Birds and Nature, Vol. 12 No. 1 [June 1902]. Various
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streams and quiet vales you had;
No snare nor line nor gun
Made war against your legions glad
That wanton’d in the sun.
Hope on, and some day you shall see,
When these ill days have end,
That man the slayer – who but he? —
Is changed to man, the friend.
OLD-FASHIONED OUTINGS
PART I
The western shore of Gloucester harbor rises in a succession of wooded ridges from the sea-rocks, which redden westward to a degree fully bearing out the sketching-books in the statement that rocks are among the most highly colored of objects. – A sketch is brought home. – “Your rocks are too red.” “Too red!” exclaims the aggrieved sketcher, “they aren’t half red enough. They fairly blazed!” These rocks abound in chasms where trap-dikes have worn away; and when some trap is left, the contrast in color is very striking, but the main charm of this shore is the intimate association of woods with rocks and water. Next the rocks, as a rule, on high knolls and hedges thinly veiled with a dry, light soil stand the pitch pines, those gnarled and fragrant dwarfs with their stout prickly needles and prevailing shape of a double umbrella. Under favorable circumstances these grow quite tall. The Lone Pine, standing in a low, moist place near the mouth of a creek, attained a height of thirty or forty feet, and its characteristic, interesting shape was long a landmark on that shore. Great was the sorrow when it fell. Fortunately a portrait of it still exists.
The white pines stand back from the water on their great purple trunks, and rain their rust-red needles down among the purple bowlders of exactly the same shade, which encumber lowland and hillside, while trunks and bowlders are alike besprinkled with lichens of palest green. Some giants used to shade the new road where it passes the Red Brook; and the perfect level, deep shadow and general dampness somehow recalled the Wood at the Hague, although that is beech forest. Oaks clothe the more easterly ridges or stand alone in open pastures near the shore, but the present tendency of fields which have lain open since our infancy to grow up to woodland in the last half-dozen years is deplored if not resented.
A ruined stone wall with a hedge-row running down toward the water divides two dear familiar fields bounded by woodland on either hand, and in the row once stood alone a delightful white pine with double crown. Through these fields we pass on our way to certain parts of the shore, and we always had a view of rocky headland, white sails and dancing water, over a sloping foreground dotted with fern and yellow St. John’s wort or golden-rod and asters, according to season, while we paused to pick blue curls and Nuttall’s polygala or spiranthus and little purple gerardia. At present that stylish pine is all mixed up with dowdy maples and poplars, the water view is completely blocked, and we wedge our way with difficulty where we once stepped freely along a tiny track beaten hard in the thin sunburnt pasture grass, running diagonally to a breach in the wall flanked by barberries, and out into the big field which, dipping suddenly to the level of the beach, becomes a grassy swamp. Half way down stands a magnificent pitch pine of most luxuriant growth and very peculiar shape, quite tall, yet stretching one broad curving arm down the slope close to the ground, like a great delicious tufted green mattress. The path, bearing a little to the right, comes out on the beach, while beyond the swamp the land rises in quite a high “hog-backed” hill, of which, after a very considerable dip on the outside, enough is left to form a very bold shore.
Ah, what a view! two views, in fact, from that outpost, the inland slope of that hill eastward, up the harbor, over a bold headland clothed all but the crown in oak woods, beautiful background to a pretty cove beyond the sloping pasture; and westward past the Rock, along the wooded shore of Norman’s Woe to the cliffs at Rafe’s Chasm and the sunset. One fairy sunset there was never matched anywhere in my experience, the sky one dome of soft luminous pink, the sea another sky, the earth translucent floating between, like the firmament that divided the waters.
A little way back from that shore ran in our day over hill, dale and brook an old grass-grown road, by each brook a ruined cellar, reputed trace of Acadian dwelling. The hills are among the sharpest little pitches ever seen. Driving at our ease about New England nowadays, we are fain to exclaim: Of a truth our forefathers would seem to have climbed hills by preference (and laid stone walls for exercise). But swamps were their horror, and the poor creatures had to thread their way through mazes of them. There can be no doubt that these wet areas are much restricted now, leaving us but a faint idea of ancestral difficulties in this regard; but even up to our time grandmothers told awe-struck children fragments of half-forgotten stories of the horrors of the swamps. Ours told of an already nameless young soldier, perhaps in the Great Swamp Fight, who, sinking slowly before the eyes of his comrades, pushed his watch to them over the bog, bidding them take it back to his mother. How it was they could do nothing to help him, did not appear.
The Magnolia Swamp lies north of the ridges, and some magnolia trees grow in an arm of it more accessible than the rest. Long before you reach a tree the dead swamp air is redeemed by their fresh fragrance if any flowers are in bloom; and redeemed is well said; for the swamp-air of the dog days is rendered doubly oppressive by millions of stiff white spikes borne by the obnoxious clethra in odor “overbearin’ and upsettin’,” – as Aunt Semantha said widders were in temper. You enter over turf wherein remain divers small deep swamp-holes surrounded by crimson calopogon, yellow-eyed grass, white cotton-grass and the pretty little yellow-horned bladder root. Further in, the path becomes miry, and you have to put aside the long swaying wands of the swamp loosestrife with its whorls of magenta bloom, and catch at the shrubs to keep you out of the mud. (At this point the poison sumach officiously tenders aid), but the path to your goal, the magnolia tree, leads aside into the bush where the footing is perfectly hard and peculiarly flat; and it doesn’t exactly quake and doesn’t exactly sound hollow, yet something tells you the bog is beneath, and you are walking on a crust.
To return to the old road: it forded two brooks, the Red Brook which runs into the sea behind Norman’s Woe Rock, and the White Brook which runs out (amid much ivy) over the rocky beach by the Dry Chasm. The Red Brook must have been much bigger formerly, for it turned a saw-mill before 1700, and the ruined dam is still to be seen a little way below the ford, where it serves as a bridge. This brook is charged with coloring-matter from the swamps, so that it lines your tin cup with gold (if you chance to have “escaped from the Bastille of civilization”), and it furnishes the most unsatisfying draught ever swallowed. Not a drop ever seems to go lower than your collar-button. It makes one thirsty to think of it. But it was lovely to look at! It ran out of a great bed of cardinal, jewel-weed and raspberry-bushes (which bore monstrous berries because they stood with their feet in the water) and spread out in a big red pool at the foot of a gentle dip in the grassy road; and from the upper level you looked over the brook at a preternaturally steep little pitch beyond, where the road climbed a pine-clad hill, bowing out to the very verge of the dark descent to a ferny swamp, cradle of the brook. The dark background was faced with bright growth, and all in the light of sweet summer mornings with water sparkling in the bay and in the brook! Above, the road turned sharply, broadening into a level glade set round with barberry-bushes, door-yard of a vanished dwelling, and then turned another corner round the cellar and away. This was a cherished haunt. A little sidelong, slippery path, parallel with the brook led down a rugged slope of pine and cedar to a little bluff behind Norman’s Woe Rock.
Here we camped out before that way of life became general, except for Uncle Sam. He had just been camping out on a large scale, and so it chanced that two large round tents and sundry new rubber blankets came our way and did not go a-begging. The Red Brook filled our kettles in a shady little glen with sides so steep we had to lower and raise ourselves by the trees, and then it ran away and spread out over the sea-rocks in a series of big, shallow basins – a famous dressing-room – but the way to it was of the roughest, for the red rock scaled off, and literally cut the soles from our boots.
The summer of 1865 was very dry, and so was the brook in many places. Therefore we slept in peace in our tents; but the next year the mosquitoes fairly drove us out, and we were fain to betake ourselves and our bed-sacks