Читать книгу Now I Remember: Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist - Thornton Waldo Burgess - Страница 6

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It was my very good fortune to be born minus the proverbial silver spoon and to spend my formative years in a lovely small village before the era of too much and too fast. For this I have long been thankful. In those days a penny was regarded with respect, to the unskilled a dime represented a full hour of honest work, and a quarter of a dollar was, to me, a small fortune.

My father died when I was nine months old. Mother and I spent the first few years in the home where she had lived from the time when she was left an orphan at four years of age until she married. An aunt and uncle had taken her in as a daughter, and they were, and in my memory still are, “Grandfather and Grandmother.” He was Charles C. P. Waterman. He had come to Sandwich as clerk of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company soon after the factory was started by Deming Jarvis.

As a small, sharp point makes a deeper impression in a soft substance than does a larger, blunt point, so it is that the little things in early life, the unimportant and trivial, often are so impressed in memory that they remain as clear and fresh as yesterday, while events of importance and significance are completely forgotten, or become so blurred by time as to lose all detail.

It is so with my recollections of those very early years. I can still see Grandfather as early one summer morning he led me out to the old russet apple tree back of the house. There from a horizontal limb hung a new swing. And such a swing! What hours of pleasure that swing afforded a small boy and his playmates. It was the best swing in all the neighborhood.

It was Grandfather who tied one end of a string to my first loose tooth, the other end to a doorknob, then suddenly slammed the door shut.

I can see him now sitting at his old desk in the small room opening off the kitchen. It was his den, or perhaps, more properly speaking, his office. In those days dens were solely for the use of wild animals. The scent and feel of spring were in the air as he sat sorting seeds in preparation for planting, at the same time explaining to his small watcher as simply as he could Nature’s alchemy whereby those tiny yellow and brown and white and black seeds would be magically transformed into rich red tomatoes, scarlet radishes, big-headed cabbages, yellow jack-o’-lanterns and lovely flowers.

Many, many years later I wrote for a magazine some stories of the “Fairies of Life” sleeping in all the tiny seeds, and how in the warm earth they would be awakened by sweet Mistress Spring to come forth in the sunlight and grow to enrich the earth and feed the hungry. As I wrote I could see Grandfather with his seeds, and the small boy standing by.

The kitchen stove was wood-burning. Although there was a housemaid, Grandfather was always up first to start the fire and in winter to “bring the pump,” as priming it was called, declaring these things were not woman’s work. At night he always “let the pump off.” I suspect that in these effete days of running water and automatic heat few know what “letting the pump off” means. It is tripping or lifting the valve so that water no longer is held in the pump where it would be subject to freezing.

On a wall of the closed-in woodshed opening off the kitchen, hung one above another, were sticks of smoked herring, preferably those smoked by the Mashpee Indians. Each stick held a dozen fish, the stick thrust through the gills. Grandfather would lift the back covers of the stove, lay the fish on top of the oven, and replace the covers. With the draft of the stove open, most of the smell went up the chimney. When the skin had burned off and tails and heads had become charred, the fish were ready to take out, scrape and serve. A Mashpee smoked herring, especially one plump with roe, and good bread and butter—what a breakfast!

Alas, the smoking of herring as in those days is now more or less a lost art. From time to time I hopefully experiment with smoked herring from the market (I am warned to shut the kitchen door when I cook them), but they never taste the same. They do not even smell the same.

The herring has long shared with the codfish the honor, if such it be, of being called “Cape Cod turkey.” The Cape herring is really an alewife. Its importance in the Cape’s economy in the early days may be judged by one of the early statutes of the town of Sandwich. At that time the town included what is now the town of Bourne. In that part is a small stream known as Herring River. Up this the herring run in great numbers every spring to reach fresh-water ponds for spawning. The right to take the fish for bait for deep-sea fishing was auctioned off each year. The taking of the fish was limited to certain days in the week. On other days no fishing was allowed in order that a sufficient number of fish should reach the spawning beds. It was also provided that each head of a family in the town was entitled to at least a barrel of herring which he could claim from the holder of the fishing rights. Furthermore, it was provided that the Mashpee Indians were given special rights in taking the fish from the waters in their reservation adjoining the town.

