The Hills of Hingham Part 14

The dogs were coming. But what was I? The fox was curious, interested, and after trying to make me out from a distance, crept gingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!

But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in the dew of the meadow and seemed to tell him little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch me. He might have out.w.a.tched me, though I kept amazingly still, but the hounds were cras.h.i.+ng through the underbrush below, and he must needs be off.

Getting carefully up, he trotted first this side of me, then that, for a better view, then down the path up which he had just come, and into the very throat of the panting clamor, when, leaping lightly aside over a pile of brush and stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly about me.

Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation to me of what may be the mind of Nature. I have never seen anything in the woods, never had a glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidence in the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wild life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms in the midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of the fox.

At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always of taking every advantage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably never will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits in the wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazing resourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yet have in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead of against, them.

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only my helping hand could have saved; but the circ.u.mstances have seldom been due to other than natural causes--very rarely man-made. On the contrary, man-made conditions out of doors--the multiplicity of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or prairie--are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths and short cuts and chances for escape--all things that help preserve life.

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along the road, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woods all night, bearing down in my direction.

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges beaded, the gra.s.s blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight, but where I could see a long stretch of the road.

On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross--and there he stood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a race burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet gra.s.s and thicket that had clogged his long course.

On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bend in the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on the road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!--back into the very jaws of the hounds!--Instead he broke into the tangle of grapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke into the road from _behind_ the ma.s.s of thick, ropy vines.

Those dogs. .h.i.t the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise and speed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, a whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on.

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyond the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail, on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.

If I had had a _gun_! Yes, but I did not. But if I _had_ had a gun, it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun that makes the difference--all the difference between much or little wild life--life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, as once the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of the Lord.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Our calendar]

XIII

OUR CALENDAR

There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with the Sundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one with the Thursdays in red,--Thursday being publication day for the periodical sending out the calendar,--and one, our own calendar, with several sorts of days in red--all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the last to be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15.

Pup's Christian name is Jersey,--because he came to us from that dear land by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar,--an explanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naming him. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling him anything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from the city New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, the cognomen done in red, this declaration:--

January 1, 1915

No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY. If anybody calls him any other name but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to clean out his coop two times a day.

This was as plain as if it had been written on the wall. Somebody at last had spoken, and not as the scribes, either.

We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on the calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our six hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck, but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that is because I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first dog! And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again.

One can hardly imagine what that means exactly. Of course, we have had other things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams, the woods and fields, books and kindling--and I have had Her and the four boys,--the family that is,--till at times, I will say, I have not felt the need of anything more. But none of these things is a dog, not even the boys. A dog is one of man's primal needs. "We want a dog!" had been a kind of family cry until Babe's last birthday.

Some six months before that birthday Babe came to me and said:--

"Father, will you guess what I want for my birthday?"

"A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," I replied.

"Skates in August!" he shouted in derision. "Try again."

"A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear and an electric self-starter and stopper."

"No. Now, Father,"--and the little face in its Dutch-cut frame sobered seriously,--"it's something with four legs."

"A duck," I suggested.

"That has only two."

"An armadillo, then."

"No."

"A donkey."

"No."

"An elephant?"

"No."

"An alligator?"

"No."

"A h-i-p hip, p-o, po, hippo, p-o-t pot, hippopot, a hippopota, m-u-s mus--hippopotamus, _that's_ what it is!"

This had always made him laugh, being the way, as I had told him, that I learned to spell when I went to school; but to-day there was something deep and solemn in his heart, and he turned away from my lightness with close-sealed lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed suspiciously open. I was half inclined to call him back and guess again. But had not every one of the four boys been making me guess at that four-legged thing since they could talk about birthdays? And were not the conditions of our living as unfit now for four-legged things as ever? Besides, they already had the cow and the pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More live stock was simply out of the question at present.

The next day Babe snuggled down beside me at the fire.

"Father," he said, "have you guessed yet?"

"Guessed what?" I asked.

"What I want for my birthday?"

"A nice little chair to sit before the fire in?"