The Fall of the Year

CHAPTER XII

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL

YOU ought to hear the scream of the hen-hawks circling high in the air. In August and September and late into October, if you listen in the open country, you will hear their piercing whistle, – shrill, exultant scream comes nearer to describing it, – as they sail and sail a mile away in the sky.

You ought to go out upon some mowing hill or field of stubble and hear the crickets, then into the apple orchard and hear the katydids, then into the high grass and bushes along the fence and hear the whole stringed chorus of green grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets. You have heard them all your life; but the trouble is that, because you have heard them so constantly in the autumn, and because one player after another has come gradually into the orchestra, you have taken them as part of the natural course of things and have never really heard them individually, to know what parts they play. Now anybody can hear a lion roar, or a mule bray, or a loon laugh his wild crazy laugh over a silent mountain lake, and know what sound it is; but who can hear a cricket out of doors, or a grasshopper, and know which is which?

Did you ever hear a loon laugh? You ought to. I would go a hundred miles to hear that weird, meaningless, melancholy, maniacal laughter of the loon, or great northern diver, as the dusk comes down over some lonely lake in the wilderness of the far North. From Maine westward to northern Illinois you may listen for him in early autumn; then, when the migration begins, anywhere south to the Gulf of Mexico. You may never hear the call of the bull moose in the northern woods, nor the howl of a coyote on the western prairies, nor the wild cac, cac, cac of the soaring eagles, nor the husky yap, yap, yap of the fox. But, if you do, “make a note of it,” as Captain Cuttle would say; for the tongues that utter this wild language are fast ceasing to speak to us.

One strangely sweet, strangely wild voice that you still may hear in our old apple orchards, is the whimpering, whinnying voice of the little screech owl. “When night comes,” says the bird book, “one may hear the screech owl’s tremulous, wailing whistle. It is a weird, melancholy call, welcomed only by those who love Nature’s voice, whatever be the medium through which she speaks.” Now listen this autumn for the screech owl; listen until the weird, melancholy call is welcomed by you, until the shiver that creeps up your back turns off through your hair, as you hear the low plaintive voice speaking to you out of the hollow darkness, out of the softness and the silence of night.

You ought to hear the brown leaves rustling under your feet.

And they should rustle to your tread as well. Scuff along in them where they lie in deep windrows by the side of the road; and hear them also, as the wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends them rattling over the fields.

You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the caw of the crow in the autumn woods.

Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, because everybody has heard that loud scream of the jay in the lonesome woods, and the caw, caw, caw of the sentinel crow from the top of some tall tree. The robins may not be all gone, for I heard and saw a flock of them this year in January; but they are silent now, and so many of the birds have gone, and the woods have become so empty, that the cries of the jay and the crow seem, on a gloomy day, to be the only sounds in all the hollow woods. There could hardly be an autumn for me if I did not hear these two voices speaking – the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn, like the color of its sable coat.

You ought to hear, you ought to catch, I should say, a good round scolding from the red squirrel this fall. A red squirrel is always ready to scold you (and doubtless you are always in need of his scolding), but he is never so breathless and emphatic as in the fall. “Whose nuts are these in the woods?” he asks, as you come up with your stick and bag. “Who found this tree first? Come, get out of here! Get right back to the city and eat peanuts! Come, do you hear? Get out of this!”

No, don’t be afraid; he won’t “eat you alive” – though I think he might if he were big enough. He won’t blow up, either, and burst! He is the kind of fire-cracker that you call a “sizzler” – all sputter and no explosion. But isn’t he a tempest! Isn’t he a whirlwind! Isn’t he a red-coated cyclone! Let him blow! The little scamp, he steals birds’ eggs in the summer, they say; but there are none now for him to steal, and the woods are very empty. We need a dash of him on these autumn days, as we need a dash of spice in our food.

In the far western mountains he has a cousin called the Douglas squirrel; and Mr. John Muir calls him “the brightest of all the squirrels I have ever seen, a hot spark of life, making every tree tingle with his prickly toes, a condensed nugget of fresh mountain vigor and valor, as free from disease as a sunbeam. How he scolds, and what faces he makes, all eyes, teeth, and whiskers!”

You must hear him this fall and take your scolding, whether you deserve it or not.

