March 4,-1886.] 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



10S 



and in a few hours all the blue is clogged with a dull gray 

 mass. As the later comiDg legions of the wind arrive, the 

 temper of their weapons is softened and their keen edge 

 blunted. The snow loses its crispness and takes the imprint 

 of a foot like wax. We have a midwinter thaw, the tradi- 

 tional January thaw a little belated ; and presently it begins 

 to rain pellets of lead out of the leaden sky. rain that has 

 noue of the pleasant sounds of summer showers. There is 

 no merry patter on the snow-covered roof, no lively clatter 

 on intercepting green leaves nor splash of dimpled pools; 

 only windows and weather-boards resound to its sullen beat. 

 When, after some hours of rainfall, the snow has become 

 softened down to the earth, so that when one walks in it his 

 tracks show a gray, compacted slush at the bottom, the wind 

 lulls and veers to the northward and patches of blue are, 

 opened in the world's low, opaque roof, windows through 

 which the sun shines upon some fields and mountain 

 peaks, making them whiter than the whiteness of snow. 

 The air grows colder, coming out of the north; but if 

 the advance of Boreas is slow and cautious, and he sends 

 much before him his light-armed skirmishers, the snow is 

 frozen so gradually that it turns to a crumbly, loose mass, 

 with a thin, treacherous surface, where nothing much heavier 

 than a fox, if not as broadly shod as with snowshoes, may go 

 without vexatious and most tiresome labor. But if the 

 change of temperature is sharp and sudden enough to freeze 

 the water held in the snow before it has time to leech down 

 to the earth, we are given a crust so firm that it is a delight 

 to coasters and all walkers and runners on the snow. 



It is now no toil but a pleasure to go across lots. "The 

 longest way round" is not now "the shortest way home." 

 The fields give better footing than the highways. The side 

 of the highways is pleasanter to the feet than the two grooves 

 the horses and sleighs have worn in its center in all their two 

 months' going and corning. There is a silver stile along 

 every rod of every fence, and you may walk anywhere over 

 the buried gray wall or rail fence at your ordinary pace, and 

 sit down to rest on the top of the stakes where last July, 

 when the daisies were blowing, the bobolink sang, higher 

 than you could reach. Can it be that summer ever blos- 

 somed here in these frozen fields? How long ago it seems; 

 and yet we are not much older! 



Now when the full moon comes pulsing up behind the 

 evergreen-crested hill, with the black silhouette of a pine 

 slowly sliding down its yellow disk, trunk, dry limb and 

 bristling branch clear cut against it, and slowly drawing 

 toward it the long blue shadows, it is no time to bide within 

 doors. In every cold night of the year that gives many such to 

 us Northern folk we may have fireside and lamplight at some 

 price, but not for love nor money many times in a wiuter 

 such a night as this, such warmth out of snow and frost, 

 such celestial light shed on silver-paved fields. Let us set 

 our faces toward the moon and trail our shadows behiud us 

 till we lose them among the shadows of the pines and hem- 

 locks of the hill, the mountain of our neighborhood. 



What solid and appetizing food is this firm crust for our 

 feet! How they devour the way with crunching bites, re- 

 minding our teeth of the loaf sugar of youtnful days when 

 the snowy cones, swathed in the purple paper that our 

 mothers used for the concoction of dyestuff , tempted us to 

 theft. What better wine than tlm still, sharp air! 



The even, smooth surface of the snow has been preserved ; 

 it is not pitted, nor in places cut into fleecy texture as the 

 sun and wind of March carves it sometimes. The dark blue 

 shadows of the tree trunks lie clear edged upon it, not jagged 

 and toothed as when they fall on grass ground. Every 

 branch's shadow lies blue-veined upon it, every mesh of 

 twhrs is netted more distinctly there than the substance is 

 against the sky, the torn bird's nest and every wind-forgotten 

 leaf are revealed on the white surface. 



A winged phantom startles us sliding across the silver 

 field justTbefcre us, as swift in its flight but not more noise- 

 less than the great owl it attends. Owl and shadow dissolve 

 in the distant blue and white, and presently, when this spirit 

 of the night has regained his woodland haunt, his hollow, 

 storm-foreboding hoot is heard resounding through the dark 

 aisles of the forest. 



