Kindling a fire on the pond by the side of the island, we saw the fox.

February 2. 

6° below at about 8 a. m. Clock has stopped. Teams squeak. 

2 p. m. — To Fair Haven Pond. 

The river, which was breaking up, is frozen over again. The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized. This new ice for forty rods together is thickly covered with these rosettes, often as thick as snow, an inch deep, and sometimes in ridges like frozen froth three inches high. Sometimes they are in a straight line along a crack. The frozen breath of the river at a myriad breathing-holes. 

A thaw began the 7th of January, and it was mild and thawing most of the time for the rest of that month; but with February we have genuine winter again. Almost all the openings in the river are closed again, and the new ice is covered with rosettes. 

It blowed considerably yesterday, though it is very still to-day, and the light, dry snow, especially on the meadow ice and the river, was remarkably plowed and drifted by it, and now presents a very wild and arctic scene. Indeed, no part of our scenery is ever more arctic than the river and its meadows now, though the snow was only some three inches deep on a level. It is cold and perfectly still, and you walk over a level snowy tract. 

It is a sea of white waves of nearly uniform shape and size. Each drift is a low, sharp promontory directed toward the northwest, and showing which way the wind blowed with occasional small patches of bare ice amid them. It is exactly as if you walked over a solid sea where the waves rose about two feet high. These promontories have a general resemblance to one another. Many of them are perfect tongues of snow more or less curving and sharp.  

Commonly the wind has made a little hollow in the snow directly behind this tongue, it may be to the ice, spoon-shaped or like a tray, — if small, a cradle in the snow. Again it is a complete canoe, the tongue being its bows.

The many distinct firm ridges on a slope of the drift — as if the edges of so many distinct layers cropped out — form undulating parallel lines of great interest. Sometimes yet smaller hollows or cradles, not reaching to the ice and at right angles with the low ridges of the drift, remind you of panelling. Again these oval hollows produce a regular reticulation. 

One hour you have bare ice; the next, a level counter pane of snow; and the next, the wind has tossed and sculptured it into these endless and varied forms. It is such a scene as Boothia Felix may present, — if that is any wilder than Concord. 

I go sliding over the few bare spots, getting a foothold for my run on the very thin sloping and ridged snow. The snow is not thus drifted in fields and meadows generally, but chiefly where there was an icy foundation on which it slid readily. The whole of the snow has evidently shifted, perhaps several times, and you cannot tell whether some slight ridges an inch high are the foundation of a drift just laid or the relics of one removed. 

Behind a tuft of bushes it is collected deep. I forgot to say that all the ice between the rosettes was thinly sprinkled with very slender grain like spiculae, sometimes two together. 

The sky was all overcast, but the sun's place quite distinct. The cloud about the sun had a cold, dry, windy look, as if the cloud, elsewhere homogeneous cold slaty, were there electrified and arranged like iron-filings about the sun, its fibres, so to speak, more or less raying from the sun as a centre. 

About 3 p. m. I noticed a distinct fragment of rainbow, about as long as wide, on each side of the sun, one north and the other south and at the same height above the horizon with the sun, all in a line parallel with the horizon; and, as I thought, there was a slight appearance of a bow. 

The sun-dogs, if that is their name, were not so distinctly bright as an ordinary rainbow, but were plainly orange-yellow and a peculiar light violet-blue, the last color looking like a hole in the cloud, or a thinness through which you saw the sky. This lasted perhaps half an hour, and then a bow about the sun became quite distinct, but only those parts where the sun-dogs were were distinctly rainbow-tinted, the rest being merely reddish-brown and the clouds within finely raying from the sun more or less. But higher up, so that its centre would have been in the zenith or apparently about in the zenith, was an arc of a distinct rainbow. A rainbow right overhead. Is this what is called a parhelion? 

It is remarkable that the straw-colored sedge of the meadows, which in the fall is one of the least noticeable colors, should, now that the landscape is mostly covered with snow, be perhaps the most noticeable of all objects in it for its color, and an agreeable contrast to the snow. 

I frequently see where oak leaves, absorbing the heat of the sun, have sunk into the ice an inch in depth and afterward been blown out, leaving a perfect type of the leaf with its petiole and lobes sharply cut, with perfectly upright sides, so that I can easily tell the species of oak that made it. Sometimes these moulds have been evenly filled with snow while the ice is dark, and you have the figure of the leaf in white. 

I see where some meadow mouse — if not mole — just came to the surface of the snow enough to break it with his back for three or four inches, then put his head out and at once withdrew it. 

We walked, as usual, on the fresh track of a fox, peculiarly pointed, and sometimes the mark of two toe nails in front separate from the track of the foot in very thin snow. And as we were kindling a fire on the pond by the side of the island, we saw the fox himself at the inlet of the river. He was busily examining along the sides of the pond by the button-bushes and willows, smelling in the snow. 

Not appearing to regard us much, he slowly explored along the shore of the pond thus, half-way round it; at Pleasant Meadow, evidently looking for mice (or moles?) in the grass of the bank, smelling in the shallow snow there amid the stubble, often retracing his steps and pausing at particular spots. He was eagerly searching for food, intent on finding some mouse to help fill his empty stomach. 

He had a blackish tail and blackish feet. Looked lean and stood high. The tail peculiarly large for any creature to carry round. He stepped daintily about, softly, and is more to the manor born than a dog. It was a very arctic scene this cold day, and I suppose he would hardly have ventured out in a warm one.

The fox seems to get his living by industry and perseverance. He runs smelling for miles along the most favorable routes, especially the edge of rivers and ponds, until he smells the track of a mouse beneath the snow or the fresh track of a partridge, and then follows it till he comes upon his game. After exploring thus a great many quarters, after hours of fruitless search, he succeeds. 

