To-day, as the Brownie sped over the soft snow, we could see how its tracks in series of fours were made. At every jump the long hind-legs thrust themselves far in front. They made the two far-apart tracks in the snow, while the close-set fore-paws made the nearby tracks.
Accordingly a rabbit is always traveling in the direction of the far-apart tracks, quite contrary to what most of us would suppose.
It is the same way with celestial rabbits. Look any clear winter night down below the belt of Orion, and you will see a great rabbit-track in the sky--the constellation of Lepus, the Hare, whose track leads away from the Great Dog with baleful Sirius gleaming green in his fell jaw.
From the rabbit-meadow we followed devious paths down through Fern Valley, which in summertime is a green ma.s.s of cinnamon fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, brake, regal fern, and half a score of others. In the midst of the marsh were rows of the fruit-stems of the sensitive fern, which is the first to blacken before the frost.
These were heavy with rich wine-brown seed-pods, filled with seeds like fine dust. They had an oily, nutty taste; and it would seem as if some hungry mouse or bird would find them good eating during famine times. Yet so far as I have observed they are never fed upon.
Along the side of the path were thickets of spice-bush, whose crushed leaves in summer have an incense sweeter than burns in any censer of man"s making. To-day I broke one of the brittle branches, to nibble the perfumed bark, and found at the end of a twig, pretending to be a withered leaf, a coc.o.o.n of the prometheus moth. The leaf had been folded together, lined with spun silk, and lashed so strongly that the twig would break before the silken cable.
We pa.s.sed through a clump of staghorn sumac with branches like antlers, bearing at their ends heavy ma.s.ses of fruit-cl.u.s.ters made up of hundreds of dark, velvety crimson berries, each containing a brown seed. The pulp of these berries is intensely sour, its flavor giving the sumac its other name of "vinegar plant." These red cl.u.s.ters crushed in sweetened water make a very good imitation of the red circus-lemonade of our childhood. The staghorn is not to be confounded with its treacherous sister, the poison sumac, with her corpse-colored berries. She is a vitriol-thrower, and with her death-pale bark and a.r.s.enic-green leaves, always makes me think of one of those haggard, horrible women of the Terror.
It was in Fern Valley that the Botanist made his discovery for the day. It was only a tree, and moreover a tree that he must have pa.s.sed many times before. Only to-day, however, did it catch his eye. The bark was that of an oak, but the leaves, which clung thick and brown to the limb, were long, with a straight edge something like the leaves of the willow-oak, only broader and larger. It was no other than the laurel-oak, a tree which by all rights belonged hundreds of miles to the south of us.
He walked gloatingly around his discovery, and it was some time before I could drag him on. Thereafter he gave me a masterly discourse, some forty minutes in duration, on the life-history of the oaks, and propounded several ingenious theories to account for the presence of this strange species. This discourse continued until we reached the historic white oak near the end of the valley, where the Botanist once found a flock of bay-breasted warblers in the middle of a rainstorm; and again I heard the story of that day.
Through the valley flowed a little stream, and the snow along its banks told of the goings and comings of the wild-folk. Gray squirrels, red squirrels, muskrats, rabbits, mice, foxes, weasels, all had pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed along these banks.
To me the most interesting trail was that of a blarina shrew. His track in the snow is a strange one. It is a round, tunnel-like trail, like that of some large caterpillar, with the trough made by the wallowing little body filled with tiny alternate tracks--one of the strangest of all the winter trails.
I could obtain very little enthusiasm from the Botanist over blarinas.
He still babbled of laurel-leafed oaks and similar frivolities. Even the crowning event of the walk left him cold. It came on the home-stretch. We were pa.s.sing through the last pasture before reaching the humdrum turnpike which led to the tame-folk. Suddenly in the snow I saw a strange trail. It was evidently made by a jumper, but not one whose track I knew. I followed it, until among the leaves in a bank something moved. Before my astonished eyes hopped falteringly, but bravely, a speckled toad.
The winter sun shone palely on his brown back still crusted with the earth of his chill home. Down under the leaves and the frozen ground he had heard the call, and struggled to the surface, expecting to find spring awaiting him. Two jumps, however, had landed him in a s...o...b..nk. It was a disillusion, and Mr. Toad winked his mild brown eyes piteously. He struggled bravely to get out, but every jump plunged him deeper into the snow. His movements became feebler as the little warmth his cold blood contained oozed out.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FLYER, THE SQUIRREL]
Just as he was settling despairingly back into the crystallized cold, I rescued him. He was too far gone even to move, for cold spells quick death to the reptile folk. Only his blinking beautiful eyes, like lignite flecked with gold, and the slow throbbing of his mottled breast, showed that life was still in him. He nestled close in my hand, willing to occupy it until warm weather.
