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| The Hunt House |
Going down railroad, listening intentionally, I hear, far through the notes of song sparrows (which are very numerous), the song of one or two larks.
Also hearing a coarse chuck, I look up and see four blackbirds, whose size and long tails betray them crow blackbirds.
Also I hear, I am pretty sure, the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker.
The bright catkins of the willow are the springing most generally observed.
P. M. — To Great Fields.
Water rising still. Winter-freshet ice on meadows still more lifted up and partly broken in some places. The broad light artery of the river (and some meadows, too) very fair in the distance from Peter's.
Talking with Garfield to-day about his trapping, he said that mink brought three dollars and a quarter, a remarkably high price, and asked if I had seen any.
I said that I commonly saw two or three in a year.
He said that he had not seen one alive for eight or ten years.
"But you trap them?"
"O yes," he said. "I catch thirty or forty dollars' worth every winter."
This suggests how little a trapper may see of his game.
Garfield caught a skunk lately.
In some meadows I see a great many dead spiders on the ice, where apparently it has been overflowed — or rather it was the heavy rain, methinks — when they had no retreat.
Hear a ground squirrel's sharp chirrup, which makes you start, it is so sudden; but he is probably earthed again, for I do not see him.
On the northeast part of the Great Fields, I find the broken shell of a Cistudo Blandingii, on very dry soil. This is the fifth, then, I have seen in the town. All the rest were three in the Great Meadows (one of them in a ditch) and one within a rod or two of Beck Stow's Swamp.
It is remarkable that the spots where I find most arrowheads, etc., being light, dry soil, — as the Great Fields, Clamshell Hill, etc., — are among the first to be bare of snow, and the frost gets out there first. It is very curiously and particularly true, for the only parts of the northeast section of the Great Fields which are so dry that I do not slump there are those small in area, where perfectly bare patches of sand occur, and there, singularly enough, the arrowheads are particularly common.
Indeed, in some cases I find them only on such bare spots a rod or two in extent where a single wigwam might have stood, and not half a dozen rods off in any direction. Yet the difference of level may not be more than a foot, — if there is any. It is as if the Indians had selected precisely the driest spots on the whole plain, with a view to their advantage at this season. If you were going to pitch a tent to-night on the Great Fields, you would inevitably pitch on one of these spots, or else lie down in water or mud or on ice. It is as if they had chosen the site of their wigwams at this very season of the year.
I see a small flock of blackbirds flying over, some rising, others falling, yet all advancing together, one flock but many birds, some silent, others tchucking, — incessant alternation. This harmonious movement as in a dance, this agreeing to differ, makes the charm of the spectacle to me. One bird looks fractional, naked, like a single thread or ravelling from the web to which it belongs. Alternation! Alternation! Heaven and hell ! Here again in the flight of a bird, its ricochet motion, is that undulation observed in so many materials, as in the mackerel sky.
If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written [were to] be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
I cannot easily forget the beauty of those terrestrial browns in the rain yesterday. The withered grass was not of that very pale hoary brown that it is to-day, now that it is dry and lifeless, but, being perfectly saturated and dripping with the rain, the whole hillside seemed to reflect a certain yellowish light, so that you looked around for the sun in the midst of the storm. All the yellow and red and leather-color in the fawn-colored weeds was more intense than at any other season. The withered ferns which fell last fall — pin weeds, sarothra, etc. — were actually a glowing brown for the same reason, being all dripping wet.
The cladonias crowning the knolls had visibly expanded and erected themselves, though seen twenty rods off, and the knolls appeared swelling and bursting as with yeast.
All these hues of brown were most beautifully blended, so that the earth appeared covered with the softest and most harmoniously spotted and tinted tawny fur coat of any animal. The very bare sand slopes, with only here and there a thin crusting of mosses, was [sic] a richer color than ever it is.
In short, in these early spring rains, the withered herbage, thus saturated, and reflecting its brightest withered tint, seems in a certain degree to have revived, and sympathizes with the fresh greenish or yellowish or brownish lichens in its midst, which also seem to have withered. It seemed to me — and I think it may be the truth — that the abundant moisture, bringing out the highest color in the brown surface of the earth, generated a certain degree of light, which, when the rain held up a little, reminded you of the sun shining through a thick mist.
Oak leaves which have sunk deep into the ice now are seen to be handsomely spotted with black (of fungi or lichens?), which spots are rarely perceived in dry weather.
All that vegetable life which loves a superfluity of moisture is now rampant, cold though it is, compared with summer.
Radical leaves are as bright as ever they are.
The barrenest surfaces, perhaps, are the most interesting in such weather as yesterday, when the most terrene colors are seen.
The wet earth and sand, and especially subsoil, are very invigorating sights.
The Hunt house, to draw from memory, — though I have given its measures within two years in my Journal, — looked like this :
This is only generally correct, without a scale.
Probably grackles have been seen some days. I think I saw them on the 11th? Garfield says he saw black ducks yesterday.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 13, 1859
The bright catkins of the willow are the springing most generally observed. See March 2, 1859 ("Go and measure to what length the silvery willow catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o' the year it is by Nature's clock"); March 10, 1853 (“Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins"); March 20, 1858 (“How handsome the willow catkins! Those wonderfully bright silvery buttons, so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which their twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver, just peeping from beneath the black scales, to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats and show some redness at base on a close inspection.”) March 20, 1858 (“How handsome the willow catkins! Those wonderfully bright silvery buttons, so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which their twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver, just peeping from beneath the black scales, to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats and show some redness at base on a close inspection.”)
Garfield to-day said that mink brought three dollars and a quarter, See March 15, 1855 ("He [Farmer] sells about a hundred mink skins in a year. . . .He says (I think) a mink’s skin is worth two dollars!”)
The Hunt house, to draw from memory. See February 17, 1857 ("To the old Hunt house. . . .The rear part has a wholly oak frame, while the front is pine."); February 9, 1858 ("The stairs of the old back part are white pine or spruce, each the half of a square log; those of the cellar in front, oak, of the same form."); March 11, 1859 ("To Hunt house. I go to get one more sight of the old house which Hosmer is pulling down, but I am too late to see much of it.")
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