The Country in November

NOVEMBER has a bad name among the months, and yet, in mountain regions at least, it possesses a peculiar beauty of its own. It is, above all others, the month of cloud effects. The clouds gather and disperse more easily and more quickly than at any other time. White, fleecy clouds, left over from summer, spread across the sky at one moment, and then give place to dark, gloomy wind clouds, apparently of immense depth, which seem to betoken a tornado, or at least a furious storm, but which, in turn, sweep over the mountains and leave the sky comparatively clear. November plays at winter. Her cold, blustering winds make you shiver, but your ear tips will not freeze; snow falls, but the roads will not be blocked; the mornings are apt to be cold, but not with that terrible, relentless, New England winter-cold which appalls all but the young and vigorous.

Moreover, this March-like month has at times an entirely different aspect, for November, at least equally with October, can lay claim to the credit of Indian Summer. On October 31, 1850, Thoreau wrote in his diary: “This has been the most perfect afternoon of the year. The air quite warm enough, perfectly still and dry and clear, and not a cloud in the sky. Scarcely the song of a cricket is heard to disturb the stillness. Our Indian Summer, I am tempted to say, is the finest season of the year. Here has been such a day as I think Italy never sees.”

In the space of ten years Thoreau noted in his diary the following as being especially Indian Summer days: September 27, October 7, 13, 14, 31, November 1, 7, 8, 17, 23, 25.

This capricious season is a visitor, though an uncertain one, in all temperate climes. In England it is called St. Martin’s, or St. Luke’s summer. In Scotland the expression “Go-Summer” is, or was once, in use, and in Acadia, if the poet may be trusted, a much more appropriate term was employed, —

Francis Parkman in the Conspiracy of Pontiac, after an exquisite description of autumn with its brilliant coloring, goes on to say,—

“A week or two elapsed, and then succeeded that gentler season which bears among us the name of the Indian Summer; when a light haze rests upon the morning landscape, and the many-colored woods seem wrapped in the thin drapery of a veil: when the air is mild and calm as that of early June, and at evening the sun goes down amid a warm, voluptuous beauty, that may well outrival the softest tints of Italy. But through all the still and breathless afternoon, the leaves have fallen fast in the woods, like flakes of snow, and everything betokens that the last melancholy change is at hand.”¹

November seems to be particularly associated in the American mind with the aborigines, for beside the Indian Summer we have sometimes the “Squaw Winter.” The Squaw Winter begins with a light fall of show, eagerly anticipated by hunters, who are up before daylight the next morning, and are off betimes to the slopes of the mountains in expectation of tracking a deer or perchance a bear. This fall of snow is succeeded by two or three rough, windy days,and then comes a cold, still, beautiful morning. For the first time the ground is frozen hard, and horses’ hoofs ring loud and clear on the highway. Ponds are skimmed over, and the pool at the roadside, where the brook widens and the stock are watered, is bordered by thin, brittle ice which shivers like glass when the horses put a hesitating foot upon it. Every twig, every blade and stem of marsh grass are beautifully coated with frost and actually glitter in the sun. There is not a breath of wind, and though the air is cold and makes the blood tingle, there is a promise in the atmosphere of something milder, and more relaxing, — a promise which is fulfilled in the noon hours.

This is the kind of day for mountain climbing. The leaves having fallen, and frost and decay having beaten down the underbrush, it is easy to make one’s way through the woods. Thickets that were almost impervious in summer can now be threaded without discomfort. To climb the pathless mountain-side is a pleasant task in this bracing air, and when you reach the summit, and sit down in some sheltered, sunny nook to eat your lunch, you have a sense of cosiness and comfort which no other season can supply. The sun is now not an enemy, but a friend; his beams at noonday cover you up warm like a cloak; their genial heat produces a pleasant feeling of drowsiness and content. Not a twig stirs, not a sound is heard, the birds have gone southward, and though in the damp moss you can plainly discern the fresh track of a deer, he gives you no other sign of his presence. Probably there is a fox somewhere near, sunning himself upon a rock, after the manner of foxes; and, as you climbed the ledges, a hare loped easily across your path, and disappeared in the scrub pines.

