THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

                                 BOOKS
                            BY HENRY BESTON

                          FIRELIGHT FAIRY BOOK
                            FULL SPEED AHEAD
                         STARLIGHT WONDER BOOK
                     THE BOOK OF GALLANT VAGABONDS
                          THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

[Illustration: _A Winter Wreck at Pamet_]

                                  THE
                            OUTERMOST HOUSE

                   A YEAR OF LIFE ON THE GREAT BEACH
                              OF CAPE COD

                                   BY
                              HENRY BESTON

                    Illustrated with Photographs by
                          WILLIAM A. BRADFORD
                               AND OTHERS

                   [Illustration: [Publisher’s logo]]

                         GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
                   DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC.
                                  1929

                  COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
                  & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
                  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
                 COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

                                   TO
                           MISS MABEL DAVISON
                                  AND
                      MISS MARY CABOT WHEELWRIGHT

FOREWORD

Only a solitary knows how social and kindly life can be. While living
on the beach, I was helped by so many friends and Cape Cod neighbours
that I should be writing a chapter were I to try to list them all.
There are a few, however, to whom I owe more than neighbourly
gratitude. To my friends Prince and Edna Nickerson Hurd of Eastham,
to Mrs. Mercy A. Mines, and to Mr. John Nickerson I owe both my right
to build on the dune-land and a world of kindest aid. For my chance
to live this book and write it, I would here thank them first of all.
I owe another real debt to Harvey Moore for building me so strong
and snug a little house, another to George and Mary Smith for their
hospitality, good counsel, and encouragement, another to Nate and Helen
Clark. And I should like to thank Captain George Nickerson of Nauset
Station, Bosun’s Mate Charles Ellis, the present No. 1, and the rest of
the Nauset crew for the thousand kind and friendly things they did to
help me.

The majority of my illustrations I owe to the courtesy of my Quincy
friend and neighbour, the Hon. William A. Bradford. Mr. Bradford made
several special trips to the Cape to get the pictures, and spared
no time or effort in preparing them for the book. I would here most
gratefully acknowledge this kindness.

I wish to return thanks to Mr. Alva Morrison for his fine studies of
the winter beach and for his notes on birds, to Mr. Arthur Cleveland
Bent for the use of the two rare photographs from his collection, to
Dr. A. B. Klugh for the sandpiper illustration, to Commander Donald
MacMillan, and the American Museum of Natural History for the dovekies,
to Dr. John E. Fish for his photograph of the summer stranding, to
Mr. George A. Whiting of Eastham for his distinguished studies of the
beach and the _Montclair_, and to Mr. Robert Whiting for his striking
photograph of the fishing schooner in the surf at Pamet. And I wish to
thank Mr. John Farrar with all my heart for the patience and good will
with which he has dealt with so inaccessible an observer as myself.

I have made several references to Mr. E. H. Forbush’s _Birds of
Massachusetts and Surrounding States_. This compendium is a favourite
of mine for it is the work of one who is both a literary artist as
well as a distinguished ornithologist. I wish to record as well an
obligation to the staffs of the various state and federal bureaus which
I have consulted, and I would thank the Hon. A. Piatt Andrew of the 6th
Massachusetts for the unfailing courtesy and good will with which he
responded to my frequent requests for scientific studies published at
Washington.

My narrative concerns itself with the events of a twelvemonth, though I
spent, on and off, a somewhat longer time upon the beach. There was a
season in the spring when I had to leave the house a while.

I would close with the acknowledgment of a special and very great
obligation, my debt to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Kelley of the Overlook Inn
in Eastham. Without their constant and ever-thoughtful aid, without
their hospitable roof to turn to on occasion, without their friendly
care for my interests ashore, it would have been perhaps impossible to
remain upon the beach. With heartfelt gratitude do I thank them here.
Long may their hospitable doors stand open on Cape Cod!
                                                                   H. B.
QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS.

CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER                               PAGE
  I.     THE BEACH                         1

  II.    AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS         19

  III.   THE HEADLONG WAVE                41

  IV.    MIDWINTER                        59

  V.     WINTER VISITORS                  91

  VI.    LANTERNS ON THE BEACH           118

  VII.   AN INLAND STROLL IN SPRING      143

  VIII.  NIGHT ON THE GREAT BEACH        168

  IX.    THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE           189

  X.     ORION RISES ON THE DUNES        218

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  A WINTER WRECK AT PAMET                  _Frontispiece_
    _Photo by R. Whiting_

                                              FACING PAGE
  THE BEACH                                             5
    _Photo by Morrison_

  THE EASTHAM DUNES FROM THE INLET                     12
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE SIERRAS OF SAND AND SNOW                         17
    _Photo by Bradford_

  HERRING GULLS                                        32
    _Photo by Bradford_

  SEMIPALMATED SANDPIPERS                              37
    _Photo by Dr. A. B. Klugh_

  THE EDGE OF FOAM                                     44
    _Photo by Bradford_

  SLIDE AND SEETHE                                     49
    _Photo by Bradford_

  SUMMER BREAKERS                                      53
    _Photo by G. A. Whiting_

  THE BURST OF A WAVE                                  60
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE WINTER BEACH                                     64
    _Photo by Morrison_

  THE BANK AFTER THE STORM                             85
    _Photo by G. A. Whiting_

  DOVEKIES OR LITTLE AUKS                              92
    _Photo by Donald B. MacMillan. Courtesy of the
    American Museum of Natural History_

  THE RAZOR-BILLED AUK                                104
    _Photo by A. C. Bent_

  BRÜNNICH’S MURRES AT NEST IN THE SUMMER NORTH       113
    _Photo by A. C. Bent_

  THE WRECK OF THE “MONTCLAIR”                        120
    _Photo by G. A. Whiting_

  NAUSET STATION                                      128
    _Photo by Bradford_

  A SURFMAN OF THE CAPE                               136
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE BAY SIDE                                        145
    _Photo by Bradford_

  FIRE IN THE PITCH PINES                             160
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE EASTHAM MOORS                                   165
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE HIGHLAND LIGHT                                  172
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE SEQUEL OF A FOG ON A SUMMER NIGHT               181
    _Photo by Fish_

  PIPING PLOVER AT NEST                               188
    _Photo by Bradford_

  NESTING TERN                                        193
    _Photo by Bradford_

  TERN COMING TO FULL STOP HEAD-ON INTO THE WIND      200
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE TERN CHICK                                      208
    _Photo by Bradford_

  A CAPE COD                                          213
    _Photo by Bradford_

  LATE SUMMER ON THE DUNES                            215
    _Photo by Bradford_

  THE FO’CASTLE                                       218
    _Photo by Bradford_

  SUNRISE FROM CAPE COD                               220
    _Photo by Bradford_

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

[Illustration: [Map of Cape Cod]]

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

_Chapter I_

THE BEACH

East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and
more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open
Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty
miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the
form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and
levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet
above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated
by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many
gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours:
old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched
with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west,
the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending
to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean
gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and
vanishes into day.

At the foot of this cliff a great ocean beach runs north and south
unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied
and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might
be the end or the beginning of a world. Age by age, the sea here gives
battle to the land; age by age, the earth struggles for her own,
calling to her defence her energies and her creations, bidding her
plants steal down upon the beach, and holding the frontier sands in a
net of grass and roots which the storms wash free. The great rhythms
of nature, to-day so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their
spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and
tide, tremor of night and day. Journeying birds alight here and fly
away again all unseen, schools of great fish move beneath the waves,
the surf flings its spray against the sun.

Often spoken of as being entirely glacial, this bulwark is really an
old land surfaced with a new. The seas broke upon these same ancient
bounds long before the ice had gathered or the sun had fogged and
cooled. There was once, so it would seem, a Northern coastal plain.
This crumbled at its rim, time and catastrophe changed its level and
its form, and the sea came inland over it through the years. Its last
enduring frontier roughly corresponds to the wasted dyke of the cliff.
Moving down into the sea, later glaciations passed over the old beaches
and the fragments of the plain, and, stumbling over them, heaped upon
these sills their accumulated drift of gravels, sand, and stones.
The warmer sea and time prevailing, the ice cliff retreated westward
through its fogs, and presently the waves coursed on to a new, a
transformed and lifeless, land.

So runs, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it in general terms,
the geological history of Cape Cod. The east and west arm of the
peninsula is a buried area of the ancient plain, the forearm, the
glaciated fragment of a coast. The peninsula stands farther out to sea
than any other portion of the Atlantic coast of the United States; it
is the outermost of outer shores. Thundering in against the cliff, the
ocean here encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.

II

The cliff I write of and the bordering beach face the Atlantic on
the forearm of the Cape. This outer earth is now scarce more than a
great dyke or wall some twenty-five miles long and only three and four
miles wide. At Provincetown it rises from the sea, beginning there in
a desert of dunes and sand plains of the ocean’s making. These sands
curve inland toward the continent, bending toward Plymouth even as a
hand may be bent down at the wrist, and Provincetown harbour lies in
the curve of palm and fingers. At Truro, the wrist of the Cape--the
forearm simile being both exact and inescapable--the land curve falls
from the east and west down through an arc to the north and south,
and the earth cliff begins and rises rather suddenly to its greatest
elevation. South by east from the Highland Light to Eastham and Nauset
Coast Guard Station, the rampart fronts the sea, its sky line being
now a progress of long undulations, now a level as military as a
battlement, hollows and mounded hills here and there revealing the
barren moorland character of the country just above. At Nauset, the
cliff ends, the sea invades the narrowing land, and one enters the
kingdom of the dunes.

[Illustration: _The Beach_]

The cliff ends, and a wall of ocean dunes carries on the beach. Five
miles long, this wall ends at a channel over whose entrance shoals the
ocean sweeps daily into a great inlet or lagoon back of the dunes, an
inlet spaced with the floors of tidal islands and traced with winding
creeks--the inlet of Eastham and Orleans. Very high tides, covering the
islands, sometimes turn this space into bay. Westward over the channels
and the marshland one looks to the uplands of the Cape, here scarce a
good two miles wide. At Eastham, the land is an open, rolling moor.
West over this lies Cape Cod Bay. A powerful tribe of Indians, the
Nausets, once inhabited this earth between the seas.

Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far,
bright rims of the world, meadow land and marsh and ancient moor: this
is Eastham; this the outer Cape. Sun and moon rise here from the sea,
the arched sky has an ocean vastness, the clouds are now of ocean, now
of earth. Having known and loved this land for many years, it came
about that I found myself free to visit there, and so I built myself a
house upon the beach.

My house stood by itself atop a dune, a little less than halfway south
on Eastham bar. I drew the home-made plans for it myself and it was
built for me by a neighbour and his carpenters. When I began to build,
I had no notion whatever of using the house as a dwelling place. I
simply wanted a place to come to in the summer, one cosy enough to
be visited in winter could I manage to get down. I called it the
Fo’castle. It consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-living
room, and its dimensions over all were but twenty by sixteen. A brick
fireplace with its back to the wall between rooms heated the larger
space and took the chill off the bedroom, and I used a two-burner oil
stove when cooking.

My neighbour built well. The house, even as I hoped, proved compact
and strong, and it was easy to run and easy to heat. The larger room
was sheathed, and I painted the wainscoting and the window frames a
kind of buff-fawn--a good fo’castle colour. The house showed, perhaps,
a somewhat amateur enthusiasm for windows. I had ten. In my larger
room I had seven; a pair to the east opening on the sea, a pair to
the west commanding the marshes, a pair to the south, and a small
“look-see” in the door. Seven windows in one room perched on a hill of
sand under an ocean sun--the words suggest cross-lights and a glare;
a fair misgiving, and one I countered by the use of wooden shutters
originally meant for winter service but found necessary through the
year. By arranging these I found I could have either the most sheltered
and darkened of rooms or something rather like an inside out-of-doors.
In my bedroom I had three windows--one east, one west, and one north to
Nauset light.

To get drinking water, I drove a well pipe directly down into the dune.
Though the sea and the beach are alongside, and the marsh channels
course daily to the west, there is fresh water here under the salty
sand. This water varies in quality, some of it being brackish, some of
it sweet and clear. To my great delight, I chanced upon a source which
seems to me as good water as one may find here anywhere. Beneath the
floor, the pipe descended into a bricked-up and covered pit housing a
pet-cock through which I drained the water from the pump in freezing
weather (On bitter days I simply pumped a few pails full and stood
them in the sink, and drained the pump immediately.). I had two oil
lamps and various bottle candlesticks to read by, and a fireplace
crammed maw-full of driftwood to keep me warm. I have no doubt that the
fireplace heating arrangement sounds demented, but it worked, and my
fire was more than a source of heat--it was an elemental presence, a
household god, and a friend.

