Part 7

These ocean peoples live on such little fish as they can seize; they pick up shellfish on shallow areas; they eat certain marine growths. Some have a taste for the local mussel, _Mytilus edulis_. Unless the winter is an exceptionally severe one, the birds seem to fare well enough. Many stay late, and May is usually at hand before the long lines of scoters fly north again under the command of their feathered admirals. Such is the history of the migrant seafarers of the Cape. A word remains to be said about the residents and the migrants in the marsh.

II

About the middle of December, I began to see that an amusing game of cross purposes was being played by the sea birds and the land birds of the region west of the dunes. Food becoming scarce upon the uplands, crows, bobwhites, and starlings began to take an interest in the sea and the salt meadows, while gulls took to exploring the moors and to sitting in the top branches of inland pines. One wise old gull once discovered that there was good fare to be had in Mr. Joe Cobb’s chicken yard just off the western rim of the great marsh, and every morning this sagacious creature would separate himself from the thousands milling about over the cold tides and flutter down among the hens. There he would forage about, picking up grain like a barnyard fowl till he had dulled the edge of his hunger. I doubt if gulls ever do more. After visiting the chicken yard regularly for several winters, the bird disappeared one spring and was never seen again. He had probably lived out the span of his days.

I pause here to wonder at how little we know of the life span of wild animals. Only cases of exceptionally long life or short life seem to attract the attention of man. I can open any good bird book and find a most careful, a most detailed study of the physical selves and habits of birds, but of their probable length of life, never a word. Such material would be exceedingly difficult to secure, and perhaps the suggestion is folly, but there are times when one wishes that this neglected side of animal existence might have more attention.

During the summer, I never saw starlings on the marsh, but now that winter is here they leave the uplands by the coast guard station, and venture out along the dunes. These flights of exploration are very rare. I have seen the birds flying over the salt meadows, I have seen them light on the ridgepole of a gunning camp, but I have never once encountered them on the outer beach. With crows, it is a different story. The birds will investigate anything promising, and during the summer I found crows on the beach on four or five different occasions, these visits being made, for the most part, early in the morning.

Chancing to look toward the marsh one warm October afternoon, I witnessed a battle between two gulls and a young crow for the possession of some marine titbit the crow had picked up on the flats; it was a picturesque contest, for the great silvery wings of the gulls beat down and inclosed the crow till he resembled a junior demon in some old lithograph of the war in heaven. Eventually one of the gulls seized on the coveted morsel, flew off a bit, and gulped it down, leaving the crow and the other gull to “consider” like the cow in the old song. Winter and necessity now make the crow something of a beach comber. The birds cross over to the beach at low tide on mild days, forage about warily, and return to their uplands the instant they no longer have the beach all to themselves. A flight of gulls will send them cawing home, their great sombre wings beating the ocean air. Even on this immense and lonely beach, they remain the wariest of creatures, and if I wish to see what they are up to, I have to use ten times the care in stalking them that I would have to use in stalking any casual sea bird. I have to creep through cuts and valleys in the dunes and worm my way over cold sand that drinks the warmth and life out of the flesh. I usually find them picking at a fish flung out of the breakers perhaps a day or two before--picking industriously and solemnly.

Once in a while, a covey of shore larks will cross the dunes and alight on the beach in the lee and the afternoon shadow of the sand bank. They fly very low, the whole group rising and falling with the rise and fall of the hills and hollows, a habit that gives their flights a picturesque and amusing roller-coaster quality. Once having settled down on the outer side of the dunes, the birds keep well up on the beach and never seem to venture close to ocean.

This same shore lark, _Otocoris alpestris_, is perhaps the bird I encounter most frequently during the winter months. This season they are here by the thousand; indeed, they are so thick that I scarce can walk behind the dunes without putting up a flock of these alert, brownish, fugitive creatures. Their kingdom lies to the west of the dunes, in the salt-hay fields and intermingled marsh areas which extend between the dunes and the creek running more or less parallel to the sand bar. Coming from Greenland and Labrador, these birds reach the Eastham meadows in October and November, and all winter long they forage and run about in the dead bristles of the hay. Their only note here is a rather sad little “_tseep, tseep_,” which they utter as they skim the grass in alarm, but it is said that they have an interesting song during their breeding season in springtime Labrador.