These animals are strangely tame on the mountains, and never seem to be in any hurry to escape from the presence of man. Even in woods that border on a highway they may sometimes be seen skipping slowly along in a course parallel with the road, and evidently as curious about the human traveler on the highway as he is about them. In November the hare is in process of changing his coat, and his autumn clothes are different from both his summer and his winter garb. His legs are now encased in that warm, white fur with which nature supplies him in winter, so that he may be inconspicuous on the snow, but his back and shoulders are clothed in russet, — a sort of intermediate fall overcoat.

The ease of getting about in the woods after the leaves have gone, and before the snow has arrived, makes November the favorite month for “running lines” by surveyors, and for inspecting the forest growth. The village “trader,” who, by virtue of his numerous mortgages, would become owner of all the land in the town, if he could only live long enough, takes a day off for a trip through the “ Sinnamon neighborhood.” He is anxious to see if his birch trees are big enough for the bobbin or the spool mill, and to calculate the cords of spruce and “popple” that he can sell to the pulp mills, whose ravenous jaws are fast consuming the forests of New England.

Lumbermen from distant places come to view, and perchance to purchase, tracts of timber land, or even whole slices of a township or “plantation.”It is wise to treat such visitors with hospitality, and perhaps it is wiser yet to exercise one’s hospitably vicariously. Stillman Keene is not the least shrewd of our townsmen, and when a customer for his “second growth” appeared, he did not himself escort the customer, but turned him over to a certain ’Rastus Partridge. To this man — his debtor for some small sums — Stillman gave a few instructions as to the lay of the land, physical and otherwise, a bottle of whiskey, and a significant wink. The result was that some surprising mistakes were made in traversing the territory. About half of Stillman’s lot abounded in well-grown, hard-wood trees, but the rest was of little value, producing almost nothing but alders and scrub pine. How did it happen that those two men spent the whole afternoon in making circles through the good timber, never once going near the alders ? Acre after acre of noble, valuable trees loomed upon the astonished gaze of the lumber merchant, — there seemed to be no end of them. Returning to the village in the early evening, they found that Stillman — with what may have been ostentatious indifference — had gone to bed. But the customer was so pleased with what he had seen that he insisted on rousing Stillman up, and making a contract of purchase, then and there.

And yet this ingenious scheme does not always work; people are so suspicious in this wicked world ! There was once a certain rich, well-seasoned old gentleman, a lumberman of renown, who, after he had been brought back the second or third time to a particular belt of pine trees, sarcastically called his guide’s attention to a chalk mark on one of the trees, secretly placed there by the old gentleman himself upon their first passage through that belt. If we have a fault in our part of the country, it is that we are a little oversubtle.

Almost everybody who goes into the woods, or indeed anywhere else, in November, carries a gun. Partridges are a certainty, deer and bear are always possible, and rumors of wildcats, loups-cerviers, and Canada lynxes are sufficiently rife to thrill the blood of children and timid persons when they pass through a patch of woods after dark. A foreigner might imagine that the county was in a state of insurrection, for in almost every wagon that you meet a shotgun or a rifle is apparent. The rural mail-carrier brings back more partridges than letters; the lawyer, on his way home from court, stands up in his buggy and shoots a plump bird without disconcerting his well-trained steed; two or three shotguns may often be seen outside the door of the district schoolhouse, resting against the wall, while their youthful owners are inside, undergoing instruction in more peaceful arts. What would a city schoolmaster think if his lads of twelve and fourteen came armed to school!

