Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and Other Papers
by
John Burroughs
Part 2 out of 3
Among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer, you may chance
upon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which the
liquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a
slight flavor of mint. This is the product of the linden or basswood,
of all the trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees.
Melissa, the goddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree.
The wild swarms in the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it.
I have seen a mountain side thickly studded with it, its straight,
tall, smooth, light-gray shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft,
like the tulip-tree or the maple.
In some of the Northwestern States there are large forests of it, and
the amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this section
during the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade
and ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and if it
were as extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey
would be greatly increased. The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is
the product of the linden.
It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that--
"A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
But a swarm in July
Is not worth a fly."
A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sure
to thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or two
later; but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no
clover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of his
seraglio," but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the
sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the
black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in
it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when
at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake.
Bread with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good
fortune. It is not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the
same class of goods as Herrick's
"Nut-brown mirth and russet wit."
How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.
Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts the
bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
asters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them.
Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
custom from the earliest times in the 0ld World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from
New Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort
of perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of
the river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the
bees were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured
must have been very great. In September they should have begun the
return trip, following the retreating summer South.
It is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet,
the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that
fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb
in both cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax
he must make himself--must evolve from his own inner consciousness.
When wax is to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and
retire into their chamber for private meditation; it is like some
solemn religious rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves
together in long lines that hang in festoons from the top of the hive,
and wait for the miracle to transpire. After about twenty-four hours
their patience is rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales
of which are secreted from between the rings of the abdomen of each
bee; this is taken off and from it the comb is built up. It is
calculated that about twenty-five pounds of honey are used in
elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing of the time that is lost.
Hence the importance in an economical point of view, of a recent device
by which the honey is extracted and the comb returned intact to the
bees. But honey without the comb is the perfume without the rose,--it
is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy. Half the
delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisite walls
yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshness by
the contact with the air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foil
that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of
the sweet.
The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the
hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the
swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has
no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the
more conspicuous marks for the birds.
Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goes
forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them.
Then the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying
to hide in corners and by-ways. There is no loud, defiant humming now,
but abject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have
seen a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space
between the glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of
them or where they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter.
They will also crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive.
But sooner or later they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes
no resistance, except to pull back and try to get away; but
(putting yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or
the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still
another feeling for your waistbands with his sting, the odds are
greatly against you.
It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young
queen is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with
the swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the
reigning queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal
scion in the hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner
and the other at large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine,
trumpet-like note that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge,
not being allowed to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day
or two by the abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the
swarm, and her successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time,
abdicates in favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided
that no more swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her
stiletto upon her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two
queens issued at the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged
by the workers, who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference,
and recognized the victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many
other curious facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.
It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always
vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty
stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.
The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the
bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing
subjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over
the imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the
country of the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people
sweetly submissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm
of bees is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no
warrant in their example. The power and authority are entirely vested
in the great mass, the workers. They furnish all the brains
and foresight of the colony, and administer its affairs. Their word is
law, and both king and queen must obey. They regulate the swarming,
and give the signal for the swarm to issue from the hive; they select
and make ready the tree in the woods and conduct the queen to it.
The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact
that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her
as a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the
hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived
of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm
loses all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in
the hive.
The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to
be disposed of they starve her to death; and the queen herself will
sting nothing but royalty--nothing but a rival queen.
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting
her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is
a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it
awakens a thrill. Before you have seen a queen you wonder if this or
that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but
when you once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment.
You know that is the queen. That long, elegant, shining,
feminine-looking creature can be none less than royalty. How
beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how
deliberate her movements! The bees do not fall down before her, but
caress her and touch her person. The drones or males, are large bees
too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is
but one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks imperial
and authoritative: Huber relates that when the old queen is restrained
in her movements by the workers, and prevented from destroying the
young queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters
a note that strikes every bee motionless, and makes every head bow;
while this sound lasts not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and
humbled, yet whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or of
sympathy with the distress of the queen mother, is hard to determine.
The moment it ceases and she advances again toward the royal cells,
the bees bite and pull and insult her as before.
I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is; how
they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees each
striving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorus
of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift,
now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about
some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point,
till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the
whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as
large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three
or four hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up,
when, if they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are
up and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the
enterprise miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small
pear-tree into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath
the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up
into it, and all seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I
observed that something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and
to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and
all returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found
beneath it the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one
of the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set
it upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the
accident terminated fatally with her or else the young queen had been
liberated in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it
was ten days before the swarm issued a second time.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
Years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciable
effect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new
swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the bees
are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive.
Or an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water,
will quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say
but that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice,
now entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but still resorted to
by unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and
creating an uproar generally, might not be without good results.
Certainly not by drowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing
the bees as with some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily
alarmed and disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought
down by a farmer ploughing in the field who showered them with handfuls
of loose soil.
I love to see a swarm go off--if it is not mine, and if mine must go I
want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles
again by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
escapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without
alighting, had returned to the parent hive--some hitch in the plan,
perhaps, or may be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next
day they came out again, and were hived. But something offended them,
or else the tree in the woods--perhaps some royal old maple or birch
holding its head high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular
chambers and galleries--had too many attractions; for they were
presently discovered filling the air over the garden, and whirling
excitedly around. Gradually they began to drift over the street;
a moment more, and they had become separated from the other bees,
and, drawing together in a more compact mass or cloud, away they went,
a humming, flying vortex of bees, the queen in the centre, and the
swarm revolving around her as a pivot,--over meadows, across creeks and
swamps, straight for the heart of the mountain, about a mile distant,
--slow at first, so that the youth who gave chase kept up with them,
but increasing their speed till only a fox hound could have kept them
in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring up the side of the mountain;
saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as he entered the woods; but he
returned a few hours afterward without any clew as to the particular
tree in which they had taken refuge out of the ten thousand that
covered the side of the mountain.
The other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot July day, and at
once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind at
least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this
direction. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase,
I threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
organized and under way. The route soon led me into a field of
standing rye, every spear of which held its head above my own.
Plunging recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from
below by the agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature
forest just in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of
the hill, some fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I
could, I soon reached the hill-top, my breath utterly gone and the
perspiration streaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side
the country opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the
north, heavily wooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident
at once that the bees had made good their escape, and that whether they
had stopped on one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed
cleared the opposite mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond,
was entirely problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the
honey-laden tree that some of these forests would hold before the
falling of the leaf.
I heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more lucky than myself on a
like occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm,
whose route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the
summit, hat in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him.
Presently he noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting
on his arm; and in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the
whole swarm had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone
wall, he coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself
from the accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation
of this singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to
such long and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very
exhaustion. It is not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in
remote fields, collected upon a bush or branch of a tree.
When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees,
as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen
feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles,
except in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high.
The swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen
(at least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a
direct course, there is always some chance of following them to the
tree, unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a
wood, or a swamp, or a high hill, intervenes--enough chance, at any
rate, to stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as
their wind holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their
retreat, two plans are feasible: either to fell the tree at once, and
seek to hive them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree
that contains the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite
your neighbors, and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey.
The former course is more business-like; but the latter is the one
usually recommended by one's friends and neighbors.
Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one is
about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
distant laborers in the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side
of the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm
dimly whirling by overhead, and, may be, gives chase; or he may simply
catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a
swarm of bees go over; and, perhaps from beneath one of the hives in
the garden a black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
They are not partial as to the kind of tree,--pine, hemlock, elm,
birch, maple, hickory,--any tree with a good cavity high up or low
down. A swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them,
and took up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree
across an adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the
ground.
Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper and went into
the cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of a
large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence
forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem
to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild
honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long since,
that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a
tree that had several pailfuls in it.
One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near
the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down,
for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another
time while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods I
discovered a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season
before remarked the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of
leaves concealed them from me. This time my former presentiment
occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees,
going out and in a large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest
of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the
creek into which it fell. I happened along that way two or three days
after the tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless,
that escaped the flood and those that were away when the disaster came,
hanging in a small black mass to a branch high up near where their home
used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved the
remnant probably sought another tree; otherwise the bees have soon
died.
