Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

In the deep woods, too, you hear the cry of the snow, not the song of the trees in the joy of its coming, but the voices of the flakes themselves, their little shrill cries as they touch leaf or twig. To the pines that held up soft arms of welcome and clasp them close and will not let them go away though each bough is weighted down, they whisper a soft little cooing word that is surely “love” in any language. No wonder it is warm under pine boughs in a snow-storm. The great trees glow with the happiness of it and the radiance of their delight filters down to you as you stand beneath. The flakes seem to love the bare, smooth twigs of the hard-wood maples less, they give them just a pat and a gentle word of greeting as they go by, and they touch the birches almost flippantly. Among the fine pointed tridents of the pasture cedars, however, they linger somewhat as they do among the pines, though their song here is of jovial friendship only, with even something waggish about it. They linger in groups among the cedar boughs for awhile, but often start up in gentle glee and shake themselves clear, leaving the tree in a sort of blank dismay until more of their fellows come to take their places. There is a little swish of fairy laughter as they do this, as of the snickering of fat bogles as they play pranks in the white wilderness.

But it is over on the oak hillside where the red and black oaks still hold resolutely to their dried leaves that the cry of the snow will most astonish you. It is not at all the rustle of these oak leaves in a wind. It is an outcry, an uproar, that drowns any other sound that might be in the wood. It is impossible to distinguish voices or words. It is as if ten thousand of the little people of the wood and field and sky had suddenly come together in great excitement over something and were shouting all up and down the gamut of goblin emotion. After I have stood and listened to it for a minute or two I begin to look at one shoulder and then the other fully expecting to see gabbling goblins grouped there, yelling to one another in my very ears. Here with closed eyes you may easily tell the quality of the snow about you by the sound. Each sort of flake has its distinct tone which is easily recognized through all the uproar. At nightfall of this first snow of ours it happened that in the meeting of northerly and southerly currents which had brought the storm, the north wind lulled and the south began to have its way again. This gave us at first a great downfall of big flakes that seemed to blot out all the world in an atmosphere of fluff. Then, evidently, the warmth in the upper atmosphere increased for the big flakes gave way to a fine fall of rounded sleet. Then, indeed, we got outcry the most astonishing in the oak wood. The voices shrilled and fined and all crepitation was lost in a vast chorus of a million peeping frogs. Nothing else ever sounded like it. It was as if a goblin springtime had burst upon us in the white gloom of the oak wood and all the hylas in the world were piping their shrillest from the boughs.

I went home. I think it was time. People used to get among goblins at dusk in this way in the old country and when they got back from goblin land they found that they had been gone three years, and I didn’t care to stay away so long.

During the night the sleet changed to rain which froze as it fell, and in the morning the snow everywhere was but an inch or two deep and covered with an icy crust that broke underfoot with a great noise and effectually scared away any woodland thing that you approached, provided it had powers of locomotion. Fox or crow, partridge or rabbit, must have thought that Gulliver was once more walking in among the Lilliputians with his very biggest boots on. Never were such thunderous footsteps heard in my wood, at least not since the last icy crust. Frozen in the icy surface were the trails that had been made when the snow was soft, the squirrel’s long, plunging leaps with his hind feet dropping into the hole his front feet had made, giving something you might mistake for deer tracks, except that they went back up the tree. You saw where the crow had dropped to earth and trailed his aristocratically long hind toe, with its incurving claw. The crow’s foot is fine for grasping a limb, but it does not fit the ground well. On the other hand, the trail of the ruffed grouse which may lie beside it shows an ideal footprint for walking woodland paths, the hind toe stubby nailed, short but firm, and the whole print well planted and fitting the earth.

