28 March 1859 – 3 April 1859

P. M. — Paddle to the Bedford line. It is now high time to look for arrowheads, etc. I spend many hours every spring gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been plowed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil. As much ground is turned up in a day by the plow as Indian implements could not have turned over in a month, and my eyes rest on the evi- dences of an aboriginal life which passed here a thou- sand years ago perchance. Especially if the knolls in the meadows are washed by a freshet where they have been plowed the previous fall, the soil will be taken away lower down and the stones left, — the arrow- heads, etc., and soapstone pottery amid them, — some- what as gold is washed in a dish or tom. I landed on two spots this afternoon and picked up a dozen arrow- heads. It is one of the regular pursuits of the spring. As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travellers of adventures, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes round again. So I help my- self to live worthily, and loving my life-as I should. It is a good collyrium to look on the bare earth, — to pore over it so much, getting strength to all your senses, like Anteeus. If I did not find arrowheads, I might, per- chance, begin to pick up crockery and fragments of pipes, — the relics of a more recent man. Indeed, you can hardly name a more innocent or wholesome entertainment. As I am thus engaged, I hear the rumble of the bowling-alley’s thunder, which has be- gun again in the village. It comes before the earliest natural thunder. But what its lightning is, and what atmospheres it purifies, I do not know. Or I might collect the various bones which I come across. They would make a museum that would delight some Owen at last, and what a text they might furnish me for a course of lectures on human life or the like! I might spend my days collecting the fragments of pipes until I found enough, after all my search, to compose one perfect pipe when laid together.

Driving rain and southeast wind, etc. Walden is first clear after to-day. Garfield says he saw a woodcock about a fortnight ago. Minott thinks the middle of March is as early as they come and that they do not then begin to lay.

The frost is out of our garden, and I see one or two plowing early land. You walk dry now over this sandy land where the frost is melted, even after heavy rain, and there is no slumping in it, for there is no hard-pan and ice to hold the water and make a batter of the surface soil. This is a new condition of things when the surface of the earth generally begins to be dry. But there is still much frost in cold ground, and I often feel the crust which was heaved by it sink under me, and for some time have noticed the chinks where the frozen ground has gaped and erected itself from and over stones and sleepers. P. M. — To Holbrook’s improvements. Many painted turtles out along a ditch in Moore’s Swamp. These the first I have seen, the water is so high in the meadows. One drops into the water from some dead brush which lies in it, and leaves on the brush two of its scales. Perhaps the sun causes the loosened scales to curl up, and so helps the turtle to get rid of them. Humphrey Buttrick says that he has shot two kinds of little dippers, — the one black, the other with some white. I see, on a large ant-hill, largish ants at work, front half reddish, back half black, but on another, very large ant-hill near by (a rod to left of Holbrook’s road, perhaps fifty rods this side of his clearing on the north side), five feet through, there [are] none out. It will show how our prejudices interfere with our perception of color, to state that yesterday morning, after making a fire in the kitchen cooking-stove, as I sat over it I thought I saw a little bit of red or scarlet flannel on a chink near a bolt-head on the stove, and I tried to pick it out, — while I was a little surprised that I did not smell it burning. It was merely the re- flection of the flame of the fire through a chink, en the dark stove. This showed me what the true color of the flame was, but when I knew what this was, it was not very easy to perceive it again. It appeared now more yellowish. I think that my senses made the truest report the first time. The wood frogs lie spread out on the surface of the sheltered pools in the woods, cool and windy as it is, dimpling the water by their motions, and as you ap- proach you hear their lively wurk wurrk wur-r-k, but, seeing you, they suddenly hist and perhaps dive to the bottom. It is a very windy afternoon, wind northwest, and at length a dark cloud rises on that side, evidently of a windy structure, a dusky mass with lighter intervals, like a parcel of brushes lying side by side, — a parcel of “mare’s-tails” perhaps. It winds up with a flurry of rain.

Some have planted peas and lettuce. Melvin, the sexton, says that when Loring’s Pond was drained once — perhaps the dam broke — he saw there about all the birds he has seen on a salt marsh. Also that he once shot a mackerel gull in Concord, — I think he said it was in May; that he sees the two kinds of yellow-legs here; that he has shot at least two kinds of large gray ducks, as big (one, at least) as black ducks. He says that one winter (it may have been the last) there were caught by him and others at one place in the river below Ball’s Hill, in sight of Carlisle Bridge, about two hundred pounds of pickerel within a week, — something quite unprecedented, at least of late years. This was about the last of February or first of March. No males were caught! and he thinks that they had collected there in order to spawn. Perhaps perch and pickerel collect in large numbers for this purpose. P. M. — To Assabet over meadows in boat; a very strong and a cold northwest wind. I land again at the (now island) rock, on Simon Brown’s land, and look for arrowheads, and picked [svc] up two pieces of soapstone pottery. One was prob- ably part of the same which C. found with me there the other day. C.’s piece was one side of a shallow dish, say an inch and a half deep, four eighths to six eighths of an inch thick, with a sort of ear for handle on one side, — almost a leg. His piece, like mine, looks as , Pi e ®. oe oe wm ? E if it had been scratched all *-. ae ; a over on the outside by a nail, ww and it is evident that this is the way it was fashioned. It was scratched with some hard, sharp-pointed stone and so crumbled and worn away. This little knoll was half plowed (through its sum- mit) last fall in order to be cultivated this spring, and the high water standing over all but the apex has for a fortnight been faithfully washing away the soil and leaving the stones— Indian relics and others — ex- posed. ‘The very roots of the grass, yellowish-brown fibres, are thus washed clean and exposed in consid- erable quantity there. You could hardly have con- trived a better way to separate the arrowheads that lay buried in that sod between the rocks from the sod and soil. At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first pheebe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-VEE, as if insisting on that with peculiar em- phasis. The villagers remark how dark and angry the water looks to-day. I think it is because it is a clear and very windy day and the high waves cast much shadow. Crow blackbirds common.