Trapping, as well as hunting, is a November pursuit, especially among the boys. Muskrat skins are easily obtainable, and will sell for about twenty cents apiece. Mink are rare, and a good mink skin will fetch five dollars. It was, doubtless, the knowledge of this fact that enabled Ed Geers bravely to hold on to a mink which, with his bare hands, he once caught in a stone wall; — he held on, I say, although the ferocious little animal bit his thumb and finger to the bone. Mink are very fierce, and sometimes fight so savagely one with another, screaming with anger, that they entirely fail to observe a human witness of the combat.

Skunk skins are not to be despised, for the price ranges from fifty cents to one dollar, according to the absence of white; and the confiding way in which a skunk will walk into a box trap is really pathetic. There is one boy in the village who uses the woodshed of his father’s house as a trapping-ground for skunks, and it would require very little encouragement, given either to the boy or the skunk, to transfer the scene of their operations to the kitchen. Once trapped, the unsuspecting, brave, friendly skunk is easily carried to a brook (not, let us hope, a source of water-supply), and there drowned.

He may then be skinned, — and all without exciting any odor that could offend the most fastidious. Let not the City Reader smile! I have seen hands that held a captain’s sword in the War of the Rebellion, hands that are capable of wielding the fiddle and the bow, hands strong and skillful to break a colt or shoot a bear; — I have seen such hands employed in skinning a skunk, and doing it so neatly and deftly as to confer an artistic quality upon the humble task.

Beside hunting and trapping, there is not much to do in November except to prepare for winter; and there is a certain luxury in putting off those preparations until the last possible minute: it is like lingering on a railroad track until you hear the roar of the express coming around the curve. Procrastination is, after all, a very real pleasure, — and not always an expensive one. Some ploughing has to be done; and the house must be banked up before the snow comes. Spruce boughs are usually employed for this purpose, and they are both useful and ornamental. The snow gathers about them and over them and fills up all the interstices; and thus a covering is provided which keeps the cellar warm, and preserves the apples, potatoes, squashes, turnips, and carrots from freezing, — to say nothing of the cider barrel. Some æsthetic persons in our village add to the spruce boughs small fir trees which, when the snow becomes deep enough, they plant in a semicircle on the north and west sides of the house, as a wind barrier. Very grateful to the eye is the rich green of the fir contrasted with the spotless white of the snow, and a house thus protected has a comfortable appearance of warmth and seclusion.

In fact the whole population go into winter quarters during this month, for commonly it is not until the first, or perhaps even the second week in November that the colts, the cattle, and the sheep are “taken up,” as we say, which means brought down from their mountain pastures to the home farm. Some penurious farmers leave their stock at pasture so late in the season that they suffer much from cold and hunger; and there is a true story of a colt which froze to death in an early snowstorm. Strangely enough, the body was found on the very top of the mountain.

The visitor in summer observes few signs of life about the farm buildings,— some hens, an occasional cow or two; but in late November flocks and herds are scattered over the intervals, cropping the “fall feed;” colts are grazing about the house; brood-mares are sunning themselves in the barnyards. The home-coming of the stock in autumn is a picturesque event, and yet our New England poets and painters have neglected it. You are most likely to meet the little procession just at dusk, on a cold, dark day, —on one of those days when an impending storm warns the merciful farmer to get his beasts home where they can be kept dry and comfortable. First come the sheep, timidly and erratically diverging from the road, shepherded by the farmer’s dog, and by his boys; then, the stolid cattle, fat, and reasonably sleek, despite the frosty nights which they have experienced; last of all, the colts and broodmares, — some running loose, others led behind a light wagon. They also are fat, but rough, shaggy, unkempt, and wild-looking, with long, disheveled manes and tails; somewhat dejected in appearance, as if they realized that their summer holidays were over. Now is the time to harness the two and three-year-olds, and even the yearlings. The grass-fed colt is not so nervous and spirited as the hay-and-grain-fed colt, and therefore can be broken the more easily.

