Sharp Dallas Lore
The Lay of the Land
Both birds were working when I discovered them, and so busily that my coming up did not delay them for a single billful. It was not hard digging, but it was very slow, for chickadee is neither carpenter nor mason. He has difficulty in killing a hard-backed beetle. So, whenever you find him occupying a clean-walled cavity, with a neat, freshly clipped doorway, you may be sure that some woodpecker built the house, not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks both the bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the explanation of his fondness for birch trees lies here: they die young and soon decay.
The birds were going down through the top, not by a hole in the leathery rind of the sides, for the bark would have been too tough for their beaks. They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a wad of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of the pine. Here, with a jerk and a snap of their bills, they would scatter the stuff in a shower so thin and far around that I could neither hear it fall nor find a trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This nest would never be betrayed by the workmen’s chips.
Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of excavating every two minutes, one of the birds regularly shoveling twice to the other’s once. They looked so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was pushing the enterprise; but I have my suspicions.
There is nothing so superior about his voice or appearance that he should thus shirk. He was doing part of his duty, apparently, but it was half-hearted work. Hers was the real interest, the real anxiety; and hers the initiative. To be a male and show off! That’s the thing. To be a male and let your wife carry the baby! The final distinctive difference between a truly humanized, civilized man and all other males of every order, is a willingness to push the baby carriage.
The finer the feathers or the song among male birds the less use they are in practical, domestic ways. Fine beaux, captivating lovers, they become little else than a nuisance as husbands. One of my friends has been watching a pair of bluebirds building. The male sat around for a week without bringing in a feather. Then one day he was seen to enter the hole, after his busy mate had just left it, and carry out a beakful of grass which he scattered to the winds in pure perversity, criticising her bungling work, maybe! More likely he was jealous.
Chickadee was no such precious fool as that. He was doing something; trying to drown his regret for the departing honeymoon in hard labor, not, however, to the danger of his health.
I sat a long time watching the work. It went on in perfect silence, not a chirp, not the sound of a fluttering wing. The swamp along whose margin the birds were building had not a joyous atmosphere. Damp, dim-shadowed, and secret, it seemed to have laid its spell upon the birds. Their very gray and black was as if mixed of the dusk, and of the gray, half-light of the swamp; their noiseless coming and going was like the slipping to and fro of shadows. They were a part of it all, and that sharing was their defense, the best defense they knew.
It didn’t save their nest, however. They felt and obeyed the spirit of the swamp in their own conduct, but the swamp did not tell them where to build. It was about three weeks later that I stopped again under the pine and found the birch stub in pieces upon the ground. Some robber had been after the eggs and had brought the whole house tumbling down. This is not the fate of all such birch-bark houses. Now and again they escape; but it is always a matter for wonder.
I was following an old disused wood road once when I scared a robin from her nest. Her mate joined her, and together they raised a great hubbub. Immediately a chewink, a pair of vireos, and two black and white warblers joined the robins in their din. Then a chickadee appeared. He (I say “he” knowingly; and here he quite redeems himself) had a worm in his beak. His anxiety seemed so real that I began to watch him, when, looking down among the stones for a place to step, what should I see but his mate emerging from the end of a birch stump at my very feet. She had heard the din and had come out to see what it was all about. At sight of her, he hastened with his worm, brushing my face, almost, as he darted to her side. She took it sweetly, for she knew he had intended it for her. But how do I know that? Perhaps he meant it for the young! There were no young in the nest, only eight eggs. Even after the young came (there were eight of them!), and when life, from daylight to dark, was one ceaseless, hurried hunt for worms, I saw him over and over again fly to her side caressingly and tempt her to eat.
The house of this pair did not fall. How could it when it stood precisely two and a half feet from the ground! But that it wasn’t looted is due to the sheer audacity of its situation. It stood alone, against the road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing might have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred persons had brushed it in going by. How many dogs and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident that discovered it to me happened apparently to no one else, and I was friendly.
