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CHAPTER 15 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 spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be 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 *** of the frozen earth he would
be safe, or if he 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 *** 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 ground 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, asserting 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.