The shaking of the snow from the trees and their gleaning among the birch cones had scattered the little seeds which they love so well all about on the snow and soon they followed them. The surface a little before had been white. Before the birds were ready to come down it was spiced so liberally with the seeds and scales that they had shaken down that it was the color of cinnamon. Then with one motion the flock dropped like autumn leaves and began a most systematic seed hunt in which they left no bit of the space unsought. Yet when they were gone you would hardly find two tracks that crossed; they hopped in winding parallels that never went over the same ground a second time, leaving figures much like the mazes which schoolboys of long ago used to draw on their slates. They came almost to my feet and I was beginning to feel that my fancy of invisibility was very real after all when with a twitter of alarm and a single united action they whirred into the air and vanished over the treetops.
I turned away in chagrin. The magic was destroyed, evidently, and in turning I saw the cause. Just behind me in the snow with quivering tail and green eyes glaring accusingly was the family cat. He was hunting far from home, but I saw contemptuous recognition in his eyes and I knew he was thinking that here was that great, clumsy creature that was always scaring away his game.
THE ROAD TO MUDDY POND
TWO days of greedy south wind had licked up the crisp snow till all the fields and southerly slopes were bare. Then came the lull before the north wind should come back, a lull in which you had but to sniff the air to smell the coming spring; its faint perfume crisped with a frosty odor that lured the senses like a flavor of stephanotis frappé. It was a day that tempts a man to take staff and scrip and climb the hills due south to meet the romance the two days’ wind has brought from far down the map, perhaps from Venezuela and the highlands that border the banks of Orinoco. By noon the north wind will be driving it back again, though bits of it will still be tangled in southerly facing corners of the hills.
Such a day is fine for cedar swamps. The boggy morasses under foot will be firm with the winter’s ice still, but the warm wind has swept all things clear of snow. Into the most tangled depths you may penetrate with at least firm footing. Where in summer the treacherous mosses wait to let you through into black depths of soft muck that have no bottom, you may walk in safety on the way that the winter has laid for you.
It is not a time of year to find new things, this season of mid-February, and yet I had hardly faced the bewildering sun a mile before, seeking the cool depths of a hemlock-clad northern hillside to rest my eyes from the glare, I found a yellow birch all hung with fluffy tassels, as if the wine aroma of the air had fooled it into foliage. Now the yellow birch is not exactly rare in our woods, here south-west of Boston, but it is rare enough to be called occasional. Where the Betula alba is as common, almost, as the grass under foot, the Betula lutea may not occur once in a square mile. I know it only on cold northern hillsides or in dense swamps where cool springs bathe its roots all summer long. There the silvery yellow, silky shreds of its outer bark mark its trunk as a thing of beauty, winter or summer. You feel like stroking these curls as if they were those of a flaxen-haired youngster lost in the deep woods and brave but a bit troubled and in need of comfort from one who knows. That is the only impression the yellow birch had ever made on me in all my greetings of it, yet here it was wearing a semblance of young leaves in this wine-sweet February air.