The drowse of noon seemed to put them all to sleep. The pond was like gla.s.s and the black duck flock which had quacked noisily there at daybreak and drawn white lines of ripples across its black surface had gone south. Everywhere was silence.
Everywhere silence, indeed, but it was the silence only of the slumbering, deeper voiced denizens. The swoon of heat in which they lay had served to rouse other lives that the frost of the morning had silenced. There are people who never can hear a partridge drum. The vibrations are pitched below the register of their ear. There are others, far more in number who never hear the shrilling of the pasture insects. Their voices are so thin and shrill that they are above the common register. Indeed they are apt to pa.s.s the average person as unnoticed as the tick of a clock in a room where one is accustomed to its presence. I do not know how long they had been at it, the black night chirping crickets which now make up for frozen nights by singing all the warm part of the day, the green day crickets whose note is pitched far higher, and a dozen other chirping, shrilling things that one never sees and rarely hears, however numerous and insistent their voices, unless something forces his attention in that direction and bids him listen. I think it was the zoon of a cicada which waked my attention, and once I heard them they seemed to fill the air with shrieking. If the drum of the partridge is the lowest pitched note of which the pasture people are capable, surely the piping of same of these tiny creatures is the highest. It is very difficult to determine the spot whence comes the pulsing of the partridge"s wings. It is born out of nowhere and reaches your ear from no particular direction. The shrilling of the pasture insects is everywhere and it is equally impossible to locate it. They are veritable spirit voices, these, and fill the s.p.a.ces among the red cedars and barberry bushes, the forests of sweet fern and the fox paths that wind among the berry bushes, with invisible fays and sprites. Only the tiniest of these could have such shrill tenuous voices. Having heard them in all their uproar it is even then difficult to hold your attention on them, more difficult than with any other pasture or woodland creatures I know. There will be times when the ear refuses them and it seems as if blank silence had settled on the whole field, then after a little it will all come pulsing back to you.
How dependent these disembodied voices are upon the sun is seen toward nightfall, when the shadows begin to grow long. Where these fall across the gra.s.ses there grow triangles of silence which travel fast. Oftentimes as the point of one of these progresses you may locate a chirper by the sudden ceasing of his chirp and find him in the tip of shadow, already numb. The black crickets keep up their tune longest, singing from beneath sheltering stones and bark or fallen leaves. With the direct sun vanish also other summer pasture people who have made the warmth of the day beautiful. Under an old apple tree the ground is yellow with the apples that it has shed and here all through the sunny hours two vanessa b.u.t.terflies have alternately floated and feasted, one a mourning cloak, the other a Compton tortoise, Vanessa antiopa and Vanessa j-alb.u.m. These are late arrivals that have come from the coc.o.o.n upon a cold world and are doing their best to make good in it. Both are of a species that are hardy beyond belief and both may well winter in the crevice within the gnarled trunk of the old tree into which they creep benumbed when the chill of night begins to fall. The pasture at midday was bright with the yellow of colias b.u.t.terflies which dashed madly about from one fall dandelion bloom to another, eager to eat enough while the warmth should linger. I saw many of the American copper with them, these with a more conspicuous white margin to the tiny wings than I have ever seen before, a fall form I fancy rather than anything permanently new in this rather variable insect.
All these the first chill of nightfall sends to crevices and with them go the black wasps which have been feeding desperately in the sun on goldenrod and aster. The hornets are dead. Not one was about even in the middle of the day fly hunting though house flies are still plentiful. The hornets seem to be almost the first insects to succ.u.mb to the cold. The black wasps are far hardier.
With their pa.s.sing goes that tiny shrill uproar of the pasture and in the amber quiet of sunset the place becomes a vast whispering gallery. Tiny sounds seem to be entangled here and made audible from very far. The quack of incoming ducks a mile away across the pond sounds as if on the nearer sh.o.r.e. The laughter of children comes as far, nor can you readily locate the direction. At such times the mystical quality of the place deepens with the peace of it. I notice then, as I did not notice in midday, the fairy rings in the gra.s.s on the little rise of ground and am half-willing to believe I stand by a fairy rath and call the childish shouts and laughter that seem to rise from it the glee of fairies over the coming of night. After dark any one of these fairy rings now growing beneath my eyes may open and let out the troop. Their comings and goings need be only a little more mysterious than those of the chipmunks in the old wall or the Cingalia catenaria that is again flitting forth in the chill of gray dusk to seek what honey the coleuses and the coppers, the vanessas and the wasp have left behind.
