Roof and Meadow by Dallas Lore Sharp
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Dallas Lore Sharp >> Roof and Meadow
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6 [Transcriber's Note: In this text, the spelling _racoon_ is used
consistently instead of _raccoon_. I have kept this and any other unusual
spellings, retaining the character of the original.]
Roof and Meadow
By Dallas Lore Sharp
Author of "A Watcher in the Woods"
With Illustrations By Bruce Horsfall
SCHOOL EDITION
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1911
Copyright, 1903, 1904, by THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1902, 1903, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
Copyright, 1903, by THE CHAPPLE PUBLISHING CO. (Ltd.).
Copyright, 1902, 1903, by W.W. POTTER CO. (Ltd.).
Copyright, 1902, 1903, by PERRY MASON COMPANY
_Published April, 1904._
TO
MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF 1
THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK 19
THREE SERMONS 31
THE MARSH 45
CALICO AND THE KITTENS 77
THE SPARROW ROOST 91
"MUX" 107
RACOON CREEK 121
THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE 147
BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF
[Illustration]
ROOF AND MEADOW
BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF
I laid down my book and listened. It was only the choking gurgle of a
broken rain-pipe outside: then it was the ripple and swish of a meadow
stream. To make out the voices of redwings and marsh-wrens in the rasping
notes of the city sparrows behind the shutter required much more
imagination. But I did it. I wanted to hear, and the splash of the water
helped me.
The sounds of wind and water are the same everywhere. Here at the heart of
the city I can forget the tarry pebbles and painted tin whenever my
rain-pipes are flooded. I can never be wholly shut away from the open
country and the trees so long as the winds draw hard down the alley past
my window.
But I have more than a window and a broken rain-pipe. Along with my five
flights goes a piece of roof, flat, with a wooden floor, a fence, and a
million acres of sky. I couldn't possibly use another acre of sky, except
along the eastern horizon, where the top floors of some twelve-story
buildings intercept the dawn.
With such a roof and such a sky, when I must, I can, with effort, get well
out of the city. I have never fished nor botanized here, but I have been
a-birding many times.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
nor city streets a cage--if one have a roof.
A roof is not an ideal spot for bird study. I would hardly, out of
preference, have chosen this with its soot and its battlement of gaseous
chimney-pots, even though it is a university roof with the great gilded
dome of a state house shining down upon it. One whose feet have always
been in the soil does not take kindly to tar and tin. But anything open to
the sky is open to some of the birds, for the paths of many of the
migrants lie close along the clouds.
Other birds than the passing migrants, however, sometimes come within
range of my look-out. The year around there are English sparrows and
pigeons; and all through the summer scarcely an evening passes when a few
chimney-swallows are not in sight.
With the infinite number and variety of chimneys hedging me in, I
naturally expected to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I thought
that some of the twenty-six pots at the corners of my roof would be
inhabited by the birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find a pair of
swallows in the air, they are surprisingly scarce, and, so far as I know,
they rarely build in the heart of the city. There are more canaries in my
block than chimney-swallows in all my sky.
The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, the smoke, the shrieking
ventilators, and the ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to their
liking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which they feed upon cannot live in
the air above the roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town with big
thunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quiet
water.
Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, in
fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits.
These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though the
finding of such nests would not surprise me. Of course a night-hawk's
_nest_, here or anywhere else, would surprise me; for like her cousin, the
whippoorwill, she never builds a nest, but stops in the grass, the gravel,
the leaves, or on a bare rock, deposits her eggs without even scratching
aside the sticks and stones that may share the bed, and in three days is
brooding them--brooding the stones too.
It is likely that some of my hawks nest on the buildings in the
neighborhood. Night-hawks' eggs have occasionally been found among the
pebbles of city roofs. The high, flat house-tops are so quiet and remote,
so far away from the noisy life in the narrow streets below, that the
birds make their nests here as if in a world apart. The twelve-and
fifteen-story buildings are as so many deserted mountain heads to them.
