Tracking Melvin

February 5. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

2 p. m., 40°. 

I see where crows have pecked the tufts of cladonia lichens which peep out of the snow, pulling them to pieces, no doubt looking for worms. Also have eaten the frozen-thawed apples under the trees, tracking all the ground over there. 

February 1st, though so cold and the snow so dry, as it blowed pretty hard, was a day of drift behind northerly walls, and when those shell-like drifts were formed, as well as the wild drifts of Hubbard's meadow described on the 3d. 

I see at the Assabet stone bridge where, apparently, one or two otters travelled about on the ice last night in the thin snow. The river is open eight or ten rods there, and I noticed their tracks all about the river and close to the edge of the ice, thin as it was, for a dozen rods above and below the bridge. At first, being at a distance, I thought them dog-tracks, but I might have known that no dogs would ever have run about so there, on that thin ice and so near the edge of it. 

They were generally each four being from fifteen to twenty-four inches apart. Occasionally the track was somewhat like a rabbit's. I saw where one had apparently dragged himself along the ice. They had entered the water in many places, also travelled along under the slanting ice next the bank long  distances. They were evidently attracted by that open water. There was no distinct sliding place. 

Coming home last night in the twilight, I recognized a neighbor a dozen rods off by his walk or carriage, though it was so dark that I could not see a single feature of his person. Indeed, his person was all covered up excepting his face and hands, and I could not possibly have distinguished these at this distance from another man's. Nor was it owing to any peculiarity in his dress, for I should have known him though he had had on a perfectly new suit. It was because the man within the clothes moved them in a peculiar manner that I knew him thus at once at a distance and in the twilight. He made a certain figure in any clothes he might wear, and moved in it in a peculiar manner. Indeed, we have a very intimate knowledge of one another; we see through thick and thin; spirit meets spirit. 

A man hangs out innumerable signs by which we may know him. So, last summer, I knew another neighbor half a mile off up the river, though I did not see him, by the manner in which the breath from his lungs and mouth, i. e. his voice, made the air strike my ear. In that manner he communicated himself to all his acquaintance within a diameter of one mile (if it were all up and down the river). 

So I remember to have been sure once in a very dark night who was preceding me on the sidewalk, — though I could not see him, — by the sound of his tread. I was surprised to find that I knew it.

And to-day, seeing a peculiar very long track of a man in the snow, who has been along up the river this morning, I guessed that it was George Melvin, because it was accompanied by a hound's track. There was a thin snow on the ice, and I observed that he not only furrowed the snow for a foot before he completed his step, but that the (toe) of his track was always indefinite, as if his boot had been worn out and prolonged at the toe. I noticed that I and my companion made a clear and distinct track at the toe, but when I experimented, and tried to make a track like this by not lifting my feet but gliding and partly scuffing along, I found myself walking just like Melvin, and that perfectly convinced me that it was he. 

We have no occasion to wonder at the instinct of a dog. In these last two instances I surpassed the instinct of the dog. 

It may always be a question how much or how little of a man goes to any particular act. It is not merely by taking time and by a conscious effort that he betrays himself. A man is revealed, and a man is concealed, in a myriad unexpected ways; e.g., I can hardly think of a more effectual way of disguising neighbors to one another than by stripping them naked.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February, 5, 1860

I see at the Assabet stone bridge where, apparently, one or two otters travelled about on the ice last night in the thin snow. See February 4, 1855 ("See this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers. The separate foot-tracks are quite round, more than two inches in diameter, showing the five toes distinctly in the snow, which is about half an inch deep.”)February 8, 1857 ("The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through. I should not wonder if one went up and down the whole length of the river. "); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare.”); February 20, 1856 ("Up Assabet. See a broad and distinct otter-trail, made last night or yesterday."); February 22, 1856 ("Just below this bridge begins an otter track, several days old yet very distinct, which I trace half a mile down the river."). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Otter

Seeing a peculiar very long track of a man in the snow, who has been along up the river this morning, I guessed that it was George Melvin, because it was accompanied by a hound's track. See December 2, 1856 ("Saw Melvin's lank bluish-white black-spotted hound, and Melvin with his gun near, going home at eve. . . . I trust the Lord will provide us with another Melvin when he is gone. How good in him to follow his own bent . . . Awkward, gawky, loose-hung, dragging his legs after him."); December 3, 1856 ("I see Melvin all alone filling his sphere, in russet suit, which no other could fill or suggest. He takes up as much room in nature as the most famous.”)