We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

April 9.

P. M. — To Goose Pond. 

The wind is as strong, and yet colder, being more from the north, than before. Through, I think, all this windy weather, or at least for about three weeks, the wind has regularly gone down with the sun, strong as it has been each day. 

As we go up the hill in the woods east of Hubbard's Close, I hear a singular sound through the roaring of the wind amid the trees, which I think at first some creature forty rods off, but it proves to be the creaking of one bough on another. When I knew what it was I was surprised to find it so near, even within a rod. 

It was occasioned by two little dead limbs, an inch or less in diameter, on two different white pines which stood four or five feet apart, — such limbs as are seen on every white pine below the living ones, some twelve feet from the ground. These with every motion of the trees in the wind were grating back and forth on each other, and had worn into one another, and this produced, not a mere coarse, grating sound, but a perfect viol sound, such as I never heard from trees before, — a jarring or vibratory creak, as if the bow leaped on the strings, for one limb was bow and the other string. 

It was on one key or note when the trees approached, and quite another and very fine and sharp when they receded. I raised one limb with a pole, and the music ceased. This was as musical as a viol, a forest viol, which might have suggested that instrument to some Orpheus wandering in the wood. He would only have to place a box of resonant wood beneath to complete a simple viol. 

We heard several others afterward which made a coarse, squeaking noise like a bird, but this would have suggested music to any one. It was mythologic, and an Indian might have referred it to a departed spirit. The fiddles made by the trees whose limbs cross one another, — played on by the wind! 

When we listened, in the wood, we heard all kinds of creaking and groaning sounds from the laboring trees. 

We go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hollows, to walk in this cold and blustering day. We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it. Now it is nearly smooth, and then there drops down on to it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and narrow blast of the icy north wind careering above, striking it, perhaps, by a point or an edge, and swiftly spreading along it, making a dark-blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns beneath. 

You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. 

It reminds me, too, of the swift Camilla on a field [of] grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. 

It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more opposite to him, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for you now see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you. 

A large fox-hole in Britton's hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hill side. 

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. 

It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lake lets by fine points and edges from time to time. 

And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol-creaking of bough on bough, that you would think music was being born again, as in the days of Orpheus. Orpheus and Apollo are certainly there taking lessons; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their "thunder." They are perforce silent, meditating new strains. 

When the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them. Sometimes it merely raises a single wave at one point, as if a fish darted near the surface. 

While to you looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look thus dark-blue, almost black, they are seen by another, standing low and more opposite to the sun, as the most brilliant sheeny and sparkling surface, too bright to look at. 

Thus water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water, seen from this side or that, — that is, as you look at the inclined surface of the wave which reflects the sun, or at the shaded side. 

For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the north west, making high waves and much shadow. 

We can sit in the deep hollows in the woods, like Frosty Hollow near Ripple Lake, for example, and find it quite still and warm in the sun, as if a different atmosphere lurked there; but from time to time a cold puff from the rude Boreas careering overhead drops on us, and reminds us of the general character of the day. 

While we lie at length on the dry sedge, nourishing spring thoughts, looking for insects, and counting the rings on old stumps. 

These old gray or whitish stumps, with their porous structure where the ducts are seen, are very much like bones, — the bones of trees. I break a little cube out of this old oak stump, which was sawed off some thirty years ago, and which has about one hundred rings, — a piece sharply square-cornered and exactly the form of a square bunch of matches; and, the sawed end being regularly channelled by time in the direction of the ducts and of the silver grain, it looks precisely like the loose ends, or dipped end of the bunch, and would be mistaken for such on any shelf. 

Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. 

They may say to the first woodland flowers, We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 9, 1859

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. See March 2, 1860 ("The great phenomenon these days is the sparkling blue water, — a richer blue than the sky ever is. The flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. . . . These are ripple days begun, — not yet in woodland pools, where is ice yet. "); March 9, 1860 (“March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light-tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert to hear the first birds.”); March 14, 1860 ("I see some dark ripples already drop and sweep over the surface of [Walden], as they will ere long over Ripple Lake and other pools in the wood."); April 15, 1860 ("Ripples spread fan-like over Fair Haven Pond, from Lee's Cliff, as over Ripple Lake."); April 21, 1859 ("This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it,. . . this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real"); April 29, 1859 ("There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake.")

The flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the northwest. See April 9, 1856 ("The water on the meadows now, looking with the sun, is a far deeper and more exciting blue than the heavens."); see also March 29, 1852 ("The water on the meadows looks very dark from the street. Their color depends on the position of the beholder in relation to the direction of the wind.") Also seeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blue waters in Spring