The pale yellow glow of autumn twilight settles in deep peace upon the place. You seem to be at once in a vast silence and yet able to note all that goes on in the world for many miles about by un.o.btrusive sounds. To stand here in the open with the night descending in blessing upon you is to be in touch with the universe: In town night shuts you away from the rest of the world, wraps you in your own tiny seclusion. Out here it makes you one with the deep secrets of common life. The mystical quality for the time vanishes and the radiance which long holds the sky seems but the light of home, a light which is no longer within a room or shut off by the walls of a house, but the real home of all the world"s creatures to which you have come at last.
As the glow fades and the darkness deepens it seems good to lie down beneath the silent pines that stretch their great arms over you in protecting fatherliness and become an integral part of the peace of the place. Sleep that comes thus is deep and refreshing.
Yet always with it there goes a subtle sub-consciousness which makes you alert to what goes on about you. Thus with the piping up of the night wind you hear once more the rapt voices of the great pines, the chanting of those weird sages of the unknown. All the mystical comes back to the pasture with the sound and the deep song of the elder trees comes nearer to finding words for you than, it can at any other time. I fancy that all the wee lives that sleep and wake beneath it are part of its mystery, its longing and its unfathomable promise.
CHAPTER XIX
WHITE PINE GROVES
A tiny brown wing brushed my cheek this morning, flitting madly southeastward on the wings of the November gale. It was a belated one of many that have scattered from the pine taps this autumn, for it was the single wing of a white pine seed and the cone harvest has been good. Ever since August the squirrels have known this and the stripped spindles lie by the score under the big pasture pines where these have left them after eating the seeds.
It seems much work for small pay for the squirrel. He must climb venturesomely to the very tip of the slippery limb, gnaw the cone from its hold, then run down the tree and gnaw it to pieces for the tiny seeds within. So light are these seeds, wing and all, that it takes twenty to thirty thousand of them to weigh a pound and it is probably fortunate that squirrels do not live by pine seed alone. However, the gnawing means as much to the squirrel as the eating, for the squirrel"s teeth grow constantly and he must continually wear them off or he dies, stabbed by his own incisors which grow in the arc of a circle. Yet the squirrel is an adept at getting at the tiny, toothsome seed and he can strip a cone of its scales far faster than I can, even if I use my knife. He holds the cone stem end upward in his fore paws which are so like hands, severs the base of the scale with his ivory shears and has munched the two little seeds that cling under the very bottom of the scale, almost before you can see him do it.
Certain wise naturalists a.s.sure us that the squirrel does not use reason in this handling of the cone, merely acting automatically by blind instinct. Yet he gets his results in the shortest time and with the least effort. The highest reasoning could teach him no more and if instinct is such a splendid short cut to the solution of problems it is a pity that it is not added to our common school course. The squirrel, they say, does it because he and his ancestors have done it in the same way for untold generations, the automatic impulse being born in him and bound to appear at the right moment, just as his teeth grow without his own volition. Yet there must have been a time when the first squirrel sat up on a limb with his first pine cone in his paws. Did he reason out the way to get those seeds or did he know instinctively?
And if so what is instinct in his case?
For all the squirrels got so many cones that in some places in the woods the ground is fairly carpeted with the brown scales which they severed, prompted by this clever whatever-it-is that is such an excellent subst.i.tute for wisdom, there are plenty still left on the trees where they dangle from the branch tips, their scales gaping and the seeds for the most part gone. Left to themselves they have been flying away ever since September, a few at a time on dry, windy days when their single wings would scull them farthest. One might impute instinct or whatever it is to the pine tree too, she works so methodically for the preservation of her species. A year ago last spring the mother pine put forth the beginnings of those pine cones that now dangle brown and pitchy, or drop to the ground, useless except as kindlings for my campfire. Then they were wee golden-green buds of pistillate flowers, set high on the uppermost branch tips that the pollen from the tree"s own staminate blooms might miss them in its flight down the wind and thus avoid in breeding. If they miss fertilization altogether they fall off. It is commonly said that the pines produce a crop of cones once in five or seven years, which is true in part, just as the statement that every seventh wave at sea is larger than any of its preceding six is occasionally borne out by the facts. I do not recall years in which the pines have failed to put forth both staminate and pistillate blossoms. Sometimes frost gets these and they fail to reproduce.
