Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my heart.
So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within the range of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.
And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as greyhounds.
Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.
Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too, hear a "fine, plaintive" sound—no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.
Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.
We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.
Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a woodchuck's—
"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."