In my larger room, I had a chest of drawers painted an honest carriage
blue, a table, a wall bookcase, a couch, two chairs, and a rocker. My
kitchen, built yacht fashion all in a line, stood at my southern wall.
First came a dish and crockery cupboard, then a space for the oil
stove--I kept this boxed in when not in use--then a shelf, a porcelain
sink, and the corner pump. Blessed pump! It never failed me or indulged
in nerves.

Using a knapsack, I carried my supplies on my own shoulders. There is
no road through the dunes, and, even if there were, no one would have
made deliveries. West of the dunes, it is true, there exists a kind of
trail on which Fords may venture, but even the most experienced of
the villagers are wary of it and tell of being mired there or stuck in
the sand. Nevertheless, my lumber came by this trail, and now and then
I could get my oil cans carried down by a neighbour who had a horse
and cart. These helps, however, were but occasional, and I counted
myself fortunate to have had them at all. My knapsack remained the only
ever-ready wagon of the dunes. Twice a week, by arrangement, a friend
met me at Nauset Station with a car, took me shopping to Eastham or
Orleans, and brought me back again to Nauset. And there I would pack my
milk and eggs and butter and rolls--being very careful as to which was
sitting on which--and strike off down the beach along the breakers.

The top of the mound I built on stands scarce twenty feet above
high-water mark, and only thirty in from the great beach. The coast
guards at Nauset, a scant two miles away, were my only neighbours.
South lay the farther dunes and a few far-away and lonely gunning
camps; the floor of marsh and tide parted me on the west from the
village and its distant cottages; the ocean besieged my door. North,
and north alone, had I touch with human things. On its solitary dune
my house faced the four walls of the world.

My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod
year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight
ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the
beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held
me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood
for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water
welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.
In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had
their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant
of nature and the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings
of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of
the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of
spring--all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed,
the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and
elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being
alone, I had something of a field naturalist’s inclination; presently
I made up my mind to remain and try living for a year on Eastham Beach.

The sand bar of Eastham is the sea wall of the inlet. Its crest
overhangs the beach, and from the high, wind-trampled rim, a long slope
well overgrown with dune grass descends to the meadows on the west.
Seen from the tower at Nauset, the land has an air of geographical
simplicity; as a matter of fact, it is full of hollows, blind passages,
and amphitheatres in which the roaring of the sea changes into the far
roar of a cataract. I often wander into these curious pits. On their
floors of sand, on their slopes, I find patterns made by the feet of
visiting birds. Here, in a little disturbed and claw-marked space of
sand, a flock of larks has alighted; here one of the birds has wandered
off by himself; here are the deeper tracks of hungry crows; here the
webbed impressions of a gull. There is always something poetic and
mysterious to me about these tracks in the pits of the dunes; they
begin at nowhere, sometimes with the faint impression of an alighting
wing, and vanish as suddenly into the trackless nowhere of the sky.

Below the eastern rim the dunes fall in steeps of sand to the beach.
Walking the beach close in along these steeps, one walks in the
afternoon shade of a kind of sand escarpment, now seven or eight feet
high and reasonably level, now fifteen or twenty feet high to the top
of a dome or mound. In four or five places storms have washed gullies
or “cuts” clean through the wall. Dune plants grow in these dry beds,
rooting themselves in under old, half-buried wreckage, clumps of dusty
miller, _Artemisia stelleriana_, being the most familiar green. The
plant flourishes in the most exposed situations, it jumps from the dune
rim to the naked slopes, it even tries to find a permanent station on
the beach. Silvery gray-green all summer long, in autumn it puts on
gold and russet-golden colourings of singular delicacy and beauty.

The grass grows thickest on the slopes and shoulders of the mounds, its
tall leaves inclosing intrusive heads and clumps of the thick-fleshed
dune goldenrod. Still lower down the slope, where the sands open and
the spears rise thin, the beach pea catches the eye with its familiar
leaf and faded topmost bloom; lower still, on desert-like floors,
are tussock mats of poverty grass and the flat green stars of
innumerable spurges. The only real bushes of the region are beach plum
thickets, and these are few and far between.

[Illustration: _The Eastham Dunes from the Inlet_]

All these plants have enormously long taproots which bury themselves
deep in the moist core of the sands.

The greater part of the year I have two beaches, one above, one below.
The lower or tidal beach begins at mean low water and climbs a clean
slope to the high-water mark of the average low-course tide; the upper
beach, more of a plateau in form, occupies the space between high water
and the dunes. The width of these beaches changes with every storm and
every tide, but I shall not be far out if I call them both an average
seventy-five feet wide. Unseasonable storm tides and high-course tides
make of the beach one vast new floor. Winter tides narrow the winter’s
upper beach and often sweep across it to the dunes. The whole beach
builds up in summer as if each tide pushed more and more sand against
it out of the sea. Perhaps currents wash in sand from the outer bars.

It is no easy task to find a name or a phrase for the colour of Eastham
sand. Its tone, moreover, varies with the hour and the seasons. One
friend says yellow on its way to brown, another speaks of the colour of
raw silk. Whatever colour images these hints may offer to a reader’s
mind, the colour of the sand here on a June day is as warm and rich a
tone as one may find. Late in the afternoon, there descends upon the
beach and the bordering sea a delicate overtone of faintest violet.
There is no harshness here in the landscape line, no hard Northern
brightness or brusque revelation; there is always reserve and mystery,
always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature,
honouring, conceals.

The sand here has a life of its own, even if it is only a life borrowed
from the wind. One pleasant summer afternoon, while a high, gusty
westerly was blowing, I saw a little “wind devil,” a miniature tornado
six feet high, rush at full speed out of a cut, whirl itself full of
sand upon the beach, and spin off breakerward. As it crossed the beach,
the “devil” caught the sun, and there burst out of the sand smoke a
brownish prism of burning, spinning, and fantastic colour. South of
me, the dune I call “big dune” now and then goes through a curious
performance. Seen lengthwise, the giant has the shape of a wave, its
slope to the beach being a magnificent fan of purest wind-blown sand,
its westward slope a descent to a sandy amphitheatre. During a recent
winter, a coast guard key post was erected on the peak of the dune; the
feet of the night patrols trod down and nicked the crest, and presently
this insignificant notch began to “work” and deepen. It is now eight or
nine feet wide and as many deep. From across the marshes, it might be
a kind of great, roundish bite out of the crest. On windy autumn days,
when the sand is still dry and alive, and westerly gusts and currents
take on a genuine violence, the loose sand behind the dune is whirled
up by the wind and poured eastward through this funnel. At such times
the peak “smokes” like a volcano. The smoke is now a streaming blackish
plume, now a thin old-ivory wraith, and it billows, eddies, and pours
out as from a sea Vesuvius.

Between the dunes and the marshes, an irregular width of salt-hay land
extends from the sand slopes to the marshier widths of tidal land along
the creeks. Each region has its own grasses, the meadows being almost a
patchwork of competing growths. In the late summer and the autumn the
marsh lavender, thin-strewn but straying everywhere, lifts its cloud of
tiny sun-faded flowers above the tawny, almost deer-coloured grasses.
The marsh islands beyond are but great masses of thatch grass rising
from floors of sodded mud and sand; there are hidden pools in these
unvisited acres which only sunset reveals. The wild ducks know them
well and take refuge in them when stalked by gunners.

How singular it is that so little has been written about the birds of
Cape Cod! The peninsula, from an ornithologist’s point of view, is one
of the most interesting in the world. The interest does not centre
on the resident birds, for they are no more numerous here than they
are in various other pleasant places; it lies in the fact that living
here, one may see more kinds and varieties of birds than it would
seem possible to discover in any one small region. At Eastham, for
instance, among visitors and migrants, residents and casuals, I had
land birds and moor birds, marsh birds and beach birds, sea birds and
coastal birds, even birds of the outer ocean. West Indian hurricanes,
moreover, often catch up and fling ashore here curious tropical and
semi-tropical forms, a glossy ibis in one storm, a frigate bird in
another. When living on the beach, I kept a particularly careful
lookout during gales.

[Illustration: _The Sierras of Sand and Snow_]

I close this chapter with what seems to me the most interesting detail
for a naturalist’s ear. Eastham bar is only three miles long and
scarce a quarter of a mile wide across its sands. Yet in this little
world Nature has already given her humbler creatures a protective
colouration. Stop at the coast guard station and catch a locust on
the station lawn--we have the maritime locust here, _Trimerotropsis
maritima harris_--and, having caught him, study him well; you will find
him tinted with green. Go fifty feet into the dunes and catch another,
and you shall see an insect made of sand. The spiders, too, are made of
sand--the phrase is none too strong--and so are the toads that go beach
combing on moonlit summer nights. One may stand at the breakers’ edge
and study a whole world in one’s hand.

So, choosing to remain upon the beach, I look forward to October and
winter and the great migrations. Earliest autumn and September now
enclose the earth.

My western windows are most beautiful in early evening. On these
lovely, cool September nights the level and quiescent dust of light
which fills the sky is as autumnal in its colouring as the earth below.
There is autumn on the earth and autumn overhead. The great isles of
tawny orange smouldering into darkness, the paths of the channels
stilled to twilight bronze, the scarlet meadows deepening to levels of
purple and advancing night--all these mount, in exhalation of colour,
to the heavens. The beam of Nauset, entering my northern casement,
brushes a recurrent pallor of light across a part of my bedroom wall. A
first flash, a second flash, a third flash, and then a little interval
as the dark sector of the lens travels between the Fo’castle and
the flame. On bright moonlit nights, I can see both the whitewashed
tower and the light; on dark nights, I can see only the light itself
suspended and secure above the earth.

It is dark to-night, and over the plains of ocean the autumnal sky
rolls up the winter stars.

_Chapter II_

AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS

There is a new sound on the beach, and a greater sound. Slowly, and
day by day, the surf grows heavier, and down the long miles of the
beach, at the lonely stations, men hear the coming winter in the roar.
Mornings and evenings grow cold, the northwest wind grows cold; the
last crescent of the month’s moon, discovered by chance in a pale
morning sky, stands north of the sun. Autumn ripens faster on the
beach than on the marshes and the dunes. Westward and landward there
is colour; seaward, bright space and austerity. Lifted to the sky, the
dying grasses on the dune tops’ rim tremble and lean seaward in the
wind, wraiths of sand course flat along the beach, the hiss of sand
mingles its thin stridency with the new thunder of the sea.

I have been spending my afternoons gathering driftwood and observing
birds. The skies being clear, noonday suns take something of the bite
out of the wind, and now and then a warmish west-sou’westerly finds its
way back into the world. Into the bright, vast days I go, shouldering
home my sticks and broken boards and driving shore birds on ahead
of me, putting up sanderlings and sandpipers, ringnecks and knots,
plovers and killdeer, coveys of a dozen, little flocks, great flocks,
compact assemblies with a regimented air. For a fortnight past, October
9th to October 23d, an enormous population of the migrants has been
“stopping over” on my Eastham sands, gathering, resting, feeding, and
commingling. They come, they go, they melt away, they gather again; for
actual miles the intricate and inter-crisscross pattern of their feet
runs unbroken along the tide rim of Cape Cod.

Yet it is no confused and careless horde through which I go, but
an army. Some spirit of discipline and unity has passed over these
countless little brains, waking in each flock a conscious sense of its
collective self and giving each bird a sense of himself as a member of
some migrant company. Lone fliers are rare, and when seen have an air
of being in pursuit of some flock which has overlooked them and gone
on. Swift as the wind they fly, speeding along the breakers with the
directness of a runner down a course, and I read fear in their speed.
Sometimes I see them find their own and settle down beside them half
a mile ahead, sometimes they melt away into a vista of surf and sky,
still speeding on, still seeking.

The general multitude, it would seem, consists of birds who have spent
the summer somewhere on the outer Cape and of autumn reinforcements
from the north.

I see the flocks best when they are feeding on the edge of a tide which
rises to its flood in the later afternoon. No summer blur of breaker
mist or glassiness of heat now obscures these outer distances, and as
on I stride, keeping to the lower beach when returning with a load,
I can see birds and more birds and ever more birds ahead. Every last
advance of a dissolved breaker, coursing on, flat and seething, has
those who run away before it, turning its flank or fluttering up when
too closely pursued; every retreating in-sucked slide has those who
follow it back, eagerly dipping and gleaning. Having fed, the birds
fly up to the upper beach and sit there for hours in the luke-cold
wind, flock by flock, assembly by assembly. The ocean thunders, pale
wisps and windy tatters of wintry cloud sail over the dunes, and the
sandpipers stand on one leg and dream, their heads tousled deep into
their feathers.