I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested
with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm
seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the
end uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would
be curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the
parties, and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the
rights and franchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the
bees to have some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter
on both sides.
Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive
seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree--"gums" as
they are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In
some European countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a
tree, a suitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned
straw hive is picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.
The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of
an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually
recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what
hair-breadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on
an average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred and
fifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by
spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and
ponds, and in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring
the principal mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get
chilled before they can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive,
unable to get in with their burden. One may see them come utterly
spent and drop hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors.
Before they can rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April
and May and pick them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with
pollen, and warm them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple
warmth of my hand, until they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their
life, and an apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him.
I have also picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them
safely to shore. It is amusing to see them come hurrying home when
there is a thunderstorm approaching. They come piling in till the rain
is upon them. Those that are overtaken by the storm doubtless weather
it as best they can in the sheltering trees or grass. It is not
probable that a bee ever gets lost by wandering into strange and
unknown parts. With their myriad eyes they see everything; and then,
their sense of locality is very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling
traits. When a bee marks the place of his hive, or of a bit of good
pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of the bee-hunter's box of honey
on the hills or in the woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.
Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for
the modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the
appetite of youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live
much in the open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and
modern confectionery is poison beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey
contains manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one
day inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and
body so long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without
and honey within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat
and milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept
farm-house will be supplied.
Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity,
an article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products.
Leigh Hunt's "Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history
and literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has
always been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years
ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the
people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus
are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees--
"Flat-nosed bees" as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons
in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this
world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that
the mouth be filled with honey-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like
Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with
which Arsinoe cherishes Adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tid-bits
made of "sweet honey." In the country of Theocritus this custom is
said still to prevail: when a couple are married the attendants place
honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that
their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.
It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped
honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised
Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the
butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I
tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts,
or, not to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot
be said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the
children of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten
raw, but roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground
made hot by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been
served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat
with honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in
Palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general
weal, and in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts,
the more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers and flowering
shrubs, Palestine has always been a famous country for bees. They
deposit their honey in hollow trees as our bees do when they escape
from the hive, and in holes in the rocks as ours do not. In a tropical
or semi-tropical climate bees are quite apt to take refuge in the
rocks, but where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer
high up in the trunk of a forest tree.
The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate
zone. There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics.
Honey from certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting,
and that from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount
Hymettus owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia
and in Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated
honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of
rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.
California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and
the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler,
"may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may
fail, and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of
the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will
continue without change or derogation."
II
SHARP EYES
AND OTHER PAPERS
CONTENTS
SHARP EYES
THE APPLE
A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH
WINTER NEIGHBORS
NOTES BY THE WAY.
I. The Weather-wise Muskrat
II. Cheating the Squirrels
III. Fox and Hound
IV. The Woodchuck
SHARP EYES AND OTHER PAPERS.
SHARP EYES.
Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often
amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go
on opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What
would he see? Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers nor
the fever germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope
nor the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not
more eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses;
but would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of
vision? At any rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than
others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision
penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a
spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open?
how many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the
hunter, matching his sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer
or a moose, or a fox or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open
another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or
outlines of things--whenever we grasp the special details and
characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new
powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants,
or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener
eyes were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like
written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the
writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was
one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse
from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn
fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable,
dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she
wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently
captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What,
but a horsehair for her nest which was in an apple-tree near by;
and she was so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have
tweaked one out of the horse's tail had he been in the stable. Later
in the season I examined her nest and found it sewed through and
through with several long horse hairs, so that the bird persisted in
her search till the hair was found.
Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes,
are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are
sharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy
played among some English sparrows and wrote an account of it in his
newspaper; it is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to his
box a large, fine goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrow
and much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered his
gratulations over it he went away in quest of his mate. His next-door
neighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and
seized the feather,--and here the wit of the bird came out, for instead
of carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree and hid
it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighbor
returned with his mate was innocently employed about her own affairs.
The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a high
state of excitement, and, with wrath in his manner and accusation on
his tongue, rushed into the cot of the female. Not finding his goods
and chattels there as he had expected, he stormed around a while,
abusing everybody in general and his neighbor in particular, and then
went away as if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight,
the shrewd thief went and brought the feather home and lined her own
domicile with it.
I was much amused one summer day in seeing a bluebird feeding her young
one in the shaded street of a large town. She had captured a cicada or
harvest-fly, and after bruising it a while on the ground flew with it
to a tree and placed it in the beak of the young bird. It was a large
morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick's ability to
dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great
solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but
made no head way in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and
flew to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more
thoroughly. Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say,
"There, try it now," and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts
that she repeated many of his motions and contortions. But the great
fly was unyielding, and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to
the beak that held it. The young bird fluttered and fluttered and
screamed, "I'm stuck, I'm stuck," till the anxious parent again seized
the morsel and carried it to an iron railing, where she came down upon
it for the space of a minute with all the force and momentum her beak
could command. Then she offered it to her young a third time, but with
the same result as before, except that this time the bird dropped it;
but she was at the ground as soon as the cicada was, and taking it in
her beak flew some distance to a high board fence where she sat
motionless for some moments. While pondering the problem how that fly
should be broken, the male bluebird approached her, and said very
plainly, and I thought rather curtly, "Give me that bug," but she
quickly resented his interference and flew farther away, where she sat
apparently quite discouraged when I last saw her.
The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him.
His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in the
progress of the season; things are never quite the same after one has
heard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in
advance of the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and
orchard all the time, apparently waiting the arrival of his mate.
He called and warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within
ear-shot, and could be hurried up. Now he warbled half-angrily or
upbraidingly, then coaxingly, then cheerily and confidently, the next
moment in a plaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his wings,
and twinkle them caressingly, as if beckoning his mate to his heart.
One morning she had come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew
to a knot-hole in an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his side.
I heard a fine confidential warble, --the old, old story. But the
female flew to a near tree, and uttered her plaintive, homesick note.
The male went and got some dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew
again to the hole in the old tree, and promised unremitting devotion,
but the other said "nay," and flew away in the distance. When he saw
her going, or rather heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff, and
cried out in a tone that said plainly enough, "Wait a minute. One word,
please," and flew swiftly in pursuit. He won her before long, however,
and early in April the pair were established in one of the four or five
boxes I had put up for them, but not until they had changed their minds
several times. As soon as the first brood had flown, and while they
were yet under their parents' care, they began another nest in one of
the other boxes, the female, as usual, doing all the work, and the male
all the complimenting.
A source of occasional great distress to the mother-bird was a white
cat that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never been known to
catch a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was very
embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother bluebird
would set up that pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the cat was
standing by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with building
material, and alighted above me to survey the place before going into
the box. When she saw the cat, she was greatly disturbed, and in her
agitation could not keep her hold upon all her material. Straw after
straw came eddying down, till not half her original burden remained.
After the cat had gone away, the bird's alarm subsided, till, presently
seeing the coast clear, she flew quickly to the box and pitched in her
remaining straws with the greatest precipitation, and, without going in
to arrange them, as was her wont, flew away in evident relief.
In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the
house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted
woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knot-hole which led to the decayed
interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a
squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not
witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird
hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and
enlarging the cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used
rather to floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders,
but rather nest-carvers.
The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard in
the heart of the old tree,--at first feebly, but waxing stronger day by
day until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand
upon the trunk of the tree, they would set up an eager, expectant
chattering; but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon
detected the unusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then
uttering a warning note. Long before they were fully fledged they
clambered up to the orifice to receive their food. As but one could
stand in the opening at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and
struggling for this position. It was a very desirable one aside from
the advantages it had when food was served; it looked out upon the
great shining world, into which the young birds seemed never tired of
gazing. The fresh air must have been a consideration also, for the
interior of a high-hole's dwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds
came with food the young one in the opening did not get it all, but
after he had received a portion, either on his own motion or on a hint
from the old one, he would give place to the one behind him. Still,
one bird evidently outstripped his fellows, and in the race of life,
was two or three days in advance of them. His voice was loudest and
his head oftenest at the window. But I noticed that when he had kept
the position too long, the others evidently made it uncomfortable in
his rear, and, after "fidgeting" about a while, he would be compelled
to "back down." But retaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates
spent few easy moments at that lookout. They would close their eyes
and slide back into the cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all
its charms for them.
