Chapter XXII
IN PRAISE OF COUNTRY WINTER
Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into “a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
Our first winter began one bleak November day when the lone pine in the potato field was outlined black against a gray sky, and over the long mountain wall to the northwest came suddenly a puff of white vapour, like the beginning of artillery fire, and then the shrapnel of the snow descended upon us. Wrapped against it, we ran about the farm, marvelling at the transformations it wrought. First it filled up the furrows on the ploughed land, making our field like a zebra’s back. Then it whitened the sundial lawn, reminding us to take the wooden dial post in for the winter. Then it whitened the brown earth around the pool, where our July-sown grass had failed to make a catch, and presently the pool was a black mirror on a field of white.
Then, as a crowning touch, it powdered the pines, and we ran among them. Under their thick shelter the wind was not felt. We could hear the flakes hissing against the needles overhead. All about us the white powder was sifting down. A peep into the outside world showed all distances blotted out by the storm. By evening the grove was a powdered Christmas card, the naked farm fields mantles of white laid upon the earth, the lamps in our house beacons of warmth gleaming behind us.
That snow melted, but others followed it, and by Christmas we were, as Mike put it, snowed in for the winter. In the barn was the warm smell of cattle. The motors had disappeared from our roads, and we went to the village in a pung, meeting other pungs on the way. It was as if we had slipped back a whole generation in time. Curiously enough, too, life became more leisurely, more familiar. The great summer estates were boarded up, the hotels closed. Only the real village people sat in church or waited at the post-office. We who in summer had known but few of our townsfolk now became acquainted with them all. We, too, left our pung in the horse sheds every Sabbath morning, listened to the nasal drone of the village choir, and joined in the social quarter-hour which followed the service. It was an altogether different world we live in from the summer world, and we liked it even better.
What walks we had! Either with stout boots along the roads or with snowshoes into the deep woods, we took our exercise almost daily by tramping, and to us the countryside was a perpetual revelation. Almost the first thing which impressed us was the colourful quality of the winter landscape. Even on our own thirty acres that was apparent. At sunset of a still, peaceful day we could look forth from our south windows across the white lawn to the dark green pines and beyond them the exquisite iron-rust tamaracks, soft and feathery. The eastern sky would be mother of pearl at that hour, the southern sky blue, the western sky warm salmon, green, and gold, and the encircling hills a soft gray. Then, as the sun sank lower, a veil of amethyst would steal mysteriously into the feathery tamaracks and over the gray hills, all the upper air would blush to rose, and for a brief ecstatic ten minutes nature would sound a colour chord like a Mozartian andante.
Out on the roads we were charmed by the tawny tiger colour of the willow shoots and the delicate lavender of the blackberry vines rising from the snow beside a gray roadside wall. On the edge of the woods a white birch trunk, naked of leaves, would tell like a lightning stab against the wall of pines, while in the woods themselves, where the sunlight flickered through, the brook would wander black as jet beneath beautifully curved banks of snow, and a laurel bush or fern would stand out a vivid green in a shaft of sunlight; or even a spot of brown leaves, where a pheasant or partridge had scratched, would disclose in its centre the vivid red of a partridge berry, a tiny woodland colour note that we loved.
And how close our wild neighbours came in the winter! We kept out a constant supply of suet and sunflower seeds on two or three downstair window ledges, and while we were dining, or reading in the south room, we could look up at any time and see chickadees or juncos or nuthatches just beyond the pane. The pheasants, too, came to our very doors in winter, leaving their unmistakable tracks, for they are walking birds and set their feet in a single line.
It was not long before we began to find tracks of four-footed wild things, a mink by the brook, a deer in the pasture, and finally a fox which, unlike Buster, tracked with one footprint in the other, leaving apparently but two marks. We followed him a long way on our snowshoes–up through our pasture and across Bert’s to Bert’s chicken house, and then out across the fields and into the woods. Stella had never tracked before, and she was as keen on the scent as a Boy Scout, reconstructing the animal’s actions in her imagination as she went along. We lost the trail finally where it crossed a road, but we picked up deer tracks instead, and found a spot where they had eaten from the sumach bushes, and another where they had pawed up the snow for frozen apples in an old abandoned orchard.
“Oh, if they’d only come into our orchard!” cried Stella.