Part 14

Not far beyond this point we found ourselves in a gray-birch swamp. Here, if anywhere, should be the nests we were in search of. And soon we began to see them, one here, another there. We followed the same course with them all; my companion shook or jarred the tree, while I stood off and watched for the squirrels. And the result was alike in all cases. Every nest was empty. We tried at least a score, and had our labor for our pains. “There are no flying squirrels this year,” my companion kept saying. Perhaps they had migrated. With one or two exceptions, indeed, the nests could be set down in advance--from their color and evident dilapidation--as being at least a year old.

Once we started a rabbit, and here and there a few chickadees accosted us. Once, I think, we heard the voice of a golden-crowned kinglet. For the rest, the woods seemed to be deserted, and at the end of our long détour we came back to the road half a mile above the point at which we had left it.

And still the world is not depopulated, even in winter, nor are all the pretty wild animals asleep. The snakes are, to be sure, and the frogs (though hylas were peeping late in December), and the chipmunks and the woodchucks; but there is abundant life stirring, nevertheless.

Yesterday I called on my friend again, and together we walked up the road--a back-country thoroughfare. This time, also, a light snow had just fallen, and my companion, better informed than I in such matters, began to discuss footprints with me.

“You know this one?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; a rabbit.”

“And this one?”

“A fox,” said I, doubtfully.

“Yes, indeed. See the shape and size of the foot. Yes, that’s a fox.”

“And this one?”

“Oh, that’s a kitty.” (A cat, he meant to say.) “Strange how many cats are prowling about this country at night,” he continued. “I have caught two this season, and C---- has caught two.”

“Do you skin them?”

“Yes,” with a laugh.

Here were red-squirrel tracks, and here a big dog’s, and here again a fox’s. At another point a bevy of quail had crossed the road. “One, two, three,” my farmer began to count. “Yes; there were twelve.” I had remarked, just before, that I hadn’t seen a quail for I didn’t know how long. “And look here,” he said, as we approached the farm on our return. He led the way to a diminutive chicken-coop sitting by itself in the orchard. A single hen, which had been ailing, was confined in it, he said. A fox had gone round and round it in the night, and once had stopped to scratch at the back side of it.

“He knew what was in there,” said I. The farmer laughed.

“Oh, he is an old fellow,” he answered. “I have a trap set for him just where he used to pass. Now he crosses the field, but he goes round that spot! I see his tracks. They say it is easy to trap foxes. Perhaps it is; but it isn’t for me.”

Yet he has shown me--not this year--more than one handsome skin.

Once, too, he showed me the fox himself. Hounds were baying in the distance as I came to the house on my Sunday morning walk, and we spoke of their probable course. He thought it likely that they would cross a certain field, and taking a by-road that would carry us within sight of it, we kept our eyes out till the dogs seemed to have diverged in the wrong direction. Then I was walking carelessly along, talking as usual (a bad habit of mine), when my companion seized me by both shoulders and swung me sharply about. “Look at that!” he said. And there stood the fox, five or ten rods away, facing us squarely. He had come up a little rise of ground, and had stopped as he saw us. But for my friend’s muscular assistance, I should have missed him, near as he was, for in one second he was gone; and though we scaled the wall instantly and ran up the slope, we got no further sight of him.

Yes, if you are a discouraged, winter-killed nature lover, who has begun to think that Massachusetts woods--woods within sight of the State House dome--are pretty much devoid of wild life, go out after a light snowfall and read the natural history record of a single night. We shall not be without woods, nor will the woods be without inhabitants, for a good while yet.

WINTER AS IT WAS

With the wind howling from the northwest, and the mercury crouching below the zero mark, it seems a good time to sit in the house and think of winter as it used to be. What is the advantage of growing old, if one cannot find an hour now and then for the pleasures of memory?

The year’s end is for the young. Such is the order of the world, the universal paradox. Opposite seeks opposite. And we were young once,--a good while ago,--and for us, also, winter was a bright and busy season, its days all too short and too few. I speak of “week-days,” be it understood. As for winter Sundays, in an unwarmed meeting-house (though the sermon might be like the breath of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace), we should have been paragons of early piety, beings too good to live, if we had wished the hours longer. Let their miseries be forgotten.

On week-days, once out of school, we wasted no time. We knew where we were going, and we went on the run. We were boys, not men. Some of us, at least, were not yet infected with the idea that we ever should be men. We aspired neither to men’s work nor to men’s pleasures. We aimed not at self-improvement. We thought not of getting rich. We might recite “Excelsior” in the schoolroom, but it did us no harm; our innocence was incorruptible. Two things we did: we skated, and we slid down-hill. There was always either snow or ice. The present demoralization of the seasons had not yet begun. Winter was winter. Snowdrifts were over your head, and ice was three feet thick. And zero--for boys who slept in attics to which no particle of artificial heat ever penetrated, zero was something like summer. Young America was tough in those days.

I recall at this moment the bitterly cold day when one of our number skated into an airhole on Whitman’s Pond. It was during the noon recess. His home was a mile or more east of the pond, and the schoolhouse was at least a mile west of the pond. He sank into the water up to his chin, and saved himself with difficulty, the airhole luckily being small and the ice firm about the edges. What would a twentieth-century boy do under such circumstances? I can only guess. But I know what Charles H. did. He came back to the schoolhouse first, to make his apologies to the master; I can see him now, as he came in smiling, looking just a little foolish; then he ran home--three miles, perhaps--to change his clothing. And he is living still. Oh, yes, we were tough,--or we died young.

That was while we were in the high school, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old. But my liveliest recollections of winter antedate that period by several years. Then sliding down-hill was our dearest excitement. Ours was “no great of a hill,” to use a form of speech common among us; I smile now as I go past it; but it could not have suited us better if it had been made on purpose; and no half holiday or moonlight evening was long enough to exhaust our enjoyment of the exercise--walking up and sliding down, walking up and sliding down. “Monotonous,” do I hear some one say? It was monotony such as would have ended too soon though it had lasted forever. If I had a thousand dollars to spend in an afternoon’s sport now, I should not know how to get half as much exhilaration out of it as two hours on that snow-covered slope afforded. There is something in a boy’s spirits that a man’s money can never buy, nor a man’s will bring back to him.

As years passed, we ventured farther from home to a steeper and longer declivity. Glorious hours we spent there, every boy riding his own sled after his own fashion. Boys who were boys rode “side-saddle” or “belly-bump;” but here and there a timid soul, or one who considered the toes of his boots, condescended to an upright position, feet foremost, like a girl--in the language of the polite people, sur son séant.

Later still came the day of the double-runner, when we slid down-hill gregariously, as it were, or, if you will, in chorus (the word is justified), every boy’s arms clinging to the boy in front of him. Older fellows now took a hand with us, and we resorted to the highway. With the icy track at its smoothest, we went the longer half of a mile, and had a mile and a half to walk back, the “going” being slippery enough to double the return distance.

At this time it was that there came a passing rage (such as communities are suddenly taken with, now and then, for a certain amusement--golf, croquet, or what not) for coasting in a huge pung. Grown people, men and women, filled it, while one man sat on a hand-sled between the thills and guided its course. Near the foot of the hill the road took a pretty sharp turn, with a stone wall on the awkward side of the way; but the excitement more than paid for the risk, and by sheer good luck a thaw intervened before anybody was killed.