by Hal
The wind blew all day and all night and half of today, but by this evening the air is almost calm, almost penitent. We walked in the dusk and came back in the dark and noticed how late Autumn had burnished the stars and hung them back in place and closer at hand. Or so it seemed, for there was an intimacy to the evening and to the trees lifting bare branches almost to the stars.
As we walked north the tail of the Big Bear, the handle of the Dipper, was hidden by the first hill. It will be well above the horizon later tonight, for the Dipper swings around the Pole Star counterclockwise throughout the night. But now it is there on the horizon; and the Little Bear, the Little Dipper, hangs from the Pole Star, which is its pivot, like a crookneck gourd from a nail in an old Summer kitchen.
When we turned and looked to the west, there stood the Northern Cross, which some call Cygnus, the Swan. It leans, actually, toward the right, as though about to pitch from the luminous sky, and it will be much brighter later in the evening when the thin moon has set. To the east were the Pleiades, a cluster which seemed to fade, as always, when we looked directly at it, and to brighten when we glanced away and saw it from the corner of the eye, which is a trick of night vision.
Stars everywhere, the Milky Way like a daisy meadow in full bloom. And so close that if we had climbed to the top of Tom’s Mountain we surely could have reached up and touched a star or two.
We have been out surveying the wild berry crop and we brought home a few specimens, just for pretty, as Barbara says. A branch or two of black alder with its vivid red bunches of berries and a couple of branches of baneberry, both the red and the white variety. We also tasted the wintergreen tang of the checkerberry, and we found the cherry-red cluster-berries of the jack-in-the-pulpit and the even redder partridge berries. The birds have pretty well stripped the miniature grapes from the Virginia creeper and the inky purple-black berries from the red stems of the pokeweed.
The partridge berries, which botanists know as Mitchella repens, seems to have been more fruitful than in years. I have heard it said that the partridge berry forecasts the coming Winter—few berries, a mild season; many berries, a hard Winter. To me, that reasoning is backward: many berries are plain evidence that the season just past was favorable for fruiting—good weather, many blossoms, and busy bees and small butterflies pollinating those blossoms. That, like a good many superstitions, about the stock market and horse races as well as the weather, is based on hindsight rather than anything resembling reason. You might as well say that because a farmer harvests a good corn crop he will face a rough and rugged Winter.
I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of Winter we’re going to have, but I haven’t had much luck. The almanacs offer their usual forecasts: “Snow and ice, or maybe nice…Wind and sleet and chilly feet…Cold and raw, then January thaw.” Mildly amusing, but pretty much double talk. And the men at the weather stations talk about averages and norms and refuse to be put out on a limb; though they don’t say so in so many words, I think they simply don’t know. And the old-timers around here, most of them, don’t make forecasts any more. “Those atomic bombs,” one of them said, “changed everything.” The fact is that he doesn’t seem to care too much, because he plans to go South and visit his married daughter right after Thanksgiving.
Charley did come up with his own forecast. I had heard it before. Every year, in fact. “The river will have to freeze over three times,” Charley always says, “before Winter’s over. Twice before Winter really settles in. It always has. One year it froze and the ice went out four times, but that’s unusual.” I’ve checked on Charley’s theory ever since we’ve lived here, and only once has it failed.
Since it was warm and sunny this afternoon we got in the boat and went upstream a few miles, to look for signs ourselves. The only signs we saw were new muskrat holes. The new holes were high up the river bank. It takes no great store of lore to guess that the muskrats expect high water before Spring. And that’s not particularly new. The river always rises with the Spring thaw. So there’s nothing to do but wait for the river to freeze over three times. After that it should be Spring, and we’ll know what kind of Winter it was.
The cold begins to deepen and I went up the mountain today to look at the pipeline from the spring. It was laid many years ago, and I can only guess at its course, but if I know anything about that mountainside the pipe lies close to the surface in a good many places. The rocky core of the mountain is close to the surface and I am sure nobody blasted a trench to lay that pipe.
