Rowland Evans Robinson

“ When one is duck-shooting on inland waters, sitting alert in the bow of the skiff with his gun ready for the expected gaudy wood duck, or plump mallard, or loud quacking dusky duck, or swift-winged teal, to rise with a splashing flutter out of the wild rice, and there is a sudden beating of broad wings among the sedges with a startled guttural quack, and one's heart leaps to his throat and his gun to his shoulder, and then—only an awkward bittern climbs the September breeze with a slow incline, there is a vengeful temptation to let drive at the disappointing good-for-nothing. ”

“ The camp-fire gives an expression to the human face that it bears in no other light, a vague intentness, an absorption in nothing tangible; and yet not a far-away look, for it is focused on the flame that now licks a fresh morsel of wood, now laps the empty air; or it is fixed on the shifting glow of embers, whose blushes flush or fade under their ashen veil. It is not the gaze of one who looks past everything at nothing, or at the stars or the mountains or the far-away sea-horizon; but it is centred on and revealed only by the camp-fire. ”

“ In the wood you may hear no sound but your own muffled footsteps, the crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from your passage, and now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a clear resonant crack of frozen fibres and its faint echo. You hear no bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the pungent fragrance of his fire nor the subtler one of fresh-cut wood. Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens, only scentless air reaches your nostrils. ”

“ With footfall so light that he is seen close at hand sooner than heard, a hare limps past; too early clad in his white fur that shall make him inconspicuous amid the winter snow, his coming shines from afar through the gray underbrush and on the tawny leaves. Unseen amid his dun and gray environment, the ruffed grouse skulks unheard, till he bursts away in thunderous flight. Overhead, invisible in the lofty thicket of a hemlock's foliage, a squirrel drops a slow patter of cone chips, while undisturbed a nuthatch winds his spiral way down the smooth trunk. ”

“ A hawk, flashing the old gold of his pinions in the face of the sun, flings down a shrill, husky cry of intense scorn; a jay scolds like a shrew; from his safe isolation in the midwater, a loon taunts you and the awakening winds with his wild laughter; there is a jeer in the chuckling diminuendo of the woodchuck's whistle, a taunt in the fox's gasping bark as he scurries unseen behind the veil of night; and a scoff on hunters and hounds and cornfield owners is flung out through the gloaming in the raccoon's quavering cry. ”

“ The wild world is not made the poorer by one life for his shot, nor [89] nature's peace disturbed, nor her nicely adjusted balance jarred.
He bears home his game, wearing still its pretty ways of life in the midst of its loved surroundings, the swaying hemlock bough where the grouse perched, the bending ferns about the deer's couch, the dew-beaded sedges where the woodcock skulks in the shadows of the alders, the lichened trunks and dim vistas of primeval woods, the sheen of voiceless waterfalls, the flash of sunlit waves that never break. ”

“ In such weather the woodland air is laden with the light burden of odor, the faintly pungent aroma of the ripened leaves, more subtle than the scent of pine or fir, yet as apparent to the nostrils, as delightful and more rare, for in the round of the year its days are few, while in summer sunshine and winter wind, in springtime shower and autumnal frost, pine, spruce, balsam, hemlock, and cedar distill their perfume and lavish it on the breeze or gale of every season. ”

“ Indeed, it is for something better than mere shooting or fishing that he has come so far. One squirrel, flicking the leaves with his downfall, one grouse plunging to earth midway in his thunderous flight, one trout caught as he can catch him, now, will appease his moderate craving for sport, and best and most desired of all, make him, for the nonce, a boy again. He anticipates with quicker heartbeat the thrill of surprised delight that choked him with its fullness when he achieved his first triumph. ”

“ The song-birds are singing in southern woods, but chickadee, nuthatch, and woodpecker are chatty and companionable and keep the woods in heart with a stir of life.
Then from overhead or underfoot a ruffed grouse booms away into the gray haze of branches, and one hears the whirr and crash of his headlong flight long after he is lost to sight, perchance long after the echo of a futile shot has died away. Far off one hears the intermittent discharge of rifles where the shooters are burning powder for their Thanksgiving turkey, and faintly from far away comes the melancholy music of a hound. ”

“ IX SPRING SHOOTING
The Ram makes way for the Bull; March goes out and April comes in with sunshine and showers, smiles and tears. The sportsman has his gun in hand again with deadly purpose, as the angler his rod and tackle with another intention than mere overhauling and putting to rights. The smiles of April are for them.
The geese come wedging their way northward; the ducks awaken the silent marshes with the whistle of their pinions; the snipe come in pairs and wisps to the thawing bogs—all on their way to breeding grounds and summer homes. The tears of April are for them. ”

“ I welcomed the bees as old acquaintances, who, in the duck-shooting of past years, always used to come aboard and bear us company for awhile, rarely alighting, but tacking from stem to stern on a cruise of inspection, till at last, satisfied or disappointed, they went booming out of sight and hearing over marshfuls of blue spikes of pickerel weed and white trinities of arrowhead. I cannot imagine why bees should be attracted to the barrenness of a boat, unless by a curiosity to explore such strange floating islands, though their dry wood promises neither leaf nor bloom. ”