It is the season, too, for matching young steers, and almost every farmer’s boy has a miniature pair of oxen, which, when snow comes, he yokes to a miniature sledge, and makes believe at hauling loads of wood. Two boys often put their cattle together, thus forming a four-inhand of steers, — and a kicking, bolting bucking team it is apt to be, until experience has chastened il. This kind of thing, however, affords a healthy amusement for the boys, and results in the mutual education of boys and steers.

For the whole community November is an easy-going month, — an interval between summer and winter. Husking bees exist in reality, as well as in magazine illustrations, and red ears of corn are found as often now as they were in old times. Whist parties are not uncommon, and church “sociables” are organized for the winter. It is the season for visiting friends and relatives in adjoining towns, and for exercising a hospitality which culminates on Thanksgiving Day. Just as the landscape discloses itself when the leaves fall, so, in November, when the stress of summer and autumn work is over, the characters of the townspeople begin to reveal themselves to a sympathetic observer. In the city one may know a man well; but in the country we know not only him but his antecedents; we know the strain of blood which he inherits on his father’s side, and we know the strain which he inherits on his mother’s side. If nature handicapped him at the start, we are aware of the fact, and make allowance for it. If some erratic or even criminal trait develops in him, the chances are that we can find its counterpart in an erring aunt or crazy cousin, and a few aged persons in the village will recollect the common grandsire in whom the taint was first disclosed. Not only the antecedents but the history of our neighbor in the country is familiar to us. What he has done and suffered and gone without; what misfortunes have happened to him, whether by marriage, ill-health, or otherwise, — all these things are known, and the knowledge begets a wide and deep charity. Quarrel and gossip as we may, there is a fellow-feeling, a sympathy, among country people, which anybody who has once experienced it will never forget or be contented without.

Let the reader contemplate our blacksmith, for example. To one who casually employs him, he is simply a tall, gaunt figure whose working clothes are picturesquely patched and stained, and who has a genius for mending unmendable things. But to one who knows his ancestry, and the wild strain of blood which he inherits; to one who remembers how he once, while fox-hunting in early spring, crawled out thirty rods on thin ice in Bass Pond, at the risk of his life, to save his dog from drowning; to one who appreciates his affection for his children and his grief when anything goes amiss with them; to one who is familiar with his poverty, and with his lifelong, unfulfilled ambition to own a fast trotter; to one who has listened to the grim jests at fortune and at himself which he hammers out of red-hot horseshoes, — to such a one, the blacksmith, tramping heavily down the street with firm-set jaw and melancholy, cavernous eyes, is an epitome of the tragedy of the human race.

It is a common remark that New England character is largely the result of New England soil and climate. Now, it is one thing to assent to this remark when we hear it, or when we come across it in print, and it is quite another thing to see it illustrated in flesh and blood. Frost and snow and ice; fierce storms and balmy winds; the cold that stimulates and congeals; the warmth that relaxes; — all these things are transmitted into human character. Thus, human nature and external nature are, in a very real sense, different aspects of the same elemental forces. One may have lived long in a New England town before this truth dawns upon him, but when once grasped, it is a keen and subtle source of satisfaction. With what a human interest is the landscape invested when we realize that the same forces which moulded it have also moulded the lives and characters of the men and women about us! On the other hand, those living personages acquire a cosmic dignity and significance when we reflect that they are, in a measure at least, the human manifestation of that wild energy which nature exhibits in New England.

The humble fact — unrecorded by historians — that, until forty or fifty years ago, the great mass of New England people wore no underclothes, even in winter, speaks eloquently for the toughness and vitality of the race. It is only within thirty years or so that the average farmer has had anything warmer than a horse blanket to wrap about his legs in the sleigh. Fur coats were very rare as late as twenty-five years ago. Even now, the usual dressing and sleeping place of the younger members of the family, at least, is an unheated garret room, where the snow sifts in, and where the wintry winds are imperfectly kept out. If the housing and clothing were of a rough and hardy character, so also was the food. The bill of fare in logging camps used to consist chiefly, if not entirely, of pork, beans, soda biscuit, doughnuts, molasses, and green tea. No fresh meat, no potatoes, no milk, no sugar, and no butter appeared on the table. Instead of butter, the hardy woodchopper used a mixture which in these squeamish days one hesitates even to mention; it was composed of pork fat and molasses.