There may be a dozen partridges resting in the snow within a square mile, and his work is simply to find them with the aid of his nose. Compared with the dog, he affects me as high-bred, unmixed. There is nothing of the mongrel in him. He belongs to a noble family which has seen its best days, — a younger son.

Now and then he starts, and turns and doubles on his track, as if he heard or scented danger. (I watch him through my glass.) He does not mind us at the distance of only sixty rods. I have myself seen one place where a mouse came to the surface to-day in the snow. Probably he has smelt out many such galleries. Perhaps he seizes them through the snow. 

I had a transient vision of one mouse this winter, and that the first for a number of years. 

I have seen a good many of those snails left on the ice during the late thaw, as the  caterpillars, etc., were.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1860

6° below at about 8 a. m. Clock has stopped. See February 7, 1855 ("Thermometer at about 7.30 A. M. gone into the bulb, -19° at least. The cold has stopped the clock.")

The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized. See December 28, 1852 ("The rosettes in the ice, as Channing calls them, now and for some time have attracted me."); December 21, 1854 ("What C. calls ice-rosettes, i.e. those small pinches of crystallized snow . . . I think it is a sort of hoar frost on the ice."); January 7, 1856 ("It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter"); February 13, 1859 ("Ice which froze yesterday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn with fibrous frost crystals . . . sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two . . . I think that this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice and froze in the night"); December 29, 1859 ("On the thin black ice lately formed on these open places, the breath of the water has made its way up through and is frozen into a myriad of little rosettes.")

With February we have genuine winter again. Almost all the openings in the river are closed again, and the new ice is covered with rosettes. See February 1, 1855 ("The river falling all day, no water has burst out through the ice next the shore, and it is now one uninterrupted level white blanket of snow quite to the shore on every side.");  The weather is still clear, cold, and unrelenting. I have walked much on the river this winter, but, ever since it froze over, it has been on a snow-clad river, or pond. They have been river walks because the snow was shallowest there. February 5, 1856 ("The weather is still clear, cold, and unrelenting. I have walked much on the river this winter, but, ever since it froze over, it has been on a snow-clad river, or pond. They have been river walks because the snow was shallowest there.") See if a man can think his summer thoughts now.); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February is Mid-Winter

No part of our scenery is ever more arctic than the river and its meadows now. See February 3, 1852 (The landscape covered with snow two feet thick, seen by moonlight from these Cliffs, gleaming in the moon and of spotless white. Who can believe that this is the habitable globe? The scenery is wholly arctic.")

It is remarkable that the straw-colored sedge of the meadows. . . should . . . be perhaps the most noticeable of all objects in it for its color, and an agreeable contrast to the snow.  See  February 13, 1860 ("The principal charm of a winter walk over ice is perhaps the peculiar and pure colors exhibited . . .The yellow of the sun and the morning and evening sky, and of the sedge (or straw-color, bright when lit on edge of ice at evening), and all three in hoar frost crystals."); February 12, 1860 ("I thus find myself returning over a green sea, winding amid purple islets, and the low sedge of the meadow on one side is really a burning yellow."). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Winter Colors

The sun-dogs, if that is their name. See February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs.")

We saw the fox himself at the inlet of the river busily examining along the sides of the pond by the button-bushes and willows, smelling in the snow. See January 21, 1857 (“It is remarkable how many tracks of foxes you will see quite near the village, where they have been in the night, and yet a regular walker will not glimpse one oftener than once in eight or ten years. ”); December 24, 1856 ("Do not see a track of any animal till returning near the Well Meadow Field, where many foxes, one of whom I have a glimpse of, had been coursing back and forth in the path and near it for three quarters of a mile. They had made quite a path"); February 10, 1856 ("Returning, I saw a fox on the railroad, at the crossing below the shanty site, eight or nine rods from me. He looked of a dirty yellow and lean. I did not notice the white tip to his tail. Seeing me, he pricked up his ears and at first ran up and along the east bank on the crust, then changed his mind and came down the steep bank, crossed the railroad before me, and, gliding up the west bank, disappeared in the woods. . . . “); November 25, 1857 ("Returning, I see a fox run across the road in the twilight from Potter’s into Richardson’s woods. He is on a canter, but I see the whitish tip of his tail. I feel a certain respect for him, because, though so large, he still maintains himself free and wild in our midst"); May 20, 1858 (“[J]ust before entering the part called Laurel Glen, I heard a noise, and saw a fox running off along the shrubby side-hill. . .It had a dirty or dark brown tail, with very little white to the tip. . . . I heard a bark behind me, and, looking round, saw an old fox on the brow of the hill on the west side of the valley, amid the bushes, about ten rods off, looking down at me. . . . I then saw a full-grown fox, perhaps the same as the last, cross the valley through the thin low wood fifteen or twenty rods behind me, but from east to west, pausing and looking at me anxiously from time to time. . . .It was a very wild sight to see the wolf-like parent circling about me in the thin wood, from time to time pausing to look and bark at me.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

The fresh track of a fox, peculiarly pointed, and sometimes the mark of two toe nails in front separate from the track of the foot in very thin snow. See February 5, 1854 ("The tracks were about two inches long, or a little less, by one and a half wide, shaped thus where the snow was only half an inch deep on ice")

 

February 2, 2014

Perhaps he seizes them through the snow. See January 7, 1860 ("It would be remarkable if a fox could smell and catch a mouse passing under the snow beneath him!")

I had a transient vision of one mouse this winter, and that the first for a number of years.  See January 4, 1860 ("The woods are nightly thronged with little creatures which most have never seen."); February 20, 1855 ("Once in a year one glances by like a flash through the grass or ice at our feet, and that is for the most part all that we see of them.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

February 2.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 2

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

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