The Kentucky Warbler

Webster, sitting on the fence and thinking of this, meantime laid his plans for the larger adventure of the following day: the clue he sought had unexpectedly been found: he would go out to the place where young cane grew: there he might have a real chance at the warbler.

This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. It had seemed empty of living creatures when he entered it; soon it had revealed itself as a whole teeming world. The mere green carpet of the woods was one vast birthplace and nursery, concert hall, playground, battlefield, slaughter-pen, cemetery.

"But my ignorance!" he complained. "I have good strong eyes, but all these years they have been required to look at dead maps, dead books, dead pencils and figures, dead everything: not once in all that time have they been trained upon the study of a living object."

His ears were as ignorant as his eyes: he had not been educated to hear and to know what he heard. Innumerable strange sounds high and low beat incessantly on them – wave upon wave of louder and fainter melodies, the summer music of the intent and earnest earth. And everywhere what fragrances! The tonic woody smells! Each deep breath he drew laved his lungs with sun-clean, leaf-sweet atmosphere. Hour after hour of this until his whole body and being – sight, smell, hearing, mind and spirit – became steeped in the forest joyousness.

Now it was alone in the June woods that long bright afternoon that Webster took final account of the last wonderful things the geologist had told them that memorable morning. He pondered those sayings as best he could, made out of them what he could:

"I am not afraid to trust you, the young, with big ideas which will lift your minds as on strong wings and carry them swiftly and far through time and space. If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought."

"The Kentucky warbler for over a hundred years has worn the name of the State and has carried it all over the world – leading the students of bird life to form some image of a far country and to fix their thoughts at least for some brief moment on this same beautiful spot of the world's surface. As long as he remains in the forests of the earth, he will keep the name of Kentucky alive though all else it once meant shall have perished and been forgotten. He is thus, as nearly as anything in Nature can be, its winged worldwide emblem, ever young as each spring is young, as the green of the woods is young."

"Study the warbler while you may: how long he will inhabit the Kentucky forest no one can tell. As civilisation advances upon the forest, the wild species retreat; when the forest falls, the wild species are gone. Every human generation during these centuries has a last look at many things in Nature. No one will ever see them again: Nature can never find what she has once lost: if it is gone, it is gone forever. What Wilson records he saw of bird life in Kentucky a hundred years ago reads to us now as fables of the marvellous, of the incredible. Were he the sole witness, some of us might think him to be a lying witness. Let me tell you that I in my boyhood – half a century later than Wilson's visit to Kentucky – beheld things that you will hardly believe. The vast oak forest of Kentucky was what attracted the passenger pigeon. In the autumn when acorns were ripe but not yet fallen, the pigeons filled the trees at times and places, eating them from the cups. Walking quietly some sunny afternoon through the bluegrass pastures, you might approach an oak and see nothing but the tree itself, thick boughs with the afternoon sunlight sparkling on the leaves along one side. As you drew nearer, all at once, as if some violent explosion had taken place within the tree, a blue smoke-like cloud burst out all around the treetop – the simultaneous explosive flight of the frightened pigeons. Or all night long there might be wind and rain and the swishing of boughs and the tapping of loosened leaves against the window panes; and when you stepped out of doors next morning, it had suddenly become clear and cold. Walking out into the open and looking up at the clear sky you might see this: an arch of pigeons breast by breast, wing-tip to wing-tip, high up in the air as the wild geese fly, slowly moving southward. You could not see the end of the arch on one horizon or the other: the whole firmament was spanned by that mighty arch of pigeons flying south from the sudden cold. Not all the forces in Nature can ever restore that morning sunlit arch of pigeons flying south. The distant time may come, or a nearer, when the Kentucky warbler will have vanished like the wild pigeon: then any story of him will be as one of the ancient fables of bird life."

