10 September 1860 – 16 September 1860

Lowell to Boston and Concord. There was a frost this morning, as my host, who keeps a market, informed me. Leaving Lowell at 7 a. M. in the cars, I observed and admired the dew on a fine grass in the meadows, which was almost as white and silvery as frost when the rays of the newly risen sun fell on it. Some of it was probably the frost of the morning melted. I saw that this phenome- non was confined to one species of grass, which grew in narrow curving lines and small patches along the edges of the meadows or lowest ground, — a grass with very fine stems and branches, which held the dew; in short, that it was what I had falsely called Eragrostis capillaris, but which is probably the Sporobolus serotinus, almost the only, if not the only, grass there in its prime. And thus this plant has its day. Owing to the number of its very fine branches, now in their prime, it holds the dew like a cobweb, —a clear drop at the end and lesser drops or beads all along the fine branches and stems. It grows on the higher parts of the meadows, where other herbage is thin, and is the less apt to be cut; and, seen toward the sun not long after sunrise, it is very conspicuous and bright a quarter of a mile off, like frostwork. Call it dew-grass. I find its hyaline seed.* Almost every plant, however humble, has thus its day, and sooner or later becomes the characteristic feature of some part of the landscape or other. Almost all other grasses are now either cut or wither- ing, and are, beside, so coarse comparatively that they can never present this phenomenon. It is only a grass that is in its full vigor, as well as fine-branched (capil- lary), that can thus attract and uphold the dew. This is noticed about the time the first frosts come. If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by on a level with you, — though commonly it has lost its freight, — notwithstand- ing that you may not know of any of these plants grow- ing in your neighborhood. My host, yesterday, told me that he was accustomed once to chase a black fox? from Lowell over this way and lost him at Chelmsford. Had heard of him within about six years. A Carlisle man also tells me since that this fox used to turn off and run northwest from Chelms- ford, but that he would soon after return.

George Melvin came to tell me this fore- noon that a strange animal was killed on Sunday, the 9th, near the north line of the town, and it was not known certainly what it was. From his description I judged it to be a Canada lynx. In the afternoon I went to see it. It was killed on Sunday morning by John Quincy Adams, who lives in Carlisle about half a mile (or less) from the Concord line, on the Carlisle road. Some weeks ago a little girl named Buttrick, who was huckleberrying near where the lynx was killed, was frightened by a wild animal leaping out of the bushes near her — over her, as she said — and bounding off. But no one then regarded her story. Also a Mr. Grimes, who lives in Concord just on the line, tells me that some month ago he heard from his house the loud cry of an animal in the woods northward, and told his wife that if he were in Canada he should say it was a bob-tailed cat. He had lived seven years in Canada and seen a number of this kind of animal. Also a neighbor of his, riding home in the night, had heard a similar cry. Jacob Farmer saw a strange animal at Bateman’s Pond a year ago, which he thinks was this. Adams had lost some of his hens, and had referred it to a fox or the like. He being out, his son told me that on Sunday he went out with his gun to look after the depredator, and some forty or fifty rods from his house northwesterly 1 (on Dr. Jones’s lot, which I surveyed) in the woods, this animal suddenly dropped within two feet of him, so near that he could not fire. He had heard a loud hiss, but did not mind it. He accordingly struck it with the butt of his gun, and it then bounded off fifteen feet! or more, turned about, and faced him, whereupon he fired directly into its eyes, putting them out. His gun was loaded with small shot, No. 9. The creature then bounded out of sight, and he had a chance to reload, by which time it appeared again, crawling toward him on its belly, fiercely seeking him. He fired again, and, it still facing him, he fired a third time also, and finally finished it