The openness of the leafless woods by moonlight.

November 12.

November 12, 2021

Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air, and so come down upon your head at last. Antæus-like, be not long absent from the ground.

Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, — a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants as the soil and the light can sustain.

Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall. Those are the admirable bounds when the performer has lately touched the spring board.

A good bound into the air from the air (sic) is a good and wholesome experience, but what shall we say to a man's leaping off precipices in the attempt to fly? He comes down like lead.

In the meanwhile, you have got your feet planted upon the rock, with the rock also at your back, and, as in the case of King James and Roderick Dhu, can say, —

 “Come one, come all! this rock shall fly 

   From its firm base as soon as I.” 

Such, uttered or not, is the strength of your sentence. Sentences in which there is no strain. A fluttering and inconstant and quasi inspiration, and ever memorable Icarian fall, in which your helpless wings are expanded merely by your swift descent into the pelagos beneath.

C. is one who will not stoop to rise (to change the subject). He wants something for which he will not pay the going price. He will only learn slowly by failure, not a noble, but disgraceful, failure. This is not a noble method of learning, to be educated by inevitable suffering, like De Quincey, for instance.

Better dive like a muskrat into the mud, and pile up a few weeds to sit on during the floods, a foundation of your own laying, a house of your own building, however cold and cheerless.

Methinks the hawk that soars so loftily and circles so steadily and apparently without effort has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a reptile in a former state of existence. You must creep before you can run; you must run before you can fly. Better one effective bound upward with elastic limbs from the valley than a jumping from the mountain - tops in the attempt to fly.

The observatories are not built high but deep; the foundation is equal to the superstructure. It is more important to a distinct vision that it be steady than that it be from an elevated point of view.

Walking through Ebby Hubbard's wood this afternoon, with Minott, who was actually taking a walk for amusement and exercise, he said, on seeing some white pines blown down, that you might know that ground had been cultivated, by the trees being torn up so, for otherwise they would have rooted themselves more strongly.

Saw some very handsome canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high. The large ones have a reddish cast, perhaps from some small lichen. Their fringes and curls give them an agreeable appearance.

Observed a peculiarity in some white oaks. Though they had a firm and close bark near the ground, the bark was very coarse and scaly, in loose flakes, above. Much coarser than the swamp white oak.

Minott has a story for every woodland path. He has hunted in them all. Where we walked last, he had once caught a partridge by the wing!


7 P. M. To Conantum.

A still, cold night.

The light of the rising moon in the east. Moonrise is a faint sunrise. And what shall we name the faint aurora that precedes the moonrise?

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes.

To-day I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. So far have we got toward winter:

• It is doubtful if they who have not pulled their turnips will have a chance to get them.
• It is not of much use to drive the cows to pasture.
• I can fancy that I hear the booming of ice in the ponds.
• I hear no sound of any bird now at night, but sometimes some creature stirring, a rabbit, or skunk, or fox, betrayed now by the dry leaves which lie so thick and light.

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight; they are nearly as bright as the open field.

It is worth the while always to go to the waterside when there is but little light in the heavens and see the heavens and the stars reflected. There is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion.

There is no fog now o’nights.

I thought to-night that I saw glow-worms in the grass, on the side of the hill; was almost certain of it, and tried to lay my hand on them, but found it was the moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine frost crystals on the withered grass, and they were so fine that they went and came like glow-worms. It had precisely the effect of twinkling glow-worms. They gleamed just long enough for glow-worms.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 12, 1851

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. See November 12, 1858 ("It is much the coldest day yet, and the ground is a little frozen and resounds under my tread.")

There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. See note to November 12, 1853 ("I hear one cricket singing still, faintly deep in the bank, now after one whitening of snow. His theme is life immortal. The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might.") See also November 9, 1851 (" I hear a cricket singing the requiem of the year . . . Soon all will be frozen up, and I shall hear no cricket chirp in the land.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November

I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. See November 22, 1860 ("Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.")

Canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high.  See May 18, 1851 ("The log of a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter, more than a foot in diameter at the stump; one foot in diameter at ten feet from the ground. . . . I counted about fifty rings"); November 2, 1851 ("Saw a canoe birch beyond Nawshawtuct, growing out of the middle of a white pine stump, which still showed the mark of the axe, sixteen inches in diameter at its bottom, or two feet from the ground, or where it had first taken root on the stump. "); July 24, 1857 ("[On the shore of Moosehead Lake] I measured a canoe birch, five and a half feet in circumference at two and a half from the ground.")

The light of the rising moon in the east. See November 7, 1851 ("At Walden are three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon, one moon and two sheens further off") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Moonlight

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight. See November 12, 1853 ("Moon nearly full. Trees stand bare against the sky again. This the first month in which they do ")

November 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 12

That faint aurora –

the light of the rising moon

precedes the moonrise.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The openness of the leafless woods by moonlight.

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 © 2009-2022

I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me.

December 1 

P. M. —Walking in Ebby Hubbard's woods, I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree. How securely he travels there, fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him that it is at first hard to get up it. His travelling a succession of leaps in the air at that height without wings! And yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground. 

I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me on a pine. I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.* 

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 1, 1857

*[Hear it all the fall (and occasionally through the summer of ’59).]

And now I see him coursing from tree to tree.  See October 26, 1855 (" I see a red squirrel dash out from the wall, snatch an apple from amid many on the ground, and, running swiftly up the tree with it, proceed to eat it, sitting on a smooth dead limb, with its back to the wind and its tail curled close over its back"); December 16, 1855 ("See two red squirrels. . . One sits twirling apparently a dried apple in his paws, with his tail curled close over his back as if to keep it warm, fitting its curve. How much smothered sunlight in their wholesome brown red this misty day! It is clear New England, Nov-anglia, like the red subsoil.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel. Compare May 7, 1855 ("Scare up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which run glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leap across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me.")

I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter. See December 31, 1853 ("Heard and saw together white-bellied nuthatches and chickadees, the former uttering a faint quank quank and making a loud tapping."); December 5, 1856 ("A pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut, flying low in mid- course and then ascending to the tree. I hear one's faint tut tut or gnah gnah — no doubt heard a good way by its mate now flown into the next tree . . . It is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black."); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch like the creak of a limb. I detect it on the trunk of an oak much nearer than I suspected, and its mate or companion not far off. This is a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember."); July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day. See note to November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese . . . According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day.”) See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

December 1. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 1

I hear the faintest

quivet from a nuthatch – quite

near me on a pine.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  A nuthatch, quite near me.

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-571201

A male bird hanging dead by the neck, just touching its toes to the ground.

November 28. 

P. M. — Around Ebby Hubbard's wood lot. 

On the hillside above his swamp, near the Ministerial land, I found myself walking in one of those shelf-like hillside paths made by Indians, hunters, cows, or what-not, and it was beset with fresh snares for partridges, this wise: Upright twigs are stuck in the ground across the path, a foot or more in height and just close enough together to turn a partridge aside, leaving a space about four inches wide in the middle, and some twigs are stretched across above to prevent the birds hopping over. Then a sapling about an inch in diameter or less is bent over, and the end caught under one of the twigs which has a notch or projection on one side, and a free-running noose, attached to the sapling, hangs in the opening and is kept spread by being hung on some very slight nicks in the two twigs. This seems to suppose the bird to be going one way only, but perhaps if it cannot escape one way it will turn and try to go back, and so spring the trap. 

I saw one that was sprung with nothing in it, another whose slip-noose was blown or fallen one side, and another with a partridge still warm in it. It was a male bird hanging dead by the neck, just touching its toes to the ground. It had a collar or ruff about its neck, of large and conspicuous black feathers with a green reflection. This black is peculiar to the male, the female's being brown. Its feet, now clinched in its agony, were the strangest-looking pale blue, with a fine fringe, of scales or the like, on each side of each toe. The small black feathers were centred with gray spots. The scapulars were darker brown, dashed with large clear pale-brown spots; the breast-feathers light with light-brown marks. The tail-feathers had each a broad black bar, except the middle one, which was more mixed or grayish there. The bands of the females are said to be more brown, as is their collar. 

There were a few droppings of the bird close by the snare in two instances. Were they dropped after it was caught? Or did they determine the locality of the snare? 

