18 January 1858 – 24 January 1858

Wednesday. Go to Lynn to lecture, via Cambridge. 4.30 p. Ma. — At Jonathan Buffum’s, Lynn. Lecture in John B. Alley’s parlor. Mr. J. Buffum describes to me ancient wolf-traps, made probably by the early settlers in Lynn, perhaps after an Indian model; one some two miles from the shore near Saugus, another more northerly; holes say seven feet deep, about as long, and some three feet wide, stoned up very smoothly, and perhaps converging a little, so that the wolf could not get out. Tradition says that a wolf and a squaw were one morning found in the same hole, staring at each other.

At the Dugan Desert, I notice, under the overhanging or nearly horizontal small white oaks and shrub oaks about the edge, singular little hollows in the sand, evidently made by drops of rain or melting snow falling from the same part of the twig, a foot or two, on the same spot a long time. They are very numerous under every such low horizontal bough, on an average about three quarters of an inch apart or more. They are a third of an inch wide and a quarter to even three quarters of an inch deep; made some days ago evi- dently. The F. hyemalis about. I hear that the Emerson children found ladies’-delights out yesterday.

F. hyemalis.

Saturday. The wonderfully mild and plea- sant weather continues. The ground has been bare since the 11th. This morning was colder than before. I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time. P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook. A fine afternoon. There has been but little use for gloves this winter, though I have been surveying a great deal for three months. ‘The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March. Standing on the bridge over the Mill Brook on the Turnpike, there being but little ice on the south side, I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring. I see the terminal shield fern very fresh, as an ever- green, at Saw Mill Brook, and (I think it is) the mar- ginal fern and Lycopodium lucidulum. I go up the brook, walking on it most of the way, surprised to find that it will bear me. How it falls from rock to rock, as down a flight of stairs, all through that rocky wood, from the swamp which is its source to the Everett farm! The bays or more stagnant parts are thickest frozen, the channel oftenest open, and here and there the water has overflowed the ice and covered it with a thickening mass of glistening spicule. The white markings on the under side are very rich and varied, — the currency of the brook, the impression of its fleeting bubbles even. It comes out of a meadow of about an acre. : I go near enough to Flint’s Pond, about 4 Pp. M., to hear it thundering. In summer I should not have suspected its presence an eighth of a mile off through the woods, but in such a winter day as this it speaks and betrays itself. Returning through Britton’s field, I notice the stumps of chestnuts cut a dozen years ago. This tree grows rapidly, and one layer seems not to adhere very firmly to another. I can easily count the concentric circles of growth on these old stumps as I stand over them, for they are worn into conspicuous furrows along the lines of the pores of the wood. One or more rings often gape an eighth of an inch or more, at about their twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, when the growth, in three or four cases that I examined, was most rapid. Looking toward the woods in the horizon, it is seen to be very hazy. At Ditch Pond I hear what I suppose to be a fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds so through the wood, while I am in the hollow, that I cannot tell from which side it comes. I hear it bark forty or fifty times at least. It is a peculiar sound, quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know. Walden, I think,. begins to crack and boom first on the south side, which is first in the shade, for I hear it cracking there, though it is still in the sun around me. It is not so sonorous and like the dumping of frogs as I have heard it, but more like the cracking of crock- ery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. Most shiv- ering, splintery, screeching cracks these are, as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is prob- ably nine or ten inches. Methinks my weight sinks it and helps to crack sometimes. Who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and unimagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mys- terious auspicious circumstances? Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? Indi- viduals accept their fate and live according to it, as the Indian does. Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully, —is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the his- tory of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation. To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be con- scious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless Nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary. Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well, that he was taller than Father, and used to ride out to their house — she was a Stone and lived where she and her husband did afterward, now Darius Merriam’s — when they made cheeses, to drink the whey, being in consumption. She said that she remembered Grand- mother too, Jennie Burns, how she came to the school- room (in Middle Street (?), Boston) once, leading her little daughter Elizabeth, the latter so small that she could not tell her name distinctly, but spoke thick and lispingly, — “‘ Elizabeth Orrock Thoreau.” ! The dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. The former has attained to more clearness in his bark; it is more ringing and musical, more developed; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better; and beside he has made his place so good in the world that he can run without skulking in the open field. What a smoth- ered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox! It seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest it should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe. I observe that the ice of Walden is heaved up more than a foot over that bar between the pond and Cyrus Hubbard’s basin. ‘The gravelly bank or bar itself is also heaved up considerably where exposed. So that I am inclined to think that such a tilting is simply the result of a thawing beneath and not merely of a crowding or pressure on the two sides. I do not see that I can live tolerably without affec- tion for Nature. If I feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify ? IT do not think much of that chemistry that can ex- tract corn and potatoes out of a barren [soil], but rather of that chemistry that can extract thoughts and senti- ments out of the life of a man on any soil. It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.