I back-tracked him from his faltering efforts, and where his first l.u.s.ty jump showed on the thawing ground I found his hibernaculum. It was only a little hollow, scarcely three inches deep, under sodden leaves and wet earth, and cheerless enough, according to mammalian ideas. It was evidently home for Mr. Toad, and when I set him therein, he scrambled relievedly under some of the loose wet leaves which had fallen back into his nest. I piled a generous measure of dripping leaves and moist earth over his warted back. It may have been imagination, but I fancied that the last look I had from his bright eyes was one of grat.i.tude. The Botanist scoffed at the idea, for toads, like pine-snakes, convey absolutely no appeal to his narrow, flower-bound nature.
I have erected a monument in the shape of a chestnut stake beside Mr.
Toad"s winter residence, and I strongly suspect that he will be the last of his family to get up when the spring rising-bell finally rings.
"There"s positively nothing to this early-rising business," I can hear him telling his friends at the Puddle Club in April. "Look at what happened to me. If it hadn"t been for a well-meaning giant, I would have caught my death of cold from getting out of bed too soon. Never again!"
Our calendar-makers use red letters to mark special days. Personally, I prefer orchids and birds and sunrises and nests and snakes and similar markers. I have in my diary "The Day of the Prothonotary Warbler," "The Day of the Henslow"s Sparrow"s Nest" (that was a day!), "The Day of the Fringed Gentian," and many, many others. But always and forever that snowy 21st of December is marked in my memory as "The Day of the Early Toad."
Once more I was climbing the Cobble. The wood-road on which I started had narrowed to a path. Overhead ma.s.ses of rock showed through the snow, and above them were the dark depths of the Bear-Hole where Great-great-uncle Jake had once shot with his flintlock musket the largest bear ever killed in that part of the state. It was here at the cliff side that Shahrazad snow told me another story.
Along the edge of the slope ran a track made up of four holes in the snow. The front ones were far apart and the back ones near apart.
Occasionally, instead of four holes, five would show in the snow, and the position of the marks was reversed. A little farther on, and the trail changed. The two near-apart tracks were now in a perpendicular line instead of side by side. To Chingachgook, or Deerslayer, or Daniel Boone, or any other well-known tracker, the trail would have, of course, been an open book. But it had taken an amateur trailer like myself some years to be able to read that snow record aright. The trail was that of a cottontail rabbit. At first he had been hopping contentedly along, with an eye open for anything eatable in the line of winter vegetables. The far-apart tracks were the paw-marks of the big hind-legs, which came in front of the marks made by the fore-paws as they touched the ground at every hop. The five marks were where he had sat down to look around. The fifth mark was the mark of his stubby tail, and when he stopped, the little fore-paws made the near-apart marks in front of the far-apart marks of his hind-feet, instead of behind them as when he hopped.
Suddenly the rabbit detected something alarming coming from behind, for the sedate hops changed into startled bounds. A little farther on the trail said that the rabbit had caught sight of its pursuer as it ran; for a rabbit by the position of its eyes sees backward and forward equally well. The tracks showed a frantic burst of speed. In an effort to get every possible bit of leverage, the fore-legs were twisted so that they struck the ground one behind the other, which accounted for the last set of marks perpendicular to those in front. A line of tracks which came from a pile of stones, and paralleled the rabbit"s trail, told the whole story. The paw-marks were small and dainty, but beyond each pad-print were the marks of fierce claws. No wonder the rabbit ran wild when it first scented its enemy, and then saw its long slim body bounding along behind, white as snow except for the black tip of its tail.
It was the weasel, whose long body moves like the uncoiling of a steel spring. A weasel running looks like a gigantic inch-worm that bounds instead of crawls. Speed, however, is not what the little white killer depends on for its prey. It can follow a trail by scent better than any hound, climb trees nearly as well as a squirrel; and if the animal it is chasing goes into a burrow, it has gone to certain death. The rabbit"s only chance would have been a straight-away run at full speed for miles and hours. In this way it could probably have tired out the weasel, which is a killer, not a runner, by profession. A rabbit, however, like the fox, never runs straight. Round and round in great circles it runs about its feeding-ground, of which it knows all the paths and runways and burrows. Against a dog or fox these are safer tactics than exploring new territory. Against a weasel they are usually fatal.
