Winthrop Packard

“ With a flirt of his tail and a flip of his wings the catbird was through the thicket and out on the other side like a gray flash, scolding away at the top of his voice and seeming to shout as the crow had, “There’s a man in the wood! There’s a man in the wood! Look out for him!”
The crimson and gold of the dawn had softened and diffused into diaphanous mother-of-pearl mists of early day. The June morning miracle was complete and it was high time I allowed the oven bird to come back and be assured that her nest and eggs were safe. ”

“ Only the bog cranberry may hold its own in any quantity against the throttling squeeze of those grass roots. Where these grow is the high sea of the bog, its waves rising and falling in the free winds. Yet, just as pickerel weed and water-lily give way before the advance of the marsh grass, so it in turn falls on the landward side before the advancing hosts of the swamp.
A steady phalanx of swamp cedars pushes its foothold farther and farther out upon it, year by year, scouting with button bush and black alder and holding every inch that they obtain for it. ”

“ So, when my lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back a little, swelled his white throat and whistled, round and clear, I went out to meet him, scanning the sky meanwhile for a change of weather. The sky of the day before had been like a brass bowl shut down over the gasping land. Shrubs of the upland hung their leaves piteously, the tougher herbs wilted, and the tenderer ones dried up and died. ”

“ In the other, however, the fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop, the red squirrel builds his nest in the cedar, and the partridge leads her young brood among the blackberry bushes of an early morning.
The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful
eye on the neighboring chicken coop
The azalea sends out its white fragrance from the one lane, and never a buttercup, even, nods to the wind in the other; yet you love the smooth shorn one best. ”

“ In my pasture world it grows in one place only,—along the shallow edges of the bogs of Ponkapoag Pond. I think no other pond or stream in this immediate region has it, and so sweetly shy is it that you may pass it year after year without noting its existence. It waits until the summer has marked its meridian before it ventures to send up its dainty little crêpe de chine petals, each fairy-like bloom appearing for one day only in the very throb of the mottled olive and bronze heart, which is a leaf. ”

“ I do not find the odor of the pasture milkweed speaking thus to any inner sense. It is just a gentle, lovable, stay-at-home smell that surely does not float farther than the pasture bars. Yet of all the plants that have bloomed within my world of garden and pasture this summer it has been by far the most popular among insects. It is not that it is the most attractive to the eye, in any of its forms, for there are many flowers of colors more vivid and to be seen farther, as well as of much stronger scent. ”

“ The false dawn reddened and vanished, the gray of the real dawn was streaked and then flushed with rosy light shot through with gold, and a thousand voices of jubilee rang from treetop to treetop the whole pasture through and far out into the wood beyond, and still I waited, stretched motionless. A man might have thought me dead, the victim of some midnight tragedy, but the denizens of the pasture are wiser in their own province than that. ”

“ The wind went down with the sun, and the willow and maple leaves were green again for a little before they faded into the growing purple of the dusk, but with every faint sigh of the failing breeze the poplars loomed white again with a radiant ghostliness which seemed to people the rustling dusk with softly phosphorescent spooks. You will see these other-world visitors to the pond shore only on such a night when the wind is right. ”

“ The catbird is clever but, like many clever people, he is lazy.
Over to the other side of the pasture, a mile from the lane as the crow flies, is a swamp which is part of the pasture, indeed, but a part of the wilderness beyond, also. It was on the edge of this that I had chosen to meet the dawn, picking my way to it through the darkness in part by scent, for the swamp has a musky fragrance of its own, which it sends far on the night air. ”

“ Under your foot the sweet-fern breathes a resin that is “like pious incense from a censer old,” the bayberry [Pg 34] sniffs of the wax of altar candles lighted at high mass in fairy land, and over by the brook the sweet-gale gives a finer fragrance even than these. There are but three members of this family,—the Myrica or Sweet-Gale family,—yet it is one that the pasture could least afford to miss. The fragrance of their spirits descends like a benediction on all about them, and I have a fancy that it is steadily influencing the lives of the other pasture folk. ”

“ The ferns and the witch-hazel are themselves mysterious and promoters of mystery, and it is hard to tell which leads in waywardness and subornation of sorcery. The ferns are the lingering representatives of an elder world,—a world that was old before the first pine dropped its cones or the leaves of the first deciduous tree fell on the first greensward. Their ways are not the ways of modern plant life.
Take the cinnamon fern, for instance, one of the commonest of our woods. It grows up each spring like a tender and succulent herb, to wither and die down in the fall as the grass does. ”

“ Sometimes he jumps a half-inch high and skitters along the surface as a boy skips a stone; again he poises, lowers his body till it all but rests on the water, then raises it till he is high on four stilts, and all the time not even his toes are wet.
Entering the cove in mid-afternoon you might think the swooning heat had left it no life awake other than the water insects and the dragon-flies that race them in airship fashion above. Yet you have but to ground your canoe on a sedgy shallow, sit motionless, and wait. ”

“ Indeed, one of our most splendid butterflies is the Anosia plexippus, otherwise known as the milkweed butterfly, rightly named also the monarch. Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their black veins. Every bird knows him too and lets him alone. On the first median nervule of the hind wings of the butterfly is a scent bag whence he dispenses an odor so disagreeable to the bird who would eat him that he goes free, and is not afterward troubled. ”

“ It bounds with fervent flashes of elasticity from the glossy leaves of the bushes that have waded out farthest and made islands of themselves. The high-bush blueberries are the most daring of all, and stand in the largest clumps farthest out. These, late in May with an off-shore wind, shower the whole surface of the water with their fallen corollas. More than once have I seen the cove white with them on Memorial Day, as if the bushes, standing with [Pg 51] bowed heads, strewed the waves with memorial flowers for the pasture people who have died at sea. ”