Cutting a tiny window in the bark just above the eggs, I looked in upon the little people every day. I watched them grow and fill the cavity and hang over at the top. I was there the day they forced my window open, the day when there was no more room at the top, and when, at the call of their parents, one after another of this largest and sweetest of bird families found his wings and flew away through the woods.
VI
The Missing Tooth
The snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened, faded, and stained with mud, – a dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the winter snows. The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle, gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.
I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton of a muskrat. It was something peculiar in the way they lay that had caused me to pause. They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands of Sleep. They had not been flung down. The delicate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone was broken or displaced, not one showed the splinter of shot, or the crack that might have been made by a steel trap. No violence had been done them. They had been touched by nothing rougher than the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had passed them here; but no one else in all the winter months.
The creature had died – a “natural” death. It had starved, while a hundred acres of plenty lay round about. Picking up the skull, I found the jaws locked together as if they were a single solid bone. One of the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing, and apparently had never developed. The opposite tooth on the lower jaw, thus unopposed and so unworn, had grown beyond its normal height up into the empty socket above, then on, turning outward and piercing the cheek-bone in front of the eye, whence, curving like a boar’s tusk, it had slowly closed the jaws and locked them, rigid, set, as fixed as jaws of stone.
Death had lingered cruelly. At first the animal had been able to gnaw; but as the tooth curved through the bones of the face and gradually tightened the jaws, the creature got less and less to eat, until, one day, creeping out of the burrow for food, the poor wretch was unable to get back.
One seldom comes upon the like of this. It is commoner than we think; but it is usually hidden away and quickly over. How often do we see a wild thing sick, – a bird or animal suffering from an accident, or dying, like this muskrat, because of some physical defect? The struggle between two lives for life – the falling of the weak as prey to the strong – is ever before us; but this single-handed fight between the creature and Nature is a far rarer, silenter tragedy. Nature is too swift, too merciless to allow us time for sympathy. It was she who taught the old Roman to take away his weak and malformed offspring and expose it on the hills.
There is, at best, scarcely a fighting chance in the meadow. Only strength and craft may win. The muskrat with the missing tooth never enters the race at all. He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and, if the owl and mink are not watching, dies alone in the grass, and we rarely know.
I shall never forget the impression made upon me by those quiet bones. It was like that made by my first visit to a great city hospital, – out of the busy, cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick and injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the woods and meadows and never step from the sweet air and the pure sunlight of health into a hospital. But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or injured are there. The proportion is smaller than among us humans, and for very good reasons, yet there is much real suffering, and to come upon it, as we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our understanding and deepen our sympathy with the life out of doors.
No sensible person could for a moment believe the animals capable of suffering as a human being can suffer, or that there is any such call for our sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. But an unselfish sharing of the life of the fields demands that we take part in all of it, – and all of it is but little short of tragedy. Nature wears a brave face. Her smile is ever in the open, her laughter quick and contagious. This brave front is no mask. It is real. Sunlight, song, color, form, and fragrance are real. And so our love and joy in Nature is real. Real, also, should be our love and sorrow with Nature. For do I share fully in as much of her life as even the crow lives as long as I think of the creature only with admiration for his cunning or with wrath for his destruction of my melons and corn?
A crow has his solemn moments. He frequently knows fear, pain, hunger, accident, and disease; he knows something very like affection and love. For all that, he is a mere crow. But a mere crow is no mean thing. Few of us, indeed, are ourselves, and as much besides as a mere crow. A real love, however, will give us part in all of his existence. We will forage and fight with him; we will parley and play; and when the keen north winds find him in the frozen pines, we will suffer, too.
With Nature as mere waters, fields, and skies, it is, perhaps, impossible for us to sorrow. She is too self-sufficient, too impersonal. She asks, or compels, everything except tears. But when she becomes birds and beasts, – a little world of individuals among whom you are only one of a different kind, – then all the others, no matter their kind, are earth-born companions and fellow mortals.
Here are the meadow voles. I know that my hay crop is shorter every year for them, – a very little shorter. And I can look with satisfaction at a cat carrying a big bobtailed vole out of my mowing. The voles are rated, along with other mice, as injurious to man. I have an impulse to plant both of my precious feet upon every one that stirs in its runway.
