



HUNTING THE SNOW 



woods. Life is 

 always new, and 

 always strange, 

 and always fas- 

 cinating. 



It has all been 



studied and classified according * 

 to species. Any one knowing the 

 woods at all, would know that 

 these were mouse tracks, would even 

 know that they were the tracks of the 

 white-footed mouse, and not the tracks 

 of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, 

 or the meadow mouse. But what is the 

 whole small story of these prints? What 

 purpose, what intention, what feeling, do 

 they spell? What and why ? a hundred 

 times ! 



So it is not the bare tracks that we are 

 hunting; it is the meaning of the tracks 

 where they are going, and what they are 

 going for. Burns saw a little mouse run 

 across the furrows as he was plowing and 

 wrote a poem about it. So could we write 

 a poem if we like Burns would stop to 

 think what the running of these little mice 

 across the snow might mean. The woods 

 and fields, summer and winter, are full of 

 poems that might be written if we only 



