The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers
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John Burroughs >> The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers
The day is veiled, but we catch such glimpses through the veil.
The bees are getting pollen from the pussy-willows and soft
maples, and the first honey from the arbutus.
It is at this time that the fruit and seed catalogues are
interesting reading, and that the cuts of farm implements have a
new fascination. The soil calls to one. All over the country,
people are responding to the call, and are buying farms and
moving upon them. My father and mother moved upon their farm in
the spring of 1828; I moved here upon mine in March, 1874.
I see the farmers, now going along their stone fences and
replacing the stones that the frost or the sheep and cattle have
thrown off, and here and there laying up a bit of wall that has
tumbled down.
There is rare music now in the unmusical call of the
ph[oe]be-bird--it is so suggestive.
The drying road appeals to one as it never does at any other
season. When I was a farm-boy, it was about this time that I used
to get out of my boots for half an hour and let my bare feet feel
the ground beneath them once more. There was a smooth, dry, level
place in the road near home, and along this I used to run, and
exult in that sense of lightfootedness which is so keen at such
times. What a feeling of freedom, of emancipation, and of joy in
the returning spring I used to experience in those warm April
twilights!
I think every man whose youth was spent on the farm, whatever his
life since, must have moments at this season when he longs to go
back to the soil. How its sounds, its odors, its occupations, its
associations, come back to him! Would he not like to return again
to help rake up the litter of straw and stalks about the barn, or
about the stack on the hill where the grass is starting? Would he
not like to help pick the stone from the meadow, or mend the
brush fence on the mountain where the sheep roam, or hunt up old
Brindle's calf in the woods, or gather oven-wood for his mother
to start again the big brick oven with its dozen loaves of rye
bread, or see the plow crowding the lingering snow-banks on the
side-hill, or help his father break and swingle and hatchel the
flax in the barnyard?
When I see a farm advertised for rent or for sale in the spring,
I want to go at once and look it over. All the particulars
interest me--so many acres of meadow-land, so many of woodland,
so many of pasture--the garden, the orchard, the outbuildings,
the springs, the creek--I see them all, and am already half in
possession.
Even Thoreau felt this attraction, and recorded in his Journal:
"I know of no more pleasing employment than to ride about the
country with a companion very early in the spring, looking at
farms with a view to purchasing, if not paying for them."
Blessed is the man who loves the soil!
XI
THE WOODCOCK'S EVENING HYMN
The twilight flight song of the woodcock is one of the most
curious and tantalizing yet interesting bird songs we have. I
fancy that the persons who hear and recognize it in the April or
May twilight are few and far between. I myself have heard it only
on three occasions--one season in late March, one season in
April, and the last time in the middle of May. It is a voice of
ecstatic song coming down from the upper air and through the mist
and the darkness--the spirit of the swamp and the marsh climbing
heavenward and pouring out its joy in a wild burst of lyric
melody; a haunter of the muck and a prober of the mud suddenly
transformed into a bird that soars and circles and warbles like a
lark hidden or half hidden in the depths of the twilight sky. The
passion of the spring has few more pleasing exemplars. The
madness of the season, the abandon of the mating instinct, is in
every move and note. Ordinarily the woodcock is a very dull,
stupid bird, with a look almost idiotic, and is seldom seen
except by the sportsman or the tramper along marshy brooks. But
for a brief season in his life he is an inspired creature, a
winged song that baffles the eye and thrills the ear from the
mystic regions of the upper air.
When I last heard it, I was with a companion, and our attention
was arrested, as we were skirting the edge of a sloping, rather
marshy, bowlder-strewn field, by the "zeep," "zeep," which the
bird utters on the ground, preliminary to its lark-like flight.
