Secret of the Woods
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William J. Long >> Secret of the Woods
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Rarely, when the snow was deep, I found the place where he, or
some other grouse, went to sleep on the ground. He would plunge
down from a tree into the soft snow, driving into it headfirst
for three or four feet, then turn around and settle down in his
white warm chamber for the night. I would find the small hole
where he plunged in at evening, and near it the great hole where
he burst out when the light waked him. Taking my direction from
his wing prints in the snow, I would follow to find where he lit,
and then trace him on his morning wanderings.
One would think that this might be a dangerous proceeding,
sleeping on the ground with no protection but the snow, and a
score of hungry enemies prowling about the woods; but the grouse
knows well that when the storms are out his enemies stay close at
home, not being able to see or smell, and therefore afraid each
one of his own enemies. There is always a truce in the woods
during a snowstorm; and that is the reason why a grouse goes to
sleep in the snow only while the flakes are still falling. When
the storm is over and the snow has settled a bit, the fox will be
abroad again; and then the grouse sleeps in the evergreens.
Once, however, the old beech partridge miscalculated. The storm
ceased early in the evening, and hunger drove the fox out on a
night when, ordinarily, he would have stayed under cover.
Sometime about daybreak, before yet the light had penetrated to
where the old beech partridge was sleeping, the fox found a hole
in the snow, which told him that just in front of his hungry nose
a grouse was hidden, all unconscious of danger. I found the spot,
trailing the fox, a few hours later. How cautious he was! The sly
trail was eloquent with hunger and anticipation. A few feet away
from the promising hole he had stopped, looking keenly over the
snow to find some suspicious roundness on the smooth surface. Ah!
there it was, just by the edge of a juniper thicket. He crouched
down, stole forward, pushing a deep trail with his body, settled
himself firmly and sprang. And there, just beside the hole his
paws had made in the snow, was another hole where the grouse had
burst out, scattering snow all over his enemy, who had
miscalculated by a foot, and thundered away to the safety and
shelter of the pines.
There was another enemy, who ought to have known better,
following the old beech partridge all one early spring when snow
was deep and food scarce. One day, in crossing the partridge's
southern range, I met a small boy,--a keen little fellow, with
the instincts of a fox for hunting. He had always something
interesting afoot,--minks, or muskrats, or a skunk, or a big
owl,--so I hailed him with joy.
"Hello, Johnnie! what you after to-day--bears?"
But he only shook his head--a bit sheepishly, I thought--and
talked of all things except the one that he was thinking about;
and presently he vanished down the old road. One of his jacket
pockets bulged more than the other, and I knew there was a trap
in it.
Late that afternoon I crossed his trail and, having nothing more
interesting to do, followed it. It led straight to the bullbrier
thicket where the old beech partridge roosted. I had searched for
it many times in vain before the fox led me to it; but Johnnie,
in some of his prowlings, had found tracks and a feather or two
under a cedar branch, and knew just what it meant. His trap was
there, in the very spot where, the night before, the old beech
partridge had stood when he jumped for the lowest limb. Corn was
scattered liberally about, and a bluejay that had followed
Johnnie was already fast in the trap, caught at the base of his
bill just under the eyes. He had sprung the trap in pecking at
some corn that was fastened cunningly to the pan by fine wire.
When I took the jay carefully from the trap he played possum,
lying limp in my hand till my grip relaxed, when he flew to a
branch over my head, squalling and upbraiding me for having
anything to do with such abominable inventions.
I hung the trap to a low limb of the cedar, with a note in its
jaws telling Johnnie to come and see me next day. He came at
dusk, shamefaced, and I read him a lecture on fair play and the
difference between a thieving mink and an honest partridge. But
he chuckled over the bluejay, and I doubted the withholding power
of a mere lecture; so, to even matters, I hinted of an otter
slide I had discovered, and of a Saturday afternoon tramp
together. Twenty times, he told me, he had tried to snare the old
beech partridge. When he saw the otter slide he forswore traps
and snares for birds; and I left the place, soon after, with good
hopes for the grouse, knowing that I had spiked the guns of his
most dangerous enemy.
