292 
WALDEN. 
shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, 
where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly 
two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers 
were confined to their streets. There, far from the vil¬ 
lage street, and except at very long intervals, from the 
jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast 
moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and 
solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with 
icicles. 
For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter 
days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a 
hooting owl indefinitely far ; such a sound as the 
frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable 
plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, 
and quite familiar to me at last, though I never 
saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened 
my door in a winter evening without hearing it; 
Hoo hoo hoo , hoover hoo , sounded sonorously, and the 
first three syllables accented somewhat like how dev do ; 
or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the beginning 
of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o’clock, 
I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, step¬ 
ping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a 
tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. 
They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seem¬ 
ingly deterred from settling by my light, their commo¬ 
dore honking all the while with a regular beat. Sud¬ 
denly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, 
with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard 
from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular 
intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and 
disgrace this intruder from Hudson’s Bay by exhibiting 
a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and 
