Ways of Wood Folk, William J. Long [ebook reader for pc .TXT] 📗

the lee of the old wall whither some line-stripping gale had blown it, was a torn fragment of cloth with loose threads showing everywhere. I was wondering why the birds did not utilize it, when the male, in one of his lively flights, discovered it and flew down. First he hopped all around it; next he tried some threads; but, as the cloth was lying loose on the grass, the whole piece came whenever he pulled. For a few moments he worked diligently, trying a pull on each side in succession. Once he tumbled end over end in a comical scramble, as the fragment caught on a grass stub but gave way when he had braced himself and was pulling hardest. Quite abruptly he flew off, and I thought he had given up the attempt.

In a minute he was back with his mate, thinking, no doubt, that she, as a capable little manager, would know all about such things. If birds do not talk, they have at least some very ingenious ways of letting one another know what they think, which amounts to the same thing.

The two worked together for some minutes, getting an occasional thread, but not enough to pay for the labor. The trouble was that both pulled together on the same side; and so they merely dragged the bit of cloth all over the lawn, instead of pulling out the threads they wanted. Once they unraveled a long thread by pulling at right angles, but the next moment they were together on the same side again. The male seemed to do, not as he was told, but exactly what he saw his mate do. Whenever she pulled at a thread, he hopped around, as close to her as he could get, and pulled too.

Twice they had given up the attempt, only to return after hunting diligently elsewhere. Good material was scarce that season. I was wondering how long their patience would last, when the female suddenly seized the cloth by a corner and flew along close to the ground, dragging it after her, chirping loudly the while. She disappeared into a crab-apple tree in a corner of the garden, whither the male followed her a moment later.

Curious as to what they were doing, yet fearing to disturb them, I waited where I was till I saw both birds fly to the nest, each with some long threads. This was repeated; and then curiosity got the better of consideration. While the orioles were weaving the last threads into their nest, I ran round the house, crept a long way behind the old wall, and so to a safe hiding place near the crab-apple.

The orioles had solved their problem; the bit of cloth was fastened there securely among the thorns. Soon the birds came back and, seizing some threads by the ends, raveled them out without difficulty. It was the work of but a moment to gather as much material as they could use at one weaving. For an hour or more I watched them working industriously between the crab-apple and the old elm, where the nest was growing rapidly to a beautiful depth. Several times the bit of cloth slipped from the thorns as the birds pulled upon it; but as often as it did they carried it back and fastened it more securely, till at last it grew so snarled that they could get no more long threads, when they left it for good.

That same day I carried out some bright-colored bits of worsted and ribbon, and scattered them on the grass. The birds soon found them and used them in completing their nest. For a while a gayer little dwelling was never seen in a tree. The bright bits of color in the soft gray of the walls gave the nest always a holiday appearance, in good keeping with the high spirits of the orioles. But by the time the young had chipped the shell, and the joyousness of nest-building had given place to the constant duties of filling hungry little mouths, the rains and the sun of summer had bleached the bright colors to a uniform sober gray.

That was a happy family from beginning to end. No accident ever befell it; no enemy disturbed its peace. And when the young birds had flown away to the South, I took down the nest which I had helped to build, and hung it in my study as a souvenir of my bright little neighbors.

VI. THE BUILDERS.

A curious bit of wild life came to me at dusk one day in the wilderness. It was midwinter, and the snow lay deep. I was sitting alone on a fallen tree, waiting for the moon to rise so that I could follow the faint snowshoe track across a barren, three miles, then through a mile of forest to another trail that led to camp. I had followed a caribou too far that day, and this was the result—feeling along my own track by moonlight, with the thermometer sinking rapidly to the twenty-below-zero point.

There is scarcely any twilight in the woods; in ten minutes it would be quite dark; and I was wishing that I had blankets and an axe, so that I could camp where I was, when a big gray shadow came stealing towards me through the trees. It was a Canada lynx. My fingers gripped the rifle hard, and the right mitten seemed to slip off of itself as I caught the glare of his fierce yellow eyes.

But the eyes were not looking at me at all. Indeed, he had not noticed me. He was stealing along, crouched low in the snow, his ears back, his stub tail twitching nervously, his whole attention fixed tensely on something beyond me out on the barren. I wanted his beautiful skin; but I wanted more to find out what he was after; so I kept still and watched.

