Ravisher of Tombs

IF I kept a check list of birds — I make no such record of my other friends, why should I of these? — the sapsucker would rank high on it. He visits us constantly. He is no dandy, for all his effective coloring; he is n’t particularly friendly, but we like him.

It is rather the habit just now to cast aspersion upon the sapsucker. The ancient accusation stands, of course, that as he drives his precise rings around bole and branch and takes his fill of the tree’s blood he is an active — if not, indeed, an immediate — menace to its life. Some are saying in addition that it is not food alone he seeks in his methodical rounds, but drink, and strong drink at that; so strong sometimes that he staggers in his flight to find a place where he may sleep off its effects.

But these indictments leave me cold. The sapsucker has killed no tree of mine, and never yet has he made one the scene of a debauch. I rather wish he might; the morality of most birds falls little, if at all, short of monotony. I must confess, however, that he is a ravisher of tombs. I have seen him at it.

Spring was just around the corner. There was neither sound nor shadow to declare her presence, but one needed no sensible proof; one just knew she was there and that the most engaging, most exasperating days of the year were at hand — the days of waiting for her to come out from her retreat.

It was not quite time for me to start for the office and I was taking a final dander among the shrubs and trees in search of some swelling bud whose discovery might ease the irk I knew would await me at the office. I like my job, but not on the first days of spring! My thoughts were filled with the things I would do, once frost and rain would let me — where the zinnias should go, and where the calendulas; whether the poppies should have their old place around the turf oval; how the phlox might be given more morning sunlight. Vagrantly my thoughts ran on to others of my small husbandries and, as I came into view of the biggest of the birches, settled on the cocoon that must be removed from it before it was burst by its sleeper.

The cocoon had, of course, been there through the winter, but it had gone untouched in tribute to its beauty and mystery. Three leaves at the tip of a lower branch had been drawn into its making, with a silvery coating as lovely and as lively in the shifting light of the gray days as frost on the nodding dead grass of a fence corner. The angriest winds of the northwest had torn in vain at the casing, rain and snow and sleet alike had beaten upon it, but still it held its place, not so much in defiance as in an indifference that had even more of contempt. Save for these three leaves the tree had been whipped bare to its twigs, and in their triumph there had been but one concession — they had been chosen from the lee of the prevailing winds.

The mystery of the processes by which these domiciles are fashioned is as profound as the results are beautiful. Man’s best achievement is a ludicrous futility beside them. Miles, perhaps, of gossamer threads had been used in binding these leaves together, and into each had been spun some element that made it — and the whole of which it became a part — impervious to wind and rain, impervious to cold, impervious to every ordinary attack. No one has ever determined the formula through which it is accomplished; perhaps no one ever will. It would be good for the arrogant soul of man to contemplate more often the might of these feeble folk.

I came, then, to the walk’s nearest approach to the tree of the cocoon. I looked perfunctorily at it, then looked again. It had suddenly more than doubled in size!

I goggled for a moment, then pulled myself together for a narrower look. I saw what I saw; there was no question about it. But in another instant I realized that I had merely been looking, not seeing at all. The cocoon was unchanged in size, as in place. The ‘growth’ was a sapsucker, clinging, back down, to the under side of the cocoon.

I did goggle then. The illusion had been extraordinary, but reasonable enough. Cocoon and sapsucker had blended into an almost exact identity of color as the branch sagged under the new weight, and by that very sagging hid the sapsucker’s distinctive marks. But to see a sapsucker feeding elsewhere than on the body of the tree — to see one feeding on larvæ, or at least such a larva as this!

For this sapsucker was feeding. Cautiously I shifted my position until I could see unmistakably what was happening. (It was a happy chance that I did, for so I was able to affirm that it was a sapsucker and not a downy woodpecker, as the cognoscenti would have had me concede.) This sapsucker was feeding, I say, and Lucullus himself never yielded more utterly to the enjoyment of a repast .

His busy bill was deep in the cocoon. I could fairly see his sides contract and expand as he drew forth the luscious store. At intervals he withdrew his bill and, as I thought, drilled with his lightning tongue another tap hole. Later I found I was wrong, in so far as I thought he drilled anew through the outer shell. I have never seen a creature work with such rapidity, such efficiency, and withal with such delight. He swelled as wisibly before my wery eyes as did the tea drinkers to whose exploits Tony Weller paid his amazed homage.

It is part of my curse that so many of my adventures come just at train time. This was but another instance, and before the feast was over I had to be on my way. I do not know how long it lasted, but I could not have missed much of it — the job was being done too expeditiously. But how I did want to stay!

