I am come forth to observe the drifts..

January 6.

Bobcat
January 6, 2016

High wind and howling and driving snowstorm all night, now much drifted. There is a great drift in the front entry and at the crack of every door and on the window-sills. Great drifts on the south of walls.

Clears up at noon, when no vehicle had passed the house. 

Frank Morton has brought home, and I opened, that pickerel of the 4th. It is frozen solid. Yellow spawn as big as a pin-head, with smaller between, enwraps its insides the whole length, half an inch thick. It must spawn very early then. I find in its gullet, or paunch, or maw (the long white bag), three young perch, one of them six inches long, and the tail of a fourth. Its belly was considerably puffed out. 

Two of the perch lay parallel, side by side, of course head downward, in its gullet(?). The upper and largest perch was so high that he was cut in two in the middle in cutting off the head. And yet it was caught in endeavoring to swallow another large minnow! 

This is what you may call voracity. 

P. M. -— To Drifting Cut. 

The snow is now probably more than a foot deep on a level. 

While I am making a path to the pump, I hear hurried rippling notes of birds, look up, and see quite a flock of snow buntings coming to alight amid the currant-tops in the yard. It is a sound almost as if made with their wings. What a pity our yard was made so tidy in the fall with rake and fire, and we have now no tall crop of weeds rising above this snow to invite these birds! 

I am come forth to observe the drifts. They are, as usual, on the south side of the walls and fences and, judging from the direction of their ridges, the wind was due north. 

Behind Monroe’s tight board fence it is a regularly swelled, unbroken bank, but behind the wall this side carved into countless scallops, perforations, scrolls, and copings. 



An open wall is, then,the best place for a drift. Yet these are not remarkably rich. The snow was perhaps too dry. Perhaps six more inches on a level has fallen, or more. It has not lodged on the trees.

Now, at 4.15, the blue shadows are very distinct on the snow-banks. 

On the north side of the Cut, above the crossing, the jutting edges of the drift are quite handsome upon the bank. The snow is raised twelve feet above the track, and it is all scalloped with projecting eaves or copings, like turtle-shells. 

They project from three to five feet, and I can stand under them. They are in three or four great layers, one lapping over another like the coarse edge of a shell. Looking along it, they appear somewhat thus : —

Often this coping has broken by its own weight, and great blocks have fallen down the bank, like smoothed blocks of white marble.

The exquisite purity of the snow and the gracefulness of its curves are remarkable. 

Around some houses there is not a single track. Neither man, woman, nor child, dog nor cat nor fowl, has stirred out to-day. There has been no meeting. Yet this afternoon, since the storm, it has not been very bad travelling.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 6, 1856

Now, at 4.15, the blue shadows are very distinct on the snow-banks. See  January 5, 1854 ("There is also some blueness now in the snow. The blueness is more distinct after sunset."); February 6, 1854 ("Crossing Walden where the snow has fallen quite level, I perceive that my shadow is a delicate or transparent blue rather than black."): December 31, 1854 ("A beautiful, clear, not very cold day. The shadows on the snow are indigo-blue."); February 10, 1855 ("I go across Walden. My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow. "); January 4, 1856 ("I think it is only such a day as this, when the fields on all sides are well clad with snow, over which the sun shines brightly, that you observe the blue shadows on the snow."); January 15, 1856 ("A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. "); January 18, 1856 ("clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. . . .I am in raptures at my own shadow. . . . Our very shadows are no longer black, but a celestial blue. This has nothing to do with cold, methinks, but the sun must not be too low."); January 30, 1856 ("crossing Walden Pond, a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows and your own are the only objects. What a solemn silence reigns here!"); March 10, 1856 ("The blue shadows on snow are as fine as ever."); March 30, 1856 ("there are as intense blue shadows on the snow as I ever saw.")