Beyond Your Doorstep Read online

  When I went inside, half a dozen squirrels scurried, glared at me, scolded, then whisked through the knotholes and raced and thumped on the roof, still chattering angrily at my intrusion. I eventually cleaned out the place and claimed it as my own for a carpenter shop, hoping to live at peace with the squirrels. But it has been an uncertain peace, and periodically I think I should evict them. They knock paint cans from the shelves, scatter my sandpaper, gnaw paintbrushes and electric cords. And they still yell at me. I am the invader, not they. But even if I could drive them out—and, short of killing every one of them, I doubt that I could—I doubt that I would. A red squirrel in a house attic is a noisy, destructive nuisance, and a whole family of them is intolerable. But out in the old chicken house they are interesting neighbors, temperamental and unpredictable as they are. I like to have them around.

  The red squirrels had rid the chicken house of almost all other residents except spiders and mud-dauber wasps. Up to now the little red fellows have not achieved a foothold in any of the other outbuildings, though now and then I see one among the piles of firewood in the woodshed. But for some reason they have never set up housekeeping there.

  The woodshed has a population of mice, most of them white-foot and deer mice—the two are not easy to tell apart without examining them in the hand. The mouse population there seems to rise and fall in direct relation to the presence or absence of rats, which move in from time to time. When the rats move in, the mice move out. Then I poison the rats and the mice come back. I prefer to have the field mice. The rats have their stronghold in the big barn, in the hay and straw that is stored there each year. I keep them in check with a selective poison in covered containers where other animals cannot get at it. Those ugly, destructive Norway rats, common all over the world, deserve no quarter.

  The barn has a huge, cathedral-like loft where the hay and straw are stored. That loft is also the home for a tribe of gray squirrels. The tribe sometimes numbers as many as fifteen, sometimes drops to only four or five. It probably consists of only one family, and I suspect that as soon as the season’s new litter begins to mature the older squirrels move out into the woodland just across the home pasture. The squirrels live on the corn that is stored in the corn crib near the barn. I see them there every day in the Winter, plucking the yellow kernels from the fat ears jammed against the wire mesh. Somehow they occasionally steal a whole ear, and now and then one brings an ear and climbs with it to a high crotch in the giant Norway spruce just outside my study window. There he sits and shells the corn, deftly eats the germ from each kernel, and dribbles the rest of it onto the ground beneath.

  The squirrels nest on a high beam in the barn loft, a nest that looks like half a bushel of trash. I have never climbed up there to examine it, but I know that gray squirrels are no better housekeepers than their small red cousins. Like the red squirrels in the chicken house, the gray squirrels in the barn have an assortment of knotholes, gnawed to proper dimensions, through which they come and go. If they are disturbed at the corn crib they dash to the barn, swarm up its weathered old gray boards with uncanny skill, and swing through a knothole with a beautiful, arrogant flip of the tail. In Winter I marvel at their sure-footed agility on the frosty shingles of the barn’s high roof, and in early Spring I watch their mating-time battles and pursuits over those dizzy heights. Now and then there are intertribal fights between the reds and grays, but not often. I have heard that in such fights the males sometimes castrate each other, but I have never seen it done. I have seen a red squirrel lose a part of his tail in a battle with a gray.

  I am still amazed at the ease and skill with which all squirrels, and especially the grays, race through the big sugar maples in front of the house. I have seen one leap ten feet from limb to limb, and only once did I see one fall more than a few feet. Usually, if one falls, it catches itself on a limb below. But I saw one miss three limbs, one beneath another, and fall forty feet. It twisted in mid-air, catlike, but failed to right itself and struck a rock. It was the only squirrel I every saw killed that way; but it was only half-grown, probably not yet fully skilled. Last Winter I saw a full-grown gray leap from a limb twenty feet to a snowbank covered with ice thick enough to support my dog. It broke the crust in the fall, but scrambled to its feet and dashed away, apparently quite unhurt.

  For some reason, the barn has never housed barn swallows. There were no swallow nests there when we came and there have been none since. The only explanation I have is that barn swallows prefer to nest where people come and go, as in my garage, though they can be annoyingly truculent when there are chicks in the nest. One year a pair of pigeons came and nested on a high beam in the barn loft. I hoped they would stay, for I like the sound of their cooing, the soft whistle of their graceful flight. I suspect that the gray squirrels drove them out. They never succeeded in raising one squab, and within a few months they left and never came back. I miss them. But the barn seems to have achieved its own balance of population, and pigeons clearly are not included in it.

  From time to time there have been transient visitors in the barn, which is full of cracks and wide gaps around the big doors to the loft. One day I found a half-grown raccoon in there. Instead of bolting outdoors when it saw me, it fled to the distant recesses of the hay. I saw it there several times over the next few weeks; then it disappeared, probably gone back to the woods. Once I met a skunk there. It was as surprised as I was, and immediately assumed a posture of defense. I backed away and left it, and never saw it in the barn again. It probably was hunting mice or crickets. Or perhaps it was the skunk that had a den under the little brooder house when we came here. Two months after we moved in I saw it, sunning itself beside a hole under the foundation. It saw me too, and hurried indoors. But it evidently didn’t like close neighbors, for it was gone before the first snow flew. I bade it Godspeed.

