This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  That scarlet oak—it has a trunk almost three feet through. With my eye I can follow that trunk to the very tip of the tree. But its branches start not ten feet from the ground and they reach toward the horizon. There is a tree as broad as it is tall, and rounded, even in Winter, like a great dome.

  The ash, whether white or black or red, is essentially a tapering trunk with whorls of lesser limbs—a pole with slender branches now, a svelte and graceful tree in full leaf.

  Maples tend to branch as do the oaks but with more lift and less spread. The sycamores down the road near the river bridge shine as though perpetually frost-patched, and they divide like the elm and branch like the maple, reaching out in all directions. The sour gum, of which we have only a few, is a central stem with a hopeless tangle of branches crisscrossed on each other, a veritable confusion of a tree when it has no leaves.

  But of all, perhaps the most beautiful against the Winter sky is the flowering dogwood with its horizontal limbs that reach skyward at their tips and form a fine lace pattern of twigs. The dogwood is a picture tree, Winter or Summer.

  The trees have been interwoven into man’s history in a hundred ways. They have provided not only fuel and shelter but dyes and medicines and all manner of comforts and conveniences. This is natural, since most early men were forest dwellers; they learned early to use what was at hand.

  Take medicine. A decoction of willow leaves was the best of the early substitutes for quinine in treating malarial and other fevers. Butternut bark made a tea for a mild purge. The sap of the white birch was supposed to be “healing” for lung complaints. The inner bark of the tulip tree made a tea which was a “powerful tonic” as well as a satisfactory vermifuge. Tea made from the spice bush was good for chills and fevers. A decoction of sassafras bark was a warming stimulant and sweat-producer for breaking up colds. Snuff made from dried witch-hazel leaves stopped nosebleed. Sumac tea was a powerful tonic—though some sumac is as poisonous as poison ivy. A decoction from elderberry leaf buds made a powerful purge. A tea brewed from root bark of the dogwood was another substitute for quinine.

  The dyes are well remembered by the old-timers. The pink inner bark of the hemlock made a dull red. Butternut bark or red sumac made black. Inner bark of the black oak made yellow. Leaves of the black locust produced blue, and their flowers made a yellow.

  White birch bark, when used to make canoes and boxes and containers of all kinds, usually was laced together with white spruce roots and waterproofed with balsam sap. Poison ivy juice made ink. Not only maple but birch and box elder made syrup and sugar. Willow withes and bark were used for cordage.

  Useful? Why, the trees were indispensable!

  Spotted wintergreen is known to the botanists as Chimaphila maculata. The “Chimaphila” comes from the Greek words meaning “to love the Winter.” I find it in the woods all Winter long, brightening the dull days almost as much as the partridge berry, though with its leaves rather than with any berries. The leaves are a deep green with white markings along the main stem and side veins; they have the almost waxen texture of the bays, those bush evergreens that fold their leaves tightly or roll them shut against the cold. But the spotted wintergreen neither folds nor rolls its leaves; it spreads them and takes what comes.

  Some call it pipsissiwa, an error by no means grave since the true pipsissiwa is close kin though a larger plant. One might almost call the spotted wintergreen a lesser pipsissiwa, if not too many sticklers were present. And as for the wintergreen part of the name, it too allows a good deal of leeway. That word has been applied to two other plants with no relationship at all. One, the so-called flowering wintergreen, is actually a milkwort. The other is the checkerberry, better known in some places as boxberry, a member of the heath family.

  Spotted wintergreen is one of the lesser plants, seldom growing more than nine inches high. It flowers, but with reticence, an inconspicuous little creamy cup that comes in June. The leaves are the principal charm of the plant, an unexpected beauty in the Winter woods. I found quite a patch of them this afternoon on the mountainside beside a drift of snow turned to ice.