In those days the householder rights never were exercised to my knowledge. Herring had long ceased to be sufficiently important as food. They were bought by the stick instead of being claimed by the barrel.

While the herring declined in gastronomic favor the lobster steadily climbed, and how! I still can hear Captain Hoxie’s fish horn and see his covered wagon come down the elm-shaded street, a red boiled lobster nailed on the wagon top just above the driver’s seat. The good captain had never heard of selling lobsters by the pound, nor had anyone else. What price? Ten cents each for the smaller ones and up to thirty cents each for the bigger ones. It is a nostalgic memory.

In those days tuna were “horse mackerel,” the curse of the fish traps because of their great size and destructiveness, good only for fertilizer. No one ever heard of tuna. Even the fish horns are now but a memory, for the market no longer comes to our doors; we go to the market. Some years ago I had need of a fish horn for use on a radio program. It was a long time before by mere chance I found one.

The division of the town of Sandwich occurred when I was a small boy. This event of vital importance to the towns of Sandwich and Bourne left no impression whatever on my memory. I do not even recall hearing the all-important subject discussed by my elders. But I do remember vividly a very minor incident stemming from that division of the town.

Cranberry growing had become a rapidly increasing industry in both towns, and Jerry Muskrat and his cohorts had become a growing menace to the industry. The dikes built for flooding the bogs when the crops were threatened by early frost were much to the liking of Jerry and his family. They tunneled their homes in them. This weakened the dikes so that now and then one failed to hold back the water. In both towns the matter was discussed in town meetings, the two meetings occurring on the same day. Sandwich voted to place a bounty of twenty-five cents each on all muskrat tails presented to the town clerk. This in no way injured the skins, so the trappers could still get the market price for their pelts. At the town meeting in Bourne it was voted to offer a like bounty on the nose of each muskrat. Now Cape Cod is a part of Yankeeland and I have never heard that its sons are lacking in Yankee acumen and thrift. The astute boy trappers of the two towns got together secretly and exchanged tails for noses. Double bounty in addition to the price of the fur made trapping really profitable.

I suppose it was inevitable that there should be a leak. The town fathers in both towns learned what was going on, but they failed to get together. At the next town meeting Sandwich voted to offer the bounty on the noses and Bourne voted to put it on the tails. We boys were still in the money.

This reminds me of another incident, for the truth of which I cannot vouch, but which I had no reason to doubt when it came to me by boyhood grapevine. The town house in Sandwich was, and still is, beside the beginning of a stream which is the outlet of a pretty body of water called Shawme Lake. In my day it was the Mill Pond. A sharp-eyed laddie discovered that the windows of the town clerk’s office opened above this stream and the town clerk, having paid the bounty on the tails, got rid of them by tossing them out of the window. Presumably he thought they would be carried away by the running water. However, he couldn’t, or didn’t, toss them far enough. They fell just short of the water. So they were discreetly salvaged and subsequently once more redeemed by the unsuspecting, co-operative town clerk. I have always felt that boyhood has certain very real and sometimes very peculiar advantages in a small country town.

So in the small mind of the child things of no consequence are impressed and permanently retained. Or is it that down the long vista of the years I am looking through the wrong end of the telescope and what now seems to be trivial was, through childish eyes, of vast and supreme importance and so registered deeply? I remember as it were yesterday my first robin’s nest, a small boy climbing a Sweet William apple tree, taking out a blue egg from a nest to show a beloved aunt standing below and—dropping the egg. It was in a hole in the trunk of a neighboring tree that I first found a nest of the tree swallow. I can see it now as I saw it then, and the small white eggs that I counted by feeling. There were four. Since then I have found many nests of this bird, but I remember none.

