Bushcraft

“ Never a sound broke the silence that brooded forever—in spite of the wind—over the lake-like, flattened expanse of the estuary save the deep "how-how!" of the buzzard's superb pinions as she climbed slowly into the sublime vault of the heavens; never a sound from bird or from beast. The beast hung on, dumbly dogged, with fangs that met in the flesh beneath the stained feathers; and the blood of the bird mingled with the blood of the beast as it trickled slowly down over his mangled head, upon which one fearful claw of the buzzard was clutched in an awful grip. ”

“ The air is full of aromatic scent from many kinds of shrubs, all growing luxuriantly. Wherever there is an opening you can see as far as the coast, and for nearly a hundred miles to the north and to the south, over the bush you have come through. And seen at a distance, the poorest bush has a peculiar and beautiful colour, quite different from anything we see in Europe, a reddish ground, shaded with the very deepest blue, often without a trace of green. ”

“ It had discovered me in the distance, and, while still invisible to my eyes, had started down to perch upon that giant stub in order to watch me. It was suspicious, and had come to watch me, because somewhere beneath its perch, I felt sure, lay a hollow log, the creature’s den, holding its two eggs or its young. A buzzard has something like a soul.
Marking the direction of the stub, and its probable distance, I waded into the deep underbrush, the buzzard perched against the sky for my guide, and, for my quest, the stump or hollow log that held the creature’s nest. ”

“ Through a charming bush forest, which, though destitute of large trees, was most imposing in the luxuriance and size of its foliage, our long column continued its march. These bush woods, remarkable for the large dimensions of their leaves, predominate everywhere throughout the countries of the Bongo and of the Niam-niam; they contain little of the nature of the steppes, except in parts where there is space left for the grass to spring up in abundance. Districts destitute of trees could not anywhere be found except upon the rocky flats or amidst the damp and marshy lowlands. ”

“ With a murmur, so soft it was almost imperceptible, glided the stream, blue as the heaven it mirrored, between banks now green and gently shelving away, crowned with a growth of oak, hickory, pine, hemlock and savin, now rising into irregular masses of grey rocks, overgrown with moss, with here and there a stunted bush struggling out of a fissure, and seeming to derive a starved existence from the rock itself ”

“ Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that they had ever hatched.
But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. Nature never intended a young buzzard for any eye but his mother’s, and she hates the sight of him. ”

“ Right under the cliff a little spring is hidden; an oak bush greedily spreads out its twigs like great fingers over the water; great silvery bubbles rise trembling from the bottom, covered with fine velvety moss. You fling yourself on the ground, you drink, but you are too lazy to stir. You are in the shade, you drink in the damp fragrance, you take your ease, while the bushes face you, glowing, and, as it were, turning yellow in the sun. ”

“ Those were the halcyon days of the bush. My husband had purchased a very light cedar canoe, to which he attached a keel and a sail; and most of our leisure hours, directly the snows melted, were spent upon the water. These fishing and shooting excursions were delightful.... We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles, and raised imaginary houses on every picturesque spot which we floated past during our aquatic excursions. ”

“ Before we came upon the white patch we encountered a valley the most difficult of passage of any thing I ever yet met with in the shape of bush, its vegetation consisted solely of shrubs advanced to a larger standard that usual in this Country the ground I suppose in consequence of perpetual shade and want of circulation was covered with moss, and on this we were obliged to crawl under the thicket, while sliding down and climbing up the numerous steep descents and acclivities in which the place abounded. ”

“ It proved to be one of those black mountain brooks born of innumerable ice-cold springs, nourished in the shade, and shod, as it were, with thick-matted moss, that every camper-out remembers. The fish are as black as the stream and very wild. They dart from beneath the fringed rocks, or dive with the hook into the dusky depths,—an integral part of the silence and the shadows. The spell of the moss is over all. The fisherman's tread is noiseless, as he leaps from stone to stone and from ledge to ledge along the bed of the stream. ”

“ But still the bush kept its sombreness along all the pellucid ether: the eternally unlighted bush.
What was the good of caring? What was the point of caring? As he looked at the silent, morning bush grey-still in the translucency of the day, a voice spoke quite aloud in him. What was the good of caring, of straining, of stressing? Not the slightest good. The vast lapse of time here—and white men thrown in like snow into dusky wine, to melt away and disappear, but to cool the fever of the dry continent. ”

“ The scenery of the bush and valley is remarkably fine. The bush is much thicker than in Australia. In places it appeared like a solid wall of green. On all sides as you climb up you see huge tree-ferns, many of which are twenty to thirty feet in height. Above these are tall gum trees, whilst beneath them are beds of common bracken.
All was white with frost, and the fronds of the ferns in many places sheltered small pools and ponds of water which were covered with a thick cake of ice. Tree-ferns helped in carboniferous times to make the coal. ”

“ Then one by one, and two by two, and three by three, and finally in whole showers, the little flowers of all the other little bushes fell off, and they looked very much like the little bush of which I am telling you, so that the little bush no longer felt sad.
All summer long all the little bushes grew and grew and grew. The birds came and built their nests among them. Peter Rabbit and his brothers and sisters scampered under them. The butterflies flew over them.
By and by came the fall, and with the fall came Jack Frost. ”