P. M.— To Lee’s Cliff (walking). Alders generally appear to be past prime.’ I see a little snow ice in one place to-day. It is still windy and cool, but not so much so as yesterday. I can always sail either up or down the river with the rudest craft, for the wind always blows more or less with the river valley. But where a blunt wooded cape or hill projects nearly in the direction to which the wind is blowing, I find that it blows in opposite directions off that shore, while there may be quite a lull off the centre. This makes a bafflmg reach. Generally a high wood close upon the west side of our river, the prevailing winds being northwest, makes such a reach. There are many fuzzy gnats now in the air, windy as itis. Especially I see them under the lee of the mid- dle Conantum cliff, in dense swarms, all headed one way, but rising and falling suddenly all together as if tossed by the wind. They appear to love best a posi- tion just below the edge of the cliff, and to rise con- stantly high enough to feel the wind from over the edge, and then sink suddenly down again. They are not, perhaps, so thick as they will be, but they are suddenly much thicker than they were, and perhaps their pre- sence affects the arrival of the phoebe, which, I suspect, feeds on them. From near this cliff, I watch a male sheldrake in the river with my glass. It is very busily pluming it- self while it sails about, and from time to time it raises itself upright almost entirely out of water, showing its rosaceous breast. It is some sixty rods off, yet I can see the red bill distinctly when it is turned against its white body. Soon after I see two more, and one, which I think is not a female, is more gray and far less dis- tinctly black and white than the other. I think it is a young male and that it might be called by some a gray duck. However, if you show yourself within sixty rods, they will fly or swim off, so shy are they. Yet in the fall I sometimes get close upon a young bird, which dashes swiftly across or along the river and dives. In the wood on top of Lee’s Cliff, where the other day I noticed that the chimaphila leaves had been ex- tensively eaten and nibbled off and left on the ground, I find under one small pitch pine tree a heap of the cones which have been stripped of their scales, evi- dently by the red squirrels, the last winter and fall, they having sat upon some dead limbs above. They were all stripped regularly from the base upward, ex- cepting the five to seven uppermost and barren scales, making a pretty figure like this:— h aa Roy ) At “) i. << ' I counted two hundred and thirty-nine cones under this tree alone, and most of them lay within two feet square upon a mass, of the scales one to two inches deep and three or four feet in diameter. There were also many cones under the surrounding pines. Those I counted would have made some three quarts or more. These had all been cut off by the squirrels and conveyed to this tree and there stripped and eaten. They appeared to have devoured all the fruit of that pitch pine grove, and probably it was they that nibbled the wintergreen. No fruit grows in vain. The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch pine. His body is about the color of the cone. I should like to get his recipe for taking out pitch, for he must often get his chaps defiled, methinks. These were all fresh cones, the fruit of last year, per- haps. There was a hole in the ground where they lodged by that tree. I see fly across the pond a rather large hawk, and when at length it turns up am surprised to see a large black- ish spot on the under side of each wing, reminding me of the nighthawk. Its wings appeared long and nar- row, but it did not show the upper or under side till far off, — sailing [?] so level. What was it? The bass recently cut down at Miles Swamp, which averages nearly two and a half feet in diameter at the ground, has forty-seven rings, and has therefore grown fast. ‘The black ash is about eighteen inches in diameter and has forty-eight rings. The white ash is about fifteen inches in diameter and has seventy-eight rings. I see the small botrychium still quite fresh in the open pasture, only a reddish or leathery brown, — some, too, yellow. It is therefore quite evergreen and more than the spleenworts. As I go down the street just after sunset, I hear many snipe to-night. This sound is annually heard by the villagers, but always at this hour, @. e. in the twilight, —a hovering sound high in the air, —and they do not know what to refer it to. It is very easily imitated by the breath. A sort of shuddering with the breath. It reminds me of calmer nights. Hardly one in a hun- dred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. Perhaps no one dreamed of snipe an hour ago, but the air seemed empty of such as they; but as soon as the dusk begins, so that a bird’s flight is concealed, you hear this peculiar spirit-sug- gesting sound, now far, now near, heard through and above the evening din of the village. I did not hear one when I returned up the street half an hour later.