These birds appear to run most along the sides of wooded banks around swamps. At least these paths and snares occur there oftenest. I often scare them up from amid or near hemlocks in the woods. 

The general color of the bird is that of the ground and dry leaves on it at present. The bird hanging in the snare was very inconspicuous. I had gone close by it once without noticing it. Its wings are short and stout and look as if they were a little worn by striking the ground or bushes, or perhaps in drumming. I observed a bare bright-red or scarlet spot over each eye. 

Spoke to Skinner about that wildcat which he says he heard a month ago in Ebby Hubbard’s woods. He was going down to Walden in the evening, to see if geese had not settled in it (with a companion), when they heard this sound, which his companion at first thought made by a coon, but S. said no, it was a wildcat. He says he has heard them often in the Adirondack region, where he has purchased furs. He told him he would hear it again soon, and he did. Some what like the domestic cat, a low sort of growling and then a sudden quick-repeated caterwaul, or yow yow you, or yang yang yang. He says they utter this from time to time when on the track of some prey.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 28, 1857

I found myself walking in one of those shelf-like hillside paths beset with fresh snares for partridges. See November 8, 1857 ("I step over the slip-noose snares which some woodling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits?"); November 18,1851 ("Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot . . .I hear the hooting of an owl . . . Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound."); December 15, 1857 ("Within a day or two, I saw another partridge in the snare of November 28th, frozen stiff. To-day I see that some creature has torn and disembowelled it, removing it half a rod, leaving the head in snare, which has lifted it three or four feet in the air on account of its lightness. This last bird was either a female or young male, its ruff and bar on tail being rather dark-brown than black.")

One of those shelf-like hillside paths. See note to  February 16, 2014 ("That Indian trail on the hillside about Walden is revealed with remarkable distinctness. . . by the slight snow which had lodged on it forming a clear white line unobscured by weeds and twigs.")

That wildcat which Skinner says he heard.  See October 20, 1857 ("Melvin tells me that Skinner says he thinks he heard a wildcat scream in E. Hubbard's Wood, by the Close. It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats."); see also   Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared "); October 4, 1856 ("In another [Harper's]article, of May, 1855, on "The Lion and his Kind," the animals are placed in this order: the domestic cat, wildcat, the ocelot or tiger-cat of Peru and Mexico, the caracal of Asia and Africa, the lynx of North America,. . . the leopard, the jaguar, the cougar, the tiger, the lion."); March 23, 1856 ("I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”); September 13, 1860 ("Five [lynx] I have heard of (and seen three) killed within some fifteen or eighteen miles of Concord within thirty years past.") 

Looking westward now.

November 3. 

November 3, 2017

P. M. – To the Easterbrooks moraine via Ponkawtasset-top.

Islands, pale-brown grassy isles, are appearing again in the meadow as the water goes down. 

From this hilltop, looking down-stream over the Great Meadows away from the sun, the water is rather dark, it being windy, but about the shores of the grassy isles is a lighter-colored smooth space. 

Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen.

There is a wild pear tree on the east side of Ponkawtasset, which I find to be four and a half feet in circumference at four feet from the ground.

Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig, but the latter often curve upward more than the other. 

I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, – robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. 

Follow up the Boulder Field northward, and it terminates in that moraine. As I return down the Boulder Field, I see the now winter-colored — i.e. reddish (of oak leaves) — horizon of hills, with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, between two of the boulders, which are a dozen rods from me, a dozen feet high, and nearly as much apart, — as a landscape between the frame of a picture. But what a picture frame! These two great slumbering masses of rock, reposing like a pair of mastodons on the surface of the pasture, completely shutting out a mile of the horizon on each side, while between their adjacent sides, which are nearly perpendicular, I see to the now purified, dry, reddish, leafy horizon, with a faint tinge of blue from the distance. 

To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! I want no other gilding to my picture-frame. There they lie, as perchance they tumbled and split from off an iceberg. What better frame could you have? The globe itself, here named pasture, for ground and foreground, two great boulders for the sides of the frame, and the sky itself for the top! And for artists and subject, God and Nature! Such pictures cost nothing but eyes, and it will not bankrupt one to own them. They were not stolen by any conqueror as spoils of war, and none can doubt but they are really the works of an old master. What more, pray, will you see between any two slips of gilded wood in that pasture you call Europe and browse in sometimes? 

