8.30 A. M. — Up river to Fair Haven by boat.
A pleasant morning; the song of the earliest birds, i.e. tree sparrows, (now decidedly) and song sparrows and bluebirds, in the air. A red-Wing’s gurgle from a willow.
The Emys picta, now pretty numerous, when young and fresh, with smooth black scales without moss or other imperfection, unworn, and with claws perfectly sharp, is very handsome. When the scales are of this clear, though dull, black, the six middle ones, counting from side to side, are edged forward with broad dull greenish-yellow borders, the others with a narrow whitish border, and the singular vermilion and yellow marks of the marginal scales extend often on to the lateral scales. The concentric lines of growth are in distinguishable. The fore and hind legs and tail are slashed or streaked horizontally with broad clear vermilion and also a fine yellow line or two, answering to those on the hinge scales continued, showing the tenant to be one with the house he occupies. Beneath it is a clear buff.
He who painted the tortoise thus, what were his designs?
At Lee’s Cliff and this side, I see half a dozen buff edged butterflies (Vanessa Antiopa) and pick up three dead or dying, two together, the edges of their wings gone. Several are fluttering over the dry rock débris under the cliff, in whose crevices probably they have -wintered. Two of the three I pick up are not dead, though they will not fly. Verily their day is a short one. What has checked their frail life? Within, the buff edge is black with bright sky-blue spots, and the main part within is a purplish brown. Those little oblong spots on the black ground are light as you look directly down on them, but from one side they vary through violet to a crystalline rose-purple.
I can remember now some thirty years — after a fashion — of life in Concord, and every spring there are many dead suckers floating belly upward on the meadows. This phenomenon of dead suckers is as constant as the phenomenon of living ones; nay, as a phenomenon it is far more apparent.
Farmer thinks pickerel may have been frozen through half a day and yet come to. Instances pickerel he caught a very cold day on Bateman’s Pond, which he brought home frozen and put in a pail of water in his cellar and after found them alive.
A Mr. Parkhurst of Carlisle assures him that though minnows put into a half-hogshead of water will die in forty-eight hours unless you change the water, if you put with it a piece of granite a foot square they will live all winter, and that he keeps his minnows in this way.
A pleasing sight this of the earlier painted tortoises which are seen along the edge of the flooded meadows, often three or four suddenly dimpling the smooth surface of a ditch, which had been sunning on a tussock, sluggish moving flakes of clear black. Soon they rise again and put their heads out warily, looking about and showing the yellow stripes on their necks. They seem to feel the very jar of the ground as you approach. They rest with their shells at an angle in the water, their heads out and their feet outstretched, or partly bury themselves in the grassy bottom. Often hindered by the bushes, between which their shells are caught. Poking their heads through, they are impeded by their shells. The very earliest I see moving along the bottom on the meadows, but soon after they begin to lie out in the sun on the banks and tussocks as I have mentioned.
The Emys guttata is found in brooks and ditches. I passed three to-day, lying cunningly quite motionless, with heads and feet drawn in, on the bank of a little grassy ditch, close to a stump, in the sun, on the russet flattened grass, like snails, or rather scales, under which some insects might lurk, with their high-arched backs. When out of water they are the less exposed to observation by their shells drying and their spots being dimmed.
Do I ever see a yellow-spot turtle in the river? Do I ever see a wood tortoise in the South Branch?
There is consolation in the fact that a particular evil, which perhaps we suffer, is of a venerable antiquity, for it proves its necessity and that it is part of the order, not disorder, of the universe. When I realize that the mortality of suckers in the spring is as old a phenomenon, perchance, as the race of suckers itself, I contemplate it with serenity and joy even, as one of the signs of spring. Thus they have fallen on fate. And so, many a fisherman is not seen on the shore who the last spring did not fail here.
Flood tells me to-day that he finds no frost to trouble him in Monroe’s garden. He can put his spade or fork in anywhere.
Chestnut, evidently because it is packed as in a little chest.
The maple sap has been flowing well for two or three weeks.
When I witness the first plowing and planting, I acquire a long-lost confidence in the earth, —that it will nourish the seed that is committed to its bosom. I am surprised to be reminded that there is warmth in it. We have not only warmer skies, then, but a warmer earth. The frost is out of it, and we may safely commit these seeds to it in some places. Yesterday I walked with Farmer beside his team and saw one furrow turned quite round his field. What noble work is plowing, with the broad and solid earth for material, the ox for fellow-laborer, and the simple but efficient plow for tool! Work that is not done in any shop, in a cramped position, work that tells, that concerns all men, which the sun shines and the rain falls on, and the birds sing over! You turn over the whole vegetable mould, expose how , many grubs, and put a new aspect on the face of the earth. It comes pretty near to making a world. Redeeming a swamp does, at any rate. A good plowman is a terrae filius. The plowman, we all know, whistles as he drives his team afield.
The broad buff edge of the Vanessa Antiopa’s wings harmonizes with the russet ground it flutters over, and as it stands concealed in the winter, with its wings folded above its back, in a cleft in the rocks, the gray brown under side of its wings prevents its being distinguished from the rocks themselves.
Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1857
Farmer thinks pickerel may have been frozen through half a day and yet come to. See March 20, 1857("When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. "); January 4, 1856 ("[T]hinking of what I had heard about fishes coming to life again after being frozen, on being put into water, I thought I would try it. . . . ")
The mortality of suckers in the spring. See March 27,1858 ("I saw on the 22d a sucker which apparently had been dead a week or two at least. Therefore they must begin to die late in the winter."); March 20, 1857 ("[the phenomenon I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter."); March 19, 1857 ("I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker."); April 14, 1856 ("I see the first dead sucker"); April 10, 1855("Saw a tolerably fresh sucker floating."); May 23, 1854 ("How many springs shall I continue to see the common sucker (Catostomus Bostoniensis) floating dead on our river!")
Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed,. . ., and I may safely record all that I remember. See March 27, 1857 ("The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory."). See also July 23, 1851 ("Put an interval between the impression and the expression, - wait till the seed germinates naturally.”); May 5, 1852 ("I succeed best when I recur to my experience not too late, but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness."); January 10, 1854 ("What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day, ... as any view changes to one who is journeying amid mountains when he has increased the distance."); April 20, 1854 ("I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following.”).
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