It was easy to see on the snow what had happened. At first, when the rabbit saw the weasel looping along its trail like a hunting snake, it had started off with a sprint that in a minute carried it out of sight. Then a strange thing happened. Although a rabbit can run for an hour at nearly top speed, and in this case had every reason to run, after a half-mile of rapid circling and doubling, the trail changed and showed that the rabbit was plodding along as if paralyzed.
One of the weird and unexplained facts in nature is the strange power that a weasel appears to have over all the smaller animals. Many of them simply give up and wait for death when they find that a weasel is on their trail. A red squirrel, which could easily escape through the tree-tops, sometimes becomes almost hysterical with fright, and has been known to fall out of a tree-top in a perfect ecstasy of terror.
Even the rat, which is a cynical, practical animal, with no nerves, and a bitter, brave fighter when fight it must, loses its head when up against a weasel. A friend of mine once saw a grim, gray old fellow run squealing aloud across a road from a woodpile and plunge into a stone wall. A moment later a weasel in its reddish summer coat came sniffing along the rat"s trail and pa.s.sed within a yard of him.
This night the rabbit, with every chance for escape, began to run slowly and heavily, as if in a nightmare, watching the while its back trail. And when the weasel came in sight again, the trail stopped as the rabbit crouched in the snow waiting for the end. It came mercifully quick. When the weasel saw the rabbit had stopped, its red eyes flamed, and with a flashing spring its teeth and claws were at poor bunny"s throat. There was a plaintive whinnying cry, and the reddened snow told the rest.
So the last story of the snow ended in tragedy, as do nearly all true stories of the wild-folk. Yet they need not our pity. Better a thousand times the quick pa.s.sing at the end of a swift run or of a brave fight, than the long, long weariness of pain and sickness by which we humans so often claim our immortality.
IV
A RUNAWAY DAY
It is a wise man who knows when to run away. To quote rightly the words of a great poet, whose name has escaped me:--
He who works and runs away May live to work another day.
So it was that, like Christian of old, I suddenly decided to escape for my life from my city.
There were many reasons. It was a holiday. Then the sun rose on one of the most perfect days that ever dawned since the calendar was invented. Furthermore, there was the thought of a little cabin hidden in the heart of the pine barrens. So I ran away through snow-covered meadows and silent woods and past farmhouses that were old when this republic was first born, until my law offices and the city and the noise and the dust and the smoke were all behind the horizon.
An hour later I was following a little path that zigzagged back and forth through thickets of scrub oak and stiff rows of pitch pines.
Above the trees was the rush of wings. The upper air was filled with the victorious sound of going that heartened David from the tops of the mulberry trees in that dread valley of Rephaim. Perhaps it was the wind; but why did not the tree-tops sway instead of standing in frozen rows? The sky above was the color of the eggs of the wood thrush, a tender blue faintly washed with white. As the sun rose higher and higher, the color deepened to that bluest of blues which burns in May under the breast of the brooding catbird. Filtered through frost, the sunlight shone, intensely bright but without heat.
The air was full of the spicery of a million pine trees. With every breath it went tingling through my blood, carrying with it the joy of the open and the freedom of the barrens.
At last I came to the cabin. It is set on the very edge of the brownest, crookedest, sweetest stream in the world--the cedar-stained Rancocas. The wide porch overhangs the water, and over the doorway is a tiny horseshoe, which was dug out of the bog at Upper Mill, undoubtedly cast by some fairy steed. One whole side of the cabin is taken up by an arched fireplace built of brown and yellow and red sandstone, the only stone that can be found in the Barrens. Squat and curly, two ma.s.sive andirons, hammered out of bog iron, stand among the ashes. They have a story all their own.
Five miles through the woods is Upper Mill, which is not a mill at all, but marks the place where, a century ago, one stood. The only occupied house there is a log cabin built of imperishable white-cedar logs in 1720, the date still showing on one of the logs. Charlie Rogers lives there alone. It used to be an old tavern on the cattle-road from Perth Amboy. Every now and then Charlie finds old coins, King George III pennies and farthings, and the rare New Jersey pennies which were coined only during two years, and which bear a plough and the old name of New Jersey--Nova Caesarea. One day, when I was gossiping with Charlie, I told him that, if he took up the old dirt floor and sifted it through an ash-sifter during the long winter evenings, he might find a further store of rare coins. He took my advice, and the first treasure he uncovered was these andirons buried where once had been a hearth. Charlie gave them to me, and they hold up logs now as well as they did two hundred years ago.
