APRIL DAYS

At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furrows of last year's ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phoebe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter's ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.

The woodchuck and chipmunk have got on top of the world again. You hear the half querulous, half chuckling whistle of the one, the full-mouthed persistent cluck of the other, voicing recognition of the season.

The song of the brooks has abated something of its first triumphant swell, and is often overborne now by the jubilant chorus of the birds, the jangled, liquid gurgle and raucous grating of the blackbirds, the robin's joyous song with its frequent breaks, as if the thronging notes outran utterance, the too brief sweetness of the meadowlark's whistle, the bluebird's carol, the cheery call of the phoebe, the trill of the song sparrow, and above them all the triumph of the hawk in its regained possessions of northern sky and earth.

The woods throb with the muffled beat of the partridge's drum and the sharp tattoo of the woodpecker, and are filled again with the sounds of insect life, the spasmodic hum of flies, the droning monotone of bees busy among the catkins and squirrelcups, and you may see a butterfly, wavering among the gray trees, soon to come to the end of his life, brief at its longest, drowned in the seductive sweets of a sap bucket.

The squirrels are chattering over the wine of the maple branches they have broached, in merrier mood than the hare, who limps over the matted leaves in the raggedness of shifting raiment, fitting himself to a new inconspicuousness.

We shall not find it unpleasant nor unprofitable to take to the woods now, for we may be sure that they are pleasanter than the untidy fields. Where nature has her own way with herself, she makes her garb seemly even now, after all the tousling and rents she gave it in her angry winter moods. The scraps of moss, bark, and twigs with which the last surface of the snow was obtrusively littered lie now unnoticed on the flat-pressed leaves, an umber carpet dotted here with flecks of moss, there sprigged with fronds of evergreen fern, purple leaves of squirrelcups, with their downy buds and first blossoms. Between banks so clad the brook babbles as joyously as amid all the bloom and leafage of June, and catches a brighter gleam from the unobstructed sunbeams. So befittingly are the trees arrayed in graceful tracery of spray and beads of purpling buds, that their seemly nakedness is as beautiful as attire of summer's greenness or autumn's gorgeousness could make them.

Never sweeter than now, after the long silence of winter, do the birds' songs sound, and never in all the round of the year is there a better time to see them than when the gray haze of the branches is the only hiding for their gay wedding garments.

If you would try your skill at still-hunting, follow up that muffled roll that throbs through the woods, and if you discover the ruffed grouse strutting upon his favorite log, and undiscovered by him can watch his proud performance, you will have done something better worth boasting of than bringing him to earth from his hurtling flight.

Out of the distant fields come, sweet and faint, the call of the meadowlark and the gurgle of the blackbirds that throng the brookside elms. From high overhead come down the clarion note of the goose, the sibilant beat of the wild ducks' wings, the bleat of the snipe and the plover's cry, each making his way to northern breeding grounds. Are you not glad they are going as safely as their uncaught shadows that sweep swiftly across the shadowy meshes of the forest floor? Are you not content to see what you see, hear what you hear, and kill nothing but time?

Verily, you shall have a clearer conscience than if you were disturbing the voice of nature with the discordant uproar of your gun, and marring the fresh odors of spring with the fumes of villainous saltpetre.

In the open marshes the lodges of the muskrats have gone adrift in the floods; but the unhoused inmates count this a light misfortune, since they may voyage again with heads above water, and go mate-seeking and food-gathering in sunshine and starlight, undimmed by roof of ice. As you see them cutting the smooth surface with long, swift, arrowy wakes, coasting the low shore in quest of brown sweethearts and wives, whimpering their plaintive call, you can hardly imagine the clumsy body between that grim head and rudder-like tail capable of such graceful motion.

The painted wood drake swims above the submerged tree roots; a pair of dusky ducks splash to flight, with a raucous clamor, out of a sedgy cove at your approach; the thronging blackbirds shower liquid melody and hail of discord from the purple-budded maples above you. All around, from the drift of floating and stranded water weeds, arises the dry, crackling croak of frogs, and from sunny pools the vibrant trill of toads.

From afar come the watery boom of a bittern, the song of a trapper and the hollow clang of his setting pole dropping athwart the gunwales of his craft, the distant roar of a gun and the echoes rebounding from shore to shore.

The grateful odor of the warming earth comes to your nostrils; to your ears, from every side, the sounds of spring; and yet you listen for fuller confirmation of its presence in the long-drawn wail of the plover and the rollicking melody of the bobolink.

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