This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest. For two days
before that event he kept his position in the opening most of the time
and sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained
from feeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As I
stood looking at him one afternoon and noting his progress, he suddenly
reached a resolution,--seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear,--and
launched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well and
carried him about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day
after, the next in size and spirit left in the same manner; then
another, till only one remained. The parent birds ceased their visits
to him, and for one day he called and called till our ears were tired
of the sound. His was the faintest heart of all. Then he had none to
encourage him from behind. He left the nest and clung to the outer
bowl of the tree, and yelped and piped for an hour longer; then he
committed himself to his wings and went his way like the rest.
A young farmer in the western part of New York, who has a sharp,
discriminating eye, sends me some interesting notes about a tame
high-hole he once had.
"Did you ever notice," says he, "that the high-hole never eats anything
that he cannot pick up with his tongue? At least this was the case
with a young one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust out
his tongue two or three inches, and it was amusing to see his efforts
to eat currants from the hand. He would run out his tongue and try to
stick it to the currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue
around it like a hook and try to raise it by a sudden jerk. But he
never succeeded, the round fruit would roll and slip away every time.
He never seemed to think of taking it in his beak. His tongue was in
constant use to find out the nature of everything he saw; a nail-hole
in a board or any similar hole was carefully explored. If he was held
near the face he would soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his
tongue into it. In this way he gained the respect of a number of
half-grown cats that were around the house. I wished to make them
familiar to each other, so there would be less danger of their killing
him. So I would take them both on my knee, when the bird would soon
notice the kitten's eyes, and leveling his bill as carefully as a
marksman levels his rifle, he would remain so a minute when he would
dart his tongue into the cat's eye. This was held by the cats to be
very mysterious: being struck in the eye by something invisible to
them. They soon acquired such a terror of him that they would avoid
him and run away whenever they saw his bill turned in their direction.
He never would swallow a grasshopper even when it was placed in his
throat; he would shake himself until he had thrown it out of his mouth.
His 'best hold' was ants. He never was surprised at anything, and
never was afraid of anything. He would drive the turkey gobbler and
the rooster. He would advance upon them holding one wing up as high as
possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward
them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that
they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of
himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and
he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going
into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he
disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw him again."
My correspondent also sends me some interesting observations about the
cuckoo. He says a large gooseberry bush standing in the border of an
old hedgerow, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his house,
was occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession, and,
after an interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a
good chance to observe them. He says the mother-bird lays a single
egg, and sits upon it a number of days before laying the second, so
that he has seen one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched,
and a whole egg all in the nest at once. "So far as I have seen, this
is the settled practice,--the young leaving the nest one at a time to
the number of six or eight. The young have quite the look of the young
of the dove in many respects. When nearly grown they are covered with
long blue pin-feathers as long as darning-needles, without a bit of
plumage on them. They part on the back and hang down on each side by
their own weight. With its curious feathers and misshapen body the
young bird is anything but handsome. They never open their mouths when
approached, as many young birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly
moving when touched." He also notes the unnatural indifference of the
mother-bird when her nest and young are approached. She makes no
sound, but sits quietly on a near branch in apparent perfect unconcern.
These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo
is occasionally found in the nests of other birds, raise the inquiry
whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European
species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether,
on the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect.
It has but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great
progress to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere
platform of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep,
compact, finely woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or
king-bird, and what a gulf between its indifference toward its young
and their solicitude! Its irregular manner of laying also seems better
suited to a parasite like our cow-bird, or the European cuckoo, than to
a regular nest-builder.
This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow,
which is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly
against the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the
loosened coat of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when
the latter escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day
in early spring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling and screaming
high in air, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them
together, fall toward the earth flapping and struggling as if they were
tied together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft
again. He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love,
and that the hawks were toying fondly with each other.
He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a humming-bird in
the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of
the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as
a chip. The bird seems to have died as it had lived, on the wing, and
its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy
this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed
depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry
timber in a hayloft, and, with spread wings, ending its existence.
When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects
about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how
they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a
mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were
very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his
machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood
of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings
over the "cut-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to tremble
and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would doubtless have
gone hungry yet another day.
Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male and female take part in
incubation. "I was rather surprised," he says, "on one occasion, to
see how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tall
beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head and
neck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk
coming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alight
near by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mate
getting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemed
almost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they
can make such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs."
The king-bird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear.
It is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable
of dealing his great antagonist. The king-bird seldom more than dogs
the hawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado;
but my correspondent says he once "saw a king-bird riding on a hawk's
back. The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the king-bird sat upon
his shoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight,"--tweaking
his feathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.
That near relative of the king-bird, the great crested fly-catcher,
has one well known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest
finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert
correspondent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make
off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good
substitute for the coveted material.
One day in May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of a
whippoorwill, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest,--two
elliptical whitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot
was within a yard of the mother-bird before she flew. I wondered what
a sharp eye would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the
bird, so I came to the place many times and had a look. It was always
a task to separate the bird from her surroundings though I stood within
a few feet of her, and knew exactly where to look. One had to bear on
with his eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and
leaves, and bits of black or dark-brown bark, were all exactly copied
in the bird's plumage. And then she did sit so close, and simulate so
well a shapeless decaying piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a
companion, and guiding his eye to the spot, noted how difficult it was
for him to make out there, in full view upon the dry leaves, any
semblance to a bird. When the bird returned after being disturbed,
she would alight within a few inches of her eggs, and then, after a
moment's pause, hobble awkwardly upon them.
After the young had appeared, all the wit of the bird came into play.
I was on hand the next day, I think. The mother-bird sprang up when I
was within a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the leaves with her
wings till they sprang up too; as the leaves started the young started,
and, being of the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which the
bird was a trying task to any eye. I came the next day, when the same
tactics were repeated. Once a leaf fell upon one of the young birds
and nearly hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down like a
young partridge, and soon follow their mother about. When disturbed,
they gave but one leap, then settled down, perfectly motionless and
stupid, with eyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions made
frantic efforts to decoy me away from her young. She would fly a few
paces and fall upon her breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would
run through her tremulous outstretched wings and prostrate body. She
kept a sharp eye out the meanwhile to see if the ruse took, and if it
did not, she was quickly cured, and moving about to some other point
tried to draw my attention as before. When followed she always
alighted upon the ground, dropping down in a sudden peculiar way.
The second or third day both old and young had disappeared.
The whippoorwill walks as awkwardly as a swallow, which is as awkward
as a man in a bag, and yet she manages to lead her young about the
woods. The latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their
protective coloring shielding them most effectively. Wilson once came
upon the mother-bird and her brood in the woods, and, though they were
at his very feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young that
he was about to give up the search, much disappointed, when he
perceived something "like a slight moldiness among the withered leaves,
and, on stooping down, discovered it to be a young whippoorwill
seemingly asleep." Wilson's description of the young is very accurate,
as its downy covering does look precisely like a "slight moldiness."
Returning a few moments afterward to the spot to get a pencil he had
forgotten, he could find neither old nor young.
It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods motionless upon the
leaves; this sense needs to be as sharp as that of smell in hounds and
pointers; and yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to see the
bird and shoot it before it takes wing. I think he sees it as soon as
it sees him and before it suspects itself seen. What a training to the
eye is hunting! To pick out the game from its surroundings, the grouse
from the leaves, the gray squirrel from the mossy oak limb it hugs so
closely, the red fox from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the rabbit
from the stubble, or the white hare from the snow requires the best
powers of this sense. A woodchuck, motionless in the fields or upon a
rock, looks very much like a large stone or bowlder, yet a keen eye
knows the difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away.
