A Country Year

by Hubbell, Liddy; Hubbell, Sue;

  Last week I was in St. Louis and went to a party with friends. When some people there learned that I lived in the country, they asked me about brown recluse spiders. Having recently been bitten and read up on the topic, I jumped right in, telling them rather more than they wanted to know about the infrequency and usual mildness of the bites and the shy nature of the little spider. What they wanted to hear more about was the part where the skin rots off. After scaring themselves deliciously for a while, several of them decided to cancel plans for a weekend in the Ozarks, and I realized that one of the major points in the favor of brown recluse spiders is that they help keep down the tourists.

  This week I have started cutting my firewood. It should be cut months ahead of time to let it dry and cure, so that it will burn hot in the winter. It is June now, and almost too late to be cutting firewood, but during the spring I was working with the bees from sunup until sundown and didn’t have time. By midday it is stifling back in the woods, so I go out at sunrise and cut wood for a few hours, load it into the pickup and bring it back to stack below the barn.

  I like being out there early. The spiders have spun webs to catch night-flying insects, and as the rising sun slants through the trees, the dewdrops that line the webs are turned into exquisite, delicate jewels. The woodlot smells of shade, leaf mold and damp soil. Wild turkey have left fresh bare spots where they scratched away the leaves looking for beetles and grubs. My dogs like being there too, and today snuffled excitedly in a hollow at the base of a tree. The beagle shrieked into it, his baying muffled. The squirrel who may have denned in the tree last night temporarily escaped their notice and sat on a low limb eying the two dogs suspiciously, tail twitching. A sunbeam lit up a tall thistle topped with a luxuriant purple blossom from which one butterfly and one honeybee sipped nectar. Red-eyed vireos sang high in the treetops where I could not see them.

  For me their song ended when I started the chain saw. It makes a terrible racket, but I am fond of it. It is one of the first tools I learned to master on my own, and it is also important to me. My woodstove, a simple black cast-iron-and-sheet-metal affair, is the only source of heat for my cabin in the winter, and if I do not have firewood to burn in it, the dogs, cat, the houseplants, the water in my pipes and I will all freeze. It is wonderfully simple and direct: cut wood or die.

  When Paul was here he cut the firewood and I, like all Ozark wives, carried the cut wood to the pickup. When he left, he left his chain saw, but it was a heavy, vibrating, ill-tempered thing. I weigh a hundred and five pounds, and although I could lift it, once I had it running it shook my hands so much that it became impossibly dangerous to use. One year I hired a man to cut my wood, but I was not pleased with the job he did, and so the next year, although I could not afford it, I bought the finest, lightest, best-made chain saw money could buy. It is a brand that many woodcutters use, and has an antivibration device built into even its smaller models.

  The best chain saws are formidable and dangerous tools. My brother nearly cut off his arm with one. A neighbor who earns his living in timber just managed to kill the engine on his when he was cutting overhead and a branch snapped the saw back toward him. The chain did not stop running until it had cut through the beak of his cap. He was very solemn when I told him that I had bought my own chain saw, and he gave me a good piece of advice. “The time to worry about a chain saw,” he said, “is when you stop being afraid of it.”

  I am cautious. I spend a lot of time sizing up a tree before I fell it. Once it is down, I clear away the surrounding brush before I start cutting it into lengths. That way I will not trip and lose my balance with the saw running. A dull chain and a poorly running saw are dangerous, so I’ve learned to keep mine in good shape and I sharpen the chain each time I use it.

  This morning I finished sawing up a tree from the place where I had been cutting for the past week. In the process I lost, in the fallen leaves somewhere, my scrench—part screwdriver, part wrench—that I use to make adjustments on the saw. I shouldn’t have been carrying it in my pocket, but the chain on the saw’s bar had been loose; I had tightened it and had not walked back to the pickup to put it away. Scolding myself for being so careless, I began looking for another tree to cut, but stopped to watch a fawn that I had frightened from his night’s sleeping place. He was young and his coat was still spotted, but he ran so quickly and silently that the two dogs, still sniffing after the squirrel, never saw him.