I wonder where these thousands spend the night. Waking the other
morning just before sunrise, I hurried into my clothes and went down to
the beach. North and then south I strolled, along an ebbing tide, and
north and south the great beach was as empty of bird life as the sky.
Far to the south, I remember now, a frightened pair of semipalmated
sandpipers did rise from somewhere on the upper beach and fly toward me
swift and voiceless, pass me on the flank, and settle by the water’s
edge a hundred yards or so behind. They instantly began to run about
and feed, and as I watched them an orange sun floated up over the
horizon with the speed and solemnity of an Olympian balloon.

The tide being high these days late in the afternoon, the birds begin
to muster on the beach about ten o’clock in the morning. Some fly
over from the salt meadows, some arrive flying along the beach, some
drop from the sky. I startle up a first group on turning from the
upper beach to the lower. I walk directly at the birds--a general
apprehension, a rally, a scutter ahead, and the birds are gone.
Standing on the beach, fresh claw marks at my feet, I watch the lovely
sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into
a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions; I
watch the spiralling flight, the momentary tilts of the white bellies,
the alternate shows of the clustered, grayish backs. The group next
ahead, though wary from the first, continues feeding. I draw nearer;
a few run ahead as if to escape me afoot, others stop and prepare to
fly; nearer still, the birds can stand no more; another rally, another
scutter, and they are following their kin along the surges.

No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the
flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms,
as I have hinted, in an instant of time, and in that same instant
develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from
each other, each one individually busy for his individual body’s
sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one,
coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on
the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such
thing, I may add, as a lead bird or guide. Had I more space I should
like nothing better than to discuss this new will and its instant of
origin, but I do not want to crowd this part of my chapter, and must
therefore leave the problem to all who study the psychic relations
between the individual and a surrounding many. My special interest is
rather the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to
the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does
this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more
tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we
to believe that these birds, all of them, are _machina_, as Descartes
long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely
alike that each cogwheel brain, encountering the same environmental
forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? or is there
some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow
through them and between them as they fly? Schools of fish, I am told,
make similar mass changes of direction. I saw such a thing once, but of
that more anon.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their
tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein
we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never
attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and
travail of the earth.

The afternoon sun sinks red as fire; the tide climbs the beach, its
foam a strange crimson; miles out, a freighter goes north, emerging
from the shoals.

II

It chanced that on a mild September morning, as I was standing a moment
at a window looking west over the marshes and the blue autumnal creeks,
an alarm of some kind began to spread among the gulls. The incoming
tide had already crowded the birds back on the higher gravel banks and
bars, and from these isles, silvery cloud by cloud, I saw the gulls
rise and stream away to the southward in a long, fugitive storm of
wings. They were flying, I noticed, unusually low. Interested to see
what had thus disturbed them, I stepped out a moment to the pinnacle
of my dune. As I stood there staring after the vanishing gulls and
questioning the sky, I saw far above the birds, and well behind them,
an eagle advancing through the heavens. He had just emerged from a
plume of hovering cloud into the open blue, and when I saw him first
was sailing south and seaward on motionless wings, seeming to follow in
the great sky the blue course of a channel far below.

There are sand bars at the mouth of Nauset harbour; many gulls feed
there between the tides, and the gulls from the marsh joined forces
with this gathering. As the eagle approached the bars, I looked to
see if he would descend or fly out to sea. But no; at the harbour’s
entrance he turned south, aligned his flight with the coast line, and
disappeared.

During the autumn I saw this same bird half a dozen different times.
I could tell when he was about by the terror of the gulls. Yet this
eagle--for a bald eagle, _Haliætus leucocephalus leucocephalus_, I
believe him to have been--is, as Mr. Forbush says, “by nature a fish
eater.” I never saw him pay the slightest attention to the fugitives;
nevertheless, he may well have a fancy for gulls when they are plump
and he is hungry. At any rate, they fear him. There are always a few
black-backed or “minister” gulls mingled in with the herring gulls upon
these flats, and these burly giants, I noticed, sought refuge with the
rest.

Eagles are by no means rare upon Cape Cod. The birds arrive here as
coast-wise visitors, find the region to their liking, and establish
themselves in various favourite domains. They fish in our sandy bays
and inlets; they have rather a fancy for the more isolated Cape Cod
ponds. Seen at close range, the bald eagle is a dusky brownish bird
with a pure-white head, neck, and tail. I never had a near view of
this Eastham visitor, but one of the coast guardsmen roused him up one
day from a thicket close by the head of a creek running up into the
moors--he heard a sudden noise of brush and great wings, he said, and,
turning round, he saw the eagle rising free of the scrub and the bright
leaves.

Ever since I came to live here on Cape Cod, I have been amazed at
the number of land-bird migrants I have encountered on the dunes. I
expected to see sandpipers on the beach and scoters in the surf, for
they are coast-wise folk, but I did not expect to see the red-breasted
nuthatch rise out of the September dunes, or find the charming
black-and-yellow warbler sitting on the ridgepole of the Fo’castle, his
black-tipped tail feathers turned to the Atlantic. But perhaps I had
best begin at the beginning and tell how the sparrows and the warblers
came down to us this autumn by the coast.

Various new sparrows were the first strangers to arrive. There are
summer sparrows here, a great abundance of them, for the marsh and
meadow land west of the dunes is the natural habitat of many species.
Walk through these grass-lands on a summer’s day, and you will see
singles and flocks break from the sunburned stubble ahead, some to drop
and hide again farther on, others to watch you from the coastguard
wires. Song sparrows are notably abundant, for these pleasant singers
frequent both the marshes and the dunes; but the seaside sparrow keeps
more to the marsh rim and the salt-hay mowings, the sharp-tailed
sparrow fancies the wheel ruts of the hay carts, and the odd little
grasshopper sparrow, _Coturniculus savannarum passerinus_, trills into
the burning sundowns the two faint notes of his curious and poignant
insect song.

Early in September Hudsonian curlews arrived in Eastham marsh, and to
see them I began going to Nauset through the meadows instead of by the
beach. High September tides were then covering both marsh and meadow
land, and, as I pushed on each afternoon, the curlews rose from close
beside the inundated road, and, circling, called to other curlews; I
could hear, when I listened, the clear reply. And then there would
be silence, and I would hear the sound of autumn and the world, and
perhaps the faint withdrawing roar of ocean beyond the dunes. When I
reached the wider meadows on these days, I found the stubble mobbed
with sparrows; the population had doubled in a week.

Flocks of fox sparrows were feeding everywhere; I whirred up groups
of savannah sparrows and families of white-throats; a solitary
white-headed sparrow watched me from the concealment of a bush. It was
a silent throng. I heard faint “_tsips_” and “_chips_” of alarm as
I passed--nothing more. Love-making was over and done, and all were
importantly busy with the importance of their lives.

On the 24th and the 25th there was wind and rain, and on the 27th I saw
the first of the warblers.

The weather had cleared, and I had risen early and begun to get
breakfast. It is my custom here to sit facing the sea, and I was moving
over my table when I noticed a small bird of some kind foraging about
in the grass before the house. I could not see him well at first,
for he had entered into the grass as into a thicket, but presently
out he came, pushing through the stalks, and I watched him from the
window unsuspected. This first arrival was a Canadian warbler. Steely
ash-gray above, yellow below, and with a broad band of black spots
between his yellow throat and yellow belly, he was a charming bit of
life. Over the pale sand, in and out of the tawny-white roots, in and
out of the variegations of morning light he moved, picking up seeds
while a sea wind shook the tops of the dying grass above his head.
Presently, in search of still more food, he turned the corner of the
house, and when I went out after breakfast he had gone.

Then came, all in one week, a Wilson’s warbler (a female, probably),
the black-and-yellow warbler, and a chestnut-sided warbler. The birds
were singles, they travelled along the dunes, they fed on the fallen
seeds. In October I saw in one day five myrtle warblers; a pair of
these lingered a week near Fo’castle dune. Then came juncos and a
raid of pigeon hawks. The juncos, like the warblers, foraged on the
dunes, and the hawks hunted them there for an hour or so before the
dawn. I went exploring one morning while Nauset was still flashing
into a sullen, cold, and overclouded world, and saw a pigeon hawk rise
unexpectedly out of the cut to the north with a wretched junco gripped
beneath him. Flying seaward through the cut, the hawk carried his
captive to the beach, found himself a sheltered nook close along the
dune wall, stood at attention for a moment, and then unbent and ate.

I saw various other migrant land birds as well, but I shall not dwell
upon them, for the listing and cataloguing of species seems to me of
less interest than their arrival by sea. This outer arm of Cape Cod,
as I have already explained, stands thirty miles or so out from the
continental main, yet there are land birds, little birds, going south
along it as casually as so many arctic geese. Writing here this cloudy
morning, with a great confused roaring of breakers in my ears, I call
to mind the Wilson’s warbler, the female, I saw a fortnight ago, and
I wonder where it was that she forsook her familiar earth for the
grey ocean, an ocean she perhaps had never seen. What a gesture of
ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance
of circumstance and death--land wing and hostile sea, the fading land
behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the
bright, aërial blood.

But who shall say by what sea routes these landsmen reach the Cape?
Some species, I imagine, cross Massachusetts Bay, their jumping-off
place being north of Boston (Cape Ann or Ipswich perhaps); some may
cross over from the South Shore at a point well north of Cape Cod
Bay, others undoubtedly come directly down from Maine. The wooded
archipelago of Maine is a famous place for warblers. It is quite
possible that the species I have mentioned may have followed some great
river to the sea, the Kennebec or the Penobscot, perhaps, and crossed
from the river mouth directly over to Cape Cod. The Highland Light
bears south 3/4 west (true) from Seguin at the mouth of the Kennebec,
and is separated from it by only 101 miles of open water. The birds
could manage this easily.

[Illustration: _Herring Gulls_]

All over the world land migrants go great distances over open water.
Numbers of birds, for instance, migrating back and forth between Europe
and North Africa cross the Mediterranean twice a year, and in our own
hemisphere there are flights across the Gulf of Mexico and movements
between the West Indies and our south Atlantic states.

Late in October there came an easterly gale, and in the afternoon, when
the tide was high, I put on oilskins and went out to see the surf.
About a mile to the north of the Fo’castle, as I was trudging on across
the rain, I saw just ahead and close over the breakers a flying speck
sailing landward out of the wrack, and even as I stared, it fell to the
beach in danger of the waves. I ran ahead, then, and picked the thing
up just as a slide of foam was about to overflow it, and found it to be
an autumn leaf, a maple leaf flat and drenched and red.

Mid-October and the land birds have gone. A few sparrows linger in the
marshes. The plum bushes have lost their leaves. Walking the beach, I
read winter in the new shapes of the clouds.

Western cloud, dark substance of cloud, gathered at the wintry horizon
of the short-lived days making them even shorter with the false sundown
of its rim. Now come the sea fowl and the wild fowl to the beach from
the lonely and darkening north, from the Arctic Ocean and the advancing
pack, from the continental fragments and great empty islands that lie
between the continent and the pole, from the tundra and the barrens,
from the forests, from the bright lakes, from the nest-strewn crevices
and ledges of Atlantic rocks no man has ever named or scaled. Over
the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living
streams, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the peoples
and flocks, the clans and families, the young and the old. And the
dying grasslands, the October snows, and the forests fall behind, and
presently the nations behold a first far glint of the sea.

There are many streams, and it is said that two of the greatest bear
down upon Cape Cod. A first river, rising in the interior of Alaska,
flows southeast across Canada to the Atlantic; on this stream move
birds from the north woods and the Canadian lakes together with birds
from the north barrens and the arctic isles and half lands; a second
stream, rising in the shadow of the pole, flows south along the coast
past Greenland and the bays of Labrador--on this move the hardy arctic
folk who get their living from the tides. Many species are common to
both streams. Somewhere north of the Cape, perhaps round and about
the mouth of the St. Lawrence, these streams immix their multitudes,
and south to New England moves the great united flood, peopling with
primeval life the seacoasts and the sky.

Ducks enter the channels, some flying in from the bay, others from the
outer ocean, geese settle at sundown in the golden skin of the western
coves, coveys of winter yellow-legs circle in the gloom, and hide
when disturbed in the taller salt grasses between the meadows and the
creeks. At nightfall and at daybreak I hear birds talking. Strangers in
rubber boots and khaki uniforms now visit my domain, and every Saturday
afternoon I look with philosophy through my western windows to a number
of tufts of grass disguised as gunners.