"The rocks of the earth are the one flooring on which every thing develops its story, then either disappears upon the stillness of the earth's atmosphere or sinks toward the silence of its rocks. Of the myriad forms of life on the earth the bird has always been the one thing nearest to what we call the higher life of the human species.

"It is the form and flight of the bird alone that has given man at last the mastery of the atmosphere. Without the bird as a living model we have not the slightest reason to believe that he could have ever learned the mechanism of flight. Now it is the flight of the bird, studied under the American sky, that has given the nations the war engine that will perhaps rule the destiny of the human race henceforth. The form of the bird will fly before our autumn-brown American armies as they cross the sea – leading them as the symbol of their victory. When they lie along the trenches of France as thick as fallen brown autumn leaves in woodland hollows, it will be the flight of bird-like emblems of destruction that will guide them like hurricane-rushing leaves as they sweep toward their evil enemy."

"Through all ages the flight of the bird alone has been the interpreter of the human spirit. The living, standing on the earth and seeing the souls of their dead pass beyond their knowledge, have fixed upon the bird as the symbol of their faith. When you are old enough, if not already, to know your Shakespeare, you will find in one line of one of his plays the whole vast human farewell of the living to the dead: they are the words of Horatio to Hamlet, his dying prince: 'the flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'"

"As far as we geologists know, this is the morning of the planet. Not its dawn but somewhere near its sunrise. The bird music we hear in these human ages are morning songs. Back of that morning stretches the earth's long dawn; and the rocks tell us that thrushes were singing in the green forests of the earth millions of years before man had been moulded of the dust and had awakened and begun to listen to them. Thus bird music which seems to us so fresh is the oldest music of the earth – millions of years older than man's. And yet all this is still but a morning song. The earth is young, the birds are young, man is young – all young together at the morning of the earth's geologic day. What the evening will be we do not know. It is possible that the birds will be singing their evening song to the earth and man already have vanished millions of years before."

"Many questions vex us: all others lead to one: when man vanishes, does he pass into the stillness of the earth's atmosphere and sink toward the stillness of its rocks like every other species? He answers with his faith: that his spirit is here he knows not why, but takes flight from it he knows not how or whither. Only, faith discloses to him one picture: the snowy pinion folded and at rest in the Final Places."

That long sunny afternoon in the June woods! The shadows of the trees slowly lengthened eastward. The sun sank below the forest boughs and shot its long lances against the tree trunks. It made a straight path of gold, deeper gold, across the yellow grain. The sounds of life died away, the atmosphere grew sweeter with the odours of leaves and grasses and blossoms.

Webster recrossed the woods as he had entered it, waded through the nightshade and climbed the fence under the dark tree.

It was twilight when he entered the City.

As he passed her yard, Jenny bounded across to him joyous, innocent, tender, in a white frock with fresh blue ribbons in her brown hair.

"Did you find him?" she asked, her happiness not depending on his answer.

"It was not the right place. Tomorrow I am going out further into the country to a better place."

"The humming-bird has been here," Jenny announced with an air of saying that she had been more successful as a naturalist.

He made no reply: as the veteran observer of a day, he had somewhat outgrown the trumpet-vine arbour and the ruby-throat.

He lingered close to the fence. Jenny lingered. He moved off, disappointed but devoid of speech.

"Come back!" Jenny whispered, with reproach and vexation.

It was the first invitation. It was the first acceptance of an invitation. There would have been a second acceptance but the invitation was not there to accept.

When Webster turned in at his home gate, everything was just as he had foreseen: his father sat on one side of the porch, smoking the one daily cigar; his mother faced him from the opposite side, slowly rocking. Elinor crouched on the top step between them: he would have to walk around her or over her.

His father laughed heartily as he sauntered up.

"Well, my son, where is your game bag? What have you brought us for breakfast?"

Webster looked crestfallen: he returned empty-handed but not empty-minded: he had had a great rich day; they thought it an idle wasted one.

