Sharp Dallas Lore
The Lay of the Land
IV
The Nature-Student
I
I had made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration – for a junior.
“You didn’t know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?” said the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves laid bare by the knife. “Now, see here,” he went on, eyeing me keenly, “doesn’t a revelation like that take all the moonshine about the ‘beauties of nature’ clean out of you?”
I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very deliberately: “No, it doesn’t. That’s a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles – mere dead dog – compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?”
The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him.
“Well,” he said, turning abruptly, “you had better quit. You’ll be only a biological fifth wheel.”
I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.
Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions, – zoölogists, botanists, geologists, – look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.
I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it Arctomys monax with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (strobus) from a pitch pine (rigida) by just a cone and a bundle of needles, – one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren, – only trees.
As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines, – ’ou calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.
Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are thawing out? It is quite as healthful, if not as scientific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.
I want this small boy some time to know the difference between these needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always, that the hard days are sure to soften, and that then there oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny, penetrating, purifying balm, – a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul.
All foolishness? sentiment? moonshine? – this love for woods and fields, this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me, but made no reply.
He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and the knowledge, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him, not a quick thing, – a shape, a million shapes, informed with spirit, – a voice of gladness, a mild and healing sympathy, a companionable soul.
“But there you go!” he exclaims, “talking poetry again. Why don’t you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors, anyway!”
I do not mean a sixteen weeks’ course in zoölogy, or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the deep and beautiful things of living nature, – the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental, vacation-time course, – the more’s the pity. The results do not often come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather; more after the manner of revelations, – data that the professors have little faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee bit heap o’ weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.
But there is the trouble with my professor. He never ploughs at all. How can he understand and believe? And isn’t this the trouble with many of our preacher poets, also? Some of them spend their summers in the garden; but the true poet – and the naturalist – must stay later, and they must plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would turn up what Burns did that November day in the field at Mossgiel.
How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns’s life! What if he had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He might have written a life of Milton in six volumes, – a monumental work, but how unimportant compared with the lines “To a Mouse”!
We are going to live real life and write real poetry again, – when all who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life’s first sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one’s own ploughing, and to write!
Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I live on the farm, hoe, and think, and write, – whenever the hoeing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse?
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
With a whole farm o’ foggage green, and all the year before me, I am not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured, – lines that we at least may live into song.
Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do, – made over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland Robinson are poets. But they are poets. We all are, – even the biologist, with half a chance, – and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration. The nature-lover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations.
He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call back to him across the echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.
That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doesn’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.
It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog. And how small and thin it sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible.
That was an inspiration. I learned something, something deep and beautiful. Had I been Burns or Wordsworth I should have written a poem to Hyla. All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so quickened by that brave little voice as to write: —
The fields are bleak, the forests bare,
The swirling snowflakes fall
About the trees a winding-sheet,
Across the fields a pall.
A wide, dead waste, and leaden sky,
Wild winds, and dark and cold!
The river’s tongue is frozen thick,
With life’s sweet tale half told.
Dead! Ah, no! the white fields sleep,
The frozen rivers flow;
And summer’s myriad seed-hearts beat
Within this breast of snow.
With spring’s first green the holly glows
And flame of autumn late, —
The embers of the summer warm
In winter’s roaring grate.
The thrush’s song is silent now,
The rill no longer sings,
But loud and long the strong winds strike
Ten million singing strings.
O’er mountains high, o’er prairies far,
Hark! the wild pæan’s roll!
The lyre is strung ’twixt ocean shores
And swept from pole to pole!
My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that meeting would have been of consequence to all the world; as I was, however, it meant something only to me, – a new point of view, an inspiration, – a beautiful poem that I cannot write.
This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical or purely sentimental. Hooting at the owls and hearing things in baffling silences may not be scientific. Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of the boy beside the starlit lake is not that of Charlie, the man who helps me occasionally on the farm.
We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow recently when we found a stone just above the surface that was too large for the horse to haul out. We decided to bury it.
Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked a while at this, then stopped a while; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think about it. It was hard work, – the thinking, I mean, harder than the picking, – but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it through.
“Well,” he said finally, “‘t ain’t no use, nohow. You can’t keep it down. You bury the darned thing, and it’ll come right up. I suppose it grows. Of course it does. It must. Everything grows.”
Now that is an unscientific attitude. But that is not the mind of the nature-lover, of the boy with the baffling silences along the starlit lake. He is sentimental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely vapid. He does not always wander along the lake by night. He is a nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and he does a great deal more than hoot at the owls. This, though, is as near as he comes to anything scientific, and so worth while, according to the professor.
II
And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts – according to the philosopher.
“We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background, atmosphere.”
“Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries… The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature.”
So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks the terminus of our philosopher’s path? Let him leap across, walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of wider, deeper mystery.
There isn’t the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe. The nature-lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing nature. The vision will not fade.
Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of the swamp. A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged wood thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or a disembodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.
Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently contemplative. Indeed, at four o’clock on a June morning in some old apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout, —
“Hence, loathèd melancholy!”
He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the day is done, that the capture of a drifting seed of the dandelion and the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.
There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the earth under the blue of the sky; and just as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and not the wood thrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not help but hear.
No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the summer’s longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.
This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How can I know real companionship with nature?
How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it, – a companionship so real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt? Simply by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they learned to halloo in reply. You may need to be born again before you can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering for the soil, then all you need for companionship with nature is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt, that you can visit, walk around, and get home from in a day’s time. If this region can be the pastures, woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-yard, then that is good; especially if you buy the land and live on it, for then Nature knows that you are not making believe. She will accept you as she does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds, walls, streams, trees, – its features large and small, as they appear in June, and as they look in July and in January.
For the first you will need the how-to-know books, – these while you are getting acquainted; but soon acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done naming things. The meanings of things now begin to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly back to herself. Companionship has begun.
Many persons of the right mind never know this friendship, because they never realize the necessity of being friendly. They walk through a field as they walk through a crowded street; they go into the country as they go abroad. And the result is that all this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the philosopher again, seems “little better than cant and self-deception.”
But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he was also a hermit), and leave off hermiting; let him live at home with his wife and children, like the rest of us; let him work in the city for his living, hoe in his garden for his recreation; and then (I don’t care by what prompting) let him study the lay of his neighbor fields, woods, and orchards until he knows every bird and beast, every tree-hole, earth-hole, even the times and places of the things that grow in the ground; let him do this through the seasons of the year, – for two or three years, – and he will know how to enjoy a woodchuck; he will understand many of the family affairs of his chipmunks; he will recognize and welcome back his bluebirds; he will love and often listen to the solemn talk of his pines.
All of this may be petty prying, not communion at all; it may be all moonshine and sentiment, not science. But it is not cant and self-deception, – in the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk, who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and whose woodpaths are of their own wearing. And if it is not communion with nature, I know that it is at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment, red blood, sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me, something close akin to religion.
V
Chickadee
Once (it was a good while ago, when I was a boy), I tried to write a poem. The first stanza ran: —
I heard him when the reeds were young
Along a clover sea;
Above the purple waves he hung,
And o’er the fragrant waters flung
His storm of ecstasy;
and the last stanza ran: —
He’s left the meadows burnt and hot,
He’s left me lone and drear;
But still within the white-birch lot
Cheeps Chickadee – whom I forgot
While Bobolink was here;
which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us. He stays the year around; he is constant and faithful in his friendship, though I sometimes forget.
He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could have only one of the birds? As it is, I get along for more than half the year without bobolink, but what would my out-of-doors be without chickadee? There is not a single day in the year that I cannot find him, no matter how hot, or cold, how hard it rains or snows. Often he is the only voice in all the silent woods, the only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter world.
I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered off among the naked bushes, – a moment of sound, a bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods. I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost; but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of his hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in such a night as this? – this vast of sweeping winds and frozen snow!
The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, where the winds were free. The cold was driving, numbing here with a power for death that the thermometer could not mark. I backed into the wind and hastened on toward the double line of elms that arched the road in front of the house. Already I could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass. It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold?
Could live? The question was hardly thought, when an answer was whirled past me into the nearest of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down, for I don’t know how far.
I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only an eddy of the gale sucking at the little round hole in the broken end, while far down in its hollow heart, huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the night, was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck the limb and turned in that he had been there before. He knew whither, across the sweeping meadows, he was being blown. He had even helped the winds as they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads till late. But he was safe for the night now, in the very bed, it may be, where he was hatched last summer, and where at this moment, who knows, were half a dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last summer’s brood, unscathed still, and still sharing the old home hollow, as snug and warm this bitter night as in the soft May days when they were nestlings here together.
The cold drove me on; but the chickadee had warmed me and all my naked world of night and death. And so he ever does. The winter has yet to be that drives him seeking shelter to the south. I never knew it colder than in January and February of 1904. During both of those months, morning and evening, I drove through a long mile of empty, snow-buried woods. For days at a time I would not see even a crow, but morning and evening, at a certain dip in the road, two chickadees would fly from bush to bush across the hollow and cheer me on the way. They came out to the road, really, to pick up whatever scanty crumbs were to be found in my wake. They came also to hear me, to see me pass, – to escape for a moment, I think, the silence, desertion, and death of the woods. They helped me to escape, too.
Four other chickadees, all winter long, ate with us, sharing, as far as the double windows would allow, the cheer of our dining-room. We served them on the lilac bush outside the window, tying their suet on so that they could see us and we them during meal time. Perhaps it was mere suet, no feast of soul at all, that they got; but constantly, when our pie was opened, the birds began to sing, – a dainty dish indeed, savory, wholesome, and good for our souls.
