第16章 CHAPTER IV(4)

Across the lake, in the swampy woods, close where the screech owl sang and the girl of the golden dream walked in the moonlight the Harvester began operations. He unrolled the sack, went to one end of the bed and systematically started a swath across it, lifting every other plant by the roots. Flowering time was almost past, but the bees knew where pollen ripened, and hummed incessantly over and inside the queer cone-shaped growths with their hooked beaks. It almost appeared as if the sound made inside might be to give outsiders warning not to poach on occupied territory, for the Harvester noticed that no bee entered a pre-empted plant.

With skilful hand each stroke brought up a root and he tossed it to one side. The plants were vastly peculiar things. First they seemed to be a curled leaf with no flower. In colour they shaded from yellow to almost black mahogany, and appeared as if they were a flower with no leaf. Closer examination proved there was a stout leaf with a heavy outside mid-rib, the tip of which curled over in a beak effect, that wrapped around a peculiar flower of very disagreeable odour. The handling of these plants by the hundred so intensified this smell the Harvester shook his head.

"I presume you are mostly mine," he said to the busy little workers around him. "If there is anything in my theory of honey having varying medicinal properties at different seasons, right now mine should be good for Granny's rheumatism and for nervous and dropsical people. I shouldn't think honey flavoured with skunk cabbage would be fit to eat. But, of course, it isn't all this. There is catkin pollen on the wind, hazel and sassafras are both in bloom now, and so are several of the earliest little flowers of the woods. You can gather enough of them combined to temper the disagreeable odour into a racy sweetness, and all the shrub blooms are good tonics, too, and some of the earthy ones. I'm going to try giving some of you empty cases next spring and analyzing the honey to learn if it isn't good medicine."

The Harvester straightened and leaned on the mattock to fill his lungs with fresh air and as he delightedly sniffed it he commented, "Nothing else has much of a chance since I've stirred up the cabbage bed. I can scent the catkins plainly, being so close, and as I came here Icould detect the hazel and sassafras all right."

Above him a peculiar, raucous chattering for an instant hushed other wood voices. The Harvester looked up, laughing gaily.

"So you've decided to announce it to your tribe at last, have you?" he inquired. "You are waking the sleepers in their dens to-day? Well, there's nothing like waiting until you have a sure thing. The bluebirds broke the trail for the feathered folk the twenty-fourth of February. The sap oozed from the maples about the same time for the trees. The very first skunk cabbage was up quite a month ago to signal other plants to come on, and now you are rousing the furred folk. I'll write this down in my records----`When the earliest bluebird sings, when the sap wets the maples, when the skunk cabbage flowers, and the first striped squirrel barks, why then, it is spring!' "

He bent to his task and as he worked closer the water he noticed sweet-flag leaves waving two inches tall beneath the surface.

"Great day!" he cried. "There you are making signs, too! And right! Of course! Nature is always right.