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 
