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"The Pipes of Pan - by Robert C. Ruark"
http://www.ncwriters.org/services/lhof/inductees/rruark.htm
http://www.ncwriters.org/services/lhof/inductees/rruark.htm
Published Jul 30, 2007
"The Pipes of Pan"
The first promise of summer was always an exciting thing to a boy - the spring winds
eased and the sun burned away the April rains, the green pushed softly up and all the
smells began. Mornings before breakfast were delightfully cool and breezy, and bred a
restless excitement that made you want to caper barefoot on the dew-wet grass.
The smells were something. Down. by the creek the dogtooth violets pushed up through
the moss. The heavy tuberosy smell of the yellow jasmine filled the countryside, and the
dogwood trees were white and pink with delicate bloom. In the orchards the early peaches
and plums were breaking into blossom, adding their scents to the wild ones. The first
tame flowers were popping out into the warmth, competing with the wild violets and the
Johnny-jump-ups. I used to think that heaven would smell like this - cool and moist and
very delicately fragrant.
You took to the woods then, not as a hunter or a fisherman, but as a naturalist. The Old
Man was very firm about that.
"You’re a bloodthirsty savage," he said, "like all boys are bloodthirsty savages. But there’s
a heap more to it than killing. Seeing the whole world come alive again after a long winter’s
nap and a wild, wet spring is more fun, ’specially as you grow older, than all the shootin’
and fishin’ there is. And I never was able to explain it, but the critters seem to notice this
too. You’ll see how tame everything is this time of the year, when it’s wilder’n a buck
rabbit in the shootin’ season."
Maybe it seems a little dull today, but we used to go berry picking, after the blackberries
had turned from green to red to purple-black, glistening on their thorny vines, and found
it exciting. There were so many things to see and hear in the spring when you took a pail
and went out berrying, to come home tired, with a crick in your back and your fingers and
lips dyed purple from the juicy berries. There were birds around that I do not seem to see
so often any more - brilliant bluebirds, which came early in the spring and went away later
in the summer. There were lots and lots of the big, fierce-looking redheaded woodpeckers;
lots of what we called yellowhammers, another species of peckerwood known as flicker; the
big cuckoos we called rain crows; the carnivorous shrikes with the bandit’s velvet masks
across their cold robbers’ eyes; and hordes of the big, brilliant, raucously screaming blue
jays.
The wet, plowed fields were crowded with teams of killdeers and the dainty-walking titlarks,
racing along like pacing horses. The bobolinks were beginning to sway on the ends of high
weeds, the stalks bending under their negligible weight. Soon the Baltimore orioles would
be along, filling the air with sounds like the clinking of coins. The big cardinals were patches
of blood against the dark green of the pines and cedars, and the scarlet tanagers darted
like air-borne snakes.
When I think of it now, I think of it in terms of sounds and smells rather than sights. The
catbirds quarreled in the low bushes around the house, and the big, fat, sassy old mocker
that lived in the magnolia mimicked the catbirds. The doves cooed sadly from a great
distance, and the quail called from the brushy cover at the edge of the cultivation. They
came marching boldly into the strawberry patches, not in coveys but in pairs, walking
through the back yard as if they owned it.
The killdeers wheeled and dipped in clouds over the wet fields, the skies filled with the
mournful kill-dee, kill-dee, and the meadowlarks sang in the fields, and out of the wet
places came the wild, sweet song of the woodcock. The crows and the jays raised general
hell with everything, including the spring, and you could hear the rain crows’ hollow tonk
from some hidden position in a tall pine, and the solid knock of the woodpeckers, and the
sweet chirrup of the little bluebirds.
This was the time of the year when the boys rushed out of school to swim naked in the
creek at recess, and when it seemed impossible not to cut classes. This was the time of
the bellyache from eating berries that had not completely ripened, from experimenting with
stone-hard green peaches; and this also was the time of the lavish use of castor oil and
calomel. It was impossible to concentrate in school, for the drowsy hum of June was just
over the hill. Hence this was the time that boys were kept after school for throwing
spitballs and making paper airplanes and dipping pigtails into inkpots. Summer vacation
was yearned for by the teachers even more eagerly than it was craved by the students.