A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wild
creatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he finds
his match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speck
against the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen
to be secreted in the bushes or behind the fence near which he alights!
One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the form,
structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field of
vision--indeed, can probably see in nearly every direction at the same
instant, behind as well as before. Man's field of vision embraces less
than half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically; his brow
and brain prevent him from seeing within many degrees of the zenith
without a movement of the head; the bird on the other hand, takes in
nearly the whole sphere at a glance.
I find I see almost without effort nearly every bird within sight in
the field or wood I pass through (a flit of the wing, a flirt of the
tail are enough, though the flickering leaves do all conspire to hide
them), and that with like ease the birds see me, though,
unquestionably, the chances are immensely in their favor. The eye sees
what it has the means of seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your
heart before you can find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose
and aim. No one ever yet found the walking fern who did not have the
walking fern in his mind. A person whose eye is full of Indian relics
picks them up in every field he walks through.
One season I was interested in the tree-frogs; especially the tiny
piper that one hears about the woods and brushy fields--the hyla of the
swamps become a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new
role. But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for
them, I several times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some
bushes, I captured two. They leaped before me as doubtless they had
done many times before; but though I was not looking for or thinking of
them, yet they were quickly recognized, because the eye had been
commissioned to find them. On another occasion, not long afterward,
I was hurriedly loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of
overtaking a gray squirrel that was fast escaping through the
tree-tops, when one of these lilliput frogs, the color of the
fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me. I saw him only out of the
corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because I had already made him
my own.
Nevertheless, the habit of observation is the habit of clear and
decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady
deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things
discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the
spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind.
The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty
from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well
to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye,
but also a faculty which they call individuality--that which separates,
discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character.
This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the
poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,--it seizes
upon and preserves the individuality of the thing. Persons frequently
describe to me some bird they have seen or heard and ask me to name it,
but in most cases the bird might be any one of a dozen, or else it is
totally unlike any bird found in this continent. They have either seen
falsely or else vaguely. Not so the farm youth who wrote me one winter
day that he had seen a single pair of strange birds, which he describes
as follows: "They were about the size of the 'chippie,' the tops of
their heads were red, and the breast of the male was of the same color,
while that of the female was much lighter; their rumps were also
faintly tinged with red. If I have described them so that you would
know them, please write me their names." There can be little doubt but
the young observer had seen a pair of red-polls,--a bird related to the
goldfinch, and that occasionally comes down to us in the winter from
the far north. Another time, the same youth wrote that he had seen a
strange bird, the color of a sparrow, that alighted on fences and
buildings as well as upon the ground, and that walked. This last fact
shoved the youth's discriminating eye and settled the case. I knew it
to be a species of the lark, and from the size, color, season, etc.,
the tit-lark. But how many persons would have observed that the bird
walked instead of hopped?
Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried to describe to me a
bird that built a nest in a tree within a few feet of the house. As it
was a brown bird, I should have taken it for a wood-thrush, had not the
nest been described as so thin and loose that from beneath the eggs
could be distinctly seen. The most pronounced feature in the
description was the barred appearance of the under side of the bird's
tail. I was quite at sea, until one day, when we were driving out,
a cuckoo flew across the road in front of us, when my friends
exclaimed, "There is our bird!" I had never known a cuckoo to build
near a house, and I had never noted the appearance the tail presents
when viewed from beneath; but if the bird had been described in its
most obvious features, as slender, with a long tail, cinnamon brown
above and white beneath, with a curved bill, anyone who knew the bird
would have recognized the portrait.
We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its
specific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of
the tulip-tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outline of
one. A good observer is quick to take a hint and to follow it up.
Most of the facts of nature, especially in the life of the birds and
animals, are well screened. We do not see the play because we do not
look intently enough. The other day I was sitting with a friend upon a
high rock in the woods, near a small stream, when we saw a water-snake
swimming across a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would have
noted it, perhaps nothing more. A little closer and sharper gaze
revealed the fact that the snake bore something in its mouth, which,
as we went down to investigate, proved to be a small cat-fish, three or
four inches long. The snake had captured it in the pool, and, like any
other fisherman, wanted to get its prey to dry land, although itself
lived mostly in the water. Here, we said, is being enacted a little
tragedy, that would have escaped any but sharp eyes. The snake, which
was itself small, had the fish by the throat, the hold of vantage among
all creatures, and clung to it with great tenacity. The snake knew
that its best tactics was to get upon dry land as soon as possible.
It could not swallow its victim alive, and it could not strangle it in
the water. For a while it tried to kill its game by holding it up out
of the water, but the fish grew heavy, and every few moments its
struggles brought down the snake's head. This would not do.
Compressing the fish's throat would not shut off its breath under such
circumstances, so the wily serpent tried to get ashore with it, and
after several attempts succeeded in effecting a landing on a flat rock.
But the fish died hard. Cat-fish do not give up the ghost in a hurry.
Its throat was becoming congested, but the snake's distended jaws must
have ached. It was like a petrified gape. Then the spectators became
very curious and close in their scrutiny, and the snake determined to
withdraw from the public gaze and finish the business in hand to its
own notions. But, when gently but firmly remonstrated with by my
friend with his walking-stick, it dropped the fish and retreated in
high dudgeon beneath a stone in the bed of the creek. The fish, with
a swollen and angry throat, went its way also.
Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw a fresh bone or a
piece of meat upon the snow in winter, and see how soon the crows will
discover it and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the crow
that first discovers it will alight near it, to make sure he is not
deceived; then he will go away, and soon return with a companion.
The two alight a few yards from the bone, and after some delay, during
which the vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the crows advances
boldly to within a few feet of the coveted prize. Here he pauses, and
if no trick is discovered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it
and makes off.
One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the
house and scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue-jay for
weeks, yet that very day one found my corn, and after that several came
daily and partook of it, holding the kernels under their feet upon the
limbs of the trees and pecking them vigorously.
Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp eyes; still I was
surprised to see how quickly Downy found out some bones that were
placed in a convenient place under the shed to be pounded up for the
hens. In going out to the barn I often disturbed him making a meal off
the bite of meat that still adhered to them.
"Look intently enough at anything," said a poet to me one day, "and you
will see something that would otherwise escape you." I thought of the
remark as I sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring day.
I saw a small hawk approaching; he flew to a tall tulip-tree and
alighted on a large limb near the top. He eyed me and I eyed him.
Then the bird disclosed a trait that was new to me: he hopped along the
limb to a small cavity near the trunk, when he thrust in his head and
pulled out some small object and fell to eating it. After he had
partaken of it for some minutes he put the remainder back in his larder
and flew away. I had seen something like feathers eddying slowly down
as the hawk ate, and on approaching the spot found the feathers of a
sparrow here and there clinging to the bushes beneath the tree.
The hawk then--commonly called the chicken hawk--is as provident as
a mouse or a squirrel, and lays by a store against a time of need,
but I should not have discovered the fact had I not held my eye on him.
An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual sound or commotion
among them. In May or June, when other birds are most vocal, the jay
is a silent bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the groves as
silent as a pickpocket; he is robbing bird's-nests and he is very
anxious that nothing should be said about it; but in the fall none so
quick and loud to cry "Thief, thief!" as he. One December morning a
troop of jays discovered a little screech-owl secreted in the hollow
trunk of an old apple-tree near my house. How they found the owl out
is a mystery, since it never ventures forth in the light of day;
but they did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I suspect
the bluebirds first told them, for these birds are constantly peeping
into holes and crannies, both spring and fall. Some unsuspecting bird
had probably entered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year's
nest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a cold night, and then
had rushed out with important news. A boy who should unwittingly
venture into a bear's den when Bruin was at home could not be more
astonished and alarmed than a bluebird would be on finding itself in
the cavity of a decayed tree with an owl. At any rate the bluebirds
joined the jays in calling the attention of all whom it might concern
to the fact that a culprit of some sort was hiding from the light of
day in the old apple-tree. I heard the notes of warning and alarm and
approached to within eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered
about uttering their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were
bolder and took turns looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor
shrinking owl. A jay would alight in the entrance of the hole and
flirt and peer and attitudinize, and then flyaway crying "Thief, thief,
thief!" at the top of his voice.
