Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 by Various

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Most of us, even _color chi sanno_, like to retain a spice of mystery in
our mental food. It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may
often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants,
however undefinable, must be recognized. It is a spur that titillates
the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action. It is a craving
that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation
and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and
respectable members until the year one million, as it has done since the
year one. The great mass of us like to see the absolute reign of reason
tempered by the incomprehensible, and are ever ready to lend a kindly
ear to men and things that humor that liking.

Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when
they leave the North in the winter? A small minority lags, not
superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued,
pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their
summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society. They
flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little
depressing. Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their
dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be
independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and
will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits. The
spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports
perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the
first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics
for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain
condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much
above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and
forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs
and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our
winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this
idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his
insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no
discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not
seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain
unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of
the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots
where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the
snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests
a survival of the unfittest.

The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the
bluebird and the robin,--our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch
as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who
give it to the redbreast,--who are usually with him long before he gets
away. They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of
Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs
appear of evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter
rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that
skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence
they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward
beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the
Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their
tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans
in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping
over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to
welcome the weary invaders on emerging from the palmetto marshes. They
can hardly be said to reach the particular region of which we propose to
speak, both species, the bluebird especially, being almost strangers to
it.

Other species, the cardinal grosbeak among them, may be said to stop,
as it were, just out of hearing, the echo of their song slumbering in
the thin, keen air, ready to swell again into unmistakable reality.
Between these stubborn fugitives and those who follow the butterflies to
the tropics there is a wide variety in the extent of travel in which our
winged compatriots indulge.

Quadrupeds, whose movements are less speedy and more limited, have to
adapt themselves to the Northern winter as best they may. Hard and long
training has made them less the creatures of climate than their
feathered associates, who might themselves in many cases have learned
perforce to stay where they were reared but for possessing the light and
agile wings which woo them to wander. We may fancy Bruin, with his
passion for sweet mast and luscious fruits, eying with envy the martin
and the wild fowl as they sweep over his head to the teeming Southland,
and wondering, as he huddles shivering into his snowy lair, why Nature
should be so partial in her gifts. The call of the trumpeting swan, the
bugler crane, and the Canada goose falls idly upon his ear. To their
breezy challenge, "A new home,--who'll follow?" he cannot respond.

Let us join this tide of travel and move sunward with some of those who
take through-tickets. We can easily keep up with them now. Steam is not
slower than wings,--often faster. Sitting at ease, yet moved by iron
muscles, we can time the coursers of the air. A few decades ago, when
this familiar motor was a new thing comparatively, we could not do so.
At the jog of twenty miles an hour, even the sparrow could pass us on a
short stretch, and the dawdling crow soon left us in the rear. Our gain
upon their time is so recent that the birds have not yet fully realized
it. Unaccustomed to being beaten by anything _on earth_, they will skim
along abreast of a train till, to their unspeakable, or at least
unspoken, wonderment, they find that what they are fleeing from is
fleeing from them. One morning last winter I was speeding eastward to
the Crescent City, the freshest of my memories a struggle at Houston
with one of those breakfasts which so atrociously distinguish the reign
of the magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the
Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for
others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of
some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than
his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the
sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad,
red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see
if the silhouetted pines and cattle were where he had left them the day
before. Glancing to the left, which was my side of the car, I became
aware of a large bird suspended in the air, not motionless, for his
wings were doing their best, but to all appearance as stationary as the
scattered trees and cattle, and about fifteen yards distant. Every
feature and marking of the "chicken," or pinnated grouse, was as
distinct to the eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an
hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he
sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better
wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer
the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the
engine--of course losing some time in the act of rising--and fallen back
gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a schedule for
birds comes to be framed, it is safe to set down _Tetrao cupido_ at
about the speed above named. Timed from a rail-car, that is; for, looked
at over a gun, he seems to move five times as fast. The double-barrel is
a powerful binocular.

Steam, then, soon carries us to the resort of the lost truants, who have
travelled with the lines of longitude by guides and tracks over that
invisible road as unerring as those of the railway. We shall find them
in close companionship with friends unknown in our latitude, whose
abiding-places are at the South, as those left behind are fixed dwellers
at the North.

