Birds and Poets

J >> John Burroughs >> Birds and Poets

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A friend of mine, a pastoral philosopher, whom I have consulted in
regard to the master cow, thinks it is seldom the case that one
rules all the herd, if it number many, but that there is often one
that will rule nearly all. "Curiously enough," he says, "a case
like this will often occur: No. 1 will whip No. 2; No. 2 whips No.
3; and No. 3 whips No. 1; so around in a circle. This is not a
mistake; it is often the case. I remember," he continued, "we once
had feeding out of a large bin in the centre of the yard six cows
who mastered right through in succession from No. 1 to No. 6;
_but_ No. 6 _paid off the score by whipping No. 1._ I often watched
them when they were all trying to feed out of the box, and of
course trying, dog-in-the-manger fashion, each to prevent any other
she could. They would often get in the order to do it very
systematically, since they could keep rotating about the box till
the chain happened to get broken somewhere, when there would be
confusion. Their mastership, you know, like that between nations,
is constantly changing. There are always Napoleons who hold their
own through many vicissitudes; but the ordinary cow is continually
liable to lose her foothold. Some cow she has always despised, and
has often sent tossing across the yard at her horns' ends, some
pleasant morning will return the compliment and pay off old
scores."

But my own observation has been that, in herds in which there have
been no important changes for several years, the question of might
gets pretty well settled, and some one cow becomes the acknowledged
ruler.

The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or
third rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those
beneath her, or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight
place. If such a one can get loose in the stable, she is quite
certain to do mischief. She delights to pause in the open bars and
turn and keep those behind her at bay till she sees a pair of
threatening horns pressing toward her, when she quickly passes on.
As one cow masters all, so there is one cow that is mastered by
all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the head and the tail.
Between them are all grades of authority, with none so poor but
hath some poorer to do her reverence.

The cow has evidently come down to us from a wild or semi-wild
state; perhaps is a descendant of those wild, shaggy cattle of
which a small band is still preserved in some nobleman's park in
Scotland. Cuvier seems to have been of this opinion. One of the
ways in which her wild instincts still crop out is the disposition
she shows in spring to hide her calf,--a common practice among the
wild herds. Her wild nature would be likely to come to the surface
at this crisis if ever; and I have known cows that practiced great
secrecy in dropping their calves. As their time approached, they
grew restless, a wild and excited look was upon them; and if left
free, they generally set out for the woods, or for some other
secluded spot. After the calf is several hours old, and has got
upon its feet and had its first meal, the dam by some sign commands
it to lie down and remain quiet while she goes forth to feed. If
the calf is approached at such time, it plays "possum," pretends to
be dead or asleep, till, on finding this ruse does not succeed, it
mounts to its feet, bleats loudly and fiercely, and charges
desperately upon the intruder. But it recovers from this wild scare
in a little while, and never shows signs of it again.

The habit of the cow, also, in eating the placenta, looks to me
like a vestige of her former wild instincts,--the instinct to
remove everything that would give the wild beasts a clew or a
scent, and so attract them to her helpless young.

How wise and sagacious the cows become that run upon the street, or
pick their living along the highway! The mystery of gates and bars
is at last solved to them. They ponder over them by night, they
lurk about them by day, till they acquire a new sense,--till they
become _en rapport_ with them and know when they are open and
unguarded. The garden gate, if it open into the highway at any
point, is never out of the mind of these roadsters, or out of their
calculations. They calculate upon the chances of its being left
open a certain number of times in the season; and if it be but
once, and only for five minutes, your cabbage and sweet corn
suffer. What villager, or countryman either, has not been awakened
at night by the squeaking and crunching of those piratical jaws
under the window, or in the direction of the vegetable patch? I
have had the cows, after they had eaten up my garden, break into
the stable where my own milcher was tied, and gore her and devour
her meal. Yes, life presents but one absorbing problem to the
street cow, and that is how to get into your garden. She catches
glimpses of it over the fence or through the pickets, and her
imagination or her epigastrium is inflamed. When the spot is
surrounded by a high board fence, I think I have seen her peeping
at the cabbages through a knothole. At last she learns to open the
gate. It is a great triumph of bovine wit. She does it with her
horn or her nose, or may be with her ever-ready tongue. I doubt if
she has ever yet penetrated the mystery of the newer patent
fastenings; but the old-fashioned thumb-latch she can see through,
give her time enough.