with the butt of his gun. It was now skinned and the skin stuffed with hay, and the skull had been boiled, in order to be put into the head. I measured the stuffed skin carefully. From the fore- head (the nose pointing down) to end of tail, 3 feet 43 [inches]. Tail stout and black at the abrupt end, 5 inches. Extreme length from fore paws to hind paws, 4 feet 8 inches, when stretched out, the skin being stzf. (They said it measured 5 feet before it was skinned, which is quite likely.) Forehead to extremity of hind feet, 503 inches. It stood, as nearly as I could measure, holding it up, 19 to 20 inches high from ground to shoulder. From midway between the legs beneath, the hind legs measured 19 inches, within; the fore legs, 16 inches, within. From skull to end of tuft on ear, 44 inches; tuft on ear (black and thin), 14 inches. The width of fore paw gently pressed was 34 inches; would have made a track perhaps four inches wide in snow. There wasa small bare brown tubercle of flesh to each toe, and also a larger one for the sole, amid the grayish-white hair. A principal claw was j inch long measured directly, but it was very curving. For color: It was, above, brownish-gray, with a dark- brown or black line down the > ss middle of the back. Sides 14 os gray, with small dark-brown spots, more or less within the hair. Beneath, lighter, hoary, and long-haired. Legs gray, like the sides, but more reddish-brown behind, especially the hind legs, and these, like the belly and sides, were indistinctly spotted with dark brown, having the effect more of a dark-brown tinge at a little distance than of spots. Gen- eral aspect brownish-hoary. ‘Tail, above, more reddish than rest of back, much, and conspicuously black at end. Did not notice any white at tip. Throat pretty white. Ears, without, broadly edged with black half an inch or more wide, the rest being a triangular white. There was but a small muffler, chiefly a C © triangular whitish and blackish tuft i on the sides of the face or neck, not Yye ye J \ noticeably under the chin. . It weighed, by their account, nineteen pounds. This was a female, and Farmer judged from his examination of the mamme — two or more of them being enlarged, and the hair worn off around them — that it had suckled young this year. The fur was good for nothing now. I cannot doubt that this is a Canada lynx; yet I am somewhat puzzled by the descriptions of the two lynxes. Emmons says of the Canada lynx that it has ‘“‘no naked ™~. spots or tubercles [on the soles of its feet] like the other species of the feline race;”? and Audubon says, “Soles, hairy;” but of the Lynx rufus, “Soles ... naked.” It is Audubon’s L. rufus in the naked soles, also in “ears, outer surface, a triangular spot of dull white, . . . bordered with brownish-black,”’ not described in his Canadensis. It is his L. Canadensis in size, in color generally, in length of ear-tuft (his L. rufus tufts being only half an inch), in “upper surface of the tail, to within an inch of the tip, and exterior portion of the thighs, rufous,” in tail being stout, not “slender” like rufus. Audubon says that the L. rufus is easily distinguished from small specimens of the female LZ. Canadensis by ‘the larger feet and more tufted ears of the latter, . . . as well as its grayer color.’’ This is four inches longer than his smaller Canada lynx and exactly as long as his larger one, — both his being males. Emmons’s one is also just 37 inches, or the same length. Emmons’s largest L. rufus is, thus measured, only 29 inches long and Audubon’s “‘fine specimen” only 30 inches. Grimes, who had lived seven years in Canada, called this a “ bob-tailed cat,” and said that the Canada lynx was as dark as his dog, which would be called a black dog, though somewhat brownish. They told me there that a boy had seen another, sup- posed to be its mate,’ this morning, and that they were going out to hunt it toward night.? The water is cold to-day, and bathing begins to be questionable. The turtles, painted and sternotherus, are certainly less timid than in the spring. I see a row of half a dozen or more painted turtles on a slanting black willow, so close together that two or three of them actually have their fore feet on the shells of their predecessors, some- what like a row of bricks that is falling. The scales of some are curled up and just falling.

