23 March 1857 – 29 March 1857

P. M. — Paddle up Assabet.

P. M. —'To Walden and Fair Haven. Though there has been quite a number of light snows, we have had no sleighing fairly since about February 14th. Walden is already on the point of breaking up. In the shallow bays it is melted six or eight rods out, and the ice looks dark and soft.

There is no snow now visible from my window except on the heel of a bank in the swallow- hole behind Dennis’s. A sunny day, but rather cold alr. 8.30 a. M. — Up Assabet in boat. At last I push myself gently through the smooth and sunny water, sheltered by the Island woods and hill, where I listen for birds, etc. There I may expect to hear a woodpecker tapping the rotten aspen tree. There I pause to hear the faint voice of some early bird amid the twigs of the still wood-side. You are pretty sure to hear a woodpecker early in the morning over these still waters. But now chiefly there comes borne on the breeze the tinkle of the song sparrow along the river- side, and I push out into wind and current. Leave the boat and run down to the white maples by the bridge. The white maple is well out with its pale [?] stamens on the southward boughs, and probably began about the 24th. That would be about fifteen days earlier than last year. I find a very regular elliptical rolled stone in the freshly (last fall) plowed low ground there, evidently brought from some pond or seaside. It is about seven inches long. The Indians prized such a stone, and I have found many of them where they haunted. Com- monly one or both ends will be worn, showing that they have used it as a pestle or hammer. As I go up the Assabet, I see two Emys insculpta on the bank in the sun, and one picta. They are all rather sluggish, and I can paddle up and take them up. “ies on the edge of Dodge’s Brook, about midway, in the cedar field, what I did not hesitate to regard as an Emys insculpta, but thickly spotted with rusty-yellowish spots on the scales above, and the back was singularly depressed. Was it a variety? It looked like a very old turtle, though not unusually large; the shell worn pretty smooth beneath. I could count more than thirty strize above. When it dropped into the brook, I saw that the rusty-yellow spots served admirably to conceal it, for while the shell was bronze-colored (for a ground- work), the rusty-yellow spots were the color of the sandy and pebbly bottom of the brook. It was very differently shaped from the shell I have, and Storer does not mention yellow spots. Heard a lark in that meadow. Twitters over it on quivering wing and awakes the slumbering life of the meadow. ‘The turtle and frog peep stealthily out and see the first lark go over. Farmer was plowing a level pasture, unplowed for fourteen years, but in some places the frost was not quite out. Farmer says that he heard geese go over two or three nights ago. I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of to-day; and by to- morrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory. I saw quail-tracks some two months ago, much like smaller partridge-tracks. Farmer describes a singular track in the snow the past winter from near his house to Annursnack. Traced it in all five or six miles to a hemlock on the west side, and there he lost it. It travelled like a mink; made a track with all its four feet together, about as big as that of a horse’s foot, eighteen inches apart more or less. Wondered if it was a pine marten. Men talk to me about society as if I had none and they had some, as if it were only to be got by going to the sociable or to Boston. Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my con- tempt by the pretension they imply, for who is he that assumes to flatter me? ‘To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction. Pickerel begin to dart in shallows.