Sometimes a long rain will prevent the pollen from being disseminated by the wind until its time is pa.s.sed and again there is a failure in cones. Only once in a while is the season perfectly favorable, and then we get that seventh wave in pine cones and the squirrels rejoice that they can file their teeth and fill their cheek pouches at the same time. The years when there are no cones at all sending forth their seeds in September are few indeed. This year the harvest in my neighborhood has been an excellent one.
The fertilized bloom soon ceases to be a little Christmas candle on the tree top, closes its tiny scales over its growing seeds and becomes a little green cone, still sitting upright on the upper branch tip where it grew. By autumn it is an inch and a half long, the short peduncle which attaches it to the branch has lengthened and thickened, but is not able to hold it wholly erect, so much has it gained in weight. At that season the young cone and its fellows have tipped over horizontal or even becomes slightly pendulous. Thus it remains through the winter, its scales pressed close to its core and to one another, defending the tender seeds from all cold and making a seemingly solid chunk of the whole.
Toward spring I have known squirrels to attack these young cones, but rarely, and I am not sure whether it was because of the pressure of hunger or whether some young squirrel"s instinct to sharpen his teeth on them made him a bit precocious. These adolescent cones begin growing again very early in the spring.
Youth will have its way, and in this case it seems to seize on the first sap that gets as far as the topmost branch tips, compelling it to the nourishing of the young cones before it can go to the making of new leaves or even of the crop of staminate and pistillate blossoms for the ensuing summer. The cones add a quarter of an inch to their length before the blossoms of that year appear, and their weight sags them still more on the stem, making them distinctly pendulous. By the last of August these greedy feeders have not only ripened the seeds within the still close-pressed scales, but have multiplied their own length by four, being four to six inches long and hanging pretty nearly straight down by their weight.
Their work is done then. Fifty or more scales has each cone, a hundred or more seeds, if the fertilization has been perfect, are ripe and ready to go forth and produce other pine trees. In early September the sap begins to recede from these ripe cones, the scales lose their green plumpness and begin to dry and curl back toward the base of the cone. This gives the seed eating birds, the siskins, the pine grosbeaks and especially the crossbills their best opportunity and they eagerly pluck out such seeds as the narrow openings will give them a chance at. Between these and the squirrels the pine forests of the future are decimated before their seeds have been planted. Nature provides bountifully for the reproduction of all her favorites, yet far more bountifully in some instances than in others. A thousand young birches spring from seed, to one pine in our Ma.s.sachusetts woods, and no wonder.
Each birch tree ripens a thousand seeds to one that comes to maturity in the great cones of the pine. Yet there are compensations for the pine tree. Barring axes and accidents it may live out its third century and yearly give more and more comfort and inspiration to mankind as it increases in dignity and beauty.
The birch may give comfort and inspiration too through its grace and beauty, but it is lucky if it lasts out a score of years.
It is often a surprise to me to see how far a seed will fly with but one wing. The air currents set it spinning the moment it leaves its parent tree making of it at once a tiny gyroscope with a single blade of a propeller. Its gyroscopic quality steadies it and the whirl of its propeller tends always to lift its weight.
Hence with a downward current it falls with a less velocity than the wind which whirls it, in a level breeze it often holds its own, while in the upward slanting streams of air which flow so often along and away from the earth"s surface it rises easily. The stronger the wind the more the whirl of that tiny propeller tends to keep it in air and with a good September gale thrashing seed out of its cones a pine tree may be planting its kind for miles to leeward. The seed that brushed my cheek this morning made no such offing. Caught in a back eddy it whirled round a sunny glade for a moment, then in a sudden lull spun directly downward to the gra.s.s.
There again its shape favored it. The first gra.s.s spear stopped its spinning and it dived plummet-like out of sight, the thin propeller becoming a tail that kept it head downward while it slipped most cannily to the very mould. There I found it, still in such a position that every movement, every pressure, would carry it dawn out of sight of all seed eating creatures where it might rest and ripen till spring when it would be ready to germinate.