Marks dropped terribly, and discipline teetered on the ragged edge of anarchy.
The Old Man said he reckoned the whole world went a little crazy at this time of the year,
and he told me if I listened real close I could hear the piping of some old pagan god named
Pan, who was half billy goat, away off in the wood. I told the Old Man that if Pan was
anything like my billy goat I would just as lief have nothing to do with him.
"Be that as it may," the Old Man said, "that wood back there is creeping with all sorts of
forest gods and spirits right now, and if we went and set quiet I ain’t so sure but what we
might see some. Hear ’em, anyhow."
The forest he mentioned was located back of the cow lot, and it was bounded by a big field
of sedge where my pet covey of quail lived, and by a gully in which my secret interlocking
caves were built, and by a big pond in which the diedappers swam and dived, and by a big
soybean field that was full of doves in the fall. The forest covered about six acres, and was
composed of towering pines and twisty live oaks and dogwood trees. Its floor was clean
and mostly free of brush, a slippery floor of pine needles and jaunty wild flowers.
The Old Man and I spent a lot of time back there. We had to remodel some of the caves,
which meant we needed fresh pine saplings for the front and some fresh beams under the
heavy sod roofs, so some woodcutting was in order. It takes a lot of work to keep a cave
in good shape, especially when there are half a dozen connected by long tunnels. The
reason we needed so many caves was that I was then chieftain of a robber band, and in
watermelon season the robbers needed plenty of sudden sanctuary.
Sometimes, when we got tired of working on the caves, the Old Man and I would sit down
under a tree and lean back against the bole. He would light his pipe and tell me all sorts of
wild tales about the Druids, who lived in trees, and the first Britons, who dug enormous
caves called dene holes in the Kentish countryside in England, and about the bad spirits
that lived in the Black Forest in Germany, and about the old pagan gods like Pan, who, I
gathered, was a pretty fast fellow with the girls.
The Old Man had been near about everywhere, and I guess he had read just about
everything, because anything I remember today I remember from what he told me. I
always got pretty high grades in geography, because if they asked what country Kent was
a county of, like New Hanover or Brunswick County in my state, I could always say
"England," on account of the dene holes. I understood what a dene hole was because the
Old Man and I had just dug us one.
We saw a lot of interesting things, just sitting quiet or walking carefully. One time I saw a
rain crow, one of those big cuckoos, chase a dove off a nest and settle down in it herself. I
went back the next day and shinnied up the tree, and sure enough, there was one great
big egg laid in the clutch of smaller dove’s eggs.
We saw the squirrels fighting and chasing each other through the trees, and once I saw
two squirrels breeding. The rabbits hopped around softly and unafraid of us. Once a deer
and a fawn wa1ked right up to us and stared for a long time, and then the old lady sort of
nodded to junior and they went off not running, not jumping, just sort of frisking, with
junior kicking up his heels.
I never did get to see Pan or any of the other strange people that live in the woods, but I
swear I heard noises that I couldn’t hook up to bird or frog or animal or insect, and soft
rustlings that proved to be nothing at all when I went to look, my skin goose-pimpled and
my neck hair lifting like a worried dog’s when he hears a sound he can’t quite figger.
What I did get was the feeling that there were spirits who lived in trees, and that there
was something very special about an ancient wood, and that there was some peculiar
magic about the late spring that has been justified by the behavior of beasts and people
down through the ages. (This I learned later from books.)
There had been some talk among the grown-ups at the time about sending me off to the
mountains to a boys’ camp, and I was hot for it until the spring got soft and sweet and
started to beckon toward the summer, and the Old Man and I made our daily pilgrimages
past the cow lot and into the secret woods. But in May I would begin to weaken on this
camp thing, and by June the camps had lost a customer. I knew when I had it good,
because the Old Man always used to say that a smart feller knew when he was well off and
was a goldarned fool to change it for something he didn’t know about.
