Distinct otter-track by the Rock at the junction of the two rivers.

February 4

Clear and cold and windy; much colder than for some time. It is better skating to-day than yesterday. This is the sixth day of some kind of skating.

See this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers. The separate foot-tracks are quite round, more than two inches in diameter, showing the five toes distinctly in the snow, which is about half an inch deep. 

Close by the Great Aspen I see where it had entered or come out of the water under a shelf of ice left adhering to a maple. There it apparently played and slid on the level ice, making a broad trail as if a shovel had been shoved along, just eight inches wide, without a foot-track in it for four feet or more. 

It had left much dung on the ice, soft, yellow, bowel-like, like a gum that has been chewed in consistency. About the edge of the hole, where the snow was all rubbed off, was something white which looks and smells exactly like bits of the skin of pouts or eels.

Minott tells of one shot once while eating an eel. Vance saw one this winter in this town by a brook eating a fish.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 4, 1855

This is the sixth day of some kind of skating. See February 5, 1855 ("The ice for the last week has reached quite up into the village, so that you could get on to it just in the rear of the bank and set sail on skates for any part of the Concord River valley.");  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating

A very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers. See February 8, 1857 (“The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through.”);  February 20, 1856 (“See a broad and distinct otter-trail, made last night or yesterday. It came out to the river through the low declivities, making a uniform broad hollow trail there without any mark of its feet  . . . Commonly seven to nine or ten inches wide, and tracks of feet twenty to twenty-four apart; but sometimes there was no track of the feet for twenty-five feet, frequently for six; in the last case swelled in the outline.”); February 22, 1856 (“Just below this bridge begins an otter track, several days old yet very distinct, which I trace half a mile down the river. In the snow less than an inch deep, on the ice, each foot makes a track three inches wide, apparently enlarged in melting. The clear interval, sixteen inches; the length occupied by the four feet, fourteen inches. It looks as if some one had dragged a round timber down the middle of the river a day or two since, which bounced as it went.”). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Otter

The Rock:  Egg Rock / Island Rock, "The most forwrd point on the small area that Thoreau refers to as the Island,"  an outcrop at the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury rivers where they form the Concord River." ~ Ray Angelo,  Thoreau Place Names 74  

Minott tells of one. See  April 6, 1855 ("It reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen."); January 30, 1854 ("How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him,"); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare."); March 31, 1857 ("The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)! ): Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared ; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly..")

February 4. See A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, February 4

Distinct otter-track

by the rock at the junction

of the two rivers.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Distinct otter-track by the Rock

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

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