Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less
poetry in the process. But the look of the old trees, the laugh
of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says,
are the same as in the old times. "How these sounds ignore the
years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees.
Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead
a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the
maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats
sparingly of sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would
clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon
thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of
those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they
had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully.
He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees
together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the
bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks;
caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be
carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and,
though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next);
and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one
could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields.
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