The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Nor was this all, for up the foot-path through the birches came the marks of two dogs. They joined the marks of the hare. And then, back along the edge of the woods to the bushy ridge, we saw a pretty race.

It was all in our imaginations, all done for us by those long-flinging footprints in the snow. But we saw it all—the white hare, the yelling hounds, nip and tuck, in a burst of speed across the open field that left a gap in the wind behind.

It had all come as a surprise. The hounds had climbed the hill on the scent of a fox, and had “jumped” the hare unexpectedly. But just such a jump of fear is what a hare’s magnificent legs were intended for.

They carried him a clear twelve feet in some of the longest leaps for the ridge, and they carried him to safety, so far as we could read the snow. In the medley of hare-and-hound tracks on the ridge there was no sign of a tragedy. He had escaped again—but how and where we have still to learn.

We had bagged our hare,—yet still we have him to bag,—and taking up the trail of one of the dogs, we continued our hunt.

One of the joys of this snow-walking is having a definite road or trail blazed for you by knowing, purposeful feet. You do not have to blunder ahead, breaking your way into this wilderness world, trusting luck to bring you somewhere. The wild animal or the dog goes this way, and not that, for a reason. You are following that reason all along; you are pack-fellow to the hound; you hunt with him.

Here the hound had thrust his muzzle into a snow-capped pile of slashings, had gone clear round the pile, then continued on his way. But we stopped, for out of the pile, in a single, direct line, ran a number of mice-prints, going and coming. A dozen white-footed mice might have traveled that road since the day before, when the snow had ceased falling.

We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.

I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods,—small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution,—is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.

It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why?—a hundred times!