I climbed up and peered into the opening, and could just descry the owl
clinging to the inside of the tree. I reached in and took him out,
giving little heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He was as
red as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He made no effort to escape,
but planted his claws in my forefinger and clung there with a grip that
soon grew uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an out-house in
hopes of getting better acquainted with him. By day he was a very
willing prisoner, scarcely moving at all, even when approached and
touched with the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-closed,
sleepy eyes. But at night what a change; how alert, how wild, how
active! He was like another bird; he darted about with wide, fearful
eyes, and regarded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window, and
swiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out into the congenial
darkness, and perhaps, ere this, has revenged himself upon the sleeping
jay or bluebird that first betrayed his hiding-place.
THE APPLE.
Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night. --TENNYSON.
Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrapped
up in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is life
sweetened by its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is more
valuable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound ruddy
life to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were.
Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little
clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural
antidote of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable
acids and aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and
antiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of
liver, etc. It is a gentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system.
Then I have read that it has been found by analysis to contain more
phosphorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the proper food of
the scholar and the sedentary man; it feeds his brain and it stimulates
his liver. Nor is this all. Besides its hygienic properties,
the apple is full of sugar and mucilage, which make it highly
nutritious. It is said, "The operators of Cornwall, England, consider
ripe apples nearly as nourishing as bread, and far more so than
potatoes. In the year 1801--which was a year of much scarcity--apples,
instead of being converted into cider, were sold to the poor, and the
laborers asserted that they could 'stand their work' on baked apples
without meat; whereas a potato diet required either meat or some other
substantial nutriment. The French and Germans use apples extensively,
so do the inhabitants of all European nations. The laborers depend
upon them as an article of food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced
apples and bread."
Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair compared with the
intense, sun-colored and sun-steeped fruit our orchards yield.
The English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and
chilly climate than in our own. It is well known that the European
maple yields no sugar, while both our birch and hickory have sweet in
their veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive love of
sweets, which may be said to be a national trait.
The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but
the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I have
seen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess,
with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste.
The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano beds, but this fact
which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives
well there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of
apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard.
The tree indeed thrives so well, that large branches cut off in the
spring and planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots
and develop into fine full-bearing trees by the third year. The people
know the value of the apple too. They make cider and wine of it and
then from the refuse a white and finely flavored spirit; then by
another process a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The children
and the pigs eat little or no other food. He does not add that the
people are healthy and temperate, but I have no doubt they are.
We knew the apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really
opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out the cider and the
spirits, but who guessed the wine and the honey, unless it were the
bees? There is a variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly
liquid name that suggests what might be done with this fruit.
The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenbergs and
greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a
rose when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be
addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it
falls in the still October days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a
banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain
hold it, but it can now assert its independence; it can now live a life
of its own.
Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely,
and down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth,
towards which it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its
bed, to hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take
time to meditate and ripen! What delicious thoughts it has there
nestled with its fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar,
and sugar into wine!
How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with
my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or
through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked
spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face
to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out
where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so
alive! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost
expect to see you move. I postpone the eating of you, you are so
beautiful! How compact; how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun
and varnished against the rains. An independent vegetable existence,
alive and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding,
wasting away, and almost of repairing damages!
How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeks
of the boys do. A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots
only makes the apple more crisp and vigorous; it peeps out from the
chance November snows unscathed. When I see the fruit-vender on the
street corner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them
warm, and his naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if
they do not ache too to clap their hands and enliven their circulation.
But they can stand it nearly as long as the vender can.
Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, following
him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is not
planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving
best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost,
the plow and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy,
cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate,
chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor
indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying
fruit, fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors
only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows;
winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a
little hyperborean, leaning towards the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active
fruit. I think you must come from the north, you are so frank and
honest, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the
northern races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous
south is not akin to you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid
fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin to
you. I think if I could subsist on you or the like of you, I should
never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or
despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality I
should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived,
and should shed warmth and contentment around.
Is there any other fruit that has so much facial expression as the
apple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with that
single eye of theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough?
The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youth
recognizes the seek-no-further buried beneath a dozen other varieties,
the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtown
pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilliflower. He goes to the
great bin in the cellar and sinks his shafts here and there in the
garnered wealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes
coming plump upon them, sometimes catching a glimpse of them to the
right or left, or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of
many varieties. In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of
touch. There is not only the size and shape, but there is the texture
and polish. Some apples are coarse grained and some are fine; some are
thin-skinned and some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous
beneath the touch; another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a
thick skin with a spongy lining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of
cork. The tallow apple has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests.
It sheds water like a duck. What apple is that with a fat curved stem
that blends so prettily with its own flesh,--the wine-apple? Some
varieties impress me as masculine,--weather-stained, freckled, lasting
and rugged; others are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining,
mild-flavored, white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger.
The practiced hand knows each kind by the touch. Do you remember the
apple hole in the garden or back of the house, Ben Bolt? In the fall
after the bins in the cellar had been well stocked, we excavated a
circular pit in the warm, mellow earth, and covering the bottom with
clean rye straw, emptied in basketful after basketful of hardy choice
varieties, till there was a tent-shaped mound several feet high of
shining variegated fruit. Then wrapping it about with a thick layer of
long rye straw, and tucking it up snug and warm, the mound was covered,
with a thin coating of earth, a flat stone on the top holding down the
straw. As winter set in, another coating of earth was put upon it,
with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry stable manure, and the precious
pile was left in silence and darkness till spring. No marmot
hibernating under-ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cosy
and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant privacy and quiet. Then how
the earth tempers and flavors the apples! It draws out all the acrid
unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtle refreshing taste of
the soil. Some varieties perish; but the ranker, hardier kinds, like
the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple, or the russet,
or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes
gold, and the bitter becomes sweet!
As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches,
the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe
we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the
inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and
bright as when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath,
which the hand soon exposes, is just as bright and far more luscious.
Then, as day after day you resort to the hole, and, removing the straw
and earth from the opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you
have a better chance than ever before to become acquainted with your
favorites by the sense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to
the right and left! Now you have got a Tolman sweet; you imagine you
can feel that single meridian line that divides it into two
hemispheres. Now a greening fills your hand, you feel its fine quality
beneath its rough coat. Now you have hooked a swaar, you recognize
its full face; now a Vandevere or a King rolls down from the apex
above, and you bag it at once. When you were a school-boy you stowed
these away in your pockets and ate them along the road and at recess,
and again at noon time; and they, in a measure, corrected the effects
of the cake and pie with which your indulgent mother filled your
lunch-basket.
The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how
he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to
him. . .His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap
draws sap. His fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his
appetite. Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat he wants the
apple just the same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss.
The farm-boy munches apples all day long. He has nests of them in the
hay-mow, mellowing, to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old
Brindle, having access through the open door, smells them out and makes
short work of them.
In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the
hand of the dead that they may find it when they enter paradise.
In northern mythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age.
The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave apples
less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating
them on the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your
hand not constantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has apples
and you have none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard;
when your lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's
night by the fireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then
be assured you are no longer a boy, either in heart or years.
The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season
as others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is
bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an
apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk, he arms
himself with apples. His traveling bag is full of apples. He offers
an apple to his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief
solace when on the road. He sows their seed all along the route.
He tosses the core from the car-window and from the top of the
stage-coach. He would, in time, make the land one vast orchard.
He dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the
first taste. Then he knows the best flavor is immediately beneath the
skin, and that in a pared apple this is lost. If you will stew the
apple, he says, instead of baking it, by all means leave the skin on.
It improves the color and vastly heightens the flavor of the dish.
The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters.
It belongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish.
I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt, to be eaten
after the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They
would take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister
be apt to grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets?
