Wild Music

When noon draws on at Otranto the wise man rests from walking. There are some in the brotherhood of ramblers who cry shame upon you if you call a halt. The day is so short, they proclaim, and there is so much to be seen; and there was one that brought Hazlitt into the argument, as though he were a battery of horse-artillery, and discharged forthwith a volley ot quotation:—‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner.... I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.’ The wise man scoffs at such; his legs cry out for mercy; and as for Hazlitt, he never tramped beneath the midday sun in Carolina, else had he refrained from all such rash excesses as running and leaping on his way. He would have marched along slowly and soberly enough, — with no unnecessary frisking, — mopping his brow from time to time, and resting now and then in the shade of the trees; and if the scene of his ramblings lay in that green country round about the Otranto lagoon, he would have turned aside in the heat of the day and gone down to the place where a slim-bodied, squarenosed punt was moored at the water’s edge.

For the lagoon is the heart and soul of Otranto; and paddling, properly practiced, is a mild and easy form of exercise; and though there is much to be seen in those opulent forest lands of pine and oak and sweetgum and magnolia, through which the lover of nature and the student of her wild creatures might wander wellnigh forever and remain unsated, yet there is still more to be seen upon the quiet winecolored waters that have stolen part of the forest for their own. The lagoon is beyond description, take it when and where you will; and so my picture of it shall be that of a mechanical draughtsman, not that of a painter.

It is about eight miles in length, and here and there as much as a mile in breadth. It is only about seven years old; for it did not exist until the historic city of Charleston, slowly awakening from the lethargy that followed the great and disastrous war, realized that she must have a new source of water-supply. Seven years ago deer ranged over all this area and wild turkeys ‘kept’ in the thickets. It was then a long curved basin drained by a deep sluggish creek. Part of it was heavily wooded, part was abandoned rice-field and meadowland grown up in bushes and weeds, part was sufficiently moist for cypresses to subsist in it. All in all, there were more than two thousand acres supporting a luxuriant plant-life that perished almost en bloc when a dam was thrown across the creek and the whole basin was inundated. The cypresses and willows and other water-loving trees survived; but millions of bushes and saplings and smaller plant-organisms were killed outright by the flood, while the pine forest that covered a large part of the submerged area died in a season.

At once nature began the making of new life out of the débris of the old — by no unwonted process, mind you, but as she makes it every year in many laboratories for the benefit of thousands of college freshmen who are taking courses in elementary biology. The professor, wishing to obtain for study by his class some of the lowly microscopic forms known as protozoa, does not trouble to go out to the ponds and pools where these tiny creatures, no larger than a pin-point, are to be found. Instead, he simply places some dead grass in a jar, half-fills it with water from the nearest faucet, and after waiting a few days, finds his ‘culture’ fairly swarming with life. Not that this life originates directly from the dead grass and water and air; it most assuredly does not, unless the majority of our savants be at fault: but in the grass or in the water or in the air there is preexistent life, if only in the form of a single germ; and from this preëxistent animalcule or plant or germ, developing and reproducing with almost incredible rapidity, there will have sprung in a comparatively short time thousands of others of the same species. Omne vivum ex vivo is a dogma that bids fair to stand the test of all experiment, and though the first of all organisms must have been produced spontaneously by a combination of lifeless constituents, spontaneous generation at the present day is a thing unknown to science.

Yet all around us, and every minute, lifeless substance is being made alive; for both animals and plants use dead organic matter as food, and convert it into the living fabric of their bodies; and where, therefore, there is a quantity of such matter collected together, there is likely to occur a very swift increase of plant and animal life; since the germs from which this life will start are virtually omnipresent unless special precautions are taken to exclude them. So, in the lagoon and in the professor’s jar precisely the same thing has taken place.

