The Fall of the Year

FOR THE PUPIL

If there is a muskrat house or village of houses in your neighborhood, report to the class, or better, take teacher and class, as soon as freezing weather comes, to see it. Go out yourselves and try to see the muskrats plastering their walls on one of the bright October nights.

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muskrats combine: The author has frequently found as many as six rats in a single house; but whether all of these helped in the building or not, he is unable to say.

winter house: If the house is undisturbed (as when situated out in a stumpy pond) it will stand for years, the rats dwelling in it the year around.

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pick and shovel: What is meant by a fox’s “pick and shovel”?

Lupton’s Pond: the name of a little wood-walled pond that the author haunted as a boy.

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and menGang aft agley.”

Learn this poem (“To A Mouse”) by heart. Burns is the author.

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very much alike: Name some other respects in which animals and men are alike in their lives. What famous line in the poem just quoted is it that makes men and mice very closely related?

bottom of the house: Down in the very foundation walls of the muskrat’s house are two runways or “doors” that open under water and so far under that they rarely if ever freeze. See picture of such a house with its door in the author’s “Wild Life Near Home,” page 174.

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tepee: What is a tepee?

juicy and pink and tender: The muskrats eat grass stems and roots, so that under the water near the lodge you will often find in winter little stacks of these tender pink stems and roots ready for eating – much as the beaver stores up sticks of tender bark under the water near his lodge for food when the ice forms overhead.

Winter is coming: Are you glad or sorry? Are you ready?

CHAPTER IXTO THE TEACHER

Let the pupils continue this list of examples of winter preparations by watching and observing for themselves. Every field, every tree, every roadside, will reveal the work done or going on under their eyes. Without preaching you may draw many an interesting and telling parallel with their own preparation – in school for instance.

FOR THE PUPIL

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“The north wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow,And what will the Robin do then,Poor thing?”

Where does the verse come from? Mother Goose? Yes, but who was she?

Chipmunk: Our little striped ground squirrel, interesting because he has cheek-pouches and thus forms a link between the arboreal squirrels (gray squirrels, etc.) and the ground squirrels or spermophiles, of which the beautiful little thirteen-lined squirrel of the prairies is an example.

Whitefoot, the wood mouse: The white-footed or wood mouse or deer mouse.

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Not so much as a bug or a single beetle’s egg has he stored: Why not, seeing that these are his food?

a piece of suet for him on a certain lilac bush: Whose bush might it be? Is there a piece on yours?

upon the telegraph-wires were the swallows – the first sign that the getting ready for winter has begun: What kind or kinds of swallows? Have you any earlier sign?

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the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow: Name four of the animals that so find their food and shelter. Are there any others? Look them up.

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there will be suffering and death: In your tramps afield this winter look out for signs of suffering. There are many little things that you can do to lessen it – a little seed scattered, a piece of suet nailed up on a tree, a place cleared in the snow where gravel stones can be picked up.

or even three hundred pounds of honey: By not allowing the bees to swarm, and thus divide their strength, bee-keepers often get more than three hundred pounds of comb-honey (in the little pound boxes or sections) from a single hive. The bees themselves require only about twenty to twenty-five pounds to carry them through the winter.

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the witch-hazels: The witch-hazels do not yield honey so far as the author has observed. Suppose you watch this autumn to see if the honey-bees (do you know a honey-bee when you see her?) visit it. Whence comes this quotation? From which poem of Bryant’s: —

“when come the calm, mild days.”

put on their storm-doors: In modern bee-hives there is a movable board in front upon which the bees alight when entering the hive; this can be so turned as to make a large doorway for the summer, and a small entrance for the cold winter.

whole drove of forty-six woodchucks: The author at one time had forty-six inhabited woodchuck holes on his farm.

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as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco: The bobolink winters even farther south – beyond the banks of the Amazon.

to sleep until dawn of spring: What is the name for this strange sleeping? What other American animals do it? Name three.

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frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice: Of course, this was never done intentionally: each time the frogs were forgotten and left in the laboratory, where they froze.

