“Now, don’t you miss,” he said, “‘cause this stick ain’t very sharp.”
Sometimes an attacking bear will run at a man like a biting dog. More often it rises on its haunches and depends on the smashing blows of its mighty arms and steel-shod paws. So it happened in this case. Just before the bear reached the boys, he lifted his head and started to rise. The first boy, not six feet away, aimed at the white spot which most black bears have under their chin, and pulled the trigger. At that close range the heavy charge of number six shot crashed through the animal’s throat, making a single round hole like a big bullet, cutting the jugular vein, and piercing the neck vertebræ beyond. The great beast fell forward with hardly a struggle, so close to the boys that its blood splashed on their rubber boots. They got ten dollars for the skin and ten dollars for the bounty, and about one million dollars’ worth of glory.
Hasting homeward for more peaceful adventures, I find, near the road which leads to the railway station over which scores and hundreds of my friends and neighbors, including myself, pass every day, a little patch of marshland. In the fall it is covered with a thick growth of goldenrod, purple asters, joe-pye-weed, wild sunflowers, white boneset, tear-thumb, black bindweed, dodder, and a score or more of other common fall flowers.
One night, at nine o’clock, I noticed that an ice-blue star shone from almost the very zenith of the heavens. Below her were two faint stars making a tiny triangle, the left-hand one showing as a beautiful double under an opera-glass. Below was a row of other dim points of light in the black sky. It was Vega of the Lyre, the great Harp Star. Then I knew that the time had come. We humans think, arrogantly, that we are the only ones for whom the stars shine, and forget that flowers and birds, and all the wild folk are born each under its own special star.
The next morning I was up with the sun and visited that bit of unpromising marshland past which all of us had plodded year in and year out. In one corner, through the dim grass, I found flaming like deep-blue coals one of the most beautiful flowers in the world, the fringed gentian. The stalk and flower-stems looked like green candelabra, while the unopened blossoms showed sharp edges like beech-nuts. Above them glowed square fringed flowers of the richest, deepest blue that nature holds. It is bluer than the bluebird’s back, and fades the violet, the aster, the great lobelia, and all the other blue flowers that grow. The four petals were fringed, and the flower seemed like a blue eye looking out of long lashes to the paler sky above. The calyx inside was of a veined purple or a silver-white, while four gold-tipped, light purple stamens clustered around a canary-yellow pistil. That morning I wore on the train one of the two flowers which I allowed myself to pick. Every friend I met spoke of it admiringly. Some had heard of it, others had seen it for themselves in places far distant. None of them knew that every day until frost they would pass unheedingly within ten feet of nearly thirty of these flowers.
Sometimes the adventure, unlike good children, is to be heard, not seen. It was the end of a hot August day. I had been down for a late dip in the lake, and was coming back through the woods to the old farmhouse where I have spent so many of my summers. The path wound through a grove of slim birches, and the lights in the afterglow were all green and gold and white. From the nearby road a field sparrow, with a pink beak, sang his silver flute song; and I stopped to listen, and thought to myself, if he were only as rare as the nightingale, how people would crowd to hear him.
Suddenly from the depths of the twilight woods a thrush song began. At first I thought the singer was the wood thrush, which, besides the veery or Wilson thrush, was the only one that I had supposed could be found in that Connecticut township. The song, however, had a more ethereal quality, and I listened in vain for the drop to the harsh bass notes which always blemish the strain of the wood thrush. Instead, after three arpeggio notes, the singer’s voice went up and up, with a sweep that no human voice or instrument could compass, and I suddenly realized that I was in the presence of one of the great singers of the world. For years I had read of the song of the hermit thrush, but in all my wanderings I had never chanced to hear it before.
Lafcadio Hearn writes of a Japanese bird whose song has the power to change a man’s whole life. So it was with me that midsummer evening. Some thing had been added to the joy of living that could never be taken from me. Since that twilight I have heard the hermit thrush sing many times. Through the rain in the dawn-dusk on the top of Mount Pocono, he sang for me once, while all around a choir of veerys accompanied him with their strange minor harp-chords. One Sunday morning, at the edge of a little Canadian river, I heard five singing together on the farther side. “Ah-h-h, holy, holy, holy,” their voices chimed across the still water. In the woods, in migration, I have heard their whisper-song, which the hermit sings only when traveling; and once on a May morning, in my back yard, near Philadelphia, one sang for me from the low limb of a bush as loudly as if he were in his mountain home.
No thrush song, however, will ever equal that first one which I heard among the birch trees. Creeping softly along the path that evening, I finally saw the little singer on a branch against the darkening sky. Again and again he sang, until at last I noticed that, when the highest notes were reached and the song ceased to my ears, the singer sang on still. Quivering in an ecstasy, with open beak and half-fluttering wings, the thrush sang a strain that went beyond my range. Like the love-song of the bat, perhaps the best part of the song of the hermit thrush can never be heard by any human ear.
It was the morning of June twentieth. I stood at the gate of the farm-house where three roads met, and the air was full of bird-songs. For a long time I stood there, and tried to note how many different songs I could hear. Nearby were the alto joy-notes of the Baltimore oriole. Up from the meadow where the trout brook flowed, came the bubbling, gurgling notes of the bobolink. Robins, wood thrushes, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, blue-birds, vireos, goldfinches, chebecs, indigo birds, flickers, phoebes, scarlet tanagers, red-winged blackbirds, catbirds, house wrens – altogether, without moving from my place, I counted twenty-three different bird-songs and bird-notes.
Nearby I saw a robin’s nest, curiously enough built directly on the ground on the side of the bank of one of the roads, and lined with white wool, evidently picked up in the neighboring sheep-pasture. This started me on another of the games of solitaire which I like to play out-of-doors, and I tried to see how many nests I could discover from the same vantage-point without moving. This is really a good way to find birds’ nests, and the one who stands still and watches the birds will often find more than he who beats about. For a long time the robin’s nest was the only one on my list. At last the flashing orange and black of a Baltimore oriole betrayed its gray swinging pouch of a nest in a nearby spruce tree – the only time that I have ever seen an oriole’s nest in an evergreen tree. In a lilac bush I saw the deep nest of the catbird, with its four vivid blue eggs and the inevitable grapevine-bark lining around its edge.
In a high fork in a great maple tree at the corner of the road, the chebec, or least flycatcher, showed me her home. Sooner or later, if you watch any of the flycatchers long enough, they will generally show you their nests. This one was high up in a fork, and made of string and wool and down. Over in the adjoining orchard I saw a kingbird light on her nest in the very top of an apple tree; and I have no doubt that, if I had climbed up to it, I would have seen three beautiful cream-white eggs blotched with chocolate-brown.
The last nest of all was my treasure nest of the summer. I was about to give up the game and start off for a walk, when suddenly, right ahead of me, hanging on the limb of a sugar-maple, not five feet above the stone wall, I saw the swinging basket-nest of a vireo, with the woven white strips of birch-bark on the outside which all vireos use in that part of the country. It was as if a veil had suddenly dropped from my eyes, for I had been looking in that direction constantly, without seeing the nest directly in front of me. Probably, at last, I must have slightly turned my head and finally caught the light in a different direction. I supposed that the nest was that of the red-eyed vireo, the only one of the five vireos which would be likely to build