Clear and not cold, and now fine skating, the river rising again to the height it had attained the 24th, which (with this) I think remarkable for this season. It is unusual for the river to be so much swollen in midwinter, because it is unusual to have so much rain at this season. The hills shed it all like a roof into the valleys. It is up to the hubs on the causeways, and foot—travellers have to cross on the river and meadows.
Minott to-day enumerates the red, gray, black, and what he calls the Sampson fox. He says, “It’s a sort of yaller fox, but their pelts ain’t good for much.” He never saw one, but the hunters have told him of them. He never saw a gray nor a black one. Told how Jake Lakin lost a dog, a very valuable one, by a fox leading him on to the ice on the Great Meadows and drowning him.
Said the raccoon made a track very much like a young child’s foot. He had often seen it in the mud of a ditch.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1855
Minott to-day enumerates the red, gray, black, and what he calls the Sampson fox. He never saw a gray nor a black one. Jake Lakin lost a dog, a very valuable one, by a fox leading him on to the ice on the Great Meadows and drowning him. See January 2, 1859 ("Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to thin ice in order that he may get in. Tells of Jake Lakin losing a hound so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the Holt; was found afterward by Sted Buttrick, his collar taken off and given to Lakin"); September 10, 1860 ("My host, yesterday, told me that he was accustomed once to chase a black fox from Lowell over this way and lost him at Chelmsford. . . .A Carlisle man also tells me since that this fox used to turn off and run northwest from Chelmsford, but that he would soon after return.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox
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