Years later I crossed the old pasture and went straight to the
bullbrier tangle. There were tracks of a grouse in the snow,-
-blunt tracks that rested lightly on the soft whiteness, showing
that Nature remembered his necessity and had caused his new
snowshoes to grow famously. I hurried to the brook, a hundred
memories thronging over me of happy days and rare sights when the
wood folk revealed their little secrets. In the midst of
them--kwit! kwit! and with a thunder of wings a grouse whirred
away, wild and gray as the rare bird that lived there years
before. And when I questioned a hunter, he said: "That ol' beech
pa'tridge? Oh, yes, he's there. He'll stay there, too, till he
dies of old age; 'cause you see, Mister, there ain't nobody in
these parts spry enough to ketch 'im."
FOLLOWING THE DEER
I was camping one summer on a little lake--Deer Pond, the
natives called it--a few miles back from a quiet summer resort
on the Maine coast. Summer hotels and mackerel fishing and
noisy excursions had lost their semblance to a charm; so I
made a little tent, hired a canoe, and moved back into the
woods.
It was better here. The days, were still and long, and the nights
full of peace. The air was good, for nothing but the wild
creatures breathed it, and the firs had touched it with their
fragrance. The faraway surge of the sea came up faintly till the
spruces answered it, and both sounds went gossiping over the
hills together. On all sides were the woods, which, on the north
especially, stretched away over a broken country beyond my
farthest explorations.
Over against my tenting place a colony of herons had their nests
in some dark hemlocks. They were interesting as a camp of
gypsies, some going off in straggling bands to the coast at
daybreak, others frogging in the streams, and a few solitary,
patient, philosophical ones joining me daily in following the
gentle art of Izaak Walton. And then, when the sunset came and
the deep red glowed just behind the hemlocks, and the gypsy bands
came home, I would see their sentinels posted here and there
among the hemlock tips--still, dark, graceful silhouettes etched
in sepia against the gorgeous after-glow--and hear the mothers
croaking their ungainly babies to sleep in the tree tops.
Down at one end of the pond a brood of young black ducks were
learning their daily lessons in hiding; at the other end a noisy
kingfisher, an honest blue heron, and a thieving mink shared the
pools and watched each other as rival fishermen. Hares by night,
and squirrels by day, and wood mice at all seasons played round
my tent, or came shyly to taste my bounty. A pair of big owls
lived and hunted in a swamp hard by, who hooted dismally before
the storms came, and sometimes swept within the circle of my fire
at night. Every morning a raccoon stopped at a little pool in the
brook above my tent, to wash his food carefully ere taking it
home. So there was plenty to do and plenty to learn, and the days
passed all too swiftly.
I had been told by the village hunters that there were no deer;
that they had vanished long since, hounded and crusted and
chevied out of season, till life was not worth the living. So it
was with a start of surprise and a thrill of new interest that I
came upon the tracks of a large buck and two smaller deer on the
shore one morning. I was following them eagerly when I ran plump
upon Old Wally, the cunningest hunter and trapper in the whole
region.
"Sho! Mister, what yer follerin?"
"Why, these deer tracks," I said simply.
Wally gave me a look, of great pity.
"Guess you're green--one o' them city fellers, ain't ye, Mister?
Them ere's sheep tracks--my sheep. Wandered off int' th' woods a
spell ago, and I hain't seen the tarnal critters since. Came up
here lookin' for um this mornin'."
I glanced at Wally's fish basket, and thought of the nibbled lily
pads; but I said nothing. Wally was a great hunter, albeit
jealous; apt to think of all the game in the woods as being sent
by Providence to help him get a lazy living; and I knew little
about deer at that time. So I took him to camp, fed him, and sent
him away.
"Kinder keep a lookout for my sheep, will ye, Mister, down 't
this end o' the pond?" he said, pointing away from the deer
tracks. "If ye see ary one, send out word, and I'll come and
fetch 'im.--Needn't foller the tracks though; they wander like
all possessed this time o' year," he added earnestly as he went
away.
That afternoon I went over to a little pond, a mile distant from
my camp, and deeper in the woods. The shore was well cut up with
numerous deer tracks, and among the lily pads everywhere were
signs of recent feeding. There was a man's track here too, which
came cautiously out from a thick point of woods, and spied about
on the shore, and went back again more cautiously than before. I
took the measure of it back to camp, and found that it
corresponded perfectly with the boot tracks of Old Wally. There
were a few deer here, undoubtedly, which he was watching
jealously for his own benefit in the fall hunting.