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they seem to have given up the struggle at once …: This may not be the explanation. One of the author’s friends suggests that it may have been caused by exposure, due to their having been frightened in the night from their usual bed and thus forced to roost where they could until morning.

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timothy: “Herd’s-grass” or “English hay” – as it is sometimes called in New England.

plenty for the birds: What are the “weeds” made for? You growl when you are set to pulling them in the garden. What are they made for? Can you answer?

CHAPTER XTO THE TEACHER

Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great city. What can you do for your pupils there? But what can’t you do? You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can for earth, a sprig of something to plant – and surely you have English sparrows behind the rain pipe or shutter! You may have the harbor too, and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the fish stores with their windows full of the sea. You have the gardens and parks, burial-grounds and housetops, bird stores, museums – why, bless you, you have the hand-organ man and his monkey; you have – but I have mentioned enough. It is a hungry little flock that you have to feed, too, and no teacher can ask more.

FOR THE PUPIL

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An English sparrow: Make a long and careful study of the sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes. The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but carefully pulling down a sparrow’s nest with eggs in it – if you are sure it is a sparrow’s nest – is kindness, he believes, to the other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th, he saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author was fishing. It is not easy to say just what our duty is in this matter.

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clack of a guinea going to roost: The guinea-fowl as it goes to roost frequently sets up a clacking that can be heard half a mile away.

an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston: The cemetery was the historic King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, Boston. Some of the elm trees have since been cut down.

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Cubby Hollow: a small pond near the author’s boyhood home, running, after a half-mile course through the woods, into Lupton’s Pond, which falls over a dam into the meadows of Cohansey Creek.

on the water: What water is it that surrounds so large a part of the City of Boston?

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the shuttered buildings: Along some of the streets, especially in the wholesale district, the heavy iron shutters, closed against the high walls of the buildings, give the deserted streets a solemn, almost a forbidding aspect.

facing the wind: like an anchored boat, offering the least possible resistance to the storm.

out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a crowded city street: Opportunities for watching the wild things, for seeing and hearing the things of nature, cannot be denied you even in the heart of the city, if you have an eye for such things. Read Bradford Torrey’s “Birds on Boston Common,” or the author’s “Birds from a City Roof” in the volume called “Roof and Meadow.”

CHAPTER XITO THE TEACHER

This is a chapter on the large wholesomeness of contact with nature; that even the simple, humble tasks out of doors are attended with a freedom and a naturalness that restore one to his real self by putting him into his original primitive environment and by giving him an original primitive task to do.

Then, too, how good a thing it is to have something alive and responsive to work for – if only a goat or a pig! Take occasion to read to the class Lamb’s essay on Roast Pig – even fifth grade pupils will get a lasting picture from it.

Again – and this is the apparent purpose of the chapter – how impossible it is to go into the woods with anything – a hay-rake – and not find the woods interesting!

FOR THE PUPIL

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the unabridged dictionary: What does “unabridged” mean?

hay-rig: a simple farm wagon with a “rigging” put on for carting hay.

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cord wood: wood cut into four-foot lengths to be cut up smaller for burning in the stove. What are the dimensions of a cord of wood?

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through the cold gray of the maple swamp below you, peers the face of Winter: What does one see in a maple swamp at this time of year that looks like the “face of winter.” Think.

he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed: How is this meant to be taken?

round at the barn: It is a common custom with farmers to make this nightly round in order to see that the stock is safe for the night. Were you ever in a barn at night where the horses were still munching hay, and the cattle rattling their stanchions and horns? Recall the picture in Whittier’s “Snow-Bound.”

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diameters: the unit of measure in the “field” or the lens of the microscope, equivalent to “times.”

white-footed wood mouse: Text should read or wood mouse. There are other wood mice, but Whitefoot is known as the wood mouse.

gives at the touch: an idiom, meaning moves back, gives way.

red-backed salamander: very common under stones; his scientific name is Plethodon erythronolus.

His “red” salamander: Read chapter V in “Pepacton,” by Burroughs. His salamander is the red triton, Spelerpes ruber.

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dull ears: Our ears are dulled by the loud and ceaseless noises of our city life, so that we cannot hear the small voices of nature that doubtless many of the wild creatures are capable of hearing.

tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla: the one who peeps so shrill from the meadows in spring.