Very heavy rain to-day (equinoctial), raising the river suddenly. I have said, within a week, that the river would rise this fall because it did not at all in the spring, and now it rises. A very dark and stormy night (after it); shops but half open. Where the fence is not painted white I can see nothing, and go whistling for fear I run against some one, though there is little danger that any one will be out. I come against a stone post and bruise my knees; then stumble over a bridge, — being in the gutter. You walk with your hands out to feel the fences and trees. There is no vehicle in the street to-night. The thermometer at 4 p. m. was 54°. There was pretty high wind in the night.

I go early to pick up my windfalls. Some of them are half buried in the soil, the rain having spat- tered the dirt over them. The river this morning, about 7 a. M., is already twenty-eight and a half inches above summer level, and more than twenty inches of this is owing to the rain of yesterday and last night!! By 1.30 p. M., when it has risen two or three inches more, I can just cross the meadow in a straight line to the Rock. I see a snake swimming on the middle of the tide, far from shore, washed out of the meadow, and myriads of grasshoppers and beetles, etc., are wrecked or clinging to the weeds and stubble that rises above the flood. At evening the river is five inches higher than in the morning. There is very little current at my boat’s place this evening, yet a chip floats down (and next morning, the 14th, I see that a large limb has been carried up-stream during the night, from where it lay at evening, some twenty rods above the junction, to a place thirty rods above the junction). Yet, when I try the current (in the evening of the 13th) with a chip, it goes down at Heron Rock, but the limb was large and irregular, and sank very deep in the water; so I think that the Assabet water was running up beneath while the Musketaquid flowed down over it slowly. A Carlisle man tells me of a coon he killed in Canale which weighed twenty-three and a half pounds and dressed fourteen pounds. He frequently sees and hears them at present. On the 13th I go to J. Q. Adams’s again to see the lynx. Farmer said that if the skin was tainted the hair would come off. The tail is black at extremity for one inch, and no white at tip; the rest of it above is rust-color (beneath it is white), with the slightest possible suggestion of white rings, 2. e. a few white hairs noticed. When stretched or spread the fore foot measured just 5 inches in width, the hind foot scarcely less than 6 inches. The black border on the ear was broadest on the inner (7. e. toward the other ear) and forward side, — 4 inch and more. The tufts on the ears only about $+ inch wide. Adams went to show me the carcass. It was quite sweet still (13th, in afternoon), only a little fly-blown. No quadruped or bird had touched it. Remarkably long and slender, made for jumping. The muscles of the thigh were proportionately very large. I thought the thigh would measure now 9 inches in circumference. I had heard that there was nothing in its stomach, but we opened the paunch and found it full of rabbits’ fur. I cut off a fore leg. He said that he had lost two or three hens only, and apparently did not think much of that. The first he knew the animal was within three feet of him, so that he could hardly turn his gun to strike him. He did not know where he came from, — whether from over the wall, to which he was near, or from a chestnut, for he was in the midst of the woods of Jones’s lot, not cut. He felt somewhat frightened. Struck him with the butt of his gun, but did not hurt him much, he was so quick. He jumped at once thirty feet, turned round, and faced him. He then fired, about thirty feet, at his eyes, and destroyed one, — perhaps put out the other, too. He then bounded out of sight. When he had loaded he found him crawling toward him on his belly as if to spring upon him; fired again, and thinks he mortally wounded him then. After loading, approached, and the lynx faced him, all alive. He then fired, and the lynx leapt up fif- teen feet, fell, and died. Either at the second or last shot ~ leapt within ten feet of him. He was much impressed by his eyes and the ruff standing out on the sides of his neck. This was about one hundred and thirty rods easterly from his house. The skinned tail measured 5 inches. I boiled the leg on the 14th (five days after it was killed) for the bone. It smelled and looked like very good meat, like mutton. Vide Salem lynxes, September 23d, 1858.1 It is remarkable how slow people are to believe that there are any wild animals in their neighborhood. They who have seen this generally suppose that it got out of a menagerie; others that it strayed down from far north. At most they call it Canada lynx. In Willey’s White Mountain book the same animal is spoken of as a terror to the hunter and called the “Siberian Lynx.” What they call it I know not. I do not think it necessary even to suppose it a strag- gler, but only very rare hereabouts. I have seen two lynxes that were killed between here and Salem since °27. Have heard of another killed in or near Andover. There may have been many more killed as near within thirty years and I not have heard of it, for they who kill one commonly do not know what it is. They are noc- turnal in their habits, and therefore are the more rarely seen, yet a strange animal is seen in this town by some- body about every year, or its track. I have heard of two or three such within a year, and of half a dozen within fifteen years. Such an animal might range fifteen to twenty miles back and forth from Acton to ‘Tewksbury and find more woodland than in the southern part of New Hampshire generally. Farmer says that a farmer in ‘Tewksbury told him two or three years ago that he had seen deer lately on the pine plain thereabouts. Adams got a neighbor to help him skin the lynx, a middle-aged man; but he was “so nervous” and un- willing to touch even the dead beast, when he came to see it, that he gave him but little assistance. Dr. Reynolds tells me of a lynx killed in Andover, in a swamp near Haggerty’s Pond, one winter when he kept school in Tewksbury, about 1820. At first it was seen crossing the Merrimack into Tewksbury, and there was accordingly a story of an animal about that was ten feet long. ‘They turned out, all the hunters of the neighbor- hood, and tracked it in the snow, across Tewksbury to the swamp in Andover and back again to Tewksbury. One old hunter bet something that they could not show him a track which he did not know, but when they showed him this he gave up. Finally they tracked it to the Andover swamp, and a boy shot it on a tree, though it leapt and fell within a few feet of him when shot. Rice tells of a common wildcat killed in Sudbury some forty years ago, resting on some ice as it was crossing the Sudbury meadows amid ice and water. Mr. Boutwell of Groton tells me that a.lynx was killed in Dunstable within two or three years. Thinks it is in the State Museum.* This makes five that I have heard of (and seen three) killed within some fifteen or eighteen miles of Concord within thirty years past, and no doubt there have been three times as many of them killed here.’

A. M.—River still rising; at 4 P. M. one and an eighth inches higher than in morning.

In morning river is three feet two and a half plus inches above summer level. 6 P. M., river is slightly higher than in morning, or at height. ‘Thus it reached its height the third day after the rain ; had risen on. the morning of the third day about thirty inches on account of the rain of one day (the 12th). Joe Smith’s man brings me this forenoon a fish hawk which was shot on George Brooks’s pigeon-stand last evening. It is evidently a female of this year, full grown. Length 23 inches; alar extent 5 feet 64 inches. It prob- ably lit there merely for a perch.