None of the birds build on my roof, however. But from early spring they
haunt the region so constantly that their families, if they have families
at all, must be somewhere in the vicinity. Should I see them like this
about a field or thicket in the country it would certainly mean a nest.
The sparrows themselves do not seem more at home here than do these
night-hawks. One evening, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm burst
over the city. The sun was low, glaring through a narrow rift between the
hill-crests and the clouds that spread green and heavy across the sky. I
could see the lower fringes of the clouds working and writhing in the
wind, but not a sound or a breath was in the air about me. Around me over
my roof flew the night-hawks. They were crying peevishly and skimming
close to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to any height.
Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as if something had given way
overhead. The wind tore across the stubble of roofs and spires; and
through the wind, the rain, and the rolling clouds shot a weird,
yellow-green sunlight.
I had never seen a storm like it. Nor had the night-hawks. They seemed to
be terrified, and left the sky immediately. One of them, alighting on the
roof across the street, and creeping into the lee of a chimney, huddled
there in sight of me until the wind was spent and a natural sunlight
flooded the world of roofs and domes and spires.
Then they were all awing once more, hawking for supper. Along with the
hawking they got in a great deal of play, doing their tumbling and
cloud-coasting over the roofs just as they do above the fields.
Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid strokes, catching flies by
the way, and crying _peent-peent_, the acrobat climbs until I look a mere
lump on the roof; then ceasing his whimpering _peent_, he turns on bowed
wings and falls--shoots roofward with fearful speed. The chimneys! Quick!
Quick he is. Just short of the roofs the taut wings flash a reverse, there
is a lightning swoop, a startling hollow wind-sound, and the rushing bird
is beating skyward again, hawking deliberately as before, and uttering
again his peevish nasal cry.
This single note, the only call he has besides a few squeaks, is far from
a song; farther still is the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the air
in the rushing wings as the bird swoops in his fall. The night-hawk, alias
"bull-bat," does not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a singing
bird! But a "voice" was never intended for the creature. Voice, beak,
legs, head--everything but wings and maw was sacrificed for a mouth. What
a mouth! The bird can almost swallow himself. Such a cleft in the head
could never mean a song; it could never be utilized for anything but a
fly-trap.
We have use for fly-traps. We need some birds just to sit around, look
pretty, and warble. We will pay them for it in cherries or in whatever
they ask. But there is also a great need for birds that kill insects. And
first among these are the night-hawks. They seem to have been designed for
this sole purpose. Their end is to kill insects. They are more like
machines than any other birds I know. The enormous mouth feeds an enormous
stomach, and this, like a fire-box, makes the power that works the
enormous wings. From a single maw have been taken eighteen hundred winged
ants, to say nothing of the smaller fry that could not be identified and
counted.
But if he never caught an ant, never one of the fifth-story mosquitos that
live and bite till Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need him! His
flight is song enough. His cry and eery thunder are the very voice of the
summer twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting in the evening dusk,
that twilight often falls--over the roofs, as it used to fall for me over
the fields and the quiet hollow woods.
There is always an English sparrow on my roof--which does not particularly
commend the roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the sparrow an
entirely different bird, but I never wish him entirely away from the roof.
When there is no other defense for him, I fall back upon his being a
bird. Any kind of a bird in the city! Any but a parrot.
A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the roof
that I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar Cock
Sparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be nothing else at
all. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him build. He tore the
old nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready. There came a
warm springish day in February, and he began. A blizzard stopped him, but
with the melting of the snow he went to work again, completing the nest by
the middle of March.
He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; for
there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the
course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the
children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof
above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife
came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at
the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then
crawl dutifully in upon the eggs.
I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock sparrow to enjoy hatching eggs. I
respected him; for though he grumbled, as any normal husband might, still
he was "drinking fair" with Mrs. Sparrow. He built and brooded and foraged
for his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, as his wife. He
deserved his blessed abundance of children.
Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? Not if you live on a roof.