“skirl”: a Scotch term; see “Tam O’Shanter,” by Burns: “He screwed the pipes and gart them skirl.”

bunches of Christmas fern: Gathered all through the winter here in the ledges about Mullein Hill by the florists for floral pieces.

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yellow-jacket’s nest: one of the Vespa Wasps, Vespa Germanica. Read the first chapter of “Wasps Social and Solitary,” by G. W. and E. G. Peckham.

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long-tusked boar of the forest: The wild boar, the ancestor of our domestic pigs is still to be found in the great game preserves in European forests; in this country only in zoölogical gardens.

live in a pen: How might one, though living in a big modern house, well furnished and ordered, still make a “pen” of it only.

CHAPTER XIITO THE TEACHER

Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do and hear a few of the characteristic sights and sounds and doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the characteristic notes and actions of individual things – birds, animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker’s flight, if his ear is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil knows that bird and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy, his habits, his family traits.

The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate and distinguish things; and there is no better training for this than to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic.

Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life; so that some of the sounds in this chapter may need to have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember that you are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good teacher is a very much better thing.

FOR THE PUPIL

Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard these ten sounds; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not stop listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing else, learn just the day’s lesson and nothing more, your teacher may think you a very “good scholar,” but I will tell you that you are a poor student of nature. The woods are full of sounds – voices, songs, whisperings – that are to be heard when none of these ten are speaking.

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hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the fox: It is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as it is usually the young foxes in the summer and fall that bark.

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“Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;

They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”“The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.”

Study this whole poem (“The Death of the Flowers,” by Bryant) for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written it had he been ignorant of nature? Can you appreciate it all unless you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can sound them again to you as you read? Nature is not only interesting for herself; but also absolutely necessary for you to know if you would know and love poetry.

the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn: What is the warning, would you say, in the scream of the jay? the solemn message in the caw of the crow?

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cave days: Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the history of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost wholly upon the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone weapons.

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to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon: Some of the birds go even farther south – away into Patagonia at the end of the southern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no more thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating birds – the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for the few weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start back again on the long, perilous journey!

CHAPTER XIIITO THE TEACHER

Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling as possible to the paragraph beginning, “I love the sound of the surf,” etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not try to teach anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful pupil read the next section as far as, “Honk, honk, honk,” beginning the third paragraph from the end. This contains the lesson, the moral, and if you stop anywhere to talk about bird-protection, do it here. Let a third pupil read the rest of the chapter. Better than a moral lesson directly taught (and such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will be the touching of the child’s imagination by the picture of the long night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them “To a Water Fowl,” by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by D. Lange (“The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life”) in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1909. Read to them Audubon’s account of the wild goose, in his “Birds.”

FOR THE PUPIL

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followed through our open windows: “followed” how? Must one have wings or a flying-machine in order to “follow” the wild geese?

Round and dim swung the earth below us…: What is the picture? It is seen from what point of view?

the call to fly, fly, fly: Did you ever feel the call to fly? Ever wish you had wings? Ever start and run as Mowgli did, or long to get up and go somewhere as the pilgrims did in the Canterbury Tales?

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in our hands to preserve: Do you belong to the Audubon Society, to the “Grange,” or to any of the organizations that are trying to protect and preserve the birds? And are you doing all you can in your neighborhood to protect them?

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not in a heap of carcasses, the dead and bloody weight of mere meat: We may be hunters by instinct; we may love the chase, and we may like to kill things. But do you think that means we ought to, or that we any longer may, kill things? No; bird life has become so scarce that even if we do want to, it is now our duty to give over such sport in the larger interests of the whole country, and try to find a higher, finer kind of pleasure, – as we can in trying to photograph, or “shoot” with the camera, a bird, getting an interesting picture in place of a dead body.

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the mated pairs of the birds have flocked together: In domestic geese the mated pairs often live together for life; and among the wild geese this, doubtless, is often true.

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may I be awake to hear you: In what sense “awake”?

The wild geese are passing – southward: the end of the autumn, the sign that winter is here.