29 January 1855 – 4 February 1855

Not cold. Sun comes out at noon.

Clear and not cold, and now fine skating, the river rising again to the height it had attained the 24th, which (with this) I think remarkable for this season. It is now about a foot lower than on the 24th (it had fallen over eighteen inches since then), but is rising. It is unusual for the river to be so much swollen in midwinter, because it is unusual to have so much rain at this season. Both these — or this whole rise — are owing to heavy rains on the frozen ground carry- ing off what snow there was, and now soaking up. The hills shed it all like a roof into the valleys. It is up to the hubs on the causeways, and foot-travellers have to cross on the river and meadows. Melvin and others are out after muskrats again, and [I] see them with their pouches stuffed out with their round bodies. Minott to-day enumerates the red, gray, black, and what he calls the Sampson fox. He says, “It’s a sort of yaller fox, but their pelts ain’t good for much.” He never saw one, but the hunters have told him of them. He never saw a gray nor a black one. Told how Jake Lakin lost a dog, a very valuable one, by a fox lead- ing him on to the ice on the Great Meadows and drowning him. Said the raccoon made a track very much like a young child’s foot. He had often seen it in the mud of a ditch.

Wednesday. A clear, cold, beautiful day. Fine skating. An unprecedented expanse of ice. At 10 a. M., skated up the river to explore further than I had been. The water within ten inches of the height at which it stood April 23d, °52, as I noticed at the stone bridge.’ At 8 a. M., the river rising, the thin yellowish ice of last night, next the shore, 1s, as usual, much heaved up in ridges, as if beginning to double on itself, and here and there at 9 o’clock, being cracked thus in the lowest parts, the water begins to spurt up in some places in a stream, as from an ordinary pump, and flow along these valleys; and thus we have soon reéstablished an edging of shallow yellowish or oil-colored water all along the river and meadows, covered with floating snow-fleas. By noon, though it was a pretty cool day, the water had generally burst through and overflowed the ice along the shore and once more stood at a level there; 2. €., water and ice made a level where the ice was un- even before. Before skating up-stream I tried my boat- sail on the meadow in front of the house and found that I could go well enough before the wind, resting the mast on my hip and holding by the middle with one hand, but I could not easily tack. The country thus almost completely bare of snow, — only some ice in the roads and fields, — and the frozen freshet at this remarkable height, I skated up as far as the boundary between Wayland and Sudbury just above Pelham’s Pond, to a point which a woman called about one and a half miles from Saxonville, about twelve miles, between 10 a. Mm. and one, quite leisurely. ‘There I found the river open unexpectedly, as if there were a rapid there, and as I walked up it some three quarters of a mile, it was still open before me a half-mile further at least, or probably to the falls.' Somewhat like this: — Ee — SS ag All the open part, one and a half miles at least, was pretty closely hemmed in by highlands. I skated about twelve miles and walked three quarters of a mile further. It was, all the way that I skated, a chain of meadows, with the muskrat-houses still rising above the ice, commonly on the bank of the river, and mark- ing it like smaller haycocks amid the large ones still left. I skated past three bridges above Sherman’s —or nine in all (?) —and walked to the fourth. The next, or fifth, would probably be that in middle of Saxonville. Viz. Causeway bridges, Mill Village Bridge at Larned Brook, Pelham Pond Bridge, and that on road from Dudley Pond to Southboro and Marl- boro. As I skated near the shore under Lee’s Cliff, I saw what I took to be some scrags or knotty stubs of a dead limb lying on the bank beneath a white oak, close by me. Yet while I looked directly at them I could not but ad- mire their close resemblance to partridges. I had come along with a rapid whir and suddenly halted right against them, only two rods distant, and, as my eyes watered a little from skating against the wind, I was not con- vinced that they were birds till I had pulled out my glass and deliberately examined them. They sat and stood, three of them, perfectly still with their heads erect, some darker feathers like ears, methinks, increasing their resemblance to scrabs [sc], as where a small limb is broken off. I was much surprised at the remarkable still- ness they preserved, instinctively relying on the re- semblance to the ground for their protection, 7. e. withered grass, dry oak leaves, dead scrags, and broken twigs. I thought at first that it was a dead oak limb with a few stub ends or scrabbs [sic] sticking up, and for some time after I had noted the resemblance to birds, standing only two rods off, I could not be sure of their character on account of their perfect motion- lessness, and it was not till I brought my glass to bear on them and saw their eyes distinctly, steadily glaring on me, their necks and every muscle tense with anx- iety, that I was convinced. At length, on some signal which I did not perceive, they went with a whir, as if shot, off over the bushes. It was quite an adventure getting over the bridge- ways or causeways, for on every shore there was either water or thin ice which would not bear. Sometimes I managed to get on to the timbers of a bridge, the end of a projecting “tie” (?), and off the same way, thus straddling over the bridges and the gulf of open water about them on to the edge of the thick ice, or else I swung myself on to the causeways by the wil- lows, or crawled along a pole or rail, catching at a tree which stood in the water, —or got in. At the bend above the Pantry, there was [a] sort of canal or crack quite across the river and meadow, excepting a slight bridge of ice. As I passed the mouth of Larned Brook, off Wayland meeting-house, I pulled out my glass and saw that it was 12.30 o’clock. In each town I found one or two trappers come forth to shoot muskrats. As a regular thing they turned out after dinner, buttoning up their greatcoats. All along the river their cabins had been torn to pieces by them, and in one place I saw two men sitting over the hole where they had just demolished one, one with a pistol ready pointed to the water where he expected the rat to come up, the other with a gun. In this twelve miles of the river there would be two or three at least pretty sure to turn out such a day and take to the ice for musk- rats. I saw again an abundance of sweet-gale seed on the ice, frozen in, near Pelham’s Pond. This seed is thus dispersed regularly on a large scale. It hes as it was washed along the edge of an overflow. Beside a dilapidated muskrat’s house, lay the wretched car- cass of its former occupant on the ice, stripped of its hide, — black, even without its skin, with veins of red. Returning, I saw a large hawk flapping and sail- ing low over the meadow. There was some dark color to its wings. You were often liable to be thrown when skating fast, by the shallow puddles on the ice formed in the middle of the day and not easy to be distinguished. These detained your feet while your unimpeded body fell forward.

