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THE LAY OF THE LAND

by

DALLAS LORE SHARP

Author of “Wild Life Near Home” and
“Roof and Meadow”

With Drawings by Elizabeth Myers Snagg







[Illustration: LOGO]

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company

The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908

Copyright 1908 by Dallas Lore Sharp
All Rights Reserved

Published September 1908




             To the Memory of my Friend
            William Frank Morrison, M. D.




Contents

     I. The Muskrats are Building            1

    II. Christmas in the Woods              19

   III. A Cure for Winter                   35

    IV. The Nature-Student                  56

     V. Chickadee                           74

    VI. The Missing Tooth                   89

   VII. The Sign of the Shad-bush          105

  VIII. The Nature Movement                114

    IX. June                               127

     X. A Broken Feather                   137

    XI. High Noon                          148

   XII. The Palace in the Pig-pen          161

  XIII. An Account with Nature             175

   XIV. The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp      189

    XV. The Lay of the Land                200




[Illustration]

I

The Muskrats are Building


WE have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water is standing over
the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch, this wet, sedgy land in
the cold twilight, drearier than any part of the woods or the upland
pastures. They are empty, but the meadow is flat and wet, naked and all
unsheltered. And a November night is falling.

The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon
swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly over.
I button the heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down to the
river and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it meets the
main ditch at the sharp turn toward the swamp. Here at the bend, behind
a clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait.

I am not mad, nor melancholy; I am not after copy. Nothing is the
matter with me. I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats
building, for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but
a half-finished muskrat house.

The moon climbs higher. The water on the meadow shivers in the light.
The wind bites through my heavy coat and sends me back, but not until
I have seen one, two, three little figures scaling the walls of the
house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by the cold,
but not until I know that here in the desolate meadow is being rounded
off a lodge, thick-walled and warm, and proof against the longest,
bitterest of winters.

This is near the end of November. My wood is in the cellar; I am about
ready to put on the double windows and storm doors; and the muskrats’
house is all but finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the
muskrats even better prepared than I, for theirs is an adequate house,
planned perfectly.

Throughout the summer they had no house, only their tunnels into the
sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and their beds
under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps. All these
months the water had been low in the ditch, and the beds among the
tussocks had been safe and dry enough.

Now the autumnal rains have filled river and ditch, flooded the
tunnels, and crept up into the beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat
will creep out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in. What shall he
do for a house? He does not want to leave his meadow. The only thing
to do is to build,—move from under the tussock, out upon the top, and
here, in the deep, wiry grass, make a new bed, high and dry above the
rising water, and close the new bed in with walls that circle and dome
and defy the winter.

Such a house will require a great deal of work to build. Why not
combine, make it big enough to hold half a dozen, save labor and
warmth, and, withal, live sociably together? So they left, each one
his bed, and joining efforts, started, about the middle of October, to
build this winter house.

Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have been rising, although
for several nights at a time there would be no apparent progress with
the work. The builders were in no hurry, it seems; the cold was
far off; but it is coming, and to-night it feels near and keen. And
to-night there is no loafing about the lodge.

When this house is done, then the rains may descend, and the floods
come, but it will not fall. It is built upon a tussock; and a tussock,
you will know, who have ever grubbed at one, has hold on the bottom of
creation. The winter may descend, and the boys, and foxes, come,—and
they will come, but not before the walls are frozen,—yet the house
stands. It is boy-proof, almost; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and
fox-proof. Many a time I have hacked at its walls with my axe when
fishing through the ice, but I never got in. I have often seen, too,
where the fox has gone round and round the house in the snow, and
where, at places, he has attempted to dig into the frozen mortar; but
it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and utterly impossible for his
pick and shovel.

Yet strangely enough the house sometimes fails of the very