The birch tree was my first objective the following morning. There was more of sunshine, and a freshening breeze was setting prophetically into the south. In the breeze the cocoon lifted and fell as though to hasten me to my inquest. In the sunshine its silvery sheen lighted in new beauty. I drew the branch down. On its upper surfaces the cocoon was quite as it had been all winter long. I turned it over, and saw in almost the mathematical centre of the under side a tiny hole. Around it was the ‘darkening stain’ that goes with all good murders.

No other trace of the ravage was to be seen, not even the marks of claws where the sapsucker had clung. I had expected to find these; it must have required a firm grasp to hold him. A glass might have revealed the scars, but my curiosity does not run to such niceties of inquiry. If they remained hid to the unaided eye it merely added a new and fascinating detail to the exploit. What I should have preferred greatly to find was some clue to the reason why the sapsucker had chosen the under side of the cocoon for his point of breaking. To my notion he could not possibly have contrived a more awkward position. If it had been the deed of a nuthatch I should have expected it, for the nuthatch loves topsy-turvy ways of going about his affairs. All other sapsucker activities I had ever observed had been carried on with due regard for traditional posture. There was, however, no clue to this problem, and I did not long vex myself with it — I was too eager to learn what WAS left inside the cocoon.

To determine this I sought the services of a specialist. By occupation he was a commercial artist, his drawing board beside a window looking out over the towers of Brooklyn Bridge. But, like thousands of whom it is rarely suspected, his abiding interest was in things far, far removed from his sixdays-a-week surroundings. He really lived for his seventh day, when he could flee the brick and plaster of the city for parks and meadows where butterflies and moths fill out their hurried, harried spans.

I laid the cocoon on his drawing board.

’Oh, yes,’ he said, with the indifference the most gracious of experts must feel for the amateur’s discoveries. He would have gone on, I suppose, to tell me just how common this sort of thing was, but I forestalled him with the story.

‘A sapsucker?’ he repeated, and incredulity took the place of indifference.

‘A sapsucker,’ I assured him, and he looked, first at me, and then at the cocoon, as though an Einstein had taken his place among naturalists.

I nodded assent to his unspoken question, and from a waistcoat pocket he drew a little leather case, and from it a pair of scissors — the sidearms of his avocation. They were so exactly at hand, even in the desert space of that workroom, I wondered for a moment if they found a place, too, in his pajamas. But, after all, my trove and I were justification for such preparedness; some day I shall go back and find how many other occasions he has found for his scissors at unexpected times and places.

The scissors flashed once, and the cocoon’s outer shell was opened. Inside lay a still more perfect case — perfect in its fit, perfect in its proportions, perfect in its workmanship, perfect, too, in coloring, for it would have blended as protectively against the twigs of the birch and against the dull winter skies showing among them as did the outer shell.

The scissors flashed again and slit the inner case. The artist laid his scissors down and placed deft thumbs on either side of the incision.

‘And here,’ he said, ‘is Prince Tut himself.’

He pressed the case open and out fell the emptied shell of a grub that had been almost ready to burst his prison.

The Prince Tut simile was precise. As long as the phalanx of one’s thumb, not quite as thick through, the shell was the very brown of the age-old cerements of a Pharaoh. But more than that, the shell showed in perfect balance of line the members that had been taking form within — here were the head and its horns, here the snugly folded legs, here the wings, here the slim body. No veritable scarab, no idealized one, could compare with this. There was sheer beauty in every aspect— even the sophistication of the specialist wavered before it.

The sapsucker’s first thrust had been through the breast; the indication of that was plain. But this thrust was only one of six. That was why he had seemed to withdraw his bill and drill anew. What he had done, though, was merely to draw back far enough to roll the body over a little way and strike again. The six holes made a complete cincture; no one of them varied a hair’s breadth from the line of the others. The workmen in the Valley of the Kings could not have been more systematic.

For a long, silent moment we viewed the evidences of the tragedy. My fancy leaped on to the time when this tomb would have been rent in its natural, orderly way, when a gay, lovely creature would have danced in the sun, when another miracle of life and procreation and death would have been wrought. My fancy leaped on to these, and then came back to the violence before me, a violence that was, after all, as natural and — who knows? — perhaps as orderly.

‘By the way,’ broke in the voice of the specialist, ‘this is the cocoon of the American silkworm.’

He paused and returned to his former incredulity.

‘Are you sure it was n’t a downy woodpecker?'

I was — and I am.