March is a weary month for the wood folk. One who follows them then has it borne in upon him continually that life is a struggle,--a keen, hard, hunger-driven struggle to find enough to keep a-going and sleep warm till the tardy sun comes north again with his rich living. The fall abundance of stored food has all been eaten, except in out-of-the-way corners that one stumbles upon in a long day's wandering; the game also is wary and hard to find from being constantly hunted by eager enemies.
It is then that the sparrow falleth. You find him on the snow, a wind- blown feather guiding your eye to the open where he fell in mid-flight; or under the tree, which shows that he lost his grip in the night. His empty crop tells the whole pitiful story, and why you find him there cold and dead, his toes curled up and his body feather-light. You would find more but for the fact that hunger-pointed eyes are keener than yours and earlier abroad, and that crow and jay and mink and wildcat have greater interest than you in finding where the sparrow fell.
It is then, also, that the owl, who hunts the sparrow o' nights, grows so light from scant feeding that he cannot fly against the wind. If he would go back to his starting point while the March winds are out, he must needs come down close to the ground and yewyaw towards his objective, making leeway like an old boat without ballast or centerboard.
The grouse have taken to bud-eating from necessity--birch buds mostly, with occasional trips to the orchards for variety. They live much now in the trees, which they dislike; but with a score of hungry enemies prowling for them day and night, what can a poor grouse do?
When a belated snow falls, you follow their particular enemy, the fox, where he wanders, wanders, wander's on his night's hunting. Across the meadow, to dine on the remembrance of field mice--alas! safe now under the crust; along the brook, where he once caught frogs; through the thicket, where the grouse were hatched; past the bullbrier tangle, where the covey of quail once rested nightly; into the farmyard, where the dog is loose and the chickens are safe under lock and key, instead of roosting in trees; across the highway, and through the swamp, and into the big bare emptywoods; till in the sad gray morning light he digs under the wild apple tree and sits down on the snow to eat a frozen apple, lest his stomach cry too loudly while he sleeps the day away and tries to forget that he is hungry.
Everywhere it is the same story: hard times and poor hunting. Even the chickadees are hard pressed to keep up appearances and have their sweet love note ready at the first smell of spring in the air.
This was the lesson that the great woods whispered sadly when a few idle March days found me gliding on snowshoes over the old familiar ground. Wild geese had honked an invitation from the South Shore; but one can never study a wild goose; the only satisfaction is to see him swing in on broad wings over the decoys--one glorious moment ere the gun speaks and the dog jumps and everything is spoiled. So I left gun and rifle behind, and went off to the woods of happy memories to see how my deer were faring.
The wonder of the snow was gone; there was left only its cold bitterness and a vague sense that it ought no longer to cumber the ground, but would better go away as soon as possible and spare the wood folk any more suffering. The litter of a score of storms covered its soiled rough surface; every shred of bark had left its dark stain where the decaying sap had melted and spread in the midday sun. The hard crust, which made such excellent running for my snowshoes, seemed bitterly cruel when I thought of the starving wild things and of the abundance of food on the brown earth, just four feet below their hungry bills and noses.
The winter bad been unusually severe. Reports had come to me from the North Woods of deep snows, and of deer dying of starvation and cold in their yards. I confess that I was anxious as I hurried along. Now that the hunt was over and the deer had won, they belonged to me more than ever more even than if the stuffed head of the buck looked down on my hall, instead of resting proudly over his own strong shoulders. My snowshoes clicked a rapid march through the sad gray woods, while the March wind thrummed an accompaniment high up among the bare branches, and the ground-spruce nodded briskly, beating time with their green tips, as if glad of any sound or music that would break the chill silence until the birds came back. Here and there the snow told stories; gay stories, tragicstories, sad, wandering, patient stories of the little woods-people, which the frost had hardened into crust, as if Nature would keep their memorials forever, like the records on the sunhardened bricks of Babylon. But would the deer live? Would the big buck's cunning provide a yard large enough for wide wandering, with plenty of browse along the paths to carry his flock safely through the winter's hunger? That was a story, waiting somewhere ahead, which made me hurry away from the foot-written records that otherwise would have kept me busy for hours.
