WAYS OF WOOD FOLK
BY
WILLIAM J. LONG
BOSTON, U.S.A.
GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
The Athenæum Press
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1899
BY WILLIAM J. LONG
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To Plato, the owl, who looks
over my shoulder as I write, and
who knows all about the woods.
PREFACE.
"All crows are alike," said a wise man, speaking ofpoliticians. That is quite true—in the dark. Bydaylight, however, there is as much difference, within andwithout, in the first two crows one meets as in the first twomen or women. I asked a little child once, who was telling meall about her chicken, how she knew her chicken from twentyothers just like him in the flock. "How do I know mychicken? I know him by his little face," she said. Andsure enough, the face, when you looked at it closely, wasdifferent from all other faces.
This is undoubtedly true of all birds and all animals. Theyrecognize each other instantly amid multitudes of their kind;and one who watches them patiently sees quite as many oddways and individualities among Wood Folk as among otherpeople. No matter, therefore, how well you know the habitsof crows or the habits of caribou in general, watch the first onethat crosses your path as if he were an entire stranger; openeyes to see and heart to interpret, and you will surely findsome new thing, some curious unrecorded way, to give delightto your tramp and bring you home with a new interest.
This individuality of the wild creatures will account, perhaps,for many of these Ways, which can seem no morecurious or startling to the reader than to the writer when hefirst discovered them. They are, almost entirely, the recordsof personal observation in the woods and fields. Occasionally,when I know my hunter or woodsman well, I have taken histestimony, but never without weighing it carefully, and provingit whenever possible by watching the animal in questionfor days or weeks till I found for myself that it was all true.
The sketches are taken almost at random from old note-booksand summer journals. About them gather a host ofassociations, of living-over-agains, that have made it a delightto write them; associations of the winter woods, of appleblossoms and nest-building, of New England uplands andwilderness rivers, of camps and canoes, of snowshoes andtrout rods, of sunrise on the hills, when one climbed for theeagle's nest, and twilight on the yellow wind-swept beaches,where the surf sobbed far away, and wings twanged like reedsin the wind swooping down to decoys,—all thronging aboutone, eager to be remembered if not recorded. Among them,most eager, most intense, most frequent of all associations,there is a boy with nerves all a-tingle at the vast sweetmystery that rustled in every wood, following the call of thewinds and the birds, or wandering alone where the spirit movedhim,