22 November 1858 – 28 November 1858

In surveying Mr. Bigelow’s wood-lot to- day I found at the northeasterly angle what in the deed from the Thayers in ’38 was called “an old stump by the wall.” It is still quite plain and may last twenty years longer. It is oak. This is quite a pleasant day, but hardly amounting to Indian summer. I see swarms of large mosquito-like insects dancing in the garden. They may be a large kind of Tipulide. Had slender ringed abdomens and no plumes. The river is quite low, — about as low as it has been, for it has not been very low. About the first of November a wild pig from the West, said to weigh three hundred pounds, jumped out of a car at the depot and made for the woods. The owner had to give up the chase at once, not to lose his passage, while some railroad employees pursued the pig even into the woods a mile and a half off, but there the pig turned and pursued them so resolutely that they ran for their lives and one climbed a tree. The next day being Sun- day, they turned out in force with a gun and a large mastiff, but still the pig had the best of it, — fairly frightened the men by his fierce charges, — and the dog was so wearied and injured by the pig that the men were obliged to carry him in their arms. The pig stood it better than the dog. Ran between the gun man’s legs, threw him over, and hurt his shoulder, though pierced in many places by a pitchfork. At the last accounts, he had been driven or baited into a barn in Lincoln, but no one durst enter, and they were preparing to shoot him. Such pork might be called venison.’

A northeasterly storm, with occasional sugarings of snow.

P. M. — To Cliffs and Walden. There is a slight sugaring of snow on the ground. On grass ground there is much the less, and that is barely perceptible, while plowed ground is quite white, and I can thus distinguish such fields even to the horizon. It is dark, drizzling still from time to time, sprinkling or snowing a little. I see more snow in the north and north- west horizon. I can not only distinguish plowed fields — regular white squares in the midst of russet — but even cart-paths, and foot or cow paths a quarter of a mile . long, as I look across to Conantum. It is pleasant to see thus revealed as a feature, even in the distant landscape, a cow-path leading from far inland down to the river. The young oaks on the plain under the Cliffs are of a more uniform color than a fortnight ago, — a reddish brown. Fair Haven Pond is closed still. It is a lichen day, with a little moist snow falling. The great green lungwort lichen shows now on the oaks, — strange that there should be none on the pines close by, —and the fresh bright chestnut fruit of other kinds, glistening with moisture, brings life and immortality to light." That side of the trunk on which the lichens are thickest is the side on which the snow lodges in long ridges. When I looked out this morning, the landscape pre- sented a very pretty wintry sight, little snow as there was. Being very moist, it had lodged on every twig, and every one had its counterpart in a light downy white one, twice or thrice its own depth, resting on it. I hear a screech owl in Wheeler’s wood by the rail- road, and I heard one a few evenings ago at home. Saw a scarlet oak some sixteen inches in diameter at three feet from ground blown down evidently in that southeast wind some months ago. It stood on the south- erly edge of Wheeler’s wood, and had fallen north-north- west, breaking off a white oak nine inches in diameter and a small white pine in its fall. It was a perfectly sound oak. I was surprised to see how little root it had. Very few roots reached deeper than two feet, — the thickness of the crust of earth turned up by its fall, — and those that did were not bigger than one’s finger; and there was nota root bigger than your finger at four feet from the centre on any side of the more than semi- circle exposed. No wonder it was uprooted! Here is an author who contrasts love for “the beauties of the person”’ with that for “excellences of the mind,” as if these were the alternatives. I must say that it is for neither of these that I should feel the strongest affection. I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she “beautiful’’ or otherwise, of excellent mind or not.

P.M. — To Ministerial Swamp. I go through the Dennis Swamp by railroad. See a few high blueberry buds which have fairly started, ex- panded into small red leaves, apparently within a few weeks.' The Rubus hispidus is now very common and conspic- uous amid the withered grass and leaves of the swamp, with its green or reddened leaves; also the gold-thread. The prinos berries on their light-brown twigs are quite abundant and handsome. While most keep close to their parlor fires this cold and blustering ‘Thanksgiving afternoon, and think with compassion of those who are abroad, I find the sunny south side of this swamp as warm as their parlors, and warmer to my spirit. Aye, there is a serenity and warmth here which the parlor does not suggest, en- hanced by the sound of the wind roaring on the north- west side of the swamp a dozen or so rods off. What a wholesome and inspiring warmth is this! I see aspen (tremulzjormis) leaves, which have long since fallen, turned black, which also shows the relation of this tree to the willow, many species of which also turn black. Pass Tarbell’s behind. The farmer, now on the down-hill of life, at length gets his new barn and barn- cellar built, far away in some unfrequented vale. This for twoscore years he has struggled for. This is his poem done at last, — to get the means to dig that cavity and rear those timbers aloft. How many millions have done just like him! — or failed to do it! There is so little originality, and just so little, and just as much, fate, so to call it, in literature. With steady struggle, with alternate failure and success, he at length gets a barn- cellar completed, and then a tomb. You would say that there was a tariff on thinking and originality. I pass through the Ministerial Swamp and ascend the steep hill on the south cut off last winter. In the barren poplar hollow just north of the old mountain cranberry is another, the largest, patch of it (2. e. bear-berry) that I remember in Concord. How often I see these aspens standing dead in barren, perhaps frosty, valleys in the woods! Most shrub oaks there have lost their leaves (Quer- cus wicrijolia), which, very fair and perfect, cover the ground. You are surprised, late these afternoons, a half an hour perhaps before sunset, after walking in the shade or on looking round from a height, to see the singularly bright yellow light of the sun reflected from pines, es- pecially pitch pines, or the withered oak leaves, through the clear, cold air, the wind, it may be, blowing strong from the northwest. Sunlight in summer falling on green woods is not, methinks, such a noticeable phe- nomenon. [I stand on that high hill south of the swamp cut off by C. (?) Wheeler last winter, and when I look round northeast I am greatly surprised by the very bril- hant sunlight of which I speak, surpassing the glare of any noontide, it seems to me.