When the next still, misty night came, it found me afloat on the
lonely little pond with a dark lantern fastened to an upright
stick just in front of me in the canoe. In the shadow of the
shores all was black as Egypt; but out in the middle the outlines
of the pond could be followed vaguely by the heavy cloud of woods
against the lighter sky. The stillness was intense; every
slightest sound,--the creak of a bough or the ripple of a passing
musquash, the plunk of a water drop into the lake or the snap of
a rotten twig, broken by the weight of clinging mist,--came to
the strained ear with startling suddenness. Then, as I waited and
sifted the night sounds, a dainty plop, plop, plop! sent the
canoe gliding like a shadow toward the shore whence the sounds
had come.
When the lantern opened noiselessly, sending a broad beam of
gray, full of shadows and misty lights, through the even
blackness of the night, the deer stood revealed--a beautiful
creature, shrinking back into the forest's shadow, yet ever drawn
forward by the sudden wonder of the light.
She turned her head towards me, and her eyes blazed like great
colored lights in the lantern's reflection. They fascinated me; I
could see nothing but those great glowing spots, blazing and
scintillating with a kind of intense fear and wonder out of the
darkness. She turned away, unable to endure the glory any longer;
then released from the fascination of her eyes, I saw her
hurrying along the shore, a graceful living shadow among the
shadows, rubbing her head among the bushes as if to brush away
from her eyes the charm that dazzled them.
I followed a little way, watching every move, till she turned
again, and for a longer time stared steadfastly at the light. It
was harder this time to break away from its power. She came
nearer two or three times, halting between dainty steps to stare
and wonder, while her eyes blazed into mine. Then, as she
faltered irresolutely, I reached forward and closed the lantern,
leaving lake and woods in deeper darkness than before. At the
sudden release I heard her plunge out of the water; but a moment
later she was moving nervously among the trees, trying to stamp
herself up to the courage point of coming back to investigate.
And when I flashed my lantern at the spot she threw aside caution
and came hurriedly down the bank again.
Later that night I heard other footsteps in the pond, and opened
my lantern upon three deer, a doe, a fawn and a large buck,
feeding at short intervals among the lily pads. The buck was
wild; after one look he plunged into the woods, whistling danger
to his companions. But the fawn heeded nothing, knew nothing for
the moment save the fascination of the wonderful glare out there
in the darkness. Had I not shut off the light, I think he would
have climbed into the canoe in his intense wonder.
I saw the little fellow again,,in a curious way, a few nights
later. A wild storm was raging over the woods. Under its lash the
great trees writhed and groaned; and the "voices"--that strange
phenomenon of the forest and rapids--were calling wildly through
the roar of the storm and the rush of rain on innumerable leaves.
I had gone out on the old wood road, to lose myself for a little
while in the intense darkness and uproar, and to feel again the
wild thrill of the elements. But the night was too dark, the
storm too fierce. Every few moments I would blunder against a
tree, which told me I was off the road; and to lose the road
meant to wander all night in the storm-swept woods. So I went
back for my lantern, with which I again started down the old cart
path, a little circle of wavering, jumping shadows about me, the
one gray spot in the midst of universal darkness.
I had gone but a few hundred yards when there was a rush--it was
not the wind or the rain--in a thicket on my right. Something
jumped into the circle of light. Two bright spots burned out of
the darkness, then two more; and with strange bleats a deer came
close to me with her fawn. I stood stockstill, with a thrill in
my spine that was not altogether of the elements, while the deer
moved uneasily back and forth. The doe wavered between fear and
fascination; but the fawn knew no fear, or perhaps he knew only
the great fear of the uproar around him; for he came close beside
me, rested his nose an instant against the light, then thrust his
head between my arm and body, so as to shield his eyes, and
pressed close against my side, shivering with cold and fear,
pleading dumbly for my protection against the pitiless storm.
I refrained from touching the little thing, for no wild creature
likes to be handled, while his mother called in vain from the
leafy darkness. When I turned to go he followed me close, still
trying to thrust his face under my arm; and I had to close the
light with a sharp click before he bounded away down the road,
where one who knew better than I how to take care of a frightened
innocent was, no doubt, waiting to receive him.
