A RUNAWAY DAY 63 



gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the smaller 

 crow flapped laboriously beneath them. 



Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare 

 climbing fern, an evergreen fern which climbs like a 

 vine and has flat, veined leaves that look like little 

 green hands with four and five fingers. The stem is 

 like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met 

 the pale-gray poison sumac, with its corpse-colored 

 berries growing out from the sides of the twigs instead 

 of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless 

 varieties. 



I followed Pond-Lily Path through the white sand 

 that in the springtime is all golden with barrens- 

 heather. It winds in and out through the scattered 

 clumps of low pitch pine and thickets of scrub oak, 

 and finally leads to a still brook all afloat in midsum- 

 mer with pond lilies. When the path reached the 

 bogs, which to-day were frozen solid, I turned in, 

 crossing them on the snow-covered ice. Everywhere 

 were lines of four-toed crow tracks, and here and 

 there were rabbit trails, a series of four round holes 

 in the snow. 



The next morning, when I followed my own tracks, 

 I found that for more than a mile I had been trailed 

 by some animal making a series of little paw-prints 

 like those of a small cat, except that they were close 

 together and sometimes doubled, showing where the 

 animal had given sudden bounds. It was none other 

 than the trail of a weasel, probably the long-tailed 

 variety, although that is rare in the barrens. Like 

 others of his family, this animal oftens follows a 