  From time to time I hear indignant words about minorities, their plight or their privileges. We were at a small gathering today and I received a fervid lecture on the matter. I listened in relative silence, for it is my experience that people who say they want to discuss such matters don’t really want to discuss; they want to lecture. They can be quite boring, when they are not frightening. And it doesn’t much matter which minority they are discussing or which side they are on. I wish such folk would stop their talk long enough to realize that mankind as a whole is a minority in this world of living creatures. We are outnumbered on every hand. Man is here only by sufferance of circumstance and his foothold is essentially precarious. Let the insects, for instance, get the upper hand for a few seasons, or let the bacteria upset the present balance, or let even the inedible weeds take over our farmlands—why, this minority to which we all belong, this race of human beings, would be fighting for existence!

  We’re a pretty arrogant crowd, we creatures who call ourselves human, and we can’t afford to go around splitting ourselves into antagonistic minorities. Yes, I know we’ve been doing it a long, long time, and we have survived. Now and then, however, we have reduced such suicidal nonsense to a minimum for a brief period and we have profited amazingly in such interludes. Won’t we ever learn? Why are we so short on enduring race wisdom and general tolerance of each other? Every time I encounter someone like that fanatic today I shiver a little and think again that mankind’s most dangerous enemy really is man himself.

  I was up on the mountain today to check things at the springhouse. All was well, though a porcupine, or some other gnawer, had been at the door. Luckily, it is a thick door, so the gnawing had done no more than splinter it a bit. But if the animal persists I shall have to take a piece of heavy wire mesh up there and cover the door with it. That will slow him up. I doubt that even a slow-witted porcupine enjoys a toothache.

  On the way back from the spring I stopped at an old apple tree in a little clearing where the white pines are just beginning to take over. In a few more years the pines will overshadow the last evidence that there was once a small orchard up there. This is the last remaining apple tree and, old as it is and crippled with rot and wind damage, it is a beautiful thing in May, full of blossom, and in September its scant harvest of undersized fruit makes a banquet for birds and deer.

  Just now it seems to be a banquet for the partridges. I examined the lower branches and it seemed to me that the partridges had eaten at least half the buds. Apple buds are an important item of their diet now, though it is a mystery to me how they get much substance or succulence from such tightly furled little potential leaves. Perhaps it is less a matter of bulk than of vitamins or some other mysterious food element. We humans know how insistent can be those hungers which call us to unexpected foods. When I was a boy the cowboys who had subsisted most of the Winter on beef, beans and pancakes sometimes rode many miles to town in March just to buy a few cans of tomatoes. They opened the cans with jackknives and ate them right there in the street, hungering for vitamin C, which hadn’t even been discovered or guessed at at the time.

  Strange, the food memories we have. Looking back to boyhood, my memories are full of sour-dough pancakes, boiled beans, bread sopped in coffee, and leaf lettuce wilted with salt-pork fat and vinegar. I am sure we ate as well as most people of that day and place, but the vivid memories are of hard-times fare—cornmeal mush, rabbit sausage, coarse bread made from cow bran. The really good fare, chicken, steak, and pie, are all but forgotten.

  Raw this morning, with a heavy overcast, and there were intermittent flurries of fine snow all day. Pat would happily have spent the whole day indoors, but I got tough in midmorning and sent him out. He needs some exercise. Half an hour later I heard his voice up on the mountain, trailing rabbits and signaling me that if I would only get a little exercise myself we could have some f
un up there. I didn’t go, and I only hope he doesn’t get into an argument with another bobcat or porcupine.

  The first Winter he was here, Pat and the other dog went out the first week and tangled with a bobcat. When they came home Pat was a bit clawed up, a long scratch across his nose and one ear slit. He was pretty well bloodied. Mike apparently had merely stood by and given Pat encouragement, for Mike was unhurt. I cleaned Pat up and salved his wounds, and he lay around for a few days with Mike as his nurse. Mike licked off the salve as fast as I put it on. Mike licked Pat’s wounds constantly, and they healed nicely. But the ear was slit and it remains a mitten-ear, as we say. And as far as I know Pat has never since tackled a bobcat, though the cats still live there on the mountain.

  I’ve heard some men scoff at bobcats, call them cowards and say they won’t fight unless cornered and that they will never attack a man. Maybe so, but one fisherman I knew still carries scars from a bobcat that dropped out of a tree onto his shoulders while he was walking from one trout pool to another. The fisherman was unarmed and had to kill the cat with his bare hands. He did it, too, choked the beast to death. And still carries the scars.

