that are mere cries or noises by day, calling of owls far or near, hunting calls, assembly calls, food calls, rain calls; hail or farewell of loons, answered by hail or farewell from another lake far away over the hills; eager or querulous barking of a mother fox, calling her cubs to the feast or chiding them for their clumsy hunting. Above these and a hundred other wild calls is that rushing sound of music which sweeps over the listening night woods, like the surge and swell of a mighty organ at an immeasurable distance.

It is commonly believed that this thrilling harmony of the night is from within, from overstrained nerves of the ear; but I think, on the contrary, that it is wholly objective, as real as the vibration of a wind harp or a ’cello string or any other instrument. I take one person into the big woods at night, and say to him: “Listen; what do you hear?” And he answers, “I hear nothing.” I take another person, and say: “Listen; what do you hear?” And a great wonder comes into his face as he answers: “I hear music. What is it?” When I am alone in the woods my ears are always tense; but on some nights the rushing harmony is everywhere, while on other nights I cannot hear it, listen as I will. Only when conditions are just right, when the air is like a stretched wire, do the woods begin to sing. Then from a distance comes a faint vibration; from the waterfall, it may be, or from some mountain edge purring under a current of air, or from ten-million trembling needles in a swaying grove of pines. The hanging leaves feel it and begin to stir rhythmically; shells of hardwood, dry and resonant as violins, fall to humming with the movement, and suddenly all the forest is musical. The strangest thing about this eerie, wonderful melody is that, when you change position to hear better, it vanishes altogether, and hours may pass before you hear it again.

Amid such conditions, which awaken even human senses from their long sleep, the animal is at home, and his ability to locate sounds is almost beyond belief. You may have heard much of moose-calling, the wailing of the guide, the tingling answer, the approach, the shot, the barbarous end; but the most astonishing thing about moose-calling I have never heard mentioned; namely, that the distant bull seems to locate your first call as accurately as if he had watched you all the way to your chosen position. And this is the way of it:

You leave camp at moonrise and make your way silently to a little bog lying amid endless barrens, lakes, forests,—an unmapped wilderness without road or trail, in which one might lose a city. From your hiding place, a thicket exactly like a thousand others near or far, you begin to call, very softly at first, because a bull may be near and listening. When nothing stirs to your trumpet you grow bolder, sending forth the weird bellow of a cow-moose. Away it goes, whining over forest and barren, rousing up innumerable echoes; in the tense, startled air it seems that such a cry must carry to the ends of the earth. The silence grows more pronounced after that; it begins to be painful when, from a mountain looming far away against the sky, there floats down the ghost of a sound, quoh! so small that the buzz of a chilled mosquito fairly drowns it. You strain your ears, thinking you were deceived; but no, the bull answers again; he is beginning to talk. Listen!

Now you can hear his voice and something else, something almost fairylike,—a rustling, faint as the stir of a mouse in the grass, and tock! an elfin report, as the bull hits a stub in his rush and sends it crackling down.

That fellow will come if you coax him properly. Indeed, if he is not mated, he is bound to come and is already on his way. But the moon is obscured now, and the light very dim. If you would see your bull clearly, or measure his antlers, or learn a new thing, go away quickly without another sound. At daybreak you shall find him not only on this particular bog, which is as a pin point in the vast expanse, but waiting expectantly near the very thicket where you were calling.

With such senses to guide him, to tell him of your every step as you go blundering through the night, no wonder that a wild animal grows serenely confident. Even the black bear, more timid than deer or moose, sheds something of his aloofness when night falls and his nose or ears become as penetrating searchlights. Ordinarily a bear avoids you; should you meet him accidentally his every action says, “I do desire that we may be better strangers.” But if you enter his territory without disturbing him, he will sometimes let curiosity get the better of discretion, and draw near to question you in the friendly darkness.

Once on a canoe journey I found myself breaking all rules of travel by making a belated camp, having passed the sunset hour and crossed a large lake in order to sleep at an old camp ground of mine, a lovely spot, endeared by happy memories. The night was chill, the moon shining full and clear, when I arrived at the familiar place and searched it all over, as a man always searches a place where he once camped, looking for something that he never finds, that he does not even name. Then I repaired my old “Commoosie,” made a fragrant bed of fir boughs, and was thinking of supper when, on the farther side of a bay, two bull-moose started a rumpus, grunting, smashing brush, clanging their antlers like metal blades as they charged each other savagely; all this to win the favor of a mate that cared nothing for either of them.

Silently I paddled over in my canoe, ran close to the fighting brutes, and watched till one drove the other out of hearing. When I returned it was over-late for cooking; so I supped of pilot-bread with dried fruit, and turned in to sleep without lighting a fire. The splash of a feeding trout in the shallows and the wild call of a bear, hey’-oo! like a person lost or demented, were the last sounds I heard.

A man in the open sleeps lightly, in some subconscious way keeping track of what goes on around him. Suddenly, as if someone had touched me, I was broad awake with every sense alert. Behind the great log which lay as a threshold across the open front of the “Commoosie” something moved; a shadow rose up, and there, sharply defined in the moonlight, stood a huge bear. His forepaws rested lightly on the log; his head was raised, his whole body drawn to its utmost tension. Eyes, ears, nose, every sense and fiber of him seemed to question the sleeper with intense wonder.