When the creek basin was flooded and practically all of its flora killed, a huge culture was formed. Here was a vast quantity of dead organic matter, hundreds of tons of it, washed by warm water and steaming in the sun. Out of it, as if by magic but in reality in strict accord with natural laws of reproduction, issued new life in wonderful abundance — one-celled and few-celled plantand animal-forms, breeding and subdividing, multiplying a hundredfold each year in this great, new, foodfilled, liquid world. Aquatic vegetable growths came into being with the spring, and spread out over the waters with the summer. In the open reaches, where the meadows and rice-fields had been, floating islands of rushes and ‘wampee,’ barely big enough at first to hide a redwing’s nest, waxed larger and larger until now some of them are fifty feet in diameter and almost firm enough to support the weight of a man. The place became a teeming metropolis of the innumerable six-footed tribes; and close on the rapid increase of insects followed a commensurate increase of birds. For every fish and frog in the creek, when the great change came to pass, there are in all likelihood fifty or a hundred in the lagoon to-day; and now the reptilian masters of the water, longarmored alligators that cruise like living submarines here and there beneath the surface, having a broadened kingdom and far more abundant prey, have probably doubled in numbers within a decade.

And to-day, at the end of seven years, nature has not yet finished her work. The lagoon is still a vast culture, ripe for the development of life; a hothed of production, rich in the stuff of which living things are builded. Crowded as the place is, the limit has not yet been reached; and so this watery wilderness is still one of the busiest portions of the great mill, the food of which is death and the product life — life in an almost infinite variety of patterns and grades, fresh from the hand of the Master Miller, who is also the greatest of Alchemists. Matter is being marvelously transmuted and strangely fashioned anew. You cannot tell how it is being done, for the Miller works in an inner chamber, and science groping for the door has groped in vain, in spite of the efforts of Dr. Bastian and the rest. But you see the raw material and the finished product, the dead and the living; and comprehending the relation of these to each other, you have come into possession of a better understanding of the lagoon. The feeling comes to you that this is not the modern world, stable and complete. Rather you have been translated backward an æn or two to a creation still in the making, to a time not far this side of chaos, to an inlet of those ancient seas where, ages before the birth of man, life on our planet ran riot in strange and monstrous forms. And just as some gigantic saurian of Jurassic days would make a fitting centrepiece for the picture, so Pan himself, in all the corporeal reality of goat’s hoofs and shaggy flanks, might tune his pipes in the tall rushes fringing the lagoon.

And there in truth he lurks and peers out across the waters. I have not seen him, but often I have heard him — and chiefly in the singing of the birds. These, when all is said, are the crowning glory of the lagoon; and so many of them are there that the coolest of ornithologists, unused to such tropical luxuriance of feathered life, may well own himself at first discomfited. There is so much to be seen in every part of the lagoon, there are so many songs ringing out at the same time, there is such a ceaseless and kaleidoscopic flashing of color on every side, that in seeking to hear and see it all he is apt to defeat, his own purpose and become utterly bewildered. Even afterwards, when he has grown accustomed in some measure to the amazing abundance of birds, he is tempted to neglect minutiæ and give himself over to general effects: to view this marvelous feathered population as in itself a unit; to stand back a little way, as it were, and, in defiance of the rules laid down for the specialist’s guidance, to look upon nature with an eye more comprehensive than searching. This, indeed, is the only thing to do if he be pressed for time; for to learn half the details of the ornithology of the flooded lands would require years of study.

As for me, if to follow such a course be heretical, I am not ashamed of having erred in this fashion, for I think that, even for the specialist, there are things more desirable than learning. It is better to have wondered at the grand chorus of the birds than to have catalogued impassively the singer of each song; better to have seen in a single hour the flaming gold of a hundred prothonotary warblers than to have filled five pages of a notebook with dry items about the feeding habits of one of them; better to have been moved by the mysterious process that has brought into being this swarming joyous life to take the place of ruin and decay, than to know the name of every species inhabiting the lagoon.

Yet the rambler who is all impressionist is recreant to his avocation; and aside from the sheer abundance of it, there are points, as the saying is, about this bird-population that lend an added charm to a day spent on these quiet waters — details, minutiæ, if you will, that mean much to the happiness of the student of birds, and that cannot escape his attention. No matter how numerous or how beautiful its feathered folk, the place would be far less interesting if all these birds were of common everyday sorts to be found in the bushes by the roadside or in any grove.