He may be all of this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my roof, for
weeks at a stretch, his is the only bird voice I hear. Throughout the
spring, and far into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in the
eaves-trough. During the winter, at nightfall, I see little bands and
flurries of birds scudding over and dropping behind the high buildings to
the east. They are sparrows on the way to their roost in the elms of an
old mid-city burial-ground.
I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly far away above the roof. Not
only the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, wilder
species come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and circle there,
trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of moving, intersecting
lines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur.
In the spring, from the trees of the Common, which are close, but, except
for the crown of one noble English elm, are shut away from me, I hear an
occasional robin and Baltimore oriole. Very rarely a woodpecker will go
over. The great northern shrike is a frequent winter visitor, but by ill
chance I have not been up when he has called at the roof.
One of these fiend birds haunts a small court only a block away, which is
inclosed in a high board fence, topped with nails. He likes the court
because of these nails. They are sharp; they will stick clean through the
body of a sparrow. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows run through
with them, leaving the impaled bodies to flutter in the wind and finally
fall away.
In sight from my roof are three tiny patches of the harbor; sometimes a
fourth, when the big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. Down to
the water of the harbor in flocks from the north come other winter
visitors, the herring and black-backed gulls. Often during the winter I
find them in my sky.
One day they will cross silently over the city in a long straggling line.
Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices
shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, the
snow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofs
like patches of foam. I hear the sea--the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce
tumult of the shore--whenever the white gulls sail screaming into my
winter sky.
I have never lived under a wider reach of sky than that above my roof. It
offers a clear, straight, six-minute course to the swiftest wedge of wild
geese. Spring and autumn the geese and ducks go over, and their passage is
the most thrilling event in all my bird calendar.
It is because the ducks fly high and silent that I see them so rarely.
They are always a surprise. You look, and there against the dull sky they
move, strange dark forms that set your blood leaping. But I never see a
string of them winging over that I do not think of a huge thousand-legger
crawling the clouds.
My glimpses of the geese are largely chance, too. Several times, through
the open window by my table, I have heard the faint, far-off honking, and
have hurried to the roof in time to watch the travelers disappear. One
spring day I was upon the roof when a large belated flock came over,
headed north. It was the 20th of April, and the morning had broken very
warm. I could see that the geese were hot and tired. They were barely
clearing the church spires. On they came, their wedge wide and straggling,
until almost over me, when something happened. The gander in the lead
faltered and swerved, the wedge lines wavered, the flock rushed together
in confusion, wheeled, dropped, then broke apart, and honking wildly,
turned back toward the bay.
It was instant and complete demoralization. A stronger gander, I think,
could have led the wedge unbroken over the city to some neighboring pond,
where the weakest of the stragglers, however, must have fallen from sheer
exhaustion.
Scaling lower and lower across the roofs, the flock had reached the
center of the city and had driven suddenly into the roar and confusion of
the streets. Weary from the heat, they were dismayed at the noise, their
leader faltered, and, at a stroke, the great flying wedge went to pieces.
There is nothing in the life of birds quite so stirring to the imagination
as their migration: the sight of gathering swallows, the sudden appearance
of strange warblers, the call of passing plovers--all are suggestive of
instincts, movements, and highways that are unseen, unaccountable, and
full of mystery. Little wonder that the most thrilling poem ever written
to a bird begins:
Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
The question, the mystery in that "certain flight" I never felt so vividly
as from my roof. Here I have often heard the reed-birds and the water-fowl
passing. Sometimes I have heard them going over in the dark. One night I
remember particularly, the sky and the air were so clear and the geese so
high in the blue.
Over the fields and wide silent marshes such passing is strange enough.
But here I stood above a sleeping city of men, and far above me, so far
that I could only hear them, holding their northward way through the
starlit sky, they passed--whither? and how guided? Was the shining dome of
the State House a beacon? Did they mark the light at Marblehead?
THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK
[Illustration]
THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK
... the chylde may Rue that ys vn-born, it wos the mor pitte.
