Hitty, Her First Hundred Years/Chapter 2

I could fill many pages with accounts of that first summer—of the trips we took with Captain Preble in his gig, to Portland, Bath, and nearer farms; of the expeditions in the old pumpkin-colored dory with the home-made canvas he was teaching Andy to sail; and of the visits from neighbors and relations who often came to spend all day now that the weather was so fine. Such long, blue, sunny days they were, too, and, as happens in northern places where seasons are short, all the flowers seemed to be trying to blossom at once. When buttercups and daisies and devil’s paint brushes were still bright in all the fields, the wild roses were already opening their petals, and before their last one fell, Queen Anne’s lace and early goldenrod were beginning to crowd them out. Then there were the baskets of berries to be picked. Never had there been such a season for them, everyone said, especially for wild raspberries. Indeed, it was thanks to them that I was so nearly lost to the world.

It came about in this way: Mrs. Preble had sent us off to pick another quart or two for her preserving. Andy and Phœbe were to go to a patch not more than a mile or so down the road, where we had picked several days before. Andy carried a big splint-bottomed basket, while Phœbe had a small one in which I was allowed to ride until it should be time for me to yield my place to the raspberries. She had lined it neatly with plantain leaves that felt pleasantly cool and smooth. It was a hot afternoon in late July, and I was thankful to be out of the dust and glare of the road. It seemed to me that this was one of the many times when it was nice to be a doll. Alas! how soon I was to change my opinion!

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All the flowers seemed to be trying to blossom at once.

But when we reached the berry patch, some one had been before us. The bushes were bent and broken and there was hardly a raspberry left.

“There’s a place way down by the shore,” Andy remembered, just as they were turning away disappointed. “You go over to the Back Cove and walk along the beach till you come to a kind of clearing between the trees. Those raspberries are ’most as big as my two thumbs put together.”

“But Mother said we weren’t to go off the turnpike,” Phœbe reminded him, “not out of sight of it, anyhow.”

“Well,” Andy wasn’t one to give up anything he had his mind set on, “she sent us to get raspberries, didn’t she? And there ain’t any more here.”

There was no denying this, and it took little urging to make Phœbe forget her mother’s words. Soon we were headed for the Back Cove through a stretch of very thick spruce woods, with only a thread of a footpath between the close-packed trees.

“I heard Abner Hawks telling your ma last night that there’s ​Injuns round again,” Andy told Phœbe. “He said they was Passamaquoddies, a whole lot of ’em. They’ve got baskets and things to sell, but he said you couldn’t trust ’em round the corner. We’d better watch out in case we see any.”

Phœbe shivered.

“I’m seared of Injuns,” she said.

“Come on,” Andy urged, “here’s where we turn off to the Cove. We have to walk a ways on the stones.”

It was pretty rough going and the stones were well heated after hours in the hot sun. Phœbe complained of them even through her slippers, while Andy, who was barefooted, yelled and jumped from one to another. He kept running down to the water’s edge and splashed about to cool his feet off, so that it was some time before they reached the raspberry patch and settled down to picking. Phœbe set me comfortably between the roots of a knotty old spruce tree at the edge of the clearing, where I could see them as they moved among the bushes. Sometimes the brambles grew so high that only their heads showed, like two round apples, one yellow and the other red, bobbing above the greenery.

It was very peaceful and pleasant there by the Back Cove. The spruce woods sloped down to the water, their tips as dark and pointed as hundreds of arrowheads against the sky. The Cove itself was blue and shining, with little white scallops of foam breaking round the edges of distant Cow Island. The air was filled with the sound of bees and birds, of the sea shuffling pebbles alongshore, and the voices of Andy and Phœbe calling to each other as they picked. No other doll in the world felt quite so contented as I.

Then suddenly, without the least warning, I heard Phœbe give a sharp cry.

“Injuns, Andy, Injuns!”

