26 November 1855 – 2 December 1855

Bottom of boat covered with ice. The ice next the shore bore me and my boat.

P. M. — By river to J. Farmer’s. He gave me the head of a gray rabbit which his boy had snared. This rabbit is white beneath, the whole length, reddish-brown on the sides, and the same spotted with black, above; the hairs coarse and homely, yet the fur beneath thick and slate-colored as usual. Well defended from the cold. Sides I might say pale brick-color, the brown part. The fur under the feet dirty-yellowish, as if stained by what it trod upon. He makes no use of their skins or fur. ‘The skin is very tender. The tail, short and curled up, is white on the inside like that of the deer described by Loskiel, gq. v., Indian book. He showed me the preserved skin of the heads of a double-headed calf, still-born, also the adjoining portion of the spine, where two short spinal columns, two or three inches long, merged in one. Only one body and other organs. I told him I saw a mink. He said he would have given me $1.50 and perhaps something more for him. I hear that he gives $1.75, and sells them again at a profit. ‘They are used to trim ladies’ coats with, among other things. A mink skin which he showed me was a darker brown than the one I saw last (he says they changed suddenly to darker about a fortnight since); and the tail was nearly all black. He said that his grandfather, who could remember one hundred and twenty-five years before this, told him that they used to catch wolves in what is now Carter’s pasture by the North River (east of. Dodge’s Brook) in this manner: They piled up logs, cob-house fashion, beginning with a large base, eight or ten feet square, and narrowing successively each tier, so as to make steps for the wolves to the top, say ten feet high. Then they put a dead sheep within. A wolf soon found it in the night, sat down outside and howled till he called his comrades to him, and then they ascended step. by step and jumped down within; but when they had done they could not get out again. They always found one of the wolves dead, and supposed that he was pun- ished for betraying the others into this trap. A man in Brighton, whom he fully believes, told him that he built a bower near a dead horse and placed himself within to shoot crows. One crow took his station as sentinel on the top of the tree, and thirty or forty alighted upon the horse. He fired and killed seven or eight, but the rest, instead of minding him, immedi- ately flew to their sentinel and pecked him to pieces before his eyes. Also Mr. Joseph Clark told him that, as he was going along the road, he cast a stick over the wall and hit some crows in a field, whereupon they flew directly at their sentinel on an apple tree and beat and buffeted him away to the woods as far as he could see. There is little now to be heard along the river but the sedge rustling on the brink. There is a little ice along most of the shore throughout the day. Farmer told me that some one told him he found a pickerel washed up in the river, choked by a bream which it had endeavored to swallow.

River skimmed over behind Dodd’s and elsewhere. Got in my boat. River remained iced over all day. This evening I received Cholmondeley’s gift of In- dian books, forty-four volumes in all, which came by the Canada, reaching Boston on the Some of the 24th. Left Liverpool the 10th. Goodwin and Farmer think that a dog will not touch the dead body of a mink, it smells so strongly. The former, after skinning them, throws the carcass into a tree for the crows. He has got eleven this fall; shot two and trapped the rest. On the 27th, when I made my last voyage for the : sea- son, I found a large sound pine log about four feet long floating, and brought it home. Off the larger end I sawed two wheels, about a foot in diameter and seven or eight inches thick, and I fitted to them an axle-tree made of a joist, which also I found in the river, and thus I had a convenient pair of wheels on which to get my boat up and roll it about. The assess- ors called me into their office this year and said they wished to get an inventory of my property; asked if I had any real estate. No. Any notes at interest or railroad shares? No. Any taxable property? None that I knew of. “I own a boat,” I said; and one of them thought that that might come under the head of a pleasure carriage, which is taxable. Now that I have wheels to it, it comes nearer to it. I was pleased to get my boat in by this means rather than on a bor- rowed wheelbarrow. It was fit that the river should furnish the material, and that in my last voyage on it, when the ice reminded me that it was time to put it in winter quarters. I am waiting for colder weather to survey a swamp, now inaccessible on account of the water. I asked Aunt L. to-night why Scheeter Potter was so called. She said, because his neighbors regarded him as so small a man that they said in jest that it was his business to make mosquitoes’ bills. He was accused of catching his neighbor’s hens in a trap and eating them. But he was crazy. William Wheeler says that he went a-spearing on the 28th (night before Thanksgiving) and, besides pouts and pickerel, caught two great suckers. He had one of the last stuffed and baked for Thanks- giving, and made himself sick by eating too heartily of it.