We paused and listened. The light of day was fast failing; a
faint murmur went up from the fields below us that defined itself
now and then in the good-night song of some bird. Now it was the
lullaby of the song sparrow or the swamp sparrow. Once the
tender, ringing, infantile voice of the bush sparrow stood out
vividly for a moment on that great background of silence. "Zeep,"
"zeep," came out of the dimness six or eight rods away. Presently
there was a faint, rapid whistling of wings, and my companion
said: "There, he is up." The ear could trace his flight, but not
the eye. In less than a minute the straining ear failed to catch
any sound, and we knew he had reached his climax and was
circling. Once we distinctly saw him whirling far above us. Then
he was lost in the obscurity, and in a few seconds there rained
down upon us the notes of his ecstatic song--a novel kind of
hurried, chirping, smacking warble. It was very brief, and when
it ceased, we knew the bird was dropping plummet-like to the
earth. In half a minute or less his "zeep," "zeep," came up again
from the ground. In two or three minutes he repeated his flight
and song, and thus kept it up during the half-hour or more that
we remained to listen: now a harsh plaint out of the obscurity
upon the ground; then a jubilant strain from out the obscurity
of the air above. His mate was probably somewhere within
earshot, and we wondered just how much interest she took in the
performance. Was it all for her benefit, or inspired by her
presence? I think, rather, it was inspired by the May night, by
the springing grass, by the unfolding leaves, by the apple bloom,
by the passion of joy and love that thrills through nature at
this season. An hour or two before, we had seen the bobolinks in
the meadow beating the air with the same excited wing and
overflowing with the same ecstasy of song, but their demure,
retiring, and indifferent mates were nowhere to be seen. It would
seem as if the male bird sang, not to win his mate, but to
celebrate the winning, to invoke the young who are not yet born,
and to express the joy of love which is at the heart of Nature.
When I reached home, I went over the fourteen volumes of
Thoreau's Journal to see if he had made any record of having
heard the "woodcock's evening hymn," as Emerson calls it. He had
not. Evidently he never heard it, which is the more surprising as
he was abroad in the fields and marshes and woods at almost all
hours in the twenty-four and in all seasons and weathers, making
it the business of his life to see and record what was going on
in nature.
Thoreau's eye was much more reliable than his ear. He saw
straight, but did not always hear straight. For instance, he
seems always to have confounded the song of the hermit thrush
with that of the wood thrush. He records having heard the latter
even in April, but never the former. In the Maine woods and on
Monadnock it is always the wood thrush which he hears, and never
the hermit.
But if Thoreau's ear was sometimes at fault, I do not recall that
his eye ever was, while his mind was always honest. He had an
instinct for the truth, and while we may admit that the truth he
was in quest of in nature was not always scientific truth, or the
truth of natural history, but was often the truth of the poet and
the mystic, yet he was very careful about his facts; he liked to
be able to make an exact statement, to clinch his observations by
going again and again to the spot. He never taxes your credulity.
He had never been bitten by the mad dog of sensationalism that
has bitten certain of our later nature writers.
Thoreau made no effort to humanize the animals. What he aimed
mainly to do was to invest his account of them with literary
charm, not by imputing to them impossible things, but by
describing them in a way impossible to a less poetic nature. The
novel and the surprising are not in the act of the bird or beast
itself, but in Thoreau's way of telling what it did. To draw upon
your imagination for your facts is one thing; to draw upon your
imagination in describing what you see is quite another. The new
school of nature writers will afford many samples of the former
method; read Thoreau's description of the wood thrush's song or
the bobolink's song, or his account of wild apples, or of his
life at Walden Pond, or almost any other bit of his writing, for
a sample of the latter. In his best work he uses language in the
imaginative way of the poet.
Literature and science do not differ in matters of fact, but in
spirit and method. There is no live literature without a play of
personality, and there is no exact science without the clear,
white light of the understanding. What we want, and have a right
to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall
have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the
expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe
in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I
can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact. If you
romance about the animals, you must do so unequivocally, as
Kipling does and as AEsop did; the fiction must declare itself at
once, or the work is vicious. To make literature out of natural
history observation is not to pervert or distort the facts, or to
draw the long bow at all; it is to see the facts in their true
relations and proportions and with honest emotion.
Truth of seeing and truth of feeling are the main requisite: add
truth of style, and the thing is done.
XII
THE COMING OF SUMMER
Who shall say when one season ends and another begins? Only the
almanac-makers can fix these dates. It is like saying when
babyhood ends and childhood begins, or when childhood ends and
youth begins. To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders
and the pussy-willows begin to swell; when the ice breaks up on
the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward.
Whatever the date--the first or the middle or the last of
March--when these signs appear, then I know spring is at hand.
Her first birds--the bluebird, the song sparrow, the robin, the
red-shouldered starling--are here or soon will be. The crows have
a more confident caw, the sap begins to start in the sugar maple,
the tiny boom of the first bee is heard, the downy woodpecker
begins his resonant tat, tat, tat, on the dry limbs, and the
cattle in the barnyard low long and loud with wistful looks
toward the fields.