I have not rediscovered the lost Cuvier’s kinglet on the lagoon, and indeed I have seen there but one species that is very rare in this part of the world, — the blue grosbeak; yet, among the denizens of the flooded woods, there are some that would be notable in any company; and I never visit the spot without meeting birds of certain kinds that for one reason or another are of more than ordinary interest to the student of avian life. For instance, there is Anhinga anhinga, a strange creature indeed, and favored with a Latin name that suggests the war-cry of some barbarous tribe. Before I beheld him for the first time, perching on one of the dead pines of the ruined forest, Anhinga the snakebird was to me a sort of halfmythical thing, — like the dodo and the great auk and the mighty dinornis,

— to be read about in books but never t o be seen in the flesh. I know him now, and I think he must know me — for he has watched me often enough with those keen little eyes of his; and, although, with more familiar acquaintance, he is no longer wrapped in a veil of mystery, the weirdness of him remains.

‘I doubt not,’ wrote William Bartram, in that quaint volume wherein a century or more ago men read about the wonders of the savage and unexplored South, ‘I doubt not but if this bird had been an inhabitant of the Tiber in Ovid’s days, it would have furnished him with a subject for some beautiful and entertaining metamorphoses.’ Possibly so, for Anhinga is sufficiently fantastic-looking to do credit to the wildest flights of fancy; yet, on the whole, things are well enough as they are: Father Tiber with his legends and his great city on her seven hills; the lagoon with its strange swampcreatures, its teeming waters, and its tumult of song. And if a Roman poet was deprived of one source of inspiration for his muse, nature, nevertheless, knew what she was about.

Here, too, are to be found the least bittern, the uncanniest bird in America, and his bigger kinsman who croaks harshly in answer to the alligators and bullfrogs on clear spring nights; and herons of five kinds, from the little green ‘skeow’ to the milk-white egret and the stately great blue, whom the darkies, noting his leanness of build, called ‘ Po’ Jo.’ Purple and Florida gallinules abound, and weave many nests in the rushes along the shores and on the floating islands; and in the autumn and winter, hundreds of coots cruise in noisy squadrons hereand there in the open reaches, or march in regiments back and forth over the plant-carpet that spreads across the water. Some fateful day I shall find a coot’s nest hereabouts, for I have seen the bird in summer though it is not supposed to breed in this state; and some day, I am half-persuaded, I shall have the great good fortune to meet the ivory-billed woodpecker himself. Why not? Improbabilities cannot dismay the hopeful rambler; nor is it sufficient that some twelve years have passed since this noble bird was last observed in South Carolina. All through this low country, in times gone by, the cypress swamps knew his clarion voice; and honest Alexander Wilson, rising to unwonted heights of eloquence, has recorded that, ’in these almost inaccessible recesses, amid ruinous piles of impending timber, his trumpet-like note and loud strokes resound through the solitary, savage wilds, of which he seems the sole lord and inhabitant.’ It may yet happen that the king will come back to his kingdom. There are Welchmen, it is said, who will not be surprised when Arthur and Excalibur return from Avalon.

Meanwhile a successor not altogether unworthy rules in these fastnesses over the feathered hewers of wood. One accustomed only to the commoner species of the race of Picus remembers ever afterward the day on which he saw his first pileated woodpecker, and finds it no easy matter to believe that the vanished ivory-bill was even bigger than this scarlet-crested giant whose loud laughter reëchoes among the dead pines. Here in some sapless trunk of the flooded forest, Old Kate, as the darkies, with a fine disregard for trivialities, call both male and female, chisels a great hole in which she lays her eggs. Summer ducks, swimming about on shady waters far below, must look up with approval at the winged carpenters working noisily above them; for the summer duck also lays her eggs in the holes and hollows of trees, and having no tools with which to drill out a home, must find one ready-made. She will not rob Old Kate of her cozy domicile; but next spring, when the latter, who is far too fastidious to use the same hole twice, excavates another cavity, perhaps in the same dead tree, the demure lady-duck, infringing on no one’s rights, will take possession of the vacant dwelling-place, before some sparrow-hawk, also on the lookout for a house, forestalls her.