Sunday. P. M. — Nut Meadow Brook. The river is broadly open, as usual this winter. You can hardly say that we have had any sleighing at all this winter, though five or six inches of snow lay on the ground five days after January 6th. But I do not quite like this warm weather and bare ground at this season. What is a winter without snow and ice in this latitude? The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer. At that gully or ravine in the Clamshell bank, me- thinks the sides fall away faster in the winter; and such a winter as this, when the ground is bare, [faster] than ever. The subsoil and sand keeps freezing and thawing, and so bursts off, and the larger stones roll down on each side and are collected in a row at the bottom, so that there will be a sort of wall there of stones as big as a hen’s egg propped up and finally covered with sand. The inside of the swallow-holes there appears quite firm yet and regular, with marks where it was pecked or scratched by the bird, and the top is mottled or blotched, almost as if made firm in spots by the saliva of the bird. There is a low oven-like expansion at the end, and a good deal of stubble for the nest. I find in one an empty black cherry stone and the remains of a cricket or two. Probably a mouse left them there. I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy cater- pillars in a mullein leaf on this bare edge-hill, which could not have blown from any tree, I think. They ap- parently take refuge in such places. One on the railroad causeway where it is high, in the open meadow. I see a couple of broken small turtle eggs here which have been trodden out of the banks by cows going to drink in the river. At Hosmer’s tub spring a small frog is active! At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer. I see forty or fifty circling together in the smooth and sunny bays all along the brook. This is something new to me. What must they think of this winter? It is like a child waked up and set to playing at midnight. Methinks they are more ready to dive to the bottom when dis- turbed than usual. At night, of course, they dive to the bottom and bury themselves, and if in the morning they perceive no curtain of ice drawn over their sky, and the pleasant weather continues, they gladly rise again and resume their gyrations in some sunny bay amid the alders and the stubble. I think that I never noticed them more numerous, but the fact is I never looked for them so particularly. But I fear for their nervous systems, lest this be too much activity, too much excitement. ‘The sun falling thus warmly for so long on the open surface of the brook tempts them upward gradually, till there is a little group gyrating there as In summer. What a funny way they have of going to bed! They do not take a light and retire up-stairs; they go below. Suddenly it is heels up and heads down, and they go down to their muddy bed and let the unresting stream flow over them in their dreams. They go to bed in another element. What a deep slumber must be theirs, and what dreams, down in the mud there! So the insect life is not withdrawn far off, but a warm sun would soon entice it forth. Sometimes they seem to have a little difficulty in making the plunge. Maybe they are too dry to slip under. I saw one floating on its back, and it struggled a little while before it righted itself. Suppose you were to plot the course of one for a day; what kind of a figure would it make? Probably this feat too will one day be per- formed by science, that maid of all work. I see one chasing a mote, and the wave the creature makes al- ways causes the mote to float away from it. I would like to know what it is they communicate to one another, they who appear to value each other’s society so much. How many water-bugs make a quorum? How many hundreds does their Fourier think it takes to make a complete bug? Where did they get their backs polished so? They will have occasion to remem- ber this year, that winter when we were waked out of our annual sleep! What is their precise hour for retiring ? I see stretching from side to side of this smooth brook, where it is three or four feet wide, apparently an in- visible waving line like a cobweb, against which the water is heaped up a very little. This line is constantly swayed to and fro, as by the current or wind bellying forward here and there. I try repeatedly to catch and break it with my hand and let the water run free, but still, to my surprise, I clutch nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its place. Is it the fluctuating edge of a lighter, perhaps more oily, fluid, overflowing a heavier? I see several such lines. It is somewhat like the slightest conceivable smooth fall over a dam. I must ask the water-bug that glides across it. Ah, if I had no more sins to answer for than a water- bug! ‘They are only the small water-bugs that I see. They are earlier in the spring and apparently hardier. I walked about the long pond-hole beyond the wooded moraine. There are prinos bushes with much moss on them, such as grows on the button-bush around. There is considerable rattlesnake grass there, which, with its drooping end above the ice, reminds me of wild rice meadows. On every old oak stump the ends of the pores are the prominent part, while only the scale-lke silver ray is left between their circles. The sprouts of the canoe birch are not reddish like the white, but a yellowish brown. ‘The small white begin to cast off their red cuticle the third or fourth year and reveal a whitish one. The poison sumach, with its recurved panicles of pale-greenish fruit massed together in profusion at the base of last year’s stout blunt twigs, is very inter- esting and handsome. It is one of the chief ornaments of the swamps, dry and durable, befitting the season, and always attracts me. It might be the symbol of a vigorous swamp. ‘The wood is very brittle to spht down in the forks, and, just broken, has a strong, some- what liquorice-like scent. I do not know that any bird eats them. I see a few fishes dart in the brooks. Between winter and summer there is, to my mind, an immeasurable interval. As, when I pry into the old bank swallows’ holes to-day, — see the marks of their bills and even whole eggs left at the bottom, — it affects me as the phenomena of a former geological period. Yet perchance the very swallow which laid those eggs will revisit this hole next spring. The upper side of his gallery is a low arch, quite firm and durable. Like the water-bugs the dormant buds and catkins which overhang the brook might be waked up in mid- winter, but these bugs are much the most susceptible to the genial influences. In fact, there was a succession of these invisible cables or booms stretched across the stream, though it ran quite swiftly. I noticed at Walden yesterday that, when the ice cracked, one part was frequently left an eighth of an inch, perhaps, higherethan another, and afterward frozen to it in this position. You could both see and with your feet feel the inequality.