The Auguries of Phudd

IN this remote up-state region where I live, and especially in this secluded dale that lies at the foot of the hill known to local historians by the thunderous name of Phudd, the inhabitants are weather prophets. The farmer from whom we get our milk and eggs and broilers can always and unhesitantly tell me, when I appear with my milk pail at 7.30, what kind of weather is to be expected during the day. The old Dutch lady who is our neighbor a mile to the south, and who contributes the big-leaved bitter lettuces for our salads, is prepared at any time to let fall oracular and entirely complacent pronouncements concerning the likelihood of rain. Even the occasional road mender who comes to tinker hopelessly but genially with the surface of our R.F.D. route can furnish prophecies replete with assurance.

The impressive feature of this soothsaying is the extraordinary accuracy of its rustic practitioners. I remember that when we lived on Cape Cod we were perpetually amused to hear the solemn and always ready prognostications of the ancient mariners who were our neighbors, and to note how almost unexceptionally the prophets proved to be entirely mistaken. But there, of course, the signs and omens upon which our informants relied were to some degree scientific. It was upon such sound phenomena as wind direction and tide height and ‘the look of the glass’ that these fishermen made their notably erroneous calculations. Here, in the countryside of Phudd, our auguries are simpler. They are such as would have delighted the late Charles Fort, that worrier of scientists who was so fervently championed by Theodore Dreiser, and they derive — all of them — from the simplest aspects of elemental earth. Phudd Prophets have none of that complex paraphernalia by which metropolitan weather bureaus are enabled to send out their predictions, but this lack, instead of weakening, rather enhances the Delphic assurance with which the prophets speak. Our friends here — these sturdy and earthrooted Dutchmen whom nothing less than a natural cataclysm can move from the farms on which they were born — these friends of ours mistrust the mechanical divinations of city prophets, even as they mistrust electricity and ice boxes. To the weather omens furnished by cogs and chemicals and retorts and barometers they prefer the evidence of such venerable signs as, for example, frogs.

At noon of one day about two weeks ago there was no cloud in the sky. A warm sun lay across the pastures, and a fresh breeze riffled treetops on the wooded hills. Our morning newspaper predicted a two-day period of unmitigated fair weather, and I, with that long-bred respect for great city institutions which it is not easy to lose, was willing to accept this nuncio devoutly. I was sitting on the bank of our small creek, enjoying the willow shade and the assurance of good weather, when our neighbor, en route to drive his cows to fresh pasture, halted close beside me and enunciated the thunderous and oracular monosyllable: ‘Rain!’ I asked him, of course, the reason for this gloomy prediction, adding that in so sunny and cloudless a day I could discern no dismal portents. My neighbor extended a bony forefinger, and, following its direction, I saw three bullfrogs — big grandfather bullfrogs, grave and immobile and unblinking — squatting in a solemn row on the opposite bank. One bullfrog, it then developed, might be observed at any time without misgiving; two bullfrogs might forebode no ill; but when three bullfrogs arrayed themselves thus with military precision in a neat row, a deluge was definitely on the way.

Basis in scientific fact? None. But it remains to be recorded as actuality that within an hour after these three portentous frogs had thus displayed themselves to me in their stately ominous array heavy clouds came sailing over the hemlock-green top of Phudd Mountain and our parched countryside was drenched by the heaviest rain in a month.

Not all the auguries and portents which our Phudd soothsayers so dearly love and venerate are quite as piquant as this Omen of the Trinity of Frogs, but all have a kind of profound classical quality, as though deriving from some lost mythology and forgotten earth lore. This quality resides even in that commonest of local performances, the divination of approaching rain by means of the Portent of the Genuflecting Kine. (‘Kneeling cows’ is, of course, the phrase by which it is described, but it seems to me that so ancient and earthy and solemn a process deserves the dignity of a vocabulary more antique and stately.)

When a herd of cows is pasturing, it will be observed as a rule that all of them are standing, or else that certain ones are standing while others are lying down. Either of these appearances is entirely normal for a herd to present, and is fraught with no solemn significance of impending elemental change. But now and again — and it is a spectacle seldom noted with any conscious awareness save by our rural friends who know its necromantic implications!— now and again all the cows in a herd, as though affected simultaneously by some subtle cosmic influence, will abruptly and almost in unison sink upon their knees in the green and clovery grass. Now this occurrence, to the weather prophets of Phudd, is an omen of even greater solemnity than the heralding of the frogs, and presages invariably the wildest kind of weather — generally a lurid and torrential thunderstorm.

Here, it seems to me, is unmistakably the flavor of an old mythology, as though this mass kneeling of the cattle were a kind of homage to the god of the impending storm, a kind of unified bovine obeisance to the thunderous threatenings of an angered Jove. It was by means of this Portent of the Genuflecting Kine that one of our rural sorcerers (a stolid Dutch pig farmer who lives a mile down the lane) was able to warn us a few weeks ago of the most furious electrical bombardment of the season — a ferocious Jovian onslaught that split trees, uprooted rocks, and killed a brown mare belonging to one of our neighbors who had depended upon the weather forecast in his paper and had neglected to heed the warning bewitchment of his cows.

I presume that in the reading of omens it is as elsewhere, the exception which proves the rule, and that would account for the recent signal failure of the Token of the Tree Toads. This augury is a favorite of our friends, and it is one of the most deeprooted tenets of their soothsayer’s creed that the long-continued piping and crying of tree toads infallibly justifies the inference of foul weather ahead. For a week now the profound darkness of our nocturnal countryside has been continuously pierced with the most strident and even frantic outcries of little toads, propitiating, entreating a Jupiter Pluvius who must have a heart of stone. Night after night the small shrill wailings and pipings continue in an agonized chorus, but still the arch of the sky has no cloud in it and our meadow grows browner day by day. I have spoken to the Prophets of Phudd about this, but they are all of them, as befits practitioners of so ancient a mystic art, enigmatic.

But only a moment ago, as I sat here on a rock writing this complaint about the tree toads, I heard a little breeze come rustling down the slope of Phudd Hill, and, looking up, I saw that the green leaves of the maple trees were unmistakably turning over and exhibiting their silvery nether sides uppermost. This is as sure a presage of rain as exists in the whole haruspical catalogue of the whole Phudd Hill countryside! This turning and fluttering of the maple leaves, as though the tree reached out upturned and quivering supplicatory hands to the gods of the rain, cannot be misread.

In a little while, when the red sun has gone down behind the high hemlocks of Phudd Hill, and the cool evening smell of earth comes in our windows, we shall hear the ‘rain hollering’ of the robins, the omen which, as final warning, precedes the storm. And then will come the rain — and the Prophets of Phudd will be able to shake their heads and record another day when the ‘newspaper feller’ was mistaken. Yes, the tree toads were right. A little forehanded, possibly; that is all.