  Now and then we have a cat at the barn. We keep no cats of our own, out of consideration for the birds. But there is a big black tom who belongs to a neighbor a mile away and who comes here and spends a few days at the barn every few months. He probably finds good hunting there, but after a few days he ends his visit and goes back home.

  Two years ago a big white and tan cat appeared at the barn, a complete stranger and wild as a fox. Several times I saw it sunning itself on a window ledge out there, but if I appeared it took off like a streak. Through the binocular I could see that it was sleek and beautiful and apparently well fed. It stayed two weeks and then was gone. A few days after it left the barn I saw it skulking in the woods far up on the mountainside, a feral cat on the hunt. It probably was a kitten abandoned somewhere in the area by Summer vacationers. Such abandoned kittens usually are killed by other animals or die of starvation, but this one must have been of tougher fiber. It was too wild to tolerate human company, though, and it didn’t return to my barn. I have never seen it since.

  I took my casual census of the wild life in the outbuildings in the first few months we lived here. It was the typical population of such a country place as this. A rural house and outbuildings that have stood vacant for some time would have a different assortment, certainly a different balance, since man, a dominant factor in any such balance, has been absent. One broken window in a vacant house, for instance, will provide entry for all kinds of creatures, birds and squirrels especially. And insects, though insects need no broken windows to get inside; they find cracks and crannies, and their numbers usually vary with the weather, the number of insect predators such as bats and birds, and the time they have been free of human control.

  Any country house that is structurally sound can be reclaimed by human inhabitants even if it has been unoccupied for several years. Once people move in and take charge, most of the wild creatures move out with little persuasion. They prefer their own company. Squirrels may be hard to dislodge, and so may bats. Some insects are hard to dislodge. But modern insecticides are thoroughly effective, and though I refuse to use them outdoors except in extreme cases because they kill
birds and small animals, I have no compunctions against using them to rid a house of flies, wasps, ants, and other household pests. Bats, squirrels, and birds usually can be evicted and kept out by replacing broken windowpanes and closing other likely places of entry. Rats and mice can be poisoned. The house, after all, is my dwelling place, and I insist on keeping it mine.

  Strange things can happen, amazing things, though, in an empty or vacant house. An acquaintance of mine left his country house for a two-months trip and came back to find a porcupine in the attic. How it got there, he still doesn’t know. And I know of a young couple who went to the Summer cottage of a friend for their honeymoon. The cottage was in the woods. They left the door open one day when they went for a walk and returned to find a skunk in the kitchen. If they had retreated down the path and waited half an hour the skunk would have left the house and gone about its business. But the bridegroom was impetuous. He took down the .22 rifle from over the mantel in the living room and shot the skunk right there in the kitchen. That ended their woodland cottage honeymoon, since the skunk, as skunks often do, used its worst weapon in its dying convulsions.

  Late Summer is not the best time to learn what a country dooryard and garden has in the way of trees, shrubs, and plants. But it is not the worst time, either; Midwinter is the worst time.

  When we came here, all the Spring-flowering bulbs had bloomed and withered. The other early flowers had gone to seed or were hidden by later growth. The previous owners said they had planted many bulbs, squills, grape hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, lilies, that sort of flowers; but they were vague, as most people are, about where those bulbs were. “Over there,” they said, “and over there somewhere,” with a vague wave of the hand. We had to wait till the next April to find most of them, though I recognized tufts of grape-hyacinth leaves, like limp grass clumps, and I saw a few stiff stems of lilies through with blooming.

  The common flowering plants in most country gardens were easily recognized. There were several clumps of phlox, in bud and showing color. There were hollyhocks, with weathering blooms on their tall stalks. There were day lilies and chrysanthemums. There was a bed of iris, the broad-bladed kind that probably was either the common purple or the old-fashioned red-and-yellow variety. (It turned out that both colors were there.) Flanking the front walk were twin rows of peonies in need of dividing. Eventually I moved them to the back of the flower garden, for background foliage and to clear the lawn for easier mowing.

  There were lilacs, including one big clump that must have been here fifty years, it was so huge. There was a big bridal-wreath bush, typical of the country; its blossoms were long gone and now it was a huge fountain of slender stems and fine green leaves. There were two weigelas and a big clump of forsythia. Flanking the front steps were big syringa bushes in need of pruning, and there was foundation planting of yew, barberry, euonymus, and azalea.

  In the edge of the flower garden was a pear tree, and beneath it was a big bed of lilies of the valley. In most country gardens the lilies of the valley will be beneath a tree or in a cool spot beside a wall or foundation. Close beside the house was the towering Norway spruce, a heroic tree that I later triangulated and found to be a hundred feet tall. Back of the house were a dozen apple trees, old trees that an orchardist would have pruned heavily. I have pruned them only casually and I have never sprayed them. They are old trees that long ago established their own balance with the natural hazards of apple trees in this area. Besides, I do not grow apples to sell. Within my plan, their primary function is to provide a magnificent display of blossoms in May, make cool shade all Summer, give me what few apples I want, and drop windfalls for wild creatures that eat windfalls. They shelter many birds, and their hollows make nesting places for bluebirds and downy woodpeckers. One year a pair of wood ducks nested in one of them. I can think of no better way to let an old apple tree make the best of its own frailties.

