Walden is open still. The river is probably open again.
There are wild men living along the shores of the Frozen Ocean. Who shall say that there is not as great an interval between the civilized man and the savage as between the savage and the brute? The undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.
I am struck with the difference between my feet and my hands. My feet are much nearer to foreign or inanimate matter or nature than my hands; they are more brute, they are more like the earth they tread on, they are more clod-like and lumpish, and I scarcely animate them.
The snow everywhere is covered with snow-fleas like pepper.
When you hold a mass in your hand, they skip and are gone before you know it. They are so small that they go through and through the new snow.
They look like some powder which the hunter has spilled in the path.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 16, 1850
The snow everywhere is covered with snow-fleas like pepper. . . . like some powder which the hunter has spilled in the path. See November 25, 1859 ("I notice the snow-fleas skipping on the surface the shore. . . . These are rather a cool-weather phenomenon.”); December 7, 1852 ("Saw a pile of snow-fleas in a rut in the wood-path, six or seven inches long and three quarters of an inch high, to the eye exactly like powder, as if a sportsman had spilled it from his flask."); December 10, 1854 ("Snow-fleas in paths; first I have seen.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Snow-flea
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