Now that I have settled down here for the winter, I find myself
becoming something of a beach comber. Every once in a while, when I
chance to look seaward, I spy an unknown something or other rising and
falling, appearing and disappearing in the offshore surges, and at this
sight the beach comber in me wakes. All kinds of things “come ashore”
on these vast sands, and even the most valueless have an air of being
treasure trove. The mysterious something moving from the swells into
the breakers may be nothing but a smelly bait tub washed overboard
from some Gloucester fisherman, or a lobster pot, or a packing case
stencilled with a liner’s name; but in the sea or on the beach a mile
ahead it is something for nothing, it is the unknown, it is hope
springing eternal in the human breast. The other day I found myself
thoughtfully examining a U. S. Navy blue undress jumper which lay flat
and soggy and solitary on the lower beach. It was not, in its day,
an unfamiliar garment, and I have an old friend in the village who
occasionally dons a rather good one he found just south of the light.
Alas, the cloth was rotted and the jumper much too small. But I cut off
and saved the buttons.

[Illustration: _Semipalmated Sandpiper_]

Now, while I stood there slicing off the buttons, I chanced to look up
a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the
only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing
along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high
and travelling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow’s
from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the
solemn unrest of ocean--their passing was more than music, and from
their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms
and heals.

IV

The last two weeks in October see the peak of the autumnal visitations.
In November and December the stream from the inland shrinks, but the
coast-wise stream, continuing to flow, brings us down a rare and
curious world. Of this I shall write at greater length, for I found it
of enormous interest.

Here, approaching the end of my notes on birds and autumn, I chance to
remember that one of the strangest and most beautiful of the migrations
over the dunes was not a movement of birds at all but of butterflies.
There came a morning early in October which ripened, as the sun rose
higher, into a rather mild and September-like day; the wind was
autumnal, I recall, and from the north by west, but the current was
both mildly warm and light. As it was a day to be spent out-of-doors,
soon after ten o’clock I went out round the back of the Fo’castle into
the sunlight and began to work there on a bin I was putting together
out of driftage. I looked about, as I always do, but nothing in the
landscape chanced to take my eye. Sawing and hammering, I worked
for about three quarters of an hour, and then downed tools to take a
moment’s rest.

During the hour, a flight of twenty or more large orange-and-black
butterflies had arrived in the region of the dunes. It was a flight,
yet were the individuals far apart. There was at least an eighth of a
mile between any two; some were on the dunes, some were on the salt
meadows, three were on the beach. Their movements were casual as the
wind, yet there was an unmistakable southerly pull drawing them on. I
tried to catch one of the travellers on the beach, and though I count
myself a fair runner, it was no easy work keeping up with his turns
and erratic doublings. I wished him no ill; I simply wanted to have a
better look at him, but he escaped me by rising and disappearing over
the top of a dune. When I reached the same top after a scramble up a
steep of sand, the fugitive was already a good eighth of a mile away. I
went back to my carpentry with an increased respect for butterflies as
fliers.

An entomologist with whom I have been in correspondence tells me that
my visitors were undoubtedly specimens of the monarch or milkweed
butterfly, _Anosia plexippus_. In early autumn adults gather in great
swarms and move in a generally southward direction, and it is believed
(but not proved) that New England specimens go as far as Florida.
The following spring individuals (not swarms) appear in the North
apparently coming from the South. We do not know--I am quoting this
paragraph almost verbatim--whether these are returning migrants or
whether they are individuals that had not previously been in the North.
We do know that none of the fall migrants had previously been in the
South.

The butterflies of Eastham remained upon the dunes the rest of the
morning. I imagine that they were in search of food. Between half-past
twelve and half-past one they melted away as mysteriously as they had
come, and with them went the last echo of summer and the high sun from
the dunes. And that day I finished my bin and filled it and began to
build a wall of seaweed round the foundation of my house. A cricket
sang as I worked in the mild afternoon, alive and hardy in his cave
under my driftwood mountain, and beyond this little familiar sound of
earth I heard the roar of ocean filling the hollow space of day with
its inexorable warning.

_Chapter III_

THE HEADLONG WAVE

This morning I am going to try my hand at something that I do not
recall ever having encountered either in a periodical or in a book,
namely, a chapter on the ways, the forms, and the sounds of ocean
near a beach. Friends are forever asking me about the surf on the
great beach and if I am not sometimes troubled or haunted by its
sound. To this I reply that I have grown unconscious of the roar, and
though it sounds all day long in my waking ears, and all night long
in my sleeping ones, my ears seldom send on the long tumult to the
mind. I hear the roar the instant I wake in the morning and return to
consciousness, I listen to it a while consciously, and then accept and
forget it; I hear it during the day only when I stop again to listen,
or when some change in the nature of the sound breaks through my
acceptance of it to my curiosity.

They say here that great waves reach this coast in threes. Three great
waves, then an indeterminate run of lesser rhythms, then three great
waves again. On Celtic coasts it is the seventh wave that is seen
coming like a king out of the grey, cold sea. The Cape tradition,
however, is no half-real, half-mystical fancy, but the truth itself.
Great waves do indeed approach this beach by threes. Again and again
have I watched three giants roll in one after the other out of the
Atlantic, cross the outer bar, break, form again, and follow each other
in to fulfilment and destruction on this solitary beach. Coast guard
crews are all well aware of this triple rhythm and take advantage of
the lull that follows the last wave to launch their boats.

It is true that there are single giants as well. I have been roused by
them in the night. Waked by their tremendous and unexpected crash, I
have sometimes heard the last of the heavy overspill, sometimes only
the loud, withdrawing roar. After the roar came a briefest pause, and
after the pause the return of ocean to the night’s long cadences. Such
solitary titans, flinging their green tons down upon a quiet world,
shake beach and dune. Late one September night, as I sat reading, the
very father of all waves must have flung himself down before the house,
for the quiet of the night was suddenly overturned by a gigantic,
tumbling crash and an earthquake rumbling; the beach trembled beneath
the avalanche, the dune shook, and my house so shook in its dune that
the flame of a lamp quivered and pictures jarred on the wall.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the
sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on
a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices,
that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied. For it is a
mistake to talk of the monotone of ocean or of the monotonous nature of
its sound. The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it
your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings
and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing
seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding
undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the
half-heard talk of people in the sea. And not only is the great sound
varied in the manner of its making, it is also constantly changing
its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and
thundering, now almost placid, now furious, now grave and solemn-slow,
now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose
and elemental will.

Every mood of the wind, every change in the day’s weather, every phase
of the tide--all these have subtle sea musics all their own. Surf of
the ebb, for instance, is one music, surf of the flood another, the
change in the two musics being most clearly marked during the first
hour of a rising tide. With the renewal of the tidal energy, the sound
of the surf grows louder, the fury of battle returns to it as it turns
again on the land, and beat and sound change with the renewal of the
war.

Sound of surf in these autumnal dunes--the continuousness of it,
sound of endless charging, endless incoming and gathering, endless
fulfilment and dissolution, endless fecundity, and endless death. I
have been trying to study out the mechanics of that mighty resonance.
The dominant note is the great spilling crash made by each arriving
wave. It may be hollow and booming, it may be heavy and churning,
it may be a tumbling roar. The second fundamental sound is the wild
seething cataract roar of the wave’s dissolution and the rush of its
foaming waters up the beach--this second sound _diminuendo_. The third
fundamental sound is the endless dissolving hiss of the inmost slides
of foam. The first two sounds reach the ear as a unisonance--the
booming impact of the tons of water and the wild roar of the up-rush
blending--and this mingled sound dissolves into the foam-bubble hissing
of the third. Above the tumult, like birds, fly wisps of watery
noise, splashes and counter splashes, whispers, seethings, slaps, and
chucklings. An overtone sound of other breakers, mingled with a general
rumbling, fells earth and sea and air.

[Illustration: _The Edge of Foam_]

Here do I pause to warn my reader that although I have recounted the
history of a breaker--an ideal breaker--the surf process must be
understood as mingled and continuous, waves hurrying after waves,
interrupting waves, washing back on waves, overwhelming waves.
Moreover, I have described the sound of a high surf in fair weather.
A storm surf is mechanically the same thing, but it _grinds_, and
this same long, sepulchral grinding--sound of utter terror to all
mariners--is a development of the second fundamental sound; it is the
cry of the breaker water roaring its way ashore and dragging at the
sand. A strange underbody of sound when heard through the high, wild
screaming of a gale.

Breaking waves that have to run up a steep tilt of the beach are often
followed by a dragging, grinding sound--the note of the baffled water
running downhill again to the sea. It is loudest when the tide is low
and breakers are rolling beach stones up and down a slope of the lower
beach.

I am, perhaps, most conscious of the sound of surf just after I have
gone to bed. Even here I read myself to drowsiness, and, reading, I
hear the cadenced trampling roar filling all the dark. So close is the
Fo’castle to the ocean’s edge that the rhythm of sound I hear oftenest
in fair weather is not so much a general tumult as an endless arrival,
overspill, and dissolution of separate great seas. Through the dark,
mathematic square of the screened half window, I listen to the rushes
and the bursts, the tramplings, and the long, intermingled thunderings,
never wearying of the sonorous and universal sound.

Away from the beach, the various sounds of the surf melt into one great
thundering symphonic roar. Autumnal nights in Eastham village are
full of this ocean sound. The “summer people” have gone, the village
rests and prepares for winter, lamps shine from kitchen windows, and
from across the moors, the great levels of the marsh, and the bulwark
of the dunes resounds the long wintry roaring of the sea. Listen to
it a while, and it will seem but one remote and formidable sound;
listen still longer and you will discern in it a symphony of breaker
thunderings, an endless, distant, elemental cannonade. There is beauty
in it, and ancient terror. I heard it last as I walked through the
village on a starry October night; there was no wind, the leafless
trees were still, all the village was abed, and the whole sombre world
was awesome with the sound.

II

The seas are the heart’s blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by
the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of earth’s
veins.

The rhythm of waves beats in the sea like a pulse in living flesh.
It is pure force, forever embodying itself in a succession of watery
shapes which vanish on its passing.

I stand on my dune top watching a great wave coursing in from sea, and
know that I am watching an illusion, that the distant water has not
left its place in ocean to advance upon me, but only a force shaped in
water, a bodiless pulse beat, a vibration.

Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a
thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth
liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. Is the original force circular, I
wonder? and do ocean waves ring out from the creative beat as they do
on a quiet surface broken by a stone? Are there, perhaps, ocean circles
so great and so intricate that they are unperceived? Once created, the
wave or the arc of a wave begins its journey through the sea. Countless
vibrations precede it, countless vibrations follow after. It approaches
the continent, swings into the coast line, courses ashore, breaks,
dissolves, is gone. The innermost waters it last inhabited flow back in
marbly foam to become a body to another beat, and to be again flung
down. So it goes night and day, and will go till the secret heart of
earth strikes out its last slow beat and the last wave dissolves upon
the last forsaken shore.

[Illustration: _Slide and Seethe_]

As I stand on my dune top, however, I do not think of the illusion and
the beat of earth, for I watch the waves with my outer rather than my
inner eye. After all, the illusion is set off by an extraordinary,
an almost miraculous thing--the embodiment of the wave beat in an
almost constant shape. We see a wave a quarter of a mile off, then
a few hundred yards nearer in, then just offshore; we seem to have
been watching the same travelling mass of water--there has been no
appreciable change in mass or in shape--yet all the while the original
beat has taken on a flowing series of liquid bodies, bodies so alike,
so much the same, that our eye will individualize them and follow them
in--the third wave, we say, or the second wave behind the great wave.
How strange it is that this beat of earth, this mysterious undulation
of the seas, moving through and among the other forces stirring the
waters close off the continent, should thus keep its constancy of form
and mass, and how odd a blend of illusion and reality it all is! On
the whole, the outer eye has the best of it.

Blowing all day long, a northwest wind yesterday swept the sky clear of
every tatter and wisp of cloud. Clear it still is, though the wind has
shifted to the east. The sky this afternoon is a harmony of universal
blue, bordered with a surf rim of snowiest blue-white. Far out at sea,
in the northeast and near the horizon, is a pool of the loveliest
blue I have ever seen here--a light blue, a petal blue, blue of the
emperor’s gown in a Chinese fairy tale. If you would see waves at their
best, come on such a day, when the ocean reflects a lovely sky, and the
wind is light and onshore; plan to arrive in the afternoon so that you
will have the sun facing the breakers. Come early, for the glints on
the waves are most beautiful and interesting when the light is oblique
and high. And come with a rising tide.