Would he not naturally hasten along to "lastly," and the big apples?
If they were the dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly
How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down
or were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out,
the divided tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts.
In some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large
dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour
fruit, too, but sweet in those early pioneer days. My grandfather,
who was one of these heroes of the stump, used every fall to make a
journey of forty miles for a few apples, which he brought home in a bag
on horseback. He frequently started from home by two or three o'clock
in the morning, and at one time both he and his horse were much
frightened by the screaming of panthers in a narrow pass in the
mountains through which the road led.
Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of
New England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse
among our rural population the apple has been, the company growing more
merry and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed
round! When the cider followed, the introduction and good
understanding were complete. Then those rural gatherings that
enlivened the autumn in the country, known as " apple cuts," now, alas!
nearly obsolete, where so many things were cut and dried besides
apples! The larger and more loaded the orchard, the more frequently
the invitations went round and the higher the social and convivial
spirit ran. Ours is eminently a country of the orchard.
Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in which the orchard formed
such a prominent feature in the rural and agricultural districts.
Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and Northern States has its
setting or its background of apple-trees, which generally date back to
the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the orchard, more than
almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize the country,
and to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled, domestic
look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any scene.
On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the sentiment
of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a wild state.
And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building site for the new
house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal apple-trees near
by; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble, who have been sad
and glad through so many winters and summers, who have blossomed till
the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and borne fruit till the
grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human contact, and
who have nourished robins and finches in their branches till they have
a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, the atmosphere of an
old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than that of the
adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soil more than
they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements and
attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape
around.
An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences dating from
childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the
orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played
there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a
thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees,
or reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted
them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar
history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop
of birds--robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds,
orioles, starlings--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly
described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard."
Whether the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can
always be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study
ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many
of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the
season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen
apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs,
the woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for
ants. The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert
its branches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the
grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin.
The smaller hawks know that this is a most likely spot for their prey;
and in spring the shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to
feed on the fine insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell
here also, and hither comes from the near woods the squirrel and the
rabbit. The latter will put his head through the boy's slipper-noose
any time for taste of the sweet apple, and the red squirrel and
chipmunk esteem its seeds a great rarity.
All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much so as the
cow. The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and
fences must be well looked after. No need to assort them or pick out
the ripe ones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best
about it. I heard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them
down from the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an
apple sometimes fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when
more apples fell. She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with
such vigor that the farmer had to check her and keep an eye on her to
save his fruit.
But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted
about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
pastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and why
should she not?
What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearly as
marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for
instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching like
the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter,
is one of my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the
belleflower, with its equally rich, sprightly uncloying fruit.
Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a
feast in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's
sweeting in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one
of the most wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August
apple, what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a
household at this season, by a single tree of this fruit! And what a
feast is its shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white
flesh has reached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the
household is the spitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her
highest flavors. It can stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a
spitz. I recently saw a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a
fruit-grower in the northern part of New York, who has devoted special
attention to this variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that
had not been the aim, but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core.
How intense, how spicy and aromatic!
But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivated
fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces
fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the
apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that
most of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and
ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild
apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had,
Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot of
a hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant
specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the
clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is good
size, and the color of a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in
the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality and so
remarkable for its firmness and density, that it is known on the farm
where it grows as the "heavy apple."
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree
are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious
piece of writing. It has a "tang and smack " like the fruit it
celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner.
It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness
of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and
was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in-doors.
Late in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge
of a swamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose," he says,
"that there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must
look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and
rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and
there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I
explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the
withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of
leaves, and pry under the fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple
and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie
concealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves
of the tree itself--a proper kind of packing. From these lurking
places, everywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth
the fruit all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out
by crickets, and perhaps a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old
manuscript from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich
bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if no better than
those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources
fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the leaves of
the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and
then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where
they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them
out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill
my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this
side, and then from that, to keep my balance."
A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.
The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless he penetrates its more
northern portions, has less reason to remember it as a pine-tree State
than a birch-tree State. The white-pine forests have melted away like
snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving only patches here and
there in the more remote and inaccessible parts. The portion of the
State I saw--the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about Moxie Lake
--had been shorn of its pine timber more than forty years before, and
is now covered with a thick growth of spruce and cedar and various
deciduous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes
out the birch comes in; the race of men succeeds the race of giants.
This tree has great stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring,
mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine,
the paper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree.
I read in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate
in verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the various
parts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch is
turned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of this
region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially for the
camper-out; yes, and for the wood-man and frontiersman generally.
It is a magazine, a furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose
goods are free to every comer. The whole equipment of the camp lies
folded in it, and comes forth at the beck of the woodman's axe; tent,
waterproof roof, boat, camp utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons,
napkins, table cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches,
candles, kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields you its
vestments with the utmost liberality. Ask for its coat, and it gives
you its waistcoat also. Its bark seems wrapped about it layer upon
layer, and comes off with great ease. We saw many rude structures and
cabins shingled and sided with it, and haystacks capped with it.
Near a maple-sugar camp there was a large pile of birch-bark
sap-buckets,--each bucket made of a piece of bark about a yard square,
folded up as the tinman folds up a sheet of tin to make a square
vessel, the corners bent around against the sides and held by a wooden
pin. When, one day, we were overtaken by a shower in traveling through
the woods, our guide quickly stripped large sheets of the bark from a
near tree, and we had each a perfect umbrella as by magic. When the
rain was over, and we moved on, I wrapped mine about me like a large
leather apron, and it shielded my clothes from the wet bushes. When we
came to a spring, Uncle Nathan would have a birch-bark cup ready before
any of us could get a tin one out of his knapsack, and I think water
never tasted so sweet as from one of these bark cups. It is exactly
the thing. It just fits the mouth and it seems to give new virtues to
the water. It makes me thirsty now when I think of it. In our camp at
Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to keep the butter in; and the
butter in this box, covered with some leafy boughs, I think improved in
flavor day by day. Maine butter needs something to mollify and sweeten
it a little, and I think birch bark will do it. In camp Uncle Nathan
often drank his tea and coffee from a bark cup; the china closet in the
birch-tree was always handy, and our vulgar tin ware was generally a
good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at all particular about
dish-washing. We all tried the oatmeal with the maple syrup in one of
these dishes, and the stewed mountain cranberries, using a birch-bark
spoon, and never found service better. Uncle Nathan declared he could
boil potatoes in a bark kettle, and I did not doubt him. Instead of
sending our soiled napkins and table-spreads to the wash, we rolled
them up into candles and torches, and drew daily upon our stores in the
forest for new ones.
But the great triumph of the birch is of course the bark canoe. When
Uncle Nathan took us out under his little wood-shed, and showed us,
or rather modestly permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe,
it was like a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius of the woods
or streams. It sat there on the chips and shavings and fragments of
bark like some shy delicate creature just emerged from its
hiding-place, or like some wild flower just opened. It was the first
boat of the kind I had ever seen, and it filled my eye completely.
What woodcraft it indicated, and what a, wild free life, sylvan life,
it promised! It had such a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never
before seen in any kind of handiwork. Its clear yellow-red color
would have become the cheek of an Indian maiden. Then its supple
curves and swells, its sinewy stays and thwarts, its bow-like contour,
its tomahawk stem and stern rising quickly and sharply from its frame,
were all vividly suggestive of the race from which it came. An old
Indian had taught Uncle Nathan the art, and the soul of the ideal
red man looked out of the boat before us. Uncle Nathan had spent two
days ranging the mountains looking for a suitable tree, and had worked
nearly a week on the craft. It was twelve feet long, and would seat
and carry five men nicely. Three trees contribute to the making of a
canoe besides the birch, namely, the white cedar for ribs and lining,
the spruce for roots and fibres to sew its joints and bind its frame,
and the pine for pitch or rosin to stop its seams and cracks. It is
hand-made and home-made, or rather wood-made, in a sense that no other
craft is, except a dug-out, and it suggests a taste and a refinement
that few products of civilization realize. The design of a savage,
it yet looks like the thought of a poet, and its grace and fitness
haunt the imagination. I suppose its production was the inevitable
result of the Indian's wants and surroundings, but that does not
detract from its beauty. It is, indeed, one of the fairest flowers the
thorny plant of necessity ever bore. Our canoe, as I have intimated,
was not yet finished when we first saw it, nor yet when we took it up,
with its architect, upon our metaphorical backs and bore it to the
woods. It lacked part of its cedar lining and the rosin upon its
joints, and these were added after we reached our destination.
