The Fall of the Year

The muskrats are building. The buds are leaving. Winter is coming. I must get out my own storm-windows and double-doors; for even now a fire is blazing cheerily on my wide, warm hearth.

CHAPTER IX

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW

“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing?”

AND what will Muskrat do? and Chipmunk? and Whitefoot, the wood mouse? and Chickadee? and the whole world of poor things out of doors?

Never fear. Robin knows as well as you that the north wind doth blow, and is now far away on his journey to the South; Muskrat knows, too, and is building his warm winter lodge; Chipmunk has already made his bed deep down under the stone wall, where zero weather is unheard of; Whitefoot, the wood mouse, has stored his hollow poplar stub full of acorns, and, taking possession of Robin’s deserted nest near by, has roofed it and lined it and turned it into a cosey, cold-proof house, while Chickadee, dear thing – has done nothing at all. Not so much as a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored up for the winter. But he knows where there is a big piece of suet for him on a certain lilac bush. And he knows where there is a snug little hole in a certain elm tree limb. The north wind may blow, blow, blow! It cannot get through Chickadee’s feathers, nor daunt for one moment his brave little heart.

The north wind sweeping the bare stubble fields and winding its shivering horn through the leafless trees does sometimes pierce my warm coat and strike a chill into my heart. Then how empty and cold seems the outdoor world! How deadly the touch of the winter! How fearful the prospect of the coming cold!

Does Muskrat think so? Does Whitefoot? Does Chickadee? Not at all, for they are ready.

The preparations for hard weather may be seen going on all through the autumn, beginning as far back as the flocking of the swallows late in July. Up to that time no one had thought of a coming winter, it would seem; but, one day, there upon the telegraph-wires were the swallows – the first sign that the getting ready for winter has begun.

The great migratory movements of the birds are very mysterious; but they were in the beginning, I think, and are still, for the most part, mere shifts to escape the cold. Yet not so much to escape the cold itself do the birds migrate, as to find a land of food. When the northland freezes, when river and lake are sealed beneath the ice and the soil is made hard as flint, then the food supplies for most of the birds are utterly cut off, causing them to move southward ahead of the cold, or starve.

There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds, like the quail, and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are so well provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the great majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn, must take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.

And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and closing bays of the vast desolate North are empty now, except for the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow.

Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready, much comforting assurance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack, no doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and death. But what with the building, the strange deep sleeping, and the harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and sociable, living.

Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don’t know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, Chipmunk or the provident ant. The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and verses have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just as thrifty. So is the busy bee.

It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far beyond her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter. By the first of August she has filled the brood chamber of the hive with honey – forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for the whole colony until the willows tassel again. But who knows what the winter may be? how cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So the harvesting is pushed with vigor on, until the frosts kill the last of the autumn asters – on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is safe should the sun not shine again for a year and a day.

The last of the asters have long since gone; so have the witch-hazels. All is quiet about the hives. The bees have formed into their warm winter clusters upon the combs; and except “when come the calm, mild days,” they will fly no more until March or April. I will half close their entrances – and so help them to put on their storm-doors.

The whole out of doors around me is like a great beehive, stored and sealed for the winter, its swarming life close-clustered, and safe and warm against the coming cold.

I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length of its frozen slope. There is no sign of life. The brown leaves have drifted into the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every burrow were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too, littering and choking the doorways. A stranger would find it hard to believe that all of my forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bottoms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and quite out of danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.

The woodchuck’s manner of providing for winter is very curious. Winter spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of danger, would need wings. But wings weren’t given him. Must he perish then? Winter spreads far, but it does not go deep – down only about four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps, escape underland. So down he goes through the winter, down into a mild and even temperature, five feet away– only five feet, but as far away from the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco.

Indeed, Woodchuck’s is a farther journey and even more wonderful than Bobolink’s; for these five feet carry him to the very gates of death. That he will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive with the spring out of this dark way, is passing strange.

Muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all the meadow into a well-stocked cellar. Beaver built him a dam, cut and anchored under water a plenty of green sticks near his lodge, so that he too would be under cover when the ice formed, with an abundance of tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his summer laying up food near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole, – a grave, – then ate until no particle more of fat could be got within his baggy hide, then crawled into his bed to sleep until the dawn of spring!

