The Blue Flower [31]
Rubies are hidden among its foliage, and if you eat of this
fruit, you will grow wise in the wisdom of birds. You will know
where the oven-bird secretes her nest, and where the wood-cock
dances in the air at night; the drumming-log of the ruffed grouse
will be easy to find, and you will see the dark lodges of the
evergreen thickets inhabited by hundreds of warblers. There will
be no dead silence for you in the forest, any longer, but you
will hear sweet and delicate voices on every side, voices that
you know and love; you will catch the key-note of the silver
flute of the woodthrush, and the silver harp of the veery, and
the silver bells of the hermit; and something in your heart will
answer to them all. In the frosty stillness of October nights
you will see the airy tribes flitting across the moon, following
the secret call that guides them southward. In the calm
brightness of winter sunshine, filling sheltered copses with
warmth and cheer, you will watch the lingering blue-birds and
robins and song-sparrows playing at summer, while the chickadees
and the juncos and the cross-bills make merry in the windswept
fields. In the lucent mornings of April you will hear your old
friends coming home to you, Phoebe, and Oriole, and
Yellow-Throat, and Red-Wing, and Tanager, and Cat-Bird. When
they call to you and greet you, you will understand that Nature
knows a secret for which man has never found a word--the secret
that tells itself in song.
The third of the forest-vines is Wood-Magic. It bears neither
flower nor fruit. Its leaves are hardly to be distinguished
from the leaves of the other vines. Perhaps they are a little
rounder than the Snowberry's, a little more pointed than the
Partridge-berry's; sometimes you might mistake them for the
one, sometimes for the other. No marks of warning have been
written upon them. If you find them it is your fortune; if
you taste them it is your fate.
For as you browse your way through the forest, nipping
here and there a rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant
emerald tip of balsam-fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance
you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not
know what you have done, but the enchantment of the tree-land
will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow
through your veins.
You will never get away from it. The sighing of the wind
through the pine-trees and the laughter of the stream in its
rapids will sound through all your dreams. On beds of silken
softness you will long for the sleep-song of whispering leaves
above your head, and the smell of a couch of balsam-boughs. At
tables spread with dainty fare you will be hungry for the joy of
the hunt, and for the angler's sylvan feast. In proud cities you
will weary for the sight of a mountain trail; in great cathedrals
you will think of the long, arching aisles of the woodland; and
in the noisy solitude of crowded streets you will hone after the
friendly forest.
This is what will happen to you if you eat the leaves of
that little vine, Wood-Magic. And this is what happened to
Luke Dubois.
I
The Cabin by the Rivers
Two highways meet before the door, and a third reaches away to
the southward, broad and smooth and white. But there are no
travellers passing by. The snow that has fallen during the
night is unbroken. The pale February sunrise makes blue shadows
on it, sharp and jagged, an outline of the fir-trees on the
mountain-crest quarter of, a mile away.
In summer the highways are dissolved into three wild
rivers--the River of Rocks, which issues from the hills; the
River of Meadows, which flows from the great lake; and the
River of the Way Out, which runs down from their meeting-place
to the settlements and the little world. But in winter, when
the ice is firm under the snow, and the going is fine, there
are no tracks upon the three broad roads except the paths of
the caribou, and the footprints of the marten and the mink and
the fox, and the narrow trails made by Luke Dubois on his