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Page 21
A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's
terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that
distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his
operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands
assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no
harm in eating his trail. There is comfort in this creed, whatever may
be our private belief in the substantiality of what the bird absorbs;
and we cheerfully eat, after the suggestion of Paul, "asking no
questions," the while tacitly assuring ourselves, like old Fuller with
the strawberry, that a better bird might doubtless have been made, but
as certainly never was. For game flavor not even the partridge (Bob
White), also exceptionally abundant here, is his superior.
But think, ye snow-bound, of the state of things implied in this
embarrassment of riches,--of a mid-winter table balanced between such a
choice, or, better, balanced by the adoption of both, one at each end!
Nor would this be near telling the whole story. Excluding fur and
sticking to feather, we have a wide range beyond. The larger birds we
may begin on, very moderately, with crane-steak, a transverse section
of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill. That is the form in
which he is thought to appear to best advantage. By the time you have
circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing
circuit of a buggy,--for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is
common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,--you will feel vicious
enough to eat him in any shape. His brother, the beautiful white bugler,
you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind. A
Canada goose--not the tough and fishy bird of the Northern coast, but
grain- and grass-fed from fledging-time--is tender, delicate, and
everyway presentable. From the back upper gallery that looks upon the
prairie you are likely to see a company or battalion of his brethren,
their long black necks and white ties "dressing" capitally in line, and
their invisible legs doing the goose-step as the inventors of that
classic manoeuvre ought to do it. This bird seems to affect the
_militaire_ in all his movements. What can be more regular than the
wedge, like that so common in tactical history, in which he begins his
march, moving in "a column of attack upon the pole"? Even when startled
and put to flight, he goes off smoothly and quietly, company-front. In
foraging he is strictly systematic, and never forgets to set sentinels.
We cannot fail to respect him while doing him the last honors. Of not
inferior claim is his prairie chum and remote cousin the mallard. They
are not often in close companionship, though I have seen a dozen and a
half of each rise from the border and the bosom of a pond forty yards
across,--one loving the open, and the other taking repose, if not food,
upon the water. That there should be ponds upon these prairies is as
striking to one accustomed to hill and dale as that so unpromising a
surface should so teem with life. The prairie is as flat as if cast like
plate-glass and rolled out,--only the table is slightly tilted toward
the Gulf at the rate of two or three hundred feet in a hundred miles. At
night you may see the head-light of an engine fifteen miles away, like
a low star that you wonder does not rise. It grows slowly in size, a
Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and
adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies. Early on fine
mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and
looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected
in an imaginary lake,--a pictured protest of Nature against monotony.
There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe
in but for the shallow little ponds which fill them and which are
indicated from a distance at this season by the lead-colored grass that
veils them and conceals their glitter. And there are longer swells,
begotten of drainage, sometimes of eight or ten feet in a mile, which
deceive you, as you advance, into the expectation of a grand prospect
when once you shall have got to the top of them. That, practically, you
never do. Arrived at what seems to be the crest of a ridge, you see
nothing but more flat. The eye, in despair, gives, when you come in
sight of it, an inclination to the water. The pond-surface ceases to be
horizontal. The principle of gravitation stands contradicted
point-blank.
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