There was murder in my heart. The woodchuck knew it. He never had had a
thought before, but he had one now. It came hard and heavily, yet it
arrived in time; and it was not a slow thought for a woodchuck,
either--just a trifle better, indeed, than my own.
This was the first time I had caught the woodchuck away from his hole. He
had left his old burrow in the huckleberry hillside, and dug a new hole
under one of my young peach-trees. I had made no objection to his
huckleberry hole. He used to come down the hillside and waddle into the
orchard in broad day, free to do and go as he pleased; but not since he
began to dig under the peach-tree.
I discovered this new hole when it was only a foot deep, and promptly
filled it with stones. The next morning the stones were out and the cavity
two feet deeper. I filled it up again, driving a large squarish piece of
rock into the mouth, tight, certainly stopping all further work, as I
thought.
There are woodchucks that you can discourage and there are those that you
can't. Three days later the piece of rock and the stones were piled about
the butt of the tree and covered with fresh earth, while the hole ran in
out of sight, with the woodchuck, apparently, at the bottom of it.
I had tried shutting him out, now I would try shutting him in. It was
cruel--it would have been to anything but a woodchuck; I was ashamed of
myself for doing it, and went back the following day, really hoping to
find the burrow open.
Never again would I worry over an imprisoned woodchuck; but then I should
never again try to destroy a woodchuck by walling up his hole, any more
than Br'er Fox would try to punish the rabbit by slinging him a second
time into the brier-patch.
The burrow was wide open. I had stuffed and rammed the rocks into it, and
buried deep in its mouth the body of another woodchuck that my neighbor's
dog had killed. All was cleared away. The deceased relative was
gone--where and how I know not; the stones were scattered on the farther
side of the tree, and the passage neatly swept of all loose sand and
pebbles.
Clearly the woodchuck had come to stay. I meant that he should move. I
could get him into a steel trap, for his wits are not abiding; they come
only on occasion. Woodchuck lives too much in the ground and too
constantly beside his own door to grow very wise. He can always be
trapped. So can any one's enemy. You can always murder. But no gentleman
strikes from behind. I hate the steel trap. I have set my last one. They
would be bitter peaches on that tree if they cost the woodchuck what I
have seen more than one woodchuck suffer in the horrible jaws of such a
trap.
But is it not perfectly legitimate and gentlemanly to shoot such a
woodchuck to save one's peaches? Certainly. So I got the gun and
waited--and waited--and waited. Did you ever wait with a gun until a
woodchuck came out of his hole? I never did. A woodchuck has just sense
enough to go into his hole--and stay in.
There were too many woodchucks about and my days were too precious for me
to spend any considerable part of my summer watching with a gun for this
one. Besides, I have been known to fire and miss a woodchuck, anyway.
So I gave up the gun. It was while thinking what I could do next that I
came down the row of young peach-trees and spied the woodchuck out in the
orchard, fifty yards away from his hole. He spied me at the same instant,
and rose upon his haunches.
At last we were face to face. The time had come. It would be a fight to
the finish; and a fair fight, too, for all that I had about me in the way
of weapons was a pair of heavy, knee-high hunting-boots, that I had put
on against the dew of the early morning. All my thought and energy, all my
hope, centered immediately in those boots.
The woodchuck kept his thoughts in his head. Into his heels he put what
speed he had; and little as that was, it counted, pieced out with the
head-work.
Back in my college days I ran a two-mile race--the greatest race of the
day, the judges said--and just at the tape lost two gold medals and the
glory of a new intercollegiate record because I didn't use my head. Two of
us out of twenty finished, and we finished together, the other fellow
twisting and falling forward, breaking the string with his side, while I,
pace for pace with him--didn't think.
For a moment the woodchuck and I stood motionless, he studying the
situation. I was at the very mouth of his burrow. It was coming to sure
death for him to attempt to get in. Yet it was sure death if he did not
get in, for I should run him down.
