Some Summer Days in Iowa | Page 8

white oak. Busy always, he stays but a few moments and then
passes on as silently as a July zephyr. The halting voice of the preacher,
the red-eyed vireo, comes out of the thicket; then, from an oak
overhead, where a little twig is trembling, the softer voice of the
warbling vireo queries: "Can't you see it's best to sing and work like
me?", with the emphasis on the "me."
Blue-jays loiter down the old road, making short flights from tree to
tree, moving in the one plane and with slowly beating wings; only
rarely do they fold their wings and dip. Redheads and flickers, like the
other woodpeckers, have a slightly dipping flight. They open and close
their wings in quick succession, not slowly like the goldfinches;
consequently their dips are not so pronounced. The line of their flight is
a ripple rather than a billow.
Chickadee and his family come chattering through the pasture. They
had a felt-lined nest in a fence-post during the warm days of June; now
they find life easy and sweet--sweet as the two notes mingled with their
chatter. Upside down they cling to the swaying twigs, romping,
disheveled bird-children, full of fun and song-talk. It is nothing to them
that the cruel winds and deep snows of winter will be here all too soon.
Summer days are long and joyous, life stretches out before them; why
waste its hours with frets and fears about the future? Another round of
merry chatter and away they flit. Scarcely have they gone until a
blood-red streak shoots down from the elm tree to the grass. It is the
scarlet tanager. For the last half-hour his loud notes, tied together in
twos, have been ringing from an ash tree in the pasture, near the
spreading oak where the mother sat so closely during June. Though the
nesting season is over he will sing for some weeks yet.
So they come and go through the happy golden hours; now the nasal
notes of the nuthatch or the "pleek" of a downy woodpecker in the
pasture, followed by the twittering tones of the chimney-swifts
zigzagging across the sea of blue above, like busy tugboats darting
from side to side of a harbor. Crows string over the woods close to the

tops of the trees, watching with piercing eyes for lone and hapless
fledglings. A cuckoo droops from a tall wild cherry tree on one side of
the road to a tangle of wild grape on the other; he peers out and gives
his rain-crow call. So is the warp of the summer woven of bird-flight
and threaded through with song.
* * * * *
When evening comes the sun's last smiles reach far into the timber and
linger lovingly on the boles of the trees with a tender beauty.
Wood-flowers face the vanishing light and hold it until the scalloped
edges of the oak leaves etched against the sky have been blurred by the
gathering darkness. Long streams of cinnabar and orange flare up in the
western sky. Salmon-colored clouds float into sight, grow gray and
gradually melt away. In the dusky depths of the woods the thrush sings
his thrilling, largo appassionato, requiem to the dying day. In this part
of the thicket the catbirds congregate, but over yonder the brown
thrashers are calling to each other. The "skirl" of the nighthawk ceases;
but away through the woods, down at the creek, the whippoorwill
begins her oft-repeated trinity of notes. A hoot owl calls from a near-by
tree. The pungent smoke of the wood-fire is sweeter than incense.
Venus hangs like a silver lamp in the northwest. She, too, disappears,
but to the east Mars--it is the time of his opposition--shines in splendor
straight down the old road, seemingly brought very near by the
telescopic effect of the dark trees on either side. Sister stars look down
in limpid beauty from a cloudless sky. All sounds have ceased. A
fortnight hence the air will be vibrant with the calls of the katydids and
the grasshoppers, but now the silence is supreme. It is good for man
sometimes to be alone in the silence of the night--to pass out from the
world of little things, temporary affairs, conditional duties, into the
larger life of nature. There may be some feeling of chagrin at the
thought how easily man passes out of the world and how readily and
quickly he is forgotten; but this is of small moment compared with the
sense of self reliance, of sturdy independence, which belongs to the
out-of-doors. By the light of the stars the non-essentials of life are seen
in their true proportions. There are so many things which have only a
commercial value, and even that is uncertain. Why strive for them or

worry