The first hint of summer comes when the trees are fully fledged
and the nymph Shadow is born. See her cool circles again beneath
the trees in the field, or her deeper and cooler retreats in the
woods. On the slopes, on the opposite side of the river, there
have been for months under the morning and noon sun only slight
shadow tracings, a fretwork of shadow lines; but some morning in
May I look across and see solid masses of shade falling from the
trees athwart the sloping turf. How the eye revels in them! The
trees are again clothed and in their right minds; myriad leaves
rustle in promise of the coming festival. Now the trees are
sentient beings; they have thoughts and fancies; they stir with
emotion; they converse together; they whisper or dream in the
twilight; they struggle and wrestle with the storm.
"Caught and cuff'd by the gale,"
Tennyson says.
Summer always comes in the person of June, with a bunch of
daisies on her breast and clover blossoms in her hands. A new
chapter in the season is opened when these flowers appear. One
says to himself, "Well, I have lived to see the daisies again and
to smell the red clover." One plucks the first blossoms tenderly
and caressingly. What memories are stirred in the mind by the
fragrance of the one and the youthful face of the other! There is
nothing else like that smell of the clover: it is the maidenly
breath of summer; it suggests all fresh, buxom, rural things. A
field of ruddy, blooming clover, dashed or sprinkled here and
there with the snow-white of the daisies; its breath drifts into
the road when you are passing; you hear the boom of bees, the
voice of bobolinks, the twitter of swallows, the whistle of
woodchucks; you smell wild strawberries; you see the cattle upon
the hills; you see your youth, the youth of a happy farm-boy,
rise before you. In Kentucky I once saw two fields, of one
hundred acres each, all ruddy with blooming clover--perfume for a
whole county.
The blooming orchards are the glory of May, the blooming
clover-fields the distinction of June. Other characteristic June
perfumes come from the honey-locusts and the blooming grapevines.
At times and in certain localities the air at night and morning
is heavy with the breath of the former, and along the lanes and
roadsides we inhale the delicate fragrance of the wild grape. The
early grasses, too, with their frostlike bloom, contribute
something very welcome to the breath of June.
Nearly every season I note what I call the bridal day of
summer--a white, lucid, shining day, with a delicate veil of mist
softening all outlines. How the river dances and sparkles; how
the new leaves of all the trees shine under the sun; the air has
a soft lustre; there is a haze, it is not blue, but a kind of
shining, diffused nimbus. No clouds, the sky a bluish white, very
soft and delicate. It is the nuptial day of the season; the sun
fairly takes the earth to be his own, for better or for worse, on
such a day, and what marriages there are going on all about us:
the marriages of the flowers, of the bees, of the birds.
Everything suggests life, love, fruition. These bridal days are
often repeated; the serenity and equipoise of the elements
combine. They were such days as these that the poet Lowell had in
mind when he exclaimed, "What is so rare as a day in June?" Here
is the record of such a day, June 1, 1883: "Day perfect in
temper, in mood, in everything. Foliage all out except on
button-balls and celtis, and putting on its dark green summer
color, solid shadows under the trees, and stretching down the
slopes. A few indolent summer clouds here and there. A day of
gently rustling and curtsying leaves, when the breeze almost
seems to blow upward. The fields of full-grown, nodding rye
slowly stir and sway like vast assemblages of people. How the
chimney swallows chipper as they sweep past! The vireo's cheerful
warble echoes in the leafy maples; the branches of the Norway
spruce and the hemlocks have gotten themselves new light green
tips; the dandelion's spheres of ethereal down rise above the
grass: and now and then one of them suddenly goes down: the
little chippy, or social sparrow, has thrown itself upon the
frail stalk and brought it to the ground, to feed upon its
seeds; here it gets the first fruits of the season. The first red
and white clover heads have just opened, the yellow rock-rose
and the sweet viburnum are in bloom; the bird chorus is still
full and animated; the keys of the red maple strew the ground,
and the cotton of the early everlasting drifts upon the air."