Now, however, the woodman’s table is spread with fresh meat, butter, sugar, potatoes, and good bread. He has coffee once a day, tea twice, and in many logging camps even the luxury of a cow is supplied. Wages also are satisfactory, and the consequence is that in the dispersal of young or unattached men which always takes place in November, the fall work being finished and the winter work requiring but few hands, many go into the woods. Choppers receive from twentyfive to thirty-five dollars a month, besides, of course, their board and lodging; drivers, especially skillful teamsters of oxen (who are becoming scarce), are paid even more sometimes, and the cook and cookee (the cook’s assistant) fare as well. The cold is not much felt in the sheltered woods; the work is exhilarating, and the life is of that sociable, gregarious kind which suits the American temperament. In the evening, the men sit around the stove, play cards, and tell stories.

The woods, in fact, exercise a fascination which some married men, even, cannot resist. It is a matter of wonder among us, for example, that Church Cults should leave his young and handsome wife, and be off to the woods in November. The cynics who gossip in the store while waiting for the stage to bring the mail wag their heads, and predict that such rash conduct as that of Cutts will result in his making application for a “bill” at the spring term of court. “ Bills,” in fact, are almost as common in our community as weddings, and a certain misanthropical bachelor once declared that, to save trouble, every marriage certificate hereafter issued ought to contain, on the reverse side, a blank form of an application for divorce.

It is possible, however, to combine family life with life in the forest. Last November, two young couples in our village, who had been married but a few weeks, started for the woods to spend the winter in a log cabin, the men to get out ship’s “knees” while the women attended to their household duties. Who, without envy, could see them depart! The four young people were snugly ensconced in a big wagon half full of hay, with two dogs and a cat as fellow passengers. The remainder of the load comprised two beds, four chairs, a cook stove, a big pile of comforters, a barrel of flour, two shotguns, a rifle, snowshoes, and a few other necessaries. It was simply a prolonged winter picnic, from which they all returned in the spring, venison-fed, and in the best of health and spirits.

But the reader may surmise that November is drawing to a close, and may expect, not without reason, that these slight, but genuine, impressions of the month should come to an end also. There is a kind of typical, late November day, when autumn may be said to take its leave of the landscape, when nature shuts the door of the seasons, and turns the lock which is to hold all vegetation fixed and motionless until the spring. It is a dark, cold, silent day. One vast, lead-colored, low-hanging cloud covers the sky, and in the still, raw, yet strangely exhilarating air there is an unmistakable suggestion of snow. If anybody has neglected to bank up his house or to fetch his stock from their mountain pasture, let him bestir himself now, for winter is at hand. But to one who loves solitude and the open air, this is the day, above all others in the year, for a long walk, or drive, or horseback excursion. Each of these ways of getting about has its own peculiar advantage, and I will leave the reader to choose for himself, provided only that he takes with him no companion who is capable of speech. A spoken word is more certain to dispel the charm of solitude than it is to bring down an avalanche of snow upon the heads of travelers in high mountains.

One other precaution should be taken, and that is to have some errand, real or pretended. Nature, as we all know, is never at home to the mere sightseer or idle spectator. Stare at her straight in the face, and you will see nothing; it is only the casual side glance which is rewarded by the sight of anything new or substantial. But if there is no business on hand, an errand can easily be invented. There is always a particular colt, ten or twenty miles off, which it is one’s duty to inspect; there are friends in adjoining towns to whom one owes a visit; there is a box of books and fashion papers, with some candy for the children, that must be taken to a certain lonely farmhouse in the mountains, situated on a rough, unfrequented road, which may soon be blocked by snow.

