Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown, destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants. It set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.
Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures. A recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods—Georgiana being away from home with her mother—showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels of the snow-walkers in search of food. Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit, weasel, mouse, mink, fox—their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful and pitiful to behold. Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the field. At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove—starved at the brink of plenty. Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I buried my vegetables. I told Georgiana:
"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets out what we need. Think of it—a whole neighborhood of rabbits hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible leaf." Once that night I turned in bed, restless. Georgiana did the same.
"Are you awake?" she said, softly.
"Are you?"
"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"
"Yes; are you?"
"What do you suppose they think about us?"
"I'd rather not know."
Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair. God and nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but death and man. She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly renders me an account of what she has done. This winter gives her a great chance and she adorns it. It seems that never before were so many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk, and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past. There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful is this whole aspect of her nature.