  Another man, who lives in the village and has hunted and fished these hills and streams for years, wants no part of a bobcat and makes no bones about admitting it. A cat rushed him in the woods one day and he had to knife it to death. Not long ago when his wife went out at dusk to bring in a washing from the line a bobcat screamed at her from close by. She called her husband, who couldn’t believe a bobcat would come right into the edge of the village. But there it was, in the edge of the circle of light from the back of the house. He went inside for his shotgun, but when he went out again the cat had retreated into the darkness. He didn’t follow it, even armed with a shotgun. He wanted no part of a bobcat in the darkness. And that man is neither a coward nor a believer of old wives’ tales.

  Pat didn’t come home till after dark last night, and I had begun to worry about him. Then he came staggering in, walking almost bowlegged. He was gorged, fat as a tick. He wanted no supper. All he wanted to do was he in front of the fire and drowse and groan. He had stuffed himself, an absolute glutton.

  This morning I took down the shotgun, called Pat and suggested we go up on the mountain. He had slept off his gluttony and was eager to go. I hoped he would lead me to whatever carcass he had been feasting on yesterday. I hoped it wasn’t a deer. Pat has never trailed deer, and if he should begin I would have to do something drastic. I’ll have no deer-killing dog.

  But all he did was lead me far up the mountain, chasing rabbits. It was a cold day and every rabbit he put up ran in, took to a hole. I didn’t get a rabbit. Then we came down into the edge of the lower pasture and I started to cross what looked like a sloping patch of thin snow. It was an icy slope covered with half an inch of white, a fact I discovered when my feet went out from under me. I went down with a crash, banging one knee on the ice and banging the other leg with the shotgun as I fell. It was as painful a fall as I’ve had in years. I melted quite a patch of snow with my language.

  I tested both legs, found no broken bones, and crawled off the ice onto the snow-covered grass. And started for home, hobbling. Pat put up another rabbit and made a great uproar, but I wasn’t interested. I came on home, painfully. Lord, what a shaking-up I’d got! I felt as though I had fallen off a cliff. And not even a good purple bruise to inspire sympathy—I don’t bruise easily.

  This evening Albert stopped past and said, casually, that he had butchered out a yearling yesterday. Yes, Pat had been around. He and Albert’s dog, Suzy, stuffed themselves pretty thoroughly with the scraps and leavings, Albert said.

  So. Pat smelled the butchering. Well, he will be eating at home again by tomorrow. And I shall be aching for a week.

  A fine way to end January, hobbling around the house like an old, old man! If only I had a minor break or a sprain to make it, somehow, legal! I had thought, yesterday morning, that I might get out the skis and do a bit of pasture-skiing. But, I tell myself now, the snow isn’t much good. I’ll stay here and suffer my aches in silence. But not complete silence. A man is entitled to a groan or two…

  Up in the woods yesterday, I was looking at the lichens, which are so much more visible in Winter. They spread over the rocks and they creep up the trunks of the trees. They are maps of strange areas man has never visited, continents almost recognizable, at times, but never quite familiar. Something like the maps we had in the big geography books when I was a small boy, big, colored relief maps with greens and browns indicating mountain and plain. I have all those pictures up in the woods now, and a thousand more, spread out on the rocks.

  Looking at the lichens I wondered who first said that moss and lichen always grow on the north side of a tree. Up on my mountain moss and lichen grow on the south sides of the trees, too, and on the east and west sides. More, perhaps, on the north side, but not much more. I suspect that moss and lichen have less of a sense of direction than a sense of shade and moisture. If I were ever lost in the woods and tried to find my way out by compassing on the lichen on the tree trunks I would starve to death or die of old age before I escaped. So much for that superstition…

  Pat doesn’t seem to care a hoot how much I ache, but Barbara just brought me a bowl of fine, hot soup.

