Читать книгу Wild Pastures онлайн

9 страница из 26

Over to the other side of the pasture, a mile from the lane as the crow flies, is a swamp which is part of the pasture, indeed, but a part of the wilderness beyond, also. It was on the edge of this that I had chosen to meet the dawn, picking my way to it through the darkness in part by scent, for the swamp has a musky fragrance of its own, which it sends far on the night air. Coming down the slope to it you pass through a tangle of scrub oak that leads you to a lower region of alders snarled with greenbrier—“horse brier” we call it familiarly.

Here the ground begins to be soft, with occasional clumps of sphagnum moss, which is like a gray-brown carpet of velvet, not yet made up, but tacked together with yellow bastings of the goldthread. Among the scrub oaks a stately pine here and there shoulders up, sending you a reassuring sniff of pitchy aroma. The scrub oaks know their allotted ground and cease wandering when their toes touch swamp water, but the pines are more venturesome, and often lift with their roots little mounds of firm brown carpeted ground in the midst of the quaky sphagnum. Slender cedars crowd in from the swamp toward these pines, plumed like vassal knights that rally to the support of their overlord.