  I like to cut the dead trees from my woodlot, leaving the ones still alive to flourish, and I noticed a big one that had recently died. This one was bigger than I feel comfortable about felling. I’ve been cutting my own firewood for six years now, but I am still awed by the size and weight of a tree as it crashes to the ground, and I have to nerve myself to cut the really big ones.

  I wanted this tree to fall on a stretch of open ground that was free of other trees and brush, so I cut a wedge-shaped notch on that side of it. The theory is that the tree, thus weakened, will fall slowly in the direction of the notch when the serious cut, slightly above the notch on the other side, is made. The trouble is that trees, particularly dead ones that may have rot on the inside, do not know the theory and may fall in an unexpected direction. That is the way accidents happen. I was aware of this, and scared, besides, to be cutting down such a big tree; as a result, perhaps I cut too timid a wedge. I started sawing through on the other side, keeping an eye on the tree top to detect the characteristic tremble that signals a fall. I did not have time to jam the plastic wedge in my back pocket into the cut to hold it open because the tree began to fall in my direction, exactly opposite where I had intended. I killed the engine on the saw and jumped out of the way.

  There was no danger, however. Directly in back of where I had been standing were a number of other trees, which was why I had wanted to have the sawed one fall in the opposite direction; as my big tree started to topple, its upper branches snagged in another one, and it fell no further. I had sawed completely through the tree, but now the butt end had trapped my saw against the stump. I had cut what is descriptively called a “widow maker.” If I had been cutting with someone else, we could have used a second saw to cut out mine and perhaps brought down the tree, but this is dangerous and I don’t like to do it. I could not even free my saw by taking it apart, for I had lost my scrench, so I drove back to the barn and gathered up the tools I needed; a socket wrench, chains and a portable winch known as a come-along. A come-along is a cheery, sensible tool for a woman. It has a big hook at one end and another hook connected to a steel cable at the other. The cable is wound around a ratchet gear operated by a long handle to give leverage. It divides a heavy job up into small manageable bits that require no more than female strength, and I have used it many times to pull my pickup free from mud and snow.

  The day was warming up and I was sweating by the time I got back to the woods, but I was determined to repair the botch I had made of the morning’s woodcutting. Using the socket wrench, I removed the bar and chain from the saw’s body and set it aside. The weight of the saw gone, I worked free the bar and chain pinched under the butt of the tree. Then I sat down on the ground, drank ice water from my thermos and figured out how I was going to pull down the tree.

  Looking at the widow maker, I decided that if I could wind one of the chains around the butt of it, and another chain around a nearby standing tree, then connect the two with the come-along, I might be able to winch the tree to the ground. I attached the chains and come-along appropriately and began. Slowly, with each pump of the handle against the ratchet gear, the tree sank to the ground.

  The sun was high in the sky, the heat oppressive and my shirt and jeans were soaked with sweat, so I decided to leave the job of cutting up the tree until tomorrow. I gathered my tools together, and in the process found the scrench, almost hidden in the leaf mold. Then I threw all the tools into the back of the pickup, and sat on the tailgate to finish off the rest of the ice water and listen to the red-eyed vireo singing.
/>   It is satisfying, of course, to build up a supply of winter warmth, free except for the labor. But there is also something heady about becoming a part of the forest process. It sounds straightforward enough to say that when I cut firewood I cull and thin my woods, but that puts me in the business of deciding which trees should be encouraged and which should be taken.

  I like my great tall black walnut, so I have cut the trees around it to give it the space and light it needs to grow generously. Dogwoods don’t care. They frost the woods with white blossoms in the spring, and grow extravagantly in close company. If I clear a patch, within a year or two pine seedlings move in, grow up exuberantly, compete and thin themselves to tolerable spacing. If I don’t cut a diseased tree, its neighbors may sicken and die. If I cut away one half of a forked white oak, the remaining trunk will grow straight and sturdy. Sap gone, a standing dead tree like the one I cut today will make good firewood, and so invites cutting. But if I leave it, it will make a home for woodpeckers, and later for flying squirrels and screech owls. Where I leave a brush pile of top branches, rabbits make a home. If I leave a fallen tree, others will benefit: ants, spiders, beetles and wood roaches will use it for shelter and food, and lovely delicate fungi will grow out of it before it mixes with leaf mold to become a part of a new layer of soil.

