Everyday Adventures

On that day the Ornithologist and myself were on our way to a rattlesnake den, the secret of which had been in the Pan family for some generations. In past years Jim’s forbears had done a thriving business in selling skins and rattlesnake oil, in the days when the rattlesnake shared with the skunk the honor of providing an unwilling cure for rheumatism. Our path led up through masses of color. There was the pale pure pink of the crane’s-bill or wild geranium, the yellow adder’s tongue, and the faint blue-and-white porcelain petals of the hepatica, with cluster after cluster of the snowy, golden-hearted bloodroot whose frail blossoms last but for a day.

That very morning a long-delayed warbler-wave was breaking over the mountain, and the Ornithologist could hardly contain himself as he watched the different varieties pass by. I recall that we scored over twenty different kinds of warblers between dawn and dark, and I saw for the first time the Wilson’s black-cap, with its bright yellow breast and tiny black crown, and the rare Cape May warbler, with its black-streaked yellow underparts and orange-red cheeks. The richly dressed and sombre black-throated blue and bay-breasted were among the crowd, while black-throated greens, myrtles, magnolias, chestnut-sided, blackpolls, Canadians, redstarts, with their fan-shaped tails, and Blackburnians, with their flaming throats and breasts glowing like live coals, went by in a never-ending procession.

All the way Jim kept up a steady flow of anecdote. I can remember only one, a blood-curdling story about a man from Bridgeport, name not given, who caught a rattlesnake while on a hunt with Jim, but who let go while attempting to put it into the bag, whereupon the rattlesnake bit him as it dropped.

“Did he die?” queried the writer and the Ornithologist in chorus.

“No,” said Jim proudly; “Tin and I saved his life.”

“Whiskey?” ventured the writer.

“Not for snake-bites,” responded Jim simply.

“Well, how was it?” persisted the Ornithologist, hoping to learn of some mysterious Indian remedy.

“Well,” said Jim, stretching out his tremendous arms like a great bear, “I held him tight and Tin here burned the place out. It took two matches and he yelled somethin’ terrible. I told him we were savin’ his life, but the fool said he would rather die of snake-bite than be burned to death. You wouldn’t suppose a grown man would make such a fuss over two little matches.”

Finally, we reached the Den, a ledge of rocks near the top of the mountain, where for some unknown reason all the rattlesnakes for miles around were accustomed to hibernate during the winter and to remain for some weeks in the late spring before scattering through the valley. The Ornithologist and I fell unobtrusively to the rear, while the dauntless Pan led the van with a crotched stick. Suddenly Jim thrust one foot up into the air like a toe-dancer, and pirouetted with amazing rapidity on the other. He had been in the very act of stepping over a small huckleberry-bush, when he noted under its lee a rattlesnake in coil, about the size of a peck measure – as pretty a death-trap as was ever set in the woods. By the time I got there, Jim had pinned the hissing heart-shaped head down with his forked stick, while the bloated, five-foot body was thrashing through the air in circles, the rattles whirring incessantly.

“Grab him just back of the stick,” panted Jim, bearing down with all his weight, “and put him in the bag.”

I paused.

“You’re not scared, are you?” he inquired; while Tin, who had hurried up with a gunny-sack, regarded me reproachfully.

“Certainly not,” I assured him indignantly, “but I don’t want to be selfish. Let Tin do it.”

“No,” said Jim firmly, “you’re company. Tin can pick up rattlesnakes any day.”

“Well, how about my friend?” I rejoined weakly.

The Ornithologist, who had been watching the scene from the far background, spoke up for himself.

“I wouldn’t touch that damn snake,” he said earnestly, “for eleven million dollars.”

At this profanity the rattlesnake started another paroxysm of struggling, while his rattle sounded like an alarm-clock. When he stopped to rest, the Ornithologist raised his price to an even billion – in gold. It was evident that I was the white man’s hope. It would never do to let two members of a conquered race see a pale-face falter. Remembering Deerslayer at the stake, Daniel Boone, and sundry other brave white men without a cross, I set my teeth, gripped the rough, cold, scaly body just back of the crotched stick, and lifted. The great snake’s black, fixed, devilish eyes looked into mine. If, in this world, there are peep-holes into hell, they are found in the eyes of an enraged rattlesnake. As he came clear of the ground, he coiled round my arm to the elbow, so that the rattles sounded not a foot from my ear. Although the rattlesnake is not a constrictor, and there was no real danger, yet under the touch of his body my arm quivered like a tuning-fork.

“What makes your arm shake so?” queried Jim, watching me critically.