The surf is high, and on the far side of it, a wave greater than its
fellows is shouldering out of the blue, glinting immensity of sea.

Friends tell me that there are certain tropic beaches where waves miles
long break all at once in one cannonading crash: a little of this, I
imagine, would be magnificent; a constancy of it, unbearable. The surf
here is broken; it approaches the beach in long intercurrent parallels,
some a few hundred feet long, some an eighth of a mile long, some, and
the longest, attaining the quarter-mile length and perhaps just over.
Thus, at all times and instants of the day, along the five miles of
beach visible from the Fo’castle deck, waves are to be seen breaking,
coursing in to break, seething up and sliding back.

But to return to the blue wave rolling in out of the blue spaciousness
of sea. On the other side of the world, just opposite the Cape, lies
the ancient Spanish province of Galicia, and the town of Pontevedra and
St. James Compostella, renowned of pilgrims. (When I was there they
offered me a silver cockle shell, but I would have none of it, and got
myself a sea shell from some Galician fisherfolk.) Somewhere between
this Spanish land and Cape Cod the pulse of earth has engendered this
wave and sent it coursing westward through the seas. Far off the coast,
the spray of its passing has, perhaps, risen on the windward bow of
some rusty freighter and fallen in rainbow drops upon her plates; the
great liners have felt it course beneath their keels.

A continent rises in the west, and the pulse beat approaches this
bulwark of Cape Cod. Two thirds of a mile out, the wave is still a sea
vibration, a billow. Slice it across, and its outline will be that
of a slightly flattened semi-circle; the pulse is shaped in a long,
advancing mound. I watch it approach the beach. Closer and closer in,
it is rising with the rise of the beach and the shoaling of the water;
closer still, it is changing from a mound to a pyramid, a pyramid which
swiftly distorts, the seaward side lengthening, the landward side
incurving--the wave is now a breaker. Along the ridge of blue forms a
rippling crest of clear, bright water; a little spray flies off. Under
the racing foam churned up by the dissolution of other breakers the
beach now catches at the last shape of sea inhabited by the pulse--the
wave is _tripped_ by the shoaling sand--the giant stumbles, crashes,
and is pushed over and ahead by the sloping line of force behind. The
fall of a breaker is never the work of gravity alone.

It is the last line of the wave that has captured the decorative
imagination of the world--the long seaward slope, the curling crest,
the incurved volute ahead.

[Illustration: _Summer Breakers_]

Toppling over and hurled ahead, the wave crashes, its mass of glinting
blue falling down in a confusion of seething, splendid white, the
tumbling water rebounding from the sand to a height almost always a
little above that of the original crest. Out of the wild, crumbling
confusion born of the dissolution of the force and the last great
shape, foamy fountains spurt, and ringlets of spray. The mass of water,
still all furiously a-churn and seething white, now rushes for the
rim of the beach as it might for an inconceivable cataract. Within
thirty-five feet the water shoals from two feet to dry land. The edge
of the rush thins, and the last impulse disappears in inch-deep slides
of foam which reflect the sky in one last moment of energy and beauty
and then vanish all at once into the sands.

Another thundering, and the water that has escaped and withdrawn is
gathered up and swept forward again by another breaking wave. Night and
day, age after age, so works the sea, with infinite variation obeying
an unalterable rhythm moving through an intricacy of chance and law.

I can watch a fine surf for hours, taking pleasure in all its wild
plays and variations. I like to stand on my beach, watching a long
wave start breaking in many places, and see the curling water run north
and south from the several beginnings, and collide in furious white
pyramids built of the opposing energies. Splendid fountains often
delight the eye. A towering and deep-bellied wave, toppling, encloses
in its volute a quantity of air, and a few seconds after the spill this
prisoned and compressed vapour bursts up through the boiling rush in
feathery, foamy jets and geyser plumes. I have seen fountains here,
on a September day, twenty and twenty-five and even thirty feet high.
Sometimes a curious thing happens. Instead of escaping vertically, the
rolled-up air escapes horizontally, and the breaker suddenly blows, as
from a dragon’s mouth, a great lateral puff of steamy spray. On sunny
days, the toppling crest is often mirrored in the glassy volute as
the wave is breaking. One lovely autumn afternoon, I saw a beautiful
white gull sailing along the volute of a breaker accompanied by his
reflection in the wave.

I add one curious effect of the wind. When the wind is directly
offshore or well offshore, the waves approach fighting it; when the
wind is offshore but so little off that its angle with the coast line
is oblique--say an angle never greater than twenty-two degrees and
never less than about twelve--the waves that approach the coast do not
give battle, but run in with their long axis parallel to the wind.
Sitting in the Fo’castle, I can often tell the exact quarter of an
offshore wind simply by looking at this oblique alignment of the waves.

The long miles of beach are never more beautiful than when waves are
rolling in fighting a strong breeze. Then do the breakers actually seem
to charge the coast. As they approach, the wind meets them in a shock
of war, the chargers rear but go on, and the wind blows back their
manes. North and south, I watch them coursing in, the manes of white,
sun brilliant spray streaming behind them for thirty and even forty
feet. Sea horses do men call such waves on every coast of the world.
If you would see them at their best, come to this beach on a bright
October day when a northwest wind is billowing off to sea across the
moors.

I will close my chapter with a few paragraphs about heavy surf.

It is best to be seen, I think, when the wind is not too high. A gale
blows up a surf, but it also flattens out the incoming rollers, making
monstrous, foamy travelling mounds of them much like those visible from
a ship at sea. Not until the wind has dropped do the breakers gather
form. The finest surf I have ever seen here--it was a Northern recoil
of the great Florida hurricane--broke on three pleasant and almost
windless autumn days. The storm itself had passed us, but our seas had
been stirred to their deeps. Returning to the Cape at night from a trip
to town, I heard the roar of the ocean in Orleans, and on arriving
at Nauset, found the beach flooded to the dunes, and covered with a
churn of surf and moonlight. Dragging a heavy suitcase and clad in my
go-to-town clothes, I had an evil time getting to the Fo’castle over
the dune tops and along the flooded marsh.

Many forces mingle in the surf of a storm--the great earth rhythm of
the waves, the violence of wind, the struggle of water to obey its
own elemental law. Out of the storm at sea come the giants and, being
giants, trip far out, spilling first on the outer bar. Shoreward then
they rush, breaking all the way. Touching the beach, they tumble in
a roar lost in a general noise of storm. Trampled by the wind and
everlastingly moved and lifted up and flung down by the incoming seas,
the water offshore becomes a furious glassiness of marbly foam; wild,
rushing sheets of seethe fifty feet wide border it; the water streams
with sand.

Under all this move furious tidal currents, the longshore undertow of
outer Cape Cod. Shore currents here move in a southerly direction;
old wreckage and driftwood is forever being carried down here from
the north. Coast guard friends often look at a box or stick I have
retrieved, and say, “Saw that two weeks ago up by the light.”

After an easterly, I find things on the beach which have been blown
down from the Gulf of Maine--young, uprooted spruce trees, lobster
buoys from Matinicus, and, after one storm, a great strewing of empty
sea-urchin shells. Another easterly washed up a strewing of curious
wooden pebbles shaped by the sea out of the ancient submerged forests
which lie just off the present coast. They were brown-black, shaped
like beach stones, and as smooth as such stones.

The last creature I found in the surf was a huge horseshoe crab, the
only one I have ever chanced to find on the outside. Poor _Limulus
polyphemus_! The surf having turned him upside down, he had as usual
doubled up, and the surf had then filled with sand the angle of his
doubling. When I discovered him, he was being bullied by a foam slide,
and altogether in a desperate way. So I picked him up, rinsed the sand
out of his waving gills, held him up all dripping by the tail, and
flung him as far as I could to seaward of the breakers. A tiny splash,
and I had seen the last of him, a moment more, and the surf had filled
the hollow in which he had lain.

Autumnal easterlies and November tides having scoured from the beach
its summer deeps of sand, the high seasonal tides now run clear across
to the very foot of the dunes. Under this daily overflow of cold, the
last of the tide-rim hoppers and foragers vanish from the beach. An icy
wind blusters; I hear a dry tinkle of sand against my western wall;
December nears, and winter closes in upon the coast.

_Chapter IV_

MIDWINTER

A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer
nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it,
one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something
of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the
most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the
last December ebb of his decline. All these autumn weeks I have watched
the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the
marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree,
now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great
deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When
all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama
by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share
in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic
spirit.

The splendour of colour in this world of sea and dune ebbed from it
like a tide; it shallowed first without seeming to lose ground, and
presently vanished all at once, almost, so it seemed, in one grey week.
Warmth left the sea, and winter came down with storms of rushing wind
and icy, pelting rain. The first snow fell early in November, just
before the dawn of a grey and bitter day. I had written a letter the
night before, intending to give it to the coast guardsman who came
south at seven o’clock, but somehow or other I missed him; and no
welcome light flashed an answer to mine as I stood on the crest of my
dune looking into the darkness of the beach and listening to the sombre
thunder of a rising sea. Unwilling to stay up till after midnight for
the next patrol, I went out and put a note on the coast guard key post
just south of me asking the last man south in the morning to wake me
up and come in and get the letter. At about half-past five I woke to a
stamping of feet and a knock on the door, and in came John Blood, the
tall, light-haired New Yorker, very much buttoned up into his blue pea
jacket, and with his watch cap well pulled down upon his ears.

[Illustration: _The Burst of a Wave_]

“Ahoy, John--thanks for coming in. What’s it like outside?”

“It’s snowing. Winter’s come, I guess,” he said, with a meditative grin.

We talked, I gave him the letter, and he went out into the dark break
of dawn, the wind, and the snow.

My fire had gone out, the Fo’castle was raw and cold, but my wood
was ready, and I soon had a fire crackling. All winter long, I kept
a basket of little sticks and fragments of driftwood ready for the
morning, and began the day with a bonfire in the fireplace. A hearthful
of high, leaping flame sends out a quick and plentiful heat. Light
came slowly into the world, coming not so much from the east as from
some vague, general nowhere--a light that did not grow brighter but
only increased in quantity. A northwest snow squall was blowing across
the sedgy marshes and the dunes, “seeming nowhere to alight” in the
enormous landscape, and whirling off to the sullen, iron-green, and
icy sea. As I watched, half-a-dozen gulls came sailing over from the
marsh. These birds like foul weather and have a way of flying out over
along the breakers a few minutes after the edge of a cloud has hidden
the sun, and there is a strange, ominous sense of storm in this great
natural scene.

The snow skirted along the beach, the wind suffering it no rest; I saw
little whirlpools of it driving down the sand into the onrush of the
breakers, it gathered in the footprints of the coast guard patrols,
building up on their leeward side and patterning them in white on the
empty beach. The very snow in the air had a character of its own, for
it was the snow of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic, snow icy
and crystalline, and sweeping across the dunes and moors rather than
down upon them. Chancing to look to the north, I saw Nauset Light
still turning and gleaming, and as I watched, it suddenly sank to a
storm-smothered and distant glow and stopped. By the almanac, the sun
had risen. So began the worst winter on the Cape for close upon fifty
years, a winter marked by great storms and tides, six wrecks, and the
loss of many lives.

The sun, this December morning, has come to the end of his southern
journey, he climbs the whitish sky to the south over the white fury
of the Orleans shoals, and takes on a silvery quality from the pallor
of the sky. On such a morning went ancient peoples to their hills, and
cried to the pale god to return to their woods and fields; perhaps the
vanished Nausets danced a ceremonial dance on those inland moors, and
the same northwest wind carried the measured drumming to these dunes. A
morning to go out upon the dunes and study the work of winter. Between
the cold blue of the sea and the levels of the marshes, the long wall
of the dunes lies blanched to a whiter pallor than the surrounding
landscape, for there is no russet and but little gold in dune grass
when it dies. That intricacy of green, full-fleshed life, which
billowed like wild wheat in the summer’s southwest wind, has thinned
away now to a sparse world of separate heads, each one holding, as in a
fist, a clump of whitish and mildewed wires.

The sand moves beneath. This shrinking of summer’s vegetation, this
uncovering of the body of the dune, has permitted the winter gales to
reach the sand, and all up and down the great wall, on the tops of
the dunes, the surface sand is moving. The direction of this movement
varies, of course, with the direction of the wind, but in general
the movement is toward the sea, for the prevailing winter winds are
northwesterly. In some places the blown and creeping sand has covered
the grass so deeply that only the very tips of the withered spikes
rise out of it; in other places, on the landward rims of the dunes,
the wind has blown the sand entirely away from the plant and left a
withered tangle of roots and stalks sprawling in the wind. Here and
there, in the dead, whitish grass, one encounters a stray tiny spotlet
of snow, relic of a storm a fortnight past. Such spots linger here for
inexplicable weeks and have an air of things disregarded and forgotten.

