Some farmers load their wood with gunpowder.

October 12.

October 12, 2015

Up Assabet. 

The leaves fallen last night now lie thick on the water next the shore, concealing it, —fleets of dry boats, blown with a rustling sound.

I see a painted tortoise still out on shore. Three of his back scales are partly turned up and show fresh black ones ready beneath. And now I see that the six main anterior scales have already been shed. They are fresh black and bare of moss. Is not this the only way they get rid of the moss, etc., which adhere to them?

Carry home a couple of rails which I fished out of the bottom of the river and left on the bank to dry about three weeks ago.

One is a chestnut which I have noticed for some years on the bottom of the Assabet, just above the spring on the east side, in a deep hole. It looks as if it has been there a hundred years. It was so heavy that C. and I had as much as we could do to lift it, covered with mud, on to the high bank. It is scarcely lighter to-day, and I amuse myself with asking several to lift one half of it after I have sawed it in two. They fail at first, not being prepared to find it so heavy, though they easily can lift it afterward.

The other is a round oak stick, and, though it looks almost as old as the first, is quite sound even to the bark, and evidently quite recent comparatively, though full as heavy.

Some farmers load their wood with gunpowder to punish thieves. There's no danger that mine will be loaded.

Pieces of both of these sink at once in a pail of water. [On the 18th they float, after drying in my chamber.]

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 12, 1855

Carry home a couple of rails which I left on the bank to dry about three weeks ago. See September 24, 1855 ("Brought home quite a boat-load of fuel . . . It would be a triumph to get all my winter’s wood thus")