Then, too, you understand, I was too busy to go to camp. The Old Man and I had a lot of
projects together, apart from the baseball and the swimming with the other boys. We had
to get the boat in shape for the summer’s fishing, and there was a puppy litter about due.
We wanted to do some work on the duck blind, of course, and there was this billy goat to
discipline - I guess you remember we failed on that one. And then there was fishing, of
course, salt-water for blackfish and speckled trout and croakers, and fresh-water for bass,
and by the time we got done fishing it would be September and the tides would swell, and
then there would be the marsh hens jumping creakily out of the flooded marshes.
When we finished with the marsh hens, the bluefish would be along; and when we got
through with the bluefish and the puppy drum, then the quail season would be on us, and
before you knew it, Christmas holidays had come and gone.
We were sitting quietly in the secret forest one day, waiting to hear some word from the
Old Man’s friend, Pan, when he stabbed his pipe at me and said, "I suppose you’re going
off to camp this summer and leave me alone and unprotected with all the grown-ups, eh?"
"I reckon not," I said.
"Why not? They got all sorts of things up there in the mountains. They got counselors,
and a swimming lake, and archery, and woodworking, and basket making, and lectures,
and all sorts of things. You’ll get to live in a tent and paddle a canoe and -- "
"I been in a tent and I got a boat and I got the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River to
swim in," I told him. "I got you for a counselor. I ain’t interested in basket making or
archery, because I got a shotgun and a boat that needs fixin’. I just ain’t got time to play
with children. The duck blind’s a mess."
"But here it is just spring, with a whole summer ahead of you," the Old Man was teasing
me.
"The way I figger, I’m through Christmas already," I said, "and by that time it’ll be puppy-
training time and we’re right back in the summer again."
"I expect you may be right," the Old Man admitted. "Time just seems to fly away for a boy.
That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.
Anyhow, I’m glad you ain’t going. It gets awful lonesome around here with all them grown-
ups."
"The Pipes of Pan"
The first promise of summer was always an exciting thing to a boy - the spring winds
eased and the sun burned away the April rains, the green pushed softly up and all the
smells began. Mornings before breakfast were delightfully cool and breezy, and bred a
restless excitement that made you want to caper barefoot on the dew-wet grass.
The smells were something. Down. by the creek the dogtooth violets pushed up through
the moss. The heavy tuberosy smell of the yellow jasmine filled the countryside, and the
dogwood trees were white and pink with delicate bloom. In the orchards the early peaches
and plums were breaking into blossom, adding their scents to the wild ones. The first
tame flowers were popping out into the warmth, competing with the wild violets and the
Johnny-jump-ups. I used to think that heaven would smell like this - cool and moist and
very delicately fragrant.
You took to the woods then, not as a hunter or a fisherman, but as a naturalist. The Old
Man was very firm about that.
"You’re a bloodthirsty savage," he said, "like all boys are bloodthirsty savages. But there’s
a heap more to it than killing. Seeing the whole world come alive again after a long winter’s
nap and a wild, wet spring is more fun, ’specially as you grow older, than all the shootin’
and fishin’ there is. And I never was able to explain it, but the critters seem to notice this
too. You’ll see how tame everything is this time of the year, when it’s wilder’n a buck
rabbit in the shootin’ season."
Maybe it seems a little dull today, but we used to go berry picking, after the blackberries
had turned from green to red to purple-black, glistening on their thorny vines, and found
it exciting. There were so many things to see and hear in the spring when you took a pail
and went out berrying, to come home tired, with a crick in your back and your fingers and
lips dyed purple from the juicy berries. There were birds around that I do not seem to see
so often any more - brilliant bluebirds, which came early in the spring and went away later
in the summer. There were lots and lots of the big, fierce-looking redheaded woodpeckers;
lots of what we called yellowhammers, another species of peckerwood known as flicker; the
big cuckoos we called rain crows; the carnivorous shrikes with the bandit’s velvet masks
across their cold robbers’ eyes; and hordes of the big, brilliant, raucously screaming blue
jays.