"Some of the boys have been here for you," said his mother. "They left word you must be certain to meet them, in the morning for the game. Freshen yourself up and I'll give you your supper."

Elinor said nothing – a bad sign with her. She sat with her sharp little chin resting on her palms and with her eyes on him with calculating secrecy. He stepped around her.

His room had never seemed so cramped after those hours in the woods under the open sky. The whole cottage seemed so unnatural, everything in the City so unnatural, after that day in the forest.

At supper he had not much to say; his mother talked to him:

"I put my berries away to eat with you for company." They ate their berries together.

He felt tired and said he would go to bed. His room was darkened when he returned to it; he felt sure he had left his lamp burning; someone had been in it. He lighted his lamp again.

As he started toward his window to close the shutters, his eye caught sight of an object hanging from the window sash. A paper was pinned around it. The handwriting was Elinor's. It was a bluejay, brought down by a lucky stone from some cottager's hand. Webster read Elinor's message for him:

"Your favourite Kentucky Warbler,

From your old friend,

Thomas Jefferson."

He sat on the side of his bed. The sights and sounds and fragrances of the pasture were all through him; the sunlight warmed his blood still, the young blood of perfect health.

He turned in for the night and sleep drew him away at once from reality. And some time during the night he awoke out of his sleep to the reality of a great dream.

IV

THE BIRD

It was in the depths of a wonderful forest, green with summer and hoary with age. He was sitting on the ground in a small open space. No path led to this or away from it, but all around him grew grasses and plants which would be natural coverts for wild creatures. No human tread had ever crushed those plants.

The soft vivid light resting on the woods was not morning-light nor evening-light: it was clear light without the hours. Yet the time must have been near noonday; for as Webster looked straight up toward the unseen sky, barred from his eyes by the forest roof of leaves, slender beams of sunlight filtered perpendicularly down, growing mistier as they descended until they could be traced no longer even as luminous vapour; no palest radiance from them reached the grass.

He could not see far in any direction. At the edge of the open space where he sat, fallen rotten trees lay amid the standing live ones – parents, grandparents, great-grandparents of the rising forest, passing back into the soil of the planet toward the rocks.

Strange as was the spot, stranger was Webster to himself and did not know what had changed him. It seemed that for the first time in his life his eyes were fully opened; never had he seen with such vision; and his feeling was so deep, so intense. The whole scene was enchantment. It was more than reality. He was more than reality. The singing of birds far away – it was so crystal sweet, yet he could see none. A few yards from him a rivulet made its way from somewhere to somewhere. He could trace its course by the growth of plants which crowded its banks and covered it with their leaves.

Expectancy weighed heavily on him. He was there for a purpose but could not say what the purpose was.

All at once as his eyes were fixed on the low, green thicket opposite him, he saw that it was shaken; something was on its way to him. He watched the top of the thicket being parted to the right and to the left. With a great leaping of his heart he waited, motionless where he sat on the grass. What creature could be coming? Then he saw just within the edge of the thicket a curious piece of head-gear – he had no knowledge of any such hat. Then he saw a gun barrel. Then the hand and forearm of a man was thrust forward and it pushed the underbrush aside; and then there stepped forth into the open the figure of a hunter, lean, vigorous, tall, athletic. The hunter stepped out with a bold stride or two and stopped and glanced eagerly around with an air of one in a search; he discovered Webster and with a look of relief stood still and smiled.

There could be no mistake. Webster held imprinted on memory from a picture those features, those all-seeing eyes; it was Wilson – weaver lad of Paisley, wandering peddler youth of the grey Scotch mountains, violinist, flutist, the poet who had burned his poem standing in the public cross, the exile, the school teacher for whom the boy caught the mouse, the failure who sent the drawing to Thomas Jefferson, the bold figure in the skiff drifting down the Ohio – the naturalist plunging into the Kentucky wilderness and walking to Lexington and shivering in White's garret – the great American ornithologist, the immortal man.

There he stood: how could it be? It was reality yet more than reality.