These and many more I found modeled in ice, but the trails that interested me most were those beneath the crust, the long tunnels that wound here and there, intersected and doubled and made portions of the fields and forests for all the world like the blue veining of a white skin. These were the trails of the shaggy-coated, crop-eared, short-legged, shorttailed meadow mouse. This firm crust had opened to him the opportunity of safety in paths that had been before dangerous in the extreme. He knew where chestnuts had lain open to the sky for months, but he dared not go into the open path to get them. Fox, cat, skunk, weasel, hawk, owl, crow, all watched the paths and the edges of the thick grass for him. He must burrow or die. So he does burrow all the year through, just beneath the surface, in dirt if he must, under light leaves and brush and matted grasses by preference, for there he may go the more easily and quickly to his food. His eyesight and hearing are good, and he moves like a little brown flash when he has to go into the open.

If I wish to see him I watch well-worn footpaths through matted grass and leaves. Here his tunnels end on one side of the path and begin on the other and he takes the chance of crossing this risky opening to sun and sky as often as he feels he must, but he wrecks the speed limit every time he does it. So quickly does he go that you cannot be sure what has happened; there was the stirring of a leaf on one side and a grass stem on the other and a sudden vanishing touch of brown between the two, but which way it went or whether it went at all is doubtful. So, too, his tunnels come down and open at the water’s edge by the meadow brook and if you are patient and have rare luck you may see him swim across. Here trout and mink are on the watch for him. His numbers need to be great if, with all his caution and agility, he is going to survive all these huntsmen, and they are great. He may breed at two months of age and have many litters a season and his progeny, if unchecked, soon swarm. All the meadows are full of them this year, but it is only when such a snow as we now have comes that we have a chance to see what they may do.

In the summer-time they stick close to their meadows, living on succulent roots and stems. They are especially fond of tuberous roots of the wild morning-glory, which they store by the pound in their grass larders near their nests. But under the welcome cover of the snow they push their excursions far afield and their netted-veined trails come even to your house itself, though they rarely dispute the wainscoting with the house mouse. Now and then they do, however, and I fancy they have no trouble in holding their own against their slighter and more aristocratic cousins. When they do come you will know their presence by the extraordinary noise of their gnawing. Once a stone crusher, no less by the sound, got into my garret, and after one sleepless night I set the biggest trap I had, expecting to get the most enormous brown rat that ever happened, if not some new and more elephantine rodent. What I caught was a well-grown field mouse, and the noise passed with him.

The rain which produced this thunderous and telltale snow crust brought a new and gorgeous growth to the trees. From trunk to topmost twig, each was garmented in regal splendor of crystal ice. I had been in goblin land when I fled, at twilight, from the eerie shrilling of bogle hylas among the oak trees. I had come back into fairyland with the rising sun. The demure shrubs, gray Cinderellas of the ashes of the year, had been touched by the magic wand and were robed in more gems than might glow in the wildest dreams of the most fortunate princess of Arabian tale. Ropes of pearl and festoons of diamonds weighed the more slender almost to earth. The soft white shoulders of the birches drooped low in bewildering curtsey, and to the fiddling of a little morning wind the ball began with a tinkling of gem on gem, a stabbing of scintillant azure, so that I was fain to shut my eyes with the splendor of it.

Then came the prince himself to dance with them, the morning sun, flashing his gold emblazonry through their gems till the corruscation drowned the sight in an outpouring of fire. The princesses all began to speak as he came among them, a speech wherein dropped from their lips all jewels and precious stones. Sunbursts of diamonds fell from dainty young pines and ropes of pearls slid from the coral lips of slender birches. The babble fell all about their feet in such ecstasies of brilliant speech, such tinkling of fairy laughter as the wood had never yet seen. Brave revels have the little people of the forest under the moon of midsummer night, no doubt, but never could they show such royal, dainty splendor as their own trees did this midwinter day when the sun shone in upon them after the ice storm.

THE MINK’S HUNTING GROUND

I wish I could have seen the country about the great spring which goes by the name, locally, of “Fountain Head” the year that the clock stopped for the glaciers hereabout. That year when the last bit of the ice cap, that for ages had slid down across southeastern Massachusetts and built up its inextricable confusion of sand and gravel moraines, melted away, would have shown a thousand great springs like it, bubbling up all through the region, almost invariably from the northerly base of gravelly cliffs over which the sun can hardly peep at noonday, so steep they are. Here they flow to-day in the same mystery. Why should these unfailing springs rush forth so steadily, be the weather hot or cold, or the drought never so long or so severe? Why should their temperature like their flow be changeless, summer or winter?