From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this
parallel of thirty degrees,--window open, as well as the door, for no
norther is on duty to-day,--I see flocks of our familiar redwings,
cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and
fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as
the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the
lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony
never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as
it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from
his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his
dead-reckoning when a wind is on. His wife is a sober-looking lady in a
suit of steel-gray, and the pair are quite conspicuous among their
winter guests. The latter are far less shy than we are accustomed to
find them, a majority being young in their first season and with little
or no experience of human guile. No one cares to shoot them, in the
abundance of larger game, and the absence of stones from the fat
prairie-soil places them out of danger from the small boy. Their only
foe is the hawk, who levies blackmail on them as coolly and regularly as
any other plumed cateran. Partly, perhaps, by reason of this outside
pressure, they are cheek by jowl with the poultry,--the cow-bunting,
which is the pet prey of the hawk, following them into the back porch
and insisting sometimes on breakfasting with Tray,--or rather with
Legion, for that is the name of the Texas dog. In this familiarity they
are approached, though not equalled, by that more home-staying bird the
meadow-lark, who is here a dweller of the lawn and garden and adds his
mellow whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark
is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the
blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in
migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped
American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen
of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find
three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and the young pass
gradually into adult plumage. The male redwing, up to his first autumn,
is hardly distinguishable in dress from his mother. Here he dons his
epaulettes, beginning with the threadbare worsted yellow of the private,
and rising in grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the officer fully
commissioned to flame upon the marsh and carry havoc among its humblest
inhabitants.

A month or two hence, the plover, as shy in his Northern haunts as the
lark, will, in three species, be as much at home upon the lawn. Youth
and inexperience must, as in the case of the other birds, be one
explanation of this unwonted familiarity. Among other reasons is the
abundance of food, under a mild sky, with but rare frosts to bind the
earth and no snows to cover it. The temperature of an average winter day
is 60 deg. or 65 deg.. A norther is apt to blow three or four times in the
season, and it brings the mercury down to freezing-point or some degrees
lower. After the two or three days of its duration, the first warm
morning covers the walks and most other bare parts of the soil with
worm-casts,--revealing the larders of the smaller birds. At an average,
too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or
three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into
orange and broadens as the air grows warm. These erections are the work
of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less
numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we
observe. Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in
its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its
habits of life,--evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the
leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we
are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species
when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects
a site for its communistic abode. One of these is located in the middle
of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty
steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and
mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a
dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling
whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission. These ant-hills, I
am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which
spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The
hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear
gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a
surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses
gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger
growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and
thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has
broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago
confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is
spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the
original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the
ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a
viand, by his neighbors. Full-grown, and still more in the larval stage,
he is esteemed by them as both a toothsome and a beaksome bit. He--or,
more numerously, she, if we insist on sex and decline the more
practically correct _it_--forms thus the lowest term in an ascending
series of animal life that grows out of the ant-hill like the tree. So
much may one such settlement in a rood of ground do for the maintenance
of organic existence.

A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's
terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that
distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his
operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands
assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no
harm in eating his trail. There is comfort in this creed, whatever may
be our private belief in the substantiality of what the bird absorbs;
and we cheerfully eat, after the suggestion of Paul, "asking no
questions," the while tacitly assuring ourselves, like old Fuller with
the strawberry, that a better bird might doubtless have been made, but
as certainly never was. For game flavor not even the partridge (Bob
White), also exceptionally abundant here, is his superior.