It is singular that several of those rocks should be thus split into twins. Even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and parallel, having a path between them. 

It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it! And yet I suppose they are considered an incumbrance only by the owner. 

I came along the path that comes out just this side the lime-kiln. 

Coming by Ebby Hubbard’s thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. It seems, then, that no wood is so dense but that the rays of the setting sun may penetrate twenty rods into it. 

The other day (November 1st), I stood on the sunny side of such a wood at the same season, or a little earlier. Then I saw the lit sides of the tree stems all aglow with their lichens, and observed their black shadows behind. Now I see chiefly the dark stems massed together, and it is the warm sunlight that is reduced to a pencil of light; i. e., then light was the rule and shadow the exception, now shadow the rule and light the exception. 

I notice some old cow-droppings in a pasture, which are decidedly pink. Even these trivial objects awaken agreeable associations in my mind, connected not only with my own actual rambles but with what I have read of the prairies and pampas and Eastern land of grass, the great pastures of the world.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 3, 1857

To the Easterbrooks moraine via Ponkawtasset-top. See June 10, 1853 ("What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called?. . . It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the Hog-Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks Place, the Old Lime-Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark‘s. Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman‘s Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called? . . .Shall we call it the Easterbrooks Country?")

Looking westward now. See September 18, 1858 ("As we paddle westward, toward College Meadow, I perceive that a new season has come."); October 20, 1854 ("This is the time to look westward.");  November 10, 1858 ("I look out westward across Fair Haven Pond. The warmer colors are now rare . . .  All the light of November may be called an afterglow. ");  November 30, 1853 (" And as we paddled home westward . . . there was more light in the water than in the sky"); December 9, 1856 ("I look over the pond westward. The sun is near setting,. . . The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light.") January 9, 1859 ("As I stand on the pond looking westward toward the twilight sky, a soft, satiny light is reflected from the ice in flakes here and there, like the light from the under side of a bird’s wing.") ;  January 31, 1859 ("When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color. ");  February 21, 1854 ("The ice in the fields . . . amid the snow, looking westward now while the sun is about setting, in cold weather, is green."); February 29, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach.");   April 30, 1852 ("Far over the woods westward, a shining vane, glimmering in the sun."); May 10, 1853 ("From the hill, I look westward over the landscape. The deciduous woods are in their hoary youth, every expanding bud swaddled with downy webs.") See also  October 20, 1858 ("There is one advantage in walking eastward these afternoons, at least, that in returning you may have the western sky before you");  Walking (1861) ("Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him . . . The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild and what I have been preparing to say is that in Wildness is the preservation of the World .") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Sunsets

It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. See  November 1, 1860  ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air."); November 7, 1855 ("gossamer on the grass. . . revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”); November 11, 1858 ("Gossamer reflecting the light is another November phenomenon (as well as October)."); November 13,1855 (" I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences.”); November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November"); November 19, 1853 (“This, too, is a gossamer day, though it is not particularly calm. . . .”);  November 28, 1856 ("sunlight reflected from the many ascending twigs of bare young chestnuts and birches... remind me of the lines of gossamer at this season, being almost exactly similar to the eye. It is a true November phenomenon.").  Also November 3, 1853 ("There are very few phenomena which can be described indifferently as occurring at different seasons of the year .")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! See November 1, 1852 ("To see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture. ")

Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen. See November 3, 1858 ("The pitch pine fallen and falling leaves now and for some time have not been bright or yellow, but brown.") See also October 22, 1851 ("The pines, both white and pitch, have now shed their leaves, and the ground in the pine woods is strewn with the newly fallen needles."); November 1, 1851 ("The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes.");  November 4, 1857 ("I frequently see a spreading pitch pine on whose lower and horizontal limbs the falling needles have lodged, forming thick and unsightly masses, where anon the snow will collect and make a close canopy.") And A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine. 

Spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. See  May 29, 1858 ("I mistook dense groves of little barberries in the droppings of cows in the Boulder Field for apple trees at first. So the cows eat barberries, and help disperse or disseminate them exactly as they do the apple! That helps account for the spread of the barberry, then."); June 28, 1858 ("I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced"); October 20, 1857 ("The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them."); October 18, 1857 ("I see many robins on barberry bushes, probably after berries.")  February 4, 1856. ("I have often wondered how red cedars could have sprung up in some pastures which I knew to be miles distant from the nearest fruit-bearing cedar, but it now occurs to me that these and barberries, etc., may be planted by the crows, and probably other birds."). Also September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that such seeds as these will turn out to be more sought after by birds and quadrupeds, and so transported by them, than those lighter ones furnished with a pappus and transported by the wind; and that those the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds."); September 23, 1860 ("It is evident, then, that the fox eats huckleberries and so contributes very much to the dispersion of this shrub, for there were a number of entire berries in its dung in both the last two I chanced to notice. To spread these seeds, Nature employs not only a great many birds but this restless ranger the fox.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Common Barberry

Coming by Ebby Hubbard’s thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. See November 1, 1857 (" I see that the sun, when low, will shine into a thick wood,. . .lighting it all up, making the gray, lichen-clad stems of the trees all warm and bright with light, and a distinct black shadow behind each. As if every grove, however dense, had its turn.") Compare April 29, 1852 ("Coming home over the Corner road, the sun, now getting low, is reflected very bright and silvery from the water on the meadows, seen through the pines of Hubbard's Grove.")

A remote landscape

seen between two near rocks – what 

better picture-frame!

Looking westward now

I see gossamer waving

against the sunlight.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Looking westward now.

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 © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-571103

Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins in Easterbrooks Country.

October 20  

October 20, 2017

P. M. – To the Easterbrooks Country. 

I go along the riverside and by Dakin the pumpmaker's. 

There is a very strong northwest wind, Novemberish and cool, raising waves on the river and admonishing to prepare for winter. 

I see two Chenopodium album with stems as bright purple and fair as the poke has been, and the calyx lobes enveloping the seeds the same color. 

Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees. 

I had gone but little way on the old Carlisle road when I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; was in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. It is he who took the Centinel so long. When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had n’t anything to carry them in, he put 'em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry fruit in. How many he got in along toward the toes, I don’t know. I noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. It pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days. Far be it from me to call it avarice or penury, this childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields and carrying it home in the October evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter's store. Oh, no; he was happy to be Nature's pensioner still, and bird- . like to pick up his living. Better his robin than your turkey, his shoes full of apples than your barrels full; they will be sweeter and suggest a better tale. He can afford to tell how he got them, and we to listen. There is an old wife, too, at home, to share them and hear how they were obtained. Like an old squirrel shuf ling to his hole with a nut. Far less pleasing to me the loaded wain, more suggestive of avarice and of spiritual penury. 

This old man's cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church's sacraments and memento mori's. It was better than a prayerful mood. It proves to me old age as tolerable, as happy, as infancy. I was glad of an occasion to suspect that this afternoon he had not been at “work” but living somewhat after my own fashion (though he did not explain the axe), — had been out to see what nature had for him, and now was hasten ing home to a burrow he knew, where he could warm his old feet. If he had been a young man, he would probably have thrown away his apples and put on his shoes when he saw me coming, for shame. But old age is manlier; it has learned to live, makes fewer apologies, like infancy. This seems a very manly man. I have known him within a few years building stone wall by himself, barefooted. 

I keep along the old Carlisle road. The leaves having mostly fallen, the country now seems deserted, and you feel further from home and more lonely. 

I see where squirrels, apparently, have gnawed the apples left in the road. 

The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them. They must make a principal part of their food now. 

I see the yellowish election-cake fungi. Those large chocolate-colored ones have been burst some days (at least). 

Warren Brown, who owns the Easterbrooks place, the west side the road, is picking barberries. Allows that the soil thereabouts is excellent for fruit, but it is so rocky that he has not patience to plow it. That is the reason this tract is not cultivated. The yellow birches are generally bare. The sassafras in Sted Buttrick's pasture near to E. Hubbard's Wood, nearly so; leaves all withered. Much or most of the fever-bush still green, though somewhat wrinkled." 

