WINTER ANIMALS 
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded 
not only new and shorter routes to many points, hut 
new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape 
around them. When I crossed Flints’ Pond, after it 
was covered with snow, though I had often paddled 
about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and 
so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin’s 
Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the ex¬ 
tremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember 
to have stood before ; and the fishermen, at an indeter¬ 
minable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with 
their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or 
in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I 
did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. 
I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in 
the evening; travelling in no road and passing no house 
between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose 
Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats 
dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though 
none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, 
being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only 
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