I found the line where it crosses a gully and it was out in the open there. Spring and Summer rains had washed the gully so deep that six feet of pipe were revealed. I carried stones and shoveled dirt and built a dam across the gully, covering the pipe and facing the dam with flat stones so it would protect itself. I hope that any freshets will deposit more silt over my pipe there. With good luck, and by leaving the faucet running at the watering trough, the line won’t freeze even if the frost strikes deep.
I like to work on the mountainside at this time of year. The wind whispers in the hemlocks, the sun strikes warm through the leafless maples, and the chickadees seem to like company. Partridge berries are bright beads underfoot and Christmas fern is untouched by the frosts. There are beds of club moss and ground cedar and ground pine.
And Pat thinks it is a holiday. He isn’t interested in such prosaic projects as covering a pipe. He finds a rabbit track and runs the mountainside, voicing his excitement. In a few days I’ll come up here with him and bring the shotgun, and we’ll see if we can get a few rabbits for the freezer.
The weather is “making up,” as they say, making up some kind of change, and probably not for the better. We have had good weather for some time now and are due for a change. It looks like rain, to me. We have had little dew the past few mornings, and none at all this morning. As the old rhyme goes:
When the morn is dry, the rain is nigh;
When the morn is wet, no rain you’ll get.
When it didn’t rain before noon I spent the afternoon cutting firewood. The chain saw takes a good deal of the labor out of that job, particularly for one man working alone; but it still isn’t loafing. Several times when I took a breather I went down and looked at the boat, wondering if I should haul it out of the water now. The bank is high and steep, and the only way I can get the boat out is with a block and tackle hitched to one of the big maples. Charley or Albert would help, but they are busy and I hesitate to ask them. But if it rains the river will rise. If the water rises enough, say three feet, I can haul the boat out easily. Being only a twelve-footer, it weighs less than 200 pounds.
I finally decided to wait and hope for rain and high water. And I finished with the wood. I cut half a cord and got it all stowed in the woodshed. And then I began to wonder if my decision about the boat was right after all. It might turn cold, the river might freeze over, and we might get a foot of snow. Then where would I be, with the boat frozen in and snowed over? But by then it was too late to get the boat out tonight.
No dew again, and still no rain. But I refused to be panicked into hauling that boat out the hard way. Besides, Pat practically said, in so many words, “How about those rabbits? They’re getting downright insolent. How about it, Boss?” So I took the 12-gauge and we went up the mountain. And, to prove his point, Pat picked up a scent just above the pasture. I took my stand and waited, listening to Pat’s wonderfully melodious voice. He trailed that rabbit halfway up the mountain before it turned and came back. And then I heard a slight rustle of brush off to my left and a moment later there was the big, fat cottontail, going just fast enough to keep ahead of the dog. He crossed in front of me, not twenty yards away, and at my shot Pat came running. We had our first rabbit.
Pat trails rabbits entirely by scent, as any good rabbit dog does. I’ve seen a rabbit jump almost under his nose, but he paid no attention to where the rabbit went until he picked up the scent. The whole idea of hunting with such a dog is based on a rabbit’s wa
y of running in a circle, returning to the place where he was flushed. The dog keeps on his trail, the rabbit keeps moving, and the hunter who takes a stand near the place where the rabbit started usually gets a shot. Nose trailing is rather slow, and the rabbit runs only fast enough to keep fifty yards or so ahead of the dog.
Pat put up three rabbits one after another. One ran in, as we say, took refuge in a hole under an old stone wall. I got the other two. Then, just before noon, when we were working through a thicket of cedars, I heard Pat utter a strange yelp of discovery. Two yelps, then silence, then a quick whimper of pain and a growl of anger.
I hurried toward the little hollow beyond the cedars and found Pat pawing at his muzzle, pawing, darting into the brush, backing out and pawing at his muzzle. He heard me and turned, literally bristling—his nose was feathered with porcupine quills.
