Here, as in Kipling’s Jungle, spring is the time of new smells. All winter there were some good smells—the odor of far-off forest fires; the fragrance of fresh-cut logs; the not unpleasing, pungent scent of Blake’s cow stable, that came over the ice to me on the crisp, frosty air, but now there is a very riot of perfume. The rotting leaves, the barks of trees, the swamps and even the rocks themselves, give forth an incense. The poplars and the birches shake out sweetness from their waving tassels, the new green fringes of the evergreens are fragrant, soon will come the odors from wild cherry, basswood, and wild grape in flower, and the scents of the new ferns, and then I shall go quite wild with delight and shall long to shout my joy to heaven, as Rufus, the red squirrel, is doing now. Far out on a birch limb, in the sun, he is clucking and chirping away, his plumy tail waving, his whole little tense, rust-colored body jerking as he gives tongue to his spring ecstasy.
Rufus is not always so harmlessly employed. He and the phœbes wage perpetual war over a nestful of eggs under the eaves. One or other of the small householders must stand ever on guard against the red robber that goes like a flash along the beam. What fluttering of wings, what scampering of tiny feet, what chattering there is! But the birds will win, they put the squirrel to flight every time.
Once again I heard a call from Blake’s point. This time it was Mary, out looking for new-born lambs. Her voice, borne on the wet wind, came clear over the water between us:
“Oh, not too bad,” I shouted in the vernacular.
“We think the ice will go out this week.”
“Never,” I screamed. “At this rate it will last until June.”
“Well, I don’t think it. We tried to get over to Jackson’s yesterday, and the middle of the lake was opening so fast we could not make it.”
“I’ll go to the shore every day at noon, and let you see that I am alive,” I promised.
“All right,” she answered. “Hang out a white cloth if there’s anything really wrong, and we’ll try to get over to you somehow.”
And away went Mary, a lamb in her arms, the ewe bleating at her heels.
Then came a day of warm rain, followed by a high wind from the south, that drove the breaking ice before it and piled great masses of glistening white fragments on all the beaches. And, sure enough, on the next Sunday, the eleventh, Henry Blake and Jimmie Dodd came across in a boat, the first I had seen in the water for four months.