Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals. William Davenport Hulbert

Some thirty years ago, while out on one of his landlooking trips in the woods of Northern Michigan, my father came upon a little lake which seemed to him the loveliest that he had ever seen, though he had visited many in the course of his explorations. The wild ponds are very apt to be shallow and muddy, with low, marshy shores; but this one was deep and clear, and its high banks were clothed with a splendid growth of beech, maple and birch. Tall elms stood guard along the water's edge, and here and there the hardwood forest was broken by dark hemlock groves, and groups of lordly pine-trees, lifting their great green heads high above their deciduous neighbors. Only in one place, around the extreme eastern end, the ground was flat and wet; and there the tamarack swamp showed golden yellow in October, and light, delicate green in late spring. Wild morning-glories grew on the grassy point that put out from the northern shore, and in the bays the white water-lilies were blossoming. Nearly two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, it lay basking and shimmering in the sunshine, a big, broad, beautiful sheet of water set down in the very heart of the woods.

There were no settlers anywhere near, nor even any Indians, yet there was no lack of inhabitants. Bears and wolves and a host of smaller animals were to be found, and along the shores were runways that had been worn deep in the soil by the tread of generation after generation of dainty little cloven hoofs. I suppose that some of those paths have been used by the deer for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years.

The lands around the entire lake were offered for sale by the United States Government at the ridiculously low price which Uncle Sam has asked for most of his possessions; and with the help of some friends my father bought the whole shore. During the years which followed he was occupied in various ways, and some of the best recollections of my boyhood are of the days and the nights which I spent with him on his fishing-tug, steaming about the Straits of Mackinac and the northern part of Lake Huron. But he could not forget the Glimmerglass, that little wild lake up in the woods. He had fallen in love with it at first sight, and at last he took his family and went there to live.

Human neighbors were scarce around the lake, and perhaps that was one reason why we took such a lively interest in the other residents—those who were there ahead of us. "Him and me's chums," my small sister said of the red-squirrel that hung around the log-barn. And some of the animals seemed to take a very lively interest in us. The chipmunks came into the house occasionally, on foraging expeditions; and so, I regret to say, did the skunks. There was a woodchuck who used to come to the back door, looking for scraps, and who learned to sit bolt upright and hold a pancake in his fore paws while he nibbled at it, without being in the least disturbed by the presence and the comments of half a dozen spectators. The porcupines became a never-ending nuisance, for they made almost nightly visits to the woodshed. To kill them was of little use, for the next night—or perhaps before morning—there were others to take their places. Once in a while one of them would climb up onto the roof of the house; and between his teeth and his feet and the rattling of his quills on the shingles, the racket that he made was out of all proportion to his size.

It is sweet to lie at evening in your little trundle-bed,

And to listen to a porky gnawing shingles overhead;

Porky, porky, porky, porky;

Gnawing shingles overhead.

The wolves had been pretty nearly exterminated since my father's first visit to the lake, and we saw little or nothing of them. The bears seemed to be more numerous, but they were very shy and retiring. We found their tracks more often than we came upon the animals themselves. Some of the cat tribe remained, and occasionally placed themselves in evidence. My brother came in one day from a long tramp on snow-shoes, and told how he had met one of them standing guard over the remains of a deer, and how the lynx had held him up and made him go around. Beavers were getting scarce, though a few were still left on the more secluded streams. Deer, on the contrary, were very plentiful. Many a time they invaded our garden-patch and helped themselves to our fresh vegetables.

One August afternoon a flock of eight young partridges, of that spring's hatching, coolly marched out of the woods and into the clearing, as if they were bent on investigating their new neighbors. Partridges appear to be subject to occasional fits of stupidity, and to temporary (or possibly permanent) loss of common-sense; but it may be that in this case the birds were too young and inexperienced to realize what they were doing. Or perhaps they knew that it was Sunday, and that the rules of the household forbade shooting on that day. If so, their confidence was sadly misplaced. We didn't shoot them, but we did surround them, and by working carefully and cautiously we "shooed" them into an empty log-house. And the next day we had them for dinner.

Around the shores of the Glimmerglass a few loons and wild-ducks usually nested, and in the autumn the large flocks from the Far North often stopped there for short visits, on their way south for the winter. They were more sociable than you would suppose—or at least the loons were—and the same small girl who had made friends with the red-squirrel learned to talk to the big birds.

Down in the water the herring and a large species of salmon trout made their homes, and probably enjoyed themselves till they met with the gill-net and the trolling-hook. But herring and salmon trout did not satisfy us; we wanted brook trout, too. And so one day a shipment of babies arrived from the hatchery at Sault Ste. Marie, and thus we first became acquainted with the habits of infant fishes, and learned something of their needs and the methods of their foster-parents.

One after another our neighbors introduced themselves, each in his own way. And they were good neighbors, all of them. Even the porcupines and the skunks were interesting—in their peculiar fashion—and I wish there were none worse than they in the city's slums.

I have said good-by to the Glimmerglass, and it may be that I shall never again make my home by its shores. But the life of the woods goes on, and will still go on as long as man will let it. I suppose that, even as I write, the bears are "holeing up" for the winter, and the deer are growing anxious because the snow is covering the best of their food, and they of the cat tribe are getting down to business, and hunting in deadly earnest. The loons and the ducks have pulled out for the Gulf

Скачать книгу