Roof and Meadow by Dallas Lore Sharp
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Dallas Lore Sharp >> Roof and Meadow
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It was one of those gray, heavy days of the early winter--one of the
vacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before a
coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to
cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last
week in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till this
dreary time, he had been cheerfully, continuously piping. This was his
last call.
_Peep, peep, peep!_ he piped in February; _Peep, peep, peep!_ in August;
_Peep, peep, peep!_ in December. But did he?
"He did just that," replies the scientist, "and that only."
"Not at all," I answer.
"What authority have you?" he asks. "You are not scientific. You are
merely a dreaming, fooling hanger-on to the fields and woods; one of those
who are forever hearing more than they hear, and seeing more than they
see. We scientists hear with our ears, see with our eyes, feel with our
fingers, and understand with our brains--"
"Just so, just so," I interrupt, "and you are a worthy but often a pretty
stupid set. Little Hyla in February, August, and December cries _Peep,
peep, peep!_ to you. But his cry to me in February is _Spring, spring,
spring!_ And in December--it depends; for I cannot see with my eyes alone,
nor hear with my ears, nor feel with my fingers only. You can, and so
could Peter Bell. To-day I saw and heard and felt the world all gray and
hushed and shrouded; and little Hyla, speaking out of the silence and
death, called _Cheer, cheer, cheer!_"
II
It is not because the gate is strait and the way narrow that so few get
into the kingdom of the Out-of-Doors. The gate is wide and the way is
broad. The difficulty is that most persons go in too fast.
If I were asked what virtue, above all others, one must possess in order
to be shown the mysteries of the kingdom of earth and sky, I should say,
there are several; I should not know which to name first. There are,
however, two virtues very essential and very hard to acquire, namely, the
ability to keep quiet and to stand still.
Last summer a fox in two days took fifteen of my chickens. I saw the
rascal in broad day come down the hill to the chicken-yard. I greatly
enjoy the sight of a wild fox; but fifteen chickens a sight was too high a
price. So I got the gun and chased about the woods half the summer for
another glimpse of the sinner's red hide. I saw him one Sunday as we were
driving into the wood road from church; but never a week-day sight for all
my chasing.
Along in the early autumn I got home one evening shortly after sundown. I
had left several cocks of hay spread out in the little meadow, and though
it was already pretty damp, I took the fork, went down, and cocked it up.
Returning, I climbed by the narrow, winding path through the pines, out
into the corner of my pasture. It was a bright moonlight night, and
leaning back upon the short-handled fork, I stopped in the shadow of the
pines to look out over the softly lighted field.
Off in the woods a mile away sounded the deep, mellow tones of two
foxhounds. Day and night all summer long I had heard them, and all summer
long I had hurried to this knoll and to that for a shot. But the fox
always took the other knoll.
The echoing cries of the dogs through the silent woods were musical. Soon
they sounded sharp and clear--the hounds were crossing an open stretch
leading down to the meadow behind me. As I leaned, listening, I heard near
by a low, uneasy murmuring from a covey of quails sleeping in the brush
beside the path, and before I had time to think what it meant, a fox
trotted up the path I had just climbed, and halted in the edge of the
shadows directly at my feet.
I stood as stiff as a post. He sniffed at my dew-wet boots, backed away,
and looked me over curiously. I could have touched him with my fork. Then
he sat down with just his silver-tipped brush in the silver moonlight, to
study me in earnest.
The loud baying of the hounds was coming nearer. How often I had heard it,
and, in spite of my lost chickens, how often I had exclaimed, "Poor little
tired fox!" But here sat "poor little tired fox" with his tongue in his
head, calmly wondering what kind of stump he had run up against this time.
I could only dimly see his eyes, but his whole body said: "I can't make it
out, for it doesn't move. But so long as it doesn't move I sha'n't be
scared." Then he trotted to this side and to that for a better wind,
somewhat afraid, but much more curious.
His time was up, however. The dogs were yelping across the meadow on his
warm trail. Giving me a last unsatisfied look, he dropped down the path,
directly toward the dogs, and sprang lightly off into the thicket.
The din of their own voices must have deafened the dogs, or they would
have heard him. Round and round they circled, giving the fox ample time
for the study of another "stump" before they discovered that he had
doubled down the path, and still longer time before they crossed the wide
scentless space of his side jump and once more fastened upon his trail.