The various evergreens, large and small, may be said generally to turn green or to have turned reddish about the middle of November. Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual). A good many leaves of the sweet-fern, though withered now, still hold on; so that this shrub may be put with the oaks in this respect. So far as I remember, it is peculiar among shrubs in this. Walden is very low, compared with itself for some years. The bar between pond and Hubbard’s pond- hole is four feet wide, but the main bar is not bare. There is a shore at least six feet wide inside the alders at my old shore, and what is remarkable, I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes only four or five rods over, such as Little Goose Pond, shallow as they are. I begin to suspect, therefore, that this rise and fall extending through a long series of years is not peculiar to the Walden system of ponds, but is true of ponds gener- ally, and perhaps of rivers, though in their case it may be more difficult to detect. Even around Little Goose Pond the shore is laid bare for a space even wider than at Walden, it being less abrupt. The Pout’s Nest, also, has lost ten feet on all sides. Those pouts’ nests which I discovered in the spring are high and dry six feet from the water. I overhauled one, ripping up the frozen roof with my hands. The roof was only three inches thick, then a cavity and a bottom of wet mud. In this mud I found two small frogs, one apparently a Rana palustris less than an inch long, the other apparently a young R. pipiens an inch and a half long. They were quite sluggish and had evidently gone into winter quarters there, but probably some mink would have got them. The Pout’s Nest was frozen just enough to bear, with two or three breathing-places left. The principal of these was a narrow opening about a rod long by eighteen inches wide within six feet of the southwest side of the pond-hole, and the immediately adjacent ice was darker and thinner than the rest, having formed quite recently. I observed that the water at this breathing-chink was all alive with pollywogs, mostly of large size, though some were small, which apparently had collected there chiefly, as the water-surface was steadily contracted, for the sake of the air (?.). There [were] more than a hundred of them there, or ten or a dozen in a square foot, and many more under the ice. I saw one firmly frozen in and dead. One had legs, and his tail was half eaten off by some creature, yet he was alive. There were also one or two frogs stirring among them. Here was evidently warmer water, probably a spring, and they had crowded to it. Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows about one inch long either floating dead there or frozen into the ice, —at least fifty of them. They were shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch. There were more pollywogs in other parts of the pond-hole, and at the north end I saw two perch about seven inches long, dead, close to the shore, and turned a bright green,— which are commonly yellow, —as if poisoned by the water or something they had eaten. Perhaps the fishes had suffered by the falling of this pond-hole and consequent isolation from the main pond, which has left this part still more shallow and stagnant than before. It is full of the target-weed. If the pond continues to fall, undoubtedly all the fishes thus landlocked will die. I noticed at the above-named chink tracks which looked like those of an otter, where some animal had entered and come out of the water, leaving weeds and fragments of ice at the edge of the hole. No doubt several creatures, like otter and mink and foxes, know where to resort for their food at this season. This is now a perfect otter’s or mink’s preserve. Perhaps such a mass of decaying weeds is fatal to the fishes here. It is evident that those frogs would have been frozen stiff the first colder night in such a shallow retreat. It is very likely that that hole (7. e. pout’s hole) was under water when they took refuge there, and, the water going down, they were chilled. In such cases, then, pollywogs and fishes, and even frogs, resort to the last part to freeze, the warmest water, where it is open longest. Examining those minnows by day, I find that they are one and one sixth inches long by two fifths of an inch wide (this my largest); in form like a bream; of a very pale golden like a perch, or more bluish. Have but one dorsal fin and, as near as I can count, rays, dorsal 19 (first, 9 stouter and stiff and more distinctly pointed, then 10 longer and flexible, whole fin about three times as long as average height), caudal 17 [?], anal 13 or 14, ventral 6, pectoral 10 (?). They have about seven trans- verse dusky bars like a perch (!). Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? Have young breams transverse bars ? A little narrower than this.’

