THE POND IN WINTER, 
805 
wonder as into a summer pond, as if lie kept summer 
locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. 
How, pray, did he get these in mid-winter ? O, he got 
worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so 
he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in Nature 
than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a 
subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss 
and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the 
former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and 
moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by 
barking trees. Such a man has some right to flsh, and 
I love to see Nature carried out in him. The perch 
swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the 
perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so 
all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. 
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I 
was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which 
some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps 
have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in 
the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal 
distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of 
the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, 
have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a 
foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, 
which, being pulled down, would show when he had a 
bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular 
intervals as you walked half way round the pond. 
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying 
on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in 
the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am 
always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were 
fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even 
to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. 
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