At the edge of the barren he crouched under a dwarf spruce, settled himself deeper in the snow by a wriggle or two till his feet were well under him and his balance perfect, and the red fire blazed in his eyes and his big muscles quivered. Then he hurled himself forward—one, two, a dozen mighty bounds through flying snow, and he landed with a screech on the dome of a beaver house. There he jumped about, shaking an imaginary beaver like a fury, and gave another screech that made one's spine tingle. That over, he stood very still, looking off over the beaver roofs that dotted the shore of a little pond there. The blaze died out of his eyes; a different look crept into them. He put his nose down to a tiny hole in the mound, the beavers' ventilator, and took a long sniff, while his whole body seemed to distend with the warm rich odor that poured up into his hungry nostrils. Then he rolled his head sadly, and went away.

Now all that was pure acting. A lynx likes beaver meat better than anything else; and this fellow had caught some of the colony, no doubt, in the well-fed autumn days, as they worked on their dam and houses. Sharp hunger made him remember them as he came through the wood on his nightly hunt after hares. He knew well that the beavers were safe; that months of intense cold had made their two-foot mud walls like granite. But he came, nevertheless, just to pretend he had caught one, and to remember how good his last full meal smelled when he ate it in October.

It was all so boylike, so unexpected there in the heart of the wilderness, that I quite forgot that I wanted the lynx's skin. I was hungry too, and went out for a sniff at the ventilator; and it smelled good. I remembered the time once when I had eaten beaver, and was glad to get it. I walked about among the houses. On every dome there were lynx tracks, old and new, and the prints of a blunt nose in the snow. Evidently he came often to dine on the smell of good dinners. I looked the way he had gone, and began to be sorry for him. But there were the beavers, safe and warm and fearless within two feet of me, listening undoubtedly to the strange steps without. And that was good; for they are the most interesting creatures in all the wilderness.

Most of us know the beaver chiefly in a simile. "Working like a beaver," or "busy as a beaver," is one of those proverbial expressions that people accept without comment or curiosity. It is about one-third true, which is a generous proportion of truth for a proverb. In winter, for five long months at least, he does nothing but sleep and eat and keep warm. "Lazy as a beaver" is then a good figure. And summer time—ah! that's just one long holiday, and the beavers are jolly as grigs, with never a thought of work from morning till night. When the snow is gone, and the streams are clear, and the twitter of bird songs meets the beaver's ear as he rises from the dark passage under water that leads to his house, then he forgets all settled habits and joins in the general heyday of nature. The well built house that sheltered him from storm and cold, and defied even the wolverine to dig its owner out, is deserted for any otter's den or chance hole in the bank where he may sleep away the sunlight in peace. The great dam, upon which he toiled so many nights, is left to the mercy of the freshet or the canoeman's axe; and no plash of falling water through a break—that sound which in autumn or winter brings the beaver like a flash—will trouble his wise little head for a moment.

All the long summer he belongs to the tribe of Ishmael, wandering through lakes and streams wherever fancy leads him. It is as if he were bound to see the world after being cooped up in his narrow quarters all winter. Even the strong family ties, one of the most characteristic and interesting things in beaver life, are for the time loosened. Every family group when it breaks up housekeeping in the spring represents five generations. First, there are the two old beavers, heads of the family and absolute rulers, who first engineered the big dam and houses, and have directed repairs for nobody knows how long. Next in importance are the baby beavers, no bigger than musquashes, with fur like silk velvet, and eyes always wide open at the wonders of the first season out; then the one-and two-year-olds, frisky as boys let loose from school, always in mischief and having to be looked after, and occasionally nipped; then the three-year-olds, who presently leave the group and go their separate happy ways in search of mates. So the long days go by in a kind of careless summer excursion; and when one sometimes finds their camping ground in his own summer roving through the wilderness, he looks upon it with curious sympathy. Fellow campers are they, pitching their tents by sunny lakes and alder-fringed, trout-haunted brooks, always close to Nature's heart, and loving the wild, free life much as he does himself.

But when the days grow short and chill, and the twitter of warblers gives place to the honk of passing geese, and wild ducks gather in the lakes, then the heart of the beaver goes back to his home; and presently he follows his heart. September finds them gathered about the old dam again, the older heads filled with plans of repair and new