What a tumult at the stone bridge,

January 22.

Heavy rain in the night and half of today, with very high wind from the southward, washing off the snow and filling the road with water. The roads are well-nigh impassable to foot-travellers.  In some places for fifteen rods the whole road is like a lake from three to fifteen inches deep.

It is very exciting to see where was so lately only ice and snow, dark wavy lakes, dashing in furious torrents through the commonly dry channels under the causeways, to hear only the rush and roar of waters and look down on mad billows where in summer is commonly only dry pebbles. 

Great cakes of ice lodged and sometimes tilted up against the causeway bridges, over which the water pours as over a dam.  

What a tumult at the stone bridge, where cakes of ice a rod in diameter and a foot thick are carried round and round by the eddy in circles eight or ten rods in diameter, and rarely get a chance to go down-stream, while others are seen coming up edgewise from below in the midst of the torrent!

The muskrats driven out of their holes by the water are exceedingly numerous, yet many of their cabins are above water on the south branch. Here there are none. 

We saw fifteen or twenty, at least, between Derby's Bridge and the Tarbell Spring, either swimming with surprising swiftness up or down or across the stream to avoid us, or sitting at the water's edge, or resting on the edge of the ice (one refreshed himself there after its cold swim regardless of us, probed its fur with its nose and scratched its ear like a dog ) or on some alder bough just on the surface. 

They frequently swam toward an apple tree in the midst of the water in the vain hope of finding a resting-place and refuge there. I saw one, looking quite a reddish brown, busily feeding on some plant just at the water's edge, thrusting his head under for it. 

But I hear the sound of Goodwin's gun upstream and see his bag stuffed out with their dead bodies. 

The radical leaves of the yellow thistle are now very fresh and conspicuous in Tarbell's meadow, the rain having suddenly carried off the snow. 

H. D.Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1855

The muskrats driven out of their holes by the water are exceedingly numerous . . . I hear the sound of Goodwin's gun upstream and see his bag stuffed out with their dead bodies. See January 22, 1859 (".Many are out in boats, steering outside the ice of the river over the newly flooded meadows, shooting musquash."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash