# The Way of the Wild (Hawkes)/Joyous Autumn Days

To the normal country boy, keen eyed, strong of limb, and full of the zest of living, every season of the year is the best season ever.
When the fifteenth of April comes, and he digs some angleworms and takes his fish-pole and goes away to the little alder-fringed trout brook, to renew his acquaintance with the Kingfisher, he thinks that spring is the best time of year. When summer comes with her full tide of life and he goes away to the pasture to pick wild strawberries, or blueberries, he votes for summer-time. When autumn comes and the nuts hang ripe on chestnut and butternut tree and he vies with the squirrels for the ripe nuts, he declares for autumn. But when winter comes with its skating and coasting, its fresh invigorating winds, with snowballing and snow forts, he is quite sure that winter is the best season of the year.
​Wise little philosopher that he is, he takes life very much as he finds it and squeezes out a full cup of joy from each passing season.
So long as he is just a boy, it does not matter what the wind or weather bring.
To scuff in the dead leaves, and kick up great clouds of them while their sweet sad scent fills the nostrils, is a deep satisfaction, but boyhood's joys are more dramatic. This is more of a girl's pastime. To go away for a day's hard work in the chestnut or butternut grove, or even to gather beechnuts, is more to his liking.
It is dizzy work climbing the high chestnuts and then holding on with one hand, while with the other one pulls off the hard-sticking burrs. The first frosts help some, but if one would be ahead of the squirrels he will have to use a pole. The beechnuts stick so hard that the best method is to saw off a convenient limb, and then strip it leisurely.
How the squirrels run up and down the trees, barking and scolding as you work. This applies especially to the red squirrel. The ​gray takes it as a matter of course, or at least he never says anything, but the red squirrel considers he owns the whole woods. Chippy, too, is quite disturbed, but he does not scold as the red squirrel does. You may have sawed off the very limb from which he was filling his winter pantry, but he will find another.
Out on the cranberry bog, the sour, red berries are very plentiful.
The gray moss gives under the feet as one moves from hillock to hillock. There is always just enough excitement about it to keep up the interest. There are legends that certain places in the bog are treacherous. Just the right spot might let one in out of sight. I have never known of any one being lost in that way on our own particular bog, but there is the legend.
Still more exciting than these harmless frolics in the autumn woods was raccoon hunting, in which the boys always joined in my boyhood.
With the faithful coon dog on a leash, and with lanterns, the start was made. There were always shadows enough to make it rather scary, ​and the hooting and laughing of the owls gave an added thrill. We skirted all the cornfields before letting the dog go. That was our best chance to find a fresh coon track.
Our excuse for hunting the raccoon was that he raided the hen-coops, scooped out the insides of the pumpkins, and did considerable damage to other vegetables. Of course, Mr. Raccoon had to live, but we did not think of that.
If we were lucky enough to tree a coon, then the fun began. He had to be either shaken or frightened out of the tree, or perhaps the tree had to be cut down. A very wasteful performance, as one good tree is worth many coonskins, or even Mr. Raccoon himself, delicious as he is, baked with sweet potatoes and served in the most approved manner.
If we were unlucky and did not start a coon, we made the best of it by going to a near-by cornfield and picking some corn that was still in the milk. This we would roast around a blazing campfire, where we would stay until the small hours of the morning, eating roast corn and ripe apples and telling stories.
​What a grown-up feeling it gives a boy to let himself in at the back door at two o'clock in the morning, after a coon hunt, only the boy knows.
There is a special halo that surrounds Thanksgiving day in the country. With what zest the normal country boy enters into this glad festal day.
He does not like picking chickens and turkeys, but he does his part at that fussy work.
There is more fun in cracking the nuts, and getting the largest, reddest apples and polishing them to make them shine and selecting the largest bunches of grapes from the storehouse. Then to put in the last two hours before dinner in just loafing about, smelling the tantalizing odors.
Going away to the great woods to cut the Christmas tree does not really come under the pleasures of autumn, but I always associate that sacred duty with this season of the year. If it is a green Christmas and the day is warm, it may still look quite like autumn, but more frequently there is snow on the ground.
​You always know that particular tree for the Christmas tree the moment you set eyes On it. Perhaps you have been looking for an hour.
Some of the trees which you inspect are too tall and some too short. Some are crooked while others do not branch enough.
There is always a special look to the Christmas tree, that no other tree has. It is preferably a spruce or hemlock. A pine is too sticky and it sheds its needles badly, so Mother has decreed against it, because it litters up the house.
The Christmas tree must be just tall enough to stand erect in the living-room, and it must be conical in shape, large at the bottom, and with a fine point at the top. It must have a great many small limbs to hang presents on.
I used to wonder, as I chopped the Christmas tree down, if it knew it was going to be the Christmas tree as it grew. If so, did that fact discourage it, or was it joy enough just to be a Christmas tree?
I often wondered if the trees ever got to ​talking in tree language, just as they do when the wind whispers softly in their branches. Perhaps one would say, "Ho, I am going to be the Christmas tree. I am going up to the house and help celebrate the glad day when I am tall enough."
"A fine stunt that is," another would retort, a crooked little tree which could never serve in that capacity. "You will be cut down for your pains. You will die and that will be the end of you."
"Oh, well, I don't care," the future Christmas tree would reply, softly sighing in all its needles. "I will have had one glad time. And they will keep me for a long time just to look at and talk about me for months and tell how beautiful I was."
The boy never feels quite so much the man in after years as he does the day he drags home the Christmas tree and all his smaller brothers and sisters run shouting to greet him. He is bringing home the woods, its fragrance and its sentient life, its mystery and its peace, to beautify the home for a brief season.
​So here's to you, brave little Christmas tree, giving your own fragrant life for the joy of others.