“ More silently than the fisher's craft the skiff of the sportsman now invades the rush-paled thoroughfares. Noiseless as ghosts, paddler and shooter glide along the even path till, alarmed by some keener sense than is given us, up rise wood duck, dusky duck, and teal from their reedy cover. Then the ready gun belches its thunder, and suddenly consternation pervades the marshes. All the world has burst forth in a burning of powder. From end to end, from border to border, the fenny expanse roars with discharge and echo, and nowhere within it is there peace or rest for the sole of a webbed foot. ”

“ He is so harmless to man, that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion [46] —a motion that charms us in the undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs. ”

“ When the sweet acorns, dropping in the frosty night, tempt the coon to a later feast, there is as good sport and primer peltry. In any of the nights wherein this sport may be pursued, the man of lazy mould and contemplative mind loves best the hunt deemed unsuccessful by the more ardent hunters, when the hounds strike the trail of a wandering fox and carry a tide of wild music, flooding and ebbing over valley and hilltop, while the indolent hunter reclines at ease, smoking his pipe and listening, content to let more ambitious hunters stumble over ledges and wallow through swamps. ”

“ June brings skies of purest blue, flecked with drifts of silver, fields and woods in the flush of fresh verdure, with the streams winding among them in crystal loops that invite the angler with promise of more than fish, something that tackle cannot lure nor creel hold.
The air is full of the perfume of locust and grape bloom, the spicy odor of pine and fir, and of pleasant voices—the subdued murmur of the brook's changing babble, the hum of bees, the stir of the breeze, the songs of birds. ”

“ All the living greenness of the forest is utterly consumed—great trees that have stood like towers, defying the centuries, with the ephemeral verdure of the woodland undergrowth; and to mark the place of all this recent majesty and beauty, there is but smouldering ruin and black and ashen waste. Little farms but lately uncovered to the sun out of the wilderness, cosy homesteads but newly builded, are swept away, and with them cherished hopes and perhaps precious lives. What irreparable devastation has been wrought by the camp-fire run wild! ”

“ And then, at the close of the brief white day, the sunset paints a promise and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the sky. The gray clouds kindle with red and yellow fire that burns about their purple hearts in tints of infinite variety, while behind them and the dark blue rampart of the mountains flames the last glory of the departing sun, fading in a tint of tender green to the upper blue. Even the cold snow at our feet flushes with warm color, and the eastern hills [234] blush roseate against the climbing, darkening shadow of the earth. ”

“ Lazily, unexpectantly, the angler casts his line, to be only a convenient perch for the dragonflies; for the fish, save the affrighted minnows and the hungry pickerel, are as lazy as he. To-day he may enjoy to the full the contemplative man's recreation, nor have his contemplations disturbed by any finny folk of the under-water world, while dreamily he floats in sunshine and dappled shadow, so at one with the placid waters and quiet shores that wood duck, sandpiper, and heron scarcely note his unobtrusive presence. ”

“ In November days, as in all others, the woods are beautiful to the lover of nature and to the sportsman who in their love finds the finer flavor of his pastime. Every marking of the gray trunks, each moss-patch and scale of lichen on them, is shown more distinctly now in the intercepted light, and the delicate tracery of the bare branches and their netted shadows on the rumpled carpet of the forest floor, have a beauty as distinctive as the fullness of green or frost-tinted leafage and its silhouette of shade. ”

“ The depressing opposite of the fire that is the warm heart of the camp is the pile of green or rain-soaked fuel that in spite of all coaxing and nursing refuses to yield a cheerful flame. Shavings from the resin-embalmed heart of a dead pine and scrolls of birch bark fail to enkindle it to more than flicker and smoke, while the wet and hungry campers brood forlornly over the cheerless centre of their temporary home, with watery eyes and souls growing sick of camp life. ”

“ Here the brown mink prowls with her lithe cubs, all unworthy yet of the trapper's skill, but tending toward it with growth accelerated by full feasts of pool-impounded minnows. Here, too, the raccoon sets the print of his footsteps on the muddy shores as he stays his stomach with frogs and sharpens his appetite with the hot sauce of Indian turnip while he awaits the setting of his feast in the cornfields. The hounds are more impatient than he for the opening of his midnight revel, and tug at their chains and whimper and bay when they hear his querulous call trembling through the twilight. ”

“ Above the patter and rustle of falling twigs and leaves comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid [191] beat of wings upon the leaf-strewn earth. With heart beating as fast he runs toward the sound, afraid to believe his senses, when he sees a noble grouse fluttering out feebly his last gasp. He cannot be sure that it is not all a dream that may vanish in a breath, till he has the bird safe in his hand, and then he is faint with joy. Was there ever such a shot? ”

“ There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phœbe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter's ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl. ”

“ Are there not grouse and quail and woodcock waiting for us, and while we wait for them can we not content ourselves with indolent angling by shaded streams in these melting days of July rather than contribute the blaze and smoke of gunpowder to the heat and murkiness of midsummer? If we must shed blood let us tap the cool veins of the fishes, not the hot arteries of brooding mother birds and their fledgelings. ”