When winter winds blow cold and chill And through the hawthorn howls the gale
The winter winds were truly cold and chill on this twenty-first of January here in Massachusetts. And I chance to know they were chill down along the Delaware this particular January day. I remember many a January day like this on the wide marshes of the Delaware and in the big woods along the Maurice River where I was a boy. But I was not thinking of those days at all here in my New England home, for I was busy at my desk.
Some one was at my study door. More than one, for I heard low talking. Then the door softly opened, and four bebundled boys stood before me—with an axe, a long-handled shovel, a covered basket, and a very big secret, which stuck out all over their faces.
They were not big boys outside. But they were almost bursting inside with their big[156] secret. They were big with boots and coats and caps and mittens; and they looked almost like monsters in my study door with their axe and shovel and big basket.
“Come on, father,” they whispered (as if She hadn’t heard them tramping through the hall and upstairs with their kit!), “come on! It’s mother’s birthday to-morrow, and we’re going after the flowers.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “Are you going to chop the flowers down with an axe, and dig them up with a shovel?” And I tried to think what a chopped-down and dug-up birthday bouquet would look like. But it was too much for me.
“You are going to give her a nice bunch of frost flowers,” I said, feeling about in my puzzled mind for just what was afoot. “If you are going to give her frost flowers, you had better get the ice-saw, too, for we shall need a big block of ice to stick their stems in.”
Not a word of comment! No sign on the four faces that they had even heard my gentle banter. They knew what they were going to do; and all they wanted of me was to come along.
“Hurry up,” they answered, dropping my[157] hip-boots on the floor. “Here are your scuffs.”
I hurried up! Scuffs and boots and cap and reefer on in a jiffy, and the five of us were soon in single file upon the meadow, the dry snow squealing under our feet, while the little imp-winds, capering fitfully about us, blew the snowdust into our faces, or catching up the thin drifts, sent them whirling and waltzing, like ghostly dancers, over the meadow’s level glittering floor.
I was beginning to warm up a little; but I was still guessing about the flowers, and not yet in the spirit of the game.
We were having a hard winter, and the novelty of zero weather was beginning to wear off—at least to me. The fact was I had intended to get the birthday flowers down at the greenhouse in the village. January is an awkward time to have a birthday, anyhow. June is a much more reasonable month for birthdays, if you gather wild flowers for the celebration. The fields are full of flowers in June! But here in January you must go with an axe and a shovel, mittens, rubber-boots, and reefers! And I confess I couldn’t make head or tail of this festive trip.
[158]It is a lucky man who has boys, or who knows and “trains,” as our New Englanders say, with boys. They won’t let him freeze up.
“Come, father,” they say, “get into your scuffs and boots, and hit the old trail for the woods!” And father drops his pen; bundles up; “clomps” out in his boots, grumbling at the weather and the boys and the birthdays and the stiffness in his knees and in his soul—for a whole hundred yards or more into the meadow! Then he begins to warm up. Then he takes the axe from one of the boys and looks at its edge, and “hefts” it; and looks about for a big birthday flower, about the size of a hundred-year-old oak, to chop down. Something queer is happening to father. He is forgetting his knees; he is capering about on the snow; he is getting ahead of the boys; he hardly realizes it, but he is beginning to feel like a birthday inside of him; and he will soon be in danger of getting this January day mixed up with the days of June!
But not right off. I was warming up, I do confess, yet it was a numb, stiff world about us, and bleak and stark. It was a world that[159] looked all black and white, for there was not a patch of blue overhead. The white underfoot ran off to meet the black of the woods, and the woods in turn stood dark against a sky so heavy with snow as to shut us apparently into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black pencil-line across the picture—the one sign of life that we could see besides ourselves. Only small boys are likely to leave their firesides on such a day; only small boys and those men who can’t grow up. Yet never before, perhaps, had boys or men ever gone afield on such a tramp with an axe, a shovel, and a basket.
Suddenly one of the boys dashed off calling, “Let’s go see if the muskrats have gone to bed yet!” And trailing after him away we went, straight across the meadow. I knew what he was after; I could see the little mound, hardly more than an anthill in size, standing up in the meadow where the alder bushes and elderberry marked the bend in the brook. If my farmer neighbor had forgotten a small haycock, when he cut his rowen, it would have looked about as this muskrat lodge here buried under the snow. I was glad the boys had seen it. For only a[160] practiced eye could have discovered it; and only a lover of bleak gray days would have known what might be alive deep down under its thatch of cat-tails and calamus here in the silent winter.
But is there any day in the whole year out of doors that real live boys and real live girls do not love? or any wild thing that they do not love—flower or bird or beast or star or storm?
