The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

THE hunt began at the hen-yard gate, where we saw tracks in the thin, new snow that led us up the ridge, and along its narrow back, to a hollow stump. Here the hunt began in earnest, for not until that trail of close, double, nail-pointed prints went under the stump were the three small boys convinced that we were tracking a skunk and not a cat.

This creature had moved leisurely. That you could tell by the closeness of the prints. Wide-apart tracks in the snow mean hurry. Now a cat, going as slowly as this creature went, would have put down her dainty feet almost in single line, and would have left round, cushion-marked holes in the snow, not triangular, nail-pointed prints like these. Cats do not venture into holes under stumps, either.

We had bagged our first quarry! No, no! We had not pulled that wood pussy out of his hole and put him into our game-bag. We did not want to do that. We really carried no bag; and if we had, we should not have put the wood pussy in it, for we were hunting tracks, not the animals, and “bagging our quarry” meant trailing a creature to its den, or following its track until we had discovered something it had done, or what its business was, and why it was out. We were on the snow for animal facts, not animal pelts.

We were elated with our luck, for this stump was not five minutes by the steep ridge path from the hen-yard. And here, standing on the stump, we were only sixty minutes away from Boston Common by the automobile, driving no faster than the law allows. So we were not hunting in a wilderness, but just outside our dooryard and almost within the borders of a great city.

And that is the interesting fact of our morning hunt. No one but a lover of the woods and a careful walker on the snow would believe that here in the midst of hay-fields, in sight of the smoke of city factories, so many of the original wild wood-folk still live and travel their night paths undisturbed.

Still, this is a rather rough bit of country, broken, ledgy, boulder-strewn, which accounts for the swamps and woody hills that alternate with small towns and cultivated fields all the way to the Blue Hill Reservation, fifteen miles to the westward. This whole region, this dooryard of Boston, is one of Nature’s own reservations, a preserve that she has kept for her small and humble folk, who are just as dear to her as we are, but whom we have driven, except in such small places as these, quite off the earth.

Here, however, they are still at home, as this hole of the skunk’s under the stump proved. But there was more proof. As we topped the ridge on the trail of the skunk, we crossed another trail, made up of bunches of four prints,—two long and broad, two small and roundish,—spaced about a yard apart.

A hundred times, the winter before, we had tried that trail in the hope of finding the form or the burrow of its maker, the great Northern hare, but it crossed and turned and doubled, and always led us into a tangle, out of which we never got a clue.

As this was the first tracking snow of the winter, we were relieved to see the strong prints of our cunning neighbor again, for what with the foxes and the hunters, we were afraid it might have fared ill with him. But here he was, with four good legs under him; and after bagging our skunk, we returned to pick up the hare’s trail, to try our luck once more.

We brought him in long, leisurely leaps down the ridge, out into our mowing field, and over to the birches below the house. Here he had capered about in the snow, had stood up on his haunches and gnawed the bark from off a green oak sucker two and a half feet from the ground. This, doubtless, was pretty near his length, stretched out—an interesting item; not exact to the inch, perhaps, but close enough for us; and much more fascinating, guessed at by such a rule, than if measured dead, with scientific accuracy.