The hunter walked straight toward him with the light of recognition in his eyes. He came and stood before Webster and looked down at him with a smile:

"Have you found him, Webster?"

Webster strangely heard his own voice:

"I have not found him."

"You have looked long?"

"I have looked everywhere and I cannot find him."

The hunter sat down and laid on the grass beside him his fowling piece, his game bag holding new species of birds, and his portfolio of fresh drawings. Then he turned upon Webster a searching look as if to draw the inmost truth out of him and asked:

"Why do you look for the Kentucky Warbler?"

Webster hesitated long:

"I do not know," he faltered.

"Something in you makes you seek him, but you do not know what that something is?"

"No, I do not know what it is: I know I wish to find him."

"Not him alone but many other things?"

"Yes, many other things."

"The whole wild life of the forest?"

"Yes, all the wild things in the forest – and the wild forest itself."

"You wish to know about these things – you wish to know them?"

"I wish to know them."

The hunter searched Webster's countenance more keenly, more severely:

"Are you sure?"

There was silence. The forest was becoming more wonderful. The singing of the unseen birds more silvery sweet. It was beyond all reality. Webster answered:

"I am sure."

The hunter hurled questions now with no pity:

"Would you be afraid to stay here all night alone?"

"I would not."

"If, during the night, a storm should pass over the forest with thunder deafening you and lightning flashing close to your eyes and trees falling everywhere, you would fear for your life and that would be natural and wise; but would you come again?"

"I would."

"If it were winter and the forest were bowed deep with ice and snow and you were alone in it, having lost your way, would you cry enough? Would you hunt for a fireside and never return?"

"I would not."

"You can stand cold and hunger and danger and fatigue; can you be patient and can you be persevering?"

"I can."

"Look long and not find what you look for and still not give up?"

"I can."

There was silence for a little while: the mood of the hunter seemed to soften:

"Do you know where you are, Webster?"

"I do not know where I am."

"You did not know then, that this is the wilderness of your forefathers – the Kentucky pioneers. You have wandered back to it."

"I did not know."

"Have you read their great story?"

"Not much of it."

"Are you beginning to realise what it means to be sprung from such men and women?"

"I cannot say."

"But you want to do great things?"

"If I loved them."

The hunter stood up and gathered his belongings together. His questions had become more kind as though he were satisfied. He struck Webster on his shoulder.

"Come," he said, as with high trust, "I will show you the Kentucky warbler."

He looked around and his eyes fell upon the forest brook. He walked over to it, to discover in what direction it ran and beckoned.

"We'll follow this stream up: the spring may not be far away." He glanced at the tree-tops: "It is nearly noon: the bird will come to the spring to drink and to bathe."

Webster followed the hunter as he threaded his way through the forest toward the source of the brook.

Not many yards off his guide turned:

"There is the spring," he said, pointing to a green bank out of which bubbled the cool current.

"Let us sit here. Make no movement and make no noise."

How tense the stillness! They waited and listened. Finally the hunter spoke in an undertone:

"Did you hear that?"

Away off in the forest Webster heard the song of a bird. Presently it came nearer. Now it was nearer still. It sounded at last within the thicket just above the spring, clear, sweet, bold, emphatic notes distinctly repeated at short intervals. And then —

There he was – the Kentucky Warbler!

Webster could see every mark of identification. The bird had come out of the dense growth and showed himself on the bough of a sapling about twenty feet from the earth, in his grace and shapeliness and manly character. With a swift, gliding flight downward he lighted on a sweeping limb of a tree still nearer, within a few inches of the ground. Then he dropped to the ground and moved about, turning over dead leaves. He was only several yards away and Webster could plainly trace the yellow line over his eye, the blackish crown and black sides of the throat, the underparts all of solid yellowish gold, the upper parts of olive green. An instant later the bird was on the wing again, hither, thither, up and down, continually in motion. No white in the wings, none in the tail feathers. Once he stopped and poured out his loud, musical song – unlike any other warbler's. A moment later he was on the ground again, with a manner of self-possession, dignity – as on his namesake soil, Kentucky.

