What do you think?
Rate this book
School of the Woods
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
28 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
William Joseph Long
73 books10 followersWilliam Joseph Long (1867-1952) was an American writer, naturalist and minister. He lived and worked in Stamford, Connecticut as a minister of the First Congregationalist Church.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 26, 2021
History first. This is a book which has been in my ‘family history’ pile for a long time. I carelessly had it in my mind that it was my mother’s book. She was born in Chester, Nova Scotia in 1918, and it seemed obvious it would have been hers, set, as it is, just across the border with the USA in, I think, Maine. Reference to the Maliseet tribe (Milicete in Long’s script) that provides the author with his guides suggests that his expeditions may have included parts of what is now Quebec and New Brunswick.
However, I seem to have missed the two names on the flyleaf: Mary Peter 20.May.1904; and Margaret Webb, Looe. (Mary Peter was my great aunt, the eldest of my great-grandfather’s daughters, and Margaret was her second child who married the potter Ken Webb. Together they founded and ran the Looe Pottery, now long closed.) The copyright is 1902 and the publication/edition date is 1903. It would seem to be the British edition of an American work, and has some glorious illustrations by a man called Charles Copeland. If I knew how to include a couple, I'd do so.
Anyway, I decided, finally, to read it. Did I enjoy it? Yes, in parts. William Long has obviously derived huge pleasure from observing animals in the wild, and his descriptions of fawns – unschooled in fear - and porcupines – who seem to have no fear at all even as adults – I particularly enjoyed. He spends a lot of time on the fishhawk and the heron, and is especially good when describing serious combat between the heron and a ‘fisher’, the common name for the Pennant’s marten, in a bout which the heron wins with some devastating blows from her bill. He considers the behaviour of a covey of partridge, whose leader, at their assigned rendezvous, is most careful to wait and search for a couple of missing members, little knowing they are by then already in Long’s game bag.
The game bag is a sign, however, of what makes this book feel out of kilter with the contemporary environmentally-conscious reader. Long is as often out in his canoe fishing and hunting for his supper as he is simply observing. Killing is what he does when he needs to, and he does it without qualmishness. It is the world of a man having to do what a man’s gotta do – which is what my maternal grandfather certainly did. (My mother gave me her pair of sealskin mittens which I used to wear out of respect for the seal who’d died in order for my mother to keep her hands warm in Nova Scotian winters. Eventually I offloaded my conscience onto my cousin who lives in Fredericton, and sent the seal ‘home’.)
Similarly, I found the Indian-speak an uncomfortable blast from a colonialist past. Nevertheless, like Longfellow in ‘Hiawatha’, Long chooses to use Maliseet words for the animals he describes:
“...the names herein used for the birds and animals are those given by the Milicete Indians. I use these names partly for their happy memories; partly for the added touch of individuality which they give to every creature; but chiefly because they have the trick of bringing the animal himself before you by some sound or suggestion. When you call the little creature that lives under your doorstep, that eats your crumbs and comes when you whistle certain tunes, a common Toad, the word means nothing. But when Simmo speaks of K’dunk the Fat One, I know something of what the interesting little creature says and just how he looks.”
There is also a certain amount of anthropomorphising which verges on the sentimental and which is not currently in vogue or part of a world view of the environment. In Long’s defence, he is writing for children, and if he sees animals as intelligible and worthy of respect because, in his view, they exhibit characteristics that are recognisable by humans, and if that is how he thinks children will best learn to wonder at, enjoy and respect the world they share with other creatures, then so be it.
As a consequence of this, I felt Long wrote with a quiet, consistent conviction and awed admiration of his neck of the North American woods. His writing has the pace of one habituated to reflective stillness and observation. And he clearly derives such pleasure from observing. For example, he opens his chapter titled ‘A Lazy Fellow’s Fun’ thus:
“A new sound, a purring rustle of leaves, stopped me instantly as I climbed the beech ridge, one late afternoon, to see what woodfolk I might surprise feeding on the rich mast. P-r-r-r-r-ush, p-r-r-r-r-ush! a curious combination of the rustling of squirrels’ feet and the soft, crackling purr of an eagle’s wings, growing nearer, clearer every instant. I slipped quietly behind the nearest tree to watch and listen.