I had a leash with me. I snapped it on Pat’s collar and tied him to a sapling. Then I found the porky, a big fellow, in the brush and finished him off. I went back to Pat and pulled a dozen quills out of his muzzle; but he had a whole mouthful of quills in his gums. I pulled what I could, but most of them were broken off. So we came back down the mountainside, Pat still on the leash. Hurt as he was, he still wanted to run rabbits.
I got a pair of pliers and pulled what quill stubs I could reach, but he needed more help than I could give. So we took him in the car and went to the veterinarian, who said he’d have to give Pat an anesthetic, put him under, to get all the quill stubs out. We left him, though he obviously thought we were deserting him in his time of trial. We went back and got him this evening. The effect of the drug was still on him. He staggered and was bleary-eyed, and when we got in the car he whimpered softly and lay with his head in my lap. We brought him home and put him to bed in his house. It had begun to rain, but I was scarcely aware of it.
It rained all night and was still raining this morning when I went to let Pat out of his house. He heard me coming and was at the door demanding his freedom. I’d thought he might have a hangover and so sore a mouth he would lie around, an invalid, all day. Not a bit of it! He came out leaping and barking, rolled in the wet grass, shook water all over me, and raced me to the back door. He had a full appetite when I gave him his snack for breakfast. Then he settled down here in my study, as though nothing had happened. But I hope he hasn’t completely forgotten that porcupine and what it did to him. He will meet other porkies.
Meanwhile, the river rose and the brooks were rushing noisily down the mountainside. It’s a strange river, peculiarly responsive to flood conditions. Normally it lies like a lake along here, broad and deep and with a current of less than two miles an hour. It has little fall, though half a mile below here it spills into white-water rapids and begins to assume a proper mountain-stream character. When heavy rains come it rises swiftly, sometimes as much as three or four feet in twenty-four hours. Fortunately the banks are about ten feet high in front of the house; it has been out of those banks only twice in recent years.
This evening the water had risen two feet and covered my dock completely. I remember a year ago, when it threatened flood and other streams swept away bridges and Jim and Juanita were marooned here for a long weekend. They were singing, “River, Stay ‘Way from My Door.” But I don’t expect a flood. I moored the boat to a post up the bank a little way, on the first ledge above the river. Another foot of rise and I can haul the boat out with one hand.
The rain continued all night and most of this morning, and I put on boots and a raincoat and went out to slosh around in it, across the pastures and along the brooks and down to the river bank. Barbara likes to walk in the rain, but not merely to slosh around in it, as I do. The rush of a brook holds no fascination for her and rouses nothing approaching ecstasy. But she recognizes my delight and knows it for what it is—the exultation of a dry-country person in water that runs ankle deep across the land. I get an almost sensual delight in watching a brook come boiling across the pasture in flood.
I was out for two hours, and though the rain was chill and I got fairly wet, it was well worth it. I was communing with water, with one of the elements, and I felt as frisky as a fish. I wanted, but lacked the small-boy obliviousness, to build a toy water wheel and set it in the brook back of the garden, just to watch the paddle wheel spin.
Soon after lunch the rain stopped and I put on my boots again and went to the river bank where the boat was moored. The river had risen so high that I slid the boat out onto the first step-off of the bank. I hauled it onto the grass with one hand, slid it on up the bank a little way, tethered it to a tree, and am all set to bring it the rest of the way tomorrow and stow it for the Winter. I am feeling a little smug tonight.
Margaret and Allerton came over this afternoon and we sat around the fire and talked, and I thought how a hearth calls for a small company, for companionship.
A hearth fire is a wasteful thing, in terms of economics. But so is much of the talk that generates around an open fire, perhaps; it seldom settles big problems and it never pays the taxes. Much of it, like the heat from the logs on the andirons, goes up the chimney. But when you have said that you have pretty well exhausted the case against the simmering log and the slow talk beside it. There still remains the reflected glow, which is its own excuse and needs no defense.
