Have you gone for a hike lately? For many of us right now that means bundling up! Wind chills and snow have much of the northern hemisphere very much in the grip of winter!
More about that in today's story, but first a look back at last week. Public Domain Day was a week ago on January 1st with many 1926 U.S. works and international works by authors, composers, and more also being added. That latter is worth noting:
I went through my personal collection and found my 1926 edition of Ernest Thompson Seton's Woodland Tales, not realizing an earlier 1922 edition was already at Project Gutenberg. In Seton's "Things to See in Wintertime" section he has a "Tale" he called "Tracks and the Stories They Tell" with the most common tracks of Dog, Cat, Sparrow, Chicken, and Robin. He called it a "Tale", but it's really the following #56 that is actually a Tale. He found a story discovered by following the tracks of a rabbit all the way through to some final feathers to solve a Woodland murder mystery. His illustration is small and a bit hard to follow. I was able to enlarge it a bit to make it slightly easier to follow. I would recommend, if you wanted to re-tell the story, getting an artist to make a larger version. (There's a limit as to how large a picture may be enlarged before it becomes unreadable.)
One other quick note, Seton in the Preface called his stories "Mother Carey Tales." Mother Carey is usually a personification of the sea, but he used it as a Mother Nature figure, complete with all the favoring of the strong over the weak.
TALE 56
A Rabbit's Story of His Life, Written by Himself
Yes, the Rabbit wrote it himself and about himself in
the oldest writing on earth, that is the tracks of his feet.
A WOODCRAFT TRAGEDY
As shown by the Tracks and Signs in the Snow
In February of 1885, one morning after a light snowfall,
I went tramping through the woods north of Toronto, when
I came on something that always makes me stop and look—the
fresh tracks of an animal. This was the track of a Cottontail
Rabbit and I followed its windings with thrills
of interest. There it began under a little brush pile (a);
the bed of brown leaves showing that he settled there, before
the snow-fall began. Now here (b) he leaped out after
the snow ceased, for the tracks are sharp, and sat looking
around. See the two long marks of his hind feet and in
front the two smaller prints of his front feet; behind
is the mark made by his tail, showing that he was sitting
on it.
Then he had taken alarm at something and dashed off at
speed (c), for now his hind feet are tracking ahead of the
front feet, as in most bounding forefoots, and the faster he
goes, the farther ahead those hind feet get.
See now how he dodged about here and there, this way
and that, among the trees, as though trying to escape
some dreaded enemy (c, d, e, f).
But what enemy? There are no other tracks, and still
the wild jumping went on.
I began to think that the Rabbit was crazy, flying from
an imaginary foe; possibly that I was on the track of a
March Hare. But at "g" I found on the trail for the first
time a few drops of blood. That told me that the Rabbit
was in real danger but gave no clue to its source.
At "h" I found more blood and at "j" I got a new thrill,
for there, plain enough on each side of the Rabbit track, were
finger-like marks, and the truth dawned on me that these
were the prints of great wings. The Rabbit was fleeing from
an eagle, a hawk, or an owl. Some twenty yards farther "k"
I found in the snow the remains of the luckless Rabbit
partly devoured. Then I knew that the eagle had not
done it, for he would have taken the Rabbit's body away, not
eaten him up there. So it must have been a hawk or an
owl. I looked for something to tell me which, and I got it.
Right by the Rabbit's remains was the large twin-toed
track (l) that told me that an owl had been there, and
that therefore he was the criminal. Had it been a hawk
the mark would have been as shown in the left lower corner,
three toes forward and one back, whereas the owl usually
sets his foot with two toes forward and two backward, as
in the sketch. This, then, I felt sure was the work of an
owl. But which owl? There were two, maybe three kinds
in that valley. I wished to know exactly and, looking
for further evidence, I found on a sapling near by a big
soft, downy, owlish feather (m) with three brown bars across
it; which told me plainly that a Barred Owl or Hoot Owl
had been there recently, and that he was almost certainly
the killer of the Cottontail.
This may sound like a story of Sherlock Holmes among
the animals—a flimsy tale of circumstantial evidence. But
while I was making my notes, what should come flying
through the woods but the Owl himself, back to make
another meal, no doubt. He alighted on a branch just
above my head, barely ten feet up, and there gave me the
best of proof, next to eye witness of the deed, that all I had
gathered from the tracks and signs in the snow was quite
true.
I had no camera in those days, but had my sketch book,
and as he sat, I made a drawing which hangs to-day among
my pictures that are beyond price.
Here, then, is a chapter of wild life which no man saw,
which man could not have seen, for the presence of a man
would have prevented it. And yet we know it was true,
for it was written by the Rabbit himself.
If you have the seeing eye, you will be able to read many
strange and thrilling happenings written for you thus in
the snow, the mud, and even the sand and the dust.
*******
Seton in this story and the study of animal tracks in "Tale 55" encourages us to see nature's stories. I try to observe those stories on my snowy hikes, but confess snow depths make it hard to get a clear view. They're sometimes as difficult to decipher as in Seton's own small illustrations.
*****************
Now for the "fine print" about Keeping the Stories in Public Domain. (You can always enlarge it on your computer.)
This
is part of a series of postings of stories under the category,
"Keeping the Public in Public Domain." The idea
behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the
authors and their immediate heirs were compensated. I feel
strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the
20th century. My
own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public
Domain I decided to share stories from them. I hope you enjoy
discovering new stories.
At
the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates
projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an
audience. Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing
of Public Domain stories will not occur that week. This is a return to
my regular posting of a research project here. (Don't worry, this
isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future
storytelling to an audience.) Response has convinced me that "Keeping
the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other
postings as often as I can manage it.
Other
Public Domain story resources I recommend-
There
are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for
folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's
database, Yashpeh,
the International Folktales Collection. I have long
recommended it and continue to do so. He has loaded
Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so
you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression
you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
- You may have noticed I'm no
longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his
offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking
specific types of stories. There's another site, FairyTalez
claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales,
folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for
phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
Between those two sites, there
is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait,
there's more!"
The
email list for storytellers, Storytell,
discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional
suggestions:
-
Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible
through the Wayback Machine, described below, but the late Jackie Baldwin's
wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google
search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ . It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016 and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.
You're
going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT
go to the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine to find some of these old links. Tim's
site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a
full-time job. In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that
Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she
could no longer maintain it. Possibly searches maintained it.
Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim
Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old
Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library
(something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine. It
took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally
in December of 2006 it appears!
Somebody
as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website
is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.
I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can
be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that
becomes the only way to find them.
You
can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun
discovering even more stories!