We crept up softly, and surrounded the lodge; then with the axe we struck the frozen, flinty roof several ringing blows. Instantly one—two—three muffled splashy “plunks” were heard, as three little muskrats, frightened out of their naps and half out of their wits, plunged into the open water of their doorways from off their damp but cozy couch.
It was a mean thing to do, but not very mean as wild animal life goes. And it did warm me up so, in spite of the chilly plunge the little sleepers took! Chilly to them? Not at all, and that is why it warmed me. To hear the splash of water down under the two feet of ice and snow that sealed the meadow like a sheet of steel! To hear the sound of stirring life, and to picture that snug, steaming bed on the top of a tough old[161] tussock, with its open water-doors leading into freedom and plenty below! “Why, it won’t be long before the arbutus is in bloom,” I began to think. I looked at the axe and shovel, and said to myself, “Well, the boys may know what they are doing, after all, though three muskrats don’t make a spring or a bouquet.”
But they did make me warmer inside and outside, too. Warm up your heart and you soon feel warmer in your fingers and toes.
We turned back from the muskrats’ lodge and headed again for the woods, where the flowers must be. Hardly had we reached the cart-path before another of the boys was off—this time to the left, going rapidly toward a low piece of maple swamp perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
“He’s going over to see if Hairy Woodpecker is in his hole,” said the boys in answer to my question. “Hairy has a winter hole over there in a big dead maple. Want to see him?”
Of course I wanted to see him. The only live thing outside of ourselves that we had seen (we had only heard the muskrats) had been a crow. Live birds on such days as these one would go far to see. So we all cut across toward the swamp[162] where the hairy woodpecker reigned solitary in his bleak domain.
The “hole” was almost twenty-five feet up in a dead maple stub that had blown off and lodged against a live tree. The meadow had been bleak and wind-swept, but the swamp was naked and dead, filled with ice, and touched with a most forbidding emptiness and stillness. I was getting cold again, when the boy ahead tapped lightly on the old stub. At the hole upstairs appeared a head—a fierce black-and-white head, a sharp, long bill, a flashing eye—as Hairy came forth to fight for his castle. He was too wise a fighter to tackle all of us, however; so, slipping out, he spread his wings, and galloped off with a loud wild call that set all the swamp to ringing.
It was a thrilling, defiant challenge that set my blood to leaping again. Black and white, he was a part of the picture; but there was a scarlet band in the nape of his neck that, like his call, had fire in it and the warmth of life.
As his shout went booming through the hollow walls of the swamp, it woke a blue jay, which squalled back from a clump of pines, then,[163] wavering out into the open on curious wings—flashing ice-blue and snow-white wings—he dived into the covert of pines again; and faint, as if beyond the swamp, the cheep of chickadees!
If anything was needed up to this moment to change my winter into spring, it was this call of the chickadees. The dullest day in winter smiles; the deepest, darkest woods speak cheerfully to me, if a chickadee is there. And did you ever know a winter day or a dank, gloomy forest hall without its chickadee? Give me a flower in my buttonhole and a chickadee in my heart and I am proof against all gloom and cold.
“What is all this noise about?” the chickadees came forward asking. It was a little troop of them, a family of them, possibly, last year’s children and one, or both, of the parents, hunting the winter woods together for mutual protection against the loneliness and long bitter cold.
How active and interested in life they were! A hard winter? Yes, of course, but what is the blue jay squawking over, anyhow? And the little troop of them came to peep into the racket, curious, but not excited, discussing the disturbance of the solemn swamp in that sewing-bee[164] fashion of theirs, as if nipping off threads and squinting through needle-eyes between their running comments.
They too were gray and black, gray as the swamp beeches, black as the spotted bark of the birches. And how tiny! But—
“Here was this atom in full breath
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north wind in waistcoat gray”;
and this is what Emerson says he sings:
“Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places
Where January brings few faces.”
And as I brought to mind the poet’s lines, I forgot to shiver, and quite warmed again to the idea of flowers, especially as one of the boys just then brought up a spray of green holly with a burning red berry on it.
I laid the spray of green holly on the hard white crust of the January snow. Then I stood a moment and spread my hands out over it to warm them! It was like a little fire in the snow. The boys laughed at me. They were warm enough in their mittens. But I had need of more[165] than mittens to warm my fingers. I had need of a fire,—a fire of green pointed holly leaves and one glowing, flaming berry, a tiny red hot coal of summer blazing here in the wide white ashes of the winter.
We were tacking again now in order to get back on our course, and had got into the edge of the swamp among the pines when the boy with the shovel began to study the ground and the trees as if trying to find the location of something.
“Here it is,” he said, and began digging through the snow at the foot of a big pine. I knew what he was after. It was goldthread, and here was the only spot in all the woods about where we had ever found it, a spot no larger than the top of a dining-room table.
Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen leaflets and long golden, threadlike roots that, mixed with the red and green of the partridge-berry in a finger-bowl, make a cheerful winter bouquet. And here with the goldthread, about the butt of the pine, was the partridge-berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which seemed to burn holes in[166] the snow that covered and banked their tiny fires.
For this is all that the ice and snow had done. The winter had come with enough wind to blow out every flame in the maple-tops, and with enough snow to smother every little fire in the peat-bogs of the swamp; but peat fires are hard to put out; and here and everywhere the winter had only banked the fires of summer. Dig down through the snow ashes anywhere, and the smouldering coals of life burst into blaze.
When that red-beaded partridge-vine was hastily placed with the goldthread in the covered basket, and the spray of holly put with them, a ray of light began to dawn on my snow-clouded mind. Did I begin to see the bouquet these boys were after? I said nothing. They said nothing. They were watching me, though, I knew, to see how long I should stumble blindly on through these glorious January woods, which were so full of joy for them.
I say I said nothing. I was thinking hard, however. “Holly, goldthread, partridge-berry,” I thought to myself. “I see so much of the birthday bouquet. But what else can they find?”
[167]The boy with the axe had again gone on ahead. And we were off again after him, stopping to get a great armful of black alder branches that were literally aflame with red berries.
We were climbing a piny knoll when almost at our feet, jumping us nearly out of our skins, and warming the very roots of our hair, was a burrrr! burrrr! burrrr! burrrr!—four big partridges—as if four snow-mines had exploded under us, hurling bunches of brown feathers on graceful scaling wings over the dip of the hill!
This was getting livelier all the time. From my study window how dead and deserted, and windswept and bare the world had looked to me! Nothing but a live crow winging wearily against the leaden sky! But out here in the real woods and meadows—partridges, chickadees, hairy woodpecker, blue jay, and muskrats as well as crows! And then I knew a certain old apple tree where a pair of screech owls were wintering. And, as for white-footed mice, I could find them in any stump. Besides, here were rabbit holes in the snow, and up in a tall pine a gray squirrel’s nest and—
But I was losing sight of the boy with the[168] axe who was leading the procession. On we went up over the knoll and down into a low bog where in the summer we gathered high-bush blueberries, the boy with the axe leading the way and going straight across the ice toward the middle of the bog.
My eye was keen for signs, and I soon saw he was heading for a sweet-pepper bush with a broken branch. My eye took in another bush a little to the right also with a broken branch. The boy with the axe walked up to the sweet-pepper bush, and drew a line on the ice between it and a bush off on the right, pacing off this line till he found the middle; then he started at right angles from it, and paced off a line to a clump of cat-tails sticking up through the ice on the flooded bog. Halfway back on this line he stopped, threw off his coat, and began to chop a hole about two feet square in the ice. Removing the block of ice while I looked on, he rolled up his sleeve, and reached down the length of his arm through the ice water.
“Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here.” And with a few dexterous cuts he soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of[169] pitcher-plants, the strange, almost uncanny, leaves filled with muddy water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted by a master potter’s hand.
Now at last I fully understood. Now I could see what those boys had been seeing with their inward eyes all the time. Now I had faith, too. But how late! The bouquet of flowers was now full.
We wrapped the wonderful pitcher-plant carefully in newspapers, and put it into the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerfully, and as full of joy in the season, as we could possible have been in June.
No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June. January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chilblains, frozen water-pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and automobile-troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in June. It is so in Delaware and Texas and Oregon, too.
What I was saying is that we started home all abloom with our pitcher-plants and goldthread and partridge-berry and holly and glowing black alder, and all aglow inside with our vigorous[170] tramp, and with the gray grave beauty of the landscape, and with the stern joy of meeting and beating the cold, and with the signs of life—of the cozy muskrats in their lodge beneath the ice-cap on the meadow; with the hairy woodpecker in his deep warm hole in the heart of a tree; with the red warm berries in our basket; with the chirping, the capable, the conquering chickadee accompanying us and singing,
“For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin;
And polar frost my form defied,
Made of the air that blows outside.”
And actually as we came over the bleak meadow, one of the boys said that he thought he heard a song-sparrow singing! And I said I thought the pussy-willows by the brook had opened a little since we had passed them coming out! And we all declared that the weather had changed, and that there were signs of a break-up. But the thermometer stood at fifteen above zero when we got home—one degree colder than when we started!
We had had a January thaw, however, and it had come off inside of us, as the color on the four[171] glowing faces showed. The birthday came off on the morrow, and I wonder if there ever was a more interesting or a more loving gift of flowers than those from the January woods?