But think, ye snow-bound, of the state of things implied in this
embarrassment of riches,--of a mid-winter table balanced between such a
choice, or, better, balanced by the adoption of both, one at each end!
Nor would this be near telling the whole story. Excluding fur and
sticking to feather, we have a wide range beyond. The larger birds we
may begin on, very moderately, with crane-steak, a transverse section
of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill. That is the form in
which he is thought to appear to best advantage. By the time you have
circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing
circuit of a buggy,--for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is
common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,--you will feel vicious
enough to eat him in any shape. His brother, the beautiful white bugler,
you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind. A
Canada goose--not the tough and fishy bird of the Northern coast, but
grain- and grass-fed from fledging-time--is tender, delicate, and
everyway presentable. From the back upper gallery that looks upon the
prairie you are likely to see a company or battalion of his brethren,
their long black necks and white ties "dressing" capitally in line, and
their invisible legs doing the goose-step as the inventors of that
classic manoeuvre ought to do it. This bird seems to affect the
_militaire_ in all his movements. What can be more regular than the
wedge, like that so common in tactical history, in which he begins his
march, moving in "a column of attack upon the pole"? Even when startled
and put to flight, he goes off smoothly and quietly, company-front. In
foraging he is strictly systematic, and never forgets to set sentinels.
We cannot fail to respect him while doing him the last honors. Of not
inferior claim is his prairie chum and remote cousin the mallard. They
are not often in close companionship, though I have seen a dozen and a
half of each rise from the border and the bosom of a pond forty yards
across,--one loving the open, and the other taking repose, if not food,
upon the water. That there should be ponds upon these prairies is as
striking to one accustomed to hill and dale as that so unpromising a
surface should so teem with life. The prairie is as flat as if cast like
plate-glass and rolled out,--only the table is slightly tilted toward
the Gulf at the rate of two or three hundred feet in a hundred miles. At
night you may see the head-light of an engine fifteen miles away, like
a low star that you wonder does not rise. It grows slowly in size, a
Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and
adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies. Early on fine
mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and
looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected
in an imaginary lake,--a pictured protest of Nature against monotony.
There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe
in but for the shallow little ponds which fill them and which are
indicated from a distance at this season by the lead-colored grass that
veils them and conceals their glitter. And there are longer swells,
begotten of drainage, sometimes of eight or ten feet in a mile, which
deceive you, as you advance, into the expectation of a grand prospect
when once you shall have got to the top of them. That, practically, you
never do. Arrived at what seems to be the crest of a ridge, you see
nothing but more flat. The eye, in despair, gives, when you come in
sight of it, an inclination to the water. The pond-surface ceases to be
horizontal. The principle of gravitation stands contradicted
point-blank.

The most frequent vedette of these miniature lakes is the
heron,--usually the blue, sometimes the larger white, the latter a most
beautiful bird. Yet neither is common. Still rarer in such situations is
the bittern, the Timon of birds, the rushes being seldom high enough to
afford him the strict concealment he likes. The mallard has to be his
own sentinel, as a rule. He does not depend on these ponds for food,
and, like other wild creatures, he reserves his chief vigilance for
feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for
the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and
green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and
pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents,
where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very
sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that
shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort
of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another
game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at
the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. As yet his
most destructive foe in this region is perhaps the hawk, although he is
raided from the timber by the opossum, raccoon, and three species of
cat, while on the open his nest has marked attractions for the skunk and
probably the coyote. He has survived these dumb discouragers so long,
and the heat at his proper season is so trying to his human foe, that he
may long find a refuge here and proudly lead forth his young Texans for
scores of Augusts. He and his family will often quietly walk off while
the panting pointer seeks the shade of the wagon and the gunner cools
off under the heavy felt sombrero that is here found to be the best
headgear for summer. A very moderate game-law, well executed, would
sustain this fine bird indefinitely in the struggle for existence. But
law of any kind seems a foreign idea on these sea-like primeval plains.
It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a
court-house on the Grand Banks.

Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture
will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for
any school, positive or negative,--plenty of cloud-land for all
conceits. Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of
simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long
before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus
bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling
overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What
more have any of us done? The greatest good of the greatest number they
unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the
greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us,
number one. Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago.
Nature may be "red with tooth and claw," but not suicidally so. It is to
quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us. And
just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so
freely. Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic. It was under
precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly
treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty
generations. Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a
chronic catarrh?

If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing
with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at
hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and
forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east,
from the Colorado to the Brazos. The head of it was Sam Houston's
"army," three or four hundred strong, with all its _materiel_ in one
wagon. The rest consisted of the debris of all the Anglo-American
settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could
be moved. Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down
the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some
more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary.
Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and
relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers. These were twice its
numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind.
Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the _cul-de-sac_ of San
Jacinto being closed at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise and smoke,
and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two. Clio nibbed
another quill, steel pens not having then been invented. The gray geese
who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all
the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the
military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary
reign.

Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced
at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures.
Of these there are three species, one of which--the Mexican vulture--is
but an occasional visitor. The other two--the black vulture and the
turkey-buzzard--are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute
here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its
islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they
do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy
which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are
theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some
of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The
railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends,
the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of
course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement
and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this
respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire
fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an
assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in
their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other.
Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.

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