Woodwind

“ CHAPTER II. “Now forced aloft, bright bounding through the air Moves the bleak ice, and sheds a dazzling glare; The torn foundations on the surface ride, And wrecks of winter load the downward tide.”
After travelling a short distance in the road, Woodburn and his companions halted, put on their snow-shoes, and, turning out to the left into the woods, commenced, with the long, loping step peculiar to the racket-shod woodsman, their march over the surface of the untrodden snow. ”

“ Look again up the wind toward the gray of the hard-wood forest and you shall find the falling hosts almost as gray as the wood which they half blot out. But if you would see black snow, you have but to lift your eyes to the leaden gray sky out of which, as you see them from below, flakes float in black blots that erase themselves only when they lie at your feet. In open wells in the deep wood you can see this still more definitely as you look up, a black snow falling all about you, to be changed to spotless white by some miracle of contact with the earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is over on the oak hillside where the red and black oaks still hold resolutely to their dried leaves that the cry of the snow will most astonish you. It is not at all the rustle of these oak leaves in a wind. It is an outcry, an uproar, that drowns any other sound that might be in the wood. It is impossible to distinguish voices or words. It is as if ten thousand of the little people of the wood and field and sky had suddenly come together in great excitement over something and{141} were shouting all up and down the gamut of goblin emotion. ”

“ The great woods were covered deep with their pure white mantle; not a fleck, not a track soiled its even whiteness; for the last soft flakes were lingering in the air, and fox and grouse and hare and lucivee were still keeping the storm truce, hidden deep in their coverts. Every fir and spruce and hemlock had gone to building fairy grottoes as the snow packed their lower branches, under which all sorts of wonders and beauties might be hidden, to say nothing of the wild things for whom Nature had been building innumerable tents of white and green as they slept. ”

“ My Woodland Study in Summer. It is an open glade in the middle of a pine-wood. Not all green and level is this glade, with trees standing round in a circle, like the clearings in forests of the Far West, which I used to read of in the novels of Cooper and that so bewitched me when a boy. No, for judging from the rough and rutty pathway that leads up to it, and from the numerous banks and hillocks in it, there can be no doubt that, in far distant days of the past, gravel must have been dug and carted hence.
The wood itself—glade and all—stands on a hill. ”

“ Ah, there is magic in the pine forests! One hears untranslatable harmonies; one sees strange subtleties of colour, and the fragrance is the complement of both. Frances loved the pine glooms. She would sometimes spend hours within the shadowy aisles, an ascetic, black-robed figure, with pale, uplifted face, drawn back, it would seem, by the weight of hair; but there was nothing ascetic in her glowing eyes and smiling mouth as she listened to the sea-music the wind sang to the pines, and inhaled the pine fragrance with a rapture which no flower scents could give her ”

“ Again, in the same woods you find trees that are made up of several boles united near the ground, and spreading in easy curves at the sides in a plane parallel to the axis of the mountain, with the elegant tassels hung in charming order between them the whole making a perfect harp, ranged across the main wind-lines just where they may be most effective in the grand storm harmonies. ”

“ All these woods there are for rambles, flushed in the spring with wood-anemones and wood-sorrel, set in the green moss and the greener heather of the bilberry. Nowhere, too, in the Forest, than in these woods, have I seen more lovely sunsets. Through some deep-cut oriel of the trees have I watched the sun begin to sink, each moment burning brighter, and then suddenly its great brand of fire would fall, reddening each tree trunk, and crimson billows of clouds come rolling eastward. ”

“ How the wind sighs in the naked hedges, with a louder whisper where the thick-leaved holly-trees are set! One is tempted to linger under the soft shelter of the wood, where the air is rich with the fragrance of the undergrowth, and the stillness gives a feeling of pleasant security by contrast with the roar and sough of the storm in the tree-tops far above. ”

“ Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. ”

“ As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled [248] odors of the many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of the axe,—fiddle, bass-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all somehow in tune. ”

“ A stile to be crossed at its edge, where a little stream, unseen, sways the stiff exuberant angelica that grows from it, gives the word to pause, and with a rush the silence and the solitude fill the brain. The wood is of uncounted age; the ground on which it stands is more ancient than the surrounding fields, for it rises and falls stormily, with huge boulders here and there; not a path intrudes upon it; the undergrowth is impenetrable to all but fox and bird and this cool red light about the trunks of the trees. ”

“ But of the seasons autumn is the most pleasant for a woodland ramble. The depth of gloom, the silence, the wild cries that are heard flitting to and fro; the falling leaves already rustling to the tread, and strewing the forest walk, render it particularly pleasant. ”

“ By-and-by the bog ends and the path marks the dividing line between the bulrushes, marsh grass, bog-hobble wickets, and mingled débris of last summer’s thorough wort, and joepye weed, and marsh St. John’s-wort on the one hand, and the soft pinky grays of the wood on the other.
The climbing sun shines in here fervently, and the clear waters lap on the sand and croon among the water weeds with all the semblance of summer. ”