Though we were not indebted to the birch-tree for our guide,
Uncle Nathan, as he was known in all the country, yet he matched well
these woodsy products and conveniences. The birch-tree had given him a
large part of his tuition, and kneeling in his canoe and making it
shoot noiselessly over the water with that subtle yet indescribably
expressive and athletic play of the muscles of the back and shoulders,
the boat and the man seemed born of the same spirit. He had been a
hunter and trapper for over forty years; he had grown gray in the
woods, had ripened and matured there, and everything about him was as
if the spirit of the woods had had the ordering of it; his whole
make-up was in a minor and subdued key, like the moss and the lichens,
or like the protective coloring of the game,--everything but his quick
sense and penetrative glance. He was as gentle and modest as a girl;
his sensibilities were like plants that grow in the shade. The woods
and the solitudes had touched him with their own softening and refining
influence; had indeed shed upon his soil of life a rich deep leaf mould
that was delightful, and that nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and
wildest growths. There was grit enough back of and beneath it all, but
he presented none of the rough and repelling traits of character of the
conventional backwoods-man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on
the Kennebec, usually having charge of a large gang of men; in the
winter he was a solitary trapper and hunter in the forests.
Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant Pond, which we found by
following a white, rapid, musical stream from the Kennebec three miles
back into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most part
dark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but Pleasant Pond is a
pale-face among them both in name and nature. It is the only strictly
silver lake I ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white and
brilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I think I detected
minute shining motes held in suspension in it. As for the trout they
are veritable bars of silver until you have cut their flesh, when they
are the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or other spots, and the
straight lateral line is but a faint pencil mark. They appeared to be
a species of lake trout peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to
twelve inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time of our
visit (last of August) at least, were to be taken only in deep water
upon a hook baited with salt pork. And then you needed a letter of
introduction to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled by
strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, although instructed
how it was to be done, until one of the natives, a young and obliging
farmer living hard by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise.
I sat in one end of the boat and he in the other; my pork was the same
as his, and I maneuvered it as directed, and yet those fish knew his
hook from mine in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in
five. Evidently they did not bite because they were hungry, but solely
for old acquaintance' sake.
Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two miles or more in its
greatest diameter, with high, rugged mountains rising up from its
western shore, and low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern and
northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never tired, when the
wind was still, of floating along its margin and gazing down into its
marvelously translucent depths. The boulders and fragments of rocks
were seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, strewing its
floor, and apparently as free from any covering of sediment as when
they were dropped there by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was
amid a dense grove of second growth of white pine on the eastern shore,
where, for one, I found a most admirable cradle in a little depression,
outside of the tent, carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the
night. The camper-out is always in luck if he can find, sheltered by
the trees, a soft hole in the ground, even if he has a stone for a
pillow. The earth must open its arms a little for us even in life, if
we are to sleep well upon its bosom. I have often heard my
grand-father, who was a soldier of the Revolution, tell with great
gusto how he once bivouacked in a little hollow made by the overturning
of a tree, and slept so soundly that he did not wake up till his cradle
was half full of water from a passing shower.
What bird or other creature might represent the divinity of Pleasant
Pond I do not know, but its demon, as of most northern inland waters,
is the loon, and a very good demon he is too, suggesting something not
so much malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubiquitous, circumventing, with
just a tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes
gleaming forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his
strange horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like
that of a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast.
He suggests something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing
quickness, cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of
their aim. I know of but one other bird so quick, and that is the
humming-bird, which I have never been able to kill with a gun.
The loon laughs the shot-gun to scorn, and the obliging young farmer
above referred to told me he had shot at them hundreds of times with
his rifle, without effect,--they always dodged his bullet. We had in
our party a breach-loading rifle, which weapon is perhaps an
appreciable moment of time quicker than the ordinary muzzleloader,
and this the poor loon could not or did not dodge. He had not timed
himself to that species of fire-arm, and when, with his fellow, he swam
about within rifle range of our camp, letting off volleys of his wild
ironical ha-ha, he little suspected the dangerous gun that was matched
against him. As the rifle cracked both loons made the gesture of
diving, but only one of them disappeared beneath the water; and when he
came to the surface in a few moments, a hundred or more yards away,
and saw his companion did not follow, but was floating on the water
where he had last seen him, he took the alarm and sped away in the
distance. The bird I had killed was a magnificent specimen, and I
looked him over with great interest. His glossy checkered coat,
his banded neck, his snow-white breast, his powerful lance- shaped
beak, his red eyes, his black, thin, slender, marvelously delicate feet
and legs, issuing from his muscular thighs, and looking as if they had
never touched the ground, his strong wings well forward while his legs
were quite at the apex, and the neat, elegant model of the entire bird,
speed and quickness and strength stamped upon every feature,--all
delighted and lingered in the eye. The loon appears like anything but
a silly bird, unless you see him in some collection, or in the shop of
the taxidermist, where he usually looks very tame and goose-like.
Nature never meant the loon to stand up, or to use his feet and legs
for other purposes than swimming. Indeed, he cannot stand except upon
his tail in a perpendicular attitude, but in the collections he is
poised upon his feet like a barn-yard fowl, all the wildness and grace
and alertness goes out of him. My specimen sits upon a table as upon
the surface of the water, his feet trailing behind him, his body low
and trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the act of
bringing that fiery eye to bear upon you, and vigilance and power
stamped upon every lineament.
The loon is to the fishes what the hawk is to the birds; he swoops down
to unknown depths upon them, and not even the wary trout can elude him.
Uncle Nathan said he had seen the loon disappear and in a moment come
up with a large trout, which he would cut in two with his strong beak,
and swallow piecemeal. Neither the loon nor the otter can bolt a fish
under the water; he must come to the surface to dispose of it. (I once
saw a man eat a cake under water in London.) Our guide told me he had
seen the parent loon swimming with a single young one upon its back.
When closely pressed it dove, or "div" as he would have it, and left
the young bird sitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and
when the old one returned and called, it came out from the shore.
On the wing overhead, the loon looks not unlike a very large duck, but
when it alights it ploughs into the water like a bombshell.
It probably cannot take flight from the land, as the one Gilbert White
saw and describes in his letters was picked up in a field, unable to
launch itself into the air.
>From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through the woods to Moxie Lake,
following an overgrown lumberman's "tote" road, our canoe and supplies,
etc., hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his three-year-old
steers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made rougher voyage than that.
As I watched it above the bushes, the sled and the luggage being
hidden, it appeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempestuous
sea. When the bushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down,
or been broken into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and
chasms of creeks and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the
most frightful manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it
was a regular bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid
the brush and boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage
them by signs and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud.
But we got through without any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek
and Mosquito Pond, and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but seeing no
mosquitoes, and brought up at dusk at a lumberman's old hay-barn,
standing in the midst of a lonely clearing on the shores of Moxie Lake.
Here we passed the night, and were lucky in having a good roof over our
heads, for it rained heavily. After we were rolled in our blankets and
variously disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to sleep by
a long and characteristic yarn.
I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in "spooks"; but he took
my question seriously, and without answering it directly, proceeded to
tell us what he himself had known and witnessed. It was, by the way,
extremely difficult either to surprise or to steal upon any of
Uncle Nathan's private opinions and beliefs about matters and things.
He was as shy of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap.
He usually talked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and caribou,
so as not to approach his point too rudely and suddenly. He would keep
on the lee side of his interlocutor in spite of all one could do.