Searching the pine grove and the scrubby country that outlies it, I found all stages of pine growth, from the gnarled patriarch four feet in diameter at the b.u.t.t to the germinating seedling. The patriarch is nearly a hundred feet tall, and though I know many pines of his height, I have found none of quite his diameter, and I am very sure none of his age, hereabouts. His age I can but guess, yet I know that fifty years ago he was as large as he is now. Indeed, he had more wood in him, for his lower limbs that then were green and flourishing and six to eight inches in diameter have since decayed and fallen away. Recently a pine was felled in Pennsylvania which was 155 feet tall and 42 inches through at 4 feet 6 inches from the ground. This tree was 351 years old. I have reason to believe my patriarch is as old as that one. His height is not so great, but he has three trunks instead of one, springing from that gnarled b.u.t.t at a number of feet above the ground: There are occasional trees like this one still standing in eastern Ma.s.sachusetts. They have seen their children and grandchildren grow to marketable size and fall before the woodchopper"s axe. They have seen one or two generations of hardwood grow between these cuttings, yet they still are allowed to remain. In cutting off wood it used to be the custom of our forefathers to leave here and there a particularly gnarled and difficult pine that the seed might furnish a growth for succeeding generations. Hence these occasional trees. I may be wrong, but I have an idea that my patriarch was growing right where he stands, a young and vigorous sapling, when quaint old Josselyn wrote about those two voyages to New England in the early years of the seventeenth century.
Josselyn gives us to understand that the wood of the white pine is that mentioned in the Scriptures as gopher wood out of which Noah built the ark. Certainly if the white pine of Josselyn"s day was abundant in the neighborhood of Ararat in Noah"s time he could have done no better. The wood is light, soft, close and straight grained. You may search the world for one more easily worked or more generally satisfactory. Indeed the last half-century has seen the good white pine of the world pretty nearly used up, certainly all the best of it, for woodworking purposes. Fifty years ago it was the cheapest New England wood, today it is the highest-priced, and the old-time clear pine, free from knots and sapwood is almost impossible to obtain at any price. For all the forestry we can bring into play it will take more than three centuries to grow for us such trees as were common in Maine and New Hampshire a century ago. In 1832 white pines were not rare in Maine six feet in diameter and 240 feet high. In 1736 near the Merrimac River above Dunstable in New Hampshire a pine was cut, straight and sound and having a diameter at the b.u.t.t of 7 feet 8 inches. Half a thousand years were none too many in which to grow such a pine as that.
Could a man have a few of these on his farm anywhere in New England today they would be worth more than any other crop the centuries could have raised for him.
The youngest pine seedlings hide so securely in the pasture gra.s.s and under the low bushes that rarely does one notice them during the first summer"s growth. By the end of that time they are singularly, to my mind, like fairy palm trees, planted in the gardens where the little folk stroll on midsummer nights. Their single stem and the spreading whorl of leaves at the summit of it are in about the same proportion as those of a palmetto whose great leaves have been tossed and shredded by the trade winds.
That so tiny a twig could become, in the pa.s.sage of centuries even, a 200-foot tree seems difficult to believe. It looks no more likely than that the "ground-pine" which is taller than the seedling and fully as st.u.r.dy should some day be 200 feet tall. Yet the ground-pine may grow from its creeping rootstock for a thousand years in the shade of one grove and never be over a foot tall. Thus easily may we be deceived by small beginnings. No palm ever rivalled a full-grown pine in height and girth, yet a palm comes out of the ground as great in diameter of trunk and with as abundant a leaf.a.ge as it will ever have.
Watching seedling pines grow year by year it is difficult to see how the great, clean trunked, old-time pines that towered over two hundred feet tall and were from four to six feet in diameter came about. The free growing pasture pine makes a round headed shrub, for the first ten years or so of its life, with abundant long limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to bottom. Even as decades pa.s.s its limbs still remain numerous and though there is abundant wood in the half century old pasture pine it is of little use for lumber, for the limbs, young and old, have filled its trunk with knots. Where our present day trees have seeded in thickly and uniformly over considerable s.p.a.ce it is different.
Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each struggling to outdo its neighbors and get more light and air. Lower limbs decay in time and in the progress of forty or fifty years we get a "second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for a height of forty or fifty feet. Give the trees another half century if you will. I know many groves that have had that and still their trunks, though fairly bare, show the knots where the limbs have been and produce anything but clear lumber. It may be that by giving these century-old groves another century or two we should have something like the old perfect boles that our great grandfathers got out of the Maine woods, but I am not sure about it. I see no promise of it in the conditions under which pines grow today. Even my patriarch, though he has, I am very sure, sufficient years to his credit would cut up into only a medium quality of box boards; there is no clear lumber in him.