“It’s probably rheumatism,” I assured him.

Suddenly, under my grip, the snake’s mouth opened, showing on either side of the upper jaw ridges of white gum. From these suddenly flashed the movable fangs which are always folded back until ready for use. They were hollow and of a glistening white. Halfway down on the side of each was a tiny hole, from which the yellow venom slowly oozed. I began tremulously to unwind my unwelcome armlet, while Tin waited with the open bag.

“Be sure you take your hand away quick after you drop him in,” advised Jim.

“Don’t you worry about that,” I replied; “no man will ever get his hand away quicker than I’m going to.”

THE KING OF THE FOREST – THE BANDED RATTLESNAKE

Whereupon I unwound the rattling coils from my arm, and then broke all speed records in removing my hand from the neighborhood of that snake. This was my first introduction to the King of the Dark Places, the grim timber rattlesnake, the handsomest of all the thirteen varieties found within the United States.

On my way back from the den it was Jim Pan who pointed out to me on the lower slope of the mountain the beautiful showy orchid (Orchis spectabilis). Between two oblong shining green leaves grew a loose spike of purple-pink and white butterfly blossoms. This is the first of the orchids to appear, and no more exquisite or beautiful flower could head the procession which stretches from May until September. I find this flower but seldom, usually because I am not in the hill-country early enough, although once I found a perfect flower in bloom as late as Decoration Day, a left-over from the first spring flowers.

It was Jim, too, that day, who quite appropriately showed me the rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera pubescens), with its rosette of green leaves heavily veined with white, from the centre of which in late summer grows a spike of crowded, greenish-white flowers. Under the doctrine of signatures, these leaves are still thought by many to be a sure cure for the bite of a rattlesnake. Personally, I would rather rely on a sharp knife and permanganate of potash. In the same group as the rattlesnake plantain are several varieties of lady’s tresses, which grow in every damp meadow in midsummer and early fall.

Little spikes of greenish-white flowers they are, growing out of what looks like a twisted or braided stem. Of them all the most interesting to me is the grass-leaved lady’s tresses (Gyrostachys præcox), where the flowers grow round and round the stem in a perfect spiral.

As I went on with my hunting, I learned that not all the members of the orchis family are beautiful. There is the coral root, with tiny dull brownish-purple flowers, which one finds growing in dry woods, often near colonies of the Indian pipe. The green and the ragged-fringed orchids are other disappointing members. Yet, to a confirmed collector, even these poor relations of the family are full of interest. In fact, the second rarest orchid of our American list – the celebrated crane-fly orchid (Tipularia unifolia) – has a series of insignificant greenish-purple blossoms which look as much like mosquitoes or flies as anything else, and can be detected only with the greatest difficulty. Yet I am planning to take a journey of several hundred miles this very summer on the off-chance of seeing one of these flowers. Nearly as rare is the strange ram’s-head lady’s-slipper (Cypripedium arietinum), the rarest of all the cypripedia and belonging to the same family as the glorious moccasin flower and queen flower. The lip of the ram’s-head consists of a strange greenish pouch with purple streaks, shaped like the head of a ram.

There are scores of other odd, often lovely, and usually rare, members of the great orchis family, which can be met with from May to September. There is the beautiful golden whip-poor-will’s shoe, in two sizes (Cypripedium hirsutum, and Cypripedium parviflorum), and those lovely nymphs, rose-purple Arethusa (Arethusa bulbosa), and Calypso (Calypso borealis), with her purple blossom varied with pink and shading to yellow.

One of the fascinations of orchid-hunting is the fact that you may suddenly light upon a strange orchid growing in a place which you have passed for years. Such a happening came to me the day when I first found the rose pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides). I was following a cow-path through the hard hack pastures which I had traveled perhaps a hundred times before. Suddenly, as I came to the slope of the upper pasture, growing in the wet bank of the deep-cut trail, my eye caught sight of a little flower of the purest rose-pink, the color of the peach-blossom, with a deeply fringed drooping lip, the whole flower springing from a slender stem with oval, grass-like leaves. To me it had a fragrance like almonds, although others have found in it the scent of sweet violets or of fresh raspberries. It is the pogonia family which includes the rarest of all of our orchids, the almost unknown smaller whorled pogonia (Pogonia affinis). Few indeed have been the botanists who have seen even a pressed specimen of this strange flower.

Two weeks after I found the rose pogonia, I came again to visit her. To my astonishment and delight, by her side was growing another orchid, like some purple-pink butterfly which had alighted on a long swaying stem. It was no other than the beautiful grass-pink (Limodorum tuberosum), which blooms in July, while the pogonia comes out in late June. The grass-pink has from two to six blossoms on each stem, and the yellow lip is above instead of below the flower, as in the case of most orchids. Years later I was to find this orchid growing by scores in the pine-barrens.