Perhaps this last excursion is the most promising, as being the most solitary. The chances are that you will not meet a human being on the highway. There are several houses scattered along the road at intervals of a mile or more, but these are all abandoned farmhouses, fast falling into picturesque decay. Some sociable persons might wish to have it otherwise; they would prefer to see faces in the windows as they go by, to hear the ringing sound of the axe, to see smoke curling upward from the kitchen fire. But give me the dark, deserted home, the cold hearthstone, the smokeless chimney! Not that I have any antipathy to the human race, — rather the contrary, indeed, — but that I love solitude also.

The rough, stony road winds up through a notch in the mountains, with woods and rocky pastures on either side, and over all a profound, brooding stillness. Nothing moves. The sap does not run in the trees. The ground is frozen. The dead leaves, half disintegrated by frost and rain, and now the food of the fungi which convert them into dressing for the ground, — even these scattered, multitudinous leaves neither rustle nor stir. But perhaps the most perfect example of arrested motion which the November landscape contains is exhibited in a small mountain lake, invisible from the road in summer, but distantly revealed when the leaves have fallen. The lake is as still as a block of black marble, for it is covered with a surface of smooth, black ice; but all around its edge is a graceful, escalloped fringe of pure white, frozen foam, — the foam produced by the miniature billows which broke upon the shore before the wind died down and the water congealed. There is nothing in all nature more unsubstantial, more fleeting, than foam; and yet the cold has seized it with frosty fingers, has transformed it into ice, and there it will remain under a covering of snow, its beauty unseen, until the warm sun of spring shall resolve it into water again.

The dearth of vegetable life seems to have driven all animal life from the scene. As you pass the gateway of the pasture, you will notice that the bars are down; the cattle and colts have been “taken up,” and the pastures are deserted. The crows have gone southward. The woodchucks crept into their holes long ago; the deer have sought the high, northern slopes of the mountains, where they maintain their winter “yards;” and if any fat bear still lingers anywhere in the landscape, you may be sure that he is on his way to some snug hole in a hollow tree or to some dry cave among the rocks which he long since selected for his hibernating quarters. Bears always know when that heavy snowstorm which ushers in the winter is impending, and they “den up" before the first flakes begin to fall.

And yet, silent as is the scene, you cannot help feeling that if only it were a little more silent, you would hear something which you never heard before. You find yourself straining to listen more intently, — unconsciously holding your breath, lest some communication should escape you. What would one hear if he could get a little more in sympathy with nature, — could efface himself more completely ? — would it be the music of the spheres, or the hitherto inaudible voices of unseen beings! It may be that the indefinable, undescribable charm of solitude consists in the fact that it is not solitude, after all, but companionship of a subtle and mysterious kind.

However, in this latitude, and among these hills, the days are short, and to-day especially night seems to be closing in abnormally early, — so dark and heavy is the pall of cloud which nature has spread over the sky, as if to celebrate the obsequies of autumn. The cold, too, is penetrating, and on the whole it is time to be moving briskly homeward. Reluctant as one is to leave the lonely mountainside and the solitude or companionship which abides there, yet there is a pleasure also in contemplating the lighted windows of the farmhouses in the valley. Expectations of a good supper, anticipations of warmth and light, of a wood fire and congenial society, — these things are not to be despised even by the solitary. Moreover, the long-threatened snow has begun to fall. The grass and the road are already of the same color, and a fringe of white decorates the tips of your horse’s ears and the roots of his mane when you turn into the stable. That evening the wind rises, and a real, “old-fashioned,” northeast snowstorm sets in. “It will be hard doing to-morrow,” the stage-driver ruefully remarks, as he takes a final look out, before going to bed; and the next morning, long before daybreak, the musical sound of sleigh-bells, mingling pleasantly with your dreams, makes you vaguely aware that another autumn has passed into history, and that winter has arrived.