There are states in the far Northwest where the porcupine is protected by law, as a last food resource for men lost and starving in the forests. Perhaps the porcupine was not designed by nature for any such purpose. Perhaps chickadee was not left behind by summer to feed our lost and starving hope through the cheerless months. But that is the use I make of him. He is summer’s pledge to me. The woods are hollow, the winds chill, the earth cold and stiff, but there flits chickadee, and – I cannot lose faith, nor feel that this procession of bleak white days is all a funeral!
He is the only bird in my little world that I can find without fail three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. From December to the end of March he comes daily to my lilac bush for suet; from April to early July he is busy with domestic cares in the gray birches of the woodlot; from August to December he and his family come hunting quietly and sociably as a little flock among the trees and bushes of the farm; and from then on he is back for his winter meals at “The Lilac.”
Is it any wonder that he was the first bird I ever felt personally acquainted with, and the first bird my children knew? That early acquaintance, however, was not due to his abundance and intrusion, as it might be with the English sparrow, but rather due to the cheerful, confiding, sociable spirit of the little bird. He drops down and peeps under your hat-brim to see what manner of boy you are, and if you are really fit to be abroad in this world, so altogether good – for chickadees.
He has a mission to perform besides the eating of eggs and grubs of the pestiferous insects. This destruction he does that the balance of things may be maintained out of doors. He has quite another work to do, which is not economic, and which, in nowise, is a matter of fine feathers or sweet voice, but simply a matter of sweet nature, vigor, and concentrated cheerfulness.
I said he is summer’s pledge, the token of hope to me. He is a lesson also. I don’t often find sermons in stones, because, no doubt, I look so little for the sermons, so little for the very stones. But I cannot help seeing chickadee, – and chickadee is all sermon. I hear him on a joyous May morning calling Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee! dee!– brisk, bright, and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he whistles, Phœ-ee-bee! Phœ-ee-bee! I meet him again on the edge of a bleak, midwinter night. He is hungry and cold, and he calls, as I hasten along, Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee! dee!– brisk, bright, and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he whistles, Phœ-ee-bee! Phœ-ee-bee!
Will you lend me your wings, chickadee, those invisible wings on which you ride the winds of life so evenly? For I would hang my ill-balanced soul between them, as your bird soul hangs, and fly as you fly.
The abundant summer, the lean and wolfish winter, find chickadee cheerful and gentle. He is busier at some seasons than at others, with fewer chances for friendship. He almost disappears in the early summer. But this is because of family cares; and because the bigger, louder birds have come back, and the big leaves have come out and hidden him. A little searching, and you will discover him, in one of your old decayed fence posts, maybe, or else deep in the swamp, foraging for a family so numerous that they spill over at the door of their home.
Here about the farm, this is sure to be a gray birch home. Other trees will do – on a pinch. I have found chickadee nesting in live white oaks, maples, upturned roots, and tumbling fence posts. These were shifts, however, mere houses, not real homes. The only good homelike trees are old gray birches dead these many years and gone to punk, – mere shells of tough circular bark walls.
Why has chickadee this very decided preference? Is it a case of protective coloration, – the little gray and black bird choosing to nest in this little gray and black tree because bird and tree so exactly match each other in size and color? Or (and there are many instances in nature) is there a subtle strain of poetry in chickadee’s soul, something æsthetic, that leads him into this exquisite harmony, – into this little gray house for his little gray self?
Explain it as you may, it is a fact that this little bird shows a marked preference, makes deliberate choice, and in his choice is protection, and poetry, too. Doubtless he follows the guidance of a sure and watchful instinct (whatever instinct be), but who shall deny to him a share of the higher, finer things of the imagination? a share of real æsthetic taste?
His life inside the birch is of a piece with the artistic exterior. It is all gentle and sweet and idyllic. There is no happier spot in the summer woods than that about the birch of the chickadees; and none whose happiness you will be so little liable to disturb.
Before the woods were in leaf one spring I found a pair of chickadees building in a birch along the edge of the swamp. They had just begun, having dug out only an inch of cavity. It was very interesting to discover them doing the work themselves, for usually they refit some abandoned chamber or adapt a ready-made hole.
The birch was a long, limbless cylinder of bark, broken off about fourteen feet up, and utterly rotten, the mere skin of a tree stuffed with dust. I could push my finger into it at any point. It was so weak that every time the birds lighted upon the top the whole stub wobbled and reeled. Surely they were building their house upon the sand. Any creature without wings would have known that. Birds, however, seem to have lost the sense of such insecurity, often placing their nests as if they expected them also to take wings and fly to safety when the rains descend and the winds come.
This shaking stub of the chickadees was standing directly beneath a great overshadowing pine, where, if no partridge bumped into it, if two squirrels did not scamper up it together, if the crows nesting overhead did not discover it, if no strong wind bore down upon it from the meadow side, it might totter out the nesting season. But it didn’t. The birds were leaving too much to luck. I knew it, and should have pushed their card house down, then and there, and saved the greater ruin later. Perhaps so, but I was too interested in their labor.