Last, but by no means least, is the great genus Habenaria– the exquisite fringed orchids. Purple, white, gold, green – they wear all these colors. He who has never seen either the large or the small purple fringed orchid growing in the June or July meadows, or the flaming yellow fringed orchid all orange and gold in the August meadows, has still much for which to live.

It was with an orchid of this genus that I had my most recent adventure. I had traveled with the Botanist into the heart of the pine-barrens. There may be places where more flowers and rarer flowers and sweeter flowers grow than in these barrens, but if so, the Botanist and I have never found the spot. From the early spring, when the water freezes in the hollow leaves of the pitcher-plant, to the last gleam of the orange polygala in the late fall, we are always finding something rare and new. On that August day we followed a dim path that led through thickets of scrub-oak and sweet pepper-bush. By its side grew clumps of deer-grass, with its purple-pink petals and masses of orange-colored stamens. Sometimes the path would disappear from sight in masses of hudsonia and sand-myrtle. Everywhere above the blueberry bushes flamed the regal Turk’s-cap lily, with its curved fire-red petals. On high the stalks towered above a tangle of lesser plants bearing great candelabra of glorious blossoms.

Finally, we came to a little ditch which some forgotten cranberry-grower had dug through the barrens to a long-deserted bog. On its side grew the rare thread-leafed sundew, with its long thread-like leaf covered with tiny red hairs and speckled thick with glittering drops of dew; while here and there little insects, which had alighted on the sweet, fatal drops, were enmeshed in the entangling hairs. Well above the line of strangled insects on which it fed, a pink blossom smiled unconcernedly. Like the attractive lady mentioned in Proverbs, her house goes down into the chambers of death.

As we followed the dike, the air was sweet with the perfume of white alder. The long stream of brown cedar-water was starred white with gleaming, fragrant water-lilies. In a marsh by the ditch grew clumps of cotton-grass or pussytoes, each stem of which bore a tuft of soft brown wool, like the down which a mother rabbit pulls from her breast when she lines her nest for her babies.

At last we came to the abandoned cranberry bog. Suddenly the Botanist jumped into the ditch, splashed his way across, and disappeared in the bog, waving his arms over his head. I found him on his knees in the wet sphagnum moss, chanting ecstatically the mystic word “Blephariglottis.” In front of him, on a green stem, was clustered a mass of little flowers of incomparable whiteness, with fringed lips and long spikes. One petal bent like a canopy over the brown stamens, while the other two flared out on either side, like the wings of tiny white butterflies. It was the white-fringed orchid (Habenaria blephariglottis). Beside her whiteness even the snowy petals of the water-lily and the white alder showed yellow tones. Like El Nath among the stars, the white fringed orchid is the standard of whiteness for the flowers.

Three great blue herons flew over our heads, folded their wings, and alighted not thirty yards away – an unheard-of proceeding for this wary bird. A Henslow sparrow sang his abrupt and, to us, almost unknown song. The Botanist neither saw nor heard. All the way home he was in a blissful daze, and when I said good-bye to him at the station, he only murmured happily “Blephariglottis.”

THE GREAT BLUE HERON AT BREAKFAST

X

THE MARSH DWELLERS

The sweet, hot, wild scent of the marsh came up to us. It was compounded of sun and wind and the clean dry smell of miles and miles of bleaching sedges, all mingled with the seethe and steam of a green blaze of growth that had leaped from the ooze to meet the summer. Through it all drifted tiny elusive puffs of fragrance from flowers hidden under thickets of willow and elderberry. The smooth petals of wild roses showed among the rushes, like coral set in jade. On the sides of burnt tussocks, where the new grass grew sparse as hair on a scarred skull, rue anemones trembled above their trefoil leaves. When the world was young they sprang from the tears which Aphrodite shed over the body of slain Adonis. Still the pale wind-driven flowers sway as if shaken by her sobs, and have the cold whiteness of him dead.

The leaves of the meadow rue, like some rare fern, showed here and there, but the clustered white flowers had not yet bloomed, nor the flat yellow blossoms of the shrubby cinquefoil. There were thickets of aronia or chokeberry, whose flat white blossoms and reddish bark showed its kinship to the apple tree. Among the pools gleamed marsh marigolds fresh from the mint of May, while deep down in the grass at the foot of the tussocks were white violets, short-stemmed

and with the finest of umber-brown traceries at the centre of their petals. The blues and purples may or may not be sweet, but one can always count on the faint fragrance of the white.