I have written of the movement of sand on the surface of the dune,
yet the very essence of the work of winter here is the quieting, the
enchainment of the mass of the sand. The sun no longer being hot enough
to dry it, moisture lies on it and within it, it loses its fluidity,
it takes on weight and definition. Footprints which the summer would
erase in a quarter of an hour remain in well-sheltered places for days
and even weeks. There is a winter change of colour, as well. The warm
golden quality vanishes and is replaced by a tone of cold silver-grey,
which makes no flashing answer to the sun.

[Illustration: _The Winter Beach_]

Animal life has disappeared into the chill air, the heavy, lifeless
sand. On the surface, nothing remains of the insect world. That
multiplicity of insect tracks, those fantastic ribbons which
grasshoppers, promenading flies, spiders, and beetles printed on
the dunes as they went about their hungry and mysterious purposes,
have come to an end in this world and left it all the poorer. Those
trillions of unaccountable lives, those crawling, buzzing, intense
presences which nature created to fulfil some unknown purpose or
perhaps simply to satisfy a whim for a certain sound or a moment of
exquisite colour, where are they now, in this vast world, silent save
for the sombre thunder of the surf and the rumble of wind in the
porches of the ears? As I muse here, it occurs to me that we are not
sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which
insects add to the natural scene; indeed, we take it so much as a
matter of course that it does not stir our fully conscious attention.
But all those little fiddles in the grass, all those cricket pipes,
those delicate flutes, are they not lovely beyond words when heard in
midsummer on a moonlight night? I like, too, the movement they give to
a landscape with their rushes, their strange comings and goings, and
their hoverings with the sun’s brilliance reflected in their wings.
Here, and at this especial moment, there is no trace or vestige of the
summer’s insect world, yet one feels them here, the trillion, trillion
tiny eggs in grass and marsh and sand, all faithfully spun from the
vibrant flesh of innumerable mothers, all faithfully sealed and hidden
away, all waiting for the rush of this earth through space and the
resurgence of the sun.

I find no more paths of little paws and claw-tipped feet, each one
with its own rhythm, its own mechanics of walking and running. The
skunks, who linger till the last chilled grasshopper has been pounced
on and eaten, are now lying torpid in their dark snuggles underground,
their heartbeat stilled to a ghost of its summer self. They do not,
apparently, make themselves burrows on the dunes, perhaps because
a wise instinct warns them that a burrow in these open sands might
collapse about them as they slept. November finds them travelling up
the dunes to the firm soil of the mainland moors. The hill nearest
the dunes is full of their winter parlours. Twice during the winter I
saw a wildcat of domestic stock hunting along the edge of the marsh,
and marked how savagery had completely altered the creature’s gait,
for it slunk along, belly close to the grass, like a panther. A large
brown cat with long fur and a wild and extraordinarily foolish face.
I imagined it was out hunting the marsh larks who feed in the stubble
of the salt-hay fields. Another time, I saw the hoofs of a deer in the
sand, but of this deer and its adventures in the frozen marsh I shall
speak later.

At Orleans, an otter, a rare animal here, has been seen, the man who
saw it taking it for a seal until it came out of the breakers and ran
along the sand. Every now and then, from the windows of the Fo’castle,
I catch sight of a seal’s black head swimming about close inshore.
In summer, seals are rarely seen on this part of the great outer
beach--I myself have never seen one--but in winter they come along the
breakers reconnoitring in search of food. They have a trick of swimming
unperceived under a flock of sea ducks, seizing one of the unwary birds
from underneath, and then disappearing with their mouths full of flesh
and frantic feathers. A confusion follows; the survivors leap from the
water with wildly beating wings, they scatter, wheel, and gather again,
and presently nature has erased every sign of the struggle, and the
sea rolls on as before.

There has been a strange tragedy to the north; one of those dread
elemental things that happen in an elemental world. The other evening
my friend Bill Eldredge, of Nauset, told me that there had been a
disaster that same morning off the Race. Two fishermen who had left
Provincetown in a big, thirty-foot motor dory were seen from the beach
to be having trouble of some kind; the dory had then drifted into a
tide rip churned up with surf, and capsized and drowned her crew. A
few nights later, Bill came south again, and I stood for a moment
talking to him on the beach at the foot of the Fo’castle dune. A lovely
night of great winter stars and a quiet sea. “You remember those two
fishermen I was telling you about?” said Bill. “They’ve found them both
now. One of them had a son at Wood End Station, and when he was coming
back from his patrol last night he saw his father’s body on the beach.”

II

On the night of Saturday, January 1st, it was almost pitch dark along
the coast. In the murk, the eye of Nauset Light had a reddish tinge,
and, turning, revealed a world shaped like a disk and pressed between
a great darkness of earth and a low, black floor of cloud. The wind
was on shore and blowing strong. Some time after midnight, a surfman
from Cahoons Hollow Coast Guard Station, patrolling south, discovered
a schooner in the surf, with the seas breaking over her, and the crew
hollering in the rigging. I write “hollering” here without shame, for
“hallooing,” or whatever the proper spelling of the verb may be, simply
would not tell the story, or convey the sound heard in the night. After
holding up a red signal flare to tell the men on the wreck that they
had been seen, the surfman hurried on to Cahoons and gave the alarm.
The crew of the station, under command of Captain Henry Daniels, then
dragged their cart of life-saving apparatus down the beach through a
surf running to the bank, and took off every single man safely in the
breeches buoy. The prompt and gallant rescue had been no easy task,
with the tide thus running high and the seas breaking over the schooner.

I had my first view of her the next afternoon. She turned out to be
the two-masted, motor-auxiliary fishing schooner _A. Roger Hickey_,
Boston-bound from the fishing grounds. Her compass had been at fault,
they said. When I caught sight of her from the top of a path descending
the great earth cliff of the Cape, the vessel lay on the open sand a
mile up the beach to the north, a typical Boston fisherman with a red
bottom and a black hull. A vessel, I judged, something over a hundred
feet long. The whole vast view was really a picture of singular and
moving beauty; it would be hard to forget, I think, that immense and
jade-green ocean under a fine sky, the great, sepia-brown beach with
its overhanging haze of faintest violet, the bright ship so forlorn,
and the tiny black figures moving round and about it. The beach had
already begun to break up its prize. Along it, on my way to the ship,
I saw splintered wood, an undamaged hatch cover painted white, and
several bunches of water-logged manila tags with a fish merchant’s name
printed on them in large black letters.

Presently there came walking toward me three ladies of Wellfleet, good,
pleasant New England housewives, each one with a large haddock under
her arm rolled up in a sheet of newspaper, the three dead-eyed haddock
heads protruding as from paper collars, the three fish tails visible
behind. Apparently the fish which the _Hickey_ had on board when she
struck were being given away.

Arriving at the wreck, I found that her rudder had already carried
away, and that her timbers were badly wrenched, and her seams opened.
The ship’s dog, who had been thrillingly rescued in his master’s arms,
sat shivering on the beach, a most inoffensive and unromantic brown
dog with what looked like an appalling case of mange. A handful of
visitors, men and boys in workaday clothes and rubber boots, were
wandering round the vessel, their boot prints making a chain about
her on the beach, and other men were busy puttering round the steeply
tilted deck. Finding Captain Henry Daniels of Cahoons aboard, an old
friend of years’ standing, I heard that the crew of the _Hickey_, two
or three excepted, had already returned to Boston by train, and that
the vessel was so badly damaged that she was to be stripped as soon as
possible of all gear worth saving, and abandoned.

Midships, a discussion was going on round the open mouth of one
of the fish holds. The _Hickey’s_ catch was still there, a mass of
big greyish fish bodies, haddocks with staring eyes, cod with chin
whiskers, flounders, and huge lemon soles. The discussion concerned
the possibility of the fish having had a bath in fuel oil when the
seas washed into the _Hickey_ at high tide. No one took serious alarm,
and the fish, handed out to all comers by a member of the crew, proved
excellent eating.

So they stripped the _A. Roger Hickey_, took out her engine and such
gear as they could, and then someone set fire to the hulk. By the end
of the winter, there was not even a splinter of this vessel on the
beach. She was the third wreck, and there were others to come.

As the winter closed in upon the beach, I began to look forward to days
when I might see what took place there during icy weather, but such
opportunities proved even rarer than I had expected. Thrust forth as it
is into the outer Atlantic, the Cape has a climate of island quality
and island moderation. Low temperatures may occur, but the thermometer
almost never falls as low as it does on the inner Massachusetts
coast, nor do “spells” of cold weather “hang on” for any length of
time. Storms which are snowstorms on the continental mainland turn to
rainstorms on the Cape, and such snowstorms as do arrive form but a
crust upon these Eastham moors. Two days after the storm the snow has
thinned to great decorative patches on the slopes of sedgy hills; in
another day only fragments, drifts, and stray islets remain. There is
even a difference of temperature between the mainland moors of Eastham
and the dunes. It is warmer on the bar. On a casual winter day I have
noted a difference of eight degrees.

The work of cold weather--I mean weather when the temperature sinks
toward zero--is thus to be observed only on occasion along this beach.
When it comes, it comes all at once, creates a new world overnight,
and vanishes overnight. The agency that brings it is the northwest
wind sweeping down on us across Massachusetts Bay from the forests and
frozen lakes of northern Canada. I remember one of the nights of its
coming, a Thursday night early in January with great winter clouds
moving out to sea, opening and closing over the cold stars, the wind on
the beach so icy that I found myself, when I first went out into it,
breathing it in little reluctant breaths. The next day was as cold
and desolate a day as I have ever seen upon the beach. The ocean was
purple-black, rough, and covered with sombre whitecaps; the morning
light was pewter dull, and over earth and sea and the lonely sands hung
a pall of purple-leaden cloud full of vast, tormented motion as it
crossed the Cape on its way to the Atlantic. Looking off to sea, as I
walked down my dune to go exploring, I saw a solitary freighter hugging
the coast for shelter from the northwest wind; she was plunging heavily
in the great seas and flinging up tons of spray with each plunge,
and her bow and her forward deck were already thick with ice. Gulls
flew along the iron-black and sombre breakers of the ebb, their white
plumage chalky in that impure and arctic light. The wind was a thing to
search the marrow of one’s bones.

Two beaches had formed in the icy night, best seen and studied at low
tide. The upper beach occupied the width between the dunes and the line
of the night’s high tide; the lower beach sloped from this high-tide
mark to the open sea. The upper beach and the dunes were frozen hard.
The frozen sand was delightful to walk upon, for the tiny congealed
grains afforded a safe, sustaining footing, and the surface, though
solid, had the resiliency of thick, unvarnished linoleum on a good
floor. It was an odd, an unnatural experience, to hit one’s foot on
a ridge of frozen sand. Fragments of wreckage imbedded in the sand,
wreaths of imbedded seaweed--all these were as immovable as so many
rocks. At the very foot of the largest of the dunes, I found a male
surf scoter or skunk coot frozen stiff. A few solid kicks dislodged it,
and I picked it up, but could find no wound. The lower beach, that is
to say the width that had been covered by the tide during the night,
was frozen solid at its junction with the upper beach, but the fine
slope down to the breakers, though frozen firm, was not frozen through
and through. Along the edge of the breakers, it was not frozen at all.

Between these two beaches, one above, one below, one frozen solid, the
other crusted over, there ran a kind of frontier some eight or ten feet
wide, a no-man’s-land of conflicting natural forces. At the height of
the night tide, the seething foam rims of the sliding surf, flung by
the ocean into the face of the night cold, had frozen on the sloping
beach in layers of salt ice which preserved all the curves and foamy
ridges of the captured edge of the sea. The brim of a high tide, that
very spirit of energy and motion, lay there motionless on a beach
itself deprived of motion; the scalloped edges, the little curls of
foam, the long, reaching, rushing tongues, all these were to be seen
enchanted into that ocean ice which is so much like a kind of snow. At
its upper edge this image of the surf brim was but a glaze of ice on
the beach; at its lower edge it was twelve to fifteen inches in height
and fell off sheer, like an ice cake, to the beach below. And north and
south it ran, mile upon icy mile, as far as the eye could see.