There was Melvin, too, a-barberrying and nutting. He had got two baskets, one in each hand, and his game-bag, which hung from his neck, all full of nuts and barberries, and his mouth full of tobacco. Trust him to find where the nuts and berries grow. He is hunting all the year and he marks the bushes and the trees which are fullest, and when the time comes, for once leaves his gun, though not his dog, at home, and takes his baskets to the spot. It is pleasanter to me to meet him with his gun or with his baskets than to meet some portly caterer for a family, basket on arm, at the stalls of Quincy Market. Better Melvin's pignuts than the others' shagbarks. It is to be ob served that the best things are generally most abused, and so are not so much enjoyed as the worst. Shag barks are eaten by epicures with diseased appetites; pignuts by the country boys who gather them. So wood. 

Melvin says he has caught partridges in his hands. If there’s only one hole, knows they’ve not gone out. Sometimes shoots them through the snow. 

What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! 

Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. Such great rocky and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little; but think of the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair, both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon. 

There are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could actually pick two bushels of berries with out being seen by you on the other side. And they are not a quarter picked at last, by all creatures to gether. I walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side, seeming to issue from between the pines or other trees, as if it were they that were promenading there, not I. 

That very dense and handsome maple and pine grove opposite the pond-hole on this old Carlisle road is Ebby Hubbard's. [Sted Buttrick's, according to Melvin.] Melvin says there are those alive who remember mowing there. Hubbard loves to come with his axe in the fall or winter and trim up his woods. 

Melvin tells me that Skinner says he thinks he heard a wildcat scream in E. Hubbard's Wood, by the Close. It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats. They had better look out, or he will skin them, for that seems to have been the trade of his ancestors. How long Nature has manoeuvred to bring our Skinner within ear-shot of that wildcat's scream! Saved Ebby's wood to be the scene of it! Ebby, the wood-saver. 

Melvin says that Sted sold the principal log of one of those pasture oaks to Garty for ten dollars and got several cords besides. What a mean bribe to take the life of so noble a tree! 

Wesson is so gouty that he rarely comes out-of-doors, and is a spectacle in the street; but he loves to tell his old stories still! How, when he was stealing along to get a shot at his ducks, and was just upon them a red squirrel sounded the alarm, chickaree chickaree chickaree, and off they went; but he turned his gun upon the squirrel to avenge himself. 

It would seem as if men generally could better appreciate honesty of the John Beatton stamp, which gives you your due to a mill, than the generosity which habitually throws in the half-cent.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 20, 1857

Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees. See October 5, 1857 (“I see in most orchards the apples in heaps under the trees, and ladders slanted against their twiggy masses.”)

Yellowish election-cake fungi. See note to October 20, 1856 (“I notice, as elsewhere of late, a great many brownish-yellow (and some pink) election-cake fungi, eaten by crickets; about three inches in diameter. Some of those spread chocolate-colored ones have many grubs in them, though dry and dusty.")


What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! See June 10, 1853 ("What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called?. . . It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the Hog-Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks Place, the Old Lime-Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark‘s.Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman‘s Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called? . . .Shall we call it the Easterbrooks Country?")

Apples all gathered.

Only ladders here and there

lean against the trees.

A mass of yellow cloud, wreath upon wreath, drifting through the air, stratified by the wind.

October 6. 

October 6, 2017

P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook via Hubbard’s Close.

A beautiful bright afternoon, still warmer than yesterday. 

I carry my coat on my arm. This weather makes the locust to be heard, – many of them. I go along the hill from the old burying-ground and descend at Minott's. 

Everything — all fruits and leaves, the reddish-silvery feathery grass in clumps [Andropogon scoparius], even the surfaces of stone and stubble – are all ripe in this air. Yes, the hue of maturity has come even to that fine silver-topped feathery grass, two or three feet high, in clumps on dry places. I am riper for thought, too. 

