December 21.
Sunday.
Think what a pitiful kind of life ours is, eating our kindred animals! and in some places one another! Some of us (the Esquimaux), half whose life is spent in the dark, wholly dependent on one or two animals not many degrees removed from themselves for food, clothing, and fuel, and partly for shelter; making their sledges "of small fragments of porous bones of whale, admirably knit together by thongs of hide" (Kane's last book, vol. i, page 205), thus getting about, sliding about, on the bones of our cousins.
Where Kane wintered in the Advance in 1853-54, on the coast of Greenland, about 78 1° north latitude, or further north than any navigator had been excepting Parry at Spitzbergen, he meets with Esquimaux, and "the fleam-shaped tips of their lances were of unmistakable steel." "The metal was obtained in traffic from the more southern tribes." Such is trade.
P. M. — To Walden.
The pond is open again in the middle, owing to the rain of yesterday.
I go across to the cliffs by way of the Andromeda Ponds. How interesting and wholesome their color now! A broad level thick stuff, without a crevice in it, composed of the dull brown-red andromeda. Is it not the most uniform and deepest red that covers a large surface now? No withered oak leaves are nearly as red at present. In a broad hollow amid the hills, you have this perfectly level red stuff, marked here and there only with gray streaks or patches of bare high blueberry bushes, etc., and all surrounded by a light border of straw-colored sedge, etc.
Even the little red buds of the Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum and vacillans on the now bare and dry-looking stems attract me as I go through the open glades between the first Andromeda Pond and the Well Meadow Field.
Many twigs of the Vaccinium vacillans appear to have been nibbled off, and some of its buds have unfolded, apparently in the fall.
I observe sage willows with many leaves on them still.
Apparently the red oak retains much fewer leaves than the white, scarlet, and black. I notice the petioles of both the black and red twisted in that peculiar way.
The red oak leaves look thinner and flatter, and therefore perhaps show the lobes more, than those of the black.
The white oak leaves are the palest and most shrivelled, the lightest, perhaps a shade of buff, but they are of various shades, some pretty dark with a salmon tinge.
The swamp white oak leaves (which I am surprised to find Gray makes a variety (discolor) of the Quercus Prinus) are very much like the shrub oak, but more curled. These two are the best preserved, though they do not hang on so well as the white and scarlet. Both remarkable for their thick, leathery, sound leaves, uninjured by insects, and their very light downy under sides.
The black oak leaves are the darkest brown, with clear or deep yellowish-brown under sides, obovate in outline.
The scarlet oak leaves, which are very numerous still, are of a ruddy color, having much blood in their cheeks. They are all winter the reddest on the hillsides. They still spread their ruddy fingers to the breeze. After the shrub and swamp white, they are perhaps the best preserved of any I describe.
The red oak leaves are a little lighter brown than the black oak, less yellowish beneath. Their lobes, methinks, are narrower and straighter-sided. They are the color of their own acorns.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 21, 1856
Think what a pitiful kind of life ours is, eating our kindred animals! See
December 12, 1856 ("At length, without having solved any of these problems, we fatten and kill and eat some of our cousins!"); and
Knud Rasmussen (“The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, . . .” )
The pond is open again in the middle, owing to the rain of yesterday. See
December 19,1856 ("Walden froze completely over last night. . .");
December 20, 1858 (“Walden is frozen over, except two small spots, less than half an acre in all, in middle.”);
December 21, 1855 (“Walden is skimmed over, all but an acre, in my cove.”);
December 21, 1854 (“Walden is frozen over, apparently about two inches thick.”)
Winter colors and oak leaves. See December 21, 1854 ("Fair Haven Pond, for instance, a perfectly level plain of white snow, untrodden as yet by any fisherman, surrounded by snow-clad hills, dark evergreen woods, and reddish oak leaves, so pure and still. The last rays of the sun falling on the Baker Farm reflect a clear pink color.");
December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.”)
See also November 29, 1857 ("Again I am struck by the singularly wholesome colors of the withered oak leaves, especially the shrub oak"); December 11, 1858 ("While the oak leaves look redder and warmer, the pines look much darker since the snow has fallen (the hemlocks darker still)"); December 13, 1856 (“A fine healthy and handsome scarlet oak . . .The leaves have a little redness in them.”); December 13, 1858 ("A damp day brings out the color of oak leaves, somewhat as of lichens. They are of a brighter and deeper leather-color, richer and more wholesome"); December 18, 1859 (“The withered oak leaves, being thoroughly saturated with moisture, are of a livelier color.”);
December 20, 1851 ("Red, white, green, and, in the distance, dark brown are the colors of the winter landscape. . . . The red shrub oaks on the white ground of the plain beneath make a pretty scene. . . .The red oak leaves are even more fresh and glossy than the white."); December 21, 1856 (“The red oak leaves are a little lighter brown than the black oak, less yellowish beneath.”);
December 23, 1855 ("These are the colors of the earth now.");
December 31, 1854 ("The shadows on the snow are indigo-blue. The pines look very dark. The white oak leaves are a cinnamon-color, the black and red oak leaves a reddish brown or leather-color.’); January 2, 1859 (“The color of young oaks of different species is still distinct, but more faded and blended, becoming a more uniform brown”)