There are times when quick heat and sharp words are among the world’s greatest inefficiencies. Some things—and friendship and understanding are high among them—mature best by ember light and in a small company. It is doubtful that mob rule was ever inspired by the gleam of a hearth fire. The tinder of violence and fanaticism requires a bigger flame and a larger arena. Philosophy and faith are companions at the hearth, and ever have been.
There are better ways to heat a house, but neither love nor friendship is too much concerned with economics. Man built a home around a fire, and there the family grew. To his fireside man brought his friends, and friendship grew, and understanding. So hearth became home, and home became heart. It has little changed over the centuries. What greater friendship or understanding is there than that which stands, back to hearth, and faces outer cold and darkness unafraid?
Thanksgiving, and I am thinking today of the early ones here. When they had given thanks for life, for loved ones, for the purpose that had brought them here, they went about their tasks. The dusk of Winter was early upon them, for Autumn was at its end.
Summer had not been easy, for it was a time of labor; but they had given thanks for that, too, for the chance to labor for themselves. And Autumn had not been easy, for it was a time of garnering, of gathering the small harvest from the woods and fields; but they had been thankful for harvest, for the chance to lay up substance that would sustain them. And now Winter was at hand.
They went about their tasks, cutting wood and snugging houses and caring for the beasts. The simple work, the drudging work, of living. And night closed in, the long night when ice would fringe the river and the trees in the forest would sigh in the toothed wind. The women spun, the children carded wool, the men carved patiently at new porringers and wiping rods and yokes for the cattle. The hearth fire eased the darkness and drove back the cold a little.
And one, it seems to me, looked up from his wood shaping and said, “We have made a clearing in the forest. Another year and we will see a larger clearing. We have made a beginning in a hostile wilderness.”
That is the way I see the picture. Beginnings are the most difficult, next only to the dream itself, which is the great beginning of all enduring things. They had the dream, and now they knew that it would endure through the Winter and live on, and on, and on.
Now it becomes clear that it isn’t the little pleasures of the country that make life worth living here. It is rather the big assurances. The little pleasures are for the casual visitor; but one must live with the wind and the weather and know the land and the seasons to find the certainties. The flash of a goldfinch or the song of an oriole can delight the senses; but the knowledge that no mat
ter how sharp or long the Winter, they will be back next Spring provides an inner surety. To see a hillside come to leaf and flower is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty; but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds that will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity. To feel the frost underfoot and know that there is both fire and ice in the earth, even as in the patterned stars overhead, is to sense the big assurances.
Man needs to know these things, and they are best learned when the silence is upon the land. No one can shout about them. They need to be whispered, that they may reach the questing soul.
I saw a mole come to the surface of the ground out in the middle pasture this afternoon. I was standing there, not ten feet away, when he appeared. He came up like a submarine surfacing, shook himself, nosed the air, went a little way in the open, not more than three to four feet, and plunged underground again. I would change the figure. It was more like a dolphin surfacing, then diving again. Whether the mole struck some underground barrier and came up to detour, or what happened, I do not know. But there he was for a moment; then there he wasn’t. It was a mild day and there was little frost in the ground, so the mole’s shovel-like forepaws could scoop out a hole in no time at all.
The mole is probably the most ravenous of all animals. It has a digestive system that assimilates food so fast that if it has nothing to eat for as little as twelve hours it will starve to death. It will consume its own weight in worms and grubs in a day. Contrary to popular belief, the mole does not eat bulbs, grass roots or anything of the kind. It is carnivorous, living almost entirely on worms and insect larva. One scientist found the remains of 150 beetle grubs in a single mole’s stomach. The damage done by a mole in a lawn is caused by exposing the grass roots to the air, an inevitable result of the mole’s search for grubs that often live among those roots. The “mole damage” done in a flower garden is nearly always done by field mice which use the mole’s burrow as a runway to reach plant roots or bulbs. Mice eat roots and bulbs. The mole merely provides them a means of access to such provender. So the mole is not the criminal; he is merely an accessory before the fact.