A large, lank, muley or polled cow used to annoy me in this way
when I was a dweller in a certain pastoral city. I more than half
suspected she was turned in by some one; so one day I watched.
Presently I heard the gate-latch rattle; the gate swung open, and
in walked the old buffalo. On seeing me she turned and ran like a
horse. I then fastened the gate on the inside and watched again.
After long waiting the old cow came quickly round the corner and
approached the gate. She lifted the latch with her nose. Then, as
the gate did not move, she lifted it again and again. Then she
gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking the hint, she
butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it rattled
again. At this juncture I emerged from my hiding-place, when the
old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she
was trespassing, and she had learned that there were usually some
swift penalties attached to this pastime.

I have owned but three cows and loved but one. That was the first
one, Chloe, a bright red, curly-pated, golden-skinned Devonshire
cow, that an ocean steamer landed for me upon the banks of the
Potomac one bright May Day many clover summers ago. She came from
the north, from the pastoral regions of the Catskills, to graze
upon the broad commons of the national capital. I was then the
fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an acre of ground
attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol.
Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my rural
and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and
cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps
that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when
that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the
evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in
the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature
farm, redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and
stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of
chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the
weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and
iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and the high,
vacant mahogany desk of a government clerk. In that ancient
inclosure I took an earth bath twice a day. I planted myself as
deep in the soil as I could, to restore the normal tone and
freshness of my system, impaired by the above-mentioned government
mahogany. I have found there is nothing like the earth to draw the
various social distempers out of one. The blue devils take flight
at once if they see you mean to bury them and make compost of them.
Emerson intimates that the scholar had better not try to have two
gardens; but I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and red-
root and twitch-grass without in some way getting rid of many weeds
and fungi, unwholesome growths, that a petty indoor life is forever
fostering in my moral and intellectual nature.

But the finishing touch was not given till Chloe came. She was the
jewel for which this homely setting waited. My agriculture had some
object then. The old gate never opened with such alacrity as when
she paused before it. How we waited for her coming! Should I send
Drewer, the colored patriarch, for her? No; the master of the house
himself should receive Juno at the capital.

"One cask for you," said the clerk, referring to the steamer bill
of lading.

"Then I hope it's a cask of milk," I said. "I expected a cow."

"One cask, it says here."

"Well, let's see it; I'll warrant it has horns and is tied by a
rope;" which proved to be the case, for there stood the only object
that bore my name, chewing its cud, on the forward deck. How she
liked the voyage I could not find out; but she seemed to relish so
much the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet once more, that
she led me a lively step all the way home. She cut capers in front
of the White House, and tried twice to wind me up in the rope as we
passed the Treasury. She kicked up her heels on the broad avenue,
and became very coltish as she came under the walls of the Capitol.
But that night the long-vacant stall in the old stable was filled,
and the next morning the coffee had met with a change of heart. I
had to go out twice with the lantern and survey my treasure before
I went to bed. Did she not come from the delectable mountains, and
did I not have a sort of filial regard for her as toward my foster-
mother?

This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-
going Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had
come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with
distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city.
There was a charm of cattle in the street and upon the commons;
goats cropped your rosebushes through the pickets, and nooned upon
your front porch; and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your
garden fence, or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the
nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden
age. Your cow, your goat, your pig, led vagrant, wandering lives,
and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees,
which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and
came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled
yourself where she went or how far she roamed.

Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to
go with her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and
then I left her to her own wit, which never failed her. What
adventures she had, what acquaintances she made, how far she
wandered, I never knew. I never came across her in my walks or
rambles. Indeed, on several occasions I thought I would look her up
and see her feeding in national pastures, but I never could find
her. There were plenty of cows, but they were all strangers. But
punctually, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, her
white horns would be seen tossing above the gate and her impatient
low be heard. Sometimes, when I turned her forth in the morning,
she would pause and apparently consider which way she would go.
Should she go toward Kendall Green to-day, or follow the Tiber, or
over by the Big Spring, or out around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom
reached a conclusion till she had stretched forth her neck and
blown a blast on her trumpet that awoke the echoes in the very
lantern on the dome of the Capitol. Then, after one or two licks,
she would disappear around the corner. Later in the season, when
the grass was parched or poor on the commons, and the corn and
cabbage tempting in the garden, Chloe was loath to depart in the
morning, and her deliberations were longer than ever, and very
often I had to aid her in coming to a decision.