I sometimes believe that their waters filter through deep caverns from far Arctic glaciers continually renewed. Perhaps to have looked at them before the changing seasons of more thousands of years had clothed the gravel and sand with humus, grown the forests all about and choked the fountains themselves with acres of the muck of decayed vegetation no one knows how deep, would have been to see them with clearer eyes and have been led to an answer to the questions. Now I know them only as bits of the land where time seems to have stood still, fastnesses where dwell the lotus eaters of our New England woods, where winter’s cold howls over their heads, but does not descend, and where summer’s heat rims them round, but hardly dares dabble its toes in their cool retreat.

Progress has built its houses on the hills about them, freight trains two miles away roar so mightily that the quaggy depths tremble with the vibrations, and you may sit with the arethusas in mossy muck and hear the honk of the automobile mingling with that of the wild geese as they both go by in spring. Yet the one makes as much impression on the land and its inhabitants as the other. The lotus eaters know not Ulysses; if he wants them for his ships of progress he must capture them by force and tie them beneath the rowers’ benches, else they return. Even the temperature of those last days of the ice cap seems to have got tangled in the spell and to dwell with the mild-eyed melancholy of the place the year round. In midsummer the thermometer may stand at 120 in the quivering nooks where the sun beats down upon the sandy plains above; the waters of the fountain head are ice cold still, and give their temperature to the brook and its borders. In midwinter the mercury may register twenty below, and the gales from the very boreal pole freeze the pines on those same sandy plains till their deep hearts burst; the waters that flow from those mysterious fountains will have no skim of ice on their surface.

From what unfathomed depths the waters draw their constancy we may never know, nor on what day may well forth with them some new form of life bred on the potency of their elixir. To-day is freezing cold and now and then snow-squalls whirl in among the swamp maples, eddying in flocks as the goldfinches do, yet the surface of the biggest pool where the waters well up is covered with the vivid green of new plant life. Millions of tiny boreal creatures swim free on the cool surface, plants reduced to their simplest terms, born for aught I know in depths below like those

“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea,”

whence they ooze in the seeping of the upward current to our shores. No one has here found the seeds of these stemless pinheads of green that lie flat on the surface and send down for a wee fraction of an inch their two or three tiny root hairs into the water.

No one can say they are apetalous or monosepalous or sporangiferous or call them other hard names in Latin having reference to their flowering or fruiting for we may not say that they flower or fruit at all. These minutest Lemnas give us no sign of stamin or spore, of carpel or indusium, yet they multiply by millions and cover the surface of the spring pools whence they depart constantly with the outflowing current, voyaging gayly down Brobdingnagian rapids to the sea. The time of year when it is winter in the sky above and on the bank a few feet up the hillside, when all green life except that which grows with its roots in this magic water from the deep caves of earth is either killed or suspended, seems to be their time for growth.

They grow a little, to a certain stage when perhaps a plant covers surface to the size of a pinhead and a half, then split and become independent plants with a tiny root hair apiece. Brave equipment this for facing the January gales and frost of a northern winter. Yet they sail forth from the home pool as confidently as liners from the home port and rollick all along down the stream, making harbor in every tiny bay and collecting a fleet in each eddy. What potency of perpetual spring they sow as they traverse all the ways that wind in and about the levels below the fountain head we do not know, any more than we know what elixir vitæ dwells in the waters on which they are borne, yet something makes the region the lotus land of creatures of the wild where they linger on unmindful of their vanished kindred.

Out of the rich vegetable mould of ages, in the cool, moist shadows grow the rarer New England orchids in the summer, and the rarer migrant birds of our summer woods find asylum here for their nests and young. In the winter the ruffed grouse comes here to drink, finds gravel for his crop always bare and unfrozen on the hillside where the first seepings of water come forth, and no doubt gets an agreeable change of food in the succulent green things of the shallows. Several of these birds cling to the place, nor can I drive them away by simply flushing them. They circle and come back to the brook margin or its immediate neighborhood every time.