“ Every creek starts in a bog or marsh, and good water can be had only by excavating.
What a charm lurks about those springs that are found near the tops of mountains, so small that they get lost amid the rocks and debris and never reach the valley, and so cold that they make the throat ache! Every hunter and mountain-climber can tell you of such, usually on the last rise before the summit is cleared. It is eminently the hunter's spring. ”

“ But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us, at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate ivy-leafed toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. ”

“ Under these impressions men learn to delight in exploring the bush, and when they meet, as they often do, with sweet spots, on which Nature has secretly lavished her choicest gifts, most thoroughly do they enjoy, most devotedly do they admire, their beauty. In travelling some miles to the northward of Perth, a town on the Swan River, [Pg 19] Captain Grey fell in with a charming scene, which he thus describes: “Our” station, “this night, had a beauty about it, which would have made any one, possessed with the least enthusiasm, fall in love with a bush life. ”

“ The bushes are slender, but they grow tall without climbing against the wall, and sway to and fro in the wind with a grace of youth and an inexpressible charm of beauty. How many lovers must have picked them on Sunday evenings, in all the bygone years, and carried them along the roads or by the pasture footpaths, hiding them clumsily under their Sunday coats if they caught sight of any one coming. ”

“ All around us was bush—a dense jungle of shrubs and trees. The conical hill on which we stood was thickly clothed, and all round, over the steep, rough ranges, the [Pg 238] abrupt ravines and gullies, with their brawling streams, was spread the one variegated mantle of gorgeous foliage.
Since then I have seen certain of the far-famed forests of the tropics, but I must candidly say that the scenery they offer is, on the whole, far less striking and beautiful than that of the bush of Northern New Zealand. The colouring is not so good; in the mass, it is not so lustrous, nor so varied. ”

“ Every dwarfed, stunted, gnarled bush, had the trunk, limbs, twigs, and gray, withered foliage, all in miniature, of some tree, hapless but sturdy, that has had a weatherbeaten struggle for life on a storm-threshed crag by the shore, or on a granite side of a mountain, with short allowance of soil to eat and water to drink. ”

“ In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind ”

“ The light bush is just as dense a wood of small trees, twenty to fifty feet in height, shrubs, creepers and undergrowth, as can well be conceived of. Where the thicket is thinner the trees are larger, and the smaller they are the denser the covert. If you wish to journey through this light bush, where there is no semblance of a track, it will take you perhaps two hours to make a single mile, so thick is it. ”

“ As these people proved not to be the Indians we wanted, after saluting him we galloped on, and crossing the valley, where we had to jump our horses over a brook, ascended the opposite hill. A new growth of bush growing 16 feet high, with long switches like osiers, forced itself unpleasantly on our attention, as, when riding fast, they sprang back into one’s face in the most painfully annoying manner. ”

“ Nicolls and Eglington, in their ‘Sportsman in South Africa,’ inform us that at the present time the Bushbuck is still plentiful in all the maritime divisions of the Cape Colony and Natal, wherever there are any considerable belts of thick bush. It is not usual to find more than a pair of adults together, and the animals seldom emerge from the impenetrable bush except at night-time, when they come out into the open glades to feed. ”

“ The bushes overhead scarcely rustle in the light-breathing air that comes fitfully across the land, and the long grass nods dreamily on the margin of the pool below. There rests a calm stillness on all the nearer landscape, and the distant ground blends away into the shades of evening. ”

“ The sense of one’s insignificance is the first lesson of travel in the bush. In the beginning the discovery amuses the adventurer. Later, he resents the implied superiority of the fixed and nerveless plants which barricade his progress. In the end, he hates the bush as though it were a sentient being. Yet the component parts of the bush are familiar to all at home: we coddle them in our gardens, and nurse them tenderly in our glass-houses. But in the Amazons they unite to form a horrible, a most evil-disposed enemy. ”

“ They were in every good-sized bush, in the meer-cat burrows that honeycombed the hollows, coiled round the tufts of toa grass—in fact, they swarmed.
We had hoped to reach the big pan by nightfall, as there was a big krantz there where we could shelter; but it became evident that we could not do so, and we turned aside towards a small pan where a few bushes gave promise of a fire at least, for it became evident that we were in for rain again. ”

“ And then, one day while I lay in my hiding, I saw the mother heron slide swiftly down from the nest, make a sharp wheel over the lake, and plunge into the fringe of berry bushes on the shore after some animal that her keen eyes had caught moving. There was a swift rustling in the bushes, a blow of her wing to head off a runaway, two or three lightning thrusts of her javelin beak; then she rose heavily, taking a leveret with her ”

“ That harvest was the happiest we ever spent in the bush. We had enough of the common necessaries of life. A spirit of peace and harmony pervaded our little dwelling, for the most affectionate attachment existed among its members. We were not troubled with servants, for the good old Jenny we regarded as an humble friend, and were freed, by that circumstance, from many of the cares and vexations of a bush life. Our evening excursions on the lake were doubly enjoyed after the labours of the day, and night brought us calm and healthful repose. ”

“ Such is the way of the buzzard—that shifting black question mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. ”