Had you been that woodchuck, gentle reader, I wonder if you would have
taken account of the thick-strewn stones behind you, the dense tangle of
dewberry-vines off on your left, the heavy boots of your enemy and his
unthinking rage?
I was vastly mistaken in that woodchuck. A blanker, flabbier face never
looked into mine. Only the sudden appearance of death could have brought
the trace of intelligence across it that I caught as the creature dropped
on all fours and began to wabble straight away from me over the area of
rough, loose stones.
With a jump and a yell I was after him, making five yards to his one. He
tumbled along the best he could, and, to my great surprise, directly away
from his hole. It was steep downhill. I should land upon him in half a
dozen bounds more.
On we went, reckless of the uneven ground, momentum increasing with every
jump, until, accurately calculating his speed and the changing distance
between us, I rose with a mighty leap, sailed into the air and came
down--just an inch too far ahead--on a round stone, turned my ankle, and
went sprawling over the woodchuck in a heap.
The woodchuck spilled himself from under me, slid short about, and
tumbled off for home by way of the dewberry-patch.
He had made a good start before I was righted and again in motion. Now it
was steep, very steep, uphill--which did not seem to matter much to the
woodchuck, but made a great difference to me. Then, too, I had counted on
a simple, straightaway dash, and had not saved myself for this lap and
climbing home-stretch.
Still I was gaining,--more slowly this time,--with chances yet good of
overtaking him short of the hole, when, in the thick of the
dewberry-vines, I tripped, lunged forward three or four stumbling strides,
and saw the woodchuck turn sharp to the right in a bee-line for his
burrow.
I wheeled, jumped, cut after him, caught him on the toe of my boot, and
lifting him, plopped him smoothly, softly into his hole.
It was gently done. And so beautifully! The whole feat had something of
the poetic accuracy of an astronomical calculation. And the perfectly
lovely dive I helped him make home!
I sat down upon his mound of earth to get myself together and to enjoy it
all. What a woodchuck! Perhaps he never could do the trick again; but,
then, he won't need to. All the murder was gone from my heart. He had
beaten the boots. He had beaten them so neatly, so absolutely, that simple
decency compelled me then and there to turn over that Crawford peach-tree,
root and stem, to the woodchuck, his heirs and assigns forever.
By way of celebration he has thrown out nearly a cart-load of sand from
somewhere beneath the tree, deepening and enlarging his home. My Swedish
neighbor, viewing the hole recently, exclaimed: "Dose vuudshuck, I t'ink
him kill dem dree!" Perhaps so. As yet, however, the tree grows on without
a sign of hurt.
But suppose the tree does die? Well, there is no certainty of its bearing
good fruit. There was once a peddler of trees, a pious man and a Quaker,
who made a mistake, selling the wrong tree. Besides, there are other trees
in the orchard; and, if necessary, I can buy peaches.
Yes, but what if other woodchucks should seek other roof-trees in the
peach row? They won't. There are no fashions, no such emulations,
out-of-doors. Because one woodchuck moves from huckleberries to a
peach-tree is no sign that all the woodchucks on the hillside are going to
forsake the huckleberries with him. Only humans are silly enough for that.
If the woodchucks should come, all of them, it would be extremely
interesting--an event worth many peaches.
THREE SERMONS
[Illustration]
THREE SERMONS
I
Thou shalt not preach.
The woods were as empty as some great empty house; they were hollow and
silent and somber. I stood looking in among the leafless trees, heavy in
spirit at the quiet and gloom, when close by my side spoke a tiny voice. I
started, so suddenly, so unexpectedly it broke into the wide December
silence, so far it echoed through the empty forest halls.
"What!" I exclaimed, turning in my tracks and addressing a small
brown-leafed beech. "What! little Hyla, are you still out? You! with a
snow-storm brewing and St. Nick due here to-morrow night?" And then from
within the bush, or on it, or under it, or over it, came an answer, _Peep,
peep, peep!_ small and shrill, dropping into the silence of the woods and
stirring it as three small pebbles might drop into the middle of a wide
sleeping pond.
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