III
Back in my knickerbocker days I once went off on a Sunday-school picnic,
and soon, replete with "copenhagen," I sauntered into the woods alone in
quest of less cloying sport. I had not gone far when I picked up a dainty
little ribbon-snake, and having no bag or box along, I rolled him up in my
handkerchief, and journeyed on with the wiggling reptile safely caged on
top of my head under my tight-fitting hat.
After a time I began to feel a peculiar movement under the hat, not
exactly the crawling of a normal snake, but more like that of a snake with
legs. Those were the days when all my soul was bent on the discovery of a
new species--of anything; when the whole of life meant a journey to the
Academy of Natural Sciences with something to be named. For just an
instant flashed the hope that I had found an uncursed snake, one of the
original ones that went on legs. I reached for the hat, bent over, and
pulled it off, and, lo! not a walking snake. Just an ordinary snake, but
with it a live wood-frog!
This, at least, was interesting, the only real piece of magic I have ever
done. Into my hat had gone only a live snake, now I brought forth the
snake and a live frog. This was a snake to conjure with; so I tied him up
again and finally got him home.
The next Sunday the minister preached a temperance sermon, in which he
said some dreadful things about snakes. The creatures do seem in some
dark, horrible way to lurk in the dregs of strong drink: but the minister
was not discriminating; he was too fierce and sweeping, saying, among
other things, that there was a universal human hatred for snakes, and that
one of the chief purposes of the human heel was to bruise their scaly
heads.
I was not born of my Quaker mother to share this "universal human hatred
for snakes"; but I did get from her a wild dislike for sweeping, general
statements. After the sermon I ventured to tell the preacher that there
was an exception to this "universal" rule; that all snakes were not adders
and serpents, but some were just innocent snakes, and that I had a
collection of tame ones which I wished he would come out to see.
He looked astonished, skeptical, then pained. It was during the days, I
think, of my "probation," and into his anxious heart had come the thought,
Was I "running well"? But he dismissed the doubt and promised to walk over
in the morning.
His interest amazed me. But, then, preachers quite commonly are different
on Monday. As we went from cage to cage, he said he had read how
boa-constrictors eat, and wouldn't I show him how these snakes eat?
We had come to the cage of the little ribbon-snake from the picnic grove,
and had arrived just in time to catch him crawling away out of a hole that
he had worked in the rusty mosquito-netting wire of the cover. I caught
him, put him back, and placed a brickbat over the hole.
I knew that this snake was hungry, because he had had nothing to eat for
nearly a week, and the frog which appeared so mysteriously with him in my
hat was the dinner that he had given up that day of his capture in his
effort to escape.
The minister looked on without a tremor. I took off the brick that he
might see the better. The snake was very long and small around and the
toad, which I had given him, was very short and big around, so that when
it was all over there was a bunch in the middle of the snake comparable to
the lump a prime watermelon would make in the middle of a small boy if
swallowed whole.
While we were still watching, the snake, having comfortably (for a snake)
breakfasted, saw the hole uncovered and stuck out his head. We made no
move. Slowly, cautiously, with his eye upon us, he glided out, up to the
big bunch of breakfast in his middle. This stuck. Frantically he squirmed,
whirled, and lashed about, but in vain. He could not pull through. He had
eaten too much.
There was just one thing for him to do if he would be free: give up the
breakfast of toad (which is much better fare according to snake standards
than pottage according to ours), as he had given up the dinner of frog.
Would he sell his birthright?
Perhaps a snake cannot calculate; perhaps he knows no conflict of
emotions. Yet something very like these processes seemed to go on within
the scaly little reptile. He ceased all violent struggle, laid his length
upon the netting, and _seemed_ to think, to weigh the chances, to count
the cost.
Soon he softly drew back into the cage. A series of severe contortions
followed; the obstructing bunch began to move forward, up, farther and
farther, until at last, dazed, squeezed, and half smothered, but entirely
alive and unhurt, the toad appeared and once more opened his eyes to the
blessed light.
The snake quickly put his head through the hole, slipped out again, and
glided away into his freedom. He had earned it. The toad deserved his
liberty too, and I took him into the strawberry-patch.