I gave up everything else but fishing after that, and took to
watching the deer; but there was little to be learned in the
summer woods. Once I came upon the big buck lying down in a
thicket. I was following his track, trying to learn the Indian
trick of sign-trailing, when he shot up in front of me like
Jack-in-a-box, and was gone before I knew what it meant. From the
impressions in the moss, I concluded that he slept with all four
feet under him, ready to shoot up at an instant's notice, with
power enough in his spring to clear any obstacle near him. And
then I thought of the way a cow gets up, first one end, then the
other, rising from the fore knees at last with puff and grunt and
clacking of joints; and I took my first lesson in wholesome
respect for the creature whom I already considered mine by right
of discovery, and whose splendid head I saw, in anticipation,
adorning the hall of my house--to the utter discomfiture of Old
Wally.
At another time I crept up to an old road beyond the little deer
pond, where three deer, a mother with her fawn, and a young
spike-buck, were playing. They kept running up and down, leaping
over the trees that lay across the road with marvelous ease and
grace--that is, the two larger deer. The little fellow followed
awkwardly; but he had the spring in him, and was learning rapidly
to gather himself for the rise, and lift his hind feet at the top
of his jump, and come down with all fours together, instead of
sprawling clumsily, as a horse does.
I saw the perfection of it a few days later. I was sitting before
my tent door at twilight, watching the herons, when there was a
shot and a sudden crash over on their side. In a moment the big
buck plunged out of the woods and went leaping in swift bounds
along the shore, head high, antlers back, the mighty muscles
driving him up and onward as if invisible wings were bearing him.
A dozen great trees were fallen across his path, one of which, as
I afterwards measured, lay a clear eight feet above the sand. But
he never hesitated nor broke his splendid stride. He would rush
at a tree; rise light and swift till above it, where he turned as
if on a pivot, with head thrown back to the wind, actually
resting an instant in air at the very top of his jump; then shoot
downward, not falling but driven still by the impulse of his
great muscles. When he struck, all four feet were close together;
and almost quicker than the eye could follow he was in the air
again, sweeping along the water's edge, or rising like a bird
over the next obstacle.
Just below me was a stream, with muddy shores on both sides. I
looked to see if he would stog himself there or turn aside; but
he knew the place better than I, and that just under the soft mud
the sand lay firm and, sure. He struck the muddy place only
twice, once on either side the fifteen-foot stream, sending out a
light shower of mud in all directions; then, because the banks on
my side were steep, he leaped for the cover of the woods and was
gone.
I thought I had seen the last of him, when I heard him coming,
bump! bump! bump! the swift blows of his hoofs sounding all
together on the forest floor. So he flashed by, between me and my
tent door, barely swerved aside for my fire, and gave me another
beautiful run down the old road, rising and falling light as
thistle-down, with the old trees arching over him and brushing
his antlers as he rocketed along.
The last branch had hardly swished behind him when, across the
pond, the underbrush parted cautiously and Old Wally appeared,
trailing a long gun. He had followed scarcely a dozen of the
buck's jumps when he looked back and saw me watching him from
beside a great maple.
"Just a-follerin one o' my tarnal sheep. Strayed off day 'fore
yesterday. Hain't seen 'im, hev ye?" he bawled across.
"Just went along; ten or twelve points on his horns. And say,
Wally--"
The old sinner, who was glancing about furtively to see if the
white sand showed any blood stains,--looked up quickly at the
changed tone.
"You let those sheep of yours alone till the first of October;
then I'll help you round 'em up. Just now they're worth forty
dollars apiece to the state. I'll see that the warden collects
it, too, if you shoot another."
"Sho! Mister, I ain't a-shootin' no deer. Hain't seen a deer
round here in ten year or more. I just took a crack at a
pa'tridge 'at kwitted at me, top o' a stump"--
But as he vanished among the hemlocks, trailing his old gun, I
knew that he understood the threat. To make the matter sure I
drove the deer out of the pond that night, giving them the first
of a series of rude lessons in caution, until the falling leaves
should make them wild enough to take care of themselves.
STILL HUNTING
October, the superb month for one who loves the forest, found me
again in the same woods, this time not to watch and, learn, but
to follow the big buck to his death. Old Wally was ahead of me;
but the falling leaves had done their work well. The deer had
left the pond at his approach. Here and there on the ridges I
found their tracks, and saw them at a distance, shy, wild, alert,
ready to take care of themselves in any emergency. The big buck
led them everywhere. Already his spirit, grown keen in long
battle against his enemies, dominated them all. Even the fawns
had learned fear, and followed it as their salvation.
