Essays of E. B. White Read Free Page B

rifleman at every crossing, and the cries of the beaters could be heard from the woods, the voice of one of them much louder and clearer than the others—a buglelike sound that suggested the eagerness of a hound. During November, a deer can’t move anywhere in this community without having its whereabouts flashed via the grapevine. As the season draws to a close, a sort of desperateness infects the male population. That afternoon it was almost as though the swamp contained an escaped convict. I heard two shots just before dark, but I learned later that neither of them took effect, and was secretly glad. Still, this business of favoring the deer over the hunter is a perplexing one; some of my best friends are deerslayers, and I never wish a man bad luck. As a spectator at the annual contest between deer and man, I am in the same fix as at the Harvard-Yale game—I’m not quite sure which club I’m rooting for.
    In the village, I found three big trucks loading fir-balsam wreaths for Boston. They were lined up in formation, headed out, ready for the starter’s gun. The loads were already built high in the air. Fir balsam is like no other cargo; even a workaday truck is exalted and wears a consecrated look when carrying these aromatic dumplings to the hungry dwellers in cities. This is the link that must not be broken. The head man in charge of wreaths was standing in front of his platoon, directing operations. He was one of those who had officiated at my chimney fire. His cheeks were red with cold. I asked him if he would be going to Boston himself with one of the trucks, and he said no, he couldn’t go, because he had pneumonia.
    â€œYou really got pneumonia?” I asked as the wicked wind tugged at our shirts.
    â€œYes, indeed,” he replied cheerfully. “Can’t seem to shake it.”
    I report this conversation so the people of Boston will not take their Christmas greens for granted. Wreaths do not come out of our wood lots and roll up to Boston under their own steam; they must be pried out and boosted on their way by a man with pneumonia. I noted that several of the crew were fellows whom I had last seen a few weeks ago shingling the roof of my ell in Indian summer. Hereabouts a man must know every trade. First he tacks cedar shingles to a neighbor’s roof, then he’s off to Boston to shingle the front doors of Beacon Hill with the living green.
    Maine sends about a million Christmas trees out of the state every year, according to my latest advices. It is an easy figure to remember, and an easy one to believe as you drive about the county and see the neatly tied bundles along the road, waiting to be picked up, their little yellow butts so bright and round against the darkling green. The young fir balsam is a standard cash crop, just like the middle-aged clam. The price paid for trees “at the side of the road” ranges from a dollar a bundle (four or five trees) to $3.75. A man can be launched, or catapulted, into the Christmas-tree business quite by surprise. I wandered across the road the other day and up into the maple woods beyond my hayfield, and discovered that a miracle had taken place while my back was turned: the grove was alive with young firs, standing as close together as theatergoers between the acts.
    The Christmas-tree harvest is hard on the woods, though. People tend to cut wastefully, hacking away wherever the going is good. And the enemy is always at our gates in the form of bugs and blights. I have just read a report on the forest-insect situation, sent me by the county agent. We have all sorts of picturesque plagues. The balsam woolly aphid. Birch dieback. Dutch elm disease. Spruce budworm. (A spruce “bud” in Maine parlance is a spruce cone—the thing a red squirrel eats the seeds of, sitting on a rock, and the thing Boston and New York celebrants like to put on their mantelpieces. The budworm comes into the state in the form of a