This is his shift! This is the length to which he goes, because he has no wings, and because he cannot cut, cure, and store away, in the depths of the stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk selects long-keeping things and buries them; but the woodchuck simply fattens himself, then buries himself, and sleeps – and lives!

“The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,”

but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect? Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog, who is also without fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at the sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him, too, in her own motherly way. All he has to do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of the ditch and sleep – and sometimes freeze!

No matter. If the cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he never knows. He will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for joy and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat. I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice. Drop the lump on the floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment of the ice itself. And this has happened more than once to the same frog without causing him the least ache or pain. He would gradually limber up, and croak, and look as wise as ever.

The north wind may blow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light. The grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.

Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger and cold. It was after an extremely long “severe spell”; but this was not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field. One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at once, although within easy reach of plenty.

Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier, bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.

The smaller birds that stay through the winter, like the tree sparrow and the junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing-field.

The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white. Then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there was a five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the crusty snow – five days of life and plenty for the birds.

Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and winters, which were made when the world was made – that even ragweeds and winters have a part in the beautiful divine scheme of things.

“The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow” —

but the wild geese are going over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks have gone to sleep; the muskrats have nearly finished their lodge; the sap in the big hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. And what has become of Robin, poor thing?

CHAPTER X

AN OUTDOOR LESSON

I HAVE had many a person ask me, “What is the best way to learn about the out of doors?” and I always answer, “Don’t try to learn about it, but first go out of the house and get into the out of doors. Then open both eyes, use both of your ears, and stand in one place stock still as long as you can; and you will soon know the out of doors itself, which is better than knowing about it.”

“But,” says my learner, “if I go out of the house, I don’t get into the out of doors at all, but into a city street!”

Look there – in the middle of the street! What is it? An English sparrow? Yes, an English sparrow – six English sparrows. Are they not a part of the out of doors? And look up there, over your head – a strip of sky? Yes – is not a strip of blue sky a part of the out of doors?

Now let me tell you how I learned an outdoor lesson one night along a crowded city street.

It was a cold, wet night; and the thick, foggy twilight, settling down into the narrow streets, was full of smoke and smell and chill. A raw wind blew in from the sea and sent a shiver past every corner. The street lights blinked, the street mud glistened, the street noises clashed and rattled, and the street crowds poured up and down and bore me along with them.

I was homesick – homesick for the country. I longed to hear the sound of the wind in the pine trees; I longed to hear the single far-away bark of the dog on the neighboring farm, or the bang of a barndoor, or the clack of a guinea going to roost. It was half-past five, and thousands of clerks were pouring from the closing stores; but I was lonely, homesick for the quiet, the wideness, the trees and sky of the country.

Feeling thus, and seeing only the strange faces all about me, and the steep narrow walls of the street high above me, I drifted along, until suddenly I caught the sound of bird voices shrill and sharp through the din.

I stopped, but was instantly jostled out of the street, up against a grim iron fence, to find myself peering through the pickets into an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston.

As I looked, there loomed up in the fog and rain overhead the outlines of three or four gaunt trees, whose limbs were as thick with sparrows as they had ever been with leaves. A sparrow roost! Birds, ten thousand birds, gone to roost in the business section of a great city, with ten thousand human beings passing under them as they slept!

I got in behind a big waste-barrel by the iron fence and let the crowd surge past. It was such a sight as I had never seen. I had seen thousands of chimney swallows go to roost in the deserted chimneys of a great country house; I had many a time gone down at night to the great crow-roost in the pines at Cubby Hollow; but I had never stumbled upon a bird-roost on a crowded city street before!

The hurrying throng behind me thinned and straggled while I waited, watching by the iron fence. The wind freshened, the mist thickened into fine rain that came slanting down through the half-lighted trees; the sleeping sparrows twittered and shifted uneasily on the limbs.

The streets were being deserted. It was going to be a wild night on the water, and a wild night in the swaying, creaking tops of these old elm trees. I shivered at the thought of the sparrows sleeping out in such a night as this, and turned away toward my own snug roost hardly two blocks away.

The night grew wilder. The wind rattled down our street past a hundred loose shutters; the rain slapped against the windows, and then stopped as a heavy gust curled over the line of roofs opposite. I thought of the sparrows. Had they been driven from the tossing limbs? Could they cling fast in such a wind, and could they sleep?