To produce the wonder trees of the early half of the nineteenth century the tiny seeds must have rooted plentifully in rich soil, the trees must have grown so close together as to steadily and persistently crowd out the weaker and shorter, and in the pa.s.sing of two, three or four centuries we had remaining the magnificent specimens, towering two hundred or more feet in the air, their trunks without limb or knot for more than half that distance. Such conditions may account for these enormous trees, yet I am inclined to think that they do not. I am inclined to the belief that in these giant pines we had a variety of Pinus strobus which was very closely allied to our smaller trees, but which was not the same, just as the Sequoia gigantea of the higher Sierras is a gigantic variety of redwood, closely allied to but not the same as the Sequoia sempervirens, which flourishes nearer the coast and in the lower levels. That would easily explain why our pines, which we call "second growth," show little tendency to become such majestic or so long lived trees as the giants of a century and more in age.
It is doubtful if any of the old time mighty ones remain in any remotest corner of our forests. It is a pity, too, for it is probable that in destroying the last one we destroyed a variety of pine that was far n.o.bler than any left.
CHAPTER XX
THE PASTURE IN NOVEMBER
In late autumn the pasture is a place of ghosts, yet ghosts so friendly withal that one walks among them unafraid. November is the month of transition when many of the pasture folk pa.s.s on to another, perhaps a better life. The blue-jays stop their harsh teasing screams now and then to toll a clear, musical pa.s.sing bell for these, and the nuthatches are goblin gabriels blowing eerie trumps of resurrection to which the spirits of the bee people drone a second as they wing their way onward. The great white town of the white-faced hornets is conspicuous on the blueberry bush down in the far corner and within it are the husks of a few of its once roaringly busy inhabitants. But it is very quiet and only a few of the husks remain. The others are scattered the pasture over and on them the shrubs drop red fruit and wreathed beauty or autumn leaves, in memoriam. The b.u.mblebees, the yellow-jackets and many another variety of scintillant, fairy-winged wild bee are with them. Their summer, like ours, is gone, and they with it, though a few of the young queen mothers are safely tucked away in warm crevices, to sleep secure until May wakes them for the peopling of the place once more.
I had thought May with its tender pastels of young color and its bubbling joy of spring song the most beautiful month in this gentle world of out-of-doors, but that was in May. Now I am convinced that November in its ethereal serenity is loveliest. May held but the vivid joy of ecstatic expectation; November speaks with the peace of fulfilment and the calm understanding of those who look with clear eyes into another world.
Between midnight and dawn I fancy the pasture folk who are still this side the pale get their farthest glimpse into the world which lies beyond. The pasture on whose bosom they dwell sleeps deeply then, its breathing not even faintly rustling the frost-browned leaves of the white oaks, not even sighing those ancient, druidical hymns through the pine tops. Sometimes as I stand with them I try to feel this bosom rise and fall in the slow rhythm of deep slumber, but even on such nights with the senses aquiver with expectation of the unknown I fail. I dare say the fox that slips along the winding paths at dawn and the little screech owl that calls lonelily to his mate note without noticing these and many other things in which our human perception fails. Man cultivates his brains to the dulling of his senses and builds a wall of useless possessions, attainments and entertainment about him till he hears only a few things and sees but through tiny c.h.i.n.ks like the prisoner in a dungeon. Yet we are not altogether endungeoned.
We are beginning to know our danger and cry "back to the woods,"
which may yet be the slogan of our next emanc.i.p.ation. It is a long path back for some of us and to cover it at a bound has its dangers. The earthworm shrivels in the sudden sun and to leap from the city block to the depths of the woods is to suffer from the "growing pains" of awakening, atrophied senses. The half-way ground is the pasture which once was the forest, which later was man"s, and where now nature and human-nature mingle in friendly truce. In the depths of the woods the town draws me toward itself.
In the city I long for the woods, In the pasture is the smiling truce of the two forces.
In the one I know best, as in most of our New England pastures, the cattle have long ceased to browse and men came only because nature draws them thither. The wild creatures seem to sense this and to lose much of their woodland fear of me. Last night, in the first promise of the gray of dawn a fox barked at my camp door, scratching at the threshold as if he were the house dog, asking to be let in out of the cold and lie at the fire. I heard the barnyard roosters faintly crowing in the distance, but a little screech owl called clearly on a limb just beyond the ridge-pole.
The roosters" cry had in it nothing but self-gratulatory bombast.