For two summers she was a wellspring of pleasure and profit in my
farm of one acre, when, in an evil moment, I resolved to part with
her and try another. In an evil moment I say, for from that time my
luck in cattle left me. The goddess never forgave me the execution
of that rash and cruel resolve.

The day is indelibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe
for sale in the public market-place. It was in November, a bright,
dreamy, Indian summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with
guilt and remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with
her pets to sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next
me. We condoled with each other; we bewailed the fate of our
darlings together; we berated in chorus the white-aproned but
blood-stained fraternity who prowled about us. When she went away
for a moment I minded the pigs, and when I strolled about she
minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was of those carnal
marketmen! How she would shrink away from them! When they put out a
hand to feel her condition she would "scrooch" down her back, or
bend this way or that, as if the hand were a branding-iron. So long
as I stood by her head she felt safe--deluded creature!--and chewed
the cud of sweet content; but the moment I left her side she seemed
filled with apprehension, and followed me with her eyes, lowing
softly and entreatingly till I returned.

At last the money was counted out for her, and her rope surrendered
to the hand of another. How that last look of alarm and
incredulity, which I caught as I turned for a parting glance, went
to my heart!

Her stall was soon filled, or partly filled, and this time with a
native,--a specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of
Virginia; a slender, furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on
cowhood, that in spite of my best efforts would wear a pinched and
hungry look. She evidently inherited a humped back. It was a family
trait, and evidence of the purity of her blood. For the native
blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of
cornstalks in the open air during those bleak and windy winters,
and roaming over those parched fields in summer, has come to have
some marked features. For one thing, her pedal extremities seem
lengthened; for another, her udder does not impede her traveling;
for a third, her backbone inclines strongly to the curve; then, she
despiseth hay. This last is a sure test. Offer a thorough-bred
Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in your face; but rattle the
husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her friend.

The new-comer even declined corn-meal at first. She eyed it
furtively, then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered
that it bore some relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to
eagerly.

I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate
brute I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her
affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him,
lowing in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out
of her sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her
meal, and entirely neglecting her beloved husks. Often in the
middle of the night she would set up that sonorous lamentation, and
continue it till sleep was chased from every eye in the household.
This generally had the effect of bringing the object of her
affection before her, but in a mood anything but filial or
comforting. Still, at such times a kick seemed a comfort to her,
and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the instrument of
my midnight wrath.

But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being
tied with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary
absence, she got her head into the meal-barrel, and stopped not
till she had devoured nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The
singularly placid and benevolent look that beamed from the meal-
besmeared face when I discovered her was something to be
remembered. For the first time, also, her spinal column came near
assuming a horizontal line.
But the grist proved too much for her frail mill, and her demise
took place on the third day, not of course without some attempt to
relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such
emergencies, everything I "could think of," and everything my
neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which
I obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I
imagined her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden
mass which no physic could penetrate or enliven.

Thus ended my second venture in live-stock. My third, which
followed sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more
of a success. This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they
call the "muley" down South,--a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow,
with a fine udder, that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for
ninety dollars. "Pag like a dish rack (rag)," said he, pointing to
her udder after she had been milked. "You vill come pack and gif me
the udder ten tollar" (for he had demanded an even hundred), he
continued, "after you have had her a gouple of days." True, I felt
like returning to him after a "gouple of days," but not to pay the
other ten dollars. The cow proved to be as blind as a bat, though
capable of counterfeiting the act of seeing to perfection. For did
she not lift up her head and follow with her eyes a dog that scaled
the fence and ran through the other end of the lot, and the next
moment dash my hopes thus raised by trying to walk over a locust-
tree thirty feet high? And when I set the bucket before her
containing her first mess of meal, she missed it by several inches,
and her nose brought up against the ground. Was it a kind of far-
sightedness and near blindness? That was it, I think; she had
genius, but not talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was
quite oblivious to the man immediately in her front. Her eyes were
telescopic and required a long range.