Perhaps it is partly due to the presence of pileated woodpeckers, who can be relied upon to furnish safe nestingholes well suited to a summer duck’s needs, that the latter species is so abundant on the lagoon; for nature is full of such instances of interdependence among her children. Be that as it may, the high thin note of Aix sponsa’s whistling wings is here a familiar sound, though the bird is now very rare over the greater part of its original range, and, if the books are to be relied upon, is already in danger of extinction. Here it is holding its own, beset by many perils. In season and out of season, in spring as in autumn, the Negro gunner is ever on the alert. He will shoot a female duck in May with her little ones swimming behind her, and afterwards his conscience will trouble him no more than does that of the alligator who also knows no law.

I have seen no prettier sight than a brood of tiny ducklings paddling behind their mother in some sunsplashed, willow-bordered opening in the flooded woods; nor met with a more mysterious occurrence than the sudden and complete disappearance of every down-covered infant as my punt shot into view from behind the fringe of bushes. In an instant the waters are empty, save for the mother fifty feet away, crying piteously and splashing half-helpless with a broken wing. The ruse is an old one. Perhaps she learned it from Madam Bobwhite, who also loves her children; but Bobwhite youngsters, though good at the game of vanishing, are mere clumsy bunglers when compared with baby ducks.

Yet, though I know, because I have seen it demonstrated, the ability of the latter to efface themselves utterly and at a moment’s notice, I find it hard to understand how in the long run they survive the ever-imminent dangers of their infancy.

At any moment the yawning jaws of an alligator may rise suddenly from below. Tropidonotus, the water-snake,

— an extraordinarily voracious fellow,

— and Ancistrodon, the deadly cottonmouth mocassin, are always eager for juicy duckling flesh; while giant glassy-eyed bullfrogs, whose voices boom deeply like the beating of bass drums, and whose appetites crave everything from a water-bug to a halfgrown catfish, wait in ambush amid the green aquatic growths. Yet, in spite of all these and many other ogres, the mother, by craft and love, brings some of her children through. One of them was snapped up yesterday, and two perhaps will go to-morrow; but the little wings of the others are growing stronger hour by hour, and soon a time will come when the two or three or four or five that remain will adventure upward into the air. None of them will live long enough to die at last of old age; but some at least will elude the dusky hunters for a season and hide their buffcolored treasures in the dead hearts of the pines.

I have read, in books of equatorial travel, of wonderful swamps and bayous so filled with birds of brilliant plumage as almost to dazzle the eye, of wild places so populous with living things that the clamor of them never ceased for an instant. At the time, I confess, I took such stories with a grain of salt; but when once I had seen the lagoon in the spring, I was ready to believe. Each April that wonderful avifauna of the tropics overflows northward, spreading across half a continent; and I hope that each April I may be so fortunate as to spend at least one day of that month of months on the lagoon — to see again the flashing colors of hundreds of fragile warblers, the fantailed snakebirds soaring high, their slender necks outstretched, the wary greves, the tall deliberate herons, the vultures far up in the sky, the long-winged ospreys poised above the waters; to hear old Kate’s bursts of laughter ring out above the varied notes of scores of her smaller kindred, the querulous call of the summer duck to her mate, the cachinnations of the loud-mouthed gallinules, the unending chatter of the garrulous grackle clan, the drowsy songs of gorgeous nonpareils, the glad pæans of martial orchard orioles, the far-off warning of a great horned owl, the screams of kingbirds and the shouts of crested flycatchers, the flute-like tones of graceful martins, the mingled strains of cardinal, mockingbird, wren, and redwing, and the wild love-language of circling red-shouldered hawks. The sum of all these is but a part of such a chorus as is worth any man’s time to hear. What a gallant company they are,—how beautiful and how careless! For them there is no thought of the morrow, no fearful peering into the future, no foreboding of final death.

while they (to make free with another’s phrases) living i’ the sun, seeking the food they eat, and pleased with what they get, neither mourn what has been nor dread what is to be.

Out of their mouths Pan speaks a joyful message — Pan, the great god of nature, immortal as nature’s self. To the music of their voices he preaches in lyric numbers a great and moving sermon for mankind. These, he tells us, are in love with life. These, with no heaven before them, are yet the happy ones of the earth.