Those barren hollows and plains in the neighborhood of Walden are singular places. I see many which were heavily wooded fifteen or thirty years ago now covered only with fine sedge, sweet-fern, or a few birches, willows, poplars, small wild cherries, panicled cornels, etc. They need not amount to hollows at all: many of them are glades merely, and all that region is elevated, but the surrounding higher ground, though it may be only five or ten feet higher, will be covered with a good growth. One should think twice before he cut off such places. Perhaps they had better never be laid bare, but merely thinned out. We do not begin to understand the treatment of wood- land yet. On such spots you will see various young trees —and some of them which I have named — dead as if a fire had run through them, killed apparently by frost. I find scarlet oak acorns like this; in form not essentially different from those of the black oak, except that the scales of the black stand out more loose and bristling about the fruit. So all scarlet oak acorns Scarlet Oak do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base, and Emerson represents but one form of the fruit. The leaf of this was not very deeply cut, was broad for its length. I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. As I now count, the dorsal fin-rays are 9-10 (Girard says 9-11), caudal 17 (with apparently 4 short on each — side), anal 3-11, pectoral 11, ventral 1-5.” They have about seven transverse dark bars, a vertical dark mark under eye, and a dark spot on edge of operculum. They appear to be the young of the Pomotzs obesus, described by Charles Girard to the Natural History Society in April, ’54, obtained by Baird in fresh water about Hing- ham and [in] Charles River in Holliston.* I got more perfect specimens than the bream drawn above. They are exceedingly pretty seen floating dead on their sides in a bow] of water, with all their fins spread out. From their size and form and position they cannot fail to remind you of coins in the basin. The conspicuous transverse bars distinguish them at once. QiK This is the form of the dorsal fin, which ** consists of two parts, the foremost of shorter stiff, spiny rays, the ? Vide Dec. 3d. Vide also Mar. 26. “Specimens of Pomotis and Esox, and of amphibians, were pre- sented by Mr. H. D. Thoreau, from Concord, Mass. Mr. Putnam was of opinion that one of the Pomotis would prove a new species. ‘There are with us two varicties of pickerel commonly known as the long or shovel-nosed, and the short or trout-nosed; these specimens were of ' the latter. Mr. Putnam was inclined to think these were distinct spe- cies, unless the differences should prove to be sexual. Drs. D. H. and other eleven at least half as long again and quite flexible and waving, falling together like a wet rag out of water. So, with the anal fin, the three foremost rays are short and spiny, as I see, and one of each of the ventral (according to Girard, and tome). These foremost rays in each case look like slender raking masts, and their points project beyond the thin web of the fin, whose edge looks like the ropes which stretch from masthead to masthead, loop- wise. The stiff and spiny foremost part of the fins evi- dently serves for a cut-water which bears the brunt of any concussion and perhaps may serve for weapons of offense, while the more ample and gently waving flexible after part more especially guides the motions of the fish. The transverse bars are continued across these parts of the dorsal and anal fins, as the markings of a turtle across its feet or flippers; methinks the fins of the min- nows are peculiarly beautiful. How much more remote the newly discovered species seems to dwell than the old and familiar ones, though H. R. Storer considered them varieties of the same species; Messrs. Baird and Girard think them (Esoz reticulatus and E. ornatus) distinct.” Another clipping says: — “Mr. F. W. Putnam at a previous meeting stated that possibly the young Pomotis presented by Mr. Thoreau were the P. obesus of Girard. He had since then examined Girard’s original specimens, and he finds that they are the same. The P. guttatus recently described in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia is identical with P. obesus. Having teeth on the palatines, and con- sequently belonging to the genus Bryttus, the proper name for the species is B. obesus (Putnam). He had also satisfied himself that the Esox ornatus of Girard is the same as the E. fasciatus of De Kay.”’} both inhabit the same pond! Where the Pomotis obesus swims must be a new country, unexplored by science. The seashore may be settled, but aborigines dwell un- seen only thus far inland. This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. The water which such a fish swims in must still have a primitive forest decaying in it.

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds —tree sparrows and chickadees — than usual about the house. There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes fall- ing steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me; that is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, Iam the only villager that ever comes here. But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him! T asked Coombs the other night if he had been a-hunt- ing lately. He said he had not been out but once this fall. He went out the other day with a companion, and they came near getting a fox. They broke his leg. He has evidently been looking forward to some such suc- cess all summer. Having done thus much, he can afford to sit awhile by the stove at the post-office. He is plot- ting now how to break his head. Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. And all the years that I have known Walden these striped breams have skulked in it without my know- ledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?