I saw her point toward the woods behind me. Her eyes and Andy’s looked as round as doorknobs. But I saw nothing, for I could not turn my head around. Andy seized Phœbe’s hand and began running with her in the opposite direction. Pebbles ​rattled under their feet as they sped along the shingle beach, and raspberries tumbled out of their baskets at every step. Then they disappeared among the trees without a single backward look. At first, I could not believe that they had forgotten me. But there was no doubt about it. It was awful to wait there alone, to hear twigs snapping and voices muttering behind me strange words I could not understand. But feeling things behind one is always so much more terrifying than when they actually appear.

They were only some five or six squaws in moccasins, beads, and blankets, who had come after raspberries, too. No one noticed me between the spruce roots. I watched them filling their woven baskets and thought they looked very fat and kind, though rather brown and somewhat untidy as to hair. One of them had a papoose slung on her back, and its little bright eyes looked out from under her blanket like a woodchuck peering out of its hole. It was almost sunset when they padded off through the trees again with their full baskets.

“Now,” thought I to myself, “Andy and Phoebe will come back for me.”

But I began to grow a little worried as the sun dropped lower and lower behind the trees. The sky was full of bright clouds now. Companies of sea gulls were flying off toward Cow Island. I could see the sunset on their wings as they moved. It would have seemed very beautiful to me if I had been in the proper company. I felt suddenly bereft and very small indeed. But this was nothing to what I was about to feel.

It happened so quickly that I have no very clear idea of how it actually came about. I had heard distant cawings all that afternoon and I had been vaguely aware that crows were in the nearby trees. But I was used to crows. There were plenty of them round the Preble house, so I thought little of their raucous “caw-caw’s” till one sounded alarmingly near my head. At the same time I felt a curious blackness settling down upon me. I knew this could not be night, for the sky was still pink, and, besides, this blackness was heavy and warm. Nor was this all. Before I could ​do anything to save myself, a sharp, pointed beak was pecking at my face and the wickedest pair of yellow eyes I have ever seen were bent upon me. “Caw, caw, caw!”

Stout ash wood though I was, I quailed at the fierceness of this attack. I felt that my end had come and I was glad to bury my
Suddenly I felt myself hoisted into the air by my waistband. face in the cool moss so that I might be spared the sight of the Crow’s cruel expression. Looking back upon it now, I realize that perhaps the Crow was not really cruel. Crows cannot help their blackness or their sharp beaks. But they should be all the more careful about what they seize. Evidently, this one was rather discouraged about eating me, for after several attempts it gave up trying. I could hear it giving vent to a rather unflattering opinion ​of its latest find in more loud “caw-caw’s.” But it was a very persistent Crow, determined to put me to some use.

Suddenly I felt myself hoisted into the air by my waistband. I tried to cling to the moss and tree roots, but it was no use. They sank away from me as I rose feet first. The Back Cove, the spruce woods, and the raspberry patch were a queer jumble under me. My skirts crackled in the wind as it rushed past, and now I felt myself go up, now down, according to the Crow’s fancy.

“This is certainly the end of me!” I thought, expecting each moment to go spinning through space.

But strange, indeed, are the ways of Providence and of crows!

I came to rest at last and when I had collected my wits enough to look about I found myself in a great untidy nest at the top of a pine tree, staring into the surprised faces of three half-grown crows. If it had been trying to have one crow pecking and peering, it was still more so to have three all fighting over me at once. They may not have been so large and fierce as their mother, but they made up for this by their hoarse cries for food and their gaping red gullets. Their beaks were continually open and I even began to have some sympathy for the Mother Crow when I saw the amount of food she had to keep dropping down those yawning caverns. But hardly was a morsel swallowed before it was “squawk, squawk, squawk” again and off she must fly for more. Never have I seen such appetites, and I had plenty of time to see, for I must have spent the better part of two days and nights in that nest.