When you surprise a brute like that, or especially when he surprises you, the rule is to freeze in your tracks; but you need not memorize it, since instinct will attend to the matter perfectly if you follow it without question. If you must move before he does, ignore the animal; turn half away (never move directly toward or from him) and walk quietly off at a tangent, as if going about your own affairs. But here the bear had me wholly at a disadvantage. Except to start fair upright, any move was impossible under the blankets, and a sudden motion would certainly throw the brute into a panic; in which event he might bolt away or bolt into the “Commoosie.” You can never be sure what a startled animal will do at close quarters. So I lay still, following an instinctive rather than a rational decision.

Presently the bear glided away, but falteringly, and I knew that he was not satisfied. Without a sound I reached for my heavy revolver, gripped it, and lay as I was before. Very soon the bear’s head reappeared; like a shadow his bulk moved across the opening, and again he raised himself on the threshold for a look. He probably smelled me, as I certainly smelled him, rank and doggy; but a sleeping man gives off very little scent (of a non-alarming kind, I think), and Mooween’s inquisitiveness had made a bold beast out of a timid one. He had a fine autumn coat; the short velvety fur rippled or gleamed as the moonlight touched it, giving to its lustrous black an apparent fringe of frosty white, like the pelt of a silver fox.

When I marked that perfect fur I knew it was what I had long wanted as a rug. It needed only the pressure of a finger to make it mine, and the finger was curling on the trigger when, unfortunately, I began to think.

Silence enfolded the earth in its benediction, and I must shatter that blessed silence by gunpowder. Like a veil let down from heaven the moonlight rested on every tree, on the rough ground, on my old “Commoosie,” making all things beautiful; and I must spatter that pure veil with red. No, it was not a pleasant notion; night and solitude make a man sensitive, averse to noise, violence, discord of every kind. Even a bear might have some rights, if one were fair with him. He had done no harm in the woods, and meant no harm when he came to my camp. He was simply curious, like all natural beasts. Somehow it began to appear as a greedy, an atrocious thing to kill him just for his skin; at my own door, too, where he stood timidly looking in. Besides, a dead animal is no longer interesting. In the back of my head was the desire, always present when a wild beast appears, to know what he thinks or, if that be impossible, to know at least what he does. The experience, startling enough at first, had now turned to comedy, and I wanted to see how it would end.

Thus a small moment passed, while I tried the great beast for his life; through it ran a river of thought or sentiment with the rush and dance of rapids.

Once during the trial Mooween turned away, only to return quickly. I had moved a trifle, and he heard it. When he turned a second time something in his gait or motion said that he would not come back, that he no longer dared trust his neighborhood. As he disappeared I peeked around the corner of the “Commoosie.” Straight off he went to the edge of the clearing, where he sat upon his haunches, feeling safer with the woods only a jump away, and rocked his nose up and down to catch air from different currents, still hoping for some message that would tell him who or what I was. It was a wild region; he had probably never before met a man. Then he stood erect on his hind legs for a last look, dropped on all-fours, and vanished silently among the shadows. A moment later panic struck him like a bomb; away he ran with a great smashing of brush, as if all the dogs of a parish were after him.

If you are desirous of meeting or knowing wild animals, the hour following the evening twilight is the best time to be abroad. Toward midnight the wood folk all rest, as a rule, and through the small hours the coverts are profoundly quiet till just before the dawn. On a moonlit night birds and beasts are apt to be stirring at all hours, and then is the time to learn the language of the wild, the cries, barks, hootings, yellings, rustlings, which come to you as mere noises at first, but which have all definite meaning when you learn to interpret them. Yet even on moonlit nights such voices are rather exceptional. Wild birds and beasts go their ways in silence for the most part; the typical wilderness night is so quiet, so peaceful, that an occasional cry seems part of a mighty stillness.

On other than moonlit nights you will do well to travel by canoe, keeping close to shore so as to get the fragrance of the breathing woods. They are wonderful in darkness; but if you enter them, your chief concern will probably be to find your way out again, because the depths of a primeval forest are so pitch dark that human eyes are useless. Even on a trail you must look up steadily, keeping your course by the heavens, which are always lighter than the earth. If you strive to look ahead, you will certainly lose the narrow way; but to look up is to see between the black forest bulks on either hand a pathway of light, which corresponds to every turn and winding of the trail beneath. Better still, if you are in danger of losing the path, shut your eyes; keep them shut, and trust to the guidance of your own feet. They are more familiar with the touch of mother earth than you are aware, and they will tell you instantly when you are departing from a beaten trail. But avoid burglar-proof shoes, of the absurd “sportsman” variety, when you try this enlightening experiment.

There are other things than animals, you see, to be met in the night. Perhaps the most interesting creature you will ever meet is your natural self, which lies buried but not dead under a crust of artificial habit. To break that crust and come forth, like a moth from its dry chrysalis; to feel again the joy of human senses, awakened, vibrant, responsive to every message of earth; to cast aside unworthy fear and walk in one’s birthright of confidence; to know the companionship of the night, more mysterious and more lovely than the day,—all this is waiting for you in the darkened woods. Try it and see. Leave your camp on the first still, moonlit evening to follow the trail alone. Look up at the trees, all fairylike, with leaves of burnished silver set amid luminous shadows, and confess that you never saw a tree in its beauty before. Smell the fragrance of the moistened woods, like an old-fashioned garden of thyme and mignonette. Listen to the night, to its small voices, to its rushing harmonies, above all to its silences. Grow accustomed to a world on which darkness has fallen like refreshing rain, until you cast aside all hallucinations of terror or struggle, and learn for yourself how friendly, how restful nature is. And when the right night comes, when the tense stillness begins to tremble and all the woods grow musical, then you will wish that some great composer could hear what you hear, and put it upon the stringed instruments, and call it his symphony of silence.