The woods are a maze of fantastic shapes of tree growth. Wood roads are barricaded with low arches of ice that the hare and the fox can barely find pa.s.sage beneath, and with long, curved slants of great limbs bent to the earth. The wild vines are turned to ropes and cables of ice, and have dragged down their strong supports, about whose prostrate trunks and limbs they writhe in a tangle of rigid coils. The lithe trunks of second growth are looped in an intricate confusion of arches one upon another, many upon one, over whole acres of low-roofed forest floor.
The hare and the grouse cower in these tents of ice, frightened and hungry; for every sprout and bud is sheathed in adamant, and scarlet berries, magnified and unattainable, glow in the heart of crystal globules. Even the brave chickadees are appalled, and the disheartened woodp.e.c.k.e.r mopes beside the dead trunk, behind whose impenetrable shield he can hear the grub boring in safety.
Through the frozen brambles that lattice the doorway of his burrow the fox peers dismayed upon a gla.s.sy surface that will hold no scent of quarry, yet perhaps is comforted that the same conditions impose a truce upon his enemies the hounds. The squirrel sits fasting in his chamber, longing for the stores that are locked from their owner in his cellar. It is the dismalest of all storms for the wood folk, despite all the splendor wherewith it adorns their realm.
One holds out his hand and lifts his face skyward to a.s.sure himself that the rain has ceased, for there is a continual clattering patter as if it were yet falling. But it is only the crackling of the icy trees and the incessant dropping of small fragments of their burden.
The gray curtain of the sky drifts asunder, and the low sun shines through. It glorifies the earth with the flash and gleam of ten million diamonds set everywhere. The fire and color of every gem that was ever delved burn along the borders of the golden pathway that stretches from your feet far away to the silver portals of the mountains that bar our glittering world from the flaming sky.
The pallid gloom of the winter night falls upon the earth. Then the full moon throbs up behind the scintillating barrier of the hills. She presently paves from herself to us a street of silver among the long blue shadows, and lights it with a thousand stars; some fallen quite to earth, some twinkling among the drooping branches, all as bright as the eternal stars that shine in the blue sky above.
LVI
SPARE THE TREES
All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is deforested, nor keep fish in waters that have shrunk to a quarter of their ordinary volume before midsummer. The streams of such a country will thus shrink when the mountains, where the snows lie latest and the feeding springs are, and the swamps, which dole out their slow but steady tribute, are bereft of shade. The thin soil of a rocky hill, when deprived of its shelter of branches, will be burned by the summer sun out of all power to help the germination of any worthy seed, or to nurture so n.o.ble a plant as a tree through the tender days of its infancy. It supports only useless weeds and brambles. Once so denuded, it will be unsightly and unprofitable for many years if not always.
Some swamps at great expense may be brought into tillage and meadow, but nine times out of ten, when cleared of the l.u.s.ty growth of woods, they bear nothing but wild gra.s.s, and the streams that trickled from them all the summer long in their days of wildness show in August only the parched trail of the spring course.
Our natives have inherited their ancestors" hatred of trees, which to them were only c.u.mberers of the ground, to be got rid of by the speediest means; and our foreign-born landholders, being unused to so much woodland, think there can be no end to it, let them slash away as they will.
Ledges and steep slopes that can bear nothing but wood to any profit, are shorn of their last tree, and the margins of streams to the very edge robbed of the willows and water-maples that shaded the water and with their roots protected the banks from washing. Who has not known a little alder swamp, in which he was sure to find a dozen woodc.o.c.k, when he visited it on the first day of the season each year? Some year the first day comes and he seeks it as usual, to find its place marked only by brush heaps, stubs, and sedges; and for the brook that wimpled through it in the days of yore, only stagnant pools. The worst of it is, the owners can seldom give any reason for this slaughter but that their victims were trees and bushes.
The Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, appears entirely to lose these gifts when it comes to the proper and sensible management of woodlands. Can he not understand that it is more profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one, and is every year becoming a more valuable one. It breaks the fierceness of the winds, and keeps the springs from drying up, and is a comfort to the eye, whether in the greenness of the leaf or the barrenness of the bough, and under its protecting arms live and breed the grouse, the quail and the hare, and in its shadowed rills swim the trout.
LVII
THE CHICKADEE
The way to the woods is blurred with a mist of driven snow that veils the portal of the forest with its upblown curtain, and blots out all paths, and gives to the familiar landmarks a ghostly unreality. The quietude of the woods is disturbed by turbulent voices, the angry roar and shriek of the wind, the groaning and clashing of writhing, tormented trees. Over all, the sunned but unwarmed sky bends its blue arch, as cold as the snowy fields and woods beneath it.
In such wild weather you are not tempted far abroad in quest of old acquaintances of fields and woods, yet from the inhospitable woods some of them come to you. Among them all, none is more welcome than that feathered atom of life, the chickadee. With the same blithe note that welcomed you to his woodland haunts in spring, in summer, and in autumn, when he attended you with such charming familiarity, amusing you with pretty acrobatic feats, as he flitted now before, now beside, now above you, he hails you now, and asks that hospitality be extended to him.
Set forth a feast of suet on the window-sill, and he will need no bidding to come and partake of it. How daintily he helps himself to the tiniest morsels, never cramming his bill with gross mouthfuls as do his comrades at the board, the nuthatch and the downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r! They, like unbidden guests, doubtful of welcome or of sufferance even, make the most of time that may prove all too brief, and gorge themselves as greedily as hungry tramps; while he, unscared by your face at the window, tarries at his repast, pecking his crumbs with leisurely satisfaction. You half expect to see him swept from your sight like a thistledown by the gusty blast, but he holds bravely to his perch, unruffled in spirit if not in feathers, and defies his fierce a.s.sailant with his oft-repeated challenge.
As often as you spread the simple feast for him he will come and sit at your board, a confiding guest, well a.s.sured of welcome, and will repay you with an example of cheerful life in the midst of dreariness and desolation. In the still, bright days, his cheery voice rings through the frosty air, and when the thick veil of the snow falls in a wavering slant from the low sky its m.u.f.fled cadence still heartens you.
What an intense spark of vitality must it be that warms such a mite in such an immensity of cold; that floats his little life in this deluge of frigid air, and keeps him in song while we are dumb with shivering! If our huge hulks were endowed with proportionate vitality, how easily we might solve the mysteries of the frozen north!
On some February day, when the first promise of spring is drifted to you in the soft south wind, the tenderness of spring is voiced in his love-note, brief but full of melody, and sweet as the evening song of the wood pewee. When the spring songsters come, he takes leave of you.
He has seen you safely through the winter, and departs to the woods on affairs of his own. He is no longer a vagrant, but at home in his own greenwood, yet as unfretted by the cares of housekeeping as he was by the heavy weariness of winter.