Where the swamp maples have grown large on the bank and lifted the soil with their roots high enough to form miniature dry islands the mink have built their burrows and thence they go forth to hunt the region all about, but especially

the brook and its tributaries, most ravenously. If you are patient, fortunate, and the wind is right you may at dusk get a glimpse of the weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze for game and enemies. In that light his fur will look black though it is really a pretty shade of brown, but you will not fail to see the white streak which runs from his chin downward. But, though you may not see the animal himself you cannot, if there is snow on the ground, fail to see his slender, aristocratic track with its clutching claws, for the mink is a desperate hunter and always hungry. All is fish that comes to his net,--trout, turtles, toads, snails, bugs, or anything he can find in the brook that seems in the least edible.

The semi-aquatic life of the enchanted region is sadly destructive of other life, and I feel little pity for the mink or the weasel, sleek and beautiful wild creatures though they are, if they in turn fall into the steel jaws which the trapper sets for them in the narrow passes all up and down the stream. It is the common lot of the woods and only the swiftest and most crafty can hope to escape it. The mink devour the trout, and they, seemingly innocent and beautiful enough to have come up, water sprites, from that unknown underground world whence well the crystal waters in which they live, are as greedy and irresponsible in their diet as the mink themselves. Like them, when hungry they will devour the young of their own species and smack their lips over the feast.

The trout will eat anything that looks to be alive either in the water or on the surface. I often amuse myself in summer by biting small chunks out of an apple and dropping them in, to see the trout swallow them as ravenously as if they had suddenly become vegetarians and had all the zeal of new converts. What the Jamaica ginger preparation of the brook world is I don’t know, unless it is watercress. That grows, green and peppery, all up and down the brook the year through. Perhaps the trout go from my green apple luncheon over to that and thus join the remedy to the disease.

One of the trout titbits is the gentle little caddice worm, grub of the little miller-like caddice fly that flits in at the open window of a May night and lights on the table under the glare of your lamp. He dwells on the bottom in these same pure waters and he has much to do to defend himself against the jaws of his nimble hunter. He is but a worm that crawls, so speed may not save him. His skin is tender and he has no weapon of defense save his brain which one would hardly think adequate in so humble a creature. Yet if you will sit on the brink and watch what goes on in the cool depths you will see how cleverly and in what a variety of ways he and his kindred, for there are several varieties, have become skilled in self-defense. The little fellow has, like most grubs, the power to spin fine silk. This would count for little though he spun a whole cocoon, for the trout would swallow him, silken overcoat and all. But he does better than that. He collects bits of log from the bottom and winds these in his silken warp till he has knotted himself firmly within a log house. There is no incentive to a trout to eat twigs from the bottom, so the defenseless caddice worm is passed unnoticed. He is snugly rolled in silk within his rough house and moves about by cautiously putting out a leg or two and crawling with the logs on his back. Another variety uses small pebbles instead of logs. Taking a stone from bottom in the swift running water of a tiny rapid to-day I found it covered with little gravel barnacles that clung like limpets to the proverbial rock.

I could pry them off only by the use of considerable force and even when I did this the wee bits of gravel, carefully fitted together in a hemisphere, still remained, bound in strong bands. Within the hollow was the little creature that had built the structure, his silken netting still holding him snug within his rock castle, so much brain has this seemingly blind and helpless worm for the preservation of himself. But more than this, the builder and riveter of this adamantine castle has other use for his silken bands than to bind stone or to weave himself a silken garment against the damp weather at the brook bottom. He is a fisherman as well, and stretched between two stones near by or perhaps hanging over the edge of the larger stone on which he dwells is his net, built funnel-form with the larger end toward the oncoming current, the smaller closed with silken netting, all carefully spread to catch tiny creatures slipping down stream with the current, on which the net-builder, castle-dweller, may feed. These homely, home-building, home-keeping fishermen lead an humble and pious life compared with that of the rakish, cannibalistic trout, and they have their reward. Some day, before the spring is very old, they will give up casting their nets, build their house firmer, though still leaving a chance for a circulation of water, and fall asleep. They will awaken to glide heavenward out of the swirl of the current, veritable white angels with downy wings which they will spread and on which they will soar away to a new world which is as different from that in which they bound themselves in logs or granite to escape their enemies as is the old-time orthodox heaven from the world in which the preachers of it lived.