Of trees which are numerous here and form consider able masses or groups, those now sufficiently changed in their color to attract the eye generally are red maple (in prime), — N. B., the white maples began in water long ago, but are rare, — white birch (perhaps in prime), young oaks in sprout-lands, etc. (especially young scar let oaks), white ash, white pines (when near), elms, buttonwoods, and perhaps walnuts. Some others are equally changed, but so rare or distant from the village as to make less impression on me. 

The shrubs now generally conspicuous from some distance, from their changed color and mass, are huckleberries and blueberries (high and low), smooth sumach and Rhus venenata, woodbine, button-bush, and grape perhaps. 

I observe too that the ferns of a rich brown (being sere), about swamps, etc., are an important feature. A broad belt of rich brown (and crisp) ferns stands about many a bright maple swamp. 

Some maples are in form and color like hickories, tall and irregular. It, indeed, admits of singular variety in form and color. I see one now shaped like a hickory which is a very rich yellow with a tinge of brown, which, when I turn my head slightly, concealing the trunk, looks like a mass of yellow cloud, wreath upon wreath, drifting through the air, stratified by the wind. 

The trumpet-weeds are perfectly killed sere brown along the fences. 

Think what a change, unperceived by many, has within a month come over the landscape! 

Then the general, the universal, hue was green. Now see those brilliant scarlet and glowing yellow trees in the low lands a mile off!

I see them, too, here and there on the sides of hills, standing out distinct, mere bright ... and squads perchance, often in long broken lines, and so apparently elevated by their distinct color that they seem arranged like the remnants of a morning mist just retreating in a broken line along the hillsides. Or see that crowd in the swamp half a mile through, all vying with one another, a blaze of glory. See those crimson patches far away on the hill sides, like dense flocks of crimson sheep, where the huckleberry reminds of recent excursions. See those patches of rich brown in the low grounds, where the ferns stand shrivelled. See the greenish-yellow phalanxes of birches, and the crisped yellowish elm-tops here and there. 

October 6, 2017

We are not prepared to believe that the earth is now so parti-colored, and would present to a bird's eye such distinct masses of bright color. A great painter is at work. 

The very pumpkins yellowing in the fields become a feature in the landscape, and thus they have shone, maybe, for a thousand years here. 

I have just read Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.” I am disappointed in not finding it a more out-of-door book, for I have heard that such was its character, but its title might have warned me. He does not describe Nature as Nature, but as Turner painted her, and though the work betrays that he has given a close attention to Nature, it appears to have been with an artist's and critic's design. How much is written about Nature as somebody has portrayed her, how little about Nature as she is, and chiefly concerns us, i.e. how much prose, how little poetry! 

Going through Ebby Hubbard's woods, I see thousands of white pine cones on the ground, fresh light brown, which lately opened and shed their seeds and lie curled up on the ground. The seeds are rather pleasant or nutritious tasting, taken in quantity, like beech nuts, methinks. 

I see a great quantity of hypopitys, now all sere, along the path in the woods beyond. Call it Pine-Sap Path. It seems to have been a favorable season for it. It was evidently withered earlier than the tobacco-pipe, which is still pretty white! 

Going through the Ministerial sprout-lands, I see the young oaks generally turning scarlet, and chestnuts, too, the young and also the old. 

The lower chestnut leaves are among the most interesting now when closely inspected, varying from green to yellow, very finely and richly peppered with brown and green spots, at length turning brown with a tinge of crimson; but they, like others, must be seen on the twig, for they fade immediately, or in one night, if plucked. These brilliant leaves are as tender and inclined to wilt and fade as flowers, indeed are more transitory.  

The amelanchier is yellowing and reddening a little, and also falling. 

I see Lobelia inflata leaves in the shade, a peculiar hoary white. 

I see one or two chestnut burs open on the trees. The squirrels, red and gray, are on all sides throwing them down. You cannot stand long in the woods without hearing one fall. 

As I came up the Turnpike, I smelt that strong scented —like carrion, etc. – obscene fungus at the mossy bank, and I saw a dozen of those large flat oval black bugs with light-colored shoulder-pieces, such as, methinks, I see on carrion, feeding on its remnants. 

. . . 

The frontier houses [in Maine] preserve many of the features of the logging-camp. . . . 