The wet, plowed fields were crowded with teams of killdeers and the dainty-walking titlarks,
racing along like pacing horses. The bobolinks were beginning to sway on the ends of high
weeds, the stalks bending under their negligible weight. Soon the Baltimore orioles would
be along, filling the air with sounds like the clinking of coins. The big cardinals were patches
of blood against the dark green of the pines and cedars, and the scarlet tanagers darted
like air-borne snakes.
When I think of it now, I think of it in terms of sounds and smells rather than sights. The
catbirds quarreled in the low bushes around the house, and the big, fat, sassy old mocker
that lived in the magnolia mimicked the catbirds. The doves cooed sadly from a great
distance, and the quail called from the brushy cover at the edge of the cultivation. They
came marching boldly into the strawberry patches, not in coveys but in pairs, walking
through the back yard as if they owned it.
The killdeers wheeled and dipped in clouds over the wet fields, the skies filled with the
mournful kill-dee, kill-dee, and the meadowlarks sang in the fields, and out of the wet
places came the wild, sweet song of the woodcock. The crows and the jays raised general
hell with everything, including the spring, and you could hear the rain crows’ hollow tonk
from some hidden position in a tall pine, and the solid knock of the woodpeckers, and the
sweet chirrup of the little bluebirds.
This was the time of the year when the boys rushed out of school to swim naked in the
creek at recess, and when it seemed impossible not to cut classes. This was the time of
the bellyache from eating berries that had not completely ripened, from experimenting with
stone-hard green peaches; and this also was the time of the lavish use of castor oil and
calomel. It was impossible to concentrate in school, for the drowsy hum of June was just
over the hill. Hence this was the time that boys were kept after school for throwing
spitballs and making paper airplanes and dipping pigtails into inkpots. Summer vacation
was yearned for by the teachers even more eagerly than it was craved by the students.
Marks dropped terribly, and discipline teetered on the ragged edge of anarchy.
The Old Man said he reckoned the whole world went a little crazy at this time of the year,
and he told me if I listened real close I could hear the piping of some old pagan god named
Pan, who was half billy goat, away off in the wood. I told the Old Man that if Pan was
anything like my billy goat I would just as lief have nothing to do with him.
"Be that as it may," the Old Man said, "that wood back there is creeping with all sorts of
forest gods and spirits right now, and if we went and set quiet I ain’t so sure but what we
might see some. Hear ’em, anyhow."
The forest he mentioned was located back of the cow lot, and it was bounded by a big field
of sedge where my pet covey of quail lived, and by a gully in which my secret interlocking
caves were built, and by a big pond in which the diedappers swam and dived, and by a big
soybean field that was full of doves in the fall. The forest covered about six acres, and was
composed of towering pines and twisty live oaks and dogwood trees. Its floor was clean
and mostly free of brush, a slippery floor of pine needles and jaunty wild flowers.
The Old Man and I spent a lot of time back there. We had to remodel some of the caves,
which meant we needed fresh pine saplings for the front and some fresh beams under the
heavy sod roofs, so some woodcutting was in order. It takes a lot of work to keep a cave
in good shape, especially when there are half a dozen connected by long tunnels. The
reason we needed so many caves was that I was then chieftain of a robber band, and in
watermelon season the robbers needed plenty of sudden sanctuary.
Sometimes, when we got tired of working on the caves, the Old Man and I would sit down
under a tree and lean back against the bole. He would light his pipe and tell me all sorts of
wild tales about the Druids, who lived in trees, and the first Britons, who dug enormous
caves called dene holes in the Kentish countryside in England, and about the bad spirits
that lived in the Black Forest in Germany, and about the old pagan gods like Pan, who, I
gathered, was a pretty fast fellow with the girls.