The minister looked on at it all. Perhaps he didn't learn anything. But I
did.
THE MARSH
[Illustration]
THE MARSH
And breathe it free, and breathe it free,
By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty.
I
It was a late June day whose breaking found me upon the edge of the great
salt-marshes which lie behind East Point Light, as the Delaware Bay lies
in front of it, and which run in a wide, half-land, half-bay border down
the cape.
I followed along the black sandy road which goes to the Light until close
to the old Zane's Place,--the last farm-house of the uplands,--when I
turned off into the marsh toward the river. The mosquitos rose from the
damp grass at every step, swarming up around me in a cloud, and streaming
off behind like a comet's tail, which hummed instead of glowed. I was the
only male among them. It was a cloud of females, the nymphs of the
salt-marsh; and all through that day the singing, stinging, smothering
swarm danced about me, rested upon me, covered me whenever I paused, so
that my black leggings turned instantly to a mosquito brown, and all my
dress seemed dyed alike.
Only I did not pause--not often, nor long. The sun came up blisteringly
hot, yet on I walked, and wore my coat, my hands deep down in the pockets
and my head in a handkerchief. At noon I was still walking, and kept on
walking till I reached the bay shore, when a breeze came up, and drove the
singing, stinging fairies back into the grass, and saved me.
I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh like
a long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging them
away from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrained
tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland. Passing along the bank
until beyond the weeds and scrub of the higher borders, I stood with the
sky-bound, bay-bound green beneath my feet. Far across, with sails
gleaming white against the sea of sedge, was a schooner, beating slowly up
the river. Laying my course by her, I began to beat slowly out into the
marsh through the heavy sea of low, matted hay-grass.
There is no fresh-water meadow, no inland plain, no prairie with this
rainy, misty, early morning freshness so constant on the marsh; no other
reach of green so green, so a-glitter with seas of briny dew, so
regularly, unfailingly fed:
Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins!
I imagine a Western wheat-field, half-way to head, could look, in the dew
of morning, somewhat like a salt-marsh. It certainly would have at times
the purple-distance haze, that atmosphere of the sea which hangs across
the marsh. The two might resemble each other as two pictures of the same
theme, upon the same scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is the
framing, the setting of the marsh that gives it character, variety, tone,
and its touch of mystery.
For the marsh reaches back to the higher lands of fences, fields of corn,
and ragged forest blurs against the hazy horizon; it reaches down to the
river of the reedy flats, coiled like a serpent through the green; it
reaches away to the sky where the clouds anchor, where the moon rises,
where the stars, like far-off lighthouses, gleam along the edge; and it
reaches out to the bay, and on, beyond the white surf-line of meeting, on,
beyond the line where the bay's blue and the sky's blue touch, on, far on.
Here meet land and river, sky and sea; here they mingle and make the
marsh.
A prairie rolls and billows; the marsh lies still, lies as even as a
sleeping sea. Yet what moods! What changes! What constant variety of
detail everywhere! In The Marshes of Glynn there was
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
but not in these Maurice River marshes. Here, to-day, the sun was blazing,
kindling millions of tiny suns in the salt-wet blades; and instead of
waist-high grass, there lay around me acres and acres of the fine rich
hay-grass, full-grown, but without a blade wider than a knitting-needle or
taller than my knee. It covered the marsh like a deep, thick fur, like a
wonderland carpet into whose elastic, velvety pile my feet sank and sank,
never quite feeling the floor. Here and there were patches of higher
sedges, green, but of differing shades, which seemed spread upon the grass
carpet like long-napped rugs.
Ahead of me the even green broke suddenly over a shoal of sand into tall,
tufted grasses, into rose, mallow, and stunted persimmon bushes, foaming,
on nearer view, with spreading dogbane blossoms. Off toward the bay
another of these shoals, mole-hill high in the distance, ran across the
marsh for half a mile, bearing a single broken file of trees--sentinels
they seemed, some of them fallen, others gaunt and wind-beaten, watching
against the sea.
These were the lookouts and the resting-places for passing birds. During
the day, whenever I turned in their direction, a crow, a hawk, or some
smaller bird was seen upon their dead branches.