IN THE WHITE WOODS

The snow came out of the north at a temperature of only twenty degrees above zero, yet, strange to say, for some hours it came damp and froze immediately on every tree-trunk or twig that it struck. The temperature remained the same all day and through the night, but the streak of soft weather somewhere up above which was responsible for the damp snow soon passed away and frozen crystals sifted down that had in them no suspicion of moisture. Yet these tangled tips with those already frozen firmly to the trees, and made a wonderful snow growth the whole woodland through. The next morning it hung there untouched in the crystal stillness and as the woodland people waked they might well have rubbed their eyes, for they had found a new world.

It was a mystical white world that had crowded in and mocked the slender growth of all trees and shrubs with swollen facsimiles in white. The northerly side of tree-trunks, large or small, showed no longer gray bark or brown, rough or smooth. Instead, fluffy white boles rose from the white ground and divided into white limbs, which separated again into mighty twigs of white. The dark outlines of bare trees, the delicate tracery of gray and black that massed day before yesterday in the exquisite dark shades of the winter woods, existed only as a faint definition of the world of whiteness which had descended upon us in a night.

Upon each shrub and tree had grown another, its fellow in exact reproduction of line and curve, only swollen to forty times the size. This enormity of limb and twig shut off all vistas. Where it had been easy to see through the bare wood, the brush merely latticing your view and softening up the middle distance with gray or pink or brown, according to the growth, now the gaze was tangled in a narrow grotto heavily decorated with buttress and baluster, with fluting, frieze, and fillet, with mantel, moulding, mullion, and machicolation, and beat in vain against a solid wall of alabaster just beyond. The greater pines were pointed cones of white, each limb drooping with the weight of snow to its fellow below, and the hangings of the outer tips joining to form a surface wherein miniature domes, set strangely askew, yet massed in curves of superb beauty to the making of the symmetrical whole.

In it all there was no feeling of weight. As a matter of fact it pressed the smaller shrubs and trees well down toward earth. The narrow woodland path was barred with a woven portcullis of white that had swung down from either side. Here and there in the open the smaller pasture cedars were bowed to the ground, doing reverence to the garment of mystic purity with which the earth was sanctified as if for the passing of the grail. In a moment you expected to see some Galahad rise from his knees with shining face, take horse beneath the marble towers of this woodland Camelot, and ride down white lanes in holy quest. In the deep wood the seedling pines broke through the drifts like gnomes from mines of alabaster, whimsical green faces showing beneath grotesque caps and shoulder capes that were part of the whelming snow. Yet it all looked as light and airy as any structure of the imagination, seeming as if it might rise and float away with a change of mood, some substance of which air castles are built, some great white dream poised to drift lightly into the realm of the remembered, as white dreams do.

In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable.

Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.

A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.

I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore--which right or wrong we must perforce believe--informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one

does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic _pas seul_, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.

On the white page of the path that lay open under groined arches of alabaster no foot had written a record for many rods, then it seemed as if from side to side stretched a highway. Back and forth in straight lines had gone a creature that made a lovely decorative pattern of a trail, a straight line firmly drawn as if with a stylus, on either side at a distance say of three-fourths of an inch tiny footmarks just opposite each other, while alternating with these and nearer the middle line were fainter and finer footprints.

Here the tiny deer-mouse had drawn his long tail through the snow, whisking from stump to stump in a quiver of excitement lest an enemy gobble him up, shooting across like a gray shuttle weaving this exquisite pattern that is like that of a dainty embroidery on a lady’s collar. How he can gallop so regularly and make his tail mark so straight is more than I can tell. Indeed, so sly he is and so swiftly does he go that I have never seen him make it. Beside this tiny pattern the marks where the gray squirrel has leaped across are like those of an hippopotamus on a rampage and the print of my own snowshoe was as if there had been a catastrophe and a section of the sky had fallen.