Something was coming down the hill; but what? It was not an animal running. No animal that I knew, unless he had gone suddenly crazy, would ever make such a racket to tell everybody where he was. It was not squirrels playing, nor grouse scratching among new-fallen leaves. Their alternate rustlings and silences are unmistakable. It was not a bear shaking down the ripe beech-nut – not heavy enough for that, yet too heavy for any prowler of the woods to make on his stealthy hunting. P-r-r-r-r-ush, swish, thump! Something struck the stem of a bush heavily and brought down a rustling shower of leaves; then out from under the low branches rolled something I had never seen before, - a heavy greyish ball, as big as a half-bushel basket, so covered over with leaves that one could not tell what was inside. It was as if someone had covered a big kettle with glue and sent it rolling down the hill, picking up dead leaves as it went. So the queer thing tumbled past my feet, purring, crackling, growing bigger and more ragged every moment as it gathered up more leaves till it reached the bottom of a sharp pitch and lay still.
I stole after it cautiously. Suddenly it moved, unrolled itself. Then out of the ragged mass came a big porcupine. He shook himself, stretched, wobbled around a moment, as if his long roll had made him dizzy; then he meandered aimlessly along the foot of the ridge, his quills stuck full of dead leaves, looking big and strange enough to frighten anything that might meet him in the woods... Now had he been bothered by some animal and rolled himself up where it was so steep that he lost his balance, and so tumbled unwillingly down the long hill; or, with his stomach full of sweet beechnuts, had he rolled down lazily to avoid the trouble of walking; or is Unk Wunk brighter than he looks to discover the joy of roller coasting and the fun of feeling dizzy afterwards?”
This is pretty typical of Long’s careful eye and delightfully ‘correct’ style. I was conscious of his writing ‘well’ in order to set a good example to his young readers, and perhaps also to meet the approval of their parents and librarians. In this vein, he stresses on several occasions that the key lesson that ‘School of the Woods’ teaches is that if youngsters do not obey their parents, they will come to grief. He evidences this in his first chapter when a too-curious fawn fails to learn that when his mother barks ‘fear’ at him he should take note: he lingers, takes flight in the wrong direction, breaks a leg and is carried off by Moween, the black bear, for dinner.
Oh yes, Long does not paint a picture of a woodland that is not ‘red in tooth and claw’. When that pine marten attacks a heron chick, Quoshk the Keen-Eyed defends her offspring. She is badly injured herself, but in mouth-to-beak combat, her spear thrusts are devastatingly accurate, blinding the marten. And Long’s last chapter is titled candidly, ‘How the Animals Die’. Obviously they can be killed, but how, if they survive to old age, how do they die? Well, Long becomes comfortingly – and, I think, not unjustifiably – lyrical. “The vast majority of animals go quietly away when their time comes... Something calls the creature away from his daily round; age or natural disease touches him gently in a way he has not felt before. He steals away, obeying the old warning instinct of his kind, and picks out a spot where they shall not find him till he is well again. The brook sings on its way to the sea; the waters lap and tinkle on the pebbles as the breeze rocks them; the wind is crooning in the pines, - The shadows lengthen; the twilight deepens; his eyes grow drowsy; he falls asleep. And his last conscious thought, since he knows no death, is that he will waken in the morning when the light calls him.”
An interesting book to have read. Dated, but treading a line between comforting illusions and observed, illusion-free reality. I think Margaret Webb would have loved it.
However, I seem to have missed the two names on the flyleaf: Mary Peter 20.May.1904; and Margaret Webb, Looe. (Mary Peter was my great aunt, the eldest of my great-grandfather’s daughters, and Margaret was her second child who married the potter Ken Webb. Together they founded and ran the Looe Pottery, now long closed.) The copyright is 1902 and the publication/edition date is 1903. It would seem to be the British edition of an American work, and has some glorious illustrations by a man called Charles Copeland. If I knew how to include a couple, I'd do so.
Anyway, I decided, finally, to read it. Did I enjoy it? Yes, in parts. William Long has obviously derived huge pleasure from observing animals in the wild, and his descriptions of fawns – unschooled in fear - and porcupines – who seem to have no fear at all even as adults – I particularly enjoyed. He spends a lot of time on the fishhawk and the heron, and is especially good when describing serious combat between the heron and a ‘fisher’, the common name for the Pennant’s marten, in a bout which the heron wins with some devastating blows from her bill. He considers the behaviour of a covey of partridge, whose leader, at their assigned rendezvous, is most careful to wait and search for a couple of missing members, little knowing they are by then already in Long’s game bag.