For several days there was but little change. "Getting toward
the high tide of summer. The air well warmed up, Nature in her
jocund mood, still, all leaf and sap. The days are idyllic. I lie
on my back on the grass in the shade of the house, and look up
to the soft, slowly moving clouds, and to the chimney swallows
disporting themselves up there in the breezy depths. No hardening
in vegetation yet. The moist, hot, fragrant breath of the
fields--mingled odor of blossoming grasses, clover, daisies,
rye--the locust blossoms, dropping. What a humming about the hives;
what freshness in the shade of every tree; what contentment in the
flocks and herds! The springs are yet full and cold; the shaded
watercourses and pond margins begin to draw one." Go to the top
of the hill on such a morning, say by nine o'clock, and see how
unspeakably fresh and full the world looks. The morning shadows
yet linger everywhere, even in the sunshine; a kind of blue
coolness and freshness, the vapor of dew tinting the air.
Heat and moisture, the father and mother of all that lives, when
June has plenty of these, the increase is sure.
Early in June the rye and wheat heads begin to nod; the
motionless stalks have a reflective, meditative air. A little
while ago, when their heads were empty or filled only with chaff
and sap, how straight up they held them! Now that the grain is
forming, they have a sober, thoughtful look. It is one of the
most pleasing spectacles of June, a field of rye gently shaken by
the wind. How the breezes are defined upon its surface--a surface
as sensitive as that of water; how they trip along, little
breezes and big breezes together! Just as this glaucous green
surface of the rye-field bends beneath the light tread of the
winds, so, we are told, the crust of the earth itself bends
beneath the giant strides of the great atmospheric waves.
There is one bird I seldom hear till June, and that is the
cuckoo. Sometimes the last days of May bring him, but oftener it
is June before I hear his note. The cuckoo is the true recluse
among our birds. I doubt if there is any joy in his soul.
"Rain-crow," he is called in some parts of the country. His call
is supposed to bode rain. Why do other birds, the robin for
instance, often make war upon the cuckoo, chasing it from the
vicinity of their nests? There seems to be something about the
cuckoo that makes its position among the birds rather anomalous.
Is it at times a parasitical bird, dropping its eggs into other
birds' nests? Or is there some suggestion of the hawk about our
species as well as about the European? I do not know. I only know
that it seems to be regarded with a suspicious eye by other
birds, and that it wanders about at night in a way that no
respectable bird should. The birds that come in March, as the
bluebird, the robin, the song sparrow, the starling, build in
April; the April birds, such as the brown thrasher, the barn
swallow, the chewink, the water-thrush, the oven-bird, the
chippy, the high-hole, the meadowlark, build in May, while the
May birds, the kingbird, the wood thrush, the oriole, the orchard
starling, and the warblers, build in June. The April nests are
exposed to the most dangers: the storms, the crows, the
squirrels, are all liable to cut them off. The midsummer nests,
like that of the goldfinch and the waxwing, or cedar-bird, are
the safest of all.
In March the door of the seasons first stands ajar a little; in
April it is opened much wider; in May the windows go up also; and
in June the walls are fairly taken down and the genial currents
have free play everywhere. The event of March in the country is
the first good sap day, when the maples thrill with the kindling
warmth; the event of April is the new furrow and the first
seeding;--how ruddy and warm the soil looks just opened to the
sun!--the event of May is the week of orchard bloom; with what
sweet, pensive gladness one walks beneath the pink-white masses,
while long, long thoughts descend upon him! See the impetuous
orioles chase one another amid the branches, shaking down the
fragrant snow. Here the rose-breasted grosbeak is in the blooming
cherry tree, snipping off the blossoms with that heavy beak of
his--a spot of crimson and black half hidden in masses of white
petals. This orchard bloom travels like a wave. In March it is in
the Carolinas; by the middle of April its crest has reached the
Potomac; a week or ten days later it is in New Jersey; then in
May it sweeps through New York and New England; and early in June
it is breaking upon the orchards in Canada. Finally, the event of
June is the fields ruddy with clover and milk-white with daisies.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
The "oe" ligature is represented as [oe].
Title page: Changed typo "Cambridg" to "Cambridge."
Table of Contents/Chapter VIII: Retained punctuation error in
chapter title.
Page 18: Added missing period to sentence: "The bear was fussing
... to burying it."
Page 30: Changed typo "sudddenly" to "suddenly."
Pages 31, 79, 95: Retained inconsistent spellings of
highhole/high-hole.
Pages 32 & 58: Retained inconsistent spellings of
treetops/tree-tops.
Page 38: Changed single quote to double quote in sentence: "Here,
Jim, you do this ... thing through".
Chapter XII: Changed typo "IIX" to "XII."