Along with the tiny mouse tracks were those of our least squirrel, the chipmunk. There is no difficulty about seeing him. He will almost come if you whistle for him. If you will camp near his burrow you may teach him to come and eat nuts out of your hand, answering any prearranged signal, such as whacking them together or chirping to him.

Even though you are a total stranger he will not hesitate to whisk out of his hole under the brush heap right in your face and eyes, whisking back again in great terror, no doubt, but immediately putting out his whiskered nose to sniff and wrinkle it in comical confusion, half friendly, half frightened. So I had but to wait a moment before little _Tamias striatus_ was out from under the brush pile and had flipped over to a fallen log, ploughing the soft snow off the end of it in a comically frantic rush to his hole there, the entrance being snowed up. He was in and out again in a jiffy, standing on his hind legs and peering over the log and making noses at me, jumping to the

top and whirling and jumping down again, and then flashing out and kicking up crystals in a rush across the road to another hole under another brush pile, his scantily furred half tail erect and as humorously vivacious as everything else about him. The chipmunk when he thinks he is going to be captured and is filled with great fear--half of it being, I believe, fear that he wont be--is the most delightfully comical little chap that grows in the woods. If he’d only keep as wild as that after he is tamed I’d like one for a pet.

Down in the open meadow where the unfrozen brook ran black in its banks of snow, touched only here and there with the green of luxuriant watercress, I found the trail of the crows. Not one was in sight and there was no sound from them anywhere. It was as if the snow had covered them under and they were unable to break through it. Here, however, was evidence to the contrary. Surely they had breakfasted, and no doubt well. They had marched all up and down the low banks, and where a snowy island lay in midstream they had promenaded it from one end to the other. Here and there I could see where they had stepped into shallow water and waded. The marks of muddy claws in the white snow were much in evidence where they had jumped out again. Just as summer bathers “tread for quahaugs” in the summer shallows south of the cape, I could fancy them feeling with their toes for shell-fish and prodding for them with long bill when found. But they had had a salad, too, with breakfast. I could see where they had pulled out the watercress all along and cropped it down to the larger stems. Even in winter weather when the snow lies deep the crow knows where to find what is good for him.

Where the path wound round the brow of the hill and the birches stand, their granaries still full of manna for the wandering bird, it seemed again as if my plunge into the white thicket had baptized me with invisibility. Of a sudden the air was full of the sound of wings and a flock of tree sparrows that must have numbered hundreds swung about my head and charged the snow-covered birches. Their dash shook some snow off and a few lighted, the others swinging off and having at them again. This time all found a footing and began to feed eagerly on the seeds from the tiny cones, scattering the birdlike scales in flocks far greater than their own.

I had stopped stock-still at the sound of their wings, and they took no more notice of me than if I had been a snowed-up fence post or a pasture cedar. I tried to count them, but it was not easy. They seemed to twinkle from twig to twig like wavelets in the sun, and though their garb is sober their movements dazzle. Just as I would get a group on a single tree nicely tallied they flashed as one bird over to another tree, and mingling with their fellows there spoiled the count. I finally estimated, rather roughly, that there were three hundred of them, a half of a light brigade of as merry fellows as I wish to meet. They twittered jovially and musically among themselves, and now and then one essayed a little _sotto voce_ song which he never could finish because immediately his mouth was full.

Once or twice some inaudible order seemed to thrill through the flock and they whirled upward as if a single muscle moved every wing, swung a short ellipse and lighted again, often in the same trees. As they worked into the birches almost over my very head I could see every marking on them; the black mandibles, the lower yellowish at the base, the reddish brown crown and the back streaked with the same color, with black, and a yellowish buff, the wing coverts tipped with white and the grayish white breast with what looks like an indistinct dark spot in the center. In a kaleidoscopic flock of three hundred or more it is not easy to give every bird even a passing glance, but I am quite sure there were other than tree sparrows present. I seemed to see birds without the faint dark spot in the breast. A few, I know, had a distinctly rufous tint there, and I fancy swamp sparrows, a few of which winter hereabouts, and perhaps other birds for sociability’s sake, were with my winter chippies.