I know town-dwarfed men that talk like that. The owl"s call was to his mate, as was the roosters", but there was no bombast in its plaint, just a mournfulness of endearment, a touch of tears at the silence and delay. After a little the other came and all the mournfulness went out of the tone. Instead there was cooing in its quality as the two talked rea.s.suringly a moment. The first call is of six or eight notes that start high and tremulo down the owl"s diatonic scale to a low one that has a round, flute-like quality though the whole sounds as if it were made somewhere else and were merely echoing from the wood. The bird is as hard to locate by sound as an echo would be and is usually much nearer than it seems when I hear him. The second call is the last note of the first one, three or four times repeated with such rapidity that it has a flute-like reverberation that is almost like a round and very musical purr.
The cry of this bird has been called eerie and disquieting, but I do not think it so, even in the loneliness of the question call.
The satisfied one is as gentle and cuddly as one can find among birds.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Fox that slips along the Winding Path at Dawn]
The pasture ghosts of still November nights are apt to be most portentous between the hours of midnight and dawn. The giants of eld stall noiselessly about them, figures of gray mist out of a world of silence. Sometimes they rise like simulacrums of ancient forest trees out of gra.s.sy spots that by day were cosey with sunshine and enclosed by barberry bushes hung with coral fruit and prim cedars, spots where no tree has stood these hundred years.
Anon they change to dim figures of preposterous beasts, called back to earth for a brief hour while the old moon, worn and thin, rises through them, a nebulous red crescent, and the stars fade, yet show dimly through like the moon, proving that these are but disembodied monsters. Sometimes they wait till dawn bids them dematerialize before it. More often winter, which is most apt to steal in upon us late at night in November, breaks their backs with the weight of his cold and spreads them as h.o.a.r frost upon all things below, showing us how thin and of little substance they really are. Sometimes this breakage comes with the first gleams of morning light and I feel the chill of their pa.s.sing as they sink slowly to the gra.s.s. They are beautiful in their eerie suggestions as they flout my three o"clock in the morning courage, but lovelier far when they sparkle on the gra.s.s and shrubs under the sudden flare of the rising sun. I fancy that with clearer light all our gorgons and chimeras dire will become but sparkling fairies, for these certainly do. Twig and leaf and gra.s.s spear bend with the cl.u.s.ters of them. I see the fluff of their ermine garments, their tossing white plumes, and get the glint of their jewels, breaking up the white light into multiple rainbows that flash all the pasture world with a dainty glamour of romance. Just as the touch of winter, slipping down from the far north tinder cover of darkness, first raises these spectres, then lays them, so the sun makes their cheery, frostwork beauty a marvel of delight for a brief time, then sends it back to the earth whence it sprang and wipes away all tears from the eyes of the shrubs and gra.s.ses that weep at losing such delicate beauty.
In those crisp morning hours of early sunlight all the ghosts are laid. The winter chill which made them has frozen them all out of the air. The twigs and leaves that gave them refuge have wept and kissed them good-bye at the shout of the oncoming sun and no suggestion from the world beyond meets the eye. The ghost chill is frozen out of the sky with the ghosts; the wine of the morning is so poured through the dry air that you must drink it to the lees whether you will or not. Such mornings as you have had in April you may get in November, nor hardly can you tell without the a.s.sistance of the almanac which season it is. The bare twigs have the flush of expectancy on them, the blushing hope of new buds, as soon as the leaves of the year are off them. It may not be so bright and winning, but you will not note the difference, for it is there, painted during the ripening of this year"s leaves. If it were not that some of these still cling the illusion might be complete.