If that feeling was habitual once, it is so no longer; for now it is only when the instincts of the farmer get the better of me that I spring at this quiet stir in the grass. Perhaps, long ago, my forbears wore claws, like pussy; and, perhaps (there isn’t the slightest doubt), I should develop claws if I continued to jump at every mouse in the grass because he is a mouse, and because I have a little patch of mucky land in hay.
One day I came upon two of my voles struggling in the water. They were exhausted and well-nigh dead. I helped them out as I should have helped out any other creature, and having saved them, why, what could I do but let them go – even into my own meadow? This has happened several times.
When the drought dries the meadow, the voles come to the deep, walled spring at the upper end, apparently to drink. The water usually trickles over the curb, but in a long dry spell it shrinks a foot or more below the edge, and the voles, once within for their drink, cannot get out. Time and time again I had fished them up, until I thought to leave a board slanting down to the water, so that they could climb back to the top.
It is stupid and careless to drown thus. The voles are blunderers. White-footed mice and house mice are abundant in the stumps and grass of the vicinity, but they never tumble into the spring. Still, I am partly responsible for the voles, for I walled up the spring and changed it into this trap. I owe them the drink and the plank, for certainly there are rights of mice, as well as of men, in this meadow of mine, where I do little but mow. But even if they have no rights, surely for such of them as the foxes, cats, skunks, snakes, hawks, and owls leave! Rights or no, hay or no, I don’t jump at my meadow mice any more, for fear of killing one who has taken a cup of cold water from me off the plank, or has had my helping hand out of the depths of the spring.
A daimen icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request
It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a meadow mouse, to pour out, even waste, a little of the oil and wine of sympathy on the humblest of our needy neighbors.
Here are the chimney swallows. One can look with complacency, with gratitude, indeed, upon the swallows of other chimneys, as they hawk in the sky; yet, when the little creatures, so useful, but so uncombed and unfumigated, set up their establishments in your chimney, to the jeopardy of the whole house, then you need an experience like mine.
I had had a like experience years before, when the house did not belong to me. Now, however, the house was mine, and if it became infested because of the swallows, I could not move away; so I felt like burning them in the chimney, bag and baggage. There were four nests, as nearly as I could make out, and, from the frequent squeakings, I knew they were all filled with young. Then one day, when the birds were feathered and nearly ready to fly, there came a rain that ran wet far down the sooty chimney, loosened the mortar of the nests, and sent them crashing into the fireplace.
Some of the young birds were killed outright; the others were at my mercy, flung upon me, – helpless, wailing infants! Of course I made it comfortable for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flutter down unhindered to feed them. Had I understood the trick, I would have hawked for them and helped feed them myself.
They made a great thunder in the chimney; they rattled down into the living-room a little soot; but nothing further came of it. We were not quarantined. On the contrary, we had our reward, according to promise; for it was an extremely interesting event to us all. It dispelled some silly qualms, it gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so foreign, yet so closely linked to our own, and it made us pause with wonder that even our empty, sooty chimney could be made use of by Nature to our great benefit.
I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows came tumbling down when the birds used to build in caves and hollow trees? It is a most extraordinary change, this change from the trees to the chimneys, and it does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase of architectural wisdom necessary to meet all the contingencies of the new hollow. The mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the empty trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so that the nest, especially when crowded with young, is easily loosened by the rain, and is sometimes even broken away by the slight wing-stroke of a descending swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird as it settles with food.
We little realize how frequent fear is among the birds and animals, nor how often it proves fatal. A situation which would have caused no trouble ordinarily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a trap. I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast express train and fall dead. Last winter I left the large door of the barn open, so that my flock of juncos could feed inside upon the floor. They found their way into the hayloft, and went up and down freely. On two or three occasions I happened in so suddenly that they were thoroughly frightened, and flew madly into the cupola to escape through the windows. They beat against the glass until utterly dazed, and would have perished there, had I not climbed up later and brought them down. So thousands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying wildly against the dazzling lanterns of the lighthouses, and thousands more lose their way in the thick darkness of the stormy nights, or are blown out of their course, and drift away to sea.
Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not as frequent among the careful wild folk as among us, perhaps; but there is abundant evidence of their occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal results.
Several instances are recorded of birds that have been tangled in the threads of their nests; and one case of a bluebird that was caught in the flying meshes of an oriole’s nest into which it had been spying.
I once found the mummied body of a chippy twisting and swinging in the leafless branches of a peach tree. The little creature was suspended in a web of horsehair about two inches below the nest. It looked as if she had brought a snarled bunch of the hair and left it loose in the twigs. Later on, a careless step and her foot was fast, when every frantic effort for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest above were four other tiny mummies, – a double tragedy that might with care have been averted.
A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I discovered hanging dead upon a barbed-wire fence. By some chance it had slipped a foot through an open place between the two twisted strands, and then, fluttering along, had wedged the leg and broken it in the struggle to escape.
We have all held our breath at the hazardous traveling of the squirrels in the treetops. What other animals take such risks, – leaping at dizzy heights from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still smaller, saving themselves again and again by the merest chance.
But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful watcher in the woods, was hunting on one occasion, when he saw a gray squirrel miss its footing in a tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.
I have frequently known them to fall short distances, and once I saw a red squirrel come to grief like the gray squirrel above. He was scurrying through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little hurried and flustered at sight of me, and nearing the end of a high branch was in the act of springing, when the dead tip cracked under him and he came tumbling headlong. The height must have been forty feet, so that before he reached the ground he had righted himself, – his tail out and legs spread, – but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with a dull thud, and before I could reach him lay dead upon the needles, with blood oozing from his eyes and nostrils.
Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things suffer as we hardly yet understand. No one can estimate the deaths of a year from severe cold, heavy storms, high winds and tides. I have known the nests of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept away in a great storm; and I have seen the tides, over and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out the nests in the grass, – those of the clapper-rails by thousands.
I remember a late spring storm that came with the returning redstarts and, in my neighborhood, killed many of them. Toward evening of that day one of the little black and orange voyageurs fluttered against the window and we let him in, wet, chilled, and so exhausted that for a moment he lay on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was another soft tapping at the window, – and two little redstarts were sharing our cheer and drying their butterfly wings in our warmth.
During the summer of 1903 one of the commonest of the bird calls about the farm was the whistle of the quails. A covey roosted down the hillside within fifty yards of the house. Then came the winter, – such a winter as the birds had never known. Since then, just once have we heard the whistle of a quail, and that, perhaps, was the call of one which a game protective association had liberated in the woods about two miles away.
The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as we; they cannot foretell as far ahead nor provide as certainly against need, despite the popular notion to the contrary.
We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat houses, and the hoards of the squirrels, and say, “How wise and far-sighted these nature-taught children are!” True, they are, but only for conditions that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the exceptional. The gray squirrels did not provide for the unusually hard weather of the winter of 1904. Three of them from the woodlot came begging of me, and lived on my wisdom, not on their own.
Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap, that have neither storehouse nor barn, yet they are fed, – but not always. Indeed, there are few of our winter birds that go hungry so often, and that die in so great numbers for lack of food and shelter, as the crows.
After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and wounded. Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and less able to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter wind breaks loose and sweeps down upon the pines.
List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the owrie cattle,
and how often I have thought me on the crows biding the night yonder in the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe, have I watched them returning at night, that the crows will never cease flying through my wintry sky, – an endless line of wavering black figures, weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.
To-night another wild storm sweeps across the January fields. All the afternoon the crows have been going over, and at five o’clock are still passing though the darkness settles rapidly. Now it is eight, and the long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind shrieks about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the fields. I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines where the fields roll into the woods, – a vast surf sound, but softer and higher, with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.
I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark forms. As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling the crows, their breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty and bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for thirteen hours of night!
Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that the small flames flicker and go out?
