“Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places
Where January brings few faces.”
And as I brought to mind the poet’s lines, I forgot to shiver, and quite warmed up again to the idea of flowers, especially as one of the boys just then brought up a spray of green holly with a burning red berry on it!
We were tacking again to get back on our course, and had got into the edge of the swamp among the pines when the boy with the shovel began to study the ground and the trees with a searching eye, moving forward and back as if trying to find the location of something.
“Here it is,” he said, and set in digging through the snow at the foot of a big pine. I knew what he was after. It was gold thread, and here was the only spot, in all the woods about, where we had ever found it—a spot not larger than the top of a dining-room table.
Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen leaflets and long, golden thread-like roots, that mixed with the red and green of the partridge berry in a finger-bowl makes a cheerful little winter bouquet. And here with the gold thread, about the butt of the pine, was the partridge berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which seemed to burn holes in the snow that had covered and banked the tiny fires.
For this is all that the ice and snow had done. The winter had come with wind enough to blow out every flame in the maple tops, and with snow enough to smother every little fire in the peat bogs of the swamp; but peat fires are hard to put out, and here and everywhere the winter had only banked the fires of summer. Dig down through the snow ashes anywhere and the smouldering fires of life burst into blaze.
But the boy with the axe had gone on ahead. And we were off again after him, stopping to get a great armful of black alder branches that were literally aflame with red berries.
We were climbing a piny knoll when almost at our feet, jumping us nearly out of our skins, and warming the very roots of our hair, was a burrrr—burrrr—burrrr—burrrr—four big partridges—as if four big snow mines had exploded under us, hurling bunches of brown on graceful scaling wings over the dip of the hills!
On we went up over the knoll and down into a low bog where, in the summer, we gather high-bush blueberries, the boy with the axe leading the way and going straight across the ice toward the middle of the bog.
My eye was keen for signs, and soon I saw he was heading for a sweet-pepper bush with a broken branch. My eye took in another bush off a little to the right with a broken branch. The boy with the axe walked up to the broken sweet-pepper bush and drew a line on the ice between it and the bush off on the right, pacing along this line till he got the middle; then he started at right angles from it and paced off a line to a clump of cat-tails sticking up through the ice of the flooded bog. Halfway back on this line he stopped, threw off his coat and began to chop a hole about two feet square in the ice. Removing the block while I looked on, he rolled up his sleeve and reached down the length of his arm through the icy water.