There too, to be sure, are the brown stems of the pasture goldenrod standing stiffly as if to state with grim definiteness that all rainbow hopes are folly and there will be no more blossoming for them. Their leaves are dun and sere where they have not already fallen and their tops that in early September were such soft c.u.mulus clouds of golden yellow are but scrawny clots of brown, draggled by the tears in which the sudden sun has drowned the pasture. Yet these least of all should be pessimistic in November, for as the sun dries their tears another summer comes back to them and to us, Indian summer, which is the finest season of the year. The Indian winter of the dark hours before dawn steals dawn with all spears pointed for the ma.s.sacre of the summer flowers that still linger unprotected, and the white magic of its own cold changes the spears to delicate, tiny frost fronds and blooms on all the outdoor world. Then, with the full day, comes Indian summer, slipping along all the pasture paths and lingering in the sheltered hollows among the evergreens. In her presence all the sorrowing plants seem to lift their heads and a new blossom time comes back to the brown, despondent goldenrod. A warmth glows in its pith which is as dear as that of its prime yet has in it some of the stir of autumn crispness. Under its power the draggled clots that once were flowers lift, fluff out, bud and bloom as does the magic plant under the potent spell of the sorcerer of the Far East. You may see on such Indian summer mornings the florets of these dead goldenrod stems lifting and spreading and before your very eyes the plant bursts into bloom once more. These blooms are the day-time ghosts with which the November pastures are full, misty gray flowers that stand on the same receptacles that held the yellow blooms of late summer, but are lovelier far than the first blossoms were. Each dewy night, each rainy day, they shrivel and seem to pa.s.s but the warmth of the sun and the drying wind need but a brief hour in which to bring them all out again. After Indian summer has gone for good and the December snows are deep the stiff stems will still hold these renewing gray blooms above the drifts and make all the pasture beautiful with the ghosts of summer flowers. Nor, lovely as they are to my eye, will they be less beautiful to the winter chippies, the goldfinches, juncos and a host of other seed-eating birds who will find them bountifully spread for their delectation all the winter through. On rainy days I like to bring these brawn stems into camp and, setting them by the glow of the open fire, see them bloom as they dry out. It is a most magical flowering and to be one"s own wizard is one of the delightful, privileges of being a November sojourner in the pasture.
For all the Indian winter which some nights ago brought us a temperature of twenty degrees and left ice a half-inch thick on shallow pools many of the pasture folk hold their summer attire well. The wild apple trees have hardly made a change, holding plentiful leaves whose green is dulled by a little, and otherwise defies the season. The bayberry has leaves as glossy green and unmarked by any sign of approaching winter as it held in August, and though the taller wild cherry trees show autumnal tints the younger ones are still in fresh green. This tendency of the young sprouts to hold on and deny the winter I note on many young trees.
The birches are in the main bare but the young wood at the very tops, and the tips of sprouts from the stumps of trees that have been cut, still hold leaves whose pale yellow simulates flowers, as if the trees, like the witch-hazel, had decided to bloom only at the very last moment, preferring the Indian summer to that which came to us in the full flush of June. So it is with the blueberry shrubs. The pinky-red top twigs hold their foliage still but they have sent some of their own flush up into these leaves and they hang there like pasture poinsettias, waiting to be part of the red of Christmas decorations. The meadow-sweet is in the bloom again, but instead of pinky white racemes topping the whorled green on its brown stalk the leaves themselves bloom in pale yellow with pinky flushes that make it as truly a sweet thing of the meadow as when it called the bees in July. The red alders add the coral of their berries and the barberries give the deep rich red of their fruit through which the sun shines with the ruby effect of stained gla.s.s windows, The November pasture is less profuse in its colors than it is in earlier autumn but one sees farther in it, and clearer. There are times when the gray walls of its maples and hickories stand illumined by the sunlight slanting through the vivid colors of its remaining foliage till the place glows with rich lights and seems a cathedral in which one ought to be able to hear the roll of anthems and the chant of bowed worshippers.
Such are its changing moods on November nights and days. The constant features are the pines and cedars. Summer and winter alike these stand unchanged, types of constancy and vigor. Yet, though there is no change, one who loves them both can at a time of year see a certain variation. This comes with the spire-like cedars, that stand so erect and point ever heavenward in close-drawn robes of priestly solemnity, in early May. Then for a few brief days the glow of spring sunshine gets into their blood and they gleam with hidden bloom through the olive green of their gowns, lighting up like sombre faces that unexpectedly smile and are flooded with sunlight. The pines, too, bloom in spring, but conspicuously on their branch tips. The candles they light then serve only to accentuate the sober, dark green of their gowns. But in September, the pines shed their last year"s leaves that have grown a little dull and rusty with long service, and now stand forth clean and more vividly green than at any other time of year.
The deciduous trees follow the fashions and change their suits for the prevailing mode three or four times a year, yet it is true of them that nature unadorned is adorned the most. There is a beauty in the bare wood standing revealed in November that they never had in the flush of June or the glory of early October. There is nothing in flower or leaf that can match the exquisite harmony of the bark tints, nor can the foliage in ma.s.s so please the eye as the delicate tracery of twigs and the matchless contour of tapering limbs. In the November birch or maple the dryad herself stands revealed.