[Illustration: _Brünnich’s Murres at Nest in the Summer North_]

It is early on a pleasant winter afternoon, and I am returning to the Fo’castle through the meadows, my staff in my hand and a load of groceries in a knapsack on my back. The preceding day brought snow flurries to us out of the northwest, and there are patches of snow on the hay fields and the marshes, and, on the dunes, nests of snow held up off the ground by wiry spears of beach grass bent over and tangled into a cup. Such little pictures as this last are often to be seen on the winter dunes; I pause to enjoy them, for they have the quality and delicacy of Japanese painting. There is a blueness in the air, a blue coldness on the moors, and across the sky to the south, a pale streamer of cloud smoking from its upper edge. Every now and then, I see ahead of me a round, blackish spot in the thin snow; these are the cast-off shells of horseshoe crabs, from whose thin tegument the snow has melted. A flock of nervous shore larks, hidden under an old mowing machine, emerge running, take to their wings, and, flying south a fifty yards, suddenly drop and disappear into the grass. Hesitating on the half-alert, a little flock of bobwhites, occasional invaders of this stubble, watch me pass, and then continue feeding. To the west, from the marsh, I hear the various cries of gulls, the mewing note, the call, and that queer sound which is almost a guttural bark. Afternoon shadows are gathering in the cuts of the dunes, blue shadows and cold, and there is a fine sea tang in the air.

It is low tide, and the herring gulls, _Larus argentatus_, are feeding on the flats and gravel banks. As I watch them through a glass, they seem as untroubled as fowls on an inland farm. Their talkative groups and gatherings have a domestic look. The gull population of the Cape is really one people, for, though separate gull congregations live in various bays and marshes, the mass of the birds seem to hear of any new food supply and flock as one to the feast. So accustomed to man have they grown, and so fearless, that they will follow in his very footsteps for a chance to scavenge food; I have seen the great birds walking round clammers who threw broken clams to them as they might throw scraps of meat to kittens. In hungry seasons the clammer may hear a flapping just behind and discover that a gull has just made off with a clam from his pail. They follow the eelers, too, and on the ice of the Eastham salt pond you may chance to see a pair of gulls disputing an eel which the eelers have thrown away; one will have it by the tail, the other by the head, and both tug with insistence and increasing bad temper. The victory in this primitive battle goes either to the strongest gull or to the fastest swallower.

An unhurried observation of the marsh, especially a study of its lesser creeks and concealed pools, reveals hundreds of ducks. To identify and classify these birds is a next to impossible task, for they are very suspicious and have chosen their winter quarters with a sound instinct for defensive strategy. The great majority of these birds are undoubtedly black duck, _Anas rubripes_, the most wary and suspicious of all wintering birds. All day long, back and forth over the dunes between the marsh and the ocean, these ducks are ever flying; by twos and threes and little flocks they go, and those who go out to sea fly so far out that the eye loses them in the vastness of ocean. I like to walk in the marsh early in the evening, keeping out as far as I can toward the creeks. The ducks hear me and begin a questioning quacking. I hear them talk and take alarm; other ducks, far off, take up the _alerte_; sometimes wings whistle by in the darkness. The sound of a pair of “whistler” ducks on the wing is a lovely, mysterious sound at such a time. It is a sound made with wings, a clear, sibilant note which increases as the birds draw near, and dies away in the distance like a faint and whistling sigh.

One March evening, just as sundown was fading into night, the whole sky chanced to be overspread with cloud, all save a golden channel in the west between the cloud floor and the earth. It was very still, very peaceful on my solitary dune. The whole earth was dark, dark as a shallow cup lifted to a solemnity of silence and cloud. I heard a familiar sound. Turning toward the marsh, I saw a flock of geese flying over the meadows along the rift of dying, golden light, their great wings beating with a slow and solemn beauty, their musical, bell-like cry filling the lonely levels and the dark. Is there a nobler wild clamour in all the world? I listened to the sound till it died away and the birds had disappeared into darkness, and then heard a quiet sea chiding a little at the turn of tide. Presently, I began to feel a little cold, and returned to the Fo’castle, and threw some fresh wood on the fire.

_Chapter VI_

LANTERNS ON THE BEACH

I

It is now the middle of March, cold winds stream between earth and the serene assurance of the sun, winter retreats, and for a little season the whole vast world here seems as empty as a shell. Winter is no mere negation, no mere absence of summer; it is another and a positive presence, and between its ebbing and the slow, cautious inflow of our northern spring there is a phase of earth emptiness, half real, perhaps, and half subjective. A day of rain, another bright week, and all earth will be filled with the tremor and the thrust of the year’s new energies.