“ On such days looking across the pond toward wind and sun there is a peculiar blink in the light reflected from the surface of the waves which you do not see if fair weather is ahead of you. The pale sky seems to reflect blackly in the water. Down to leeward the shore poplars stand silvery white, a quivering, flashing silver under the lash of the wind. The swamp maples lose their green and turn pale and the willows lighten up in color. ”

“ A butterfly, especially a large butterfly, rarely bothers with these low-growing herbs, though each has its own delicious fragrance—and a butterfly’s scent is keen. So my black white admiral alternately danced and soared on down through the richly perfumed areas of the wood while I plunged eagerly after, glissading the needle-carpeted slope, making station from trunk to trunk lest a too headlong flight plunge me to oblivion in what I knew was at the foot of the hill. ”

“ The pasture birds are waking up their preludes of evensong, and the sun across the cove to the west is glorifying all the quivering canopy of green leaves through which it shines with a luminous, diaphanous quality which makes magic all along that side of the cove. ”

“ At the very bottom of the glen it forms a shallow pool where brook magic and witch-hazel glamour shall show you many midsummer fantasies if you will but look for them.
It was in the glen that I found the first real relief from the heat of midday. The grasses of the sun-parched pasture had crisped under foot and broken off, so dry were they, all the way down to the sweet-flag meadow. Here the brook [Pg 118] water keeps all growing things lush and green, but the glare of the sun is only the more intense. ”

“ However, not to be a water-lily is not so bad if one may be classed with the fringed and closed gentians which are to bloom later on the landward edges of the bog. As the little blossom fades at nightfall, its short stalk curls back beneath the water to ripen the seeds there, hung just beneath the leaf from a peculiar bulb-like nodule just an inch or so down on the petiole. ”

“ Because you are wise with the remembered wisdom of boyhood, you have left at home the expensive rod and reel. Just back from the swamp edge is a birch jungle where young trees stand as thick as canes in a Cuban brake. Here you find your pole; as large as your thumb at the butt, tapering, straight, clean and strong, fifteen feet to the tip. Cut it and trim the limbs from it and bend to it your ten feet of stout line at the end of which is a hook whose curve is as big as that of your little finger nail. ”

“ It wells up from the earth instead, for when the crimson is gone the sky is still black with shadows, while the pasture grows distinct in a gray outline wherein is no color.
A stillness of expectation broods all things,—a stillness so intense that the first rain-drop sounds like a pistol-shot as it strikes a leaf near you. ”

“ In the rain the fountain of youth wells up in the cup of every flower that waits in the soft pasture grasses and the grasses themselves drink eagerly. The cedars deck themselves in these clear pearls, wearing garments fringed with them and ropes and necklaces without number, and letting their prim propriety be so softened that they are no longer firm and erect but take on curves of soft roundness that should go with pearl-embroidered garments. ”

“ All summer long their long, red wings bear them bravely from one clump of milkweed to another. They sip the honey which each floret of the umbels holds forth, the sticky mass the size of a pinhead. They lay their eggs upon its leaves and the black and yellow caterpillars hatch and feed there. Then they hang in a green and gold chrysalis from a nearby twig till the imago, the perfect butterfly, bursts its bonds and sails away to find more milkweed. ”

“ In such dusk stars do not twinkle, they blink, and that is a sign of rain which all the pasture people that have eyes know well.
Those that have ears and no eyes may know what sort of a night it is as well, for there is some quality in such an atmosphere which makes sounds carry far. The rap of a paddle on a canoe seat a mile away up the pond sounds right in your ear. A train roaring through the wood three miles distant seems so near that you involuntarily look around lest it be coming behind and run over you. ”

“ For in the glen cool waters crisp over cold stones and the breeze sighs up stream and fans you as you sit on the brink of the pool and lean your head against the ledge from whose crannies drip the fairy fronds of the rock fern.
These are but little fellows of our [Pg 119] fern world, and the magic which distills from their fern seed is no doubt less potent than that from greater ferns, but added to the witch-hazel glamour it makes brook magic which will initiate you into many mysteries of the pasture world if you are but patient. ”

“ Perhaps all this fine fragrance is but the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that this is true of all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. ”

“ Sometimes in this annual flight the monarchs [Pg 164] pass the sandy stretches of the New Jersey coast in swarms that, stopping at nightfall for rest, refoliate with their folded wings the shrubs left bare by the autumn gales.
It may be that, like the birds, the knowledge of the route they must follow is bred in the marrow of their butterfly bones by the constant use of a million generations. It may be that they simply drift away from the cool wind from the North toward the Southern sun that shines so serenely in the bright autumn days. ”

“ The English sparrow will build his nest in any impossible place to which he takes a fancy, but he greatly prefers, in choosing a new site, one that has a convenient perch close by the entrance. So these undesirable citizens decided that [Pg 177] they did not care for my bird boxes and let them alone, much to my delight. Then came the bluebirds, bringing to our cold, raw spring their flashes of blue like bits of a heaven that is fairer than ours, a blue that is hope and dreams of happiness and all things noble yet gentle. ”

“ The muskrats breed in the bog, the bittern had his grassy nest there, and a myriad blackbirds have made the low bushes vocal with their cheery whistles all summer. They are flocking now, getting the young birds in training for the long flight south, but they still hang about the bog and they still whistle merrily. Surely it is not environment that makes temperament. ”