We lay on the turf covering a ledge of smoky quartz thrust like a wedge into the marsh. Across a country of round green hills and fertile farms its squat bulk stretched unafraid, an untamed monster of another age. Beyond the long levels we could see Wolf Island, where a hunted wolf-pack, protected by quagmires and trembling bogs, made its last stand two centuries ago. Where a fringe of trees showed the beginning of solid ground, a pair of hawks with long black-barred tails wheeled and screamed through the sky. “Geck, geck, geck, geck,” they called, almost like a flicker, except that the tone was flatter. As they circled, both of them showed a snowy patch over the rump, the field-mark of the marsh hawk. The male was a magnificent blue-gray bird, whose white under-wings were tipped with black like those of a herring gull. We watched them delightedly, for the rare nest of the marsh hawk, the only one of our hawks which nests on the ground, was one of the possibilities of the marsh.

Suddenly we heard from behind us a sound that sent us crawling carefully up to the crest of the ridge. It was like the pouring of water out of some gigantic bottle or the gurgling suck of an old-fashioned pump: “Bloop – bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop” – it came to us with a strange subterranean timbre. The last time I had heard that note was in the pine-barrens three years before. Then it sounded like the thudding of a mallet on a stake, for its quality always depends on the nature of the country across which it travels. From the top of our knoll we saw a rare sight. In the open pasture by the edge of the marsh stood a bird between two and three feet high, of a streaked brown color, with a black stripe down each side of its neck. Even as we watched, the bird began a series of extraordinary actions. Hunching its long neck far down between its shoulders, it suddenly thrust it up. As each section straightened, there came to us across the pasture the thudding, bubbling, watery note which we had first heard. It seemed impossible that a bird could make such a volume of sound. At times, after each “bloop,” would come the sharp click of the bill as it rapidly opened and shut. Finally the singer convulsively straightened the last kink out of its neck and with a last retching note thrust its long yellow beak straight skyward. We had seen an American bittern boom – a rarer sight even than the drumming of a ruffed grouse or the strange flight-song of the woodcock at twilight. Suddenly the bittern stopped and, hunching its neck, stepped stealthily, like a little old bent man, into the sedges. With its long beak pointing directly upward, it stood motionless and seemed to melt into the color of the withered rushes. One look away, and it was almost impossible for the eye to pick the bird out from its cover.

I turned to look at the marsh hawks just in time to see the female alight on the ground by a stunted willow bush far across the marsh. I waited, one, two, three minutes, but no bird rose. Evidently she was on the nest. Keeping my eye fixed on that special bush, which looked like a score of others, I plunged into the marsh, intending to bound like a chamois from crag to crag. On the second bound I slipped off a tussock and went up to my knees in mud and water. The rest of the way I ploughed along, making a noise at each step like the bittern’s note. Half-way to the bush, the mother hawk rose and circled around us, screaming monotonously. For half an hour we searched back and forth without finding any nest. At last we hid in a willow thicket, thinking that perhaps the hawk might go back to her nest. Instead, both birds disappeared in some distant woods. The sun was getting low and we were miles from our inn; yet as this was the nearest either of us had ever been to finding a marsh hawk’s nest, we decided to hunt on until dark.

THE MARSH HAWK’S NEST

I laid out a route from my bush to another about thirty yards away, and between those two as bounds planned to quarter back and forth over every square foot of ground, moving toward the woods where the hawks had gone. It seemed an almost hopeless hunt, for the marsh at this point was dry, with patches of bushes, masses of sedge, and piled heaps here and there of dry rushes. As I reached my farther boundary and was about to return, I straightened my aching back and looked beyond the bush. There, directly ahead, in a space fringed by spirea bushes but in plain sight, lay a round nest on the ground – about eight inches across and three inches deep, made of coarse grasses ringed around with rushes. Beneath the nest was a well-packed platform several inches thick. I think that this was a natural pile of rushes pressed down by the bird. There, under the open sky, were five large eggs of a dirty bluish-white, nearly ready to hatch. They were the size of a small hen’s egg. The very second I caught sight of the nest the mother hawk came dashing through the air, from some unseen perch where she had been watching me with her telescopic eyes. Fifty feet away, she folded her wings and dived at my head, falling through the air like a stone. With her fierce unflinching eyes, half-open beak, and outspread claws, she looked dangerous. Ten feet away, however, she swooped up and circled off in ever-widening rings, screaming mournfully. Beside the nest was one barred tail-feather.