As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the inclosure,
this strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence. But
when spring came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her
livelihood in the city's waste places, I was embarrassed. Into what
remote corners or into what _terra incognita_ might she not wander!
There was little doubt but that she would drift around home in the
course of the summer, or perhaps as often as every week or two; but
could she be trusted to find her way back every night? Perhaps she
could be taught. Perhaps her other senses were acute enough to
compensate in a measure for her defective vision. So I gave her
lessons in the topography of the country. I led her forth to graze
for a few hours each day and led her home again. Then I left her to
come home alone, which feat she accomplished very encouragingly.
She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but apparently
a most diligent and interested sight-seer. But she was not sure of
the right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very
hard.

Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic
eyes apparently of some service to her. On the third day, there was
a fierce thunder-storm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did
not come home. It had evidently scattered and bewildered what
little wits she had. Being barely able to navigate those streets on
a calm day, what could she be expected to do in a tempest?

After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of
her, but could get no clew. I heard that two cows had been struck
by lightning about a mile out on the commons. My conscience
instantly told me that one of them was mine. It would be a fit
closing of the third act of this pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent
my steps, and there upon the smooth plain I beheld the scorched and
swollen forms of two cows slain by thunderbolts, but neither of
them had ever been mine.

The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next.
Finally I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had
become hot, and set out deliberately and systematically to explore
every foot of open common on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles,
and found every man's cow but my own,--some twelve or fifteen
hundred, I should think. I saw many vagrant boys and Irish and
colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a buffalo cow that very
day that answered exactly to my description, but in such diverse
and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine. And
it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many
rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over
knolls, or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong
to no cow but mine!

Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen,
and advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no
tidings were obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low,--was indeed
on the point of going out altogether,--when one afternoon, as I was
strolling over the commons (for in my walks I still hovered about
the scenes of my lost milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a
grassy knoll, that looked familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted
up her head; and, behold! it was she! only a few squares from home,
where doubtless she had been most of the time. I had overshot the
mark in my search. I had ransacked the far-off, and had neglected
the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But she was ruined as a
milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and touching!

VII BEFORE GENIUS

If there did not something else go to the making of literature
besides mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago
the old bards and the Biblical writers would have been superseded
by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later
times! Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language,
who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial
adjuncts of poetry,--rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet,
dainty fancies,--surpass Europe's and Asia's loftiest and oldest?
Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this
respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if
the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the refined and
euphonious producers of our own day?

If we were to inquire what this something else is which is
prerequisite to any deep and lasting success in literature, we
should undoubtedly find that it is the man behind the book. It is
the fashion of the day to attribute all splendid results to genius
and culture. But genius and culture are not enough. "All other
knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and
goodness," says Montaigne. The quality of simple manhood, and the
universal human traits which form the bond of union between man and
man,--which form the basis of society, of the family, of
government, of friendship,-- are quite overlooked; and the credit
is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit.
Does any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up
mainly of the most common universal human and heroic
characteristics?--that in them, though working to other ends, is
all that construct the soldier, the sailor, the farmer, the
discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field, and that their work
is good and enduring in proportion as it is saturated and
fertilized by the qualities of these? Good human stock is the main
dependence. No great poet ever appeared except from a race of good
fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Literature
dies with the decay of the _un-_literary element. It is not in the
spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon,
something ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo,
Dante, and Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and
of the homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the
path of the creator lies.

It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly
refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary
basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and
technical acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter
scorn of the "sensual caterwauling of the literary classes," for
this is not the only country in which books are produced that are a
mere skin of elegant words blown up by copious literary gas.

In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of
mere weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable. It is like
the immobility and the power of resistance of a piece of ordnance,
upon which the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend.
In the most daring flights of the master, there is still something
which remains indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as
reserve power, making the man always superior to his work. He must
always leave the impression that if he wanted to pull harder or to
fly higher he could easily do so. In Homer there is much that is
not directly available for Homer's purposes as poet. This is his
personality,--the real Homer,--which lies deeper than his talents
and skill, and which works through these by indirections. This
gives the authority; this is the unseen backer, which makes every
promise good.

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