A more uncomfortable position I have never found myself in. The nest was large of its kind but not nearly big enough for three restless crows already nearing the fledgling stage. I was jostled and crowded and poked and shoved till it seemed there would be nothing left of me. To add to the crowded quarters the Mother Crow folded herself over the lot of us and I nearly suffocated down at the bottom of the nest with baby crows’ claws scratching and sharp spikes of twig sticking into me. How I ever survived that first night I do not know.

​But morning came at last and the Mother Crow began her foragings for food. It was strange to see the sun rise behind the topmost branches of a pine, instead of through decent window-panes, and to feel the nest rocking as the branches swayed in the wind. Rather a pleasant sensation when one grows used to it. This motion combined with the crows’ jostlings made my position even more precarious, and I knew I must keep my feet braced firmly between the crisscross twigs if I did not wish to be crowded out. Little by little I learned to change my place and to climb higher so that I might peer out over the nest’s edge. This terrified me at first, so that I dared not look down from such a vast height. That was why it took me such a long time to discover that I was not far from home, as I had supposed, but within a stone’s throw of my own front door. The Crow had carried me to the very ancestral pine that grew beside the Preble house. I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the smoke rising from that familiar chimney and saw old knobble-kneed Charlie grazing near the barn.

There was comfort in this at first. Later, it seemed only to make things harder. To see the Preble family moving about below me, to hear the voices of Andy and Phœbe, and yet to be unable to attract their attention was tantalizing. And still the baby crows squawked and shoved and fought over the insides of mussel shells and sea urchins. I grew more uncomfortable and lonely as the day wore on.

Now I saw the sunset between pine needles. The wind moved through them with a deep, rushing noise. This may sound very beautiful when one listens to it in safety on firm ground, but it is a very different matter to hear it from such a perilous perch as mine. I could see curls of blue smoke going up from the Preble chimney and I knew supper must be cooking in the big fireplace. Soon they would be gathering round the table to eat it. But I should not be with them.

“Phœbe would certainly cry if she could see where her doll is now,” I thought to myself disconsolately, poking my arm between two twigs as the most active of the crows jostled me.

​I was none too quick, either, for the young crows were becoming more and more restless. They begrudged me even the smallest corner until I began to realize that my hours in their nest were numbered.

Night came on. The stars shone very clear and big, like snow crystals sprinkled across the dark. A despair settled down upon me, heavier than the Crow’s wing, blacker than the night sky.

“I cannot bear it any longer,” I told myself at last. “Better be splintered into kindling wood than endure this for another night.”

I knew that any move must be made at once before the Mother Crow returned from a last late foraging expedition, so I began working my way toward the edge of the nest. I must confess that I have never been more frightened in my life than when I peered down into that vast space below and thought of deliberately hurling myself into it. About this time I also remembered a large gray boulder below the tree trunk where Phœbe and I had often sat. Just for a moment my courage failed me.

“Nothing venture, nothing have,” I reminded myself. It was a favorite motto of Captain Preble’s and I repeated it several times as I made ready. “After all, it isn’t as if I were made of ordinary wood.”

It would have been easier if I could have let go by degrees, if I could have put first one arm and then a leg over, but the nature of my pegging forbade this. My legs and arms must move together or not at all.

“Caw, caw, caw!”

I heard the Mother Crow coming and knew there was not a moment to lose. Fortunately for me, the young crows heard this, too, and began flinging themselves about the nest so violently that I could not have stayed in if I had wanted. Up went my two feet, out went my arms, and plop! I dropped over the edge!

The darkness seemed like a bottomless pit into which I was falling. Stiff pine needles and cones scratched my face and sharp twigs tore at me as I fell—down, down, down. I do not believe that falling from the moon itself would have seemed any farther

​to me. By the time I stopped I thought I must certainly have reached the bottom. Still, I felt pine needles and branches about me and when I stretched out my arms there was no comforting solid earth beneath them.

