Back and forth across the land, in swift and sudden alternation, the
March winds toss days of bitter cold and days of genial warmth, now out
of the eternal winter of the north, now from the endless summer of the
tropics.
Repeated thawing and freezing has given the snow a coarse grain. It is
like a mass of fine hailstones and with no hint of the soft and feathery
flakes that wavered down like white blossoms shed from the unseen bloom
of some far-off upper world and that silently transformed the
unseemliness of the black and tawny earth into the beauty of immaculate
purity.
One day, when the wind breathes from the south a continuous breath of
warmth, your feet sink into this later coarseness come of its base
earthly association, with a grinding slump, as in loose wet sand, so
deep, perhaps, that your tracks are gray puddles, marking your toilsome
way.
As you wallow on, or perch for a moment's rest on a naked fence-top
among the smirched drifts, you envy the crows faring so easily along
their aerial paths above you. How pleasant are the voices of these
returning exiles, not enemies now, but friendly messengers, bringing
tidings of spring. You do not begrudge them the meagre feasts they find,
the frozen apple still hanging, brown and wrinkled, in the bare orchard,
or the winter-killed youngling of flock or herd, cast forth upon a
dunghill, and which discovered, one generous vagabond calls all his
black comrades to partake of.
Watching them as they lag across the sky, yet swifter than the white
clouds drift above them, you presently note that these stand still, as
you may verify by their blue shadows on the snow, lying motionless, with
the palpitating shadows of the crows plunging into them on this side,
then, lost for an instant in the blue obscurity, then, emerging on that
side with the same untiring beat of shadowy wings. A puff of wind comes
out of the north, followed by an angry gust, and then a howling wintry
blast that the crows stagger against in labored flight as they make for
the shelter of the woods.
You, too, toil to shelter and fireside warmth, and are thankful to be
out of the biting wind and the treacherous footing. The change has come
so suddenly that the moist, grainy snow is frozen before it has time to
leach, and in a little while gives you a surface most delightful to walk
upon, and shortens distances to half what they were. It has lost its
first pure whiteness wherewith no other whiteness can compare, but it is
yet beyond all things else, and in the sunlight dazzles you with a broad
glare and innumerable scintillating points of light, as intense as the
sun itself.
The sunshine, the bracing air, the swaying boughs of the pines and
hemlocks beckoning at the woodside, and the firm smooth footing,
irresistibly invite you forth. Your feet devour the way with crisp
bites, and you think that nothing could be more pleasant to them till
you are offered a few yards of turf, laid bare by winds and sun, and
then you realize that nothing is quite so good as the old stand-by, a
naked ground, and crave more of it, even as this is, and hunger for it
with its later garnishing of grass and flowers. The crows, too, are
drawn to these bare patches and are busy upon them, and you wonder what
they can find; spiders, perhaps, for these you may see in thawy days
crawling sluggishly over the snow, where they must have come from the
earth.
The woods are astir with more life than a month ago. The squirrels are
busy and noisy, the chickadees throng about you, sometimes singing their
sweet brief song of three notes; the nuthatches pipe their tiny trumpets
in full orchestra, and the jays are clamoring their ordinary familiar
cries with occasional notes that you do not often hear. One of these is
a soft, rapidly uttered cluck, the bird all the time dancing with his
body, but not with his feet, to his own music, which is pleasant to the
ear, especially when you remember it is a jay's music, which in the main
cannot be recommended. To-day, doubtless, he is practicing the
allurements of the mating season.
You hear the loud cackle of a logcock making the daily round of his
preserves, but you are not likely to get more than a glimpse of his
black plumage or a gleam of his blood-red crest.
By rare luck you may hear the little Acadian owl filing his invisible
saw, but you are likelier to see him and mistake him for a clot of last
year's leaves lodged midway in their fall to earth.
The forest floor, barred and netted with blue shadows of trunks and
branches, is strewn with dry twigs, evergreen leaves, shards of bark,
and shreds of tree-moss and lichen, with heaps of cone scales,--the
squirrel's kitchen middens,--the sign of a partridge's nightly roosting,
similar traces of the hare's moonlight wanderings, and perhaps a fluff
of his white fur, showing where his journeys have ended forever in a
fox's maw.
Here and there the top of a cradle knoll crops out of the snow with its
patches of green moss, sturdy upright stems and leaves and red berries
of wintergreen, as fresh as when the first snow covered them, a rusty
trail of mayflower leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes of
squirrelcup with a downy heart of buds full of the promise of spring.
The woods are filled with a certain subtle scent quite distinct from the
very apparent resinous and balsamic aroma of the evergreens, that eludes
description, but as a kind of freshness that tickles the nose with
longing for a more generous waft of it. You can trace it to no source,
as you can the odors of the pine and the hemlocks or the sweet fragrance
of the boiling sap, coming from the sugar-maker's camp with a pungent
mixture of wood-smoke. You are also made aware that the skunk has been
abroad, that reynard is somewhere to windward, and by an undescribed,
generally unrecognized, pungency in the air that a gray squirrel lives
in your neighborhood. Yet among all these more potent odors you still
discover this subtle exhalation, perhaps of the earth filtered upward
through the snow, perhaps the first awakening breath of all the
deciduous trees.
Warmer shines the sun and warmer blows the wind from southern seas and
southern lands. More and more the tawny earth comes in sight among
puddles of melted snow, which bring the mirrored sky and its fleecy
flocks of clouds, with treetops turned topsy-turvy, down into the bounds
of fields. The brooks are alive again and babbling noisily over their
pebbled beds, and the lake, hearing them, groans and cries for
deliverance from its prison of ice.
On the marshes you may find the ice shrunken from the shores and an
intervening strip of water where the muskrat may see the sun and the
stars again. You hear the trumpets of the wild geese and see the gray
battalion riding northward on the swift wind.
The sun and the south wind, which perhaps bears some faint breath of
stolen fragrance from far-off violet banks, tempt forth the bees, but
they find no flowers yet, not even a squirrelcup or willow catkin, and
can only make the most of the fresh sawdust by the wood-pile and the
sappy ends of maple logs.
Down from the sky, whose livery he wears and whose song he sings, comes
the heavenly carol of the bluebird; the song sparrow trills his cheery
melody; the first robin is announced to-day, and we cry, "Lo, spring has
come." But to-morrow may come winter and longer waiting.