Читать книгу Under the Maples - John Burroughs - Страница 3

I

How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life, especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogical museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry, shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den. Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.

The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body. This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand, sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature, blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see an egg protest.

Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to eye or ear.

The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn the leaves.

A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair. And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up the opening.

II

My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that the hummer bathed at all.

I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can see only one at a time – to the right or left of you. It also is a fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints. In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position, and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at one time.

In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment. These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most workmanlike manner.

In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and, holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the period of hatching, I do not know.

III

Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day! Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!

IV

We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which, except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night prowlers – skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls – yes, and mice.

The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.

Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the small folk beneath it, – ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders, – all objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil, but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep, and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.

V

In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature, Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:

Well may we affirm that every part of the world is inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains – warm mineral springs – the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of perpetual snow – all support organic beings.

Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the mud – he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or zoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil shells."

His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge. Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.

VI

The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived, when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields, but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.

Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts for it.

VII

We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturalist studies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season I made my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first day of December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit a bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemian waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is common to both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be sure there is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved.

When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of the coming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When December is marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winter will be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that the hum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the season is very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing through November and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for a snug winter.

As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall on the Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess on the eastern. For four or five years past California has been short of its rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over the gradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs; and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York with which I am acquainted have had very wet seasons – floods in midsummer, and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have been temporary and local.

We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the meteorological laws are pretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in a wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another time the north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions over a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take no step beyond that.

VIII

There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it conveys.

Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.

The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current originates is the only logical or permissible one.

IX

Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:

The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life, and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of earthly brotherhood with them… There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.

Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land animals outside the insect world.

The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows. We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel the earthquake.

The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration. Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touch with a world of which we are quite oblivious.

X

To how many things our lives have been compared! – to a voyage, with its storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer, autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.

In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more often like a game than is life – your gain is often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that suggests a game of any kind.

We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three things – money, goods, labor – and the greatest of these is labor. Labor is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.

The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen, artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?

Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.

Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive force.

XI

I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the meadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was a deep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found it difficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to get seeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are not seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hidden beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow coming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks. Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surface of the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently in a festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees and take their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat stones, and lead once more the life of fear.

XII

Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from a slight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everyday aspects of nature before me – in the white and purple lilacs, in the maple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of the yellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting or background for the wild life near by.

The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regard me curiously in this great temple of trees, – wrens, chippies, robins, bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A few days earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appeared around the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glanced hastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone. Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa branches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler was reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for material to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren, was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-material into the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic she is! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday an interloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as it were, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to see that the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder. Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maple thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culprit did not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must not forget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at my feet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neck of the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly about his speckled breast.

A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south end of the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest is completed, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the public eye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behind the curtain.

One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush down in the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deep woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuring water and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats – such magic hath associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sang briefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistent call added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. He has not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple, with the blood of our grapes.

But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add another ray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle of that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch, like a little fairy, and then vanishing.

The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is not enough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily and seasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you. Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see them in your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone and color to your day.