But the new position in which I found myself when morning came was little better than my old one. Instead of falling clear of the old pine, as I had expected, I had become entangled in one of the outer branches. There I dangled ignominiously in midair with my head down and my petticoats over it. My discomfort was great, but it was nothing compared to the humiliation I felt at this unladylike attitude, which I could do nothing to change. Indeed, I could scarcely move at all, so firmly was I caught.

And now an even more trying experience awaited me. I soon discovered that although I could see plainly everything that went on about the Preble house, I might have been a pine cone for all the notice I got. The pine tree was tall and bare of branches halfway up the trunk. It never occurred to one of the family to stand underneath and look for me in such a place. So I hung there for a number of days and nights, headfirst, drenched by rains and buffeted by every wind that blew by. But the greatest hardship of all was when I must see Phœbe Preble moving about below me, sitting on the boulder directly beneath my branch so that its very shadow fell on her curls, and yet be unable to make her look up.

“Suppose,” I thought sadly, “I have to hang here till my clothes fall into tatters. Suppose they never find me till Phœbe is grown up and too old for dolls.”

I know she missed me. I heard her tell Andy so, and he promised to go once more with her to look for me in the raspberry patch. They were sure the Indians had carried me away and I think this made Phœbe even more distressed about my loss. And all the time I hung just overhead with my skirts turned down till I must have looked like an umbrella inside out.

Curiously enough, it was the crows who were the means of reuniting us in the end. During the days immediately following my departure from their nest they had begun to try their own wings. ​Such flappings and cawing as they made, too. Never have I heard anything like it since, but then I never knew any other crows so intimately as those. Mrs. Preble said their goings-on were driving her distracted, and Andy spent most of his time aiming at them with pebbles and a sling shot. He never by any chance hit one, but they cawed as if he had. Finally, one morning when he stood right under the old pine with his sling shot all poised and ready, he caught sight of me. I suppose the yellow of my dress attracted his attention, but even then it was some time before he made out what I was.

“Phœbe!” he screamed, when he suddenly realized his find, “come and see what’s growin’ on the old pine.”

He dropped his sling shot and ran to fetch her. Soon the whole family were all gathered in a group under me discussing the best way to bring me back to earth. It was a very serious problem, for the tree trunk was enormous and even if Captain Preble lifted Andy on his shoulders there was not a single branch for him to climb by. No ladder was long enough to reach me, and as I hung far out toward the tip, it looked as if the only way would be to cut down the whole tree. This Mrs. Preble steadily refused to consider. She said it was an ancestral pine and belonged to the family as much as the brass door-knocker or the pine dresser. Andy tried shying green apples, but I was hooked too firmly for these to dislodge me and they dared not use stones. I began to feel desperate.

Then Captain Preble, who had been gone some time, reappeared with a long birch pole he had cut. This was tall enough to reach me, but though both he and Andy worked for over an hour they could not bring me down, for no matter how sharply they whittled the end of the wood, I was too firmly hooked to be dislodged. At last, Phœbe’s mother appeared at the kitchen door with a long frying fork in one hand and a plate of fresh doughnuts in the other. That gave the Captain an idea.

“Just you let me try lashin’ that fork on here,” he said, “and we’ll grapple for her.”

Quick as a wink he had the doughnut fork tied to the sapling. The steel prongs looked rather terrifying at such close range, but ​I was in no mood to be critical. I did not wince when I felt them sticking into me even more sharply than the Crow’s claws. To my joy I felt myself lifted free of the pine bough.

“More’n one way to harpoon your whale!” he laughed as he put me in Phœbe’s hands, “and more’n one use for a doughnut fork!” he added as he gave it back.

“I wouldn’t wonder but those pesky crows fetched her ’way over here from the Back Cove,” Andy told Phœbe. “It don’t seem hardly possible; still, they do say they’re awful thieves.”

But Phœbe was too happy to have me back to bother about that or even to grieve much over the sad state of my clothes. As for me, I had no other wish than to stay in her lap forever and ever.