“ It awakes the forest. When the voice of the woodpecker is heard it is the hour for Nature to celebrate her own Ides of March. Elsewhere the song-thrush and the skylark have been the first heralds. Even in the woods the missel-thrush may have flung a sudden storm of song out on the cold tides of the wind swaying the elm-tops like dusky airweed of the upper ocean. But, in the glades themselves, in the listening coverts, it is the call of the green woodpecker that has awakened the dreaming forest. ”

“ In the embracing light and warmth, warm and dry at last, with weary legs propped up in front of them, and a suggestive clink of plates being arranged on the table behind, it seemed to the storm-driven animals, now in safe anchorage, that the cold and trackless Wild Wood just left outside was miles and miles away, and all that they had suffered in it a half-forgotten dream. ”

“ And there is no sound in Nature quite so wonderful as that faint spiritual singing of pine trees, that gentle whirring of a forest when soft airs are moving—that säuseln, susurrement, whispering. Midway in the wood, of course, a pine forest shouting in a free wind is simply the sea shouting on a sandy shore; close the eyes, and it is impossible to tell the difference; it is tumbling surf, mellowed by distance, tossing, instead of spray, the flying odours of their needles’ frankincense. ”

“ All the while, as you fish, the great dark woods stand close about you, silent, listening. The air is full of scents and odors that steal abroad only by night, while the air is dew-laden. Strange cries, calls, squeaks, rustlings run along the hillside, or float in from the water, or drop down from the air overhead, to make you guess and wonder what wood folk are abroad at such unseemly hours, and what they are about. So that it is good to fish by night, as well as by day, and go home with heart and head full, even though your creel be empty. ”

“ The trees grew less thickly, the ground more broken, strewn with flinty bowlders. Through the clear moonlight could be seen distant hills rising darkly, with their covering of trees, or bleak and bare, their rocky summits scarce affording subsistence for a scant growth of shriveled, prematurely-growing grass.
True to his latter calculation, the Wood King reached the gorge at a point only a few steps from the vine-wreathed elm tree, and then one stroke of his keen knife severed the pendent grape-vine close to its root. ”

“ The moon rose about ten, and lifted her perfect orb, without a mist or a cloud, over the shoulder of the mountain which turns the outlet of the ravine. The fine and majestic wood, through which winds the narrow footpath to the Falls, let in the white light in silvery and broken masses—sometimes sliding a long argent line down the dark body of a pine, sometimes pouring in upon the horizontal branches of the hemlock, like an open hand sprinkled with snow ”

“ It is a very blaze of sunshine that fills the open spaces of the wood. The tall ash saplings that join hands across the path, now almost lost among the briar sprays, the trailing woodbine, and the long arms of wandering bryony, sway slowly in the hot and heavy air. But the stir of the leaves that flutter lightly overhead, their green lacework all dark against the summer sky, is a restful, soothing sound. ”

“ Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind, which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days, for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into wood roads. ”

“ Are spread o'er land and sea - And would'st thou hew it down?
In all their gush-ing joy Here, too, my sis - ters played.
Here shall the wild-bird sing, And still thy branch-es bend.
'Twas my fore - fa - ther's hand That placed it near his cot;
Wood- man, for - bear thy stroke. Cut not its earth - bound ties!
My mother kissed me here; My fa - ther press'd my hand—
Old tree, the storm still brave! And, wood - man, leave the spot;
Then, wood-man, let it stand, Thy axe shall harm it not. ”

“ The trees have each their own voice—a degree of flexibility or length of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted flowers. ”

“ The air is full of the sound of streams—of the roar of moorland torrents, of the deeper voice of the river plunging through the wooded gorge below. The stems of the tall birches in the wood below the house, still wet with last night's rain, shine as if they were sheathed in silver, and their branches glitter as if every twig were hung with silver beads—as, indeed, they are, the silver of the clinging raindrops. ”

“ Around the base is a circular ring of dark rich mold which was once the bark on the stump. This has in every case fallen off and crumbled to humus, leaving the heart-wood exposed. Mosses gray and green cling to this and cover it, and because it retains its shape you might almost think it sound, but a kick or a stab with your walking-stick will prove{31} the opposite. It is but punk, standing in the breathless, windless silence of the wood, mute monument to a glory that is departed, waiting itself to pass on at a touch. ”

“ At the beginning of the ascent, passed through gateways and sheds among picturesque old buildings with overhanging flat roofs—vines hanging from the walls, with the wildness of brambles or the untrained woodbine. The ascent from the beginning is exceedingly steep and without intermission to the very summit. Vines spreading from tree to tree, resting upon walls, or clinging to wooden poles, they creep up the steep sides of the hill, no boundary line between them and the wild growth of the mountain, with which, at last, they are blended till no trace of cultivation appears. ”

“ Yet these tangled tips with those already frozen firmly to the trees, and made a wonderful snow growth the whole woodland through. The next morning it hung there untouched in the crystal stillness and as the{172} woodland people waked they might well have rubbed their eyes, for they had found a new world.
It was a mystical white world that had crowded in and mocked the slender growth of all trees and shrubs with swollen facsimiles in white. The northerly side of tree-trunks, large or small, showed no longer gray bark or brown, rough or smooth. ”