Naturally the variety of bird life upon the marsh is limited; but there is
by no means the scarcity here which is so often noted in the forests and
wild prairies of corresponding extent. Indeed, the marsh was birdy--rich
in numbers if not in species. Underfoot, in spots, sang the marsh-wrens;
in larger patches the sharp-tailed sparrows; and almost as wide-spread and
constant as the green was the singing of the seaside sparrows. Overhead
the fish-hawks crossed frequently to their castle nest high on the top of
a tall white oak along the land edge of the marsh; in the neighborhood of
the sentinel trees a pair of crows were busy trying (it seemed to me) to
find an oyster, a crab--something big enough to choke, for just one
minute, the gobbling, gulping clamor of their infant brood. But the dear
devouring monsters could not be choked, though once or twice I thought by
their strangling cries that father crow, in sheer desperation, had brought
them oysters with the shells on. Their awful gaggings died away at dusk.
Besides the crows and fish-hawks, a harrier would now and then come
skimming close along the grass. Higher up, the turkey-buzzards circled all
day long; and once, setting my blood leaping and the fish-hawks screaming,
there sailed over, far away in the blue, a bald-headed eagle, his snowy
neck and tail flashing in the sunlight as he careened among the clouds.
In its blended greens the marsh that morning offered one of the most
satisfying drinks of color my eyes ever tasted. The areas of different
grasses were often acres in extent, so that the tints, shading from the
lightest pea-green of the thinner sedges to the blue-green of the rushes,
to the deep emerald-green of the hay-grass, merged across their broad
bands into perfect harmony.
As fresh and vital as the color was the breath of the marsh. There is no
bank of violets stealing and giving half so sweet an odor to my nostrils,
outraged by a winter of city smells, as the salty, spray-laden breath of
the marsh. It seems fairly to line the lungs with ozone. I know how
grass-fed cattle feel at the smell of salt. I have the concentrated thirst
of a whole herd when I catch that first whiff of the marshes after a
winter, a year it may be, of unsalted inland air. The smell of it
stampedes me. I gallop to meet it, and drink, drink, drink deep of it, my
blood running redder with every draught.
II
I had waded out into the meadow perhaps two hundred yards, leaving a dark
bruised trail in the grass, when I came upon a nest of the long-billed
marsh-wren. It was a bulky house, and so overburdened its frail sedge
supports that it lay almost upon the ground, with its little round doorway
wide open to the sun and rain. They must have been a young couple who
built it, and quite inexperienced. I wonder they had not abandoned it;
for a crack of light into a wren's nest would certainly addle the eggs.
They are such tiny, dusky, tucked-away things, and their cradle is so deep
and dark and hidden. There were no fatalities, I am sure, following my
efforts to prop the leaning structure, though the wrens were just as sure
that it was all a fatality--utterly misjudging my motives. As a rule, I
have never been able to help much in such extremities. Either I arrive too
late, or else I blunder.
I thought, for a moment, that it was the nest of the long-billed's cousin,
the short-billed marsh-wren, that I had found--which would have been a gem
indeed, with pearly eggs instead of chocolate ones. Though I was out for
the mere joy of being out, I had really come with a hope of discovering
this mousy mite of a wren, and of watching her ways. It was like hoping to
watch the ways of the "wunk." Several times I have been near these little
wrens; but what chance has a pair of human eyes with a skulking four
inches of brownish streaks and bars in the middle of a marsh! Such birds
are the everlasting despair of the naturalist, the salt of his earth. The
belief that a pair of them dwelt somewhere in this green expanse, that I
might at any step come upon them, made me often forget the mosquitos.
When I reached the ridge of rose and mallow bushes, two wrens began
muttering in the grass with different notes and tones from those of the
long-billed. I advanced cautiously. Soon one flashed out and whipped back
among the thick stems again, exposing himself just long enough to show me
_stellaris_, the little short-billed wren I was hunting.
I tried to stand still for a second glimpse and a clue to the nest; but
the mosquitos! Things have come to a bad pass with the bird-hunter, whose
only gun is an opera-glass, when he cannot stand stock-still for an hour.
His success depends upon his ability to take root. He needs light feet, a
divining mind, and many other things, but most of all he needs patience.