The shaking of the snow from the trees and their gleaning among the birch cones had scattered the little seeds which they love so well all about on the snow and soon they followed them. The surface a little before had been white. Before the birds were ready to come down it was spiced so liberally with the seeds and scales that they had shaken down that it was the color of cinnamon. Then with one motion the flock dropped like autumn leaves and began a most systematic seed hunt in which they left no bit of the space unsought. Yet when they were gone you would hardly find two tracks that crossed; they hopped in winding parallels that never went over the same ground a second time, leaving figures much like the mazes which schoolboys of long ago used to draw on their slates. They came almost to my feet and I was beginning to feel that my fancy of invisibility was very real after all when with a twitter of alarm and a single united action they whirred into the air and vanished over the treetops.

I turned away in chagrin. The magic was destroyed, evidently, and in turning I saw the cause. Just behind me in the snow with quivering tail and green eyes glaring accusingly was the family cat. He was hunting far from home, but I saw contemptuous recognition in his eyes and I knew he was thinking that here was that great, clumsy creature that was always scaring away his game.

THE ROAD TO MUDDY POND

Two days of greedy south wind had licked up the crisp snow till all the fields and southerly slopes were bare. Then came the lull before the north wind should come back, a lull in which you had but to sniff the air to smell the coming spring; its faint perfume crisped with a frosty odor that lured the senses like a flavor of stephanotis frappé. It was a day that tempts a man to take staff and scrip and climb the hills due south to meet the romance the two days’ wind has brought from far down the map, perhaps from Venezuela and the highlands that border the banks of Orinoco. By noon the north wind will be driving it back again, though bits of it will still be tangled in southerly facing corners of the hills.

Such a day is fine for cedar swamps. The boggy morasses under foot will be firm with the winter’s ice still, but the warm wind has swept all things clear of snow. Into the most tangled depths you may penetrate with at least firm footing. Where in summer the treacherous mosses wait to let you through into black depths of soft muck that have no bottom, you may walk in safety on the way that the winter has laid for you.

It is not a time of year to find new things, this season of mid-February, and yet I had hardly faced the bewildering sun a mile before, seeking the cool depths of a hemlock-clad northern hillside to rest my eyes from the glare, I found a yellow birch all hung with fluffy tassels, as if the wine aroma of the air had fooled it into foliage. Now the yellow birch is not exactly rare in our woods, here south-west of Boston, but it is rare enough to be called occasional. Where the _Betula alba_ is as common, almost, as the grass under foot, the _Betula lutea_ may not occur once in a square mile. I know it only on cold northern hillsides or in dense swamps where cool springs bathe its roots all summer long. There the silvery yellow, silky shreds of its outer bark mark its trunk as a thing of beauty, winter or summer. You feel like stroking these curls as if they were those of a flaxen-haired youngster lost in the deep woods and brave but a bit troubled and in need of comfort from one who knows. That is the only impression the yellow birch had ever made on me in all my greetings of it, yet here it was wearing a semblance of young leaves in this wine-sweet February air.

Even after the cool depths of the woods had cured my eyes of the sun glare the illusion remained and I had to climb the tree and pluck some of this foliage before I was sure what it could be. Surely eyes and no eyes have we all, for, in all my life, I had never noticed what happens in winter to the catkins of the yellow birch. Instead of hanging rigid like wee cones, as do those of the white birch, giving up seeds and scales to sprinkle the snow or the bare earth as the creatures of the woods have need of them, these had shed their _fleur-de-lis_ scales and then held them fluttering in the wind, each by a tiny thread. On looking at them closely I saw the slim, rat-tail spindle sticking out, its surface file-like with the sockets of seed and scale, but the effect of the whole was that of fluffy tan-colored tassels hung along the twigs. Here and there among these _fleur-de-lis_ the round, flat, wing-margined seeds were still tangled by the two pistils which still remained, seeming like tiny black roots, or something like those hooks by which the tick-seed fastens to you for a free ride.