There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the worst. On Monday morning last, shortly after five o’clock, the big three-masted schooner _Montclair_ stranded at Orleans and went to pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.

It had blown hard all Sunday night, building up enormous seas. Monday’s dawn, however, was not stormy, only wintry and grey. The _Montclair_, on her way from Halifax to New York, had had a hard passage, and sunrise found her off Orleans with her rigging iced up and her crew dog-weary. Helpless and unmanageable, she swung inshore and presently struck far out and began to break up. Lifted, rocked, and pounded by the morning’s mountainous seas, her masts were seen to quiver at each crash, and presently her foremast and her mainmast worked free, and, scissoring grotesquely back and forth across each other, split the forward two thirds of the vessel lengthwise--“levered the ship open,” as Russell Taylor of Nauset said. The vessel burst, the two forward masses of the ship drifted inshore and apart, a cargo of new laths poured into the seas from the broken belly of the hold. Seven men clung to the rocking, drifting mass that was once the stern.

It was a singular fragment, for the vessel had broken as neatly crosswise as it had lengthwise, and the seas were washing in below deck as into an open barrel. Dragging over the shoal ground, the mass rocked on its keel, now rolling the men sickeningly high, now tumbling them down into the trampling rush of the seas. The fall of the two forward masts had snapped off the mizzen some twenty-five feet above the deck, and from the stump cracked-out slivers swung free with the rolling. Bruised, wet through, and chilled to the bone, the unfortunate men dared not lash themselves down, for they had to be free to climb the tilted deck when the ship careened.

Five clung to the skylight of the after deckhouse, two to the stern-rail balustrade. Laths filled the sea, poured over the men, and formed a jagged and fantastic wall along the beach.

One great sea drowned all the five. Men on the beach saw it coming and shouted, the men on the deckhouse shouted and were heard, and then the wave broke, hiding the tragic fragment in a sluice of foam and wreckage. When this had poured away, the men on the afterhouse were gone. A head was visible for a minute, and then another drifting southward, and then there was nothing but sea.

Two men still clung to the balustrade, one a seventeen-year-old boy, the other a stocky, husky-built sailor. The wave tore the boy from the balustrade, but the stocky man reached out, caught him, and held on. The tide rising, the stern began to approach the beach. A detail of men hurriedly sent over from Nauset Station now appeared on the beach and managed to reach and rescue the survivors. The _Montclair_ had chanced to strand near a station classed as “inactive”--coast guard stations are discontinued if there is not enough work to justify their maintenance--and the two or three men who garrisoned the station could do little but summon instant aid. Men came from Nauset, circling the Eastham lagoon and Orleans cove in local automobiles, but the whole primitive tragedy was over in a moment of time.

[Illustration: _The Wreck of the_ Montclair. _Early Afternoon_]

As the vessel was breaking up, men came to the beach and helped themselves to the laths and what wreckage they fancied. Later on, there was a kind of an auction of the salvaged material. The other day I saw half-a-dozen bundles of the _Montclair’s_ laths piled up near a barn.

A week after the wreck, a man walking the Orleans shore came to a lonely place, and there he saw ahead of him a hand thrust up out of the great sands. Beneath he found the buried body of one of the _Montclair’s_ crew.

I can see the broken mast of the schooner from the deck of the Fo’castle. Sunday last, I walked over to the ship. The space under the after deckhouse from which the men were swept--officers’ quarters, I imagine--is an indescribable flung mass of laths, torn wood, wrecked panelling, sopped blankets, and sailor’s clothing. I remember the poor, stringy, cheap ties. In the midst of the débris a stain of soppy pink paper caught my eye: it was a booklet, “If You Were Born in February.” I have often seen the set of twelve on newsstands. The scarlet cover of this copy had seeped into the musty pages. “Those who are born in this month,” I read, “have a particular affection for home”; and again, “They will go through fire and water for their loved ones.”

Who brought this thing aboard? one wonders. Whose curious hands first opened it in the lamplight of this tragic and disordered space? The seventeen-year-old boy is dead of the shock and exposure; the stocky, husky-built man, the only survivor, is going on with the sea. “He says it’s all he knows,” said a coast guardsman.

The wreck lies on the edge of the surf and trembles when the incoming seas strike its counter and burst there with a great upflinging of heavy spray.

