Part 8 (1/2)

After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and wounded. Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and less able to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter wind breaks loose and sweeps down upon the pines.

”List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle, I thought me on the ourie cattle,”--

and how often I have thought me of the crows biding the night yonder in the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe, have I watched them returning at night, that the crows will never cease flying through my wintry sky,--an endless line of wavering black figures, weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.

And to-night another wild storm sweeps across the winter fields. All the afternoon the crows have been going over, and are still pa.s.sing as the darkness settles at five o'clock. Now it is nearly eight, and the long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind shrieks about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the fields. I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines where the fields roll into the woods--a vast surf sound, but softer and higher, with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.

I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark forms. As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling the crows, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s turned all to the storm. With crops empty and bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for thirteen hours of night.

Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that sometimes the small flames flicker and go out?

CHAPTER IX

THE PECULIAR 'POSSUM

If you are a New Englander, or a Northwesterner, then, probably, you have never pulled a 'possum out of his hollow stump or from under some old rail-pile, as I have done, many a time, down in southern New Jersey. And so, probably, you have never made the acquaintance of the most peculiar creature in our American woods.

Even roast 'possum is peculiar. Up to the time you taste roast 'possum you quite agree with Charles Lamb that roast pig is peculiarly the most delicious delicacy ”in the whole _modus edibilis_,” in other words, bill of fare. But once you eat roast 'possum, you will go all over Lamb's tasty ”Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” marking out ”pig”

with your pencil and writing in ”'possum,” making the essay read thus:--

”There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, _'possum_, as it is called,--the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance,--with the adhesive oleaginous--O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it--the tender blossoming of fat--fat cropped in the bud--taken in the shoot--in the first innocence--” For no matter how old your roast 'possum, he is as tender as the tenderest roast pig.

And that, of course, is peculiar.

But live 'possum is more peculiar than roast 'possum. It is peculiar, for instance, that almost all of the 'possum's relations, except his immediate family, dwell apart in Australia,--in Australasia, for marsupials are found also in Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Moluccas--which islands the marsupials seem to have had given them for their own when the world was made. There, at least, most of them live and have lived for ages, except the 'possums. These latter, strangely enough, live in South and North America, and nowhere else. The peculiar, puzzling thing about them is: how they, and they only of the marsupials, got away from Australia across the sea to America. Did a family of them get set adrift on a log and float across? Or was there once, as geologists tell us, a long string of islands close together, stretching from the tip of South America, from the ”Horn,” off across the sea to Australia, over which the 'possums might once have made their way? But if they came by such a route, why did not the kangaroos come too? Ah, the kangaroo is not a 'possum. There is no other creature in the woods that would dare play ”Follow the leader” with the 'possum. No, I am half inclined to think the scientists right who say that the 'possum is the great-great-grandfather of all the marsupials, and that the migration might have been the other way about--from America, across the sea.

But what is the use of speculating? Here is the 'possum in our woods; that we know; and yonder in Australasia are his thirteen sets of cousins, and there they seem always to have been, for of these thirteen sets of cousins, four sets have so long since ceased to live that they are now among the fossils, slowly turning, every one of them, to stone!

A queer history he has, surely! But queerer than his history, is his body, and the way he grows from babyhood to twenty-pound 'possumhood.

For besides having a tail that can be used for a hand, and a paw with a thumb like the human thumb, the female 'possum has a pocket or pouch on her abdomen, just as the kangaroo has, in which she carries her young.

Now that is peculiar, so very peculiar when you study deeply into it, that the 'possum becomes to the scientist quite the most interesting mammal in North America.

Returning from a Christmas vacation one year, while a student in college, I brought back with me twenty-six live 'possums so that the professor of zoology could study the peculiar anatomy of the 'possum for several of its many meanings.

This pouch, for instance, and the peculiar bones of the 'possum, show that it is a very primitive mammal, one of the very oldest mammals, so close to the beginning of the mammalian line that there are only two other living ”animals” (we can hardly call them mammals) older and more primitive--the porcupine ant-eater, and, oldest of all, the duck-bill, not ”older” at all perhaps, but only more primitive.

For the duck-bill, though cla.s.sed as a mammal, not only has the bill of the duck, but also lays eggs like the birds. The porcupine ant-eater likewise lays eggs, and so seems almost as much bird or reptile as mammal. And as the birds and reptiles lived upon the earth before the age of mammals, and are a lower and more primitive order of creatures, so the duck-bill, the porcupine ant-eater, and the 'possum, because in their anatomy they are like the birds and the reptiles in some respects, are perhaps the lowest and the oldest of all the mammals.

The 'possum, therefore, is one of the most primitive of mammals, and dates as far back as the reptilian age, when only traces of mammalian life are to be found, the 'possum's fossil ancestors being among the notable of these early remains.

The mammals at that time, as I have just said, were only partly mammal, for they were partly bird or reptile, as the duck-bill and ant-eater still are. Now the 'possum does not lay eggs as these other two do, for its young are born, not hatched; yet so tiny and undeveloped are they when born, that they must be put into their mother's pouch and nursed, as eggs are put into a nest and brooded until they are hatched--really born a second time.

For here in their mother's pouch they are like chicks in the sh.e.l.l, and quite as helpless. It is five weeks before they can stick their heads out and take a look at the world.