All sounds are at one with the hour and season. The snow 

 crust cracks in long but almost imperceptible fissures, theice 

 settles to the falling level of the brooks and ponds with a 

 sudden resonant crash, the frozen trees snap like the ineffec- 

 tual primers of an ambushed foe. All are winter's voices, 

 as ancient as hoary winter's self, and that only emphasize 

 the silence out of which they break. The jingle of the 

 sleigh bells along a distant road, the crunching of our foot- 

 steps, and their sharp, short echoes, are the only souuds that 

 betoken any human presence in all the wide glittering ex- 

 panse, with its blotches of woodland and dots of sleeping 

 farmsteads. 



But we are not the first explorers here even this winter. 

 A fox has left the record of his wanderings, exaggerated like 

 many another traveler's accounts of himself writ on a more 

 enduring paae than this, for if you will believe this fellow's 

 tracks made before the thaw, he was as big as a wolf, and 

 formidable enough to raise a hue and cry in the township 

 against him. The hare might be frightened to see the print 

 of his own pads, now grown as big as the tracks of his enemy, 

 the lynx. A skunk was warmed up into such activity as his 

 short legs could compass and made his mark in the soft snow, 

 unmistakable, though almost big enough for the track of the 

 mephitic monster of the Wabanakee legend; the rows of four 

 footmarks printfd diagonally athwart his course when he 

 cantered abroad from his burrow are none but his, whereto 

 is added proof of his sometime presence in a spicy waft of 

 the air. The regular parallel dots of the weasel's track make 

 a great show where he came to the surface above his regular 

 runway along the buried fence. He and the fox, though un- 

 seen, are as wide awake this cold night as ever, but they and 

 all later travelers are modester now, and set down naught of 

 their journeys. 



Can it be that there were giants here so lately as a month 

 ago when the woodchopper went this way to his work! Here 

 are his monstrous footprints, albeit the stride is short, and 

 there he set his huge axe, before which the trees should have 

 gone down like mullein stalks, and there he set his cauldron 

 of a dinner pail while he lighted his pipe. How could so 

 small a blaze as that little burned out match afforded ever 

 have fired his furnace of a pipe! Yet from these dropped 

 fragments of home-gi own tobacco, I conclude that our giant 

 was only an ordinary little Frenchman whose feet caught the 

 trick ot his tongue. 



The packed snow resisted the thaw more than that which 

 lay as it fell, so that beaten paths that were sunk below the 

 surface are raised causeways now, a narrow slippery foot- 

 ing that no one tries with all this wide pavement to choose 

 from. 



Now if we might have the luck to see a fox, how well his 



furry form, clad for such weather, so agile, noiseless and 

 wild, would fit the scene, and we ought to see one, for this 

 little basin, rimmed with the rough hills on the east side and 

 on the others with low ridges, is a favorite spot with foxes, 

 a trysting place at this love-making season and a hunting 

 ground in sprint, summer and fall, when the tall wild grass 

 harbors many field mice. Moreover, reynard often gets a 

 free lunch here, for hardly a year goes by that to save the 

 trouble of burial, a dead horse or cow is not hauled to this out- 

 of the way spot where foxes, skunks and crows find cheap 

 and speedy sepulture for everything but the bones. It was 

 undoubtedly the bed of a little ponrl two or three hundred 

 years ago and the home of btavers or in some such way of 

 account to the Indians, for on the southwest bank are to be 

 found plenty of flint chips of the old arrow makers. Only 

 a little brook trickles through it now, complaining with a 

 faint muffled whimper under its concave glare of shell ice, 

 of its diminished strength and babbling in a feeble voice of 

 the days when it brawled bravely over the stones into the 

 pond all the drouthiest summer through and tumbled down 

 the rocks below it with incessant clatter. 



But hush! Stand stock still, breathe softly and whisper no 

 louder, for there, just out of the shadows of the hill, sits a 

 fox bolt upright and alert. A stump? Nonsense! No wood 

 nor stone uutouched by the hand of the cunningest carver 

 ever had such lifelike form, such expression of alertness. 

