V
If winter is the season of large sounds, it is also the season of small sounds, for it is the season of wide silence when the slightest of stirrings can be heard. Three of these small sounds you must listen for this winter: the smothered tinkle-tunkle of water running under thin ice, as where the brook passes a pebbly shallow; then the tick-tick-tick of the first snowflakes hitting the brown leaves on a forest floor; then the fine sharp scratch of a curled and toothed beech leaf skating before a noiseless breath of wind over the crusty snow. Only he that hath ears will hear these sounds, speaking, as they do, for the vast voiceless moments of the winter world.
VI
I have not heard the “covey call” of the quail this winter. But there is not a quail left alive in all the fields and sprout-lands within sound of me. I used to hear them here on Mullein Hill; a covey used to roost down the wooded hillside in front of the house; but even they are gone—hunted out of life; shot and eaten off of my small world. What a horribly hungry animal man is!
But you may have the quail still in your fields. If so, then go out toward dusk on a quiet, snowy day, especially if you have heard shooting in the fields that day, and try to hear some one of the covey calling the flock together: Whir-r-rl-ee! Whir-r-rl-ee! Whirl-ee-gee!—the sweetest, softest, tenderest call you will ever hear!
VII
And you certainly do have chickadees in your woods. If so, then go out any time of day, but go on a cold, bleak, blustery day, when everything is a-shiver, and, as Uncle Remus would say, “meet up” with a chickadee. It is worth having a winter, just to meet a chickadee in the empty woods and hear him call—a little pin-point of live sound, an undaunted, unnumbed voice interrupting the thick jargon of the winter to tell you that all this bluster and blow and biting cold can’t get at the heart of a bird that must weigh, all told, with all his winter feathers on, fully—an ounce or two!
VIII
And then the partridge—you must hear him, bursting like a bottled hurricane from the brown leaves at your feet!