Our pines have suffered much from a mysterious "disease" for the last few years, and the most careful study has failed to find any fungus blight or insect at the bottom of this. We have had summer after summer of severe and long continued drought. It is now believed that this has weakened the trees so that they could not withstand the winter cold and have been "winter killed." With the drought we had several winters of infrequent snowfall. We did better last winter and the disease seems to be on the wane. Next to plenty of rain in summer, a winter in which we have frequent falls of light snow will be the best medicine for the pines that we could have.
It is the air entangled among the snow crystals, then, which makes the snow blanket, as we often call it, so sure a protection from cold. The ground may have frozen to a considerable depth before the snow comes, but if it stays throughout the winter there is no frost in the earth beneath it when the spring melts it away. No sooner is the ground protected from further freezing from above than the greater warmth below begins to melt the frost and change it to life-giving moisture. Because of this warmth from below the sap stirs in the trees long before the temperature in the air above the snow blanket has given it any warrant for such action. It pushes up until the frost-bound trunk denies it further passage and there waits the first brief respite in the air above. Hence in March, though the snow may be still deep on the surface and the mercury in the glass fall well toward zero at night, the fires are started in the maple sugar camps and the pails hung to the trees. We know that no sooner will the sun warm their trunks than the sap will begin to tinkle in the pails, dripping with the sweet promise of the spring which is already pulsing in the subsoil.
It was not a big storm, in my woods, after all. It lasted less than twenty-four hours and hardly six inches of light snow fell. Proverbs are half-truths, anyway, and "long foretold, long last" has proved less than half of itself this time. But though the day is clear and the sun bright, Aunt Sue's snowbank is lifting its purple mass in the southeast again and, with the other Dorchester backwoodsmen, I am wagging my head solemnly and joining in a jeremiad concerning a big one next time. I should like to have known Aunt Sue. I picture her as a stout, keen-eyed, wise-headed house-mother of the old English stock. Surely she is the patron saint of the young pines and of all others who know how to enjoy a good old-fashioned winter. As such I hope someone will paint her, seated on a good big snowbank, attended by cupid pines robed in such ermine as they now wear, and with the soft radiance of a snow rainbow around her head for an aureole.
CHAPTER XXIII
SPORTS OF THE WINTER WOODS
The time to go into the winter woods for love of them is in the still chill of dawn when the blue-black of the west is hardly yet touched with the purple that heralds the day, when the high sky in the east begins to warm from gray to gold and below black twigs make lace against an amber glow that draws one as does the flame the moth. At such a time the cold of the night may lie bitter on the open fields and the snow crystals there whine beneath the tread, but in the deep heart of the woods the warmth of the day before is still held entangled, an afterglow of the sun that waits his golden coming once more. At that hour I like to set my course eastward. The wind, if there be one, will be at my back and half its keenness dulled thereby, and the ever visible, growing promise of the sun warms almost as much as his later presence.
Our coldest midwinter nights are still and the tangle of the trees enmeshes a protecting warmth that the outside cold cannot penetrate altogether. This is the outer winter overcoat of the woods. Even deciduous trees provide it and the level boughs of evergreens give layer after layer of air that fends from the cold. Even without the snow, the frost penetrates but a little way in the earth of the woods. No matter how low the temperature above the tree-tops and in the open spaces, the ground beneath the trees hardly freezes, and, if the snow comes, the moment its blanket is spread the temperature beneath it warms to above freezing and the frost comes out. Deep snows are hard on certain winter birds, but they are the salvation of many of the smaller winter animals and they provide man with one of the chief joys of the winter woods.
Going forth at dawn one has the full joy of the day before him and need leave no pleasure untasted. It is something worth while to meet the sun on such a morning. No wonder the ancient Persians worshipped him. Even his first rays enfold you with a warmth that the thermometer might not notice but which is none the less real for all that. They set the fires of the spirit burning more brightly, warming the cockles of the heart and raising the temperature of the man if not that of the air about him. The pleasure of the pathless woods which is to be yours for all day is sweetest in the first encounter. Toward the sun your goal glows with red fire and the woods seem in its burning to celebrate your advent. You move eastward the chief figure in the procession.
For it always seems to me as if at winter sunrise all things of the wood move forward in this matutinal procession of welcome to the coming warmth of the new day. As a matter of fact, of course, they do. The whole round earth is swinging toward the east at a wondrous pace. But it is more than that. The little winds of dawn are drawn toward the rising column of heated air beneath his glow. They come out of the nether cold of the night and it is the chill of their passing which often brings the temperature a little lower as the sun shows above the horizon, but they go to him to get warm just as the rest of us do. It may be fancy, but it always seems to me that the morning birds on their first hunt for breakfast work eastward. The first flight of the crows is apt to be in that direction and the chickadees hunt from the south side of one tree to that of the next, making the sunward side of the grove their rallying place. The trees in growth reach always toward the sun, stretching their limbs longest on the sunny side, and it always seems to me as if in winter they could be seen to yearn in the same direction with the fond fingers of bare twigs. I have an idea that measurements made at leaf-fall of one year and again at bud-time of the next would show this. But there is really no need. We have but to go forth in the woods of a clear, still winter morning to feel the impulse ourselves and to know that it is universal.