It was that same aunt of the robin’s egg tragedy who gave me the first real storybook I can remember. It was Aim, Fire, Bang Stories, really my introduction to the four-footed and feathered folk of the Green Forest. They were true stories and I loved them for that. Fairy tales had little appeal to me. When a new story was read to me I invariably asked if it was a true story. When I learned that my aunt was personally acquainted with the author of that book I looked on her with awe little short of reverence.

In those days there were no pernicious “comics,” so-called. There was the famous Saint Nicholas magazine for which many years later I was to write a series of stories to run through a full year and later to appear between covers as Tommy and the Wishing Stone. There was a competing magazine called the Wide Awake, and there was the Youth’s Companion of blessed memory. Long since all three stopped their presses and closed their doors, to childhood’s irreparable loss.

Yearly in October one issue of the Companion was devoted to a list of premiums offered for new subscriptions. It came in a reddish cover. The hours I pored over that wonderful list! Usually I secured one or two subscribers, therewith gaining a Christmas gift for Mother—a silver soup ladle, a pretty bit of tableware.

But one year I got something for myself, a long-wanted bow gun. It was before the days of the destructive air rifle. The propelling force was provided by stout rubber bands. It was the slingshot adapted to the crossbow wooden gun. Proudly I sallied forth to hunt. I shot a chickadee. Poor little Tommy Tit! I still see him held out in a grimy hand for Mother to look at, the mighty hunter flushed with pride at this proof of his marksmanship, while tears slowly welled from his eyes because Tommy’s bright little eyes were dimmed forever, his cheery voice still, and his busy little wings quiet. How typical of daily life that incident was.

I think even then I loved the chickadee and that is why tears washed away pride. Today I love this little bird above all others. Through the years I have sought to expiate that tragic shot of long ago by striving to teach children to love and protect our feathered friends and those in fur. The living thing is a source of constant pleasure and interest. Both end with the death of the subject.

It took me a long time to learn this. As I grew older I loved to hunt. I devoured hunting and fishing stories. I was afield in woods or on the marshes at every opportunity, usually alone. Studying the wild things and their ways that I might better outwit and kill them, I was with complete unawareness laying the foundations for my lifework, which began happily when I put away the gun for camera and typewriter.

As it were but yesterday I remember the catching of my first big fish. It really wasn’t very big except in the eyes of a small boy. It was a pickerel, a monster of perhaps two pounds. I was with a cousin a year and a half my senior and my looked-up-to and trusted guide in all such matters as concern small boys. The water of the Mill Pond was smooth and clear. In plain sight a little way out lay the big pickerel. In vain Billy dangled a worm-baited hook at the very nose of the big fish. Either it was completely ignored or the fish scornfully backed away just a little, a teasing, tantalizing, provoking little.

Then I discovered a small pickerel, perhaps five inches long, close to the wharf. This one snapped at my offering and was well hooked. I was for securing my prize and rebaiting, but Billy, after making sure that the hook was well set, suggested that I drop the fish back in the water and watch it swim around. So I tossed the little pickerel out and it landed right in front of the big one. Wham! Splash! The monster was a cannibal! Instead of one fish I now had two on the hook! The alder stick which was my rod was almost jerked from my hands. That fish was twice as big in my gloating eyes as it was in actual weight.

Another memory is of standing in front of Grandfather’s house and watching the famous one-man express passing through the village on the way from the lower Cape to Boston. In memory I can still see the lone, dusty figure marching in the middle of the elm-shaded street, disdainful of sidewalks, a placard GOULD’S EXPRESS across his chest.

He was Barney Gould, now almost a legendary character, who for an absurdly small sum would carry a message or small package to any destination between the Cape and Boston. He is reputed to have once bet a sea captain about to sail around the Horn to California that he, Barney, would get there across country first, and did, being on hand at the dock in San Francisco to greet the captain when he sailed through the Golden Gate. Be this true or not, I find some pleasure and satisfaction in having seen “Gould’s Express,” and knowing that this famous character really lived.