The Woods Are Full Of Colour, Belts And Blotches Of It, The
Colours Of The Savage - Red, Yellow, And Blue.
Yet in their lodges there
is very little life, for the wood-people do not readily go into the
shadows.
The squirrels have their business among the beeches and
hickories by the road-side, where they can watch the traffic and talk.
We have no gray ones hereabouts (they are good to eat and suffer for
it), but five reds live in a hickory hard by, and no weather puts them
to sleep. The wood-chuck, a marmot and a strategist, makes his burrow in
the middle of a field, where he must see you ere you see him. Now and
again a dog manages to cut him off his base, and the battle is worth
crossing fields to watch. But the woodchuck turned in long ago, and will
not be out till April. The coon lives - well, no one seems to know
particularly where Brer Coon lives, but when the Hunter's Moon is large
and full he descends into the corn-lands, and men chase him with dogs
for his fur, which makes the finest kind of overcoat, and his flesh,
which tastes like chicken. He cries at night sorrowfully as though a
child were lost.
They seem to kill, for one reason or other, everything that moves in
this land. Hawks, of course; eagles for their rarity; foxes for their
pelts; red-shouldered blackbirds and Baltimore orioles because they are
pretty, and the other small things for sport - French fashion. You can
get a rifle of a kind for twelve shillings, and if your neighbour be
fool enough to post notices forbidding 'hunting' and fishing, you
naturally seek his woods. So the country is very silent and unalive.
There are, however, bears within a few miles, as you will see from this
notice, picked up at the local tobacconist's:
JOHNNY GET YOUR GUN! BEAR HUNT!
As bears are too numerous in the town of Peltyville Corners, Vt., the
hunters of the surrounding towns are invited to participate in a grand
hunt to be held on Blue Mountains in the town of Peltyville Corners,
Vt., Wednesday, Nov. 8th, if pleasant. If not, first fine day. Come one,
come all!
They went, but it was the bear that would not participate. The notice
was printed at somebody's Electric Print Establishment. Queer mixture,
isn't it?
The bear does not run large as a rule, but he has a weakness for swine
and calves which brings punishment. Twelve hours' rail and a little
marching take you up to the moose-country; and twenty-odd miles from
here as the crow flies you come to virgin timber, where trappers live,
and where there is a Lost Pond that many have found once but can never
find again.
Men, who are of one blood with sheep, have followed their friends and
the railway along the river valleys where the towns are. Across the
hills the inhabitants are few, and, outside their State, little known.
They withdraw from society in November if they live on the uplands,
coming down in May as the snow gives leave. Not much more than a
generation ago these farms made their own clothes, soap, and candles,
and killed their own meat thrice a year, beef, veal, and pig, and sat
still between-times. Now they buy shop-made clothes, patent soaps, and
kerosene; and it is among their tents that the huge red and gilt
Biographies of Presidents, and the twenty-pound family Bibles, with
illuminated marriage-registers, mourning-cards, baptismal certificates,
and hundreds of genuine steel-engravings, sell best. Here, too, off the
main-travelled roads, the wandering quack - Patent Electric Pills, nerve
cures, etc. - divides the field with the seed and fruit man and the
seller of cattle-boluses. They dose themselves a good deal, I fancy,
for it is a poor family that does not know all about nervous
prostration. So the quack drives a pair of horses and a gaily-painted
waggon with a hood, and sometimes takes his wife with him. Once only
have I met a pedlar afoot. He was an old man, shaken with palsy, and he
pushed a thing exactly like a pauper's burial-cart, selling pins, tape,
scents, and flavourings. You helped yourself, for his hands had no
direction, and he told a long tale in which the deeding away of a farm
to one of his family was mixed up with pride at the distances he still
could cover daily. As much as six miles sometimes. He was no Lear, as
the gift of the farm might suggest, but sealed of the tribe of the
Wandering Jew - a tremulous old giddy-gaddy. There are many such rovers,
gelders of colts and the like, who work a long beat, south to Virginia
almost, and north to the frontier, paying with talk and gossip for their
entertainment.
Yet tramps are few, and that is well, for the American article answers
almost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being a
predatory ruffian who knows too much to work. 'Bad place to beg in after
dark - on a farm - very - is Vermont. Gypsies pitch their camp by the river
in the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe. They have
the gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but say that they are
largely mixed with Gentile blood.
Winter has chased all these really interesting people south, and in a
few weeks, if we have anything of a snow, the back farms will be
unvisited save by the doctor's hooded sleigh. It is no child's play to
hold a practice here through the winter months, when the drifts are
really formed, and a pair can drop in up to their saddle-pads. Four
horses a day some of them use, and use up - for they are good men.
Now in the big silence of the snow is born, perhaps, not a little of
that New England conscience which her children write about.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 28 of 71
Words from 27498 to 28514
of 71314
