Late winter

February 26

February 26, 2022

Still clear and cold and windy. 

No thawing of the ground during the day. This and the last two or three days have been very blustering and unpleasant, though clear.

I see some cracks in a plowed field, — Depot Field cornfield, — maybe recent ones. I think since this last cold snap, else I had noticed them before. 

Those great cakes of ice which the last freshet floated up on to uplands now lie still further from the edge of the recent ice. You are surprised to see them lying with perpendicular edges a foot thick on bare, grassy upland where there is no other sign of water, sometimes wholly isolated by bare grass there.

When the weather became colder and froze, the new ice only reached part way up these cakes, which lay high and dry. It is therefore pretty good skating on the river itself and on a greater part of the meadows next the river, but it is interrupted by great cakes of ice rising above the general level near the shore.

Directly off Clamshell Hill, within four rods of it, where the water is three or four feet deep, I see where the musquash dived and brought up clams before the last freezing. Their open shells are strewn along close to the edge of the ice, and close together. They lie thickly around the edge of each small circle of thinner black ice in the midst of the white, showing where was open water a day or two ago. This shows that this is still a good place for clams, as it was in Indian days.

Examine with glass some fox-dung from a tussock of grass amid the ice on the meadow. It appears to be composed two thirds of clay, and the rest a slate-colored fur and coarser white hairs, black-tipped, - too coarse for the deer mouse. Is it that of the rabbit? This mingled with small bones. A mass as long as one’s finger.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 26, 1855

Still clear and cold and windy. No thawing . . . very blustering and unpleasant. See February 25, 1855 ("Clear, cold, and windy. "); February 26, 1857 ("Cold and windy."); February 26, 1860 ("Cold and strong northwest wind this and yesterday.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February is Mid-Winter

I see some cracks in a plowed field, — Depot Field cornfield, — maybe recent ones. I think since this last cold snap, else I had noticed them before.  See  February 7, 1855 ("The coldest night for a long, long time. People dreaded to go to bed. The ground cracked in the night as if a powder-mill had blown up"); February 23, 1855 ("I see no cracks in the ground this year yet."); December 23, 1856 (“The cracking of the ground is a phenomenon of the coldest nights”); January 11, 1859 ("It would appear then that the ground cracks on the advent of very severe cold weather.")

Those great cakes of ice which the last freshet floated up. See February 23, 1855 ("I see great cakes of ice, a rod or more in length and one foot thick, lying high and dry on the bare ground in the low fields some ten feet or more beyond the edge of the thinner ice, washed up by the last rise (the 18th).”); February 24, 1855 ("The whole of the broad meadows is a rough, irregular checker-board of great cakes a rod square or more.”); February 28, 1855 ("Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered a stretching pack of great cakes of ice, often two or more upon each other and partly tilted up, a foot thick and one to two or more rods broad.")

Pretty good skating on the river itself and on a greater part of the meadows. 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

I see where the musquash dived and brought up clams. See January 3, 1860 ("Melvin thinks that the musquash eat more clams now than ever, and that they leave the shells in heaps under the ice."); February 9, 1851 ("The last half of January was warm and thawy. The swift streams were open, and the muskrats were seen swimming and diving and bringing up clams, leaving their shells on the ice.");  April 1, 1860 ("The river was lowest for March yesterday . . . so low that the mouths of the musquash-burrows in the banks are exposed with the piles of shells before them.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Musquash

Examine with glass some fox-dung from a tussock of grass amid the ice on the meadow. See February 1, 1856 ("What gives to the excrements of the fox that clay color often, even at this season? Left on an eminence."); September 23, 1860 ("I see on the top of the Cliffs to-day the dung of a fox, consisting of fur, with part of the jaw and one of the long rodent teeth of a woodchuck in it, and the rest of it huckleberry seeds with some whole berries") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

Pretty good skating  

interrupted by great cakes 

of ice near the shore.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Late winter

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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