II

To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its “feel,” one must have a sense of it as the scene of wreck and elemental drama. Tales and legends of the great disasters fill no inconsiderable niche in the Cape mind. Older folk will tell you of the _Jason_, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and of how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic _Castagna_ and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner. When the coast guards returned to the _Castagna_ on the quiet morning after the wreck, they found a grey cat calmly waiting for them in the dead captain’s cabin, and a chilled canary hunched up upon his perch. The bird died of the bitter cold while being taken ashore in a lifeboat, “just fell off,” but the cat left a dynasty to carry on his name.

Cape Codders have often been humorously reproached for their attitude toward wrecks. On this coast, as on every other in the old isolated days, a wreck was treasure trove, a free gift of the sea; even to-day, the usable parts of a wreck are liable to melt away in a curious manner. There is no real looting; in fact, public opinion on the Cape is decidedly against such a practice, for it offends the local sense of decency. The gathering of the _Montclair’s_ laths during the wreck really upset many people. They did not like it here. When men are lost on the beach, the whole Cape takes it very much to heart, talks about it, mulls over it; when men are saved, there is no place where they are treated with greater hospitality and kindness. Cape folks have never been wreckers in the European sense of that dark word. Their first thought has always been of the shipwrecked men.

Forty years ago, a winter nor’easter flung the schooner _J. H. Eells_ on the outer bar of Eastham. Water-logged, leaking, and weighted down with a cargo of railroad iron, the ship remained on the outer bar, snow flurries hiding her now and then through the furious winter day. So swift and powerful were the alongshore currents that a surfboat could not approach the ship, and so far offshore had she stranded that the life-saving gun would not carry. All Eastham was on the beach, the women as well as the boys and men, and all day long villagers and surfmen fought to reach the vessel. They were powerless, however, and when darkness and continuing snow closed the winter day, they had to watch the _Eells_ fading away in the squalls, her dying men still clinging to the shrouds.

To give these men heart, to let them know themselves remembered, the villagers that night built great fires of driftwood on the beach. Men and women shook the thin snow and sand from ancient wreckage and tossed it on a wind-crazed heap of flame. All night long they fed these pyres. With the slow return of day, it was seen that two of the men had already died and fallen overboard. At ten o’clock that morning, the storm having somewhat abated, the survivors were pluckily taken off by a lone tug which approached the wreck from seaward. Every once in a while, the rusty, shell-fouled iron uncovers, and above it, the yellow-green waters of the outer bar turn blue-black in a strike of summer sun.

Eighteenth Century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders, Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten Nineteenth Century schooners--all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and dead. Why this history of wreck and storm? Because the outer Cape stands a full thirty miles out in the North Atlantic, and because its shelterless eastern beaches flank the New Englander’s ocean lanes for fifty miles. When a real nor’easter blows, howling landward through the winter night over a thousand miles of grey, tormented seas, all shipping off the Cape must pass the Cape or strand. In the darkness and scream of the storm, in the beat of the endless, icy, crystalline snow, rigging freezes, sails freeze and tear--of a sudden the long booming undertone of the surf sounds under the lee bow--a moment’s drift, the feel of surf twisting the keel of the vessel, then a jarring, thundering crash and the upward drive of the bar.

Stranded vessels soon begin to break up. Wrecks drag and pound on the shoals, the waves thunder in-board, decks splinter and crack like wooden glass, timbers part, and iron rods bend over like candles in a heat.

Ships may strand here in dull weather and fog. The coast guards then work at full speed to get them off before a surf rises; a coast guard cutter comes to aid.

A few mornings ago, when I walked the beach to Nauset Station, I followed close along the dune wall to see the wreckage uncovered since the storm. North of the Fo’castle, along a broken mile, the new seaward cliff of the dunes stands at least twenty feet west of the former rim, and all the old wreckage once buried up in the region washed away is now lying on the beach or tumbling out of the wall. Being young, the twelve-foot cliff is still sheer, and the wreckage lies solidly packed in its side like fruits in a sliced pudding. In one place, some ten feet of a schooner’s mast is jutting from the wall like a cannon from a fortress; in another, the sand is crumbling away from the fragments of a ship’s boat, in another appears the speckled and musty yellow corner of a door. Root tendrils of beach grass, whitish and fine-spun as open nerves, have grown in the crumbled and sand-eroded crevices.

Some of this wreckage is centuries old. High course tides carry débris up the beach, sand and the dunes move down to claim it; presently beach grass is growing tall in sand wedged between a ship’s splintered ribs and its buried keel. A few laths from the _Montclair_ are whitening on the beach.