xii FOREWORD 



wise mainly occupied, in the doubtless unscientific 

 and haphazard observation of woodland folk and 

 winged, in the personalities of trees and the retreats 

 of wild flowers, that he has been moved to think 

 such avocation cannot be wholly evil, and that the 

 scientists who deal with lovely or fascinating sen- 

 suous things must expect those lovely or fascinating 

 things to be approached from other angles than 

 theirs. One who is not a scientist does not delib- 

 erately toy with a 40,000- volt high-potential cur- 

 rent. But you or I may, .1 trust, explore for the 

 Cypripedium spectabile in its swamp, or track a wea- 

 sel over its snowy rocks, in a spirit of pure advent- 

 ure, in the quest, let us say, for the essential flavor 

 of the wilderness, which may come in the odor of a 

 flower or the note of a bird or the imaginative reali- 

 zation on our part of how the world looked last 

 night to the animal which tracked warily here, 

 searching for its prey. 



In such a spirit, at any rate, these chapters have 

 been written, records of sometimes purposeful but 

 more often idle wanderings through the fields and 

 woods, beside the streams and over the steep slopes, 

 of the Berkshire Hills, with here and there a record 

 or a memory of wandering elsewhere. Those of us 

 who live in these hills, wisely, the year through, and 

 know their rugged winter moods as well as their 

 softer summer aspect, love the Berkshires less for 

 their softness than their wildness, less for their val- 

 leys than their heights, less for their well-groomed 

 towns than their half -abandoned upland hamlets 

 and their miles of forest where to-day moose and 

 wildcat roam, and even there is recent evidence of a 



