In mid-forenoon, seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. I at once heard their clangor and rushed to and opened the window.
The three harrows were gradually formed into one great one before they were out of sight, the geese shifting their places without slacking their progress.
P. M. —— To Cardinal Shore.
Going over Swamp Bridge Brook at 3 P. M., I saw in the pond by the roadside, a few rods before me, the sun shining bright, a mink swimming, the whole length of his back out. It was a rich brown fur, glowing internally as the sun fell on it, like some ladies’ boas, not black, as it sometimes appears, especially on ice.
It landed within three rods, showing its long, some what cat-like neck, and I observed was carrying some thing by its mouth, dragging it overland. At first I thought it a fish, maybe an eel, and when it had got half a dozen feet, I ran forward, and it dropped its prey and went into the wall.
It was a muskrat, the head and part of the fore legs torn off and gone, but the rest still fresh and quite heavy, including hind legs and tail. It had probably killed this muskrat in the brook, eaten so much, and was dragging the remainder to its retreat in the wall.
A fine clear afternoon after the misty morning and heavy rain of the night. Even after all this rain I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences.
From Fair Haven Hill the air is clear and fine-grained, and now it is a perfect russet November landscape, —including the reddish brown of the oaks, excepting where the winter-rye fields and some low meadows show' their green, the former quite bright, and also the evergreen patches of pines, edged in the northwest by the blue mountain ridges.
Got the wood thrush’s (?) nest of November 5th. It is about five inches [in] diameter from outside to outside, and two and a half within. Outside of some weedy tufts (beneath), weed stems and stubble (some dry galium stems, small), and lined with a little fine grass and horsehair. I found the egg partly concealed by some dry alder leaves which had fallen into the nest.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1855
Seventy or eighty geese . . . over the house. See November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night."); See also November 14, 1855 ("Minott hears geese to-day.""); November 24, 1855 ("Geese went over on the 13th and 14th, on the 17th the first snow fell, and the 19th it began to be cold and blustering.”); November 18, 1854 ("Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while") and A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn
P. M. —— To Cardinal Shore.
Going over Swamp Bridge Brook at 3 P. M., I saw in the pond by the roadside, a few rods before me, the sun shining bright, a mink swimming, the whole length of his back out. It was a rich brown fur, glowing internally as the sun fell on it, like some ladies’ boas, not black, as it sometimes appears, especially on ice.
It landed within three rods, showing its long, some what cat-like neck, and I observed was carrying some thing by its mouth, dragging it overland. At first I thought it a fish, maybe an eel, and when it had got half a dozen feet, I ran forward, and it dropped its prey and went into the wall.
It was a muskrat, the head and part of the fore legs torn off and gone, but the rest still fresh and quite heavy, including hind legs and tail. It had probably killed this muskrat in the brook, eaten so much, and was dragging the remainder to its retreat in the wall.
A fine clear afternoon after the misty morning and heavy rain of the night. Even after all this rain I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences.
From Fair Haven Hill the air is clear and fine-grained, and now it is a perfect russet November landscape, —including the reddish brown of the oaks, excepting where the winter-rye fields and some low meadows show' their green, the former quite bright, and also the evergreen patches of pines, edged in the northwest by the blue mountain ridges.
Got the wood thrush’s (?) nest of November 5th. It is about five inches [in] diameter from outside to outside, and two and a half within. Outside of some weedy tufts (beneath), weed stems and stubble (some dry galium stems, small), and lined with a little fine grass and horsehair. I found the egg partly concealed by some dry alder leaves which had fallen into the nest.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1855
It was a rich brown fur, glowing internally as the sun fell on it, like some ladies’ boas, not black. See December 2, 1852 ("Above the bridge . . . we see a mink, slender, black”); November 27, 1855 ("A mink skin which he showed me was a darker brown than the one I saw last (he says they changed suddenly to darker about a fortnight since); and the tail was nearly all black.”)
Even after all this rain I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences. See November 7, 1855 ("gossamer on the grass . . . revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”) See also November 19, 1853 (“This, too, is a gossamer day, though it is not particularly calm.”); November 1, 1860 ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields,”); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days
Now it is a perfect russet November landscape. See November 10, 1858 ("Now a new season begins, the pure November season of the russet earth and withered leaf and bare twigs."); November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight on russet and frosty fields. "); November 29, 1852 (".The softness of the sunlight on the russet landscape . . . the sun now getting low in a November day. "); November 29, 1853 ("We have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year."); See also November 28, 1858 ("In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?")
Wood thrush's nest of November 5th: ("A nest made very thick, of grass and stubble, and lined with finer grass and horsehair, as big as a king bird’s, on an alder, within eighteen inches of ground, close to the water, at Cardinal Shore. The alder had been broken down at that height by the ice, and the nest rested-on the stub ends. I took a few dead leaves out and to my surprise found an egg—very pale greenish-blue.”)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
Geese in three harrows
gradually shift to one
now out of sight.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows
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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