In the wood you may hear no sound but your own muffled footsteps, the crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from your passage, and now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a clear resonant crack of frozen fibres and its faint echo. You hear no bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the pungent fragrance of his fire nor the subtler one of fresh-cut wood. Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens, only scentless air reaches your nostrils.
One day there comes from the south a warm breath, and with it fleets of white clouds sailing across the blue upper deep, outstripped by their swifter shadows sweeping in blue squadrons along the glistening fields and darkening with brief passage the gray woodlands. Faster come the clouds out of the south and out of the west, till they crowd the sky, only fragments of its intense azure showing here and there between them, only now and then a gleam of sunlight flashing across the earth. Then the blue sunlit sky is quite shut away behind a low arch of gray, darkening at the horizon with thick watery clouds, and beneath it all the expanse of fields and forest lies in universal shadow.
The south wind is warmer than yesterday's sunshine, the snow softens till your footsteps are sharply moulded as in wax, and in a little space each imprint is flecked thick with restless, swarming myriads of snow-fleas. Rain begins to fall softly on snow-covered roofs, but beating the panes with the familiar patter of summer showers. It becomes a steady downpour that continues till the saturated snow can hold no more, and the hidden brooks begin to show in yellow streaks between white, unstable shores, and glide with a swift whisking rush over the smooth bottom that paves their rough natural bed; and as their yellow currents deepen and divide more widely their banks, the noise of their onflow fills the air like an exaggeration of the murmur of pines, and the song of the pines swells and falls with the varying wind.
After the rain there come, perhaps, some hours of quiet sunshine or starlight, and then out of the north a nipping wind that hardens the surface of the snow into solid crust that delights your feet to walk upon. The rivulets shrink out of sight again, leaving no trace but water-worn furrows in the snow, some frozen fluffs of yellow foam and stranded leaves and twigs, grass and broken weeds. The broad pools have left their shells of unsupported ice, which with frequent sudden crashes shatters down upon their hollow beds.
When the crust has invited you forth, you cannot retrace your way upon it, and the wild snow walkers make no record now of their recent wanderings. But of those who fared abroad before this solid pavement was laid upon the snow, fabulous tales are now inscribed upon it. Reading them without question, you might believe that the well-tamed country had lapsed into the possession of its ancient savage tenants, for the track of the fox is as big as a wolf's, the raccoon's as large as a bear's, the house cat's as broad as the panther's, and those of the muskrat and mink persuade you to believe that the beaver and otter, departed a hundred years ago, have come to their own again. Till the next thaw or snowfall, they are set as indelibly as primeval footprints in the rocks, and for any scent that tickles the hounds' keen nose, might be as old. He sniffs them curiously and contemptuously passes on, yet finds little more promising on footing that retains but for an instant the subtle trace of reynard's unmarked passage.
The delicate curves and circles that the bent weeds etched on the soft snow are widened and deepened in rigid grooves, wherein the point that the fingers of the wind traced them with is frozen fast. Far and wide from where they fall, all manner of seeds drift across miles of smooth fields, to spring to life and bloom, by and by, in strange, unaccustomed places, and brown leaves voyage to where their like was never grown. The icy knolls shine in the sunlight with dazzling splendor, like golden islands in a white sea that the north wind stirs not, and athwart it the low sun and the waning moon cast their long unrippled glades of gold and silver. Over all winter again holds sway, but we have once more heard the sound of rain and running brooks and have been given a promise of spring.
LIV
THE FOX
Among the few survivals of the old untamed world there are left us two that retain all the raciness of their ancestral wildness.