  FEBRUARY

  I WENT DOWN THE road to the swamp this afternoon and found what I was looking for—the first signs of skunk cabbage thrusting up like the first sign of the tulips in our garden. Some of them were up two or three inches, purplish brown with a strong green undertone, fat and primitive. A little later they will begin to open their strange hoods, spathes like eccentric orchestra shells in which will appear the bulb-shaped blossom “spike.” Then will come the giant green leaves.

  The Old Men of the Swamps are the earliest of all Spring flowers. I have seen them at Christmas time, occasionally, thrusting up through the ice. Often they come in January, and I would have bet heavily that I could find them today in almost any bog. The outside temperature has to be low indeed to discourage them, for they generate their own warmth. The skunk cabbage literally melts its path up through the icy swampland. Those I saw today were surrounded by small pools of open water while all around was ice.

  All plants generate a certain amount of warmth through respiration. Since they cannot use it to maintain body temperature, as animals do, they throw it off, as waste. It is nothing more than the heat of oxidation of food in the plant’s normal processes. Scientists have measured the heat generated by many plants and found that it sharply increases at the time of blossoming and at germination. So plants too have their time “in heat.”

  Skunk cabbage thrusting up through the frost may have as much as 27 degrees more heat than the surrounding soil or air and its shape, like a closed conical dome, concentrates that heat where it will do the most good. Thus, even on a day when the air temperature is in the low 20s, as it is today, the skunk cabbage can go right on growing.

  Groundhog Day, and it is my experience that the groundhogs, or woodchucks, have more sense than those who go out looking for groundhog shadows.

  February came in kindly, this year, but the woodchucks in these parts have for a long time slept through the first week of February without a worry about the weather. Oh, now and then one may be out by now, but I am sure it is only because he ate one too few meals before he hibernated. And if any woodchuck should come out today he would look for something to eat, not for a shadow. But such mythology dies hard.

  I never see a woodchuck out before the end of February, no matter what the weather. Charley says that last year one came out, up at his farm, toward the end of February and seemed to have a hard time of it. We had several inches of snow on the ground and the beast wandered around, hungrily, and Charley’s dog saw it and took after it and they had quite a scramble in the snow. The woodchuck, lean from the Winter, could stay on top of the snow, and the dog bogged in, so the ’chuck got away. Charley didn’t see a woodchuck again til
l toward the end of April.

  The sun came out for a time this afternoon. I cite it only for later reference: the groundhog could have seen his shadow if there had been a groundhog out and open-eyed. Six weeks more Winter? I doubt it.

  Our snow is gone, except in the deep shade among the pines and hemlocks on the mountain. I went up there a little way today and the sun was warm, almost balmy, when I got out of the wind; so I sat down with my back to a pine and listened to the song of the tumbling waters of the brook and watched the birds.

  I saw dozens of juncos and chickadees, and then I saw two birds among the trees fifty yards away that I am sure were robins. I caught only a quick glimpse of them, but they flew like robins and I thought I saw one flash of ruddy breasts. I sat and waited half an hour, hoping they would appear again, but there wasn’t another sign of them.

  When I came back to the house Barbara said, “I have been expecting to see bluebirds. In fact, I looked out the window several times, looking for them.” But she didn’t see any bluebirds. Perhaps it’s the weather that makes us feel this way. It was only half dark at six o’clock. We are beginning to be impatient for Spring, as always.

  A cold rain today, and yesterday’s hopes are gone. Spring isn’t just over the hill. Not yet. It’s still February.

  February rain isn’t any wetter than that of March, and February snow isn’t any more slushy than that of January. Nor is the sun Summer-hot on an occasional mild February day. They only seem that way because, at this time of year, our weather nerves are right up on the surface. The bad times seem worse and the good seems better than reality.

  It sometimes appears that our forefathers who lived closer to the soil and the seasons were a little more patient. In public print they wrote of February: “Now comes the deepest snow; now we receive the remainderment of Winter.” But I have been looking at some of their private letters, and I have another picture of those doughty ancestors. “February,” one writes, “is a miserable time. I would gladly pass it by. I long for March, inclement as it is.” Another writes, “Patience is a virtue, that I know! but February tries my patience sorely.” And in the journals I have found laconic weather records that make chilly reading indeed, cold and wet and disappointing.