 Why you can see, if your eyes are sharp enough, the slight 

 motion of his ears as he pricks them toward us, as his nose 

 points, for he has seen or heard, not smelted, us; for the 

 light breeze sets from him to us, and, I faucy, touches our 

 nostrils with a faint waft of his pungent odor. You can see 

 the curve of his back, his fluffy brush lying along the snow — 

 almost make out the white tip of it. "The ruddiness of his 

 coat almost shows, but moonlight is a poor revealer of color; 

 the pines are not green, as we know they are, but black, and 

 everything is black or blue, or gray or white. Now he moves 

 his head a little. He is growing more and more suspicious 

 and presently will vanish like a swift shadow in the shadow 

 of the woods. Shall we send him off with a shout or try 

 how near he will let us come? Tnen step carefully and 

 slowly. How steadfast he stands, though we have lessened 

 by half the distance that lay between us when we first saw 

 him. He must have an appointment here with the most be- 

 witching vixen in all fox society, and will not budge till he 

 must. How does the wise scamp know that our guns are at 

 home? Or has he not heard or seen us yet, all his looking 

 and listening being for the coming of his mistress? Has love 

 made him blind and deaf to all enemies but the maiden of 

 his heart? Try with a mouse squeak if he cannot be moved 

 by an appeal to his stomach. Stock still yetl Confound his 

 impudence or his unvulpine stupidity. Salute him with a 

 yell that shall make the moonlit night more hideous to him 

 than the glare of noon with a hundred hounds baying behind 

 him. The shadowy hill and the black pines behind us toss 

 back and forth the echoes of such an infernal uproar as has 

 not stirred them since Indians and the "Indian devil" were 

 here. Our fox is paralyzed with fright, actually frozen with 

 fear. Let us rush upon him aud secure him before the blood 

 starts again in his veins. Well, it is a stump after all! But 

 were ever mortals played a worse trick by a real fox? 



It is something out of common experience to go into the 

 woods in the nighttime without stumbling over roots, logs 

 or bushes and groping in constant fear of bringing up against 

 a tree. No danger now of bumping against trees that show 

 as plainly as in a summer day. The undergrowth is bent 

 down and snugly packed under the hard crust and brush 

 heaps are bridged with it and trunks of fallen trees are 

 faintly marked by slight ridges that one walks over almost 

 without knowing it. The partridge could not find his drum- 

 ming log now if he wanted it, as he will not for six weeks to 

 come. Sad is his fate if he was caught napping under the 

 snow when this crust made, but that, I think seldom hap- 

 pens to him, though often to the poor quail in this region of 

 deep snows. Sixty years ago quail were not uncommon here 

 where now a wild turkey would scarely be a stranger sight. 

 Such crusts as these have been their more relentless enemy 

 than guns and snares or beasts and birds of prey and have 

 exterminated them. The partridge does not harbor under 

 the snow except in cold dry weather, though he allows tiim- 

 self to be covered by snow falls. One may often see the 

 mold of his plump body where he has lain for hours in his 

 snug bed of down, and rarely — two or three times in his life 

 perhaps— one may have the luck to be startled by bis sudden 

 apparition, bursting from the unsuspected, even whiteness 

 of the wood's soft carpet. In mild winter weather he is 

 aloft where his food is or is embroidering the yielding snow 

 with his pretty footprints. Here is some of his work done a 

 week ago, now frayed out at the edges by the thaw, but it 

 has the mark of his own pattern unmistakable, even in this 

 moonlight, so different from the clumsy track of civilized 

 poultry. It runs this way and that, sometimes doubling on 

 itself and disappears in the pallid gloom of an evergreen 

 thicket, where perhaps is his roosting place. 



The floor of the woods is barred and netted with an intri- 

 cate maze of blue shadows, here and there splashed with a 

 great blot of shade where the branches of a hemlock inter- 

 cept the moonlight. 