The game bag is a sign, however, of what makes this book feel out of kilter with the contemporary environmentally-conscious reader. Long is as often out in his canoe fishing and hunting for his supper as he is simply observing. Killing is what he does when he needs to, and he does it without qualmishness. It is the world of a man having to do what a man’s gotta do – which is what my maternal grandfather certainly did. (My mother gave me her pair of sealskin mittens which I used to wear out of respect for the seal who’d died in order for my mother to keep her hands warm in Nova Scotian winters. Eventually I offloaded my conscience onto my cousin who lives in Fredericton, and sent the seal ‘home’.)
Similarly, I found the Indian-speak an uncomfortable blast from a colonialist past. Nevertheless, like Longfellow in ‘Hiawatha’, Long chooses to use Maliseet words for the animals he describes:
“...the names herein used for the birds and animals are those given by the Milicete Indians. I use these names partly for their happy memories; partly for the added touch of individuality which they give to every creature; but chiefly because they have the trick of bringing the animal himself before you by some sound or suggestion. When you call the little creature that lives under your doorstep, that eats your crumbs and comes when you whistle certain tunes, a common Toad, the word means nothing. But when Simmo speaks of K’dunk the Fat One, I know something of what the interesting little creature says and just how he looks.”
There is also a certain amount of anthropomorphising which verges on the sentimental and which is not currently in vogue or part of a world view of the environment. In Long’s defence, he is writing for children, and if he sees animals as intelligible and worthy of respect because, in his view, they exhibit characteristics that are recognisable by humans, and if that is how he thinks children will best learn to wonder at, enjoy and respect the world they share with other creatures, then so be it.
As a consequence of this, I felt Long wrote with a quiet, consistent conviction and awed admiration of his neck of the North American woods. His writing has the pace of one habituated to reflective stillness and observation. And he clearly derives such pleasure from observing. For example, he opens his chapter titled ‘A Lazy Fellow’s Fun’ thus:
“A new sound, a purring rustle of leaves, stopped me instantly as I climbed the beech ridge, one late afternoon, to see what woodfolk I might surprise feeding on the rich mast. P-r-r-r-r-ush, p-r-r-r-r-ush! a curious combination of the rustling of squirrels’ feet and the soft, crackling purr of an eagle’s wings, growing nearer, clearer every instant. I slipped quietly behind the nearest tree to watch and listen.
Something was coming down the hill; but what? It was not an animal running. No animal that I knew, unless he had gone suddenly crazy, would ever make such a racket to tell everybody where he was. It was not squirrels playing, nor grouse scratching among new-fallen leaves. Their alternate rustlings and silences are unmistakable. It was not a bear shaking down the ripe beech-nut – not heavy enough for that, yet too heavy for any prowler of the woods to make on his stealthy hunting. P-r-r-r-r-ush, swish, thump! Something struck the stem of a bush heavily and brought down a rustling shower of leaves; then out from under the low branches rolled something I had never seen before, - a heavy greyish ball, as big as a half-bushel basket, so covered over with leaves that one could not tell what was inside. It was as if someone had covered a big kettle with glue and sent it rolling down the hill, picking up dead leaves as it went. So the queer thing tumbled past my feet, purring, crackling, growing bigger and more ragged every moment as it gathered up more leaves till it reached the bottom of a sharp pitch and lay still.
I stole after it cautiously. Suddenly it moved, unrolled itself. Then out of the ragged mass came a big porcupine. He shook himself, stretched, wobbled around a moment, as if his long roll had made him dizzy; then he meandered aimlessly along the foot of the ridge, his quills stuck full of dead leaves, looking big and strange enough to frighten anything that might meet him in the woods... Now had he been bothered by some animal and rolled himself up where it was so steep that he lost his balance, and so tumbled unwillingly down the long hill; or, with his stomach full of sweet beechnuts, had he rolled down lazily to avoid the trouble of walking; or is Unk Wunk brighter than he looks to discover the joy of roller coasting and the fun of feeling dizzy afterwards?”
This is pretty typical of Long’s careful eye and delightfully ‘correct’ style. I was conscious of his writing ‘well’ in order to set a good example to his young readers, and perhaps also to meet the approval of their parents and librarians. In this vein, he stresses on several occasions that the key lesson that ‘School of the Woods’ teaches is that if youngsters do not obey their parents, they will come to grief. He evidences this in his first chapter when a too-curious fawn fails to learn that when his mother barks ‘fear’ at him he should take note: he lingers, takes flight in the wrong direction, breaks a leg and is carried off by Moween, the black bear, for dinner.
Oh yes, Long does not paint a picture of a woodland that is not ‘red in tooth and claw’. When that pine marten attacks a heron chick, Quoshk the Keen-Eyed defends her offspring. She is badly injured herself, but in mouth-to-beak combat, her spear thrusts are devastatingly accurate, blinding the marten. And Long’s last chapter is titled candidly, ‘How the Animals Die’. Obviously they can be killed, but how, if they survive to old age, how do they die? Well, Long becomes comfortingly – and, I think, not unjustifiably – lyrical. “The vast majority of animals go quietly away when their time comes... Something calls the creature away from his daily round; age or natural disease touches him gently in a way he has not felt before. He steals away, obeying the old warning instinct of his kind, and picks out a spot where they shall not find him till he is well again. The brook sings on its way to the sea; the waters lap and tinkle on the pebbles as the breeze rocks them; the wind is crooning in the pines, - The shadows lengthen; the twilight deepens; his eyes grow drowsy; he falls asleep. And his last conscious thought, since he knows no death, is that he will waken in the morning when the light calls him.”
An interesting book to have read. Dated, but treading a line between comforting illusions and observed, illusion-free reality. I think Margaret Webb would have loved it.
February 18, 2025
We appreciated this book so much. The author obviously loved and studied closely the animals he wrote about while also not worshiping them. His insights into fear and death amongst animals were especially insightful.
March 15, 2025
Another beautiful read by William Long.
August 18, 2020
There are some gory details to gloss over when reading to children and one very sad one (the author is living in a very different context from mine). The book is a very special glimpse into the lives of wild animals.
I was unaware until reading this book that a worldwide debate at the time was that animals are unable to learn (it seems scientists and business leaders were justifying cruel treatment). The author wrote this book in part to show that animals teach their young and learn from each other -they aren't relying on instinct alone to survive. We will continue to read the rest of the series.
I was unaware until reading this book that a worldwide debate at the time was that animals are unable to learn (it seems scientists and business leaders were justifying cruel treatment). The author wrote this book in part to show that animals teach their young and learn from each other -they aren't relying on instinct alone to survive. We will continue to read the rest of the series.
June 26, 2017
Thankful for the vividness of narration, words that animate the woods we visit, & for the nurturing wisdom of Chapter 1.
"To the wild creature obedience is everything. It is the deep, unconscious tribute of ignorance to wisdom, of weakness to power. All the wilderness mothers, from partridge to panther, seize upon this and through long summer days and quiet starlit nights train and train it, till the young, profiting by their instinct of obedience, grow wise and strong by careful teaching. This, in a word, seems to me to be the whole secret of animal life. And one who watches the process with sympathetic eyes—this mother fishhawk, overcoming the young birds' natural instinct for hunting the woods, and teaching them the better mysteries of going a-fishing; this mother otter, teaching her young their first confidence in the water, which they naturally distrust, and then how to swim deep and silent...these interesting little wild kindergartens are, emphatically, happy gatherings. The more I watch them, teachers and pupils, the more I long for some measure of their freedom, their strength of play, their joyfulness. This is the great lesson which a man soon learns, with open eyes and heart, in the school of the woods."
"To the wild creature obedience is everything. It is the deep, unconscious tribute of ignorance to wisdom, of weakness to power. All the wilderness mothers, from partridge to panther, seize upon this and through long summer days and quiet starlit nights train and train it, till the young, profiting by their instinct of obedience, grow wise and strong by careful teaching. This, in a word, seems to me to be the whole secret of animal life. And one who watches the process with sympathetic eyes—this mother fishhawk, overcoming the young birds' natural instinct for hunting the woods, and teaching them the better mysteries of going a-fishing; this mother otter, teaching her young their first confidence in the water, which they naturally distrust, and then how to swim deep and silent...these interesting little wild kindergartens are, emphatically, happy gatherings. The more I watch them, teachers and pupils, the more I long for some measure of their freedom, their strength of play, their joyfulness. This is the great lesson which a man soon learns, with open eyes and heart, in the school of the woods."
Currently reading
January 14, 2008finished first chapter
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews