Winter - Dallas Lore Sharp

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CHAPTER XIII

       Table of Contents

The Fox Sparrows’ Bath Frontispiece
Skunk Tracks 3
Cat Tracks 4
Tracks of Hare joined by Dogs 6
“In a burst of speed across the open field” 7
Dog Tracks in Four Inches of Snow 7
Tracks of the White-Footed Mouse 9
“A gray squirrel with a red squirrel at his heels” 11
Fox Tracks 12
Muskrat Trail 14
“Into the air they went” 26
White-Foot—“In the winter gales” 33
“Five wee mice” 35
White-Foot and the Hickory-Nuts 38
A Vireo’s Nest in Winter 40
“Wind-sweepings” 41
’Possum in the Persimmon Tree 50
Weasel—“Watching me from between the sticks” 58
“A chickadee!” 62
“Doing the excavating themselves” 69
Food for the Nuthatches 76
The Mourning-Cloak Butterfly, an Early Flitter 77
A Ruffed Grouse Trail 78
“The snow had melted from the river meadows” 80
“Carrying a big bob-tailed vole out of my ‘mowing’” 85
“Scurrying through the tops of some pitch pines” 90
“All the afternoon the crows have been going over” 93
The Duck-billed Platypus, or Duck-Bill 97
The Echidna, or Porcupine Ant-Eater 98
“Standing before a large ’possum” 99
“Out she spilled and nine little ’possums with her” 100
“A great blue heron would beat ponderously across” 106
Meadow Mouse—“In a drifting catbird’s nest” 109
“A little figure in yellow oil-skins” 114
“Drew a limp little form out of the water” 121
Quail—“One of the covey calling the flock together” 127
“A flock of robins dashing into the cedars” 131
Pussy-Willows and Watercress 132
“The hazelnut bushes are in bloom” 133
Bluebird—“Like a bit of summer sky” 135

       Table of Contents

      As in The Fall of the Year, so here in Winter, the second volume of this series, I have tried by story and sketch and suggestion to catch the spirit of the season. In this volume it is the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter which I would catch, the bitter boreal might that, out of doors, drives all before it; that challenges all that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us, till the bounding red blood belts us like an equator, and the glow of all the tropics blooms upon our faces and down into the inmost of our beings.

      Winter within us means vitality and purpose and throbbing life; and without us in our fields and woods it means widened prospect, the storm of battle, the holiness of peace, the poetry of silence and darkness and emptiness and death. And I have tried throughout this volume to show that Winter is only a symbol, that death is only an appearance, that life is everywhere, and that everywhere life dominates even while it lies buried under the winding-sheet of the snow.

      “A simple child,

      That lightly draws its breath,

      What should it know of death?”

      Why, this at least, that the winter world is not dead; that the cold is powerless to destroy; that life flees and hides and

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