How still it is; even the harps of the pines are silent, and 

 our ears are hungry for some other sound than our own 

 breathing and the crunch of our footsteps. Imagine them 

 suddenly filled with tue scream of a panther, stealthily creep- 

 ing on our track unsuspected, unseen, unheard, till he splits 

 the silence with his devi.ish yell. But they tell us now tbat 

 the panther is voiceless, and the tales that thrilled our chUd- 

 hood with an ecstasy of delightful terror, of our grand- 

 fathers being led into the woods by the catamount's cry, 

 like that of a woman in distress, were myths — our good old 

 grandfathers were liars or they were fools, "brought up in 

 the woods to be scared by owls." But the panther may be 

 here, for there are panthers in Vermont yet, or at least there 

 was one, two or three years ago, when on a Thanksgiving 

 Day two little Green Mountain boys, partridge hunting in 

 Barnard, came upon a monster crouching in a thicket of 

 black growth, and a doughty grown-up Green Mountain boy 

 killed him at short range with a well-delivered charge of BB 

 shot. When I was a boy there was always a panther prowl- 

 ing about this mountain in huckleberry time, guarding the 

 berries, I now suspect, for the two or three old women who 

 used to tell us of hearing his fearful cries. He performed 

 his duty well, as far as concerned us youngsters. Wheu the 

 berry season was over he departed and was heard of no more 

 till next summer. 



A sheer wall of rock bars our further way up the moun- 

 tain in this direction. An ice cascade, silent as all its sur- 

 roundings, not the trickle of the smallest rill of snow water 

 to be heard in its core, veils a portion of the black steep with 

 dull silver, burnished here and there with a moon-glint. 



Let us sound a retreat and set our faces toward the gray 

 steeps of Split Rock Mount and the piled up blue and white 

 Adirondack^, and get back on to the silver fields, brighter 

 than ever now, as we march abreast of our northward slant' 

 ing shadows, and the moon, now well up above the world, 

 we fancy that one-half of this northern half of the earth out' 

 shines her. 



Silver fields is not a good enough name to-night for these 

 shining farms, the creek unmarfeed now but by the fringe 

 of wooded bimks, the broad lake quiet under ice and snow, 

 but never when tossed by autumnal storms so white as now 

 and scarcely brighter in the glare of the summer sun. If 

 you have a newly-minted silver coin in your pocket, cast it 

 before you and see how dull a dot it is on the surface. It 

 would hearten a greenbacker to see how poor a show the 

 precious metal makes to look at, hardly worth picking up out 

 of acres of brighter riches that rust doth not corrupt and that 

 shall be stolen by no meaner thief than the sun, the south 

 wind and the rain. The roofs of gray old homesteads out- 

 shine the lights in the windows, and we wonder if any of the 

 inmates are aware bow royally their houses are tiled. Doubt- 

 less not one of them thinks of it, or if at all, only as protect- 

 ing the many shingles from the sparks of the rousing winter 

 tires, or as so much filling for the cistern when the next thaw 

 comes; nor, as compared with it, do the interiors, the low, 

 whitewashed ceilings, rag carpets, creaking spliut bottomed 

 chairs and deal furniture, seem mean to them or unfitting 

 their fine, perishable covering. For ourselves, we begin to 

 entertain most kindly thoughts of such in-door homeliness 

 and desire the comforts of us harboring, and presently shut 

 ourselves in from the blue sky and shining moonlit outer 

 world, tired and content to smoke a restful pipe by the fire- 

 side. Rowland E. Robinson. 



Address all communications to the Forest and Stream Publish' 

 ing Co. 



THE AUDUBON SOCIETY, 



IN a supplement to Science, recently published, the Ameri- 

 can Ornithologists' Union's Committee for the Protec- 

 tion of North American Birds have published a great amount 

 of interesting matter on the slaughter of our birds. Papers 

 are contributed by Mr. J. A. Allen, President of the Union, 

 on The Present AYholesale Destruction of Bird Life in 

 the United States; by Mr. William Dutcher on the De- 

 struction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York, and by 

 Mr. G. B. Sennett, chairman of the committee, on the De- 

 struction of the Eggs of Birds for Food. Other articles, un- 

 signed, though furnished by members of the committee, treat 

 of the Destruction of Birds lor Millinery Purposes, of The 

 Relation of Birds to Agriculture, and of Bird Laws. There 

 is also contained in this supplement An Appeal to the Women 

 of the Country in Behalf of the Birds, and an account of the 

 A. 0. U. Committee on the subject. This paper will be 

 issued separately as Bulletin No. 1 of the Committee, and 

 will contain in its new form a brief account of the plans 

 and purposes of the Audubon Society/. 