  Someone had planted a weeping willow near the watering trough in the barnyard. When we came here it was four inches through at the butt and twenty feet high. Today it is fifty feet high and has a trunk thick as my own body. It makes a litter of leaves and dead withes every Winter which I clean up without too much complaint, because each Spring it is an amber fountain of livening branch and leaf and blossom, and all Summer long it is a whispering tower of green beauty. Orioles and robins love its swaying crown.

  At one end of the big barn was an elderberry bush ten feet tall, twelve feet around. In May that bush is white with bloom and in late August it bows its head with purple fruit, some of which goes onto our pantry shelves in jelly glasses, the rest of which makes hungry birds happy. Not far from the elderberry bush was a sapling sugar maple fifteen feet high. I wondered if it should be left there. Then in late September it turned gold and orange and I knew I could never cut it down. Now it stands forty feet high and every Autumn it is magnificent.

  Just across the road from the house was a row of big sugar maples, all of equal age, no doubt planted there long ago by a provident countryman. There must have been nine trees in that row to begin with, but one of them seems to have died early. For some strange reason, it was replaced by a popple, as poplars are called in this area—this one actually is a cottonwood. Today that tree stands head-and-shoulders above the maples, a giant of a tree close to five feet through at the butt. Its limbs are so brittle that every Winter storm brings down a few of them. It is untidy in Spring when it sheds long brown-red catkins, and in June when its seeds ripen it spills clouds of cottony fluff to every breeze, fluff that frosts the screens on that side of the house for several weeks. In terms of human economy, that tree is probably worthless. I wouldn’t part with it for anything.

  The sugar maples were tapped for years by the farmers who lived here and made their own syrup and sugar. I tapped them myself a few times and boiled down the sap in a washtub over a fireplace improvised in the backyard. Everyone who owns sugar maples and has room to do it should make syrup at least once, not only for the satisfaction of such accomplishment but to understand why maple syrup costs what it does in the market. I found that it takes at least a cord of wood to boil down the forty gallons of sap needed to make one gallon of syrup. A cord of wood and a week of fire-tending.

  I cherish those maples for a variety of reasons of no commercial consequence. The Baltimore orioles that nest in them make Summer mornings rich with color and song. A swarm of wild bees is resident in one of them and probably has forty or fifty pounds of well-tanged honey there right now. I’ll never know, for they can live there safe from my pilfering as long as they choose. Each Spring those maples are a glory of golden blossom, and every October they turn gold that is like no other color in the spectrum of Autumn. They shimmer and glow in the sunlight, and on a dark day they are like sunshine itself. Then the leaves come down and I am knee-deep in crisp gold as I stand beneath them and look up at November through their sky-reaching gray branches.

  Beyond the road and maples is the river, with its own movement and its own life. Lakesides have their charm and personality, but after living with this river for ten years I know that my personal choice is flowing water. A river comes from somewhere, flows past my wondering eyes, and goes on to some other place. It has movement, change, and there is a sense of both time and eternity in it. The river tells me that so long as there are heights and lowlands on earth, water will continue to flow and life will persist. A river, flowing water, not only has its own life—it is life. I am prejudiced about rivers, and I shall have more to say about them.

  Back of the house is the pastureland, the old flood plain of the river. Beyond the pastureland the mountain rises sharply. Current maps call this eminence Tom’s Hill, but maps of two generations ago named it Tom’s Mountain. It is a remnant of one of the older mountain chains of America and was cut down to its present size by wind and rain and frost and finally by the massive glaciers of the Ice Age. I hold to the old name, granting it mountain status and honoring the granite stubbornness with which it has sto
od up to the eons.

  On that mountainside are pine woods and hemlock and there are stands of white pine and white and gray birch and poplar and ash. There are clumps of red oaks and white oaks, and there is a scattering of hickories. Once there were chestnut trees, and from some of the big old stumps still spring hopeful sprouts that sometimes grow as thick as my wrist before the deadly blight withers and kills them. In October those sprouts are like tongues of golden fire, telling me what the groves of chestnuts must have looked like in their Autumn glory. But the chestnut trees were gone before I came here.

  On the mountainside are old stone walls, laid up by a generation of countrymen who farmed long-abandoned fields up there with plodding ox teams. There are even remnants of an old orchard high on the mountainside, now forgotten by all except the grouse and the deer. And there are springs from which brooks tumble down the mountain and flow across the pastureland to the river.

  Not on my own land but only a mile down the valley is a small patch of bogland, a minor swamp created when the river changed its course several centuries ago. A small brook empties into it, and another brook of slight consequence flows out of it and down to the river’s present channel. The bog itself is a few acres of ooze and muck and brush and cattails, red-wing blackbirds and muskrats and water snakes. A wonderful place, as are all boglands—a reminder that all life as we know it began in the wetlands of this earth.