A WINTER RESIDENT. 199 



paper — the fresh fallen snow. A shrewd observer can read 

 there the whole story. AVhere the trefoil tracks are thickest 

 was the scene of the hare's dinner party, — poplar on the 

 stick was the 2n^ce-de-Tesistance , — and a very merry party 

 it was to judge by the number of tracks, until the old 

 horned owl swooped down and seized poor Long-ears. How 

 scared the others were can be read in these tremendously 

 long leaps toward the alder thicket. These light, triple- 

 pointed tracks are the grouse's where he alighted and walked 

 a few feet toward that little fir tree with down-hanging limbs, 

 which stands sheeted in snow like a pointed soldier's tent. 

 His bedroom was the slanting lower bongh, walled and roofed 

 by the drift. Thfs beaded chain straight to his hiding place 

 was the fox's track; that long-paced, round-pitted track the 

 wildcat made. And mark the broken level where he tossed 

 the snow from the bough above him as he burst up in terror, 

 and the wing-strokes in the snow where he strnck it three or 

 four times before he could gather headway and rise clear. 



So it is written in the snow. Every little while Nature 

 prepares a new edition of the great blanket sheet newspaper, 

 powders all the fields afresh, and lets the creatures of the 

 woods write again the story of their woes and pleasures among 

 the personals and in the society columns. There it is reported, 

 plain as if in print, that the flying squirrels had a frolic about 

 the hollow apple tree ; that the mink caught a trout in the 

 open water below the mill-dam ; that the red squirrels had a 

 sapping party in the maples, and ate the burrs of the juni- 

 pers for dessert; of the snow-bunting's feast of weed-seed 

 eaten from a snow table-cover ; how the old porcupine has 

 broken out his lumber road between his den in the rocks 

 and the tall hemlock; and the shrew-mouse's wanderings 

 beneath the snow were not so crooked and out of the 