As I slipped into a well-worn suit of khaki, all the worry of the month fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was drowned in the golden water. Tucking a pair of field-gla.s.ses into one pocket and a package of lunch into the other, I started off on an exploring trip. In the barrens everywhere are paths that wind for miles in and out among the trees and along the edges of brooks and bogs. Who made them? Who keeps them open? No one knows. I have been able to follow a few of them out to the end. One leads to Ong"s Hat, a little clearing in the heart of the woods, where grows an enormous white-oak tree. A century and a half ago Ong, the Indian, lived there. One day he disappeared. Nothing was ever found except his blood-stained hat. Then there is the path that leads to Sheep-Pen Hill, where seven empty houses and a well stand deserted and alone. Others lead to Gum Sprung, which, being translated, means Gum-Tree Cove, and to Double Trouble and Mount Misery, where the rattlesnake den is, and Apple-Pie Hill, and Friendship, and a host of other places that I have not explored.
To-day I walked for miles and miles through stretches of low, gleaming pines and past pools set in golden sphagnum moss. The wind had died down, and the silence seeped in and carried with it the comfort of the wilderness. The first friend I met was a little bird that dived like a mouse into a pile of brush. I saw a brook, and hurried to it, knowing that if the bird were a winter wren it could not possibly keep from running along the edges of that brook. Sure enough, in a minute I saw it darting in and out of holes and with c.o.c.ked tail curtsying on the stones. It is the next to the smallest of our five wrens--only the rare short-billed marsh wren is tinier.
To-day all through the tree-tops I heard the high-pitched tiny notes of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Its forked tail, striped head, and wing-bars are the field-marks by which it can be told in spite of its quick movements. It is the third smallest of all our birds: only the hummingbird and the short-billed marsh wren are smaller. Beyond the kinglet I heard the clicking alarm-notes and saw a flutter of the white skirts of a junco as it flew up ahead of me, showing its white tail-feathers, while in the woods a silver-and-blue bird sprang out of the bushes, for a wonder without a sound. It was the blue jay, which scolds and squalls all day long. Overhead, in spite of the bitter cold, the grim black buzzards, with their fringed wings and black-and-gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the smaller crow flapped laboriously beneath them.
Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare climbing fern, an evergreen fern which climbs like a vine and has flat, veined leaves that look like little green hands with four and five fingers. The stem is like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met the pale-gray poison sumac, with its corpse-colored berries growing out from the sides of the twigs instead of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless varieties.
I followed Pond-Lily Path through the white sand that in the springtime is all golden with barrens-heather. It winds in and out through the scattered clumps of low pitch pine and thickets of scrub oak, and finally leads to a still brook all afloat in midsummer with pond lilies. When the path reached the bogs, which to-day were frozen solid, I turned in, crossing them on the snow-covered ice. Everywhere were lines of four-toed crow tracks, and here and there were rabbit trails, a series of four round holes in the snow.
The next morning, when I followed my own tracks, I found that for more than a mile I had been trailed by some animal making a series of little paw-prints like those of a small cat, except that they were close together and sometimes doubled, showing where the animal had given sudden bounds. It was none other than the trail of a weasel, probably the long-tailed variety, although that is rare in the barrens. Like others of his family, this animal oftens follows a man"s tracks for a long distance, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps in the hope of finding food. As I looked at the trail of this little killer, I was glad that he was not larger. If weasels, or those other killers, the shrews, were as large as a dog, no man"s life would be safe out of doors.
I explored so far that the sun had set before I turned back for the cabin. Suddenly, from far over where the tree-trunks were inked black against the golden afterglow, I heard a hoot, deep rather than loud.
"_Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo!_" it went, and sometimes, "_Hoo-hoo-hoo!_"
Usually, though, the second note was doubled. It meant that the great horned owl with its speckled gray back and white collar was hunting rabbits through the silent woods. If it had been the barred owl, the third note would have been doubled and the last note would have had a drop in its cadence.
In the frosty twilight I hurried along the winding path, back to the cabin and a long, dreamy evening before the roaring fire. First came a wonderful exhibition of free-hand cooking. Then I piled the great fireplace well up the chimney with ma.s.ses of pitch-pine knots and stumps that I had dug up in the dry bogs. All of the sapwood had decayed, leaving nothing except the resinous bones of the fallen trees. They burned at the touch of a match, with a red smoky flame.
Above them I banked dry lengths of swamp maple and post oak. Then, drawing up a vast rocker well within the circle of the heat, I settled down to read and dream in front of the red coals.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LONG-TAILED WEASEL]