Sharp Dallas Lore
The Face of the Fields
The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least noticeable, – negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity, euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in Mr. Burroughs they amount to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a flying swallow – the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?
But there is more than efficiency to Mr. Burroughs’s style; there are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. “What little merit my style has,” he declares, “is the result of much study and discipline.” And whose style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much study and discipline. Flourish, fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and as for the “limpidness, sweetness, freshness,” which Mr. Burroughs says should characterize outdoor writing, and which do characterize his writing, how else than by study and discipline shall they be obtained?
Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one; but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say it. If Mr. Burroughs writes in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he does, it is because he goes about his writing as he goes about his vineyarding – for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he can make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he can train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself, – if it bear fruit.
And so is language. Take Mr. Burroughs’s manner in any of its moods: its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second to the work they do; or take his use of figures – when he speaks of De Quincey’s “discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep,” – and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.
As an essayist, – as a nature-writer I ought to say, – Mr. Burroughs’s literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple architecture of his essay plans, in their balance and finish, a quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common fault of outdoor books is the catalogue – raw data, notes. There are paragraphs of notes in Mr. Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau. The average nature-writer sees not too much of nature, but knows all too little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning out of nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which is precisely what everybody may see; whereas, we want also what he thinks and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and divine and fathom – the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The bulk of nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot, into a note-book, as were the journals of Thoreau – fragmentary, yet with Thoreau often exquisite fragments – bits of old stained glass, unleaded, and lacking unity and design.
No such fault can be found with Mr. Burroughs. He goes pencilless into the woods, and waits before writing until his return home, until time has elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to blur and blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for his pen. Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from knots and seams and sap-wood as a piece of old-growth pine. There is plan, proportion, integrity to his essays – the naturalist living faithfully up to a sensitive literary conscience.
Mr. Burroughs is a good but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon’s in part) upon us is literary. He has been a watcher in the woods; has made a few pleasant excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home, and his camera, too, thank Heaven! He has broken out no new trail, discovered no new animal, no new thing. But he has seen all the old, uncommon things, has seen them oftener, has watched them longer, through more seasons, than any other writer of our out-of-doors; and though he has discovered no new thing, yet he has made discoveries, volumes of them, – contributions largely to our stock of literature, and to our store of love for the earth, and to our joy in living upon it. He has turned a little of the universe into literature; has translated a portion of the earth into human language; has restored to us our garden here eastward in Eden – apple tree and all.
For a real taste of fruity literature, try Mr. Burroughs’s chapter on “The Apple.” Try Thoreau’s, too, – if you are partial to squash-bugs. There are chapters in Mr. Burroughs, such as “Is it going to Rain?” “A River View,” “A Snow-Storm,” which seem to me as perfect, in their way, as anything that has ever been done – single, simple, beautiful in form, and deeply significant; the storm being a piece of fine description, of whirling snow across a geologic landscape, distant, and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture lighted and warmed at the end by a glowing touch of human life: —
“We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but the mark of life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man – the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.”
There are many texts in these eleven volumes, many themes; and in them all there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good, here and now, and altogether worth living.
VII
HUNTING THE SNOW
THE hunt began at the hen-yard gate, where we saw tracks in the thin, new snow that led us up the ridge, and along its narrow back, to a hollow stump. Here the hunt began in earnest, for not until that trail of close, double, nail-pointed prints went under the stump were the three small boys convinced that we were tracking a skunk and not a cat.
This creature had moved leisurely. That you could tell by the closeness of the prints. Wide-apart tracks in the snow mean hurry. Now a cat, going as slowly as this creature went, would have put down her dainty feet almost in single line, and would have left round, cushion-marked holes in the snow, not triangular, nail-pointed prints like these. Cats do not venture into holes under stumps, either.
We had bagged our first quarry! No, no! We had not pulled that wood pussy out of his hole and put him into our game-bag. We did not want to do that. We really carried no bag; and if we had, we should not have put the wood pussy in it, for we were hunting tracks, not the animals, and “bagging our quarry” meant trailing a creature to its den, or following its track until we had discovered something it had done, or what its business was, and why it was out. We were on the snow for animal facts, not animal pelts.
We were elated with our luck, for this stump was not five minutes by the steep ridge path from the hen-yard. And here, standing on the stump, we were only sixty minutes away from Boston Common by the automobile, driving no faster than the law allows. So we were not hunting in a wilderness, but just outside our dooryard and almost within the borders of a great city.
And that is the interesting fact of our morning hunt. No one but a lover of the woods and a careful walker on the snow would believe that here in the midst of hay-fields, in sight of the smoke of city factories, so many of the original wild wood-folk still live and travel their night paths undisturbed.
