The fall sings in full chorus, but it speaks in a whispered word. A scarlet leaf of a sourwood tree whirls in the front yard, then smacks against the porch screen. It holds there, flattened and pinned by the warden wind like a captive pleading with me. Then, after a few seconds, it is yanked away.

It was like the Monarch butterfly I saw on the gravel road, displaying and folding the only bright color of that moldy November morning. The leaf, the butterfly. What were they trying to tell me?

The trees in chorus are something else. They fill the air in harmony, but like a church chorale, the words are hard to discern, English or Latin. In the meadow framing the woods, in this Indian summer sunshine, millions of particles are swirling with the warm breezes. I wonder if they are an offshoot of the uncut grasses, the rusty stalks as tall as fawns. I investigate.

They are insects, countless hoards. An infestation, but harmless. Ladybugs. Herman says no, they are kudzu bugs, swarming because the highway department killed off too much kudzu. I know they’re ladybugs, harmless but with hardshell wings. Their bright yellow or orange bodies, freckled in black (the Monarch’s black borders were freckled in white dots), hit me in the face and hands, so drunk on sunshine they were. Maybe they aren’t so harmless in this infestation. How can so many be around on just this last day or two of warmth in early November? Nature explodes, showing her potential for incredible abundance, or plague. And in contrast, a lone prophet tries to tell us, Prepare for one or the other.

Speak up. I don’t understand.

I lifted the Monarch off the road and set it on a crooked tree. The next day, it was still there, still barely alive. At least the slow wing motions seemed to show signs of art and life.

We like to imagine that the natives who were here before Europe invaded and settled were more attuned to Nature’s words and music. But they had their plagues, wars and hungers. David J. Silverman’s “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanaug Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of the First Thanksgiving,” depicts an epoch of abundance for the red tribe of Cape Cod. Their God, Kiehtan, had been good. They mastered the maize horticulture that had spread across Indian culture from Mexico for a thousand years, but balanced that with summer fishing, and winter hunting. The women were in charge of edible plantings, which held female spirit and allowed for child raising, while the males were into fishing, hunting, tobacco, and war. They learned of the spirit world from dreams that one of their two souls could visit while the other kept the body alive. And in a special way, for males, from a rite of passage that involved fasting, sleep deprivation and ingesting of emetics and hallucinogens (Bradford’s history, p. 190).

But they were devastated by an epidemic around 1618. So when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620, the Wampapaug sachem was ready for trading – which held promise of mutual benefit as well as symbolic meaning for a good relationship. Theirs was a gift economy. Our economy today has some of this understanding, mutual benefit in regulated commerce. But we tend to squash it with fear, distrust and not getting the symbolic, human part.

Phinizy Spalding’s “Oglethorpe in America” also tells a story, from 110 years later and down here in Georgia, of a benevolent and fairly equitable relationship between the colony’s founder and the Creek Indians. The Indians welcomed the treaty Oglethorpe negotiated on friendly terms, and they granted lands that they didn’t use for hunting and living.

The settlers were given to mistrust and fear, but an initial impulse for openness and mutual respect among leaders of both groups laid a good foundation. At least among leaders like the Wampanaug sachem Ousamaquin, the Creek leader Tomochichi, the “Pilgrims” Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins, and the last English knight errant James Edward Oglethorpe. (See Michael L. Thurmond’s “James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist.”)