You ought to hear in the cedars, pines, or spruces the small thin cheep, cheep, cheep of the chickadees or the kinglets. You must take a quiet day on the very edge of winter and, in some sunny dip or glade, hear them as they feed and flit about you. They speak in a language different from that of the crow and the jay. This tiny talk of the kinglet is all friendly and cheerful and personal and confidential, as if you were one of the party and liked spiders’ eggs and sunshine and didn’t care a snap for the coming winter! In all the vast gray out of doors what bits of winged bravery, what crumbs of feathered courage, they seem! One is hardly ready for the winter until he has heard them in the cedars and has been assured that they will stay, no matter how it snows and blows.

You ought to hear, some quiet day or moonlit night in October or November, the baying of the hounds as they course the swamps and meadows on the heels of the fox. Strange advice, you say? No, not strange. It is a wild, fierce cry that your fathers heard, and their fathers, and theirs – away on back to the cave days, when life was hardly anything but the hunt, and the dogs were the only tame animal, and the most useful possession, man had. Their deep bass voices have echoed through all the wild forests of our past, and stir within us nowadays wild memories that are good for us again to feel. Stand still, as the baying pack comes bringing the quarry through the forest toward you. The blood will leap in your veins, as the ringing cries lift and fall in the chorus that echoes back from every hollow and hill around; and you will on with the panting pack – will on in the fierce, wild exultation of the chase; for instinctively we are hunters, just as all our ancestors were.

No, don’t be afraid. You won’t catch the fox.

You ought to hear by day – or better, by night – the call of the migrating birds as they pass over, through the sky, on their way to the South. East or west, on the Atlantic or on the Pacific shore, or in the vast valley of the Mississippi, you may hear at night, so high in air that you cannot see the birds, these voices of the passing migrants. Chink, chink, chink! will drop the calls of the bobolinks – fine, metallic, starry notes; honk, honk, honk! the clarion cry of the wild geese will ring along the aërial way, as they shout to one another and to you, listening far below them on the steadfast earth.

Far away, yonder in the starry vault, far beyond the reach of human eyes, a multitude of feathered folk, myriads of them, are streaming over; armies of them winging down the long highway of the sky from the frozen North, down to the rice fields of the Carolinas, down to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon, down beyond the cold, cruel reach of winter.

Listen as they hail you from the sky.

CHAPTER XIII

HONK, HONK, HONK!

H ONK , honk, honk! Out of the silence of the November night, down through the depths of the darkened sky, rang the thrilling call of the passing geese.

Honk, honk, honk! I was out of bed in an instant; but before I had touched the floor, there was a patter of feet in the boys’ room, the creak of windows going up, and – silence.

Honk, honk, honk! A mighty flock was coming. The stars shone clear in the far blue; the trees stood dark on the rim of the North; and somewhere between the trees and the stars, somewhere along a pathway running north and south, close up against the distant sky, the wild geese were winging.

Honk, honk, honk! They were overhead. Clear as bugles, round and mellow as falling flute notes, ordered as the tramp of soldiers, fell the honk, honk, honk, as the flock in single line, or double like the letter V, swept over and was gone.

We had not seen them. Out of a sound sleep they had summoned us, out of beds with four wooden legs and no wings; and we had heard the wild sky-call, had heard and followed through our open windows, through the dark of the night, up into the blue vault under the light of the stars.

Round and dim swung the earth below us, hushed and asleep in the soft arms of the night. Hill and valley lay close together, farm-land and wood-land, all wrapped in the coverlet of the dark. City and town, like watch fires along the edge of a sleeping camp, burned bright on the rivers and brighter still on the ragged line of shore and sea, for we were far away near the stars. The mountains rose up, but they could not reach us; the white lakes beckoned, but they could not call us down. For the stars were bright, the sky-coast was clear, the wind in our wings was the keen, wild wind of the North, and the call that we heard – ah! who knows the call? Yet, who does not know it – that distant haunting call to fly, fly, fly?

I found myself in my bed the next morning. I found the small boys in their beds. I found the big round sun in the sky that morning and not a star in sight! There was nothing unusual to be seen up there, nothing mysterious at all. But there was something unusual, something mysterious to be seen in the four small faces at the breakfast-table that morning – eyes all full of stars and deep with the far, dark depths of the midnight sky into which they had gazed – into which those four small boys had flown!

We had often heard the geese go over before, but never such a flock as this, never such wild waking clangor, so clear, so far away, so measured, swift, and – gone!

I love the sound of the ocean surf, the roar of a winter gale in the leafless woods, the sough of the moss-hung cypress in the dark southern swamps. But no other voice of Nature is so strangely, deeply thrilling to me as the honk, honk, honk of the passing geese.

For what other voice, heard nowadays, of beast or bird is so wild and free and far-resounding? Heard in the solemn silence of the night, the notes fall as from the stars, a faint and far-off salutation, like the call of sentinels down the picket line – “All’s well! All’s well!” Heard in the open day, when you can see the winged wedge splitting through the dull gray sky, the notes seem to cleave the dun clouds, driven down by the powerful wing-beats where the travelers are passing high and far beyond the reach of our guns.

The sight of the geese going over in the day, and the sound of their trumpetings, turn the whole world of cloud and sky into a wilderness, as wild and primeval a wilderness as that distant forest of the far Northwest where the howl of wolves is still heard by the trappers. Even that wilderness, however, is passing; and perhaps no one of us will ever hear the howl of wolves in the hollow snow-filled forests, as many of our parents have heard. But the honk of the wild geese going over we should all hear, and our children should hear; for this flock of wild creatures we have in our hands to preserve.

The wild geese breed in the low, wet marshes of the half-frozen North, where, for a thousand years to come they will not interfere with the needs of man. They pass over our northern and middle states and spend the winter in the rivers, marshes, and lagoons of the South, where, for another thousand years to come, they can do little, if any, harm to man, but rather good.

But North and South, and all along their journey back and forth, they are shot for sport and food. For the wild geese cannot make this thousand-mile flight without coming down to rest and eat; and wherever that descent is made, there is pretty sure to be a man with a gun on the watch.

Here, close to my home, are four ponds; and around the sides of each of them are “goose blinds” – screens made of cedar and pine boughs fixed into the shore, behind which the gunners lie in wait. More than that, out upon the surface of the pond are geese swimming, but tied so that they cannot escape – geese that have been raised in captivity and placed there to lure the flying wild flocks down. Others, known as “flyers,” are kept within the blind to be let loose when a big flock is seen approaching – to fly out and mingle with them and decoy them to the pond. These “flyers” are usually young birds and, when thrown out upon their wings, naturally come back, bringing the wild flock with them, to their fellows fastened in the pond.

A weary flock comes winging over, hungry, and looking for a place to rest. Instantly the captive geese out on the pond see them and set up a loud honking. The flying flock hear them and begin to descend. Then they see one (tossed from the blind) coming on to meet them, and they circle lower to the pond, only to fall before a fury of shots that pour from behind the blind.

Those of the flock that are not killed rise frightened and bewildered to fly to the opposite shore, where other guns riddle them, the whole flock sometimes perishing within the ring of fire!

Such shooting is a crime because it is unfair, giving the creature no chance to exercise his native wit and caution. The fun of hunting, as of any sport, is in playing the game – the danger, the exercise, the pitting of limb against limb, wit against wit, patience against patience; not in a heap of carcasses, the dead and bloody weight of mere meat!

If the hunter would only play fair with the wild goose, shoot him (the wild Canada goose) only along the North Carolina coast, where he passes the winter, then there would be no danger of the noble bird’s becoming extinct. And the hunter then would know what real sport is, and what a long-headed, far-sighted goose the wild goose really is – for there are few birds with his cunning and alertness.

Along the Carolina shore the geese congregate in vast numbers; and when the day is calm, they ride out into the ocean after feeding, so far off shore that no hunter could approach them. At night they come in for shelter across the bars, sailing into the safety of the inlets and bays for a place to sleep. If the wind rises, and a storm blows up, then they must remain in the pools and water-holes, where the hunter has a chance to take them. Only here, where the odds, never even, are not all against the birds, should the wild geese be hunted.

With the coming of March there is a new note in the clamor of the flocks, a new restlessness in their movements; and, before the month is gone, many mated pairs of the birds have flocked together and are off on their far northern journey to the icy lakes of Newfoundland and the wild, bleak marshes of Labrador.