Yet he has shown me—not this year—more than one handsome skin.
Once, too, he showed me the fox himself. Hounds were baying in the distance as I came to the house on my Sunday morning walk, and we spoke of their probable course. He thought it likely that they would cross a certain field, and taking a by-road that would carry us within sight of it, we kept our eyes out till the dogs seemed to have diverged in the wrong direction. Then I was walking carelessly along, talking as usual (a bad habit of mine), when my companion seized me by both shoulders and swung me sharply about. “Look at that!” he said. And there stood the fox, five or ten rods away, facing us squarely. He had come up a little rise of ground, and had stopped as he saw us. But for my friend’s muscular assistance, I should have missed him, near as he was, for in one second he was gone; and though we scaled the wall instantly and ran up the slope, we got no further sight of him.
Yes, if you are a discouraged, winter-killed nature lover, who has begun to think that Massachusetts woods—woods within sight of the State House dome—are pretty much devoid of wild life, go out after a light snowfall and read the natural history record of a single night. We shall not be without woods, nor will the woods be without inhabitants, for a good while yet.
WINTER AS IT WAS
With the wind howling from the northwest, and the mercury crouching below the zero mark, it seems a good time to sit in the house and think of winter as it used to be. What is the advantage of growing old, if one cannot find an hour now and then for the pleasures of memory?
The year’s end is for the young. Such is the order of the world, the universal paradox. Opposite seeks opposite. And we were young once,—a good while ago,—and for us, also, winter was a bright and busy season, its days all too short and too few. I speak of “week-days,” be it understood. As for winter Sundays, in an unwarmed meeting-house (though the sermon might be like the breath of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace), we should have been paragons of early piety, beings too good to live, if we had wished the hours longer. Let their miseries be forgotten.
On week-days, once out of school, we wasted no time. We knew where we were going, and we went on the run. We were boys, not men. Some of us, at least, were not yet infected with the idea that we ever should be men. We aspired neither to men’s work nor to men’s pleasures. We aimed not at self-improvement. We thought not of getting rich. We might recite “Excelsior” in the schoolroom, but it did us no harm; our innocence was incorruptible. Two things we did: we skated, and we slid down-hill. There was always either snow or ice. The present demoralization of the seasons had not yet begun. Winter was winter. Snowdrifts were over your head, and ice was three feet thick. And zero—for boys who slept in attics to which no particle of artificial heat ever penetrated, zero was something like summer. Young America was tough in those days.
I recall at this moment the bitterly cold day when one of our number skated into an airhole on Whitman’s Pond. It was during the noon recess. His home was a mile or more east of the pond, and the schoolhouse was at least a mile west of the pond. He sank into the water up to his chin, and saved himself with difficulty, the airhole luckily being small and the ice firm about the edges. What would a twentieth-century boy do under such circumstances? I can only guess. But I know what Charles H. did. He came back to the schoolhouse first, to make his apologies to the master; I can see him now, as he came in smiling, looking just a little foolish; then he ran home—three miles, perhaps—to change his clothing. And he is living still. Oh, yes, we were tough,—or we died young.
That was while we were in the high school, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old. But my liveliest recollections of winter antedate that period by several years. Then sliding down-hill was our dearest excitement. Ours was “no great of a hill,” to use a form of speech common among us; I smile now as I go past it; but it could not have suited us better if it had been made on purpose; and no half holiday or moonlight evening was long enough to exhaust our enjoyment of the exercise—walking up and sliding down, walking up and sliding down. “Monotonous,” do I hear some one say? It was monotony such as would have ended too soon though it had lasted forever. If I had a thousand dollars to spend in an afternoon’s sport now, I should not know how to get half as much exhilaration out of it as two hours on that snow-covered slope afforded. There is something in a boy’s spirits that a man’s money can never buy, nor a man’s will bring back to him.
As years passed, we ventured farther from home to a steeper and longer declivity. Glorious hours we spent there, every boy riding his own sled after his own fashion. Boys who were boys rode “side-saddle” or “belly-bump;” but here and there a timid soul, or one who considered the toes of his boots, condescended to an upright position, feet foremost, like a girl—in the language of the polite people, sur son séant.