Still, this is a rather rough bit of country, broken, ledgy, boulder-strewn, which accounts for the swamps and woody hills that alternate with small towns and cultivated fields all the way to the Blue Hill Reservation, fifteen miles to the westward. This whole region, this dooryard of Boston, is one of Nature’s own reservations, a preserve that she has kept for her small and humble folk, who are just as dear to her as we are, but whom we have driven, except in such small places as these, quite off the earth.
Here, however, they are still at home, as this hole of the skunk’s under the stump proved. But there was more proof. As we topped the ridge on the trail of the skunk, we crossed another trail, made up of bunches of four prints, – two long and broad, two small and roundish, – spaced about a yard apart.
A hundred times, the winter before, we had tried that trail in the hope of finding the form or the burrow of its maker, the great Northern hare, but it crossed and turned and doubled, and always led us into a tangle, out of which we never got a clue.
As this was the first tracking snow of the winter, we were relieved to see the strong prints of our cunning neighbor again, for what with the foxes and the hunters, we were afraid it might have fared ill with him. But here he was, with four good legs under him; and after bagging our skunk, we returned to pick up the hare’s trail, to try our luck once more.
We brought him in long, leisurely leaps down the ridge, out into our mowing field, and over to the birches below the house. Here he had capered about in the snow, had stood up on his haunches and gnawed the bark from off a green oak sucker two and a half feet from the ground. This, doubtless, was pretty near his length, stretched out – an interesting item; not exact to the inch, perhaps, but close enough for us; and much more fascinating, guessed at by such a rule, than if measured dead, with scientific accuracy.
Nor was this all, for up the foot-path through the birches came the marks of two dogs. They joined the marks of the hare. And then, back along the edge of the woods to the bushy ridge, we saw a pretty race.
It was all in our imaginations, all done for us by those long-flinging footprints in the snow. But we saw it all – the white hare, the yelling hounds, nip and tuck, in a burst of speed across the open field that left a gap in the wind behind.
It had all come as a surprise. The hounds had climbed the hill on the scent of a fox, and had “jumped” the hare unexpectedly. But just such a jump of fear is what a hare’s magnificent legs were intended for.
They carried him a clear twelve feet in some of the longest leaps for the ridge, and they carried him to safety, so far as we could read the snow. In the medley of hare-and-hound tracks on the ridge there was no sign of a tragedy. He had escaped again – but how and where we have still to learn.
We had bagged our hare, – yet still we have him to bag, – and taking up the trail of one of the dogs, we continued our hunt.
One of the joys of this snow-walking is having a definite road or trail blazed for you by knowing, purposeful feet. You do not have to blunder ahead, breaking your way into this wilderness world, trusting luck to bring you somewhere. The wild animal or the dog goes this way, and not that, for a reason. You are following that reason all along; you are pack-fellow to the hound; you hunt with him.
Here the hound had thrust his muzzle into a snow-capped pile of slashings, had gone clear round the pile, then continued on his way. But we stopped, for out of the pile, in a single, direct line, ran a number of mice-prints, going and coming. A dozen white-footed mice might have traveled that road since the day before, when the snow had ceased falling.
We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods, – small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution, – is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.
It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why? – a hundred times!
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that – Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what the humblest flower is.
root and all, and all in all,
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.
The squirrel’s track wound up and down the hillside, wove in and out and round and round, hitting every possible tree, as if the only road for a squirrel was one that looped and doubled and tied up every stump and zigzagged into every tree trunk in the woods.
But all this maze was no ordinary journey. The squirrel had not run this coil of a road for breakfast, because when he travels, say, for distant nuts, he goes as directly as you go to your school or office; but he goes not by streets, but by trees, never crossing more of the open in a single rush than the space between him and the nearest tree that will take him on his way.
What interested us here in the woods was the fact that a second series of tracks just like the first, only about half as large, dogged the larger tracks persistently, leaping tree for tree, and landing track for track with astonishing accuracy – tracks which, had they not been evidently those of a smaller squirrel, would have read to us most menacingly.
As this was the mating season for squirrels, I suggested that it might have been a kind of Atalanta’s race here in the woods. But why did so little a squirrel want to marry one so big? They would not look well together, was the answer of the small boys. They thought it much more likely that Father Squirrel had been playing wood-tag with one of his children.
Then, suddenly, as sometimes happens in the woods, the true meaning of the signs was literally hurled at us, for down the hill, squealing and panting, rushed a large male gray squirrel, with a red squirrel like a shadow, like a weasel, at his heels.
For just an instant I thought it was a weasel, so swift and silent and gliding were its movements, so set and cruel seemed its expression, so sure, so inevitable its victory.
Whether it ever caught the gray squirrel or not, and what it would have done had it caught the big fellow, I do not know. But I have seen the chase often – the gray squirrel put to the last extremity with fright and fatigue, the red squirrel an avenging, inexorable fate behind. They tore round and round us, then up over the hill, and disappeared.