The subsequent history of this ice is not without interest. After two
days of bitter cold the wind changed in the night, and that night’s
tide quietly removed every vestige of the ice cakes from the beach.
The swathe on which the ice had lain, however, remained half visible,
for there water and sand had mingled and frozen deep. Presently the
upper beach thawed, the cold crumbling drily out of the sand, and the
lower beach, which had yielded its frozen surface to each succeeding
tide and frozen again during the ebb, remained as the last tide left
it. Between the two beaches, the width of buried ice lingered for a
fortnight, resisting sun and whole days of winter rain. It had a way
of coming suddenly to an end, and of beginning as suddenly again; sand
drifted over it, the tide edge seeped through to it, the moving beach,
forever adjusting itself to complex forces, burst it open, yet it
lingered on. For all of us who used the beach, this buried width of ice
became a secret road. The coast guards knew it well and followed along
it in the night. As I set down these words, I think of the times I have
come to a blind end and prodded the sand with my beach staff in search
of that secret footing. Little by little the sun and the tides wore
down its resistance, and so it disappeared, and our searching feet knew
it no more.

The great marsh was another desolation on that same overcast and icy
day. Salt ice had formed in wide rims along the edges of the great
level islands, the shallower channels had frozen over, and the deeper
ones were strewn with ice cakes sailing and turning about in the
currents of the tides. The scene had taken on a certain winter unity,
for the ice had bound the channels and the islands together into one
wide and wintry plain.

On the next morning--it was sunny then, but still freezing cold--I
chanced to go out for a moment to look at the marsh. About a mile and
a half away, in one of the open channels, was a dark something which
looked like a large, unfamiliar bird. A stray goose, perhaps? Taking my
glass, I found the dark object to be the head of a deer swimming down
the channel, and, even as I looked, there came to my ears the distant
barking of dogs. A pair of marauding curs, out hunting on their own,
had found a deer somewhere and driven the creature down the dunes and
into the icy creeks. Down the channel it swam, and presently turned
aside and climbed out on the marsh island just behind the Fo’castle.
The animal was a young doe. I thought then, and I still believe, that
this doe and the unseen creature whose delicate hoofprints I often
found near the Fo’castle were one and the same. It lived, I believe, in
the pines on the northern shore of the marsh and came down to the dunes
at earliest dawn. But to return to its adventures: All afternoon I
watched it standing on the island far out in the marsh, the tall, dead
sea grass rising about its russet body; when night came, it was still
there, a tiny spot of forlorn mammalian life in that frozen scene. Was
it too terrified to return? That night a tide of unusual height was
due which would submerge the islands under at least two feet of water
and floating ice. Would the doe swim ashore under cover of darkness?
I went out at midnight into my solitary world and saw the ice-covered
marsh gleaming palely under a sky of brilliant stars, but could see
nothing of the island of the doe save a ghostliness of salt ice along
the nearer rim.

The first thing I did, on waking the next morning, was to search the
island with my glass. The doe was still there.

I have often paused to wonder how that delicate and lovely creature
endured so cruel a night, how she survived the slow rise of the icy
tide about her poor legs, and the northwest gale that blustered about
her all night long in that starlit loneliness of crunchy marsh mud and
the murmur of the tides. The morning lengthened, the sun rose higher
on the marsh, and presently the tide began to rise again. I watched it
rising toward the refugee, and wondered if she could survive a second
immersion. Just a little before noon, perhaps as the water was flooding
round her feet, she came down to the edge of her island, and plunged
into the channel. The creek was full of ice mush and of ice floes
moving at a good speed; the doe was weak, the ice cakes bore down upon
her, striking her heavily; she seemed confused, hesitated, swam here,
swam there, stood still, and was struck cruelly by a floe which seemed
to pass over her, yet on she swam, bewildered, but resolute for life.
I had almost given up hope for her, when rescue came unexpectedly. My
friend Bill Eldredge, it appeared, while on watch in the station tower
the day before had chanced to see the beginning of the story, and on
the second morning had noticed the doe still standing in the marshes.
All the Nauset crew had taken an interest. Catching sight of the poor
creature fighting for life in the drift, three of the men put off in
a skiff, poled the ice away with their oars, and shepherded the doe
ashore. “When she reached dry land, she couldn’t rise, she was so weak,
and fell down again and again. But finally she stood up and stayed up,
and walked off into the pines.”

I have now to tell of the great northeast storm of February 19th and
20th. They say here that it was the worst gale known on the outer Cape
since the _Portland_ went down with all hands on that terrible November
night in ’98.

It began after midnight on a Friday night, and the barometer gave but
little warning of its coming. That Friday afternoon I had walked up the
beach to Nauset Station, found Bill Eldredge on watch in the tower, and
asked him to wake me up when he went by at midnight. “Never mind if you
don’t see a light,” I said. “Come in anyway and wake me up. I may go
down the beach with you.” I often made the patrols with the men at the
station, for I liked to walk the beach by night.

Shortly after midnight, Bill came to the door, but I did not get up
and dress to go down the beach with him, for I was rather tired from
piling up a mass of driftwood, so I sat up in bed and talked to him by
the dying light of my fire. On bitter nights, I used to put a big log
on in the hope that it might flicker and smoulder till morning, but on
average nights, I let the fire die down to a bed of ashes, for I am
a light sleeper, and the little play of flames on the hearth kept me
awake. Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone
stirs in them a certain watchfulness.

The coast guardsman stood against the brick fireplace, his elbow
propped for a moment on the shelf; I scarce could see his blue-clad
figure in the gloom. “It’s blowing up,” he said. “I think we are going
to have a northeaster.” I apologized for not getting up, pleaded
weariness, and, after a little talk, Bill said that he must be going,
and returned to the beach. I saw him use his flashlight a moment as he
plunged down the dune.

I woke in the morning to the dry rattle of sleet on my eastern windows
and the howling of wind. A northeaster laden with sleet was bearing
down on the Cape from off a furious ocean, an ebbing sea fought with a
gale blowing directly on the coast; the lonely desolation of the beach
was a thousand times more desolate in that white storm pouring down
from a dark sky. The sleet fell as a heavy rain falls when it is blown
about by the wind. I built up my fire, dressed, and went out, shielding
my face from the sleet by pulling my head down into the collar of my
coat. I brought in basket after basket of firewood, till the corner
of the room resembled a woodshed. Then I folded up the bedclothes,
threw my New Mexican blanket over the couch, lighted the oil stove,
and prepared breakfast. An apple, oatmeal porridge, toast made at the
fireplace, a boiled egg, and coffee.

Sleet and more of it, rushes of it, attacks of it, screaming descents
of it; I heard it on the roof, on the sides of the house, on the
windowpanes. Within, my fire fought against the cold, tormented light.
I wondered about a small fishing boat, a thirty-foot “flounder dragger”
that had anchored two miles or so off the Fo’castle the evening before.
I looked for her with my glass, but could not see into the storm.

Streaming over the dunes, the storm howled on west over the moors.
The islands of the marsh were brownish black, the channels leaden and
whipped up by the wind; and along the shores of the desolate islands,
channel waves broke angrily, chidingly, tossing up heavy ringlets of
lifeless white. A scene of incredible desolation and cold. All day
long I kept to my house, building up the fire and keeping watch from
the windows; now and then I went out to see that all was well with the
Fo’castle and its foundations, and to glimpse what I could, through the
sleet, of the storm on the sea. For a mile or so offshore the North
Atlantic was a convulsion of elemental fury whipped by the sleety
wind, the great parallels of the breakers tumbling all together and
mingling in one seething and immense confusion, the sound of this mile
of surf being an endless booming roar, a seethe, and a dread grinding,
all intertwined with the high scream of the wind. The rush of the
inmost breakers up the beach was a thing of violence and blind will.
Darkness coming early, I closed my shutters on the uproar of the outer
world, all save one shutter on the landward side.

With the coming of night the storm increased; the wind reaching a
velocity of seventy to eighty miles an hour. It was at this time, I
am told, that friends on the mainland began to be worried about me,
many of them looking for my light. My lamp, a simple kerosene affair
with a white china shade, stood on a table before the unshuttered
window facing the land. An old friend said he would see it or think
that he saw it for a half minute or so, and then it would vanish for
hours into the darkness of the gale. It was singularly peaceful in the
little house. Presently, the tide, which had ebbed a little during the
afternoon, turned and began to come in. All afternoon long the surf
had thundered high upon the beach, the ebb tide backed up against
the wind. With the turn of the tide came fury unbelievable. The great
rhythm of its waters now at one with the rhythm of the wind, the ocean
rose out of the night to attack the ancient rivalry of earth, hurling
breaker after thundering breaker against the long bulwark of the
sands. The Fo’castle, being low and strongly built, stood solid as a
rock, but its walls thrummed in the gale. I could feel the vibration
in the bricks of the chimney, and the dune beneath the house trembled
incessantly with the onslaught of the surf.

[Illustration: _The Bank After a Storm_]

Where were my friends at Nauset Station, thought I, in this furious
night. Who was on his way north, with seven miles of night and sleet
to battle through before he returned to the shelter of the station and
the warmth of that kitchen stove which is kept polished to a brilliance
beyond all stoves? It was Bill, as a matter of fact, and because of the
surf on the beach he was using the path which runs along the top of the
cliff close by its brim, a path exposed to the full violence of the
gale. As I mused thus, troubled about my friends, there came a knock
at my open window, and then steps outside and a knock at the door.
Letting my visitor in was easy enough, but to close the door after him
was another matter. Closing the door against the force of the gale was
like trying to close it upon something material; it was exactly as if I
were pressing the door against a bulging mass of felt. My visitor was
Albert Robbins, first man south from Nauset, a big powerful youngster
and a fine lad; he was covered with sleet and sand, sand and sleet in
his hair, in his eyebrows, in the corners of his eyes, in his ears,
behind his ears, in the corners of his mouth, in his nostrils even. And
a cheerful, determined grin!

“Wanted to see if you were still here,” he said humorously, rooting
sand out of his eyes with a knuckle. I busied myself getting him a cup
of steaming coffee.

“Any news? Anyone in trouble?” I asked.

“Yes, there’s a coast guard patrol boat off the Highland; something’s
the matter with her engine. She’s anchored off there, and they’ve sent
two destroyers out from Boston to get her.”

“When did you hear that?”

“This afternoon.”

“Didn’t hear anything else?”

“No, the wires blew down, and we can’t get beyond Cahoons.”

“Think they’ve got any chance if the destroyers haven’t got to them?”

“Gosh, I hope so,” he said; and then, after a pause, “but it don’t look
like it.” And then, “So long,” and into the storm again.

I did not go to bed, for I wanted to be ready for any eventuality. As
the hour of flood tide neared, I dressed as warmly as I could, turned
down my lamp, and went out upon the dunes.

An invisible moon, two days past the full, had risen behind the rushing
floor of cloud, and some of its wan light fell on the tortured earth
and the torment of the sea. The air was full of sleet, hissing with
a strange, terrible, insistent sound on the dead grass, and sand was
being whirled up into the air. Being struck on the face by this sand
and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip. I have never
looked on such a tide. It had crossed the beach, climbed the five-foot
wall of the dune levels that run between the great mounds, and was
hurling wreckage fifty and sixty feet into the starved white beach
grass; the marsh was an immense flooded bay, and the “cuts” between
the dunes and the marsh rivers of breakers. A hundred yards to the
north of me was such a river; to the south, the surf was attempting to
flank the dune, an attempt which did not succeed. Between these two
onslaughts, no longer looking _down_ upon the sea, but directly into it
and just over it, the Fo’castle stood like a house built out into the
surf on a mound of sand. A third of a mile or so to the north I chanced
to see rather a strange thing. The dune bank there was washing away and
caving in under the onslaught of the seas, and presently there crumbled
out the blackened skeleton of an ancient wreck which the dunes had
buried long ago. As the tide rose this ghost floated and lifted itself
free, and then washed south close along the dunes. There was something
inconceivably spectral in the sight of this dead hulk thus stirring
from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.

As I walked in the night I wondered about the birds who live here in
the marsh. That great population of gulls, ducks, and geese and their
rivals and allies--where were they all crouching, where were they
hidden in that wild hour?

All Sunday morning there was sleet--more sleet fell in this storm than
the Cape had seen in a generation--and then, about the middle of
the afternoon, the wind died down, leaving a wild sea behind. Going
to Nauset Station, I had news of the disaster at the Highland. The
destroyers, in spite of a splendid battle, had been unable to reach the
disabled patrol boat, and the luckless ship had gone to pieces. It is
thought that she dragged onto the outer bar. Nine men had perished. Two
bodies came ashore next day; their watches had stopped at five o’clock,
so we knew that the vessel had weathered the night and gone to pieces
in the morning. What a night they must have had, poor souls!

