Just below this bridge begins an otter track

February 22.

—To Assabet stone bridge and home on river. 

It is a pleasant and warm afternoon, and the snow is melting. Yet the river is still perfectly closed (as it has been for many weeks), both against Merrick’s and in the Assabet, excepting directly under this upper stone bridge and probably at mouth of Loring’s Brook. 

I am surprised that the warm weather within ten days has not caused the river to open at Merrick’s, but it was too thick to be melted. 

Now first, the snow melting and the ice beginning to soften, I see those slender grayish-winged insects creeping with closed wings over the snow-clad ice, — Perla (?) on all parts of  the river. Have seen none before, this winter. 

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.

There is now a crack running down the middle of the river, and it is slightly elevated there, owing, probably, to the increasing temperature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 22, 1856

An otter track, several days old . . . which I trace half a mile down the river. . . . 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 February 20, 1856 (" See a broad and distinct otter-trail, made last night or yesterday. . . .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. . ."); March 6, 1856 ("On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter.”);April 6, 1855 ("it reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen."); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare.”); February 4, 1855 ("See this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock”); 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”).