Looking up Trout Stream, it seemed as wild a place for a man to live as we had seen. What a difference between a residence there and within five minutes’ walk of the depot! What different men the two lives must turn out!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 6, 1857

I smelt that strong scented ... – obscene fungus at the mossy bank, See October 16, 1856 ("'Phallus impudicus, Stinking Morel, very fetid.' In all respects a most disgusting object, yet very suggestive. . . .as offensive to the eye as to the scent, the cap rapidly melting and defiling what it touched with a fetid, olivaceous, semiliquid matter.. . .")

The very pumpkins yellowing in the fields become a feature in the landscape, and thus they have shone, maybe, for a thousand years here. see August 12, 1854 ("It is already the yellowing year."); August 27, 1853 ("Topping corn now reveals the yellowing pumpkins."); See August 28, 1859 ("Pumpkins begin to be yellow."); September 4, 1859 ("Topping the corn, which has been going on some days, now reveals the yellow and yellowing pumpkins. This is a genuine New England scene. The earth blazes not only with sun-flowers but with sun-fruits."); September 18, 1858 ("The earth is yellowing in the September sun.") See also Basho:

A hundred years of landscape

in the garden’s

fallen leaves.

I see a great quantity of hypopitys, now all sere, along the path in the woods beyond. Call it Pine-Sap Path. See July 29, 1853 ("Hypopitys lanuginosa, American pine-sap, just pushing up . . . It is cream-colored or yellowish under the pines in Hubbard's Wood Path . . . A plant related to the tobacco-pipe."); August 13, 1858 ("Hypopytis abundantly out (how long ?), apparently a good while, in that long wood-path on the left side, under the oak wood, before you begin to rise, going from the river end . . . Not generally quite so high as the Monotropa uniflora which grows with it. I see still in their midst the dry upright brown spikes of last year’s seed-vessels.");   August 23, 1858 ("See an abundance of pine-sap on the right of Pine-sap Path."); October 14, 1858 ("On the top of Ball’s Hill, nearly half-way its length, the red pine-sap, quite fresh, apparently not long in bloom, the flower recurved. As last year, I suspect that this variety is later than the yellowish one, of which I have seen none for a long time. The last, in E. Hubbard’s wood, is all brown and withered.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pine-sap and Tobacco-pipe

Pumpkins yellowing 

in the fields – thus they have shone

for a thousand years.

The fields and woods seem now particularly empty and bare. Culling Ebby Hubbard's large oaks.

December 3.

A pleasant day. No snow yet (since that first whitening which lasted so long), nor do I see any ice to speak of. 

Hear and see, of birds, only a tree sparrow in the willows on the Turnpike. 

Met Goodwin going out with his gun. He shot (evidently) some crossbills once in Roxbury. He sometimes gets a skunk drowned in his muskrat or mink traps, and so can get at their secretion without being disturbed by the scent. He, too, has heard that it is a sure cure for the phthisic.

The fields and woods seem now particularly empty and bare. No cattle in pasture; only here and there a man carting or spreading manure. 

Every larger tree which I knew and admired is being gradually culled out and carried to mill. I see one or two more large oaks in E. Hubbard’s wood lying high on stumps, waiting for snow to be removed. 

I miss them as surely and with the same feeling that I do the old inhabitants out of the village street. To me they were something more than timber; to their owner not so.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 3, 1855

Hear and see, of birds, only a tree sparrow. See December 3, 1853 ("Two tree sparrows on Monroe's larch by the waterside. Larger than chip-birds, with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings, not to mention bright-chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast; all beneath pale-ash.")

Large oaks culled from E. Hubbard's wood.  See March 11, 1852 ("The woods I walked in in my youth are cut off. Is it not time that I ceased to sing?"); January 22, 1852 ("I love to look at Ebby Hubbard's oaks and pines on the hillside from Brister's Hill. Am thankful that there is one old miser who will not sell nor cut his woods."); January 9, 1855 ("This winter I hear the axe in almost every wood of any consequence left standing in the township."); October 20, 1860 ("I examine Ebby Hubbard's old oak and pine wood. The trees may be a hundred years old."); November 2, 1860 ("Ebby Hubbard's [wood]was never cut off but only cut out of.")