He was thoroughly good and reliable, but the wild creatures of the
woods, in pursuit of which he had spent so much of his life, had taught
him a curious gentleness and indirection, and to keep himself in the
back-ground; he was careful that you should not scent his opinions upon
any subject at all polemic, but he would tell you what he had seen and
known. What he had seen and known about spooks was briefly this:--In
company with a neighbor he was passing the night with an old recluse
who lived somewhere in these woods. Their host was an Englishman, who
had the reputation of having murdered his wife some years before in
another part of the country, and, deserted by his grown-up children,
was eking out his days in poverty amid these solitudes. The three men
were sleeping upon the floor, with Uncle Nathan next to a rude
partition that divided the cabin into two rooms. At his head there was
a door that opened into this other apartment. Late at night,
Uncle Nathan said, he awoke and turned over, and his mind was occupied
with various things, when he heard somebody behind the partition.
He reached over and felt that both of his companions were in their
places beside him, and he was somewhat surprised. The person, or
whatever it was, in the other room moved about heavily, and pulled the
table from its place beside the wall to the middle of the floor.
"I was not dreaming," said Uncle Nathan;" I felt of my eyes twice to
make sure, and they were wide open." Presently the door opened; he was
sensible of the draught upon his head, and a woman's form stepped
heavily past him; he felt the "swirl" of her skirts as she went by.
Then there was a loud noise in the room as if some one had fallen their
whole length upon the floor. "It jarred the house," said he, "and woke
everybody up. I asked old Mr.----- if he heard that noise. 'Yes,'
said he, 'it was thunder.' But it was not thunder, I know that;"
and then added, "I was no more afraid than I am this minute. I never
was the least mite afraid in my life. And my eyes were wide open," he
repeated; "I felt of them twice; but whether that was the speret of
that man's murdered wife or not I cannot tell. They said she was an
uncommon heavy woman." Uncle Nathan was a man of unusually quick and
acute senses, and he did not doubt their evidence on this occasion any
more than he did when they prompted him to level his rifle at a bear or
a moose.
Moxie Lake lies much lower than Pleasant Pond, and its waters compared
with those of the latter are as copper compared with silver. It is
very irregular in shape; now narrowing to the dimensions of a slow
moving grassy creek, then expanding into a broad deep basin with rocky
shores, and commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that
the pond-lily and the speckled trout are found together,--the fish the
soul of the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of
the dark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in
Moxie they were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the
birches, poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the
best fishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval
head, rather shallow, but bumpy with rocks; a long, deep neck, full of
springs, where the trout lie; and a very broad chest, with two islands
tufted with pine-trees for breasts. We swam in the head, we fished in
the neck, or in a
small section of it, a space about the size of the
Adam's apple, and we paddled across and around the broad expanse below.
Our birch bark was not finished and christened till we reached Moxie.
The cedar lining was completed at Pleasant Pond, where we had the use
of a bateau, but the rosin was not applied to the seams till we reached
this lake. When I knelt down in it for the first time and put its
slender maple paddle into the water, it sprang away with such quickness
and speed that it disturbed me in my seat. I had spurred a more
restive and spirited steed than I was used to. In fact, I had never
been in a craft that sustained so close a relation to my will, and was
so responsive to my slightest wish. When I caught my first large trout
from it, it sympathized a little too closely, and my enthusiasm started
a leak, which, however, with a live coal and a piece of rosin, was
quickly ended. You cannot perform much of a war-dance in a birch-bark
canoe: better wait till you get on dry land. Yet as a boat it is not
so shy and "ticklish" as I had imagined. One needs to be on the alert,
as becomes a sportsman and an angler, and in his dealings with it must
charge himself with three things,--precision, moderation, and
circumspection.
Trout weighing four and five pounds have been taken at Moxie, but none
of that size came to our hand. I realized the fondest hopes I had
dared to indulge in when I hooked the first two-pounder of my life, and
my extreme solicitude lest he get away I trust was pardonable. My
friend, in relating the episode in camp, said I implored him to row me
down in the middle of the lake that I might have room to manœuver my
fish. But the slander has barely a grain of truth in it. The water
near us showed several old stakes broken off just below the surface,
and my fish was determined to wrap my leader about one of these stakes;
it was only for the clear space a few yards farther out that I prayed.
It was not long after that my friend found himself in an anxious frame
of mind. He hooked a large trout, which came home on him so suddenly
that he had not time to reel up his line, and in his extremity he
stretched his tall form into the air and lifted up his pole to an
incredible height. He checked the trout before it got under the boat,
but dared not come down an inch, and then began his amusing further
elongation in reaching for his reel with one hand while he carried it
ten feet into the air with the other. A step-ladder would perhaps have
been more welcome to him just then than at any other moment during his
life. But the trout was saved, though my friend's buttons and
suspenders suffered.
We learned a new trick in fly-fishing here, worth disclosing. It was
not one day in four that the trout would take the fly on the surface.
When the south wind was blowing and the clouds threatened rain, they
would at times, notably about three o'clock, rise handsomely. But on
all other occasions it was rarely that we could entice them up through
the twelve or fifteen feet of water. Earlier in the season they are
not so lazy and indifferent, but the August languor and drowsiness were
now upon them. So we learned by a lucky accident to fish deep for
them, even weighting our leaders with a shot, and allowing the flies to
sink nearly to the bottom. After a moment's pause we would draw them
slowly up, and when half or two thirds of the way to the top the trout
would strike, when the sport became lively enough. Most of our fish
were taken in this way. There is nothing like the flash and the strike
at the surface, and perhaps only the need of food will ever tempt the
genuine angler into any more prosaic style of fishing; but if you must
go below the surface, a shotted leader is the best thing to use.
Our camp-fire at night served more purposes than one; from its embers
and flickering shadows, Uncle Nathan read us many a tale of his life in
the woods. They were the same old hunter's stories, except that they
evidently had the merit of being strictly true, and hence were not very
thrilling or marvelous. Uncle Nathan's tendency was rather to tone
down and belittle his experiences than to exaggerate them. If he ever
bragged at all (and I suspect he did just a little, when telling us how
he outshot one of the famous riflemen of the American team, whom he was
guiding through these woods), he did it in such a sly, round-about way
that it was hard to catch him at it. His passage with the rifleman
referred to shows the difference between the practical off-hand skill
of the hunter in the woods and the science of the long-range target
hitter. Mr. Bull's Eye had heard that his guide was a capital shot and
had seen some proof of it, and hence could not rest till he had had a
trial of skill with him. Uncle Nathan, being the challenged party, had
the right to name the distance and the conditions. A piece of white
paper the size of a silver dollar was put upon a tree twelve rods off,
the contestants to fire three shots each off-hand. Uncle Nathan's
first bullet barely missed the mark, but the other two were planted
well into it. Then the great rifleman took his turn, and missed every
time.
"By hemp!" said Uncle Nathan," I was sorry I shot so well, Mr.-----
took it so to heart; and I had used his own rifle, too. He did not get
over it for a week."
But far more ignominious was the failure of Mr. Bull's Eye when he saw
his first bear. They were paddling slowly and silently down Dead
River, when the guide heard a slight noise in the bushes just behind a
little bend. He whispered to the rifleman, who sat kneeling in the bow
of the boat, to take his rifle. But instead of doing so he picked up
his two-barreled shot-gun. As they turned the point, there stood a
bear not twenty yards away, drinking from the stream. Uncle Nathan
held the canoe, while the man who had come so far in quest of this very
game was trying to lay down his shot-gun and pick up his rifle. "His
hand moved like the hand of a clock," said Uncle Nathan, "and I could
hardly keep my seat. I knew the bear would see us in a moment more,
and run. Instead of laying his gun by his side, where it belonged, he
reached it across in front of him and laid it upon his rifle, and in
trying to get the latter from under it a noise was made; the bear heard
it and raised his head. Still there was time, for as the bear sprang
into the woods he stopped and looked back,--"as I knew he would," said
the guide; yet the marksman was not ready. "By hemp! I could have shot
three bears," exclaimed Uncle Nathan, "while he was getting that rifle
to his face!"
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