From the rabbit-meadow we followed devious paths down through Fern Valley, which in summertime is a green mass of cinnamon fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, brake, regal fern, and half a score of others. In the midst of the marsh were rows of the fruit-stems of the sensitive fern, which is the first to blacken before the frost. These were heavy with rich wine-brown seed-pods, filled with seeds like fine dust. They had an oily, nutty taste; and it would seem as if some hungry mouse or bird would find them good eating during famine times. Yet so far as I have observed they are never fed upon.
Along the side of the path were thickets of spice-bush, whose crushed leaves in summer have an incense sweeter than burns in any censer of man’s making. To-day I broke one of the brittle branches, to nibble the perfumed bark, and found at the end of a twig, pretending to be a withered leaf, a cocoon of the prometheus moth. The leaf had been folded together, lined with spun silk, and lashed so strongly that the twig would break before the silken cable.
We passed through a clump of staghorn sumac with branches like antlers, bearing at their ends heavy masses of fruit-clusters made up of hundreds of dark, velvety crimson berries, each containing a brown seed. The pulp of these berries is intensely sour, its flavor giving the sumac its other name of “vinegar plant.” These red clusters crushed in sweetened water make a very good imitation of the red circus-lemonade of our childhood. The staghorn is not to be confounded with its treacherous sister, the poison sumac, with her corpse-colored berries. She is a vitriol-thrower, and with her death-pale bark and arsenic-green leaves, always makes me think of one of those haggard, horrible women of the Terror.
It was in Fern Valley that the Botanist made his discovery for the day. It was only a tree, and moreover a tree that he must have passed many times before. Only to-day, however, did it catch his eye. The bark was that of an oak, but the leaves, which clung thick and brown to the limb, were long, with a straight edge something like the leaves of the willow-oak, only broader and larger. It was no other than the laurel-oak, a tree which by all rights belonged hundreds of miles to the south of us.
He walked gloatingly around his discovery, and it was some time before I could drag him on. Thereafter he gave me a masterly discourse, some forty minutes in duration, on the life-history of the oaks, and propounded several ingenious theories to account for the presence of this strange species. This discourse continued until we reached the historic white oak near the end of the valley, where the Botanist once found a flock of bay-breasted warblers in the middle of a rainstorm; and again I heard the story of that day.
Through the valley flowed a little stream, and the snow along its banks told of the goings and comings of the wild-folk. Gray squirrels, red squirrels, muskrats, rabbits, mice, foxes, weasels, all had passed and repassed along these banks.
To me the most interesting trail was that of a blarina shrew. His track in the snow is a strange one. It is a round, tunnel-like trail, like that of some large caterpillar, with the trough made by the wallowing little body filled with tiny alternate tracks—one of the strangest of all the winter trails.
I could obtain very little enthusiasm from the Botanist over blarinas. He still babbled of laurel-leafed oaks and similar frivolities. Even the crowning event of the walk left him cold. It came on the home-stretch. We were passing through the last pasture before reaching the humdrum turnpike which led to the tame-folk. Suddenly in the snow I saw a strange trail. It was evidently made by a jumper, but not one whose track I knew. I followed it, until among the leaves in a bank something moved. Before my astonished eyes hopped falteringly, but bravely, a speckled toad.
The winter sun shone palely on his brown back still crusted with the earth of his chill home. Down under the leaves and the frozen ground he had heard the call, and struggled to the surface, expecting to find spring awaiting him. Two jumps, however, had landed him in a snowbank. It was a disillusion, and Mr. Toad winked his mild brown eyes piteously. He struggled bravely to get out, but every jump plunged him deeper into the snow. His movements became feebler as the little warmth his cold blood contained oozed out.