Webster had sat bent over toward him, forgetful of everything else. At last drawing a deep breath, he looked around gratefully, remembering his guide.

No one was near him. Webster saw the hunter on the edge of the thicket yards away; he stood looking back, his figure dim, fading. Webster, forgetful of the bird, cried out with quick pain:

"Are you going away? Am I never to see you again?"

The voice that reached him seemed scarcely a voice; it was more like an echo, close to his ear, of a voice lost forever:

"If you ever wish to see me, enter the forest of your own heart."

V

THE ROAD

Webster sprang to his feet in the depths of the strange summer-dark forest: that is to say, he awoke with a violent start and found himself sitting on his bed with his feet hanging over one side.

It was late to be getting up. The sun already soared above the roof of the cottage opposite his window and the light slanted in full blaze against his shutters. Shafts penetrated some weather-loosened slats and fell on his head and shoulders and on the wall behind him. Breakfast must be nearly ready. Fresh cooking odours – coffee odour, meat odour, bread odour – filled the little bathroom-bedroom. Feet were hurrying, scurrying, in the kitchen. Quieter footsteps approached his door along the narrow hall outside and there came a tap:

"Breakfast, Webster!"

It was his mother's voice, indulgent, peaceful, sweet. He suddenly thought that never before had he fully realised how sweet it was, had always been, notwithstanding he disappointed her.

He got up and went across to open his shutters and had taken hold of the catch, when he was arrested in his movement. At night he tilted the shutters, so that the morning sun might not enter crevices and shine in his face and awaken him. Now looking down through the slats, he discovered something going on in the yard beneath his window. Elinor had come tipping around the corner of the cottage. She held one dark little witch-like finger unconsciously pressed against her tense lips. Her dark eyes were brimming with a secret, mischievous purpose. A ribbon which looked like a huge, crumpled purple morning-glory was knotted into the peak of her ravenish hair. Her fresh little gown, too, suggested the colours of the purple morning-glory and her whole presence, with a freshness as of dew-drops formed amid moonbeams at midnight, somehow symbolised that flower which surprises us at dawn as having matured its unfolding in the dark: half sinister, half innocent.

With cautious, delicate steps, which could not possibly have made any noise in the grass, she approached the window and stopped and lifted the notched pole which was used to hold up the clothes-line in the back yard. Setting the pole on end and planting herself beside it, she pushed it with all her slight but concentrated strength against the window shutters. It struck violently and fell over to the grass in one direction as Elinor, with the silence of a light wind, fled in the other.

Webster stood looking down at it all: he understood now: that was the crashing sound which had awakened him.

It had been Elinor who had ended his dream.

But his dream was not ended. It would never end. It was in him to stay and it was doing its work. The feeling which had surprised him as to the sweetness of his mother's voice but marked the deeper awakening that had taken place in his sleep, an unfolding, his natural growth. It was this growth that now animated him as he smiled at Elinor's flying figure. Her prank had not irritated him: no intrigue of hers would ever annoy him again. Instead, the idea struck him that Elinor must be thinking of him a great deal, if so much of her life – incessantly active as it was with the other children of the cottages – were devoted to plans to worry him. She must often have him in mind quite to herself, he reflected; and this fresh picture of Elinor's secret brooding about him somehow for the first time touched him tenderly and finely.

He turned back from the window shutters without opening them and sat on the edge of his bed. He could not shake off his dream. How could it possibly be true that there was no such forest as he had wandered into in his dream – that Kentucky wilderness of the old heroic days? Could anything destroy in him the certainty that with wildly beating heart he had seen the living colours and heard the actual notes and watched the characteristic movements of the warbler? Then, though these things were not real, still they were true and would remain true always.