Tracks in the Snow 



13 



you hear, a mouse squeak or an Owl hoot, and see nothing. Next day 

 while you cut across lots to the village post-office, you find where a Grouse 

 has left his bed in the snow. A little farther along, a trampled, bloody 

 place, with a bit of fur here and there, all being in the center of a network 

 of tracks, shows where a fox has caught and killed a Rabbit. Rabbit, 

 squirrel and mouse-tracks, Snow Bunting, Tree Sparrow and Crow tracks 

 are numerous along your way. Again the inevitable thought: What a 

 wealth of observations awaits the man who will, for several whole winter 

 nights and days, be a stump — a seeing and hearing stump — in a corner 

 of the wooded swamp. But now "signs and and wonders" are all that 

 is left you, in summer perhaps not even these. 



The most interesting trail I find in the winter woods is that of the 

 Ruffed Grouse. I love to follow the little path among the saplings and 

 alders, and under evergreens where I must be careful, or else a bough will 

 discharge its load of snow down the back of my neck. I find where the 

 bird spent the night under the snow, and the exit whence he passed along 

 to find a breakfast of sumach berries and wintergreen leaves, scratching 

 down to the latter through the snow. Now the trail is close and leisurely, 

 now open and hurried; here he came out to sun himself in a roadway; 

 then he crossed a brook on thin ice where his tread was evidently hestitat- 

 ing and gingerly. 



These, and other still more interesting things of the same sort, indicate 

 how much I have missed; they are so many signs that I have come too late, 

 have even been out-generaled. Sometimes the trail ends in a way to show 

 that a fox has sprung at the wary Grouse, getting for his pains perhaps a 



TRACKS OF RUFFED GROUSE 