Then began the most fascinating experience that comes to one who
haunts the woods--the first, thrilling, glorious days of the
still-hunter's schooling, with the frost-colored October woods
for a schoolroom, and Nature herself for the all-wise teacher.
Daylight found me far afield, while the heavy mists hung low and
the night smells still clung to the first fallen leaves, moving
swift and silent through the chill fragrant mistiness of the
lowlands, eye and ear alert for every sign, and face set to the
heights where the deer were waiting. Noon found me miles away on
the hills, munching my crust thankfully in a sunny opening of the
woods, with a brook's music tinkling among the mossy stones at my
feet, and the gorgeous crimson and green and gold of the hillside
stretching down and away, like a vast Oriental rug of a giant's
weaving, to the flash and blue gleam of the distant sea. And
everywhere--Nature's last subtle touches to her picture--the
sense of a filmy veil let down ere the end was reached, a soft
haze on the glowing hilltops, a sheen as of silver mist along the
stream in the valley, a fleecy light-shot cloud on the sea, to
suggest more, and more beautiful, beyond the veil.
Evening found me hurrying homeward through the short twilight,
along silent wood roads from which the birds had departed,
breathing deep of the pure air with its pungent tang of ripened
leaves, sniffing the first night smells, listening now for the
yap of a fox, now for the distant bay of a dog to guide me in a
short cut over the hills to where my room in the old farmhouse
was waiting.
It mattered little that, far behind me (though not so far from
where the trail ended), the big buck began his twilight wandering
along the ridges, sniffing alertly at the vanishing scent of the
man on his feeding ground. The best things that a hunter brings
home are in his heart, not in his game bag; and a free deer meant
another long glorious day following him through the October
woods, making the tyro's mistakes, to be sure, but feeling also
the tyro's thrill and the tyro's wonder, and the consciousness of
growing power and skill to read in a new language the secrets
that the moss and leaves hide so innocently.
There was so much to note and learn and remember in those days! A
bit of moss with that curiously measured angular cut in it, as if
the wood folk had taken to studying Euclid,--how wonderful it was
at first! The deer had been here; his foot drew that sharp
triangle; and I must measure and feel it carefully, and press
aside the moss, and study the leaves, to know whether it were my
big buck or no, and how long since he had passed, and whether he
were feeding or running or just nosing about and watching the
valley below. And all that is much to learn from a tiny triangle
in the moss, with imaginary a, b, c's clinging to the dried moss
blossoms.
How careful one had to be! Every shift of wind, every cloud
shadow had to be noted. The lesson of a dewdrop, splashed from a
leaf in the early morning; the testimony of a crushed flower, or
a broken brake, or a bending grass blade; the counsel of a bit of
bark frayed from a birch tree, with a shred of deer-velvet
clinging to it,--all these were vastly significant and
interesting. Every copse and hiding place and cathedral aisle of
the big woods in front must be searched with quiet eyes far
ahead, as one glided silently from tree to tree. That depression
in the gray moss of a fir thicket, with two others near it--three
deer lay down there last night; no, this morning; no, scarcely an
hour ago, and the dim traces along the ridge show no sign of
hurry or alarm. So I move on, following surely the trail that,
only a few days since, would have been invisible as the trail of
a fish in the lake to my unschooled eyes, searching, searching
everywhere for dim forms gliding among the trees, till--a scream,
a whistle, a rush away! And I know that the bluejay, which has
been gliding after me curiously the last ten minutes,--has
fathomed my intentions and flown ahead to alarm the deer, which
are now bounding away for denser cover.
I brush ahead heedlessly, knowing that caution here only wastes
time, and study the fresh trail where the quarry jumped away in
alarm. Straight down the wind it goes. Cunning old buck! He has
no idea what Bluejay's alarm was about, but a warning, whether of
crow or jay or tainted wind or snapping twig, is never lost on
the wood folk. Now as he bounds along, cleaving the woods like a
living bolt, yet stopping short every hundred yards or so to
whirl and listen and sort the messages that the wood wires bring
to him, he is perfectly sure of himself and his little flock,
knowing that if danger follow down wind, his own nose will tell
him all about it. I glance at the sun; only another hour of
light, and I am six miles from home. I glance at the jay,
flitting about restlessly in a mixture of mischief and curiosity,
whistling his too-loo-loo loudly as a sign to the fleeing game
that I am right here and that he sees me. Then I take up the back
trail, planning another day.
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