The Old Man had been near about everywhere, and I guess he had read just about
everything, because anything I remember today I remember from what he told me. I
always got pretty high grades in geography, because if they asked what country Kent was
a county of, like New Hanover or Brunswick County in my state, I could always say
"England," on account of the dene holes. I understood what a dene hole was because the
Old Man and I had just dug us one.
We saw a lot of interesting things, just sitting quiet or walking carefully. One time I saw a
rain crow, one of those big cuckoos, chase a dove off a nest and settle down in it herself. I
went back the next day and shinnied up the tree, and sure enough, there was one great
big egg laid in the clutch of smaller dove’s eggs.
We saw the squirrels fighting and chasing each other through the trees, and once I saw
two squirrels breeding. The rabbits hopped around softly and unafraid of us. Once a deer
and a fawn wa1ked right up to us and stared for a long time, and then the old lady sort of
nodded to junior and they went off not running, not jumping, just sort of frisking, with
junior kicking up his heels.
I never did get to see Pan or any of the other strange people that live in the woods, but I
swear I heard noises that I couldn’t hook up to bird or frog or animal or insect, and soft
rustlings that proved to be nothing at all when I went to look, my skin goose-pimpled and
my neck hair lifting like a worried dog’s when he hears a sound he can’t quite figger.
What I did get was the feeling that there were spirits who lived in trees, and that there
was something very special about an ancient wood, and that there was some peculiar
magic about the late spring that has been justified by the behavior of beasts and people
down through the ages. (This I learned later from books.)
There had been some talk among the grown-ups at the time about sending me off to the
mountains to a boys’ camp, and I was hot for it until the spring got soft and sweet and
started to beckon toward the summer, and the Old Man and I made our daily pilgrimages
past the cow lot and into the secret woods. But in May I would begin to weaken on this
camp thing, and by June the camps had lost a customer. I knew when I had it good,
because the Old Man always used to say that a smart feller knew when he was well off and
was a goldarned fool to change it for something he didn’t know about.
Then, too, you understand, I was too busy to go to camp. The Old Man and I had a lot of
projects together, apart from the baseball and the swimming with the other boys. We had
to get the boat in shape for the summer’s fishing, and there was a puppy litter about due.
We wanted to do some work on the duck blind, of course, and there was this billy goat to
discipline - I guess you remember we failed on that one. And then there was fishing, of
course, salt-water for blackfish and speckled trout and croakers, and fresh-water for bass,
and by the time we got done fishing it would be September and the tides would swell, and
then there would be the marsh hens jumping creakily out of the flooded marshes.
When we finished with the marsh hens, the bluefish would be along; and when we got
through with the bluefish and the puppy drum, then the quail season would be on us, and
before you knew it, Christmas holidays had come and gone.
We were sitting quietly in the secret forest one day, waiting to hear some word from the
Old Man’s friend, Pan, when he stabbed his pipe at me and said, "I suppose you’re going
off to camp this summer and leave me alone and unprotected with all the grown-ups, eh?"
"I reckon not," I said.
"Why not? They got all sorts of things up there in the mountains. They got counselors,
and a swimming lake, and archery, and woodworking, and basket making, and lectures,
and all sorts of things. You’ll get to live in a tent and paddle a canoe and -- "
"I been in a tent and I got a boat and I got the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River to
swim in," I told him. "I got you for a counselor. I ain’t interested in basket making or
archery, because I got a shotgun and a boat that needs fixin’. I just ain’t got time to play
with children. The duck blind’s a mess."
"But here it is just spring, with a whole summer ahead of you," the Old Man was teasing
me.
"The way I figger, I’m through Christmas already," I said, "and by that time it’ll be puppy-
training time and we’re right back in the summer again."
"I expect you may be right," the Old Man admitted. "Time just seems to fly away for a boy.
That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.
Anyhow, I’m glad you ain’t going. It gets awful lonesome around here with all them grown-
ups."
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