The Hills of Hingham Part 12

Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I think, from their poetry.

For a big snoring pig is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little roast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (in this country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him! You put on your old clothes for him. He takes you out behind the barn; there shut away from the prying gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, you deliberately fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till he grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling in the sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any other flesh. You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it would not be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the hens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for the horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them to scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo your--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pig and feed _it_, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and to hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spirit demands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfies the flesh and is winked at by the soul.

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs just such companions.h.i.+p as the pig's, and just such shelter as one finds within his pen. After a day in the cla.s.sroom discoursing on the fourth dimension of things in general, I am p.r.o.ne to feel somewhat removed, at sea somewhat.

Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchor with the pig.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Leafing]

XI

LEAFING

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. But keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day in the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.

And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and zest enough to the labor.

But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hills of Hingham has its own reward,--and when you can say that of any labor you are speaking of its poetry.

We jolt across the b.u.mpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig.

You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are; you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy capers you know; for this is a Sat.u.r.day; these are the wild woods and the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays and the crows?

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my heart.

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within the range of opera-gla.s.s or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as greyhounds.

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.

Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too, hear a "fine, plaintive" sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.

We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing cl.u.s.ters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries--a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.

But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a woodchuck's--

"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuff in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and pack the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag.

Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and let us jog you home. Swis.h.!.+ bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!

Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for the stump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything that your heart does with you?--even though you do it for a pig!

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. There is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of pure pig joy.

"Boos.h.!.+ Boos.h.!.+" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down within him.

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the forest for him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of pig, _roast_ pig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to give my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not want to; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into the wide, sweet woods, my ancestral home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The little foxes]

XII

THE LITTLE FOXES

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out from the road:--

"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"

I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region, and answered:--

"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens lately."

"Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's been trapped and killed.

Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 've hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em." And he disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that spread in every direction about him. I did not see which way he went, for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing through the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump to think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did not return.

He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! I don't know how he found them. But patience and knowledge and love, and a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursed them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then, that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.

But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes were shot at my lower bars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard fence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun.

For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human nature and in all nature--to preserve a remnant, that no line perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and smaller-growing globe of ours.

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.