Quite clear and colder, yet it could not refrain from snowing half an inch more in the night, whitening the ground now, as well as the ice. Brown is again filling his ice-house, which he com- menced to do some weeks ago. I got another skate this afternoon, in spite of the thin coating of snow. This, then, is the fourth day of this rare skating, though since yesterday noon the slight whitening of snow has hurt it somewhat. The river at 4p. m. has fallen some eight or ten inches. In some places there are thin flakes of ice standing on their edges within an inch or two of each other over more than a quarter of an acre, either ice blown into that position (which in this case is not likely, since there is a great deal too much for that surface) or crystallized so while the water suddenly ran off below. There are large tracts of thin white ice, where the water ran off before it had time to freeze hard enough to bear. This last half-inch of snow, which fell in the night, is just enough to track animals on the ice by. All about the Hill and Rock I see the tracks of rabbits which have run back and forth close to the shore repeatedly since the night. In the case of the rabbit the fore feet are further apart than the hind ones, the first say four or five inches to the outside, the last two or three.’ They are generally not quite regular, but one of the fore feet a little in advance of the other, and so with one of the hind feet. There is an interval of about sixteen inches between each four tracks. Sometimes they are in a curve or crescent, 4 all touching. I saw what must have been either “* a muskrat’s or mink’s track, I think, since it came out of the water, —the tracks roundish and toes much rayed, four or five inches apart in the trail, with only a trifle more between the fore and hind legs, and the mark of the tail in succes- ae sive curves as it struck the ice, thus: Another track puzzled me, as if a hare had been running like a dog Id =e = oe ™ Se eoate ae and touched its tail, — if it had any. This in several places.

This morning it is snowing again, as if a squall. ‘The snow has thus spit on the ice four times since this last skating began on Tuesday, the 30th, viz. Thursday noon, Thursday evening, Friday even- ing, and now Saturday morning. This will deserve to be called the winter of skating. The heavens thus spit on the ice as if they had a spite against it. I even suspect that the account of the matter may be that when an atmosphere containing more moisture than usual is wafted over this chain of broad ice lakes (es- pecially the rest of the country being bare of snow) its moisture is suddenly condensed and frozen, and there is a spitting of snow. This last flurry lasted an hour or more, and then it grew colder and windy. P. M. — Skating through snow.

Clear and cold and windy; much colder than for some time. Saw this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers. The separate foot-tracks were quite round, more than two inches in diameter, showing the five toes distinctly in the snow, which was about half an inch deep. In one place, where it had crossed last night to Merrick’s pasture, its trail, about six inches wide and of furrows in the snow, was on one side of its foot-tracks, thus: *°< | and there was about nine inches between ~" the fore and hind feet [sic]. Close by the Great Aspen I saw where it had entered or come out of the water under a shelf of ¢** ice left adhering to a maple. There it apparently played and slid on the level ice, making a broad trail as if a shovel had been shoved along, just eight inches wide, without a foot-track in it for four feet or more. And again the trail was only two inches wide and between the foot-tracks, which were Oo | o” a a a 7 yee ‘A ar side by side and twenty-two inches apart. It had left much dung on the ice, soft, yellow, bowel-like, like a gum that has been chewed in consistency. About the edge of the hole, where the snow was all rubbed off, was something white which looked and smelt exactly like bits of the skin of pouts or eels. Minott tells of one shot once while eating an eel. Vance saw one this winter in this town by a brook eating a fish. The water has now fallen nearly two feet, and those ice shelves I noticed yesterday, when you go into a swamp and all along the shore amid the alders, birches, and maples, look just like ample picnic tables ready set, two feet high, with often a leaf down or else a table-cloth hanging, — just like camp tables around the tent-poles, now covered with snowy napkins. I notice my old skate-tracks like this: — Rie —— oO ‘Fors? fear It is better skating to-day than yesterday. This is the sixth day of some kind of skating.