Surely the wilderness families have strongly marked individuality. Both the white and yellow birches must hold their seeds and scatter them little by little the whole season through, that they may have the better chance to germinate and continue the race, and I can never see why they should not do it in the same way. But they do not. Perhaps this infinite variability is arranged wisely so that people who blunder about with half seeing eyes may now and then have them opened a little wider and so be pleased and teased into blundering on. Another season I shall watch the yellow birches and find, if I can, on what winter date their catkins blossom into tassels.

The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;

“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw
Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink
To westward--in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an eagle owl
Under the half-dead sunset glared;--”

That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the _Nesæa verticillata_, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags--decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.

Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the _Nesæa verticillata_ were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter--and all he heard was frogs.

Looking down upon it this brilliant February day, with a tiny cloud drawn across the sun, it was a pearl. The winter and the distance made the bog edging pure gold in which it shone with all the white radiance of its opaque, foot-thick ice. Anon the sun came out and what had been a pearl gathered subtle fires of blue and red in its crystalline heart and flashed opaline tints back at me that changed again as I plunged down the hill toward it, and it lay a Norwegian sunstone shooting forth fire-yellow glows as the rays of the sun caught the right angle. Nor was the ice less beautiful when I stood on it. Here opaqueness wove sprightly patterns with crystalline purity. The surface was smooth under foot and yet these patterns rose and fell in the ice itself, and it was hard to believe they were not carved intaglio and then the surface iced over to a level. It was no prettier ice than I had crossed on the big pond, but its setting brought out the beauty.

Ice grown old, after all, is far more beautiful than young ice. Character is built into it. Living has taught it the highest form of art, which is to repeat beauty without sameness. What designs might the makers of floor coverings win from this surface if they would but study it, and how trite and tame in comparison seem their tiresome interweaving of square and circle and their endless repetition!

This solid floor, woven by winter witchery, goes on through the spongy surface of the bog, mingling with it, yet by some necromancy never interfering with its own intricate patterns of growth. The sphagnum fluffs up through it with its delicate fiber unharmed. The pitcher plants sit jauntily holding their ewers to the sky, filled with ice instead of water, to be sure, but uncracked and waiting in rows as if for bogle bellboys to rush with them to unseen guests. I found one flower-scape with its nodding head still persistent. The seed pod had cracked along the sides, but the umbrella-like style was still there, opened and inverted, and it had caught many of the seeds that the pod had spilled and was holding them for a more favorable season, without doubt.

Everywhere the solemn cassandra pushed its black twigs up through the moss and held its leathery leaves, brown and discouraged, drooping yet persistent. The cassandra always reminds me of thin, elderly New England spinsters who enjoy poor health. It is so homely and solemn; even in joyous June it never cracks a smile, but is just as lugubrious and sallow and barely holds on to an unprofitable life. And all about, indeed in many places crowding the very life out of it, grow these brave, virid, white cedars. You’d think it might catch geniality from them. Their footing is as precarious as its own. Of course, now, the ice has set all things in its firm grip, but in summer there is little enough to hold up the swamp cedars and it is only by entwining their roots and growing them firmly together in a mat that they are able to keep their sprightly uprightness. So closely are the young trees set on the edge of their grove that it is difficult to penetrate their intertwining branches, and even when you have passed this barrier you find the trunks so close that often there is no room to go between them. Here all branches have passed and the straight trunks run upward in close parallels making all their struggle at the top. And a struggle it has been indeed for all that are now alive. You may note this by the bare poles of those that have lagged behind a little in the fight and lost the magic touch of sunlight on their tops. These are dead and bare, and their companions have so immediately taken up their slender space that you wonder how the dead ones ever got so far as they did. It is a very solemn temple under these cedars. The living wall the dead within the catacombs and the sighing of the motionless leaves above your head still leaves you in doubt. It may be trees that sorrow for dead neighbors or gasp in the struggle to retain their own breathing space.