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WALDEN Or Life In The Woods

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Mindwarp
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« Reply #60 on: March 23, 2009, 02:05:28 am »

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled
them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the
pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together
so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not seared from the
stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went
grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and
the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.
There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and
there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no
worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom
was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had,
hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of- we
three- it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to
say how many pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure
on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be
calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;-
but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked.

  There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be
remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me
from time to time; but I had no more for society there.

  There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at
eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed
this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of
cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town.

                           WINTER ANIMALS.

  WHEN THE ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of
the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after
it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and
skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I
could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up
around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not
remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable
distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs,
passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like
fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or
pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the
evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut
and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony
of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice,
though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like
the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted
drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when the snow
was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were
confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and
except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid
and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak
woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.

  For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the
forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a
sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable
plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar
to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I
seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo
hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three
syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo
only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze
over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a
goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings
like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They
passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from
settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a
regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat owl from very near me, with
the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant
of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if
determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by
exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and
boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the
citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am
ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and
a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of
the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as
these plains never saw nor heard.

  I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great
bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its
bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had
dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost,
as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning
would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third
of an inch wide.

  Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-crust, in
moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking
raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some
anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs
outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into
our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes
as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men,
still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation.
Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked
a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.

  Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn,
coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if
sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter
I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had not got
ripe, on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by watching
the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the
twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty
meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me
much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first
warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and
starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with
wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with
his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces
that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and
then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous
somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him- for all
the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the
forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl- wasting
more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk
the whole distance- I never saw one walk- and then suddenly, before
you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch
pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators,
soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time- for no
reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I
suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable
ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the
topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in
the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear
from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the
half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and
played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the
ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from
his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over
at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting
that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again,
or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to
hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste
many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and
plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing
it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a
buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching
along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the
while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and
horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;- a
singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;- and so he would get off
with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine
tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs
strewn about the woods in various directions.

  At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard
long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of
a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from
tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the
squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they
attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for
their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge it,
and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with
their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much
respect for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work
as if they were taking what was their own.
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