Altered Seasons

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 885, 20 July 1956, Page 9

Altered Seasons

by

SUNDOWNER

JUNE 19

EITHER the birds and rabbits nor the trees and flowers have discovered yet whether winter is coming of going. By the calendar it is almost the shortest day. By the thermometer it is early spring. When I was milking Betty this morning a sparrow came down and carried off a straw. A few minutes later it returned and picked up a feather. Our cat, as I write this

note, is up the cabbage tree outside my window looking for nests. The

leaves are off the fruit trees, but the buds on some of them are ‘swelling. A jasmine, which I have been trying for two years to lead up a post, and have had difficulty in keeping alive, rushed away a fortnight ago and yesterday broke into flower. A lilac bush which has already flowered twice has developed new leaf buds. A bed of nasturtiums, which the first frost invariably cuts down, though they are dedraggled and drooping, have survived three frosts, and are not sure yet whether to die finally or lift up their heads again. Wallflower and stock plants set out for spring blooming are not waiting . for spring, though we have twice pinched off their heads The weeping willows are yellow but still holding their leaves. The lucerne trees are splashed with white. The hills are a deep green. The sheep are drinking no water. Elsie, who has had no hay or mangolds or hours on the rope in the garden, and who is only a week or two from another calf, looks well enough to tempt a butcher. There are week-old rabbits in the gully, as our cat has recently proved, and when I was bringing down the cows a few mornings ago I disturbed a full-grown rabbit-one of three or four that escaped the traps-driving a new burrow into the open hillside and throwing the earth

out faster than anyone would imagine who has never watched this operation. The mating and nesting of birds, men of science tell us, depend not on temperature but on light. I do not therefore know whether the sparrow I saw with the straw and the feather was building a nest or making some kind of acknowledgment of the morning sun. It may have been doing what good and simple Christians do-are there any others?--when they count their blessings. But I don’t think the cat would be deceived by piety of that kind, and playful as she still is at six or seven, her journeys up the cabbage tree are as purposeful as a B, and K. jaunt to London. I suspect that light is one factor only in plant and animal physiology.

JUNE 22

NE of my bad habits is to tune in to church services and cut out when the sermon begins. The associations that tie me emotionally to the hymns, some of which are jingling nonsense, some poetry, and some gory rant, are not strong enough when the sermons begin to let me listen and not hear.

even on the air the preacher remains a person whom it is boorish

to laugh at. He is doing his best and he will never succeed. So I bow myself out before he begins. But sometimes I am not quick enough. I listen to the text, wonder what he can possibly say after so bold a start, and then lose myself in a jungle of pity. admiration, envy and shame. It is like watching a sheep in the dip that has not enough wit to take the easy way out, or a horse I once saw drowning itself in a high-banked African river. Nothing that I could do would turn it down stream to the only possible land-

ing place. It was desperate with weariness and fear, and kept heading upstream and floundering against the overhanging banks. I endured the situation as long as I could, then hurried away; but when I passed the spot a day or two later there was a carcass in the mud and hoofmarks gouged out of the clay three or four feet above the water. Horses die hard. So do religions, superstitions, myths, desires, and hopes. Though I am not suggesting that the content of all sermons is myth, I have seldom heard one that was reasonable all the way.’ The gaps open, and the planks thrown across never bear a struggling man’s weight. There would be no sermons if I were an Archbishop or a Pope, and I would keep a shotgun for the preacher who tried to explain the music. If he tried to justify, or simplify, or amplify the text that provoked this note ("I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging dread"?)-if he did anything with those words but leave them as the psalmist said them I would send him to the Seychelles Islands to convert the heathen there. ; / ~~ y=

JUNE 23

NE of the four duties of all good (and new) Chinese, a recent visitor told me, is to kill sparrows. I have forgotten the other three-I suppose because they sounded sensible-but the sparrows linger in my protesting mind. Killing sparrows in New Zealand is like the wag’s description of Prohibition in

America-bDetter than no drink at all. We could not kill them all, or

nearly all, even if we all agreed to try. But if ali the people of China start killing something-sparrows, flies, lice, or landlords-the blood will really flow. So will all the streams that these potential victims now check. I don’t know enough about the bird life of China to think what will remain after the sparreaws go. My impression, gained from Chinese artists, is that there will be only ducks, geese, and hens, herons and fabulous pheasants. But there must have been originally the usual tropical birds in the south, the birds of most of Europe in the cold and temperate north, sea birds, river birds, and birds of the rocks and deserts in the high and cry interior. If some of these have disappeared before the march of man, those that remain will have adapted themselves to life in an area occupied by 60 million human beings, most of them short of food for two or three thousand years. So the drive against sparrows is a drive against food thieves. It is the kind of war we wage against rats and mice, but likely to be more effective. Our only interest in rats and mice is to kill them, but a dozen sparrows, whether served up whole or baked into a pie, would keep a Chinese family happy for a day or two. The question is how long after that the happiness would last. Would there be more rice and more wheat, more vegetables and more eggs, if the sparrows all disappeared for ever? I can’t believe that there would be in a country exposed to all the plagues of the great trade routes stretching right back to Egypt. But I am not short of bread. Not once in my life have I had to lie awake at night wondering where to get another meal, It is easy to take a long view when there is nothing in the short view to breed alarm. (To be continued)