There are few mortals, however, with mosquito-proof patience--one that
would stand the test here. Remembering a meadow in New England where
stellaris nested, I concluded to wait till chance took me thither, and
passed on.
This ridge of higher ground proved to be a mosquito roost--a thousand
here to one in the deeper, denser grass. As I hurried across I noted with
great satisfaction that the pink-white blossoms of the spreading dogbane
were covered with mosquito carcasses. It lessened my joy somewhat to find,
upon examination, that all the victims were males. Either they had drunk
poison from the flowers, or else, and more likely, they had been unable to
free their long-haired antennae from the sticky honey into which they had
dipped their innocent beaks. Several single flowers had trapped three, and
from one blossom I picked out five. If we could bring the dogbane to brew
a cup which would be fatal to the females, it might be a good plant to
raise in our gardens along with the eucalyptus and the castor-oil plants.
Everywhere as I went along, from every stake, every stout weed and topping
bunch of grass, trilled the seaside sparrows--a weak, husky, monotonous
song, of five or six notes, a little like the chippy's, more tuneful,
perhaps, but not so strong. They are dark, dusky birds, of a grayish
olive-green hue, with a conspicuous yellow line before the eye, and
yellow upon the shoulder.
There seems to be a sparrow of some kind for every variety of land between
the poles. Mountain-tops, seaside marshes, inland prairies, swamps, woods,
pastures--everywhere, from Indian River to the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yet
one can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, for they seem out of place
in houseless, treeless, half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts of
the shyer, more secretive birds. Here the ducks, rails, bitterns,
coots,--birds that can wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs,--seem naturally
at home. The sparrows are perchers, grain-eaters, free-fliers, and
singers; and they, of all birds, are the friends and neighbors of man.
This is no place for them. The effect of this marsh life upon the flight
and song of these two species was very marked. Both showed unmistakable
vocal powers which long ago would have been developed under the stimulus
of human listeners; and during all my stay (so long have they crept and
skulked about through the low marsh paths) I did not see one rise a
hundred feet into the air, nor fly straight away for a hundred yards.
They would get up just above the grass, and flutter and drop--a puttering,
short-winded, apoplectic struggle, very unbecoming and unworthy.
By noon I had completed a circle and recrossed the lighthouse road in the
direction of the bay. A thin sheet of lukewarm water lay over all this
section. The high spring tides had been reinforced by unusually heavy
rains during April and May, giving a great area of pasture and hay land
back, for that season, to the sea. Descending a copsy dune from the road,
I surprised a brood of young killdeers feeding along the drift at the edge
of the wet meadow. They ran away screaming, leaving behind a pair of
spotted sandpipers, "till-tops," that had been wading with them in the
shallow water. The sandpipers teetered on for a few steps, then rose at my
approach, scaled nervously out over the drowned grass, and, circling,
alighted near where they had taken wing, continuing instantly with their
hunt, and calling _Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet_, and teetering, always
teetering, as they tiptoed along.
If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get an
idea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced on
its needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall not
go on tilting forever, it is because something is wrong with the mechanism
of the world outside their little spotted bodies. Surely the easiest,
least willed motion in all the universe is this sandpiper's teeter,
teeter, teeter, as it hurries peering and prying along the shore.
Killdeers and sandpipers are noisy birds; and one would know, after half a
day upon the marsh, even if he had never seen these birds before, that
they could not have been bred here. For however
candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
the marsh may seem to one coming suddenly from the wooded uplands, it will
not let one enter far without the consciousness that silence and secrecy
lie deeper here than in the depths of the forest glooms. The true birds of
the marsh, those that feed and nest in the grass, have the spirit of the
great marsh-mother. The sandpiper is not her bird. It belongs to the
shore, living almost exclusively along sandy, pebbly margins, the margins
of any, of almost every water, from Delaware Bay to the tiny bubbling
spring in some Minnesota pasture. Neither is the killdeer her bird. The
upland claims it, plover though it be. A barren, stony hillside, or even a
last year's corn-field left fallow, is a better-loved breast to the
killdeer than the soft brooding breast of the marsh. There are no
grass-birds so noisy as these two. Both of them lay their eggs in pebble
nests; and both depend largely for protection upon the harmony of their
colors with the general tone of their surroundings.
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