To review, however briefly, the subject matter of this ad- 

 mirable pamphlet is impossible, but it may be well to note 

 one or two points made. It is frequently charged that 

 much of the destruction of our birds is due to the collecting 

 by ornithologists. As to this point Mr. Allen says; 



The scientific collector, as already intimated, is charged, in some 

 quarters, with the "lion's share" of the responsibility fori he decrease 

 of our song birds; with what justice, or rather injustice, may be 

 jsasily shown, for the necessary statistics are notdiftieulc to obtain. 

 The catalogue of the Ornithological Department of the National 

 Museum numbers rather less than 110,000 birdskins. The record 

 covers nearly half a century, and the number of specimens is four 

 times greater than that of any other museum in this country ; while 

 the aggregate number of all our other public museums would prob- 

 ably not greatly exceed this number. But to make a liberal estimate, 

 with the chance for error on the side of exaggeration, we will allow 

 300,000 birds for the public museums of North America, one half of! 

 which, or nearly one-half, are of foreign origin, or not North 

 American. To revert to the National Museum collection, it 

 should be stated that, while only pare of the specimens are 

 Konh American— say about two thirds— they represent the 

 work of many individuals, extending over a third of a 

 century, and over the whole continent, from Alaska and Hudson Bay 

 to Mexico and Florida, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Fur* 

 thermore, this number— 110,000. more or less— is not the number now 

 in the national collection, which is far less than this, thousands and 

 thousands of specimens having been distributed in past years to other 

 museums in this country and abroad. 



So far the public museums: now in relation to private cabinets of 

 bird skins. Of these it is safe to say theie are hundreds scattered 

 throughout the country, containing from 300 to 500 or 600 specimens 

 each, with a few easily counted on the fingers of the two hands, if 

 not on a single hand, numbering 5 or 6,000 each, with possibly two 

 approaching 10,000 each. Probably 150,000 would be a lioeral esti- 

 mate for the number of North American bird skin« in private cabi- 

 nets, but again to throw the error on the side of exaggeration, let us 

 say 300 000, not however, taken in a single year, but the result of all 

 the collecting up to the present time, and covering all parts of the 

 continent. Add this number to the number of birds in our 

 public museums, less those of foreign origin, and we have, allowing 

 our exaggerated estimates to be true, less than 500,000 as the num- 

 ber of North American birds thus far sacrificed for science. The 

 few thousand that have been sent to other countries in exchange for 

 foreign birds can safely be included under the above estimate, which 

 is at least a third above the actual number. 



We have now passed briefly in review all the agencies and objects 

 affecting the decrease of our birds, save one, and that the most im- 

 portant—many times exceeding all the others together— the most 

 heartless and the least defensible, namely, the sacrifice of birds to 

 fashion, for hat ornamentation and personal decoration. Startling as 

 this assertion may seem, its demonstration is easy. 



In this country of 50,000,000 inhabitants, half, or 25,000,000, may be 

 said to belong to what some one has forcibly termed the "dead bird 

 wearing gender," of whom at least 10,000,000 are not only of the bird- 

 wearing age, but— judging from what we see on our streets, in public 

 assemblies and public conveyances— also of bird-weariug proclivities. 

 Different individuals of this class vary greatly in their ideas of style 

 and quantity in the way of what constitutes a proper decoration for 

 that part of the person the Indians delight to ornament with 

 plumes of various kinds of wildfowl. Some are content with 

 a single bird, if a large one, mounted nearly entire; others 

 prefer several small ones— a group of three or four to half 

 a dozen; or the heads and wings of even a greater number. 

 Others still will content themselves with a few wings fancifully 



