The pond is frozen about the edges.

December 18. 

December 18, 2018

P. M. — To Walden. 

The pond is merely frozen a little about the edges. I see various little fishes lurking under this thin, transparent ice, close up to the edge or shore, especially where the shore is flat and water shoal. 

They are little shiners with the dark longitudinal stripe, about an inch and a half long, perch, and one pickerel about a foot long. They are all a peculiar rich-brown color seen thus through the ice. They love to get up as close to the shore as possible, and when you walk along you scare them out. 

I cast a stone on the ice over a perch six inches long, thinking only to stun it, but killed it so. 

The ice is about one inch thick. I notice that it is firmly frozen to the shore, so that there is no rise and fall as when it was water, or at least nothing equal to that, but the ice has been cracked with a great many parallel cracks six inches to a foot from the shore. Yet apparently no water has oozed out there. 

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops. He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove, but he adds that it was dangerous, for even a small dead limb broken off by the wind and falling from such a height would kill a man at once.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 18, 1858

This thin, transparent ice, close up to the edge or shore. See December 19, 1856 ("The ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transparent green ice, through which I see the bottom.")

I cast a stone on the ice over a perch six inches long, thinking only to stun it. See December 2, 1857 ("I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow.")

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove. See October 4, 1851 ("He loves to walk in a swamp in windy weather and hear the wind groan through the pines."); February 29, 1856 ("I willingly listen to the stories he has told me half a dozen times already.“); February 20, 1857 ("Minott always sits in the corner behind the door, close to the stove, with commonly the cat by his side. See also April 3, 1854 ("This is methinks the first hazy day, and the sough of the wind in the pines sounds warmer, whispering of summer.")