WINTER ANIMALS |
WHEN THE ponds were firmly frozen, they
afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new
views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When
I crossed Flint's Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had
often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide
and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The
Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in
which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at
an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with
their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty
weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether
they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to
lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing
no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond,
which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their
cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I
crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with
only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could
walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level
elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There,
far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from
the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast
moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent
down with snow or bristling with icicles.
For sounds in winter
nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious
note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen
earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua
vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I
never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in
a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo,
sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat
like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo only. One night in the
beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock,
I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the
door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as
they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair
Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore
honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable
cat owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I
ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular
intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this
intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume
of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do
you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to
me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I
have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo,
boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever
heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the
elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard.
I
also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow
in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would
fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams; or I
was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one
had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a
crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch
wide.
Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the
snow-crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other
game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if
laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for
light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if
we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization
going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be
rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting
their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted
by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then
retreated.
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked
me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of
the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the
course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn,
which had not got ripe, on to the snow-crust by my door, and was
amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were
baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came
regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came
and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One
would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over
the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now
a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy,
making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it
were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting
on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a
ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in
the universe were eyed on him- for all the motions of a squirrel,
even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as
much as those of a dancing girl- wasting more time in delay and
circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance- I
never saw one walk- and then suddenly, before you could say Jack
Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up
his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and
talking to all the universe at the same time- for no reason that I
could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length
he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in
the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my
wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and
there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to
time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs
about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his
food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was
held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless
grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a
ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had
life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one,
or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in
the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a
forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,
considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he
would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by
the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it
as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its
fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being
determined to put it through at any rate;- a singularly frivolous and
whimsical fellow;- and so he would get off with it to where he lived,
perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods
distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods
in various directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose
discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making
their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and
sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and
pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting
on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a
kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after
great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to
crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly
thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the squirrels,
though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was
their own.
Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks,
which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the
nearest twig and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at
them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark,
till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A
little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my
woodpile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping
notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with
sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in springlike days, a wiry
summery phebe from the woodside. They were so familiar that at length
one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked
at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my
shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I
felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should
have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew
at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe,
when that was the nearest way.
When the ground was not yet
quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was
melted on my south hillside and about my wood-pile, the partridges
came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever
side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring
wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which
comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave
bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by
drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into
the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." I
used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of
the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They
will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the
cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards
next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge
gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds
and diet-drink.
In dark winter mornings, or in short winter
afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the
woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of
the chase, and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals, proving
that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts
forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing
their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning
with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking
their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of
the frozen earth he would be safe, or if be would run in a straight
line away no foxhound could overtake him; but, having left his
pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up,
and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the
hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many
rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that
water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a
fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered
with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the
same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the
scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and
circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if
afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them
from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent
trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for
this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after
his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by
himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for
every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by
asking, "What do you do here?" He had lost a dog, but found
a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come
to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at
such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his
gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he
walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and
ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought
leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not
touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in
full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in
the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick
woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over
toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their
hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and
nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long
time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a
hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn
aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a
sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the round,
leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the
woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a
moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a
short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his
piece was levelled, and whang!- the fox, rolling over the rock, lay
dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to
the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded
through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old
hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air
as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but, spying the dead
fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if struck dumb with
amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one
her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence
by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their
midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he
skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length
turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston squire came to
the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how
for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston
woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the
skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his
hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the
river and put up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been
well fed, they took their departure early in the morning.
The
hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used to
hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in
Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there.
Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne- he pronounced it
Bugine- which my informant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book"
of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk,
and representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3,
"John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0-2-3"; they are not now
found here; and in his ledger, Feb, 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has
credit "by 1/2 a Catt skin 0-1-4 1/2"; of course, a
wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and
would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is
given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. One man still
preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this
vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in
which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and
merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up
a leaf by the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more
melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-horn.
At
midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my
path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if
afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had
passed.
Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts.
There were scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four
inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous
winter- a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep,
and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with
their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing
at midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely
girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead.
It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole
pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it;
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are
wont to grow up densely.
The hares (Lepus Americanus) were
very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated
from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her
hasty departure when I began to stir- thump, thump, thump, striking
her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come
round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown
out, and were so nearly the color of the round that they could hardly
be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately
lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window.
When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak
and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening one
sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet
unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears
and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature
no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last
toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical.
I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the
snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful
length, and soon put the forest between me and itself- the wild free
venison, assenting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not without
reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. (Lepus,
levipes, light-foot, some think.)
What is a country without
rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous
animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as
to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest
allied to leaves and to the ground- and to one another; it is either
winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild
creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural
one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the
rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil,
whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and
bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more
numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not
support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp
may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences
and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends.
THE
POND IN WINTER
Return
to North Glen or Reading
List
visitors since Jan 8th 1999