One of the rarest prints for most snow-hunters nowadays, but one of the commonest hereabouts, is the quick, sharp track of the fox. In the spring particularly, when my fancy young chickens are turned out to pasture, I have spells of fearing that the fox will never be exterminated here in this untillable but beautiful chicken country. In the winter, however, when I see Reynard’s trail across my lawn, when I hear the music of the baying hounds, and catch a glimpse of the white-tipped brush swinging serenely in advance of the coming pack, I cannot but admire the capable, cunning rascal, cannot but be glad for him, and marvel at him, so resourceful, so superior to his almost impossible conditions, his almost innumerable foes.
We started across the meadow on his trail, but found it leading so straightaway for the ledges, and so continuously blotted out by the passing of the pack, that, striking the wallowy path of a muskrat in the middle of the meadow, we took up the new scent to see what the shuffling, cowering water-rat wanted from across the snow.
A man is known by the company he keeps, by the way he wears his hat, by the manner of his laugh; but among the wild animals nothing tells more of character than their manner of moving. You can read animal character as easily in the snow as you can read act and direction.
The timidity, the indecision, the lack of purpose, the restless, meaningless curiosity of this muskrat were evident from the first in the loglike, the starting, stopping, returning, going-on track he had ploughed out in the thin snow.
He did not know where he was going or what he was going for; he knew only that he insisted upon going back, but all the while kept going on; that he wanted to go to the right or to the left, yet kept moving straight ahead.
We came to a big wallow in the snow, where, in sudden fear, he had had a fit at the thought of something that might not have happened to him had he stayed at home. Every foot of the trail read, “He would if he could; but if he wouldn’t, how could he?”
We followed him on, across a dozen other trails, for it is not every winter night that the muskrat’s feet get the better of his head, and, willy-nilly, take him abroad. Strange and fatal weakness! He goes and cannot stop.
Along the stone wall of the meadow we tracked him, across the highroad, over our garden, into the orchard, up the woody hill to the yard, back down the hill to the orchard, out into the garden, and back toward the orchard again; and here, on a knoll just in the edge of the scanty, skeleton shadow where the moon fell through the trees, we lost him.
Two mighty wings had touched the snow lightly here, and the lumbering trail had vanished as into the air.
Close and mysterious the silent wings hang poised indoors and out. Laughter and tears are companions. Comedy begins, but tragedy often ends the trail. Yet the sum of life indoors and out is peace, gladness, and fulfillment.
VIII
THE CLAM FARM: A CASE OF CONSERVATION
OUR hunger for clams and their present scarcity have not been the chief factors in the new national movement for the conservation of our natural resources; nor are the soaring prices of pork and lumber and wheat immediate causes, although they have served to give point and application to the movement. Ours is still a lavishly rich country. We have long had a greed for land, but we have not felt a pang yet of the Old World’s land-hunger. Thousands of acres, the stay for thousands of human lives, are still lying as waste places on the very borders of our eastern cities. There is plenty of land yet, plenty of lumber, plenty of food, but there is a very great and growing scarcity of clams.
Of course the clam might vanish utterly from the earth and be forgotten; our memory of its juicy, salty, sea-fat flavor might vanish with it; and we, ignorant of our loss, be none the poorer. We should live on, – the eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave live on, – but life, nevertheless, would not be so well worth living. For it would be flatter, with less of wave-wet freshness and briny gusto. No kitchen-mixed seasoning can supply the wild, natural flavors of life; no factory-made sensations the joy of being the normal, elemental, primitive animal that we are.
The clam is one of the natural flavors of life, and no longer ago than when I was a freshman was considered one of life’s necessities. Part of the ceremony of my admission to college was a clambake down the Providence River – such a clambake as never was down any other river, and as never shall be again down the Providence River, unless the Rhode Island clam-diggers take up their barren flats and begin to grow clams.
This they will do; our new and general alarm would assure us of that, even if the Massachusetts clam-diggers were not leading the way. But Rhode Island already has one thriving clam farm of her own at Rumstick Point along the Narragansett. The clam shall not perish from our tidal flats. Gone from long reaches where once it was abundant, small and scattering in its present scanty beds, the clam (the long-neck clam) shall again flourish, and all of New England shall again rejoice and be glad.
We are beginning, as a nation, while still the years are fat with plenty, to be troubled lest those of the future come hungry and lean. Up to the present time our industrial ethics have been like our evangelical religion, intensely, narrowly individualistic, —my salvation at all costs. “Dress-goods, yarns, and tops” has been our industrial hymn and prayer. And religiously, even yet, I sing of my own salvation: —
While in this region here below,
No other good will I pursue:
I’ll bid this world of noise and show,
With all its glittering snares, adieu;
A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too common in both religion and business, yet far from representing, to-day, the guiding spirit of either business or religion. For the growing conception of human brotherhood is mightily expanding our narrow religious selfishness; and the dawning revelation of industrial solidarity is not only making men careful for the present prosperity of the ends of the earth, but is making them concerned also for the future prosperity of the Farther-Off.
Priests and prophets we have had heretofore. “Woodman, woodman, spare that tree,” they have wailed. And the flying chips were the woodman’s swift response. The woodman has not heard the poet’s prayer. But he is hearing the American public’s command to let the sapling alone; and he is beginning to heed. It is a new appeal, this for the sapling; there is sound scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too. We shall save our forests, our watersheds, and rivers; we shall conserve for time to come our ores and rich deposits; we shall reclaim the last of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of our eastern farms; we shall herd our whales of the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific, number and multiply our truant schools of mackerel that range the waters of the sea; just as we shall restock with clams the waste, sandy shores of the sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were as fruitful as Eden, but which through years of digging and no planting have become as barren as the bloodless sands of the Sahara.
It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the course of time, what one sows – even clams if one sows clams; but it is a more solemn saying that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for all eternity, what one has not sown – even clams out of the exhausted flats of the New England coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run brackish to the sea.
Hitherto we have reaped where we have not sown, and gathered where we have not strawed. But that was during the days of our industrial pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the wilderness, where manna and quails and clams are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only barberries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had nowadays for the gathering. There are still enough barberries to go round without planting or trespassing, for the simple, serious reason that the barberries do not carry their sugar on their bushes with them, as the clams carry their salt. The Sugar Trust carries the barberries’ sugar. But soon or late every member of that trust shall leave his bag of sweet outside the gate of Eden or the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it now, lest once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his eternal feeding, but barberries!
We have not sown the clam hitherto: we have only digged; so that now, for all practical purposes, that is to say, for the old-time, twenty-five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, uncultivated clam has had its day; as the unenterprising, unbelieving clammers themselves are beginning to see.
The Providence River fishermen are seeking distant flats for the matchless Providence River clams, bringing them overland from afar by train. So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Duxbury clams come out of flats that reach all the way from the mouth of the St. Johns, on the down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake. And this, while eight hundred acres of superb clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town, which might be producing yearly, for the joy of man, eighty thousand bushels of real Duxbury clams!
What a clambake Duxbury does not have each year! A multitude of twice eighty thousand might sit down about the steaming stones and be filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more, that Duxbury does not hunger thus alone. For this is the story of fifty other towns in Massachusetts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to Dighton – a tale with a minus total of over two million bushels of clams, and an annual minus of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.
Nor is this the story of Massachusetts alone, nor of the tide-flats alone. It is the story of the whole of New England, inland as well as coast. The New England farm was cleared, worked, exhausted, and abandoned. The farmer was as exhausted as his farm, and preferring the hazard of new fortunes to the certain tragedy of the old, went West. But that tale is told. The tide from New England to the West is at slack ebb. There is still a stream flowing out into the extreme West; rising in the Middle Western States, however, not in the East. The present New England farmers are staying on their farms, except where the city buyer wants an abandoned farm, and insists upon its being abandoned at any price. So will the clammer stay on his shore acres, for his clams shall no more run out, causing him to turn cod-fisher, or cranberry-picker, or to make worse shift. The New England clam-digger of to-day shall be a clam-farmer a dozen years hence; and his exhausted acres along shore, planted, cultivated, and protected by law, shall yield him a good living. A living for him and clams for us; and not the long-neck clams of the Providence River and Duxbury flats only: they shall yield also the little-neck clams and the quahaug, the scallop, too, the oyster, and, from farther off shore, the green-clawed lobster in abundance, and of a length the law allows.
Our children’s children may run short of coal and kerosene; but they need never want for clams. We are going to try to save them some coal, for there are mighty bins of it still in the earth, while here, besides, are the peat-bogs – bunkers of fuel beyond the fires of our imaginations to burn up. We may, who knows? save them a little kerosene. No one has measured the capacity of the tank; it has been tapped only here and there; the plant that manufactured it, moreover, is still in operation, and is doubtless making more. But whether so or not, we still may trust in future oil, for the saving spirit of our new movement watches the pipes that carry it to our cans. There is no brand of economy known to us at present that is more assuring than our kerosene economy. The Standard Oil Company, begotten by Destiny, it would seem, as distributor of oil, is not one to burn even its paraffine candles at both ends. There was, perhaps, a wise and beneficent Providence in its organization, that we might have five gallons for fifty-five cents for our children’s sake – a price to preserve the precious fluid for the lamps of coming generations.
But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not. The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of perfect human character, may be a process requiring all eternity, – longer than we can wait, – so that the present deposits may some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection, is – conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or the roundness of the “Square Deal”) – except, I say, for a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands.