  One person with a chain saw makes a difference in the woods, and by making a difference becomes part of the woodland cycle, a part of the abstraction that is the forest community.

  I’ve been out in back today checking beehives. When I leaned over one of them to direct a puff of smoke from my bee smoker into the entrance to quiet the bees, a copperhead came wriggling out from under the hive. He had been frightened from his protected spot by the smoke and the commotion I was making, and when he found himself in the open, he panicked and slithered for the nearest hole he could find which was the entrance to the next beehive. I don’t know what went on inside, but he came out immediately, wearing a surprised look on his face. I hadn’t known that a snake could look surprised, but this one did. Then, after pausing to study the matter more carefully, he glided off to the safety of the woods.

  He was a young snake, not even two feet long. Like the other poisonous snakes found in the Ozarks, the cottonmouths, copperheads belong to the genus Agkistrodon, which means fish-hook toothed. The copperheads in my part of the Ozarks are the southern variety, Agkistrodon contortrix contortrix, which makes them sound very twisty indeed. They are a pinkish coppery color with darker hourglass-patterned markings. They have wide jaws, which give their heads a triangular shape. Like the cottonmouths, they are pit vipers, which means that between eye and nostril they have a sensory organ that helps them aim in striking at warm-blooded prey. They eat other small snakes, mice, lizards and frogs.

  The surprising thing about copperheads are their mild manners, timidity and fearfulness. They have, after all, a potent defensive weapon in their venom, and yet their dearest wish when they are discovered is to escape. This rocky upland peninsula of land between the river and creek is a lovely habitat for copperheads. I often find them under the beehives, and they are common in the open field. Twice I have had them in the cabin. Every time I come upon copperheads they simply try to get away from me and never offer to strike.

  Once I had an old and heavy Irish setter who was badly bitten when he clumsily stepped on a copperhead. To the snake, being walked on by eighty-five pounds of dog represented a direct attack, and so he struck. The dog’s leg swelled and he was in obvious pain. Within a few hours his heartbeat was rapid, his breath shallow, and I took him to the vet. Afterwards he watched where he put his feet. I do, too, and wear leather boots when I walk through the field or in the woods, and in the warm months I give decent warning when I turn over a stack of old boards. I have enormous respect for a small animal with venom so potent that it can make a large dog very sick. I weigh more than the dog, and so I might not have such a severe reaction; there is no record of a human death caused by a copperhead bite in Missouri, but I don’t want to risk the pain.

  I respect copperheads, but I also have another set of feelings toward them, a combination of amazement and sympathy that an animal should be so frightened by me, so eager to escape, so little inclined to use the powerful means that he has to defend himself.

  Copperheads contrast oddly with the eastern hognose snakes, sometimes called puff adders, that I also see here sometimes. These are harmless, but put on a tremendous show of ferocity. I came upon a hognose one day in the field, and he raised up the first third of his body and spread his neck wide, hissing horribly, trying to convince me that he was a cobra. I was fooled hardly at all and stood quietly watching him; after some more halfhearted hissing and spreading he gave up the attempt to frighten me, remembered urgent business he had elsewhere and slithered away into the tall grasses.

  Apart from copperheads, there are few dangerous snakes here. There are supposed to be rattlers, but in the twelve years I have been walking the woods and river banks I have never met one. Most of the snakes around are harmless or, like the black rat snakes, which eat rodents, beneficial, and I have no sympathy with the local habit of killing every snake in sight. It is an Ozark custom to pack a pistol along with the beer on a float trip. The pistol is for shooting the cottonmouths that are supposed to fill the river and be thick upon its banks.

  In point of fact the river is too cold and swift for cottonmouths, and since I have lived here I have seen only one. He was idling in a warm, shallow pool at the side of the creek that runs along my southern property line. I stopped to look at him from a safe distance. Heavy-bodied and dark, confident and self-assured, he watched me in his turn and did not retreat as a copperhead would have. Instead, he coiled and raised his head, in a defensive posture, ready to strike if I were to advance. He opened his mouth wide, and I could see the white, cottony-looking interior that gives the snake his common name. After he was sure I was not going to come closer, he dropped into the water slowly and with dignity and swam away from me to the bank, where he disappeared under the safe cover of the branches hanging over the pool.

  This species of cottonmouth is called Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma, or white-mouthed agkistrodon who eats fish. They are often found in warmish water, and are primarily fish-eaters, but they also feed on other snakes, rodents, frogs and lizards.

  The cottonmouth I saw was evidently an old one, for he was big, probably nearly four feet in length; only a slight hint of his cross-banding was visible. Young cottonmouths are lighter, more patterned, and newborn cottonmouths, like copperheads, have yellow-tipped tails. Both cottonmouths and copperheads belong to the evolutionarily advanced group of snakes that do not lay eggs. The young are retained within the mother’s body, protected by a saclike membrane, until they are born. Like other snakes, they shed their skins as they grow.

  A treasured possession of mine is one of those snakeskins, fragile but perfect, with even the eye scales intact. It is always startling to me to notice people shudder when they see it. There is enough psychomythology about humankind’s aversion to snakes to reach from here to Muncie, Indiana, some of it entertaining, much of it contradictory. Whatever the reason, many people are irrationally afraid of snakes, and this makes for poor observation. It is hard to tell what a snake is up to if you are running away from it or killing it. This may account for the preponderance of folklore over natural history in conversations about snakes. It may be why Ozarkers have told me that the hognose snake is poisonous, that snakes go blind in August, that the hills are full of the dread hoop snake who holds his tail in his mouth and comes roaring down hillsides after folks to attack them with the horn on his tail—a horn so deadly that if it gets stuck in a tree, the tree will die within a few days.

  My favorite folk story about snakes is the one about copperheads, who are said to spit out their venom on a flat rock before taking a drink of water and then, having drunk, suck it back up into their fangs. I always liked it because I thought it was a grand Ozark stretcher. B
ut then I found the exact same story in a Physiologus, a medieval bestiary. It is a snake story at least eight hundred years old, perhaps more. So it turns out that the yarn is a piece of natural history after all. It is just that it has to do with the nature of the human mind, not nature of the snakish kind.

  There is a magnificent dappled brown and gold house spider changing her skin today in a corner up above the wood stove. A spider grows by molting its skin, which doubles as a skeleton. My spider spent yesterday quietly in her corner, getting it all together and feeling a bit uncomfortable, I suppose, for I read that spiders raise their blood pressure in molt. It has taken her the best part of the morning to crawl out of the old skin, and now she is hanging beside it, resting from the effort, which must have been considerable. Her old skin is beginning to shrivel. It looks wispy and impossibly small for this fine new spider to have worn. She is big, more than half an inch, but not as large as a similar house spider I have seen in the kitchen, so she probably has more molts to go before she reaches her full size.

  Molting is one answer to the problem posed by growth—not mine to be sure, but no less correct an answer for all that. Biologists like to emphasize that growth from the inside out is one of the characteristics that separates things that are alive from those that are not. Crystals, which are not alive, grow, but they do so by accretion, simply adding new material to what is already there.

  Human beings and other mammals, who hang their soft body parts onto and outside a skeleton, never have to face the growth problems of creatures such as insects—grasshoppers, or the honeybees out in my beehives—or spiders (which are not insects at all, but arachnids). Growth does present certain difficulties, but they are different ones.

  Spiders, grasshoppers and honeybees—or lobsters, for that matter—wear their skeletons on the outside, and so when they grow too tight they must find some means to shed them. Many insects follow molts with metamorphosis, a complete and radical dissolution of the old body form and rearrangement into a new one. But spiders just step out of their skeletons, doing so anywhere from two to twenty times before they are grown, but keeping the same relative form. Baby spiders, unlike many baby insects, look like adults, but smaller.