[Illustration: RED SALAMANDERS, OLD AND YOUNG]
You will go many times into the fields before you can make of the reptiles your friends and neighbors. But by and by you will watch them and note their ways with as much interest as you watch the other wild folk about you. It is a pretty shallow lover of nature who jumps upon a little snake with both feet, or who shivers when a little salamander drops out of the leaf-mould at his feet.
And what shall I say of the fishes? There are a dozen of them in the stream and ponds within the compass of my haunt. They are a fascinating family, and one very little watched by the ordinary tramper. But _you_ are not ordinary. Quiet and patience and much putting together of scraps of observations will be necessary if you are to get at the whole story of any fish's life. The story will be worth it, however.
No, I shall not even try to _number_ the insects--the butterflies, beetles, moths, wasps, bees, bugs, ticks, mites, and such small "deer" as you will find in the round of your summer's tramp. Nor shall I try to name the flowers and trees, the ferns and mosses. It is with the common things that you ought now to become familiar, and one summer is all too short for the things you ought to see and hear and do in your vacation out of doors.
The watcher of wild animals never gets used to the sight of their mirthless sport. In all other respects animal play is entirely human.
A great deal of human play is serious--desperately serious on the football-field, and at the card-table, as when a lonely player is trying to kill time with solitaire.
I have watched a great ungainly hippopotamus for hours trying to do the same solemn thing by cuffing a croquet-ball back and forth from one end of his cage to the other. His keepers told me that without the plaything the poor caged giant would fret and worry himself to death. It was his game of solitaire.
In all their games of rivalry the animals are serious as humans, and, forgetting the fun, often fall to fighting--a sad case, indeed. But brutes are brutes. We cannot expect anything better of the animals. Only this morning the whole flock of chickens in the hen-yard started suddenly on the wild flap to see which would beat to the back fence and wound up on the "line" in a free fight, two of the cockerels tearing the feathers from each other in a desperate set-to.