8.30 a. m. — Up river to Fair Haven by boat. A pleasant morning; the song of the earliest birds, 1. €. tree sparrows, (now decidedly) and song sparrows and bluebirds, in the air. A red-wing’s gurgle from a willow. The Emys picta, now pretty numerous, when young and fresh, with smooth black scales without moss or other imperfection, unworn, and with claws perfectly sharp, is very handsome. When the scales are of this clear, though dull, black, the six middle ones, counting from side to side, are edged forward with broad dull greenish-yellow borders, the others with a narrow whitish border, and the singular vermilion and yellow marks of the marginal scales extend often on to the lateral scales. The concentric lines of growth are in- distinguishable. The fore and hind legs and tail are slashed or streaked horizontally with broad clear ver- milion and also a fine yellow line or two, answering to those on the hinge scales continued, showing the ten- ant to be one with the house he occupies. He who painted the tortoise thus, what were his designs? Beneath it 1s a clear buff. At Lee’s Cliff and this side, I see half a dozen buff- edged butterflies (Vanessa Antiopa) and pick up three dead or dying, two together, the edges of their wings gone. Several are fluttering over the dry rock débris under the cliff, in whose crevices probably they have wintered. ‘T'wo of the three I pick up are not dead, though they will not fly. Verily their day is a short one. What has checked their frail life? Within, the buff edge is black with bright sky-blue spots, and the main part within is a purplish brown. Those little oblong spots on the black ground are light as you look directly down on them, but from one side they vary through violet to a crystalline rose-purple. I can remember now some thirty years — after a fashion — of life in Concord, and every spring there are many dead suckers floating belly upward on the mead- ows. This phenomenon of dead suckers is as constant as the phenomenon of living ones; nay, as a phenomenon it is far more apparent. Farmer thinks pickere]l may have been frozen through half a day and yet come to. Instances pickerel he caught a very cold day on Bateman’s Pond, which he brought home frozen and put in a pail of water in his cellar and after found them alive. A Mr. Parkhurst of Carlisle assures him that though minnows put into a half-hogshead of water will die in forty-eight hours unless you change the water, if you put with it a piece of granite a foot square they will live all winter, and that he keeps his minnows in this way. A pleasing sight this of the earlier painted tortoises which are seen along the edge of the flooded meadows, often three or four suddenly dimpling the smooth sur- face of a ditch, which had been sunning on a tussock, sluggish moving flakes of clear black. Soon they rise again and put their heads out warily, looking about and showing the yellow stripes on their necks. They seem to feel the very jar of the ground as you approach. They rest with their shells at an angle in the water, their heads out and their feet outstretched, or partly bury themselves in the grassy bottom. Often hindered by the bushes, between which their shells are caught. Poking their heads through, they are impeded by their shells. The very earliest I see moving along the bottom on the meadows, but soon after they begin to lie out in the sun on the banks and tussocks as I have mentioned. The Emys guttata is found in brooks and ditches. I passed three to-day, lying cunningly quite motionless, with heads and feet drawn in, on the bank of a little grassy ditch, close to a stump, in the sun, on the russet flattened grass, like snails, or rather scales, under which some insects might lurk, with their high-arched backs. When out of water they are the less exposed to obser- vation by their shells drying and their spots being dimmed. Do I ever see a yellow-spot turtle in the river? Do I ever see a wood tortoise in the South Branch? There is consolation in the fact that a particular evil, which perhaps we suffer, is of a venerable antiquity, for it proves its necessity and that it is part of the order, not disorder, of the universe. When I realize that the mor- tality of suckers in the spring is as old a phenomenon, perchance, as the race of suckers itself, I contemplate it with serenity and joy even, as one of the signs of spring. Thus they have fallen on fate. And so, many a fisher- man is not seen on the shore who the last spring did not fail here. Flood tells me to-day that he finds no frost to trouble him in Monroe’s garden. He can put his spade or fork in anywhere. Chestnut, evidently because it is packed as in a little chest. The maple sap has been flowing well for two or three weeks. When I witness the first plowing and planting, I acquire a long-lost confidence in the earth, — that it will nourish the seed that is committed to its bosom. I am surprised to be reminded that there is warmth in it. We have not only warmer skies, then, but a warmer earth. The frost is out of it, and we may safely commit these seeds to it in some places. Yesterday I walked with Farmer beside his team and saw one furrow turned quite round his field. What noble work is plow- ing, with the broad and solid earth for material, the ox for fellow-laborer, and the simple but efficient plow for tool! Work that is not done in any shop, in a cramped position, work that tells, that concerns all men, which the sun shines and the rain falls on, and the birds sing over! You turn over the whole vegetable mould, expose how many grubs, and put a new aspect on the face of the earth. It comes pretty near to making a world. Re- deeming a swamp does, at any rate. A good plowman is alerrae filius. The plowman, we all know, whistles as he drives his team afield. The broad buff edge of the Vanessa Antiopa’s wings harmonizes with the russet ground it flutters over, and as it stands concealed in the winter, with its wings folded above its back, in a cleft in the rocks, the gray- brown under side of its wings prevents its being dis- tinguished from the rocks themselves. Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember. Farmer tells me that his bees are killing one another nowadays,’ 1. e. as he supposes: and he is probably right; the workers are killing the drones.

P. M. — To Walden and river. Walden open, say to-day, though there is still a little ice in the deep southern bay and a very narrow edging along the southern shore. Cross through the woods to my boat under Fair Haven Hill. How empty and silent the woods now, before leaves have put forth or thrushes and warblers are come! Deserted halls, floored with dry leaves, where scarcely an insect stirs as yet. Taking an average of eight winters, it appears that Walden is frozen about ninety-eight days in the year. When I have put my boat in its harbor, I hear that sign-squeaking blackbird, and, looking up, see half a dozen on the top of the elm at the foot of Whiting’s lot. They are not red-wings, and by their size they make me think of crow blackbirds, yet on the whole I think them grackles (? ).! Possibly those I heard on the 18th were the same?? Does the red-wing ever make a noise like a rusty sign?