There was wreckage everywhere, great logs, tree stumps, fragments of
ships, planking, splintered beams, boards, rough timber, and, by itself
in the surf, the enormous rudder of the _Hickey_, splintered sternpost
and all. The day after the storm, people came down from Eastham in
farm wagons and Fords, looked at the sea for a while, talked over the
storm with whoever happened to be standing by, paid a call on the
coast guards, and then went casually to work piling up the best of
the timber. I saw Bill Eldredge in one of the cuts sorting out planks
to be used in building a henhouse. Gulls were milling over the surf
and spume--the greatest numbers gathering where the surf was most
discoloured--and gulls were flying back and forth between the breakers
and the marsh. From their point of view, perhaps, nothing had happened.

_Chapter V_

WINTER VISITORS

During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was
entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo’castle as undisturbed as Crusoe
on his island. Man disappeared from the world of nature in which I
lived almost as if he, too, were a kind of migratory bird. It is true
that I could see the houses of Eastham village on the uplands across
the marsh, and the passing ships and fishing boats, but these were the
works of man rather than man himself. By the middle of February the
sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo’castle
would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this
isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only
answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see
and study undisturbed the processes of nature--I like better the old
Biblical phrase “mighty works”--is an opportunity for which any man
might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence
and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost
natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the
hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came
to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune
unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes
as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.

It is not good to be too much alone, even as it is unwise to be always
with and in a crowd, but, solitary as I was, I had few opportunities
for moods or to “lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.” From
the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking
toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the
evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to
do, something to observe, something to record, something to study,
something to put aside in a corner of the mind. There was the ocean in
all weathers and at all tides, now grey and lonely and veiled in winter
rain, now sun-bright, coldly green, and marbled with dissolving foam;
there was the marsh with its great congresses, its little companies,
its wandering groups, and little family gatherings of winter birds;
there was the glory of the winter sky rolling out of the ocean over and
across the dunes, constellation by constellation, lonely star by star.
To see the night sky in all its divinity of beauty, the world beneath
it should be lovely, too, else the great picture is split in halves
which no mind can ever really weld into a unity of reverence. I think
the nights on which I felt most alone (if I paused to indulge myself
in such an emotion) were the nights when southeasterly rains were at
work in the dark, immense world outside my door dissolving in rain and
fog such ice and snow as lingered on after a snowfall or a cold spell
had become history. On such southeasterly nights, the fog lay thick on
marsh and ocean, the distant lights of Eastham vanished in a universal
dark, and on the invisible beach below the dune, great breakers born of
fog swell and the wind rolled up the sands with the slow, mournful pace
of stately victims destined to immolation, and toppled over, each one,
in a heavy, awesome roar that faded to silence before a fellow victim
followed on out of the darkness on the sea. Only one sense impression
lingered to remind me of the vanished world of man, and that the long,
long complaints and melancholy bellowings of vessels feeling their way
about miles offshore.

[Illustration: _Dovekies or Little Auks_]

But I was not entirely alone. My friends the coast guards at Nauset
Station, patrolling the beach every night and in all weathers, often
came in to see how I was faring, to hand me on a letter, or to tell me
the news of the Cape. My pleasure in such visits was very real, and
between half after seven and eight o’clock I always hoped for a step.
When one has not spoken to another human being for twenty-four hours,
a little conversation is pleasant exercise, though to the speaker the
simplest phrases, even the simple idiom, “Come in,” may take on a
quaint air of being breathless and voluble. Sometimes no one came, and
I spent the evening by my fire reading quietly, going over my notes,
and wondering who it was who walked the beach.

It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature;
especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a
way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind.
I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the
conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century
romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and
butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with
the men on night patrol, a mediæval anchorite would have probably
regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch
with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus
upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life
which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus
surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call
the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy.
There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed
as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come
to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the
secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood,
but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open
their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand
well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as
electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains
life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may
mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a
moment with a candle flame.

But now I must begin to tell of the birds who are wintering on the
coast, of the exchange of species which takes place here, and of how
all manage to live.

As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first
impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness. The summer bird
life of the beach has completely disappeared, and at the moment of
which I tell, not a single beach bird or sea bird, not even a resident
gull, is to be seen on the beach along all these empty miles. I walk,
and no terns come swooping down at me out of the dunes, scolding me
for my intrusion on their immense and ancient privacy; no sandpipers
rise at my approach, wheel over the inner breakers, and settle down
again a hundred yards ahead. Summer residents and autumn migrants of
the beach, sandpipers, plovers, yellow-legs, “knots,” and sanderlings,
all have gone south with the sun and are now to be found anywhere from
the Carolinas south to Patagonia. The familiar sanderlings--it is of
_Crocethia alba_ that I write--lingered surprisingly late; they seemed
almost as numerous in October as in August, there were plenty to be
seen in November, but in December flocks were rare, and by Christmas,
there were only a few strays and cripples left behind.

New Year’s Day, on the deserted beach, I surprised a little flock of
ruddy turnstones, _Arenaria interpres morinella_, who took wing on my
approach and flew south close along the seaward face of the dunes. I
shall always remember this picture as one of the most beautiful touches
of colour I have ever seen in nature, for the three dominant colours of
this bird--who is a little larger than the semipalmated sandpiper--are
black, white, and glowing chestnut red; and these colours are
interestingly displayed in patches and bold stripes seen at their best
when the bird is flying. The great dunes behind them and the long vista
of the beach were cold silver overlaid with that faint, loveliest
violet which is the overtone colour of the coast.

As I watched these decorative birds flying away ahead of me into that
vast ocean world, I began thinking of how little has ever been written
or said about the loveliness of our North Atlantic birds. There are
plenty of books about them, there are a world of kind people who
cherish and love them as birds, but there is a lack of printed material
and discussion celebrating their qualities of beauty. Such æsthetic
appreciation of our shore birds as we have had seems to have reached
that showy and unfortunate creature, the wood duck, _Aix sponsa_, and
been permanently overcome. Now, the turnstone is a lovely little bird,
the least tern is another; the king eider is a magnificent creature,
and there are many more whose beauty deserves comment and attention.
A second notion, too, came into my head as I saw the turnstones fly
away--that no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight.
Since my year upon the dunes, spent in a world of magnificent fliers, I
have been tempted to believe that the relation of the living bird with
its wings folded to the living bird in flight is almost that of the
living bird to the same bird stuffed. In certain cases, the difference
between the bird on the wing and the bird at rest is so great that one
might be watching two different creatures. Not only do colours and new
arrangements of colours appear in flight, there is also a revelation of
personality. Study your birds on the ground as you will, but once you
have thus observed them and studied their loveliness, do not be afraid
to clap your hands and send them off into the air. They will take no
real alarm and will soon forgive you. Watch birds flying.

The tide is going out, and the breakers are shallowing to chiding
curls of foam along the edge of the ebb. Gone are the thin-footed,
light-winged peoples, the industrious waders, the busy pickup,
runabout, and scurry-along folk. South, south with the sun, along
bright beaches and across wide bays, south with the sun along the edge
of a continent, with heaven knows what ancient mysteries stirring in
their tiny minds and what ancient instincts waking in their veins. As I
think of the tropical lands to which these birds have flown, I remember
walking one night along a tropical beach in Central America. It was
late at night, no one was about, the warm, endless, pouring wind shook
a sound like rain out of endlessly agitated palms, and a magnificent
full moon sailed through the wind over an ocean and a surf that might
have been a liquid and greener moonlight. Suddenly, a flock of little
birds rose up on the beach from nowhere, wheeled, fell off a little
with the wind, and then disappeared completely into the turbulent
splendour. I wonder now if you were by any chance Cape Cod sandpipers,
little birds!

But now to return to the North Atlantic, the Eastham dunes, and the
exchange of species I mentioned earlier in the chapter. As the smaller
birds have flown south to their tropics, birds from the arctic north,
following the same migrational impulse of the ebbing year, have moved
south along the New England coast, and found in the open, deserted Cape
a region which is to them a Florida. These birds are the arctic sea
ducks, many of them big, heavy, powerful birds, all of them built to
stand icy water and icy weather, all of them enclosed in a water-tight
pack of feathers which is almost a kind of feather fur. These ducks
belong to the subfamily _Fuligulinæ_, the people of the outermost
waters, but there are still other arctic visitors, auks, murres, and
even guillemots. The region which these birds prefer is the region
south of Cape Cod, where the currents of warmer water swirl over the
great south shoals. I have for neighbours the three varieties of
“scoters,” or more familiarly and wrongly “coots,” the black-winged
coot _Oidemia americana_, the white-winged coot _Oidemia deglandi_,
the skunk coot, _Oidemia perspicillata_; I have scaups or blue-billed
widgeons, _Marila marila_, dipper ducks, _Charitonetta albeola_, old
squaws, _Harelda hyemalis_, eiders, _Somateria dresseri_, king eiders,
_Somateria spectabilis_, and others. It is possible that, before the
coming of the white man, the number of these winter outer-sea birds in
the Cape Cod region exceeded that of the summer birds, but now, alas!
the shotgun and the killer had their fun, the winter peoples have been
wasted away, and some even exterminated. To-day, the summer birds
outnumber their winter kin.

A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible
residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills
after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers
and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large
areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They
inevitably die. Just how they perish is still something of a question.
Some die of cold, for the gluey oil so mats and swabs the thick arctic
feathering that creases open through it to the skin above the vitals;
others die of hunger as well. Captain George Nickerson of Nauset
tells me that he saw an oil-covered eider trying to dive for food off
Monomoy, and that the bird was unable to plunge. I am glad to be able
to write that the situation is better than it was. Five years ago, the
shores of Monomoy peninsula were strewn with hundreds, even thousands,
of dead sea fowl, for the tankers pumped out slop as they were passing
the shoals--into the very waters, indeed, on which the birds have lived
since time began! To-day oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate
individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end.

My beach is empty, but not the ocean beyond. Between the coast guard
station and Nauset Light, a “raft” of skunk coots is spending the
winter. Patches of white on the forehead and the hind neck of the
glossy black head of the male are responsible for this local name. The
birds sit in the ocean, just seaward of the surf--the coast guardsmen
say there is a shallow close by and shellfish--and the whole raft rises
and falls unconcernedly as the swells roll under it. Sometimes a bird
will dive through the oncoming ridge of a breaker and emerge casually
on the other side; sometimes a bird will stand up in the water, flap
its wings, and settle down again unconcernedly. There are perhaps
thirty birds in this flock. In Thoreau’s time, these rafts of coots
formed a flock which was practically continuous the whole length of
the outer Cape, but to-day such rafts, though not at all rare, are but
occasional.

Standing at the door of my house, I watch these winter birds pass and
repass, flying well offshore. Now a company of a hundred or more old
squaws pass, now a tribe of one of the scoter folk; now a pair of
eiders come to rest in the ocean directly in front of the Fo’castle.

These birds practically never come ashore during the winter. They
eat, sleep, live, and meet together at sea. When you see a sea duck
on the beach, you can be sure something is the matter with him, so
runs a saying of the Cape which I had from Captain Nickerson. The
only way in which I can observe these winter folk is by using a good
glass or by catching a specimen who has got into some kind of trouble
and taken refuge on the beach. All these creatures are at a great
disadvantage when ashore, and have a world of difficulty trying to
launch themselves into the air; they make unwieldy jump after jump,
the auks being practically unable to rise at all upon their wings. It
was thrilling to walk the beach, and catch sight of a bird sitting
solitary on the sands. What might it be? What had led it ashore? Could
I possibly catch it and give it a careful looking over? The keynote of
my strategy lay in the attempt to prevent the birds from getting back
into the water, so between them and the surf I would rush--for the
birds would begin to move down the slope to the surf the instant they
saw or heard or felt me--and I soon learned that a brisk countercharge
was worth all the ruse and the patient stalking in the world. Then
began a furious game of tag, the alarmed bird skittering all over the
beach, being gradually driven by me toward the dunes, till I manœuvred
him into the angle between the beach and the sandy wall.

My first prisoners were three unhappy little auks, _Alle alle_, who
had dipped themselves in oil somewhere on their way down from the
arctic--odd little browny-black and white birds about the size of a
pigeon, who stood up on queer little auk feet, faced me, and beat
little bent wings with a penguin look to them; indeed, the bird
has much of an Adelie penguin air. On the Cape, these auks are known
as “pine knots”--a term said to be derived from the creature’s tough
compactness--or as “dovekies.” They have always been “aukies” to me. At